Yes, it is. It's just throttling over a short period. Latency and throttling are one and the same. You have a piece of pipe that can take hold ten marbles at a time before the marbles come out the other end. If the marbles can flow at only a certain speed (say one marble pulled out per second), then this behaves very much like a network cable. (See, it is a series of tubes.)
It's basically inevitable that bandwidth will be oversold; the cost of running the lines would otherwise be prohibitive. So this is similar to having two people who are allowed to put marbles in at a rate of one per second. Remember that you can only take out one per second from the other end.
Assume that the two people usually put in one marble every two seconds. On average, neither is throttled. However, person A has to guarantee that his marbles get there in exactly ten seconds, and person B does not. If at any point, person A puts in one marble slightly before that two second mark, this means that it delays person B's marble by a second. For that brief moment in time, person B is effectively capped at one marble every three seconds, because he or she was not able to insert a second marble until three seconds after the previous marble.
For a sufficiently large download, the period doesn't even have to be short. Assume that you and I both have connections rated at 1 GB per hour. If you download a 10 GB file over the course of 10 hours, and I make a video call that transfers 2 GB over the course of 2 hours, we're using the same amount of bandwidth averaged over the relevant period.
If the total shared bandwidth available is only 1.5 GB per hour, you can't have the 1 GB per hour you need for the transfer while I have the 1 GB per hour I need for my video call. However, if instead of rate limiting you to 1 GB per hour the whole time, the service provider rate limits you to.5 GB per hour during that 2 hour call and makes up for it by opening up the full 1.5 GB per hour to you during the following two hours, your download time is the same, but my call was successful.
In effect, what service provider temporarily increased the latency of your packets by squeezing them into the gaps between the higher priority traffic, then made up for that latency by reducing the latency it would otherwise have applied during a period when the network was less congested. However, you would say that the network provider throttled your connection during a period of higher demand.
The important factor is not whether the peak demand exceeds the peak bandwidth available, but whether the average demand exceeds the average bandwidth available, and whether the service is advertised based on best-case available bandwidth or average-case available bandwidth.
4 GB in a month is not excessive. That's less than the average bandwidth of a 14.4k modem. Remember those?
Most sane Internet services set their cap at 250 GB these days. A 30 GB cap is considered paltry. 4 GB is... well, the only place that's remotely acceptable is on an untethered cellular phone.
You didn't really think they'd take the take these petitions seriously petition seriously, did you? Of course not. They're waiting for the inevitable take this take this petition seriously petition seriously petition. Then they'll reply. Maybe. And when they do, they'll take this take this take this petition seriously petition seriously petition seriously.
It's actually nowhere near halfway. Anyone with common sense can tell that a free, pirated copy of a DVD does not pay the author. By contrast, it is extraordinarily difficult for someone to determine whether an unauthorized commercial exploitation of a work pays the author anything or not. That's a fairly fundamental difference between the two types of exploitation.
Put another way, if commercial piracy were legal, it would not be feasible to make money off of any creative work unless it was unique and sold for huge sums of money. You could sell a painting for ten grand, sure, but you could never sell a novel for ten grand; most creative works can only earn their creators a living if sold in quantity.
If commercial exploitation of a work without a license were legal, then there would be nothing stopping every business that sells your work from doing so without a license and paying you nothing. There would be no way for the consumer to know that you were not getting money, thus there would be no pressure on those resellers to behave ethically. Therefore, taken to its logical conclusion, such a system would pay you at or near zero for your work.
By contrast, a system that prohibits commercial exploitation but allows noncommercial exploitation would guarantee that anyone buying a copy of your work would actually be giving you money. I'd like to believe that most people are honest and would choose to buy a copy of a work that they enjoyed to support the author. Therefore, I would expect this system o act very similarly to the way the current system does, except that there would be more piracy (but not fewer sales), which translates into broader exposure, and in the long run, more sales.
Therefore, IMO, noncommercial piracy is a much less important thing to protect against than commercial piracy. One potentially eliminates payment from people who probably would not have paid for the creative work anyway. The other potentially eliminates payment from everyone, including those who want to pay for that creative work.
Give it ten or fifteen years, and you'll probably see this happening. The entire entertainment industry is so small compared with the technology industry that such consolidation is almost inevitable if the entertainment industry continues to act the way that they have been lately. The tech companies will eat the entertainment "giants" one by one, and in so doing, become them. Then the cycle will repeat itself as some new disruptive technology changes the game again ten or twenty years hence.
