You raise an extremely worrying argument:( I think we should watch closely to see when all the dolphins vanish. Instead of monitoring the internet we can set the NSA and GCHQ into decoding their last messages to us.
"it occurs to me that since the universe is supposed to have been expanding since the big bang, the overall density has decreased during that time"
Yes, absolutely.
"Does space/time and the Quantum Foam also have a density that might affect the rate at which super massive black holes could gobble it?"
Yes; one would normally link it to what I guess would be called the Planck density. (We have a Planck energy and a Planck length, which imply a Planck volume, so a Planck density would be the Planck energy / c^2 divided by the Planck volume. Forgive me not going through the algebra but it would probably be a few minutes' work on Wikipedia; the important point is that a fundamental volume associated with the quantum gravitational scale probably exists. Or may exist.)
"Could conditions in the early universe encourage black hole growth/consolidation more than the current space environment?"
Certainly. If nothing else, higher energies - and a higher density is immediately a higher energy through E=mc^2 - would most likely lead to a high production of black holes. Maybe not, but what we *can* say is that higher energies leads to a higher abundance of primordial black holes through more standard processes, so that even if the foam black holes are *not* preferentially produced in the extremely early universe, other black holes actually are, so the absorption rate will be higher anyway.
The background temperature of space is 2.7K, measured to exquisite accuracy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Background_Explorer). You might be referring to the dark energy problem, which is pretty much ill-defined, meaning we don't actually have an explanation or, indeed, even an agreement on the size of the discrepancy (which is commonly quoted as 10^120 but is actually much nearer 10^60... not that that's good.) Although you're likely referring to the string landscape, where you can get something like 10^10^100 unique vacua, or more, or maybe a few more than that, or a few more again. Which while the dark energy problem is ill-defined at least it's related - via a few assumptions, to be fair - to observation. The string landscape is entirely theoretical and relies on you accepting both string theory and the arguments that lead to the landscape - and those are much more controversial than the simple statement that the standard cosmological model does not work without a surprisingly large quantity that acts more or less like a dark energy.
Indeed, given that black holes famously have no hair, we can't find anything more than mass, angular momentum and charge.
And, as you say, right now we have very little chance of measuring the angular momentum or charge of a black hole, while the mass is relatively straightforward...
We're talking more like being more sure that the world will end because it will suddenly mutate into jelly than because CERN will make a black hole that will grow and eat up everyone and then (most bewilderingly) continue growing and eat the universe.
No, in the simplest case it gives you a population model. What you've said could be crudely mapped onto a foxes hares model to read "If hares can grow by breeding how could foxes ever kill them all?" What we'd end up with is oscillations or balances, depending on the parameters. Personally, I'd suspect that any balance between consumption and evaporation would kick in around roughly the Planck scale but that really is a knee-jerk guess.
If they're having to look at it with supermassive black holes -- and the abstract of the paper says the hole at the centre of the Milky Way has grown *exponentially* to its current mass -- then the timescales involved are large. We may balance against Hawking radiation but I don't think we have to fear a black hole at CERN.
(Moreover, the models that predicted black holes at the LHC were themselves extraordinarily speculative, and even were they true, which I think no-one actually would suggest, would almost certainly not manifest themselves at such low energies. The "danger" of black holes at CERN was almost entirely manufactured by the media. Almost.)
Yes, true. But like I said to the other AC who made the same (totally valid - people with mod points might want to mod these people informative, btw, so those who ignore ACs might see it) point, it's close enough for government work and it's good intuition.
But yes, both of you are right, the Newtonian calculation isn't entirely right. I should have thought a bit more carefully about what I was saying.
Doesn't work - the big bang is not an expansion into pre-existing spacetime. Further, it's very hard to find a way of forcing a black hole solution of GR (Schwarzschild would be the most plausible in this context) to suddenly turn into a cosmological ("Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker") solution of GR. What you *can* do is embed an FLRW solution inside a Schwarzschild and get a model indistinguishable from observation, but extraordinarily contrived, and indeed pointless. (Come to that I'm not fully convinced those models genuinely work because the Schwarzschild solution is static, but if you linked that with Wetterich's recent model where the "expansion" is actually a manifestation of the increasing mass of particles you could avoid that issue, too and, indeed, avoid having to embed an FLRW inside a Schwarzschild at all.)
