They themselves could offer a low-resolution download
A movie is typically a single use product. The "replay value" of an already watched movie is near zero. You watch it and walk out of the theater (or set the DVD aside.) You might want to view it again only a few years later, if ever. So that low-res download will be reducing the market for the full, high-res product.
Another possibility is that the resolution is so small that the movie is unwatchable. Then several possibilities arise:
The viewer is disgusted and promises to never watch that movie again.
The viewer pirates the proper high-res download and watches that.
The viewer forces himself to watch the low-res movie, and once that is done crosses it off of his "to buy" list.
The viewer waits until an official high-res product is available, and buys that.
I don't see any upside for the movie company in these options; only #4 is a zero-gain, the rest are pure loss.
At least Microsoft can program an OS, unlike Apple who had to get Unix, since there old OS sucked worse than Win3.0
Ability to code an OS may be nice to brag about, but your customers can't care less. They appreciate only results, and if you build your product from best components users like that.
There are thousands of computer manufacturers in the world and only ten or so OS kernel manufacturers (if you count all Linux flavors as one.) Years ago it was common for a manufacturer to build their own OS (and I worked for one such company) but eventually they saw the light and migrated to a supported commercial RTOS, just because it was so much better, and cheaper too.
When you own the 1000 acres that surround you, you are free to do just about anything you want
When you own 1,000 acres and attempt to use some of it, shooting at animals may be a full time job - unless you want your land to be infested by rodents and snakes, deer and coyotes and foxes. Wild pigs will gladly dig up your lawns for you, even if you don't ask for that service. The animals are cuddly in photos, but when a fox and a coyote start having a discussion under your window at 3am there ought to be some sort of law and order:-)
A 0.02 microsievert effective dose to the whole body is nothing.
The discussion is full of explanations why this is meaningless. Let me try an analogy.
A human's body is normally at 36.6 deg C, and can be up to 40 deg on average when you are sick. Now take a blowtorch and point it at a toe on your left foot. I guarantee that the average temperature of your body would hardly change, but the toe would be toast. That's exactly what seems to happen with millimeter wave scanners - their radiation is all absorbed by skin, but for averaging purposes the manufacturer pretends that it is spread inside the entire body.
there are far greater threats than what little traffic Google may have captured
North Korea has a nuclear bomb, but that doesn't mean that the police in Nowhere, KS shouldn't be arresting a pickpocket - even if the thief only stole one penny.
In Google's case we are dealing with a massive data collection program. You are right that the van is in range of any given AP only for 10-20 seconds. However in heavily populated cities the van is *always* in range of some APs; this is equivalent to parking the van in front of someone's home, statistically speaking. Sure, if the van moves they will collect random blocks of data - but since they don't care who to spy upon it is just as good as spying upon some specific person.
On top of that, there are cases when *any* exposure to the traffic is an invasion of privacy. For example, people may run torrents or newsgroup agents 24/7. Even if you observe for one second you will see lots of traffic, and it is not encrypted.
With regard to the fact that anyone can do that, not just Google: it is true, if the connection is not encrypted then everyone can access the payload. However a lot of privacy depends on other people not being expected to do certain things. For example, hardly anyone uses dense black cloth as window curtains at night; a determined Peeping Tom with binoculars can see through many curtains. But there are very few determined Peeping Toms, and when they are discovered (as is the case with Google) they are accused of crime and prosecuted. This is doubly so in countries where capture of someone else's computer traffic is a crime. I'm not a lawyer, but the US Code specifically defines it as a crime to "(a) intentionally intercept[s], endeavor[s] to intercept, or procure[s] any other person to intercept or endeavor to intercept, any wire, oral, or electronic communication;"
What Google did is similar to driving the vans at night and using a high zoom camera to take pictures of all lighted windows in the city. If you take enough pictures some of them will contain "interesting" material. So in my opinion if Google captured the 802.11 payload they committed a crime in the USA. The claim that the data wasn't used [yet] is not very important here; if a thief steals some c/c numbers it's a crime on its own; if he uses those numbers then he gets extra charges for that.
edit those frames to remove any potential user payload data. I'm not aware of any functionality for doing this on-the-fly with any of the open-source tools for capturing traffic.
It's just too bad that those open-source tools are closed source, and in any case Google has no programmers on payroll to do the necessary changes:-) Otherwise they'd learn that it is a one line change: a memmove() call. The position and size of the payload is well known within the packet. Or if you want to keep the format of the output, use memset() instead and zero the payload.
