When you say this had nothing to do with the "cloud" do you mean gases in the atmosphere? If not, what hell is the difference between the "cloud" and amazon hosted services? Also, if Amazon is unable to offer a "real support team" who the hell can?
I think he means the problem wasn't that the systems were hosted in a cloud environment, so you can't blame the cloud. The problem was that Cloud Spaces deployed their systems without a dedicated systems management and security team, and without using a service provider that could have provided one. If the systems were hosted in AWS but with integrated systems management and security protocols in place, this problem may not have had catastrophic consequences. Conversely, if Code Spaces was a bunch of servers in some racks in an office building instead of hosted in the cloud, the problem could have still been about as severe without those management protections.
However, I will say that physicality does have some intrinsic protections that virtual hosting in the cloud lacks, although even those tend to be last resort elements. For example, if the stuff was a bunch of real servers in a real location that was dedicated to Code Spaces and not shared with anyone else, they could have just pulled the plug on networking or even power, an option that is straight forward for conventional dedicated systems and often difficult or impossible to simulate with shared hosted or cloud-based systems (particularly on the hypervisor or cloud control side). One of the things I tend to strongly recommend to people contemplating deploying public or private clouds is to work out well ahead of time an incident response plan that includes as its last resort how they would kill all access to the system for a period of time to allow them to gain control of a fast-moving situation. Kill as in stop all servers, shutdown everything running, and even suspend all access to the hypervisor or cloud control systems. Kill everything, and kill everyone's access to change anything. Basically, the cloud equivalent of pulling the power on the entire building. If you can't do that, you had better have one stellar incident response team.
When will they never catch you? Are you referring to a period of time which you experience repeatedly, such that "they" will never catch you during that time? Are you traveling back to 1987 and committing crimes? Are you referring to your toilet in a hardened bunker and the fact that they'll never catch you when you're defecating? Or did you mean to type "They'll never catch me, then."?
I speak a secret language called "Syntactically Correct American English", an archaic language no one understands any more.
Ignoring the jokes about it being a secret language (your post renders it a formerly-secret language) and no one understanding it (clearly a few do, though you do not), you committed a few errors in that sentence as well. You should have typed "I speak a secret language called "Syntactically-Correct American English", an archaic language which no one understands any longer.".
I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that everything in this post is syntactically correct, and that the language itself is not unambiguous.
Actually, no it is not.
Syntactically correct American English places the comma inside the quote, and single quotes within double quotes: "I speak a secret language called 'Syntactically-Correct American English,' an archaic language which no one understands any longer." British English places the comma outside the quote. Furthermore, the double period is incorrect in either version of English as is the use of double quotes within double quotes.
Second, semantically speaking its more proper to use "that" over "which" since the word references an syntactic object intended to be distinguished from other similar items: "I speak a secret language called 'Syntactically-Correct American English,' an archaic language that no one understands any longer."
Third, its worth noting that "I speak a secret language called 'Syntactically-Correct American English,' an archaic language that no one understands any longer" is written English, not spoken English, and therefore when the original sentence I speak a secret language called "Syntactically Correct American English", an archaic language no one understands any more is spoken, its essentially indistinguishable from syntactically correct American English.
There are few things goofier than grammatically incorrect grammar police.
What's the deal with the spate of ideologically-driven "scientific" studies appearing in the last couple of years? The first really blatant one I am aware of was the "organic food isn't more nutritious" study, which completely deflected from the point of organic food altogether. It was obviously a piece designed to confuse lay people into thinking organic food didn't have additional health benefits over conventionally-grown food. Now we see this piece, claiming that a species genetically equipped to survive huge fluctuations in population over millions of years was really just going to go extinct anyway and we just happened to be there to see it. These people should be blacklisted from scientific journals. They're not academically honest in the slightest.
If you read the actual study, the scientists didn't say that. The article only says that the rapid population spikes and crashes the passenger pigeon experienced made it more vulnerable to humans. "Here we use both genomic and ecological analyses to show that the passenger pigeon was not always super abundant, but experienced dramatic population fluctuations, which could increase its vulnerability to human exploitation." Furthermore, the point of the study was not to suggest that humans had no effect on passenger pigeons, but rather that even species with very large populations could be vulnerable to extinction pressures caused by humans if they are also vulnerable to the same effects that caused the passenger pigeon population swings. Nowhere do I see the article in question exonerate human effects from extinction.
(2] -- Call me old-fashioned, but I plan my auto trips so I don't have to have live directions given to me in real-time by something in my dashboard. My solution: buy a f**king map. Need detailed turn information to your destination? Look up the directions on Google Maps (or similar), print them out, and refer to them while you're at a stop light/sign or have your significant other read them.
I generally keep printed maps as a stand by, but I find automated turn by turn navigation to be vastly safer than periodically glancing at a printed map while driving, and often far less stressful than having someone attempt to read a map and give directions verbally. Most people just aren't very good at that.
I'm curious to see what the NHTSA discovers the risk factors are to having significant others attempt to give drivers directions. Or for that matter what the risk factors are for having car stereos, or screaming babies. I'm generally in favor of regulations like seat belt usage, or car seats for children, where the safety benefits vastly outweigh any inconvenience, but the risks should be weighed not as an absolute but against alternatives and other accepted risks. Dashboard GPS shouldn't be judged based on its distraction effect, but compared to using folding maps or just plain wandering around lost. For that matter what's the risk associated with taking one's eyes off of the traffic to look at highway signs. Audio directions should be compared to the distraction generated by listening to the radio, which I doubt anyone would allow the government to ban.
In cars without dashboard GPS, I generally use my phone. But instead of just glancing at the dash, I'm sometimes glancing down at my phone, which can't possibly be better. In a world where dashboard GPS was eliminated from cars, I would switch to phone GPS, and which would be almost impossible to regulate effectively. That's not likely to be a better situation.
I'm pretty sure they agree to defend the constitution from ALL enemies, foreign and domestic. I don't think there is an exemption for government officials who have overstepped their power.
That's true, but as I mentioned previously: a) Snowden initially claimed he did not know if "government officials" were actually violating the Constitution and b) if everyone was allowed to make that determination on their own there would be no need for a judiciary. Defending the Constitution includes defending Article 3, which vests the power of adjudicating Constitutionality with the US Supreme Court and its lower Federal Courts.
Legality is decided based on due process according to the Constitution. If you believe in the Constitution and claim to defend it, then you believe due process is the best and only way to decide legality in our country. If you believe due process doesn't work, or decide you're the exception to due process, you aren't defending the Constitution against all its enemies, because you're one of them.
I dnavid, hereby declare on oath, that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic (except when I'm just following orders, even if I know those orders are wrong and are counter to the constitution I'm swearing to protect).
