Basically the UK is asking its companies to pay huge taxes and then compete against companies that don't.
No they are not. Apple pays a large amount of tax in the USA, the idea that Apple doesn't pay tax is pure propaganda. They don't pay much corporation tax in the UK but hey, guess what, that's because they're not a British company! It's really not that hard to understand.
Companies in the EU can earn a lot of money in America and then bring it home to the EU as well - this isn't some unique trick that only Apple can exploit. But there's much less need for weird tax arrangements if you're a UK or EU company because these countries don't double tax foreign earned income. If you earn money in Hong Kong and the Chinese government taxes it, then when you bring that money back to the UK, you don't pay tax on it again. The USA doesn't do this (almost uniquely in the world) and as such, US companies end up not bringing the money home. They leave it piling up outside the borders.
Money paid out in dividends is not "making the rich richer", that's way too categorical. Apple stock is held by all sorts of institutional investors, like pension funds. The money Apple pays out in divvies, does quite directly get spent into the economy in all sorts of ways.
Meanwhile the money piling up in Bermuda or wherever isn't going to stay there, and isn't doing anything whilst it's parked. All it's doing is waiting for the day Apple can use it. It may be that they never figure out a way to use it, and as Cook doesn't have a messiah complex like Jobs did, Cook is much more likely to pay that money out in dividends (and has already done so for some of it). But eventually that money will get spent somewhere, and then it will get taxed. The only question is where does it get spent and at what rate.
The thing to bear in mind is that you can't (or rather shouldn't) make tax laws that apply to specific named companies. You cannot actually make an Apple tax or a Google tax, you have to write tax codes that apply to all companies. And US tax law is very problematic. For every Apple that seems to be "abusing" the system because they could afford to pay lots in tax, there's a little known US company that's struggling to compete in the world market, and having their income taxed twice would make them hopelessly uncompetitive. And that's what this is all about - the US desire to tax income that's already been taxed when it was earned abroad.
Why would that make a difference? If your XMPP provider is blocked by your telco, then you're still out of luck. You can't simply move between servers at will, XMPP doesn't work like that because your server name is encoded in your identity. And anyway, WhatsApp uses XMPP under the hood (or used to) - it's essentially just a really big provider.
The figures stated in the article can theoretically be accurate, if you assume a truly massive and very modern rail line. For example, the Crossrail project (in London) will have trains that can carry 1,500 people and could theoretically be pushed up to 32-33 trains per hour. That gets you to the 50,000 passengers per hour figure the summary appears to be using.
But still, the story is a lot more complex than the "trains have 2x throughput of roads" claim. For one, it seems that a train every 90 seconds is about the maximum rate you can push a rail line. For another the cited capacity for roads is per lane, not per road. And for yet another highway capacity depends a lot on the speeds the vehicles are going at. Lower speeds equals faster capacity, but of course, that does not apply to trains where adding additional trains doesn't change their speed assuming modern computer controlled signalling.
It's rare for train systems to reach figures as high as 50k passengers per hour, but in busy metro areas like London, Paris, Tokyo etc it is absolutely not impossible.
When Firefox was new it was considered a controversial skunkworks project. The idea that Mozilla might not be an integrated suite anymore upset a lot of the existing users, believe it or not, especially as Firefox bore a rather strong resemblance to the primary competitor at the time..... Internet Explorer.
Firefox is caught between the rock and the hard place that many products get stuck in: a competitor comes along that leapfrogs them with a design that appeals to the majority of the market. But it also is disliked by a minority of the market. They pretty quickly lose the majority to the competitor and are left with the ever-shrinking minority that vocally disagree with any change.
And when Europe decides to ignore a whole lot of American drug patents in return?
The reason the WTO exists is to try and avoid tit-for-tat trade wars like what you're suggesting. Ultimately they make everyone poorer.
The US has an uncompetitive tax system for corporations. It's not even about the rate, it's about the fact that they're double taxed on worldwide income, something no other country does. Instead of coming up with creative ways to try and "punish" people who develop life saving drugs for getting sick of American tax exceptionalism, why not find ways to make them want to stay?
To which I ask, what's your point? I accept that risk in the name of freedom. You can have freedom or the illusion of safety, which would you prefer?