But if you refine what you say a bit it's not very far from an idea Penrose proposed a while back but has, unfortunately, never published in detail, although he's put out some (admittedly extremely ill-advised -- Penrose is basically a genius, but knows little of either statistics or observation) papers claiming signatures on the microwave sky. Basically Penrose points out that eventually everything will evaporate to radiation one way or another: if we follow any extension to the standard model we at least open the possibility that fundamental particles can decay, and otherwise ultimately every path every particle will take will inevitably, over an infinite period of time, take it into a black hole. If there are eventually two electrons in the universe and nothing more but radiation, they will themselves inevitably collide, after an unimaginable period, with enough energy to form a black hole (remember in this scenario the electrons are constantly buffeted by radiation of ridiculously high power... even if most of the radiation is at wavelengths of, say 10m, there will be *some* photons at a vast energy and these will interact with the electrons... eventually... and accelerate them to speeds far in excess of those reached on Earth or, indeed, in the Sun). And black holes radiate. So everything becomes radiation. But for reasons that are rather technical, it is impossible within the framework of GR to distinguish between an infinite future bathed in radiation and an infinite *past* bathed in radiation, because time and length scales become rather arbitrary. Which means that through some process Penrose has never explicated - if that's a word - the ultimate future can wrap onto the ultimate past and suddenly there's a new Big Bang.
There are also other ways of getting cyclic models, which involve a bit more new physics (new scalar fields, or branes hanging near ours, etc.) but a bit less hand-waving. Indeed, there are many ways of getting cyclic universes. But Penrose's struck me as being nearest to your suggestion.
No, it's actually close to the exact opposite, though both are quantum effects. In loose terms, Hawking's argument is that if you generate a pair of particles just outside of the black hole (which is allowed by the energy/time uncertainty principle so long as their lifetime - before they recollide - is short enough), and one falls through the event horizon and the other escapes, then they can *never* recombine -- and then you're left with a net negative energy. That negative energy has to come from somewhere, and it comes from the black hole. Which means that the black hole radiates energy -- Hawking radiation -- and eventually will evaporate.
The argument here is quite different, although it's still a quantum effect; instead of virtual pairs here, we simply have a black hole gobbling up unimaginably small black holes that foam in and out of existence. There is no net energy loss with these, and rather than losing mass/energy, the black hole *gains* it. I'd be interested in a study seeing whether these two effects would ever balance -- I'd imagine they probably would, somewhere near the Planck scale, but that's nothing more than a speculative assumption.
In the case of a black hole? Because the radius of the event horizon - which is one of the easiest definitions of the "size" of a black hole - grows monotonically with the mass. You can see it from Newtonian physics; if you look at the distance at which a "particle" travelling at the speed of light can't escape from a body with mass M you find it grows linearly with M. It turns out, rather coincidentally, that this coincides with the event horizon of a Schwarzschild hole, which is a black hole which is perfectly spherical (ie non-rotating), uncharged black hole.
(I went looking for a reference but I gave up quickly. Basically take Newton's gravitational law, F=GMm/r^2 for a large body of mass M and an orbiting (test) body of mass m. A particle of velocity c moving in a circular orbit is experiencing a radial force of F=mv^2/r=mc^2/r. (This is the centrifugal force, and to head of pedants, in the frame of the particle it is very much experienced even if in an inertial frame it is evidently fictional.) Equating these two you quickly find GM/r=c^2, or r=GM/c^2. This is the Schwarzschild radius.)
Oh, I think Snowden is authentic, as far as he goes. Whether he knows everything that's going on, or whether everything he's leaked is actually true, is a different matter entirely, but I don't think the man himself is deliberately lying, nor that there isn't at least a lot of truth in most of what he's released. Likewise Manning and Vanunu (probably more so, too, in both cases given the jail time).
