Those are just a few of the ways individual freedom has increased in the last half century. We may have taken a small step backward with overzealous mass surveillance but it has done little to reverse the great strides forward that occurred in the 60's and 70's.
I'm not sure surveillance and tolerance belongs on the same axis. We've moved from a fairly low-tolerance, low-surveillance state where many people did "unapproved" things in private to a high tolerance, high surveillance state where the government knows but it doesn't care. Graciously supported by "if you got nothing to fear, you got nothing to hide", "think of the children" and "either you're with us or the terrorists win" crowd, panopticon believers and other useful idiots privacy is rapidly shredded.
It doesn't get bad until the government gets repressive and you realize that the curtains you've opened can't be pulled shut again without going on all sorts of watch lists and shitlists for covert activity. Look at the countries that don't exactly have a stellar record for freedom, is it getting better there? Not really, through more surveillance the people in power have gained even more control. Crushing any form of resistance is often about catching it in its infancy, making people believe it's hopeless to gather enough to make a change. It's a lopsided fight leaning more and more heavily against the incumbent.
As for me, business is always wrong because profit makes people eventually do evil. Capitalism makes people spiral to the bottom because of its nature. The excuse of "our bottom line" creates a mentality to destroy the commons and poison people. I have never seen an exception. Please, tell me when the profit motive has helped people over the long term. I would really like to know.
Money is what keeps me showing up at work five days a week. Now I'd like to think I'm doing something useful there, granted I'm not curing cancer or anything like that but still. Throw me in a "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" communist hellhole I'll do my best to be useless and needy. Or better yet, one of the people in power who decide if other people are useful or have needs. Give me the Star Trek utopia and I'll be the bloody useless guy who spends all his time on the holodeck. Which is why I think all the basic income people are on crack, because there's frankly jobs you wouldn't do if you could live well without doing them.
Money isn't really the cause of anything, it's just the objectification of "What's in it for me?" and honestly, I don't ever see most of my money. They just exist as numbers in a bank somewhere, I can't even wipe my ass with them. They're just easier to use as intermediaries and to gain interest on than buying lifestock and breeding them, forests that produce lumber or whatever else produces "interest". If we weren't using currency we'd still have economics, for example people would look for arbitrage in swapping cows for goats for corn for cows if the exchange rates were off. People would look at the ROI for giving you grain now in return for pork next summer. Maybe they weren't so formal about it, but it still happened long before we started using coins and notes.
It seems that ISP's are so concerned with Netflix's bandwidth suck that they try to get away with throttling. What about Google? Supposedly Google's web crawlers account for the largest single chunk of Internet bandwidth. (Ok, educate me)
Well, if you divide everything else into very small chunks I guess that's true. However, if you exclude streaming media over http like YouTube most statistics I find shows web traffic accounts for 15-20% of total Internet traffic. The largest chunks from a very high-level perspective seems to be 1) streaming media, 2) bittorrent/p2p and 3) everything else.
Since they are selling Internet access and Netflix is in the Internet, they most certainly are promising that. The congestion is at Verizon's port so it is their responsability.
By that logic I could set up an ISP charging $1000/MB for peering and your ISP would be forced to pay it since "it's on the Internet". It's a little bit more complicated than that, behind the scenes all the ISPs and backbone providers are negotiating how to hook themselves together. You can't demand that there be a peering point any particular place with any particular speed, it takes two to make a contract. It takes two to adjust a contract. You can't just hold one over a barrel and say "sign what that other guy is offering, no matter what".
Besides that, what about people in rural areas? What about people who still rely on dialup? They're already in existence but because some rich people in certain cities will have stupid fast Internet, there's suddenly an Internet class divide?
Actually there is and getting wider, I've been watching the national telecom statistics here in Norway and the bottom 20% are rather stuck, also known as the people who only have broadband because the government forced the telco to give them a phone line, but who'll never see an upgrade over their crappy ADSL ever without subsidies. Same with mobile data, not enough customers to justify it. Meanwhile the people in central areas are constantly seeing new forms of fiber, cable, xDSL, super-3G, 4G etc. to give them higher and higher speeds.
That said, the government here in Norway is promising 100 Mbit/s capability to 90% of the population within 2020, but I'll see it before I believe it. Still, 23% of households already have fiber as of last year so we're doing fairly well I think.
The primary example we have of this is the NSA's BULLRUN program, which tries to "insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems, IT systems, networks and endpoint communication devices." This is the worst of the NSA's excesses, because it destroys our trust in the Internet, weakens the security all of us rely on and makes us more vulnerable to attackers worldwide..... [T]he remainder of the NSA needs to be rebalanced so COMSEC (communications security) has priority over SIGINT (signals intelligence). Instead of working to deliberately weaken security for everyone, the NSA should work to improve security for everyone.'"
In an actual war - which is what the whole DoD is there for - SIGINT is incredibly powerful. Imagine WWII again without cracking the Enigma machines, what would have happened without it is anyone's guess but an oft quoted assessment says it shortened the war by two years. For all we know a more effective sea blockade of the UK could have led to their surrender or the Russians invading all of Europe with the UK/US on the sidelines. If the Germans had known the plans for D-day it would have been a massacre.