I'd like to chime in here that I use MediaFire to distribute musical compositions which I hold the copyrights to collaborators and fans. I'll concede that I may be considered as "indie and amateur stuff."
You see right here? This is the downside to tight copyright controls. If the copyright police have their way, we're eventually going to get to the point where most independent creators (the ones who don't know how to run their own servers) can't publish their own works, as all of the avenues for doing so will have been systematically eliminated by lawsuit, jail time, or threat thereof.
Or just formalize what has historically been standard operating procedure for this sort of thing by limiting copyright infringement proceedings to those who profit from the infringement, under the assumption that the small fish aren't worth frying.
No, if you live in an area with a high cost of living, salaries are proportionally larger. Normally, salaries in most fields are set up so that people without large families can put away a reasonable percentage of their income for retirement. The percentage tends to be fairly comparable.
This means that if you live in California, where a software engineer makes about $110 grand on average, and your lifestyle allows you, for example, to put away 30% of your income towards retirement, you're banking $33k per year. If you live in Tennessee, where the average software engineer salary is only about $65k, assuming you also save 30%, you're only putting away about $19.5k per year. After ten years, the Californian has put away $135,000 more money than the Tennesseean.
Now if the Californian retires in California and the Tennessean retires in Tennessee, they'll have similar lifestyles. However, if the Californian retires to Tennessee, he or she can live a much better lifestyle (and similarly, if the Tennessean retires to California, he or she will probably live in abject poverty).
First, even if you live somewhere in the U.S. with a very cheap cost of living, $50,000 for a two-earner family isn't considered middle class. That's right at what most folks consider to be the poverty line these days....
Second, nobody says you have to give up TV. What we're saying is that if you're living right at the poverty line, you're unlikely to be able to afford to buy a house, period, but if you are going to try, your choices are: A. move in with your parents so you don't have to pay rent, B. find a better job, or C. give up damn near everything else to make that dream a reality.
First, I misread the statistics and thought $50k was the median individual income rather than median household income, which means all of my numbers were off by a factor of 2. Mea culpa.
Second, that $10,000 is based on living in a city, in which case you're probably making well above the median. Outside of cities, in most places, you should be able to find a decent home for a lot less than $200,000. Half that, even. And there's almost always the option of driving into a city to work at city wage levels.
Third, if you aren't already saving a lot more than four or five thousand dollars per year, you're screwed. In general, everyone should be putting away a minimum of 15% of their annual income towards retirement, and ideally 20% or more. In the (very) short term, you can reduce the money you put away for retirement, and use that money towards your house fund. If you're not able to save even 10% of your current salary, particularly before you have those two kids, then (assuming you aren't overspending) you're being seriously underpaid based on the cost of living wherever you are.
Finally, don't think for a moment that I'm arguing that you should pay cash for a house. I'm merely arguing that it's not nearly as impossible as the original post suggested.
Of course I'm not saying that. I'm saying that it is possible to buy a house on cash without waiting 20+ years to do it. The most obvious way is to start out somewhere with a high cost of living, work for a decade with a high salary, then move somewhere with a lower cost of living.
Not only did MegaUpload not delete the actual files when sent DMCA notices (but did when sent abuse letters about illegal content like child porn), they also paid the uploaders cash in exchange to send downloaders to their site.
The first part of that is actually reasonable behavior.
First, you're talking about content that is probably de-duplicated, and deleting the actual content (as opposed to the reference to it) would make legal uploads of that same content go away. Remember, it's invariably legal to make a copy of copyrighted material for backup purposes, which means that it's also presumably legal to keep that backup on a shared server somewhere. It's just not legal to make it available to anyone else. By contrast, there is presumably no legal copy of child porn, so nuking the backing store might be a reasonable response.
Second, deleting the content has far-reaching implications, should a media house decide to sue the uploader. If the media house decides to sue and the original data is not retained, they could potentially be held liable for destruction of evidence. It's probably a lot safer if they nuke the backing store only as part of their regularly scheduled cleanup, per their data retention policy.
So that part is not nearly as clear cut as you make it out to be. Paying uploaders... not so much, which is why they'll probably get spanked with jail time for this.
