When I was playing EVE, it was widely rumored that the Russian mafia were also playing - using game/real currency exchange as a form of money laundering to hide the income from their real-world criminal activities. Not sure how much truth there was to the rumors.
Sarcasm aside, this ridiculous claims has actually been made by not only copyright agencies, but the US government, to justify more money for copyright-enforcement efforts. news.cnet.com/Terrorist-link-to-copyright-piracy-alleged/2100-1028_3-5722835.html http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/03/us-attorney-general-piracy-funds-terror/
I'm not even sure what the stock market *does*. I don't think many people do. Including the people who run it. The higher echelons of finance are so many layers of abstraction away from what the common people deal with, it's hard to fit the two ends together.
There are plenty of crazy liberals, too. I make fun of them when they come up for discussion. I'd be happy to mock PETA all you want, and the fringes of the environmental movement are a goldmine of well-intentioned stupidity.
If you want more pointed criticism, I can do that too. 'Conservatism' has become a joke. The ideals of small government, individual liberty and self-determination have been burried beneath a new form of conservative movement that is more concerned with enforcing their outdate social views into law. Patriotism has become empty flag-waving, cheering for the country while forgetting just what makes it worth cheering for, and 'support the troops' has turned into some strange military ritual worship.
That is modern conservatism. A movement that supports individual liberty and a minimal government... except for where the government needs to be endorsing Christianity as the supreme religion, making sure gays are suitably penalised, limiting access to contraception, banning abortion, banning pornography, spying on half the country on the off-chance that they might catch a terrorist, regulating the media to protect the delicate ears of children from evil dirty words, enforcing the federal War on Drugs even in cases where states have expressly passed laws saying otherwise, and maintaining plenty of regulations about work and residence permits to keep immigrants from too easily moving into the country.
Obama is hardly a liberal messiah. Liberals by-and-large are disillusioned with him - he went into office proclaiming change, and gave nothing but a few tokens and more of the same. The only reason he still has their support at all is that he is a democrat, and thus still infinitely better to them than any republican would be.
They already are. A lot of conservative blogs and news sites have long been claiming that Manning is proof Teh Geys are a threat to national security and condemning liberals for endangering the country by letting them serve in the military. This is just going to revitalize their old gay-panic angle.
Betteridge's Law of Headlines: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
It's more a guideline than a law - exceptions exist, but are rare. It holds true because the question-mark-headline is a sign of a story where the author has had to resort to speculation in order to make up for a rather uninteresting set of facts.
I'm waiting to see what abuses show-off hackers can carry out with that. Not hacking the grid itsself, but the devices. Think a virus that infects the top five lines of electric car in 2030 and tells them all to flatten their batteries one night, then all simutainously kick in fast-charge mode at precisely the peak of the normal morning cuppa-tea surge. From low load to a couple hundred gigawatt above normal in five seconds. Grid wouldn't be able to react in time, substations would shut down automatically to prevent damage, could take hours to bring everything back up manually.
That, and the massive public funding for the construction and maintainance of oil transport - pipelines and such. And a number of focused tax deductions for drilling costs. Federal loan guarantees. A public-private partnership program for offshore oil and gas exploration. The 'marginal wells credit.' There's a It's hard to even estmate the total subsidy, as it comes in so many small chunks, but it's probably somewhere in the region of $20-50B annually.
I'm convinced that there is a conspiracy in place, in which the parties agree on which issues are not permitted for public mention. Not a smoke-filled room conspiracy like you'd expert of a foil-hatter, but just an informal agreement among all those involved, and an unspoken agreement not to promote anyone who breaks the taboo. It'd just upset too many people.
It'd explain why no politician in the US ever even mentions publically the subsidies on oil or corn production. Not even to support them - they are just unspoken, the great elephant sitting in the corner of Congress.
We're onto selective reporting. Within a day expect to see a few right-leading sites headlining 'SCIENTISTS SAY SEA LEVELS NOW FALLING!' and implying that this means that scientists made a mistake and therefore can't be trusted to get anything right.
The 'increase taxes on fossil fuel' part is a deal-breaker in the US. Even with the current very low petrol tax, the national pasttimes include grumbling about the cost to fill up. People there aren't going to be at all happy about losing their cheap gas - the car is more than a means of transport, it's a symbol of individual freedom and independence.
I think his plan succeeded. He wished to make the argument that Muslims are easily incited to violence, so he made a film insulting them - and the immediate reaction was a series of violent protests and a few murders, making his point quite clearly.
