Every flight that I have booked in the last few years, has involved booking the seats at the time of reserving the tickets. The only ones that didn't recline were in the back row and were clearly marked as such, and in some cases were cheaper.
An upgrade to Economy Plus (which has more leg room) typically costs about an extra 10%, and is often automatic for regular flyers. If you can't afford an extra $10/hour for comfort, then perhaps that comfort isn't as important to you as you're claiming...
There are currently a million people who have Top Secret or above security clearance. That means, one million people who may be sharing secrets with a foreign power if they are bribed or blackmailed into doing so. Do you really trust the vetting to have managed to find a million incorruptible people in the USA?
The cost is embodied in the regulation, but the regulation is (in most cases) really just codifying the cost. You can't bring a drug to market until you've first done trials that it doesn't have any serious negative effects (or, at least, that you know what they are and can disclose them), and then until you've demonstrated that it actually works. This is expensive to do, because it involves doing controlled scientific experiments on groups of human subjects.
The fact that it's expensive means that it's not possible to explore all of them and so profit-motivated companies pick the ones that will give the most return on financial investment, which may or may not be the same ones that will save the most lives, or cause the greatest overall improvements in the standard of living.
The important thing to remember is that if it was so easy for him to get these documents, then that also means that there are about a million other people with the same clearance level as him who would find it equally easy. What's the betting that none of those are Chinese agents? Especially given how many Russian agents we've learned were working for the NSA and CIA during the cold war.
People focus on Snowden's disclosure as if it's possibly giving information to America's enemies (or, at least, not-so-friendly friends), but any of them that doesn't have a completely inept intelligence agency of their own will already have the information he's released. It was only secret from the people to whom these agencies should be accountable.
My main complaint is the seat backs. They seem to be the exact opposite of the shape of an ergonomic chair, so they push forward at the base (restricting leg room) and then have no support for the lower back. You could easily make the seats thinner and more comfortable, if you took a quick look at the shape of a human before designing them.
without pushing the seatback back (which I never like doing if there is someone behind me, I think airlines should remove that option)
Why? If the person in front of me in a flight pushes their seat back, then it moves the bottom forward very slightly, so I get about half a centimetre of knee room, and it moves the (small) screen of the in-flight entertainment system closer to my eyes. The seats are designed not to be made more uncomfortable when the person in front of you leans back...
Universities do a lot of early work on various kinds of treatments, but the big cost is doing the big trials needed for getting FDA approval. That's out of the budget of most universities, and even if they come up with a revolutionary cure someone still needs to do that work before it can become widely available.
The UK can't run out of GBP, but can run out of purchasing power. If the government keeps printing money, then the value of the money goes down (which is great for exports, for a while, but it makes buying things made abroad difficult). Unless all of the medical supplies, everything that doctors buy, and all of the raw materials for making them is produced in the UK, that's not a sustainable strategy.
You might want to check the renewal terms. Prior to ACA, it was entirely legal to charge someone for insurance, then refuse to renew their insurance (or jack up the price to make it unaffordable) after the first year where they make claims for something that is likely to require ongoing treatment. And then they have a preexisting condition, so they couldn't get insurance from anyone else either.
You (and other posters in this thread) are making several assumptions that are not necessarily warranted:
That the person needing the care will negotiate for it at the time when they need it
That the person needing the care will negotiate individually, and not via some collective bargaining mechanism
The second point is why socialised health care and insurance companies have advantages over individuals in negotiating for care. An individual probably won't need to go to hospital in any given year, and very few of the ones that will need to can predict what treatment they will need in advance. In contrast, you can statistically work out roughly how many people in a country will need what kinds of treatment, with quite high accuracy. Negotiating to pay for them all together puts you in a much stronger bargaining position.
The big problem with this debate is that it conflates a whole range of choices in a single socialised medicine vs private medicine debate. In reality, there are a lot of points on the spectrum, depending on:
Are hospitals owned and doctors employed by central government, local government, or private enterprise?
Are medical services bought individually, as a private collective, at a local government level, or nationally?
What mechanism is in place for judging the quality of care and for the payer to select between providers?
Is payment by individuals based on need, ability to pay, or something in the middle?
The question of what role the free market plays is complex. Obviously, you can't have people who have just suffered a heart attack shopping around for the best value ambulance to take them to the best value hospital. But you can have, for example, a central government buying medical services for all citizens (which typically counts as socialised medicine in these debates), but having different medical centres competing for the business, especially if they're allowed to take private patients as well so that they can stay in business when they don't have the majority of the government contract.
VirtualBox is open source. Having a lot of Oracle contributors doesn't make much difference. Oracle may decide to make a closed fork, but the builds for FreeBSD and in most Linux distros' package systems are from the open source tree, so they'll keep being supported even if Oracle decides to do something evil.