The idea that guns lead to freedom is based on a simple assumption: an overly oppressive government could be overthrown through some sort of armed uprising. This is a fantasy. Nobody in America has any chance of overthrowing or resisting their local government through force of arms. If you attempted it alone, you'd be immediately killed by armed police and written off as just another guy with mental problems. If you tried to coordinate a group bigger than 10 people you'd be detected and classified as some sort of domestic terrorists, and most likely end up in a firefight with a much larger, better armed and better armoured group than yourself (US police have access to ex-military equipment from Iraq, right).
But there are literally no scenarios in which a government passes a law, a bunch of people start shooting up police stations or senate buildings, and that government says, "oh ok, I guess that was kind of oppressive, we'll repeal the law" and everything goes back to being peaches and cream.
So it's a false choice. Guns do not equate to freedom and the cultural link between the two is an American-specific phenomenon.
There are apps for Android that claim to do exactly that. I believe some of them warn you if you were downgraded to 2G unexpectedly or if encryption was switched off by the cell site.
Two problems. One is nobody uses such apps. It needs to be integrated with the OS really. And another is that apparently the makers of the Stingray devices have a device that can attack 3G networks as well. This latter device is only rumoured and last time I researched it, I concluded almost nothing is known about how it works, assuming it actually works at all. It's possible it's doing something like exploiting bugs in radio firmwares or something like that.
The biggest criticism of it is that the entire conspiracy theory makes no sense, as it revolves around the idea that Putin's FSB bombed its own people to create support for the war in Chechnya. Except that war had already been started by Yeltsin with the full support of all the power structures and Putin's 1999 attack on Chechnya was preceded by the insurrection in Dagestan. There was no need for apartment bombings to get an excuse to engage in military action in Chechnya. The claimed motive just doesn't line up with the actual timings of events.
The second biggest criticism is that the people who suggested the possibility had no evidence for it good enough to stand up in a court.
The third biggest criticism is that whilst the motive of the Kremlin to do this was rather garbled, a Chechen rebel leader had actually said "[they would] set off bombs everywhere", "Russian women and children will pay for the crimes of Russian generals." and that "this will not happen tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow"..... and two days after he said that, an apartment building was bombed. And after fighting in Dagestan was concluded the bombings stopped.
So you have two possibilities - Islamic extremists bombed the apartment buildings in retaliation for their insurrection being put down. That possibility is a simple one. Or the Russian government engaged in a conspiracy to bomb its own people in a false flag operation. Given the history since 1999 of Islamists blowing shit up, I say... go with Occam's Razor.
He is not fighting against ISIS, he is fighting for Assad
Because Putin is not an idiot.
The idea western governments seem to have is that they can air-strike IS out of existence. Reality check: you cannot bomb a state out of existence short of using nukes and killing everyone within its territory. The idea that they can drop bombs on a few buildings and get rid of IS is about as realistic as the 9/11 hijackers idea that they could destroy America by destroying a few office buildings. Who cares? Countries and governments are spread out, and stronger than that.
The only actual way to expunge IS from the world without literally glassing half of Syria is to have boots on the ground, an army that is close enough to the action to separate friends from foes, and a credible replacement for IS once it's gone. Western powers are unwilling to provide either of those things: they won't put soldiers on the ground, and they don't know what would replace IS if it was gone. Oh, wait, maybe those "moderate" rebels (lol).
Russia and Putin, whether you like them or not, are clear thinkers. To get rid of IS they need an army. Assad has an army. Check. They need a credible replacement for IS. Assad is such a replacement. He may not be a good leader, indeed in many ways he's incredibly bad, but there don't appear to be any good leadership candidates in Syria and Assad is at least a good old fashioned mostly secular dictator, as opposed to a crazed death cultist.
One problem - Assad is on the verge of losing against the "moderate" rebels (like al-Qaeda) who are being armed by the CIA. The CIA doesn't have a fucking clue what will happen if Assad falls, they just aren't capable of thinking that far ahead, but it's fair to say that the bits of Syria where women can walk around dressed like westerners will quickly become.... not like that.
So Russia props up Assad. That mostly means hitting the "moderate" rebels. If Assad manages to stabilise his position and regain control over the areas currently controlled by the non-IS rebels, then there's a credible battle tested army that's fighting for its own existence ready and waiting to go to war against IS.
I understand that cutting of the money supply for terrorist is very effective
Based on what? Have there been any successful financial actions against terrorists, ever? I know the US Treasury likes to claim there has, but whenever you look at the details you discover that by "terrorist" they meant something like "someone wiring money to Cuba or Iran". Not actual terrorists of the kind that blow themselves up.
