I don't agree with you on the specs. The numbers definitely do add up.
This plane (concept, exists only on the drawing board, etc) is supposed to fly all-electrical for 300 miles, but with the 1.500 cc petrol engine it should be able to reach 1,000 miles. So the petrol engine alone is enough to power the plane.
The plane is supposed to cruise at some 160 mph, so 300 miles that's about 2 hrs battery-only. That doesn't sound unreasonable when compared to modern hybrid/electrical cars, and hybrids have a petrol engine of similar size. The batteries supply the power boosts needed to take off, the petrol engine can do more than needed to keep in the air. The additional 4-5 hours on petrol is then also very reasonable.
But can such a small engine keep that plane cruising at a speed higher than the four-seater Cessna 182 (I take that one as it's been mentioned here more)? It seems plausible again.
That Cessna has an 8.874 cc engine, producing 230-350 hp depending on the version (source: Wikipedia). Half the 600 hp this plane's electrical engine can do, at peak. Googling for the power output of a typical 1500 cc car engine gives me numbers of around 100-120 hp, so 1/3-1/2 of the Cessna engine. That sounds very reasonable: peak power you only need for take-off only. For cruising at altitude you need far less. And from the artists impression it looks a lot more streamlined than the Cessna so should need less power to maintain speed.
Whether the plane will ever see the light of day, that's a totally different matter. But from the face of it, the power specs are really plausible, suggesting it could be made.
Assuming games are truly an issue, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. Games are written for the platform that has the most users, to get more sales. That'd be Windows. So the only way to get games written for Linux is to have more (or at least sufficient) people on Linux. But if, as you say, people choose the platform based on the games they can get for it, they'll naturally stick to Windows.
Yet I think about half of the PCs in this world are used in office-type environments, where games are not exactly a primary application. And the Windows-less tablet market also appears to do quite OK, without having high-end games available. Probably for most people Angry Birds is good enough there.
The one most powerful form of advertising (and the folks of Google may argue it's the only one that counts - it got them big), is word-of-mouth. Having people recommend a product to other people. I know that is how I for one got to know Google, and started to use Linux.
One should wonder why it doesn't work in the case of getting Linux more widespread.
Actually I don't know of any country other than the US that allows this political advertising. And those democracies do just fine. Having a free media is important of course; one that will not only publish info abotu the incumbent but also the views of the opposition.
And actually in my experience free newspapers tend to be critical of the government, and that way providing lots of this "free publicity" for the opposition.
The main problem of a channel like CNN is of course how to fill the time. There is usually not enough significant news in this world to full a 24-hour station, day after day. Some days of course have a lot of news to go around: when the US is invading yet another country, when there has been an earth quake and (if they're lucky) a big tsunami following it - then you can fill your day with constant updates about those events. Election days should also go fine, at least the few days before (final campaigns), the day itself (exit polls, results) and the days after (new government being installed, selection of their cabinets, etc).
The rest of the year? Well you have to make a lot of filler-TV. Having multiple news-only channels competing with one another doesn't help of course.
Lowering the price doesn't necessarily level the playing field.
It allows candidates with smaller budgets to enter the game, but it also allows bigger budgets to simply buy more advertising time.
The only way leveling the playing field in this would be to 1) prohibit political commercials and 2) oblige TV stations to set aside a certain time for political broadcasts, that is then shared equally between the various parties/candidates that participate in an election. This way every single candidate has their say 15 minutes of TV time, and all have the same amount of time to spread their views.
The rates themselves are, by law, the lowest rate that the stations charge (to avoid stations charging different rates based on whether they support that candidate)
In this line: in how far are stations allowed to accept/reject certain ads?
For starters they have limited time in which to put advertisements (is there any regulation on that in the US? Such as no more than so many minutes per hour for ads on a TV channel?). So one candidate may simply buy up all advertising slots, and bring a few five-minute ads every hour.
