Google is not a good example, as they have more cash in the bank than they know what to do with. I don't want to take anything away from Brin and Page, they have done a sterling job so far, but a small ISP in a competitive market with razor thin margins trying to take a stand is more impressive.
If they are free to walk out at any time, why is the capsule locked? (No, seriously.)
They lock the capsule because in space the capsule would be locked. They are free to walk out at any time because they can ask to leave any time and the capsule will be opened to let them out.
Surely a mission to Mars would include more time on the planet? The time spent on the planet would be more intellectually stimulating than the spaceflight (one presumes) and might offer relief/reward from the journey to Mars and better prepare the crew psychologically for the return mission. I wonder why that wasn't factored in.
That is being factored in. There might be a problem when they arrive which means they have to leave almost immediately, and so they need to simulate a worst-case scenario.
Bonus question: Would an actual mission to Mars pay astronauts more than $70,000 per year?
If top brass know it's actually a one way mission, they pretty much have a free hand to offer 10x that salary...
I didn't see the pitch, Fringe was recommended to me by a friend. I tried to force myself through the first season but it was so dull and badly acted. I agree with Enderandrew, I just didn't care about the characters.
With Alias there were so many plot twists your head span, but you could really empathise with the characters. Plus it was slick, action packed, and visually gorgeous.
Assange was detained and held in solitary confinement in the UK. The UK is not the United States Government and UK jails aren't policed by Americans.
I have a lot of respect for the US, but the "by any means necessary" of the current US administration is very disappointing. I think they are letting their country down, and themselves as a role model abroad. The ironic thing is that they don't actually come out too badly in the leaked cables!
That is blatantly a lie, Moryath. I will lay you a wager that if we make a list of people that are against the imprisonment of Julian Assange for something he has not even officially been charged with, that list will not consist primarily of dictatorial murdering thugs like Hugo Chavez. Would you like to name a sum for that wager?
By that logic, that means we should go around and liberate all oppressed nations.
I think you are using poor logic. Stepping in and helping an oppressed nation does not mean you then have to liberate all oppressed nations. Nor does it mean that if you do not liberate every oppressed nation in the world it invalidates the good work you did to help a few. Some you can step in quickly (eg Kuwait), others better late than never (eg Kosovo and Darfur), and others you may not be able to step in militarily but can try economic pressure (eg North Korea and Iran). In real life with limited resources, you can only do so much.
There's is one hell of a difference between stepping in and helping someone individually in trouble and putting thousands of soldiers in harms way along with billions and trillions of dollars for the sake of bringing our version of "freedom" with the barrel of a tank.
Not really, conceptually. It is only a matter of scale.
I don't see how that follows. Most of the cables will be dull, and extracting good information tedious. Some initial keyword searches will pull up juicy gossip, eg "Iran". As you pick off the low hanging fruit, it will be harder and harder to find dramatic ones to release. The last one about US happy to let Japan kill whales is of passing interest, but hardly on the same level as Saudi Arabia wanting to bomb Iran. There may be a couple of bomb-shells being kept back, but probably not. The best stuff may already out there.
Or simply the changes be clearly marked on the book. Eg: "This is the children's under 12 version. Language and scenes have been redacted to make accessible for pupils who have not yet studied US history, should be used for young persons entertainment only. The author recommends reading the unedited version once the child is of mature age to appreciate the novel in its full historical context".
I agree with both arguments. Some words make it difficult to accept in todays society, for instance a parent may be uncomfortable reading it out to a young child. The child may copy the word and use it without appreciating its significance in the book, which you can only understand having studied American history. On the other hand, it is a significant change which corrupts the intent of the author and is blatantly censorship.
If there are two distinct versions, with the changes clearly marked, then this could be an acceptable compromise.
Hardly. The current Minister for Defence Alain Juppé has been convicted for fraud whilst holding public office 2004. The fact that the French elite is riddled with corruption (Sarkozy, Chirac, Mitterand were all mired in fraud scandals) is why corruption is seen as ok.
Ridiculously over the top. The ASF response was fair enough, in a United Nations kind of way, but trying to tear David Richards apart on a probably over the top PR piece is just as counter-productive.
