Dark energy is just the latest name for the Cosmological Constant
You know, I'm as happy as anyone else that physicists have been able to do so much with their models, but what kind of navel-gazing mathurbation is this?
Dark energy is an observed physical phenomenon.
The cosmological constant is a term in an equation. It's a very good equation, mind you, but a lot of very good equations have later turned out to be wrong or good for only a special class of phenomena. Equations can predict, but they don't prove anything. It's also worth noting that the cosmological constant was supposed to predict a force that would hold the universe together. Dark energy is a force that is tearing the universe apart. Someone clever pointed out that hey, that works if you just flip the sign of the cosmological constant but I'm not sure I'd call that a win.
And regardless, I don't think it's reasonable to imply that the territory is imitating the map.
1. The gravity of dark matter affects luminous matter (we knew this.)
2. The gravity of dark matter doesn't affect other dark matter (...wtf?)
That would have been... interesting.
But I made the mistake of clicking the article and it looks like they're just talking about kinetic interactions (no observed slowdown due to "friction" between separately moving clouds.) I guess it's news, but given that we're already pretty sure it doesn't interact with baryonic matter (except through gravity) I'm not really shocked that it doesn't interact with itself either.
Meh. It depends on what you mean by "a lot". I think we're better off pushing for better heating/cooling solutions and more fuel efficient cars than insisting consumers screw around with micro usb cables to save a handful of watt-hours per year.
Also, I love how you think inductively charging your wireless toothbrush is "sensible" but making it easier to keep a life-saving device like a cell phone fully charged is, apparently, not.
This is what has happened again and again. If it was limited to Apple fanboys it might be tolerable, but the mainstream media insists on parroting the view that Steve Jobs invented things that trailblazers were doing 5+ years before.
I especially loved the fallout from the iPhone 1 vs. Android third party application situation with the full on meme-generating commerical blitz--"There's an app for that!" Yes, there's an app for that. Because competition from Android forced you to abandon some of your draconian 'Apple experience' enhancing lock-downs.
And, of course, 3G simply didn't exist until the iPhone 3G came along.
A couple years ago, youtube was extremely frustrating to watch on my DSL connection. Lots of buffering. I don't just mean one day youtube slow for some reason; this went on for several months and I basically gave up on youtube for a little while. Then I finally got around to googling the issue and I saw a bunch of people saying to use a VPN. So I did. Flawless performance from then on... this despite the VPN having significantly lower bandwidth than what I had through my ISP. Oh and my ISP was heavily pushing their own streaming on-demand video service at the time.
So tell me... what's YOUR explanation for what happened?
The problem with this sort of thing not being illegal is they really don't have to even tell people they are doing it. And if they're smart, they can and probably are taking measures to prevent people from realizing they're doing it--rotating out the customers they throttle, throttling only at certain times of day, etc.
So, that's my thesis. It has existed for quite a while, but it's growing and starting to involve third parties so that it really isn't possible to hide it any more. Oh yeah, and ISPs were throttling P2P users (not pirates--ANY use of p2p, like sharing ubuntu ISOS) a LONG time ago.
In my last job I was dealing with a lot of extremely complicated Excel and Access macros written by finance majors. Smart people, but people who had zero formal programming experience. I opened up a module one day and this is what I saw:
if foo1 then [VBA requires a "then"]
bar1
Goto Label1
end if
bat1
Label1:
if foo2 then
bar2
Goto Label2
end if
bat2
Label2:
I stared at my screen for probably ten whole seconds and then began laughing uncontrollably, then kept laughing as I alternated shaking my head and occasionally shrugging in halfhearted approval. The guy invented an else. He didn't know about the existing else so he found a simple "design pattern" that did what he needed and used it. Once you got over the initial ridiculousness, it was pretty easy to follow.
