The NSA needs a lot of "cloud" to process all that data they're collecting... Amazon and several other vendors have been jumping at the chance to create 'government cloud' services... several are in production now.
Creation of computing infrastructure for a government three-letter agency does not compensate for loss of trade to other countries. Making something for the government does not contribute to the economy unless its innovations flow back to the market, as the government is using tax money raised from the market to pay for it.
This is not the Apollo program where all kinds of great inventions paid for by taxpayer money went on to be used in civilian manufacturing processes and ultimately boosted the economy. In this case, whatever great things are created for the NSA are not likely to be declassified for decades.
Not that it may or may not have happened, but that'll give you links of the same quality as "9/11 false flag demolition" and "moon landing faked" - an awful lot of speculation and conspiracy theories but actual proof is pretty hard to come by.
The European Parliament's 2001 report on ECHELON details some cases of corporate espionage on behalf of the US against European firms, and its reliabilty has always been assumed, plus those accusations went on to be confirmed by other serious media investigations of the NSA. Sure, a Google search is likely to turn up some speculation and conspiracy theories, but I assume that that report will be fairly high in the search results.
Just FYI: whenever you read "Romanian" in the news regarding crime, and it's not related to the country of Romania, it actually means "gypsy"
That would be somewhat more likely if this were a story about petty crime like pickpocketing or car theft (but even there, some amount of ethnic Romanian immigrants are perfectly capable of engaging in petty crime). But when it comes to crime involving computer exploits, they are considerably more likely to be ethnic Romanian and not Roma. For example, this Wired article about online theft involves a number of young people who are not Roma.
Living in Romania myself and seeing it treated like a pariah abroad in spite of the fact that some parts of it are among the best educated and cultured parts of Europe, I am used to the tendency of many to blame the country's ills on the Roma, but good and evil is inside of everyone ethnicity.
This "Romanians = gypsies = criminals" connection is also dangerous one, as it can really mislead people about moving populations in Europe. I spend a lot of time in Finland, and I watched as one community lamented a large Roma tribe that flooded their town each summer, begging, pickpocketing and recycling. They called them "the Romanians" and that formed everyone's opinion about the country. When I tried to start a conversation with one of them in a queue at a supermarket's bottle-return machine, it turned out all of them were from a small town in central Bulgaria. But for some reason, Bulgaria never gets rubbished half as much as Romania.
Obviously you or whoever you got the quotation from thought it did matter if you or they put de Tocqueville's name on it. Trying to lend prestige your cause by attaching a dead man's name on it is tiresome and dishonest.
And really? You are going to cite Wikipedia when making assertions of spurious quotations?
I linked to Wikiquote, not Wikipedia, and Wikiquote is an excellent quick reference for determining if a quotation is spurious. (Nearly all of the obvious false quotations that go around in political chain mails or blog comments are already debunked there.)
So you support Right to Mooch States, where the Unions fight for benefits that apply to all the workers, but the workers don't have to support the union to get them?
In fact, this is how things work in countries with the highest support for organized labour, not just your "Right to Mooch States" in the USA. In Finland, for example, if an employee chooses not to support a union, he loses out on the right to help determine the direction of collective bargaining, but he is covered by all the protections that such collection bargaining wins.
While more open to letting users want with their phones than most devices, the N900 hardware has some significant black boxes and comes with binary blobs.
Now there's a [citation needed] if I ever saw one, SNCF is booking half a billion per quarter.
While SNCF eventually got to the point it could generate large profits on its own, the French rail network benefitted heavily from state subsidy in the 20th century. Without the state support to expand the rail network, there would have been no present-day SNCF. Therefore, the OP's point that no country's passenger rail system has functioned purely as a private business is valid.
I think you will find that Jesus did not speak medieval English.
The King James Version is written in Early Modern English, not a medieval variety (the differences between the KJV and the Middle English of, say, Chaucer or Old English which were spoken within the medieval era is significant).
Plastics are so vital to advanced technology, and mass production of them depends on hydrocarbons. While technological civilization could reboot, it would likely stall at a 19th-century stage.
