According to the wikipedia, GLONASS has complete global coverage and is fully operational.
I have a GPS/GLONASS receiver and it certainly seems to have comparable coverage to GPS everywhere I've been in the last few years. Accuracy using both GPS and GLONASS, particularly when both are augmented by EGNOS, is quite good (on the order of 2-5 meters).
The satellites they were launching on this rocket were the GLONASS-M type, which was designed in 2001, and were not part of the new GLONASS-K series.
While certainly expensive and troublesome, I don't really see how this incident would set GLONASS back by years./looking forward to Galileo and modernized GPS as well.
It depends on the nature of the data and that of the entity seeking the data.
The EU, for example, has stringent privacy laws that relate to personal data stored by private organizations (e.g. corporations) -- such organizations are restricted on what information they can collect, disclose to others, how they use the data, etc. However, for things like email, providers are required to store metadata about emails for 6-24 months (depending on the member state) in case the authorities with to investigate something.
With a few industry-specific exceptions, providers in the US are not compelled to retain user data for any period of time. An email host is perfectly able, legally speaking, to send all logs to/dev/null and keep no records whatsoever. They can, like any provider in most places in the world, be compelled by authorities to turn over user information they do keep, but they're under no obligation to retain that data at all beforehand. On the other hand, the US has very few regulations (again, there are some specific exceptions) that prevent providers from collecting lots of information or sharing it with other organizations for whatever purpose they wish.
I'm not so sure about that: an acquaintance of mine is a FFL (a licensed gun dealer, for those not familiar with the term). Several years ago he was moving his shop to a new location and so he had various non-gun orders (e.g. ammo) shipped to his home (which is not listed on the license, so the ATF would have no idea that he was a licensed dealer -- they'd think he was just a private citizen).
The UPS guy showed up a few days later with ~100,000 rounds of 5.56mm NATO, 50,000 rounds of 7.62mm NATO ammo, and several thousand rounds of other mixed calibers. No issues from anyone except the neighbors (who called the local police to report him as a potential terrorist due to the huge pile of ammo the UPS guy was unloading -- the cops came out, chatted with him for a minute, he explained the move and showed them his FFL, and they went away happy). He was somewhat amused by the whole experience.
Around the same timeframe I found a really good deal on a 5,000 round case of subsonic.22LR (I have a legally-owned suppressor for my.22 rifle and fire subsonic ammo a lot) and ordered it for delivery. It arrived within the week. No issues at all.
I'm not sure if there's been any change in ATF policy in regards to bulk orders, but there certainly wasn't any issues a few years ago.
Wherever you are finding 5.56 mm ammunition for 30 cents a round, please let me know. I will buy everything they have.
Hah. You and me both.
I was just quoting a price from memory from a year or two back when I last bought ammo (I'm presently an expat and haven't bought any shooting stuff in a while.). Sorry for getting your hopes up.
That said, if you haven't tried it already check out Prvi Partizan ammo. It's a Serbian company but they make NATO-spec 5.56mm that's reasonably priced, reliable, and comparable in many ways to the more-expensive Federal stuff.
I wouldn't be surprised if buying $200 worth of ammunition or $50 worth of gunpowder would get your other recent purchases reviewed.
A case of 1,000 rounds of 5.56mm ammo (an extremely common caliber) usually costs about $300 or so (though prices vary with demand). That's a fairly common amount of ammo to buy for sporting/recreation/competition purposes (hunters use much less ammo). In my personal experience, a trip to the range would usually involve firing ~200 rounds or so, so a case would last a few months at most depending on how often I'd shoot. Several of my friends report similar consumption of ammo. Anecdotal, yes, but I'd venture to say that it's not terribly out of the ordinary.
An 8lb "keg" of powder (about the size of a gallon of milk) costs about $150 or so (1lb jars cost about $20). Since there's a $20-per-order special shipping fee if you're ordering powder, it's not uncommon to buy a few pounds at a time to spread out the extra fee. Reloading is not uncommon, though not many local shops store powder in large amounts due to various regulations: it's much more common to order it online (where the extra fee applies) rather than buying it locally.