My point wasn't really to attack Snowden, or open that whole can of worms again, but more to always make sure you don't blithely trust something he (or anyone else) says, merely because it might fit in with your particular views or beliefs. It's a truism that everyone has their own biases and political beliefs and that it colours everything people say or write, and the interpretations they cast on information they receive, entirely unintentionally. It's also a truism that many people throughout history have been happy to distort the truth, or distort others' statements, to further their own interests. And so on.
And yeah, ultimately we should all try and make sure that our own conspiracy fantasies - nice phrase:) - are controlled a bit...
If you think that he was happily sitting in a hotel in Hong Kong and Chinese agents didn't talk to him, or that he was sitting "in an airport" in Moscow and Russian agents never talked to him, you are absurdly naive. I know people like to point out that Hong Kong isn't China and all but... seriously, when it comes to security, it is, and Beijing ultimately rules Hong Kong despite "One Nation, Two Systems".
When I say "talk" I mean "interrogate". I'm not implying that they treated him as a criminal, nor that he necessarily obliged them, but they will have wanted to assess everything he had with him and learn everything they could from him. To think otherwise is... crazy. To think we'd do otherwise with a whistleblower from Russia or China is equally crazy.
With the passport thing, that was a bit of a smokescreen. If it suited the Russians they could very easily provide him with a temporary visa (as indeed they eventually did), take him out of the airport via the back door (as indeed they may well have done; we have zero proof that he was literally in the airport that entire time) and transported him anywhere within Russia that they chose. Leaving it so long before they did this doesn't automatically mean they were playing for time to see what they could learn, but I've no doubt that *one* of the consequences of the delay was that the FSB had more time to have friendly chats with Snowden (who may or may not have been playing ball; I'm casting no allegations around).
"Snowden confirms that properly implemented crypto still works"
Yes, because I'm going to trust everything he says. Honestly, kudos to him for leaking everything he has but am I *really* going to trust he knows *everything* and he also isn't going to misreport things for his own personal gain, or to mislead the Russians and Chinese, or to *help* the Russians and Chinese (who, after all, he ran to and was held by for a month) and mislead others, or any other conspiracy-lead scenario you can think of?
Surely, if you care at all about what Snowden decided to leak one thing you should really get from it is *don't fucking trust what someone says who may have vested interests*. And he has vested interests, merely different ones from the NSA (although not necessarily that different if his pious claims to not leaking anything that would hurt American security can be believed, which they may or may not be). And since we never know what someone's vested interests are, assume that everyone has vested interests. So don't trust anyone. Then it all becomes a game about how far you think you can go on anything.
Personally I take the view that what I do online - and, if they are bugging every single computer which is technically possible though unless they've got to them too would pop up on network analyzers which it doesn't seem to - is just going on an enormous slagheap of metadata, which is kept for about three days before space runs out and it's pruned down to the most likely pieces of interest and kept for about six months to a year, at which point most of it is trashed to recover the space.
Paranoia is all well and good - and definitely, definitely do not trust anything *anyone* says, and that includes Snowden just as much as it includes shitheads like Obama and Putin (who is in a different world of shitheadedness entirely, no matter what the propaganda currently says) if there's even the vaguest reason to think they might want to keep one thing hidden or exaggerate another.
Healthy cynicism is the way to go, people. Mad paranoia is just ridiculous because ultimately the NSA/GCHQ/FSB/whoever really just do not care about you. Mad acceptance is equally ridiculous because every spy agency on the planet will always push its remit as far as possible to invade as much privacy as they can - because they would be remiss if they didn't, and hang the consequences.
Others have already pointed out he did it as an art project (I admit my first response to this was also "What the fuck is the point in that?"). If you want to avoid DRM on eBooks and for some masochistic reason don't want to simply strip it - the widely-used systems are almost laughably easy to remove if you want to - it would be far easier to just take screencaps, and far more accurate since then you get a pixel-perfect representation of the page, with the subsequent improvement in OCR.
He has very little defense: he has explicitly stated to the press that he took the job with the NSA specifically because it would give him access to classified files, and such premeditation will go down very badly with even his defence lawyers, let alone the prosecutors. There is also (as a consequence) absolutely no doubt that he has contravened whatever the American version of the Official Secrets Act is, which leaves him immediately liable to criminal prosecution. What he isn't facing under law - which doesn't necessarily reflect on what would happen - is military law, nor the death penalty, etc, since he is a civilian and legally has to be charged under the civilian laws he has openly admitted to breaking. None of this is to say whether he was right or wrong to do what he's done - just he'd be very silly to go back to America because he's already crippled his own defence, in a way that was entirely unnecessary.