It would be a somewhat different situation if Snowden actually stated "I'm absolutely certain that the instructions I've been given are unconstitutional acts that I'm legally obligated to ignore." That's not what he stated. He originally stated he wanted to "start a dialog" about the surveillance programs he witnessed, and did not know if their basis was constitutionally legal. "I declare under oath that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies foreign and domestic unless I want to start a dialog about them" is not a valid conscientious objection.
This is not a question of whether Snowden was "right" or "wrong" but whether his actions were Constitutionally legal. I cannot see any reasonable argument that says they were. There are a lot of reasons why the mass surveillance programs were undesirable, but undesirable is not the same thing as unconstitutional. If they are eventually determined to be unconstitutional I would say that's a strong mitigating circumstance surrounding Snowden's actions. But until such a ruling is made, unconstitutionality isn't decided by opinion poll.
I don't consider this a hypothetical situation either. I think a large percentage of IT professionals find themselves in situations legally analogous (if far smaller in scope) to Snowden: IT professionals are exposed to a lot of information about a lot of people, and are bound by various civil and legal restrictions governing the use and disclosure of that information. It is sometimes the case there is no appropriate legal action: you have to decide based on your own conscience what is the lesser of two evils. Sometimes you have to voluntarily break the law to avoid an unacceptable consequence. But I think nothing is gained by lying about it or wrapping it in euphemisms. Civil rights leaders were not "defending the Constitution" when they staged acts of civil disobedience. They decided to violate the law to serve what they felt was a higher purpose. There's no shame in admitting you believe the Constitution and the laws derived from it are inadequate, and the people need to be marshalled to improve it, and you're willing to break some laws to a point to achieve that goal. In fact, I think its important to acknowledge that fact, to underscore the seriousness of those actions. We respect people like civil rights leaders because they felt their cause was important enough to become essentially criminals to further its cause. I would probably have more respect for Snowden if he simply stated that he felt the mass surveillance programs were so abhorrent to him that he f
Even putting aside the facts that he was willing to break the oaths he took when he got his security clearance
The oath he took was to "protect and defend the Constitution, against all enemies, foreign and domestic"
He's committed many crimes, but breaking that oath does not appear to be one of them.
Among the things included within the Constitution are rules governing who gets to determine how the Constitution is to be interpreted and who gets to enforce its language. Nowhere within the Constitution does there exist a clause that states any citizen is entitled to substitute their own judgment for the authority delegated by the Constitution. When Snowden or anyone else swears to protect and defend the Constitution, they do not specifically swear to defend a couple of clauses within the bill of rights, but the entire Constitution. When Snowden first disclosed himself in his very first published interview he stated he did not know if the intelligence programs he was disclosing were strictly speaking illegal, since they had been authorized by the office of the president in some cases and authorized by legislation in other cases. What he said was that he felt he needed to start a dialog about them. And while he was basically correct in that its obvious the majority of the American people want that dialog, there exists no Constitutional authority or right by which Snowden started that conversation.
However else you justify Snowden's actions, they were extra-Constitutional in nature. Its something to consider when considering that the primary power the Constitution provides to its citizens to remedy situations like this is basically the vote. We live in a Constitutional republic, not a Constitutional democracy, and our primary power as citizens is we can change the makeup of our representation within that republic. If We The People don't think that works anymore, its not the Constitution that needs saving, its the Constitution itself that is intrinsically broken. It did not anticipate a day when the people would be incapable of choosing a government capable of representing its own interests.
well, smart is relative. This shows him to be pro society.
From a stock holder perspective. it's a very dumb move.
Not really. Every supercharger station anyone else builds to Tesla's specifications is in effect a "gas station" for Tesla cars. At the moment Tesla is spending tons of money building a supercharger network. Every station someone else decides to build, assuming they remain compatible, is a station Tesla gets for free. Technically speaking, Musk is making it easier for competitors to compete with him building electric cars because they will get an easier way to build out a charging network but just like the ATM networks, there's a huge advantage to make them compatible because it validates the concept for consumers. Right now the biggest hurdle facing electric car manufacturers including Tesla is not competition from other electric car manufacturers, its the lack of infrastructure to support electric cars. Supercharger stations would be a tide that lifts all boats in that market, just like when the banks decided to cooperate with their ATM networks.
That's not actually the case here. See, unlike the boogeyman that someone is artfully crafting in the media, the NSA isn't spying on each individual. They're snarfing up all the data they can, and then, only under a very narrow ruleset, looking at the small.parts.they have permission to. Now, the systems are set up to purge data before it has been retained beyond the limit of law(my system does this automatically) and data that is kept has to be pulled out. This is a privacy safeguard that your strawman deliberately ignores. So, unless you have pulled the data, in a specific manner, its gone. This is not a bad thing. If one guy misinterpreted the preservation order as described, this exact situation will happen. Its not a DOJ destroying evidence thing, its an artifact of a set of systems meticulously built to comply with the law. There's a reason the folks lkistening in on their exes got caught. The system is designed to the ruleset presented by congress and the courts.
If it was a legitimate and reasonable error, the guidelines for federal discovery specify that the offending party should not face serious sanctions. However, that's not the case here for several specific reasons. First, the DOJ attempts to argue that the misinterpretation was that the discovery order only involved programs authorized by Presidential directive and not FISA court approved programs, however the discover orders make no such reference nor can any such reference be reasonably made. Second, the NSA specifically made a request to the FISA court to allow them to preserve that very information beyond its normal expiration date, implying they had already temporarily suspended purging that information pending the court ruling. Therefore, suggesting that the data was automatically purged by default is false: the NSA already implied in court documents that they had taken steps to preserve elements of that information they deemed useful to themselves for the purposes of these court cases. Third, the DOJ was explicitly asked by plaintiffs in one of the related cases to explicitly notify the FISA court that the documents in question should be preserved for discovery, and the DOJ failed to notify the FISA court. The DOJ's excuse was that they disagreed with the plaintiffs in that case and thus felt there was no need to notify the FISA court, but that's either gross incompetence or willful fraud: according to the rules for discovery, the DOJ does not have the right to simply disagree with a party's discovery request and ignore it, as they claimed they did. The DOJ lawyers should know that: its a fundamental rule of how discovery works in US courts. The DOJ had an obligation to present that request to the FISA court and then attempt to get an evidentiary ruling before choosing to ignore it.
More simply, you can't argue the data was deleted "automatically" because the NSA had already made efforts to preserve it past its expiration. Second, you can't argue the DOJ was reasonable in its belief the data was irrelevant because the discovery order explicitly covers it. And third you can't argue the DOJ was acting in good faith because they deliberately failed in its fundamental responsibility to the FISA court to report any discovery or evidence preservation request, something the FISA court itself called the DOJ on.
But its actually worse than that. The evidence now suggests that all of this was a legal ploy, something the judges in both courts (Federal court and the FISA court) now seem to be aware of. When the DOJ was asked to hold the documents, they didn't go to the FISA court initially and ask the FISA court for permission to hold the data for evidence in the Federal court case. They asked the FISA judge for permission to hold the data indefinitely. The FISA court refused, and the DOJ then told the Federal court that it couldn't hold the data because the FISA court said no. But the FISA court found out about it (via a restraining order request) and essentially scolded the DOJ for attempting to
The destruction of that data is required by law. EFF tried to go on a fishing expedition.