Of course their primary target is military communications, but if you couldn't penetrate civilian communcations then really all you'd have to do is to use off-the-shelf components and you'd be secure. Duh. Which is often the poor man's military network anyway, not everybody can afford to design everything new from scratch. China can I guess, but to most it's a huge and costly effort and you could always end up doing some newbie blunders.
Besides, they as most other three letter agencies now seem equally busy trying to find terrorists who obviously aren't running around with military communications gear. And COMSEC is all but useless against terrorists, they don't care what we talk about as long as they can plan how to blow us up in private. Which is why I believe that no matter how much bullshit they feed to the press behind the scenes it's going to be "Carry on, but don't get caught again!"
Unlike personal computing, cell phones or flat panel televisions, electric cars are not a new technology. They have been around in one form or another, since the 1880s. (...) The technological limitation that's holding back electric cars has always been a lack of energy density in the batteries.
Sure, but the power grid was extremely different back then. If you had it - which by far most didn't - it was barely good enough to power light bulbs, not cars. Sure you could wire up a bunch of car batteries, drive it a little while but then it'd take a month to recharge. Between stoves, refridgerators, dish washers, washing machines, computers, TVs, power tools and whatnot it's only recently come to a point where in-home charging of a car is feasible. Even now they're suffering from growth pains just like the Internet adapted to Napster and YouTube, but they will pass. The other things is that there was no public charging grid, even if you got yourself an industrial size electric connection at home you'd be stuck in your little range circle. And unlike at home were you can reasonably be expected to let it charge overnight, on the road chargers must be much faster and stronger.
Tesla's superchargers do 120 kW/car (here in Norway, I understand slightly lower in the US at the moment) and by their nature you want them in the middle of "nowhere" between cities. I don't know their total capacity - probably some oversubscription - but again I think it's something that only in very recent times has become feasible. Not to mention the rapid charging technology itself is very much state of the art. In short, even if we can't make miracles on density we are making huge advances in distribution and delivery. And as EVs become more popular, the grid will become more fine masked.
I think there's really four ranges to an EV: 1. Round-trip range - just charge at home, drive around and plug in when you get back home. No fuss, can use any parking spot. 2. One-way range - if you have a charger at the office or cabin or shopping center parking lot or whereever you're going. 3. Range with charging(s) - hopefully not too many snack breaks. 4. You just can't do it. Go rent an ICE.
If you break it down to percentages, most people's commutes and general shopping are in the first one. I know the Tesla has pushed interest in getting more power to cabins - not the "deep in the forest/mountains" cabin but the beachhouse and alpine skiing cabin that are in populated areas with a decent power grid. The third one is the one with most advances, it's not pretty or easy but you can do it the 1% of the time you need to. Really, if you can get rid of #4 and fulfill the 90%+ of driving inside #1 it's a winner. And they are making a lot of progress on shifting #4 into #3 through chargers, I mean it wouldn't be my first choice but that you can drive a Tesla coast to coast means you don't have to get an ICE.
It's something about the sheer scale of it, at +10C India is the new Sahara. Is anyone going to build AC and irrigation for a billion people there? No, about 99% of them have to move - meaning, they have to invade someone - and they're hardly the only ones. You can have massive crop failures and if there's food for six billion people on a seven billion people planet, I think a lot more than one billion is going to die. Very quickly we could have a cascading failure because the war stops the tractors, destroys farmlands and crops. Maybe they even start employing scorched earth tactics to avoid it falling into enemy hands.
Going back to living off the land might be hopeless because the fish is dying, the game is dying, the plants are dying because they can't adapt quick enough. We probably don't stand a chance to feed the current population without modern agriculture anyway, the wildlife would soon be spent.You're right, I don't think humans as a race will go extinct, the climate changes alone aren't that bad. The climate changes and WWIII though? That could get rather nasty....
Hint: If you ever left your basement and went out to find real women - those are the ones with boobies you look at on the PC but they won't look like supermodels, you'd find that this is already extremely common knowledge.
Well, it might not be you but I've seen the traffic numbers and there's an absolutely massive increase in mobile traffic. When people were on laptops, they mostly used wireless nets. Now with smartphones, phablets and tablets with built in 3G/4G connections they tend to get used a lot. And many of them are high PPI devices, meaning you're still sending HD signals even if it's on a 4-10" screen.
Waaaaaaaay off-topic but social democracy through single payer market economy seems to be working out fairly well. Back when I was a kid, government employees built the roads, emptied the trash, drove the public transport and so on. Today very much of it is replaced by private companies submitting tenders to provide public services, which the government pays for through our tax money. It creates the same incentive as in the private sector to deliver higher quality at lower cost, while enabling us to provide socially beneficial services taking into account external costs such as pollution, crime and danger to public health.
Besides, capitalism has hardly failed, the 1%ers are running off with more money than ever but the global population-weighted Gini index suggests that with India and China gaining on us the overall wealth distribution of the world is actually evening out somewhat. It helps that they're 2.5 billion while the 1%ers are just 70 million, overall they have far more impact on the curve than the billionaires on the top. The number of people living in extreme poverty has also declined, in short for a failing system it looks to be in awfully good health.