Well, firstly the GCHQ are *in* Europe, and secondly every European nation has its own counterpart of the American agencies -- sometimes close analogues of the NSA like GCHQ are, sometimes amalgamations of parts of the NSA and FBI. Genuinely, everyone *is* at it. The difference is the extent to which the agencies are held to account, but by their very nature it's hard - and indeed extremely counter-productive - to have public exposes and analysis of their activities.
I'm not sure that court cases won't set an extremely dangerous precedent; every major power is in a position to take every other major power to court, and no nation holds the moral highground on this. I'm fine to have the French investigate GCHQ and the NSA so long as everyone else has the right to investigate the DGSE and DSRI. (Same goes for Russian protests and the not-so-secret programmes of the FSB, who have been happily active in Britain and America over the last decade, let alone within Russia. And of course they can counter-charge MI6 and the CIA for their own happy activities within Russia, and so on and so on.)
Ah, but I've been dragged into the habit of blustering my own opinions on Slashdot in the past and then flouncing off. It makes you feel such an idiot it strikes you that it's better not to be a dick:)
I quite agree, Red Dwarf has aged horribly. I watched through the lot (well, until I got depressed around series 8) and while I think it's still funny it's also aged, horribly. Obviously my bold statement about Star Trek aging badly is purely my own opinion; other people can and will always see very different things in it to me, which is kind of how it should be...
It's somewhat of an aside but it's I think relevant - have a read of Poul Anderson's Technic series. He paints a basically plausible picture of how a civilisation emerges based on relatively cheap space flight, a giant "federation" of sorts (in his case based on the Hanseatic League and increasingly brutally capitalist) emerges and imposes a peace, and then heads towards an inevitable morass of corruption, bureaucratic paralysis and internecine war.
You may or may not feel it relates to the situation in Star Trek: Renegades but it's at least mildly analogous and, besides, if you haven't read through Anderson's Technic series (recently collected by Baen in the van Rijn and Falkayn books) it may persuade you to give them a look. You will genuinely not be sorry, they're fantastic.
(My personal favourite is when van Rijn and his crew, attempting to escape the Adderkops in a ship with crippled engines, overhaul and board an unknown vessel which turns out to be some form of zoo... with the crew happily playing dumb amongst the fauna of fifteen different suns. They have to find out who the crew are, and persuade them that they're not like the Adderkops despite having two arms and two legs and boarding them violently, all before the Adderkops themselves overhaul the zoo ship. Fantastic stuff.)
Are you arguing that Star Trek: The Original Series had better planned and executed dialogue than Firefly??? I'm not the world's greatest Firefly apologist but, seriously, the one was a reasonably short-lived and reasonably tightly-planned series executed by a team of modern TV writers - who for all their faults are well trained - and the other was, for all its undoubted charms, a shoddy amateur affair from the 60s which on as near an objective watch as a single man can give (which is close to being unobjective and is entirely anecdotal... as are all critics) has aged badly.
Oh, you might be meaning things like annihilation signals and the like, where we can actually get a handle on what dark matter is actually composed of, what it decays into, what it interacts with and how strongly. In which case, yes, I totally agree with you on that one. While it's still possible we're going to be lucky to find that (if a particulate dark matter exists) we can observe dark matter in the laboratory. If we're looking for something other than gravitational effects then yes, we have to look at where the dark matter density is at its greatest (and most observable), and that's towards the centre of the galaxy, and doubtless in other scattered clumps that we have to infer the location of.
It's more or less a matter of record that my personal prejudice is probably that the bulk of the contributions to the dark matter effect are probably not particulate, so my guess is we won't see anything conclusive from that type of observation either, but absolutely it has to be done and locally (on astronomical scales) is the best place to look.
Slashdot Mirror
You raise an extremely worrying argument :( I think we should watch closely to see when all the dolphins vanish. Instead of monitoring the internet we can set the NSA and GCHQ into decoding their last messages to us.