Let them. If it doesn't work, they'll have wasted a few million dollars on testing. If it does, then the tech isn't hard to reproduce and everyone will be manufacturing them soon after.
I wouldn't even feel happy running a drive overwritten with random data - they might claim that data is encrypted secrets, and demand the key for it. Only way I can see to avoid giving them something they can use against you would be to either write zeros over the whole drive and do an OS reinstall. Make sure you have a legitimate Windows license. Don't install linux - to the over-suspicious, those strange black screens and white text could be classed as a 'hacking tool.'
When traveling internationally, make backups. And don't take anything remotely incriminating - even if it means reformatting the laptop. Any data you need to work with, store online somewhere.
And if you really want to annoy those who seek to annoy you, take the family photo album and be happy knowing that some low-level agent is going to have to spend eight hours looking through the library of pictures of people standing around.
Used in a crime, or proceeds of a crime. Fodder for the police auction. Cars are most common, if someone drives to the site of a crime or to visit their drug dealer.
Which do you prefer: A dictator who generally confines his killing to political opponents and threats to his power, or several competing factions divided on religious and ethnic groups each bent on exterminating all the others? Because right now, scarcely a week can go by without another car bombing in Baghdad - and they've even managed to rig explosives on chlorine tankers for improvised chemical weapons.
Depends on region. For example, Israel is a country widely hated by the population of nearby countries and frequently involved in resource conflicts over water, plus ongoing religious tensions. The support of the US is the only thing keeping the simmering border conflicts from breaking out into open war. But at the same time, without the US pushing for war Saddam would probably still be playing regional dictator and Iraq, though still under some level of oppression, would at least be a country where one could walk the streets without fear of a car bomb.
Aerial photography, surveying, temporary communications relays for large gatherings (sports events, concerts and such - hover a few cellphone stations over the crowd), traffic monitoring/reporting, security.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was playing EVE, it was widely rumored that the Russian mafia were also playing - using game/real currency exchange as a form of money laundering to hide the income from their real-world criminal activities. Not sure how much truth there was to the rumors.
Sarcasm aside, this ridiculous claims has actually been made by not only copyright agencies, but the US government, to justify more money for copyright-enforcement efforts.
news.cnet.com/Terrorist-link-to-copyright-piracy-alleged/2100-1028_3-5722835.html
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/03/us-attorney-general-piracy-funds-terror/
Schadenfreude.
I'm not even sure what the stock market *does*. I don't think many people do. Including the people who run it. The higher echelons of finance are so many layers of abstraction away from what the common people deal with, it's hard to fit the two ends together.
There are plenty of crazy liberals, too. I make fun of them when they come up for discussion. I'd be happy to mock PETA all you want, and the fringes of the environmental movement are a goldmine of well-intentioned stupidity.
If you want more pointed criticism, I can do that too. 'Conservatism' has become a joke. The ideals of small government, individual liberty and self-determination have been burried beneath a new form of conservative movement that is more concerned with enforcing their outdate social views into law. Patriotism has become empty flag-waving, cheering for the country while forgetting just what makes it worth cheering for, and 'support the troops' has turned into some strange military ritual worship.
That is modern conservatism. A movement that supports individual liberty and a minimal government... except for where the government needs to be endorsing Christianity as the supreme religion, making sure gays are suitably penalised, limiting access to contraception, banning abortion, banning pornography, spying on half the country on the off-chance that they might catch a terrorist, regulating the media to protect the delicate ears of children from evil dirty words, enforcing the federal War on Drugs even in cases where states have expressly passed laws saying otherwise, and maintaining plenty of regulations about work and residence permits to keep immigrants from too easily moving into the country.
Obama is hardly a liberal messiah. Liberals by-and-large are disillusioned with him - he went into office proclaiming change, and gave nothing but a few tokens and more of the same. The only reason he still has their support at all is that he is a democrat, and thus still infinitely better to them than any republican would be.
They already are. A lot of conservative blogs and news sites have long been claiming that Manning is proof Teh Geys are a threat to national security and condemning liberals for endangering the country by letting them serve in the military. This is just going to revitalize their old gay-panic angle.
Betteridge's Law of Headlines: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
It's more a guideline than a law - exceptions exist, but are rare. It holds true because the question-mark-headline is a sign of a story where the author has had to resort to speculation in order to make up for a rather uninteresting set of facts.
Just ask it to explain the offside rule. If it answers coherently, it's a computer.
Silicon transistors can run at 500GHz* - but that's hitting the limits of electron mobility, and it needed liquid helium cooling.
