So when will we be able to combine the two platforms? Ever? The consoles are designed for overpriced closed-source plugin-cartridge games designed with expensive toolkits, which preserves the console company's market control, since they make money on the games, not the hardware. They usually don't have the resolution I'd want to read text at, because televisions are usually too grainy to be good monitors, but as resolution gets better and they get networking capability, I'd expect to see games like "X-Terminal" or "Tivo-Replacement" becoming available.... I'm not a gamer, but there are other uses for multimedia-heavy systems than running thumb candy, and it makes it easier to ooncentrate those things near the TV rather than adding lots of graphics boards to the machines in the Beowul\\\\\\ (sorry, can't say that word here) information-focused parts of the home network.
Tmark is wondering when *he'll* be able to afford this wireless technology. The price of 802.11b seems to have dropped by half in about the last six months; if you're still can't afford it, wait another 15 minutes and yet another brand will go on sale at Fry's.
Many of them *are* against greater communication and information exchange. That's especially true if the communication includes container ships as well as just verbal communications, because the low cost of shipping goods makes it easy for people to trade with each other, and they also oppose communications about things that people want to buy and sell, as opposed to just cultural exchanges, and they oppose cultural exchange as well, at least the direction of it that involves Corporatist Homogenized Culture. Most of the anti-globalists I've talked to are clueless about economics, and unwilling to face free speech that has a scope broad enough to include Disney as well as including interesting speech or drivelling leftybabble.
Having said that, though, the protests themselves mainly occur at meetings of Western and other big governments, which generally *are* focused more on extending their power and authority and supporting their big political constituents than on genuine free trade. A Libertarian version of NAFTA wouldn't have been 1600 pages of protectionist rulemaking that shifts the details of who gets protected; it would have been a paragraph or so with a lot of room for signatures at the bottom. The IMF Austerity Rules that get imposed on any government that wants to borrow more money are generally pretty rational, if painful, because they have to get the target country on a revenue-positive economic track so they can get their earlier debts paid back. Unfortunately, however, both the old debts that are being paid back and the new money they're lending tend to be for projects that weren't economically viable, centralize power in the hands of the governments and usually the ruling elites, and if they aren't spent on the military, they tend to be spent on big development projects that are environmentally destructive or at best on Bread&Circuses. And many of these countries either have government-controlled broadcasting systems, or if they do have privatized media, it's still controlled by the Usual Suspects, so having an Indymedia type thing around to provide some alternative to the major media is really valuable.
Point 1 - True, but a lot of these are going to the Indymedia news folks. They may be clueless about economics, but anybody who can't tell that the International Monetary Fund aren't clueless corrupt government-funded supporters of corrupt governments hasn't been paying attention. Their news may be biased, but it has a much wider range of biases than the Capitalist Broadcasting System, and especially in the third world, it's important to have news sources that are independent of the government news channels.
Point 2 - 300 computers to a news-gathering organization can be amazingly significant; 300 computers to schools would be a drop in the bucket, though the long-term payback would still be worthwhile. Sure, most of these machines are Offical Doorstops today, which means that they can run Microsoft Office version N, N-1, or N-2 at reasonable speed, and can't play recent video games, but people running news-gathering organizations need text-handling, email, and simple databases can do amazing things with 486s. A 14.4kbps modem is about 200 times faster than most people type. (And 486s could run Doom, which was really amazing in its day.)
Point 3 - Hey, Indymedia are a press organization - of course they're going to give good press to things that help them get press:-) If your government is the US government, they do spend many millions of dollars in most Latin American countries - most of it given to the local militaries to buy US-made military equipment, and most of the rest of it to run wars against their populations in the name of drug eradication (remember, if you're not smoking US-grown marijuana, you're supporting terrorism!). Some of the money does go to agricultural research, though most of that benefits large-scale agribusiness rather than decentralized small farming, and very little of it has unfortunately been done in ways that protects the environment and gives small farmers a better choice than either the traditional slash-and-burn methods (massively ecologically destructive) or dependence on industry-produced chemicals (produces economic dependence as well as pesticide damage.)