If the government is keeping tabs on all normal-sized ammo and powder purchases, they're going to have their work cut out for them as there's literally millions of people making such purchases.
Assuming Google can deliver better search results than Bing, some people may be more willing to put up with advertising and fewer privacy-protecting features.
If Bing produces poor search results, all the privacy features and lack of advertising in the world are not terribly useful: the primary purpose of a search engine is to allow people to search for (and presumably find) things.
Considering that the Swiss have a well-developed satellite monitoring system, it wouldn't surprise me if they had monitoring of domestic and international phone and internet traffic going through the country.
They may have very strong data protection laws that help prevent the misuse of data by private entities (the EU has similar laws), but do they have strong laws that protect data from misuse by the government? (If so, I'd appreciate a link, as that'd be really useful to know.) I know that the EU mandates retention of various email metadata (IP addresses, sender/recipient addresses, etc.) for 6-24 months in case the government wants the info -- do the Swiss?
A nuclear weapon is the only thing that would work against an asteroid on short notice, Wie added. Other systems designed to divert an asteroid such as tugboats, gravity tractors, solar sails and mass drivers would require 10 or 20 years of advance notice.
It's not really possible to put big rocket motors on an asteroid and push it out of the way, as transporting enough fuel to the asteroid would be unbelievably expensive and likely infeasible with current technology.
Indeed. That's why I bought a domain ~14 years ago and have used that for all my personal correspondence (business-related stuff, of course, goes to the business address). It's extremely portable: I've switched back-end mail providers maybe half a dozen times in those years (mostly at the beginning when things were getting settled) with no disruption to mail service or needing to change my address. I highly recommend it.
For migrating to a new address, it's useful to have the old Yahoo/Gmail/whatever address forward to your new one at your domain (or otherwise setup the new system to periodically check for new mail from the old address). This way even contacts who haven't updated their contact list can still have their messages reach you (though you should remind them to update their contact list).
Having a "portable" address that's not tied to a particular provider is very handy.
Note that Google Authenticator does not generate the 'multi-factor' password after receiving the first password from the user.
The multi-factor password is streamed passed to the (pager, phone, etc.) every X seconds.
No it's not. Google Authenticator implements TOTP which depends only on having a reasonably accurate clock and a previously-agreed-upon shared secret from which the codes are generated.
When one uses Google Authenticator, one gets a shared secret from Google (which can be easily input in the form of a QR code, though one can manually input it as well) and adds it to the GA app. When one wishes to authenticate to a service (e.g. a Google Account or any other service that implements TOTP), the app uses the current time and the shared secret to compute the code for that 30 second time period. The service that the user is authenticating to also had the shared secret and computes the code for the same time period. They should match. If they don't, the service will usually calculate the codes in a time window surrounding the current time (e.g. +/- 2 minutes) in case the client's clock has drifted.
TOTP (and Google Authenticator) do not rely on network access at all -- you can use Google Authenticator as a TOTP code generator for other sites without having anything going through Google at all. For example, I have a TOTP hardware token that had the shared secret programmed by the factory (they don't keep any record of the secret, unlike RSA -- they print it on a piece of paper that comes with the token and that's it). I configured my various TOTP-enabled services (e.g. a secure website) with the shared secret and require the TOTP code during authentication. There's no dependence on outside services or network connections at all. Very handy.
My understanding is that antibiotics are permitted to treat infection, but the meat from that animal cannot be sold as "organic" for as long as they're taking the medication and for a certain period of time afterwards to allow for the medication to be excreted from their bodies.
Interestingly enough, several Swiss banks do. My bank, PostFinance (the bank run by the Swiss post office) uses S/MIME to sign all outgoing mail, including their periodic newsletter. No confidential content is ever sent via email -- users are directed to login to the (https-enabled) website to view the sensitive information. All PDFs, such as account statements, are digitally signed and timestamped by a third-party timestamping service to prove their authenticity.
Good points, though I felt it necessary to comment on the wireless mouse issue: RF-related laws do differ from country to country and there can be serious consequences (not just legal consequences) to breaking them.
