I don't know if it was their idea from the start, but MSR is hugely different from other companies' R&D. They operate more like a university. Researchers are free to work on anything they want, without consideration to whether it will directly effect a Microsoft product or not. It is one of the few places left outside academia where researchers can do basic research in computer science.
I have no way to know if that's right or not, but I'm willing to concede that it's right. I wonder if the problem was that they accomplished nothing of value or if they did actually come up with great ideas, but the non-R&D management above them squelched them. In any event, Microsoft has always struck me as a reactionary rather than visionary, which is exactly why they are pursuing their current strategy of trying to become major players in phones and tablets. Microsoft just waits to see where everybody else in the industry is going and then they follow them and try to pretend that they were there first. In the past that worked pretty well on the PC side of things, but consumers understand phones and tablets enough that they can't get away with that in those areas.
You're painting a picture with pretty broad strokes there, chief. Perhaps it would be useful to explain exactly what part of Asia you are in now because they are not allthe same. Chinese people in Asia, both in China and other places with large Chinese communities like Singapore, believe that Chinese Traditional Medicine is the number one cure for anything not life threatening. You just about have to put a gun to the head of these people to get them to go to Western doctors, who they view as almost witch doctors who prescribe pills for everything. There is some truth to that view in that Western medicine everywhere does tend to lean towards giving a pill for everything, but certainly Chinese Traditional Medicine is not guilty of using antibiotics at all. CTM patients will get some herbal concoction of possibly dubious ingredients but they're definitely not going to Western doctors unless CTM just completely fails and they cannot get better by following it. Unless you have Chinese friends who actually were born and live in Asia, you really cannot understand the resistance towards Western medicine. One of my friends in Taiwan had constant pain for a condition that can only be fixed by surgery but she tried every possible herbal approach towards treating it that existed and they all failed. It took the efforts of me and her mother constantly trying to convince her to get surgery before she would do it and the surgery did fix her problem. This kind of thing just illustrates how some Asians aren't just looking for antibiotics every time they go to the doctor.
Seem quite simple, doesnt it? The fact that cattle, fish and shrimp feed in asia have huge amounts of antibiotics as a "preventive" measure to keep the animal from going sick, and the resistance the bacteria gain dealing in that sick field, and whatever trickles up the food chain doesnt seem to bother anyone, has long money is made. And nobody will care until it is too late. Big pharma also doesnt care, quite by the contrary the patents have long expired, and antibiotics are bought by the shovel, as soon as they stop working they will have then gov "fund" to further develop very expensive nanomeds. This seems like a stupid plot from a bad scifi movie.
This isn't just an Asia thing. You have described at exactly how food production in the USA works. I'm sure that there are other countries where it's the same. Food production in the USA is Big Business and Big Business always gets what it wants. What they want is zero loss and the way to achieve this is to use high amounts of pesticides that kill any bug that dares to get near produce and feed antibiotics to animals to keep them alive long enough to slaughter them.
>Why shouldn't the Chinese people think their government has their best interest at heart? They are seeing everyday evidence of their government working to make their lives better. As contrasted with the US where the government has pursued a stagnant wage policy for over a generation.
Because people still get poisoned and sometimes die when some food manufacturer puts adulterants in the product to save money. Just last week I found an article about how all kinds of meats that would be considered undesirable in the USA were being faked into being "beef". There's also the fact that the government is pretty darn corrupt at all levels and rule of law and property rights aren't respected. There's the fact that for the first time Communist Party leaders are becoming rich and their children are being simply given the spoils of wealth just by virtue of birth. Yes, some thing are better for sure, but you better believe that among educated and internet savvy people there that they know that things could also be a whole lot better. If you're rich, you can do almost anything you want. If you're ordinary, the rules that you may not like still apply to you.
I find that link name a little humorous in that the US has not had an embassy in Iran since some, ahem, "unpleasantness" in the late 1970s. But we do need to keep accepting and educating them because it benefits big business (US universities) and anything that benefits big business can't be bad? Right?
Hulu may work fine in Canada for all I know, but basically I wanted to respond to the bitching about it being a US only service. There is an actual reason for this and it has nothing to do with "America hates your country" or "America is stupid". Foreign rights to American TV shows bring in a lot of money and basically Hulu only works for US viewers because somebody may have bought the rights to the TV show in your country and the deal prevents Hulu from letting you watch it because doing so makes you less inclined to watch on TV, where the rights were paid for. Since the foreign rights buyers might argue next time they need to pay less because Hulu is cutting into their viewers, the only way to protect the revenue streams is to do a "US only" policy for Hulu. Additionally there is some chance that actors, writers, etc. might have to get cut in for additional money if too many new distribution methods are found, so it's just makes it easier on everybody in the US side to have those restrictions.