Nice post.
"it occurs to me that since the universe is supposed to have been expanding since the big bang, the overall density has decreased during that time"
Yes, absolutely.
"Does space/time and the Quantum Foam also have a density that might affect the rate at which super massive black holes could gobble it?"
Yes; one would normally link it to what I guess would be called the Planck density. (We have a Planck energy and a Planck length, which imply a Planck volume, so a Planck density would be the Planck energy / c^2 divided by the Planck volume. Forgive me not going through the algebra but it would probably be a few minutes' work on Wikipedia; the important point is that a fundamental volume associated with the quantum gravitational scale probably exists. Or may exist.)
"Could conditions in the early universe encourage black hole growth/consolidation more than the current space environment?"
Certainly. If nothing else, higher energies - and a higher density is immediately a higher energy through E=mc^2 - would most likely lead to a high production of black holes. Maybe not, but what we *can* say is that higher energies leads to a higher abundance of primordial black holes through more standard processes, so that even if the foam black holes are *not* preferentially produced in the extremely early universe, other black holes actually are, so the absorption rate will be higher anyway.
The background temperature of space is 2.7K, measured to exquisite accuracy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Background_Explorer). You might be referring to the dark energy problem, which is pretty much ill-defined, meaning we don't actually have an explanation or, indeed, even an agreement on the size of the discrepancy (which is commonly quoted as 10^120 but is actually much nearer 10^60... not that that's good.) Although you're likely referring to the string landscape, where you can get something like 10^10^100 unique vacua, or more, or maybe a few more than that, or a few more again. Which while the dark energy problem is ill-defined at least it's related - via a few assumptions, to be fair - to observation. The string landscape is entirely theoretical and relies on you accepting both string theory and the arguments that lead to the landscape - and those are much more controversial than the simple statement that the standard cosmological model does not work without a surprisingly large quantity that acts more or less like a dark energy.
Indeed, given that black holes famously have no hair, we can't find anything more than mass, angular momentum and charge.
And, as you say, right now we have very little chance of measuring the angular momentum or charge of a black hole, while the mass is relatively straightforward...
We're talking more like being more sure that the world will end because it will suddenly mutate into jelly than because CERN will make a black hole that will grow and eat up everyone and then (most bewilderingly) continue growing and eat the universe.
No, in the simplest case it gives you a population model. What you've said could be crudely mapped onto a foxes hares model to read "If hares can grow by breeding how could foxes ever kill them all?" What we'd end up with is oscillations or balances, depending on the parameters. Personally, I'd suspect that any balance between consumption and evaporation would kick in around roughly the Planck scale but that really is a knee-jerk guess.
If they're having to look at it with supermassive black holes -- and the abstract of the paper says the hole at the centre of the Milky Way has grown *exponentially* to its current mass -- then the timescales involved are large. We may balance against Hawking radiation but I don't think we have to fear a black hole at CERN.
(Moreover, the models that predicted black holes at the LHC were themselves extraordinarily speculative, and even were they true, which I think no-one actually would suggest, would almost certainly not manifest themselves at such low energies. The "danger" of black holes at CERN was almost entirely manufactured by the media. Almost.)
Yes, true. But like I said to the other AC who made the same (totally valid - people with mod points might want to mod these people informative, btw, so those who ignore ACs might see it) point, it's close enough for government work and it's good intuition.
But yes, both of you are right, the Newtonian calculation isn't entirely right. I should have thought a bit more carefully about what I was saying.
oh whatever, a factor of two compared to entirely the wrong answer... it gives some intuition, at least. feel free to log on and mod me overrated :)
Doesn't work - the big bang is not an expansion into pre-existing spacetime. Further, it's very hard to find a way of forcing a black hole solution of GR (Schwarzschild would be the most plausible in this context) to suddenly turn into a cosmological ("Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker") solution of GR. What you *can* do is embed an FLRW solution inside a Schwarzschild and get a model indistinguishable from observation, but extraordinarily contrived, and indeed pointless. (Come to that I'm not fully convinced those models genuinely work because the Schwarzschild solution is static, but if you linked that with Wetterich's recent model where the "expansion" is actually a manifestation of the increasing mass of particles you could avoid that issue, too and, indeed, avoid having to embed an FLRW inside a Schwarzschild at all.)