While there's wide international agreement on certain bands, like the 2.4GHz ISM band, not everything is so unified. I'm an American living in Switzerland. One of my fellow Americans here in Switzerland had brought a Skype-capable cordless phone from the US and had used it for a few weeks. Eventually, some Swiss government officials with direction-finding equipment showed up at his house and requested entrance to his home. He allowed them in and they homed in on the phone. It turns out the frequencies used in the US for certain types of cordless phones are used, in Switzerland, by the Swiss military and his phone was causing interference. They gave him a ticket saying that there was no penalty this time, but if he continued to use the phone he would be fined 10,000 Swiss francs (about $10,000 USD/8,000 Euro).
While the use of a wireless mouse isn't likely to cause enough interference to bother anyone, it's still a good thing to check first to ensure it is appropriate to use.
There's no such thing as an AK-47 permit in Texas or elsewhere in the US, assuming you're referring to the semi-auto variant.
Assuming that one is not otherwise prohibited from possessing firearms (e.g. not a criminal), it's perfectly legal to make any otherwise-legal firearm for personal use in the US. For example, if one wished to build a semi-auto AK-47, that's fine (here's a guy making one from a shovel he bent into the appropriate shape, while here are the stamped/punched flats that you'd need to bend, drill, and heat-treat to make your own semi-auto AK receiver, the only regulated part). If you wanted to build a full-auto one, that's forbidden. You can make silencers, short-barreled rifles/shotguns, etc., but ONLY after getting the appropriate tax stamp from the ATF.
I am routinely a bit confused as to why datacenters aren't predominantly located in places with colder climates. Free cooling from the outside during the winter and whatnot. Is there simply a lack of infrastructure to make an ultrahigh-bandwidth line out to...say...northern Montana?
Basically, yeah.
A lot of the networks have expanded where there's people: early networks grew up around universities and government facilities (often located in or near major population centers), companies later grew up (or migrated to) where the tech people were, and things more or less grew organically from there.
Take a look at Level3's network map for the US: there's a lot of facilities in areas where there's a lot of population: SF Bay Area, Los Angeles, New England, etc. Florida has more than I would otherwise expect, but it's not too surprising. There's basically nothing in the Dakotas and very little in other sparesely-populated areas.
One may well be able to get some network connections in remote areas, but it'll likely be expensive, inconvenient, and from a considerably less-diverse group of network providers than one might get in, say, Ashburn VA or the Bay Area.
Ok, but what information does that give Facebook? They already know people's social connections due to people "friending" each other.
My point was more "Leaving aside the privacy issues related to the use of Facebook and its specific implementation, in general people should choose diverse 'trusted contacts' from separate social groups so the odds of multiple friends colluding to get enough codes to gain access to one's account is minimized."
While I'd hope that people would trust their friends to not abuse a privileged position in order to gain access to one's account, it's probably a good idea to pick friends from different, non-overlapping social circles to make it difficult for them to know who other "trusted" people for one's account are.
That doesn't make any sense: Spamhaus only charges money to services that subscribe to their lists (that is, actual customers). They don't charge anything for de-listing.
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what the AC you're replying to said: you can manufacture Title I firearms (that is, non-NFA-regulated items like the AR-15) for personal use with no paperwork.
If you wish to manufacture Title II firearms (NFA-regulated items) like SBRs, SBSs, suppressors, AOWs, etc. that's fine, but you need the relevant ATF forms and tax stamp though no manufacturer's license is required. Manufacturing machine guns, however, requires that one possess the appropriate manufacturer's license.
Say what you will about Ubuntu, of all the Linux distros, it has the most polished out of the box experience.
That used to be the case. Since the time of 10.10 of the "mainline" Ubuntu, I've found it to be considerably less intuitive than expected. I much prefer Mint+MATE over any of the mainline Ubuntu releases. That and Xubuntu.
I wouldn't really say that most people were *hiding* -- that is, I don't think they were staying inside due to fear of the bad guy -- but rather trying to let the professionals (the police and federal agents) who were searching for this very dangerous bad guy to do their job with the least interference and confusion possible.
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According to the wikipedia, GLONASS has complete global coverage and is fully operational.
I have a GPS/GLONASS receiver and it certainly seems to have comparable coverage to GPS everywhere I've been in the last few years. Accuracy using both GPS and GLONASS, particularly when both are augmented by EGNOS, is quite good (on the order of 2-5 meters).
