.. you use client-side rules to do the majority of the sorting.
Even rule-based sorting/routing into category-based folders is a useful heuristic. If the logic in the rules is reasonably smart, you save even more time.
(And that's not even counting performance impact of storing and indexing a huge number of messages in one folder, or server-side purges that silently delete messages when your provider thinks you don't need them anymore, for those who swear by (and sometimes at) IMAP-client or webmail access.)
And if it were a conspiracy, it would still look like low-level bureaucratic infighting at its best. What better cover?
I'm sure someone in the chain recognized the credibility of the threat they were analyzing, and given how compartmentalized info is in the intelligence community, it was probably only a handful of people at most. A tacit standing agreement here and there, no phone calls or emails on the record, just an understanding and a recognition of the value of such an event in certain circles, and information just.. doesn't make it where it needs to go in time.
Bush II had just made it into office in an election a fair chunk of the country still believed he'd flat out stolen, and the legitimacy of his presidency was being debated way too openly by way too many people for people cliose to him (like Cheney) not to have been sorely tempted to arrange a major disaster very much like 9/11. I just can't see those guys not having at least some desire for something to come along to scare the hell out of the population and provide the right climate to intimidate the critics into silence.
You're right, there's no real evidence of it. There won't be, if they did it right. But look at the situation the administration was in, and look at their possible motives. A few face to face conversations off the record with a few key people most likely to have the right scope of "need to know", setting the pieces in place for the right kind of event and the right kind of calculated tactical delay at the right time, and oops! Sorry, we should have caught that, boy, that's terrible, isn't it?
If it hadn't also conveniently provided the justification for passing the USA PATRIOT Act (and what Congresscritter in his/her right mind would vote against America and patriotism, the day after a bunch of scary swarthy foreign people attacked us, right?), it wouldn't resonate this way with me. But I've come to believe it because it's the only coherent story I can make of it. Yeah, that marks me as crazy in some circles. But it's just too convenient in too many ways..
OK, I probably misremembered about the simultaneous arrival.
But the same velocity factor, 0.002%, would have meant a difference in time of flight of about 3.36 years at that distance. So that doesn't bode well for CERN's results, at least not for light vs neutrinos travelling through free space.
Unless the neutrino spike that was detected wasn't the spike from SN 1987A.. any info on data from a few years earlier?
There's an intriguing graph in the AP article stating that Fermilab saw something like this in 2007, but didn't have enough accuracy in their time measurements to support it. The AP article also suggested that CERN and others are looking at the data from the SN 1987A explosion (which showed near-simultaneous arrival of light and neutrinos from almost all observations) to see if that can be explained in light of this discovery, if it's real.
Thinking like a crazy man for a second and assuming this is a real result, either there was a mechanism in the SN 1987A explosion that caused the light to get enough of a head start for the neutrinos to just catch up to it at earth (which gets a few nasty cuts from Occam's Razor on the way out of my mind), or this is a really bizarre quantum-mechanical interaction between neutrinos and matter that only appears when neutrinos pass through matter like the earth's crust over large distances. (Which, in turn, might or might not show up in NDE data from SN 1987A, depending on how accurate the timing of the NDE data is from sites facing the supernova and directly opposite it when the neutrino front arrived.)
(Me, I'm with you. Relativistic physics as we know it says, "If you got this answer, your clock is wrong!":p )
Acid-base chemistry is based on proton and hydroxyl (OH) ion exchange. Protons are also known as hydrogen nuclei, and in a lot of wet chemistry where nuclei and electrons interact on a more or less constant basis, they're interchangeable for most practical conceptual purposes.
I'm pretty sure, however, that the article was concentrating more on ionic transfer than on protons, specifically. A lot of ion flow through cell walls is heavier alkali metals like sodium and potassium. Communicating with *neurons*, in particular, is mostly activation and deactivation of surface proteins that open and close those ion channels. So.. maybe they can interact by altering the ion balance? Bit lost on the theory there..
According to Wikipedia, I don't exist. Argumentum ad Wikipediam falls by the wayside.;D
I jest. Mostly.
There is good reason to fight the conflation between those two particular senses of the word -- it's entirely possible to use it equivocally between those two senses to promote the very idea I intended to warn against: the idea that smart self-educating people are dangerous and need to be locked up preemptively before they hurt someone. I'm not convinced that that isn't a meme being deliberately seeded by that particular usage.