Other than reasonably-priced basic internet connectivity at less than the cost of overpriced metered phone service, what interesting new broadband apps have come out of Europe? The US cable modem carriers usually have policies against running servers or doing anything interesting on cable modems, even running a home web server, and while most of the DSL providers don't, many of them only provide dynamic addressing which is a bit hard to use for servers. The last few interesting applications I've seen were Napster and its follow-ons, plus increased use of instant messaging. I don't count games as interesting, but I gather the gamers are somewhat heavy broadband users, though the online games are mostly designed to work adequately on dialup to maximize their markets.
Sure, you're weird (:-) So are many of my friends, like Hugh, whose house is "mainly insulated with copper wire". But when you're talking about mass-market adoption of a product, that's not who buys most of the millions of units - it's the people who probably have multiple computers and don't want to wire their house with Cat5E and fiber, but most of the computing horsepower is in the house is the kids' game machines and maybe the adult's work laptop. Business usability is a different matter (that's why the word "home" is in the subject line:-), but businesses probably won't be really mass adopters until the security issues are fixed. 802.11a prices have started to come down enough that in a new business installation it's almost certainly worthwhile, but for mass-market home use the main reason for it is better coverage (or sharing with your neighbors.)
For the home user, the speed of a wireless connection doesn't affect usability - your connection to the outside world is probably DSL or cable modem, usually not more than 1.5Mbps, so even if you only get 2Mbps out of your wireless, it's fast enough. (Also, the last time I had a 1.1Mbps DSL connection, I found that my end was almost always faster than the other end; the only way to fill it was to download more than ~10Mbps from a really big server.) Sometimes you might be doing big file transfers between different machines in your house, but most people don't do that very often, except for backups where speed doesn't matter - the video stuff that vendors are using to say that you should buy their products isn't really widespread, especially since DVD players for PCs are cheap enough that the difference in price between 802.11a and 802.11b can buy you an extra DVD drive.
Distance affects usability, of course - if the thing can't talk from the living room to the bedroom, that's a problem. But speed isn't enough to justify the extra cost for most home users.
Business is a different matter - there you often have enough machines sharing a server in the same building that total bandwidth matters.
In most cases, you can read the papers and figure out if they're worth signing, though apparently some Canadian provinces have severance-pay laws that may be at least as generous as the one you're getting. But if you're working for a dot-bomb, and they're laying you off and giving you a severance package, there's probably a good reason why, which is that they're not making enough money to keep employing you. Suing a dying company is seldom worthwhile. Sign the papers, take the check, and deposit it on your way home, unless you've gotten hints that they'll be bankrupt within the month, in which case you should probably go to the company's bank and get the cash directly.
The typical dot-bomb is not to be more than 5 years old, usually less. (Otherwise it's some other category of failed computer company:-) So if Ontario's rule is that you had to be there five years, you probably weren't. So take the money and run.
No, it's not just brute force, and you'll have to think mathematically, at least real briefly, to get the concept. It's easy to build cryptosystems that are exponentially hard to crack - adding 1 bit to the key length doubles the effort required to crack it. If you have a 100-bit key, then adding 1 bit makes your job 1% harder (or more commonly 2% or sometimes a bit more) and makes the cracker's job 100% harder. Adding 10 bits makes your job 10-20% harder, and makes the cracker's job 1024 times harder. Adding 100 bits makes your job 2-4 times harder, and makes the cracker's job ~10**32 times harder. If the cracker's computer still fits on the planet, you can add a few percent to your workload, and the cracker has to buy another planet for his computer. Repeat as often as needed.
The way you crack these algorithms is to throw mathematicians at them until some of them stick. Once you've done that, if there's anything left to bother with, then you can figure out how many processor cycles you'd need to throw at the problem to break it, and decide whether that's feasible.