And does cutting government services help the poor? The rich can typically opt out of them: send their children to private schools, buy private security, pay someone to take their rubbish away, drink bottled water, go abroad for heath care, and even use stock and currency markets so that they're not reliant on a single government's currency.
For society as a whole, we single payer countries tend to see better results. But per person, the healthcare in the US is the best. Assuming you have a good health insurance plan.
The last sentence here is the important one. And it means that, if you are either wealthy, or have a good job and no preexisting conditions (especially the kind that would stop you working for a bit) then you're better off in the USA. Or, to put it more cynically, US health insurance is a great deal, right up until the point where you need to make a claim.
Luckily, it's not too difficult to build a CPU which performs fully homomorphic operations. The math isn't even beyond high-school level (it's about on par with RSA). The primary issue right now is speed.
The primary issue with homomorphic encryption is speed, in the same way that the primary issue with running Quake 4 on EDSAC is speed. No one has come up with a general-purpose homomorphic encryption scheme that doesn't also come with a slowdown that is so many orders of magnitude that you would get faster results doing the work on your mobile phone than in Amazon's cloud with homomorphic encryption. There are some special-purpose schemes for simple database queries, but each primitive operation you need (at least) doubles the total dataset size (and insertion / deletion times).
No, the argument is that it can happen if someone decides that it's worth doing. Just making the code open doesn't mean that anyone will read it. It does, however, mean that:
You can build it yourself, so you know that the code that is audited is the code that is built (modulo toolchain trojans)
You can audit the code, or pay someone else to do it, without permission from the original authors beyond their original license
You can fix any security holes that such an audit turns up (or pay someone else to do it, again without requiring permission from the original authors beyond their original license
I would not expect that loop to have any impact on performance. Once the code is in SSA form, it's obvious that it's a fixed-length loop and that it's side-effect free, so constant propagation will eliminate it. If you want to write a slowdown loop, your best bet would be to make counter volatile, so that the compiler is not allowed to elide the reads. In Java, you can make it a static public volatile field and that will have the added bonus of making everyone who reads it wonder where it's modified and what the effects are...
I'd have thought there was a pretty narrow gap between really bad code that works and non-functional code, but I'm constantly amazed by how many people manage to hit it.
It's been about 15 years since I fired or stripped one one, but doing so made me very glad that I was never in a position where my life depended on its correct functioning. Lots of moving pieces, all manufactured at too low a tolerance, any one of which could cause the weapon to jam (or worse). I'm glad they finally got the kinks worked out, although possibly if your navy chum has been using them all this time it's a case of stockholm syndrome finally getting to him...
A webmail provider (like Google) has to be able to see what your email is, even if only because they are sending you the HTML containing your emails
They have to store it. They have to provide a mechanism by which you can index it. They don't have to provide a mechanism to search all email on their servers, because that's not something email users want (or have access to), it's only something that they need for advertising. And it's difficult to implement. Email on Google servers is stored spread over a huge number of machines, in a number of datacentres. Implementing a search function that (quickly and efficiently and without impacting performance of email access and delivery) that lets you run arbitrary complex queries on this data is far from trivial (Google people have given some interesting talks over the years about how it works).
Everything Ive seen suggests that the Google et al taps were done via tapping at the ISP level or else sending NSLs, neither of which a company can really do much about so long as they are based in the US.
They send NSLs, and what do you think they say? The NSA says 'give us access to the search infrastructure that you've built for your emails'. Now they can run queries like 'who sent an email containing these keywords in the last year' or 'what is the transitive closure of correspondents with this email address'. If Google didn't already have the infrastructure for running these queries, they'd be able to reply 'we don't have the ability to do that and it will cost several million dollars to implement', but they'd already built it.
While Im not happy with that, I fail to see how the use or lack thereof of XMPP somehow presents an obstacle to the NSA.
If a GTalk user comes under suspicion as a terrorist, then the NSA will request their entire social graph to a certain depth. If all of they are communicating solely with other GTalk users, then just searching the information Google has gives you everyone that has talked to anyone who has talked to the person under suspicion, and so on. If they've talked to other users on federated XMPP servers, then the NSA can't do anything passively. They get the single-hop information, but because XMPP traffic is encrypted by default they probably can't get anything from the remote server by passive interception. So they have to either compromise the remote server (risky if they're discovered) or send another NSL. Both are within their capabilities, but now it becomes a matter of actively investigating someone, rather than passively scooping up all of the available data.