That, right there, makes everything about these new smartphones, and Ubuntu in general, entirely worthless. The entire point of all this is to put control in the hands of the USERS, not "partners!"
"Users" were never going to get around to writing the software nor get a hardware producer to ship these phones, for example their little fundraiser failed with less than half the stated goal and even that was only good for one small run of vanity phones. To get the kind of funding he'd need he had to make a pitch to his partners, and I bet it went something like "Remember when Apple and Google wasn't running the show? Well, partner with us and you'll relive the glory days of old." If you want control then find a rootable Android phone and root it, that's as close as you're going to get.
While it might be symbolic TPB is the mockingjay showing just how impotent the attempts at curbing piracy is. For a while they were pretty successful at taking out the big, publicly known services and while mirrors popped up it was a hit and run strategy where you hoped they wouldn't be able to drive it back down underground. Then TPB came and stayed, despite the trial and all they're in Alexa's top 100 most visited web sites and have been for many years, it's as if your moonshine had a name and brand and flyers and salesmen roaming the streets during prohibition. They couldn't win, but they could lose less humiliatingly.
If you tear down all the power structures, it's not like you'd have freedom. Tear it down to indivudals and those indivuals wlll immediately start to form gangs, because one man is weak. You mess with one gang member, you mess with the whole gang. Then you need to form some form of mututal defense which will become a power structure of its own and from there it will simply escalate until you have countries with nukes to defend themselves against other countries with nukes. And with every power system comes corruption and abuse, even the rule of law - which I assume most feel is a good thing - is abused, whether it's those who make the laws, enforce them or judge on them. You try to set up checks and balances, but sometimes nobody is watching the watchers or they're powerless to stop it or complicit in it.
Tear down the government and megacorporations will get even more massive power over you. Once you're ready to "rebuild", you won't start with blank sheets you'll be neck deep in a corporate power well where any attempt at reform will threaten the livelyhood of your constituents and cost you the election. Not because they need to destroy people's jobs but because they can and that way, they control you. If you think it's bad now when politicans are handing out the pork to their buddies in the industry, just wait until the politicians have to beg for the industry not to take the pork away. We already have a word for when the government becomes married to the corporations, last time it had strong government leaders but I don't think the same wtih weak government leaders will fare any better.
Get together with three friends, headsets, a few beers and enjoy co-op multiplayer. Incredibly much fun as long as you don't take it too seriously. Currently I don't have any solo addictions, just a bit of online chess but when I get addicted I do get addicted....
No, that's because nobody gives a shit about the UI on a server, so why bother creating a different UI? The Metro interface is good enough to get done what needs to be done while logged in to the server.
Which contradicts the whole point about this behind some kind of segmentation, if it were then the workstation/server market would use the traditional desktop. Clearly we shall all use Metro whether we like it or not. Oh well, still 5+ years until my Windows 7 support ends...
Thus it would be a disincentive to carry any data where they could not do any double billing for the bandwidth revenue. Is Berin Szoka an industry shill?
Yes. Not to mention the obvious fact that if content providers have to pay for that bandwidth those expenses will be passed on to the customers. The only people who'll benefit from this are ISPs that can double dip and price gouge while services become both less varied and more expensive. That the customer buys the bandwidth and is then free to use it on Netflix or YouTube or TPB or any other service he wants is exactly what has made the Internet so successful, obviously the ISPs would love to be the gatekeepers to their customers charging companies lots of money for the priviledge of communicating with them but we'd be total fools for letting them.
Near as I can tell, it's simply a way to outsource number crunching. Like for example in a paternity suit, you can encrypt the DNA of the people in question, hand it over to a cloud provider who'll give you a paternity index score but can't recover the actual DNA sequences involved. Okay, not best example. Say you have a huge number of samples like a genetic archive. You want to find "The people with genes XYZ, what other genetic differences do they have from the general population?", so you hand a cloud provider a million encrypted DNA sequences, say "I'm interested in knowing how these 300 differ from the rest, crunch it" Or you have one suspected rapist, compare this to everyone else in the database and tell me best full/partial matches.
What you get back are results saying which genes are often found/not found together wtih XYZ or what persons are matching but they're scrambled by the encryption. Only the one who encrypted it can decrypt it and discover what actual genes in the DNA material or actual people it's pointing to. Imagine if that was for example a criminal registry, even if you hacked the number cruncher you still can't svab a person and tell if he's on the registry or not. That said, it still looks like symmetric encryption so it doesn't let two institutions/systems compare data anonymously. Whoever can encrypt their data can also decrypt other's data encrypted to the same key. So you need one trusted place and it seems easier to just do the crunching there on the unencrypted material.
I was going to mention that, but I wasn't sure. Can you get a full genome sequenced from hair, or do you need a certain quantity of blood or something?
As far as I can tell you need full cells so hair that has been cut with a scissor no, but if you have a hair follicle pulled out by a hair brush that's enough. Any blood, saliva, semen or tissue sample will also do. a quick check suggests as little as 5 cells are needed so we're talking nanograms of material here.
