Opportunistic is walking past a car with an unlocked door and keys in plain view. These people didn't happen to get a wrong number and find themselves opportunistically in Milly Dowler's voice mail service. It was premeditated. They went out of their way to listen to and delete her messages.
No, burning coal without scrubbers releases both CO2 and SO2. CO2 has a long term warming effect, SO2 has a temporary cooling effect. Overall it's still climate change and with a long term warming effect.
If you need to know the number of seconds between 1 Feb 2012 16:32:12 and 22 Jun 2016 17:42:31 then either you should UT1/GMT or you should be using TAI timestamps. When you designed your system you chose a time system that includes leap seconds and then did not account for it, there is no excuse for later on complaining about leap seconds.
And if that is your stance, then you won't ever trust photos provided by the US Government. So this can't be used an argument for the US Government to publish the photos to dispel these types scepticism.
And indeed may harm you, your children and grand children by diverting resources that could have been used to improve the human condition on Earth. How many hospitals, wells, schools etc could be built and maintained for the cost of building and operating a moon base.
Of course then it isn't really a one time pad, it is a book code.
If someone else can get access to your OTP then it loses it's security. For OTP there should be precisely two instances. One used to encrypt and one used to decrypt.
Of course that's your opinion. There is nothing inherently wrong about taxing based on your net wealth, it's just not the way we do it at the moment. The idea of taxes is to pay for the services and protection that everyone in the country needs.
If you are in the 5%, own huge amounts of property, shares, have massive savings but don't earn any income during the year should you not still contribute to society? Do you not benefit from a stable society that protects you and your assets?
Currently though we decide that it's easier to tax based on income in any year (since it's easier to calculate than estimating the value of for example an old master painting that has been "in the family for 400 years"), and on any capital gain made on sales of assets (we know the value of the asset since it's just been sold).
Therefore one could argue that having a higher rate of tax on the very wealthy is a fair balance.
High frequency trading allows the spread between buy and sell to be smaller. Typical high frequency traders are market makers who both offer to buy and sell in the same market, both to provide liquidity and to earn a profit.
If you are offering both to buy and sell, you have to provide a spread between them if you are going to make any money on the deals. If you can only change your offers to buy and sell, for example, every minute, then you need to offer a spread that is generally as wide as the typical volatility in the market over a minute. If you can change your offered prices every millisecond then you can really tighten up the spread since volatility over that time period is much much lower.
Therefore a high frequency market maker can offer a better deal to the traders who only looking to either buy or sell. Who would you buy from, someone who is 1% off the mid point or someone who is 5% off the mid point?
They are though farther west, and thus farther from the meridian. No doubt this idea springs from the south-east of England - probably from someone who has a holiday home in Europe and doesn't like changing their watches on the weekend.
The argument about tourism is clearly spurious to me, since of all the people in a country, the ones least likely to worry about the time of day are the ones who are on holiday.
What I would suggest instead is that the government actively encourages people to be more flexible in their working hours so that people can, where appropriate and reasonable, start and end work at whatever time they like. It would enable the rush hour to spread more etc. (Yes there would be places of work where that is not easy to implement - but perhaps those places could decide between themselves what start time is best for the people who work there rather than being tied to specific 9 - 17 hours).
Actually, it can be falsified. All we need to do is to continue to pump carbon dioxide in to the atmosphere and if there is no climate change then the theory would be shown to be false. That's a simple experiment.
However, the *big* problem with this is that if the theory is correct, then it would kill untold hundreds of millions of people and destroy a lot of ecosystems. That's why people would like to err on the side of caution, given that much (most) of the evidence is in line with the predictions of the climate change theories, and try to mitigate the problem by reducing carbon dioxide emissions etc.
