Touch pads have however always been the weakpoint of thinkpads.
I'll never know. The very first thing I do when I get a new Thinkpad is to disable the touchpad on it completely. The trackpoint is greatly superior to any touchpad, even an Apple touchpad.
Um, the main point of the post *is* that the US DoD is involved. I quote the GGGGP:
If the US DoD were spending enormous amounts of money developing those comic books with the express purpose of making war look as glamorous and consequence-free as possible, then yes, I would still let my kids read them, because I disagree with intellectual censorship in any form, at any age. But you can bet I'd talk with them about what they were reading, who wrote it, and why they might have written it.
Man On Pink Corner said the DoD's influence was the issue, essentially that the DoD is brainwashing kids through Call of Duty, and that he'd address that point with his kids.
But there is no evidence that the DoD had anything whatsoever to do with Call of Duty.
And what does this have to do with the article? As far as I can tell, the US DoD has nothing to do with the development of Call of Duty.
You seem to be impaired in your ability to follow simple conversations, so I'll help you out: the connection is that Call of Duty makes war look glamorous and consequence-free. That is the connection he was trying to make, and I'm sure you could have figured it out.
I used to think anonymity was part of the problem, but I haven't seen improvement when some forums have switched to real names, so I now no longer think that really helps. My local paper switched to Facebook as its commenting platform, with comments posted under real names, and the comment section is still as terrible as before.
I think real names do help, but only some. I think you can divide the population into three groups:
1. The people who will be civil, at least most of the time, regardless of anonymity.
2. The people who will be civil if they have to attach a name they care about (which may be a pseudonym).
3. The people who just don't care. Most, if not all, of these are asses in real life, too. We all know some.
I think the majority of people fall into group 1. Group 2 is a minority. Group 3 is a tiny minority... but on the Internet the relevant population of even a moderate-size site is enormous, so a tiny minority can do enormous damage.
According to your own argument, simulating the known laws of physics acting on a collection of particles analogous to a physical brain should be sufficient to produce general intelligence.
Well, it's possible that there are some unknown laws of physics that are relevant as well.
There are lots of theories why this happens, such as men being more aggressive when it comes to promotions and pay increases.
I listened to a talk by Google HR a while ago about this. They found that within Google women were being promoted at a much lower rate than men. Looking closer, they realized that among men and women who self-nominated for promotion (the Google promotion process is one of self-nomination rather than manager nomination), the promotion rates were statistically indistinguishable, but that women self-nominated at a lower rate than men. HR's solution was to direct managers to specifically seek out women they felt were ready for promotion and encourage them to self-nominate. They did not issue any instructions to the promotion committees to favor the promotion of women, and instead reaffirmed the commitment to purely merit-based promotion (or as close to it as could be achieved).
But as it turned out there was no need to tell the committees to favor women, because merely getting managers to encourage women to self-nominate immediately equalized the promotion rates. Of course, there are still far fewer women promoted because there are far fewer women.
I've heard some criticize Google HR's actions on the grounds that it shows favoritism toward women. I don't think that's true. I think it shows recognition of and adaptation to gender differences. Whether the differences are ultimately biological or cultural in origin, they clearly exist, and not adjusting for them is a bias in favor of men. If a system evolved in a context where one predominates, then the system will have evolved to best fit the culture and characteristics of that group. De-biasing such a system requires making intelligent adjustments to account for the differences with other groups. I think Google's solution to their promotion imbalance was spectacular -- minimal intervention, precisely on target and without lowering the standard at all.
Second, I hope he doesn't mean it, but it sounds like Cook want to be more diverse to look more politically correct. If I were a stock holder, I'd be upset. I wouldn't want him be "diverse" so he can look good; I'd want him to hire the best qualified people in a completely "blind" way.
Maybe, maybe not. I don't know anything about Cook's motives, but several studies have shown that teams with greater diversity are more productive and more creative. There is actual, bottom-line, revenue-generating value in diversity. To the extent that Cook is seeking that benefit, stockholders should applaud.