And that *is* all that an "if" is: a species of goto. So are continuations. So are a lot of other control structures. This sentiment--"you shouldn't use a Goto when it is simple and intuitive; instead, you should use a bunch of conditional Gotos in an unintuitive way"--is completely incomprehensible to me. It's not merely saying 'never taking off the training wheels; it's saying, "if the training wheels make a certain turn in the path too difficult, just get off the bike, pick it up, gently turn it where it needs to go, and hop back on." If large projects with code monkeys require tons of least-common-denominator idiotproofing, so be it. But competent experts are not wrong to say that sometimes you need to take off the training wheels. I've yet to hear a coherent argument about the wrongness of Goto that doesn't boil down to "this is what I was always taught", "I'm not imaginative enough to think of a use case", or "you have to prevent stupid programming from doing stupid things."
To defend your coworker here for a moment, I think he was talking about the general concepts of abstraction and DWIM (do what I mean). It is indeed true that Common Lisp and (perhaps to a slightly lesser extent) Scheme do this better than just about any other programming languages out there partially because it supports stuff like weak (actually, optionally strong) typing and first class functions long before 'modern' scripting languages popularized them, but mostly because by essentially having one single syntactic structure -- (DoThis To This Stuff) -- you are able to easily use self-analyzing and self-modifying code via macros. Since you brought up "it" in your post, I think a good and interesting example is Paul Graham's "anaphoric" macros from his book On Lisp ( http://www.paulgraham.com/onli... ):
Now, the regular if is uses an (if this then_do_this else_do_this) form. Paul's macro functions exactly as if except the word "it" is now automatically variable referring to the value returned by 'this' in the preceeding if usage example. Thus, an example usage of aif:
(aif [really_friggin_long_to_type_and_computationally_expensive_thing] (print it) (print "null value error"))
The "it" variable is lexically scoped only within the aif, and in Lisp variables can be "shadowed" by interior redefinitions an arbitrary number of times (basically, once you hit the relevant ")" the higher-up definition of "it" takes over once again), so you can chain together consecutive or nested aifs seemlessly. And of course you can build aands, awhiles (very useful), etc. Note that usage of macros do not result in runtime slowdowns, only (potentially) compile-time slowdowns. Also note how simple of an example this is--look at how short that macro definition was. And once you train yourself to comprehend the ()s, it's perfectly and easily readable.
Common Lisp's generic functions (i.e. methods, except not hopelessly hobbled and limited in scope) are another good example of JustDoIt style programming. Also note that you can override the default definition of any operator/function so that, if you really felt like it, you could replace if's definition with aif.
None of this gets you out of actually defining what "it" is in JustDoIt (you are stuck with that in any language), but if done properly this kind of flexibility and abstraction results in code that is both more readable and more modular / maintainable. And it's a fast language, DAMN fast if you know what you're doing. Faster than Java, if you turn on the proper optimizations. No need for an interpreter--most of the heavy lifting can be done at compile time.
Just to show I'm not a total fanboy, almost all of the Lisps suffer from "good enough" syndrome and crotchety old man syndrome. The concept of M-Expressions (i.e. infix syntax, i.e. not having to use ()s all over the damn place) was abandoned because S-Expressions turned out to be so incredibly powerful. Power is good, but if you make it mandatory you jack up the learning curve unnecessarily, as well as make some things harder to read or as well as requiring more keystrokes to program... although I must say if you do pattern X more than once, you can always abstract out whatever pattern X is--just as aif abstracts out the pattern of evaluating an expression and then binding the return value to a disposable variable. That's the blessing/curse of Lisp. It's so easy for a journeyman Lisper to fix the warts in the language that no one ever fixes them in the language spec itself, and that unnecessarily scares off the noobs.
That, and there is just way, way too much fad-ism in computer languages... of which Java's popularity is possibly the best example.
I recently filed a complaint with the CFPB for a situation wherein a major bank processed my mortgage application manual entirely via email. They did this because they managed to waste weeks of my time and then lose my first web form based application.
Well, I get an email response back re: second application and I'm denied because my credit scores are atrocious. This is surprising, so I immediately ask if they can give me more info, and they say no they are legally only allowed to tell me the credit scores. Huh. Ok. So I get my credit reports and for various reasons involving general credit bureau assholishness this takes several more weeks and by this point THE HOUSE WE'RE TRYING TO BUY HAS BEEN SOLD TO SOMEONE ELSE... and there are no inquiries on my reports. Did some more digging and all three FICOs are great.