Secondly I know advertisements are sometimes rejected based on "objectional content" - content or a product that the media channel doesn't agree with or whatever.
Shouldn't the criminal phisher be responsible? So I leave my car unlocked and someone steals it. You could say "you idiot you deserve that". Does the thief gain legal rights to my car now?
You mix up things.
Of course the one stealing your car commits theft, as does the one stealling the 5000 Euro from this person's bank account. And those criminals, when caught, will be held responsible.
The question here is who's liable for the damage incurred by the theft. In case of your car being stolen, you will not be able to get any damages from the car manufacturer arguing, say, not good enough locks on the doors. Just like in case of the money stolen from the bank account, the bank is not liable, and the judge ruled that the locks the bank put in place were good enough, and that the bank client should have taken better care.
And even if the criminal gets caught, that doesn't mean the victim will get their money or car back. So they still lose out.
Great for finding cheap rates, and then move to the ailiner's own web site for generally even cheaper fares.
Airlines don't pay commission to agents anymore on tickets, so the price you see at those agents is including an agent's mark-up. Of course my behaviour is killing off those agents... but that's what airliners want anyway.
Well many people like to go to great places, so unless you don't go to what are considered the "best places to visit" you will run into this problem.
Another problem is that in many places if you want to eat something you will go to the one restaurant that provides English menu (because the rest is unreadable - incomprehensible scripts) and that's where all the foreigners end up going to. Unless you're very adventurous and don't care what you get on your plate.
That said, if in an unknown area, if I have to choose between two restaurants I'd generally prefer the busier one. Reasoning: the locals know what's best, and the better restaurant will attract more people.
Oh and I've never used Lonely Planet as travel guide, other than reading a bit about a target area at home before leaving to see what's interesting. Plenty of other options to go around.
Please put off that tinfoil hat. Totally unbelievable that NSA would have operative QC for 16 years, while the rest of the world hasn't even seen proof of concept with this many researchers working on it. Using terms like "five eyes" also doesn't do much for credibility, on the contrary. Oh yeah and your total lack of any source references...
Target was searching for specific situations, very specific. Indeed tech has come a long way.
NSA would want to search for many as yet unknown situations, making it a much more difficult problem, with a far less consistent database. Also I still think bigger database = harder to mine due to the sheer size.
The real problem is: how do I get my key in a secure manner to the people that want to read my encrypted message, and the other way around? Some of whom I have never met in person (primary contact method is e-mail and phone); others who I have met maybe once or twice long time and am unlikely to meet again anytime soon (primarily for geographical reasons).
And another big difference: Windows/OS-X malware are usually worms that spread themselves over the network (including drive-by downloads). I haven't heard of any such malware with Android or iOS, instead it was always linked to a certain app that contained some "extra functionality".
No, no, no. Totally wrong. If it's reviewed and accepted for listing in the App Store, then it's not malware. So the App Store is by definition 100% malware free. QED.
Being accountable does help keeping people honest. Knowing you will get away with taking a fistful of dollars from the cash register versus knowing that the management will realise that there is money missing from your cash register makes a big difference.
Security is all about layers. Accountability is just one of them, and it is an important one.
I am not a criminal, but yes I do this on a daily basis. And I strongly suspect most people do. Not everything that's sensitive, is criminal in nature.
It's commonplace to communicate about business dealings by e-mail; also the sensitive ones. E-mail is just too convenient to stop using the moment something may be sensitive; actually that's a reason to not stop using it, as e-mail at least leaves a written record, allowing you to look back in discussions to see what was agreed upon (or not).
Intercepting and storing all this communication is the really easy part.
Making sense of it; finding interesting connections; that's the really hard part.
Now the probable justification would be "for the terrorists" which means you almost instantly have to branch out of the US, and intercept far more than just internal communication. And both possible and actual connections increase exponentially with the volume.