These changes would not only ensure that they are in the clear in terms of computer trespass, memmove() also would reduce the storage requirements. It is possible that nobody at Google was thinking ahead. Google is a company of young people, and those may not be sufficiently worried about legal stuff. And there was no oversight at all, even by Google's legal department. I'd think that when you send thousands of cars into foreign countries to record stuff you'd involve a lawyer or two... this looks like incompetence that flows from the very top.
You're assuming that "thousands of Google coders, workers and managers" are auditing the parameters passed to tcpdump in some script or at least looking over the raw capture files rather than the output data.
If people in charge haven't had time even once in three years to look at what they collected, they are idiots by anyone's definition. Intercepting of other people's communications is a crime in many countries. It's perfectly legal to receive AP's broadcasts that advertise it, but once you start capturing packets that are sent to (or from) other computers, you are receiving "legally protected" (but not physically protected) data that is not for you. Lawyers in different jurisdictions may have different laws on this subject, but intercepting other people's data is amoral in most human societies.
- A company accidentally collects data that careless users broadcast to anyone who is listening.
Two people have a quiet, private conversation in an empty street. They have a reasonable expectation of privacy. A car with a sensitive microphone drives by and records several seconds of the conversation, without participants' knowledge.
- The data is largely worthless anyway due to the circumstances.
Google wouldn't deploy a system for collecting worthless data on thousands of StreetView cars over three years. It's not like a lowly code monkey made a build with a few extra #defines, threw it over the wall and forgot about it. The car has to have WiFi, the operators have to be trained to use the system, and the collected data has to be taken out of the car and stored somewhere on company's servers. This can't happen accidentally.
- The company doesn't realize they actually have this data, and doesn't do anything with it.
That assumes that thousands of Google coders, workers and managers are idiots. Far more likely is that Google, being in data mining business, were perfectly aware of every aspect of this collection. It costs money to run StreetView cars, so they packed the cars with everything they could think of, and collected everything that they could.
- Once they actually find out they have this data, instead of trying to hide it or make excuses, they voluntarily come forth
The "voluntarily" part was forced - see the TFA:
Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research for Google, wrote in a blog post that the company uncovered the mistake while responding to a German data-protection agency's request for it to audit the Wi-Fi data
Google was silent about it for three years, but once they were asked a direct question they decided not to lie. When a lawyer asks a question he already knows the answer, so lying in these circumstances would be much more dangerous.
Magnetic fields this strong wouldn't effect just one person.
Not in the same way. If several people see the same object with the same behavior, it implies transfer of shared information to all observers[1]. Normally that's light that reflects from real objects and is collected by any number of eyes. But if magnetic fields, especially "this strong", convey information, they would be changing fast, and thus induce considerable currents in all metal objects around. This is not associated with ball lightning.
Another problem is that strong magnetic fields require either large area conductors (coils, plasma paths, whatever) or large currents. Either of those possibilities requires channels or power sources that are so far unknown to us. The only obvious source of a strong magnetic field is the lightning itself, it can carry plenty of amps. But many ball lightnings were observed without any conventional lightning strike nearby, and without any technology that is capable of producing those strong fields. Most people even today aren't anywhere near equipment that is capable of doing such things.
[1] One can claim, of course, that some trigger can cause "playback" of some genetically coded information that is the same for all humans, that's why once triggered they see the same thing. Then you can get away with just one trigger bit, and the rest is "in the dictionary." However such uniformity of response to my knowledge haven't been observed in humans. Besides, that theory would need to explain why there is correlation of observations within any one observing group, but not across several groups that are observing different events.
And of course there is sometimes material evidence of the encounter - besides photos and videos there are melted, charred and boiled objects. It's certainly puzzling that some BL causes such charring and some BL is inert. It's like BL is 3D sections of 4D objects, and depending on where the section is made you perceive different effects. That explains BL appearing and disappearing out of thin air, though it is generally associated with storms.
I tend to agree with fractoid and Khashishi. The land will feed you, even if you are not a farmer. Anyone is smart enough to grow potatoes and gather fruits from trees. Other plants are also doable if you are willing to look at what your more experienced neighbors do. Humans learned all this stuff from each other for most of the known history, without books.
It is true that you will need horses. There are few domesticated horses in the USA, but many more are freely roaming BLM lands. They can be caught if anyone wants them. Meanwhile even the power of one human (or one family) is enough to keep them alive, that had been proven too many times in history.