The blunt reality is that terrorism is very cheap. The entire cost of 9/11 came under the $10,000 reporting threshold for cash transactions.
The idea that you can attack terrorism through finance doesn't make much sense. It just has too little to do with money.
I went and took a look at the Game of Thrones community, seeing as that's apparently an example they wanted to highlight about how great this aspect of G+ is. It consists almost entirely of image macros. That is not what the word 'community' implies to me.
I don't see how G+ can possibly ever get good at communities whilst it revolves around Facebook-sized pieces of text with giant images attached, and especially not whilst it insists on clipping posts and comments to just a couple of lines. When I'm on the internet I want to see WORDS and not endless idiotic memes posted over and over. I wish to be entertained and informed. G+ has no chance of doing either unless it redesigns a heck of a lot more than the stylesheets.
Terrorists have tried to develop their own encryption systems before. "Asrar" is one that I vaguely recall. They all suck and can be broken almost immediately by any professional cryptanalyst on the back on a napkin.
As skilled cryptographers are very rare and tend not to be the type of people who think blowing things up is a good plan, this means they more or less have to use western developed products. Moreover if they do find "Islamic" encryption apps on the net it's often unclear if they were really produced by Jihadi's or whether they're developed by western intelligence. But then their problem becomes that they don't know which mainstream products are any good and which ones are backdoored.
It's odd that PS4 is considered harder to monitor than WhatsApp. I suspect the reason is that PS4 communications isn't tied to a phone number, and that the messages aren't in the form of easily searched text.
Also, people will put off having kids longer and everyone is going to start to care a lot more about the "longterm" of things. Seems like a positive direction for humanity. ..
Not obviously so. It also means that old ideas will hang around for a lot longer because people who are mentally stuck in their ways will take even longer to die off.
No they did not. You didn't read my post, did you? Reporting standards changed around that time so all crime figures went up, but that's a statistical artifact: the BCS figures show there was no spike around that time and crime started to steadily fall around the late 90's.
The U.S. does not have shootings happening every day - and France just surpassed years of U.S. mass shootings of innocents.
Yes it does, actually more than one in 2015. As of August 26th the number of "mass shootings" (defined there as at least four people getting shot) had passed the number of days in the year. Multiplied out that's 247 shootings * 4 people == 988 minimum but those stats are for "at least" four people: each incident could have had more than four. So it's in reality higher.
So that's say around a thousand people, vs 129 people in this Paris attack. It simply is not comparable. Your attempted rebuttal is based on fiction, which is never a good start.
The U.S. has more gun deaths per year but almost all of that is gang violence, who aren't buying guns legally anyway so I'm not sure how you plan to stop them...
You seem to think that gangs are somehow special. The UK has gangs too. They're the ones renting the same gun to shoot at each other with because they can't obtain their own. Gun control, properly implemented, takes guns away from everyone. Or did you not read any of what I wrote above?
Over the next few years Europe will have a vastly higher death toll at the hands of guns, precisely because the populace has been disarmed and pacified.
You are delusional. What do you think is going to happen, some sort of mass EU-initiated genocide? Although the events in Paris are tragic, they don't fundamentally change anything: Europe isn't about to experience a "vastly higher death toll at the hands of guns". Even if the occurrence of Paris-style attacks becomes 10x more frequent, that'd merely bring it into the range of US mass shooting deaths, not exceed it.
If Europe had American style gun control laws then it'd probably have an American style problem with mass shootings happening every day due to ordinary white citizens going crazy, instead of every few years or so due to poorly integrated Muslim men who are radicalised by the blowback from foreign military campaigns.
Somehow that would not seem like an improvement.
It looks like every time someone finds a gun and pulls the trigger in Europe (a place larger than America), crazed yanks immediately pop up and start saying it could have all been avoided if only literally everyone was carrying guns including in cafes and rock concerts.
The reality is a lot more boring. The combination of strong borders and gun controls do work. The experience of the UK is unequivocal. Gun crime is virtually unheard of, guns being involved in merely 0.2% of all crimes, and that proportion has been steadily falling for a decade. Guns are so hard to obtain in the UK that gangs have been observed using antique 19th century weapons and the few that do still exist tend to be owned by professional "armourers" who rent the guns out, often to opposing sides in the same dispute. Gangs literally rent the same gun to go shoot at each other with.
