I doubt it all matters that much really. I'm sure the NSA has taps on every fiber line to any major internet company. Anything that goes cleartext is available to them - even if you use SSL to connect to your gmail server, unless you're emailing someone else on gmail it'll still go cleartext to the SMTP server at the other end. They are also certain to have the ability to spoof SSL certificates - not via any high-tech method, but simply by leaning on the root CAs to sign them - but I imagine they'd use that trick sparingly to avoid detection.
2 doesn't really apply to nuclear-armed countries because they can never really 'lose' a war. They can certainly lose battles overseas, and lose the ability to defend their interests there, but the moment any opponent starts to look like they could really be capable of actually invading and deposing a government you can bet the nukes will come out. Victory follows: War doesn't determine who is right, but it can determine who is left.
You could only get away because of the limitations of technology at the time. Even the KGB couldn't hire enough people to read every single letter sent or watch every last person entering a shop to note down what they buy. That the NSA can isn't a tribute to greater skill, it's tribute to them owning giant supercomputers and living in a time when everyone carries a trackable cellphone.
The president can't just hand over money like that, the budget needs to be approved by congress, or at least a department head who is getting their budget approved by congress. So I suspect there is something going the other way too. At a guess, almost all of that $7B is going to be spent paying US-based engineering and construction companies. It's a good plan: Split the bill with Africa in return for building up international trade relations and establishing contacts that could last for decades. Everyone wins. Just don't pretend this is a grand altuistic gesture.
When the confirmed-true-beyond-doubt stories look like the ramblings of a crazed conspiracy theorist, it becomes impossible to say which conspiricy theorists are really crazed. He's probably full of crap, but it's no longer possible to just dismiss the seemingly crazy out of hand.
It's the CIA that is supposed to spy on people - specifically, foreign governments and individuals of interest. The NSA was established in the fifties to assist the CIA in response to the increasing use of advanced cryptography - they were a department of mathematicians, responsible for breaking enemy (Or peaceful-for-the-moment) codes and making sure the US codes were not broken and the interception of electronic foreign communications.
The agency has since experienced considerable scope creep. Both the NSA and CIA are supposed to be strictly prohibited from spying domestically within the US (Law enforcement investigation is the FBI's job), but in practice have found plenty of loopholes.
I think it's wrong to say a religion allows or prohibits anything. A religion is defined by its followers, and can change greatly between regions or historical periods. The best you can really state is that there are some things in a religion which the vast majority of followers will agree upon at this time.
To give a concrete example, a few centuries ago Christianity prohibited lending money*. This wasn't a contriversial thing: Ask any priest, or any layperson with a passing familiarity with the subject, and they'd tell you it was just plain common sense. Today, we'd think this is silly. That doesn't mean the people of medieval europe were 'wrong' - it just means that their religion may have been Christianity, but it was not quite the same Christianity we have today.
*In medievel Europe, almost all money-lenders were Jewish. This is a major part of where they got their reputation for greedyness.
I return you to my point above: No, it's not. Even a simple libel case is going to take hours of legal research, hireing a solicitor, booking time off work for a court appearance and generally a lot of disruption. You'd need to file a case and appear before a judge just to get them to reveal the identity of AHole - someone known only by internet handle and blog address.
That's if it all goes to plan. Chances are AHole lives in another country, in which case it'll get even harder as you need to deal with the complexities of international legal differences too.
Nor can you just make it easier to sue for libel, because then you end up with the opposite problem - libel courts being used as a legal tool to silence critics making legitimate arguments, as often happens in the UK.
Plus it's going to really screw with name resolution. When I type 'ommadon' into my browser, how is it supposed to know if I mean to google on the string 'ommadon'*, or visit the host names 'ommadon' on my local network**, or resolve the gTLD 'ommadon'***? Any of the three possibilities could be valid - or possibly even all three. And none of them is a consistantly correct default. Even worse, 'guessing' wrong could be a security vulnerability - by spoofing broadcast name resolution an attacker could trivially appear on a local network with a hostname of his choice, so every time someone tried to google on a common word they'd be redirected to his own server.