The guy has stuck his head over the parapet and claims he will implement the features users most want. The rest of the community is scoffing at him saying it can't be done in the time he is projecting. Why not sit back and let him go ahead? Either he will fail in which case the PR piece will come back to haunt him, or he is going to give a massive boost to the Subversion project. Either way it's a win win for those like Ben Collins-Sussman disbelieving of his claims but use Subversion.
Why get dragged into petty politics, rather than saying "Let's see you put your money where your mouth is, I look forward to seeing monthly progress reports on the dev mailing list"? Get the guy to commit cash for code, rather than try and pick a playground fight.
Rather than buy a specialised encrypted phone, couldn't you just install Skype or any VoIP supporting encrypted codecs and use that?
As for strong crypto requiring a more powerful CPU or dedicated chip, hardly. There is an overhead but it's not that dramatic. New smartphones can handle image processing and wouldn't even notice an encryption layer.
Also, it wouldn't solve a damn thing, as it would merely shift the focus from eavesdropping to more... direct methods of obtaining the required information, since a cypher is only as strong as the weakest point, in this case the human endpoints.
Correction that solves everything. We want the police to be able to catch bad guys. They need to be able to get targeted intelligence. We don't want mass surveillance by the government as it will inevitably be abused at some point.
AFAICR GSM went with TDMA as it was more reliable, equipment was cheaper, and it didn't walk across the Qualcomm patent minefield. However, TDMA vs CDMA is irrelevant if using proper end-to-end encryption. With A5/1 broken (it did pretty well lasting a couple of decades with the pace of change in technology) the new generation of smart phones have plenty of processing power to provide a decent PK layer on top. You are already doing this when using Skype on your mobile. A simple app download is probably easier than changing most of the world's mobile infrastructure.
This doesn't make any sense. It is a fleet of buses designed for a city. It would be a bit dumb to buy buses that cannot manage their basic routes. If you want to have a bus every 15 mins, then you just assign 2 buses per route. They can recharge at each terminus. An interchangeable battery pack is pointless.
With a large percentage of the worlds population, and where the pollution is largely concentrated causing large scale medical problems, in the cities it's not "one to watch" but a perfectly valid solution. Use something different for rural areas, there is no one size fits all solution.
The city of Nice, in France, did the sums recently and still dug up the roads and built a tramway with overhead cables. This is a city that has run all its vehicles (buses, cars) on natural gas for decades, and from next year will make available a fleet of electric cars that the public can pick up and drop off as they want on street corners. They are already massive PV fans, with lots of buildings such as schools and government buildings having massive PV installations.
btw they would have to be pretty low power street lights to run self-contained on PV. PV is great for things like parking meters, etc, though.
In all three links the SUVs appear to have had a head on collision, and the smaller cars all *seem* to have been hit in the side (the 2nd is obvious, the other two apparently from the side-on views which appear show an undamaged side but I can't tell for sure). If this is the case then I would expect similar results from the same collision between two non-SUV vehicles.
In fact it is more a comment on SUV drivers being selfish and not caring about others. Pretty much echoing yourself, with your comments on 'trivial' CO2 emissions and pollution that we all have to breath in.
From what I've read in the local Nice newspaper, Véronique Paquis in the Department for Ecology is setting up "zapa" zones in Paris, Lyon, and Grenoble where high emission cars such as SUVs and old diesel cars will be banned. Other towns, such as Nice, are also applying for the scheme (must submit proposal by December 31st). These towns will then have internal debates to select the best zones for the trial. It will not apply to the whole city but to 'sensitive' areas.
Nice is same as Paris, they are buying 200 electric cars which you can just pick up and drop off like the bicycles.
It's not just Paris, it's also Aix-en-Provence, Grenoble and Lyon. Also Nice wants to be in the trial. There is a massive ecological drive going on in France. Electric tramway systems are replacing buses, parks are being built in dense urban areas, charging stations are being built into car parks for electric cars, you can get free or cheap bike rental on every corner, and every house can have free solar panels on the roof (but for the first decade you have to sell electricity back to the grid). Every public park in my town now has to be pesticide free. It's all about raising quality of life.