Maybe you should consider moving somewhere that doesn't massively gouge you on housing prices. The average new home costs about three years' salary in the U.S. unless you are in a major city. Even in smaller cities (in most states), you can get a fairly nice home for maybe 200 grand, which is only about 4 years at U.S. median income.
Now I realize that you can't put 100% of your salary into a house, but assuming both of you work, it's hard to imagine not being able to save more than 10% of your combined total income every year.... That's how little you'd have to save for it to take 20 years (on average).
I'm not sure what the password for my account was before, and I'm really not sure what it is now. I use an SSL key for authentication anyway, so this doesn't matter much....
What would be really cool would be if DreamHost allowed you to inject an SSL public key into the account for login purposes, and stopped having a password database entirely. Just my $0.02.
This does not occur in most places. That's why most airports have most or all of their runways pointing in only one direction. In most places, the vast majority of your wind is going to be within a few degrees of coming from the same direction every time.
The only place I've ever lived where wind direction changes by 180 degrees is California. I think it probably has something to do with the sun heating the water off the cost, but I'm not certain. It's very odd to realize that the wind blows in one direction in the morning and in the opposite direction in the evening. It's certainly not typical in most parts of the world.:-)
I disagree. It's a clear example of how direct democracy can work to fix broken laws. Occasionally, a referendum is heinous and gets struck down by the courts. Occasionally, a referendum is heinous and doesn't. The side effects are still statistically far lower than in crap passed by Congress, on average....
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure for more. The average estimate for the one you mention is actually 171,000, according to Wikipedia, plus it left some eleven million people homeless.
Put another way, that one hydroelectric incident killed more people than all the nuclear accidents in human history, and some of the higher estimates for that incident (as high as 230,000) actually exceed the official estimate for total deaths for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, plus the immediate deaths from Chernobyl combined.
The big difference between nuclear power and hydro power in terms of safety is that it is always possible to avoid the danger in the latter case. Just don't build within a couple hundred miles downstream of one.... (On the other hand, I suppose you could make the same argument about living downwind from a nuke plant....)
Living for 62 years after making a recording isn't really all that optimistic. It's probably less than one standard deviation above the norm even if someone made the recording in his/her mid-twenties.
...and that would work, too, because there's no chance that people who install HVAC equipment for a living would notice that the "HVAC" equipment is full of C4. Yes, I know, HVACs are big boxes and you could cram all sorts of stuff in them... this might fool me and you (since we don't know what's supposed to be in that big box), but installing them involves opening all the doors and connecting the innards to gas, power, water, air ducts, temperature control systems, etc.
HVAC units was an entirely arbitrary example of a big piece of gear that could conceivably conceal an explosive charge. It could be furniture movers and sofas, for all it really matters. That's a rather minor detail in the grand scheme of things.
Seems to me it would take at least dozens, probably hundreds, of people to acquire and assemble the explosives.
See the previous comment about anyone higher level being threatened. Besides, you're missing the fact that the government builds explosive devices all the time. Redirecting a few thousand in a separate shipment to a black-ops building somewhere would require maybe one or two people getting involved, if that. Heck, you could probably do it by changing computer records without getting anyone else involved. Planting the explosives in sofas, furnaces, whatever, requires a handful of people. In other words, such a conspiracy need not be anywhere near as large as you think.
Again, I'm not in any way suggesting that this happened. It's pretty unlikely, but it's not pretty unlikely because it isn't possible. It's pretty unlikely because it's pretty unlikely....
Not sure where you get that. The data stream for DisplayPort is not that much more complicated than HDMI. The only real difference is that you have to have a little more advanced logic to check the packet type before you shove the data into the monitor's frame buffer. And ideally, you should do something with some of the other packet types, like providing extra ports, but that's entirely optional. It certainly is not the case that the monitor is doing anything that could be done in the GPU. In all cases, the monitor has to decode the protocol and buffer it, then read that buffer back as it paints the screen. Digital video is not like analog video to a CRT where you could basically let the signal drive the tube....
The DVI-A to VGA adapters cost nothing because they're nothing more than a handful of wires. Of course any adapter that contains electronics is going to cost more than a wire. If you need an HDMI to VGA adapter, that's going to cost you a lot more than a cable, too (about $40—$10 more than a DP to VGA adapter, BTW). It has nothing to do with DP being too complex and everything to do with the fact that active electronics are required to do the job. That and the fact that there are not enough purchasers to drive prices down through economies of scale.
