The victims might have noticed that the certificates changed, even if they did check out
Actually, only half the victims could have realised this (at least directly). The websites being spoofed are victims here as well - after all it does your reputation no good at all if someone spoofs your website to serve malware. Best case, you look like an incompetent admin; worst case, someone thinks you did it deliberately and starts telling a lot of their friends. It's akin to a murderer framing an innocent party for his crime - that innocent party is a victim of a crime too. I suspect these agencies have legal immunity unfortunately but if I had proof this had happened to a website I owned, I'd be thinking about what legal redress I could seek.
As an outsider, the political problem with Obamacare is obvious - it simply overpromised massively. Not surprisingly, it turns out that many people will have to pay a bit (and in a large number of cases a lot) more so that other people can pay a lot less and/or get a lot more out of the system - that's just how the maths works out. So Obamacare is, and always was, fundamentally a political deal between generations and between classes about who pays for what - but that was never made clear enough at the time, in my opinion because the Obama administration was far too worried about its short-term poll ratings and was (from what I could tell at the time) obsessed with the law being seen to be "popular" at the time it was passed.
I suspect this is where Romney's and Obama's proposals differed most - in the rhetroric which would have been attached to a Romney-led reform. Because Romney would have been coming from a position of political strength (Democrats would have been in favour of any kind of reform in the direction he proposed), he could have afforded to make the "grand argument" without taking much risk; whereas for Obama the risks were greater, hence he did not.
The problem the administration now have is that because noone was straight about how this would work at the time, a lot of people feel that what is now happening was never the political bargain that was entered in to. As a consequence, they feel that they and their fellow voters (including, crucially, those who were in favour at the time) were taken advantage of. Many of this group would likely have grudgingly supported the actual deal as a case where effectively their "side" was outvoted if it was concluded more openly at the time - but the way the changes were marketed leaves them feeling like the administration lied to people to get the law passed.
This leaves the administration with a problem which cannot be solved in any satisfying way without simply repealing Obamacare and starting again after a fresh election with a fresh president. As this is unlikely to happen I suspect the programme will be unpopular for many years to come and get blamed for all sorts of ills, some of which will be its fault but many of which will not.
I don't think people on their phones mid-flight are likely to be a significant problem in the near future at least. For one thing, you're rather unlikely to get signal at a high altitude unless the airline installs repeaters on the plane (if you fly a lot you might notice every so often on flights that about 5 minutes before landing people suddenly start to receive a lot of texts; that's because they left their phones on by accident but didn't have signal until the plane got lower). And of course you can guarantee if the airlines do that it will be expensive to use, at least for the first few years, and therefore not used very much for calls - how often did you ever see people using AirFones when they were still installed in nearly every seat after all? (though people's phones would still ring with a repeater which could get annoying I suppose).
For another, aeroplanes are actually very noisy environments - it's amazing how quickly the human brain can simply tune that background noise out (which works since it's pretty constant and unchanging noise) - but unless you have something like a jawbone headset, the person on the other end of the call might have a bit of a hard time hearing you so most calls are likely to be pretty short.
I'm not in Australia (I live in the UK) but I have bought a couple of things from ebay sellers who would only ship to the US in the past few years (sadly this seems to be an increasingly common occurence). I've used Shipito for package forwarding for this and would definitelty recommend them - for my sort of low-volume use they worked out cheapest by quite some margin (as they have a plan where they don't charge you a monthly or annual fee, just a higher fee per shipment) and everything has worked out so far exactly as advertised. Although I've not really had any major issues, I've been in contact with their customer support team a couple of times too and that has been a good experience - they respond to emails/online form submissions pretty quickly.
One other tip - more relevant if you're not using a forwarding service though - I've found it's well worth paying for USPS Express rather than USPS Priority Mail for boxes as it's usually not much more money (often in the region of 5%) and is SIGNIFICANTLY quicker - we're talking a difference of 2-3 WEEKS, at least from the US to the UK and in my experience.
Even if all the information were a 100% accurate representation of the actual records and all links were correct, the original records likely contain numerous errors or important omissions; to take the most obvious point, there is likely to be almost no way to verify whether children were legitimate or not. So its usefulness for genetic study seems doubtful to me as many generations later I suspect those sort of effects are difficult to pick up or isolate properly in living people's genes.
What's worse, in some historical periods it would not have been uncommon for some children to be biologically unrelated to either of their legal parents - e.g. lovechild of an affair the man had with a woman who was also sleeping with other men (but who claimed he was the father as he represented the best economic/social prospect of the possibilities), after which the man might take responsibility and raise the child as his own.
What are they going to do? We have far more military might than the EU combined, and the EU doesn't have a military chain of command worth speaking about.
Don't worry, the EU isn't about to invade the US in some weird reincarnation of Red Dawn. But they (or individual member states) could do a lot of things which would hurt the US a great deal.
Off the top of my head for example, while still keeping things at least nominally relatively "targeted": (1) economically punish the US: impose import/export tariffs on relevant US goods/services (particularly tech but perhaps also bandwidth/peering etc), make it much much harder for US citizens to get visas to come over here for business, expropriate the EU assets of US companies who have been complicit in this eg Google, Facebook, etc, or even impose full-on trade sanctions e.g. banning EU companies from dealing with US companies in certain sectors (eg ban EU companies from using or buying Cisco gear); (2) withdraw military cooperation and support from the US: close US military bases on EU soil, cancel their (remaining) participation in various joint procurement projects eg the JSF project, immediately withdraw EU-country troops from roles around the world where they are supporting or working alongside US troops, and stop sharing intelligence with the US; (3) diplomatically punish the US, by removing some of their diplomatic staff from the US and expelling some US diplomatic staff from EU countries, stopping cooperation on international treaties such as extradition agreements, ending support for the US in international fora such as the UN etc etc.
