That argument cannot hold water. The "big" law-enforcement actions against downloaders in Europe in the last few years have yielded no or nearly no children to be freed of their abusers.
It may also be known to criminals that use it sparingly and carefully. Or to foreign intelligence agencies that are allowed to do industrial espionage (for example, the French). It may also be become widely known but patching it may require a few weeks. And so on. I think the FBI just does not care.
Exactly. Freedom always includes the freedom to do wrong and a realistic chance to get away with it (depending on the magnitude of the crime). I believe freedom is of critical importance and the only purpose of law-enforcement is to keep crime at a level that society continues to function reasonably well. They are clearly not doing that, or the banksters would all be in prison now for a long, long time. Nobody on recent memory did this much damage to society and individuals.
They are not a homogeneous group. Typically, the quality of the researchers is dependent on the professor who is head of a group. The IWES apparently has 500 staff members, so it will be something like 10...50 different research groups. You will likely not have dealt with the specific people that did this.
You do not get any argument from me that Sturegeon's law applies to research and research groups as well. I have reviewed far too many bad papers (sometimes with big names on them) to not know that and I know from personal experience personally that Fraunhofer research can be really bad. I do think that this project here is an exception.
They do not. You only get a lift proportional to the weight of the water volume inside if you pump that out. The prototype at 1:10 weights 20 metric tons. Hence a 1:1 version would weight 2000 metric tons (10 times larger in 3 dimensions). The 1:10 version reportedly has a diameter of 3m (no idea whether inner or outer and I am not going to spend $30 on the paper, so lets assume it is the inner diameter, i.e. the worst case). 3m diameter is (by V = 4/3 r^3 pi) a volume of around 14 m^3. Apparently for seawater, that means around 14.5 metric tons. This gives the 1:10 device a remaining 5 metric tons to stay below, even if completely empty. For the 1:1 version, that would be 500 metric tons weight underwater when empty. I don't think there is anything to worry about.
I am not sure what you are getting at. To the best of my knowledge, they are pumping water not air and they are using the water rushing back in by outside pressure to recover the energy. As everything is done in the concrete-bubble at a target depth of 700m or so, there should be no problems with storms at all. I do admit I have no idea what details are in the story referenced here, I read the original German reporting.
Child abuse, horrible as it is, does not qualify as "National Security". Also, because they did disclose the name of the accused, they should be sued into the ground after dropping the charges. While it is not pretty, civil liberties need to be defended, even if it means defending scumbags. Otherwise they can just destroy anybody in the future by first publicly accusing them and then dropping the charges, possibly without ever providing any evidence or only fake evidence they then withdraw when asked to prove that it is genuine and how they obtained it. Not good at all.
Indeed. But if they go after the producers (which I have no doubt they could do), they would stop the ready supply of easily identified consumers. And that would cut into their convictions, and hence into their funding and power. It is rather obvious why they do not do that.
Actually, it seems that they are wrong. First, most child abuse obviously does not end up on film. That part they are completely ignoring. Second, even if they are not saying it loudly, there are statements by law-enforcement in different countries that there is no "industry" behind child abuse, it is mostly amateur stuff and it is mostly traded without money involved. Incidentally, follow-the-money is something law-enforcement is very, very good at, so if this really was mostly commercial, they would long since have stopped the whole thing with ease.
Well, judging from their tactics in "fighting terrorism", they would produce child pornography themselves, if they legally could. They have been producing "terrorists" for a while now. Hence my take would be they have zero interest in in actually doing anything real about the problem because that could dry up the ready supply of downloaders that they can catch and prosecute easily. And with that supply drying up, their funding and power would get reduced. If that is not a perfectly fine motive explaining what they are doing, then I do not know what is.
There is actually some genuine "murder porn" out there: You get to see it on the news, perfectly legally. Think for example, the footage exposed by Manning. It even comes with mocking comments by the murderers while they kill innocent civilians.
Or rather locking people up trumps protecting children. That is also why they kept running the site for 13 days. By the very definition of the DoJ, they committed child abuse for 13 days. Seems to me the FBI is part of the problem now.
This is not a "Tor" exploit. It is a Firefox exploit against the version of Firefox used in the Tor browser bundle. It may well still be exploitable in current Firefox versions, including the one used in the current Tor browser bundle versions. Otherwise there really would be no point in keeping it secret.
Hence the FBI is actively and knowingly endangering anybody using Firefox. That seems to be legal, but it is hugely unethical.
Nonsense. They are already in the state of practical tests at 100m (well, they just had complete success at those). You do not get there if you do not have very good indicators that this will work and there are only minor issues to address.
No bullshit grab-for-the-stars (and never get them) waste of money and time, but practical, pragmatic and addressed at real problems. Of course, this will take another 10 years or so to practical deployment, but it is highly likely to work and be both reliable and cost-effective. Things like these drive progress.
