The list is no surprise. Their top returns can be classified into 3 categories: 1) Tablet cases/covers. Oftentimes they explicitly claim to fit the iPads, and also other 10.1/7" tablets, but end up too loose and the tablet slips out, and of course the straps aren't adjustable. Few people bring their tablet into the store to check, and it's likely a present and still in a box.
2) Devices which utilize radio waves. Interference by walls/furniture, and other devices, cause reception to vary widely. The overloaded 2.4GHz spectrum is making this gradually worse. For wireless audio, people have little tolerance for the signal cutting out. Remember 'antennagate'? A poor wifi antenna can make a tablet (or unlocked phone) hard to use.
3) Sticks of RAM. I was kinda surprised by this, although thinking back to how many unused sticks of RAM I own that my mobos just won't work with for various reasons, it shouldn't be too surprising. Some people likely get SODIMMs instead of DIMMs and vice versa, or the wrong speed, or the wrong DDR tech.
In brick and mortar, top electronics returns are phone chargers with the wrong plug (Lightning instead of micro-usb or vice versa), and $5 headphones whose wires snap after bending them twice. Tablets are next, followed by Wifi speakers. God, the tablets; the cheap ones are cheap enough to be unusable, but are expensive enough to warrant returning, so the return rate is ~75% on some of them. Printers were very frequently returned because the manufacturer tried to save 50cents by not including a USB-B cable; customers would complain it had no cable, and for some reason they don't have a dozen laying around their house like I do. Only including a black ink cartridge and no color (or vice versa) was another frequently given reason. If people weren't able to rip the packaging open and try it on, I imagine many smartphone cases would be returned; apparently noone knows what phone they have, and have to try to put the case on in order to figure out if it'll fit. At best, they know they have an iPhone, or 'a Samsung', but most often, it's e.g. 'a Verizon'. Most amusing return award: an HDMI cable returned for 'not working with a 3d signal' despite the packaging explicitly saying it did. Surprisingly, (small) TVs were almost never returned, I guess they really do encourage passivity.
'Lost' was an alright show (although I hated its slow slide from sci-fi to spiritualism), but why are they remaking it in space? It's such a new series to remake, too./s
I suspect that genetically modifying livestock will lower the number of animals that need to be slaughtered. The meat per animal will go up, and they can be engineered to have improved immune systems; the mass culls of flocks suspected of infection with serious disease can go the way of the Dodo (pun intended). As meat production goes up, price will go down, increasing consumption somewhat, but it will reach a limit; eventually we'll reach Peak Meat where people are too gorged on animal flesh to consume more (obesity epidemic notwithstanding), even if it's cheaper than human-edible grains. I predict that animal size will gradually increase in order to improve efficiency. For example, there will eventually just be one giant 50-foot-tall chicken-zilla in America. She will be given a name, and slaughtered on television after a ritual involving nude chanting in a circle. I'll bring the body paint, absinthe, and wing sauce! And how about some GM cows that don't produce so much methane. Or go a step further and make meat-sacks that have no legs or heads, and nutrients are pumped in and wastes are pumped out. I'm sure noone will have any kneejerk reactions to that idea, nosirree. I wonder how much of that will be allowed under Kosher/Halal.
Animals that are GM to grow faster will bioaccumulate less toxins before they are slaughtered, so it may actually be healthier than the non-GM version. Wild fish generally swim in far more polluted waters than what the farms use (because farms care about yields and disease.)
Some posited that gluten-free diets help with autism symptoms. A recent study nixed that though. There's another position that seems to boil down to "gluten means 'glue' because it's sticky, therefore it clogs your arteries" or somesuch.
These include electronic/anonymous payments, virtual currencies and the transfers of gold and precious metals by pre-paid cards.
Two problems here. Electronic payments can transfer from anything to anything else, meaning two accounts both external to the EU; the EU's rules would never touch that transaction. The payment can then be introduced into the EU if someone wanted to (and honestly it would never need to). It's the old trick of "abstract until it's legal."