While the vast majority of scribes probably could not read, and were therefore copying verbatim
What is your source for this assertion? The monasteries that copied books also trained those scribes in literacy. By the time anyone would have been allowed to copy, they would have learned the values of the letters, and beginning readers not much different from the schoolboy primers of later centuries are abundant among medieval manuscripts.
Now, junior monks in the West may have had a shaky knowledge of Latin and not understood entirely what they were transcribing, but for senior scribes a firm command of Latin was common. And for monks in the Byzantine world, the Koine Greek of the Septuagint and the New Testament was not so different from their own native language as to seriously impede understanding (it was Attic Greek that required rigorous schooling).
There's no reason for the gun to be out of the safe at all, unless it is being transported under careful supervision to a firing range or hunting area. Taking it out of the safe otherwise puts those around the gun owner at risk (for accidents are much more probable than stopping supposed aggressors).
But to me, mine are kept in a safe that is secured to the floor in my house
Wait a second. You oppose guns that require the user to be wearing something, because you might not have it on at the time when you have to use a gun to protect yourself in a rush. But at the same time, you store your guns in a safe, which presumably takes the same (if not more) time to open as putting on the device that enables a smart gun.
If you properly maintain your guns to keep them out of reach of unintended users, then you are not going to be able to use them instantly in a crisis situation. That is how it has always been. Smart guns don't change anything.
Back in the 1990s I heard the use of sound waves to move objects proposed as one of the fringe theories for how the pyramids were built, because "people could not have moved those great big blocks such long distances!". So, there must have been earlier work by scientists in moving things with sound waves that crank historians could twist for their own theories.
How does society benefit by having every little detail of everyone's life being spied upon?
As one official has already said, in order to find a needle in the haystack, you need to have a haystack. Not that I agree, but such thinking is widespread.
I've hitchhiked well over 100,000 km all over the world (including the United States, FWIW). Never have I seen a hint of "rape/mugging/beating". The only danger I have encountered is a few people who just don't know how to drive, but I could find the same thing getting a lift from a friend or relative. Experiences identical to mine are reported by the rest of the international hitchhiking community, it's a pretty organized community these days with resources like Hitchwiki and the Academy of Free Travel, so you can read an enormous number of reports on hitchhiking if you'd like. Even my solo female peers report that the occasional annoyance from male drivers does not go beyond tiresome suggestive comments.
I won't claim that hitchhiking is "100% safe". Mishaps may occur like in any form of travel (I've since moved from hitchhiking into bicycle touring, and it too has its statistically insignificant horror stories). But it is certainly safer a lot more than "99% of the time".
You are supposed to use HTTPS only over Tor anyway and transmit no identifying data in other cases, respectively.
It is already widely suspected that the major signing certificates are compromised so that the NSA can do man-in-the-middle. Therefore, even if you are using Tor, the details of your HTTPS browsing can come to the attention of NSA.
Yes I'm sure encrypting all your messages in such a way as they can now be proven mathematically to come from the same set of encryption keys (which is what OpenPGP does) will guarantee your anonymity.
Only if you encrypt and sign, which is a distinct command from encrypting only. If you merely encrypt a message to a recepient without signing, the ciphertext has no relationship to your own private key.
I was about to post the same thing. The scene in Niven's The Ringworld Engineers where Louis Wu is shown to have become a "wirehead", someone who becomes addicted to directly stimulating the pleasure centre of the brain and losing interest in all else in life, was one of the creepiest things I've ever read.
Thankfully, in 20 years we'll have rich trust-fund hipster-kids developing on film "before it was cool."
Already happening. My local bookstore, unable to make much of a profit on books alone and therefore offering all kinds of hipster items, does a brisk trade in the retro film cameras from Lomography. Lord knows where they develop the film, though. (Unless setting up your own darkroom is a hipster fad I've overlooked.)
The minimum wage laws and the socialist State agenda already made it impossible for people to take very low paid position only to be apprentices, so apprenticeship is dead in America because of the minimum wage.
Funny how high minimum wages and "socialism" to a degree much greater than in the US hasn't eradicated Germany's very popular system of apprenticeship.
And first-world countries that do not have minimum wage set by law tend to have minimum wage worked out in collective bargaining between a union and management (which then applies to all employees, union or non-union). Do you think that that would lower wages?
