is also missing. The website you are reading is IPv4-only and hasn't bothered to publish an AAAA record in all the time it's been posting IPv6 articles.
And how long does it take to IPv6 enable a website nowadays, even if only in a basic "testing" mode before you try to redo all your blacklist scripts, etc.? About ten minutes.
It might be the worst nuclear accident but it's nowhere close to the world's worst nuclear "deliberate", of which there were at least two with much more cost.
To be honest, for the world's worst nuclear accident, it shows how scared we are of nuclear power.
There are men in the pictures, assembling a structure to trundle over the top of the reactor in the background. They no doubt have exposure limits and suitable apparatus but the fact remains that they are standing around it. There's a 19 mile exclusion zone. That's about equivalent to the zones put around nuclear testing sites anyway (and there are even tourist trips into that exclusion zone on a regular basis).
Sure, there *was* fallout and biological effects, and it's not something you want to ever repeat - that's undeniable, but in terms of taking out countries, or killing millions, it hasn't exactly worked out that way even under the shoddiest of safety regimes. It can be argued that all of the worst nuclear accidents combined are significantly "safer" than the best output from modern coal plants combined, in terms of long-term damage. Hell, it's safer than cars, which are currently being linked to everything from asthma to autism.
We just need to handle it sensibly. Put a 25 mile exclusion zone around them. Site them away from centres of population. Encase them in the equivalent of the measures being put around Chernobyl already, by default - rather than waiting for an accident before you do so. And stop being sloppy when running them (admittedly the hardest to do).
The fact is that, even with Chernobyl, the knock-on effects aren't Armageddon as predicted. Fukushima had a fecking tsunami wash over it and similar ineptness in terms of safety (the only other "Level 7" accident ever), and the deaths were almost exclusively due to the tsunami itself, not the reactor, and all the local population (again... grrr....) were not exposed to a radiation level that affected health (only a couple of workers who were on the site). And, again, outside of the ten miles exclusion zone, not much happens at all.
No-one is saying they're "safe". But because their danger is much more visible when exposed, they get a worse rap than some silent gases being spewed off into the air for decades on end and killing us and the atmosphere. They are "safer" still. Still.
Keep building them, keep decommissioning old ones, and make sure you stick them out of the way and suffer the transfer losses BY LAW before you build new ones. By modern law, you wouldn't be allowed to have a 1960's coal power plant within that distance of a population anyway (if at all) because of the same amount of hazard to health. We just need to get them AWAY from people and accept that out of over 400 power stations currently in operation (not including those that have been decommissioned) worldwide, there have only been a handful of incidents and the vast majority of those have little, if any, impact. And even the "big" accidents are no worse than a pretty minor natural disaster.
Because nuke testing has only been around less than a hundred years. In universal scales, that's barely worth bothering with. It's literally a fleeting spark. The Sun is 4.6bn years old alone. Even from the Sun, it would have been a long wait to see some activity on earth that you could detect by looking for nukes (if they even have a signature that will travel across the galaxy which seems unlikely given that thousands of them have gone off across the globe in the past and we barely notice *here*, let alone light-years away), and the spectacle would be inherently short-lived (given that we either will switch to another weapon in the next 100 years or blow ourselves up anyway, which nearly happened in the Cold War, let alone modern times).
And then you have to have ANOTHER civilisation somewhere out there, in a SIMILARLY advanced state also detonating nukes and thereby thinking of looking for other's nuke detonations, and they have to be in the same part of space or, critically, roughly the same time as us to notice us - even if they do nothing but stare permanently in the perfect direction to see us and have no obstacles.
If you made a time-lapse on a similar scale (that video is one second = one month) for the entire galaxy since its birth as a galaxy (so you're probably looking at one second = a million years to even get close to something that was about the same length), we'd barely be a tiny colour change, on a tiny single pixel, a blip at the very, very, very, very end of the very last frame of the very last second of the time-lapse and barely even register on the data whatsoever. And that's just a galaxy, of which there are 170 billion by even the best estimate.
And you're expecting a civilisation similarly "blippy" to just happen to be looking at us for the time of their time and see our blip, in an entire universe.
And light pollution measures and energy saving says that the streetlighting we've had for a mere fraction of a galactic second (i.e. a couple of hundred years) won't be here in that same fraction again.
Hell, as it is, we try to reduce the amount of light that goes somewhere unnecessary (e.g. the sky!) or that is produced and doesn't do anything. There are already countries and cities with lighting that's dynamic based on the cars rolling over it (which means the signal is even HARDER to find, even if you knew what you were looking for).
And in terms of the stretch of a civilisation, lighting visible even from orbit, let alone the other side of the galaxy, is literally a tiny flicker that you'll only catch if you're constantly listening to EXACTLY that, in EXACTLY the right place for a few billion years.
Hell, it's hard enough to see all of Earth's artificial lighting from orbit if there is cloud cover, let alone from somewhere like where Voyager currently is, and as you got further out the inverse square law solves the problem nicely to give you a probability of anyone detecting it tending rather swiftly towards zero.
If you want to detect a civilisation, about the only sensible thing to do is ignore the planets, look at the stars. Because sources of energy that huge, that well light-up, that stable, that predictable and, with suitable technology, even harvestable (I believe it's called a Dyson sphere) are likely to be something that won't stop being a commodity for a long time and activity on them will be inherently visible (even if that's by one-day disappearing entirely).
Think to yourself. I plonk you down into the universe at an unknown point and at an unknown time since the Big Bang. I give you a billion-year-long-life (sound a lot? It's not). How do you find someone who's had the same done to them? The chances are you're not even going to be able to see each other, would never be at the right stages at the right times to communicate with each other before moving onto the "next most advanced / obvious method of communication", and even if you do by some chance talk be too far away or your communication too "out of date" to do anything useful with it.
Until you can quite literally bend space and visit other places, it's all a bit pointless to be looking because of simple physical laws. And by the time you *can* do that, it's easier to just plonk a sensor on every star system with your space bending techniques than it would be to ever listen out for them all.
We are quite literally talking about how to detect a particular mayfly of interest on an entire planet of activity. And by the time we do it, that mayfly has evolved to build its own space program and buggered off deeper into the galaxy anyway.
The chances are that we are *not* alone in the universe. Seriously.
However, the chances also state that us ever finding someone else within the existence of our species is very small.
And the chances that we can communicate with them before they die out is smaller still.
And the chances that anyone of our species will ever meet anyone of theirs, "in person", are even smaller still.
Simple physics still has to be overcome - you can't move faster than the speed of light, and by the time we detect something interesting, it's probably too late to communicate with it, and by the time we *do* communicate with it and verify what's happened, the time to GET to it means it's probably too late to ever actually meet them. Unless a planet literally NEXT DOOR to us in the galaxy exhibits signs of complex life, it's barely worth even trying to communicate.
And, as pointed out, the greatest chance of something happening is that we are in fact contacted by someone else. As yet, that's not happened but we are literally, what, a few hundred years into the capability of detecting things like that and the average span of life itself is some billions of years.
The chances of two nearby lifeforms being at the same or greater evolutionary point as each other, around the same time, within a reasonable distance, both looking for each other, and then happening by a billion-to-one chance to actually discover a foreign message... it's just too small to worry much about.
And, actually, the biggest chance is that any civilisation capable of communicating to us at any point in its history had a similar exponential curve in technological innovation at the point they got interested and actually now use technology MILLIONS of years advanced of our own (so the world's best supercomputer looks like a particularly curiously-shaped fossil to them). By the time we catch up, they will be MILLIONS of years ahead again and if not actually zipping between dimensions and creating their own universes, then at least looking for "life" by other definitions and in places that we can't even IMAGINE to look, let alone have the technology to do so.
Seriously, what if the best communication method to use at the moment is some quantum effect? Quantum mechanics is less than 100 years old, really. So it would be like expecting Plato to detect a code hidden in entangled photon emissions to communicate with someone even a few hundred years (or, say, one politician less in terms of global education) ahead of us.