*Cheaply-animated villain with a habbit of laughing evily a lot. **My NAS box. *** I can't imagine why anyone would register this, but it could happen.
Well, they still havn't solved the homoglyph problem.
You're quite right, though. It's just a big money-grab. There isn't a shortage of domains. There's a shortage of the really good domains, but adding more isn't going to help with that because it just means every major company is going to need to buy yet more variations of their name to prevent a prankster, porn site or competitor using them.
Disaster recovery common sense says all the data of any importance at all is going to be stored at two datacenters in case of natural disaster. So one copy near the user for performance, and the other just goes wherever storage is cheapest. At a guess.
We do that quite often at the school I work at to identify the owner of lost USB sticks handed in to lost property. They sit in a box for a few days, and if no-one claims them then IT is asked to have a quick glance at the contents to identify the owner so they can be returned.
The number of lives lost as a result of vaccine reactions is far, far less than the number of lives saved by the elimination of what would otherwise be endemic and often fatal diseases. Overall, the vaccines are saver. People just percieve them as dangerous because their danger is obvious, while all the times their child *didn't* get polio are not so easily apparant.
Don't forget the bit about posting comments insulting religious or political views, and then potential employers not hireing you over it. The annoying thing is it can't be proven: If an employer looks you up and finds you've been insulting his religion, he isn't going to give that as the reason in your rejection letter - you'll just get a generic form rejection saying 'your application has not been successful on this occasion.' It probably happens all the time.
It's cloud data. You don't know where it is, and if you did it might not stay there. That's half the point of the cloud: Abstraction of services from physical equipment.
Even if you confirm it's hosted in the US for now, perhaps in a couple of months it'll be reclassified from 'active use' to 'inactive but required' and transferred from the US to a datacenter somewhere in northern Europe where the operator has more spare low-cost storage. Some major cloud operators like Amazon will even move virtual machines between datacenters across timezones to follow the night and the lower electricity bills nighttime brings.
It means of no commercial significence. But you're right, it is growing - and growing with very impressive speed. In large part due to Valve's show of commitment. Give it more time, and the situation may change.
If Valve do go ahead with their rumored project to release some sort of linux-powered console tied into Steam, everything changes overnight. Linux becomes a serious gaming platform. The only issue remaining would be convincing games publishers their games are safe from piracy - but they seem happy enough releasing on PC right now, and I've yet to find even one Windows/PC game that could not be obtained from bittorrent somehow.
Windows 8 comes with app store functionality bundled.
Valve has to do something to counter this, or else they'll be going the way of Netscape and Winamp. Turning linux into a gaming platform or launching their own linux-based console are options. Very high-risk options, but this is a 'bet the company' moment.
Linux is a vanishingly tiny market for games. OSX is a bit bigger. Consoles are a lot bigger. What games developers want are games engines that can be easily portable between Windows and at least one major console.
The XBox (all of them), as name implies, uses DirectX APIs. If you write your game to use DirectX then it becomes almost easy to port it from Windows to XBox or vice versa. Graphics, audio, controls - all of it can remain basically the same. That's a big appeal to developers, and a strong reason to use DirectX.
The PS3 uses not-OpenGL. It's a PS3-specific API, but it's based on OpenGL, so porting is a little trickier but still practical.
People don't like change. Change means updating software and retraining users. For people to accept change, they must see some form of benefit to themselves to justify the difficulties. Windows 8 looks a lot like change for the sake of change - or, for the more cynical, change for the sake of furthering Microsoft's long term business ambitions in the mobile and service areas. Either way, it's a change in interface without apparent benefit.
We've been through this before with Office and the Ribbon - and to this day, even though almost everyone is now used to the ribbon, it's really hard to find something it makes easier than the old drop-down menu system did.
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That's what I meant. I just worded it poorly. The point remains.
I doubt it all matters that much really. I'm sure the NSA has taps on every fiber line to any major internet company. Anything that goes cleartext is available to them - even if you use SSL to connect to your gmail server, unless you're emailing someone else on gmail it'll still go cleartext to the SMTP server at the other end. They are also certain to have the ability to spoof SSL certificates - not via any high-tech method, but simply by leaning on the root CAs to sign them - but I imagine they'd use that trick sparingly to avoid detection.
