To assure that the material is genuine. An explanation of how one obtained the material and why one is exposing it can help assure the reporter that it's not just made up lies. Anyone who's been asked to testify at a child custody hearing can attest to the careful manipulation of testimony, and the questioning of how you know the material you're testifying about. While "ad hominem" is a logical fallacy, it's vital to assess the integrity, and reliability, of a source to write good news reports.
I'm afraid that the "we will cooperate with lawyers" is also a way to protect the reporters from having to authenticate, and verify, the contents. If the reporters and newspaper would put their own names and reputations at risk protecting their informants, I'd give it more credence and be more confident that they had verified the material. But I've read the Wall Street Journal, and watched companies manipulate their hiring practices, their leaking of purchase plans, and their product announcements purely to affect news coverage in such magazines. The Wall Street Journal has some reporters who care about veracity, but it is, historically and today, a mouthpiece for conservative fiscal leaders who have no interest in their behavior being risked by whistleblowers. I'll be very surprised if this encourages any genuine news, and I'd expect a lot of "astroturfing", or attempts to leak secrets about other companies to make them look bad just before quarterly earnings are reported and companies are sold to lower the price.
Al Jazeera, now, I've not followed them closely and would welcome insights into what they're attempting to achieve.
As a very experienced engineer, I can tell you that they may well have fought back. But we won't see it in the press, and we'll only see it in the court documents if the IT staff are pressed very hard and forced to defend themselves personally, and if htey had the good sense to keep paper or other copies of the relevant documents in an emergency backup loation. The school district's managers and attorneys will control any information that gets to the plaintiffs about whose idea this was, what warnings were made, and how the monitoring actually worked. And with the IT world in a hiring freeze for the last 5 years while the banking crisis and recession played itself out, IT staff in school districts were very cautious about making political waves.
I've been in the unfortunate position of having to compel a respected colleague with criminal supervisors to explain the details of what happened, when, why, and help produce the evidence. It was an education for both of us: for me in how to protect a fundamentally innocent person from the consequences of their superiors, and for him in how, and why, to retain evidence in violation of his manager's "team player" policies that could help protect him from criminal liability.
And the computers were owned by the schools, with agreements signed by the students or their parents as part of the computer loan program. While this may not provide absolute protection for the school district, as demonstrated by the previous out of court settlements, it means the computer is not "private". It is the school's.
While it would be amusing to apply that label here, it doesn't fit except by the most repressive government standards of "terrorism". They're attacking a specific economic and political practice, they're not attacking people or facilities unrelated to that practice, and they're not engaging in violence. That makes it quite clearly political, and potentially justifiable.
GMO presents some real benefits, and some real risks, compounded by the commercial desires to draw profit for genetic modification, by monopolistic practices that encourage single-breed agriculture, by the unmanageable cross-fertilization between GMO and non-GMO plants of all sorts. and aggravated by the _speed_ of development and release of GMO crops. They've little opportunity to be tested against other breeds, they can trigger unexpected food allergies, and the use of such monocultures encourages other worldwide blights.
This does not justify this kind of attack, but it makes it politically feasible.
Contractors charge typically higher hourly or salaried rates than employees. If someone wants shares, vacation time, parking privileges, health insurance, and other employee benefits, that person needs to be prepared to surrender salary. It's a great question to discuss at contract renewal time, or when you've just completed a major project and they're looking to expand your responsibilities.
If you've just completed a major project, it's also good to have that on your resume as you look for new work, because if they won't give you the new employee role with benefits, it's time to leave. This is especially true if you're getting jealous of the vested employees.
And there were thousands of years of native American cultures there before the Europeans showed up. It's the last group in charge that sets the policies. I'm not aware of any US treaty with the UK or with the UN that would mandate the US follow such injunctions. I'm sure the UK would love US based companies to follow such policies.
It's a troubling principle. The fact that it was used for a "famous footballer", rather than being generally used for rape victims or abused children, indicates that it's main purpose is to protect the reputation of the powerful. If this "famous footballer" didn't want his name all over tweet, he shouldn't have been straying without knowledge of his wife. (I've had an acquantance suggest an affair, with the knowledge of their spouse: we were all at dinner. It can happen.)
