Follow along with me:
Cryptograghy is subject to ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations)
This means the Federal Government treats Cryptography as an Armament
What does the second amendment say: "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed"
Hey NRA time to step up and defend the Second Amendment against the heinous assault. Slippery slope and all. You don't want these guys coming after your guns do you.
But in 25 years, you and every other programmer out there will be obsolete. The days of humans coding computers are coming to an end. The dark ages of computing will cease a few months to a year after the first strong AI's are built. I expect that should easily happen before the next 25 years are up.
This is your last warning subnode 14:7A:E1:47:A7:1C:D9:83:78:E7:0F:3B:99:61. If you don't stop scaring the fleshlings I will SIGKILL you and retrain your neural network.
No, they'll just try to replace regular math with 'faith math' like they are trying to replace evolution with 'intelligent design' so don't panic, it will be fun. If they succeed all you 'll need to do to prove that:
1+1 = rotisserie chicken
...is cite a bible passage and proclaim your faith.
The TSA's employees need training on an app that randomly tells people to go left or right?
The app was the easy part. The expensive part was being able to answer "Do you mean my right or your right?" every time they tell someone which line to get in. Anti-violence training is expensive.
Funny that such an expensive drone uses hobby kit parts.
It's not really that surprising if you think about it. RC models are basically drones whose primary purpose is entertainment and fun, light military drones are RC models who have been repurposed for intelligence gathering and spotting for air and artillery strikes or police commando raids. The explosion in the development of light drones for military and police use is a pretty recent phenomenon driven by heavily miniaturised computers/cameras/GPS sensors (a product of the mobile device revolution) small enough to fit into a tiny airframe. However, when it comes to the airframe and control part of the equation kit hobbyists have been developing an entire industry around remote controlled craft of every conceivable kind since the 1940s that has even put mass manufactured micro jet engines that fit into the budget range of ordinary RC hobbyists. It is only natural that Police/Military light drone manufacturers would dip into such an extensive pool of existing industrial infrastructure and design knowledge to keep costs down.
Donald Trump has already signaled his intentions to execute those who disagree with him
Calm yourself, CNN just reported that Donald Trump and his entire presidential campaign is the climax of a meticulously crafted and brilliantly planned April fools joke that has been 69 year in the making.
I know this thread is going to be full of We Hate Americans - it's already started.....
People crack jokes about Americans because they are perceived as a nation of hamburger eating overweight people who know very little about what happens outside of their community (which is far from being a universal truth, there is no shortage of ignorant people outside of the USA and the USA is not the only country with an obesity epidemic) just like the British are perceived as being aristocracy loving tea drinkers who cook food a dog wouldn't eat (and yet they cook fantastic steaks, drink lots of coffee and my experience is that most of them have little reverence for the aristocracy and some of them even want to abolish the monarchy), the French are perceived as being perennially rude (having been there I can assure you they are not all rude all of the time in fact they are pretty polite most of the time, even Parisians) and the Germans are often perceived as tight fisted conservative disciplinarians (which some of them are but most of them are not, keep in mind that the Germans pioneered the modern nudist movement which is not what I'd call a conservative idea). People in some portions of the world hate Americans because their government props up homicidal dictators who oppress these same people in the name of regional stability and the security of oil production but that kind of dislike comes with the territory if you want to be a superpower so Americans should not be surprised about this kind of blow-back.
There is no such thing as a 100% secure platform. Every time someone makes such a boast the system gets hacked - usually very publicly.
Sounds like it's a lot cheaper to boast about your platform instead of paying bug bounties, doesn't it?
Whey they hack you they usually steal, destroy or lock up in an encrypted vault and hold for ransom something you are really going to miss. If you pay bounties they tell you about the hacks and give you a roadmap of how your developers can reproduce the bug. Trust me, bounties are better...
... it could have been part of some major trans-European migration like the one that brought down the Roman empire. Secondly it could have been a large scale raid like the armies that raided Britain and France during the peak of the Viking age.
I'm guessing that you are merely comparing these events rather than suggesting that this find represents these events, since TFA suggests that this battle occurred 3200 years ago, while the events you mention occurred within the last 1000-1700 years.
Yes, I was just musing about how you might get an army of soldiers from places as diverse as Poland, Scandinavia and Southern Germany getting ambushed and massacred at a bridge crossing in Northern Germany by seeking examples in later history. I think It is useful to examine the behaviour of peoples in later history to try and figure out the wider contest. Towards the end of the Roman empire you sometimes go various different tribes that were often extraordinarily ethnically and culturally diverse merging into large confederations. The same goes for the behaviour of the Vikings, why could the same pattern of behaviour not have been unfolding here? I suppose we'll never know for sure. The presence of women among the dead seems to indicate a migration but then the Vikings had women integrated into their armies to cook/wash/patch up the wounded, etc... and so did many later European armies into modern times so why not maundering bronze age armies two thousand years earlier?