In the USA, the plaintiff is extremely unlikely to get court and attorney fees awarded, even when the other side has been a complete douchebag. My best friend is an attorney and he explained to me that judges almost never award court and attorney costs, even when the lawsuit should never have happened, because they are afraid that doing so will make people afraid of bringing legitimate cases to court because they might have to pay the other side's fees if they lose. Yes, fees are awarded sometimes in very egregious cases, but these are the exception.
I'm not saying that Edison wasn't smart and didn't accomplish anything, but do keep in mind that in a lot of cases he just simply improved what others did before him, profiting off the heavy lifting that others did. He promoted things that weren't really all that good to begin with such as the current wars. It's known that he took credit for things that were actually done by people who worked for him. And finally, it's not well known today, but you can research how his motion picture patents put the early motion picture business under his total control and it took deliberate, illegal violations of his patents to get the movie industry established in Hollywood. In fact, one of the reasons Hollywood got started was to be completely on the other side of the US from Edison and thus in a place harder for him to control. If I remember correctly the US government eventually had a conversion experience and invalidated those motion picture patents when it became convenient for them to do so because Edison was basically using them to prevent all competition. Then again, maybe he is a perfect example for this kind of discussion but not because he benefited society but precisely because his goal was pure old greed and to use his patents to remove competition so he could make more money.
When you ask a neighbor about Facebook, they give you a confused look. Posting a status update on Twitter is a foreign concept, and most citizens still rely on printed newspapers and radio reports.
This could also be said about China, although they do have their own in country Twitter knock off that does get used and is subjected to heavy government censorship. About all a Chinese person can tell you about Facebook, if they've heard of it at all, is that they are officially blocked from using it.
So what. The USA has over 100 reactors running, and have more nuclear weapons than any other country,
Untrue. Most sources agree that Russia has roughly 1000 more than USA. This is one of the reasons that Putin has been unwilling to reach any agreements to reduce the number of weapons each country has although previous leaders on both sides were able to reach such agreements in the past. Nice try at America bashing buddy, but if you'd like to deal with reality, you can consider that Putin and his government actually believe that if the US builds a missile interceptor base in Eastern Europe that it can singlehandedly stop 100% of the Russian nuclear missiles and open Russia up to complete and utter nuclear annihilation at the hands of the USA, or so they have said in public. You might consider that the US has been talking about having maybe 10 interceptor missiles at such a site and we don't even truly know if the technology will actually work. An 80% kill rate of theoretical Iranian or North Korean missiles aimed at the USA would be disastrous for the unlucky people where the 20% of the missiles hit.
The worry about North Korea is that they are actually stupid enough to potentially launch a nuclear weapon at South Korea, Japan or potentially even US territories should one of their unstable military leaders actually give the order if they were under attack or the guy with the finger on the button just freaks out. What concerns me is not that Kim Jong-un might be running things but that it probably isn't his finger at all on the button and all the years of propaganda, special treatment, and purges of dissent have created a military with a tenuous grip on reality. Just the rumor of an invasion without anything happening in reality might be enough to cause tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people to die via a North Korean nuke. But don't worry, I'm sure that you'll be safe in Euroland while everybody else pays the price for the freedom you enjoy.
I fear the US has more or less decided that the entire world should be operating on less security to protect their interests. And I'm not sure why everybody is playing along with that.
Have you considered the possibility that maybe they aren't playing along with that at all but simply have the good sense to know when to shut up?
I am going to be the cold, hard dose of reality in your situation.
Takedown laws do not exist so one of the unwashed masses (this means you ) can protect their content. They exist so big business can protect whatever the the intellectual property du jour is that they want to be protected.
I can assure you that nobody in the government or judicial system has any interest at all in protecting situations like your web content. Don't know how you missed the memo, but the laws are for the benefit of the rich and corporations. If you were one of those, you'd be protected.
That's what most Americans who've never left the US would say. In practice, there are few places worse. You'd have to work hard to land somewhere worse. China is better than the US, so long as you don't spend time and money opposing the government.
My Chinese friends who live in China certainly don't think it's better. Some of them desire more political freedom, specifically a true multi-party system that would offer some choices. I hear a ton of complaints about corruption in government officials. In the US this gets punished enough that there seems to be a big incentive against it as the fear of getting caught is high. In China, few government officials fear getting caught and they have the idea that the odds are that they either won't get caught or if they don't go too far with the corruption, they can just bribe their way out of it. My friends also have expressed some fear about food contamination with the idea that those responsible will likely never be punished, even if people die from it.
It will be interesting to see how they will handle this. When I visited China, computer security didn't seem to be one of the top priorities among the computer users, so the majority of the population might just not care much about updates.