You do have the right to refuse such deals, you know. You can always tell Wal-Mart, "Sorry. We can't hit that price point without compromising quality, and we won't do that."
Wal-Mart might decide to drop your product, or they might not. If they don't, you've won. If they do, you can tell the world (on your website) that your products are no longer sold at Wal-Mart because they tried to force you to compromise on quality, and you said, "No". Then provide a list of alternative retailers that do carry your product. By so doing, you turn lost sales into increased customer loyalty.
Wal-Mart only screws businesses who are so desperate for Wal-Mart to carry their products that they will compromise their integrity just to stay on their shelves. If you ask me, the fault lies equally with both parties. Just saying.
Forget radios - how many people would need be involved? How likely is it that NONE of them will talk?
If you do it right, pretty close to a 100% chance. You tell them that they're installing HVAC equipment or something. You send them all in a few minutes apart, and make sure it takes at least an hour to do the job. Then you set them off remotely before the first worker leaves the building. For the higher-ups, you promise that if they talk, they will be "disappeared".
I'm not in any way insinuating that this was what happened on 9/11. I'm just saying that you need a better argument against such a conspiracy than the assumption that someone would have said something by now....
It's unlikely burglars carry scanners on their rounds. Maybe before and after, but during might get kind of cumbersome and noisy.
Don't forget the guy in the getaway car honking the horn.
Lanier stressed that new mobile technologies like scanner apps for phones made the move even more vital, and cited a number of cases where police suspected that criminals used scanners to stay ahead of police. A rash of carjackings in Capitol Hill in 2010 was facilitated by mobile scanners, she said, as was an alleged drug operation run out of a laundromat in the Seventh District, which covers Ward 8.
If carjackers are staying ahead of police, then the police are incompetent. They're in a stolen car. We have D.O.T. cameras at nearly every major intersections in most cities. Point them and use them to track the carjackers. Even if they jumped out of the car and jacked somebody else at every block, the police should be able to figure out what's going on and keep up with them pretty handily. That's one crime that should be damn near impossible these days.
As for the alleged drug operation, undercover cops usually aren't dispatched. If they seem to be staying one step ahead of your plainclothes cops, that means one of two things: you have the wrong laundromat, or they have somebody working on the inside feeding them information. Either way, crypto won't help.
"When a potential criminal can ask how they can evade capture and there's an app for that, it's time to change our practices," she told Councilmember Phil Mendelson (D-At Large), who chaired the hearing."
Yup. If "there's an app for that", it almost invariably means that what you are doing is causing enough collateral damage to piss off most of the people in your jurisdiction (DUI checkpoints, for example), which means whatever you're doing, you need to stop, take a step back, and find a better way to solve the problem that doesn't cause so many headaches for the innocent bystanders.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it is. It's just throttling over a short period. Latency and throttling are one and the same. You have a piece of pipe that can take hold ten marbles at a time before the marbles come out the other end. If the marbles can flow at only a certain speed (say one marble pulled out per second), then this behaves very much like a network cable. (See, it is a series of tubes.)
It's basically inevitable that bandwidth will be oversold; the cost of running the lines would otherwise be prohibitive. So this is similar to having two people who are allowed to put marbles in at a rate of one per second. Remember that you can only take out one per second from the other end.
Assume that the two people usually put in one marble every two seconds. On average, neither is throttled. However, person A has to guarantee that his marbles get there in exactly ten seconds, and person B does not. If at any point, person A puts in one marble slightly before that two second mark, this means that it delays person B's marble by a second. For that brief moment in time, person B is effectively capped at one marble every three seconds, because he or she was not able to insert a second marble until three seconds after the previous marble.
For a sufficiently large download, the period doesn't even have to be short. Assume that you and I both have connections rated at 1 GB per hour. If you download a 10 GB file over the course of 10 hours, and I make a video call that transfers 2 GB over the course of 2 hours, we're using the same amount of bandwidth averaged over the relevant period.
If the total shared bandwidth available is only 1.5 GB per hour, you can't have the 1 GB per hour you need for the transfer while I have the 1 GB per hour I need for my video call. However, if instead of rate limiting you to 1 GB per hour the whole time, the service provider rate limits you to .5 GB per hour during that 2 hour call and makes up for it by opening up the full 1.5 GB per hour to you during the following two hours, your download time is the same, but my call was successful.