Even if it were actually the NSA's job (which you seem to be saying it might be, provided simply that they don't get caught), you're answering the wrong question. Here's a close analogy - in countries that have armed forces, the military's most basic job is to fight and kill other people (whether to advance an invasion of other countries, repel an invasion by another country, or for some other purpose). Does that mean that we have no right to be surprised or outraged if politicians or military commanders tell their troops to kill everyone in a certain category "just in case" they might be troublemakers (even if they made it legal by changing/secretly reinterpreting the law/constitution/regulations)? Of course not. Does it make any difference if "the enemy" is doing the same? No. Neither does it make any difference if they do it in secret and never get found out. The law (of any country or even international law) doesn't even enter into the question. It's simply a moral (and ethical) imperative.
Just because you can do something, does not mean you should do something, and it is especially not a valid excuse when you get caught later. Likewise, just because someone else is doing something, or other people have "always" done something, or someone in authority has told you to do something, doesn't mean you should. I mean, come on, these are basic morals and ethics that small children the world over are taught by their parents.
If something similar had happened in any other agency of government, it would be a scandal and people would be fired (although sadly often not the actual people responsible). In fact, that seems to happen with reassuring regularity, even if the scandal is far less wide-reaching than this one. What is puzzling me is why the normal rules of politics seem not to apply to the UK/USA signals intelligence agencies.
And how do you expect Facebook to comply with the EU?
Mostly because they make significant profits from EU-based customers. The EU can easily cut off their access to EU-originated revenues, which is what FB, Google etc really care about. The users are the product, not the customer remember - and this is one of the very very few instances when this can work in users' favour.
I'd add either the (UK, not Australian) Telegraph or (preferably) the Financial Times to that list (much better than the WSJ). Particularly for financial/business stories I almost never read the mainstream press, they are simply awful at reporting these things (usually misunderstanding, missing key details, or over-sensationalising stories as well as over-simplifying - the BBC is particularly bad at this). Bloomberg generally does a decent job most of the time on them and is worth following for that as it's free to read on the web (unlike the FT).
It's also WELL worth picking up a copy of the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, or Foreign Affairs on occasion (as well as The Economist, although that's a bit lighter-weight) - they are not really "real time" but they will give you much more to think about when you are reading the day-to-day news (just be aware that they each have their own institutional biases too).
In India and most countries outside of the USA, landline numbers and mobile numbers have a different format
Landline numbers = Area Code + Number
Cell Numbers = one long 10 digit number (there is no area code)
Because of this, there cannot be portability between landline and Cell numbers.
One of the big reasons for this is that outside the USA, generally people do not pay to receive calls on mobile phones; the caller pays a higher cost to call a mobile number than a landline instead (at least in theory, although inclusive minutes deals make this increasingly not the case for either the USA or rest of world). One of the principles that seems to be broadly applied in the numbering systems used in most countries is that you should be able to tell whether a number is an "expensive" one or not by looking at the prefix. Allowing higher cost for calls to mobiles would break this principle (it also makes sense logically, since mobiles are non-geographical so giving them a geographical prefix is a bit weird).
One other fact which appears to have been massively under-reported is that, from what I understand, their definition of "metadata" includes location data for cellphones (ie at least which tower you were connected to, and potentially a tower signal-strength triangulated position). Simply knowing where you made your calls from (and where the recipient was) can allow someone to infer an awful lot about what might have been said on those calls. Especially if they can then cross-reference that with e.g. credit card records etc.
I ended up with gscan2pdf and a rigid directory and filename structure. It works, but yeah, tags would be nice.
gscan2pdf is OK, but if you want to do this seriously then you're probably going to want a reasonably fast sheet-fed scanner (I got a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500, which is supported by SANE and can scan at 18-20 pages/36-40 sides per minute) with a button so that you can go through a whole stack of paper quickly with minimal keyboard/mouse interaction to slow you down. This led me to setting up scanbuttond (which just gained official support for the ScanSnap but there was a patch floating around somewhere for a while before that) with a custom script.
Make sure you OCR your documents to make them searchable then run an indexer (I like recoll but KDE and GNOME both have their own desktop search solutions as well). I've found the best OCR engine on Linux seems to be tesseract, but there are a couple of others you can try. The process took me a while to get right and is a bit painful - the script which scanbuttond runs runs scanadf to scan to a string of image files per side and puts them in a processing directory. I then have another batch-processing script I run once I'm done with a pile of papers while I go and get a cup of tea which runs unpaper then tesseract on them, then hocr2pdf to convert each page individually into a searchable PDF file then finally pdftk to concatenate all the pages together into a scanned document. I split the two parts of the process out because the OCR bit can take some time and this way I can get maximum throughput on the scanner itself without needing to wait for the rest to catch up. If I could be bothered then I could make the scanning script run my de-batching script once only and have it pick up new files as they are dropped in the directory but it's not that much of an effort really.
I then sort my PDFs into a hierarchical directory structure once they've been OCRd (and at this point they get indexed as well for searching).
If you're on Windows/Mac then the software that comes with the ScanSnap will pretty much do all this for you; although it's better to scan with OCR disabled then use Acrobat to batch-OCR the PDFs later for the same reason. Add a decent desktop search solution like an old version of Copernic (or possible Windows Search) and all is good.