The United States has enough IP addresses in our pool to carry us through to the end of say... 2018. If current growth of the Internet continues we will still have enough IP addresses in our pool, we'll just have to knock a year or two off that projection. Say, may 2017 or half way through 2016. The United States has more than enough IP addresses to keep us going for some time.
Europe and other parts of the world is a totally different story. When the Internet was created and we started handing out the IP addresses we were quite stingy when giving them to other parts of the world. The United States is one of the biggest hoarders of IP addresses in the IPv4 world while Europe and the rest of the world got relatively few IP addresses with compared to how many the US holds. There's where we are seeing the problem.
This is pretty much wrong on all accounts, IP addresses have been allocated on demand to RIRs and in early 2011 all of them had approximately 5-6/8 networks left in the pool. So the only difference is who has needed IPs in the last three years. However there was no relation between population size and pool size, some RIRs like APNIC in the Asia-Pacific covers billions of people and has insane demand so they ran out in late 2011, Europe came second in early 2012, South and North America will run out this year while Africa is still good until 2019 or so. Or technically speaking they don't let them run totally out, when they're down to the last/8 they reseve the last for CGNAT and such but you can't get regular address blocks anymore.
This however is 3 years on the shelf with no temperature controls at all. There are very few things that can make that particular claim. Just ask anyone that works in your local Target/Wal-mart/regional groccery about product rotation. Only candy manages to hit the 3 year mark, and that's pushing it.
I think it's mostly due to lack of demand and cost than complexity, here in Norway the company who makes our "MREs" called Drytech make lots of variations and it's basically the same formula with freeze drying then vacuum sealing no matter if it's beef, pork, chicken, fish, rice, pasta, vegetables or whatever. Without water and oxygen it's pretty much totally inert, to prepare it you open the bag, add hot water, stir, close the bag and wait five minutes for it to get warm and yummy. The nominal shelf life is five years but in practice I'd eat it however old as long as the vacuum seal is still good.
We eat some of them when we go camping as they're incredibly light and surprisingly good, but it's nowhere near as good as fresh food or even frozen food - the freeze drying does some weird things to the texture of it and reliquidifying it by soaking it in boiling water only works so-so. On top of that they cost quite a bit so why would you eat that at home? Even on a weekend trip they're not really necessary as there's plenty food that won't spoil that quick, sure if you're going on an expedition and will be away from civilization for a week or a month that's different but that's a very tiny market.
Meh, some just like to hate on Hollywood anyway. Take for example Elysium, it's about a low orbit space station and a not entirely unplausible split between the <0.01% and the rest and instead of trying to build a billionaire fortress on Earth they've established their own extremely exclusive space colony. Granted, their medical tech is pure magic but it's just to quickly get the point across that up there they can cure anything. It's more realistic than particle-of-the-day Star Trek, it doesn't have any warp drives or phasers and I'd say the society is more realistic too. And it isn't full of CGI aliens.
Now the characters and plot has a bunch of holes but as far as mainstream sci-fi goes it's fairly well grounded in reality. The way they citizens of Elysium treat the rest as shit they had to scrape of their shoes is not nearly as implausible as you'd want to believe, the implication was that most never went down to Earth unless they had to. Trying to smuggle up people using stolen transports and fake transporter codes is a little far fetched, but at least the parallel to today is very clear. Okay so it's not great sci-fi but not everything will be a District 9.
However, there seems to be a severe disconnect between extra range and price. It should be cheap and a simple matter to have a slightly larger gas tank but that's not the way things work out in practice. I've seen some people just load 10 to 15 extra gallons of a gas on a tow mounted shelf behind the car but I guess those shelves cost a five hundred to a thousand bucks.
With an ICE? For most the people most the time the solution is just to bring a few jerry cans, why permanently waste so much space on a bigger gas tank. That's probably why the people with 10-15 gallons extra keep it outside the car too.
Mostly due to batteries. If you compare the power usage of laptops then, and now, you'll find that older laptops tended to use in the 10-20W range for their motherboard and CPU. Modern ultra books use a similar power level, while modern laptops use around 30-50W, and still get longer battery life.
No, mostly due to higher IPC, agressive power gating and deeper sleep stages. Here's the extended battery pack from my 2002 UltraPortable, 3600 mAh in 330 grams. In 2014 the extended battery for the Sony Vaio Pro 11 is 4690 mAh in 290 grams, that's about a 75% increase in power/gram in 12 years. There have not been any major revolutions in battery technology, it's still the same lithium-ion technology just a little more refined.
They can CLAIM anything. They can claim their shit doesn't stink. That doesn't make it so. GPL is GPL.
And copyright law is copyright law which trumphs the GPL. If you make a photo book you can get a copyright on the selection and arrangement of photos that is separate from the copyright on the individual photo. In fact, they can be all public domain photos and you can still get a copyright on that particular mix. The GPL can't prevent them from being created, but they can control their use like the GPLv3 does:
A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an "aggregate" if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit.
The GPLv2 just said that a "mere aggregate" is fine and left the door wide open on that one, the GPLv3 says a "mere aggregate" is fine if and only if you don't use the compilation copyright for anything. So there's a good chance that if Ubuntu did try anything using their compilation copyrights anyone with GPLv3 code could claim it's a license violation.