That's a mailing list archive: not helpful to this question. Go directly to the CentOS 5.5 archive, now set aside to the "vailt.centos.org" site, and viewable sorted by date at http://vault.centos.org/5.5/updates/SRPMS/http://vault.centos.org/5.5/updates/SRPMS/?C=M;O=A. Then compare it to the CentOS 5.6 release packages, and the dozens if not hundreds of published RHEL 5 updates for the time from the day _before_ the release of RHEL 5.6 and the advent of CentOS 5.6. . This kind of 4 month "pause" and the focus on completing a release rather than publishing the ongoing updates makes CentOs unsuitable for any externally exposed servers: it means any remaining 0-day exploits will remain exposed and unpatched and need to be manually built and repaired.
This sort of thing is why production environments cannot merely slap in CentOS for production environments. The much vaunted by core maintainers "binary compatibility" with RHEL is pointless when the "compatible components" for the current release of RHEL have not been published.
I've reviewed it for a recent partner: the SL update repository has _all_ the RHEL 5.6 components and ongoing updates. CentOS held up all updates for months until they completed their CentOS 5.6 release, which left their users with significant security risks and compatibility problems with use or bundling of upstream RHEL freeware components. SL is also cooperating with links to very useful 3rdparty repositories contained in their core distribution, such as EPEL and RPMforge and altrepo. These are components which RHEL is unable to directly support for various reasons, but which make Scientific Linux even _more_ useful than RHEL for development or leading edge work, and which CentOS also refuses to proved even in their "extras" repository.
The company would not have been able to afford the RHEL 6 licenses for their entire environment: their testing environments are now SL 6, and their production hosts are RHEL 6, which saves a lot of compatibility problems. CentOS could not even be considered due to the missing version 6 release.
They're not POW's. POW's are handled under the Geneva conventions, and would have received military trials or released now that Iraq and Afghanistan have been conquered and new governments installed. George Bush's fascinating legal experts came up with the concept of "enemy noncambatants". The whole mess is a direct violation of either the Constitution or the relevant Geneva conventions: there was _no_ legal basis for inventing this category.
Even war criminals would have received a trial, but it would have been under UN conrol, not held secretly at Guantanamo Bay with no published records. The only equivalent of hte last few decades was Manuel Noriega, who was also a political prisoner deliberately prevented from testifying in anything like an open court lest he reveal criminal activities by the US government. (Manuel's early regimem received strong fiscal and military support from the US government: Afghanistan's Taliban received strong US support when they were fighting off the Russians.)
He can't get consensus to do so. President Obama can't wipe his nose without committees to hammer out an agreement with both parties: this is a fact of his leadership style, not one of lack of votes. The result has been endless delay and some ghastly compromises to get that consensus, and enormous catering to the most extreme members of his opposing party.
Yes, it's clearly a troll. But the research in closed environments and recycling for space flight have already borne fruit, as have the materials research in lightweight alloys and ceramics used for space flight. Information solar radiation, weather monitoring, and terrain and oean mapping have already paid off the space program costs, including manned spacef flight, by huge factors. Increased communications from the satellite networks have also more than paid for space flight.
Technologies within reach but not yet active, requiring further space access and much better done with intelligent personnel than over designed machines, include large scale computer chip manufacture, electropheris in zero gee for DNA research, handling of truly dangerous viral or bacterial research in a vacuum surrounded safety zone, deuterium and tritium and simple helium collection from the solar wind (which has far higher concentrations and is easier to collect in many ways than solar material), solar power on a scale impossible lto ground based collectors, metal refining from asteroidal materials for metals almost depleted on Earth's surface such as mercury.
Are you aware that you've probably just violated your non-disclosure agreement? These are a strong reason why engineers don't warn other engineers about internal issues where they work: the non-discluser agreements for finance companies are quite dstrong.
> Alas, the most corrupt will communicate off the record anyway.
I'm afraid this is not a reliable assumption. I've seen such correspondence working with business partners, cleaning up after other departing partners. People are quite careless about where they keep their illicit documents, fiscal data, passwords, insider trading communications with people outside the company, and correspondence about job candidate evaluations that violate gender and racial and age bias regulations, etc. I was once asked to help retrieve email messages about an employee seeking an internal transfer, where the manager of the other department actually wrote that they did not want to get stuck with the employee's pension bills when they retired, and couldn't the employee be eased out before then. (After retrieving the email, I brought this to the corporate legal counsel: we cooperated to help educate the HR department that this was going on, that this was illegal, and to explain the costs of throwing out your most experienced people by surprise and leaving them _angry_ at you. The manager got released due to this and other issues, the manager's upset about my "unauthorized access" let the employee know what had happened despite my discretion, we wound up acknowledged by the rank and file of our partner's employees as being on _their_ side, and that transfer worked out very well for our partners and for us working with them.)