Second is that there's no point in only restricting cards that represent 'precious metals', since it represents a denomination that's indirectly backed by the metal. A card could just as conveniently represent the same value in base metals, or blue chip stocks, or frozen concentrated orange juice. Limiting prepaid card value to 500Euro or something should suffice.
That said I don't see how any of that would've prevented the Paris attacks or allowed the accomplices to be found out after the fact. Wallet cash could've covered transportation, food and lodging; and the guns (probably the largest expense) were smuggled into the country anyhow. The total cost was probably less than 50k Euros, almost all of which was probably paid in cash to criminals who weren't going to try and trace their payment even if it were traceable (demanding cash because they don't want to be traced themselves). I don't know the details of the case though. All I see is politicians trying to push through a EU PATRIOT ACT.
I'm waiting for Einstein Electric, who'll have the slogan "Spooky autos at a distance." Unfortunately I expect them to be entangled with regulators for a relatively long period of time.
Lessig's campaign asked the DNC for clarity on the rule, and they kept waffling back and forth on whether it requires 1% in the polls >6 weeks before the debate, or 6 weeks before the debate. I have a feeling that noone at the DNC actually knows which it is, explaining the conflicting answers; the 'rule' is probably only there for show, and never actually critically applied; it is simply 'known' which candidates have enough buzz, and those are the ones that make it to the debate.
In theory, tests should be utilized for two purposes: determining the effectiveness of a curriculum and how it is taught (i.e. the teacher), and determining a specific student's retention. Unfortunately, making test scores part of a student's permanent record (via Grades) leads to discrimination against those who do poorly on tests, which leads to the dysfunctional practice of 'cramming'. Cramming leads to much-reduced retention compared to other learning techniques, and further testing (e.g. final exams) will lead to more cramming rather than more learning in ways that improve retention. Sudden pop-quizzes could be utilized instead, where the students don't know to cram for them, but I'm skeptical these could be done in a cram-proof manner, particularly if they are regular occurrences.
The solution is for test results to not be associable with individual students or affect grades. Pop quizzes can be used to determine who needs additional instruction to understand the material. Only 1 standardized test should be necessary annually, not 10 like the summary says is average. Furthermore, only giving funding to schools who score well leads to a positive feedback loop, where rich schools get higher scores and thus get more money they don't need, while poor schools get low scores and don't get the money they badly need. There's too much graft involved with the boondoggles that aren't helping, and I imagine standardized tests are a part of that. The lack of nationwide homogenization in schools is a double-edged sword: some happen to do something right, somehow, that the federal govt. wouldn't have thought of, yet others fall into easily-avoided traps that the dept. of education could ward off.
Rant mode: Even in pre-NCLB public schools, I wasn't taught what breadth of endeavors and fields of study there were. I didn't know what Sociology was until college, for example. I don't necessarily think every high-schooler should take a Sociology course, but they should at least know it exists. There are countless things that exist that schools fail to notify students about: "hey, this exists. it's a thing. check it out maybe." One's world can seem to feel like it holds nothing more than what's taught in one's courses. Many students aren't interested in (at least some of) the few things their public schools offer, leading some to come to dislike learning in general, which leads to anti-intellectualism. Some people will just never have the patience for learning things that are abstract or not immediately obvious to be relevant to them, so teaching them things like math or geography are a waste of time compared to teaching them practical hands-on things like carving furniture. Worse, it's condescending for some teachers to suggest that "if you do bad at $my_subject then you're doomed to be a burger-flipper for all your days" as if that's a horrible inevitable fate. There are LOTS of blue-collar jobs of all different types, which can be done by someone without even a high school education, some of which a given person may enjoy.
