Further, given the obviously meticulous planning, don't you think it likely he might also have considered what to wear during the jump and maximise the chances of a safe landing? He could quite easily have brought more appropriate clothing than what the crew and passengers saw him wearing and changed once he was alone in the cabin prior to the actual jump, taking everything else like his coat along for the ride to remove evidence - he even took back the note he passed the stewardess afterall. Still, given that none of the bank notes have ever been identified apart from those three bundles and there has been no plausible death bed confessions or similar, either he managed to pass them into circulation very carefully (a few at a time in overseas bureau de change, perhaps?) which seems unlikely, or he did indeed die in the attempt.
Yes, there was heavy rain, and especially so in the south east where some polling stations were closed due to flooding, yet the turnout is still fairly consistent across the entire country, from the worst rain-hit areas to the least, so while there would definitely have been voters who were rained off, most seem to have made an effort. Personally, I put it more down to the large number of people who still hadn't made up their minds on the day of the election - around 10-15% according to polls - deciding not to vote and go with the flow; again a failure of the campaigners to provide people with the information they wanted because they were too tied up in a slanging match.
"A lot", or "a vocal minority" cherry picked by pro-Remain media? It's not zero, certainly, but there's a world of difference and I don't think there's any easy way to demonstrably quantify it which would almost certainly have to be done and show that a significant proportion of the public were now in favour of Remain before any party is even going to think about talking seriously about a strategy to ignore the referendum in public. Even if that happens (or some other scenario being mooted by Remain supporters, like having a general election where one major party successfully runs as the "Remain" party) and Article 50 is not invoked, it still leaves months of the same kind of market and industry uncertainty that we had in the run up to the referendum, and that's not helping anyone.
Even though I voted Remain and think we've made the lesser of two choices (not necessarily a bad one, just not the best one), right now I think the thing everyone needs most is a sense of direction and a reasonably solid timescale for Cameron's replacement, invoking Article 50, and when the next General Election is to be held if it's to be under the "Two Year" rule. Keep Calm, and GET ON WITH IT! Alternatively, if an attempt to avoid invoking Article 50 is to be attempted - or people given a second chance because it can be shown there are a significant number of Leave voters having second thoughts - then the process by which that is to occur and on what timescale. Unfortunately, having just watched one of Boris Johnson's closest aides waffling his way though an interview and studiously avoiding all of the above, it's seems quite likely that kind of information isn't coming any time soon we'd best get used to uncertainty.
The £13.7 billion figure comes from the disproven £350m/day figure (£350m * 365 = £12.8b) that Nigel Farage has described as "a mistake" because it's from *before* the rebate and subsidies; once you take into account the rebate and subsidies it's actually about half that. You are right about the EU choosing who gets the difference, although again that's not the whole picture as most of the money is allocated to projects that would have needed to come out of the public purse anyway - in practice, it's a money-go-round that attempts to make people feel good about the EU because of all the "EU funded" signs when their taxes would have paid for it anyway. Assuming no changes to the level of taxation, there's undeniably going to be more money per annum in the UK public purse once we leave the EU, but after things like additional import/export duties and other potential costs of leaving the EU are factored in, it's anyone's guess as to how much is going to be available to be spent on things like the NHS - and it's going to stay that way at least until all the post Article 50 treaties are hammered out.
Willful ignorance and frustration. There have far too many interviews with people who admitted to not paying any attention to the media coverage because they either didn't care what the talking heads thought or because they wanted to be told the facts and make an informed choice rather than listen to politicians launching personal attacks on each other. Both campaigns actually did present some cherry picked "facts" to support their case, but the rebuttals were either lost in the noise or came too late.
I do agree that the reason the result went the way it did is apathy though. Apathy on behalf of the politicians who have ignored the growing disconnect between themselves and the electorate rather than trying to address it, and apathy on behalf of all the voters who couldn't be bother to look up a few things for themselves, or even vote. Given the impact and importance of the vote I'm still amazed that the turnout was a "mere" 72% which, while well above a typical general election turnout, pales compared to the 84% turnout of the Scottish independence referendum.
There is no such clause in the legislation that governed the referendum; he's asking the government to "implement a rule" by changing the rules after the fact, not implement a clause that was present in the legislation.
Definitely. I'm not ecstatic about the result as I think we'd have been better off as a nation in the EU (despite its numerous flaws) than going it alone, and especially so long-term, but I do think we can make a success of going it alone as well so the approach now should be to pull together and try to make the best of what the majority wanted; "Keep Calm, and Carry On!" Clearly there ought to be a lot of reform in both the way the EU and the UK approach things and politicians work with the public after this, which might raise the prospect that the EU's reforms might make membership at least a little more palatable to those who voted to Leave, which makes the "Get on with it!" approach from Juncker and others interesting. That seems to make it far more likely the EU will take a much harder line with the UK to send a message to other countries considering an exit, resulting in a much worse situation for the UK than people are hoping for, rather than an appeasement approach; "take your time, we'll work together and try to fix the problems with the EU, and if you want to change your mind (possibly via a second referendum in a few years), that's fine...". That sends entirely the wrong message to me; surely if they were truly interested in a fair and equal Europe they'd be taking the latter approach to open as many doors as possible for the UK to stay in the union rather than trying to scare other vacillating nations off the idea of a referendum? With an attitude like that, maybe we are better off going it alone.