But people engaged in such casual corruption are notoriously careless about their record keeping, and their social correspondence can very much provide links to their activities. It can also lead to that nest of political troublemakers who are engaging in unwelcome but legal activity, such as starting a union, planning a skunkworks project, or are being approached by corporate recruiters. People often don't _plan_ to do illegal things. They do them as part of their ordinary lives, and forget (over time) that this is not acceptable behavior, or come to think of it as "how things are done". That's where an outside partner can be very handy, to help remind both partners of how they _should_ be done for reasons of safety, ethics, and profit.
And RedHat _directly_ pushes their upgrades back to the linux kernel and numerous other projects. The original poster has _no_ idea what they're talking about. This is not a change to general RHEL packaging, it's only a few abused packages, such as the kernel, which Oracle modifies heavily in their repackaging for this "Unbreakable Linux", which frankly isn't "Unbreakable", it's merely tuned for Oracle, which is typically very fragile.
The "life-giving" part of the Catholic Church's reasoning is actually a complete misinterpretation of the biblical story of Onan. The man was supposed to get his sister-in-law, a widow, pregant. The son and widow would thus inherit his prother's property. By "spilling his seed" outside her tent, Onan got to have some extra sex outside the marriage *and* inherit the property, a profound violation of old Jewish property and inheritance rights.
The story says absolutely *nothing* about how many children a couple should have nor about the general issue of birth control, but rather about breaking contracts, and deceiving a grieving widow into thinking her inheritance from her dead husband could be assured.
This was "trade secret" algorighms, not "copyright infringement". It was part of the crown jewels of Goldman Sachs business, and our convicted felon took it with him to his start up. What, precisely, did you think they were offering him triple the salary _for_ if not for his knowledge of these technologies and these algorithms?
Now, the whole "high speed trading" needs to be halted outright. The idea that a few microseconds difference in access to such information is being used to fund billions of dollars of profit on the margins of who can process the numbers to buy, or sell, the stock first while the profit is greatest is insider trading with computers, and it's incredibly dangerous because there _will_ be feedback loops, and phase delays in them _will_ become outrageous positive feedback loops which _will_ make the market thrash at unexpected moments. The only reliable protection is the classic one, which most of us learned when we first studied mechanical, electronic, or software feedback cycles. Damp the system.
But that would eliminate a lot of glamorous projects at these larger investment firms, and _those_ are critically tied to bonuses of a lot of very excitable "trend setters" at such firms. Don't expect this to happen until after several more crashes and trashes due to this kind of unstable trading.
It's also very helpful in making web pages more robust and reliable in different browsers, and reducing the complexity of the web page. This reduces testing costs and improves its stability. It also forces certain types of design, keeping interfaces simple, consistent, and filled with content rather than unstable and unreliable eye candy.
Simple guidelines for webpages for documentation include:
1) No Flash or other proprietary formats. 2) 7-bit ASCII text only. (This can be relaxed for international documentation, but it's helpful.) 2) No Javascript. (It clutters the document, makes it alter content in unpredictable ways, and is historically unstable. It has its uses, for filling out complex forms, but those come at a very real price in stability of the documentation itself.) 3) No font awareness. (bold and italic should be enough: the time is better spent on the content, not selecting fonts) 4) Minimize graphics. Never use an image when a few lines of text will do.
The resulting tools are not beautiful, but they will work after the project is over and everyone is on a new operating system.
But you can use such arrays against paint, rust, frozen water, and the other dust cluttering LEO. And that should be quite detectable as "glitter" in the ordinary spy satellite monitoring of LEO, which is taken from LEO and has less relative velocity to cope with and less atmospheric distortion. So I think your premise of being able to "see it from Earth" has nothing to do with most of this debris.
DNA ID's are expensive. They use consumable chemicals, and drawing body fluids into a publicly accessible device presents fascinating liability and exposure issues, and they neglect the existence of "chimeras", organisms (including humans) who have multiple sets of DNA. (They're fascinating medically, usually from shared blood supples with non-identical twins before birth.)