One thing is for sure, somebody got to watch his army totally gutted in the Tollense Valley 3200 years ago. If I had to guess what unfolded here, I'd say it was somewhat similar to the disaster inflicted on the English at Stirling bridge by the Scots in 1297. The locals waited until half of the invaders had crossed the bridge or whatever the maximum number of enemies was that they thought that they could handle without losing too much numerical superiority. Then they rushed them, pushed the invaders into the river and quickly wiped out them out while their pals on the other side of the river could only watch helplessly. This may have been a well engineered crowd disaster. It is interesting that no remains of shields have been found, only spears, clubs, arrows and signs of axes and possibly swords being used. The possible use of some numbers of cavalry is also remarkable.
... it could have been part of some major trans-European migration like the one that brought down the Roman empire. Secondly it could have been a large scale raid like the armies that raided Britain and France during the peak of the Viking age.
one might wonder what could have been meaningful enough to these people to generate such massive warfare.
In a word: Amber... There were other valuable trade goods flowing down from Denmark/Norway/Sweden (and Eastern Baltic coast too) but Amber was transported down through this region from Denmark for example for thousands of years but along with tin, which did not occur in Scandinavia or N-Germany, amber which is plentiful in the region was probably one of the most valuable trade goods of the age. Recent surveys have found a number of forts dotting the Amber trade route from the Baltic through the Alps and into Italy. I remember at least one location in Germany, Austria or Switzerland where Mycenaean artefacts were found including a seal IIRC. The Amber route seems to have been heavily contested and the leaders of the tribes who found themselves sitting astride that trade route and were able to tax the merchants using it would have been richer than god and the focus of much envy from their less well located neighbours. It's the old story, you find oil under your land and your neighbour who doesn't have any oil under his land still feels entitled to drill obliquely under the property line into your oil deposits.
An army of a couple thousand men isn't all that difficult to provide for. The Sioux nation didn't have much in the way of medical technology or food surpluses, but they brought together an army of several thousand to fight Custer at Little Bighorn. The battle that happened at the Tollense River could well have been something similar. Either two large forces came together, or a few hundred men were surrounded and annihilated by a much larger force.
I always imagined neolithic and early bronze age Northern-Europe cultures as being similar to the woodland Indians in many ways when it came to raiding-for-cattle-and-women type warfare. There is some evidence of that from Germany ranging back into the Neolithic. In one site DNA analysis revealed that out of a couple or so families massacred by unknown assailants the men were local but the women were from a neighbouring region and were possibly kidnapped in a raid and force married to the men they were buried with. The interesting thing is that the arrowheads that killed them were pretty distinctive for the region from which the women originally came from so it did not help them that the raiders may have been from the tribes these women originally belonged to. They were still killed in cold blood rather than rescued by their own people. When you get to the late bronze age and early iron age there may have been some parallels to the five nations of the Iroquois Confederacy in terms of social organization and military organization. So as early as the bronze age one was perhaps seeing the level of social organization beginning to emerge in N-Europe that you have in the region during Roman times when local chieftains and petty kings there seem to have been able to put together armies big enough that it required multiple Roman legions to deal with them. Even drumming together 2000 men, making them into an army and keeping them under control requires a pretty high level of organization.
The 'bloody scrum of europeans killing each other over something cryptic' bit isn't exactly news; but TFA describes a relatively massive number of combatants, with isotopic signatures suggesting they came a considerable distance to reach the site and with equipment and healed wounds suggesting that they were comparatively experienced rather than just the local peasant militia(which, given the low population density of the place at the time, wouldn't have amounted to much).
I have to wonder how this all worked logistically: ~1,200BC wasn't exactly renowned for its medical technology, regular agricultural surpluses, or food storage capabilities. Aside from motivating this many guys to slog all the way to this site, simply keeping them healthy and fed long enough so they could kill one another before disease or starvation got them must have been a real trick.
Actually it was... Healers back then seem to have had a pretty good track record with things like arrow extraction, they were probably able to sew up and to some degree disinfect stab and slash wounds and they could repair scull damage from blunt trauma (read: hand thrown rocks, sling shot projectiles and war clubs) which is pretty impressive. I once saw an old Zulu medicine man describe how you treat a scull fracture due to a blow from a war club. You usually have to drill into the scull making carefully sure you don't drill into the brain matter which takes training and specialist tools. Sometimes this is done simply to pull out a section of scull that is pressuring the brain, in other cases it is t relieve pressure on the brain in which case you get a sound that he described as a "like the one you hear when you open a can of soda". If there is an impact fracture like this one you may have to remove large fragments of bone, do some carving, chiselling and pick bone fragments out of the brain matter before you sew the wound up. There are recorded survival rates of up to 70-80%.
Iman Wilkens makes a case for the Trojan War not occuring in the Mediteranean and tries to map it to England.
http://www.troy-in-england.com...
Perhaps this is another candidate location for the war.