I very much remember a Dutch supermarket introducing their discount card some 20 years ago. They openly stated that they wanted to track what people bought (linking separate purchases through this discount card), in order to put products that were often bought in tandem closer together in the shelves. Better for sales, convenient for customers.
A few years later the card was cancelled. It didn't have the desired result. Sure they got a huge database of linked purchases, but they did not manage to get any useful connections out of it. And that was a relatively limited scope (just the products they sold and maybe a few million cards issued), well defined and easily parsable data (product bar code numbers; no fuzzy communication), and looking for specific connections only (products bought together frequently). Yet they didn't manage to do it.
Sure computing has advanced, US government has possibly more resources, but also the problem is so much more complex in both size and scope. It uses fuzzy human communication, not even necessarily in English, can be any language. Looking for connections - but not knowing in advance what kind of connections. In an immense database: hundreds of millions of e-mail accounts, hundreds of millions of telephone subscriptions, each producing many data points every single day. Trigger by keywords? Well good luck making them general enough to catch who you want, and specific enough to not be drowned in noise.
Only retroactively it may have some use. See who a suspect talked to, and when, can be valuable for investigations. But there surely are other and possibly easier ways to do the same: call up telephone records from their telco, analyse contents on their computer, etc.
Is the story true or not? Can't say. It's unbelievable enough to be true.
Is such a database, if it exists, useful? Probably; but I doubt it's worth the effort.
Http is more and more replaced by https (even Facebook and Google do it now). Ssh is commonplace, encrypted VPN too, torrent traffic can be encrypted, etc. At a transport level encryption is making steady inroads, and is far from stagnant.
On the other hand, for e-mails, it's not that easy. This is end-user level, and there is a good reason why it's stagnant. It's too technical for the general public to do properly, especially the key exchange with the other parties. And you have to do that over and over again, for every single e-mail contact you have. And in my case, that's easily a couple hundred. That's a bother.
If we want encryption in e-mail, then we need a major e-mail client to implement its use transparently, and by default urge users to create a PGP key for their mail. Then the mail client needs a protocol to exchange keys securely with new contacts, to collect all the keys you may need to send encrypted mail to those contacts.
And now the real fun thing: how to keep your secret key, secret? It's not a one-time key (like ssh uses). It's a permanent key; and you will have to cherish it to be able to decrypt old e-mails unless you store them decrypted on your computer. Have your secret key compromised and you're SOL.
If you can solve all that, you could become rich. Or at least help us all have encrypted e-mail.
Hiding that I'm talking to certain people is not really important to me. Sure it's not that I like it to be in some database in some far-away country, they should keep their hands off of that stuff, on the other hand it's easy enough to identify who deals with who.
What I'm more worried about is that in this database apparently the complete contents of e-mails that I sent to US business relations are now there. Including confidential information. The fact that I have contact with a certain company is not much of a secret. What I'm talking about to them, how often, and the nature of the deals if any, is something between me and them and not for outsiders. And that's what encryption could solve, and that's enough.
You can either dump the sales for 2 or 3 dollars for dvd's and get your materials cost back, or ship them to china and re purpose the jewel cases. Seriously.
No.
You can trust me on this - it's my trade. Well, maybe I should say "was" as over the past decade the volume of CD/DVD and related material has gone down by at least 80% so I rarely deal with it nowadays. That includes the disks (mainly rejects from production) and complete sets (with casing; mainly surplus stock).
Complete disks are rarely exported due to copyright restrictions. These are usually ground up before selling to the recyclers.
The same for completed sets: these are either shredded, baled, or saw cut to make them unusable as product. Re-using the jewel case, or the DVD box? Forget it.
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I don't agree with you on the specs. The numbers definitely do add up.
This plane (concept, exists only on the drawing board, etc) is supposed to fly all-electrical for 300 miles, but with the 1.500 cc petrol engine it should be able to reach 1,000 miles. So the petrol engine alone is enough to power the plane.