The satellites they were launching on this rocket were the GLONASS-M type, which was designed in 2001, and were not part of the new GLONASS-K series.
While certainly expensive and troublesome, I don't really see how this incident would set GLONASS back by years. /looking forward to Galileo and modernized GPS as well.
It depends on the nature of the data and that of the entity seeking the data.
The EU, for example, has stringent privacy laws that relate to personal data stored by private organizations (e.g. corporations) -- such organizations are restricted on what information they can collect, disclose to others, how they use the data, etc. However, for things like email, providers are required to store metadata about emails for 6-24 months (depending on the member state) in case the authorities with to investigate something.
With a few industry-specific exceptions, providers in the US are not compelled to retain user data for any period of time. An email host is perfectly able, legally speaking, to send all logs to /dev/null and keep no records whatsoever. They can, like any provider in most places in the world, be compelled by authorities to turn over user information they do keep, but they're under no obligation to retain that data at all beforehand. On the other hand, the US has very few regulations (again, there are some specific exceptions) that prevent providers from collecting lots of information or sharing it with other organizations for whatever purpose they wish.
I'm not so sure about that: an acquaintance of mine is a FFL (a licensed gun dealer, for those not familiar with the term). Several years ago he was moving his shop to a new location and so he had various non-gun orders (e.g. ammo) shipped to his home (which is not listed on the license, so the ATF would have no idea that he was a licensed dealer -- they'd think he was just a private citizen).
The UPS guy showed up a few days later with ~100,000 rounds of 5.56mm NATO, 50,000 rounds of 7.62mm NATO ammo, and several thousand rounds of other mixed calibers. No issues from anyone except the neighbors (who called the local police to report him as a potential terrorist due to the huge pile of ammo the UPS guy was unloading -- the cops came out, chatted with him for a minute, he explained the move and showed them his FFL, and they went away happy). He was somewhat amused by the whole experience.
Around the same timeframe I found a really good deal on a 5,000 round case of subsonic .22LR (I have a legally-owned suppressor for my .22 rifle and fire subsonic ammo a lot) and ordered it for delivery. It arrived within the week. No issues at all.
I'm not sure if there's been any change in ATF policy in regards to bulk orders, but there certainly wasn't any issues a few years ago.
Wherever you are finding 5.56 mm ammunition for 30 cents a round, please let me know. I will buy everything they have.
Hah. You and me both.
I was just quoting a price from memory from a year or two back when I last bought ammo (I'm presently an expat and haven't bought any shooting stuff in a while.). Sorry for getting your hopes up.
That said, if you haven't tried it already check out Prvi Partizan ammo. It's a Serbian company but they make NATO-spec 5.56mm that's reasonably priced, reliable, and comparable in many ways to the more-expensive Federal stuff.
I wouldn't be surprised if buying $200 worth of ammunition or $50 worth of gunpowder would get your other recent purchases reviewed.
A case of 1,000 rounds of 5.56mm ammo (an extremely common caliber) usually costs about $300 or so (though prices vary with demand). That's a fairly common amount of ammo to buy for sporting/recreation/competition purposes (hunters use much less ammo). In my personal experience, a trip to the range would usually involve firing ~200 rounds or so, so a case would last a few months at most depending on how often I'd shoot. Several of my friends report similar consumption of ammo. Anecdotal, yes, but I'd venture to say that it's not terribly out of the ordinary.
An 8lb "keg" of powder (about the size of a gallon of milk) costs about $150 or so (1lb jars cost about $20). Since there's a $20-per-order special shipping fee if you're ordering powder, it's not uncommon to buy a few pounds at a time to spread out the extra fee. Reloading is not uncommon, though not many local shops store powder in large amounts due to various regulations: it's much more common to order it online (where the extra fee applies) rather than buying it locally.
If the government is keeping tabs on all normal-sized ammo and powder purchases, they're going to have their work cut out for them as there's literally millions of people making such purchases.
Assuming Google can deliver better search results than Bing, some people may be more willing to put up with advertising and fewer privacy-protecting features.