If your conclusion is that it's not feasible to break, then you need to decide whether to use rubber-hose cryptanalysis to get the key, or steal the target's computer where they saved the unencrypted version, or look for the yellow sticky notes next to their desk, or put a camera in their ceiling to watch them type in their keys.
Quantum computing means that you can either tell what color somebody's hat is or how many hats they'r ewearing, but not both simultaneously:-)
Quantum computing appears to allow the user to cheat, by picking the correct n-bit value out of 2**n bits, for a class of problems that mostly look like the factoring problems that make RSA public key crypto work. This doesn't appear to make things faster for the white hats, because the white hats already knew what the correct bits were for data that was intended for them or data that they were trying to sign.
We need to start exploring the theory of QC, to find algorithms that don't get exponentially faster with QC.
We also need to start remembering and improving the symmetric-key-based Key Distribution Center (KDC) models like Kerberos that don't depend on public-key crypto. We abandoned most of these, because public-key is much more convenient and doesn't have big obvious centralized security targets that can be attacked, but they still do an amazing number of jobs just fine.
Today's problem is attacks on the Rijndael and Serpent AES winner/candidate symmetric-key algorithms, which has been proposed as a replacement for 3DES, the current highly-trusted-but-slow symmetric-key algorithm. We need to watch the crypto math folks apply their new techniques to the other AES candidates, so we can tell if any of them are still usable or if we have to get the NSA to run another contest. These aren't particularly affected by Quantum Cryptography.
As the other posters have pointed out, quantum computing doesn't affect One-Time Pad security. The glaring weakness in AC's argument is that the computation to determine whether a guess is correct is NOT polynomial-time - there's no way to tell if a "1" in the cyphertext is a message bit of 0 and a pad bit of 1 or the other way around.
In normal public/private hybrid systems, you use the public-key algorithm to encrypt a random secret session key, and then use the session key with a symmetric-key algorithm to encrypt the message. For some popular categories of factoring-based public-key algorithms, a hypothetical QC can instantly factor the key, and you can do the polynomial-time validation to show that the decryption key you've pulled out of the quanta matches the public encryption key. (OTPs don't let you do that.) You can then use the session key to crank the symmetric-key algorithm. The lead article that this discussion is about deals with weaknesses in the new symmetric-key algorithms that all of us were hoping we could use to replace Triple-DES, which appears to be very strong but is slow and clumsy (and neither 3DES nor AES appears to be attackable using QCs.)
Since widespread use of OTPs means a return to lots of couriers with briefcases attached to their arms, I suppose there are some non-mathematical ways to use QC to attack OTPs - hit the courier on the head with the QC, and then use the liquid helium from the qc to help shatter the handcuff chain, or offer the courier a Quantum Computer as bribe, or whatever:-)
There's no Constitutional support for your assertion. The Constitution says "Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court." and the following amendments are quite explicit about the rights to due process for everybody - there's no mention of Citizenship affecting any rights up through the 12th Amendment other than the right to be President and who gets counted for voting. The only limitations given are that if you're in "land or naval forces or the Militia", during war or public danger, they don't need a Grand Jury to accuse you to a court, and there's nothing that prevents Congress from letting the military have their own courts for their own members, subject to their legal definitions of due process, but there's still no definition of "illegal combatant" that has Constitutional backing except when applied to members of the US military, and there's entirely no way that native-borns lose their citizenship without a trial for treason. You may lose your moral right to citizenship by deciding to attack the US, but until and unless there's a trial and you lose, you still have your legal right to it.
This doesn't mean that the military or police can't shoot you to protect the public if you're in the process of shooting people or waving around nuclear weapons, but it's illegal for them to do so except in clear and present danger, and if they can arrest you without killing you, you still have the right to a speedy and public trial with full due process, with none of the kind of Star Chamber secret trials or military kangaroo courts that helped motivate our predecessors to throw out the King. If you're a US soldier or actively in the Militia during a war, they may be able to give you a trial that's speedier and more public than you'd like before shooting you, and it might be argued that if you're planning the terrorist attack, there's a war or public danger even though the rest of the military doesn't know about it yet. But if you're a civilian, that still doesn't apply to you.