About 8 years ago, I bought a motherboard. It had an AMD chip on it. Literally *on* it. You couldn't remove it, it wasn't even socketed. This isn't anything new. I want to say the board was MSI but I can't be sure enough to remember without looking.
Had that motherboard for all that time without a problem (still have it somewhere) and I can't even remember the last time I changed a component inside a machine (used to be fitting PCI cards all day long, adding RAM, etc.). Given that I've managed thousands of machines over the last ten years, that's a pretty significant sign that computers - generally speaking, for business use - get replaced before they ever get upgraded.
Hell, I actually used my last piece of Arctic Silver to give to my dad friend's for use on fitting heatsinks to his professional remote-control model racing car. That was a few years ago now. I'm not even sure I'd know the right sockets any more without having to research it. In the past, I was always adding ram, sticking in cards for the "new" USB, Ethernet etc. standards, and occasionally (very occasionally) having to re-seat a heatsink. Replacing a CPU? I can't even remember the last time I ever did it, but probably back in the 386 days.
The fact is, as has been the case since the early Pentium days, if you're upgrading your CPU it's because you either bought a very cheap setup initially, or for replacement (which suggests substandard components anyway, I can't tell you that I've ever replaced a faulty CPU), or to get every ounce out of an old machine in a very uneconomical way (much cheaper nowadays to just buy a replacement that will almost certainly be faster).
For the majority of home users, and the vast majority of small / office businesses, there's just no need to ever upgrade the CPU. And if you do, it normally means upgrading the motherboard and probably other components as well, which takes you into the cost of a new setup anyway. Motherboards with CPU's hard-wired is really NOT that big a deal for the vast, vast majority of people. Hell, for all intents and purposes, most laptops are already "non-upgradeable" anyway (and, yes, I once owned a laptop that had a soldered-in CPU too).
When it comes to it, CPU's being socketed still is something that I find incredibly surprising. There were times when BIOS chips were socketed too, but most people scrapped that idea. There were times when FPU's were separately socketed, but that went the way of the dodo. Networking used to require an expansion card. So did USB, sound, and a myriad other features that we take for granted. Hell, even GPU's are coming onto the board now, but there I at least see a reason to allow upgrades because the onboards aren't that powerful and the expansion card ones still don't hit bottlenecks on the standard motherboards (but, to be honest, the same was try of everything from soundcards to winmodems at one point).
Outside of large servers with SMP motherboards (which, after a year or two, the cost of adding more processors usually outweighs the cost of the server anyway), I don't even care about CPU sockets.
This is one of those things, inevitably, that will go into an integrated package. And, overall, nobody will notice. And the gamers (I hate the word "enthusiasts" for things like this, the same as I do for trainspotters, etc.) will still be upgrading to new motherboards at the same time anyway (because how else will get you the full power of your new CPU?).
Talking about upgrading CPU's just reminds me of the days of things like the 486 DX4, where you could ramp up an old 386 motherboard to a 100MHz CPU - still, without upgrading the motherboard little of serious use benefited very much. And it was probably cheaper to just buy a new board and CPU simultaneously.
Worried about this? It was happening years ago. I can probably dig out a board that was available on general sale to prove it (even at the time, I bought it because I thought "I'll never be upgrading the CPU without the motherboard any
And the movie you linked? "simplistic to the point of idiocy" it's been called. That makes me wonder exactly what you learned from them than a highschool textbook could have taught you better.
For anyone else posting - this is serious quackery here, leading in lawsuits and charges of administering illegal medicine by various private individuals, groups and government departments.
Or a conspiracy theory to stop cancer treatment reaching the masses. You decide. I'll go with the former.
My ex was in chronic joint pain for years. She was told by leading medical experts that it was arthritis (before she was 30) and prescribed all kinds of arthritis medication and treatment over decades for it before giving up because nothing really worked.
When I started living with her, I spotted lots of problems she had with movement and joints and I had to explain to her that, no, it's not normal to hurt all the time, or to dislocate your shoulder by opening a jar of sweets. We googled around, and put a lot of footwork into avoiding quackery, and ended up discovering about hypermobility syndrome (now call JHS, where J = joint) purely by chance. The doctor had never heard of it and was interested in it up to a point.
Basically, her DNA codes a few dodgy things that make her cartilage weak. Most people have JHS in some form or another but if two people with particular bad cases coincide to make a child, the child is *generally* worse. There's also an even worse form called EDS where sufferers are in a wheelchair from birth.
This gives some sufferers chronic pain from being a baby while others just become good ballet dancers (huge amount of flexibility in the joints, which *can* wear the joints to the point that inflammation of tissue and joint damage results). My ex was a professional black belt karate instructor throughout most of her painful years (because flexing joints made them no worse, and was not a way to induce the pain - a clear sign that it *wasn't* arthritis from the very start.
In the end, we gave up on all the doctors she'd had previously, and researched it ourselves. We hit at random upon a rare condition that had almost zero information on it at the time. Apparently there was one guy in the country doing research on the condition when we discovered it (and other sufferers we met up with describe him as one of the most arrogant and ignorant doctors they'd ever met - telling tiny slips of girls that were not far off transparency that they were obese and he wouldn't treat them, etc.).
We FORCED her current doctor to refer us to a specialist. We were referred to a consultant who dealt with arthritis. However, he was bright enough to look and say instantly "You don't have arthritis, you have hypermobility" and write us off with a confirmed diagnosis that the doctor would at least accept to prescribe more suitable medication for (i.e. not arthritis medication which worsens the problem because the condition is the polar opposite of arthritis).
Beyond that, she never got much help and still has the condition. Variably over the years she's been registered disabled and able to run a karate club (though not simultaneously - the condition is always present but the severity varies greatly with seemingly random triggers and even things like the weather).
Bear in mind that all this happened in a country with free healthcare.
- Doctors can't know everything. - Even those that are specialised in your area might not help you at all. - Even those who want to help often can't find out enough to get you to someone that helps. - Even those with a real interest on the cutting edge of research may be able to do no more than prescribe a painkiller and sign a form for you. - The human body is more complicated than any one person, or even group, can ever understand.
But, that said, we went to great lengths to avoid quackery. At a residential weekend for sufferers, there was one true doctor who gave a short 10 minute presentation and then tried to escape before he got hounded for everyone's personal problems. 50% of the rest were salesmen trying to flog memory foam pillows and other junk to "help your condition". The other 50% were nothing more than charlatans (I shall never forget being in a Reiki healing class for moral support - against my will - and there being a ten-minute interlude between the instructor and a student where one "saw colours" with her eyes closed and then they discussed how insightful and "in-touch" with Reiki that made her while
Stop declaring war and sending money overseas. You'd get back about $500-750bn a year instantly.
Abolish all taxes and associated administration, except for one.
Stop declaring war and sending money overseas.
Implement a 50% income tax rate on individuals. By a quick reckoning based on census data and current average wages, this would give you about $10T a year. Current tax receipts contribute only 25% of the current $15T annual GDP (only Chile and Mexico tax less as a share of GDP!). This would make them contribute nearer to 67%. The rich get taxed in proportion, the non-working don't get taxed, the lowly worker gets taxed a pittance. Products, imports and running a business get cheaper = wages have more value anyway.
Stop declaring war and sending money overseas.
Enforce that income tax like mad, so that people *can't* escape it. Hell, make all currency have to go through a central US bank if necessary.
An interesting thought - I wonder how rigorous the average police search is.
As someone that just bought three Gigabit powerline-Ethernet devices, it would (as a thought experiment) be a cinch to put two of them to work to push a connection around your house and the third ANYWHERE on the household electrical wiring to pull off an Internet connection (hell, it could be at the bottom of the garden or inside a security light, or in the walls, or in the loft).