It seems that certain subjects are considered 'sacred cows', and are rarely justified for why they are taught, particularly for as many hours as they are. For example, Algebra is great, as a programmer I use it all the time; there's certainly enough knowledge of Algebra to fill 50, 100 or maybe 1000 hours of class time... but does the average high school student really need more than 5 or 10 hours to learn the most important elements of it they're most likely to actually remember and use? If some obscure element is required to be understood primarily for the purpose of understanding something in a later class, it can be explained in that later class right before what builds upon it, saving time for those who never take that later class. In high school did I really need to be taught the details of WW2 three separate times? The teachers went into more depth each time, sure, yet I learned about names and dates of battles and who won them and why rather than stuff like the Nuremberg Trials and w
Proving standing when one is subject to a secret procedure is akin to proving one's innocence: it may be impossible unless the guilty party steps forward and admits guilt. What the judges SHOULD do is modify the rules on determining standing, so that if it regards a secret procedure, the judge does his own discovery, and examines the classified information on his own, in order to determine if the plaintiff has standing. Judges already privately examine classified information in other contexts, so it shouldn't be unreasonable. Maybe get FISC involved if necessary.
No, Slashdot (and just about any other website) gains revenue from clicked ads.
Not anymore they don't. Due to click-fraud, ad networks don't generally pay for ad clicks, but 'impressions' aka views. It's alot easier to fake a thousand unique clicks than a million unique views.
This has happened before. People who gain critical thinking look back upon what they were learned about history in school or books, and realize that much of it is heavily colored by biases popular in that place and time. '1984' made the concept of rewriting history well-known, although propagandized 'interpretations' of historical events surely predated it. That someone went to the trouble to write a long description of an event indicates a motivation to do so, but that motivation may not be a desire to record or disseminate the truth; therefore, being written down is not proof of its truthfulness. For example, it used to be a common occurrence for trusted/respected writers to have new writings attributed to them in order for their 'legitimacy' to be improved. Thus the large amount of apocryphal writings that exist. The Wright bros. weren't believed by journalists at the time that they'd achieved controlled flight; later, they withheld their flyer from the Smithsonian unless they agreed to acknowledge them as the inventors of controlled flight and ignore all the others who worked on airplanes at the time; so the media can get it wrong coming and going. And then there's the whole 'mainstream media'/Faux News problem, presenting 1/3 of a story and encouraging people to jump to conclusions. In the past, storytelling was the main method of history preservation. Look at how many myths and urban legends that led to, as well as gross embellishments a la Journey to the West. When you were a kid, chances are you believed a myth or 50; how did you feel when you grew up and realized they were nonsense? In the end it's going to come down to chains of evidence leading to a trustworthy content creator: a well-known photographer, speaker, or a journalist who goes right to the source. If it originated from an anonymous internet account, then it's less trustworthy.
Most countries fall into one of four categories here: Five Eyes (shares surveillance data with U.S.), 'The West' (same, probably with implicit economic threats involved), Laizzes-faire governments (trivially bribed in order to share surveillance data with U.S.), and totalitarian (keeps the info to themselves but surveils everything openly).
Reporters Without Borders maintains a nice ranking here of countries based on their histories of surveillance and censorship; however, sometimes it turns out that a country high on the list will be revealed to have been engaged in a mass-surveillance scheme all along or has major corruption problems that weren't factored in.
In practical terms, it has always been advised that anything unencrypted sent over the Internet should be assumed to be snooped upon, and now we merely know how true that assumption always was. Your efforts should be put into ensuring everything is encrypted and hashed using secure algorithms that haven't been broken. Even if your server is physically located in Utopia, whose government never does any surveillance, censorship or takedowns, hackers (government or otherwise) from other countries can compromise your server and take all the data or install backdoors to your encryption efforts, so security is more important than location. Of course, a country that doesn't have a history of raiding datacenters hosting certain materials is still a good idea, but don't forget that your upstream hosting providers are one bribe/threat away from pulling your plug unilaterally, so choose them well too.
Your pee came out... orange-ish yellow. You fail. Please drink further cans until it is green. Remember to urinate directly in front of the Kinect for verification. Thank you for your cooperation, citizen, I mean consumer, I mean sir and/or madam.