I can confirm this. My previous job was doing customer support on an email product my company sold (had anti-spam and various other features). We used to host customer mail domains on our servers, so all mail involving our email customers went through us, both from them and to them. We were always getting servers on blacklists because some stupid customer in China had a compromised PC that was sending spam through us. We'd have to contact the customer with some kind of nasty warning email that they if they didn't clean up their servers that we'd have to shut down their access. The impression I got was that nobody in China cared anything about patching their PCs or security in any manner.
One of the reasons that XP might still be widely in use was that it was the last version of Windows that could easily be cracked and distributed and made to look legit to Microsoft's validation servers. Microsoft has backed down from every previous deadline on stopping support of XP so while I do understand why it would be in their best interests to stick to the deadline this time, their reluctance to do so previously makes me think that they'll likely push this one off by yet another year or two as it gets closer to the deadline.
I live in the eastern US and also am an AT&T customer. A few months ago I got blasted awake by an Amber alert in the middle of the night. It was the loudest sound I ever have heard coming from my iPhone. I honestly did not know it was possible for the phone to produce a sound that loud. I was less than thrilled at having received no warning about this being implemented. The next morning I read up on how to disable the alerts. If you haven't received an Amber alert on your phone, disable them now because you definitely do not want your first experience to be your phone screaming like a banshee in the middle of the night.
Looking at the comments in the first link in the original post is useful. One comment says that the only thing the panicked bug reporter knows is that the WLAN password was retrieved in the clear, but it could be that this information actually is encrypted but the retrieval decrypted it. In other words, things may not necessarily be as the original post and the bug reporter suggest. There is a chance that things are exactly as bad as suggested though. At this point only Google can say for sure how it is.
... then having the approval of the worst US president of the 20th century has removed all doubts from my mind. Snowden is definitely in the wrong if Jimmy Carter thinks otherwise.
I'm guessing that you have never served on a jury in the USA. I have twice and it just left me completely cynical about the entire US justice system and the use of juries in general. Literally anything can happen on a jury. A lot of ugly horse trading goes on like "OK, that guy over there wants a conviction on all counts, that woman over there wants him found innocent on all counts but she admits he may be guilty on one count... can we just agree on a guilty verdict on that one count and call it a day?" As the joke goes, juries are made up of people too stupid to get out of serving. The last time I served, I sat in stunned silence in the jury room before we went into court as 3 male members of the jury got onto a contest and tried to top each other as each insisted in turn that he was far stupider about technology than the other 2 and each provided examples to support his contention. The case we heard was a criminal case involving a black defendant and what I could basically describe as property damage and we had a black guy on the jury who was a reverse racist and was very strongly prejudiced against the defendant simply because he was black. It took some smooth talking and pleading by the white foreman to get this guy to agree to our verdict of guilty on 2 counts, innocent on 1 count, as I think the black guy would literally have voted for the death penalty if he could against the defendant. These are the kinds of people in the USA who serve on juries. Do you honestly think that any sane person would roll the dice on that when maybe facing 10+ years if the jury convicts? Plus, a lot of people in juries are obsessive about punishing "evil doers" as they see them and they want the most severe punishment possible given, sometimes arguing for punishment way beyond what the crime should involve, like 10 years for stealing $5 worth of merchandise. The only thing I took away from my service as a juror is that juries are made up mostly of idiots who aren't fit to judge whether the sun will come up tomorrow or not, let alone someone's life or freedom.
Reward the artist by going to see a show and buying some merch. Nothing else really gets back to them in any significant amounts.
This.
I read an interview with Mick Jagger on the BBC website a few years ago and the BBC interviewer asked him about MP3 and digital downloads, figuring that Mick would likely be a stuffy old guy who would rail about how MP3s were killing music and so. Was the interviewer ever mistaken! Mick stated that for the majority of his career the Stones had actually not made all that much money from recordings. He said that there were exceptions in the late 80s into the 90s when labels actually were paying the artists a lot of money, but from his perspective MP3s hadn't changed anything and the Stones made their real money off touring. He said he had no problem with digital downloads. In fact, the Stones long ago got on iTunes and they offer special downloads of selected old concerts on a website they run. Sadly, it's somewhat younger artists like U2 who just do not get it at all and continue to bitch about how things are not what they once were.
I mean, what about the ships clever enough to *not* take the Panama Canal - and follow the longer path? IOT, how many ships did we miss and How close NK is to having a working nuke?
I'll speculate here. A Hong Kong based company won a 25 year contract (still in force as far as I know) to mange container operations in the canal, so I'm guessing that the boat and its North Korean masters probably assumed basically China (let's be realistic here - Hong Kong does what China wants) was running the show there and a North Korean boat would be given a nod and a wink in terms of its cargo inspection. It could also be that the boat captain took this on himself to shorten the journey making the assumption that I previously mentioned and this was something he did on his own, so he tried to kill himself when it became clear that his cargo was going to be found. Remember that although Cuba seems to have violated the UN agreement that nothing at all will be done to them in punishment.