If Bing produces poor search results, all the privacy features and lack of advertising in the world are not terribly useful: the primary purpose of a search engine is to allow people to search for (and presumably find) things.
For those who are interested, the service you're referring to is likely http://www.itconsult.co.uk/stamper.htm.
Considering that the Swiss have a well-developed satellite monitoring system, it wouldn't surprise me if they had monitoring of domestic and international phone and internet traffic going through the country.
They may have very strong data protection laws that help prevent the misuse of data by private entities (the EU has similar laws), but do they have strong laws that protect data from misuse by the government? (If so, I'd appreciate a link, as that'd be really useful to know.) I know that the EU mandates retention of various email metadata (IP addresses, sender/recipient addresses, etc.) for 6-24 months in case the government wants the info -- do the Swiss?
If you have the time for it, sure.
As the article says,
A nuclear weapon is the only thing that would work against an asteroid on short notice, Wie added. Other systems designed to divert an asteroid such as tugboats, gravity tractors, solar sails and mass drivers would require 10 or 20 years of advance notice.
It's not really possible to put big rocket motors on an asteroid and push it out of the way, as transporting enough fuel to the asteroid would be unbelievably expensive and likely infeasible with current technology.
Indeed. That's why I bought a domain ~14 years ago and have used that for all my personal correspondence (business-related stuff, of course, goes to the business address). It's extremely portable: I've switched back-end mail providers maybe half a dozen times in those years (mostly at the beginning when things were getting settled) with no disruption to mail service or needing to change my address. I highly recommend it.
For migrating to a new address, it's useful to have the old Yahoo/Gmail/whatever address forward to your new one at your domain (or otherwise setup the new system to periodically check for new mail from the old address). This way even contacts who haven't updated their contact list can still have their messages reach you (though you should remind them to update their contact list).
Having a "portable" address that's not tied to a particular provider is very handy.
Note that Google Authenticator does not generate the 'multi-factor' password after receiving the first password from the user.
The multi-factor password is streamed passed to the (pager, phone, etc.) every X seconds.
No it's not. Google Authenticator implements TOTP which depends only on having a reasonably accurate clock and a previously-agreed-upon shared secret from which the codes are generated.
When one uses Google Authenticator, one gets a shared secret from Google (which can be easily input in the form of a QR code, though one can manually input it as well) and adds it to the GA app. When one wishes to authenticate to a service (e.g. a Google Account or any other service that implements TOTP), the app uses the current time and the shared secret to compute the code for that 30 second time period. The service that the user is authenticating to also had the shared secret and computes the code for the same time period. They should match. If they don't, the service will usually calculate the codes in a time window surrounding the current time (e.g. +/- 2 minutes) in case the client's clock has drifted.
TOTP (and Google Authenticator) do not rely on network access at all -- you can use Google Authenticator as a TOTP code generator for other sites without having anything going through Google at all. For example, I have a TOTP hardware token that had the shared secret programmed by the factory (they don't keep any record of the secret, unlike RSA -- they print it on a piece of paper that comes with the token and that's it). I configured my various TOTP-enabled services (e.g. a secure website) with the shared secret and require the TOTP code during authentication. There's no dependence on outside services or network connections at all. Very handy.
My understanding is that antibiotics are permitted to treat infection, but the meat from that animal cannot be sold as "organic" for as long as they're taking the medication and for a certain period of time afterwards to allow for the medication to be excreted from their bodies.
Interestingly enough, several Swiss banks do. My bank, PostFinance (the bank run by the Swiss post office) uses S/MIME to sign all outgoing mail, including their periodic newsletter. No confidential content is ever sent via email -- users are directed to login to the (https-enabled) website to view the sensitive information. All PDFs, such as account statements, are digitally signed and timestamped by a third-party timestamping service to prove their authenticity.
It's nice to see *someone* getting it right.
Good points, though I felt it necessary to comment on the wireless mouse issue: RF-related laws do differ from country to country and there can be serious consequences (not just legal consequences) to breaking them.