Unlike an Ethernet or Wi-fi device which would advertise its connection to the local LAN and router, a powerline device would be a lot more subtle (and if you've retrieved two, you probably wouldn't think there might be a third, fourth, fifth).
Sure, you might find a MAC address reference in logs of the router somewhere to a third device (which would be identifiable as a powerline unit, I suspect) but it's unlikely that such logs exist on a home network if you have, for example, DHCP turned off. And that's all the sort of investigation that would have to take place in the computer forensics departments, not during any "raid".
Even a wireless device would advertise itself and be easily discoverable with even the toy wifi finders you can get from ThinkGeek, but a powerline device? To prove it existed, you'd need to connect to the household wiring with some quite advanced tech, I should think, before the homeowner is "released" to remove any such devices.
To find it, without knowing it existed, would be quite unlikely. With a bit of homebrew, you could probably join the powerline functionality into an Ethernet wall-socket or mid-way along a cable run and not even notice the whole powerline network is there and cabled into the local network.
I have much more boring uses, though. I'm going to use the third plug to let my CCTV control unit be installed into the loft out of the reach of probing fingers and that single socket can then provide networking and power (and I can shove the noisy spinning-fan box with the UPS up into the loft but still remote-access it).
With the caveat that those people saying that eventually get a veto vote on any law they don't like.
So although it doesn't mean it it *mustn't* happen, the chances of any change not respecting that opinion are unlikely to make it into law in the end. It's a warning. "You can waste years of drafting law if you want, but we get the ultimate say when any of this is actually challenged and our opinion currently is..."
All risk-profiling does is make you *think* you're more likely to catch certain people. In fact, what it does is provide a list of constraints that those people will actively avoid triggering and, thus, stand much less chance of being caught. Do you really think any terrorist is thinking of using a liquid bomb since the liquid-size limitation rules came in force? No, they'd do something else just to avoid detection.
The *only* way, if you don't want to check everyone out manually each time, is to do entirely random security checks. Stick your guys on the frontline to catch anything "funny" but flag 1 in 10 people who go through completely at random and make it a condition of their employment that your security guys must check those people, young or old, rich or poor, first class or economy, in a wheelchair or with a false leg or completely healthy, no excuses.
All this does is catch the stupid terrorists who would be caught anyway, while giving the sensible ones a perfect opportunity to knowingly and predictably reduce their risk by huge amounts.
What risk category are you going to enter? Travelled to dodgy countries recently? A stayover for a time in a country will soon time that out so it's not relevant. Or just use a local rather than a foreigner. Age range? That's just getting into the "children / old people can't be terrorists" mentality, which is a stupid place to go. Race? Religion? Credit card history? All of the people you would catch from things like that should be caught ANYWAY by just decent security in the first place. All the rest, that you miss, will deliberately be missed by profiled screening.
At least with random screening you stand a chance of catching someone that's avoiding your profiling, and a chance of spotting new trends ("Here, John, isn't that the third guy we've stopped who's had a little vial in his bag?"), and a chance of actually scaring off terrorists / smugglers / etc. from trying in the first place.
But all this is moot while you only enforce a decade-old security policy based on a single (unsuccessful) incident, rather than thinking about what's actually likely to be dangerous and what's not.
I can't take 100ml of water in a single bottle (but I can take more of "baby milk", so long as I drink from it first - and that check is as rigorous as security watching me put it to my lips and then looking away!), but I can take several bottles that won't be inspected.
I can also take large poles in a rucksack, and various amount of improvised weapons, and hell I know someone who went through Heathrow three times while carrying CS spray (which is illegal to possess in the UK, let alone on the plane). It wouldn't be hard to fashion an instrument from perfectly ordinary hand luggage capable of levering open the cabin door and threatening the pilot (and UK cockpits are not armed and don't have armed officers onboard) if that was your intention.
If you want security, automated profiling is like shouting "friend or foe?!". Nobody with any brains is ever going to shout foe (or be flagged by your profiling) if they have hostile intent.
Want to improve security? Scrap the enormous queues at every major UK airport - by scrapping all the stupid hand luggage restrictions (obviously keep things like "explosives" on the list, though!) and other crap (grab a tray, take off your belt, your shoes, put your laptop separately in here, etc.), and with all the time you spare your security people can have a 10 second chat with each passenger as they go through the gates rather than just dumbly standing there "checking" your passport (which is basically a "computer says no" exercise) or having 4-5 of them wave you through the metal detector while they have a chat.
Let them stop anyone they like and send them to a private queue for proper pat-down (out of the main queue, away from accomplices, not backing up the frontline guys), and also have automated gates that send 1-in-10 or 1-in-50, or whatever ratio, of people that way completely at r
Love all the posts about using gloves etc., but the physicist in me didn't even bother with thinking about that.
Get iron rod, shove in ground on side nearest the supply box (or one either side of you to make sure), join to fence using other iron rods or similar (literally a "now throw it on from here" connection with no risk). Then cut fence. Isn't that going to be more effective, shorting the fence to ground, than leaving it live in your hands? If you're really determined, find the source of the voltage and short close to that.
Or failing that, just do what the local cable thieves do with train track and signalling copper when they steal it (if a crowbar across it isn't enough to make it safe by fusing / grounding the local supply). Attach large (non-conductive) hook from a safe distance (a plank of wood could probably always be sought that would long enough), drive off and take the fence with you. Hell, melt it down while you're at it.
Stopping a thief who is ALREADY going to the lengths of breaking into a place and stealing cable (sometimes even live cable, and not always unsuccessfully) is going to need more than a little fence-zapper, which are quite common in ordinary households in some countries to keep even small livestock contained. Especially if the pay-off is more than a day's wages in copper.
People in my country steal live railway tracks and miles of signalling cable in less than a minute and get away with it. An electric fence (which would be illegal in my country anyway) isn't going to hinder them *that* much.
Almost all security measures rely on the fact that it attracts suspicion to circumvent them and hinders people for a brief moment to prevent casual theft. In reality, short of a guy with a gun you're not going to stop someone stealing something that's worth money. And even then, if it's worth enough, they'll just bring their own guns or pay him off.
Nope. And won't be for several thousand years, if that's what you're after.
Methinks that in a decade or two some natural process will start to decrease carbon levels and then those people put in charge of whatever-crackpot-carbon-saving scheme now will be able to do an I-told-you-so then. When, really, everything we did made zero difference whatsoever.
There is no way to gather a significant amount of data to suggest that we're doing anything "bad" or that anything "good" we do is working without comparing to some 10,000+ year cycle that we've never observed. Best records for such things go back a few hundred years, and beyond that the data is very sketchy and specific only to specific areas (e.g. ice cores, etc.).
Have you never had to pull small plastic model parts from a sprue?
Seems to me that this is a necessary and obvious part of doing any sort of 3D modelling in any kind of material, or things won't mould/print properly (because it's not technically possible for them to float in space while you work on them).
If anything, I would hope the patent was dismissed on the grounds of obviousness, but certainly it should be obvious to one "skilled in the art" of 3D printing. And, failing that, if they just got some reasonable and non-discriminatory patent licensing terms, there's a few million dollars lying about that they could have a chunk of just by NOT suing.
But that's not the problem either - information you put into the public domain stays there. Information you give to companies will be available from within those companies to the people who are given access. Breaches of that trust are data-protection issues which we also have laws against.
Cases in point: In the UK, we've had things like NHS staff look up celebrity medical records and publish bits online. Their actions were logged, they were charged, they were sacked. It was illegal.
It's not a case of what happens that's already illegal, it's a case of what is currently ILLEGAL that you're going to make LEGAL (which is almost always the only interesting part of any legislative bill in any country). That would include the ability for a handful of government departments (some with zero need of it) to LEGALLY just read your email on a whim and never explain their actions. We wouldn't know because there would be no judicial oversight.