There's some ambiguity about whether being a citizen of one state makes you a citizen of all of them, which the 13th Amendment tries to address, and there was an amendment that may or may not have been ratified in 1819 that would revoke citizenship from people who accept foreign titles or (without permission) foreign government employment, and there are some civil rights you can lose as a penalty for some crimes (or until 1870, by being a slave or politically incorrect color), and the 14th Amendment distinguishes between privileges of citizenship, which can be abridged as a punishment for crimes, and equal protection of law, which applies to everybody within the states' jurisdiction.
There's an Ask Yahoo question asking if anyone's been tried for treason in the US. It gives a rather incomplete answer - details about Aaron Burr and John Brown, and also about a German-American who was imprisoned for treason in 1947 for non-violently helping his son, a Nazi spy who was executed. There's been lots of other press about the topic of treason since Johnny Walker Lindh got caught. Aaron Burr was acquitted; Tokyo Rose was convicted and jailed, later pardoned by President Ford.
Unlike the rules against bringing weapons on planes, I'm not bothered by rules against bringing dangerous things on planes, smoking in the bathrooms on planes, etc. The pressurized-gas lighters have been banned for a long time, but the non-pressurized-liquid ones (Zippos with oily lighter fluid, etc.) usually haven't been. Air pressure changes can cause Bad Things to happen to the pressurized ones, though that's much less risky since they banned smoking on planes, but the the worst that your Zippo will do is drip oil on your plastic stuff.
Of course, once you arrive, there are the usual announcements about "Please refrain from smoking until after you've left the state of California", but that's a separate problem:-)
Yes, the GSM encryption was designed by amateurs and then weakened because of government pressure; you don't need key escrow when the key's too short and 10 of its bits are always set to 0:-) I don't know if 3G does the same or not. The first independent professional who looked at the GSM stuff cracked it over a long lunchtime.
However, that doesn't mean that the US situation is any better - analog cellphones aren't encrypted, and none of the encryption protocols used in the common TDMA systems are at all strong, and in most cases they're not turned on (if you've got a Nokia phone, the message is "Voice privacy not active".) The first generation of CDMA phones also had bogus encryption; the people who designed it were competent but under political pressure. I don't know if newer CDMA standards are any better.
The only encryption in these systems that has any strength at all is the authentication side that's used for the billing, and with GSM, that's also been broken. But that's ok, you're secure in the US, because the US government made it illegal for anybody but them to eavesdrop.
The real problem with 3G was that the government was convinced it could get billions of euros in revenue by auctioning off the spectrum licenses, and the telcos also believed it. The governments got most of their money upfront and let Darwin sort out the impacts on the telcos. Fortunately or unfortunately, the US wireless carriers were in a different phase of their build/deploy/sell/replace cycles, so they didn't deploy that infrastructure before the market crashed. If Europeans can use their 3G data services at a reasonable flat-rate price, say 30-50 euros/month for unlimited service, they may really accomplish something, but otherwise it's mostly a waste - and with the debts that the telephone companies accumulated, it's unlikely that that will happen.
OK, so the web started in Europe, or more precisely in Academia, a country that doesn't play by the same rules as the mundane world. That was a decade ago. Now that you guys are getting all this broadband, and generally without the same stupid rules as US cable TV companies (can't run a server, etc., so you can't develop anything new or interesting), what else have you developed that's new and interesting?. US college students took advantage of campus LANs to develop Napster (note: students, not university-organized activities); I got the impression that some of the MP3 craze started in Europe before becoming common in North America. What's next? Korea's also heavily wired for broadband, and somebody here said Taiwan is. What are people doing with it?