The plane is supposed to cruise at some 160 mph, so 300 miles that's about 2 hrs battery-only. That doesn't sound unreasonable when compared to modern hybrid/electrical cars, and hybrids have a petrol engine of similar size. The batteries supply the power boosts needed to take off, the petrol engine can do more than needed to keep in the air. The additional 4-5 hours on petrol is then also very reasonable.
But can such a small engine keep that plane cruising at a speed higher than the four-seater Cessna 182 (I take that one as it's been mentioned here more)? It seems plausible again.
That Cessna has an 8.874 cc engine, producing 230-350 hp depending on the version (source: Wikipedia). Half the 600 hp this plane's electrical engine can do, at peak. Googling for the power output of a typical 1500 cc car engine gives me numbers of around 100-120 hp, so 1/3-1/2 of the Cessna engine. That sounds very reasonable: peak power you only need for take-off only. For cruising at altitude you need far less. And from the artists impression it looks a lot more streamlined than the Cessna so should need less power to maintain speed.
Whether the plane will ever see the light of day, that's a totally different matter. But from the face of it, the power specs are really plausible, suggesting it could be made.
Assuming games are truly an issue, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. Games are written for the platform that has the most users, to get more sales. That'd be Windows. So the only way to get games written for Linux is to have more (or at least sufficient) people on Linux. But if, as you say, people choose the platform based on the games they can get for it, they'll naturally stick to Windows.
Yet I think about half of the PCs in this world are used in office-type environments, where games are not exactly a primary application. And the Windows-less tablet market also appears to do quite OK, without having high-end games available. Probably for most people Angry Birds is good enough there.
The one most powerful form of advertising (and the folks of Google may argue it's the only one that counts - it got them big), is word-of-mouth. Having people recommend a product to other people. I know that is how I for one got to know Google, and started to use Linux.
One should wonder why it doesn't work in the case of getting Linux more widespread.
Actually I don't know of any country other than the US that allows this political advertising. And those democracies do just fine. Having a free media is important of course; one that will not only publish info abotu the incumbent but also the views of the opposition.
And actually in my experience free newspapers tend to be critical of the government, and that way providing lots of this "free publicity" for the opposition.
The main problem of a channel like CNN is of course how to fill the time. There is usually not enough significant news in this world to full a 24-hour station, day after day. Some days of course have a lot of news to go around: when the US is invading yet another country, when there has been an earth quake and (if they're lucky) a big tsunami following it - then you can fill your day with constant updates about those events. Election days should also go fine, at least the few days before (final campaigns), the day itself (exit polls, results) and the days after (new government being installed, selection of their cabinets, etc).
The rest of the year? Well you have to make a lot of filler-TV. Having multiple news-only channels competing with one another doesn't help of course.
Lowering the price doesn't necessarily level the playing field.
It allows candidates with smaller budgets to enter the game, but it also allows bigger budgets to simply buy more advertising time.
The only way leveling the playing field in this would be to 1) prohibit political commercials and 2) oblige TV stations to set aside a certain time for political broadcasts, that is then shared equally between the various parties/candidates that participate in an election. This way every single candidate has their say 15 minutes of TV time, and all have the same amount of time to spread their views.
The rates themselves are, by law, the lowest rate that the stations charge (to avoid stations charging different rates based on whether they support that candidate)
In this line: in how far are stations allowed to accept/reject certain ads?
For starters they have limited time in which to put advertisements (is there any regulation on that in the US? Such as no more than so many minutes per hour for ads on a TV channel?). So one candidate may simply buy up all advertising slots, and bring a few five-minute ads every hour.
Secondly I know advertisements are sometimes rejected based on "objectional content" - content or a product that the media channel doesn't agree with or whatever.
Shouldn't the criminal phisher be responsible? So I leave my car unlocked and someone steals it. You could say "you idiot you deserve that". Does the thief gain legal rights to my car now?