It's not like there isn't already a more than large enough part of the population of the USA, at least, who would be more than happy to support such a "precautionary" measure..
Agreed. Legislators in general tend to suck pretty badly at writing law, and an order of magnitude worse at writing code. Even when it doesn't involve crypto or IT security.
(They weren't elected for their ability to apply reasoning to problems, after all. They were elected for being handsome/pretty and/or popular and willing to accept huge campaign contributions from the interests they're at least theoretically supposed to regulate. These attributes are not known to correlate strongly with strong reasoning skills.)
.. with the passion only a kid on a meager allowance could muster..
The $100-150 (in early 70's money) price tag was so far beyond my reach it might as well have been on Mars, but I got to experiment with them at the camera shop (while the film was still affordable enough that they were willing to tolerate me taking the occasional demo shot) and got hold of one for a whole day through an elementary school project.
I've been fascinated with them ever since. The whole idea of a folding instant-film SLR captured my imagination the day these things first hit the stores, and while it wasn't quite a "pocket" camera (unless you had big pockets!) like it was advertised, it was pretty compact for its day and amazingly so for what amounted to a sheet film camera. And if you've never watched an SX-70 photo develop, there's something really magical about the way it slowly emerges from the blank background -- always fascinated me more than the peel-off Type 107 and 108 film I used to shoot on in those days.
Still love those old Polaroids. I have a 104 and a (very much abused but mostly intact) first gen SX-70 in the process of being restored at home. (Yes, I finally got one!;)
Facts? I'm not making a legal argument.. as I said, the law may very well disagree with me. My argument is purely philosophical.
How I identify myself has an effect on how people perceive me, and can, if I identify myself in certain ways, can cloud their opinion of what I'm trying to communicate with their own prejudices about me and whatever stereotype that name represents to them. It could also tip off a would-be stalker to the fact that I am the one communicating. Should I be restricted to my birth identity everywhere I go, just to make it more convenient to follow me? (Or compile a dossier on me if my opinions happen to be inconvenient to the administration in power?) Should I merely be restricted to my current legal identity and be forced to change my name legally any time who I am becomes an obstacle to people understanding what I choose to say?
I disagree with the opinion that anonymity only promotes uncivil discourse, and with the opinion that the only uncivil discourse is from people who post anonymously. I see very little distinction between that and "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". Anonymity can, and often does, facilitate civil discourse, and it allows exploring communication that might otherwise be off limits to someone posting in their own "public" identity.
So whether or not it's a *fact* that have the right to determine how people know us, and we have the right not to have that dictated to us based on an arbitrary legal distinction, I still believe it's true. I may be wrong. For all our sakes, I hope not.
"Hacker" != "cracker". (We've allowed far too much confusion and conflation of those terms already, and it's time it stopped.)
We're getting dangerously close to the idea of "person in possession of unsanctioned knowledge == criminal and/or terrorist" here. I refer to myself as a "hacker" on a regular basis, but what I mean by that is that I enjoy recreational computing and coding for the fun of it, and occasionally repurposing hardware or building my own in the possibly insane belief that as a self-educated techie I can do it better than most people with engineering degrees. That, to me, is being a hacker.
And I'm not entirely convinced that that isn't what reframing "hacking" as "organized crime" is about.. really. I'm sort of convinced -- it's fairly plausible that people like Martinez just don't know the first thing about what they're talking about, which is dangerous in a far more clueless and haphazard way, and really honestly don't know the difference between people like me and people who crack into things to vandalize or steal data from them -- but there's a nagging voice in the back of my mind that hints that maybe people like him do know the difference, and it's no accident that they're conflating and confusing the terminology because it's hard to hide things from people who educate themselves outside the system.
And defacing websites may be a way for people whose message has been blocked from every other possible channel to communicate their ideas. So is it really the same as mob drug dealers selling heroin to teenagers? Is it certain there's no baby in that bathwater?
Possibly moot points. But I am a hacker. And I am not a criminal. Get it right, people.
I would add avoiding *scattered* light to the list of warnings. (It has a BRH Class 4 warning label, which does include that wording.) A bit safer perhaps than other wavelengths because your eye responds with very high sensitivity to 532nm green (so you're not in *quite* as much danger as you would be from short-wavelength blue or, far worse, UV), but you definitely want to be wearing 532nm notch filter glasses with side shields as even looking at the beam spot on a white (and non-specularly-reflecting) surface could give cause fairly rapid eye damage. (And you can't control who's staring at the beam spot in most cases.) Note: The beam spot of my 40mW DPSS laser is significantly brighter than I'm comfortable looking at for long..