Of course you've got good connectivity - you're near a university, and universities are good at getting stuff like that done, and in your case there's also a student cooperative which is good at getting things done. Last time I tried to get an E1 line installed for a customer in Denmark was 1-2 years ago - the PTT was telling us 4 months, and I think the real time was about 6 months. (For you non-Europeans, an E1 is a 2Mbps line, a bit bigger than a US T1 line.) I've sometimes seen similar delays in the Netherlands, where there's even less excuse for it. Some of this may be because we had our partnership with BT Concert at the time, so several different phone companies were involved...
It's easy to upgrade a Windows machine to Linux*. It's difficult to upgrade it to a Mac; that takes capital expenditure, though if you've got a Mac that's new enough, you can upgrade it to MacOS 10.x+1 as needed.
* Ok, in fact it's sometimes difficult *not* to upgrade your Windows machine to Linux:-) In particular, it's often easier than upgrading to a newer version of Microsoft Office (I've found recent upgrades of the Windows operating system seem to work pretty well, if your hardware is fast enough, but the real reason for upgrading is usually driven by Office.)
Upgrading a Windows machine to Linux doesn't quite require negative capital expenditure - eliminating bloatware makes the machine a lot faster, but some of the recent window managers get amazingly doggy on less than 64MB RAM, and some of the installers do really stupid things with disk drives smaller than 4GB, and some of the distribution systems really don't netinstall well unless you've got a large spare disk to copy all their CDs into, but desktop machines that don't hav e CDROMs in them are usually too old to bother with. The Register recently reported that many businesses ppear to be moving to a 4-year upgrade cycle for PCs rather than 3-year cycles - Linux makes it easy to do this, and makes it easy to do low-cost bandaid upgrades like adding bigger disk drives and more RAM rather than replacing a whole machine.
Perhaps China only blocked the main Google front door, but blocking other things at google.com should be obvious. What we really need are widespread anonymizers, whether they're Peek-a-Booty or Triangle Boy or some Apache plugin.
Some Congresscritter from Missouri got the Fedz to kick in a bunch of money to stamp out Goth culture in Missouri. I forget if the amount was $270K or $2.7M. There's no indication of how much of that went for mirrors and garlic.....
If there's a Slashdot story about FooBar1244 being released, and you're not familiar with it, this means one of N things
You should try to look at the web page for FooBar1244. If it's Not Slashdotted, this means that the product isn't interesting enough for very many people to care about, so unless you're one of the few people for whom this would actually be useful that didn't already know about it, you've wasted your time by reading the web page.
The web page is Slashdotted, because FooBar1244 is really cool, and the reason you don't know what it is is because you're not really cool. You've wasted your time, because all the cool people will be downloading the latest release for the next three days. That's actually OK, because what the web page said was that they've fixed three minor bugs and added Dynamic Animated Skin Authoring to a product you'd never heard of, so you'd have had to have waded half a dozen links down into the menu system to find out what the product actually did.
The product is lame, but it's Slashdotted because it's running on a really lame webserver, so you can't actually tell. You've wasted your time on this fork also (but just because the product is lame doesn't make you cool for not knowing about it, so don't go feeling superior here either.)
The web page is Slashdotted, but some nice person has posted a copy to Slashdot that lets you know what it is. Unfortunately, the posting is modded down to -1 for redundancy, because anybody who doesn't know what FooBar1244 is must be totally lame and out of the loop. So you don't see it either, because you're not a moderator today so you're not reading at -1. So you've wasted your time looking for it anyway.
Leonard's death was also mentioned at the Worldcon science fiction convention in San Jose. I don't think I know him, but many of the other filk singers did - as his web page says, he's been hosting the web site for the Consonance annual music conventions, and the "dandelion" in his domain name and masthead has become somewhat of an icon for the filk music genre. Lotsa folks knew and miss him.