You mix up things.
Of course the one stealing your car commits theft, as does the one stealling the 5000 Euro from this person's bank account. And those criminals, when caught, will be held responsible.
The question here is who's liable for the damage incurred by the theft. In case of your car being stolen, you will not be able to get any damages from the car manufacturer arguing, say, not good enough locks on the doors. Just like in case of the money stolen from the bank account, the bank is not liable, and the judge ruled that the locks the bank put in place were good enough, and that the bank client should have taken better care.
And even if the criminal gets caught, that doesn't mean the victim will get their money or car back. So they still lose out.
What you ask for is the exact opposite DRM intends to accomplish. Just Say No.
In my area these sites still exist.
Great for finding cheap rates, and then move to the ailiner's own web site for generally even cheaper fares.
Airlines don't pay commission to agents anymore on tickets, so the price you see at those agents is including an agent's mark-up. Of course my behaviour is killing off those agents... but that's what airliners want anyway.
Well many people like to go to great places, so unless you don't go to what are considered the "best places to visit" you will run into this problem.
Another problem is that in many places if you want to eat something you will go to the one restaurant that provides English menu (because the rest is unreadable - incomprehensible scripts) and that's where all the foreigners end up going to. Unless you're very adventurous and don't care what you get on your plate.
That said, if in an unknown area, if I have to choose between two restaurants I'd generally prefer the busier one. Reasoning: the locals know what's best, and the better restaurant will attract more people.
Oh and I've never used Lonely Planet as travel guide, other than reading a bit about a target area at home before leaving to see what's interesting. Plenty of other options to go around.
Boarding pass contains that info printed, and your ticket number or so as bar code for machine checks.
Good luck guessing someone else's ticket number, and boarding a flight in their place.
Please put off that tinfoil hat. Totally unbelievable that NSA would have operative QC for 16 years, while the rest of the world hasn't even seen proof of concept with this many researchers working on it. Using terms like "five eyes" also doesn't do much for credibility, on the contrary. Oh yeah and your total lack of any source references...
Target was searching for specific situations, very specific. Indeed tech has come a long way.
NSA would want to search for many as yet unknown situations, making it a much more difficult problem, with a far less consistent database. Also I still think bigger database = harder to mine due to the sheer size.
The real problem is: how do I get my key in a secure manner to the people that want to read my encrypted message, and the other way around? Some of whom I have never met in person (primary contact method is e-mail and phone); others who I have met maybe once or twice long time and am unlikely to meet again anytime soon (primarily for geographical reasons).
Use S/MIME. It's standardized and exists in every good client software.
PGP or S/MIME is not the point. No-one uses either anyway. The point is: why don't they use it?
And another big difference: Windows/OS-X malware are usually worms that spread themselves over the network (including drive-by downloads). I haven't heard of any such malware with Android or iOS, instead it was always linked to a certain app that contained some "extra functionality".
No, no, no. Totally wrong. If it's reviewed and accepted for listing in the App Store, then it's not malware. So the App Store is by definition 100% malware free. QED.
Afaik most Android malware is not from the Play Store, but from third-party Android stores.
And besides Play Store does have accountability: every developer has to register, and pay a small one-off registration fee as form of identification.
Being accountable does help keeping people honest. Knowing you will get away with taking a fistful of dollars from the cash register versus knowing that the management will realise that there is money missing from your cash register makes a big difference.
Security is all about layers. Accountability is just one of them, and it is an important one.
I am not a criminal, but yes I do this on a daily basis. And I strongly suspect most people do. Not everything that's sensitive, is criminal in nature.
It's commonplace to communicate about business dealings by e-mail; also the sensitive ones. E-mail is just too convenient to stop using the moment something may be sensitive; actually that's a reason to not stop using it, as e-mail at least leaves a written record, allowing you to look back in discussions to see what was agreed upon (or not).
Intercepting and storing all this communication is the really easy part.