I remember telling a friend on 9-11 that we would do way more damage to OURSELVES with our response to 9-11 than 9-11 or any other terrorist attack would ever do directly. That's the whole point of terrorism, really.
That's not the "point of terrorism" at all. All you have to do around here is spout some sort of line about how "what the government has done is far worse than terrorism" and you get modded up by the morons who agree with you. The point of terrorism is most assuredly not to make you do bad things for yourself. The point of terrorism is to gain a political objective you cannot get through the ballot box or through legal and normal means of working within the system by killing so many people that you make the price of maintaining the status quo higher than those who maintain the status quo are willing to pay. The 9/11 attacks were in part to get US infidel troops out of holy Saudi Arabia, in part to punish the US for it's support for "evil" Israel, and in part to unite the Arab world under a caliph who would just happen to be Osama Bin Laden. I can assure you that Osama and his buddies did not sit around the campfire some months before September 2001 and say "You know, if we pull this off it will make air travel within the US extremely inconvenient, which is, of course, our ultimate goal". The IRA killed people to try to force the non-Catholics to leave Northern Ireland so it could be joined with the Irish Republic. The PLO and similar groups wanted to kill so many Jews that they could either get an independent state for Palestinians or drive all the Jews out of Israel. The Chechen terrorists want to make so many non-Muslim Russians die that those who survive will give them complete independence. The Tamil Tigers tried to kill their way into an independent nation. Those are the point of terrorism, to take by force what cannot be gained without it.
Probably every constitution in the world should be amended to guarantee people the right to private, secure communication. This is probably more important than the right to bear arms when defending people's rights against rogue governments.
Who gets to define "rogue governments"? When George W. Bush was president, the lunatic left was insistent that he "stole" the 2000 election for sure, he probably stole the 2004 Ohio election (yet oddly the Republican candidates were unable to steal the state in 2008 and 2012) and thus the general election, he had no respect for individual rights, wasn't going to leave office willingly, and on and on. Fast forward to today and some of the same people who blew off such talk are now saying that Barack Obama wasn't even born in the USA, is not a citizen, and is thus ineligible to be president, has trampled on everybody's rights, is trying to take your guns away from you, and on and on.
When Chinese hackers stole a load of information about the F-35 it wasn't because they pulled off some righteous hack that required skill, perseverance and a high degree of technical knowledge, but precisely because protection of such sensitive data is sloppier than the good practice guidelines claim it should be.
I worked for the US military many years ago as a civilian programmer and I'd agree with this based on what I saw. I don't want to embarrass the particular branch of the service by naming them, but I used to say that their motto ought to be "Using yesterday's technology today" based on how many antiquated computer systems we had to work on and support. We actually had a system that still used punch cards and when I was in college the course books were already beginning to mock punch cards as being ancient technology. I can say that the government really doesn't want to be incompetent and have bad security, but the powers that be have too much blind faith in civilian contractors and Snowden burned them very badly as a result. The lesson that should be learned from this is exactly what Congress has been saying for years - "We need fewer non-government employees with access to these sensitive programs and their data" - but you'll be able to knock me over with a feather if there's a decrease in contractors as much as 10% as a result of this.
In reality this is a just a case of the following:
Researcher finds that Joe Blow has gone out of town and left the door to his house unlocked and open. Researcher publishes this information in a blog along with the address to the house. House gets robbed. Police hold Researcher responsible. Researcher insists it's not his fault that the house got robbed.
I've come to the conclusion that Putin and Obama have reached some kind of deal. Putin is getting something he wants in exchange for agreeing to neither overtly help Snowden to get to another country nor requiring that Russia hand him over directly to US authorities. I have believed for years that George W. Bush botched the relationship between the US and Russia by being unable to understand the concept of quid pro quo. See, Bush believed that people should just do the right thing because it was right, not because they were going to get anything in return. This is a big part of why Poland, Bulgaria and Ukraine quickly jumped in to provide troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. They thought they were going to get visa free US travel in exchange. They pulled out when they realized that Bush was literally incapable of understanding that he owed them something in return. Putin somehow got burned by this too, although I have no idea what he wanted, and he has not forgotten it. Russia isn't going to provide any travel docs to Snowden, offer him asylum in Russia or hand him over to the USA. Venezuela won't send a ship because it fears that the US would just board it or maybe even sink it in international waters. My guess is that Venezuela will offer him a travel document that the Russians will accept, at which point they'll casually mention to their American friends "Oh by the way, Snowden is on flight XXX bound for Venezuela. Here's the flight path." and the US may plan an interception over international waters once it leaves European airspace. The Russians will then claim publicly that they are shocked, yes shocked, at this violation of international air space, which provides the plausible deniability they need.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if it was their idea from the start, but MSR is hugely different from other companies' R&D. They operate more like a university. Researchers are free to work on anything they want, without consideration to whether it will directly effect a Microsoft product or not. It is one of the few places left outside academia where researchers can do basic research in computer science.