For the average individual man on the street though, I really don't think either result would make much difference, especially in the short- to mid-term; it'll mostly be the same 3000 or so names from the major parties on the ballot papers at the next General election, it'll mostly be the same people in control and raking in the money, and it'll still be unelected civil servants writing our legislation and sending it to the Commons and Lords to be approved/rejected. We'll also have the same immigration at our borders that lets a number of illegal immigrants slip though, only we won't have cheap labour from the EU available to do the jobs UK citizens don't seem prepared to do - yes, the pay is at the bottom end of the scale, but if employers pay staff more prices are going to rise - guess which one is the better net option? We'll also have many of the workers benefits enforced on reluctant UK governments and businesses like the working time directive, unemployment/retirement benefits, minimum wages, mobile roaming charges, and so on all open to being rolled back or held below inflation levels - and there's already indications that some of this is being considered. It's going to be interesting to see how it all plays out, that's for sure.
Agreed on the EU ignoring inconvenient legislation, and they're obviously not alone in that, but that's not the issue here. There nothing stopping non-EU companies (which includes ourselves) working on the infrastructure projects in question if they meet the tender requirements; the requirement we can no longer meet from a post-exit UK is having a physical presence within an EU country at which the staff working on the projects are based, and since the work is engineering on national infrastructure projects that's not an unreasonable requirement. Basically, the UK jobs go and possibly new jobs get created in one of our other EU offices instead with some UK staff getting to relocate to Europe, if that's the way they want to go - we're in the "consultation" phase at present so that kind of stuff is up in the air.
True, until Article 50 is invoked and the resultant negotiation process or two year period and any extensions concluded the UK remains within the EU and bound by its rules, so the exit could theoretically still be aborted. More than half of those who voted wanted out though, and if you respect the basic principles of democracy you have to accept the majority opinion, whether you agree with it or not, and work with that as best you can - which means you can almost certainly expect pro-EU MPs to try and negotiate terms that retain as much of the status quo as they can. Going too far down that road however, let alone ignoring the will of the majority completely, is precisely the kind of tactic that led many people to vote for Leave in the first place - a perception of the "elite" ignoring the people and doing what was best for themselves. That seems to have backfired massively for Remain with many voters seeing the campaign as "we know what's best for you" and rebelling, so any attempt to go too far down that road could well have a similar effect and cause even more turmoil for the main parties and support for parties perceived to be taking an anti-establishment stance.
Maybe, if it became absolutely clear to the public at large that the number of people having second thoughts about their Leave vote was a significant percentage of the Leave voters I could see a UK government going all the way and completely ignoring the referendum, but right now I don't see any evidence at all of that level of opinion swing, nor do I think there is going to be. Far too many of the Leave voters being interviewed today seemed perfectly content with the result despite the turmoil in the markets and other fallout so far to make that prospect likely, so unless the fallout gets considerably worse - at which point we're probably screwed no matter what happens with the EU - the best and most likely outcome seems to Leave and try and make the best of it.
Definitely not entirely anecdotal. There was a fair bit of buyer's remorse around our (mostly pro-remain) offices in Manchester today, with only a handful prepared to stand by their "Leave" vote, even before management confirmed that one entire engineering department - about 600 employees, or 10% of our UK workforce - was going to be wound up because EU regulations require that the work be done by staff located within an EU member state, and the bulk of their work was coming from the EU. As you can imagine, the atmosphere in the office went downhill pretty sharpish after that...
As for the do-over, despite the campaign on the UK Government's equivalent to change.org getting a huge number of votes asking for just this, the answer is "none". The guy at work (a Leave voter with buyer's remorse, as it happens) who brought this to our attention seemed to think it was asking the government to enact some provision of the official rules of the referedum concerning turnout levels and margins of victory. Turns out that was about on a par with the level of research many of the Leave voters with buyer's remorse presumably did; "none at all". A quick search with Google, a download of the actual legislation for the referendum from Parliament's website, a bit of reading (it's not a huge document) and it's pretty easy to see that this is a one-shot deal, in or out, and there is no such turnout/margin of victory clause. In fact the word "turnout" appears exactly twice, and one of those is to define the meaning of the word "turnout".
It's done. We're out, and we're now going to have to live with the consequences of that vote. From the state of the global markets and so on it also looks like quite a few people who are not UK citizens and didn't get a say in the matter are, at least to some extent, coming along for the ride. Sorry about that.
The second question, "What happens if we leave the EU?", shooting up the ratings is actually quite understandable. Around midnight UK time was when it first started to seem that the Leave campaign might actually win, something many doubted would actually happen, when the first results were announced showing much narrower margins for Remain victories (Newcastle) against much larger margins for Leave victories (Sunderland) than expected. You've going to have a lot of people who favoured Remain and were confident that would be the case starting to get nervous and wonder what might happen if Leave won, who didn't really have any reason to find out previously; it had no bearing on their vote or what most polls and just about every opinion outside the actual Leave campaign were suggesting would be the result.
All good and valid points, but taking "obsolete" to automatically mean "of no further use" is an awfully narrow definition and certainly not the one I was intending which, to be clear, was that it hasn't been developed by the original vendor for more than a decade, is no longer supported at all, and has been replaced by a more up to date version by the vendor. In the same vein, I think that most people would accept that steam trains are obsolete for passenger transport in the first world, yet there are dozens of such trains still running nostalgia trips on a regular basis in the UK alone, and far more across Europe and the US - again obsolete does not imply that it can't serve a purpose. Yes, it might well still get the job done for them, but you also have to weigh up the risks; specifically, the risk of something going wrong with an upgrade - which can be mitigated that with a well thought out roll-back procedure or interim parallel operation anyway - versus the risk of someone compromising a system that almost certainly isn't as compliant with current security practices, no matter how well they might have wrapped it up in VMs, firewalls or other more up to date tech.