I have no idea why you would believe that "our genetic code is a type of program", I don't think anyone working in molecular biology has this interpretation. And even if you view the genetic code as a type of program, then it is a program that primarily deals with how the individual cells that make up our body operates and _not_ how the brain processes input.
Meh. Our genes code for sequences of proteins. From those proteins emerge the complex actions that form cells and cellular processes, including all of the cellular differentiation necessary to form a complex organism, and the arrangement of those differentiated cells, including the structure and arrangement of our brains. That structure determines how our brains process input, but all of the information needed to form that structure is in the genes (plus the environment in which the genes evolved to operate... but the information about what is provided by the environment is implicit in the genes, too).
You're right that molecular biologist aren't looking at genes in terms of how they affect higher-level cognitive functions, but that's only because we lack huge amounts of knowledge required to explain the connection. We don't really even understand protein folding, much less how genes code for differentiated cellular structures, then organ structures, then organ arrangement. From the other end, we don't understand how the nature and arrangement of neurons makes general intelligence possible. Once we understand all of the links in that chain, we will be discussing how our genes code for intelligence, because they absolutely do.
I think your sentiment is better phrased as, "if we manage to program a general intelligence, we will not understand how it works."
I think we will not be able to program general intelligence until we understand how it works. I believe we will eventually do it, but there is basically no example, ever, of humans being able to create a non-trivial technology without first having a good explanation of the relevant processes. It's common that we create technologies without understanding lower levels underpinning the processes, but we have to understand enough, at the relevant level.
I see no reason why intelligence should be any different.
According to the paper, it looks like biggest novelty is... DRM. The optimizer code will be encrypted and will run in its own memory block, hidden from the OS.
DRM is already fully supported in ARM processors. See TrustZone, which provides a separate "secure virtual CPU" with on-chip RAM not accessible to the "normal" CPU and the ability to get the MMU to mark pages as "secure", which makes them inaccessible to the normal CPU. Peripherals can also have secure and non-secure modes, and their secure modes are accessible only to TrustZone. A separate OS and set of apps run in TrustZone. One DRM application of this is to have secure-mode code that decrypts encrypted video streams and writes them directly to a region of display memory which is marked as secure, so the normal OS can never see the decrypted data. Another common application is secure storage for cryptographic keys, ensuring that even if an attacker can acquire root on your device, he can't extract your authentication keys (though he can probably use them as long as he controls the device, since the non-secure OS is necessarily the gatekeeper).
Nearly all mainstream Android devices have TrustZone, and nearly all have video DRM implemented in it. A large subset also use it for protection of cryptographic keys (Go to Settings -> Security and scroll down to "Credential Storage -> Storage type". If it says "hardware-backed" your device has TrustZone software for key storage.
So, no, nVidia isn't doing this for DRM. That problem is already solved, though it's stupid because all of the content is on the Internet anyway.
You didn't actually support your assertion. You still just continue to claim that forgiving without forgetting is impossible. I agree that it will require a societal change, but in a world where everyone's peccadilloes are public knowledge, I think that change will happen.
Whoever gave the NFL monopoly rights (resulting in price gouging tickets) over all football matches in the country is at fault
That would be the pro football fans.
Seriously, there are any number of other, smaller, leagues, and it would be easy to start more, but the fans keep flocking to the NFL. Why? Well, this is a case of a sort of natural monopoly. If there are multiple competing pro football leagues, then none of them can lay claim to having all of the best athletes, coaches, etc., so there is no real football championship. So the fans are always going to pick one league to be "the" league, and everything else will more or less disappear.
FCC should pull the rule to let supply and demand work it out.
It's not the FCC's rule, its the NFL's rule. The NFL is exercising its rights as a copyright holder to prevent games from airing locally unless the stadium is sold out. The NFL believes this encourages local fans to attend, boosting revenues, and argues that if fans can watch it on free TV rather than going to the stadium, many of them will, so the NFL will be forced to pull the games from free TV and move them exclusively to cable, probably pay-per-view, to make up the lost revenues.
I have no position on whether the NFL is right, but this is them exercising their rights as a business to sell their produce in the way they choose (well, they're using the government granted and enforced copyright in order to control their product, which muddies that argument quite a bit).