I have no way to know if that's right or not, but I'm willing to concede that it's right. I wonder if the problem was that they accomplished nothing of value or if they did actually come up with great ideas, but the non-R&D management above them squelched them. In any event, Microsoft has always struck me as a reactionary rather than visionary, which is exactly why they are pursuing their current strategy of trying to become major players in phones and tablets. Microsoft just waits to see where everybody else in the industry is going and then they follow them and try to pretend that they were there first. In the past that worked pretty well on the PC side of things, but consumers understand phones and tablets enough that they can't get away with that in those areas.
You're painting a picture with pretty broad strokes there, chief. Perhaps it would be useful to explain exactly what part of Asia you are in now because they are not allthe same. Chinese people in Asia, both in China and other places with large Chinese communities like Singapore, believe that Chinese Traditional Medicine is the number one cure for anything not life threatening. You just about have to put a gun to the head of these people to get them to go to Western doctors, who they view as almost witch doctors who prescribe pills for everything. There is some truth to that view in that Western medicine everywhere does tend to lean towards giving a pill for everything, but certainly Chinese Traditional Medicine is not guilty of using antibiotics at all. CTM patients will get some herbal concoction of possibly dubious ingredients but they're definitely not going to Western doctors unless CTM just completely fails and they cannot get better by following it. Unless you have Chinese friends who actually were born and live in Asia, you really cannot understand the resistance towards Western medicine. One of my friends in Taiwan had constant pain for a condition that can only be fixed by surgery but she tried every possible herbal approach towards treating it that existed and they all failed. It took the efforts of me and her mother constantly trying to convince her to get surgery before she would do it and the surgery did fix her problem. This kind of thing just illustrates how some Asians aren't just looking for antibiotics every time they go to the doctor.
Seem quite simple, doesnt it? The fact that cattle, fish and shrimp feed in asia have huge amounts of antibiotics as a "preventive" measure to keep the animal from going sick, and the resistance the bacteria gain dealing in that sick field, and whatever trickles up the food chain doesnt seem to bother anyone, has long money is made. And nobody will care until it is too late. Big pharma also doesnt care, quite by the contrary the patents have long expired, and antibiotics are bought by the shovel, as soon as they stop working they will have then gov "fund" to further develop very expensive nanomeds. This seems like a stupid plot from a bad scifi movie.
This isn't just an Asia thing. You have described at exactly how food production in the USA works. I'm sure that there are other countries where it's the same. Food production in the USA is Big Business and Big Business always gets what it wants. What they want is zero loss and the way to achieve this is to use high amounts of pesticides that kill any bug that dares to get near produce and feed antibiotics to animals to keep them alive long enough to slaughter them.
>Why shouldn't the Chinese people think their government has their best interest at heart? They are seeing everyday evidence of their government working to make their lives better. As contrasted with the US where the government has pursued a stagnant wage policy for over a generation.
Because people still get poisoned and sometimes die when some food manufacturer puts adulterants in the product to save money. Just last week I found an article about how all kinds of meats that would be considered undesirable in the USA were being faked into being "beef". There's also the fact that the government is pretty darn corrupt at all levels and rule of law and property rights aren't respected. There's the fact that for the first time Communist Party leaders are becoming rich and their children are being simply given the spoils of wealth just by virtue of birth. Yes, some thing are better for sure, but you better believe that among educated and internet savvy people there that they know that things could also be a whole lot better. If you're rich, you can do almost anything you want. If you're ordinary, the rules that you may not like still apply to you.
You can find the quote here: http://iran.usembassy.gov/education.html
I find that link name a little humorous in that the US has not had an embassy in Iran since some, ahem, "unpleasantness" in the late 1970s. But we do need to keep accepting and educating them because it benefits big business (US universities) and anything that benefits big business can't be bad? Right?
Hulu may work fine in Canada for all I know, but basically I wanted to respond to the bitching about it being a US only service. There is an actual reason for this and it has nothing to do with "America hates your country" or "America is stupid". Foreign rights to American TV shows bring in a lot of money and basically Hulu only works for US viewers because somebody may have bought the rights to the TV show in your country and the deal prevents Hulu from letting you watch it because doing so makes you less inclined to watch on TV, where the rights were paid for. Since the foreign rights buyers might argue next time they need to pay less because Hulu is cutting into their viewers, the only way to protect the revenue streams is to do a "US only" policy for Hulu. Additionally there is some chance that actors, writers, etc. might have to get cut in for additional money if too many new distribution methods are found, so it's just makes it easier on everybody in the US side to have those restrictions.