Yes, in an ideal world they'd have taken the OSS route (and if compelled to switch might even do so), but think of the timescale and specialist nature of the software. When this system was deployed (mid-1990s), Linux was still an experimental OS that a few organizations who were capable of supporting it in-house were only just starting to deploy in production systems for things like FTP, SMTP & WWW services that were mostly ports from commercial *NIX - specialist software was basic at best and vendors using it for commercial systems of any kind very thin on the ground. The realistic choices for a system like this would have basically boiled down to something put together by a specialist vendor and based on either MS DOS using something like dBase/FoxPro at the low-end, and equally bespoke systems running on commercial *NIX based on DB2/Informix/Oracle at the high-end; the chances of an OSS solution are extremely slim, to say the least, and it's doubtful that any vendor would hand over source code without a large financial consideration, if they'd entertain the notion at all.
I doubt it. Quite likely the licensing agreement between Working Systems and SW Health is part of a bespoke contract rather than the kind of license that comes with software for the average Joe's PC - especially given that it's strongly implied that there was an on-going license fee until March 2015 or some other kind of cut-off at that point. Assuming that whoever wrote the original contract knew their stuff and put in specific clauses to cover the inevitable software EoL, I suspect this is going to be resolved pretty smoothly with either SW Health being able to continue using the systems in perpetuity albeit without any support from Working Systems, or SW Health being found in breach of license and compelled to update their systems - and maybe pay additional penalties as well.
Frankly, if I were in SW Australia, I'd be hoping for the latter - and fast - although I suspect it's probably already too late. If SW Health is using software this obsolete in one part of their operation, then there is a good chance that they'll be doing so elsewhere too and, if so, then it's probably just a matter of time before some one figures out a way in and dumps a whole bunch of people's health records on the Internet. Given the typical pace of legal proceedings though, I'm guessing we'll be reading about a breach of SW Health's systems long before we find out how this license spat is to be resolved.
It's not like this is really a new thing either. I remember a whole bunch of people getting their pants in a bunch because they took the letters "NYC" in the Wingdings font to be a deliberate antisemitic statement some years back just because it renders as a sequence of Skull & Crossbones, Star of David, and Thumbs Up. The Wingdings font also includes a symbol for a bomb. This is really just another symptom of political correctness gone too far - the logical conclusion of zero tolerance policies that can get kids kicked out school just for making a gun shape with their hand, and the irony is particularly think given that of all the depictions of the pistol emoji one of the most realistic is Apple's.
The only real failing of ICANN has been the failure to reclaim IPv4 space from the Class A holders. All those/8 spaces should be divvied up.
This discussion has been done to death and every time it's been shown to be a waste of time and effort. The "burn rate" for IPv4 addresses outstrips the number of IPv4 addresses that could even potentially have been reclaimed in this manner was (and still is) such that it would, at most, have bought just months before complete exhaustion - and that still didn't really take into account the explosive demand for connectivity in China, India and other countries, or for the growing demand for mobile data (not just phones) and IoT type devices. ICANN made absolutely the right decision not to bother attempting this; it would have been expensive (you just *know* lawyers would have got involved), time consuming, mostly futile, and wouldn't have provided any real benefit anyway.
Given that you mention "some people making a huge pile of money" in connection with ICANN's failings, I'm rather surprised you didn't being up ICANN's decision to open up the gTLD system without any form of sane oversight/control of what new registrars were able to do to at least try and prevent the overwhelming majority of them becoming the cesspits they are. That essentially pointless cash grab is definitely one of ICANN's failings, and one that's likely to get a whole lot worse now that the inherent bias of an English language using oversight committee has been removed; I'm fulling expecting to see non-roman script equivalents of all those malware peddling gTLDs - run by equally incompetent and shady registrars - coming on line within a matter of months.
No, that's not it. They are clearly pining for the fjords. It's not been quite the same since Magrathea shut up shop. That Slartibartfast fellow just to do some amazing work on the crinkly bits...
No, it's not four or five additional entries - that's just how many examples are given in the summary. The "extra characters" option blows that away since it could be *any* extra character, so unless you start getting clever with keyboard layouts and adjacent keys that could potentially mean almost any character on the keyboard, shifted, unshifted and so on. Technically though you could certainly have the server store all the acceptable hashes, which gets around the breakage of tools like Fail2Ban as you'd have to hit a valid match (including typo variants) within a much smaller number of retries, but that does nothing to fix the issue of a kiddie doing brute force attacks of common passwords as they could send "P@ssword" and still have all the auto-correct variations (whether it's just three/four, or thousands) tried in a single hit.
With salted and hashed passwords it would need to be the client generating the auto-corrected versions - the server should never, ever, have any idea what the actual password was and just retain a copy of the hash to mitigate against brute forcing, but otherwise yes, the lost security would be offset by adding a few more characters. What I'm currently trying to figure out is what additional impact (if any) combining this with a scenario involving dictionary attack and rainbow tables might have on the net security of the system. My initial gut feeling was that you would need to add more than 1,000 extra combinations to the password through additional characters to offset the loss of allowing 1,000 variants - and possibly a lot more - but I'm coming up short on actually quantifying it; ultimately you *still* need an exact match, so all the proposed system is doing is a small scale version of a dictionary attack, so maybe there's no change there at all.
One way it absolutely weakens your overall security though is account lockouts through retries; you are going to need to allow a lot more retries for this to work, which is going to allow kiddies trying lists of popular passwords a *lot* more attempts before they trigger an account lockout. Tools like Fail2Ban are incredibly effective when you only allow three attempts before blacklisting the IP (bonus points if you do so across your entire estate), but if you need to set that to a few thousand to allow for auto-corrected variations then what's the point?