They sent me someone else's credit scores. Never pulled my credit at all. And the CFPB really could not give fuck about any of it. By all means file the complaint--it may get someone at the bank to pay attention and issue a response so as not to look like a douche--but the CFPB complaint process appears to exist only so they can gauge big picture tends, not to get involve in individual cases.
In my case, the bank refused to respond to me at all until after I'd submitted the CFPB complaint. The official response: "Hey, you're right! Our bad. Feel free to submit a third application if you want! "
Despite losing the god damned house (and there isn't anything remotely equivalent on the market right now) and having written documentation for everything, the lawyer I've been in contact with still isn't sure we have a case; he wants to check some more case law first.
I think I may look into getting a shack in Montana next...
As bingoUV said, I was referring to hardware keyloggers (harder to install on a laptop, but not impossible), hardware network surveillance / MITM boxes, physical microphones or cameras planted in the room (not your webcam), etc. If you are somewhat delayed discovering evidence of a break-in, it won't be too late to take action as long as they haven't examined your hard drive a second time, but it would already be too late if the attacker leaves behind any physical devices that broadcast or phone home.
This is either a magnificent troll or the single most interesting thing I've thus far read this decade.
Dude, if you can say more, please go for it. Use public wifi (McDonald's, etc.) and if you're worried about lingual forensics use short, stubby sentences without any words an elementary school child couldn't grasp.
Or just think of it this way: If they have physical access they can install keyloggers, MITM devices on your network, audio bugs and cameras, etc. Imaging your hard drive is comparatively minor--oh no, you you have evidence strongly suggesting the presence of a hidden container. Why on earth would you worry about that really, really minor annoyance instead of the potential for captured passwords or intercepted network traffic?
Bios lock it to not boot from anything but the FDE bootloader, so they have to actually dismantle it to get a dump. I can think of a few ways to rig it so you know if it's been opened up or not. There's a bunch of other physical security measures you can take as well--hiding your laptop when not in use (maybe with a dummy lying around), surveillance cameras (they can disable them sure, but will they be able to quickly rig up a fake video feed that matches? Especially if you leave the TV on in the background or something.) Seriously, if you're actually worried people are sneaking into your damn house then, relative to *that* level of paranoia (justified or no), these measures are not that difficult to take.
Just turn off your computer when you are not around. Problem solved. There's also something to be said for being able to boot your computer and hand it over for inspection if customs agents demand it (including customs agents of China, North Korea, etc.)
This is the strongest argument I've seen against NSL theories, but if it's true why did they do this in such a sensationalistic way? Why not gently explain the situation? Why the over the top site defacement and source code warnings? Why not release all of the source (not decrypt only) under the GPL so a fork could develop? Why the laughable non-sequitur reference to XP's EOL? And why did they recommend Bitlocker over, say, the excellent GPL that is DiskCryptor? Or mention this might be a good time to migrate to Linux?
And by non-RSA, I don't just mean elliptic curve. The encryption protocol needs to support stateful and nonstateful solutions. Symmetric-only with web of trust, asymmetric+symmetric (like we have now), changing-response symmetric signing as an alternative to asymmetric certs, even one time pads need to be supported. All of these have advantages and disadvantages. And it should never be obvious to an eavesdropper which is being used at any given time.
I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than myself will come along and correct you about autogyros being obsolete.
I'll get them started: they're simpler/cheaper and are arguably more reliable than helicopters in case of mechanical failure. Any lingering safety concerns are largely a result of pilots used to other craft not understanding the handling characteristics of autogyros. The only major disadvantages vs. helicopters are they can't hover (though they can fly much slower than airplanes) and they can't do a vertical takeoff without tip jets or some other sort of specialized launcher. Important features, sure, but not always worth the attendant disadvantages.
It's not too hard to imagine a total extinction event. To my mind the interesting point here is that there is that Martian soil contains a known energy source. That's... spectecular. We already know there's plenty of oxygen tied up in the iron oxide in the soil, and now we know there's also energy for microbes. That's one step closer to terraforming. And hey, in the process they'll get rid of this pesky toxic stuff too, at least on the surface layers.