Both the FISA court and Federal court eventually decided that the NSA was both allowed to, and required to, preserve information relevant to the ongoing cases, and the NSA both knew this and also eventually advocated for this position. See: https://www.techdirt.com/artic....
Court-ordered legal discovery also has force of law and would supercede any legal requirement to destroy information by plaintiffs or defendents.
And the DOJ did not assert the EFF was on a "fishing expedition"; it argued that it misunderstood the scope of discovery, and would not have destroyed the information in question if it did (which seems highly improbable given the circumstances).
By default, the Terran Computational Calendar accounts for IERS issued leap seconds.
But, Leap seconds can actually be ignored by applying a year base of 0.
Therefore, the following two dates are the same instant in time:
44-05-20 22:16:41 TC (includes leap seconds), 44-05-20 22:17:06 TC0 (excludes all leap seconds)
And if you use Steven Wright's calendar, you can ignore sevens.
I just had a vision of the driverless car offered as SaaS, and what happens when the Cloud goes down even for a moment.
I think latency would make that basically impossible, or at least too dangerous. So would tunnels. Autonomous cars would have to be actually autonomous, relying on external networks for things like maps and software updates, but not for actually controlling the car.
For this reason I also think they could, if manufacturers wanted to, be made essentially tamper-proof while the car was being driven: simply design the software to refuse to accept any outside connections while the car was in motion, and require all connections to be pulled from the car rather than pushed from the manufacturer. It would still be theoretically possible to hack a car by replacing its software completely, particularly when it was being serviced, but the notion of hackers breaking into autonomous cars while they were on the road and taking them over could be made essentially impossible.
Unless its just a super-accurate way of finding out which way is North in which case it is probably a compass (not trademarked, at least in that context, AFAIK). Carefully analysing the name "quantum compass" suggests that maybe, just maybe, that's the case - although it could still form part of a System that gives your Position on the Globe.
Maybe the key distinction is that a GPS (TM-or-otherwise) will work out your position from scratch, whereas the sort of hyper-accurate dead reckoning/inertial navigation system that TFA appears to describe would need to know where you started from...
Everything I've read suggests it is in fact a form of inertial navigation system, or more precisely a type of sensor that could be used to create one. Although its being called a "quantum compass" it appears to be a really a hyper-accurate accelerometer that can be calibrated to measure inertial effects, gravitational effects, and magnetic effects on a laser cooled Bose-condensate cluster.
You see, In the 'Special Housing Unit,' which is Bureau of Prisons codespeak for 'solitary confinement' and 'torture,' I had enough time to think about the current state of federal government. "
The guy is clearly messed up in the head from his experience (or maybe he was to some degree before, I don't know). They successfully broke him. Most likely with all that time in solitary confinement, in his mind he rallied behind the names of people who are famous for hating the government, regardless of their cause. I wonder if he can find a good psychotherapist willing to accept bitcoins.
Everyone who thinks prison broke weev's mind seem to think its possible to break a bag of gravel by putting it in the wrong box.
If the vendor pays, then the vendor owns the brain in the car you bought rather than YOU owning the brain in YOUR car.
They will make modding the car illegal as they own it. And if they are liable for it's misbehavior, that even makes sense.
Do you want to live in a world where you own your property?
Or would you prefer to rent a license from the corporate overlords?
I don't mod my car now, for the same reason the vast majority of people do not mod their cars now: it would void the warranty. I doubt they would make it explicitly illegal to "mod" an autonomous car, they would just place significant liability responsibility on anyone tampering with the autonomous driving systems. As well they should: if you tamper with them and that tampering causes someone to die, you should be held fully responsible.
I own my own home (and the land its on), I don't rent or lease because I want to own my own home. However, I've stopped buying most paper printed books in favor of Kindle books for the simple reason its vastly more convenient and I don't have megatons of paper cluttering my house. I still buy DVDs and Bluerays rather than stream movies electronically, because I still like owning those (at least the media if not the content). I make calculated decisions about what I will choose to take the trouble to own, and what I choose to "rent" based on a lot of personal factors. I don't consider this to be a binary all or nothing decision, and when it comes to autonomous cars I will probably make the same calculation based on the circumstances at the time.
Having a car that always drove itself by design is something I'm not sure I'm comfortable with yet. But a car I can put into autopilot to drive me home when I'm tired, distracted, stressed, or impaired is something I would definitely be interested in having, even if it meant "renting" its brains from a corporate overlord.
Taken to its logical conclusion it states that it could be legal in the EU for someone to publish information that can theoretically be accessed by the general public, but illegal for anyone else to point out that fact.
No, the ruling clearly states that isn't the case. Maybe we need a new RTFR tag.
I actually read the entire ruling word for word. Did you?
Part 99:
It follows from the foregoing considerations that the answer to Question 3 is that Article 12(b) and subparagraph (a) of the first paragraph of Article 14 of Directive 95/46 are to be interpreted as meaning that, when appraising the conditions for the application of those provisions, it should inter alia be examined whether the data subject has a right that the information in question relating to him personally should, at this point in time, no longer be linked to his name by a list of results displayed following a search made on the basis of his name, without it being necessary in order to find such a right that the inclusion of the information in question in that list causes prejudice to the data subject. As the data subject may, in the light of his fundamental rights under Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter, request that the information in question no longer be made available to the general public on account of its inclusion in such a list of results, those rights override, as a rule, not only the economic interest of the operator of the search engine but also the interest of the general public in having access to that information upon a search relating to the data subject’s name. However, that would not be the case if it appeared, for particular reasons, such as the role played by the data subject in public life, that the interference with his fundamental rights is justified by the preponderant interest of the general public in having, on account of its inclusion in the list of results, access to the information in question.
In other words, the court ruled the only primary issue is whether the subject had a legal right to that information and could decide whether it should be disseminated, and that fundamental right should, by default, override all other issues, except for the specific case where the subject and the information in question play a sufficient public role that the right of the general public in knowing that information supersede the subject's right to privacy.
Although it doesn't explicitly state so, TAKEN TO ITS LOGICAL CONCLUSION the legal argument could be construed as leading to that conclusion.
Now, since you believe the ruling "clearly states that isn't the case" I'm sure you would have no problem quoting that clearly stated conclusion.
The original court decision was twofold
1. You have no right to be forgotten by the Newspaper that published the story
2. You have a right to be forgotten by search engines.
This only applies in the EU and only applies to companies incorporated in the EU.
Google is welcome to shut down its various European subsidiaries (including the ones in Ireland and the Netherlands that they use to shelter income).