(Wicked also has pretty emphatic warnings in the manual about never aiming it at satellites. Me, I wouldn't want to be the guy who gets sued by or faces criminal charges from the operators of a commercial or government LEO satellite whose sensors are damaged by one of these. Goes at least double for whoever tries to show off to the ISS crew.. not a good idea.)
Would imagine it's an array of Peltier modules, thermally bonded to the (somewhat thermally conductive) outer layer of the tank hull on the inside, and to "pixel" segments made of something thermally conductive (like aluminum) on the outside, with a temperature sensor on each pixel plate for feedback. It wouldn't allow convective cooling of the outer hull if it's mimicking ambient on the outer surface, but it would mask the hull's thermal signature. (And it would require a fair bit of current to the Peltier modules, but probably not a huge amount compared to what's available from the tank's power systems.)
Since it would block convective cooling of the hull, the portions of the hull underneath it would be hotter, resulting in a bright signature *below* the camouflage. Which is exactly what i see in the photo. (Notice the "car" only covers the turret and upper hull. Look at the hot spikes underneath it.)
Conservation of energy? Peltier modules just move heat, they don't get rid of it. In this case they're just moving heat back into the inner surface against the hull as fast as it's conducting outward..
The fact that Google is providing a free service has nothing to do with the fact that it's demanding control over how people identify themselves.
No, you don't have to use G+ if you don't want to. But if they want to be the only channel you can use, then they have to accept that they are at least a de facto common carrier by doing so, whether or not they're considered one in a de jure sense, and by acting like a common carrier, they have certain responsibilities to the people who use G+ to communicate.. and that includes allowing people to identify themselves using their chosen expressions of identity.
No, the law almost certainly doesn't say that -- because the law doesn't yet address situations like this as far as I know -- but it's consistent with how humans understand communication. And the trend in civil liberties is to place fewer restrictions on expressions of identity, not greater ones. One hopes the law catches up to this understanding soon, but that's the reality. We have the right to determine how people know us, and we have the right not to have that dictated to us based on an arbitrary legal distinction..
If it's on a re-entry trajectory, it's going to land where it's going to land, and it would take a very large missile indeed to reduce it to small enough pieces to not pose a serious threat. The main truss itself is made of some very large and massive pieces. But again, de-orbiting it would take a fairly large amount of energy they'd have to bring with them. Other than that, the big worry would be vandalism of various sorts.
De-orbiting it would require a spacecraft docked to it. As far as I know it has no maneuvering capability of its own, and the only delta-V available to modify its orbit (including de-orbiting it) is in the Progress or Soyuz thrust stage (and previously was sometimes assisted by the Shuttle OMS engines).
The worst-case rogue scenario would be a rogue nation with a secret launch capability to put something with a compatible docking system into the ISS' orbit. The only country I know of that's close would be China (maybe) and I don't know if the Shenzhou uses a docking system that's compatible with the NASA APAS system.
And you can rest assured that if anyone were making preparations to fly a mission like that, a number of major intel organizations would be asking a lot of questions and making a lot of briefings, so it wouldn't stay secret for long once an actual spacecraft stack starts coming together at a launch facility..
I'm pretty sure that unless you're a celebrity of some sort (who needs is real name to identify him), using a believable name is enough to get around Google I think.
I suspect using a name that doesn't match common non-name words in the most commonly-used languages on the Internet is probably more than enough. I'm currently waiting to see if they can see a common non-name word and a common place name through rot13. (And if they do, it will mean they're working hard enough to ferret out pseudonymous users that they're almost certainly mining them for back-end profit from advertisers, at which point I can choose to no longer be a product.)
Then again its a social network. Also if you have stalkers, then simply use the privacy tools properly. You can show your stalking family members very little information about you, and show posts to the right people in the right circles.