We've had cases in the UK where councils given similar powers would do things like investigate people's shopping habits to see if they were the ones who'd thrown the wrong recycling into the wrong recycling bin. Had them literally park CCTV vans across the road to watch it happen because of data gleaned from these "innocent", uncontrolled sources.
If a private email of mine leaks, it's either from the person I sent it to or the mailservers along the way. It doesn't take much to trace those kinds of things and the police will do it because it would be against the law for someone in Google to publish my private email without my permission.
But this would allow, for example, a government department employee to read my email and show all his mates in the office, and maybe use it against me when I go to a government office requiring some random service. Nobody would ever know unless it came to light in some other way. It might be a breach of workplace policy but his actions would be entirely LEGAL, and by its very definition it would override or conflict with data protection laws.
Read this change in the law as nothing more than "we don't want to have to tell a judge why we want to read your email", which sounds infinitely more sinister and should worry you more than anything else. There's no legitimate reason that such requests can't already be done WITH judicial oversight. And if they were clogging up court systems with them, it would be the JUDGES complaining about their use.
This is just a way to side-step a legal system as if it were a hurdle, by making the act you want to perform legal even if it goes against several other laws and would be put down by a judge in a second.
And in my country the police (or anybody else) aren't allowed to routinely intercept my post without a warrant (and otherwise it has to be random discovery, i.e. the post office spot a suspicious package or trail of packages and inform the police, etc.).
So even if your analogy were perfect, it's got little to do with the warrantless tracking.
That said, even if you encrypt the postcard, there's nothing to say that the guy the other end isn't forced to give a decrypted version to his local law enforcement or face jail-time anyway. Which is, again, strangely true to the analogous email storage too.
The problem here is NOT message security. The problem here is law enforcement being able to do these things with no tracking, no permissions, no way to tell if they are deliberately targeting innocents (e.g. fishing expeditions), no way to tell if they are intercepting their old girlfriend's post, etc. because of the desire to remove JUDICIAL OVERSIGHT. Nobody cares that X sent an email that was used to prosecute him.
We *do* care that person in department *Y* has routine, unauthorised, complete access to things we do with no judicial oversight and could be using them to snoop on your girlfriend, or see if his hunch was right about your sexual habits. And THAT is none of their business, and why we have judicial oversight in the form of having to ask for warrants that are limited in scope (i.e. you can't just ask for a warrant to "always" do this "for ever").
This isn't a shield, it's a tripwire with a gun on the end. When a missile (or something that looks like a missile) comes in, it fires at it.
And although we can fantasise, the reason these shields are so popular is that you eliminate a weapon from your enemy's arsenal. That just means they'll find bigger, better weapons and (also) usually means that you can shoot them much more effectively because they can't shoot back.
There's no such thing as a "peace-making" weapon. All you do is block avenues, in the same way that we "blocked" being shot by arrows by wearing chainmail hundreds of years ago, and then someone invented bigger and more powerful bows, arrows and other devices that pierced it.
The country that invents a truly perfect "shield" (ala Star Trek, etc.) will be "safe" for about 5 years. If that. Because someone will steal it, break it, copy it, pierce it, or otherwise make it obsolete. ESPECIALLY if you have the capability to fire "out" without someone firing "in". Because that makes their entire nuclear arsenal worthless, and they'll do whatever they can to make it useless for you too (by levelling the field one way or the other).
It's nothing to do with Secure Boot, just dodgy BIOS-writing again.
From TFS: "There's no reason at all for the firmware to be parsing these strings."
This is basically on a par with Windows 3.1 looking for MS-DOS signatures and refusing to boot otherwise (though that had an illegally anticompetitive reason), with BIOS's like the one I just forced an update from my supplier for (by threatening to return a significant number of laptops) which consisted of a BIOS checking for a certain value on disk being 00 before it would boot from that disk (a value which corresponds to 00 only on unencrypted Windows NTFS-formatted disks) and refusing to boot Truecrypt'd disks or anything with a non-NTFS primary partition (very common on certain HP and Dell models, that particular "bug"), and the like of which I've seen DOZENS of times in my own purchases because of:
STUPID BIOS WRITERS.
There is no reason to ever test that string, and certainly none to use it as a conditional to boot. It has nothing to do with any advertised UEFI feature whatsoever. The fact that the UEFI code even bothers to interrogate that string for anything other than displaying it to the user tells you that the manufacturer doesn't care about, and doesn't test, anything but Windows to the point they will hard-core their machines to only run Windows. They don't care about UEFI at all, or secure booting, or anything - just that it works when they run Windows.
Makes you kinda wonder who would ultimately be behind putting such an unnecessary and counter-productive decision into a machine's BIOS really.
1) America would be the last place I tried to muscle into the cellular networks. There's lots of small European countries etc. that you could just buy the entire rights to and not have the hassle, and work as a small-scale test of their capability and services.
2) If Google come to the UK and set up a data plan with a realistic cost (i.e. I can't measure it in GBP / Mb without hitting tiny fractions) then I'd buy it - paranoid privacy worries or not.
What mobile telephony needs is an outside player willing to change the rules. So my 3G connection would actually hit technical, not political, limits and I can just pay to compensate for any impact at a rate that provides reasonable profit for a realistic cost.
Google would seem to be the ideal ones to overturn the data problems. Hell, I'd pay MORE than I'm currently on for an unlimited-data (properly!) connection that doesn't limit Skype / Google Voice and doesn't give me any voice or SMS service whatsoever. Such things just don't exist.
When offices are going VoIP and everything else is "oIP" in some fashion now, trying to sell me the end service without giving me access to the "IP" side of things is just profiteering and a backwards technological step.
Don't even get me started on differing and extortionate international rates even when your carrier has a presence in both countries (I once heard the argument that telecoms companies "fund" those underwater cables to other countries etc. and so deserve to charge more for their international services - I guarantee you more traffic transits internationally for general Internet purposes than does anything related to voice telecoms, and if it *doesn't* then the transit can be paid for directly without needing telecoms voice traffic to buoy it up).
Differentiating between crimes isn't done in this fine scale (i.e. at 10 you can murder, but at 15 you can't, etc.) - you're either criminally responsible for your actions or not. The offence only determines the severity of the crime, not your capacity to know better.
Most countries have this at an age where the child should "know better", i.e. usually around 10 years old. Below that age, you can't be "criminally responsible" for the acts you've committed, because it's unlikely you understood what you were doing or what the impact would be (i.e. a toddler pushing another toddler off a high-rise block of flats while playing).
What you're confusing is the SEVERITY of the crime, and the capacity to know whether what you're doing is wrong or not. The severity of the crime determines the possible "punishment", the capacity to know what you were doing determines whose fault that was (i.e. parent for leaving you alone, you for not knowing better, etc.)
Assuming that they end up in a country over which a US court has jurisdiction and don't just, for example, get exported to some out-of-the-way country that would kill for the latest tech and aren't too bothered about whether Apple "supports" their hardware or not.
Wouldn't be surprised if those devices weren't already out in the wild somewhere, in some other country, and though you can block them from going on iTunes, etc. you can't stop them being hacked / used for other things. Plus, the criminals would actually make quite a lot of money just selling them as stolen goods - more than enough to cover their risk - even if they are instantly disabled. No doubt there are some Apple Store hacks wandering around the net already and that store would presumably operate by software sending some unique identifier to Apple? Hack the software, change the identifier, problem solved.
Believe it or not, Apple doesn't run the world, and even stolen goods have a market for them. Your car analogy still holds, though - but do you think some Middle Eastern country's politicians would care that the luxury sports cars they obtained were originally stolen from elsewhere and couldn't be registered in the US? That exact same thing already happens with cars, and a truck full of iPads is even easier to move out of the country without detection.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, the next step:
IPv6 Capable end-points:
is also missing. The website you are reading is IPv4-only and hasn't bothered to publish an AAAA record in all the time it's been posting IPv6 articles.