I have noticed that google is becoming less and less useful as a search tool as any enquirey leads to pages upon pages of virtual companies selling things.
That comes and goes. Google constantly fights it. Google makes changes which remove that crud, then the virtual companies figure out how to work around the changes. Rinse, repeat. The smaller search engines don't have as much trouble because there's not as much effort put into figuring out how to work around their protections.
Those of us who are old enough to remember the 80s, 70s, 60s even - we remember how each generation of nuclear power was supposed to be cleaner, cheaper, safer than the one before.
Yes, they were. And the reason they weren't is because those newer-generation reactors were never built. We had the first gen reactors built in the early 50s that were horrible, and the second generation (like Fukishima) in the 60s and early 70s which were much better than the first-gen, but still had some potentially nasty failure modes and required active management to be safe. And that's where we stopped. The third and fourth-gen reactors were never built. So, yes, we hear about all these new generations of designs which were supposed to be cleaner, cheaper and safer, and they would have been... if we built them.
AES256 with snake-oil certificates sounds good to me but I bet ROT13 looks pretty similar at first glance – and if you are trying to spy on everything then first glance is the only one you are going to get.
You're using hyperbole to make a point, I get that, but the pedant in me insists on responding to your literal statement: No, ROT-13 doesn't look a lot like AES256, even at a glance they look very different. ROT-13, or even more sophisticated fixed substitution ciphers, are trivial to recognize and break, in real time, with only the most cursory knowledge of the structure of the plaintext.
However, I can see the issue that it's only Google who gets to decide what's relevant.
Google gets to decide what's relevant in the rankings on their site, but not what's relevant for other search engines. If they do a bad job of picking good ranking criteria, it gives other engines an opportunity to provide better service. This is a somewhat coarse mechanism for demanding more relevant criteria, I suppose, but you'd better believe that Google takes it very seriously. They have a lot of other signals that help them decide whether users are well-served by the top-ranked hits, and if something like preferring HTTPS damages that, it'll almost certainly lose.
I'll give you my answers to your questions. These answers are based on little to no real data, mostly just reasoning about how Snowden's flight most likely went down, and a (reasonable, I think) assumption that he's a fairly ordinary guy, not a brilliant and nefarious planner. I also doubt that he extracted much, if any, data prior to his big grab-and-run, because it would have been too risky. So I don't think he had much time to do things between getting the dump and hightailing it.
How much additional information does Snowden have squirreled away in dead drops, that will be revealed if he is killed or imprisoned?
None. This would have required more planning, and probably more time, than is evident. Any place he might have tried to drop data in the cloud would be too risky because the NSA's tendrils are too widespread. Physical dead drops are more feasible, but they'd have to be in the US, and probably not too far from Snowden's normal stomping grounds. They'd also have to be fairly easy to locate (since he'd have to provide instructions, which he'd have to be able to remember accurately), but also well-hidden enough not to be found accidentally. That's not impossible, but it's harder than it appears, as anyone who's tried to place geocaches knows.
Of course, he could have done something like left the supposed additional, unrevealed data, or the location of the data, with an attorney or other trustworthy person. But again, the NSA has long arms, and has undoubtedly pulled out all the stops to trace his steps before he ran.
Nope, I think taking time to drop data between grabbing the dump, delivering it to the news agencies and running would have been too risky and require too much planning, so I doubt he did it.
How much information can Russian personnel gather about subtle policies of NSA, by indirect deduction of what Snowden says to press or to his handlers?
Very little that's useful. I doubt it's all that difficult for them to gather information about NSA policies, and the really valuable stuff was all turned over to the Guardian and has been published anyway.
What has, or can, the NSA do to protect its revealed policies and assets?
I doubt Snowden knows much about that. He was a SharePoint admin, remember, not an operational guy. The data he collected may contain quite a bit on that, but I strongly suspect he doesn't have that data. I certainly wouldn't have kept it on my when I took off... much safer to deliver it all to a news agency and travel without it.
What inspiration do minor details about NSA monitoring provide for Russian surveillance?