I think they are going a bit further than that; based on the examples in the summary, then for the actual password of "p@ssword" the system would also accept "P@SSWORD", "P@ssword", "p@sswor" and "p@ssword1". That's all well and good if you have access to the original password and can apply the auto-correct algorithm to see if what was entered is good enough, but how is that supposed to work if you are taking password security seriously and using salted and hashed passwords? The article isn't totally clear on this, but it seems that in the event of an authentication failure they'll just retry with each auto-corrected variation in sequence until they either get a match or run out of permitted options. Unless both ends of the transaction are making allowances for this (allowing more than three retries for instance), that might actually cause more problems than it solves through locked out accounts, etc. and might also open up new means of attacking an account.
As always, it sounds like the devil is lurking in the details...
It's quite a common issue on very large projects where there might be a network file system based file repository instead of a document management system. You'll quite often see insanely deep directory structures to keep things organized and try and let people find exactly what they are looking for (which seldom work, because there's *always* a bunch of files that refuse to be pidgeon holed like that). Generally not a problem on network servers, but when you try and copy a chunk of the directory tree over for offline access, almost certainly prepending everything with something along the lines of "C:\Users\$UserName\My Documents\Projects\$ProjectName\$FolderName\" in the process, you can get into some interesting issues depending on how well the file copy routine handles the error.
If I'm using Bitcoin merely as a payment mechanism, e.g. I hold my cash in a "proper" currency and only convert it to Bitcoin in order to make the transaction for the car, then sure, I don't need to worry too much about wild fluctuations in its value - the spot price is good enough. It's worth pointing out that unless you adjusted the price of the hypothetical car in the interim it's now going to be 21% more expensive than it was when you listed it compared to that "proper" currency, so unlikely to be attacting many potential buyers in the first place.
OP, however, was talking about actual currencies - e.g. buying into the whole "Bitcoin as a currency alternative" idea and actually keeping some liquid assets in Bitcoin. In that case, I'd be very alarmed about a 21% fluctuation - in either direction - in such a short timescale, because that kind of volatility in an actual currency never a good sign and usually indicates some severe financial problems, or even an impending collapse. Quite how that kind of traditional currency market problem translates across to Bitcoin is still a matter of some conjecture, but I think it's *far* too soon to be making predictions about how this is going to turn out; yes, it could be the start of a price rally as TFA suggests, in which case now would be a good time to buy some Bitcoin, if it's just people using it as a hedge in case their own currency devalues (see post about China, above) then they'll be cashing out again fairly soon and the price of Bitcoin will likely drop again.
"Terrifying" is right. What the approach used by Facebook's is clearly doing is creating an echo chamber so people mostly only get to see views that match their own, with all that entails for producing a skewed outlook on the world that is mostly based on the misperception that the overwhelming majority takes a similar view. Interestingly, it's not just happening on the conventional social media sites; there's a similar thing going on over on the BBC news site at the moment - in particular around the UK's EU referendum, but also around several other topics in various sections of the site. Check out any of the stories relating to the referendum where the BBC has enabled comments, sort by rating, and it's a classic echo chamber; all (and I do mean ALL) of the highest rated comments are pro-exit, critical of perceived bias in the BBC's coverage, and throwing insults at those with a pro-remain view - quite often demonstrating ignorance of facts and an amazing degree of bigotry and bias in the process.
The self-deception is incredibly strong - easily in line with that 99.5% figure cited in your quote; there was one post that made me laugh (the Lulz at the more idiotic comments are the only reason I read them) about how all the polls (which mostly have it as a close-run thing with remain usually slightly ahead) must be wrong "because no one ever posts a pro-remain comment on the BBC". Someone being unaware they are viewing biased data and having their opinions skewed on a social media site is one thing; it's mostly gossip and celebrity "news" that has little bearing on the big picture anyway. That a similar thing is also happening on mainstream news sites relating to topics that will quite possible have a lasting influence on millions of people for generations is deeply concerning, as is the growning lack of any openness to consideration of alternative viewpoints, let alone some critical thinking about the topic, amongst the masses.
I doubt there are too many hosts (zero, in fact) in the.KP domain that don't fall under the remit of the DPRK regime. Anyway, the site (starcon.net.kp) resolves to the IP address 175.45.176.19, which whois confirms is within the limited amount of IP space directly allocated to the DPRK. Assuming the information is accurate, then the owners of the IP space are Star Joint Venture Co. Ltd. of Ryugyong-dong, in the Potong-gang District of Pyongyang. That doesn't mean that someone hasn't hacked one of the web servers that they host and set up a webserver on it though, which seems quite probable given that the size is not completely covered in DPRK propaganda and many of the links go to "Lorum Ipsum" texts...
I think OP meant the timeframe for the consumption of the fossil fuels, not the timeframe for the effects (that are stated in the article and summary). There's a big difference between the (purely theoretical) possibility of burning them all *NOW* and looking at what a model says the effects will be in 2100/2300, and just continuing to burn them at the currently predicted rates of consumption and looking the output. FTW, I interpreted the article as claiming the latter - "if we don't reduce our rate of consumption, the effects may be far worse than previously predicted by 2100/2300".
Even if they were still being lax about their ethics and legal compliance in the wake of Snowden, you can be sure that they would be very, very, careful to appear to that everything was very much above board around Geoffrey Stone. It can't have escaped the NSA's notice that he was interested in civil liberties and part of the President's Review Group when they started working with him, and that would have almost certainly have led to special handling in any event. Given that they were still reeling from the fallout from Snowden at that point, it's pretty much a given that Stone would have been kept as far away from anything they thought might be too damaging to their reputation as they possibly could, historical or otherwise, while trying to give the impression they were not keeping anything back. So, the question is, is Stone so naive that he believes that the post-Snowden NSA is a model of ethical and legal compliance because they successfully managed to hide their dirty laundry and he didn't see it, or is Stone so confident - or even certain - that the NSA held nothing back that he is sure of it?