Making sense of it; finding interesting connections; that's the really hard part.
Now the probable justification would be "for the terrorists" which means you almost instantly have to branch out of the US, and intercept far more than just internal communication. And both possible and actual connections increase exponentially with the volume.
I very much remember a Dutch supermarket introducing their discount card some 20 years ago. They openly stated that they wanted to track what people bought (linking separate purchases through this discount card), in order to put products that were often bought in tandem closer together in the shelves. Better for sales, convenient for customers.
A few years later the card was cancelled. It didn't have the desired result. Sure they got a huge database of linked purchases, but they did not manage to get any useful connections out of it. And that was a relatively limited scope (just the products they sold and maybe a few million cards issued), well defined and easily parsable data (product bar code numbers; no fuzzy communication), and looking for specific connections only (products bought together frequently). Yet they didn't manage to do it.
Sure computing has advanced, US government has possibly more resources, but also the problem is so much more complex in both size and scope. It uses fuzzy human communication, not even necessarily in English, can be any language. Looking for connections - but not knowing in advance what kind of connections. In an immense database: hundreds of millions of e-mail accounts, hundreds of millions of telephone subscriptions, each producing many data points every single day. Trigger by keywords? Well good luck making them general enough to catch who you want, and specific enough to not be drowned in noise.
Only retroactively it may have some use. See who a suspect talked to, and when, can be valuable for investigations. But there surely are other and possibly easier ways to do the same: call up telephone records from their telco, analyse contents on their computer, etc.
Is the story true or not? Can't say. It's unbelievable enough to be true.
Is such a database, if it exists, useful? Probably; but I doubt it's worth the effort.
Http is more and more replaced by https (even Facebook and Google do it now). Ssh is commonplace, encrypted VPN too, torrent traffic can be encrypted, etc. At a transport level encryption is making steady inroads, and is far from stagnant.
On the other hand, for e-mails, it's not that easy. This is end-user level, and there is a good reason why it's stagnant. It's too technical for the general public to do properly, especially the key exchange with the other parties. And you have to do that over and over again, for every single e-mail contact you have. And in my case, that's easily a couple hundred. That's a bother.
If we want encryption in e-mail, then we need a major e-mail client to implement its use transparently, and by default urge users to create a PGP key for their mail. Then the mail client needs a protocol to exchange keys securely with new contacts, to collect all the keys you may need to send encrypted mail to those contacts.
And now the real fun thing: how to keep your secret key, secret? It's not a one-time key (like ssh uses). It's a permanent key; and you will have to cherish it to be able to decrypt old e-mails unless you store them decrypted on your computer. Have your secret key compromised and you're SOL.
If you can solve all that, you could become rich. Or at least help us all have encrypted e-mail.
Hiding that I'm talking to certain people is not really important to me. Sure it's not that I like it to be in some database in some far-away country, they should keep their hands off of that stuff, on the other hand it's easy enough to identify who deals with who.
What I'm more worried about is that in this database apparently the complete contents of e-mails that I sent to US business relations are now there. Including confidential information. The fact that I have contact with a certain company is not much of a secret. What I'm talking about to them, how often, and the nature of the deals if any, is something between me and them and not for outsiders. And that's what encryption could solve, and that's enough.
You can either dump the sales for 2 or 3 dollars for dvd's and get your materials cost back, or ship them to china and re purpose the jewel cases. Seriously.
No.
You can trust me on this - it's my trade. Well, maybe I should say "was" as over the past decade the volume of CD/DVD and related material has gone down by at least 80% so I rarely deal with it nowadays. That includes the disks (mainly rejects from production) and complete sets (with casing; mainly surplus stock).
Complete disks are rarely exported due to copyright restrictions. These are usually ground up before selling to the recyclers.
The same for completed sets: these are either shredded, baled, or saw cut to make them unusable as product. Re-using the jewel case, or the DVD box? Forget it.