Nothing, unless the Russians are stupid, which they're not. Nothing that we've learned about the NSA's surveillance methods were at all surprising. The only surprising things were (a) the scope, (b) the fact that they weren't being careful about targeting US citizens and (c) that they were actively working to undermine security systems, in direct violation of one of their two missions. If you had asked the computer security community "Hypothetically, supposing the NSA decided to take the gloves off, ignore the law and ignore their responsibility to ensure the strength of US security technology in both public and private sectors, what would they do?", the answer you'd have gotten would have been a pretty accurate description of what they've been doing. The "what" and "how" are quite obvious.
Oh, and while I'm at it:
did the Russians use this as leverage over him to get to more information or influence him?
I don't think they could use it as leverage to get more information, because I don't think he has any more information. As for influence, well, I suppose, but what would they be influencing him to do? Just giving him a place to live accomplishes a significant goal for them, that of poking the US in the eye. I suppose they could try to convince him to
my algorithm is even better, and even more accurate. its simple: What is the worst possible outcome for the citizenry?
I don't know about the accuracy of your SCOTUS result-picking algorithm, but you and mwvdlee have a good algorithm to get modded up on slashdot: Just express deep cynicism about the system. Doesn't have to be true in the slightest.
FWIW, I watch SCOTUS pretty closely, and I'd say their bad decisions are fairly rare. I'm unhappy with the outcome in a larger minority of cases, but it's not very common that upon reading the opinions and dissents that I find myself ultimately in disagreement with their conclusions. And in most cases I think they not only make the right legal call, but the right call for the citizenry (though that isn't, and shouldn't be, their primary focus).
Of course, you and I may well disagree about some of the decisions.
Slashdot Mirror
Touch pads have however always been the weakpoint of thinkpads.
I'll never know. The very first thing I do when I get a new Thinkpad is to disable the touchpad on it completely. The trackpoint is greatly superior to any touchpad, even an Apple touchpad.
Do you really think you're fooling anyone?
So, you don't have a rational refutation. I knew that before you posted, actually.
Um, the main point of the post *is* that the US DoD is involved. I quote the GGGGP:
If the US DoD were spending enormous amounts of money developing those comic books with the express purpose of making war look as glamorous and consequence-free as possible, then yes, I would still let my kids read them, because I disagree with intellectual censorship in any form, at any age. But you can bet I'd talk with them about what they were reading, who wrote it, and why they might have written it.
Man On Pink Corner said the DoD's influence was the issue, essentially that the DoD is brainwashing kids through Call of Duty, and that he'd address that point with his kids.
But there is no evidence that the DoD had anything whatsoever to do with Call of Duty.
And what does this have to do with the article? As far as I can tell, the US DoD has nothing to do with the development of Call of Duty.
You seem to be impaired in your ability to follow simple conversations, so I'll help you out: the connection is that Call of Duty makes war look glamorous and consequence-free. That is the connection he was trying to make, and I'm sure you could have figured it out.
But what is the connection with the US DoD?
Pro Religion, Pro Microsoft, Anti GNU, Anti Linux, Pro DRM. Posts unless extremely well explained will get modded down to troll.
Even with a careful explanation most of those will be censored^Wmoderated as trolls.
Sometimes, but not always. It really depends on the post.
I used to think anonymity was part of the problem, but I haven't seen improvement when some forums have switched to real names, so I now no longer think that really helps. My local paper switched to Facebook as its commenting platform, with comments posted under real names, and the comment section is still as terrible as before.
I think real names do help, but only some. I think you can divide the population into three groups:
1. The people who will be civil, at least most of the time, regardless of anonymity.
2. The people who will be civil if they have to attach a name they care about (which may be a pseudonym).
3. The people who just don't care. Most, if not all, of these are asses in real life, too. We all know some.
I think the majority of people fall into group 1. Group 2 is a minority. Group 3 is a tiny minority... but on the Internet the relevant population of even a moderate-size site is enormous, so a tiny minority can do enormous damage.
I don't think it's likely, either. But it is possible.
According to your own argument, simulating the known laws of physics acting on a collection of particles analogous to a physical brain should be sufficient to produce general intelligence.