Similarly we can create small scale experiments that could falsify some of the fundamental tenets of the theory - such as showing how different concentrations of carbon dioxide do or do not trap heat in lab experiments. These experiments have been done and their evidence supports the hypothesis. Many experiments have been designed that could have potentially falsified the theory; and yet when they are performed they do not falsify it, instead they just continue to accumulate evidence that climate change is correct. Perhaps some people do not accept these experiments as valid since they are small scale and over short time scales; the problem is that we just can't afford to run long term (decades or centuries long) experiments on a global scale; so we have to make our decisions on the best evidence we can get, and this overwhelmingly shows that climate change is real and is a problem.
Of course though when you use 'doofus' on site A and on site B as the answer to your favourite colour, a hacker that gets access to the details from site B could guess that you used the same on site A. This becomes particularly an issue when you use the same 'security information' and password over many different sites, you just need one to be compromised and you suddenly leave yourself open to attack on other sites; you know that site that stores the info in plain text - because the developer thought hey it's a pretty simple site and we store no sensitive information that could be compromised right and it's much easier for our customer services department to have direct access to the question's answers to help deal with our customer's enquiries.
Or you could use a proper unique password for each security question and store it in KeePass against the site (oblig BBC: other password storage tools are available)
Correct. However, be aware that if you do anything with EU citizen's data that was collected in the EU that breaches EU law then you may be liable for prosecution if you ever did enter EU jurisdiction. The same applies in reverse of course as Gary McKinnon has found to his detriment. Twitter may well be OK provided that there is no extradition treaty in place that would allow the EU to extradite a Twitter executive over this.
If they are operating in the EU (i.e have servers and/or offices in EU) then they must abide by EU law. For example if they collect EU citizen personal information in the EU they are not allowed to transmit that outside of the EU, e.g. back to the US. Of course if all their servers and business are in the US then the EU cannot effectively punish them since they have no assets or personnel in EU to seize, fine or imprison. I do not know whether Twitter have a presence in the EU.
Another point to consider is if the US and EU had a treaty regarding data protection that binds their own companies and citizens then effectively solely US companies might not be forced to hand over EU citizen data because of the US's treaty commitment (however, I do not believe that there is such a treaty in place - though I think it would be an excellent idea).
Finally, there is final remedy for EU where they cannot enforce their data protection laws on non-EU companies: They could block those services, or less draconian, they could run an advertising campaign warning EU citizens about the problems concerning privacy of dealing with US/foreign companies and websites, that any private and personal information supplied to such web sites is essentially directly available to the US/foreign government and/or could be sold etc to private companies since EU data protection legislation is not applicable outside the EU.
Actually it's usually that the publisher only ask for rights for ebooks to be same as the rights they want to pay for for paper books. So a US publisher will only want to buy US paper rights and so only buy US ebook rights. The author however, typically doesn't manage to sell their book to an international publisher, probably because it's often a waste of time for an international English language publisher to publish a book that is also published in US since international customers who want it can import the paper book (or have Amazon or Waterstones do it for them), so no publisher ends up buying the rights for ebooks outside of the US.
I've spoken to authors who've said, it's the contract the publisher offered me, it was a take it or leave it deal.
So it's currently the publishers who are sticking with a business model that works for paper books and trying to apply it to ebooks. It would be so much easier if the publishers updated their contracts to buy regional paper book rights and non-exclusive global (language specific) rights for ebooks.
Or you could keep UTC for 'human' based time with its leap seconds to keep it in synchronisation with the rotation of the earth, and use TAI for any systems that require precision with conversion to UTC or local time when required.
The length of the second in GMT is not fixed. It's really hard to use for anything which requires precise accuracy. A second in GMT is defined based on the length of the day in Greenwich, so if the Earth's spin speed increases (see the Chile earthquake) then a GMT second decreases.
NASA and others would be much better off using TAI than UTC
The government can still fall on a vote of no confidence.
The difference now is that it doesn't force a general election. If there are less than 55% (or is it now 60%) that are in favour of a general election, then someone else gets to form a government. For example, it's possible that Labour and Lib Dems could form the rainbow coalition after all if the current government fails a vote of no confidence. A general election would only be called if there were sufficient MPs who weren't in favour of a different government forming and therefore voted for a dissolution of parliament.