We need something more fundamental. Like it never being against the law to disclose information on crimes committed by intelligence agencies, and enforcement of existing laws once those crimes come to light: for example, Keith Alexander needs to be arrested for perjury. Perhaps we could bring back private prosecutions... that would certainly go a long way towards ensuring public officials are not above the law.
This more holistic approach is necessary because the usual suspects (CIA, NSA) and the usual frameworks (FISC) only capture a tiny fraction of what the intelligence community actually engages in. Take the NRO ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office ) for example. It has a comparable budget to the more well known agencies and they were even caught by the CIA to be squirrelling away extra money, presumably to finance black projects. They started in spy satellites but these days they appear to devote a significant portion of the resources towards hacking. They really put the NSA to shame when it comes to blackhat and grayhat activities, though good luck finding anyone to confirm that for you. Let's just say they appear to enjoy inspiring awe and fear in their employees, to the point where though I've met several people who worked for them I had to do a considerable amount of detective work and deduction to figure it out. And even then there was no explicit confirmation I was right, just a wry smile and a "I can neither confirm nor deny..."
And that's just an agency we know about. Like the NSA before it, the NRO used to be secret. And there remain still more secret intelligence agencies today, probably even more fearsome and powerful than the public ones. And if you think these guys go through FISC every time they feel the urge to skim through someone's inbox...
So, back to my original point: what we really need here is a mechanism to permit the discovery and prosecution of people who conceal crimes, both for the original crime and for the act of covering it up by claiming state secrets. Crimes like lying to congress under oath. Or spying on American citizens, without judicial oversight, in ways that would be illegal if a private citizen did it (which does not necessarily apply to PRISM but most certainly applies to other programs.)
This is at best a waste of money. I know he catches some flak for this, but Stephen Hawking has it right. There's no reason at all we should expect intelligent alien life forms to deal with us as respected equals, especially if they are considerably more advanced. At the same time, it would be too much to hope for them to ignore us. Our planet would be a treasure trove of scientific interest to them, and even practical interest in the same way rainforests are useful to biochemists or bacteria are useful to genetic engineers. The altruism argument ignores how very limited it is here on Earth. Forget intercultural conflict, how many people give/gave a shit enough about dead dolphins enough to boycott tuna? Or save the poor bonobos? Their intelligence is a lot closer to ours than ours would be to any life form advanced enough to travel the stars (unless they had some kind of taboo on both genetic and cybernetic enhancement.) Overall point being: altruism isn't a prerequisite for advanced spaceflight, but relentless pragmatism is.
Fortunately, what with the speed of light being what it is, this shouldn't be of any immediate concern.
Also, I think there's a recent 'obligatory' xkcd that's quite on-topic here if anyone wants to whore some karma. In the what if section.
I would argue (quite unsuccessfully, I'm sure) that any wing of the military or intelligence community that takes takespayer dollars while actively lying about the activities it engages in to the powers that are supposed to oversee it is effectively attempting to subvert the democratically elected government through (and this is where their role as members of the military community comes into play) force and coercion. Which is treason. I agree with the spirit of your post in that we don't want the charge to be thrown around too lightly, but I think it fits cases like these a lot better than it fits someone who, say, did a radio show for the Nazis or al Qaeda. But, then, I view the idea of 'government' in a democracy as being considerably more than just the authoritarian whims of whoever is currently in office.
Snowden claims that one of the specific reasons why he chose to act is because the NSA was deliberately lying to congress. If that isn't a crime, it should be. IMO it should be considered treason, but the very least I think it is a clear-cut case of perjury.
Of course, the government will punish the real guilty parties here to the same extent that they punished the criminal activities Manning revealed...
Slashdot Mirror
Dark energy is just the latest name for the Cosmological Constant
You know, I'm as happy as anyone else that physicists have been able to do so much with their models, but what kind of navel-gazing mathurbation is this?
Dark energy is an observed physical phenomenon.