I've noticed that the UK experience is sometimes dismissed by US gun advocates using misleading statistics. For example it's commonly pointed out that after gun controls were tightened in 1996 the number of gun offences went up. Actually that's an artifact of changed police reporting standards that increased all types of crime figures simultaneously and it doesn't show up in the British Crime Survey, which gives an independent measure of crime by polling randomly selected people instead of counting police reports. Also there tends to be an assumption that merely passing a law immediately implements working gun control, whereas in reality it can take police forces quite some years to drain the supply of weapons even when they have all the tools they need.
Nonetheless, the outcome 20 years on is quite clear - mass shootings are so rare they're basically non-existent, gun crime in general is falling towards extinction, and the local people are happy with it.
Why is this not happening in France? Well, France is inside the Schengen border free zone and that zone has recently accepted a number of former communist states where there are large stockpiles of Soviet era weaponry still easily accessible. West Europe can't implement UK style gun control even if they wanted to (actually, French gun control law isn't even as strict as the UK anyway). There isn't any easy solution to that beyond waiting for the eastern countries to step up gun law enforcement and track down/destroy the remaining weapons, which could easily take decades. Americans should therefore be careful about over-generalising from the mainland European experience to all gun control everywhere. In island nations like the UK and Australia it tends to work a lot better.
Has somebody noticed that tragedies in free gun zones occur not when people are not armed, but when the right to bear arms is limited. Because criminals do no care about zones.
Criminals do care about zones, or rather, their borders. The fact that mass shootings are happening in mainland Europe is traceable largely to the recent entrance of eastern European countries to the EU, countries which still have large stockpiles of Soviet-era weaponry and little history of gun control. As Schengen is a border-free zone, bringing such countries in undermines the gun control at the borders.
Note that the UK, which is a part of the EU but is not a part of Schengen, does not seem to have the same issue at this time. Because it's an island which makes it easier to enforce gun controls.
The new EU countries will eventually track down and get rid of the stockpiles of Kalashnikovs that are still floating around eastern Europe, as they've agreed to do so when they joined Schengen and it's not like any of those places love Muslims. But it may take a long time. That's OK though. I don't see any other way to push forward the boundaries of relatively low-gun-number zones.
So... they're just collecting metadata, not actual content
One of the insightful points made by the head of Gigaclear is that the line between metadata and data is pretty vague. For instance, who are you calling on Skype? "Obviously" metadata.... but if someone is added to a group call in the middle of it, then suddenly metadata might be being mixed in seamlessly with voice and video data. If you post a message to a website like Slashdot that has subject lines and bodies, is the subject line metadata? And if so, how does an ISP extract that and store it separately from the body?
The real cost of this scheme isn't even in the hardware, really, it's in paying large numbers of skilled people to develop a dizzying array of Wireshark filters to try and separate and index the metadata for every imaginable internet protocol.
And the government knows that, and in fact May has said repeatedly that the data stored wouldn't include the specific pages you visit but only the name of the website.
The Tories, of course, are painting this as a nuanced compromise with civil libertarians rather than what it is - a pragmatic acceptance that SSL isn't going anywhere so the SNI field (and IP addresses) is all the ISPs can actually see.
Interestingly, there are proposals to encrypt the SNI. That would lessen the data ISPs can log yet again, probably down to the level of IP address only. Given the prevalence of hosting on CDNs like CloudFront and CloudFlare, this would at a stroke make browsing to sites behind such services largely anonymous.
Traditionally phones have been subsidised by the carrier. What this means is that from the users perspective, they got the phone from the carrier. The carrier has the tech support infrastructure and the customer relationship, even if it says Samsung or Sony or whatever on the box. That means if something goes wrong.... the customer calls the telco. Not Samsung.
As a results of this, the OEM's customer is actually the carriers, not the end users. And carriers learned the hard way in the 1990's and for much of the 2000's that OEMS suck at software and have a habit of making firmwares that are bug ridden pieces of crap. And never updating them.
It's popular to blame the carriers for the slow pace of firmware updates, and surely, they do share some of the blame. They should have sorted out their internal processes a long time ago. The reason they didn't is simply:
1. The carrier QA processes do in fact find a lot of bugs
2. Most OEMs have historically simply not done security patches, and when they did do firmware revs, actually introduced new bugs with the updates.
So that's why carriers insist on re-qualifying firmwares and why it takes forever. It isn't because they're diabolically evil or anything (at least not in most cases).