This actually prevents the Conservatives from ditching the Lib Dems and calling a snap election to get a majority on their own. The real point though to remove power from a prime minister and give it to parliament as a whole.
Yes, correct. but I don't see the MPs doing anything about it because they all did vote to join the coalition.
Did they? When? I recall Nick Clegg and David Cameron announcing the coalition without any consultation of the back-benchers. Did I miss a day's news?
Yes you must have done. There was meeting of all Lib Dem MPs required to agree to the decision, it went on late in to the evening after the negotiators from both parties had drawn up the basics of the agreement and before the final announcement. If they hadn't agreed then there would have been a Lib Dem party conference to decide. As it was they did agree, and yet they still held the special conference at the NEC.
The Lib Dems are one of the most democratic parties in the UK. Certainly more so than Labour or Conservatives.
It's not that easy though: maybe if Hitler didn't become German leader then someone else would have who would have been a more successful war leader, meaning that the war went on longer and more people were killed. Another alternative is that without a German initiated second world war, then there may have been a later war where Russia swept over Europe and ended up killing more people, maybe even through nuclear weapons which since we hadn't seen the effects from Hiroshima would have been launched on dozens of cities at once.
The point is that one can't just imagine what would be better with a change in history, one also has to think about what might happen that's worse. It leaves us with the the original point that perhaps our history is already the least bad one, any further change causing unexpected consequences that make things worse.
At least the new lot in UK have explicitly said that they are going to repeal some of the civil liberty infringing laws, including ensuring the removal of innocent people's DNA from the DNA database. Of course they've only be in power a couple of weeks haven't even yet placed their programme for government before parliament, but I'm at least hopeful that they will do some (all) of the things they've promised on civil liberties.
Slashdot Mirror
Opportunistic is walking past a car with an unlocked door and keys in plain view. These people didn't happen to get a wrong number and find themselves opportunistically in Milly Dowler's voice mail service. It was premeditated. They went out of their way to listen to and delete her messages.
No, burning coal without scrubbers releases both CO2 and SO2. CO2 has a long term warming effect, SO2 has a temporary cooling effect. Overall it's still climate change and with a long term warming effect.
We already have that. It's called GMT and UT1.
If you need to know the number of seconds between 1 Feb 2012 16:32:12 and 22 Jun 2016 17:42:31 then either you should UT1/GMT or you should be using TAI timestamps. When you designed your system you chose a time system that includes leap seconds and then did not account for it, there is no excuse for later on complaining about leap seconds.
And if that is your stance, then you won't ever trust photos provided by the US Government. So this can't be used an argument for the US Government to publish the photos to dispel these types scepticism.
And indeed may harm you, your children and grand children by diverting resources that could have been used to improve the human condition on Earth. How many hospitals, wells, schools etc could be built and maintained for the cost of building and operating a moon base.
Only in dry weight, not when brewed into a tasty beverage.
Of course then it isn't really a one time pad, it is a book code.
If someone else can get access to your OTP then it loses it's security. For OTP there should be precisely two instances. One used to encrypt and one used to decrypt.
Of course that's your opinion. There is nothing inherently wrong about taxing based on your net wealth, it's just not the way we do it at the moment. The idea of taxes is to pay for the services and protection that everyone in the country needs.
If you are in the 5%, own huge amounts of property, shares, have massive savings but don't earn any income during the year should you not still contribute to society? Do you not benefit from a stable society that protects you and your assets?
Currently though we decide that it's easier to tax based on income in any year (since it's easier to calculate than estimating the value of for example an old master painting that has been "in the family for 400 years"), and on any capital gain made on sales of assets (we know the value of the asset since it's just been sold).
Therefore one could argue that having a higher rate of tax on the very wealthy is a fair balance.