2 doesn't really apply to nuclear-armed countries because they can never really 'lose' a war. They can certainly lose battles overseas, and lose the ability to defend their interests there, but the moment any opponent starts to look like they could really be capable of actually invading and deposing a government you can bet the nukes will come out. Victory follows: War doesn't determine who is right, but it can determine who is left.
For all that 9/11 terrorised a country, the death toll is equivilent to a little more than a month's worth of fatalities in traffic accidents.
Cars 'attack' the citizens of the united states with a 9/11 every month. You don't see any mass outrage or panic about that though.
It's all relative. What is left in one country can still be seen as right in another.
You could only get away because of the limitations of technology at the time. Even the KGB couldn't hire enough people to read every single letter sent or watch every last person entering a shop to note down what they buy. That the NSA can isn't a tribute to greater skill, it's tribute to them owning giant supercomputers and living in a time when everyone carries a trackable cellphone.
The president can't just hand over money like that, the budget needs to be approved by congress, or at least a department head who is getting their budget approved by congress. So I suspect there is something going the other way too. At a guess, almost all of that $7B is going to be spent paying US-based engineering and construction companies. It's a good plan: Split the bill with Africa in return for building up international trade relations and establishing contacts that could last for decades. Everyone wins. Just don't pretend this is a grand altuistic gesture.
When the confirmed-true-beyond-doubt stories look like the ramblings of a crazed conspiracy theorist, it becomes impossible to say which conspiricy theorists are really crazed. He's probably full of crap, but it's no longer possible to just dismiss the seemingly crazy out of hand.
Sort of.
It's the CIA that is supposed to spy on people - specifically, foreign governments and individuals of interest. The NSA was established in the fifties to assist the CIA in response to the increasing use of advanced cryptography - they were a department of mathematicians, responsible for breaking enemy (Or peaceful-for-the-moment) codes and making sure the US codes were not broken and the interception of electronic foreign communications.
The agency has since experienced considerable scope creep. Both the NSA and CIA are supposed to be strictly prohibited from spying domestically within the US (Law enforcement investigation is the FBI's job), but in practice have found plenty of loopholes.
I think it's wrong to say a religion allows or prohibits anything. A religion is defined by its followers, and can change greatly between regions or historical periods. The best you can really state is that there are some things in a religion which the vast majority of followers will agree upon at this time.
To give a concrete example, a few centuries ago Christianity prohibited lending money*. This wasn't a contriversial thing: Ask any priest, or any layperson with a passing familiarity with the subject, and they'd tell you it was just plain common sense. Today, we'd think this is silly. That doesn't mean the people of medieval europe were 'wrong' - it just means that their religion may have been Christianity, but it was not quite the same Christianity we have today.
*In medievel Europe, almost all money-lenders were Jewish. This is a major part of where they got their reputation for greedyness.
Wealth is no guarantee of power, but it's certainly a big advantage.
Why sell to one market when, for a very slight increase in development costs, you can sell to two? It just makes commercial sense.
I return you to my point above: No, it's not. Even a simple libel case is going to take hours of legal research, hireing a solicitor, booking time off work for a court appearance and generally a lot of disruption. You'd need to file a case and appear before a judge just to get them to reveal the identity of AHole - someone known only by internet handle and blog address.
That's if it all goes to plan. Chances are AHole lives in another country, in which case it'll get even harder as you need to deal with the complexities of international legal differences too.
Nor can you just make it easier to sue for libel, because then you end up with the opposite problem - libel courts being used as a legal tool to silence critics making legitimate arguments, as often happens in the UK.
Plus it's going to really screw with name resolution. When I type 'ommadon' into my browser, how is it supposed to know if I mean to google on the string 'ommadon'*, or visit the host names 'ommadon' on my local network**, or resolve the gTLD 'ommadon'***? Any of the three possibilities could be valid - or possibly even all three. And none of them is a consistantly correct default. Even worse, 'guessing' wrong could be a security vulnerability - by spoofing broadcast name resolution an attacker could trivially appear on a local network with a hostname of his choice, so every time someone tried to google on a common word they'd be redirected to his own server.