You know why the NSA was able to search social graphs and emails so easily? Because all of those pro-freedom Silicon Valley companies (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, and so on) had already built infrastructure for doing so for the purpose of selling adverts. The NSA just piggybacked on existing system to look for other information. If Silicon Valley had really cared about individual freedom, Google would have been pushing federated, decentralised services with no single point where you can insert a tap. Instead, what has happened since we've learned about the NSA's involvement? Google has replaced federated XMPP in GTalk with non-federated XMPP in Google Hangouts.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite a few of them are working on upstreaming JunOS changes to FreeBSD.
Every flight that I have booked in the last few years, has involved booking the seats at the time of reserving the tickets. The only ones that didn't recline were in the back row and were clearly marked as such, and in some cases were cheaper.
An upgrade to Economy Plus (which has more leg room) typically costs about an extra 10%, and is often automatic for regular flyers. If you can't afford an extra $10/hour for comfort, then perhaps that comfort isn't as important to you as you're claiming...
There are currently a million people who have Top Secret or above security clearance. That means, one million people who may be sharing secrets with a foreign power if they are bribed or blackmailed into doing so. Do you really trust the vetting to have managed to find a million incorruptible people in the USA?
The cost is embodied in the regulation, but the regulation is (in most cases) really just codifying the cost. You can't bring a drug to market until you've first done trials that it doesn't have any serious negative effects (or, at least, that you know what they are and can disclose them), and then until you've demonstrated that it actually works. This is expensive to do, because it involves doing controlled scientific experiments on groups of human subjects.
The fact that it's expensive means that it's not possible to explore all of them and so profit-motivated companies pick the ones that will give the most return on financial investment, which may or may not be the same ones that will save the most lives, or cause the greatest overall improvements in the standard of living.
The important thing to remember is that if it was so easy for him to get these documents, then that also means that there are about a million other people with the same clearance level as him who would find it equally easy. What's the betting that none of those are Chinese agents? Especially given how many Russian agents we've learned were working for the NSA and CIA during the cold war.
People focus on Snowden's disclosure as if it's possibly giving information to America's enemies (or, at least, not-so-friendly friends), but any of them that doesn't have a completely inept intelligence agency of their own will already have the information he's released. It was only secret from the people to whom these agencies should be accountable.
My main complaint is the seat backs. They seem to be the exact opposite of the shape of an ergonomic chair, so they push forward at the base (restricting leg room) and then have no support for the lower back. You could easily make the seats thinner and more comfortable, if you took a quick look at the shape of a human before designing them.
without pushing the seatback back (which I never like doing if there is someone behind me, I think airlines should remove that option)
Why? If the person in front of me in a flight pushes their seat back, then it moves the bottom forward very slightly, so I get about half a centimetre of knee room, and it moves the (small) screen of the in-flight entertainment system closer to my eyes. The seats are designed not to be made more uncomfortable when the person in front of you leans back...
Universities do a lot of early work on various kinds of treatments, but the big cost is doing the big trials needed for getting FDA approval. That's out of the budget of most universities, and even if they come up with a revolutionary cure someone still needs to do that work before it can become widely available.
The UK can't run out of GBP, but can run out of purchasing power. If the government keeps printing money, then the value of the money goes down (which is great for exports, for a while, but it makes buying things made abroad difficult). Unless all of the medical supplies, everything that doctors buy, and all of the raw materials for making them is produced in the UK, that's not a sustainable strategy.
You might want to check the renewal terms. Prior to ACA, it was entirely legal to charge someone for insurance, then refuse to renew their insurance (or jack up the price to make it unaffordable) after the first year where they make claims for something that is likely to require ongoing treatment. And then they have a preexisting condition, so they couldn't get insurance from anyone else either.
The second point is why socialised health care and insurance companies have advantages over individuals in negotiating for care. An individual probably won't need to go to hospital in any given year, and very few of the ones that will need to can predict what treatment they will need in advance. In contrast, you can statistically work out roughly how many people in a country will need what kinds of treatment, with quite high accuracy. Negotiating to pay for them all together puts you in a much stronger bargaining position.
The big problem with this debate is that it conflates a whole range of choices in a single socialised medicine vs private medicine debate. In reality, there are a lot of points on the spectrum, depending on:
The question of what role the free market plays is complex. Obviously, you can't have people who have just suffered a heart attack shopping around for the best value ambulance to take them to the best value hospital. But you can have, for example, a central government buying medical services for all citizens (which typically counts as socialised medicine in these debates), but having different medical centres competing for the business, especially if they're allowed to take private patients as well so that they can stay in business when they don't have the majority of the government contract.
Technically, the USB2 support is a personal / evaluation use license, so you may not be allowed to use it without paying Oracle in some situations.
VirtualBox is open source. Having a lot of Oracle contributors doesn't make much difference. Oracle may decide to make a closed fork, but the builds for FreeBSD and in most Linux distros' package systems are from the open source tree, so they'll keep being supported even if Oracle decides to do something evil.