A potentially excellent idea IF you can guarantee that one single file won't ever suffer from data corruption. Maildir or other multi-file formats will have a bit more overhead in terms of space and performance, but is far more resistant to data corruption. Good indexing eliminates most of the performance difference, and for my money I'll take data robustness over space any day, at least for personal files. Sure, regular backups are even better, but I know very few people that are actually good about doing that.
But if the "cur" directory in the Maildir is corrupted then you're back to the same problem; in fact potentially worse depending on how resistant to corruption your filesystem is (will that trash the whole directory or just a part of it? If a single file has corruption in the middle of it can you still read before and after the corruption?). The correct solution to corruption concerns like that is to make good backups. Maildir has advantages over mbox in terms of the consequences of a crash/segfault/whatever while your mail client is writing the mailbox causing an issue but for an archive you won't ever write to it so this shouldn't be an issue.
You're being very generous on R&D, as currently they only get 20 years. And that's because R&D uses patents rather than a copyright.
That's 20 years from the filing date though, not 20 years from the date of invention/date of first spend on R&D. There are often several years of research which happen before the filing date.
Well, when a fire erupts at the Facebook HQ, simply don't send the firemen when Facebook calls and tell them to contract a private firefighting company. They will have the fire put down by that company and will simply pay an invoice for the services rendered.:-)
Actually, this is exactly what used to happen before (roughly, and depending on where you live) the early to mid 19th century. The earliest firefighters in modern times were either volunteers or employed on a private contractual basis (ie they would literally turn up at the scene of a fire and try to negotiate payment before putting it out). As insurance developed in the 17th century, naturally insurers started to provide their own firefighters to reduce the losses sustained to fire. The insurers in London, for example, set up a system after the Great Fire of 1666 whereby each had their own group of firemen and they placed "fire insurance marks" on each house so that they could identify whether their unit was supposed to fight a particular fire or not. Eventually the usual pressures of commerce meant that these units usually merged into a single unit covering the whole of London across multiple insurers in the early to mid 19th century, however, still under a model of privately funded provision.
What happened next could be viewed as an example of "corporate welfare"... the insurers lost large sums in a few particularly bad fires and they decided as a result of this that they would lobby the government to provide a beefed-up firefighting service at taxpayers' expense. At the same time, there was a growing movement to "profesionalise" the remaining voluntary provision in other parts of the world which led to them becoming paid rather than voluntary. Following the model set in the insurer-led markets, these areas paid their firefighters out of the public purse.
I would suggest that it seems the right thing to do to fund fire defence by extracting the costs directly from insurers on an incident basis rather than simply relying on general taxation - i.e. if my house catches fire, my insurer would then have to pay the government back the cost involved in calling the fire brigade out (you can argue about the corner case of how to deal with people who are uninsured and whether you fund their costs from general taxation, a levy on those who are insured, or by trying to pursue them individually). One benefit is that the insurers then have even more incentive (beyond just the threat of loss) to ensure that fire prevention measures are adequate. You could also compare this to the idea that the court system should be self-funding through filing fees etc. Just because it's a legitimate use of a government monopoly, doesn't mean it has to be funded through general taxation.
I just went over to the Radeon because of the multimonitor support given off of one card. I have 5 monitors attached to my current video card and I like it that way. Before then I bought nVidia because they worked so well without issues. I have had multiple issues from radeon since purchasing it, but oh well I finally got it to work.
Completely agree with this. The multimonitor support on Radeon is much, much better than nVidia and that's why I moved over as well. I wouldn't say I've had any big "issues" but ATI's driver support (at least on Linux, using the Catalyst drivers) has been a little bit disappointing - I had to stay on an old version of X.org for a while because of the amd64 Xv issue forcing me to use an older driver for example.
Pay more attention to the summary--they are "free" as in beer, not speech. They are government funded, and so should expect the government to impose reasonable criteria on the use of those taxpayer funds. Apparently the purpose was to allow broad discretion in the curricula, but now the government is deciding that teaching creationism as "science" is out of bounds for use of public funds.
No, "free schools" are a special type of state school and "free" means that they are free from a number of the diktats usually imposed upon the rest of our state-funded schools, including the requirement to adhere to the national (government-mandated) curriculum. They are a new thing in the past year or two. The idea was to get rid of some of the bureaucracy involved in founding a school so that groups of parents and other people could more easily open their own new schools to create more competition in the state-funded sector which in turn would drive up standards across the board.
Probably also worth pointing out that, unlike the US etc., the UK has no legal recognition of the right to free speech. Stupid acts like this, especially coming so soon after the recent case of offensive postings to Facebook etc. in the case of the missing April Jones, are not going to help convince politicians that maybe this is something that needs changing.
That's not completely true. The UK does have a legal recognition of the right to free speech, both uncodified (it is accepted as part of the common law) and as codified through the Human Rights Act (amongst other statutes). It's just that the exceptions to this right are rather broader here than in many other countries (notably the US).
I disagree that this is going to make politicians less sensitive to requests to narrow those exceptions. It's all about how it's framed. When everyone is being asked to tighten their belts either through higher taxes or lower service provision from the public sector (or both), it seems pretty difficult to justify the police (and, if it goes that far, the crown prosecutors and the courts) spending their time on things as trivial as this. It really doesn't help their case when they are complaining about cuts to their resources.