And how long does it take to IPv6 enable a website nowadays, even if only in a basic "testing" mode before you try to redo all your blacklist scripts, etc.? About ten minutes.
New Rule:
Websites are only allowed to try to garner page-views on IPv6 when all the websites that article is posted on are available over IPv6.
It might be the worst nuclear accident but it's nowhere close to the world's worst nuclear "deliberate", of which there were at least two with much more cost.
To be honest, for the world's worst nuclear accident, it shows how scared we are of nuclear power.
There are men in the pictures, assembling a structure to trundle over the top of the reactor in the background. They no doubt have exposure limits and suitable apparatus but the fact remains that they are standing around it. There's a 19 mile exclusion zone. That's about equivalent to the zones put around nuclear testing sites anyway (and there are even tourist trips into that exclusion zone on a regular basis).
Sure, there *was* fallout and biological effects, and it's not something you want to ever repeat - that's undeniable, but in terms of taking out countries, or killing millions, it hasn't exactly worked out that way even under the shoddiest of safety regimes. It can be argued that all of the worst nuclear accidents combined are significantly "safer" than the best output from modern coal plants combined, in terms of long-term damage. Hell, it's safer than cars, which are currently being linked to everything from asthma to autism.
We just need to handle it sensibly. Put a 25 mile exclusion zone around them. Site them away from centres of population. Encase them in the equivalent of the measures being put around Chernobyl already, by default - rather than waiting for an accident before you do so. And stop being sloppy when running them (admittedly the hardest to do).
The fact is that, even with Chernobyl, the knock-on effects aren't Armageddon as predicted. Fukushima had a fecking tsunami wash over it and similar ineptness in terms of safety (the only other "Level 7" accident ever), and the deaths were almost exclusively due to the tsunami itself, not the reactor, and all the local population (again... grrr....) were not exposed to a radiation level that affected health (only a couple of workers who were on the site). And, again, outside of the ten miles exclusion zone, not much happens at all.
No-one is saying they're "safe". But because their danger is much more visible when exposed, they get a worse rap than some silent gases being spewed off into the air for decades on end and killing us and the atmosphere. They are "safer" still. Still.
Keep building them, keep decommissioning old ones, and make sure you stick them out of the way and suffer the transfer losses BY LAW before you build new ones. By modern law, you wouldn't be allowed to have a 1960's coal power plant within that distance of a population anyway (if at all) because of the same amount of hazard to health. We just need to get them AWAY from people and accept that out of over 400 power stations currently in operation (not including those that have been decommissioned) worldwide, there have only been a handful of incidents and the vast majority of those have little, if any, impact. And even the "big" accidents are no worse than a pretty minor natural disaster.
Because nuke testing has only been around less than a hundred years. In universal scales, that's barely worth bothering with. It's literally a fleeting spark. The Sun is 4.6bn years old alone. Even from the Sun, it would have been a long wait to see some activity on earth that you could detect by looking for nukes (if they even have a signature that will travel across the galaxy which seems unlikely given that thousands of them have gone off across the globe in the past and we barely notice *here*, let alone light-years away), and the spectacle would be inherently short-lived (given that we either will switch to another weapon in the next 100 years or blow ourselves up anyway, which nearly happened in the Cold War, let alone modern times).
And then you have to have ANOTHER civilisation somewhere out there, in a SIMILARLY advanced state also detonating nukes and thereby thinking of looking for other's nuke detonations, and they have to be in the same part of space or, critically, roughly the same time as us to notice us - even if they do nothing but stare permanently in the perfect direction to see us and have no obstacles.
If you made a time-lapse on a similar scale (that video is one second = one month) for the entire galaxy since its birth as a galaxy (so you're probably looking at one second = a million years to even get close to something that was about the same length), we'd barely be a tiny colour change, on a tiny single pixel, a blip at the very, very, very, very end of the very last frame of the very last second of the time-lapse and barely even register on the data whatsoever. And that's just a galaxy, of which there are 170 billion by even the best estimate.
And you're expecting a civilisation similarly "blippy" to just happen to be looking at us for the time of their time and see our blip, in an entire universe.
And light pollution measures and energy saving says that the streetlighting we've had for a mere fraction of a galactic second (i.e. a couple of hundred years) won't be here in that same fraction again.
Hell, as it is, we try to reduce the amount of light that goes somewhere unnecessary (e.g. the sky!) or that is produced and doesn't do anything. There are already countries and cities with lighting that's dynamic based on the cars rolling over it (which means the signal is even HARDER to find, even if you knew what you were looking for).
And in terms of the stretch of a civilisation, lighting visible even from orbit, let alone the other side of the galaxy, is literally a tiny flicker that you'll only catch if you're constantly listening to EXACTLY that, in EXACTLY the right place for a few billion years.
Hell, it's hard enough to see all of Earth's artificial lighting from orbit if there is cloud cover, let alone from somewhere like where Voyager currently is, and as you got further out the inverse square law solves the problem nicely to give you a probability of anyone detecting it tending rather swiftly towards zero.
If you want to detect a civilisation, about the only sensible thing to do is ignore the planets, look at the stars. Because sources of energy that huge, that well light-up, that stable, that predictable and, with suitable technology, even harvestable (I believe it's called a Dyson sphere) are likely to be something that won't stop being a commodity for a long time and activity on them will be inherently visible (even if that's by one-day disappearing entirely).
Think to yourself. I plonk you down into the universe at an unknown point and at an unknown time since the Big Bang. I give you a billion-year-long-life (sound a lot? It's not). How do you find someone who's had the same done to them? The chances are you're not even going to be able to see each other, would never be at the right stages at the right times to communicate with each other before moving onto the "next most advanced / obvious method of communication", and even if you do by some chance talk be too far away or your communication too "out of date" to do anything useful with it.
Until you can quite literally bend space and visit other places, it's all a bit pointless to be looking because of simple physical laws. And by the time you *can* do that, it's easier to just plonk a sensor on every star system with your space bending techniques than it would be to ever listen out for them all.
We are quite literally talking about how to detect a particular mayfly of interest on an entire planet of activity. And by the time we do it, that mayfly has evolved to build its own space program and buggered off deeper into the galaxy anyway.
The chances are that we are *not* alone in the universe. Seriously.
However, the chances also state that us ever finding someone else within the existence of our species is very small.
And the chances that we can communicate with them before they die out is smaller still.
And the chances that anyone of our species will ever meet anyone of theirs, "in person", are even smaller still.
Simple physics still has to be overcome - you can't move faster than the speed of light, and by the time we detect something interesting, it's probably too late to communicate with it, and by the time we *do* communicate with it and verify what's happened, the time to GET to it means it's probably too late to ever actually meet them. Unless a planet literally NEXT DOOR to us in the galaxy exhibits signs of complex life, it's barely worth even trying to communicate.
And, as pointed out, the greatest chance of something happening is that we are in fact contacted by someone else. As yet, that's not happened but we are literally, what, a few hundred years into the capability of detecting things like that and the average span of life itself is some billions of years.
The chances of two nearby lifeforms being at the same or greater evolutionary point as each other, around the same time, within a reasonable distance, both looking for each other, and then happening by a billion-to-one chance to actually discover a foreign message... it's just too small to worry much about.
And, actually, the biggest chance is that any civilisation capable of communicating to us at any point in its history had a similar exponential curve in technological innovation at the point they got interested and actually now use technology MILLIONS of years advanced of our own (so the world's best supercomputer looks like a particularly curiously-shaped fossil to them). By the time we catch up, they will be MILLIONS of years ahead again and if not actually zipping between dimensions and creating their own universes, then at least looking for "life" by other definitions and in places that we can't even IMAGINE to look, let alone have the technology to do so.
Seriously, what if the best communication method to use at the moment is some quantum effect? Quantum mechanics is less than 100 years old, really. So it would be like expecting Plato to detect a code hidden in entangled photon emissions to communicate with someone even a few hundred years (or, say, one politician less in terms of global education) ahead of us.