In the USA, the plaintiff is extremely unlikely to get court and attorney fees awarded, even when the other side has been a complete douchebag. My best friend is an attorney and he explained to me that judges almost never award court and attorney costs, even when the lawsuit should never have happened, because they are afraid that doing so will make people afraid of bringing legitimate cases to court because they might have to pay the other side's fees if they lose. Yes, fees are awarded sometimes in very egregious cases, but these are the exception.
I'm not saying that Edison wasn't smart and didn't accomplish anything, but do keep in mind that in a lot of cases he just simply improved what others did before him, profiting off the heavy lifting that others did. He promoted things that weren't really all that good to begin with such as the current wars. It's known that he took credit for things that were actually done by people who worked for him. And finally, it's not well known today, but you can research how his motion picture patents put the early motion picture business under his total control and it took deliberate, illegal violations of his patents to get the movie industry established in Hollywood. In fact, one of the reasons Hollywood got started was to be completely on the other side of the US from Edison and thus in a place harder for him to control. If I remember correctly the US government eventually had a conversion experience and invalidated those motion picture patents when it became convenient for them to do so because Edison was basically using them to prevent all competition. Then again, maybe he is a perfect example for this kind of discussion but not because he benefited society but precisely because his goal was pure old greed and to use his patents to remove competition so he could make more money.
When you ask a neighbor about Facebook, they give you a confused look. Posting a status update on Twitter is a foreign concept, and most citizens still rely on printed newspapers and radio reports.
This could also be said about China, although they do have their own in country Twitter knock off that does get used and is subjected to heavy government censorship. About all a Chinese person can tell you about Facebook, if they've heard of it at all, is that they are officially blocked from using it.
So what. The USA has over 100 reactors running, and have more nuclear weapons than any other country,
Untrue. Most sources agree that Russia has roughly 1000 more than USA. This is one of the reasons that Putin has been unwilling to reach any agreements to reduce the number of weapons each country has although previous leaders on both sides were able to reach such agreements in the past. Nice try at America bashing buddy, but if you'd like to deal with reality, you can consider that Putin and his government actually believe that if the US builds a missile interceptor base in Eastern Europe that it can singlehandedly stop 100% of the Russian nuclear missiles and open Russia up to complete and utter nuclear annihilation at the hands of the USA, or so they have said in public. You might consider that the US has been talking about having maybe 10 interceptor missiles at such a site and we don't even truly know if the technology will actually work. An 80% kill rate of theoretical Iranian or North Korean missiles aimed at the USA would be disastrous for the unlucky people where the 20% of the missiles hit.
The worry about North Korea is that they are actually stupid enough to potentially launch a nuclear weapon at South Korea, Japan or potentially even US territories should one of their unstable military leaders actually give the order if they were under attack or the guy with the finger on the button just freaks out. What concerns me is not that Kim Jong-un might be running things but that it probably isn't his finger at all on the button and all the years of propaganda, special treatment, and purges of dissent have created a military with a tenuous grip on reality. Just the rumor of an invasion without anything happening in reality might be enough to cause tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people to die via a North Korean nuke. But don't worry, I'm sure that you'll be safe in Euroland while everybody else pays the price for the freedom you enjoy.
I fear the US has more or less decided that the entire world should be operating on less security to protect their interests. And I'm not sure why everybody is playing along with that.
Have you considered the possibility that maybe they aren't playing along with that at all but simply have the good sense to know when to shut up?
I am going to be the cold, hard dose of reality in your situation.
Takedown laws do not exist so one of the unwashed masses (this means you ) can protect their content. They exist so big business can protect whatever the the intellectual property du jour is that they want to be protected.
I can assure you that nobody in the government or judicial system has any interest at all in protecting situations like your web content. Don't know how you missed the memo, but the laws are for the benefit of the rich and corporations. If you were one of those, you'd be protected.
That's what most Americans who've never left the US would say. In practice, there are few places worse. You'd have to work hard to land somewhere worse. China is better than the US, so long as you don't spend time and money opposing the government.
My Chinese friends who live in China certainly don't think it's better. Some of them desire more political freedom, specifically a true multi-party system that would offer some choices. I hear a ton of complaints about corruption in government officials. In the US this gets punished enough that there seems to be a big incentive against it as the fear of getting caught is high. In China, few government officials fear getting caught and they have the idea that the odds are that they either won't get caught or if they don't go too far with the corruption, they can just bribe their way out of it. My friends also have expressed some fear about food contamination with the idea that those responsible will likely never be punished, even if people die from it.
It will be interesting to see how they will handle this. When I visited China, computer security didn't seem to be one of the top priorities among the computer users, so the majority of the population might just not care much about updates.