But if you refine what you say a bit it's not very far from an idea Penrose proposed a while back but has, unfortunately, never published in detail, although he's put out some (admittedly extremely ill-advised -- Penrose is basically a genius, but knows little of either statistics or observation) papers claiming signatures on the microwave sky. Basically Penrose points out that eventually everything will evaporate to radiation one way or another: if we follow any extension to the standard model we at least open the possibility that fundamental particles can decay, and otherwise ultimately every path every particle will take will inevitably, over an infinite period of time, take it into a black hole. If there are eventually two electrons in the universe and nothing more but radiation, they will themselves inevitably collide, after an unimaginable period, with enough energy to form a black hole (remember in this scenario the electrons are constantly buffeted by radiation of ridiculously high power... even if most of the radiation is at wavelengths of, say 10m, there will be *some* photons at a vast energy and these will interact with the electrons... eventually... and accelerate them to speeds far in excess of those reached on Earth or, indeed, in the Sun). And black holes radiate. So everything becomes radiation. But for reasons that are rather technical, it is impossible within the framework of GR to distinguish between an infinite future bathed in radiation and an infinite *past* bathed in radiation, because time and length scales become rather arbitrary. Which means that through some process Penrose has never explicated - if that's a word - the ultimate future can wrap onto the ultimate past and suddenly there's a new Big Bang.
There are also other ways of getting cyclic models, which involve a bit more new physics (new scalar fields, or branes hanging near ours, etc.) but a bit less hand-waving. Indeed, there are many ways of getting cyclic universes. But Penrose's struck me as being nearest to your suggestion.
No, it's actually close to the exact opposite, though both are quantum effects. In loose terms, Hawking's argument is that if you generate a pair of particles just outside of the black hole (which is allowed by the energy/time uncertainty principle so long as their lifetime - before they recollide - is short enough), and one falls through the event horizon and the other escapes, then they can *never* recombine -- and then you're left with a net negative energy. That negative energy has to come from somewhere, and it comes from the black hole. Which means that the black hole radiates energy -- Hawking radiation -- and eventually will evaporate.
The argument here is quite different, although it's still a quantum effect; instead of virtual pairs here, we simply have a black hole gobbling up unimaginably small black holes that foam in and out of existence. There is no net energy loss with these, and rather than losing mass/energy, the black hole *gains* it. I'd be interested in a study seeing whether these two effects would ever balance -- I'd imagine they probably would, somewhere near the Planck scale, but that's nothing more than a speculative assumption.
I'm not sure there are many supermassive black holes in our vicinity, so I think we're probably safe.
In the case of a black hole? Because the radius of the event horizon - which is one of the easiest definitions of the "size" of a black hole - grows monotonically with the mass. You can see it from Newtonian physics; if you look at the distance at which a "particle" travelling at the speed of light can't escape from a body with mass M you find it grows linearly with M. It turns out, rather coincidentally, that this coincides with the event horizon of a Schwarzschild hole, which is a black hole which is perfectly spherical (ie non-rotating), uncharged black hole.
(I went looking for a reference but I gave up quickly. Basically take Newton's gravitational law, F=GMm/r^2 for a large body of mass M and an orbiting (test) body of mass m. A particle of velocity c moving in a circular orbit is experiencing a radial force of F=mv^2/r=mc^2/r. (This is the centrifugal force, and to head of pedants, in the frame of the particle it is very much experienced even if in an inertial frame it is evidently fictional.) Equating these two you quickly find GM/r=c^2, or r=GM/c^2. This is the Schwarzschild radius.)
Oh, I think Snowden is authentic, as far as he goes. Whether he knows everything that's going on, or whether everything he's leaked is actually true, is a different matter entirely, but I don't think the man himself is deliberately lying, nor that there isn't at least a lot of truth in most of what he's released. Likewise Manning and Vanunu (probably more so, too, in both cases given the jail time).
