An optical disc will outlive a hard drive by decades.
Only ones you purchase pre-recorded, not ones you write which have a lifetime of 2-5 years. Even then while hard drives may fail it is easy to keep a RAID array up and they are very easy to copy the data to and from. So in 10 years time when the 8TB solid state memory stick or 1000+-year lifetime quartz technology drive is available you can easily copy all the files over to it...unlike your optical discs which you will have to load into the machine individually to copy the data over a speeds well below that of a hard drive.
They also have a need to purchase food to eat. Chances are if they have a solution for getting to the supermarket (home help, neighbours, family etc.) it should work for getting to a mail box which is undoubtedly a lot nearer.
This is an attempt to eliminate willing participation of these 15 EU member states, and other states with similar laws and policies, as potential havens for Snowden on the basis of a possible U.S. death penalty or torture of the extradited person.
Well, speaking as an EU citizen, I would not be happy with any extradition until they promised not to torture him using the definition of torture used in the EU. American and English often have somewhat different meanings for the same word and sadly 'torture' appears to be one of them. Even then frankly I'm not sure I would not trust them to hold to that and not drag up some legal argument that they don't have to hold to their promise or else have an 'accident' occur.
I think it's pretty fucking sad when the US is obliged to promise explicitly, on a recurring basis, not to torture people.
Worse it's a pointless exercise. When your definition of torture excludes things like water boarding and sleep deprivation any promise not to torture is clearly meaningless.
That could be dangerous - you'd really get into trouble with the astrologer's union. I doubt "Venus ascends in aquarius and then disappears in a large nuclear fireball shortly before teatime" is something they have a prediction for in their charts. In fact you might force them to just make something up!;-)
Time Machine on a Mac laptop does exactly this - it uses a journal of filesystem changes to update only the files it needs to. While this is probably not much use to you since I'm guessing that if you had a Mac you would not be asking this question it would be a system to look at if there is no FOSS alternative and you want to code your own.
The other advantage is that cluster boxes (at least in Canada) have secure parcel delivery capability which, while limited in size, is still a big improvement over what can fit through a letter box. Only downside is that unlike your home the parcel boxes are not heated which means if you parcel contains electronics you need to let it heat up before opening it in the winter when temperatures drop below -30C otherwise you risk condensation.
We already do this in Edmonton, Alberta and manage to get to our post boxes even in -40C weather in the winter so while door-to-door delivery is nicer I think those living in Buffalo will survive.
We already 'see' microwave radiation, it is called 'radar'.
No we do not see it - our eyes are not sensitive to that region of the EM spectrum. We can detect it but that requires a device which detects the waves and then displays the information to us in a human accessible form like radar, radio or TV. If we could see WiFi then it would look nothing like the artist's rendition. For a start we would not see the crests and troughs of the wave anymore than we see the crests and troughs of light waves or hear the crests and troughs of sound waves. Then there is the problem that the artist seems to have drawn the waves and lines or planes from which light is emitted. Again this is wrong. Unless something is scattering the EM waves you will not see them unless they are aimed at you. This is a classic mistake made by artists. Think of a laser pointer - unless there is dust in the air to scatter some of the beam in your direction you only see the spot on the projection screen not a beam between the pointer and the screen.
What you would actually see if you could see WiFi would be a glow of a fixed 'colour' emanating from the router and visible through walls and other radio-transparent objects. Metal objects would reflect this light so really what you would see is one bright spot that might appear in the middle of a wall or a floor etc plus several other less-bright spots due to reflections off metal.
Now you might argue that this is overly nitpicking on an artistic work but if an artist comes up with a clever idea like this is it really too much for them to actually put a little thought into it and read up some simple physics to figure out what it might actually look like? Afterall if they decided to draw an elephant without ever having seen one wouldn't they take the time to read up about them and either find a picture of one or visit one in a zoo. It would be insane to try to draw one without this and I doubt anyone would recognize it as an elephant if they tried. Well guess what - the same applies if you are trying to draw something physics related!
No - I'm implying that saying "oh they can't do that it would be against the US constitution" is not a good argument when you have a US government that is already doing things that appear to be against the US constitution. It's akin to arguing that it's safe to leave a laptop on a park bench because it would be illegal for anyone to take it. It might be illegal to take it but that will not stop it getting nicked will it?