Well, it's possible that there are some unknown laws of physics that are relevant as well.
There are lots of theories why this happens, such as men being more aggressive when it comes to promotions and pay increases.
I listened to a talk by Google HR a while ago about this. They found that within Google women were being promoted at a much lower rate than men. Looking closer, they realized that among men and women who self-nominated for promotion (the Google promotion process is one of self-nomination rather than manager nomination), the promotion rates were statistically indistinguishable, but that women self-nominated at a lower rate than men. HR's solution was to direct managers to specifically seek out women they felt were ready for promotion and encourage them to self-nominate. They did not issue any instructions to the promotion committees to favor the promotion of women, and instead reaffirmed the commitment to purely merit-based promotion (or as close to it as could be achieved).
But as it turned out there was no need to tell the committees to favor women, because merely getting managers to encourage women to self-nominate immediately equalized the promotion rates. Of course, there are still far fewer women promoted because there are far fewer women.
I've heard some criticize Google HR's actions on the grounds that it shows favoritism toward women. I don't think that's true. I think it shows recognition of and adaptation to gender differences. Whether the differences are ultimately biological or cultural in origin, they clearly exist, and not adjusting for them is a bias in favor of men. If a system evolved in a context where one predominates, then the system will have evolved to best fit the culture and characteristics of that group. De-biasing such a system requires making intelligent adjustments to account for the differences with other groups. I think Google's solution to their promotion imbalance was spectacular -- minimal intervention, precisely on target and without lowering the standard at all.
This goes in the 50% of marketing. If you have a diversity policy, it's a diversity policy. If you communicate over your diversity policy, it's PR.
It also relates to the 50% of product, since studies have shown that team diversity improves performance and creativity.
Second, I hope he doesn't mean it, but it sounds like Cook want to be more diverse to look more politically correct. If I were a stock holder, I'd be upset. I wouldn't want him be "diverse" so he can look good; I'd want him to hire the best qualified people in a completely "blind" way.
Maybe, maybe not. I don't know anything about Cook's motives, but several studies have shown that teams with greater diversity are more productive and more creative. There is actual, bottom-line, revenue-generating value in diversity. To the extent that Cook is seeking that benefit, stockholders should applaud.
I have no idea why you would believe that "our genetic code is a type of program", I don't think anyone working in molecular biology has this interpretation. And even if you view the genetic code as a type of program, then it is a program that primarily deals with how the individual cells that make up our body operates and _not_ how the brain processes input.
Meh. Our genes code for sequences of proteins. From those proteins emerge the complex actions that form cells and cellular processes, including all of the cellular differentiation necessary to form a complex organism, and the arrangement of those differentiated cells, including the structure and arrangement of our brains. That structure determines how our brains process input, but all of the information needed to form that structure is in the genes (plus the environment in which the genes evolved to operate... but the information about what is provided by the environment is implicit in the genes, too).
You're right that molecular biologist aren't looking at genes in terms of how they affect higher-level cognitive functions, but that's only because we lack huge amounts of knowledge required to explain the connection. We don't really even understand protein folding, much less how genes code for differentiated cellular structures, then organ structures, then organ arrangement. From the other end, we don't understand how the nature and arrangement of neurons makes general intelligence possible. Once we understand all of the links in that chain, we will be discussing how our genes code for intelligence, because they absolutely do.
I think your sentiment is better phrased as, "if we manage to program a general intelligence, we will not understand how it works."
I think we will not be able to program general intelligence until we understand how it works. I believe we will eventually do it, but there is basically no example, ever, of humans being able to create a non-trivial technology without first having a good explanation of the relevant processes. It's common that we create technologies without understanding lower levels underpinning the processes, but we have to understand enough, at the relevant level.
I see no reason why intelligence should be any different.
According to the paper, it looks like biggest novelty is... DRM. The optimizer code will be encrypted and will run in its own memory block, hidden from the OS.