Complete nonsense. Everything they offer, you can download for free somewhere. They are turning a profit because they are not too greedy and they are convenient.
Wrong. The main reason is technological limits. The current slowdown was well expected by experts and speeds will reach a peak soon. If it was primarily money, then there would be lab-demonstrations that show the possibilities. There are not. BTW, for the last 10...15 years it has not been the transistors that limit speed, but the interconnection. Transistors much, much faster than the ones currently used in CPUs have been demonstrated and are used in RF chips. But nobody has yet come up with something better than copper strip-conductors to distribute the HF (clocks and signals) that flow in today's CPUs. Physics actually says that if you want to keep using electricity and stay mostly 2D, there likely is no better thing in this universe. Of course, optics have some advantages there, but the disadvantages are so severe that > 30 years of research activities into optical computing have yielded nothing usable and they may never do.
Indeed. The surprising thing is how long CPUs kept getting faster, it is absolutely no surprise that is mostly over now. All game-changer technologies have historically followed this model, it quite expected that CPU speeds (and GPU speeds a little later) are not going to increase much more now.
People do not understand what is going on, they only remember pretty impressive growth rates from a short historical period. As they are clueless about the actual subject, they just expect this to be going on and do not recognize that certain scientific breakthroughs can cause a brief period of very fast improvement that then slows down and usually peaks shortly after. This has happened quite often historically and it always goes the same way.
In short: The expectations result from cluelessness.
The answer to that is simple: Nobody can program them, except for very specific tasks. The Transputer (1978) tried it, the Connection machine (1983) tried it. Others have tried in the meantime. Any "supercomputer" today follows this model. Yet, except for very specific tasks (mostly finite-element simulations), these machines are pretty useless. So in answer to your question, where it makes sense it has been done for a long time. It does however not make sense for most applications.
As such, there are some small possibilities for further speed improvement, except for special scenarios. GPUs may still have a few generations with significant speed increases, but CPUs do not. There is room for optimizing cost and power consumption, but when that has happened, then that is it.
Think of this like a hammer or an ax as we know them today: They are finished and there is no way to make them better with reasonable effort. However do not forget that the steel used in them is the result of a few 1000 years of optimization and that they are a very sophisticated product, simple though they may appear to be.
Incidentally, CPUs have not had any dramatic speed increases for about half a decade.
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That argument cannot hold water. The "big" law-enforcement actions against downloaders in Europe in the last few years have yielded no or nearly no children to be freed of their abusers.
It may also be known to criminals that use it sparingly and carefully. Or to foreign intelligence agencies that are allowed to do industrial espionage (for example, the French). It may also be become widely known but patching it may require a few weeks. And so on. I think the FBI just does not care.
Exactly. Freedom always includes the freedom to do wrong and a realistic chance to get away with it (depending on the magnitude of the crime). I believe freedom is of critical importance and the only purpose of law-enforcement is to keep crime at a level that society continues to function reasonably well. They are clearly not doing that, or the banksters would all be in prison now for a long, long time. Nobody on recent memory did this much damage to society and individuals.
No. Some of that is good, like the X-7.
They are not a homogeneous group. Typically, the quality of the researchers is dependent on the professor who is head of a group. The IWES apparently has 500 staff members, so it will be something like 10...50 different research groups. You will likely not have dealt with the specific people that did this.
You do not get any argument from me that Sturegeon's law applies to research and research groups as well. I have reviewed far too many bad papers (sometimes with big names on them) to not know that and I know from personal experience personally that Fraunhofer research can be really bad. I do think that this project here is an exception.
They do not. You only get a lift proportional to the weight of the water volume inside if you pump that out. The prototype at 1:10 weights 20 metric tons. Hence a 1:1 version would weight 2000 metric tons (10 times larger in 3 dimensions). The 1:10 version reportedly has a diameter of 3m (no idea whether inner or outer and I am not going to spend $30 on the paper, so lets assume it is the inner diameter, i.e. the worst case). 3m diameter is (by V = 4/3 r^3 pi) a volume of around 14 m^3. Apparently for seawater, that means around 14.5 metric tons. This gives the 1:10 device a remaining 5 metric tons to stay below, even if completely empty. For the 1:1 version, that would be 500 metric tons weight underwater when empty. I don't think there is anything to worry about.
I am not sure what you are getting at. To the best of my knowledge, they are pumping water not air and they are using the water rushing back in by outside pressure to recover the energy. As everything is done in the concrete-bubble at a target depth of 700m or so, there should be no problems with storms at all. I do admit I have no idea what details are in the story referenced here, I read the original German reporting.
Child abuse, horrible as it is, does not qualify as "National Security". Also, because they did disclose the name of the accused, they should be sued into the ground after dropping the charges. While it is not pretty, civil liberties need to be defended, even if it means defending scumbags. Otherwise they can just destroy anybody in the future by first publicly accusing them and then dropping the charges, possibly without ever providing any evidence or only fake evidence they then withdraw when asked to prove that it is genuine and how they obtained it. Not good at all.