High frequency trading allows the spread between buy and sell to be smaller. Typical high frequency traders are market makers who both offer to buy and sell in the same market, both to provide liquidity and to earn a profit.
If you are offering both to buy and sell, you have to provide a spread between them if you are going to make any money on the deals. If you can only change your offers to buy and sell, for example, every minute, then you need to offer a spread that is generally as wide as the typical volatility in the market over a minute. If you can change your offered prices every millisecond then you can really tighten up the spread since volatility over that time period is much much lower.
Therefore a high frequency market maker can offer a better deal to the traders who only looking to either buy or sell. Who would you buy from, someone who is 1% off the mid point or someone who is 5% off the mid point?
They are though farther west, and thus farther from the meridian. No doubt this idea springs from the south-east of England - probably from someone who has a holiday home in Europe and doesn't like changing their watches on the weekend.
The argument about tourism is clearly spurious to me, since of all the people in a country, the ones least likely to worry about the time of day are the ones who are on holiday.
What I would suggest instead is that the government actively encourages people to be more flexible in their working hours so that people can, where appropriate and reasonable, start and end work at whatever time they like. It would enable the rush hour to spread more etc. (Yes there would be places of work where that is not easy to implement - but perhaps those places could decide between themselves what start time is best for the people who work there rather than being tied to specific 9 - 17 hours).
Actually, it can be falsified. All we need to do is to continue to pump carbon dioxide in to the atmosphere and if there is no climate change then the theory would be shown to be false. That's a simple experiment.
However, the *big* problem with this is that if the theory is correct, then it would kill untold hundreds of millions of people and destroy a lot of ecosystems. That's why people would like to err on the side of caution, given that much (most) of the evidence is in line with the predictions of the climate change theories, and try to mitigate the problem by reducing carbon dioxide emissions etc.
Similarly we can create small scale experiments that could falsify some of the fundamental tenets of the theory - such as showing how different concentrations of carbon dioxide do or do not trap heat in lab experiments. These experiments have been done and their evidence supports the hypothesis. Many experiments have been designed that could have potentially falsified the theory; and yet when they are performed they do not falsify it, instead they just continue to accumulate evidence that climate change is correct. Perhaps some people do not accept these experiments as valid since they are small scale and over short time scales; the problem is that we just can't afford to run long term (decades or centuries long) experiments on a global scale; so we have to make our decisions on the best evidence we can get, and this overwhelmingly shows that climate change is real and is a problem.
Of course though when you use 'doofus' on site A and on site B as the answer to your favourite colour, a hacker that gets access to the details from site B could guess that you used the same on site A. This becomes particularly an issue when you use the same 'security information' and password over many different sites, you just need one to be compromised and you suddenly leave yourself open to attack on other sites; you know that site that stores the info in plain text - because the developer thought hey it's a pretty simple site and we store no sensitive information that could be compromised right and it's much easier for our customer services department to have direct access to the question's answers to help deal with our customer's enquiries.
Or you could use a proper unique password for each security question and store it in KeePass against the site (oblig BBC: other password storage tools are available)
Correct. However, be aware that if you do anything with EU citizen's data that was collected in the EU that breaches EU law then you may be liable for prosecution if you ever did enter EU jurisdiction. The same applies in reverse of course as Gary McKinnon has found to his detriment. Twitter may well be OK provided that there is no extradition treaty in place that would allow the EU to extradite a Twitter executive over this.
If they are operating in the EU (i.e have servers and/or offices in EU) then they must abide by EU law. For example if they collect EU citizen personal information in the EU they are not allowed to transmit that outside of the EU, e.g. back to the US. Of course if all their servers and business are in the US then the EU cannot effectively punish them since they have no assets or personnel in EU to seize, fine or imprison. I do not know whether Twitter have a presence in the EU.
Another point to consider is if the US and EU had a treaty regarding data protection that binds their own companies and citizens then effectively solely US companies might not be forced to hand over EU citizen data because of the US's treaty commitment (however, I do not believe that there is such a treaty in place - though I think it would be an excellent idea).