It will be interesting to see how this ruling actually gets implemented by member states of the EU. It appears to be highly problematic for various reasons. First, because the ruling while comporting with EU law appears inconsistent with how the internet actually works. Taken to its logical conclusion it states that it could be legal in the EU for someone to publish information that can theoretically be accessed by the general public, but illegal for anyone else to point out that fact. The ruling also states that its legal interpretation only applies to legal entities that are actually within the EU. That means global entities like Google can be held to the legal standard articulated within their ruling, but entities outside the EU are completely immune. So, a search engine in China, say, that had no subsidiaries within the EU would be free to ignore EU's attempt to implement this "right to be forgotten" principle. But if a large enough search engine anywhere contains that information, its not hard to presume technology that would make it accessible from anywhere. In the extreme, you'd just balkanize search, with different search engines referring to each other to access content an individual search engine was legally not allowed to offer.
More likely you'd simply make it much more inconvenient for countries that attempt to enforce this type of law to access global search. And you'd encourage your own citizens to use search engines outside the regulatory umbrella of your own country to obtain the most complete search results. The unintended consequences of this type of ruling seem to have no end to the list of detrimental collateral damage that they can cause.
The internet has nothing wrong with it that we couldn't fix with a combination of net neutrality and convincing American ISPs to get off their asses and bring us up to speed with the rest of the third world.
Net neutrality and speed increases would not solve the intrinsic problems with DNS architecture, NAT proxies breaking things, gigantic non-aggregate BGP tables, limited IPv4 address space, limitations of TCP protocol, ICMP mismanagement, lack of standards to address continuous disruption in mobile environments, and a whole mess of other problems that are currently addressed by patchwork solutions, or simply no solutions.
As for this BS marketroid term "Internet of Things"... Please people, just... Don't let them win. The internet has always had "things" on it. Whether that "thing" means your PC or your phone or your microwave. The idea of having every device in your house online should terrify you, not delight you, so fuck upgrades that make it easier for your fridge to tell the NSA that you eat the same things as Joe Terrorist.
At one time, people said the same thing about PC connectivity to the internet. Who are you that you need to connect to the global internet. The internet is for mainframes and important computers; why would you want anyone else to be able to connect to your computer, and why should we allow you to connect to everyone elses?
Paranoia notwithstanding, it should be up to individuals to decide what they connect and how they connect and what capabilities they decide to leverage. But if you think its bad for your fridge to be connected to the internet, I have no idea why you would allow your computer to be connected to it either. That's infinitely more dangerous.
Nellie Moffitt is a clueless person who shouldn't be quoted on technical manners.
"their GPS... can give away their position to the enemy"
A GPS receiver in a traditional e-reader (ARE there any traditional e-readers with a GPS?) can't give away your position on a sub because:
1) A GPS receiver is only a receiver
2) It doesn't know your position because it is in a metal tube 100's of feet below the water.
Kindle fire? B&N Nook? Yep both of those "e-readers" have GPS. And you know submarines occasionally do spent time at the surface, where their whereabouts are still a good thing to keep secret? Clearly instead of a more detailed policy they simply exclude any device that might resemble one with such capabilities, as a safeguard.
Its not just current positions that are potentially useful to an enemy, its also historical positioning. An e-reader that managed to get a GPS fix and record that position in memory could eventually be lost or stolen, and positional data points retrieved. While an e-reader cannot get a GPS fix in a submarine while underwater under normal conditions, the many possible ways it could accidentally be exposed to GPS signals are such that its not worth the risk to guard against them all. And on surface ships the chance that a general purpose e-reader could collect and store that information is far too high to risk using them aboard active duty warships.
They are talking about the GPS ground stations that monitors the GPS signals (and is programed with its exact position and altitude) and determine what corrections, if any, need to be made to the GPS signals (so that what it knows to be its correct position is the same as what its GPS receiver is telling it)
Actually, there are no such receiver stations for US GPS systems anywhere within the Russian Federation. I believe the GPS stations they are talking about are differential GPS stations, which are used to increase the accuracy of GPS positioning from satellites from about a couple meters to a few centimeters. A list of DGPS stations is here. Of the stations listed as associated with Russia, most show as either planned or currently on trial, which could explain where there are discrepancies in reporting about how many there are. Its possible that the reporting talks about eleven because of the nineteen stations showing as "on trial" eleven are actually on-line and delivering commercial signals.
I can name more than three. Skype or other IP telephony (gatewayed through public wifi for extra measure), Hacked PBX call redirectors (which are a favorite of many scammers), prepaid cell phone, disposable SIM cards, telephone call anonymizing services, public pay phone.
No one is going to shoot you for not paying taxes.
And what do you suppose they do when someone refuses to peacefully submit to arrest for failure to pay their official annual extortion fee, through a barred and reinforced door?
Hint: They don't challenge you to a debate..
Sure, if you take it far enough, you could force the government to shoot you. Given the right forced circumstances could also force me to shoot you. That same power you think is the only power the government has, is ultimately the only power you have also. Taken to the ludicrous extreme, the only power you really have ultimately is the power to kill people who oppose you.
/ Fact of the day: The US made it through over half of its existence with no income tax in place except for extremely limited wartime assessments.
Also, electricity and reliable indoor plumbing. The historical circumstances of the country have no direct bearing on its current functional requirements and goals. Whether the government levies too much taxes or not, the fact that it did not levy a general income tax in the past is not particularly relevant. For most of US history women could be denied the right to vote because the US Constitution granted almost unlimited power to the states to decide more or less arbitrarily who could and could not vote. The fact that the country apparently functioned reasonably well without granting women the right to vote on the federal level does not mean it was not a beneficial change.
Has your government done anything you're not proud of? Comitted any acts you call evil? You chose to pay taxes didn't you?
No, actually, I don't. I submit to taxation only under duress, the threat of Government Guns appearing on my doorstep. I actively oppose the majority of US foreign policy, and consider the government in its current form as little more than an occupying entity entirely hostile to both the constitution and the founding principles of my country.
No one is going to shoot you for not paying taxes. They may imprison you, but that's a conscious choice. Conscientious objectors have gone to prison for far less motivation than opposing an "occupying entity entirely hostile to both the constitution and the founding principles of my country."
If you genuinely believe that to be the case, financially supporting such an entity and willingly living under its rule is a far more serious act than working within the bureaucracy of the FCC.
So is this a case of too much government involvement in "open source" things or is this a case of the government is a bit late and should have prevented this situation from happening in the first place?
In my opinion neither. The government has no specific interest in deciding how people choose to invest their money, provided those investments are not explicitly fraudulent. But they do have an obligation to police illegal fraud. Kickstarter projects can fail: that is the risk investors take as investors. But if the people running the project do not make a good-faith effort to produce what they have asserted they can produce for their investors, that's a crime. I would say going dark on your investors for almost a year strongly suggests no good faith effort is being made to complete the project.
Slashdot Mirror
When you say this had nothing to do with the "cloud" do you mean gases in the atmosphere? If not, what hell is the difference between the "cloud" and amazon hosted services? Also, if Amazon is unable to offer a "real support team" who the hell can?