Indeed. But if they go after the producers (which I have no doubt they could do), they would stop the ready supply of easily identified consumers. And that would cut into their convictions, and hence into their funding and power. It is rather obvious why they do not do that.
Actually, it seems that they are wrong. First, most child abuse obviously does not end up on film. That part they are completely ignoring. Second, even if they are not saying it loudly, there are statements by law-enforcement in different countries that there is no "industry" behind child abuse, it is mostly amateur stuff and it is mostly traded without money involved. Incidentally, follow-the-money is something law-enforcement is very, very good at, so if this really was mostly commercial, they would long since have stopped the whole thing with ease.
Well, judging from their tactics in "fighting terrorism", they would produce child pornography themselves, if they legally could. They have been producing "terrorists" for a while now. Hence my take would be they have zero interest in in actually doing anything real about the problem because that could dry up the ready supply of downloaders that they can catch and prosecute easily. And with that supply drying up, their funding and power would get reduced. If that is not a perfectly fine motive explaining what they are doing, then I do not know what is.
There is actually some genuine "murder porn" out there: You get to see it on the news, perfectly legally. Think for example, the footage exposed by Manning. It even comes with mocking comments by the murderers while they kill innocent civilians.
Or rather locking people up trumps protecting children. That is also why they kept running the site for 13 days. By the very definition of the DoJ, they committed child abuse for 13 days. Seems to me the FBI is part of the problem now.
This is not a "Tor" exploit. It is a Firefox exploit against the version of Firefox used in the Tor browser bundle. It may well still be exploitable in current Firefox versions, including the one used in the current Tor browser bundle versions. Otherwise there really would be no point in keeping it secret.
Hence the FBI is actively and knowingly endangering anybody using Firefox. That seems to be legal, but it is hugely unethical.
The FBI does not care about prevention. They care about locking up people. Hence this is exactly as they want it.
Nonsense. They are already in the state of practical tests at 100m (well, they just had complete success at those). You do not get there if you do not have very good indicators that this will work and there are only minor issues to address.
It is a bit hard to get that 700m hill next to the wind-farm in the sea...
That thing with the hill is being done already (for almost 100 years now) where conditions are right. Next to a off-shore wind-farm they are not.
No bullshit grab-for-the-stars (and never get them) waste of money and time, but practical, pragmatic and addressed at real problems. Of course, this will take another 10 years or so to practical deployment, but it is highly likely to work and be both reliable and cost-effective. Things like these drive progress.
Complete nonsense. Everything they offer, you can download for free somewhere. They are turning a profit because they are not too greedy and they are convenient.
Hey, in that scope it is a cool idea!
Wrong. The main reason is technological limits. The current slowdown was well expected by experts and speeds will reach a peak soon. If it was primarily money, then there would be lab-demonstrations that show the possibilities. There are not. BTW, for the last 10...15 years it has not been the transistors that limit speed, but the interconnection. Transistors much, much faster than the ones currently used in CPUs have been demonstrated and are used in RF chips. But nobody has yet come up with something better than copper strip-conductors to distribute the HF (clocks and signals) that flow in today's CPUs. Physics actually says that if you want to keep using electricity and stay mostly 2D, there likely is no better thing in this universe. Of course, optics have some advantages there, but the disadvantages are so severe that > 30 years of research activities into optical computing have yielded nothing usable and they may never do.
So no. It is _not_ money.
Indeed. The surprising thing is how long CPUs kept getting faster, it is absolutely no surprise that is mostly over now. All game-changer technologies have historically followed this model, it quite expected that CPU speeds (and GPU speeds a little later) are not going to increase much more now.
People do not understand what is going on, they only remember pretty impressive growth rates from a short historical period. As they are clueless about the actual subject, they just expect this to be going on and do not recognize that certain scientific breakthroughs can cause a brief period of very fast improvement that then slows down and usually peaks shortly after. This has happened quite often historically and it always goes the same way.
In short: The expectations result from cluelessness.
The answer to that is simple: Nobody can program them, except for very specific tasks. The Transputer (1978) tried it, the Connection machine (1983) tried it. Others have tried in the meantime. Any "supercomputer" today follows this model. Yet, except for very specific tasks (mostly finite-element simulations), these machines are pretty useless. So in answer to your question, where it makes sense it has been done for a long time. It does however not make sense for most applications.
As such, there are some small possibilities for further speed improvement, except for special scenarios. GPUs may still have a few generations with significant speed increases, but CPUs do not. There is room for optimizing cost and power consumption, but when that has happened, then that is it.
Think of this like a hammer or an ax as we know them today: They are finished and there is no way to make them better with reasonable effort. However do not forget that the steel used in them is the result of a few 1000 years of optimization and that they are a very sophisticated product, simple though they may appear to be.
Incidentally, CPUs have not had any dramatic speed increases for about half a decade.