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Those are just a few of the ways individual freedom has increased in the last half century. We may have taken a small step backward with overzealous mass surveillance but it has done little to reverse the great strides forward that occurred in the 60's and 70's.
I'm not sure surveillance and tolerance belongs on the same axis. We've moved from a fairly low-tolerance, low-surveillance state where many people did "unapproved" things in private to a high tolerance, high surveillance state where the government knows but it doesn't care. Graciously supported by "if you got nothing to fear, you got nothing to hide", "think of the children" and "either you're with us or the terrorists win" crowd, panopticon believers and other useful idiots privacy is rapidly shredded.
It doesn't get bad until the government gets repressive and you realize that the curtains you've opened can't be pulled shut again without going on all sorts of watch lists and shitlists for covert activity. Look at the countries that don't exactly have a stellar record for freedom, is it getting better there? Not really, through more surveillance the people in power have gained even more control. Crushing any form of resistance is often about catching it in its infancy, making people believe it's hopeless to gather enough to make a change. It's a lopsided fight leaning more and more heavily against the incumbent.
As for me, business is always wrong because profit makes people eventually do evil. Capitalism makes people spiral to the bottom because of its nature. The excuse of "our bottom line" creates a mentality to destroy the commons and poison people. I have never seen an exception. Please, tell me when the profit motive has helped people over the long term. I would really like to know.
Money is what keeps me showing up at work five days a week. Now I'd like to think I'm doing something useful there, granted I'm not curing cancer or anything like that but still. Throw me in a "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" communist hellhole I'll do my best to be useless and needy. Or better yet, one of the people in power who decide if other people are useful or have needs. Give me the Star Trek utopia and I'll be the bloody useless guy who spends all his time on the holodeck. Which is why I think all the basic income people are on crack, because there's frankly jobs you wouldn't do if you could live well without doing them.
Money isn't really the cause of anything, it's just the objectification of "What's in it for me?" and honestly, I don't ever see most of my money. They just exist as numbers in a bank somewhere, I can't even wipe my ass with them. They're just easier to use as intermediaries and to gain interest on than buying lifestock and breeding them, forests that produce lumber or whatever else produces "interest". If we weren't using currency we'd still have economics, for example people would look for arbitrage in swapping cows for goats for corn for cows if the exchange rates were off. People would look at the ROI for giving you grain now in return for pork next summer. Maybe they weren't so formal about it, but it still happened long before we started using coins and notes.
It seems that ISP's are so concerned with Netflix's bandwidth suck that they try to get away with throttling. What about Google? Supposedly Google's web crawlers account for the largest single chunk of Internet bandwidth. (Ok, educate me)
Well, if you divide everything else into very small chunks I guess that's true. However, if you exclude streaming media over http like YouTube most statistics I find shows web traffic accounts for 15-20% of total Internet traffic. The largest chunks from a very high-level perspective seems to be 1) streaming media, 2) bittorrent/p2p and 3) everything else.
Since they are selling Internet access and Netflix is in the Internet, they most certainly are promising that. The congestion is at Verizon's port so it is their responsability.
By that logic I could set up an ISP charging $1000/MB for peering and your ISP would be forced to pay it since "it's on the Internet". It's a little bit more complicated than that, behind the scenes all the ISPs and backbone providers are negotiating how to hook themselves together. You can't demand that there be a peering point any particular place with any particular speed, it takes two to make a contract. It takes two to adjust a contract. You can't just hold one over a barrel and say "sign what that other guy is offering, no matter what".
Besides that, what about people in rural areas? What about people who still rely on dialup? They're already in existence but because some rich people in certain cities will have stupid fast Internet, there's suddenly an Internet class divide?
Actually there is and getting wider, I've been watching the national telecom statistics here in Norway and the bottom 20% are rather stuck, also known as the people who only have broadband because the government forced the telco to give them a phone line, but who'll never see an upgrade over their crappy ADSL ever without subsidies. Same with mobile data, not enough customers to justify it. Meanwhile the people in central areas are constantly seeing new forms of fiber, cable, xDSL, super-3G, 4G etc. to give them higher and higher speeds.
That said, the government here in Norway is promising 100 Mbit/s capability to 90% of the population within 2020, but I'll see it before I believe it. Still, 23% of households already have fiber as of last year so we're doing fairly well I think.
The primary example we have of this is the NSA's BULLRUN program, which tries to "insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems, IT systems, networks and endpoint communication devices." This is the worst of the NSA's excesses, because it destroys our trust in the Internet, weakens the security all of us rely on and makes us more vulnerable to attackers worldwide. .... [T]he remainder of the NSA needs to be rebalanced so COMSEC (communications security) has priority over SIGINT (signals intelligence). Instead of working to deliberately weaken security for everyone, the NSA should work to improve security for everyone.'"
In an actual war - which is what the whole DoD is there for - SIGINT is incredibly powerful. Imagine WWII again without cracking the Enigma machines, what would have happened without it is anyone's guess but an oft quoted assessment says it shortened the war by two years. For all we know a more effective sea blockade of the UK could have led to their surrender or the Russians invading all of Europe with the UK/US on the sidelines. If the Germans had known the plans for D-day it would have been a massacre.