Now things are getting better. Samsung took these security reports from Google, fixed them, and pushed out the fixes with the new monthly online updates they're doing. Carriers are taking a risk by doing this: if an update goes wrong, it'll be them taking the heat from customers and Samsung only secondarily. But that's the new world they're playing in.
Slashdot Mirror
No they are not. Apple pays a large amount of tax in the USA, the idea that Apple doesn't pay tax is pure propaganda. They don't pay much corporation tax in the UK but hey, guess what, that's because they're not a British company! It's really not that hard to understand.
Companies in the EU can earn a lot of money in America and then bring it home to the EU as well - this isn't some unique trick that only Apple can exploit. But there's much less need for weird tax arrangements if you're a UK or EU company because these countries don't double tax foreign earned income. If you earn money in Hong Kong and the Chinese government taxes it, then when you bring that money back to the UK, you don't pay tax on it again. The USA doesn't do this (almost uniquely in the world) and as such, US companies end up not bringing the money home. They leave it piling up outside the borders.
Money paid out in dividends is not "making the rich richer", that's way too categorical. Apple stock is held by all sorts of institutional investors, like pension funds. The money Apple pays out in divvies, does quite directly get spent into the economy in all sorts of ways.
Meanwhile the money piling up in Bermuda or wherever isn't going to stay there, and isn't doing anything whilst it's parked. All it's doing is waiting for the day Apple can use it. It may be that they never figure out a way to use it, and as Cook doesn't have a messiah complex like Jobs did, Cook is much more likely to pay that money out in dividends (and has already done so for some of it). But eventually that money will get spent somewhere, and then it will get taxed. The only question is where does it get spent and at what rate.
The thing to bear in mind is that you can't (or rather shouldn't) make tax laws that apply to specific named companies. You cannot actually make an Apple tax or a Google tax, you have to write tax codes that apply to all companies. And US tax law is very problematic. For every Apple that seems to be "abusing" the system because they could afford to pay lots in tax, there's a little known US company that's struggling to compete in the world market, and having their income taxed twice would make them hopelessly uncompetitive. And that's what this is all about - the US desire to tax income that's already been taxed when it was earned abroad.
Why would that make a difference? If your XMPP provider is blocked by your telco, then you're still out of luck. You can't simply move between servers at will, XMPP doesn't work like that because your server name is encoded in your identity. And anyway, WhatsApp uses XMPP under the hood (or used to) - it's essentially just a really big provider.
The figures stated in the article can theoretically be accurate, if you assume a truly massive and very modern rail line. For example, the Crossrail project (in London) will have trains that can carry 1,500 people and could theoretically be pushed up to 32-33 trains per hour. That gets you to the 50,000 passengers per hour figure the summary appears to be using.
But still, the story is a lot more complex than the "trains have 2x throughput of roads" claim. For one, it seems that a train every 90 seconds is about the maximum rate you can push a rail line. For another the cited capacity for roads is per lane, not per road. And for yet another highway capacity depends a lot on the speeds the vehicles are going at. Lower speeds equals faster capacity, but of course, that does not apply to trains where adding additional trains doesn't change their speed assuming modern computer controlled signalling.
It's rare for train systems to reach figures as high as 50k passengers per hour, but in busy metro areas like London, Paris, Tokyo etc it is absolutely not impossible.
When Firefox was new it was considered a controversial skunkworks project. The idea that Mozilla might not be an integrated suite anymore upset a lot of the existing users, believe it or not, especially as Firefox bore a rather strong resemblance to the primary competitor at the time..... Internet Explorer.
Firefox is caught between the rock and the hard place that many products get stuck in: a competitor comes along that leapfrogs them with a design that appeals to the majority of the market. But it also is disliked by a minority of the market. They pretty quickly lose the majority to the competitor and are left with the ever-shrinking minority that vocally disagree with any change.
lol. A bit more seriously the 9x more likely than social scientists thing tells you nothing, because social science is an ideologically homogenous wasteland in which literally everyone is left wing, according to social scientists themselves!
And when Europe decides to ignore a whole lot of American drug patents in return?
The reason the WTO exists is to try and avoid tit-for-tat trade wars like what you're suggesting. Ultimately they make everyone poorer.
The US has an uncompetitive tax system for corporations. It's not even about the rate, it's about the fact that they're double taxed on worldwide income, something no other country does. Instead of coming up with creative ways to try and "punish" people who develop life saving drugs for getting sick of American tax exceptionalism, why not find ways to make them want to stay?