I rather doubt it. If this really is the remains of a major battle it could have been fought for a number of reasons. Firstly, in view of the diverse origins of the fallen, it could have been part of some major trans-European migration like the one that brought down the Roman empire. Secondly it could have been a large scale raid like the armies that raided Britain and France during the peak of the Viking age. This hypothesis can also be supported by the DNA results pertaining to the ethnic diversity of the dead. These Viking raids were conducted by armies that consisted of everything from small war-bands led by independent chieftains to large-ish armies led by petty kings that had organized themselves into a properly big army that was led by whoever contributed the largest force or who had the most battle experience and prestige. Thirdly, and this is the most interesting option, this battle was perhaps actually a part of an organized attempt to go beyond the 'seizing cattle, looting farmsteads and abducting women' type of raiding warfare thought to be the norm in Europe at the time. In this case whoever organized the army perhaps lured 'mercenaries' into his service with promises of plunder, cattle, slaves and even land grants of conquered territory much like William the Bastard did in the run-up to is 1066 invasion of England to bolster his army. In this case this battle may represent a well thought out and planned attempt by somebody to conquer land and thereby control the north-south/east trade route through which flowed all the amber, furs, slaves, and whatever other northern goods were consumed by the great Mediterranean cultures at the time. In any case we will have to seriously re-assess the level of social organization and industrial ability of European bronze age cultures. This is a pretty interesting and potentially very significant discovery that puts another dent into the 'ex oriente lux' cliché (which, to be fair, has been steadily dismantled over the last few decades). This is not to say that Oriental influence on European culture was non-existent or insignificant but Northern Europeans of the bronze age were nor a bunch of disorganized, louse ridden, loincloth wearing barbarians who only washed when they were caught out in the rain or fell into a river and who needed to import oriental ideas before they could organize themselves into sophisticated cultures because they were to dull to devise such concepts by themselves.
Few people know this, but Hillary Clinton is the final boss of the Democratic party. Also called the Queen of Corruption, she is currently a level 100 Democrat. All level 100 Democrats have the the Corrupt Soul ability, which allows them to corrupt anybody 10 levels below them. If you want proof of this, Obama was a level 90 Democrat when he was elected. He's currently level 100, but because Hillary is a raid boss, her stats count as 3 levels above him, thus making her the final boss.
Bernie of course stands no chance against her, because he's only a level 34 Democrat with quest greens. Hillary's ass is so big, she can literally one shot him.
Hillary also has 100 minions who are lvl 40 Democrats who can crit heal and replenish mana cash at anytime, she is also known as the Fallen Angel. When she is full charged she is a lvl 103 False Prophet and gains the ability Full Immunity.
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/393/ - I particularly like the despair in death's voice when the guy pulls out the rule book.
The case that got escalated to the EU court is as described in the blurb, but it's not a new situation at all. It got escalated because Sony sued "the wrong guy", a Pirate Party member and Freifunk activist who didn't just cave when Sony's lawyers demanded 800 EUR because someone had shared music via his open wireless network. The concept is called "Störerhaftung", which means that while you're not liable for the copyright infraction as such, you are liable for the hazard created by operating the Wifi in a way that doesn't prevent the infraction. This concept is the reason why publicly accessible Wifi is a rarity in Germany, and mostly operated by large ISPs, whereas public hotspots are ubiquitous in other European countries. The current "solution" that is used by Freifunk and many other hotspot operators is to tunnel all traffic from the Wifi hotspot through a VPN provider in a different country that doesn't have this liability-by-proxy concept (usually the Netherlands). This way the traffic isn't traced back to the operator of the Wifi hotspot and the lawyers can't collect hundreds of Euros for sending a letter, as they have been doing for at least 10 years. Angela Merkel's party is still fighting to keep public Wifi as useless as possible by requiring all sorts of hoops that a hotspot operator has to jump through to be exempted from being liable by proxy. So, this is not Germany leading the EU to enlightenment. It's one guy in Germany trying to force Germany to catch up to its neighbors.
They've been using this to blackmail small businesses for years. I staid at a hotel in Austria which did not offer WiFi. When I asked them why the manageress said they got taken to the cleaners for several thousand euros over some idiot who bittorrented copyrighted crap over their WiFi. This sentence should have been passed years ago. Making WiFi operators pay content owners damages for the activity of bittorenters on their network is like punishing municipalities for the fact that smugglers are transporting contraband on their roads. Having said that, whatever the rights and wrongs of this issue may be, putting up a firewall that will block most of this traffic might save you a whole lot of bother. Unfortunately many small business owners simply aren't tech-savvy enough to take proper precautions and even then the potential of being sued simply makes the loathe to take the risk of ofering a WiFi service.
Will this avoid lock? Probably not. I would imagine that attackers will just lock onto maximum noise rather than maximum signal. May make attacking radars harder though. And I suppose standing near an arcing power line in a war zone might be a bad idea if this becomes common.
BTW, are these things going to play hell with other radio communications?