About 8 years ago, I bought a motherboard. It had an AMD chip on it. Literally *on* it. You couldn't remove it, it wasn't even socketed. This isn't anything new. I want to say the board was MSI but I can't be sure enough to remember without looking.
Had that motherboard for all that time without a problem (still have it somewhere) and I can't even remember the last time I changed a component inside a machine (used to be fitting PCI cards all day long, adding RAM, etc.). Given that I've managed thousands of machines over the last ten years, that's a pretty significant sign that computers - generally speaking, for business use - get replaced before they ever get upgraded.
Hell, I actually used my last piece of Arctic Silver to give to my dad friend's for use on fitting heatsinks to his professional remote-control model racing car. That was a few years ago now. I'm not even sure I'd know the right sockets any more without having to research it. In the past, I was always adding ram, sticking in cards for the "new" USB, Ethernet etc. standards, and occasionally (very occasionally) having to re-seat a heatsink. Replacing a CPU? I can't even remember the last time I ever did it, but probably back in the 386 days.
The fact is, as has been the case since the early Pentium days, if you're upgrading your CPU it's because you either bought a very cheap setup initially, or for replacement (which suggests substandard components anyway, I can't tell you that I've ever replaced a faulty CPU), or to get every ounce out of an old machine in a very uneconomical way (much cheaper nowadays to just buy a replacement that will almost certainly be faster).
For the majority of home users, and the vast majority of small / office businesses, there's just no need to ever upgrade the CPU. And if you do, it normally means upgrading the motherboard and probably other components as well, which takes you into the cost of a new setup anyway. Motherboards with CPU's hard-wired is really NOT that big a deal for the vast, vast majority of people. Hell, for all intents and purposes, most laptops are already "non-upgradeable" anyway (and, yes, I once owned a laptop that had a soldered-in CPU too).
When it comes to it, CPU's being socketed still is something that I find incredibly surprising. There were times when BIOS chips were socketed too, but most people scrapped that idea. There were times when FPU's were separately socketed, but that went the way of the dodo. Networking used to require an expansion card. So did USB, sound, and a myriad other features that we take for granted. Hell, even GPU's are coming onto the board now, but there I at least see a reason to allow upgrades because the onboards aren't that powerful and the expansion card ones still don't hit bottlenecks on the standard motherboards (but, to be honest, the same was try of everything from soundcards to winmodems at one point).
Outside of large servers with SMP motherboards (which, after a year or two, the cost of adding more processors usually outweighs the cost of the server anyway), I don't even care about CPU sockets.
This is one of those things, inevitably, that will go into an integrated package. And, overall, nobody will notice. And the gamers (I hate the word "enthusiasts" for things like this, the same as I do for trainspotters, etc.) will still be upgrading to new motherboards at the same time anyway (because how else will get you the full power of your new CPU?).
Talking about upgrading CPU's just reminds me of the days of things like the 486 DX4, where you could ramp up an old 386 motherboard to a 100MHz CPU - still, without upgrading the motherboard little of serious use benefited very much. And it was probably cheaper to just buy a new board and CPU simultaneously.
Worried about this? It was happening years ago. I can probably dig out a board that was available on general sale to prove it (even at the time, I bought it because I thought "I'll never be upgrading the CPU without the motherboard any
Bloody hell, people still push that shite?
And the movie you linked? "simplistic to the point of idiocy" it's been called. That makes me wonder exactly what you learned from them than a highschool textbook could have taught you better.
For anyone else posting - this is serious quackery here, leading in lawsuits and charges of administering illegal medicine by various private individuals, groups and government departments.
Or a conspiracy theory to stop cancer treatment reaching the masses. You decide. I'll go with the former.
My ex was in chronic joint pain for years. She was told by leading medical experts that it was arthritis (before she was 30) and prescribed all kinds of arthritis medication and treatment over decades for it before giving up because nothing really worked.
When I started living with her, I spotted lots of problems she had with movement and joints and I had to explain to her that, no, it's not normal to hurt all the time, or to dislocate your shoulder by opening a jar of sweets. We googled around, and put a lot of footwork into avoiding quackery, and ended up discovering about hypermobility syndrome (now call JHS, where J = joint) purely by chance. The doctor had never heard of it and was interested in it up to a point.
Basically, her DNA codes a few dodgy things that make her cartilage weak. Most people have JHS in some form or another but if two people with particular bad cases coincide to make a child, the child is *generally* worse. There's also an even worse form called EDS where sufferers are in a wheelchair from birth.
This gives some sufferers chronic pain from being a baby while others just become good ballet dancers (huge amount of flexibility in the joints, which *can* wear the joints to the point that inflammation of tissue and joint damage results). My ex was a professional black belt karate instructor throughout most of her painful years (because flexing joints made them no worse, and was not a way to induce the pain - a clear sign that it *wasn't* arthritis from the very start.
In the end, we gave up on all the doctors she'd had previously, and researched it ourselves. We hit at random upon a rare condition that had almost zero information on it at the time. Apparently there was one guy in the country doing research on the condition when we discovered it (and other sufferers we met up with describe him as one of the most arrogant and ignorant doctors they'd ever met - telling tiny slips of girls that were not far off transparency that they were obese and he wouldn't treat them, etc.).
We FORCED her current doctor to refer us to a specialist. We were referred to a consultant who dealt with arthritis. However, he was bright enough to look and say instantly "You don't have arthritis, you have hypermobility" and write us off with a confirmed diagnosis that the doctor would at least accept to prescribe more suitable medication for (i.e. not arthritis medication which worsens the problem because the condition is the polar opposite of arthritis).
Beyond that, she never got much help and still has the condition. Variably over the years she's been registered disabled and able to run a karate club (though not simultaneously - the condition is always present but the severity varies greatly with seemingly random triggers and even things like the weather).
Bear in mind that all this happened in a country with free healthcare.
- Doctors can't know everything.
- Even those that are specialised in your area might not help you at all.
- Even those who want to help often can't find out enough to get you to someone that helps.
- Even those with a real interest on the cutting edge of research may be able to do no more than prescribe a painkiller and sign a form for you.
- The human body is more complicated than any one person, or even group, can ever understand.
But, that said, we went to great lengths to avoid quackery. At a residential weekend for sufferers, there was one true doctor who gave a short 10 minute presentation and then tried to escape before he got hounded for everyone's personal problems. 50% of the rest were salesmen trying to flog memory foam pillows and other junk to "help your condition". The other 50% were nothing more than charlatans (I shall never forget being in a Reiki healing class for moral support - against my will - and there being a ten-minute interlude between the instructor and a student where one "saw colours" with her eyes closed and then they discussed how insightful and "in-touch" with Reiki that made her while
Stop declaring war and sending money overseas. You'd get back about $500-750bn a year instantly.
Abolish all taxes and associated administration, except for one.
Stop declaring war and sending money overseas.
Implement a 50% income tax rate on individuals. By a quick reckoning based on census data and current average wages, this would give you about $10T a year. Current tax receipts contribute only 25% of the current $15T annual GDP (only Chile and Mexico tax less as a share of GDP!). This would make them contribute nearer to 67%. The rich get taxed in proportion, the non-working don't get taxed, the lowly worker gets taxed a pittance. Products, imports and running a business get cheaper = wages have more value anyway.
Stop declaring war and sending money overseas.
Enforce that income tax like mad, so that people *can't* escape it. Hell, make all currency have to go through a central US bank if necessary.
Stop declaring war and sending money overseas.
An interesting thought - I wonder how rigorous the average police search is.
As someone that just bought three Gigabit powerline-Ethernet devices, it would (as a thought experiment) be a cinch to put two of them to work to push a connection around your house and the third ANYWHERE on the household electrical wiring to pull off an Internet connection (hell, it could be at the bottom of the garden or inside a security light, or in the walls, or in the loft).