Laser surgery to correct vision distorts the lens: that can cause profound distortion of the expected retinal image, beyond the ability of the computer to recognize the correct image. Given the number of false negativies retinal scans provide, it significantly lowers their usefulness.
Diabetic laser surger is also fascinating in its results. Do look it up. I'm afraid I'm old enough that I have acquaintances who've had such surger, and feel sure that retinal scans taken before, during, and after the retinopathy, and I've even had the opportunity to look through an opthalmoscope and actually see the changes. If they're enough for a casual observer to note, I'm sure theyre' enough to distort the results of a retinal scan.
It can be planted in the computer records. Why would you think that is actually reliable?
It's also uncomfortable and easily confused (though not faked) by laser surgy for vision correction or diabetic retinopathy,by cataracts, or even by contacts.
No, it's an excuse for tracking _everyone_. "Think of the children" has been a rallying cry for numerous attacks on civil liberties, free speech, anonymity, and a general desire to have full access to everyone's personal matters.
Most child abductions are by relatives: divorced parents pulling children across state lines because they disagree with divorce court proceedings, often with good reason, is one of the most common sources of child abduction. Tnad this will do very little about that unless the _states_ agree to exchange data and support extradition proceedings, and there are excellent cases of why this is exactly the wrong thing to do for the child.
Such "child tracking" and the necessary national tracking database for it to be effective is also a direct violation of states' rights, which have set standards for custody and child care on a state by state basis.
Oh, my. No. Newton's third law discusses force, not energy. While the net forces on the individual components are balanced, action and reaction, the energy imparted into the bullet is much higher. Energy is equivalent to force times distance: that force is applied to the bullet over the length of the barrel, and the rifle's distance moved is only the distance of the recoil against the shooter's shoulder or hand.
Oh, dear. That's a disarming belief, but I urge you to study some radiochemistry. Alpha radiation would be useless: it wouldn't typically get through clothing.
I'm afraid you've been misled. Check out the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam and check out the "Origiin of Spam".The US sends out less than 20% of all spam.
The US is a leader in being the _target_ of spam, because we have more money than most potential victims. And unless you actually trace it back, it's hard to tell from the contents of the spam where the author actually is.
Slashdot Mirror
To assure that the material is genuine. An explanation of how one obtained the material and why one is exposing it can help assure the reporter that it's not just made up lies. Anyone who's been asked to testify at a child custody hearing can attest to the careful manipulation of testimony, and the questioning of how you know the material you're testifying about. While "ad hominem" is a logical fallacy, it's vital to assess the integrity, and reliability, of a source to write good news reports.
I'm afraid that the "we will cooperate with lawyers" is also a way to protect the reporters from having to authenticate, and verify, the contents. If the reporters and newspaper would put their own names and reputations at risk protecting their informants, I'd give it more credence and be more confident that they had verified the material. But I've read the Wall Street Journal, and watched companies manipulate their hiring practices, their leaking of purchase plans, and their product announcements purely to affect news coverage in such magazines. The Wall Street Journal has some reporters who care about veracity, but it is, historically and today, a mouthpiece for conservative fiscal leaders who have no interest in their behavior being risked by whistleblowers. I'll be very surprised if this encourages any genuine news, and I'd expect a lot of "astroturfing", or attempts to leak secrets about other companies to make them look bad just before quarterly earnings are reported and companies are sold to lower the price.
Al Jazeera, now, I've not followed them closely and would welcome insights into what they're attempting to achieve.
As a very experienced engineer, I can tell you that they may well have fought back. But we won't see it in the press, and we'll only see it in the court documents if the IT staff are pressed very hard and forced to defend themselves personally, and if htey had the good sense to keep paper or other copies of the relevant documents in an emergency backup loation. The school district's managers and attorneys will control any information that gets to the plaintiffs about whose idea this was, what warnings were made, and how the monitoring actually worked. And with the IT world in a hiring freeze for the last 5 years while the banking crisis and recession played itself out, IT staff in school districts were very cautious about making political waves.
I've been in the unfortunate position of having to compel a respected colleague with criminal supervisors to explain the details of what happened, when, why, and help produce the evidence. It was an education for both of us: for me in how to protect a fundamentally innocent person from the consequences of their superiors, and for him in how, and why, to retain evidence in violation of his manager's "team player" policies that could help protect him from criminal liability.