Welcome to the future. You live somewhere without reliable internet access, and want to play a game on the Xbox Two. You take your hard-earned bitcoins to a Gamestop as well as a flash drive/external HDD that's been prepared by the console. You plug it in to a kiosk at the store, which lets you download game data for ANY game available for the system (a single HDD can hold every game released in the past several months). Of course, you won't just be able to play it. You scratch off a prepaid bitcoin card and input the code into the kiosk, and choose which games to buy a license for. The kiosk connects to the internet, sending a file containing your console's hardware ID, and your Xbox Live login info. Microsoft cryptographically signs a certificate containing the console's ID, and the game's unique title ID, and sends that back to the kiosk, which is then saved back to the flash drive. You yank the flash drive, go home, and plug it into the Xbox Two, which validates the signed certificate, and lets you play the game whose data is present. No home internet access required, much less an always-on connection. The certificates for all games are in one file which is signed by Microsoft. While in theory you could sell a game license, keep your console disconnected from the net and use an outdated certificate file in order to continue playing it, you'd never be able to use Xbox Live or run any additional games, so that's unlikely. Thanks to asynchronous keys, the master key wouldn't be anywhere in the console and thus need to be hacked from Microsoft's servers, which AFAIK has never happened to a console maker. Rentals will work by containing a time limit in the certificate file, and of course rolling back the clock in the settings menu won't work around that; perhaps it'll just allow X hours of runtime, rather than X hours of access (although both wouldn't surprise me, a la Steam returns). You may also be allowed to sell your licenses, although they'll have to get this up and running before anyone believes it. The process will have to resemble "here ya go" more than "list of restrictions a mile long" or else they'll be handing another win to Sony. In order for the process to not suck, they're probably going to have to bite the bullet and accept that someone, somewhere, may be playing a game they 'sold', but it's ok because few people will accept the tradeoffs. Consoles may also lose their internal hard drives, and just get an external accessory instead; USB 3.1 is faster than SATA 3 so it's not totally nuts (cache will help latency problems). The console will be ostensibly cheaper since they have one less component, they can say "supports bajillionty terabyte drives!" in marketing, and simultaneously sell their own branded overpriced drives which are "officially supported."
I RTFA (I know) He wasn't placed on a sex offender's register (last I heard, the UK declined to implement one), rather a registry of people who have had legal complaints filed with the police agency. Someone (probably a tip from whatever social network the picture was shared on) notified the police about it, and a public record was automatically made about that notification. The police didn't press charges, as they claim to be lenient about teen sexting; an actual modification to the law would be a better option than selective enforcement, however. A bigger problem is that a publicly-searchable registry exists of people who have been accused of a crime, even if the police thought there wasn't enough of a case/cause to arrest or prosecute them. Most people never get called on their 3 felonies per day, so it can be used to single out people no more guilty than typical.
Even cheap TN monitors use FRC to interpolate to 8-bit, which is better than nothing. IPS monitors can be had for $120, with an 8-bit color panel. Several gaming monitors use native 8-bit with FRC to 10-bit for less than $800, and a few even use native 10-bit.
I expect they'll hire someone from a well-known tech company to be CTO, who will give a buzzword-filled speech frequently referencing encryption and 'best practices' and how incredibly secure their new system will be. The new CEO will announce that they won't hold on to personal data any more once one pays to delete it, that financial data will be held in a separate system/outsourced, and steps will be taken to improve the male/female ratio. They might even change their TOS to remove reference to the 'for entertainment only' women, and claim to stop using them. They'll almost certainly change their website name, maybe just to the initialism 'AM', to make it harder years from now to find out that it'd been hacked.
One might remember that Plenty of Fish and Adult Friend Finder have both been hacked in recent years, which didn't kill those sites.
The F-35 (program) generates FAR more pork than competing fighter jets. That's the only performance that matters. This is just like the NASA projects that are legally required to be completed, then mothballed because they're already obsolete, only with a hint of 'design by committee' to help sink it.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of the software that automatically churns out randomly-generated research papers and gets them published in sketchy scientific journals.
The list is no surprise. Their top returns can be classified into 3 categories:
1) Tablet cases/covers. Oftentimes they explicitly claim to fit the iPads, and also other 10.1/7" tablets, but end up too loose and the tablet slips out, and of course the straps aren't adjustable. Few people bring their tablet into the store to check, and it's likely a present and still in a box.