My point wasn't really to attack Snowden, or open that whole can of worms again, but more to always make sure you don't blithely trust something he (or anyone else) says, merely because it might fit in with your particular views or beliefs. It's a truism that everyone has their own biases and political beliefs and that it colours everything people say or write, and the interpretations they cast on information they receive, entirely unintentionally. It's also a truism that many people throughout history have been happy to distort the truth, or distort others' statements, to further their own interests. And so on.
And yeah, ultimately we should all try and make sure that our own conspiracy fantasies - nice phrase :) - are controlled a bit...
If you think that he was happily sitting in a hotel in Hong Kong and Chinese agents didn't talk to him, or that he was sitting "in an airport" in Moscow and Russian agents never talked to him, you are absurdly naive. I know people like to point out that Hong Kong isn't China and all but... seriously, when it comes to security, it is, and Beijing ultimately rules Hong Kong despite "One Nation, Two Systems".
When I say "talk" I mean "interrogate". I'm not implying that they treated him as a criminal, nor that he necessarily obliged them, but they will have wanted to assess everything he had with him and learn everything they could from him. To think otherwise is... crazy. To think we'd do otherwise with a whistleblower from Russia or China is equally crazy.
With the passport thing, that was a bit of a smokescreen. If it suited the Russians they could very easily provide him with a temporary visa (as indeed they eventually did), take him out of the airport via the back door (as indeed they may well have done; we have zero proof that he was literally in the airport that entire time) and transported him anywhere within Russia that they chose. Leaving it so long before they did this doesn't automatically mean they were playing for time to see what they could learn, but I've no doubt that *one* of the consequences of the delay was that the FSB had more time to have friendly chats with Snowden (who may or may not have been playing ball; I'm casting no allegations around).
"Snowden confirms that properly implemented crypto still works"
Yes, because I'm going to trust everything he says. Honestly, kudos to him for leaking everything he has but am I *really* going to trust he knows *everything* and he also isn't going to misreport things for his own personal gain, or to mislead the Russians and Chinese, or to *help* the Russians and Chinese (who, after all, he ran to and was held by for a month) and mislead others, or any other conspiracy-lead scenario you can think of?
Surely, if you care at all about what Snowden decided to leak one thing you should really get from it is *don't fucking trust what someone says who may have vested interests*. And he has vested interests, merely different ones from the NSA (although not necessarily that different if his pious claims to not leaking anything that would hurt American security can be believed, which they may or may not be). And since we never know what someone's vested interests are, assume that everyone has vested interests. So don't trust anyone. Then it all becomes a game about how far you think you can go on anything.
Personally I take the view that what I do online - and, if they are bugging every single computer which is technically possible though unless they've got to them too would pop up on network analyzers which it doesn't seem to - is just going on an enormous slagheap of metadata, which is kept for about three days before space runs out and it's pruned down to the most likely pieces of interest and kept for about six months to a year, at which point most of it is trashed to recover the space.
Paranoia is all well and good - and definitely, definitely do not trust anything *anyone* says, and that includes Snowden just as much as it includes shitheads like Obama and Putin (who is in a different world of shitheadedness entirely, no matter what the propaganda currently says) if there's even the vaguest reason to think they might want to keep one thing hidden or exaggerate another.
Healthy cynicism is the way to go, people. Mad paranoia is just ridiculous because ultimately the NSA/GCHQ/FSB/whoever really just do not care about you. Mad acceptance is equally ridiculous because every spy agency on the planet will always push its remit as far as possible to invade as much privacy as they can - because they would be remiss if they didn't, and hang the consequences.
Others have already pointed out he did it as an art project (I admit my first response to this was also "What the fuck is the point in that?"). If you want to avoid DRM on eBooks and for some masochistic reason don't want to simply strip it - the widely-used systems are almost laughably easy to remove if you want to - it would be far easier to just take screencaps, and far more accurate since then you get a pixel-perfect representation of the page, with the subsequent improvement in OCR.