And the computers were owned by the schools, with agreements signed by the students or their parents as part of the computer loan program. While this may not provide absolute protection for the school district, as demonstrated by the previous out of court settlements, it means the computer is not "private". It is the school's.
While it would be amusing to apply that label here, it doesn't fit except by the most repressive government standards of "terrorism". They're attacking a specific economic and political practice, they're not attacking people or facilities unrelated to that practice, and they're not engaging in violence. That makes it quite clearly political, and potentially justifiable.
GMO presents some real benefits, and some real risks, compounded by the commercial desires to draw profit for genetic modification, by monopolistic practices that encourage single-breed agriculture, by the unmanageable cross-fertilization between GMO and non-GMO plants of all sorts. and aggravated by the _speed_ of development and release of GMO crops. They've little opportunity to be tested against other breeds, they can trigger unexpected food allergies, and the use of such monocultures encourages other worldwide blights.
This does not justify this kind of attack, but it makes it politically feasible.
Contractors charge typically higher hourly or salaried rates than employees. If someone wants shares, vacation time, parking privileges, health insurance, and other employee benefits, that person needs to be prepared to surrender salary. It's a great question to discuss at contract renewal time, or when you've just completed a major project and they're looking to expand your responsibilities.
If you've just completed a major project, it's also good to have that on your resume as you look for new work, because if they won't give you the new employee role with benefits, it's time to leave. This is especially true if you're getting jealous of the vested employees.
And there were thousands of years of native American cultures there before the Europeans showed up. It's the last group in charge that sets the policies. I'm not aware of any US treaty with the UK or with the UN that would mandate the US follow such injunctions. I'm sure the UK would love US based companies to follow such policies.
It's a troubling principle. The fact that it was used for a "famous footballer", rather than being generally used for rape victims or abused children, indicates that it's main purpose is to protect the reputation of the powerful. If this "famous footballer" didn't want his name all over tweet, he shouldn't have been straying without knowledge of his wife. (I've had an acquantance suggest an affair, with the knowledge of their spouse: we were all at dinner. It can happen.)
That's a mailing list archive: not helpful to this question. Go directly to the CentOS 5.5 archive, now set aside to the "vailt.centos.org" site, and viewable sorted by date at
http://vault.centos.org/5.5/updates/SRPMS/http://vault.centos.org/5.5/updates/SRPMS/?C=M;O=A. Then compare it to the CentOS 5.6 release packages, and the dozens if not hundreds of published RHEL 5 updates for the time from the day _before_ the release of RHEL 5.6 and the advent of CentOS 5.6. . This kind of 4 month "pause" and the focus on completing a release rather than publishing the ongoing updates makes CentOs unsuitable for any externally exposed servers: it means any remaining 0-day exploits will remain exposed and unpatched and need to be manually built and repaired.
This sort of thing is why production environments cannot merely slap in CentOS for production environments. The much vaunted by core maintainers "binary compatibility" with RHEL is pointless when the "compatible components" for the current release of RHEL have not been published.
I've reviewed it for a recent partner: the SL update repository has _all_ the RHEL 5.6 components and ongoing updates. CentOS held up all updates for months until they completed their CentOS 5.6 release, which left their users with significant security risks and compatibility problems with use or bundling of upstream RHEL freeware components. SL is also cooperating with links to very useful 3rdparty repositories contained in their core distribution, such as EPEL and RPMforge and altrepo. These are components which RHEL is unable to directly support for various reasons, but which make Scientific Linux even _more_ useful than RHEL for development or leading edge work, and which CentOS also refuses to proved even in their "extras" repository.
The company would not have been able to afford the RHEL 6 licenses for their entire environment: their testing environments are now SL 6, and their production hosts are RHEL 6, which saves a lot of compatibility problems. CentOS could not even be considered due to the missing version 6 release.
They're not POW's. POW's are handled under the Geneva conventions, and would have received military trials or released now that Iraq and Afghanistan have been conquered and new governments installed. George Bush's fascinating legal experts came up with the concept of "enemy noncambatants". The whole mess is a direct violation of either the Constitution or the relevant Geneva conventions: there was _no_ legal basis for inventing this category.
Even war criminals would have received a trial, but it would have been under UN conrol, not held secretly at Guantanamo Bay with no published records. The only equivalent of hte last few decades was Manuel Noriega, who was also a political prisoner deliberately prevented from testifying in anything like an open court lest he reveal criminal activities by the US government. (Manuel's early regimem received strong fiscal and military support from the US government: Afghanistan's Taliban received strong US support when they were fighting off the Russians.)