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Further, given the obviously meticulous planning, don't you think it likely he might also have considered what to wear during the jump and maximise the chances of a safe landing? He could quite easily have brought more appropriate clothing than what the crew and passengers saw him wearing and changed once he was alone in the cabin prior to the actual jump, taking everything else like his coat along for the ride to remove evidence - he even took back the note he passed the stewardess afterall. Still, given that none of the bank notes have ever been identified apart from those three bundles and there has been no plausible death bed confessions or similar, either he managed to pass them into circulation very carefully (a few at a time in overseas bureau de change, perhaps?) which seems unlikely, or he did indeed die in the attempt.
Yes, there was heavy rain, and especially so in the south east where some polling stations were closed due to flooding, yet the turnout is still fairly consistent across the entire country, from the worst rain-hit areas to the least, so while there would definitely have been voters who were rained off, most seem to have made an effort. Personally, I put it more down to the large number of people who still hadn't made up their minds on the day of the election - around 10-15% according to polls - deciding not to vote and go with the flow; again a failure of the campaigners to provide people with the information they wanted because they were too tied up in a slanging match.
"A lot", or "a vocal minority" cherry picked by pro-Remain media? It's not zero, certainly, but there's a world of difference and I don't think there's any easy way to demonstrably quantify it which would almost certainly have to be done and show that a significant proportion of the public were now in favour of Remain before any party is even going to think about talking seriously about a strategy to ignore the referendum in public. Even if that happens (or some other scenario being mooted by Remain supporters, like having a general election where one major party successfully runs as the "Remain" party) and Article 50 is not invoked, it still leaves months of the same kind of market and industry uncertainty that we had in the run up to the referendum, and that's not helping anyone.
Even though I voted Remain and think we've made the lesser of two choices (not necessarily a bad one, just not the best one), right now I think the thing everyone needs most is a sense of direction and a reasonably solid timescale for Cameron's replacement, invoking Article 50, and when the next General Election is to be held if it's to be under the "Two Year" rule. Keep Calm, and GET ON WITH IT! Alternatively, if an attempt to avoid invoking Article 50 is to be attempted - or people given a second chance because it can be shown there are a significant number of Leave voters having second thoughts - then the process by which that is to occur and on what timescale. Unfortunately, having just watched one of Boris Johnson's closest aides waffling his way though an interview and studiously avoiding all of the above, it's seems quite likely that kind of information isn't coming any time soon we'd best get used to uncertainty.
The £13.7 billion figure comes from the disproven £350m/day figure (£350m * 365 = £12.8b) that Nigel Farage has described as "a mistake" because it's from *before* the rebate and subsidies; once you take into account the rebate and subsidies it's actually about half that. You are right about the EU choosing who gets the difference, although again that's not the whole picture as most of the money is allocated to projects that would have needed to come out of the public purse anyway - in practice, it's a money-go-round that attempts to make people feel good about the EU because of all the "EU funded" signs when their taxes would have paid for it anyway. Assuming no changes to the level of taxation, there's undeniably going to be more money per annum in the UK public purse once we leave the EU, but after things like additional import/export duties and other potential costs of leaving the EU are factored in, it's anyone's guess as to how much is going to be available to be spent on things like the NHS - and it's going to stay that way at least until all the post Article 50 treaties are hammered out.
Willful ignorance and frustration. There have far too many interviews with people who admitted to not paying any attention to the media coverage because they either didn't care what the talking heads thought or because they wanted to be told the facts and make an informed choice rather than listen to politicians launching personal attacks on each other. Both campaigns actually did present some cherry picked "facts" to support their case, but the rebuttals were either lost in the noise or came too late.
I do agree that the reason the result went the way it did is apathy though. Apathy on behalf of the politicians who have ignored the growing disconnect between themselves and the electorate rather than trying to address it, and apathy on behalf of all the voters who couldn't be bother to look up a few things for themselves, or even vote. Given the impact and importance of the vote I'm still amazed that the turnout was a "mere" 72% which, while well above a typical general election turnout, pales compared to the 84% turnout of the Scottish independence referendum.
There is no such clause in the legislation that governed the referendum; he's asking the government to "implement a rule" by changing the rules after the fact, not implement a clause that was present in the legislation.
Definitely. I'm not ecstatic about the result as I think we'd have been better off as a nation in the EU (despite its numerous flaws) than going it alone, and especially so long-term, but I do think we can make a success of going it alone as well so the approach now should be to pull together and try to make the best of what the majority wanted; "Keep Calm, and Carry On!" Clearly there ought to be a lot of reform in both the way the EU and the UK approach things and politicians work with the public after this, which might raise the prospect that the EU's reforms might make membership at least a little more palatable to those who voted to Leave, which makes the "Get on with it!" approach from Juncker and others interesting. That seems to make it far more likely the EU will take a much harder line with the UK to send a message to other countries considering an exit, resulting in a much worse situation for the UK than people are hoping for, rather than an appeasement approach; "take your time, we'll work together and try to fix the problems with the EU, and if you want to change your mind (possibly via a second referendum in a few years), that's fine...". That sends entirely the wrong message to me; surely if they were truly interested in a fair and equal Europe they'd be taking the latter approach to open as many doors as possible for the UK to stay in the union rather than trying to scare other vacillating nations off the idea of a referendum? With an attitude like that, maybe we are better off going it alone.