While there's wide international agreement on certain bands, like the 2.4GHz ISM band, not everything is so unified. I'm an American living in Switzerland. One of my fellow Americans here in Switzerland had brought a Skype-capable cordless phone from the US and had used it for a few weeks. Eventually, some Swiss government officials with direction-finding equipment showed up at his house and requested entrance to his home. He allowed them in and they homed in on the phone. It turns out the frequencies used in the US for certain types of cordless phones are used, in Switzerland, by the Swiss military and his phone was causing interference. They gave him a ticket saying that there was no penalty this time, but if he continued to use the phone he would be fined 10,000 Swiss francs (about $10,000 USD/8,000 Euro).
While the use of a wireless mouse isn't likely to cause enough interference to bother anyone, it's still a good thing to check first to ensure it is appropriate to use.
There's no such thing as an AK-47 permit in Texas or elsewhere in the US, assuming you're referring to the semi-auto variant.
Assuming that one is not otherwise prohibited from possessing firearms (e.g. not a criminal), it's perfectly legal to make any otherwise-legal firearm for personal use in the US. For example, if one wished to build a semi-auto AK-47, that's fine (here's a guy making one from a shovel he bent into the appropriate shape, while here are the stamped/punched flats that you'd need to bend, drill, and heat-treat to make your own semi-auto AK receiver, the only regulated part). If you wanted to build a full-auto one, that's forbidden. You can make silencers, short-barreled rifles/shotguns, etc., but ONLY after getting the appropriate tax stamp from the ATF.
I am routinely a bit confused as to why datacenters aren't predominantly located in places with colder climates. Free cooling from the outside during the winter and whatnot. Is there simply a lack of infrastructure to make an ultrahigh-bandwidth line out to...say...northern Montana?
Basically, yeah.
A lot of the networks have expanded where there's people: early networks grew up around universities and government facilities (often located in or near major population centers), companies later grew up (or migrated to) where the tech people were, and things more or less grew organically from there.
Take a look at Level3's network map for the US: there's a lot of facilities in areas where there's a lot of population: SF Bay Area, Los Angeles, New England, etc. Florida has more than I would otherwise expect, but it's not too surprising. There's basically nothing in the Dakotas and very little in other sparesely-populated areas.
One may well be able to get some network connections in remote areas, but it'll likely be expensive, inconvenient, and from a considerably less-diverse group of network providers than one might get in, say, Ashburn VA or the Bay Area.
Ok, but what information does that give Facebook? They already know people's social connections due to people "friending" each other.
My point was more "Leaving aside the privacy issues related to the use of Facebook and its specific implementation, in general people should choose diverse 'trusted contacts' from separate social groups so the odds of multiple friends colluding to get enough codes to gain access to one's account is minimized."
While I'd hope that people would trust their friends to not abuse a privileged position in order to gain access to one's account, it's probably a good idea to pick friends from different, non-overlapping social circles to make it difficult for them to know who other "trusted" people for one's account are.
s/websit/website
That's because their website isn't http://www.piratebay.sx/
Their websit is http://thepiratebay.sx/ -- note the presence of "the" in the name.
That doesn't make any sense: Spamhaus only charges money to services that subscribe to their lists (that is, actual customers). They don't charge anything for de-listing.
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what the AC you're replying to said: you can manufacture Title I firearms (that is, non-NFA-regulated items like the AR-15) for personal use with no paperwork.
If you wish to manufacture Title II firearms (NFA-regulated items) like SBRs, SBSs, suppressors, AOWs, etc. that's fine, but you need the relevant ATF forms and tax stamp though no manufacturer's license is required. Manufacturing machine guns, however, requires that one possess the appropriate manufacturer's license.
Say what you will about Ubuntu, of all the Linux distros, it has the most polished out of the box experience.
That used to be the case. Since the time of 10.10 of the "mainline" Ubuntu, I've found it to be considerably less intuitive than expected. I much prefer Mint+MATE over any of the mainline Ubuntu releases. That and Xubuntu.
MATLAB is inappropriate for any field.
Why?
For calculations that involve lots of matrices, it's quite good.
The people hid from one militant guy.
I wouldn't really say that most people were *hiding* -- that is, I don't think they were staying inside due to fear of the bad guy -- but rather trying to let the professionals (the police and federal agents) who were searching for this very dangerous bad guy to do their job with the least interference and confusion possible.