I think he means the problem wasn't that the systems were hosted in a cloud environment, so you can't blame the cloud. The problem was that Cloud Spaces deployed their systems without a dedicated systems management and security team, and without using a service provider that could have provided one. If the systems were hosted in AWS but with integrated systems management and security protocols in place, this problem may not have had catastrophic consequences. Conversely, if Code Spaces was a bunch of servers in some racks in an office building instead of hosted in the cloud, the problem could have still been about as severe without those management protections.
However, I will say that physicality does have some intrinsic protections that virtual hosting in the cloud lacks, although even those tend to be last resort elements. For example, if the stuff was a bunch of real servers in a real location that was dedicated to Code Spaces and not shared with anyone else, they could have just pulled the plug on networking or even power, an option that is straight forward for conventional dedicated systems and often difficult or impossible to simulate with shared hosted or cloud-based systems (particularly on the hypervisor or cloud control side). One of the things I tend to strongly recommend to people contemplating deploying public or private clouds is to work out well ahead of time an incident response plan that includes as its last resort how they would kill all access to the system for a period of time to allow them to gain control of a fast-moving situation. Kill as in stop all servers, shutdown everything running, and even suspend all access to the hypervisor or cloud control systems. Kill everything, and kill everyone's access to change anything. Basically, the cloud equivalent of pulling the power on the entire building. If you can't do that, you had better have one stellar incident response team.
There's nothing more pathetic than someone trying and failing to police the grammar police.
Self-annihilating irony seems to contradict that statement.
They'll never catch me then.
When will they never catch you? Are you referring to a period of time which you experience repeatedly, such that "they" will never catch you during that time? Are you traveling back to 1987 and committing crimes? Are you referring to your toilet in a hardened bunker and the fact that they'll never catch you when you're defecating? Or did you mean to type "They'll never catch me, then."?
I speak a secret language called "Syntactically Correct American English", an archaic language no one understands any more.
Ignoring the jokes about it being a secret language (your post renders it a formerly-secret language) and no one understanding it (clearly a few do, though you do not), you committed a few errors in that sentence as well. You should have typed "I speak a secret language called "Syntactically-Correct American English", an archaic language which no one understands any longer.".
I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that everything in this post is syntactically correct, and that the language itself is not unambiguous.
Actually, no it is not.
Syntactically correct American English places the comma inside the quote, and single quotes within double quotes: "I speak a secret language called 'Syntactically-Correct American English,' an archaic language which no one understands any longer." British English places the comma outside the quote. Furthermore, the double period is incorrect in either version of English as is the use of double quotes within double quotes.
Second, semantically speaking its more proper to use "that" over "which" since the word references an syntactic object intended to be distinguished from other similar items: "I speak a secret language called 'Syntactically-Correct American English,' an archaic language that no one understands any longer."
Third, its worth noting that "I speak a secret language called 'Syntactically-Correct American English,' an archaic language that no one understands any longer" is written English, not spoken English, and therefore when the original sentence I speak a secret language called "Syntactically Correct American English", an archaic language no one understands any more is spoken, its essentially indistinguishable from syntactically correct American English.
There are few things goofier than grammatically incorrect grammar police.
What's the deal with the spate of ideologically-driven "scientific" studies appearing in the last couple of years? The first really blatant one I am aware of was the "organic food isn't more nutritious" study, which completely deflected from the point of organic food altogether. It was obviously a piece designed to confuse lay people into thinking organic food didn't have additional health benefits over conventionally-grown food. Now we see this piece, claiming that a species genetically equipped to survive huge fluctuations in population over millions of years was really just going to go extinct anyway and we just happened to be there to see it. These people should be blacklisted from scientific journals. They're not academically honest in the slightest.
If you read the actual study, the scientists didn't say that. The article only says that the rapid population spikes and crashes the passenger pigeon experienced made it more vulnerable to humans. "Here we use both genomic and ecological analyses to show that the passenger pigeon was not always super abundant, but experienced dramatic population fluctuations, which could increase its vulnerability to human exploitation." Furthermore, the point of the study was not to suggest that humans had no effect on passenger pigeons, but rather that even species with very large populations could be vulnerable to extinction pressures caused by humans if they are also vulnerable to the same effects that caused the passenger pigeon population swings. Nowhere do I see the article in question exonerate human effects from extinction.
(2] -- Call me old-fashioned, but I plan my auto trips so I don't have to have live directions given to me in real-time by something in my dashboard. My solution: buy a f**king map. Need detailed turn information to your destination? Look up the directions on Google Maps (or similar), print them out, and refer to them while you're at a stop light/sign or have your significant other read them.
I generally keep printed maps as a stand by, but I find automated turn by turn navigation to be vastly safer than periodically glancing at a printed map while driving, and often far less stressful than having someone attempt to read a map and give directions verbally. Most people just aren't very good at that.
I'm curious to see what the NHTSA discovers the risk factors are to having significant others attempt to give drivers directions. Or for that matter what the risk factors are for having car stereos, or screaming babies. I'm generally in favor of regulations like seat belt usage, or car seats for children, where the safety benefits vastly outweigh any inconvenience, but the risks should be weighed not as an absolute but against alternatives and other accepted risks. Dashboard GPS shouldn't be judged based on its distraction effect, but compared to using folding maps or just plain wandering around lost. For that matter what's the risk associated with taking one's eyes off of the traffic to look at highway signs. Audio directions should be compared to the distraction generated by listening to the radio, which I doubt anyone would allow the government to ban.
In cars without dashboard GPS, I generally use my phone. But instead of just glancing at the dash, I'm sometimes glancing down at my phone, which can't possibly be better. In a world where dashboard GPS was eliminated from cars, I would switch to phone GPS, and which would be almost impossible to regulate effectively. That's not likely to be a better situation.
I'm pretty sure they agree to defend the constitution from ALL enemies, foreign and domestic. I don't think there is an exemption for government officials who have overstepped their power.
That's true, but as I mentioned previously: a) Snowden initially claimed he did not know if "government officials" were actually violating the Constitution and b) if everyone was allowed to make that determination on their own there would be no need for a judiciary. Defending the Constitution includes defending Article 3, which vests the power of adjudicating Constitutionality with the US Supreme Court and its lower Federal Courts.
Legality is decided based on due process according to the Constitution. If you believe in the Constitution and claim to defend it, then you believe due process is the best and only way to decide legality in our country. If you believe due process doesn't work, or decide you're the exception to due process, you aren't defending the Constitution against all its enemies, because you're one of them.
I dnavid, hereby declare on oath, that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic (except when I'm just following orders, even if I know those orders are wrong and are counter to the constitution I'm swearing to protect).