For the average individual man on the street though, I really don't think either result would make much difference, especially in the short- to mid-term; it'll mostly be the same 3000 or so names from the major parties on the ballot papers at the next General election, it'll mostly be the same people in control and raking in the money, and it'll still be unelected civil servants writing our legislation and sending it to the Commons and Lords to be approved/rejected. We'll also have the same immigration at our borders that lets a number of illegal immigrants slip though, only we won't have cheap labour from the EU available to do the jobs UK citizens don't seem prepared to do - yes, the pay is at the bottom end of the scale, but if employers pay staff more prices are going to rise - guess which one is the better net option? We'll also have many of the workers benefits enforced on reluctant UK governments and businesses like the working time directive, unemployment/retirement benefits, minimum wages, mobile roaming charges, and so on all open to being rolled back or held below inflation levels - and there's already indications that some of this is being considered. It's going to be interesting to see how it all plays out, that's for sure.
Agreed on the EU ignoring inconvenient legislation, and they're obviously not alone in that, but that's not the issue here. There nothing stopping non-EU companies (which includes ourselves) working on the infrastructure projects in question if they meet the tender requirements; the requirement we can no longer meet from a post-exit UK is having a physical presence within an EU country at which the staff working on the projects are based, and since the work is engineering on national infrastructure projects that's not an unreasonable requirement. Basically, the UK jobs go and possibly new jobs get created in one of our other EU offices instead with some UK staff getting to relocate to Europe, if that's the way they want to go - we're in the "consultation" phase at present so that kind of stuff is up in the air.
True, until Article 50 is invoked and the resultant negotiation process or two year period and any extensions concluded the UK remains within the EU and bound by its rules, so the exit could theoretically still be aborted. More than half of those who voted wanted out though, and if you respect the basic principles of democracy you have to accept the majority opinion, whether you agree with it or not, and work with that as best you can - which means you can almost certainly expect pro-EU MPs to try and negotiate terms that retain as much of the status quo as they can. Going too far down that road however, let alone ignoring the will of the majority completely, is precisely the kind of tactic that led many people to vote for Leave in the first place - a perception of the "elite" ignoring the people and doing what was best for themselves. That seems to have backfired massively for Remain with many voters seeing the campaign as "we know what's best for you" and rebelling, so any attempt to go too far down that road could well have a similar effect and cause even more turmoil for the main parties and support for parties perceived to be taking an anti-establishment stance.
Maybe, if it became absolutely clear to the public at large that the number of people having second thoughts about their Leave vote was a significant percentage of the Leave voters I could see a UK government going all the way and completely ignoring the referendum, but right now I don't see any evidence at all of that level of opinion swing, nor do I think there is going to be. Far too many of the Leave voters being interviewed today seemed perfectly content with the result despite the turmoil in the markets and other fallout so far to make that prospect likely, so unless the fallout gets considerably worse - at which point we're probably screwed no matter what happens with the EU - the best and most likely outcome seems to Leave and try and make the best of it.
Definitely not entirely anecdotal. There was a fair bit of buyer's remorse around our (mostly pro-remain) offices in Manchester today, with only a handful prepared to stand by their "Leave" vote, even before management confirmed that one entire engineering department - about 600 employees, or 10% of our UK workforce - was going to be wound up because EU regulations require that the work be done by staff located within an EU member state, and the bulk of their work was coming from the EU. As you can imagine, the atmosphere in the office went downhill pretty sharpish after that...
As for the do-over, despite the campaign on the UK Government's equivalent to change.org getting a huge number of votes asking for just this, the answer is "none". The guy at work (a Leave voter with buyer's remorse, as it happens) who brought this to our attention seemed to think it was asking the government to enact some provision of the official rules of the referedum concerning turnout levels and margins of victory. Turns out that was about on a par with the level of research many of the Leave voters with buyer's remorse presumably did; "none at all". A quick search with Google, a download of the actual legislation for the referendum from Parliament's website, a bit of reading (it's not a huge document) and it's pretty easy to see that this is a one-shot deal, in or out, and there is no such turnout/margin of victory clause. In fact the word "turnout" appears exactly twice, and one of those is to define the meaning of the word "turnout".
It's done. We're out, and we're now going to have to live with the consequences of that vote. From the state of the global markets and so on it also looks like quite a few people who are not UK citizens and didn't get a say in the matter are, at least to some extent, coming along for the ride. Sorry about that.
The second question, "What happens if we leave the EU?", shooting up the ratings is actually quite understandable. Around midnight UK time was when it first started to seem that the Leave campaign might actually win, something many doubted would actually happen, when the first results were announced showing much narrower margins for Remain victories (Newcastle) against much larger margins for Leave victories (Sunderland) than expected. You've going to have a lot of people who favoured Remain and were confident that would be the case starting to get nervous and wonder what might happen if Leave won, who didn't really have any reason to find out previously; it had no bearing on their vote or what most polls and just about every opinion outside the actual Leave campaign were suggesting would be the result.
All good and valid points, but taking "obsolete" to automatically mean "of no further use" is an awfully narrow definition and certainly not the one I was intending which, to be clear, was that it hasn't been developed by the original vendor for more than a decade, is no longer supported at all, and has been replaced by a more up to date version by the vendor. In the same vein, I think that most people would accept that steam trains are obsolete for passenger transport in the first world, yet there are dozens of such trains still running nostalgia trips on a regular basis in the UK alone, and far more across Europe and the US - again obsolete does not imply that it can't serve a purpose. Yes, it might well still get the job done for them, but you also have to weigh up the risks; specifically, the risk of something going wrong with an upgrade - which can be mitigated that with a well thought out roll-back procedure or interim parallel operation anyway - versus the risk of someone compromising a system that almost certainly isn't as compliant with current security practices, no matter how well they might have wrapped it up in VMs, firewalls or other more up to date tech.