Ross Anderson does great work in this field, and has done for decades. The banks are happy to put out a flawed system, and hope that people don't notice they are getting ripped off by criminals. Those that actually do notice get reimbursed if they fight hard enough and manage to win their court case (the banks often falsely convince the judge their system is infallible), and then this simply gets shifted back onto the customers through increased bank charges.
If you look at his February post after they broadcast the problem on Newsnight (major UK political television programme), a large number of the commenters appear to be victims.
The message is clear: if you take your credit or debit card out with you, or use it online, there is a good chance money will easily be stolen from your account. If somebody swipes and clones your card, they do not need to know your PIN number to extract money from it. The safest way to pay is currently with cash.
France has passed a law "Loppsi 2" which allows the Interior Minister to ban any web site without any legal process. The Ministry for the Interior sends a blacklist to ISPs which they have to enforce. Though ostensibly to cut down "child porn" and malware sites, there aren't any actual restrictions on what kind of site can be blacklisted and could be used to black out a site such as Wikileaks.
Even stranger is after Sweden opposed bail, and then both Sweden and the British prosecution stated Sweden were appealing against the bail, suddenly Sweden claims they it wasn't them appealing against bail at all. Then the British prosecution admitted they were trying to incarcerate Assange in solitary confinement when Sweden seemed quite happy for him to be released on bail. The two countries are so busy tripping over themselves to curry favour with the US they appear to be getting a little confused as to which side of the law they are supposed to be on.
Slashdot Mirror
Google is not a good example, as they have more cash in the bank than they know what to do with. I don't want to take anything away from Brin and Page, they have done a sterling job so far, but a small ISP in a competitive market with razor thin margins trying to take a stand is more impressive.
Phillip.
Personally I like the name. What do you think is wrong with it?
Phillip.
If they are free to walk out at any time, why is the capsule locked? (No, seriously.)
They lock the capsule because in space the capsule would be locked. They are free to walk out at any time because they can ask to leave any time and the capsule will be opened to let them out.
Surely a mission to Mars would include more time on the planet? The time spent on the planet would be more intellectually stimulating than the spaceflight (one presumes) and might offer relief/reward from the journey to Mars and better prepare the crew psychologically for the return mission. I wonder why that wasn't factored in.
That is being factored in. There might be a problem when they arrive which means they have to leave almost immediately, and so they need to simulate a worst-case scenario.
Bonus question: Would an actual mission to Mars pay astronauts more than $70,000 per year?
If top brass know it's actually a one way mission, they pretty much have a free hand to offer 10x that salary...
Phillip.
I didn't see the pitch, Fringe was recommended to me by a friend. I tried to force myself through the first season but it was so dull and badly acted. I agree with Enderandrew, I just didn't care about the characters.
With Alias there were so many plot twists your head span, but you could really empathise with the characters. Plus it was slick, action packed, and visually gorgeous.
Phillip.
Assange was detained and held in solitary confinement in the UK. The UK is not the United States Government and UK jails aren't policed by Americans.
I have a lot of respect for the US, but the "by any means necessary" of the current US administration is very disappointing. I think they are letting their country down, and themselves as a role model abroad. The ironic thing is that they don't actually come out too badly in the leaked cables!
Phillip.
That is blatantly a lie, Moryath. I will lay you a wager that if we make a list of people that are against the imprisonment of Julian Assange for something he has not even officially been charged with, that list will not consist primarily of dictatorial murdering thugs like Hugo Chavez. Would you like to name a sum for that wager?
Phillip.
Talk about false equivalency.
By that logic, that means we should go around and liberate all oppressed nations.
I think you are using poor logic. Stepping in and helping an oppressed nation does not mean you then have to liberate all oppressed nations. Nor does it mean that if you do not liberate every oppressed nation in the world it invalidates the good work you did to help a few. Some you can step in quickly (eg Kuwait), others better late than never (eg Kosovo and Darfur), and others you may not be able to step in militarily but can try economic pressure (eg North Korea and Iran). In real life with limited resources, you can only do so much.