It would be a somewhat different situation if Snowden actually stated "I'm absolutely certain that the instructions I've been given are unconstitutional acts that I'm legally obligated to ignore." That's not what he stated. He originally stated he wanted to "start a dialog" about the surveillance programs he witnessed, and did not know if their basis was constitutionally legal. "I declare under oath that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies foreign and domestic unless I want to start a dialog about them" is not a valid conscientious objection.
This is not a question of whether Snowden was "right" or "wrong" but whether his actions were Constitutionally legal. I cannot see any reasonable argument that says they were. There are a lot of reasons why the mass surveillance programs were undesirable, but undesirable is not the same thing as unconstitutional. If they are eventually determined to be unconstitutional I would say that's a strong mitigating circumstance surrounding Snowden's actions. But until such a ruling is made, unconstitutionality isn't decided by opinion poll.
I don't consider this a hypothetical situation either. I think a large percentage of IT professionals find themselves in situations legally analogous (if far smaller in scope) to Snowden: IT professionals are exposed to a lot of information about a lot of people, and are bound by various civil and legal restrictions governing the use and disclosure of that information. It is sometimes the case there is no appropriate legal action: you have to decide based on your own conscience what is the lesser of two evils. Sometimes you have to voluntarily break the law to avoid an unacceptable consequence. But I think nothing is gained by lying about it or wrapping it in euphemisms. Civil rights leaders were not "defending the Constitution" when they staged acts of civil disobedience. They decided to violate the law to serve what they felt was a higher purpose. There's no shame in admitting you believe the Constitution and the laws derived from it are inadequate, and the people need to be marshalled to improve it, and you're willing to break some laws to a point to achieve that goal. In fact, I think its important to acknowledge that fact, to underscore the seriousness of those actions. We respect people like civil rights leaders because they felt their cause was important enough to become essentially criminals to further its cause. I would probably have more respect for Snowden if he simply stated that he felt the mass surveillance programs were so abhorrent to him that he f
Even putting aside the facts that he was willing to break the oaths he took when he got his security clearance
The oath he took was to "protect and defend the Constitution, against all enemies, foreign and domestic"
He's committed many crimes, but breaking that oath does not appear to be one of them.
Among the things included within the Constitution are rules governing who gets to determine how the Constitution is to be interpreted and who gets to enforce its language. Nowhere within the Constitution does there exist a clause that states any citizen is entitled to substitute their own judgment for the authority delegated by the Constitution. When Snowden or anyone else swears to protect and defend the Constitution, they do not specifically swear to defend a couple of clauses within the bill of rights, but the entire Constitution. When Snowden first disclosed himself in his very first published interview he stated he did not know if the intelligence programs he was disclosing were strictly speaking illegal, since they had been authorized by the office of the president in some cases and authorized by legislation in other cases. What he said was that he felt he needed to start a dialog about them. And while he was basically correct in that its obvious the majority of the American people want that dialog, there exists no Constitutional authority or right by which Snowden started that conversation.
However else you justify Snowden's actions, they were extra-Constitutional in nature. Its something to consider when considering that the primary power the Constitution provides to its citizens to remedy situations like this is basically the vote. We live in a Constitutional republic, not a Constitutional democracy, and our primary power as citizens is we can change the makeup of our representation within that republic. If We The People don't think that works anymore, its not the Constitution that needs saving, its the Constitution itself that is intrinsically broken. It did not anticipate a day when the people would be incapable of choosing a government capable of representing its own interests.
well, smart is relative. This shows him to be pro society. From a stock holder perspective. it's a very dumb move.
Not really. Every supercharger station anyone else builds to Tesla's specifications is in effect a "gas station" for Tesla cars. At the moment Tesla is spending tons of money building a supercharger network. Every station someone else decides to build, assuming they remain compatible, is a station Tesla gets for free. Technically speaking, Musk is making it easier for competitors to compete with him building electric cars because they will get an easier way to build out a charging network but just like the ATM networks, there's a huge advantage to make them compatible because it validates the concept for consumers. Right now the biggest hurdle facing electric car manufacturers including Tesla is not competition from other electric car manufacturers, its the lack of infrastructure to support electric cars. Supercharger stations would be a tide that lifts all boats in that market, just like when the banks decided to cooperate with their ATM networks.
That's not actually the case here. See, unlike the boogeyman that someone is artfully crafting in the media, the NSA isn't spying on each individual. They're snarfing up all the data they can, and then, only under a very narrow ruleset, looking at the small.parts.they have permission to. Now, the systems are set up to purge data before it has been retained beyond the limit of law(my system does this automatically) and data that is kept has to be pulled out. This is a privacy safeguard that your strawman deliberately ignores. So, unless you have pulled the data, in a specific manner, its gone. This is not a bad thing. If one guy misinterpreted the preservation order as described, this exact situation will happen. Its not a DOJ destroying evidence thing, its an artifact of a set of systems meticulously built to comply with the law. There's a reason the folks lkistening in on their exes got caught. The system is designed to the ruleset presented by congress and the courts.
If it was a legitimate and reasonable error, the guidelines for federal discovery specify that the offending party should not face serious sanctions. However, that's not the case here for several specific reasons. First, the DOJ attempts to argue that the misinterpretation was that the discovery order only involved programs authorized by Presidential directive and not FISA court approved programs, however the discover orders make no such reference nor can any such reference be reasonably made. Second, the NSA specifically made a request to the FISA court to allow them to preserve that very information beyond its normal expiration date, implying they had already temporarily suspended purging that information pending the court ruling. Therefore, suggesting that the data was automatically purged by default is false: the NSA already implied in court documents that they had taken steps to preserve elements of that information they deemed useful to themselves for the purposes of these court cases. Third, the DOJ was explicitly asked by plaintiffs in one of the related cases to explicitly notify the FISA court that the documents in question should be preserved for discovery, and the DOJ failed to notify the FISA court. The DOJ's excuse was that they disagreed with the plaintiffs in that case and thus felt there was no need to notify the FISA court, but that's either gross incompetence or willful fraud: according to the rules for discovery, the DOJ does not have the right to simply disagree with a party's discovery request and ignore it, as they claimed they did. The DOJ lawyers should know that: its a fundamental rule of how discovery works in US courts. The DOJ had an obligation to present that request to the FISA court and then attempt to get an evidentiary ruling before choosing to ignore it.
More simply, you can't argue the data was deleted "automatically" because the NSA had already made efforts to preserve it past its expiration. Second, you can't argue the DOJ was reasonable in its belief the data was irrelevant because the discovery order explicitly covers it. And third you can't argue the DOJ was acting in good faith because they deliberately failed in its fundamental responsibility to the FISA court to report any discovery or evidence preservation request, something the FISA court itself called the DOJ on.
But its actually worse than that. The evidence now suggests that all of this was a legal ploy, something the judges in both courts (Federal court and the FISA court) now seem to be aware of. When the DOJ was asked to hold the documents, they didn't go to the FISA court initially and ask the FISA court for permission to hold the data for evidence in the Federal court case. They asked the FISA judge for permission to hold the data indefinitely. The FISA court refused, and the DOJ then told the Federal court that it couldn't hold the data because the FISA court said no. But the FISA court found out about it (via a restraining order request) and essentially scolded the DOJ for attempting to
The destruction of that data is required by law. EFF tried to go on a fishing expedition.