There are very few wolves in the USA; but they are being reintroduced, against the best judgement of competent people. Certainly running out of ammo is unpleasant, since you need it for hunting too. But there are plenty of modern muzzleloaders on the market and in hands of hunters; they require fewer factory parts to operate. In any case, wolves typically don't read newspapers, and they will not know that a social disaster struck; they will be just as active (or inactive) as they are today - for a while. Right now wolves are protected and can't be shot for any reason; damage to cattle so far is small.
With regard to healthcare, indeed only the primitive forms of it will survive. The average lifespan will drop to 40-50 years. There certainly are advantages to living in the modern technological society. But without oil that society will die in an amazingly short period of time, like a few weeks. With regard to roaming gangs of city dwellers, that's definitely possible, but consider that gas is a precious commodity, and there is hardly anything to plunder at the countryside at any given time, unless the gang wants to steal a cow. IMO, for a while the gangs will be busy in cities, and when they are done there they may be already too weak to mount a serious attack on a farming community a hundred miles away. This is just a guess, of course - it may be possible that city thugs *will* be conducting raids to get food, especially if they are hungry.
If we suddenly awoke tomorrow and petroleum disappeared from the ground, after the sudden earth shattering ground collapses we'd be working on implementing nuclear/solar/wind/ for power, and we'd be implementing another source to make lipstick/plastics/etc.
If we wake up tomorrow and find that oil disappeared from the ground, the best next thing is to go and buy a nice, comfortable coffin. This is because no amount of horses would be sufficient to deliver food from places where it is made to places where it is consumed. Hundreds of millions of city dwellers will be left without food; what do you think will happen next? I think making a new kind of lipstick would be rather a low priority project.
Do not be surprised at the popularity of authoritarian leaders in Russia. That's one of the weird things about the country.
There is nothing surprising here. Russian history had weak rulers and strong rules. Weak ones brought disaster; strong ones brought success and prosperity. You don't need to go too far back, just look at the chaos and wars of Yeltsin's years.
Americans and mostly happy and proud to vote, from what I've seen. They certainly would hate being in a situation where they don't have the opportunity to do so.
I find this placebo to be quite interesting. They vote and they enjoy voting, but their votes change nothing. Perhaps they should classify voting as entertainment.
It looks like your situation is not that dire. But if you want peace of mind, get a set of switches and install them on all doors and windows. Do not rely upon motion detection in cameras, this is not very reliable. In my case it gets triggered by sudden changes in illumination (such as caused by clouds) and by tree branches moving in the wind. PIR sensors aren't much better, they can react to cold (or hot) air coming in through a window or a vent and mixing with the air within the house. But simple switches will reliably tell you if the door is opened, for example. If your house is not easy to wire this way, get wireless sensors (Z-Wave, for example, or Insteon.) You can connect the whole thing so that you get an SMS when an event occurs, and then you can review the video.
But quite importantly you need to make sure that all this hardware has a deterrent effect. For example, your motion sensors (outdoors) should produce some very obvious effect, like activating floodlights around the house, or beeping something inside the house (loud enough that it is heard outside) and so on. Otherwise you may still be burglarized, even though after the fact there would be plenty of evidence to arrest and convict. I doubt you want to build a honeypot house; you want to make sure burglars don't even try. Of course your shutters help in this department. But they may reduce the resale value of your house (and of those of your neighbors) by pointing out that the whole area is unsafe (whether this is true or not - many buyers are scaredy cats, and no amount of explanations will help if facts speak for themselves.)
And with regard to "teenage bandits" - they are unpredictable and can be more dangerous than old, seasoned burglars.
Having just had my house broken into ~2 weeks ago and spending most of the past two weeks researching good-but-affordable security cams as a result
Your research is very nice, however you don't mention how those cameras will prevent another break-in. Quality of most cameras is so dismal that all you will see after the burglary is some hooded shadows carrying your stuff away. I have one camera myself, but it is not a major part of the security solution, I mostly use it to see when guests are coming.
If you want to make your house safe then you need to think deeper into what can make it safer. Right now it seems you are focusing only on what you can do due to your background. You need to focus on what needs to be done. Houses in some [bad] locations can't be made safe, short of hiring 24/7 security guards. In other places you may need: a tall fence; a dog; external motion-controlled lights; excellent cameras that take 10 MP photos of everything that happens when the motion sensors activate; other perimeter sensors (beam break type, for example;) door and window sensors; security system that summons police; alarm lights and sirens; battery backup to power all that after the utility power is cut; and other stuff that anyone can easily come up with. You also need to understand what you are going to do if you are so unlucky that the burglars break into the house when you and your family are inside. Many burglars leave no witnesses, and you shouldn't depend on your cameras - at best they will help to catch the killers. If you want an instant (not customized) solution, get a few guard dogs and a gun or two, and stay at home most of the time. 99% of burglars will be deterred by the dogs, and you hopefully will never have to deal with the remaining 1% (but be prepared nevertheless.)