DRM is already fully supported in ARM processors. See TrustZone, which provides a separate "secure virtual CPU" with on-chip RAM not accessible to the "normal" CPU and the ability to get the MMU to mark pages as "secure", which makes them inaccessible to the normal CPU. Peripherals can also have secure and non-secure modes, and their secure modes are accessible only to TrustZone. A separate OS and set of apps run in TrustZone. One DRM application of this is to have secure-mode code that decrypts encrypted video streams and writes them directly to a region of display memory which is marked as secure, so the normal OS can never see the decrypted data. Another common application is secure storage for cryptographic keys, ensuring that even if an attacker can acquire root on your device, he can't extract your authentication keys (though he can probably use them as long as he controls the device, since the non-secure OS is necessarily the gatekeeper).
Nearly all mainstream Android devices have TrustZone, and nearly all have video DRM implemented in it. A large subset also use it for protection of cryptographic keys (Go to Settings -> Security and scroll down to "Credential Storage -> Storage type". If it says "hardware-backed" your device has TrustZone software for key storage.
So, no, nVidia isn't doing this for DRM. That problem is already solved, though it's stupid because all of the content is on the Internet anyway.
You didn't actually support your assertion. You still just continue to claim that forgiving without forgetting is impossible. I agree that it will require a societal change, but in a world where everyone's peccadilloes are public knowledge, I think that change will happen.
Whoever gave the NFL monopoly rights (resulting in price gouging tickets) over all football matches in the country is at fault
That would be the pro football fans.
Seriously, there are any number of other, smaller, leagues, and it would be easy to start more, but the fans keep flocking to the NFL. Why? Well, this is a case of a sort of natural monopoly. If there are multiple competing pro football leagues, then none of them can lay claim to having all of the best athletes, coaches, etc., so there is no real football championship. So the fans are always going to pick one league to be "the" league, and everything else will more or less disappear.
FCC should pull the rule to let supply and demand work it out.
It's not the FCC's rule, its the NFL's rule. The NFL is exercising its rights as a copyright holder to prevent games from airing locally unless the stadium is sold out. The NFL believes this encourages local fans to attend, boosting revenues, and argues that if fans can watch it on free TV rather than going to the stadium, many of them will, so the NFL will be forced to pull the games from free TV and move them exclusively to cable, probably pay-per-view, to make up the lost revenues.
I have no position on whether the NFL is right, but this is them exercising their rights as a business to sell their produce in the way they choose (well, they're using the government granted and enforced copyright in order to control their product, which muddies that argument quite a bit).
I have noticed that google is becoming less and less useful as a search tool as any enquirey leads to pages upon pages of virtual companies selling things.
That comes and goes. Google constantly fights it. Google makes changes which remove that crud, then the virtual companies figure out how to work around the changes. Rinse, repeat. The smaller search engines don't have as much trouble because there's not as much effort put into figuring out how to work around their protections.
Those of us who are old enough to remember the 80s, 70s, 60s even - we remember how each generation of nuclear power was supposed to be cleaner, cheaper, safer than the one before.
Yes, they were. And the reason they weren't is because those newer-generation reactors were never built. We had the first gen reactors built in the early 50s that were horrible, and the second generation (like Fukishima) in the 60s and early 70s which were much better than the first-gen, but still had some potentially nasty failure modes and required active management to be safe. And that's where we stopped. The third and fourth-gen reactors were never built. So, yes, we hear about all these new generations of designs which were supposed to be cleaner, cheaper and safer, and they would have been... if we built them.
When you're making the big bucks off Google by operating industrial scale link farms $50/year is a small price to pay for success.
Is it really? Industrial-scale link farming requires thousands of sites. At $50 each, that's going to start chewing into your profit margins.
AES256 with snake-oil certificates sounds good to me but I bet ROT13 looks pretty similar at first glance – and if you are trying to spy on everything then first glance is the only one you are going to get.
You're using hyperbole to make a point, I get that, but the pedant in me insists on responding to your literal statement: No, ROT-13 doesn't look a lot like AES256, even at a glance they look very different. ROT-13, or even more sophisticated fixed substitution ciphers, are trivial to recognize and break, in real time, with only the most cursory knowledge of the structure of the plaintext.
However, I can see the issue that it's only Google who gets to decide what's relevant.