The cosmological constant is a term in an equation. It's a very good equation, mind you, but a lot of very good equations have later turned out to be wrong or good for only a special class of phenomena. Equations can predict, but they don't prove anything. It's also worth noting that the cosmological constant was supposed to predict a force that would hold the universe together. Dark energy is a force that is tearing the universe apart. Someone clever pointed out that hey, that works if you just flip the sign of the cosmological constant but I'm not sure I'd call that a win.
And regardless, I don't think it's reasonable to imply that the territory is imitating the map.
I parsed the summary like this:
1. The gravity of dark matter affects luminous matter (we knew this.)
2. The gravity of dark matter doesn't affect other dark matter (...wtf?)
That would have been... interesting.
But I made the mistake of clicking the article and it looks like they're just talking about kinetic interactions (no observed slowdown due to "friction" between separately moving clouds.) I guess it's news, but given that we're already pretty sure it doesn't interact with baryonic matter (except through gravity) I'm not really shocked that it doesn't interact with itself either.
Meh. It depends on what you mean by "a lot". I think we're better off pushing for better heating/cooling solutions and more fuel efficient cars than insisting consumers screw around with micro usb cables to save a handful of watt-hours per year.
Also, I love how you think inductively charging your wireless toothbrush is "sensible" but making it easier to keep a life-saving device like a cell phone fully charged is, apparently, not.
This is what has happened again and again. If it was limited to Apple fanboys it might be tolerable, but the mainstream media insists on parroting the view that Steve Jobs invented things that trailblazers were doing 5+ years before.
I especially loved the fallout from the iPhone 1 vs. Android third party application situation with the full on meme-generating commerical blitz--"There's an app for that!" Yes, there's an app for that. Because competition from Android forced you to abandon some of your draconian 'Apple experience' enhancing lock-downs.
And, of course, 3G simply didn't exist until the iPhone 3G came along.
A couple years ago, youtube was extremely frustrating to watch on my DSL connection. Lots of buffering. I don't just mean one day youtube slow for some reason; this went on for several months and I basically gave up on youtube for a little while. Then I finally got around to googling the issue and I saw a bunch of people saying to use a VPN. So I did. Flawless performance from then on... this despite the VPN having significantly lower bandwidth than what I had through my ISP. Oh and my ISP was heavily pushing their own streaming on-demand video service at the time.
So tell me... what's YOUR explanation for what happened?
The problem with this sort of thing not being illegal is they really don't have to even tell people they are doing it. And if they're smart, they can and probably are taking measures to prevent people from realizing they're doing it--rotating out the customers they throttle, throttling only at certain times of day, etc.
So, that's my thesis. It has existed for quite a while, but it's growing and starting to involve third parties so that it really isn't possible to hide it any more. Oh yeah, and ISPs were throttling P2P users (not pirates--ANY use of p2p, like sharing ubuntu ISOS) a LONG time ago.
In my last job I was dealing with a lot of extremely complicated Excel and Access macros written by finance majors. Smart people, but people who had zero formal programming experience. I opened up a module one day and this is what I saw:
if foo1 then [VBA requires a "then"]
bar1
Goto Label1
end if
bat1
Label1:
if foo2 then
bar2
Goto Label2
end if
bat2
Label2:
I stared at my screen for probably ten whole seconds and then began laughing uncontrollably, then kept laughing as I alternated shaking my head and occasionally shrugging in halfhearted approval. The guy invented an else. He didn't know about the existing else so he found a simple "design pattern" that did what he needed and used it. Once you got over the initial ridiculousness, it was pretty easy to follow.
And that *is* all that an "if" is: a species of goto. So are continuations. So are a lot of other control structures. This sentiment--"you shouldn't use a Goto when it is simple and intuitive; instead, you should use a bunch of conditional Gotos in an unintuitive way"--is completely incomprehensible to me. It's not merely saying 'never taking off the training wheels; it's saying, "if the training wheels make a certain turn in the path too difficult, just get off the bike, pick it up, gently turn it where it needs to go, and hop back on." If large projects with code monkeys require tons of least-common-denominator idiotproofing, so be it. But competent experts are not wrong to say that sometimes you need to take off the training wheels. I've yet to hear a coherent argument about the wrongness of Goto that doesn't boil down to "this is what I was always taught", "I'm not imaginative enough to think of a use case", or "you have to prevent stupid programming from doing stupid things."