Priesthood doesn't pay all that well, given the amount of training and effort it requires.
But the job security is great. Once you are in, you are taken care of for life (even, as facts show, if you commit a crime.) Not bad for people who are more interested in philosophy and abstract knowledge (and religion too.)
For example, Series 587 (and there are many more here. If the part number starts with 'K' it means consumer part. Without 'K' it is a military grade part. You can see the difference in packages - ceramic packages are common for military grade components.
how the Russian lag in developing VLSI chips curiously did not critically hinder their accomplishments in space missions, ICBMs and chess computation.
VLSI is not necessarily an advantage in space missions. You can do a lot of embedded computing just using low density, but radiation hardened parts. USSR had several chipsets that were suitable for military and space use. I can't find them on the Web right now (forgot their p/n). With regard to SWaP, one engineer told me "our rockets are powerful enough":-)
The new ad API is specifically for developers to use in their applications.
Yes, but who will be profiting from those ads? If Apple wants some considerable cut from ads then Google may be unwilling to bring their competitor as a partner.
Also Google doesn't need anyone's ad API, they have their own, and a pretty capable too, thank you very much:-)
You forgot to mention that Cipro was distributed to "people who matter" in the government weeks in advance, and nobody is willing to explain this or even ask why it was done.
Wanting to prevent your children from seeing pornography and wanting to prevent your children from seeing breasts are two completely different things.
The whole natural purpose of breasts is to be touched (and seen, unless blindfolded) by children. Of course that is subverted nowadays out of convenience, and children are fed with some industrially produced powders of random quality.
(Note so I don't get sued: this is 100% false, obviously)
You chose the wrong audience to claim that. How do you know that it is 100% false? How do you prove it without accounting for every moment in entire lives of both protagonists?
Also my definition of steal is accurate, they broke in and copied the code without consent from Google.
Several people noted that theft requires taking something away. Google still has their code. However it's probably correct to say that Google's trade secrets were stolen because Google doesn't have them any more.
I think they will sacrifice the relatively free and open Internet we have today
In context of this article it won't do a thing. If you have thousands of students living together, they don't need Internet to trade songs. The horse - an exact digital copy - has left the barn long ago; MP3 codec and pocket-sized multi-gigabyte players just make it practical. There is a a huge mass of music out there - essentially everything is there - and if the government introduces artificial scarcity by clamping down on copying then students will make sure to copy and store *everything* they come across, even if they don't like the music - just because it may be harder to do in the future.
Internet is important only for geeks who don't meet anyone, ever. But such geeks are probably sophisticated enough to get what they need - the government will be using a pretty rough net; they can monitor standard ports, but they can't look into SCP traffic or decode everything that is posted in a.b.*.encrypted, or try to figure out why foo.o is 4 MB long and the linker says it's corrupted, while foo.c is just "void foo() {}"...
Laws are being proposed to mandate spyware, which you can bet will also restrict the use of "dubious" alternative systems like Linux and OSS if they get passed
All the spyware in the world is useless on a computer that is not on the network. With prices of computers going down fast, it is not unreasonable to see more and more people having two computers - one for Internet and one without a network card. The government would need to set up a Computer Police to bust doors and search premises (since a 1 TB portable drive fits in a shirt pocket.)
Nowadays ? *ALL* system are either closed , or too complicated to really go on
It's nowhere that bad, you just have a case of selective memory. Recall "Hello, World!" in Windows 3.1? It's 100+ LOC, with derived window classes done by hand, in C. Remember RS-232? You had to do it *all* by hand, probably in assembly language. Sure, a simple console application was easy - but it's still easy today; it's just nobody wants them.
And recall how marvelously easy was it back then to put together a multithreaded UI with shaped windows and dockable/floating toolbars. Windows 3.x had only one thread for everything, and had no RAD tools; VB was the first one, IIRC - you had to code pixels and create your widgets programmatically. Today - in WPF or in Android - you do that in XML.
What happened is that the inner workings of the computer are farther away, better hidden. Libraries got developed that changed software from an individual, unique, handcrafted project to a generic, common, and heavily automated process. For example, if you need an application that receives a challenge over the network, shows it to you, gets your response and sends it back, it could be put together (not even written!) in minutes. So things changed indeed, but not all that change is for worse.