Of course their primary target is military communications, but if you couldn't penetrate civilian communcations then really all you'd have to do is to use off-the-shelf components and you'd be secure. Duh. Which is often the poor man's military network anyway, not everybody can afford to design everything new from scratch. China can I guess, but to most it's a huge and costly effort and you could always end up doing some newbie blunders.
Besides, they as most other three letter agencies now seem equally busy trying to find terrorists who obviously aren't running around with military communications gear. And COMSEC is all but useless against terrorists, they don't care what we talk about as long as they can plan how to blow us up in private. Which is why I believe that no matter how much bullshit they feed to the press behind the scenes it's going to be "Carry on, but don't get caught again!"
Unlike personal computing, cell phones or flat panel televisions, electric cars are not a new technology. They have been around in one form or another, since the 1880s. (...) The technological limitation that's holding back electric cars has always been a lack of energy density in the batteries.
Sure, but the power grid was extremely different back then. If you had it - which by far most didn't - it was barely good enough to power light bulbs, not cars. Sure you could wire up a bunch of car batteries, drive it a little while but then it'd take a month to recharge. Between stoves, refridgerators, dish washers, washing machines, computers, TVs, power tools and whatnot it's only recently come to a point where in-home charging of a car is feasible. Even now they're suffering from growth pains just like the Internet adapted to Napster and YouTube, but they will pass. The other things is that there was no public charging grid, even if you got yourself an industrial size electric connection at home you'd be stuck in your little range circle. And unlike at home were you can reasonably be expected to let it charge overnight, on the road chargers must be much faster and stronger.
Tesla's superchargers do 120 kW/car (here in Norway, I understand slightly lower in the US at the moment) and by their nature you want them in the middle of "nowhere" between cities. I don't know their total capacity - probably some oversubscription - but again I think it's something that only in very recent times has become feasible. Not to mention the rapid charging technology itself is very much state of the art. In short, even if we can't make miracles on density we are making huge advances in distribution and delivery. And as EVs become more popular, the grid will become more fine masked.
I think there's really four ranges to an EV:
1. Round-trip range - just charge at home, drive around and plug in when you get back home. No fuss, can use any parking spot.
2. One-way range - if you have a charger at the office or cabin or shopping center parking lot or whereever you're going.
3. Range with charging(s) - hopefully not too many snack breaks.
4. You just can't do it. Go rent an ICE.
If you break it down to percentages, most people's commutes and general shopping are in the first one. I know the Tesla has pushed interest in getting more power to cabins - not the "deep in the forest/mountains" cabin but the beachhouse and alpine skiing cabin that are in populated areas with a decent power grid. The third one is the one with most advances, it's not pretty or easy but you can do it the 1% of the time you need to. Really, if you can get rid of #4 and fulfill the 90%+ of driving inside #1 it's a winner. And they are making a lot of progress on shifting #4 into #3 through chargers, I mean it wouldn't be my first choice but that you can drive a Tesla coast to coast means you don't have to get an ICE.
It's something about the sheer scale of it, at +10C India is the new Sahara. Is anyone going to build AC and irrigation for a billion people there? No, about 99% of them have to move - meaning, they have to invade someone - and they're hardly the only ones. You can have massive crop failures and if there's food for six billion people on a seven billion people planet, I think a lot more than one billion is going to die. Very quickly we could have a cascading failure because the war stops the tractors, destroys farmlands and crops. Maybe they even start employing scorched earth tactics to avoid it falling into enemy hands.
Going back to living off the land might be hopeless because the fish is dying, the game is dying, the plants are dying because they can't adapt quick enough. We probably don't stand a chance to feed the current population without modern agriculture anyway, the wildlife would soon be spent.You're right, I don't think humans as a race will go extinct, the climate changes alone aren't that bad. The climate changes and WWIII though? That could get rather nasty....
Hint: If you ever left your basement and went out to find real women - those are the ones with boobies you look at on the PC but they won't look like supermodels, you'd find that this is already extremely common knowledge.
Well, it might not be you but I've seen the traffic numbers and there's an absolutely massive increase in mobile traffic. When people were on laptops, they mostly used wireless nets. Now with smartphones, phablets and tablets with built in 3G/4G connections they tend to get used a lot. And many of them are high PPI devices, meaning you're still sending HD signals even if it's on a 4-10" screen.
Waaaaaaaay off-topic but social democracy through single payer market economy seems to be working out fairly well. Back when I was a kid, government employees built the roads, emptied the trash, drove the public transport and so on. Today very much of it is replaced by private companies submitting tenders to provide public services, which the government pays for through our tax money. It creates the same incentive as in the private sector to deliver higher quality at lower cost, while enabling us to provide socially beneficial services taking into account external costs such as pollution, crime and danger to public health.
Besides, capitalism has hardly failed, the 1%ers are running off with more money than ever but the global population-weighted Gini index suggests that with India and China gaining on us the overall wealth distribution of the world is actually evening out somewhat. It helps that they're 2.5 billion while the 1%ers are just 70 million, overall they have far more impact on the curve than the billionaires on the top. The number of people living in extreme poverty has also declined, in short for a failing system it looks to be in awfully good health.