80+% of the people in the US HAD a good health insurance plan
Nope, 80% has a health insurance plan.
And does cutting government services help the poor? The rich can typically opt out of them: send their children to private schools, buy private security, pay someone to take their rubbish away, drink bottled water, go abroad for heath care, and even use stock and currency markets so that they're not reliant on a single government's currency.
For society as a whole, we single payer countries tend to see better results. But per person, the healthcare in the US is the best. Assuming you have a good health insurance plan.
The last sentence here is the important one. And it means that, if you are either wealthy, or have a good job and no preexisting conditions (especially the kind that would stop you working for a bit) then you're better off in the USA. Or, to put it more cynically, US health insurance is a great deal, right up until the point where you need to make a claim.
Luckily, it's not too difficult to build a CPU which performs fully homomorphic operations. The math isn't even beyond high-school level (it's about on par with RSA). The primary issue right now is speed.
The primary issue with homomorphic encryption is speed, in the same way that the primary issue with running Quake 4 on EDSAC is speed. No one has come up with a general-purpose homomorphic encryption scheme that doesn't also come with a slowdown that is so many orders of magnitude that you would get faster results doing the work on your mobile phone than in Amazon's cloud with homomorphic encryption. There are some special-purpose schemes for simple database queries, but each primitive operation you need (at least) doubles the total dataset size (and insertion / deletion times).
I would not expect that loop to have any impact on performance. Once the code is in SSA form, it's obvious that it's a fixed-length loop and that it's side-effect free, so constant propagation will eliminate it. If you want to write a slowdown loop, your best bet would be to make counter volatile, so that the compiler is not allowed to elide the reads. In Java, you can make it a static public volatile field and that will have the added bonus of making everyone who reads it wonder where it's modified and what the effects are...
I'd have thought there was a pretty narrow gap between really bad code that works and non-functional code, but I'm constantly amazed by how many people manage to hit it.
It's been about 15 years since I fired or stripped one one, but doing so made me very glad that I was never in a position where my life depended on its correct functioning. Lots of moving pieces, all manufactured at too low a tolerance, any one of which could cause the weapon to jam (or worse). I'm glad they finally got the kinks worked out, although possibly if your navy chum has been using them all this time it's a case of stockholm syndrome finally getting to him...
A webmail provider (like Google) has to be able to see what your email is, even if only because they are sending you the HTML containing your emails
They have to store it. They have to provide a mechanism by which you can index it. They don't have to provide a mechanism to search all email on their servers, because that's not something email users want (or have access to), it's only something that they need for advertising. And it's difficult to implement. Email on Google servers is stored spread over a huge number of machines, in a number of datacentres. Implementing a search function that (quickly and efficiently and without impacting performance of email access and delivery) that lets you run arbitrary complex queries on this data is far from trivial (Google people have given some interesting talks over the years about how it works).
Everything Ive seen suggests that the Google et al taps were done via tapping at the ISP level or else sending NSLs, neither of which a company can really do much about so long as they are based in the US.
They send NSLs, and what do you think they say? The NSA says 'give us access to the search infrastructure that you've built for your emails'. Now they can run queries like 'who sent an email containing these keywords in the last year' or 'what is the transitive closure of correspondents with this email address'. If Google didn't already have the infrastructure for running these queries, they'd be able to reply 'we don't have the ability to do that and it will cost several million dollars to implement', but they'd already built it.
While Im not happy with that, I fail to see how the use or lack thereof of XMPP somehow presents an obstacle to the NSA.
If a GTalk user comes under suspicion as a terrorist, then the NSA will request their entire social graph to a certain depth. If all of they are communicating solely with other GTalk users, then just searching the information Google has gives you everyone that has talked to anyone who has talked to the person under suspicion, and so on. If they've talked to other users on federated XMPP servers, then the NSA can't do anything passively. They get the single-hop information, but because XMPP traffic is encrypted by default they probably can't get anything from the remote server by passive interception. So they have to either compromise the remote server (risky if they're discovered) or send another NSL. Both are within their capabilities, but now it becomes a matter of actively investigating someone, rather than passively scooping up all of the available data.
Just back off the ones carrying SA-80s and AR-15s, there's a good chap.
Anyone, police or otherwise, who is responsible for maintenance of an SA-80 is likely to be in a bad mood...
You know why the NSA was able to search social graphs and emails so easily? Because all of those pro-freedom Silicon Valley companies (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, and so on) had already built infrastructure for doing so for the purpose of selling adverts. The NSA just piggybacked on existing system to look for other information. If Silicon Valley had really cared about individual freedom, Google would have been pushing federated, decentralised services with no single point where you can insert a tap. Instead, what has happened since we've learned about the NSA's involvement? Google has replaced federated XMPP in GTalk with non-federated XMPP in Google Hangouts.