Slashdot Mirror
They themselves could offer a low-resolution download
A movie is typically a single use product. The "replay value" of an already watched movie is near zero. You watch it and walk out of the theater (or set the DVD aside.) You might want to view it again only a few years later, if ever. So that low-res download will be reducing the market for the full, high-res product.
Another possibility is that the resolution is so small that the movie is unwatchable. Then several possibilities arise:
I don't see any upside for the movie company in these options; only #4 is a zero-gain, the rest are pure loss.
At least Microsoft can program an OS, unlike Apple who had to get Unix, since there old OS sucked worse than Win3.0
Ability to code an OS may be nice to brag about, but your customers can't care less. They appreciate only results, and if you build your product from best components users like that.
There are thousands of computer manufacturers in the world and only ten or so OS kernel manufacturers (if you count all Linux flavors as one.) Years ago it was common for a manufacturer to build their own OS (and I worked for one such company) but eventually they saw the light and migrated to a supported commercial RTOS, just because it was so much better, and cheaper too.
When you own the 1000 acres that surround you, you are free to do just about anything you want
When you own 1,000 acres and attempt to use some of it, shooting at animals may be a full time job - unless you want your land to be infested by rodents and snakes, deer and coyotes and foxes. Wild pigs will gladly dig up your lawns for you, even if you don't ask for that service. The animals are cuddly in photos, but when a fox and a coyote start having a discussion under your window at 3am there ought to be some sort of law and order :-)
A 0.02 microsievert effective dose to the whole body is nothing.
The discussion is full of explanations why this is meaningless. Let me try an analogy.
A human's body is normally at 36.6 deg C, and can be up to 40 deg on average when you are sick. Now take a blowtorch and point it at a toe on your left foot. I guarantee that the average temperature of your body would hardly change, but the toe would be toast. That's exactly what seems to happen with millimeter wave scanners - their radiation is all absorbed by skin, but for averaging purposes the manufacturer pretends that it is spread inside the entire body.
there are far greater threats than what little traffic Google may have captured
North Korea has a nuclear bomb, but that doesn't mean that the police in Nowhere, KS shouldn't be arresting a pickpocket - even if the thief only stole one penny.
In Google's case we are dealing with a massive data collection program. You are right that the van is in range of any given AP only for 10-20 seconds. However in heavily populated cities the van is *always* in range of some APs; this is equivalent to parking the van in front of someone's home, statistically speaking. Sure, if the van moves they will collect random blocks of data - but since they don't care who to spy upon it is just as good as spying upon some specific person.
On top of that, there are cases when *any* exposure to the traffic is an invasion of privacy. For example, people may run torrents or newsgroup agents 24/7. Even if you observe for one second you will see lots of traffic, and it is not encrypted.
With regard to the fact that anyone can do that, not just Google: it is true, if the connection is not encrypted then everyone can access the payload. However a lot of privacy depends on other people not being expected to do certain things. For example, hardly anyone uses dense black cloth as window curtains at night; a determined Peeping Tom with binoculars can see through many curtains. But there are very few determined Peeping Toms, and when they are discovered (as is the case with Google) they are accused of crime and prosecuted. This is doubly so in countries where capture of someone else's computer traffic is a crime. I'm not a lawyer, but the US Code specifically defines it as a crime to "(a) intentionally intercept[s], endeavor[s] to intercept, or procure[s] any other person to intercept or endeavor to intercept, any wire, oral, or electronic communication;"
What Google did is similar to driving the vans at night and using a high zoom camera to take pictures of all lighted windows in the city. If you take enough pictures some of them will contain "interesting" material. So in my opinion if Google captured the 802.11 payload they committed a crime in the USA. The claim that the data wasn't used [yet] is not very important here; if a thief steals some c/c numbers it's a crime on its own; if he uses those numbers then he gets extra charges for that.
edit those frames to remove any potential user payload data. I'm not aware of any functionality for doing this on-the-fly with any of the open-source tools for capturing traffic.
It's just too bad that those open-source tools are closed source, and in any case Google has no programmers on payroll to do the necessary changes :-) Otherwise they'd learn that it is a one line change: a memmove() call. The position and size of the payload is well known within the packet. Or if you want to keep the format of the output, use memset() instead and zero the payload.