I can confirm this. My previous job was doing customer support on an email product my company sold (had anti-spam and various other features). We used to host customer mail domains on our servers, so all mail involving our email customers went through us, both from them and to them. We were always getting servers on blacklists because some stupid customer in China had a compromised PC that was sending spam through us. We'd have to contact the customer with some kind of nasty warning email that they if they didn't clean up their servers that we'd have to shut down their access. The impression I got was that nobody in China cared anything about patching their PCs or security in any manner.
One of the reasons that XP might still be widely in use was that it was the last version of Windows that could easily be cracked and distributed and made to look legit to Microsoft's validation servers. Microsoft has backed down from every previous deadline on stopping support of XP so while I do understand why it would be in their best interests to stick to the deadline this time, their reluctance to do so previously makes me think that they'll likely push this one off by yet another year or two as it gets closer to the deadline.
I live in the eastern US and also am an AT&T customer. A few months ago I got blasted awake by an Amber alert in the middle of the night. It was the loudest sound I ever have heard coming from my iPhone. I honestly did not know it was possible for the phone to produce a sound that loud. I was less than thrilled at having received no warning about this being implemented. The next morning I read up on how to disable the alerts. If you haven't received an Amber alert on your phone, disable them now because you definitely do not want your first experience to be your phone screaming like a banshee in the middle of the night.
Looking at the comments in the first link in the original post is useful. One comment says that the only thing the panicked bug reporter knows is that the WLAN password was retrieved in the clear, but it could be that this information actually is encrypted but the retrieval decrypted it. In other words, things may not necessarily be as the original post and the bug reporter suggest. There is a chance that things are exactly as bad as suggested though. At this point only Google can say for sure how it is.
... then having the approval of the worst US president of the 20th century has removed all doubts from my mind. Snowden is definitely in the wrong if Jimmy Carter thinks otherwise.
I'm guessing that you have never served on a jury in the USA. I have twice and it just left me completely cynical about the entire US justice system and the use of juries in general. Literally anything can happen on a jury. A lot of ugly horse trading goes on like "OK, that guy over there wants a conviction on all counts, that woman over there wants him found innocent on all counts but she admits he may be guilty on one count... can we just agree on a guilty verdict on that one count and call it a day?" As the joke goes, juries are made up of people too stupid to get out of serving. The last time I served, I sat in stunned silence in the jury room before we went into court as 3 male members of the jury got onto a contest and tried to top each other as each insisted in turn that he was far stupider about technology than the other 2 and each provided examples to support his contention. The case we heard was a criminal case involving a black defendant and what I could basically describe as property damage and we had a black guy on the jury who was a reverse racist and was very strongly prejudiced against the defendant simply because he was black. It took some smooth talking and pleading by the white foreman to get this guy to agree to our verdict of guilty on 2 counts, innocent on 1 count, as I think the black guy would literally have voted for the death penalty if he could against the defendant. These are the kinds of people in the USA who serve on juries. Do you honestly think that any sane person would roll the dice on that when maybe facing 10+ years if the jury convicts? Plus, a lot of people in juries are obsessive about punishing "evil doers" as they see them and they want the most severe punishment possible given, sometimes arguing for punishment way beyond what the crime should involve, like 10 years for stealing $5 worth of merchandise. The only thing I took away from my service as a juror is that juries are made up mostly of idiots who aren't fit to judge whether the sun will come up tomorrow or not, let alone someone's life or freedom.
Reward the artist by going to see a show and buying some merch. Nothing else really gets back to them in any significant amounts.
This.
I read an interview with Mick Jagger on the BBC website a few years ago and the BBC interviewer asked him about MP3 and digital downloads, figuring that Mick would likely be a stuffy old guy who would rail about how MP3s were killing music and so. Was the interviewer ever mistaken! Mick stated that for the majority of his career the Stones had actually not made all that much money from recordings. He said that there were exceptions in the late 80s into the 90s when labels actually were paying the artists a lot of money, but from his perspective MP3s hadn't changed anything and the Stones made their real money off touring. He said he had no problem with digital downloads. In fact, the Stones long ago got on iTunes and they offer special downloads of selected old concerts on a website they run. Sadly, it's somewhat younger artists like U2 who just do not get it at all and continue to bitch about how things are not what they once were.
I mean, what about the ships clever enough to *not* take the Panama Canal - and follow the longer path? IOT, how many ships did we miss and How close NK is to having a working nuke?
I'll speculate here. A Hong Kong based company won a 25 year contract (still in force as far as I know) to mange container operations in the canal, so I'm guessing that the boat and its North Korean masters probably assumed basically China (let's be realistic here - Hong Kong does what China wants) was running the show there and a North Korean boat would be given a nod and a wink in terms of its cargo inspection. It could also be that the boat captain took this on himself to shorten the journey making the assumption that I previously mentioned and this was something he did on his own, so he tried to kill himself when it became clear that his cargo was going to be found. Remember that although Cuba seems to have violated the UN agreement that nothing at all will be done to them in punishment.