Yes, in an ideal world they'd have taken the OSS route (and if compelled to switch might even do so), but think of the timescale and specialist nature of the software. When this system was deployed (mid-1990s), Linux was still an experimental OS that a few organizations who were capable of supporting it in-house were only just starting to deploy in production systems for things like FTP, SMTP & WWW services that were mostly ports from commercial *NIX - specialist software was basic at best and vendors using it for commercial systems of any kind very thin on the ground. The realistic choices for a system like this would have basically boiled down to something put together by a specialist vendor and based on either MS DOS using something like dBase/FoxPro at the low-end, and equally bespoke systems running on commercial *NIX based on DB2/Informix/Oracle at the high-end; the chances of an OSS solution are extremely slim, to say the least, and it's doubtful that any vendor would hand over source code without a large financial consideration, if they'd entertain the notion at all.
I doubt it. Quite likely the licensing agreement between Working Systems and SW Health is part of a bespoke contract rather than the kind of license that comes with software for the average Joe's PC - especially given that it's strongly implied that there was an on-going license fee until March 2015 or some other kind of cut-off at that point. Assuming that whoever wrote the original contract knew their stuff and put in specific clauses to cover the inevitable software EoL, I suspect this is going to be resolved pretty smoothly with either SW Health being able to continue using the systems in perpetuity albeit without any support from Working Systems, or SW Health being found in breach of license and compelled to update their systems - and maybe pay additional penalties as well.
Frankly, if I were in SW Australia, I'd be hoping for the latter - and fast - although I suspect it's probably already too late. If SW Health is using software this obsolete in one part of their operation, then there is a good chance that they'll be doing so elsewhere too and, if so, then it's probably just a matter of time before some one figures out a way in and dumps a whole bunch of people's health records on the Internet. Given the typical pace of legal proceedings though, I'm guessing we'll be reading about a breach of SW Health's systems long before we find out how this license spat is to be resolved.
It's not like this is really a new thing either. I remember a whole bunch of people getting their pants in a bunch because they took the letters "NYC" in the Wingdings font to be a deliberate antisemitic statement some years back just because it renders as a sequence of Skull & Crossbones, Star of David, and Thumbs Up. The Wingdings font also includes a symbol for a bomb. This is really just another symptom of political correctness gone too far - the logical conclusion of zero tolerance policies that can get kids kicked out school just for making a gun shape with their hand, and the irony is particularly think given that of all the depictions of the pistol emoji one of the most realistic is Apple's.
This discussion has been done to death and every time it's been shown to be a waste of time and effort. The "burn rate" for IPv4 addresses outstrips the number of IPv4 addresses that could even potentially have been reclaimed in this manner was (and still is) such that it would, at most, have bought just months before complete exhaustion - and that still didn't really take into account the explosive demand for connectivity in China, India and other countries, or for the growing demand for mobile data (not just phones) and IoT type devices. ICANN made absolutely the right decision not to bother attempting this; it would have been expensive (you just *know* lawyers would have got involved), time consuming, mostly futile, and wouldn't have provided any real benefit anyway.
Given that you mention "some people making a huge pile of money" in connection with ICANN's failings, I'm rather surprised you didn't being up ICANN's decision to open up the gTLD system without any form of sane oversight/control of what new registrars were able to do to at least try and prevent the overwhelming majority of them becoming the cesspits they are. That essentially pointless cash grab is definitely one of ICANN's failings, and one that's likely to get a whole lot worse now that the inherent bias of an English language using oversight committee has been removed; I'm fulling expecting to see non-roman script equivalents of all those malware peddling gTLDs - run by equally incompetent and shady registrars - coming on line within a matter of months.
No, that's not it. They are clearly pining for the fjords. It's not been quite the same since Magrathea shut up shop. That Slartibartfast fellow just to do some amazing work on the crinkly bits...
No, it's not four or five additional entries - that's just how many examples are given in the summary. The "extra characters" option blows that away since it could be *any* extra character, so unless you start getting clever with keyboard layouts and adjacent keys that could potentially mean almost any character on the keyboard, shifted, unshifted and so on. Technically though you could certainly have the server store all the acceptable hashes, which gets around the breakage of tools like Fail2Ban as you'd have to hit a valid match (including typo variants) within a much smaller number of retries, but that does nothing to fix the issue of a kiddie doing brute force attacks of common passwords as they could send "P@ssword" and still have all the auto-correct variations (whether it's just three/four, or thousands) tried in a single hit.
With salted and hashed passwords it would need to be the client generating the auto-corrected versions - the server should never, ever, have any idea what the actual password was and just retain a copy of the hash to mitigate against brute forcing, but otherwise yes, the lost security would be offset by adding a few more characters. What I'm currently trying to figure out is what additional impact (if any) combining this with a scenario involving dictionary attack and rainbow tables might have on the net security of the system. My initial gut feeling was that you would need to add more than 1,000 extra combinations to the password through additional characters to offset the loss of allowing 1,000 variants - and possibly a lot more - but I'm coming up short on actually quantifying it; ultimately you *still* need an exact match, so all the proposed system is doing is a small scale version of a dictionary attack, so maybe there's no change there at all.
One way it absolutely weakens your overall security though is account lockouts through retries; you are going to need to allow a lot more retries for this to work, which is going to allow kiddies trying lists of popular passwords a *lot* more attempts before they trigger an account lockout. Tools like Fail2Ban are incredibly effective when you only allow three attempts before blacklisting the IP (bonus points if you do so across your entire estate), but if you need to set that to a few thousand to allow for auto-corrected variations then what's the point?