He says, "they have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent." Maybe I'm just eating the bullshit media too much... but China doesn't seem like the best place for free speech and overall freedom really
When the UK handed Hong Kong back the China, they bound China to allow Hong Kong autonomy for fifty years. In Hong Kong, there is free speech, freedom of assembly and unfiltered internet. It's common to see Falun Gong protestors at spots where commuters pass by daily, for example, while in Mainland China they would immediately be arrested. Now, the Chinese government has been tightening its grip on Hong Kong and arguably violating the spirit of its agreement with the UK, but Hong Kong is still nothing like what you think of when you hear the word "China".
Slashdot Mirror
Creation of computing infrastructure for a government three-letter agency does not compensate for loss of trade to other countries. Making something for the government does not contribute to the economy unless its innovations flow back to the market, as the government is using tax money raised from the market to pay for it.
This is not the Apollo program where all kinds of great inventions paid for by taxpayer money went on to be used in civilian manufacturing processes and ultimately boosted the economy. In this case, whatever great things are created for the NSA are not likely to be declassified for decades.
The European Parliament's 2001 report on ECHELON details some cases of corporate espionage on behalf of the US against European firms, and its reliabilty has always been assumed, plus those accusations went on to be confirmed by other serious media investigations of the NSA. Sure, a Google search is likely to turn up some speculation and conspiracy theories, but I assume that that report will be fairly high in the search results.
That would be somewhat more likely if this were a story about petty crime like pickpocketing or car theft (but even there, some amount of ethnic Romanian immigrants are perfectly capable of engaging in petty crime). But when it comes to crime involving computer exploits, they are considerably more likely to be ethnic Romanian and not Roma. For example, this Wired article about online theft involves a number of young people who are not Roma .
Living in Romania myself and seeing it treated like a pariah abroad in spite of the fact that some parts of it are among the best educated and cultured parts of Europe, I am used to the tendency of many to blame the country's ills on the Roma, but good and evil is inside of everyone ethnicity.
This "Romanians = gypsies = criminals" connection is also dangerous one, as it can really mislead people about moving populations in Europe. I spend a lot of time in Finland, and I watched as one community lamented a large Roma tribe that flooded their town each summer, begging, pickpocketing and recycling. They called them "the Romanians" and that formed everyone's opinion about the country. When I tried to start a conversation with one of them in a queue at a supermarket's bottle-return machine, it turned out all of them were from a small town in central Bulgaria. But for some reason, Bulgaria never gets rubbished half as much as Romania.
Obviously you or whoever you got the quotation from thought it did matter if you or they put de Tocqueville's name on it. Trying to lend prestige your cause by attaching a dead man's name on it is tiresome and dishonest.
I linked to Wikiquote, not Wikipedia, and Wikiquote is an excellent quick reference for determining if a quotation is spurious. (Nearly all of the obvious false quotations that go around in political chain mails or blog comments are already debunked there.)
This is a spurious quotation (and a pretty obvious one). Please don't perpetuate those.
In fact, this is how things work in countries with the highest support for organized labour, not just your "Right to Mooch States" in the USA. In Finland, for example, if an employee chooses not to support a union, he loses out on the right to help determine the direction of collective bargaining, but he is covered by all the protections that such collection bargaining wins.
While more open to letting users want with their phones than most devices, the N900 hardware has some significant black boxes and comes with binary blobs.
While SNCF eventually got to the point it could generate large profits on its own, the French rail network benefitted heavily from state subsidy in the 20th century. Without the state support to expand the rail network, there would have been no present-day SNCF. Therefore, the OP's point that no country's passenger rail system has functioned purely as a private business is valid.
If a server for which you need to enable Javascript has been compromised, NoScript is no help at all.
The King James Version is written in Early Modern English, not a medieval variety (the differences between the KJV and the Middle English of, say, Chaucer or Old English which were spoken within the medieval era is significant).
Plastics are so vital to advanced technology, and mass production of them depends on hydrocarbons. While technological civilization could reboot, it would likely stall at a 19th-century stage.