I don't think that means that this law will be removed from the statute books (unfortunately). But I wouldn't be surprised if police forces and individual officers are told (perhaps quietly, perhaps not) to use a bit more common sense about these types of cases when exercising their discretion.
Wikipedia has a list of people killed by police in the UK. If you discount the ones that happened in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, it has a grand total of 15 people killed by police since 1920.
I do not feel scared by that number.
I'm not sure which numbers you were looking at, but I think they are rather a lot higher than that, even if not officially acknowledged as such. Possibly you have confused "being shot by the police" with "being killed by the police" (although even then the number is far, far higher than that).
Between 2000 and 2011 there were nearly 6,000 deaths in police custody in the UK. Now, some (perhaps even many or most) of those will be unavoidable - perhaps people who would have died anyway even if not in police custody. Then, some are down to negligence (although I'd argue that in many case that is just as bad as malfeasance - if I was at home and vulnerable to some medical condition e.g. diabetes then it's much more likely someone would be around who would watch and look after me properly). But I find it very difficult to believe that given such a large number of cases there is no significant element of either bad intent or intentinoal recklessness, because it really is a shockingly high number - for context, it is not terribly far off the total number of murders recorded in the UK in the same period.
Looking just at shootings - there seem to be on average about 6 or 7 a year in recent years - e.g. here is a list of some of them. There are in fact multiple recent cases where the police have literally shot naked and unarmed people (and faced only relatively minor consequences as a result) and several more where they have shot unarmed people. Even in this case, which would appear to be about as clear-cut a case as they come, the officers were acquitted and retained their jobs in the police, albeit not on firearm duties.
Finally, I'd like to say that the fact that police can apparently get away with murder should worry you, for two reasons. Firstly - not because you might be murdered by the police yourself (that is still very unlikely), but because it means they might be likely to get away with far lesser crimes (like assaulting you, planting drugs on you, or making up a traffic offence because they decide they don't like the look of you) much more easily. Secondly - because it is indicative of a force who don't see their primary loyalty as being to the victims of crime (and to thus solving crime) but rather to looking after their own. If you were a victim of crime, would you want a force where the officers thought people who didn't pull their weight to solve it effectively should be protected from public scrutiny?
If anything, we should be holding police officers, especially firearms officers, to a higher standard than we do the general public because we grant them additional powers and privileges and entrust them to use those responsibly while paying them out of the public purse.
Turbolifts are only very superficially like elevators.
They are more similar, I believe, to escalators in that they are always ready to board. When a person gets on a turbo lift and the door closes behind them, another person can board the turbo lift immediately afterward, and they can move in the same direction, or another one. They do not need to wait for the lift that the previous person took to arrive.
Indeed. I think Personal Rapid Transit is much closer to the concept of how they are supposed to work (only on a slightly larger scale than a ship).
It's also worth pointing out HTTPS Finder which will work for the random sites you visit that aren't in HTTPS Everywhere's default list. And of course you might want to use some other privacy-protecting addons to stop info leaking out to ad-trackers over plain old HTTP and/or alert you to a potential compromise of your HTTPS certificate chain of authority.
Whether tape or disk is appropriate really depends what you are intending to use the backup for and how important your data is. You might even choose to use a mixture of the two.
If it's your only backup, I would suggest that it's not wise to leave it permanently online in the way you suggest; that leaves you open to any number of potential issues which your backup is supposed to protect you from (OS bug, misconfiguration, lightning strike, power failure, overheating,...). Tape libraries have the same issue although at least there you are exposed to a different set of software bugs and the other tapes in the library might be OK if they are not physically in use when the worst happens.
For the inadvertent file deletion, you can cover this with better tools using true online storage - effectively some form of regular snapshotting (ZFS snapshots, rdiff-backup, Windows VSS, etc) to keep a (shortish) recent history. This should cover a good proportion of restore requests depending on how much history you can keep. For the rest, you're right that if you need to restore files very regularly then you might need a second drive and/or robot. Whether you need to do that or not will just depend on your use case.
Even if you do go with disk, make sure you use something which can properly keep multiple versions of files - just rsync'ing a big directory onto another disk is a recipe for disaster. My personal favourites are rdiff-backup and DAR (which can handle multiple volumes as others have pointed out) but there are others out there too, eg bacula.
Actually, for a data set this large it will probably work out only very slightly more expensive - and the benefit to be gained is worth it IMHO (in speed if nothing else - USB disks are *slow* and eat a lot of CPU). I live in the UK so I'll work in GBP. I think US prices are likely to be cheaper but the relative sizes will be similar.
I'd figure around ~£1100 for drive and SAS interface plus £500-700 for 24TB worth of media. Throw in an extra 2TB drive to spool to before you write to tape as well for say £150 (if you are buying SAS) and you get to less around £81/TB (which works out roughly the same as current external hard drive costs). If your data is precious though you'll want double the amount of media so you can store offsite (or at least have a spare backup). Then the lower marginal cost of tape vs disk will become apparent.
Yes, tape can be harder to configure correctly and swapping tapes over etc will be a pain for a set this large. But that's equally true for disk; and we all know that it's not a backup until you've checked that you can restore from it. User error in configuration of the backup scripts is way more likely to cause an issue than any kind of hardware error and for that reason alone, you are stupid in my opinion if you don't test your backups. If you test them, then you will spot any SCSI misconfiguration etc immediately.
I agree that for moving data around, disk (or network) is much much easier. But that wasn't the submitter asked about.