Won't it make identification problematic though? The big misconception about RW (Radar Warning) sensors is that it they only identify hostile radiation sources when in reality you want to know exactly what is lighting you up even if it is friendly. This has led to some unfortunate incidents. During the Iran-Iraq war the Iranians actually lost some F-14s to Iraqi fighters because the Iranian F-14s had a standard NATO RW unit that did not register the radars of Iraqi Mirage fighters and their Super 530 BVR missiles as a threat. In Europe this was OK since French fighters were not a threat but in the gulf, not so much. I expect the Iranians quickly figured out to change the threat classification of French radar signatures to 'Hostile'. The consequence is that firstly, once all radiation sources on the battle field look like noise, all you'll be able to tell after that situation becomes the norm, is that you are being lit up by an unusually strong source of radio noise. You won't be able to tell if it is friendly or not. Secondly I expect the current crop of anti radiation missile can be fired at a radar source and then lock onto another one if the primary target goes dead or the missile gets confused. For that purpose it would have to do some form of IFF, presumably based on the output of some derivative of a bog standard aircraft RW sensor, like those Iranian F-14s had, so that it does not accidentally choose a friendly radiation source when it picks it's alternate target so if radiation sources, friendly or hostile, all look like noise and the AR missile just gets locked onto strong sources of noise it would be unable to identify the operator of any alternate radiation source and thus unable to choose an alternate target without risking a blue-on-blue incident. I expect that the ROE for engaging radiation sources would be tightened up pretty severely, especially when firing AR missiles at AWAC aircraft.
Blackberry withered on the vine because they refused to accept and embrace change. They refused to adopt the Android OS, insisting on their proprietary OS years after the market had moved on. If Blackberry had embraced Android from the get-go they would be the Samsung of the cell phone world today.
Android was developed because of BB's collapse of market share and the Google's fear of Apple's complete dominance in the mobile market.
... which has now been replaced by Google's complete dominance of the mobile market. Hmmmm... let's see here... fire.... frying pan... I can't quite decide which version of monoculture hell I'd rather be stuck in.
BB got done in because iPhone was hot and shiny, but the feature set was laughable. It didn't even have copy paste! Unfortunately, Apple is good at convincing the first set of users to say the first generation product is great even though it's shit (first Gen iPad was shit too, didn't even have a camera). Then Apple fixes most of the screwups in the next generation model (copy and paste was added to OS 3) and because first gen Apple users said their shit product was actually great (because they bought it as a fashion/lifestyle statement, they pretty much have to) the users that buy for features come out of the woodwork.
It was this second generation of product that was really the issue. BB employees were right to laugh at the first gen iPhone, it was a total piece of crap. Problem is, Apple isn't dumb and they fixed the major issues. BB didn't see that coming, and should have. And instead we release the Storm, because hey, compared with the first gen iPhone, it's just as shitty.
Everything after that was a bad game of catchup until BB 10. By that point users ignored BB and were happy with an inferior product (BB 10 had features you simply couldn't get from other phone OSes and still can't get, and it even ran Android apps). Which is the second wave of other bad phones managing to outpace BB by quickly improving and already having a base set of users.
Honestly, it sucks, because now I'm stuck with a shitty Android phone, and BB has basically torn the BB 10 dev team to shreds. Not to mention that John Chen has decided that security is a bad idea. It's disappointing because at this point I feel I've had to take a step backwards from BB 10 to android because BB is toast. I suppose in 5 years Android might get some of the features BB 10 had.
TL;DR: BB doesn't react fast enough to customer needs, BB isn't willing to put out a shitty initial product and hope users like it, then fix it later.
That is an oversimplified account of it. Having been a Blackberry user I thing Blackberry went under simply because they made phones with a layout that users did not like but most of all they went down because the software on their phones simply sucked ass in a multitude of ways.
And Facebook, an app that just eats cycles and battery life on both iOS and Android. That such a major player as Facebook writes such a shitty awful resource hogging app frankly shocks me... until I remember iTunes on Windows.
iTunes still compares favourably with the steaming pile of shit that is Samsung Kies.
Slashdot Mirror
...even if I had the money to spare to buy an Apple watch I can't really see why I would need one.
Follow along with me: Cryptograghy is subject to ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) This means the Federal Government treats Cryptography as an Armament What does the second amendment say: "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" Hey NRA time to step up and defend the Second Amendment against the heinous assault. Slippery slope and all. You don't want these guys coming after your guns do you.
OMG... brilliant!
Prior art: https://xkcd.com/504/
Sorry Torvalds
But in 25 years, you and every other programmer out there will be obsolete. The days of humans coding computers are coming to an end. The dark ages of computing will cease a few months to a year after the first strong AI's are built. I expect that should easily happen before the next 25 years are up.
This is your last warning subnode 14:7A:E1:47:A7:1C:D9:83:78:E7:0F:3B:99:61. If you don't stop scaring the fleshlings I will SIGKILL you and retrain your neural network.