He can't get consensus to do so. President Obama can't wipe his nose without committees to hammer out an agreement with both parties: this is a fact of his leadership style, not one of lack of votes. The result has been endless delay and some ghastly compromises to get that consensus, and enormous catering to the most extreme members of his opposing party.
Yes, it's clearly a troll. But the research in closed environments and recycling for space flight have already borne fruit, as have the materials research in lightweight alloys and ceramics used for space flight. Information solar radiation, weather monitoring, and terrain and oean mapping have already paid off the space program costs, including manned spacef flight, by huge factors. Increased communications from the satellite networks have also more than paid for space flight.
Technologies within reach but not yet active, requiring further space access and much better done with intelligent personnel than over designed machines, include large scale computer chip manufacture, electropheris in zero gee for DNA research, handling of truly dangerous viral or bacterial research in a vacuum surrounded safety zone, deuterium and tritium and simple helium collection from the solar wind (which has far higher concentrations and is easier to collect in many ways than solar material), solar power on a scale impossible lto ground based collectors, metal refining from asteroidal materials for metals almost depleted on Earth's surface such as mercury.
Are you aware that you've probably just violated your non-disclosure agreement? These are a strong reason why engineers don't warn other engineers about internal issues where they work: the non-discluser agreements for finance companies are quite dstrong.
> Alas, the most corrupt will communicate off the record anyway.
I'm afraid this is not a reliable assumption. I've seen such correspondence working with business partners, cleaning up after other departing partners. People are quite careless about where they keep their illicit documents, fiscal data, passwords, insider trading communications with people outside the company, and correspondence about job candidate evaluations that violate gender and racial and age bias regulations, etc. I was once asked to help retrieve email messages about an employee seeking an internal transfer, where the manager of the other department actually wrote that they did not want to get stuck with the employee's pension bills when they retired, and couldn't the employee be eased out before then. (After retrieving the email, I brought this to the corporate legal counsel: we cooperated to help educate the HR department that this was going on, that this was illegal, and to explain the costs of throwing out your most experienced people by surprise and leaving them _angry_ at you. The manager got released due to this and other issues, the manager's upset about my "unauthorized access" let the employee know what had happened despite my discretion, we wound up acknowledged by the rank and file of our partner's employees as being on _their_ side, and that transfer worked out very well for our partners and for us working with them.)
But people engaged in such casual corruption are notoriously careless about their record keeping, and their social correspondence can very much provide links to their activities. It can also lead to that nest of political troublemakers who are engaging in unwelcome but legal activity, such as starting a union, planning a skunkworks project, or are being approached by corporate recruiters. People often don't _plan_ to do illegal things. They do them as part of their ordinary lives, and forget (over time) that this is not acceptable behavior, or come to think of it as "how things are done". That's where an outside partner can be very handy, to help remind both partners of how they _should_ be done for reasons of safety, ethics, and profit.
And RedHat _directly_ pushes their upgrades back to the linux kernel and numerous other projects. The original poster has _no_ idea what they're talking about. This is not a change to general RHEL packaging, it's only a few abused packages, such as the kernel, which Oracle modifies heavily in their repackaging for this "Unbreakable Linux", which frankly isn't "Unbreakable", it's merely tuned for Oracle, which is typically very fragile.
The "life-giving" part of the Catholic Church's reasoning is actually a complete misinterpretation of the biblical story of Onan. The man was supposed to get his sister-in-law, a widow, pregant. The son and widow would thus inherit his prother's property. By "spilling his seed" outside her tent, Onan got to have some extra sex outside the marriage *and* inherit the property, a profound violation of old Jewish property and inheritance rights.
The story says absolutely *nothing* about how many children a couple should have nor about the general issue of birth control, but rather about breaking contracts, and deceiving a grieving widow into thinking her inheritance from her dead husband could be assured.
This was "trade secret" algorighms, not "copyright infringement". It was part of the crown jewels of Goldman Sachs business, and our convicted felon took it with him to his start up. What, precisely, did you think they were offering him triple the salary _for_ if not for his knowledge of these technologies and these algorithms?