There's is one hell of a difference between stepping in and helping someone individually in trouble and putting thousands of soldiers in harms way along with billions and trillions of dollars for the sake of bringing our version of "freedom" with the barrel of a tank.
Not really, conceptually. It is only a matter of scale.
Phillip.
I don't see how that follows. Most of the cables will be dull, and extracting good information tedious. Some initial keyword searches will pull up juicy gossip, eg "Iran". As you pick off the low hanging fruit, it will be harder and harder to find dramatic ones to release. The last one about US happy to let Japan kill whales is of passing interest, but hardly on the same level as Saudi Arabia wanting to bomb Iran. There may be a couple of bomb-shells being kept back, but probably not. The best stuff may already out there.
Phillip.
Or simply the changes be clearly marked on the book. Eg:
"This is the children's under 12 version. Language and scenes have been redacted to make accessible for pupils who have not yet studied US history, should be used for young persons entertainment only. The author recommends reading the unedited version once the child is of mature age to appreciate the novel in its full historical context".
I agree with both arguments. Some words make it difficult to accept in todays society, for instance a parent may be uncomfortable reading it out to a young child. The child may copy the word and use it without appreciating its significance in the book, which you can only understand having studied American history. On the other hand, it is a significant change which corrupts the intent of the author and is blatantly censorship.
If there are two distinct versions, with the changes clearly marked, then this could be an acceptable compromise.
Phillip.
Hardly. The current Minister for Defence Alain Juppé has been convicted for fraud whilst holding public office 2004. The fact that the French elite is riddled with corruption (Sarkozy, Chirac, Mitterand were all mired in fraud scandals) is why corruption is seen as ok.
Phillip.
Ridiculously over the top. The ASF response was fair enough, in a United Nations kind of way, but trying to tear David Richards apart on a probably over the top PR piece is just as counter-productive.
The guy has stuck his head over the parapet and claims he will implement the features users most want. The rest of the community is scoffing at him saying it can't be done in the time he is projecting. Why not sit back and let him go ahead? Either he will fail in which case the PR piece will come back to haunt him, or he is going to give a massive boost to the Subversion project. Either way it's a win win for those like Ben Collins-Sussman disbelieving of his claims but use Subversion.
Why get dragged into petty politics, rather than saying "Let's see you put your money where your mouth is, I look forward to seeing monthly progress reports on the dev mailing list"? Get the guy to commit cash for code, rather than try and pick a playground fight.
Phillip.
Rather than buy a specialised encrypted phone, couldn't you just install Skype or any VoIP supporting encrypted codecs and use that?
As for strong crypto requiring a more powerful CPU or dedicated chip, hardly. There is an overhead but it's not that dramatic. New smartphones can handle image processing and wouldn't even notice an encryption layer.
Also, it wouldn't solve a damn thing, as it would merely shift the focus from eavesdropping to more ... direct methods of obtaining the required information, since a cypher is only as strong as the weakest point, in this case the human endpoints.
Correction that solves everything. We want the police to be able to catch bad guys. They need to be able to get targeted intelligence. We don't want mass surveillance by the government as it will inevitably be abused at some point.
Phillip.
AFAICR GSM went with TDMA as it was more reliable, equipment was cheaper, and it didn't walk across the Qualcomm patent minefield. However, TDMA vs CDMA is irrelevant if using proper end-to-end encryption. With A5/1 broken (it did pretty well lasting a couple of decades with the pace of change in technology) the new generation of smart phones have plenty of processing power to provide a decent PK layer on top. You are already doing this when using Skype on your mobile. A simple app download is probably easier than changing most of the world's mobile infrastructure.
Phillip.
Even funnier is the way people put locks on their front doors. Just imagine OMG LOL crap I lost my door key. Hilarious.
Phillip.
This doesn't make any sense. It is a fleet of buses designed for a city. It would be a bit dumb to buy buses that cannot manage their basic routes. If you want to have a bus every 15 mins, then you just assign 2 buses per route. They can recharge at each terminus. An interchangeable battery pack is pointless.
With a large percentage of the worlds population, and where the pollution is largely concentrated causing large scale medical problems, in the cities it's not "one to watch" but a perfectly valid solution. Use something different for rural areas, there is no one size fits all solution.