As for being a subject, while no government or country is perfect I honestly believe Canada has a far more open, friendly and accepting society than the US. There might have been a bit more of a barb to your comment in the late 18th century but in the 21st century I think I have a lot more to be proud of as a subject of her majesty living in Canada that I would have as a citizen in the US.
You still need to physically get a bug into the room where the typewriter is. I imagine this is a lot harder and certainly carries far more personal risk than siting half way around the world and connecting via the net.
I doubt that - I would imagine people had some idea about the organization they were working for but joined it because it was better to work for it since it gave some measure of protection from it. The problem with the NSA seems to be that they paint this rosy picture of them defending against terrorism when, in reality, they are invading everyone's privacy and spying on allied governments. Hence their recruitment drive is likely to attract honest and open idealists like Snowden who suddenly find themselves confronting their morals.
If the NSA, and US government, had a more realistic view of themselves i.e. that they are like every other government in the world and not some disney-princess version that can do no wrong, people would at least have realistic expectations of what they are getting in to when they sign up.
The whole melting pot metaphor is supposed to represent how culturally diverse we are, and it's true almost to an annoying level in some places.
I lived in Michigan and Illinois. I would actually argue that the melting pot metaphor represents how culturally diverse you were before you blended them together into a single, relatively uniform, US culture. The only evidence of non-US culture I saw were places like Holland, MI which celebrated their dutch heritage. However there is a huge difference between a living culture and celebrating the culture of your ancestors. The latter, a frozen image of your ancestors past culture when they emigrated which you bring out for the tourists, is what I have seen in the US but this is not multi-culturalism: for that you need people really living other cultures.
When I was a schoolboy we were taught to take pride in the fact that we were and always had been a melting pot.
Yes - I've always found it amusing that the US is so proud of being a "melting pot". This suggests that all cultural distinctiveness will be lost and you have to become just like everyone else - it's the Borg approach to immigration. Not sure why you would want to be so proud of that but, having once been a US resident, I'll grant that it is an accurate metaphor.
If it is, you should be able to use two different speeds of the shadow to distinguish zero from one, which yields a protocol for sending messages faster than photons can be sent from the earth to the moon?
You can detect the speed of the shadow on the moon at a single point but what you are getting wrong is who is sending the message. The shadow is under the complete control of the person on Earth. There is NOTHING the person on the moon can do to control the shadow other than interact with the person on Earth. This means that all information transfer comes from the Earth and it comes at the speed of light through the presence, or absence, of photons. You can essentially think of your speed detector as two photosensitive sensors which, if one sees a signal a certain time after the other you interpret as a '1' but that '1' was transmitted from the Earth NOT from one sensor to the other.
The only reason classified information should appear on an unclassified machine is if there's a security breach.
While I understand your argument there is one fatal, logical flaw in it. This would logically require that they block ALL media coverage of the classified material, not just the Guardian.
This is brought to you by the same people who brought you the VAT and the television tax.
Forget that, this is the government that gave the world graduated income tax. It was introduced as a temporary measure to finance the Napoleonic Wars. Interestingly it was temporarily repealed in 1816 and all the tax records were taken out and burnt to show that they had been destroyed...only they kept a second copy in the basement of the tax court. So even back then they were lying to us!
It's a form of argument known as reductio ad absurdum. It amazes me that having studied humanities at university you have not seen it before especially since I learnt this as school when, apparently, I lacked sufficient "life experience" to really understand it. Ah but now we are broaching another topic: irony.
Can the person on the moon detect the speed of the shadow's movement? If he can, then you could create a protocol: 2c = 0, 3c = 1 or something. The person on the ground controlling the beam could then send a message to the person on the moon that would get there faster than the same message sent using photons?
They can do exactly that and, as you correctly note the message would go from the person on the ground controlling the beam to the person on the moon by the photons being emitted. Those photons travel at the speed of light (by definition!) so there is no problem with that. What cannot happen is that one person on the moon use it to communicate with another person on the moon because neither has control over the beam....and the only way to gain control would be to signal the person on Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
An optical disc will outlive a hard drive by decades.
Only ones you purchase pre-recorded, not ones you write which have a lifetime of 2-5 years. Even then while hard drives may fail it is easy to keep a RAID array up and they are very easy to copy the data to and from. So in 10 years time when the 8TB solid state memory stick or 1000+-year lifetime quartz technology drive is available you can easily copy all the files over to it...unlike your optical discs which you will have to load into the machine individually to copy the data over a speeds well below that of a hard drive.