Slashdot Mirror
The victims might have noticed that the certificates changed, even if they did check out
Actually, only half the victims could have realised this (at least directly). The websites being spoofed are victims here as well - after all it does your reputation no good at all if someone spoofs your website to serve malware. Best case, you look like an incompetent admin; worst case, someone thinks you did it deliberately and starts telling a lot of their friends. It's akin to a murderer framing an innocent party for his crime - that innocent party is a victim of a crime too. I suspect these agencies have legal immunity unfortunately but if I had proof this had happened to a website I owned, I'd be thinking about what legal redress I could seek.
As an outsider, the political problem with Obamacare is obvious - it simply overpromised massively. Not surprisingly, it turns out that many people will have to pay a bit (and in a large number of cases a lot) more so that other people can pay a lot less and/or get a lot more out of the system - that's just how the maths works out. So Obamacare is, and always was, fundamentally a political deal between generations and between classes about who pays for what - but that was never made clear enough at the time, in my opinion because the Obama administration was far too worried about its short-term poll ratings and was (from what I could tell at the time) obsessed with the law being seen to be "popular" at the time it was passed.
I suspect this is where Romney's and Obama's proposals differed most - in the rhetroric which would have been attached to a Romney-led reform. Because Romney would have been coming from a position of political strength (Democrats would have been in favour of any kind of reform in the direction he proposed), he could have afforded to make the "grand argument" without taking much risk; whereas for Obama the risks were greater, hence he did not.
The problem the administration now have is that because noone was straight about how this would work at the time, a lot of people feel that what is now happening was never the political bargain that was entered in to. As a consequence, they feel that they and their fellow voters (including, crucially, those who were in favour at the time) were taken advantage of. Many of this group would likely have grudgingly supported the actual deal as a case where effectively their "side" was outvoted if it was concluded more openly at the time - but the way the changes were marketed leaves them feeling like the administration lied to people to get the law passed.
This leaves the administration with a problem which cannot be solved in any satisfying way without simply repealing Obamacare and starting again after a fresh election with a fresh president. As this is unlikely to happen I suspect the programme will be unpopular for many years to come and get blamed for all sorts of ills, some of which will be its fault but many of which will not.
I don't think people on their phones mid-flight are likely to be a significant problem in the near future at least. For one thing, you're rather unlikely to get signal at a high altitude unless the airline installs repeaters on the plane (if you fly a lot you might notice every so often on flights that about 5 minutes before landing people suddenly start to receive a lot of texts; that's because they left their phones on by accident but didn't have signal until the plane got lower). And of course you can guarantee if the airlines do that it will be expensive to use, at least for the first few years, and therefore not used very much for calls - how often did you ever see people using AirFones when they were still installed in nearly every seat after all? (though people's phones would still ring with a repeater which could get annoying I suppose).
For another, aeroplanes are actually very noisy environments - it's amazing how quickly the human brain can simply tune that background noise out (which works since it's pretty constant and unchanging noise) - but unless you have something like a jawbone headset, the person on the other end of the call might have a bit of a hard time hearing you so most calls are likely to be pretty short.
I'm not in Australia (I live in the UK) but I have bought a couple of things from ebay sellers who would only ship to the US in the past few years (sadly this seems to be an increasingly common occurence). I've used Shipito for package forwarding for this and would definitelty recommend them - for my sort of low-volume use they worked out cheapest by quite some margin (as they have a plan where they don't charge you a monthly or annual fee, just a higher fee per shipment) and everything has worked out so far exactly as advertised. Although I've not really had any major issues, I've been in contact with their customer support team a couple of times too and that has been a good experience - they respond to emails/online form submissions pretty quickly.
One other tip - more relevant if you're not using a forwarding service though - I've found it's well worth paying for USPS Express rather than USPS Priority Mail for boxes as it's usually not much more money (often in the region of 5%) and is SIGNIFICANTLY quicker - we're talking a difference of 2-3 WEEKS, at least from the US to the UK and in my experience.
Even if all the information were a 100% accurate representation of the actual records and all links were correct, the original records likely contain numerous errors or important omissions; to take the most obvious point, there is likely to be almost no way to verify whether children were legitimate or not. So its usefulness for genetic study seems doubtful to me as many generations later I suspect those sort of effects are difficult to pick up or isolate properly in living people's genes.
What's worse, in some historical periods it would not have been uncommon for some children to be biologically unrelated to either of their legal parents - e.g. lovechild of an affair the man had with a woman who was also sleeping with other men (but who claimed he was the father as he represented the best economic/social prospect of the possibilities), after which the man might take responsibility and raise the child as his own.
What are they going to do? We have far more military might than the EU combined, and the EU doesn't have a military chain of command worth speaking about.
Don't worry, the EU isn't about to invade the US in some weird reincarnation of Red Dawn. But they (or individual member states) could do a lot of things which would hurt the US a great deal.
Off the top of my head for example, while still keeping things at least nominally relatively "targeted": (1) economically punish the US: impose import/export tariffs on relevant US goods/services (particularly tech but perhaps also bandwidth/peering etc), make it much much harder for US citizens to get visas to come over here for business, expropriate the EU assets of US companies who have been complicit in this eg Google, Facebook, etc, or even impose full-on trade sanctions e.g. banning EU companies from dealing with US companies in certain sectors (eg ban EU companies from using or buying Cisco gear); (2) withdraw military cooperation and support from the US: close US military bases on EU soil, cancel their (remaining) participation in various joint procurement projects eg the JSF project, immediately withdraw EU-country troops from roles around the world where they are supporting or working alongside US troops, and stop sharing intelligence with the US; (3) diplomatically punish the US, by removing some of their diplomatic staff from the US and expelling some US diplomatic staff from EU countries, stopping cooperation on international treaties such as extradition agreements, ending support for the US in international fora such as the UN etc etc.