Phillip.
The city of Nice, in France, did the sums recently and still dug up the roads and built a tramway with overhead cables. This is a city that has run all its vehicles (buses, cars) on natural gas for decades, and from next year will make available a fleet of electric cars that the public can pick up and drop off as they want on street corners. They are already massive PV fans, with lots of buildings such as schools and government buildings having massive PV installations.
btw they would have to be pretty low power street lights to run self-contained on PV. PV is great for things like parking meters, etc, though.
Phillip.
In all three links the SUVs appear to have had a head on collision, and the smaller cars all *seem* to have been hit in the side (the 2nd is obvious, the other two apparently from the side-on views which appear show an undamaged side but I can't tell for sure). If this is the case then I would expect similar results from the same collision between two non-SUV vehicles.
In fact it is more a comment on SUV drivers being selfish and not caring about others. Pretty much echoing yourself, with your comments on 'trivial' CO2 emissions and pollution that we all have to breath in.
Phillip.
From what I've read in the local Nice newspaper, Véronique Paquis in the Department for Ecology is setting up "zapa" zones in Paris, Lyon, and Grenoble where high emission cars such as SUVs and old diesel cars will be banned. Other towns, such as Nice, are also applying for the scheme (must submit proposal by December 31st). These towns will then have internal debates to select the best zones for the trial. It will not apply to the whole city but to 'sensitive' areas.
Nice is same as Paris, they are buying 200 electric cars which you can just pick up and drop off like the bicycles.
Phillip.
It's not just Paris, it's also Aix-en-Provence, Grenoble and Lyon. Also Nice wants to be in the trial. There is a massive ecological drive going on in France. Electric tramway systems are replacing buses, parks are being built in dense urban areas, charging stations are being built into car parks for electric cars, you can get free or cheap bike rental on every corner, and every house can have free solar panels on the roof (but for the first decade you have to sell electricity back to the grid). Every public park in my town now has to be pesticide free. It's all about raising quality of life.
Phillip.
Flaws for me:
* no ARM processor
* fairly bulky looking frame around the device
* looks like standard LCD, bit of glare, not as good as Samsung AMOLED
Every Ubuntu user probably bought a Microsoft Windows PC and reformatted it, probably do the same with an Android tablet.
Phillip.
Ross Anderson does great work in this field, and has done for decades. The banks are happy to put out a flawed system, and hope that people don't notice they are getting ripped off by criminals. Those that actually do notice get reimbursed if they fight hard enough and manage to win their court case (the banks often falsely convince the judge their system is infallible), and then this simply gets shifted back onto the customers through increased bank charges.
If you look at his February post after they broadcast the problem on Newsnight (major UK political television programme), a large number of the commenters appear to be victims.
The message is clear: if you take your credit or debit card out with you, or use it online, there is a good chance money will easily be stolen from your account. If somebody swipes and clones your card, they do not need to know your PIN number to extract money from it. The safest way to pay is currently with cash.
Phillip.
France has passed a law "Loppsi 2" which allows the Interior Minister to ban any web site without any legal process. The Ministry for the Interior sends a blacklist to ISPs which they have to enforce. Though ostensibly to cut down "child porn" and malware sites, there aren't any actual restrictions on what kind of site can be blacklisted and could be used to black out a site such as Wikileaks.
Phillip.
So far I've picked up from this thread:
a) Julian Assange may have two-timed a couple of women
b) He probably isn't gay
Who cares? Did Tiger Woods leave a gossip void that simply needed to be filled?
Phillip.
Even stranger is after Sweden opposed bail, and then both Sweden and the British prosecution stated Sweden were appealing against the bail, suddenly Sweden claims they it wasn't them appealing against bail at all. Then the British prosecution admitted they were trying to incarcerate Assange in solitary confinement when Sweden seemed quite happy for him to be released on bail. The two countries are so busy tripping over themselves to curry favour with the US they appear to be getting a little confused as to which side of the law they are supposed to be on.
Phillip.
Impressive, you got this far down the thread without reading any comments at all.
Phillip.
PS bunch of Russian criminals != Anonymous