Google gets to decide what's relevant in the rankings on their site, but not what's relevant for other search engines. If they do a bad job of picking good ranking criteria, it gives other engines an opportunity to provide better service. This is a somewhat coarse mechanism for demanding more relevant criteria, I suppose, but you'd better believe that Google takes it very seriously. They have a lot of other signals that help them decide whether users are well-served by the top-ranked hits, and if something like preferring HTTPS damages that, it'll almost certainly lose.
I'll give you my answers to your questions. These answers are based on little to no real data, mostly just reasoning about how Snowden's flight most likely went down, and a (reasonable, I think) assumption that he's a fairly ordinary guy, not a brilliant and nefarious planner. I also doubt that he extracted much, if any, data prior to his big grab-and-run, because it would have been too risky. So I don't think he had much time to do things between getting the dump and hightailing it.
How much additional information does Snowden have squirreled away in dead drops, that will be revealed if he is killed or imprisoned?
None. This would have required more planning, and probably more time, than is evident. Any place he might have tried to drop data in the cloud would be too risky because the NSA's tendrils are too widespread. Physical dead drops are more feasible, but they'd have to be in the US, and probably not too far from Snowden's normal stomping grounds. They'd also have to be fairly easy to locate (since he'd have to provide instructions, which he'd have to be able to remember accurately), but also well-hidden enough not to be found accidentally. That's not impossible, but it's harder than it appears, as anyone who's tried to place geocaches knows.
Of course, he could have done something like left the supposed additional, unrevealed data, or the location of the data, with an attorney or other trustworthy person. But again, the NSA has long arms, and has undoubtedly pulled out all the stops to trace his steps before he ran.
Nope, I think taking time to drop data between grabbing the dump, delivering it to the news agencies and running would have been too risky and require too much planning, so I doubt he did it.
How much information can Russian personnel gather about subtle policies of NSA, by indirect deduction of what Snowden says to press or to his handlers?
Very little that's useful. I doubt it's all that difficult for them to gather information about NSA policies, and the really valuable stuff was all turned over to the Guardian and has been published anyway.
What has, or can, the NSA do to protect its revealed policies and assets?
I doubt Snowden knows much about that. He was a SharePoint admin, remember, not an operational guy. The data he collected may contain quite a bit on that, but I strongly suspect he doesn't have that data. I certainly wouldn't have kept it on my when I took off... much safer to deliver it all to a news agency and travel without it.
What inspiration do minor details about NSA monitoring provide for Russian surveillance?
Nothing, unless the Russians are stupid, which they're not. Nothing that we've learned about the NSA's surveillance methods were at all surprising. The only surprising things were (a) the scope, (b) the fact that they weren't being careful about targeting US citizens and (c) that they were actively working to undermine security systems, in direct violation of one of their two missions. If you had asked the computer security community "Hypothetically, supposing the NSA decided to take the gloves off, ignore the law and ignore their responsibility to ensure the strength of US security technology in both public and private sectors, what would they do?", the answer you'd have gotten would have been a pretty accurate description of what they've been doing. The "what" and "how" are quite obvious.
Oh, and while I'm at it:
did the Russians use this as leverage over him to get to more information or influence him?
I don't think they could use it as leverage to get more information, because I don't think he has any more information. As for influence, well, I suppose, but what would they be influencing him to do? Just giving him a place to live accomplishes a significant goal for them, that of poking the US in the eye. I suppose they could try to convince him to
my algorithm is even better, and even more accurate. its simple: What is the worst possible outcome for the citizenry?
I don't know about the accuracy of your SCOTUS result-picking algorithm, but you and mwvdlee have a good algorithm to get modded up on slashdot: Just express deep cynicism about the system. Doesn't have to be true in the slightest.
FWIW, I watch SCOTUS pretty closely, and I'd say their bad decisions are fairly rare. I'm unhappy with the outcome in a larger minority of cases, but it's not very common that upon reading the opinions and dissents that I find myself ultimately in disagreement with their conclusions. And in most cases I think they not only make the right legal call, but the right call for the citizenry (though that isn't, and shouldn't be, their primary focus).
Of course, you and I may well disagree about some of the decisions.