These changes would not only ensure that they are in the clear in terms of computer trespass, memmove() also would reduce the storage requirements. It is possible that nobody at Google was thinking ahead. Google is a company of young people, and those may not be sufficiently worried about legal stuff. And there was no oversight at all, even by Google's legal department. I'd think that when you send thousands of cars into foreign countries to record stuff you'd involve a lawyer or two... this looks like incompetence that flows from the very top.
You're assuming that "thousands of Google coders, workers and managers" are auditing the parameters passed to tcpdump in some script or at least looking over the raw capture files rather than the output data.
If people in charge haven't had time even once in three years to look at what they collected, they are idiots by anyone's definition. Intercepting of other people's communications is a crime in many countries. It's perfectly legal to receive AP's broadcasts that advertise it, but once you start capturing packets that are sent to (or from) other computers, you are receiving "legally protected" (but not physically protected) data that is not for you. Lawyers in different jurisdictions may have different laws on this subject, but intercepting other people's data is amoral in most human societies.
- A company accidentally collects data that careless users broadcast to anyone who is listening.
Two people have a quiet, private conversation in an empty street. They have a reasonable expectation of privacy. A car with a sensitive microphone drives by and records several seconds of the conversation, without participants' knowledge.
- The data is largely worthless anyway due to the circumstances.
Google wouldn't deploy a system for collecting worthless data on thousands of StreetView cars over three years. It's not like a lowly code monkey made a build with a few extra #defines, threw it over the wall and forgot about it. The car has to have WiFi, the operators have to be trained to use the system, and the collected data has to be taken out of the car and stored somewhere on company's servers. This can't happen accidentally.
- The company doesn't realize they actually have this data, and doesn't do anything with it.
That assumes that thousands of Google coders, workers and managers are idiots. Far more likely is that Google, being in data mining business, were perfectly aware of every aspect of this collection. It costs money to run StreetView cars, so they packed the cars with everything they could think of, and collected everything that they could.
- Once they actually find out they have this data, instead of trying to hide it or make excuses, they voluntarily come forth
The "voluntarily" part was forced - see the TFA:
Google was silent about it for three years, but once they were asked a direct question they decided not to lie. When a lawyer asks a question he already knows the answer, so lying in these circumstances would be much more dangerous.
Magnetic fields this strong wouldn't effect just one person.
Not in the same way. If several people see the same object with the same behavior, it implies transfer of shared information to all observers[1]. Normally that's light that reflects from real objects and is collected by any number of eyes. But if magnetic fields, especially "this strong", convey information, they would be changing fast, and thus induce considerable currents in all metal objects around. This is not associated with ball lightning.
Another problem is that strong magnetic fields require either large area conductors (coils, plasma paths, whatever) or large currents. Either of those possibilities requires channels or power sources that are so far unknown to us. The only obvious source of a strong magnetic field is the lightning itself, it can carry plenty of amps. But many ball lightnings were observed without any conventional lightning strike nearby, and without any technology that is capable of producing those strong fields. Most people even today aren't anywhere near equipment that is capable of doing such things.
[1] One can claim, of course, that some trigger can cause "playback" of some genetically coded information that is the same for all humans, that's why once triggered they see the same thing. Then you can get away with just one trigger bit, and the rest is "in the dictionary." However such uniformity of response to my knowledge haven't been observed in humans. Besides, that theory would need to explain why there is correlation of observations within any one observing group, but not across several groups that are observing different events.
And of course there is sometimes material evidence of the encounter - besides photos and videos there are melted, charred and boiled objects. It's certainly puzzling that some BL causes such charring and some BL is inert. It's like BL is 3D sections of 4D objects, and depending on where the section is made you perceive different effects. That explains BL appearing and disappearing out of thin air, though it is generally associated with storms.
I tend to agree with fractoid and Khashishi. The land will feed you, even if you are not a farmer. Anyone is smart enough to grow potatoes and gather fruits from trees. Other plants are also doable if you are willing to look at what your more experienced neighbors do. Humans learned all this stuff from each other for most of the known history, without books.
It is true that you will need horses. There are few domesticated horses in the USA, but many more are freely roaming BLM lands. They can be caught if anyone wants them. Meanwhile even the power of one human (or one family) is enough to keep them alive, that had been proven too many times in history.
There are very few wolves in the USA; but they are being reintroduced, against the best judgement of competent people. Certainly running out of ammo is unpleasant, since you need it for hunting too. But there are plenty of modern muzzleloaders on the market and in hands of hunters; they require fewer factory parts to operate. In any case, wolves typically don't read newspapers, and they will not know that a social disaster struck; they will be just as active (or inactive) as they are today - for a while. Right now wolves are protected and can't be shot for any reason; damage to cattle so far is small.