Finally, there is final remedy for EU where they cannot enforce their data protection laws on non-EU companies: They could block those services, or less draconian, they could run an advertising campaign warning EU citizens about the problems concerning privacy of dealing with US/foreign companies and websites, that any private and personal information supplied to such web sites is essentially directly available to the US/foreign government and/or could be sold etc to private companies since EU data protection legislation is not applicable outside the EU.
Actually it's usually that the publisher only ask for rights for ebooks to be same as the rights they want to pay for for paper books. So a US publisher will only want to buy US paper rights and so only buy US ebook rights. The author however, typically doesn't manage to sell their book to an international publisher, probably because it's often a waste of time for an international English language publisher to publish a book that is also published in US since international customers who want it can import the paper book (or have Amazon or Waterstones do it for them), so no publisher ends up buying the rights for ebooks outside of the US.
I've spoken to authors who've said, it's the contract the publisher offered me, it was a take it or leave it deal.
So it's currently the publishers who are sticking with a business model that works for paper books and trying to apply it to ebooks. It would be so much easier if the publishers updated their contracts to buy regional paper book rights and non-exclusive global (language specific) rights for ebooks.
Or you could keep UTC for 'human' based time with its leap seconds to keep it in synchronisation with the rotation of the earth, and use TAI for any systems that require precision with conversion to UTC or local time when required.
The length of the second in GMT is not fixed. It's really hard to use for anything which requires precise accuracy. A second in GMT is defined based on the length of the day in Greenwich, so if the Earth's spin speed increases (see the Chile earthquake) then a GMT second decreases.
NASA and others would be much better off using TAI than UTC
No, you're wrong
The government can still fall on a vote of no confidence.
The difference now is that it doesn't force a general election. If there are less than 55% (or is it now 60%) that are in favour of a general election, then someone else gets to form a government. For example, it's possible that Labour and Lib Dems could form the rainbow coalition after all if the current government fails a vote of no confidence. A general election would only be called if there were sufficient MPs who weren't in favour of a different government forming and therefore voted for a dissolution of parliament.
This actually prevents the Conservatives from ditching the Lib Dems and calling a snap election to get a majority on their own. The real point though to remove power from a prime minister and give it to parliament as a whole.
Did they? When? I recall Nick Clegg and David Cameron announcing the coalition without any consultation of the back-benchers. Did I miss a day's news?
Yes you must have done. There was meeting of all Lib Dem MPs required to agree to the decision, it went on late in to the evening after the negotiators from both parties had drawn up the basics of the agreement and before the final announcement. If they hadn't agreed then there would have been a Lib Dem party conference to decide. As it was they did agree, and yet they still held the special conference at the NEC.
The Lib Dems are one of the most democratic parties in the UK. Certainly more so than Labour or Conservatives.
Though I'm sure that they can be tackled single-handed (girls: "yes, yes, let him tackle us single-handed!")
It's not that easy though: maybe if Hitler didn't become German leader then someone else would have who would have been a more successful war leader, meaning that the war went on longer and more people were killed. Another alternative is that without a German initiated second world war, then there may have been a later war where Russia swept over Europe and ended up killing more people, maybe even through nuclear weapons which since we hadn't seen the effects from Hiroshima would have been launched on dozens of cities at once.
The point is that one can't just imagine what would be better with a change in history, one also has to think about what might happen that's worse. It leaves us with the the original point that perhaps our history is already the least bad one, any further change causing unexpected consequences that make things worse.
At least the new lot in UK have explicitly said that they are going to repeal some of the civil liberty infringing laws, including ensuring the removal of innocent people's DNA from the DNA database. Of course they've only be in power a couple of weeks haven't even yet placed their programme for government before parliament, but I'm at least hopeful that they will do some (all) of the things they've promised on civil liberties.
Methane includes carbon too: CH4