Both the FISA court and Federal court eventually decided that the NSA was both allowed to, and required to, preserve information relevant to the ongoing cases, and the NSA both knew this and also eventually advocated for this position. See: https://www.techdirt.com/artic....
Court-ordered legal discovery also has force of law and would supercede any legal requirement to destroy information by plaintiffs or defendents.
And the DOJ did not assert the EFF was on a "fishing expedition"; it argued that it misunderstood the scope of discovery, and would not have destroyed the information in question if it did (which seems highly improbable given the circumstances).
By default, the Terran Computational Calendar accounts for IERS issued leap seconds. But, Leap seconds can actually be ignored by applying a year base of 0. Therefore, the following two dates are the same instant in time: 44-05-20 22:16:41 TC (includes leap seconds), 44-05-20 22:17:06 TC0 (excludes all leap seconds)
And if you use Steven Wright's calendar, you can ignore sevens.
I just had a vision of the driverless car offered as SaaS, and what happens when the Cloud goes down even for a moment.
I think latency would make that basically impossible, or at least too dangerous. So would tunnels. Autonomous cars would have to be actually autonomous, relying on external networks for things like maps and software updates, but not for actually controlling the car.
For this reason I also think they could, if manufacturers wanted to, be made essentially tamper-proof while the car was being driven: simply design the software to refuse to accept any outside connections while the car was in motion, and require all connections to be pulled from the car rather than pushed from the manufacturer. It would still be theoretically possible to hack a car by replacing its software completely, particularly when it was being serviced, but the notion of hackers breaking into autonomous cars while they were on the road and taking them over could be made essentially impossible.
Unless its just a super-accurate way of finding out which way is North in which case it is probably a compass (not trademarked, at least in that context, AFAIK). Carefully analysing the name "quantum compass" suggests that maybe, just maybe, that's the case - although it could still form part of a System that gives your Position on the Globe.
Maybe the key distinction is that a GPS (TM-or-otherwise) will work out your position from scratch, whereas the sort of hyper-accurate dead reckoning/inertial navigation system that TFA appears to describe would need to know where you started from...
Everything I've read suggests it is in fact a form of inertial navigation system, or more precisely a type of sensor that could be used to create one. Although its being called a "quantum compass" it appears to be a really a hyper-accurate accelerometer that can be calibrated to measure inertial effects, gravitational effects, and magnetic effects on a laser cooled Bose-condensate cluster.
You see, In the 'Special Housing Unit,' which is Bureau of Prisons codespeak for 'solitary confinement' and 'torture,' I had enough time to think about the current state of federal government. "
The guy is clearly messed up in the head from his experience (or maybe he was to some degree before, I don't know). They successfully broke him. Most likely with all that time in solitary confinement, in his mind he rallied behind the names of people who are famous for hating the government, regardless of their cause. I wonder if he can find a good psychotherapist willing to accept bitcoins.
Everyone who thinks prison broke weev's mind seem to think its possible to break a bag of gravel by putting it in the wrong box.
So I assume he shits out gold bars for a living?
24 hours a day, seven days a week, even when he sleeps, apparently.
If the vendor pays, then the vendor owns the brain in the car you bought rather than YOU owning the brain in YOUR car. They will make modding the car illegal as they own it. And if they are liable for it's misbehavior, that even makes sense.
Do you want to live in a world where you own your property? Or would you prefer to rent a license from the corporate overlords?
I don't mod my car now, for the same reason the vast majority of people do not mod their cars now: it would void the warranty. I doubt they would make it explicitly illegal to "mod" an autonomous car, they would just place significant liability responsibility on anyone tampering with the autonomous driving systems. As well they should: if you tamper with them and that tampering causes someone to die, you should be held fully responsible.
I own my own home (and the land its on), I don't rent or lease because I want to own my own home. However, I've stopped buying most paper printed books in favor of Kindle books for the simple reason its vastly more convenient and I don't have megatons of paper cluttering my house. I still buy DVDs and Bluerays rather than stream movies electronically, because I still like owning those (at least the media if not the content). I make calculated decisions about what I will choose to take the trouble to own, and what I choose to "rent" based on a lot of personal factors. I don't consider this to be a binary all or nothing decision, and when it comes to autonomous cars I will probably make the same calculation based on the circumstances at the time.
Having a car that always drove itself by design is something I'm not sure I'm comfortable with yet. But a car I can put into autopilot to drive me home when I'm tired, distracted, stressed, or impaired is something I would definitely be interested in having, even if it meant "renting" its brains from a corporate overlord.
Taken to its logical conclusion it states that it could be legal in the EU for someone to publish information that can theoretically be accessed by the general public, but illegal for anyone else to point out that fact.
No, the ruling clearly states that isn't the case. Maybe we need a new RTFR tag.
I actually read the entire ruling word for word. Did you?
Part 99:
It follows from the foregoing considerations that the answer to Question 3 is that Article 12(b) and subparagraph (a) of the first paragraph of Article 14 of Directive 95/46 are to be interpreted as meaning that, when appraising the conditions for the application of those provisions, it should inter alia be examined whether the data subject has a right that the information in question relating to him personally should, at this point in time, no longer be linked to his name by a list of results displayed following a search made on the basis of his name, without it being necessary in order to find such a right that the inclusion of the information in question in that list causes prejudice to the data subject. As the data subject may, in the light of his fundamental rights under Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter, request that the information in question no longer be made available to the general public on account of its inclusion in such a list of results, those rights override, as a rule, not only the economic interest of the operator of the search engine but also the interest of the general public in having access to that information upon a search relating to the data subject’s name. However, that would not be the case if it appeared, for particular reasons, such as the role played by the data subject in public life, that the interference with his fundamental rights is justified by the preponderant interest of the general public in having, on account of its inclusion in the list of results, access to the information in question.
In other words, the court ruled the only primary issue is whether the subject had a legal right to that information and could decide whether it should be disseminated, and that fundamental right should, by default, override all other issues, except for the specific case where the subject and the information in question play a sufficient public role that the right of the general public in knowing that information supersede the subject's right to privacy.
Although it doesn't explicitly state so, TAKEN TO ITS LOGICAL CONCLUSION the legal argument could be construed as leading to that conclusion.
Now, since you believe the ruling "clearly states that isn't the case" I'm sure you would have no problem quoting that clearly stated conclusion.
The original court decision was twofold 1. You have no right to be forgotten by the Newspaper that published the story 2. You have a right to be forgotten by search engines.
This only applies in the EU and only applies to companies incorporated in the EU. Google is welcome to shut down its various European subsidiaries (including the ones in Ireland and the Netherlands that they use to shelter income).