If you trust the privacy tools, which I tend not to. Some of them leak in unexpected ways, and while I don't know of any examples of G+ doing this, I can recall more instances than I can count of Facebook promising privacy and then (oops!) turning on a new feature that defaults to the most wide-open setting there is, requiring users to monitor their privacy settings constantly and turn off new promiscuous features as they're added. We know Facebook is like the "BFF" in junior high school who swears to keep your secrets, and then scatters them far and wide on the gossip circuit at the first opportunity -- because, after all, what was their initial target demographic? -- and it's only natural in that light to anticipate that G+ is just better at covering their tracks in that regard, so in that light, do you really trust them with your full legal name, knowing that your employer or your harassing conservative-minded relatives are only one covert disclosure away from pallet-loads of ammunition to use against you? Are you sure?
All of this occurs with the permission of the television's owner, says Harrison. The first time the TV is switched on, it asks users if they would like to opt in to the data-sharing service. If they say yes, it prompts them to accept a terms-of-service agreement. Individual sites and apps must ask for, and be granted, permission to access the data the TV makes available.
So.. does opting out turn off the data feed from the TV, or does it just flag itself as opted out?
Can opting out only be done at the first turn-on, or is it available later on through the setup menu? And if you opt in later, can you opt out again or are you locked in?
How long will it be before scripts get out into the wild that let your 1337 h4x0r neighbor kid eavesdrop on your TV watching habits because you're still running WEP on your wireless network?
Is it X ray or millimeter wave? (There seemed to be some confusion on that.) If X ray, what wavelength and intensity?
With that information, it wouldn't be *that* hard to come up with a detection sensor that would at least pick it up. Wouldn't stop them scanning you, but you'd at least know you'd been scanned..
The thing is what the computer tells you may not be a sensor directly. Such as bank 1 lean... ok so is the oxygen sensor screwed up, a bad injector, MAF sensor.. etc.
Which means an expert system of some sort, one that can take the overall pattern of sensor warnings into account and possibly isolate sensor failures from deeper functional issues. (An example would be comparing the upstream and downstream O2 sensor readings and doing a reality check that both are showing the usual fluctuations and the downstream one is much smaller amplitude than the upstream one, before making a decision on whether it's a failed sensor showing a solid offscale high or low signal, or a real indication of the catalyst starting to lose efficiency..)
Slashdot Mirror
".. we have come for your uncool niece! .."
.. you use client-side rules to do the majority of the sorting.
Even rule-based sorting/routing into category-based folders is a useful heuristic. If the logic in the rules is reasonably smart, you save even more time.
(And that's not even counting performance impact of storing and indexing a huge number of messages in one folder, or server-side purges that silently delete messages when your provider thinks you don't need them anymore, for those who swear by (and sometimes at) IMAP-client or webmail access.)
You *could* heat them up above their Curie point. Not sure how strong they'd be after that though .. :p
And if it were a conspiracy, it would still look like low-level bureaucratic infighting at its best. What better cover?
.. doesn't make it where it needs to go in time.
..
I'm sure someone in the chain recognized the credibility of the threat they were analyzing, and given how compartmentalized info is in the intelligence community, it was probably only a handful of people at most. A tacit standing agreement here and there, no phone calls or emails on the record, just an understanding and a recognition of the value of such an event in certain circles, and information just
Bush II had just made it into office in an election a fair chunk of the country still believed he'd flat out stolen, and the legitimacy of his presidency was being debated way too openly by way too many people for people cliose to him (like Cheney) not to have been sorely tempted to arrange a major disaster very much like 9/11. I just can't see those guys not having at least some desire for something to come along to scare the hell out of the population and provide the right climate to intimidate the critics into silence.
You're right, there's no real evidence of it. There won't be, if they did it right. But look at the situation the administration was in, and look at their possible motives. A few face to face conversations off the record with a few key people most likely to have the right scope of "need to know", setting the pieces in place for the right kind of event and the right kind of calculated tactical delay at the right time, and oops! Sorry, we should have caught that, boy, that's terrible, isn't it?
If it hadn't also conveniently provided the justification for passing the USA PATRIOT Act (and what Congresscritter in his/her right mind would vote against America and patriotism, the day after a bunch of scary swarthy foreign people attacked us, right?), it wouldn't resonate this way with me. But I've come to believe it because it's the only coherent story I can make of it. Yeah, that marks me as crazy in some circles. But it's just too convenient in too many ways
OK, I probably misremembered about the simultaneous arrival.
.. any info on data from a few years earlier?
But the same velocity factor, 0.002%, would have meant a difference in time of flight of about 3.36 years at that distance. So that doesn't bode well for CERN's results, at least not for light vs neutrinos travelling through free space.