Even if it were actually the NSA's job (which you seem to be saying it might be, provided simply that they don't get caught), you're answering the wrong question. Here's a close analogy - in countries that have armed forces, the military's most basic job is to fight and kill other people (whether to advance an invasion of other countries, repel an invasion by another country, or for some other purpose). Does that mean that we have no right to be surprised or outraged if politicians or military commanders tell their troops to kill everyone in a certain category "just in case" they might be troublemakers (even if they made it legal by changing/secretly reinterpreting the law/constitution/regulations)? Of course not. Does it make any difference if "the enemy" is doing the same? No. Neither does it make any difference if they do it in secret and never get found out. The law (of any country or even international law) doesn't even enter into the question. It's simply a moral (and ethical) imperative.
Just because you can do something, does not mean you should do something, and it is especially not a valid excuse when you get caught later. Likewise, just because someone else is doing something, or other people have "always" done something, or someone in authority has told you to do something, doesn't mean you should. I mean, come on, these are basic morals and ethics that small children the world over are taught by their parents.
If something similar had happened in any other agency of government, it would be a scandal and people would be fired (although sadly often not the actual people responsible). In fact, that seems to happen with reassuring regularity, even if the scandal is far less wide-reaching than this one. What is puzzling me is why the normal rules of politics seem not to apply to the UK/USA signals intelligence agencies.
And how do you expect Facebook to comply with the EU?
Mostly because they make significant profits from EU-based customers. The EU can easily cut off their access to EU-originated revenues, which is what FB, Google etc really care about. The users are the product, not the customer remember - and this is one of the very very few instances when this can work in users' favour.
I'd add either the (UK, not Australian) Telegraph or (preferably) the Financial Times to that list (much better than the WSJ). Particularly for financial/business stories I almost never read the mainstream press, they are simply awful at reporting these things (usually misunderstanding, missing key details, or over-sensationalising stories as well as over-simplifying - the BBC is particularly bad at this). Bloomberg generally does a decent job most of the time on them and is worth following for that as it's free to read on the web (unlike the FT).
It's also WELL worth picking up a copy of the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, or Foreign Affairs on occasion (as well as The Economist, although that's a bit lighter-weight) - they are not really "real time" but they will give you much more to think about when you are reading the day-to-day news (just be aware that they each have their own institutional biases too).
In India and most countries outside of the USA, landline numbers and mobile numbers have a different format
Landline numbers = Area Code + Number Cell Numbers = one long 10 digit number (there is no area code)
Because of this, there cannot be portability between landline and Cell numbers.
One of the big reasons for this is that outside the USA, generally people do not pay to receive calls on mobile phones; the caller pays a higher cost to call a mobile number than a landline instead (at least in theory, although inclusive minutes deals make this increasingly not the case for either the USA or rest of world). One of the principles that seems to be broadly applied in the numbering systems used in most countries is that you should be able to tell whether a number is an "expensive" one or not by looking at the prefix. Allowing higher cost for calls to mobiles would break this principle (it also makes sense logically, since mobiles are non-geographical so giving them a geographical prefix is a bit weird).
Ha, corporations get to settle their criminal cases.
And individuals get plea bargains. Same difference really, just the available penalties for corporate infringement are more limited.
One other fact which appears to have been massively under-reported is that, from what I understand, their definition of "metadata" includes location data for cellphones (ie at least which tower you were connected to, and potentially a tower signal-strength triangulated position). Simply knowing where you made your calls from (and where the recipient was) can allow someone to infer an awful lot about what might have been said on those calls. Especially if they can then cross-reference that with e.g. credit card records etc.
I ended up with gscan2pdf and a rigid directory and filename structure. It works, but yeah, tags would be nice.
gscan2pdf is OK, but if you want to do this seriously then you're probably going to want a reasonably fast sheet-fed scanner (I got a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500, which is supported by SANE and can scan at 18-20 pages/36-40 sides per minute) with a button so that you can go through a whole stack of paper quickly with minimal keyboard/mouse interaction to slow you down. This led me to setting up scanbuttond (which just gained official support for the ScanSnap but there was a patch floating around somewhere for a while before that) with a custom script.
Make sure you OCR your documents to make them searchable then run an indexer (I like recoll but KDE and GNOME both have their own desktop search solutions as well). I've found the best OCR engine on Linux seems to be tesseract, but there are a couple of others you can try. The process took me a while to get right and is a bit painful - the script which scanbuttond runs runs scanadf to scan to a string of image files per side and puts them in a processing directory. I then have another batch-processing script I run once I'm done with a pile of papers while I go and get a cup of tea which runs unpaper then tesseract on them, then hocr2pdf to convert each page individually into a searchable PDF file then finally pdftk to concatenate all the pages together into a scanned document. I split the two parts of the process out because the OCR bit can take some time and this way I can get maximum throughput on the scanner itself without needing to wait for the rest to catch up. If I could be bothered then I could make the scanning script run my de-batching script once only and have it pick up new files as they are dropped in the directory but it's not that much of an effort really.
I then sort my PDFs into a hierarchical directory structure once they've been OCRd (and at this point they get indexed as well for searching).