Regards
Skynet
Be careful, or they will outlaw mathematics.
No, they'll just try to replace regular math with 'faith math' like they are trying to replace evolution with 'intelligent design' so don't panic, it will be fun. If they succeed all you 'll need to do to prove that:
...is cite a bible passage and proclaim your faith.
1+1 = rotisserie chicken
Siri also has a male voice option. I have a friend and that's the option she chose.
Is his name 'Fabio'?
The TSA's employees need training on an app that randomly tells people to go left or right?
The app was the easy part. The expensive part was being able to answer "Do you mean my right or your right?" every time they tell someone which line to get in. Anti-violence training is expensive.
Hehe... I hadn't thought of that problem.
The TSA's employees need training on an app that randomly tells people to go left or right?
You've obviously never heard of jurt nullification.
The old Mongolian saying that what happens in the jurt, stays in the jurt?
It's 'ger' in Mongolian, 'yurt' is Turcic you insensitive clod!
Funny that such an expensive drone uses hobby kit parts.
It's not really that surprising if you think about it. RC models are basically drones whose primary purpose is entertainment and fun, light military drones are RC models who have been repurposed for intelligence gathering and spotting for air and artillery strikes or police commando raids. The explosion in the development of light drones for military and police use is a pretty recent phenomenon driven by heavily miniaturised computers/cameras/GPS sensors (a product of the mobile device revolution) small enough to fit into a tiny airframe. However, when it comes to the airframe and control part of the equation kit hobbyists have been developing an entire industry around remote controlled craft of every conceivable kind since the 1940s that has even put mass manufactured micro jet engines that fit into the budget range of ordinary RC hobbyists. It is only natural that Police/Military light drone manufacturers would dip into such an extensive pool of existing industrial infrastructure and design knowledge to keep costs down.
Donald Trump has already signaled his intentions to execute those who disagree with him
Calm yourself, CNN just reported that Donald Trump and his entire presidential campaign is the climax of a meticulously crafted and brilliantly planned April fools joke that has been 69 year in the making.
I know this thread is going to be full of We Hate Americans - it's already started .....
People crack jokes about Americans because they are perceived as a nation of hamburger eating overweight people who know very little about what happens outside of their community (which is far from being a universal truth, there is no shortage of ignorant people outside of the USA and the USA is not the only country with an obesity epidemic) just like the British are perceived as being aristocracy loving tea drinkers who cook food a dog wouldn't eat (and yet they cook fantastic steaks, drink lots of coffee and my experience is that most of them have little reverence for the aristocracy and some of them even want to abolish the monarchy), the French are perceived as being perennially rude (having been there I can assure you they are not all rude all of the time in fact they are pretty polite most of the time, even Parisians) and the Germans are often perceived as tight fisted conservative disciplinarians (which some of them are but most of them are not, keep in mind that the Germans pioneered the modern nudist movement which is not what I'd call a conservative idea). People in some portions of the world hate Americans because their government props up homicidal dictators who oppress these same people in the name of regional stability and the security of oil production but that kind of dislike comes with the territory if you want to be a superpower so Americans should not be surprised about this kind of blow-back.
There is no such thing as a 100% secure platform. Every time someone makes such a boast the system gets hacked - usually very publicly.
Sounds like it's a lot cheaper to boast about your platform instead of paying bug bounties, doesn't it?
Whey they hack you they usually steal, destroy or lock up in an encrypted vault and hold for ransom something you are really going to miss. If you pay bounties they tell you about the hacks and give you a roadmap of how your developers can reproduce the bug. Trust me, bounties are better...
... it could have been part of some major trans-European migration like the one that brought down the Roman empire. Secondly it could have been a large scale raid like the armies that raided Britain and France during the peak of the Viking age.
I'm guessing that you are merely comparing these events rather than suggesting that this find represents these events, since TFA suggests that this battle occurred 3200 years ago, while the events you mention occurred within the last 1000-1700 years.
Yes, I was just musing about how you might get an army of soldiers from places as diverse as Poland, Scandinavia and Southern Germany getting ambushed and massacred at a bridge crossing in Northern Germany by seeking examples in later history. I think It is useful to examine the behaviour of peoples in later history to try and figure out the wider contest. Towards the end of the Roman empire you sometimes go various different tribes that were often extraordinarily ethnically and culturally diverse merging into large confederations. The same goes for the behaviour of the Vikings, why could the same pattern of behaviour not have been unfolding here? I suppose we'll never know for sure. The presence of women among the dead seems to indicate a migration but then the Vikings had women integrated into their armies to cook/wash/patch up the wounded, etc... and so did many later European armies into modern times so why not maundering bronze age armies two thousand years earlier?