Unless the neutrino spike that was detected wasn't the spike from SN 1987A
There's an intriguing graph in the AP article stating that Fermilab saw something like this in 2007, but didn't have enough accuracy in their time measurements to support it. The AP article also suggested that CERN and others are looking at the data from the SN 1987A explosion (which showed near-simultaneous arrival of light and neutrinos from almost all observations) to see if that can be explained in light of this discovery, if it's real.
:p )
Thinking like a crazy man for a second and assuming this is a real result, either there was a mechanism in the SN 1987A explosion that caused the light to get enough of a head start for the neutrinos to just catch up to it at earth (which gets a few nasty cuts from Occam's Razor on the way out of my mind), or this is a really bizarre quantum-mechanical interaction between neutrinos and matter that only appears when neutrinos pass through matter like the earth's crust over large distances. (Which, in turn, might or might not show up in NDE data from SN 1987A, depending on how accurate the timing of the NDE data is from sites facing the supernova and directly opposite it when the neutrino front arrived.)
(Me, I'm with you. Relativistic physics as we know it says, "If you got this answer, your clock is wrong!"
Acid-base chemistry is based on proton and hydroxyl (OH) ion exchange. Protons are also known as hydrogen nuclei, and in a lot of wet chemistry where nuclei and electrons interact on a more or less constant basis, they're interchangeable for most practical conceptual purposes.
.. maybe they can interact by altering the ion balance? Bit lost on the theory there ..
I'm pretty sure, however, that the article was concentrating more on ionic transfer than on protons, specifically. A lot of ion flow through cell walls is heavier alkali metals like sodium and potassium. Communicating with *neurons*, in particular, is mostly activation and deactivation of surface proteins that open and close those ion channels. So
According to Wikipedia, I don't exist. Argumentum ad Wikipediam falls by the wayside. ;D
..
I jest. Mostly.
There is good reason to fight the conflation between those two particular senses of the word -- it's entirely possible to use it equivocally between those two senses to promote the very idea I intended to warn against: the idea that smart self-educating people are dangerous and need to be locked up preemptively before they hurt someone. I'm not convinced that that isn't a meme being deliberately seeded by that particular usage.
It's not like there isn't already a more than large enough part of the population of the USA, at least, who would be more than happy to support such a "precautionary" measure
Agreed. Legislators in general tend to suck pretty badly at writing law, and an order of magnitude worse at writing code. Even when it doesn't involve crypto or IT security.
(They weren't elected for their ability to apply reasoning to problems, after all. They were elected for being handsome/pretty and/or popular and willing to accept huge campaign contributions from the interests they're at least theoretically supposed to regulate. These attributes are not known to correlate strongly with strong reasoning skills.)
.. with the passion only a kid on a meager allowance could muster ..
;)
The $100-150 (in early 70's money) price tag was so far beyond my reach it might as well have been on Mars, but I got to experiment with them at the camera shop (while the film was still affordable enough that they were willing to tolerate me taking the occasional demo shot) and got hold of one for a whole day through an elementary school project.
I've been fascinated with them ever since. The whole idea of a folding instant-film SLR captured my imagination the day these things first hit the stores, and while it wasn't quite a "pocket" camera (unless you had big pockets!) like it was advertised, it was pretty compact for its day and amazingly so for what amounted to a sheet film camera. And if you've never watched an SX-70 photo develop, there's something really magical about the way it slowly emerges from the blank background -- always fascinated me more than the peel-off Type 107 and 108 film I used to shoot on in those days.
Still love those old Polaroids. I have a 104 and a (very much abused but mostly intact) first gen SX-70 in the process of being restored at home. (Yes, I finally got one!
Facts? I'm not making a legal argument .. as I said, the law may very well disagree with me. My argument is purely philosophical.
How I identify myself has an effect on how people perceive me, and can, if I identify myself in certain ways, can cloud their opinion of what I'm trying to communicate with their own prejudices about me and whatever stereotype that name represents to them. It could also tip off a would-be stalker to the fact that I am the one communicating. Should I be restricted to my birth identity everywhere I go, just to make it more convenient to follow me? (Or compile a dossier on me if my opinions happen to be inconvenient to the administration in power?) Should I merely be restricted to my current legal identity and be forced to change my name legally any time who I am becomes an obstacle to people understanding what I choose to say?