If you're on Windows/Mac then the software that comes with the ScanSnap will pretty much do all this for you; although it's better to scan with OCR disabled then use Acrobat to batch-OCR the PDFs later for the same reason. Add a decent desktop search solution like an old version of Copernic (or possible Windows Search) and all is good.
A potentially excellent idea IF you can guarantee that one single file won't ever suffer from data corruption. Maildir or other multi-file formats will have a bit more overhead in terms of space and performance, but is far more resistant to data corruption. Good indexing eliminates most of the performance difference, and for my money I'll take data robustness over space any day, at least for personal files. Sure, regular backups are even better, but I know very few people that are actually good about doing that.
But if the "cur" directory in the Maildir is corrupted then you're back to the same problem; in fact potentially worse depending on how resistant to corruption your filesystem is (will that trash the whole directory or just a part of it? If a single file has corruption in the middle of it can you still read before and after the corruption?). The correct solution to corruption concerns like that is to make good backups. Maildir has advantages over mbox in terms of the consequences of a crash/segfault/whatever while your mail client is writing the mailbox causing an issue but for an archive you won't ever write to it so this shouldn't be an issue.
You're being very generous on R&D, as currently they only get 20 years. And that's because R&D uses patents rather than a copyright.
That's 20 years from the filing date though, not 20 years from the date of invention/date of first spend on R&D. There are often several years of research which happen before the filing date.
Well, when a fire erupts at the Facebook HQ, simply don't send the firemen when Facebook calls and tell them to contract a private firefighting company. They will have the fire put down by that company and will simply pay an invoice for the services rendered. :-)
Actually, this is exactly what used to happen before (roughly, and depending on where you live) the early to mid 19th century. The earliest firefighters in modern times were either volunteers or employed on a private contractual basis (ie they would literally turn up at the scene of a fire and try to negotiate payment before putting it out). As insurance developed in the 17th century, naturally insurers started to provide their own firefighters to reduce the losses sustained to fire. The insurers in London, for example, set up a system after the Great Fire of 1666 whereby each had their own group of firemen and they placed "fire insurance marks" on each house so that they could identify whether their unit was supposed to fight a particular fire or not. Eventually the usual pressures of commerce meant that these units usually merged into a single unit covering the whole of London across multiple insurers in the early to mid 19th century, however, still under a model of privately funded provision.
What happened next could be viewed as an example of "corporate welfare"... the insurers lost large sums in a few particularly bad fires and they decided as a result of this that they would lobby the government to provide a beefed-up firefighting service at taxpayers' expense. At the same time, there was a growing movement to "profesionalise" the remaining voluntary provision in other parts of the world which led to them becoming paid rather than voluntary. Following the model set in the insurer-led markets, these areas paid their firefighters out of the public purse.
I would suggest that it seems the right thing to do to fund fire defence by extracting the costs directly from insurers on an incident basis rather than simply relying on general taxation - i.e. if my house catches fire, my insurer would then have to pay the government back the cost involved in calling the fire brigade out (you can argue about the corner case of how to deal with people who are uninsured and whether you fund their costs from general taxation, a levy on those who are insured, or by trying to pursue them individually). One benefit is that the insurers then have even more incentive (beyond just the threat of loss) to ensure that fire prevention measures are adequate. You could also compare this to the idea that the court system should be self-funding through filing fees etc. Just because it's a legitimate use of a government monopoly, doesn't mean it has to be funded through general taxation.
I just went over to the Radeon because of the multimonitor support given off of one card. I have 5 monitors attached to my current video card and I like it that way. Before then I bought nVidia because they worked so well without issues. I have had multiple issues from radeon since purchasing it, but oh well I finally got it to work.
Completely agree with this. The multimonitor support on Radeon is much, much better than nVidia and that's why I moved over as well. I wouldn't say I've had any big "issues" but ATI's driver support (at least on Linux, using the Catalyst drivers) has been a little bit disappointing - I had to stay on an old version of X.org for a while because of the amd64 Xv issue forcing me to use an older driver for example.
Pay more attention to the summary--they are "free" as in beer, not speech. They are government funded, and so should expect the government to impose reasonable criteria on the use of those taxpayer funds. Apparently the purpose was to allow broad discretion in the curricula, but now the government is deciding that teaching creationism as "science" is out of bounds for use of public funds.
No, "free schools" are a special type of state school and "free" means that they are free from a number of the diktats usually imposed upon the rest of our state-funded schools, including the requirement to adhere to the national (government-mandated) curriculum. They are a new thing in the past year or two. The idea was to get rid of some of the bureaucracy involved in founding a school so that groups of parents and other people could more easily open their own new schools to create more competition in the state-funded sector which in turn would drive up standards across the board.
Probably also worth pointing out that, unlike the US etc., the UK has no legal recognition of the right to free speech. Stupid acts like this, especially coming so soon after the recent case of offensive postings to Facebook etc. in the case of the missing April Jones, are not going to help convince politicians that maybe this is something that needs changing.
That's not completely true. The UK does have a legal recognition of the right to free speech, both uncodified (it is accepted as part of the common law) and as codified through the Human Rights Act (amongst other statutes). It's just that the exceptions to this right are rather broader here than in many other countries (notably the US).
I disagree that this is going to make politicians less sensitive to requests to narrow those exceptions. It's all about how it's framed. When everyone is being asked to tighten their belts either through higher taxes or lower service provision from the public sector (or both), it seems pretty difficult to justify the police (and, if it goes that far, the crown prosecutors and the courts) spending their time on things as trivial as this. It really doesn't help their case when they are complaining about cuts to their resources.