With regard to healthcare, indeed only the primitive forms of it will survive. The average lifespan will drop to 40-50 years. There certainly are advantages to living in the modern technological society. But without oil that society will die in an amazingly short period of time, like a few weeks. With regard to roaming gangs of city dwellers, that's definitely possible, but consider that gas is a precious commodity, and there is hardly anything to plunder at the countryside at any given time, unless the gang wants to steal a cow. IMO, for a while the gangs will be busy in cities, and when they are done there they may be already too weak to mount a serious attack on a farming community a hundred miles away. This is just a guess, of course - it may be possible that city thugs *will* be conducting raids to get food, especially if they are hungry.
If we suddenly awoke tomorrow and petroleum disappeared from the ground, after the sudden earth shattering ground collapses we'd be working on implementing nuclear/solar/wind/ for power, and we'd be implementing another source to make lipstick/plastics/etc.
If we wake up tomorrow and find that oil disappeared from the ground, the best next thing is to go and buy a nice, comfortable coffin. This is because no amount of horses would be sufficient to deliver food from places where it is made to places where it is consumed. Hundreds of millions of city dwellers will be left without food; what do you think will happen next? I think making a new kind of lipstick would be rather a low priority project.
Maybe for them, the game of chess is the most important thing in the universe.
It is, with a full glass of zolt in hand.
Do not be surprised at the popularity of authoritarian leaders in Russia. That's one of the weird things about the country.
There is nothing surprising here. Russian history had weak rulers and strong rules. Weak ones brought disaster; strong ones brought success and prosperity. You don't need to go too far back, just look at the chaos and wars of Yeltsin's years.
Americans and mostly happy and proud to vote, from what I've seen. They certainly would hate being in a situation where they don't have the opportunity to do so.
I find this placebo to be quite interesting. They vote and they enjoy voting, but their votes change nothing. Perhaps they should classify voting as entertainment.
It looks like your situation is not that dire. But if you want peace of mind, get a set of switches and install them on all doors and windows. Do not rely upon motion detection in cameras, this is not very reliable. In my case it gets triggered by sudden changes in illumination (such as caused by clouds) and by tree branches moving in the wind. PIR sensors aren't much better, they can react to cold (or hot) air coming in through a window or a vent and mixing with the air within the house. But simple switches will reliably tell you if the door is opened, for example. If your house is not easy to wire this way, get wireless sensors (Z-Wave, for example, or Insteon.) You can connect the whole thing so that you get an SMS when an event occurs, and then you can review the video.
But quite importantly you need to make sure that all this hardware has a deterrent effect. For example, your motion sensors (outdoors) should produce some very obvious effect, like activating floodlights around the house, or beeping something inside the house (loud enough that it is heard outside) and so on. Otherwise you may still be burglarized, even though after the fact there would be plenty of evidence to arrest and convict. I doubt you want to build a honeypot house; you want to make sure burglars don't even try. Of course your shutters help in this department. But they may reduce the resale value of your house (and of those of your neighbors) by pointing out that the whole area is unsafe (whether this is true or not - many buyers are scaredy cats, and no amount of explanations will help if facts speak for themselves.)
And with regard to "teenage bandits" - they are unpredictable and can be more dangerous than old, seasoned burglars.
Having just had my house broken into ~2 weeks ago and spending most of the past two weeks researching good-but-affordable security cams as a result
Your research is very nice, however you don't mention how those cameras will prevent another break-in. Quality of most cameras is so dismal that all you will see after the burglary is some hooded shadows carrying your stuff away. I have one camera myself, but it is not a major part of the security solution, I mostly use it to see when guests are coming.
If you want to make your house safe then you need to think deeper into what can make it safer. Right now it seems you are focusing only on what you can do due to your background. You need to focus on what needs to be done. Houses in some [bad] locations can't be made safe, short of hiring 24/7 security guards. In other places you may need: a tall fence; a dog; external motion-controlled lights; excellent cameras that take 10 MP photos of everything that happens when the motion sensors activate; other perimeter sensors (beam break type, for example;) door and window sensors; security system that summons police; alarm lights and sirens; battery backup to power all that after the utility power is cut; and other stuff that anyone can easily come up with. You also need to understand what you are going to do if you are so unlucky that the burglars break into the house when you and your family are inside. Many burglars leave no witnesses, and you shouldn't depend on your cameras - at best they will help to catch the killers. If you want an instant (not customized) solution, get a few guard dogs and a gun or two, and stay at home most of the time. 99% of burglars will be deterred by the dogs, and you hopefully will never have to deal with the remaining 1% (but be prepared nevertheless.)