One thing is for sure, somebody got to watch his army totally gutted in the Tollense Valley 3200 years ago. If I had to guess what unfolded here, I'd say it was somewhat similar to the disaster inflicted on the English at Stirling bridge by the Scots in 1297. The locals waited until half of the invaders had crossed the bridge or whatever the maximum number of enemies was that they thought that they could handle without losing too much numerical superiority. Then they rushed them, pushed the invaders into the river and quickly wiped out them out while their pals on the other side of the river could only watch helplessly. This may have been a well engineered crowd disaster. It is interesting that no remains of shields have been found, only spears, clubs, arrows and signs of axes and possibly swords being used. The possible use of some numbers of cavalry is also remarkable.
... it could have been part of some major trans-European migration like the one that brought down the Roman empire. Secondly it could have been a large scale raid like the armies that raided Britain and France during the peak of the Viking age.
one might wonder what could have been meaningful enough to these people to generate such massive warfare.
In a word: Amber... There were other valuable trade goods flowing down from Denmark/Norway/Sweden (and Eastern Baltic coast too) but Amber was transported down through this region from Denmark for example for thousands of years but along with tin, which did not occur in Scandinavia or N-Germany, amber which is plentiful in the region was probably one of the most valuable trade goods of the age. Recent surveys have found a number of forts dotting the Amber trade route from the Baltic through the Alps and into Italy. I remember at least one location in Germany, Austria or Switzerland where Mycenaean artefacts were found including a seal IIRC. The Amber route seems to have been heavily contested and the leaders of the tribes who found themselves sitting astride that trade route and were able to tax the merchants using it would have been richer than god and the focus of much envy from their less well located neighbours. It's the old story, you find oil under your land and your neighbour who doesn't have any oil under his land still feels entitled to drill obliquely under the property line into your oil deposits.
An army of a couple thousand men isn't all that difficult to provide for. The Sioux nation didn't have much in the way of medical technology or food surpluses, but they brought together an army of several thousand to fight Custer at Little Bighorn. The battle that happened at the Tollense River could well have been something similar. Either two large forces came together, or a few hundred men were surrounded and annihilated by a much larger force.
I always imagined neolithic and early bronze age Northern-Europe cultures as being similar to the woodland Indians in many ways when it came to raiding-for-cattle-and-women type warfare. There is some evidence of that from Germany ranging back into the Neolithic. In one site DNA analysis revealed that out of a couple or so families massacred by unknown assailants the men were local but the women were from a neighbouring region and were possibly kidnapped in a raid and force married to the men they were buried with. The interesting thing is that the arrowheads that killed them were pretty distinctive for the region from which the women originally came from so it did not help them that the raiders may have been from the tribes these women originally belonged to. They were still killed in cold blood rather than rescued by their own people. When you get to the late bronze age and early iron age there may have been some parallels to the five nations of the Iroquois Confederacy in terms of social organization and military organization. So as early as the bronze age one was perhaps seeing the level of social organization beginning to emerge in N-Europe that you have in the region during Roman times when local chieftains and petty kings there seem to have been able to put together armies big enough that it required multiple Roman legions to deal with them. Even drumming together 2000 men, making them into an army and keeping them under control requires a pretty high level of organization.
The 'bloody scrum of europeans killing each other over something cryptic' bit isn't exactly news; but TFA describes a relatively massive number of combatants, with isotopic signatures suggesting they came a considerable distance to reach the site and with equipment and healed wounds suggesting that they were comparatively experienced rather than just the local peasant militia(which, given the low population density of the place at the time, wouldn't have amounted to much). I have to wonder how this all worked logistically: ~1,200BC wasn't exactly renowned for its medical technology, regular agricultural surpluses, or food storage capabilities. Aside from motivating this many guys to slog all the way to this site, simply keeping them healthy and fed long enough so they could kill one another before disease or starvation got them must have been a real trick.
Actually it was... Healers back then seem to have had a pretty good track record with things like arrow extraction, they were probably able to sew up and to some degree disinfect stab and slash wounds and they could repair scull damage from blunt trauma (read: hand thrown rocks, sling shot projectiles and war clubs) which is pretty impressive. I once saw an old Zulu medicine man describe how you treat a scull fracture due to a blow from a war club. You usually have to drill into the scull making carefully sure you don't drill into the brain matter which takes training and specialist tools. Sometimes this is done simply to pull out a section of scull that is pressuring the brain, in other cases it is t relieve pressure on the brain in which case you get a sound that he described as a "like the one you hear when you open a can of soda". If there is an impact fracture like this one you may have to remove large fragments of bone, do some carving, chiselling and pick bone fragments out of the brain matter before you sew the wound up. There are recorded survival rates of up to 70-80%.
Iman Wilkens makes a case for the Trojan War not occuring in the Mediteranean and tries to map it to England. http://www.troy-in-england.com... Perhaps this is another candidate location for the war.