I remember telling a friend on 9-11 that we would do way more damage to OURSELVES with our response to 9-11 than 9-11 or any other terrorist attack would ever do directly. That's the whole point of terrorism, really.
That's not the "point of terrorism" at all. All you have to do around here is spout some sort of line about how "what the government has done is far worse than terrorism" and you get modded up by the morons who agree with you. The point of terrorism is most assuredly not to make you do bad things for yourself. The point of terrorism is to gain a political objective you cannot get through the ballot box or through legal and normal means of working within the system by killing so many people that you make the price of maintaining the status quo higher than those who maintain the status quo are willing to pay. The 9/11 attacks were in part to get US infidel troops out of holy Saudi Arabia, in part to punish the US for it's support for "evil" Israel, and in part to unite the Arab world under a caliph who would just happen to be Osama Bin Laden. I can assure you that Osama and his buddies did not sit around the campfire some months before September 2001 and say "You know, if we pull this off it will make air travel within the US extremely inconvenient, which is, of course, our ultimate goal". The IRA killed people to try to force the non-Catholics to leave Northern Ireland so it could be joined with the Irish Republic. The PLO and similar groups wanted to kill so many Jews that they could either get an independent state for Palestinians or drive all the Jews out of Israel. The Chechen terrorists want to make so many non-Muslim Russians die that those who survive will give them complete independence. The Tamil Tigers tried to kill their way into an independent nation. Those are the point of terrorism, to take by force what cannot be gained without it.
Probably every constitution in the world should be amended to guarantee people the right to private, secure communication. This is probably more important than the right to bear arms when defending people's rights against rogue governments.
Who gets to define "rogue governments"? When George W. Bush was president, the lunatic left was insistent that he "stole" the 2000 election for sure, he probably stole the 2004 Ohio election (yet oddly the Republican candidates were unable to steal the state in 2008 and 2012) and thus the general election, he had no respect for individual rights, wasn't going to leave office willingly, and on and on. Fast forward to today and some of the same people who blew off such talk are now saying that Barack Obama wasn't even born in the USA, is not a citizen, and is thus ineligible to be president, has trampled on everybody's rights, is trying to take your guns away from you, and on and on.
When Chinese hackers stole a load of information about the F-35 it wasn't because they pulled off some righteous hack that required skill, perseverance and a high degree of technical knowledge, but precisely because protection of such sensitive data is sloppier than the good practice guidelines claim it should be.
I worked for the US military many years ago as a civilian programmer and I'd agree with this based on what I saw. I don't want to embarrass the particular branch of the service by naming them, but I used to say that their motto ought to be "Using yesterday's technology today" based on how many antiquated computer systems we had to work on and support. We actually had a system that still used punch cards and when I was in college the course books were already beginning to mock punch cards as being ancient technology. I can say that the government really doesn't want to be incompetent and have bad security, but the powers that be have too much blind faith in civilian contractors and Snowden burned them very badly as a result. The lesson that should be learned from this is exactly what Congress has been saying for years - "We need fewer non-government employees with access to these sensitive programs and their data" - but you'll be able to knock me over with a feather if there's a decrease in contractors as much as 10% as a result of this.
In reality this is a just a case of the following:
Researcher finds that Joe Blow has gone out of town and left the door to his house unlocked and open. Researcher publishes this information in a blog along with the address to the house. House gets robbed. Police hold Researcher responsible. Researcher insists it's not his fault that the house got robbed.
Yes it really is that simple.
I've come to the conclusion that Putin and Obama have reached some kind of deal. Putin is getting something he wants in exchange for agreeing to neither overtly help Snowden to get to another country nor requiring that Russia hand him over directly to US authorities. I have believed for years that George W. Bush botched the relationship between the US and Russia by being unable to understand the concept of quid pro quo. See, Bush believed that people should just do the right thing because it was right, not because they were going to get anything in return. This is a big part of why Poland, Bulgaria and Ukraine quickly jumped in to provide troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. They thought they were going to get visa free US travel in exchange. They pulled out when they realized that Bush was literally incapable of understanding that he owed them something in return. Putin somehow got burned by this too, although I have no idea what he wanted, and he has not forgotten it. Russia isn't going to provide any travel docs to Snowden, offer him asylum in Russia or hand him over to the USA. Venezuela won't send a ship because it fears that the US would just board it or maybe even sink it in international waters. My guess is that Venezuela will offer him a travel document that the Russians will accept, at which point they'll casually mention to their American friends "Oh by the way, Snowden is on flight XXX bound for Venezuela. Here's the flight path." and the US may plan an interception over international waters once it leaves European airspace. The Russians will then claim publicly that they are shocked, yes shocked, at this violation of international air space, which provides the plausible deniability they need.