2) Devices which utilize radio waves. Interference by walls/furniture, and other devices, cause reception to vary widely. The overloaded 2.4GHz spectrum is making this gradually worse. For wireless audio, people have little tolerance for the signal cutting out. Remember 'antennagate'? A poor wifi antenna can make a tablet (or unlocked phone) hard to use.
3) Sticks of RAM. I was kinda surprised by this, although thinking back to how many unused sticks of RAM I own that my mobos just won't work with for various reasons, it shouldn't be too surprising. Some people likely get SODIMMs instead of DIMMs and vice versa, or the wrong speed, or the wrong DDR tech.
In brick and mortar, top electronics returns are phone chargers with the wrong plug (Lightning instead of micro-usb or vice versa), and $5 headphones whose wires snap after bending them twice. Tablets are next, followed by Wifi speakers. God, the tablets; the cheap ones are cheap enough to be unusable, but are expensive enough to warrant returning, so the return rate is ~75% on some of them. Printers were very frequently returned because the manufacturer tried to save 50cents by not including a USB-B cable; customers would complain it had no cable, and for some reason they don't have a dozen laying around their house like I do. Only including a black ink cartridge and no color (or vice versa) was another frequently given reason. If people weren't able to rip the packaging open and try it on, I imagine many smartphone cases would be returned; apparently noone knows what phone they have, and have to try to put the case on in order to figure out if it'll fit. At best, they know they have an iPhone, or 'a Samsung', but most often, it's e.g. 'a Verizon'. Most amusing return award: an HDMI cable returned for 'not working with a 3d signal' despite the packaging explicitly saying it did. Surprisingly, (small) TVs were almost never returned, I guess they really do encourage passivity.
'Lost' was an alright show (although I hated its slow slide from sci-fi to spiritualism), but why are they remaking it in space? It's such a new series to remake, too. /s
Better car bombings than horse bombings. Won't someone please think of the horses?!
I suspect that genetically modifying livestock will lower the number of animals that need to be slaughtered. The meat per animal will go up, and they can be engineered to have improved immune systems; the mass culls of flocks suspected of infection with serious disease can go the way of the Dodo (pun intended).
As meat production goes up, price will go down, increasing consumption somewhat, but it will reach a limit; eventually we'll reach Peak Meat where people are too gorged on animal flesh to consume more (obesity epidemic notwithstanding), even if it's cheaper than human-edible grains.
I predict that animal size will gradually increase in order to improve efficiency. For example, there will eventually just be one giant 50-foot-tall chicken-zilla in America. She will be given a name, and slaughtered on television after a ritual involving nude chanting in a circle. I'll bring the body paint, absinthe, and wing sauce!
And how about some GM cows that don't produce so much methane. Or go a step further and make meat-sacks that have no legs or heads, and nutrients are pumped in and wastes are pumped out. I'm sure noone will have any kneejerk reactions to that idea, nosirree. I wonder how much of that will be allowed under Kosher/Halal.
Animals that are GM to grow faster will bioaccumulate less toxins before they are slaughtered, so it may actually be healthier than the non-GM version. Wild fish generally swim in far more polluted waters than what the farms use (because farms care about yields and disease.)
Some posited that gluten-free diets help with autism symptoms. A recent study nixed that though. There's another position that seems to boil down to "gluten means 'glue' because it's sticky, therefore it clogs your arteries" or somesuch.
These include electronic/anonymous payments, virtual currencies and the transfers of gold and precious metals by pre-paid cards.
Two problems here. Electronic payments can transfer from anything to anything else, meaning two accounts both external to the EU; the EU's rules would never touch that transaction. The payment can then be introduced into the EU if someone wanted to (and honestly it would never need to). It's the old trick of "abstract until it's legal."
Second is that there's no point in only restricting cards that represent 'precious metals', since it represents a denomination that's indirectly backed by the metal. A card could just as conveniently represent the same value in base metals, or blue chip stocks, or frozen concentrated orange juice. Limiting prepaid card value to 500Euro or something should suffice.