Priesthood doesn't pay all that well, given the amount of training and effort it requires.
But the job security is great. Once you are in, you are taken care of for life (even, as facts show, if you commit a crime.) Not bad for people who are more interested in philosophy and abstract knowledge (and religion too.)
For example, Series 587 (and there are many more here. If the part number starts with 'K' it means consumer part. Without 'K' it is a military grade part. You can see the difference in packages - ceramic packages are common for military grade components.
how the Russian lag in developing VLSI chips curiously did not critically hinder their accomplishments in space missions, ICBMs and chess computation.
VLSI is not necessarily an advantage in space missions. You can do a lot of embedded computing just using low density, but radiation hardened parts. USSR had several chipsets that were suitable for military and space use. I can't find them on the Web right now (forgot their p/n). With regard to SWaP, one engineer told me "our rockets are powerful enough" :-)
The new ad API is specifically for developers to use in their applications.
Yes, but who will be profiting from those ads? If Apple wants some considerable cut from ads then Google may be unwilling to bring their competitor as a partner.
Also Google doesn't need anyone's ad API, they have their own, and a pretty capable too, thank you very much :-)
You forgot to mention that Cipro was distributed to "people who matter" in the government weeks in advance, and nobody is willing to explain this or even ask why it was done.
Wanting to prevent your children from seeing pornography and wanting to prevent your children from seeing breasts are two completely different things.
The whole natural purpose of breasts is to be touched (and seen, unless blindfolded) by children. Of course that is subverted nowadays out of convenience, and children are fed with some industrially produced powders of random quality.
(Note so I don't get sued: this is 100% false, obviously)
You chose the wrong audience to claim that. How do you know that it is 100% false? How do you prove it without accounting for every moment in entire lives of both protagonists?
Also my definition of steal is accurate, they broke in and copied the code without consent from Google.
Several people noted that theft requires taking something away. Google still has their code. However it's probably correct to say that Google's trade secrets were stolen because Google doesn't have them any more.
I think they will sacrifice the relatively free and open Internet we have today
In context of this article it won't do a thing. If you have thousands of students living together, they don't need Internet to trade songs. The horse - an exact digital copy - has left the barn long ago; MP3 codec and pocket-sized multi-gigabyte players just make it practical. There is a a huge mass of music out there - essentially everything is there - and if the government introduces artificial scarcity by clamping down on copying then students will make sure to copy and store *everything* they come across, even if they don't like the music - just because it may be harder to do in the future.
Internet is important only for geeks who don't meet anyone, ever. But such geeks are probably sophisticated enough to get what they need - the government will be using a pretty rough net; they can monitor standard ports, but they can't look into SCP traffic or decode everything that is posted in a.b.*.encrypted, or try to figure out why foo.o is 4 MB long and the linker says it's corrupted, while foo.c is just "void foo() {}" ...
Laws are being proposed to mandate spyware, which you can bet will also restrict the use of "dubious" alternative systems like Linux and OSS if they get passed
All the spyware in the world is useless on a computer that is not on the network. With prices of computers going down fast, it is not unreasonable to see more and more people having two computers - one for Internet and one without a network card. The government would need to set up a Computer Police to bust doors and search premises (since a 1 TB portable drive fits in a shirt pocket.)
Nowadays ? *ALL* system are either closed , or too complicated to really go on
It's nowhere that bad, you just have a case of selective memory. Recall "Hello, World!" in Windows 3.1? It's 100+ LOC, with derived window classes done by hand, in C. Remember RS-232? You had to do it *all* by hand, probably in assembly language. Sure, a simple console application was easy - but it's still easy today; it's just nobody wants them.
And recall how marvelously easy was it back then to put together a multithreaded UI with shaped windows and dockable/floating toolbars. Windows 3.x had only one thread for everything, and had no RAD tools; VB was the first one, IIRC - you had to code pixels and create your widgets programmatically. Today - in WPF or in Android - you do that in XML.
What happened is that the inner workings of the computer are farther away, better hidden. Libraries got developed that changed software from an individual, unique, handcrafted project to a generic, common, and heavily automated process. For example, if you need an application that receives a challenge over the network, shows it to you, gets your response and sends it back, it could be put together (not even written!) in minutes. So things changed indeed, but not all that change is for worse.