The idea that guns lead to freedom is based on a simple assumption: an overly oppressive government could be overthrown through some sort of armed uprising. This is a fantasy. Nobody in America has any chance of overthrowing or resisting their local government through force of arms. If you attempted it alone, you'd be immediately killed by armed police and written off as just another guy with mental problems. If you tried to coordinate a group bigger than 10 people you'd be detected and classified as some sort of domestic terrorists, and most likely end up in a firefight with a much larger, better armed and better armoured group than yourself (US police have access to ex-military equipment from Iraq, right).
But there are literally no scenarios in which a government passes a law, a bunch of people start shooting up police stations or senate buildings, and that government says, "oh ok, I guess that was kind of oppressive, we'll repeal the law" and everything goes back to being peaches and cream.
So it's a false choice. Guns do not equate to freedom and the cultural link between the two is an American-specific phenomenon.
Remember that Ukraine is in massive arrears to Russia for gas they never paid for. Meanwhile Crimea was/is paying Ukraine for electricity.
There are apps for Android that claim to do exactly that. I believe some of them warn you if you were downgraded to 2G unexpectedly or if encryption was switched off by the cell site.
Two problems. One is nobody uses such apps. It needs to be integrated with the OS really. And another is that apparently the makers of the Stingray devices have a device that can attack 3G networks as well. This latter device is only rumoured and last time I researched it, I concluded almost nothing is known about how it works, assuming it actually works at all. It's possible it's doing something like exploiting bugs in radio firmwares or something like that.
Fall of the Soviet Union was 25 years ago. Do you think Putin hasn't changed his worldview one bit since then?
Although some of those events look pretty bad at first, there's nonetheless significant criticism of that theory from neutral third parties.
The biggest criticism of it is that the entire conspiracy theory makes no sense, as it revolves around the idea that Putin's FSB bombed its own people to create support for the war in Chechnya. Except that war had already been started by Yeltsin with the full support of all the power structures and Putin's 1999 attack on Chechnya was preceded by the insurrection in Dagestan. There was no need for apartment bombings to get an excuse to engage in military action in Chechnya. The claimed motive just doesn't line up with the actual timings of events.
The second biggest criticism is that the people who suggested the possibility had no evidence for it good enough to stand up in a court.
The third biggest criticism is that whilst the motive of the Kremlin to do this was rather garbled, a Chechen rebel leader had actually said "[they would] set off bombs everywhere", "Russian women and children will pay for the crimes of Russian generals." and that "this will not happen tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow" ..... and two days after he said that, an apartment building was bombed. And after fighting in Dagestan was concluded the bombings stopped.
So you have two possibilities - Islamic extremists bombed the apartment buildings in retaliation for their insurrection being put down. That possibility is a simple one. Or the Russian government engaged in a conspiracy to bomb its own people in a false flag operation. Given the history since 1999 of Islamists blowing shit up, I say ... go with Occam's Razor.
Because Putin is not an idiot.
The idea western governments seem to have is that they can air-strike IS out of existence. Reality check: you cannot bomb a state out of existence short of using nukes and killing everyone within its territory. The idea that they can drop bombs on a few buildings and get rid of IS is about as realistic as the 9/11 hijackers idea that they could destroy America by destroying a few office buildings. Who cares? Countries and governments are spread out, and stronger than that.
The only actual way to expunge IS from the world without literally glassing half of Syria is to have boots on the ground, an army that is close enough to the action to separate friends from foes, and a credible replacement for IS once it's gone. Western powers are unwilling to provide either of those things: they won't put soldiers on the ground, and they don't know what would replace IS if it was gone. Oh, wait, maybe those "moderate" rebels (lol).
Russia and Putin, whether you like them or not, are clear thinkers. To get rid of IS they need an army. Assad has an army. Check. They need a credible replacement for IS. Assad is such a replacement. He may not be a good leader, indeed in many ways he's incredibly bad, but there don't appear to be any good leadership candidates in Syria and Assad is at least a good old fashioned mostly secular dictator, as opposed to a crazed death cultist.
One problem - Assad is on the verge of losing against the "moderate" rebels (like al-Qaeda) who are being armed by the CIA. The CIA doesn't have a fucking clue what will happen if Assad falls, they just aren't capable of thinking that far ahead, but it's fair to say that the bits of Syria where women can walk around dressed like westerners will quickly become .... not like that.