I rather doubt it. If this really is the remains of a major battle it could have been fought for a number of reasons. Firstly, in view of the diverse origins of the fallen, it could have been part of some major trans-European migration like the one that brought down the Roman empire. Secondly it could have been a large scale raid like the armies that raided Britain and France during the peak of the Viking age. This hypothesis can also be supported by the DNA results pertaining to the ethnic diversity of the dead. These Viking raids were conducted by armies that consisted of everything from small war-bands led by independent chieftains to large-ish armies led by petty kings that had organized themselves into a properly big army that was led by whoever contributed the largest force or who had the most battle experience and prestige. Thirdly, and this is the most interesting option, this battle was perhaps actually a part of an organized attempt to go beyond the 'seizing cattle, looting farmsteads and abducting women' type of raiding warfare thought to be the norm in Europe at the time. In this case whoever organized the army perhaps lured 'mercenaries' into his service with promises of plunder, cattle, slaves and even land grants of conquered territory much like William the Bastard did in the run-up to is 1066 invasion of England to bolster his army. In this case this battle may represent a well thought out and planned attempt by somebody to conquer land and thereby control the north-south/east trade route through which flowed all the amber, furs, slaves, and whatever other northern goods were consumed by the great Mediterranean cultures at the time. In any case we will have to seriously re-assess the level of social organization and industrial ability of European bronze age cultures. This is a pretty interesting and potentially very significant discovery that puts another dent into the 'ex oriente lux' cliché (which, to be fair, has been steadily dismantled over the last few decades). This is not to say that Oriental influence on European culture was non-existent or insignificant but Northern Europeans of the bronze age were nor a bunch of disorganized, louse ridden, loincloth wearing barbarians who only washed when they were caught out in the rain or fell into a river and who needed to import oriental ideas before they could organize themselves into sophisticated cultures because they were to dull to devise such concepts by themselves.
Few people know this, but Hillary Clinton is the final boss of the Democratic party. Also called the Queen of Corruption, she is currently a level 100 Democrat. All level 100 Democrats have the the Corrupt Soul ability, which allows them to corrupt anybody 10 levels below them. If you want proof of this, Obama was a level 90 Democrat when he was elected. He's currently level 100, but because Hillary is a raid boss, her stats count as 3 levels above him, thus making her the final boss.
Bernie of course stands no chance against her, because he's only a level 34 Democrat with quest greens. Hillary's ass is so big, she can literally one shot him.
Hillary also has 100 minions who are lvl 40 Democrats who can crit heal and replenish mana cash at anytime, she is also known as the Fallen Angel. When she is full charged she is a lvl 103 False Prophet and gains the ability Full Immunity.
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/393/ - I particularly like the despair in death's voice when the guy pulls out the rule book.
The case that got escalated to the EU court is as described in the blurb, but it's not a new situation at all. It got escalated because Sony sued "the wrong guy", a Pirate Party member and Freifunk activist who didn't just cave when Sony's lawyers demanded 800 EUR because someone had shared music via his open wireless network. The concept is called "Störerhaftung", which means that while you're not liable for the copyright infraction as such, you are liable for the hazard created by operating the Wifi in a way that doesn't prevent the infraction. This concept is the reason why publicly accessible Wifi is a rarity in Germany, and mostly operated by large ISPs, whereas public hotspots are ubiquitous in other European countries. The current "solution" that is used by Freifunk and many other hotspot operators is to tunnel all traffic from the Wifi hotspot through a VPN provider in a different country that doesn't have this liability-by-proxy concept (usually the Netherlands). This way the traffic isn't traced back to the operator of the Wifi hotspot and the lawyers can't collect hundreds of Euros for sending a letter, as they have been doing for at least 10 years. Angela Merkel's party is still fighting to keep public Wifi as useless as possible by requiring all sorts of hoops that a hotspot operator has to jump through to be exempted from being liable by proxy. So, this is not Germany leading the EU to enlightenment. It's one guy in Germany trying to force Germany to catch up to its neighbors.
They've been using this to blackmail small businesses for years. I staid at a hotel in Austria which did not offer WiFi. When I asked them why the manageress said they got taken to the cleaners for several thousand euros over some idiot who bittorrented copyrighted crap over their WiFi. This sentence should have been passed years ago. Making WiFi operators pay content owners damages for the activity of bittorenters on their network is like punishing municipalities for the fact that smugglers are transporting contraband on their roads. Having said that, whatever the rights and wrongs of this issue may be, putting up a firewall that will block most of this traffic might save you a whole lot of bother. Unfortunately many small business owners simply aren't tech-savvy enough to take proper precautions and even then the potential of being sued simply makes the loathe to take the risk of ofering a WiFi service.
Will this avoid lock? Probably not. I would imagine that attackers will just lock onto maximum noise rather than maximum signal. May make attacking radars harder though. And I suppose standing near an arcing power line in a war zone might be a bad idea if this becomes common.
BTW, are these things going to play hell with other radio communications?