But 80 year old grandmothers have mailboxes.
They also have a need to purchase food to eat. Chances are if they have a solution for getting to the supermarket (home help, neighbours, family etc.) it should work for getting to a mail box which is undoubtedly a lot nearer.
This is an attempt to eliminate willing participation of these 15 EU member states, and other states with similar laws and policies, as potential havens for Snowden on the basis of a possible U.S. death penalty or torture of the extradited person.
Well, speaking as an EU citizen, I would not be happy with any extradition until they promised not to torture him using the definition of torture used in the EU. American and English often have somewhat different meanings for the same word and sadly 'torture' appears to be one of them. Even then frankly I'm not sure I would not trust them to hold to that and not drag up some legal argument that they don't have to hold to their promise or else have an 'accident' occur.
I think it's pretty fucking sad when the US is obliged to promise explicitly, on a recurring basis, not to torture people.
Worse it's a pointless exercise. When your definition of torture excludes things like water boarding and sleep deprivation any promise not to torture is clearly meaningless.
Shoot them down!
That could be dangerous - you'd really get into trouble with the astrologer's union. I doubt "Venus ascends in aquarius and then disappears in a large nuclear fireball shortly before teatime" is something they have a prediction for in their charts. In fact you might force them to just make something up! ;-)
TimeMachine takes about 15 minutes to do the prep work before it starts copying for me
Well with my 2012 non-Retina MBP with a 1TB disk it only takes a few minutes at most. I guess those extra screen pixels must really slow it down! ;-)
Time Machine on a Mac laptop does exactly this - it uses a journal of filesystem changes to update only the files it needs to. While this is probably not much use to you since I'm guessing that if you had a Mac you would not be asking this question it would be a system to look at if there is no FOSS alternative and you want to code your own.
The other advantage is that cluster boxes (at least in Canada) have secure parcel delivery capability which, while limited in size, is still a big improvement over what can fit through a letter box. Only downside is that unlike your home the parcel boxes are not heated which means if you parcel contains electronics you need to let it heat up before opening it in the winter when temperatures drop below -30C otherwise you risk condensation.
We already do this in Edmonton, Alberta and manage to get to our post boxes even in -40C weather in the winter so while door-to-door delivery is nicer I think those living in Buffalo will survive.
We already 'see' microwave radiation, it is called 'radar'.
No we do not see it - our eyes are not sensitive to that region of the EM spectrum. We can detect it but that requires a device which detects the waves and then displays the information to us in a human accessible form like radar, radio or TV. If we could see WiFi then it would look nothing like the artist's rendition. For a start we would not see the crests and troughs of the wave anymore than we see the crests and troughs of light waves or hear the crests and troughs of sound waves. Then there is the problem that the artist seems to have drawn the waves and lines or planes from which light is emitted. Again this is wrong. Unless something is scattering the EM waves you will not see them unless they are aimed at you. This is a classic mistake made by artists. Think of a laser pointer - unless there is dust in the air to scatter some of the beam in your direction you only see the spot on the projection screen not a beam between the pointer and the screen.
What you would actually see if you could see WiFi would be a glow of a fixed 'colour' emanating from the router and visible through walls and other radio-transparent objects. Metal objects would reflect this light so really what you would see is one bright spot that might appear in the middle of a wall or a floor etc plus several other less-bright spots due to reflections off metal.
Now you might argue that this is overly nitpicking on an artistic work but if an artist comes up with a clever idea like this is it really too much for them to actually put a little thought into it and read up some simple physics to figure out what it might actually look like? Afterall if they decided to draw an elephant without ever having seen one wouldn't they take the time to read up about them and either find a picture of one or visit one in a zoo. It would be insane to try to draw one without this and I doubt anyone would recognize it as an elephant if they tried. Well guess what - the same applies if you are trying to draw something physics related!
The only way to win is not to play.
Actually the only way to win is for nobody to play. Even if you don't play yourself the fallout from the idiot playing next door may still get you.
No - I'm implying that saying "oh they can't do that it would be against the US constitution" is not a good argument when you have a US government that is already doing things that appear to be against the US constitution. It's akin to arguing that it's safe to leave a laptop on a park bench because it would be illegal for anyone to take it. It might be illegal to take it but that will not stop it getting nicked will it?