*Cheaply-animated villain with a habbit of laughing evily a lot.
**My NAS box.
*** I can't imagine why anyone would register this, but it could happen.
Well, they still havn't solved the homoglyph problem.
You're quite right, though. It's just a big money-grab. There isn't a shortage of domains. There's a shortage of the really good domains, but adding more isn't going to help with that because it just means every major company is going to need to buy yet more variations of their name to prevent a prankster, porn site or competitor using them.
Disaster recovery common sense says all the data of any importance at all is going to be stored at two datacenters in case of natural disaster. So one copy near the user for performance, and the other just goes wherever storage is cheapest. At a guess.
We do that quite often at the school I work at to identify the owner of lost USB sticks handed in to lost property. They sit in a box for a few days, and if no-one claims them then IT is asked to have a quick glance at the contents to identify the owner so they can be returned.
The number of lives lost as a result of vaccine reactions is far, far less than the number of lives saved by the elimination of what would otherwise be endemic and often fatal diseases. Overall, the vaccines are saver. People just percieve them as dangerous because their danger is obvious, while all the times their child *didn't* get polio are not so easily apparant.
Don't forget the bit about posting comments insulting religious or political views, and then potential employers not hireing you over it. The annoying thing is it can't be proven: If an employer looks you up and finds you've been insulting his religion, he isn't going to give that as the reason in your rejection letter - you'll just get a generic form rejection saying 'your application has not been successful on this occasion.' It probably happens all the time.
It's cloud data. You don't know where it is, and if you did it might not stay there. That's half the point of the cloud: Abstraction of services from physical equipment.
Even if you confirm it's hosted in the US for now, perhaps in a couple of months it'll be reclassified from 'active use' to 'inactive but required' and transferred from the US to a datacenter somewhere in northern Europe where the operator has more spare low-cost storage. Some major cloud operators like Amazon will even move virtual machines between datacenters across timezones to follow the night and the lower electricity bills nighttime brings.
It means of no commercial significence. But you're right, it is growing - and growing with very impressive speed. In large part due to Valve's show of commitment. Give it more time, and the situation may change.
If Valve do go ahead with their rumored project to release some sort of linux-powered console tied into Steam, everything changes overnight. Linux becomes a serious gaming platform. The only issue remaining would be convincing games publishers their games are safe from piracy - but they seem happy enough releasing on PC right now, and I've yet to find even one Windows/PC game that could not be obtained from bittorrent somehow.
It's early days yet.
Steam is basically an app store.
Windows 8 comes with app store functionality bundled.
Valve has to do something to counter this, or else they'll be going the way of Netscape and Winamp. Turning linux into a gaming platform or launching their own linux-based console are options. Very high-risk options, but this is a 'bet the company' moment.
Linux is a vanishingly tiny market for games. OSX is a bit bigger. Consoles are a lot bigger. What games developers want are games engines that can be easily portable between Windows and at least one major console.
The XBox (all of them), as name implies, uses DirectX APIs. If you write your game to use DirectX then it becomes almost easy to port it from Windows to XBox or vice versa. Graphics, audio, controls - all of it can remain basically the same. That's a big appeal to developers, and a strong reason to use DirectX.
The PS3 uses not-OpenGL. It's a PS3-specific API, but it's based on OpenGL, so porting is a little trickier but still practical.
"Is that why so many people don't like it?"
People don't like change. Change means updating software and retraining users. For people to accept change, they must see some form of benefit to themselves to justify the difficulties. Windows 8 looks a lot like change for the sake of change - or, for the more cynical, change for the sake of furthering Microsoft's long term business ambitions in the mobile and service areas. Either way, it's a change in interface without apparent benefit.
We've been through this before with Office and the Ribbon - and to this day, even though almost everyone is now used to the ribbon, it's really hard to find something it makes easier than the old drop-down menu system did.