Slashdot Mirror
So when will we be able to combine the two platforms? Ever? The consoles are designed for overpriced closed-source plugin-cartridge games designed with expensive toolkits, which preserves the console company's market control, since they make money on the games, not the hardware. They usually don't have the resolution I'd want to read text at, because televisions are usually too grainy to be good monitors, but as resolution gets better and they get networking capability, I'd expect to see games like "X-Terminal" or "Tivo-Replacement" becoming available.... I'm not a gamer, but there are other uses for multimedia-heavy systems than running thumb candy, and it makes it easier to ooncentrate those things near the TV rather than adding lots of graphics boards to the machines in the Beowul\\\\\\ (sorry, can't say that word here) information-focused parts of the home network.
Tmark is wondering when *he'll* be able to afford this wireless technology. The price of 802.11b seems to have dropped by half in about the last six months; if you're still can't afford it, wait another 15 minutes and yet another brand will go on sale at Fry's.
Having said that, though, the protests themselves mainly occur at meetings of Western and other big governments, which generally *are* focused more on extending their power and authority and supporting their big political constituents than on genuine free trade. A Libertarian version of NAFTA wouldn't have been 1600 pages of protectionist rulemaking that shifts the details of who gets protected; it would have been a paragraph or so with a lot of room for signatures at the bottom. The IMF Austerity Rules that get imposed on any government that wants to borrow more money are generally pretty rational, if painful, because they have to get the target country on a revenue-positive economic track so they can get their earlier debts paid back. Unfortunately, however, both the old debts that are being paid back and the new money they're lending tend to be for projects that weren't economically viable, centralize power in the hands of the governments and usually the ruling elites, and if they aren't spent on the military, they tend to be spent on big development projects that are environmentally destructive or at best on Bread&Circuses. And many of these countries either have government-controlled broadcasting systems, or if they do have privatized media, it's still controlled by the Usual Suspects, so having an Indymedia type thing around to provide some alternative to the major media is really valuable.
Point 2 - 300 computers to a news-gathering organization can be amazingly significant; 300 computers to schools would be a drop in the bucket, though the long-term payback would still be worthwhile. Sure, most of these machines are Offical Doorstops today, which means that they can run Microsoft Office version N, N-1, or N-2 at reasonable speed, and can't play recent video games, but people running news-gathering organizations need text-handling, email, and simple databases can do amazing things with 486s. A 14.4kbps modem is about 200 times faster than most people type. (And 486s could run Doom, which was really amazing in its day.)
Point 3 - Hey, Indymedia are a press organization - of course they're going to give good press to things that help them get press
Has anybody ported Linux to the Beeb Microcomputer?
Other than reasonably-priced basic internet connectivity at less than the cost of overpriced metered phone service, what interesting new broadband apps have come out of Europe? The US cable modem carriers usually have policies against running servers or doing anything interesting on cable modems, even running a home web server, and while most of the DSL providers don't, many of them only provide dynamic addressing which is a bit hard to use for servers. The last few interesting applications I've seen were Napster and its follow-ons, plus increased use of instant messaging. I don't count games as interesting, but I gather the gamers are somewhat heavy broadband users, though the online games are mostly designed to work adequately on dialup to maximize their markets.
Sure, you're weird (:-) So are many of my friends, like Hugh, whose house is "mainly insulated with copper wire". But when you're talking about mass-market adoption of a product, that's not who buys most of the millions of units - it's the people who probably have multiple computers and don't want to wire their house with Cat5E and fiber, but most of the computing horsepower is in the house is the kids' game machines and maybe the adult's work laptop. Business usability is a different matter (that's why the word "home" is in the subject line :-), but businesses probably won't be really mass adopters until the security issues are fixed. 802.11a prices have started to come down enough that in a new business installation it's almost certainly worthwhile, but for mass-market home use the main reason for it is better coverage (or sharing with your neighbors.)
Distance affects usability, of course - if the thing can't talk from the living room to the bedroom, that's a problem. But speed isn't enough to justify the extra cost for most home users.
Business is a different matter - there you often have enough machines sharing a server in the same building that total bandwidth matters.