That, right there, makes everything about these new smartphones, and Ubuntu in general, entirely worthless. The entire point of all this is to put control in the hands of the USERS, not "partners!"
"Users" were never going to get around to writing the software nor get a hardware producer to ship these phones, for example their little fundraiser failed with less than half the stated goal and even that was only good for one small run of vanity phones. To get the kind of funding he'd need he had to make a pitch to his partners, and I bet it went something like "Remember when Apple and Google wasn't running the show? Well, partner with us and you'll relive the glory days of old." If you want control then find a rootable Android phone and root it, that's as close as you're going to get.
While it might be symbolic TPB is the mockingjay showing just how impotent the attempts at curbing piracy is. For a while they were pretty successful at taking out the big, publicly known services and while mirrors popped up it was a hit and run strategy where you hoped they wouldn't be able to drive it back down underground. Then TPB came and stayed, despite the trial and all they're in Alexa's top 100 most visited web sites and have been for many years, it's as if your moonshine had a name and brand and flyers and salesmen roaming the streets during prohibition. They couldn't win, but they could lose less humiliatingly.
If you tear down all the power structures, it's not like you'd have freedom. Tear it down to indivudals and those indivuals wlll immediately start to form gangs, because one man is weak. You mess with one gang member, you mess with the whole gang. Then you need to form some form of mututal defense which will become a power structure of its own and from there it will simply escalate until you have countries with nukes to defend themselves against other countries with nukes. And with every power system comes corruption and abuse, even the rule of law - which I assume most feel is a good thing - is abused, whether it's those who make the laws, enforce them or judge on them. You try to set up checks and balances, but sometimes nobody is watching the watchers or they're powerless to stop it or complicit in it.
Tear down the government and megacorporations will get even more massive power over you. Once you're ready to "rebuild", you won't start with blank sheets you'll be neck deep in a corporate power well where any attempt at reform will threaten the livelyhood of your constituents and cost you the election. Not because they need to destroy people's jobs but because they can and that way, they control you. If you think it's bad now when politicans are handing out the pork to their buddies in the industry, just wait until the politicians have to beg for the industry not to take the pork away. We already have a word for when the government becomes married to the corporations, last time it had strong government leaders but I don't think the same wtih weak government leaders will fare any better.
Get together with three friends, headsets, a few beers and enjoy co-op multiplayer. Incredibly much fun as long as you don't take it too seriously. Currently I don't have any solo addictions, just a bit of online chess but when I get addicted I do get addicted....
No, that's because nobody gives a shit about the UI on a server, so why bother creating a different UI? The Metro interface is good enough to get done what needs to be done while logged in to the server.
Which contradicts the whole point about this behind some kind of segmentation, if it were then the workstation/server market would use the traditional desktop. Clearly we shall all use Metro whether we like it or not. Oh well, still 5+ years until my Windows 7 support ends...
Thus it would be a disincentive to carry any data where they could not do any double billing for the bandwidth revenue. Is Berin Szoka an industry shill?
Yes. Not to mention the obvious fact that if content providers have to pay for that bandwidth those expenses will be passed on to the customers. The only people who'll benefit from this are ISPs that can double dip and price gouge while services become both less varied and more expensive. That the customer buys the bandwidth and is then free to use it on Netflix or YouTube or TPB or any other service he wants is exactly what has made the Internet so successful, obviously the ISPs would love to be the gatekeepers to their customers charging companies lots of money for the priviledge of communicating with them but we'd be total fools for letting them.
Near as I can tell, it's simply a way to outsource number crunching. Like for example in a paternity suit, you can encrypt the DNA of the people in question, hand it over to a cloud provider who'll give you a paternity index score but can't recover the actual DNA sequences involved. Okay, not best example. Say you have a huge number of samples like a genetic archive. You want to find "The people with genes XYZ, what other genetic differences do they have from the general population?", so you hand a cloud provider a million encrypted DNA sequences, say "I'm interested in knowing how these 300 differ from the rest, crunch it" Or you have one suspected rapist, compare this to everyone else in the database and tell me best full/partial matches.
What you get back are results saying which genes are often found/not found together wtih XYZ or what persons are matching but they're scrambled by the encryption. Only the one who encrypted it can decrypt it and discover what actual genes in the DNA material or actual people it's pointing to. Imagine if that was for example a criminal registry, even if you hacked the number cruncher you still can't svab a person and tell if he's on the registry or not. That said, it still looks like symmetric encryption so it doesn't let two institutions/systems compare data anonymously. Whoever can encrypt their data can also decrypt other's data encrypted to the same key. So you need one trusted place and it seems easier to just do the crunching there on the unencrypted material.
I was going to mention that, but I wasn't sure. Can you get a full genome sequenced from hair, or do you need a certain quantity of blood or something?
As far as I can tell you need full cells so hair that has been cut with a scissor no, but if you have a hair follicle pulled out by a hair brush that's enough. Any blood, saliva, semen or tissue sample will also do. a quick check suggests as little as 5 cells are needed so we're talking nanograms of material here.