It will be interesting to see how this ruling actually gets implemented by member states of the EU. It appears to be highly problematic for various reasons. First, because the ruling while comporting with EU law appears inconsistent with how the internet actually works. Taken to its logical conclusion it states that it could be legal in the EU for someone to publish information that can theoretically be accessed by the general public, but illegal for anyone else to point out that fact. The ruling also states that its legal interpretation only applies to legal entities that are actually within the EU. That means global entities like Google can be held to the legal standard articulated within their ruling, but entities outside the EU are completely immune. So, a search engine in China, say, that had no subsidiaries within the EU would be free to ignore EU's attempt to implement this "right to be forgotten" principle. But if a large enough search engine anywhere contains that information, its not hard to presume technology that would make it accessible from anywhere. In the extreme, you'd just balkanize search, with different search engines referring to each other to access content an individual search engine was legally not allowed to offer.
More likely you'd simply make it much more inconvenient for countries that attempt to enforce this type of law to access global search. And you'd encourage your own citizens to use search engines outside the regulatory umbrella of your own country to obtain the most complete search results. The unintended consequences of this type of ruling seem to have no end to the list of detrimental collateral damage that they can cause.
The internet has nothing wrong with it that we couldn't fix with a combination of net neutrality and convincing American ISPs to get off their asses and bring us up to speed with the rest of the third world.
Net neutrality and speed increases would not solve the intrinsic problems with DNS architecture, NAT proxies breaking things, gigantic non-aggregate BGP tables, limited IPv4 address space, limitations of TCP protocol, ICMP mismanagement, lack of standards to address continuous disruption in mobile environments, and a whole mess of other problems that are currently addressed by patchwork solutions, or simply no solutions.
As for this BS marketroid term "Internet of Things"... Please people, just... Don't let them win. The internet has always had "things" on it. Whether that "thing" means your PC or your phone or your microwave. The idea of having every device in your house online should terrify you, not delight you, so fuck upgrades that make it easier for your fridge to tell the NSA that you eat the same things as Joe Terrorist.
At one time, people said the same thing about PC connectivity to the internet. Who are you that you need to connect to the global internet. The internet is for mainframes and important computers; why would you want anyone else to be able to connect to your computer, and why should we allow you to connect to everyone elses?
Paranoia notwithstanding, it should be up to individuals to decide what they connect and how they connect and what capabilities they decide to leverage. But if you think its bad for your fridge to be connected to the internet, I have no idea why you would allow your computer to be connected to it either. That's infinitely more dangerous.
Nellie Moffitt is a clueless person who shouldn't be quoted on technical manners.
"their GPS ... can give away their position to the enemy"
A GPS receiver in a traditional e-reader (ARE there any traditional e-readers with a GPS?) can't give away your position on a sub because: 1) A GPS receiver is only a receiver 2) It doesn't know your position because it is in a metal tube 100's of feet below the water.
Kindle fire? B&N Nook? Yep both of those "e-readers" have GPS. And you know submarines occasionally do spent time at the surface, where their whereabouts are still a good thing to keep secret? Clearly instead of a more detailed policy they simply exclude any device that might resemble one with such capabilities, as a safeguard.
Its not just current positions that are potentially useful to an enemy, its also historical positioning. An e-reader that managed to get a GPS fix and record that position in memory could eventually be lost or stolen, and positional data points retrieved. While an e-reader cannot get a GPS fix in a submarine while underwater under normal conditions, the many possible ways it could accidentally be exposed to GPS signals are such that its not worth the risk to guard against them all. And on surface ships the chance that a general purpose e-reader could collect and store that information is far too high to risk using them aboard active duty warships.
They are talking about the GPS ground stations that monitors the GPS signals (and is programed with its exact position and altitude) and determine what corrections, if any, need to be made to the GPS signals (so that what it knows to be its correct position is the same as what its GPS receiver is telling it)
Actually, there are no such receiver stations for US GPS systems anywhere within the Russian Federation. I believe the GPS stations they are talking about are differential GPS stations, which are used to increase the accuracy of GPS positioning from satellites from about a couple meters to a few centimeters. A list of DGPS stations is here. Of the stations listed as associated with Russia, most show as either planned or currently on trial, which could explain where there are discrepancies in reporting about how many there are. Its possible that the reporting talks about eleven because of the nineteen stations showing as "on trial" eleven are actually on-line and delivering commercial signals.
Like what? You said "numerous". Name three.
I can name more than three. Skype or other IP telephony (gatewayed through public wifi for extra measure), Hacked PBX call redirectors (which are a favorite of many scammers), prepaid cell phone, disposable SIM cards, telephone call anonymizing services, public pay phone.
No one is going to shoot you for not paying taxes. And what do you suppose they do when someone refuses to peacefully submit to arrest for failure to pay their official annual extortion fee, through a barred and reinforced door? Hint: They don't challenge you to a debate..
Sure, if you take it far enough, you could force the government to shoot you. Given the right forced circumstances could also force me to shoot you. That same power you think is the only power the government has, is ultimately the only power you have also. Taken to the ludicrous extreme, the only power you really have ultimately is the power to kill people who oppose you.
/ Fact of the day: The US made it through over half of its existence with no income tax in place except for extremely limited wartime assessments.
Also, electricity and reliable indoor plumbing. The historical circumstances of the country have no direct bearing on its current functional requirements and goals. Whether the government levies too much taxes or not, the fact that it did not levy a general income tax in the past is not particularly relevant. For most of US history women could be denied the right to vote because the US Constitution granted almost unlimited power to the states to decide more or less arbitrarily who could and could not vote. The fact that the country apparently functioned reasonably well without granting women the right to vote on the federal level does not mean it was not a beneficial change.
Has your government done anything you're not proud of? Comitted any acts you call evil? You chose to pay taxes didn't you? No, actually, I don't. I submit to taxation only under duress, the threat of Government Guns appearing on my doorstep. I actively oppose the majority of US foreign policy, and consider the government in its current form as little more than an occupying entity entirely hostile to both the constitution and the founding principles of my country.
No one is going to shoot you for not paying taxes. They may imprison you, but that's a conscious choice. Conscientious objectors have gone to prison for far less motivation than opposing an "occupying entity entirely hostile to both the constitution and the founding principles of my country."
If you genuinely believe that to be the case, financially supporting such an entity and willingly living under its rule is a far more serious act than working within the bureaucracy of the FCC.
So is this a case of too much government involvement in "open source" things or is this a case of the government is a bit late and should have prevented this situation from happening in the first place?
In my opinion neither. The government has no specific interest in deciding how people choose to invest their money, provided those investments are not explicitly fraudulent. But they do have an obligation to police illegal fraud. Kickstarter projects can fail: that is the risk investors take as investors. But if the people running the project do not make a good-faith effort to produce what they have asserted they can produce for their investors, that's a crime. I would say going dark on your investors for almost a year strongly suggests no good faith effort is being made to complete the project.