As for being a subject, while no government or country is perfect I honestly believe Canada has a far more open, friendly and accepting society than the US. There might have been a bit more of a barb to your comment in the late 18th century but in the 21st century I think I have a lot more to be proud of as a subject of her majesty living in Canada that I would have as a citizen in the US.
You still need to physically get a bug into the room where the typewriter is. I imagine this is a lot harder and certainly carries far more personal risk than siting half way around the world and connecting via the net.
Ah, you mean the same document which has rules against unreasonable searches? How's that working out?
I doubt that - I would imagine people had some idea about the organization they were working for but joined it because it was better to work for it since it gave some measure of protection from it. The problem with the NSA seems to be that they paint this rosy picture of them defending against terrorism when, in reality, they are invading everyone's privacy and spying on allied governments. Hence their recruitment drive is likely to attract honest and open idealists like Snowden who suddenly find themselves confronting their morals.
If the NSA, and US government, had a more realistic view of themselves i.e. that they are like every other government in the world and not some disney-princess version that can do no wrong, people would at least have realistic expectations of what they are getting in to when they sign up.
The whole melting pot metaphor is supposed to represent how culturally diverse we are, and it's true almost to an annoying level in some places.
I lived in Michigan and Illinois. I would actually argue that the melting pot metaphor represents how culturally diverse you were before you blended them together into a single, relatively uniform, US culture. The only evidence of non-US culture I saw were places like Holland, MI which celebrated their dutch heritage. However there is a huge difference between a living culture and celebrating the culture of your ancestors. The latter, a frozen image of your ancestors past culture when they emigrated which you bring out for the tourists, is what I have seen in the US but this is not multi-culturalism: for that you need people really living other cultures.
He lost me at "That is the occasion we're celebrating today, right?", wrong. Today is Higgs Day - one year since the announcement of the Higgs!
When I was a schoolboy we were taught to take pride in the fact that we were and always had been a melting pot.
Yes - I've always found it amusing that the US is so proud of being a "melting pot". This suggests that all cultural distinctiveness will be lost and you have to become just like everyone else - it's the Borg approach to immigration. Not sure why you would want to be so proud of that but, having once been a US resident, I'll grant that it is an accurate metaphor.
Well so far Russia seems to be absent from the revelations which, if true, would be amazingly ironic. Perhaps that's why Snowden went there.
If it is, you should be able to use two different speeds of the shadow to distinguish zero from one, which yields a protocol for sending messages faster than photons can be sent from the earth to the moon?
You can detect the speed of the shadow on the moon at a single point but what you are getting wrong is who is sending the message. The shadow is under the complete control of the person on Earth. There is NOTHING the person on the moon can do to control the shadow other than interact with the person on Earth. This means that all information transfer comes from the Earth and it comes at the speed of light through the presence, or absence, of photons. You can essentially think of your speed detector as two photosensitive sensors which, if one sees a signal a certain time after the other you interpret as a '1' but that '1' was transmitted from the Earth NOT from one sensor to the other.
If a phone had this option, I'd hack it so it would always read "PISSED"
If your phone is running windows 8 you probably won't need to hack it.
The only reason classified information should appear on an unclassified machine is if there's a security breach.
While I understand your argument there is one fatal, logical flaw in it. This would logically require that they block ALL media coverage of the classified material, not just the Guardian.
This is brought to you by the same people who brought you the VAT and the television tax.
Forget that, this is the government that gave the world graduated income tax. It was introduced as a temporary measure to finance the Napoleonic Wars. Interestingly it was temporarily repealed in 1816 and all the tax records were taken out and burnt to show that they had been destroyed...only they kept a second copy in the basement of the tax court. So even back then they were lying to us!
It's a form of argument known as reductio ad absurdum. It amazes me that having studied humanities at university you have not seen it before especially since I learnt this as school when, apparently, I lacked sufficient "life experience" to really understand it. Ah but now we are broaching another topic: irony.
Can the person on the moon detect the speed of the shadow's movement? If he can, then you could create a protocol: 2c = 0, 3c = 1 or something. The person on the ground controlling the beam could then send a message to the person on the moon that would get there faster than the same message sent using photons?
They can do exactly that and, as you correctly note the message would go from the person on the ground controlling the beam to the person on the moon by the photons being emitted. Those photons travel at the speed of light (by definition!) so there is no problem with that. What cannot happen is that one person on the moon use it to communicate with another person on the moon because neither has control over the beam....and the only way to gain control would be to signal the person on Earth.