The United States has enough IP addresses in our pool to carry us through to the end of say... 2018. If current growth of the Internet continues we will still have enough IP addresses in our pool, we'll just have to knock a year or two off that projection. Say, may 2017 or half way through 2016. The United States has more than enough IP addresses to keep us going for some time.
Europe and other parts of the world is a totally different story. When the Internet was created and we started handing out the IP addresses we were quite stingy when giving them to other parts of the world. The United States is one of the biggest hoarders of IP addresses in the IPv4 world while Europe and the rest of the world got relatively few IP addresses with compared to how many the US holds. There's where we are seeing the problem.
This is pretty much wrong on all accounts, IP addresses have been allocated on demand to RIRs and in early 2011 all of them had approximately 5-6 /8 networks left in the pool. So the only difference is who has needed IPs in the last three years. However there was no relation between population size and pool size, some RIRs like APNIC in the Asia-Pacific covers billions of people and has insane demand so they ran out in late 2011, Europe came second in early 2012, South and North America will run out this year while Africa is still good until 2019 or so. Or technically speaking they don't let them run totally out, when they're down to the last /8 they reseve the last for CGNAT and such but you can't get regular address blocks anymore.
This however is 3 years on the shelf with no temperature controls at all. There are very few things that can make that particular claim. Just ask anyone that works in your local Target/Wal-mart/regional groccery about product rotation. Only candy manages to hit the 3 year mark, and that's pushing it.
I think it's mostly due to lack of demand and cost than complexity, here in Norway the company who makes our "MREs" called Drytech make lots of variations and it's basically the same formula with freeze drying then vacuum sealing no matter if it's beef, pork, chicken, fish, rice, pasta, vegetables or whatever. Without water and oxygen it's pretty much totally inert, to prepare it you open the bag, add hot water, stir, close the bag and wait five minutes for it to get warm and yummy. The nominal shelf life is five years but in practice I'd eat it however old as long as the vacuum seal is still good.
We eat some of them when we go camping as they're incredibly light and surprisingly good, but it's nowhere near as good as fresh food or even frozen food - the freeze drying does some weird things to the texture of it and reliquidifying it by soaking it in boiling water only works so-so. On top of that they cost quite a bit so why would you eat that at home? Even on a weekend trip they're not really necessary as there's plenty food that won't spoil that quick, sure if you're going on an expedition and will be away from civilization for a week or a month that's different but that's a very tiny market.
Meh, some just like to hate on Hollywood anyway. Take for example Elysium, it's about a low orbit space station and a not entirely unplausible split between the <0.01% and the rest and instead of trying to build a billionaire fortress on Earth they've established their own extremely exclusive space colony. Granted, their medical tech is pure magic but it's just to quickly get the point across that up there they can cure anything. It's more realistic than particle-of-the-day Star Trek, it doesn't have any warp drives or phasers and I'd say the society is more realistic too. And it isn't full of CGI aliens.
Now the characters and plot has a bunch of holes but as far as mainstream sci-fi goes it's fairly well grounded in reality. The way they citizens of Elysium treat the rest as shit they had to scrape of their shoes is not nearly as implausible as you'd want to believe, the implication was that most never went down to Earth unless they had to. Trying to smuggle up people using stolen transports and fake transporter codes is a little far fetched, but at least the parallel to today is very clear. Okay so it's not great sci-fi but not everything will be a District 9.
However, there seems to be a severe disconnect between extra range and price. It should be cheap and a simple matter to have a slightly larger gas tank but that's not the way things work out in practice. I've seen some people just load 10 to 15 extra gallons of a gas on a tow mounted shelf behind the car but I guess those shelves cost a five hundred to a thousand bucks.
With an ICE? For most the people most the time the solution is just to bring a few jerry cans, why permanently waste so much space on a bigger gas tank. That's probably why the people with 10-15 gallons extra keep it outside the car too.
Mostly due to batteries. If you compare the power usage of laptops then, and now, you'll find that older laptops tended to use in the 10-20W range for their motherboard and CPU. Modern ultra books use a similar power level, while modern laptops use around 30-50W, and still get longer battery life.
No, mostly due to higher IPC, agressive power gating and deeper sleep stages. Here's the extended battery pack from my 2002 UltraPortable, 3600 mAh in 330 grams. In 2014 the extended battery for the Sony Vaio Pro 11 is 4690 mAh in 290 grams, that's about a 75% increase in power/gram in 12 years. There have not been any major revolutions in battery technology, it's still the same lithium-ion technology just a little more refined.
They can CLAIM anything. They can claim their shit doesn't stink. That doesn't make it so. GPL is GPL.
And copyright law is copyright law which trumphs the GPL. If you make a photo book you can get a copyright on the selection and arrangement of photos that is separate from the copyright on the individual photo. In fact, they can be all public domain photos and you can still get a copyright on that particular mix. The GPL can't prevent them from being created, but they can control their use like the GPLv3 does:
A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an "aggregate" if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit.
The GPLv2 just said that a "mere aggregate" is fine and left the door wide open on that one, the GPLv3 says a "mere aggregate" is fine if and only if you don't use the compilation copyright for anything. So there's a good chance that if Ubuntu did try anything using their compilation copyrights anyone with GPLv3 code could claim it's a license violation.