I think they are going a bit further than that; based on the examples in the summary, then for the actual password of "p@ssword" the system would also accept "P@SSWORD", "P@ssword", "p@sswor" and "p@ssword1". That's all well and good if you have access to the original password and can apply the auto-correct algorithm to see if what was entered is good enough, but how is that supposed to work if you are taking password security seriously and using salted and hashed passwords? The article isn't totally clear on this, but it seems that in the event of an authentication failure they'll just retry with each auto-corrected variation in sequence until they either get a match or run out of permitted options. Unless both ends of the transaction are making allowances for this (allowing more than three retries for instance), that might actually cause more problems than it solves through locked out accounts, etc. and might also open up new means of attacking an account.
As always, it sounds like the devil is lurking in the details...
It's quite a common issue on very large projects where there might be a network file system based file repository instead of a document management system. You'll quite often see insanely deep directory structures to keep things organized and try and let people find exactly what they are looking for (which seldom work, because there's *always* a bunch of files that refuse to be pidgeon holed like that). Generally not a problem on network servers, but when you try and copy a chunk of the directory tree over for offline access, almost certainly prepending everything with something along the lines of "C:\Users\$UserName\My Documents\Projects\$ProjectName\$FolderName\" in the process, you can get into some interesting issues depending on how well the file copy routine handles the error.
If I'm using Bitcoin merely as a payment mechanism, e.g. I hold my cash in a "proper" currency and only convert it to Bitcoin in order to make the transaction for the car, then sure, I don't need to worry too much about wild fluctuations in its value - the spot price is good enough. It's worth pointing out that unless you adjusted the price of the hypothetical car in the interim it's now going to be 21% more expensive than it was when you listed it compared to that "proper" currency, so unlikely to be attacting many potential buyers in the first place.
OP, however, was talking about actual currencies - e.g. buying into the whole "Bitcoin as a currency alternative" idea and actually keeping some liquid assets in Bitcoin. In that case, I'd be very alarmed about a 21% fluctuation - in either direction - in such a short timescale, because that kind of volatility in an actual currency never a good sign and usually indicates some severe financial problems, or even an impending collapse. Quite how that kind of traditional currency market problem translates across to Bitcoin is still a matter of some conjecture, but I think it's *far* too soon to be making predictions about how this is going to turn out; yes, it could be the start of a price rally as TFA suggests, in which case now would be a good time to buy some Bitcoin, if it's just people using it as a hedge in case their own currency devalues (see post about China, above) then they'll be cashing out again fairly soon and the price of Bitcoin will likely drop again.
"Terrifying" is right. What the approach used by Facebook's is clearly doing is creating an echo chamber so people mostly only get to see views that match their own, with all that entails for producing a skewed outlook on the world that is mostly based on the misperception that the overwhelming majority takes a similar view. Interestingly, it's not just happening on the conventional social media sites; there's a similar thing going on over on the BBC news site at the moment - in particular around the UK's EU referendum, but also around several other topics in various sections of the site. Check out any of the stories relating to the referendum where the BBC has enabled comments, sort by rating, and it's a classic echo chamber; all (and I do mean ALL) of the highest rated comments are pro-exit, critical of perceived bias in the BBC's coverage, and throwing insults at those with a pro-remain view - quite often demonstrating ignorance of facts and an amazing degree of bigotry and bias in the process.
The self-deception is incredibly strong - easily in line with that 99.5% figure cited in your quote; there was one post that made me laugh (the Lulz at the more idiotic comments are the only reason I read them) about how all the polls (which mostly have it as a close-run thing with remain usually slightly ahead) must be wrong "because no one ever posts a pro-remain comment on the BBC". Someone being unaware they are viewing biased data and having their opinions skewed on a social media site is one thing; it's mostly gossip and celebrity "news" that has little bearing on the big picture anyway. That a similar thing is also happening on mainstream news sites relating to topics that will quite possible have a lasting influence on millions of people for generations is deeply concerning, as is the growning lack of any openness to consideration of alternative viewpoints, let alone some critical thinking about the topic, amongst the masses.
I doubt there are too many hosts (zero, in fact) in the .KP domain that don't fall under the remit of the DPRK regime. Anyway, the site (starcon.net.kp) resolves to the IP address 175.45.176.19, which whois confirms is within the limited amount of IP space directly allocated to the DPRK. Assuming the information is accurate, then the owners of the IP space are Star Joint Venture Co. Ltd. of Ryugyong-dong, in the Potong-gang District of Pyongyang. That doesn't mean that someone hasn't hacked one of the web servers that they host and set up a webserver on it though, which seems quite probable given that the size is not completely covered in DPRK propaganda and many of the links go to "Lorum Ipsum" texts...
I think OP meant the timeframe for the consumption of the fossil fuels, not the timeframe for the effects (that are stated in the article and summary). There's a big difference between the (purely theoretical) possibility of burning them all *NOW* and looking at what a model says the effects will be in 2100/2300, and just continuing to burn them at the currently predicted rates of consumption and looking the output. FTW, I interpreted the article as claiming the latter - "if we don't reduce our rate of consumption, the effects may be far worse than previously predicted by 2100/2300".
Even if they were still being lax about their ethics and legal compliance in the wake of Snowden, you can be sure that they would be very, very, careful to appear to that everything was very much above board around Geoffrey Stone. It can't have escaped the NSA's notice that he was interested in civil liberties and part of the President's Review Group when they started working with him, and that would have almost certainly have led to special handling in any event. Given that they were still reeling from the fallout from Snowden at that point, it's pretty much a given that Stone would have been kept as far away from anything they thought might be too damaging to their reputation as they possibly could, historical or otherwise, while trying to give the impression they were not keeping anything back. So, the question is, is Stone so naive that he believes that the post-Snowden NSA is a model of ethical and legal compliance because they successfully managed to hide their dirty laundry and he didn't see it, or is Stone so confident - or even certain - that the NSA held nothing back that he is sure of it?