That said I don't see how any of that would've prevented the Paris attacks or allowed the accomplices to be found out after the fact. Wallet cash could've covered transportation, food and lodging; and the guns (probably the largest expense) were smuggled into the country anyhow. The total cost was probably less than 50k Euros, almost all of which was probably paid in cash to criminals who weren't going to try and trace their payment even if it were traceable (demanding cash because they don't want to be traced themselves). I don't know the details of the case though. All I see is politicians trying to push through a EU PATRIOT ACT.
The only ones able to stand up in court for our constitutional rights as Americans... are the terrorists. What a fucked-up world we live in.
I'm waiting for Einstein Electric, who'll have the slogan "Spooky autos at a distance." Unfortunately I expect them to be entangled with regulators for a relatively long period of time.
Lessig's campaign asked the DNC for clarity on the rule, and they kept waffling back and forth on whether it requires 1% in the polls >6 weeks before the debate, or 6 weeks before the debate. I have a feeling that noone at the DNC actually knows which it is, explaining the conflicting answers; the 'rule' is probably only there for show, and never actually critically applied; it is simply 'known' which candidates have enough buzz, and those are the ones that make it to the debate.
In theory, tests should be utilized for two purposes: determining the effectiveness of a curriculum and how it is taught (i.e. the teacher), and determining a specific student's retention. Unfortunately, making test scores part of a student's permanent record (via Grades) leads to discrimination against those who do poorly on tests, which leads to the dysfunctional practice of 'cramming'. Cramming leads to much-reduced retention compared to other learning techniques, and further testing (e.g. final exams) will lead to more cramming rather than more learning in ways that improve retention. Sudden pop-quizzes could be utilized instead, where the students don't know to cram for them, but I'm skeptical these could be done in a cram-proof manner, particularly if they are regular occurrences.
The solution is for test results to not be associable with individual students or affect grades. Pop quizzes can be used to determine who needs additional instruction to understand the material. Only 1 standardized test should be necessary annually, not 10 like the summary says is average. Furthermore, only giving funding to schools who score well leads to a positive feedback loop, where rich schools get higher scores and thus get more money they don't need, while poor schools get low scores and don't get the money they badly need. There's too much graft involved with the boondoggles that aren't helping, and I imagine standardized tests are a part of that. The lack of nationwide homogenization in schools is a double-edged sword: some happen to do something right, somehow, that the federal govt. wouldn't have thought of, yet others fall into easily-avoided traps that the dept. of education could ward off.
Rant mode:
Even in pre-NCLB public schools, I wasn't taught what breadth of endeavors and fields of study there were. I didn't know what Sociology was until college, for example. I don't necessarily think every high-schooler should take a Sociology course, but they should at least know it exists. There are countless things that exist that schools fail to notify students about: "hey, this exists. it's a thing. check it out maybe." One's world can seem to feel like it holds nothing more than what's taught in one's courses. Many students aren't interested in (at least some of) the few things their public schools offer, leading some to come to dislike learning in general, which leads to anti-intellectualism. Some people will just never have the patience for learning things that are abstract or not immediately obvious to be relevant to them, so teaching them things like math or geography are a waste of time compared to teaching them practical hands-on things like carving furniture. Worse, it's condescending for some teachers to suggest that "if you do bad at $my_subject then you're doomed to be a burger-flipper for all your days" as if that's a horrible inevitable fate. There are LOTS of blue-collar jobs of all different types, which can be done by someone without even a high school education, some of which a given person may enjoy.