So Russia props up Assad. That mostly means hitting the "moderate" rebels. If Assad manages to stabilise his position and regain control over the areas currently controlled by the non-IS rebels, then there's a credible battle tested army that's fighting for its own existence ready and waiting to go to war against IS.
Based on what? Have there been any successful financial actions against terrorists, ever? I know the US Treasury likes to claim there has, but whenever you look at the details you discover that by "terrorist" they meant something like "someone wiring money to Cuba or Iran". Not actual terrorists of the kind that blow themselves up.
The blunt reality is that terrorism is very cheap. The entire cost of 9/11 came under the $10,000 reporting threshold for cash transactions.
The idea that you can attack terrorism through finance doesn't make much sense. It just has too little to do with money.
I went and took a look at the Game of Thrones community, seeing as that's apparently an example they wanted to highlight about how great this aspect of G+ is. It consists almost entirely of image macros. That is not what the word 'community' implies to me.
I don't see how G+ can possibly ever get good at communities whilst it revolves around Facebook-sized pieces of text with giant images attached, and especially not whilst it insists on clipping posts and comments to just a couple of lines. When I'm on the internet I want to see WORDS and not endless idiotic memes posted over and over. I wish to be entertained and informed. G+ has no chance of doing either unless it redesigns a heck of a lot more than the stylesheets.
Terrorists have tried to develop their own encryption systems before. "Asrar" is one that I vaguely recall. They all suck and can be broken almost immediately by any professional cryptanalyst on the back on a napkin.
As skilled cryptographers are very rare and tend not to be the type of people who think blowing things up is a good plan, this means they more or less have to use western developed products. Moreover if they do find "Islamic" encryption apps on the net it's often unclear if they were really produced by Jihadi's or whether they're developed by western intelligence. But then their problem becomes that they don't know which mainstream products are any good and which ones are backdoored.
It's odd that PS4 is considered harder to monitor than WhatsApp. I suspect the reason is that PS4 communications isn't tied to a phone number, and that the messages aren't in the form of easily searched text.
Not obviously so. It also means that old ideas will hang around for a lot longer because people who are mentally stuck in their ways will take even longer to die off.
No they did not. You didn't read my post, did you? Reporting standards changed around that time so all crime figures went up, but that's a statistical artifact: the BCS figures show there was no spike around that time and crime started to steadily fall around the late 90's.
Yes it does, actually more than one in 2015. As of August 26th the number of "mass shootings" (defined there as at least four people getting shot) had passed the number of days in the year. Multiplied out that's 247 shootings * 4 people == 988 minimum but those stats are for "at least" four people: each incident could have had more than four. So it's in reality higher.
So that's say around a thousand people, vs 129 people in this Paris attack. It simply is not comparable. Your attempted rebuttal is based on fiction, which is never a good start.
You seem to think that gangs are somehow special. The UK has gangs too. They're the ones renting the same gun to shoot at each other with because they can't obtain their own. Gun control, properly implemented, takes guns away from everyone. Or did you not read any of what I wrote above?
You are delusional. What do you think is going to happen, some sort of mass EU-initiated genocide? Although the events in Paris are tragic, they don't fundamentally change anything: Europe isn't about to experience a "vastly higher death toll at the hands of guns". Even if the occurrence of Paris-style attacks becomes 10x more frequent, that'd merely bring it into the range of US mass shooting deaths, not exceed it.
If Europe had American style gun control laws then it'd probably have an American style problem with mass shootings happening every day due to ordinary white citizens going crazy, instead of every few years or so due to poorly integrated Muslim men who are radicalised by the blowback from foreign military campaigns.
Somehow that would not seem like an improvement.
It looks like every time someone finds a gun and pulls the trigger in Europe (a place larger than America), crazed yanks immediately pop up and start saying it could have all been avoided if only literally everyone was carrying guns including in cafes and rock concerts.
The reality is a lot more boring. The combination of strong borders and gun controls do work. The experience of the UK is unequivocal. Gun crime is virtually unheard of, guns being involved in merely 0.2% of all crimes, and that proportion has been steadily falling for a decade. Guns are so hard to obtain in the UK that gangs have been observed using antique 19th century weapons and the few that do still exist tend to be owned by professional "armourers" who rent the guns out, often to opposing sides in the same dispute. Gangs literally rent the same gun to go shoot at each other with.