I don't think that means that this law will be removed from the statute books (unfortunately). But I wouldn't be surprised if police forces and individual officers are told (perhaps quietly, perhaps not) to use a bit more common sense about these types of cases when exercising their discretion.
Wikipedia has a list of people killed by police in the UK. If you discount the ones that happened in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, it has a grand total of 15 people killed by police since 1920.
I do not feel scared by that number.
I'm not sure which numbers you were looking at, but I think they are rather a lot higher than that, even if not officially acknowledged as such. Possibly you have confused "being shot by the police" with "being killed by the police" (although even then the number is far, far higher than that).
Between 2000 and 2011 there were nearly 6,000 deaths in police custody in the UK. Now, some (perhaps even many or most) of those will be unavoidable - perhaps people who would have died anyway even if not in police custody. Then, some are down to negligence (although I'd argue that in many case that is just as bad as malfeasance - if I was at home and vulnerable to some medical condition e.g. diabetes then it's much more likely someone would be around who would watch and look after me properly). But I find it very difficult to believe that given such a large number of cases there is no significant element of either bad intent or intentinoal recklessness, because it really is a shockingly high number - for context, it is not terribly far off the total number of murders recorded in the UK in the same period.
Looking just at shootings - there seem to be on average about 6 or 7 a year in recent years - e.g. here is a list of some of them. There are in fact multiple recent cases where the police have literally shot naked and unarmed people (and faced only relatively minor consequences as a result) and several more where they have shot unarmed people. Even in this case, which would appear to be about as clear-cut a case as they come, the officers were acquitted and retained their jobs in the police, albeit not on firearm duties.
Finally, I'd like to say that the fact that police can apparently get away with murder should worry you, for two reasons. Firstly - not because you might be murdered by the police yourself (that is still very unlikely), but because it means they might be likely to get away with far lesser crimes (like assaulting you, planting drugs on you, or making up a traffic offence because they decide they don't like the look of you) much more easily. Secondly - because it is indicative of a force who don't see their primary loyalty as being to the victims of crime (and to thus solving crime) but rather to looking after their own. If you were a victim of crime, would you want a force where the officers thought people who didn't pull their weight to solve it effectively should be protected from public scrutiny?
If anything, we should be holding police officers, especially firearms officers, to a higher standard than we do the general public because we grant them additional powers and privileges and entrust them to use those responsibly while paying them out of the public purse.
Turbolifts are only very superficially like elevators.
They are more similar, I believe, to escalators in that they are always ready to board. When a person gets on a turbo lift and the door closes behind them, another person can board the turbo lift immediately afterward, and they can move in the same direction, or another one. They do not need to wait for the lift that the previous person took to arrive.
Indeed. I think Personal Rapid Transit is much closer to the concept of how they are supposed to work (only on a slightly larger scale than a ship).
It's also worth pointing out HTTPS Finder which will work for the random sites you visit that aren't in HTTPS Everywhere's default list. And of course you might want to use some other privacy-protecting addons to stop info leaking out to ad-trackers over plain old HTTP and/or alert you to a potential compromise of your HTTPS certificate chain of authority.
Actually in England we have not had juries for most civil cases for quite a while.
Whether tape or disk is appropriate really depends what you are intending to use the backup for and how important your data is. You might even choose to use a mixture of the two.
If it's your only backup, I would suggest that it's not wise to leave it permanently online in the way you suggest; that leaves you open to any number of potential issues which your backup is supposed to protect you from (OS bug, misconfiguration, lightning strike, power failure, overheating, ...). Tape libraries have the same issue although at least there you are exposed to a different set of software bugs and the other tapes in the library might be OK if they are not physically in use when the worst happens.
For the inadvertent file deletion, you can cover this with better tools using true online storage - effectively some form of regular snapshotting (ZFS snapshots, rdiff-backup, Windows VSS, etc) to keep a (shortish) recent history. This should cover a good proportion of restore requests depending on how much history you can keep. For the rest, you're right that if you need to restore files very regularly then you might need a second drive and/or robot. Whether you need to do that or not will just depend on your use case.
Even if you do go with disk, make sure you use something which can properly keep multiple versions of files - just rsync'ing a big directory onto another disk is a recipe for disaster. My personal favourites are rdiff-backup and DAR (which can handle multiple volumes as others have pointed out) but there are others out there too, eg bacula.
Actually, for a data set this large it will probably work out only very slightly more expensive - and the benefit to be gained is worth it IMHO (in speed if nothing else - USB disks are *slow* and eat a lot of CPU). I live in the UK so I'll work in GBP. I think US prices are likely to be cheaper but the relative sizes will be similar.
I'd figure around ~£1100 for drive and SAS interface plus £500-700 for 24TB worth of media. Throw in an extra 2TB drive to spool to before you write to tape as well for say £150 (if you are buying SAS) and you get to less around £81/TB (which works out roughly the same as current external hard drive costs). If your data is precious though you'll want double the amount of media so you can store offsite (or at least have a spare backup). Then the lower marginal cost of tape vs disk will become apparent.
Yes, tape can be harder to configure correctly and swapping tapes over etc will be a pain for a set this large. But that's equally true for disk; and we all know that it's not a backup until you've checked that you can restore from it. User error in configuration of the backup scripts is way more likely to cause an issue than any kind of hardware error and for that reason alone, you are stupid in my opinion if you don't test your backups. If you test them, then you will spot any SCSI misconfiguration etc immediately.
I agree that for moving data around, disk (or network) is much much easier. But that wasn't the submitter asked about.