It seems that certain subjects are considered 'sacred cows', and are rarely justified for why they are taught, particularly for as many hours as they are. For example, Algebra is great, as a programmer I use it all the time; there's certainly enough knowledge of Algebra to fill 50, 100 or maybe 1000 hours of class time... but does the average high school student really need more than 5 or 10 hours to learn the most important elements of it they're most likely to actually remember and use? If some obscure element is required to be understood primarily for the purpose of understanding something in a later class, it can be explained in that later class right before what builds upon it, saving time for those who never take that later class. In high school did I really need to be taught the details of WW2 three separate times? The teachers went into more depth each time, sure, yet I learned about names and dates of battles and who won them and why rather than stuff like the Nuremberg Trials and w
Proving standing when one is subject to a secret procedure is akin to proving one's innocence: it may be impossible unless the guilty party steps forward and admits guilt. What the judges SHOULD do is modify the rules on determining standing, so that if it regards a secret procedure, the judge does his own discovery, and examines the classified information on his own, in order to determine if the plaintiff has standing. Judges already privately examine classified information in other contexts, so it shouldn't be unreasonable. Maybe get FISC involved if necessary.
No, Slashdot (and just about any other website) gains revenue from clicked ads.
Not anymore they don't. Due to click-fraud, ad networks don't generally pay for ad clicks, but 'impressions' aka views. It's alot easier to fake a thousand unique clicks than a million unique views.
This has happened before. People who gain critical thinking look back upon what they were learned about history in school or books, and realize that much of it is heavily colored by biases popular in that place and time. '1984' made the concept of rewriting history well-known, although propagandized 'interpretations' of historical events surely predated it. That someone went to the trouble to write a long description of an event indicates a motivation to do so, but that motivation may not be a desire to record or disseminate the truth; therefore, being written down is not proof of its truthfulness.
For example, it used to be a common occurrence for trusted/respected writers to have new writings attributed to them in order for their 'legitimacy' to be improved. Thus the large amount of apocryphal writings that exist. The Wright bros. weren't believed by journalists at the time that they'd achieved controlled flight; later, they withheld their flyer from the Smithsonian unless they agreed to acknowledge them as the inventors of controlled flight and ignore all the others who worked on airplanes at the time; so the media can get it wrong coming and going.
And then there's the whole 'mainstream media'/Faux News problem, presenting 1/3 of a story and encouraging people to jump to conclusions.
In the past, storytelling was the main method of history preservation. Look at how many myths and urban legends that led to, as well as gross embellishments a la Journey to the West. When you were a kid, chances are you believed a myth or 50; how did you feel when you grew up and realized they were nonsense?
In the end it's going to come down to chains of evidence leading to a trustworthy content creator: a well-known photographer, speaker, or a journalist who goes right to the source. If it originated from an anonymous internet account, then it's less trustworthy.
Most countries fall into one of four categories here: Five Eyes (shares surveillance data with U.S.), 'The West' (same, probably with implicit economic threats involved), Laizzes-faire governments (trivially bribed in order to share surveillance data with U.S.), and totalitarian (keeps the info to themselves but surveils everything openly).
Reporters Without Borders maintains a nice ranking here of countries based on their histories of surveillance and censorship; however, sometimes it turns out that a country high on the list will be revealed to have been engaged in a mass-surveillance scheme all along or has major corruption problems that weren't factored in.
In practical terms, it has always been advised that anything unencrypted sent over the Internet should be assumed to be snooped upon, and now we merely know how true that assumption always was. Your efforts should be put into ensuring everything is encrypted and hashed using secure algorithms that haven't been broken. Even if your server is physically located in Utopia, whose government never does any surveillance, censorship or takedowns, hackers (government or otherwise) from other countries can compromise your server and take all the data or install backdoors to your encryption efforts, so security is more important than location. Of course, a country that doesn't have a history of raiding datacenters hosting certain materials is still a good idea, but don't forget that your upstream hosting providers are one bribe/threat away from pulling your plug unilaterally, so choose them well too.
My security update procedure is: laziness. Unfortunately, I'm too lazy to update the procedure.
Your pee came out... orange-ish yellow. You fail. Please drink further cans until it is green. Remember to urinate directly in front of the Kinect for verification. Thank you for your cooperation, citizen, I mean consumer, I mean sir and/or madam.