Sometimes, liquid nitrogen just doesn't cut it.
* http://gtresearchnews.gatech.edu/newsrelease/half-terahertz.htm
I'm waiting to see what abuses show-off hackers can carry out with that. Not hacking the grid itsself, but the devices. Think a virus that infects the top five lines of electric car in 2030 and tells them all to flatten their batteries one night, then all simutainously kick in fast-charge mode at precisely the peak of the normal morning cuppa-tea surge. From low load to a couple hundred gigawatt above normal in five seconds. Grid wouldn't be able to react in time, substations would shut down automatically to prevent damage, could take hours to bring everything back up manually.
The focus shifted from more MHZ to doing more with them. Mostly parallelisation, more specialised hardware abilities and more efficient pipelining.
Still sucks for those algorithms that can't be made parallel, though.
Oh, to clarify: That figure is for all fossil fuels together, not just oil.
That, and the massive public funding for the construction and maintainance of oil transport - pipelines and such. And a number of focused tax deductions for drilling costs. Federal loan guarantees. A public-private partnership program for offshore oil and gas exploration. The 'marginal wells credit.' There's a It's hard to even estmate the total subsidy, as it comes in so many small chunks, but it's probably somewhere in the region of $20-50B annually.
Here's a partial list: http://priceofoil.org/content/uploads/2012/05/SandersSummaryFinal.pdf
I'm convinced that there is a conspiracy in place, in which the parties agree on which issues are not permitted for public mention. Not a smoke-filled room conspiracy like you'd expert of a foil-hatter, but just an informal agreement among all those involved, and an unspoken agreement not to promote anyone who breaks the taboo. It'd just upset too many people.
It'd explain why no politician in the US ever even mentions publically the subsidies on oil or corn production. Not even to support them - they are just unspoken, the great elephant sitting in the corner of Congress.
We're onto selective reporting. Within a day expect to see a few right-leading sites headlining 'SCIENTISTS SAY SEA LEVELS NOW FALLING!' and implying that this means that scientists made a mistake and therefore can't be trusted to get anything right.
The 'increase taxes on fossil fuel' part is a deal-breaker in the US. Even with the current very low petrol tax, the national pasttimes include grumbling about the cost to fill up. People there aren't going to be at all happy about losing their cheap gas - the car is more than a means of transport, it's a symbol of individual freedom and independence.
I think his plan succeeded. He wished to make the argument that Muslims are easily incited to violence, so he made a film insulting them - and the immediate reaction was a series of violent protests and a few murders, making his point quite clearly.
Let them. If it doesn't work, they'll have wasted a few million dollars on testing. If it does, then the tech isn't hard to reproduce and everyone will be manufacturing them soon after.
I wouldn't even feel happy running a drive overwritten with random data - they might claim that data is encrypted secrets, and demand the key for it. Only way I can see to avoid giving them something they can use against you would be to either write zeros over the whole drive and do an OS reinstall. Make sure you have a legitimate Windows license. Don't install linux - to the over-suspicious, those strange black screens and white text could be classed as a 'hacking tool.'
They'd just demand the key, then arrest you for failing to provide it.
When traveling internationally, make backups. And don't take anything remotely incriminating - even if it means reformatting the laptop. Any data you need to work with, store online somewhere.
And if you really want to annoy those who seek to annoy you, take the family photo album and be happy knowing that some low-level agent is going to have to spend eight hours looking through the library of pictures of people standing around.
Used in a crime, or proceeds of a crime. Fodder for the police auction. Cars are most common, if someone drives to the site of a crime or to visit their drug dealer.
Which do you prefer: A dictator who generally confines his killing to political opponents and threats to his power, or several competing factions divided on religious and ethnic groups each bent on exterminating all the others? Because right now, scarcely a week can go by without another car bombing in Baghdad - and they've even managed to rig explosives on chlorine tankers for improvised chemical weapons.
Over a thirty-year period, and generally in an orderly and predictable manner.
Depends on region. For example, Israel is a country widely hated by the population of nearby countries and frequently involved in resource conflicts over water, plus ongoing religious tensions. The support of the US is the only thing keeping the simmering border conflicts from breaking out into open war. But at the same time, without the US pushing for war Saddam would probably still be playing regional dictator and Iraq, though still under some level of oppression, would at least be a country where one could walk the streets without fear of a car bomb.
Aerial photography, surveying, temporary communications relays for large gatherings (sports events, concerts and such - hover a few cellphone stations over the crowd), traffic monitoring/reporting, security.