In effect, what service provider temporarily increased the latency of your packets by squeezing them into the gaps between the higher priority traffic, then made up for that latency by reducing the latency it would otherwise have applied during a period when the network was less congested. However, you would say that the network provider throttled your connection during a period of higher demand.
The important factor is not whether the peak demand exceeds the peak bandwidth available, but whether the average demand exceeds the average bandwidth available, and whether the service is advertised based on best-case available bandwidth or average-case available bandwidth.
4 GB in a month is not excessive. That's less than the average bandwidth of a 14.4k modem. Remember those?
Most sane Internet services set their cap at 250 GB these days. A 30 GB cap is considered paltry. 4 GB is... well, the only place that's remotely acceptable is on an untethered cellular phone.
You didn't really think they'd take the take these petitions seriously petition seriously, did you? Of course not. They're waiting for the inevitable take this take this petition seriously petition seriously petition. Then they'll reply. Maybe. And when they do, they'll take this take this take this petition seriously petition seriously petition seriously.
Seriously.
It's actually nowhere near halfway. Anyone with common sense can tell that a free, pirated copy of a DVD does not pay the author. By contrast, it is extraordinarily difficult for someone to determine whether an unauthorized commercial exploitation of a work pays the author anything or not. That's a fairly fundamental difference between the two types of exploitation.
Put another way, if commercial piracy were legal, it would not be feasible to make money off of any creative work unless it was unique and sold for huge sums of money. You could sell a painting for ten grand, sure, but you could never sell a novel for ten grand; most creative works can only earn their creators a living if sold in quantity.
If commercial exploitation of a work without a license were legal, then there would be nothing stopping every business that sells your work from doing so without a license and paying you nothing. There would be no way for the consumer to know that you were not getting money, thus there would be no pressure on those resellers to behave ethically. Therefore, taken to its logical conclusion, such a system would pay you at or near zero for your work.
By contrast, a system that prohibits commercial exploitation but allows noncommercial exploitation would guarantee that anyone buying a copy of your work would actually be giving you money. I'd like to believe that most people are honest and would choose to buy a copy of a work that they enjoyed to support the author. Therefore, I would expect this system o act very similarly to the way the current system does, except that there would be more piracy (but not fewer sales), which translates into broader exposure, and in the long run, more sales.
Therefore, IMO, noncommercial piracy is a much less important thing to protect against than commercial piracy. One potentially eliminates payment from people who probably would not have paid for the creative work anyway. The other potentially eliminates payment from everyone, including those who want to pay for that creative work.
Give it ten or fifteen years, and you'll probably see this happening. The entire entertainment industry is so small compared with the technology industry that such consolidation is almost inevitable if the entertainment industry continues to act the way that they have been lately. The tech companies will eat the entertainment "giants" one by one, and in so doing, become them. Then the cycle will repeat itself as some new disruptive technology changes the game again ten or twenty years hence.
You see right here? This is the downside to tight copyright controls. If the copyright police have their way, we're eventually going to get to the point where most independent creators (the ones who don't know how to run their own servers) can't publish their own works, as all of the avenues for doing so will have been systematically eliminated by lawsuit, jail time, or threat thereof.
Or just formalize what has historically been standard operating procedure for this sort of thing by limiting copyright infringement proceedings to those who profit from the infringement, under the assumption that the small fish aren't worth frying.
No, if you live in an area with a high cost of living, salaries are proportionally larger. Normally, salaries in most fields are set up so that people without large families can put away a reasonable percentage of their income for retirement. The percentage tends to be fairly comparable.
This means that if you live in California, where a software engineer makes about $110 grand on average, and your lifestyle allows you, for example, to put away 30% of your income towards retirement, you're banking $33k per year. If you live in Tennessee, where the average software engineer salary is only about $65k, assuming you also save 30%, you're only putting away about $19.5k per year. After ten years, the Californian has put away $135,000 more money than the Tennesseean.
Now if the Californian retires in California and the Tennessean retires in Tennessee, they'll have similar lifestyles. However, if the Californian retires to Tennessee, he or she can live a much better lifestyle (and similarly, if the Tennessean retires to California, he or she will probably live in abject poverty).