I disagree with the opinion that anonymity only promotes uncivil discourse, and with the opinion that the only uncivil discourse is from people who post anonymously. I see very little distinction between that and "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". Anonymity can, and often does, facilitate civil discourse, and it allows exploring communication that might otherwise be off limits to someone posting in their own "public" identity.
So whether or not it's a *fact* that have the right to determine how people know us, and we have the right not to have that dictated to us based on an arbitrary legal distinction, I still believe it's true. I may be wrong. For all our sakes, I hope not.
"Hacker" != "cracker". (We've allowed far too much confusion and conflation of those terms already, and it's time it stopped.)
.. really. I'm sort of convinced -- it's fairly plausible that people like Martinez just don't know the first thing about what they're talking about, which is dangerous in a far more clueless and haphazard way, and really honestly don't know the difference between people like me and people who crack into things to vandalize or steal data from them -- but there's a nagging voice in the back of my mind that hints that maybe people like him do know the difference, and it's no accident that they're conflating and confusing the terminology because it's hard to hide things from people who educate themselves outside the system.
We're getting dangerously close to the idea of "person in possession of unsanctioned knowledge == criminal and/or terrorist" here. I refer to myself as a "hacker" on a regular basis, but what I mean by that is that I enjoy recreational computing and coding for the fun of it, and occasionally repurposing hardware or building my own in the possibly insane belief that as a self-educated techie I can do it better than most people with engineering degrees. That, to me, is being a hacker.
And I'm not entirely convinced that that isn't what reframing "hacking" as "organized crime" is about
And defacing websites may be a way for people whose message has been blocked from every other possible channel to communicate their ideas. So is it really the same as mob drug dealers selling heroin to teenagers? Is it certain there's no baby in that bathwater?
Possibly moot points. But I am a hacker. And I am not a criminal. Get it right, people.
I would add avoiding *scattered* light to the list of warnings. (It has a BRH Class 4 warning label, which does include that wording.) A bit safer perhaps than other wavelengths because your eye responds with very high sensitivity to 532nm green (so you're not in *quite* as much danger as you would be from short-wavelength blue or, far worse, UV), but you definitely want to be wearing 532nm notch filter glasses with side shields as even looking at the beam spot on a white (and non-specularly-reflecting) surface could give cause fairly rapid eye damage. (And you can't control who's staring at the beam spot in most cases.) Note: The beam spot of my 40mW DPSS laser is significantly brighter than I'm comfortable looking at for long..
.. not a good idea.)
(Wicked also has pretty emphatic warnings in the manual about never aiming it at satellites. Me, I wouldn't want to be the guy who gets sued by or faces criminal charges from the operators of a commercial or government LEO satellite whose sensors are damaged by one of these. Goes at least double for whoever tries to show off to the ISS crew
Would imagine it's an array of Peltier modules, thermally bonded to the (somewhat thermally conductive) outer layer of the tank hull on the inside, and to "pixel" segments made of something thermally conductive (like aluminum) on the outside, with a temperature sensor on each pixel plate for feedback. It wouldn't allow convective cooling of the outer hull if it's mimicking ambient on the outer surface, but it would mask the hull's thermal signature. (And it would require a fair bit of current to the Peltier modules, but probably not a huge amount compared to what's available from the tank's power systems.)
..
Since it would block convective cooling of the hull, the portions of the hull underneath it would be hotter, resulting in a bright signature *below* the camouflage. Which is exactly what i see in the photo. (Notice the "car" only covers the turret and upper hull. Look at the hot spikes underneath it.)
Conservation of energy? Peltier modules just move heat, they don't get rid of it. In this case they're just moving heat back into the inner surface against the hull as fast as it's conducting outward
The fact that Google is providing a free service has nothing to do with the fact that it's demanding control over how people identify themselves.
.. and that includes allowing people to identify themselves using their chosen expressions of identity.
No, you don't have to use G+ if you don't want to. But if they want to be the only channel you can use, then they have to accept that they are at least a de facto common carrier by doing so, whether or not they're considered one in a de jure sense, and by acting like a common carrier, they have certain responsibilities to the people who use G+ to communicate
No, the law almost certainly doesn't say that -- because the law doesn't yet address situations like this as far as I know -- but it's consistent with how humans understand communication. And the trend in civil liberties is to place fewer restrictions on expressions of identity, not greater ones. One hopes the law catches up to this understanding soon, but that's the reality. We have the right to determine how people know us, and we have the right not to have that dictated to us based on an arbitrary legal distinction..