What is your source for this assertion? The monasteries that copied books also trained those scribes in literacy. By the time anyone would have been allowed to copy, they would have learned the values of the letters, and beginning readers not much different from the schoolboy primers of later centuries are abundant among medieval manuscripts.
Now, junior monks in the West may have had a shaky knowledge of Latin and not understood entirely what they were transcribing, but for senior scribes a firm command of Latin was common. And for monks in the Byzantine world, the Koine Greek of the Septuagint and the New Testament was not so different from their own native language as to seriously impede understanding (it was Attic Greek that required rigorous schooling).
You must be new here.
There's no reason for the gun to be out of the safe at all, unless it is being transported under careful supervision to a firing range or hunting area. Taking it out of the safe otherwise puts those around the gun owner at risk (for accidents are much more probable than stopping supposed aggressors).
Wait a second. You oppose guns that require the user to be wearing something, because you might not have it on at the time when you have to use a gun to protect yourself in a rush. But at the same time, you store your guns in a safe, which presumably takes the same (if not more) time to open as putting on the device that enables a smart gun.
If you properly maintain your guns to keep them out of reach of unintended users, then you are not going to be able to use them instantly in a crisis situation. That is how it has always been. Smart guns don't change anything.
Back in the 1990s I heard the use of sound waves to move objects proposed as one of the fringe theories for how the pyramids were built, because "people could not have moved those great big blocks such long distances!". So, there must have been earlier work by scientists in moving things with sound waves that crank historians could twist for their own theories.
As one official has already said, in order to find a needle in the haystack, you need to have a haystack. Not that I agree, but such thinking is widespread.
I've hitchhiked well over 100,000 km all over the world (including the United States, FWIW). Never have I seen a hint of "rape/mugging/beating". The only danger I have encountered is a few people who just don't know how to drive, but I could find the same thing getting a lift from a friend or relative. Experiences identical to mine are reported by the rest of the international hitchhiking community, it's a pretty organized community these days with resources like Hitchwiki and the Academy of Free Travel, so you can read an enormous number of reports on hitchhiking if you'd like. Even my solo female peers report that the occasional annoyance from male drivers does not go beyond tiresome suggestive comments.
I won't claim that hitchhiking is "100% safe". Mishaps may occur like in any form of travel (I've since moved from hitchhiking into bicycle touring, and it too has its statistically insignificant horror stories). But it is certainly safer a lot more than "99% of the time".
It is already widely suspected that the major signing certificates are compromised so that the NSA can do man-in-the-middle. Therefore, even if you are using Tor, the details of your HTTPS browsing can come to the attention of NSA.
Only if you encrypt and sign, which is a distinct command from encrypting only. If you merely encrypt a message to a recepient without signing, the ciphertext has no relationship to your own private key.
I was about to post the same thing. The scene in Niven's The Ringworld Engineers where Louis Wu is shown to have become a "wirehead", someone who becomes addicted to directly stimulating the pleasure centre of the brain and losing interest in all else in life, was one of the creepiest things I've ever read.
Already happening. My local bookstore, unable to make much of a profit on books alone and therefore offering all kinds of hipster items, does a brisk trade in the retro film cameras from Lomography. Lord knows where they develop the film, though. (Unless setting up your own darkroom is a hipster fad I've overlooked.)
Funny how high minimum wages and "socialism" to a degree much greater than in the US hasn't eradicated Germany's very popular system of apprenticeship.
And first-world countries that do not have minimum wage set by law tend to have minimum wage worked out in collective bargaining between a union and management (which then applies to all employees, union or non-union). Do you think that that would lower wages?
Could you cite this please? This political event is typically referred to as the Velvet Divorce and I'm surprised by claims of "thousands" of deaths.
When the UK handed Hong Kong back the China, they bound China to allow Hong Kong autonomy for fifty years. In Hong Kong, there is free speech, freedom of assembly and unfiltered internet. It's common to see Falun Gong protestors at spots where commuters pass by daily, for example, while in Mainland China they would immediately be arrested. Now, the Chinese government has been tightening its grip on Hong Kong and arguably violating the spirit of its agreement with the UK, but Hong Kong is still nothing like what you think of when you hear the word "China".