First, even if you live somewhere in the U.S. with a very cheap cost of living, $50,000 for a two-earner family isn't considered middle class. That's right at what most folks consider to be the poverty line these days....
Second, nobody says you have to give up TV. What we're saying is that if you're living right at the poverty line, you're unlikely to be able to afford to buy a house, period, but if you are going to try, your choices are: A. move in with your parents so you don't have to pay rent, B. find a better job, or C. give up damn near everything else to make that dream a reality.
First, I misread the statistics and thought $50k was the median individual income rather than median household income, which means all of my numbers were off by a factor of 2. Mea culpa.
Second, that $10,000 is based on living in a city, in which case you're probably making well above the median. Outside of cities, in most places, you should be able to find a decent home for a lot less than $200,000. Half that, even. And there's almost always the option of driving into a city to work at city wage levels.
Third, if you aren't already saving a lot more than four or five thousand dollars per year, you're screwed. In general, everyone should be putting away a minimum of 15% of their annual income towards retirement, and ideally 20% or more. In the (very) short term, you can reduce the money you put away for retirement, and use that money towards your house fund. If you're not able to save even 10% of your current salary, particularly before you have those two kids, then (assuming you aren't overspending) you're being seriously underpaid based on the cost of living wherever you are.
Finally, don't think for a moment that I'm arguing that you should pay cash for a house. I'm merely arguing that it's not nearly as impossible as the original post suggested.
Of course I'm not saying that. I'm saying that it is possible to buy a house on cash without waiting 20+ years to do it. The most obvious way is to start out somewhere with a high cost of living, work for a decade with a high salary, then move somewhere with a lower cost of living.
The first part of that is actually reasonable behavior.
First, you're talking about content that is probably de-duplicated, and deleting the actual content (as opposed to the reference to it) would make legal uploads of that same content go away. Remember, it's invariably legal to make a copy of copyrighted material for backup purposes, which means that it's also presumably legal to keep that backup on a shared server somewhere. It's just not legal to make it available to anyone else. By contrast, there is presumably no legal copy of child porn, so nuking the backing store might be a reasonable response.
Second, deleting the content has far-reaching implications, should a media house decide to sue the uploader. If the media house decides to sue and the original data is not retained, they could potentially be held liable for destruction of evidence. It's probably a lot safer if they nuke the backing store only as part of their regularly scheduled cleanup, per their data retention policy.
So that part is not nearly as clear cut as you make it out to be. Paying uploaders... not so much, which is why they'll probably get spanked with jail time for this.
Maybe you should consider moving somewhere that doesn't massively gouge you on housing prices. The average new home costs about three years' salary in the U.S. unless you are in a major city. Even in smaller cities (in most states), you can get a fairly nice home for maybe 200 grand, which is only about 4 years at U.S. median income.
Now I realize that you can't put 100% of your salary into a house, but assuming both of you work, it's hard to imagine not being able to save more than 10% of your combined total income every year.... That's how little you'd have to save for it to take 20 years (on average).
Uh... what do WordPress user databases have to do with shell account user databases?
Err... s/SSL/RSA/g.
I'm not sure what the password for my account was before, and I'm really not sure what it is now. I use an SSL key for authentication anyway, so this doesn't matter much....
What would be really cool would be if DreamHost allowed you to inject an SSL public key into the account for login purposes, and stopped having a password database entirely. Just my $0.02.
This does not occur in most places. That's why most airports have most or all of their runways pointing in only one direction. In most places, the vast majority of your wind is going to be within a few degrees of coming from the same direction every time.
The only place I've ever lived where wind direction changes by 180 degrees is California. I think it probably has something to do with the sun heating the water off the cost, but I'm not certain. It's very odd to realize that the wind blows in one direction in the morning and in the opposite direction in the evening. It's certainly not typical in most parts of the world. :-)
I disagree. It's a clear example of how direct democracy can work to fix broken laws. Occasionally, a referendum is heinous and gets struck down by the courts. Occasionally, a referendum is heinous and doesn't. The side effects are still statistically far lower than in crap passed by Congress, on average....
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure for more. The average estimate for the one you mention is actually 171,000, according to Wikipedia, plus it left some eleven million people homeless.
Put another way, that one hydroelectric incident killed more people than all the nuclear accidents in human history, and some of the higher estimates for that incident (as high as 230,000) actually exceed the official estimate for total deaths for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, plus the immediate deaths from Chernobyl combined.