To defend your coworker here for a moment, I think he was talking about the general concepts of abstraction and DWIM (do what I mean). It is indeed true that Common Lisp and (perhaps to a slightly lesser extent) Scheme do this better than just about any other programming languages out there partially because it supports stuff like weak (actually, optionally strong) typing and first class functions long before 'modern' scripting languages popularized them, but mostly because by essentially having one single syntactic structure -- (DoThis To This Stuff) -- you are able to easily use self-analyzing and self-modifying code via macros. Since you brought up "it" in your post, I think a good and interesting example is Paul Graham's "anaphoric" macros from his book On Lisp ( http://www.paulgraham.com/onli... ) :
,test-form)) ,then-form ,else-form)))
Macro definition of "aif": (defmacro aif (test-form then-form &optional else-form)
‘(let ((it
(if it
Now, the regular if is uses an (if this then_do_this else_do_this) form. Paul's macro functions exactly as if except the word "it" is now automatically variable referring to the value returned by 'this' in the preceeding if usage example. Thus, an example usage of aif:
(aif [really_friggin_long_to_type_and_computationally_expensive_thing] (print it) (print "null value error"))
The "it" variable is lexically scoped only within the aif, and in Lisp variables can be "shadowed" by interior redefinitions an arbitrary number of times (basically, once you hit the relevant ")" the higher-up definition of "it" takes over once again), so you can chain together consecutive or nested aifs seemlessly. And of course you can build aands, awhiles (very useful), etc. Note that usage of macros do not result in runtime slowdowns, only (potentially) compile-time slowdowns. Also note how simple of an example this is--look at how short that macro definition was. And once you train yourself to comprehend the ()s, it's perfectly and easily readable.
Common Lisp's generic functions (i.e. methods, except not hopelessly hobbled and limited in scope) are another good example of JustDoIt style programming. Also note that you can override the default definition of any operator/function so that, if you really felt like it, you could replace if's definition with aif.
None of this gets you out of actually defining what "it" is in JustDoIt (you are stuck with that in any language), but if done properly this kind of flexibility and abstraction results in code that is both more readable and more modular / maintainable. And it's a fast language, DAMN fast if you know what you're doing. Faster than Java, if you turn on the proper optimizations. No need for an interpreter--most of the heavy lifting can be done at compile time.
Just to show I'm not a total fanboy, almost all of the Lisps suffer from "good enough" syndrome and crotchety old man syndrome. The concept of M-Expressions (i.e. infix syntax, i.e. not having to use ()s all over the damn place) was abandoned because S-Expressions turned out to be so incredibly powerful. Power is good, but if you make it mandatory you jack up the learning curve unnecessarily, as well as make some things harder to read or as well as requiring more keystrokes to program... although I must say if you do pattern X more than once, you can always abstract out whatever pattern X is--just as aif abstracts out the pattern of evaluating an expression and then binding the return value to a disposable variable. That's the blessing/curse of Lisp. It's so easy for a journeyman Lisper to fix the warts in the language that no one ever fixes them in the language spec itself, and that unnecessarily scares off the noobs.
That, and there is just way, way too much fad-ism in computer languages... of which Java's popularity is possibly the best example.
I recently filed a complaint with the CFPB for a situation wherein a major bank processed my mortgage application manual entirely via email. They did this because they managed to waste weeks of my time and then lose my first web form based application.
Well, I get an email response back re: second application and I'm denied because my credit scores are atrocious. This is surprising, so I immediately ask if they can give me more info, and they say no they are legally only allowed to tell me the credit scores. Huh. Ok. So I get my credit reports and for various reasons involving general credit bureau assholishness this takes several more weeks and by this point THE HOUSE WE'RE TRYING TO BUY HAS BEEN SOLD TO SOMEONE ELSE... and there are no inquiries on my reports. Did some more digging and all three FICOs are great.