Who knew?
*goes back to sleep*
If it's on a re-entry trajectory, it's going to land where it's going to land, and it would take a very large missile indeed to reduce it to small enough pieces to not pose a serious threat. The main truss itself is made of some very large and massive pieces. But again, de-orbiting it would take a fairly large amount of energy they'd have to bring with them. Other than that, the big worry would be vandalism of various sorts.
De-orbiting it would require a spacecraft docked to it. As far as I know it has no maneuvering capability of its own, and the only delta-V available to modify its orbit (including de-orbiting it) is in the Progress or Soyuz thrust stage (and previously was sometimes assisted by the Shuttle OMS engines).
..
The worst-case rogue scenario would be a rogue nation with a secret launch capability to put something with a compatible docking system into the ISS' orbit. The only country I know of that's close would be China (maybe) and I don't know if the Shenzhou uses a docking system that's compatible with the NASA APAS system.
And you can rest assured that if anyone were making preparations to fly a mission like that, a number of major intel organizations would be asking a lot of questions and making a lot of briefings, so it wouldn't stay secret for long once an actual spacecraft stack starts coming together at a launch facility
I'm pretty sure that unless you're a celebrity of some sort (who needs is real name to identify him), using a believable name is enough to get around Google I think.
I suspect using a name that doesn't match common non-name words in the most commonly-used languages on the Internet is probably more than enough. I'm currently waiting to see if they can see a common non-name word and a common place name through rot13. (And if they do, it will mean they're working hard enough to ferret out pseudonymous users that they're almost certainly mining them for back-end profit from advertisers, at which point I can choose to no longer be a product.)
Then again its a social network. Also if you have stalkers, then simply use the privacy tools properly. You can show your stalking family members very little information about you, and show posts to the right people in the right circles.
If you trust the privacy tools, which I tend not to. Some of them leak in unexpected ways, and while I don't know of any examples of G+ doing this, I can recall more instances than I can count of Facebook promising privacy and then (oops!) turning on a new feature that defaults to the most wide-open setting there is, requiring users to monitor their privacy settings constantly and turn off new promiscuous features as they're added. We know Facebook is like the "BFF" in junior high school who swears to keep your secrets, and then scatters them far and wide on the gossip circuit at the first opportunity -- because, after all, what was their initial target demographic? -- and it's only natural in that light to anticipate that G+ is just better at covering their tracks in that regard, so in that light, do you really trust them with your full legal name, knowing that your employer or your harassing conservative-minded relatives are only one covert disclosure away from pallet-loads of ammunition to use against you? Are you sure?
Ugh. Markup fail. Should have said: ..
(remembers when TV standards groups used to bend over backwards to not obsolete first-gen tech
So .. does opting out turn off the data feed from the TV, or does it just flag itself as opted out?
..
Can opting out only be done at the first turn-on, or is it available later on through the setup menu? And if you opt in later, can you opt out again or are you locked in?
How long will it be before scripts get out into the wild that let your 1337 h4x0r neighbor kid eavesdrop on your TV watching habits because you're still running WEP on your wireless network?
Inquiring minds want to know
Or will they be obsoleting the non-net-aware ones via HDCP so we all have to upgrade?
.. anyone remember NTSC-M?)
(bend over backwards to not obsolete first-gen tech
This might be a good component to check out .. :)
I suppose good questions to ask might be:
Is it X ray or millimeter wave? (There seemed to be some confusion on that.)
If X ray, what wavelength and intensity?
With that information, it wouldn't be *that* hard to come up with a detection sensor that would at least pick it up. Wouldn't stop them scanning you, but you'd at least know you'd been scanned..
The thing is what the computer tells you may not be a sensor directly. Such as bank 1 lean... ok so is the oxygen sensor screwed up, a bad injector, MAF sensor.. etc.
Which means an expert system of some sort, one that can take the overall pattern of sensor warnings into account and possibly isolate sensor failures from deeper functional issues. (An example would be comparing the upstream and downstream O2 sensor readings and doing a reality check that both are showing the usual fluctuations and the downstream one is much smaller amplitude than the upstream one, before making a decision on whether it's a failed sensor showing a solid offscale high or low signal, or a real indication of the catalyst starting to lose efficiency..)