He has very little defense: he has explicitly stated to the press that he took the job with the NSA specifically because it would give him access to classified files, and such premeditation will go down very badly with even his defence lawyers, let alone the prosecutors. There is also (as a consequence) absolutely no doubt that he has contravened whatever the American version of the Official Secrets Act is, which leaves him immediately liable to criminal prosecution. What he isn't facing under law - which doesn't necessarily reflect on what would happen - is military law, nor the death penalty, etc, since he is a civilian and legally has to be charged under the civilian laws he has openly admitted to breaking. None of this is to say whether he was right or wrong to do what he's done - just he'd be very silly to go back to America because he's already crippled his own defence, in a way that was entirely unnecessary.
Well, firstly the GCHQ are *in* Europe, and secondly every European nation has its own counterpart of the American agencies -- sometimes close analogues of the NSA like GCHQ are, sometimes amalgamations of parts of the NSA and FBI. Genuinely, everyone *is* at it. The difference is the extent to which the agencies are held to account, but by their very nature it's hard - and indeed extremely counter-productive - to have public exposes and analysis of their activities.
I'm not sure that court cases won't set an extremely dangerous precedent; every major power is in a position to take every other major power to court, and no nation holds the moral highground on this. I'm fine to have the French investigate GCHQ and the NSA so long as everyone else has the right to investigate the DGSE and DSRI. (Same goes for Russian protests and the not-so-secret programmes of the FSB, who have been happily active in Britain and America over the last decade, let alone within Russia. And of course they can counter-charge MI6 and the CIA for their own happy activities within Russia, and so on and so on.)
Ah, but I've been dragged into the habit of blustering my own opinions on Slashdot in the past and then flouncing off. It makes you feel such an idiot it strikes you that it's better not to be a dick :)
I quite agree, Red Dwarf has aged horribly. I watched through the lot (well, until I got depressed around series 8) and while I think it's still funny it's also aged, horribly. Obviously my bold statement about Star Trek aging badly is purely my own opinion; other people can and will always see very different things in it to me, which is kind of how it should be...
It's somewhat of an aside but it's I think relevant - have a read of Poul Anderson's Technic series. He paints a basically plausible picture of how a civilisation emerges based on relatively cheap space flight, a giant "federation" of sorts (in his case based on the Hanseatic League and increasingly brutally capitalist) emerges and imposes a peace, and then heads towards an inevitable morass of corruption, bureaucratic paralysis and internecine war.
You may or may not feel it relates to the situation in Star Trek: Renegades but it's at least mildly analogous and, besides, if you haven't read through Anderson's Technic series (recently collected by Baen in the van Rijn and Falkayn books) it may persuade you to give them a look. You will genuinely not be sorry, they're fantastic.
(My personal favourite is when van Rijn and his crew, attempting to escape the Adderkops in a ship with crippled engines, overhaul and board an unknown vessel which turns out to be some form of zoo... with the crew happily playing dumb amongst the fauna of fifteen different suns. They have to find out who the crew are, and persuade them that they're not like the Adderkops despite having two arms and two legs and boarding them violently, all before the Adderkops themselves overhaul the zoo ship. Fantastic stuff.)
Are you arguing that Star Trek: The Original Series had better planned and executed dialogue than Firefly??? I'm not the world's greatest Firefly apologist but, seriously, the one was a reasonably short-lived and reasonably tightly-planned series executed by a team of modern TV writers - who for all their faults are well trained - and the other was, for all its undoubted charms, a shoddy amateur affair from the 60s which on as near an objective watch as a single man can give (which is close to being unobjective and is entirely anecdotal... as are all critics) has aged badly.
Oh, you might be meaning things like annihilation signals and the like, where we can actually get a handle on what dark matter is actually composed of, what it decays into, what it interacts with and how strongly. In which case, yes, I totally agree with you on that one. While it's still possible we're going to be lucky to find that (if a particulate dark matter exists) we can observe dark matter in the laboratory. If we're looking for something other than gravitational effects then yes, we have to look at where the dark matter density is at its greatest (and most observable), and that's towards the centre of the galaxy, and doubtless in other scattered clumps that we have to infer the location of.
It's more or less a matter of record that my personal prejudice is probably that the bulk of the contributions to the dark matter effect are probably not particulate, so my guess is we won't see anything conclusive from that type of observation either, but absolutely it has to be done and locally (on astronomical scales) is the best place to look.
Sorry if I misunderstood to begin with.