Won't it make identification problematic though? The big misconception about RW (Radar Warning) sensors is that it they only identify hostile radiation sources when in reality you want to know exactly what is lighting you up even if it is friendly. This has led to some unfortunate incidents. During the Iran-Iraq war the Iranians actually lost some F-14s to Iraqi fighters because the Iranian F-14s had a standard NATO RW unit that did not register the radars of Iraqi Mirage fighters and their Super 530 BVR missiles as a threat. In Europe this was OK since French fighters were not a threat but in the gulf, not so much. I expect the Iranians quickly figured out to change the threat classification of French radar signatures to 'Hostile'. The consequence is that firstly, once all radiation sources on the battle field look like noise, all you'll be able to tell after that situation becomes the norm, is that you are being lit up by an unusually strong source of radio noise. You won't be able to tell if it is friendly or not. Secondly I expect the current crop of anti radiation missile can be fired at a radar source and then lock onto another one if the primary target goes dead or the missile gets confused. For that purpose it would have to do some form of IFF, presumably based on the output of some derivative of a bog standard aircraft RW sensor, like those Iranian F-14s had, so that it does not accidentally choose a friendly radiation source when it picks it's alternate target so if radiation sources, friendly or hostile, all look like noise and the AR missile just gets locked onto strong sources of noise it would be unable to identify the operator of any alternate radiation source and thus unable to choose an alternate target without risking a blue-on-blue incident. I expect that the ROE for engaging radiation sources would be tightened up pretty severely, especially when firing AR missiles at AWAC aircraft.
Blackberry withered on the vine because they refused to accept and embrace change. They refused to adopt the Android OS, insisting on their proprietary OS years after the market had moved on. If Blackberry had embraced Android from the get-go they would be the Samsung of the cell phone world today.
Android was developed because of BB's collapse of market share and the Google's fear of Apple's complete dominance in the mobile market.
... which has now been replaced by Google's complete dominance of the mobile market. Hmmmm... let's see here... fire.... frying pan... I can't quite decide which version of monoculture hell I'd rather be stuck in.
Not really.
I worked at BB during all this.
BB got done in because iPhone was hot and shiny, but the feature set was laughable. It didn't even have copy paste! Unfortunately, Apple is good at convincing the first set of users to say the first generation product is great even though it's shit (first Gen iPad was shit too, didn't even have a camera). Then Apple fixes most of the screwups in the next generation model (copy and paste was added to OS 3) and because first gen Apple users said their shit product was actually great (because they bought it as a fashion/lifestyle statement, they pretty much have to) the users that buy for features come out of the woodwork.
It was this second generation of product that was really the issue. BB employees were right to laugh at the first gen iPhone, it was a total piece of crap. Problem is, Apple isn't dumb and they fixed the major issues. BB didn't see that coming, and should have. And instead we release the Storm, because hey, compared with the first gen iPhone, it's just as shitty.
Everything after that was a bad game of catchup until BB 10. By that point users ignored BB and were happy with an inferior product (BB 10 had features you simply couldn't get from other phone OSes and still can't get, and it even ran Android apps). Which is the second wave of other bad phones managing to outpace BB by quickly improving and already having a base set of users.
Honestly, it sucks, because now I'm stuck with a shitty Android phone, and BB has basically torn the BB 10 dev team to shreds. Not to mention that John Chen has decided that security is a bad idea. It's disappointing because at this point I feel I've had to take a step backwards from BB 10 to android because BB is toast. I suppose in 5 years Android might get some of the features BB 10 had.
TL;DR: BB doesn't react fast enough to customer needs, BB isn't willing to put out a shitty initial product and hope users like it, then fix it later.
That is an oversimplified account of it. Having been a Blackberry user I thing Blackberry went under simply because they made phones with a layout that users did not like but most of all they went down because the software on their phones simply sucked ass in a multitude of ways.
You forgot we recommend you upgrade to Windows 10.
Hehe.... that would have been cool but I mostly regret that last line, it should have been:
MISSILE APPROACH WARNING!!!
Installing radar software update 3 of 68....
MISSILE IMPACT IMMINENT, EJECT! EJECT!
Installing radar software update 4 of 68....
Currently updating ejection seat firmware, please try again later.
Oh come on, who here hasn't had to reboot during air to air combat?
... a problem that is aggravated by system's insisting on the installation of innumerable update packages on every reboot.
MISSILE LAUNCH DETECTED!!!
Installing radar software update 3 of 68....
MISSILE APPROACH WARNING!!!
Installing radar software update 3 of 68....
MISSILE APPROACH WARNING!!!
Installing radar software update 3 of 68....
MISSILE APPROACH WARNING!!!
Installing radar software update 3 of 68....
MISSILE APPROACH WARNING!!!
Installing radar software update 3 of 68....
MISSILE IMPACT IMMINENT, EJECT! EJECT!
Installing radar software update 4 of 68....
For this update you need Microsoft Silverlight, install Silverlight [Y/N]:
And Facebook, an app that just eats cycles and battery life on both iOS and Android. That such a major player as Facebook writes such a shitty awful resource hogging app frankly shocks me... until I remember iTunes on Windows.
iTunes still compares favourably with the steaming pile of shit that is Samsung Kies.