They sent me someone else's credit scores. Never pulled my credit at all. And the CFPB really could not give fuck about any of it. By all means file the complaint--it may get someone at the bank to pay attention and issue a response so as not to look like a douche--but the CFPB complaint process appears to exist only so they can gauge big picture tends, not to get involve in individual cases.
In my case, the bank refused to respond to me at all until after I'd submitted the CFPB complaint. The official response: "Hey, you're right! Our bad. Feel free to submit a third application if you want! "
Despite losing the god damned house (and there isn't anything remotely equivalent on the market right now) and having written documentation for everything, the lawyer I've been in contact with still isn't sure we have a case; he wants to check some more case law first.
I think I may look into getting a shack in Montana next...
As bingoUV said, I was referring to hardware keyloggers (harder to install on a laptop, but not impossible), hardware network surveillance / MITM boxes, physical microphones or cameras planted in the room (not your webcam), etc. If you are somewhat delayed discovering evidence of a break-in, it won't be too late to take action as long as they haven't examined your hard drive a second time, but it would already be too late if the attacker leaves behind any physical devices that broadcast or phone home.
This is either a magnificent troll or the single most interesting thing I've thus far read this decade.
Dude, if you can say more, please go for it. Use public wifi (McDonald's, etc.) and if you're worried about lingual forensics use short, stubby sentences without any words an elementary school child couldn't grasp.
Or just think of it this way: If they have physical access they can install keyloggers, MITM devices on your network, audio bugs and cameras, etc. Imaging your hard drive is comparatively minor--oh no, you you have evidence strongly suggesting the presence of a hidden container. Why on earth would you worry about that really, really minor annoyance instead of the potential for captured passwords or intercepted network traffic?
Bios lock it to not boot from anything but the FDE bootloader, so they have to actually dismantle it to get a dump. I can think of a few ways to rig it so you know if it's been opened up or not. There's a bunch of other physical security measures you can take as well--hiding your laptop when not in use (maybe with a dummy lying around), surveillance cameras (they can disable them sure, but will they be able to quickly rig up a fake video feed that matches? Especially if you leave the TV on in the background or something.) Seriously, if you're actually worried people are sneaking into your damn house then, relative to *that* level of paranoia (justified or no), these measures are not that difficult to take.
Just turn off your computer when you are not around. Problem solved. There's also something to be said for being able to boot your computer and hand it over for inspection if customs agents demand it (including customs agents of China, North Korea, etc.)
This is the strongest argument I've seen against NSL theories, but if it's true why did they do this in such a sensationalistic way? Why not gently explain the situation? Why the over the top site defacement and source code warnings? Why not release all of the source (not decrypt only) under the GPL so a fork could develop? Why the laughable non-sequitur reference to XP's EOL? And why did they recommend Bitlocker over, say, the excellent GPL that is DiskCryptor? Or mention this might be a good time to migrate to Linux?
*challenge-response
And by non-RSA, I don't just mean elliptic curve. The encryption protocol needs to support stateful and nonstateful solutions. Symmetric-only with web of trust, asymmetric+symmetric (like we have now), changing-response symmetric signing as an alternative to asymmetric certs, even one time pads need to be supported. All of these have advantages and disadvantages. And it should never be obvious to an eavesdropper which is being used at any given time.
Junk traffic degrades performance for other people; optional variable latency improves it. That said, they could coexist.
It's our only hope.
Also: mandatory encryption, support for non-RSA modes of key exchange, and (this is what Tor really lacks) extra latency on request.
I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than myself will come along and correct you about autogyros being obsolete.
I'll get them started: they're simpler/cheaper and are arguably more reliable than helicopters in case of mechanical failure. Any lingering safety concerns are largely a result of pilots used to other craft not understanding the handling characteristics of autogyros. The only major disadvantages vs. helicopters are they can't hover (though they can fly much slower than airplanes) and they can't do a vertical takeoff without tip jets or some other sort of specialized launcher. Important features, sure, but not always worth the attendant disadvantages.
"A previous rumor in 2010 blamed a series of shark attacks along Egypt's Mediterranean coast on an Israeli plot. It wasn't."