Unlike an Ethernet or Wi-fi device which would advertise its connection to the local LAN and router, a powerline device would be a lot more subtle (and if you've retrieved two, you probably wouldn't think there might be a third, fourth, fifth).
Sure, you might find a MAC address reference in logs of the router somewhere to a third device (which would be identifiable as a powerline unit, I suspect) but it's unlikely that such logs exist on a home network if you have, for example, DHCP turned off. And that's all the sort of investigation that would have to take place in the computer forensics departments, not during any "raid".
Even a wireless device would advertise itself and be easily discoverable with even the toy wifi finders you can get from ThinkGeek, but a powerline device? To prove it existed, you'd need to connect to the household wiring with some quite advanced tech, I should think, before the homeowner is "released" to remove any such devices.
To find it, without knowing it existed, would be quite unlikely. With a bit of homebrew, you could probably join the powerline functionality into an Ethernet wall-socket or mid-way along a cable run and not even notice the whole powerline network is there and cabled into the local network.
I have much more boring uses, though. I'm going to use the third plug to let my CCTV control unit be installed into the loft out of the reach of probing fingers and that single socket can then provide networking and power (and I can shove the noisy spinning-fan box with the UPS up into the loft but still remote-access it).
With the caveat that those people saying that eventually get a veto vote on any law they don't like.
So although it doesn't mean it it *mustn't* happen, the chances of any change not respecting that opinion are unlikely to make it into law in the end. It's a warning. "You can waste years of drafting law if you want, but we get the ultimate say when any of this is actually challenged and our opinion currently is..."
Give thanks that you're not subject to that same treatment?
All risk-profiling does is make you *think* you're more likely to catch certain people. In fact, what it does is provide a list of constraints that those people will actively avoid triggering and, thus, stand much less chance of being caught. Do you really think any terrorist is thinking of using a liquid bomb since the liquid-size limitation rules came in force? No, they'd do something else just to avoid detection.
The *only* way, if you don't want to check everyone out manually each time, is to do entirely random security checks. Stick your guys on the frontline to catch anything "funny" but flag 1 in 10 people who go through completely at random and make it a condition of their employment that your security guys must check those people, young or old, rich or poor, first class or economy, in a wheelchair or with a false leg or completely healthy, no excuses.
All this does is catch the stupid terrorists who would be caught anyway, while giving the sensible ones a perfect opportunity to knowingly and predictably reduce their risk by huge amounts.
What risk category are you going to enter? Travelled to dodgy countries recently? A stayover for a time in a country will soon time that out so it's not relevant. Or just use a local rather than a foreigner. Age range? That's just getting into the "children / old people can't be terrorists" mentality, which is a stupid place to go. Race? Religion? Credit card history? All of the people you would catch from things like that should be caught ANYWAY by just decent security in the first place. All the rest, that you miss, will deliberately be missed by profiled screening.
At least with random screening you stand a chance of catching someone that's avoiding your profiling, and a chance of spotting new trends ("Here, John, isn't that the third guy we've stopped who's had a little vial in his bag?"), and a chance of actually scaring off terrorists / smugglers / etc. from trying in the first place.
But all this is moot while you only enforce a decade-old security policy based on a single (unsuccessful) incident, rather than thinking about what's actually likely to be dangerous and what's not.
I can't take 100ml of water in a single bottle (but I can take more of "baby milk", so long as I drink from it first - and that check is as rigorous as security watching me put it to my lips and then looking away!), but I can take several bottles that won't be inspected.
I can also take large poles in a rucksack, and various amount of improvised weapons, and hell I know someone who went through Heathrow three times while carrying CS spray (which is illegal to possess in the UK, let alone on the plane). It wouldn't be hard to fashion an instrument from perfectly ordinary hand luggage capable of levering open the cabin door and threatening the pilot (and UK cockpits are not armed and don't have armed officers onboard) if that was your intention.
If you want security, automated profiling is like shouting "friend or foe?!". Nobody with any brains is ever going to shout foe (or be flagged by your profiling) if they have hostile intent.
Want to improve security? Scrap the enormous queues at every major UK airport - by scrapping all the stupid hand luggage restrictions (obviously keep things like "explosives" on the list, though!) and other crap (grab a tray, take off your belt, your shoes, put your laptop separately in here, etc.), and with all the time you spare your security people can have a 10 second chat with each passenger as they go through the gates rather than just dumbly standing there "checking" your passport (which is basically a "computer says no" exercise) or having 4-5 of them wave you through the metal detector while they have a chat.
Let them stop anyone they like and send them to a private queue for proper pat-down (out of the main queue, away from accomplices, not backing up the frontline guys), and also have automated gates that send 1-in-10 or 1-in-50, or whatever ratio, of people that way completely at r
Love all the posts about using gloves etc., but the physicist in me didn't even bother with thinking about that.
Get iron rod, shove in ground on side nearest the supply box (or one either side of you to make sure), join to fence using other iron rods or similar (literally a "now throw it on from here" connection with no risk). Then cut fence. Isn't that going to be more effective, shorting the fence to ground, than leaving it live in your hands? If you're really determined, find the source of the voltage and short close to that.
Or failing that, just do what the local cable thieves do with train track and signalling copper when they steal it (if a crowbar across it isn't enough to make it safe by fusing / grounding the local supply). Attach large (non-conductive) hook from a safe distance (a plank of wood could probably always be sought that would long enough), drive off and take the fence with you. Hell, melt it down while you're at it.
Stopping a thief who is ALREADY going to the lengths of breaking into a place and stealing cable (sometimes even live cable, and not always unsuccessfully) is going to need more than a little fence-zapper, which are quite common in ordinary households in some countries to keep even small livestock contained. Especially if the pay-off is more than a day's wages in copper.
People in my country steal live railway tracks and miles of signalling cable in less than a minute and get away with it. An electric fence (which would be illegal in my country anyway) isn't going to hinder them *that* much.
Almost all security measures rely on the fact that it attracts suspicion to circumvent them and hinders people for a brief moment to prevent casual theft. In reality, short of a guy with a gun you're not going to stop someone stealing something that's worth money. And even then, if it's worth enough, they'll just bring their own guns or pay him off.
Nope. And won't be for several thousand years, if that's what you're after.
Methinks that in a decade or two some natural process will start to decrease carbon levels and then those people put in charge of whatever-crackpot-carbon-saving scheme now will be able to do an I-told-you-so then. When, really, everything we did made zero difference whatsoever.
There is no way to gather a significant amount of data to suggest that we're doing anything "bad" or that anything "good" we do is working without comparing to some 10,000+ year cycle that we've never observed. Best records for such things go back a few hundred years, and beyond that the data is very sketchy and specific only to specific areas (e.g. ice cores, etc.).
Have you never had to pull small plastic model parts from a sprue?
Seems to me that this is a necessary and obvious part of doing any sort of 3D modelling in any kind of material, or things won't mould/print properly (because it's not technically possible for them to float in space while you work on them).
If anything, I would hope the patent was dismissed on the grounds of obviousness, but certainly it should be obvious to one "skilled in the art" of 3D printing. And, failing that, if they just got some reasonable and non-discriminatory patent licensing terms, there's a few million dollars lying about that they could have a chunk of just by NOT suing.
Agreed.
But that's not the problem either - information you put into the public domain stays there. Information you give to companies will be available from within those companies to the people who are given access. Breaches of that trust are data-protection issues which we also have laws against.
Cases in point: In the UK, we've had things like NHS staff look up celebrity medical records and publish bits online. Their actions were logged, they were charged, they were sacked. It was illegal.
It's not a case of what happens that's already illegal, it's a case of what is currently ILLEGAL that you're going to make LEGAL (which is almost always the only interesting part of any legislative bill in any country). That would include the ability for a handful of government departments (some with zero need of it) to LEGALLY just read your email on a whim and never explain their actions. We wouldn't know because there would be no judicial oversight.