Now, the whole "high speed trading" needs to be halted outright. The idea that a few microseconds difference in access to such information is being used to fund billions of dollars of profit on the margins of who can process the numbers to buy, or sell, the stock first while the profit is greatest is insider trading with computers, and it's incredibly dangerous because there _will_ be feedback loops, and phase delays in them _will_ become outrageous positive feedback loops which _will_ make the market thrash at unexpected moments. The only reliable protection is the classic one, which most of us learned when we first studied mechanical, electronic, or software feedback cycles. Damp the system.
But that would eliminate a lot of glamorous projects at these larger investment firms, and _those_ are critically tied to bonuses of a lot of very excitable "trend setters" at such firms. Don't expect this to happen until after several more crashes and trashes due to this kind of unstable trading.
It's also very helpful in making web pages more robust and reliable in different browsers, and reducing the complexity of the web page. This reduces testing costs and improves its stability. It also forces certain types of design, keeping interfaces simple, consistent, and filled with content rather than unstable and unreliable eye candy.
Simple guidelines for webpages for documentation include:
1) No Flash or other proprietary formats.
2) 7-bit ASCII text only. (This can be relaxed for international documentation, but it's helpful.)
2) No Javascript. (It clutters the document, makes it alter content in unpredictable ways, and is historically unstable. It has its uses, for filling out complex forms, but those come at a very real price in stability of the documentation itself.)
3) No font awareness. (bold and italic should be enough: the time is better spent on the content, not selecting fonts)
4) Minimize graphics. Never use an image when a few lines of text will do.
The resulting tools are not beautiful, but they will work after the project is over and everyone is on a new operating system.
But you can use such arrays against paint, rust, frozen water, and the other dust cluttering LEO. And that should be quite detectable as "glitter" in the ordinary spy satellite monitoring of LEO, which is taken from LEO and has less relative velocity to cope with and less atmospheric distortion. So I think your premise of being able to "see it from Earth" has nothing to do with most of this debris.
DNA ID's are expensive. They use consumable chemicals, and drawing body fluids into a publicly accessible device presents fascinating liability and exposure issues, and they neglect the existence of "chimeras", organisms (including humans) who have multiple sets of DNA. (They're fascinating medically, usually from shared blood supples with non-identical twins before birth.)
Laser surgery to correct vision distorts the lens: that can cause profound distortion of the expected retinal image, beyond the ability of the computer to recognize the correct image. Given the number of false negativies retinal scans provide, it significantly lowers their usefulness.
Diabetic laser surger is also fascinating in its results. Do look it up. I'm afraid I'm old enough that I have acquaintances who've had such surger, and feel sure that retinal scans taken before, during, and after the retinopathy, and I've even had the opportunity to look through an opthalmoscope and actually see the changes. If they're enough for a casual observer to note, I'm sure theyre' enough to distort the results of a retinal scan.
It can be planted in the computer records. Why would you think that is actually reliable?
It's also uncomfortable and easily confused (though not faked) by laser surgy for vision correction or diabetic retinopathy,by cataracts, or even by contacts.
No, it's an excuse for tracking _everyone_. "Think of the children" has been a rallying cry for numerous attacks on civil liberties, free speech, anonymity, and a general desire to have full access to everyone's personal matters.
Most child abductions are by relatives: divorced parents pulling children across state lines because they disagree with divorce court proceedings, often with good reason, is one of the most common sources of child abduction. Tnad this will do very little about that unless the _states_ agree to exchange data and support extradition proceedings, and there are excellent cases of why this is exactly the wrong thing to do for the child.
Such "child tracking" and the necessary national tracking database for it to be effective is also a direct violation of states' rights, which have set standards for custody and child care on a state by state basis.
Oh, my. No. Newton's third law discusses force, not energy. While the net forces on the individual components are balanced, action and reaction, the energy imparted into the bullet is much higher. Energy is equivalent to force times distance: that force is applied to the bullet over the length of the barrel, and the rifle's distance moved is only the distance of the recoil against the shooter's shoulder or hand.
Oh, dear. That's a disarming belief, but I urge you to study some radiochemistry. Alpha radiation would be useless: it wouldn't typically get through clothing.
I'm afraid you've been misled. Check out the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam and check out the "Origiin of Spam".The US sends out less than 20% of all spam.
The US is a leader in being the _target_ of spam, because we have more money than most potential victims. And unless you actually trace it back, it's hard to tell from the contents of the spam where the author actually is.