Welcome to the future. You live somewhere without reliable internet access, and want to play a game on the Xbox Two. You take your hard-earned bitcoins to a Gamestop as well as a flash drive/external HDD that's been prepared by the console. You plug it in to a kiosk at the store, which lets you download game data for ANY game available for the system (a single HDD can hold every game released in the past several months). Of course, you won't just be able to play it. You scratch off a prepaid bitcoin card and input the code into the kiosk, and choose which games to buy a license for. The kiosk connects to the internet, sending a file containing your console's hardware ID, and your Xbox Live login info. Microsoft cryptographically signs a certificate containing the console's ID, and the game's unique title ID, and sends that back to the kiosk, which is then saved back to the flash drive. You yank the flash drive, go home, and plug it into the Xbox Two, which validates the signed certificate, and lets you play the game whose data is present. No home internet access required, much less an always-on connection.
The certificates for all games are in one file which is signed by Microsoft. While in theory you could sell a game license, keep your console disconnected from the net and use an outdated certificate file in order to continue playing it, you'd never be able to use Xbox Live or run any additional games, so that's unlikely. Thanks to asynchronous keys, the master key wouldn't be anywhere in the console and thus need to be hacked from Microsoft's servers, which AFAIK has never happened to a console maker. Rentals will work by containing a time limit in the certificate file, and of course rolling back the clock in the settings menu won't work around that; perhaps it'll just allow X hours of runtime, rather than X hours of access (although both wouldn't surprise me, a la Steam returns). You may also be allowed to sell your licenses, although they'll have to get this up and running before anyone believes it. The process will have to resemble "here ya go" more than "list of restrictions a mile long" or else they'll be handing another win to Sony. In order for the process to not suck, they're probably going to have to bite the bullet and accept that someone, somewhere, may be playing a game they 'sold', but it's ok because few people will accept the tradeoffs.
Consoles may also lose their internal hard drives, and just get an external accessory instead; USB 3.1 is faster than SATA 3 so it's not totally nuts (cache will help latency problems). The console will be ostensibly cheaper since they have one less component, they can say "supports bajillionty terabyte drives!" in marketing, and simultaneously sell their own branded overpriced drives which are "officially supported."
I RTFA (I know)
He wasn't placed on a sex offender's register (last I heard, the UK declined to implement one), rather a registry of people who have had legal complaints filed with the police agency. Someone (probably a tip from whatever social network the picture was shared on) notified the police about it, and a public record was automatically made about that notification. The police didn't press charges, as they claim to be lenient about teen sexting; an actual modification to the law would be a better option than selective enforcement, however. A bigger problem is that a publicly-searchable registry exists of people who have been accused of a crime, even if the police thought there wasn't enough of a case/cause to arrest or prosecute them. Most people never get called on their 3 felonies per day, so it can be used to single out people no more guilty than typical.
Even cheap TN monitors use FRC to interpolate to 8-bit, which is better than nothing. IPS monitors can be had for $120, with an 8-bit color panel. Several gaming monitors use native 8-bit with FRC to 10-bit for less than $800, and a few even use native 10-bit.
I expect they'll hire someone from a well-known tech company to be CTO, who will give a buzzword-filled speech frequently referencing encryption and 'best practices' and how incredibly secure their new system will be. The new CEO will announce that they won't hold on to personal data any more once one pays to delete it, that financial data will be held in a separate system/outsourced, and steps will be taken to improve the male/female ratio. They might even change their TOS to remove reference to the 'for entertainment only' women, and claim to stop using them. They'll almost certainly change their website name, maybe just to the initialism 'AM', to make it harder years from now to find out that it'd been hacked.
One might remember that Plenty of Fish and Adult Friend Finder have both been hacked in recent years, which didn't kill those sites.
He decided he 'wanted to spend more time with his mistress... err, wife.'
short of a revolution in fusion technology
Luckily, that's only 20 years away. 2040 is 25 years away. Disaster averted.
The F-35 (program) generates FAR more pork than competing fighter jets. That's the only performance that matters. This is just like the NASA projects that are legally required to be completed, then mothballed because they're already obsolete, only with a hint of 'design by committee' to help sink it.