I've noticed that the UK experience is sometimes dismissed by US gun advocates using misleading statistics. For example it's commonly pointed out that after gun controls were tightened in 1996 the number of gun offences went up. Actually that's an artifact of changed police reporting standards that increased all types of crime figures simultaneously and it doesn't show up in the British Crime Survey, which gives an independent measure of crime by polling randomly selected people instead of counting police reports. Also there tends to be an assumption that merely passing a law immediately implements working gun control, whereas in reality it can take police forces quite some years to drain the supply of weapons even when they have all the tools they need.
Nonetheless, the outcome 20 years on is quite clear - mass shootings are so rare they're basically non-existent, gun crime in general is falling towards extinction, and the local people are happy with it.
Why is this not happening in France? Well, France is inside the Schengen border free zone and that zone has recently accepted a number of former communist states where there are large stockpiles of Soviet era weaponry still easily accessible. West Europe can't implement UK style gun control even if they wanted to (actually, French gun control law isn't even as strict as the UK anyway). There isn't any easy solution to that beyond waiting for the eastern countries to step up gun law enforcement and track down/destroy the remaining weapons, which could easily take decades. Americans should therefore be careful about over-generalising from the mainland European experience to all gun control everywhere. In island nations like the UK and Australia it tends to work a lot better.
Criminals do care about zones, or rather, their borders. The fact that mass shootings are happening in mainland Europe is traceable largely to the recent entrance of eastern European countries to the EU, countries which still have large stockpiles of Soviet-era weaponry and little history of gun control. As Schengen is a border-free zone, bringing such countries in undermines the gun control at the borders.
Note that the UK, which is a part of the EU but is not a part of Schengen, does not seem to have the same issue at this time. Because it's an island which makes it easier to enforce gun controls.
The new EU countries will eventually track down and get rid of the stockpiles of Kalashnikovs that are still floating around eastern Europe, as they've agreed to do so when they joined Schengen and it's not like any of those places love Muslims. But it may take a long time. That's OK though. I don't see any other way to push forward the boundaries of relatively low-gun-number zones.
One of the insightful points made by the head of Gigaclear is that the line between metadata and data is pretty vague. For instance, who are you calling on Skype? "Obviously" metadata .... but if someone is added to a group call in the middle of it, then suddenly metadata might be being mixed in seamlessly with voice and video data. If you post a message to a website like Slashdot that has subject lines and bodies, is the subject line metadata? And if so, how does an ISP extract that and store it separately from the body?
The real cost of this scheme isn't even in the hardware, really, it's in paying large numbers of skilled people to develop a dizzying array of Wireshark filters to try and separate and index the metadata for every imaginable internet protocol.
I thought I read somewhere that none of Dropbox, Stripe or Airbnb actually make a profit? Is that really a success story if so?
And the government knows that, and in fact May has said repeatedly that the data stored wouldn't include the specific pages you visit but only the name of the website.
The Tories, of course, are painting this as a nuanced compromise with civil libertarians rather than what it is - a pragmatic acceptance that SSL isn't going anywhere so the SNI field (and IP addresses) is all the ISPs can actually see.
Interestingly, there are proposals to encrypt the SNI. That would lessen the data ISPs can log yet again, probably down to the level of IP address only. Given the prevalence of hosting on CDNs like CloudFront and CloudFlare, this would at a stroke make browsing to sites behind such services largely anonymous.
Traditionally phones have been subsidised by the carrier. What this means is that from the users perspective, they got the phone from the carrier. The carrier has the tech support infrastructure and the customer relationship, even if it says Samsung or Sony or whatever on the box. That means if something goes wrong .... the customer calls the telco. Not Samsung.
As a results of this, the OEM's customer is actually the carriers, not the end users. And carriers learned the hard way in the 1990's and for much of the 2000's that OEMS suck at software and have a habit of making firmwares that are bug ridden pieces of crap. And never updating them.
It's popular to blame the carriers for the slow pace of firmware updates, and surely, they do share some of the blame. They should have sorted out their internal processes a long time ago. The reason they didn't is simply:
1. The carrier QA processes do in fact find a lot of bugs
2. Most OEMs have historically simply not done security patches, and when they did do firmware revs, actually introduced new bugs with the updates.
So that's why carriers insist on re-qualifying firmwares and why it takes forever. It isn't because they're diabolically evil or anything (at least not in most cases).
Now things are getting better. Samsung took these security reports from Google, fixed them, and pushed out the fixes with the new monthly online updates they're doing. Carriers are taking a risk by doing this: if an update goes wrong, it'll be them taking the heat from customers and Samsung only secondarily. But that's the new world they're playing in.