The typical dot-bomb is not to be more than 5 years old, usually less. (Otherwise it's some other category of failed computer company :-) So if Ontario's rule is that you had to be there five years, you probably weren't. So take the money and run.
The way you crack these algorithms is to throw mathematicians at them until some of them stick. Once you've done that, if there's anything left to bother with, then you can figure out how many processor cycles you'd need to throw at the problem to break it, and decide whether that's feasible.
If your conclusion is that it's not feasible to break, then you need to decide whether to use rubber-hose cryptanalysis to get the key, or steal the target's computer where they saved the unencrypted version, or look for the yellow sticky notes next to their desk, or put a camera in their ceiling to watch them type in their keys.
Quantum computing appears to allow the user to cheat, by picking the correct n-bit value out of 2**n bits, for a class of problems that mostly look like the factoring problems that make RSA public key crypto work. This doesn't appear to make things faster for the white hats, because the white hats already knew what the correct bits were for data that was intended for them or data that they were trying to sign.
In normal public/private hybrid systems, you use the public-key algorithm to encrypt a random secret session key, and then use the session key with a symmetric-key algorithm to encrypt the message. For some popular categories of factoring-based public-key algorithms, a hypothetical QC can instantly factor the key, and you can do the polynomial-time validation to show that the decryption key you've pulled out of the quanta matches the public encryption key. (OTPs don't let you do that.) You can then use the session key to crank the symmetric-key algorithm. The lead article that this discussion is about deals with weaknesses in the new symmetric-key algorithms that all of us were hoping we could use to replace Triple-DES, which appears to be very strong but is slow and clumsy (and neither 3DES nor AES appears to be attackable using QCs.)
Since widespread use of OTPs means a return to lots of couriers with briefcases attached to their arms, I suppose there are some non-mathematical ways to use QC to attack OTPs - hit the courier on the head with the QC, and then use the liquid helium from the qc to help shatter the handcuff chain, or offer the courier a Quantum Computer as bribe, or whatever :-)
This doesn't mean that the military or police can't shoot you to protect the public if you're in the process of shooting people or waving around nuclear weapons, but it's illegal for them to do so except in clear and present danger, and if they can arrest you without killing you, you still have the right to a speedy and public trial with full due process, with none of the kind of Star Chamber secret trials or military kangaroo courts that helped motivate our predecessors to throw out the King. If you're a US soldier or actively in the Militia during a war, they may be able to give you a trial that's speedier and more public than you'd like before shooting you, and it might be argued that if you're planning the terrorist attack, there's a war or public danger even though the rest of the military doesn't know about it yet. But if you're a civilian, that still doesn't apply to you.
There's some ambiguity about whether being a citizen of one state makes you a citizen of all of them, which the 13th Amendment tries to address, and there was an amendment that may or may not have been ratified in 1819 that would revoke citizenship from people who accept foreign titles or (without permission) foreign government employment, and there are some civil rights you can lose as a penalty for some crimes (or until 1870, by being a slave or politically incorrect color), and the 14th Amendment distinguishes between privileges of citizenship, which can be abridged as a punishment for crimes, and equal protection of law, which applies to everybody within the states' jurisdiction.
There's an Ask Yahoo question asking if anyone's been tried for treason in the US. It gives a rather incomplete answer - details about Aaron Burr and John Brown, and also about a German-American who was imprisoned for treason in 1947 for non-violently helping his son, a Nazi spy who was executed. There's been lots of other press about the topic of treason since Johnny Walker Lindh got caught. Aaron Burr was acquitted; Tokyo Rose was convicted and jailed, later pardoned by President Ford.
Of course, once you arrive, there are the usual announcements about "Please refrain from smoking until after you've left the state of California", but that's a separate problem
But the web site said it was twice as fast and the post only said 50% faster :-)
However, that doesn't mean that the US situation is any better - analog cellphones aren't encrypted, and none of the encryption protocols used in the common TDMA systems are at all strong, and in most cases they're not turned on (if you've got a Nokia phone, the message is "Voice privacy not active".) The first generation of CDMA phones also had bogus encryption; the people who designed it were competent but under political pressure. I don't know if newer CDMA standards are any better.