The big difference between nuclear power and hydro power in terms of safety is that it is always possible to avoid the danger in the latter case. Just don't build within a couple hundred miles downstream of one.... (On the other hand, I suppose you could make the same argument about living downwind from a nuke plant....)
Living for 62 years after making a recording isn't really all that optimistic. It's probably less than one standard deviation above the norm even if someone made the recording in his/her mid-twenties.
HVAC units was an entirely arbitrary example of a big piece of gear that could conceivably conceal an explosive charge. It could be furniture movers and sofas, for all it really matters. That's a rather minor detail in the grand scheme of things.
See the previous comment about anyone higher level being threatened. Besides, you're missing the fact that the government builds explosive devices all the time. Redirecting a few thousand in a separate shipment to a black-ops building somewhere would require maybe one or two people getting involved, if that. Heck, you could probably do it by changing computer records without getting anyone else involved. Planting the explosives in sofas, furnaces, whatever, requires a handful of people. In other words, such a conspiracy need not be anywhere near as large as you think.
Again, I'm not in any way suggesting that this happened. It's pretty unlikely, but it's not pretty unlikely because it isn't possible. It's pretty unlikely because it's pretty unlikely....
Not sure where you get that. The data stream for DisplayPort is not that much more complicated than HDMI. The only real difference is that you have to have a little more advanced logic to check the packet type before you shove the data into the monitor's frame buffer. And ideally, you should do something with some of the other packet types, like providing extra ports, but that's entirely optional. It certainly is not the case that the monitor is doing anything that could be done in the GPU. In all cases, the monitor has to decode the protocol and buffer it, then read that buffer back as it paints the screen. Digital video is not like analog video to a CRT where you could basically let the signal drive the tube....
The DVI-A to VGA adapters cost nothing because they're nothing more than a handful of wires. Of course any adapter that contains electronics is going to cost more than a wire. If you need an HDMI to VGA adapter, that's going to cost you a lot more than a cable, too (about $40—$10 more than a DP to VGA adapter, BTW). It has nothing to do with DP being too complex and everything to do with the fact that active electronics are required to do the job. That and the fact that there are not enough purchasers to drive prices down through economies of scale.
You do have the right to refuse such deals, you know. You can always tell Wal-Mart, "Sorry. We can't hit that price point without compromising quality, and we won't do that."
Wal-Mart might decide to drop your product, or they might not. If they don't, you've won. If they do, you can tell the world (on your website) that your products are no longer sold at Wal-Mart because they tried to force you to compromise on quality, and you said, "No". Then provide a list of alternative retailers that do carry your product. By so doing, you turn lost sales into increased customer loyalty.
Wal-Mart only screws businesses who are so desperate for Wal-Mart to carry their products that they will compromise their integrity just to stay on their shelves. If you ask me, the fault lies equally with both parties. Just saying.
If you do it right, pretty close to a 100% chance. You tell them that they're installing HVAC equipment or something. You send them all in a few minutes apart, and make sure it takes at least an hour to do the job. Then you set them off remotely before the first worker leaves the building. For the higher-ups, you promise that if they talk, they will be "disappeared".
I'm not in any way insinuating that this was what happened on 9/11. I'm just saying that you need a better argument against such a conspiracy than the assumption that someone would have said something by now....
Don't forget the guy in the getaway car honking the horn.
If carjackers are staying ahead of police, then the police are incompetent. They're in a stolen car. We have D.O.T. cameras at nearly every major intersections in most cities. Point them and use them to track the carjackers. Even if they jumped out of the car and jacked somebody else at every block, the police should be able to figure out what's going on and keep up with them pretty handily. That's one crime that should be damn near impossible these days.
As for the alleged drug operation, undercover cops usually aren't dispatched. If they seem to be staying one step ahead of your plainclothes cops, that means one of two things: you have the wrong laundromat, or they have somebody working on the inside feeding them information. Either way, crypto won't help.
Yup. If "there's an app for that", it almost invariably means that what you are doing is causing enough collateral damage to piss off most of the people in your jurisdiction (DUI checkpoints, for example), which means whatever you're doing, you need to stop, take a step back, and find a better way to solve the problem that doesn't cause so many headaches for the innocent bystanders.