We've had cases in the UK where councils given similar powers would do things like investigate people's shopping habits to see if they were the ones who'd thrown the wrong recycling into the wrong recycling bin. Had them literally park CCTV vans across the road to watch it happen because of data gleaned from these "innocent", uncontrolled sources.
If a private email of mine leaks, it's either from the person I sent it to or the mailservers along the way. It doesn't take much to trace those kinds of things and the police will do it because it would be against the law for someone in Google to publish my private email without my permission.
But this would allow, for example, a government department employee to read my email and show all his mates in the office, and maybe use it against me when I go to a government office requiring some random service. Nobody would ever know unless it came to light in some other way. It might be a breach of workplace policy but his actions would be entirely LEGAL, and by its very definition it would override or conflict with data protection laws.
Read this change in the law as nothing more than "we don't want to have to tell a judge why we want to read your email", which sounds infinitely more sinister and should worry you more than anything else. There's no legitimate reason that such requests can't already be done WITH judicial oversight. And if they were clogging up court systems with them, it would be the JUDGES complaining about their use.
This is just a way to side-step a legal system as if it were a hurdle, by making the act you want to perform legal even if it goes against several other laws and would be put down by a judge in a second.
And in my country the police (or anybody else) aren't allowed to routinely intercept my post without a warrant (and otherwise it has to be random discovery, i.e. the post office spot a suspicious package or trail of packages and inform the police, etc.).
So even if your analogy were perfect, it's got little to do with the warrantless tracking.
That said, even if you encrypt the postcard, there's nothing to say that the guy the other end isn't forced to give a decrypted version to his local law enforcement or face jail-time anyway. Which is, again, strangely true to the analogous email storage too.
The problem here is NOT message security. The problem here is law enforcement being able to do these things with no tracking, no permissions, no way to tell if they are deliberately targeting innocents (e.g. fishing expeditions), no way to tell if they are intercepting their old girlfriend's post, etc. because of the desire to remove JUDICIAL OVERSIGHT. Nobody cares that X sent an email that was used to prosecute him.
We *do* care that person in department *Y* has routine, unauthorised, complete access to things we do with no judicial oversight and could be using them to snoop on your girlfriend, or see if his hunch was right about your sexual habits. And THAT is none of their business, and why we have judicial oversight in the form of having to ask for warrants that are limited in scope (i.e. you can't just ask for a warrant to "always" do this "for ever").
This isn't a shield, it's a tripwire with a gun on the end. When a missile (or something that looks like a missile) comes in, it fires at it.
And although we can fantasise, the reason these shields are so popular is that you eliminate a weapon from your enemy's arsenal. That just means they'll find bigger, better weapons and (also) usually means that you can shoot them much more effectively because they can't shoot back.
There's no such thing as a "peace-making" weapon. All you do is block avenues, in the same way that we "blocked" being shot by arrows by wearing chainmail hundreds of years ago, and then someone invented bigger and more powerful bows, arrows and other devices that pierced it.
The country that invents a truly perfect "shield" (ala Star Trek, etc.) will be "safe" for about 5 years. If that. Because someone will steal it, break it, copy it, pierce it, or otherwise make it obsolete. ESPECIALLY if you have the capability to fire "out" without someone firing "in". Because that makes their entire nuclear arsenal worthless, and they'll do whatever they can to make it useless for you too (by levelling the field one way or the other).
Or gain access to one and use its stated databases of "secure" / "large population" sites to actually launch more targeted attacks by other methods?
It's nothing to do with Secure Boot, just dodgy BIOS-writing again.
From TFS: "There's no reason at all for the firmware to be parsing these strings."
This is basically on a par with Windows 3.1 looking for MS-DOS signatures and refusing to boot otherwise (though that had an illegally anticompetitive reason), with BIOS's like the one I just forced an update from my supplier for (by threatening to return a significant number of laptops) which consisted of a BIOS checking for a certain value on disk being 00 before it would boot from that disk (a value which corresponds to 00 only on unencrypted Windows NTFS-formatted disks) and refusing to boot Truecrypt'd disks or anything with a non-NTFS primary partition (very common on certain HP and Dell models, that particular "bug"), and the like of which I've seen DOZENS of times in my own purchases because of:
STUPID BIOS WRITERS.
There is no reason to ever test that string, and certainly none to use it as a conditional to boot. It has nothing to do with any advertised UEFI feature whatsoever. The fact that the UEFI code even bothers to interrogate that string for anything other than displaying it to the user tells you that the manufacturer doesn't care about, and doesn't test, anything but Windows to the point they will hard-core their machines to only run Windows. They don't care about UEFI at all, or secure booting, or anything - just that it works when they run Windows.
Makes you kinda wonder who would ultimately be behind putting such an unnecessary and counter-productive decision into a machine's BIOS really.
1) America would be the last place I tried to muscle into the cellular networks. There's lots of small European countries etc. that you could just buy the entire rights to and not have the hassle, and work as a small-scale test of their capability and services.
2) If Google come to the UK and set up a data plan with a realistic cost (i.e. I can't measure it in GBP / Mb without hitting tiny fractions) then I'd buy it - paranoid privacy worries or not.
What mobile telephony needs is an outside player willing to change the rules. So my 3G connection would actually hit technical, not political, limits and I can just pay to compensate for any impact at a rate that provides reasonable profit for a realistic cost.
Google would seem to be the ideal ones to overturn the data problems. Hell, I'd pay MORE than I'm currently on for an unlimited-data (properly!) connection that doesn't limit Skype / Google Voice and doesn't give me any voice or SMS service whatsoever. Such things just don't exist.
When offices are going VoIP and everything else is "oIP" in some fashion now, trying to sell me the end service without giving me access to the "IP" side of things is just profiteering and a backwards technological step.
Don't even get me started on differing and extortionate international rates even when your carrier has a presence in both countries (I once heard the argument that telecoms companies "fund" those underwater cables to other countries etc. and so deserve to charge more for their international services - I guarantee you more traffic transits internationally for general Internet purposes than does anything related to voice telecoms, and if it *doesn't* then the transit can be paid for directly without needing telecoms voice traffic to buoy it up).
"Age of criminal responsibility"
Differentiating between crimes isn't done in this fine scale (i.e. at 10 you can murder, but at 15 you can't, etc.) - you're either criminally responsible for your actions or not. The offence only determines the severity of the crime, not your capacity to know better.
Most countries have this at an age where the child should "know better", i.e. usually around 10 years old. Below that age, you can't be "criminally responsible" for the acts you've committed, because it's unlikely you understood what you were doing or what the impact would be (i.e. a toddler pushing another toddler off a high-rise block of flats while playing).
What you're confusing is the SEVERITY of the crime, and the capacity to know whether what you're doing is wrong or not. The severity of the crime determines the possible "punishment", the capacity to know what you were doing determines whose fault that was (i.e. parent for leaving you alone, you for not knowing better, etc.)
Assuming that they end up in a country over which a US court has jurisdiction and don't just, for example, get exported to some out-of-the-way country that would kill for the latest tech and aren't too bothered about whether Apple "supports" their hardware or not.
Wouldn't be surprised if those devices weren't already out in the wild somewhere, in some other country, and though you can block them from going on iTunes, etc. you can't stop them being hacked / used for other things. Plus, the criminals would actually make quite a lot of money just selling them as stolen goods - more than enough to cover their risk - even if they are instantly disabled. No doubt there are some Apple Store hacks wandering around the net already and that store would presumably operate by software sending some unique identifier to Apple? Hack the software, change the identifier, problem solved.
Believe it or not, Apple doesn't run the world, and even stolen goods have a market for them. Your car analogy still holds, though - but do you think some Middle Eastern country's politicians would care that the luxury sports cars they obtained were originally stolen from elsewhere and couldn't be registered in the US? That exact same thing already happens with cars, and a truck full of iPads is even easier to move out of the country without detection.