[Citation needed]
It's not too hard to imagine a total extinction event. To my mind the interesting point here is that there is that Martian soil contains a known energy source. That's... spectecular. We already know there's plenty of oxygen tied up in the iron oxide in the soil, and now we know there's also energy for microbes. That's one step closer to terraforming. And hey, in the process they'll get rid of this pesky toxic stuff too, at least on the surface layers.
We need something more fundamental. Like it never being against the law to disclose information on crimes committed by intelligence agencies, and enforcement of existing laws once those crimes come to light: for example, Keith Alexander needs to be arrested for perjury. Perhaps we could bring back private prosecutions... that would certainly go a long way towards ensuring public officials are not above the law.
This more holistic approach is necessary because the usual suspects (CIA, NSA) and the usual frameworks (FISC) only capture a tiny fraction of what the intelligence community actually engages in. Take the NRO ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office ) for example. It has a comparable budget to the more well known agencies and they were even caught by the CIA to be squirrelling away extra money, presumably to finance black projects. They started in spy satellites but these days they appear to devote a significant portion of the resources towards hacking. They really put the NSA to shame when it comes to blackhat and grayhat activities, though good luck finding anyone to confirm that for you. Let's just say they appear to enjoy inspiring awe and fear in their employees, to the point where though I've met several people who worked for them I had to do a considerable amount of detective work and deduction to figure it out. And even then there was no explicit confirmation I was right, just a wry smile and a "I can neither confirm nor deny..."
And that's just an agency we know about. Like the NSA before it, the NRO used to be secret. And there remain still more secret intelligence agencies today, probably even more fearsome and powerful than the public ones. And if you think these guys go through FISC every time they feel the urge to skim through someone's inbox...
So, back to my original point: what we really need here is a mechanism to permit the discovery and prosecution of people who conceal crimes, both for the original crime and for the act of covering it up by claiming state secrets. Crimes like lying to congress under oath. Or spying on American citizens, without judicial oversight, in ways that would be illegal if a private citizen did it (which does not necessarily apply to PRISM but most certainly applies to other programs.)
This is at best a waste of money. I know he catches some flak for this, but Stephen Hawking has it right. There's no reason at all we should expect intelligent alien life forms to deal with us as respected equals, especially if they are considerably more advanced. At the same time, it would be too much to hope for them to ignore us. Our planet would be a treasure trove of scientific interest to them, and even practical interest in the same way rainforests are useful to biochemists or bacteria are useful to genetic engineers. The altruism argument ignores how very limited it is here on Earth. Forget intercultural conflict, how many people give/gave a shit enough about dead dolphins enough to boycott tuna? Or save the poor bonobos? Their intelligence is a lot closer to ours than ours would be to any life form advanced enough to travel the stars (unless they had some kind of taboo on both genetic and cybernetic enhancement.) Overall point being: altruism isn't a prerequisite for advanced spaceflight, but relentless pragmatism is.
Fortunately, what with the speed of light being what it is, this shouldn't be of any immediate concern.
Also, I think there's a recent 'obligatory' xkcd that's quite on-topic here if anyone wants to whore some karma. In the what if section.
I would argue (quite unsuccessfully, I'm sure) that any wing of the military or intelligence community that takes takespayer dollars while actively lying about the activities it engages in to the powers that are supposed to oversee it is effectively attempting to subvert the democratically elected government through (and this is where their role as members of the military community comes into play) force and coercion. Which is treason. I agree with the spirit of your post in that we don't want the charge to be thrown around too lightly, but I think it fits cases like these a lot better than it fits someone who, say, did a radio show for the Nazis or al Qaeda. But, then, I view the idea of 'government' in a democracy as being considerably more than just the authoritarian whims of whoever is currently in office.
Snowden claims that one of the specific reasons why he chose to act is because the NSA was deliberately lying to congress. If that isn't a crime, it should be. IMO it should be considered treason, but the very least I think it is a clear-cut case of perjury.
Of course, the government will punish the real guilty parties here to the same extent that they punished the criminal activities Manning revealed...