The only encryption in these systems that has any strength at all is the authentication side that's used for the billing, and with GSM, that's also been broken. But that's ok, you're secure in the US, because the US government made it illegal for anybody but them to eavesdrop.
The real problem with 3G was that the government was convinced it could get billions of euros in revenue by auctioning off the spectrum licenses, and the telcos also believed it. The governments got most of their money upfront and let Darwin sort out the impacts on the telcos. Fortunately or unfortunately, the US wireless carriers were in a different phase of their build/deploy/sell/replace cycles, so they didn't deploy that infrastructure before the market crashed. If Europeans can use their 3G data services at a reasonable flat-rate price, say 30-50 euros/month for unlimited service, they may really accomplish something, but otherwise it's mostly a waste - and with the debts that the telephone companies accumulated, it's unlikely that that will happen.
OK, so the web started in Europe, or more precisely in Academia, a country that doesn't play by the same rules as the mundane world. That was a decade ago. Now that you guys are getting all this broadband, and generally without the same stupid rules as US cable TV companies (can't run a server, etc., so you can't develop anything new or interesting), what else have you developed that's new and interesting?. US college students took advantage of campus LANs to develop Napster (note: students, not university-organized activities); I got the impression that some of the MP3 craze started in Europe before becoming common in North America. What's next? Korea's also heavily wired for broadband, and somebody here said Taiwan is. What are people doing with it?
Of course you've got good connectivity - you're near a university, and universities are good at getting stuff like that done, and in your case there's also a student cooperative which is good at getting things done. Last time I tried to get an E1 line installed for a customer in Denmark was 1-2 years ago - the PTT was telling us 4 months, and I think the real time was about 6 months. (For you non-Europeans, an E1 is a 2Mbps line, a bit bigger than a US T1 line.) I've sometimes seen similar delays in the Netherlands, where there's even less excuse for it. Some of this may be because we had our partnership with BT Concert at the time, so several different phone companies were involved...
* Ok, in fact it's sometimes difficult *not* to upgrade your Windows machine to Linux :-) In particular, it's often easier than upgrading to a newer version of Microsoft Office (I've found recent upgrades of the Windows operating system seem to work pretty well, if your hardware is fast enough, but the real reason for upgrading is usually driven by Office.)
Upgrading a Windows machine to Linux doesn't quite require negative capital expenditure - eliminating bloatware makes the machine a lot faster, but some of the recent window managers get amazingly doggy on less than 64MB RAM, and some of the installers do really stupid things with disk drives smaller than 4GB, and some of the distribution systems really don't netinstall well unless you've got a large spare disk to copy all their CDs into, but desktop machines that don't hav e CDROMs in them are usually too old to bother with. The Register recently reported that many businesses ppear to be moving to a 4-year upgrade cycle for PCs rather than 3-year cycles - Linux makes it easy to do this, and makes it easy to do low-cost bandaid upgrades like adding bigger disk drives and more RAM rather than replacing a whole machine.
Great - Now Mars will be slashdotted in 5 minutes! Just because nobody's living there doesn't mean the machines won't get overloaded.....
Perhaps China only blocked the main Google front door, but blocking other things at google.com should be obvious. What we really need are widespread anonymizers, whether they're Peek-a-Booty or Triangle Boy or some Apache plugin.
Some Congresscritter from Missouri got the Fedz to kick in a bunch of money to stamp out Goth culture in Missouri. I forget if the amount was $270K or $2.7M. There's no indication of how much of that went for mirrors and garlic.....
Leonard's death was also mentioned at the Worldcon science fiction convention in San Jose. I don't think I know him, but many of the other filk singers did - as his web page says, he's been hosting the web site for the Consonance annual music conventions, and the "dandelion" in his domain name and masthead has become somewhat of an icon for the filk music genre. Lotsa folks knew and miss him.