Let's also not forget all the other ways GoDaddy sucks:

• So much up-selling a car dealer would blush
• Obnoxious TV advertisements that are straight out of Idiocracy
• Customer service worse than the post office or a bank
• That whole elephant-killing thing.

So fuck GoDaddy. There's plenty of registrars with better service that cost less anyway.

I'm confident that even with expensive and difficult processes it'll still happen. Look at some of the treatments for Chron's Disease- there's a med that a friend of mine uses that's massively complex and extremely expensive, but allows her to essentially live a normal life. It's thousands of dollars a month, so something half the price could still be very profitable if it still works properly.

Certainly a lot of generics manufacturers might avoid the more complex drugs, but plenty will take a look, and possibly new companies will get in on the act too.

If you read the summary, it says they are already producing these molecules via cell cultures.

A protein is a VERY complex molecule and simply inserting a gene into a yeast strain might not produce a protein that is similar enough to what humans make to be viable as a drug.

Wow. That's like... four illegal downloads!

1. a lot of financial institutions would rather not it be public knowledge that they have problems in their security systems, etc. they try to hush things up without getting the cops involved.

2. the cops sometimes will collude with them to hush things up. see 'The Asylum' by Leah McGrath Goodman and NYMEX (yes, NYMEX from Trading Places)

3. at the highest echelon, the notion of what is legal and illegal gets distorted and fooled with, by lobbyists, payed-for intellectuals, and the super rich. so that to date there has been little-to-no prosecution of the people in the CDO, mortgage securities, robo signing, foreclosure fraud, and housing bubble system. experts and authors like Roger Lowenstein spill buckets of ink trying to prove that no crime took place, even though 2 trillion dollars magically disappeared into hedge funds and investment banks offshore accounts in 2008, with the help of the taxpayer.

4. take number 3 and just ... multiply it. well. did you know, for example, that the guy who ran Nymex was, directly before he ran Nymex, the head government regulator of Nymex? And that he let Nymex do stuff that it shouldn't have been doing, and then they hired him out of his government job and gave him a huge raise? there are thousands of cases like that that never receive media attention.

in other words, people DO get away with that sort of thing, all the time.
and the best way to get away with it is to have something like 'CEO' or 'Board Chairman' on your resume.

You know, there is never just one cockroach...

This "controversy" is largely driven by War on Terror scammers who want to 1) set up a bureaucratic lobbyist-driven police state gravy train, and 2) loot the treasury using War on Terror hype as a pretext, much as they have done with Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran. If you think that it is a new phenomenon to use the results of scientific research for nefarious purposes, or that the only major precedent is nuclear arms proliferation you are quite mistaken. Next time you have a few hours of free time and are near a university chemistry library with a hard-copy of Chemical Abstracts that goes back 100 years or so, I highly recommend browsing through it looking for the nastiest substances you can think of. They're in there, recipes and all.

We really need to stop believing all that horse shit just because some pompous windbag politician says it's true. Scientists, who know the literature, are justifiably reticent to cooperate with that crap unless their political aspirations demand it.

A great deal of modern science comes from the practice of alchemy, which begat chemistry and (less directly) biology. And a lot of what alchemists did looked like what modern scientists do: they had laboratories, they did experiments, they weighed and measured and otherwise quantified their results, they developed theories consistent with their observations. Similarly, modern astronomy and much of physics grew out of the work of astrologers, who, although they obviously couldn't experiment on the subjects of their observation, did take precise, repeated measurements of the apparent motions of celestial bodies, and developed mathematically rigorous models with considerable predictive power.

So what distinguishes the alchemist or astrologer from the modern scientist? The sharing of knowledge. Alchemy and astrology spread knowledge, if at all, by the apprenticeship system, in which well-respected practicioners would take on a small number of apprentices, swear them to secrecy, and slowly teach them the secrets of (their particular version of) the art, often with considerable penalties for revealing this knowledge to anyone outside the circle; the apprentices would then do the same in turn. The very idea of anything like the modern system of peer-reviewed, widely disseminated publication would have been anathema to them. The walls started to crumble during the late Renaissance period and were more or less completely down by the mid-eighteenth century, and thus modern science was born.

Since then we've seen incremental improvements, of which the internet and open access -- fought tooth and nail by certain journal publishers, who used to be allies of the scientist's labor of spreading knowledge, but have now become the last gatekeepers of the alchemical worldview -- are among the most recent and the most successful. But the basic idea is centuries old. It's thoroughly tested, and it works, in a way that the old mysticism, for all its occasional brilliance, never could. And any attempt to drag us back to the days of sages locking up their knowledge behind guild walls must be fought tooth and nail, or science itself will be in danger.

It's the excuse that is inexcusable. Anyone who wishes to make use of this, or other research, has to have a lab and funding, whether nefarious or not. If you have that level of resources, you can bribe people, infiltrate, recreate the research from scratch, etc. Pretending that hiding the information from general scientific publication is a form of security is delusional at best and intellectually dishonest at worst.

I get your point, but I suspect you are missing mine. Forget nuclear weapons, they are a red herring in the current discussion. It is a huge stretch of the imagination to expect that "terrorists" can cause a pandemic with virus genetically engineered in a lab. It is far too expensive and there are myriad factors that decelerate pandemics, which is why they are so rare. More to my point, that there is plenty of knowledge already accumulated over several generations, "terrorists" would be better off getting virus samples from several origins in the field (e.g. pig and chicken farms) and crossing them in Third World pig and chicken ranches at random, the more strains mixed in the better. That would eventually yield highly infectious strains by ordinary natural selection. They could then harvest samples from locations where the most people got cross infected and do it again, iterating until they have some suitably nasty specimens. Scientific censorship is a moot point. More than enough information is out there for all sorts of mischief, whether nuclear, biological, or chemical (NBC). This "controversy" is plain old propaganda for the purposes of political manipulation, career advancement, and corruption, nothing more. We should stop believing this shit.

Also, don't underestimate the stuff in Chemical Abstracts and related sources.

From TFA:

The system-on-chip (SoC) solution can accurately distinguish between objects that appear virtually identical using traditional red-green-blue imaging chips.

The sentence immediately preceding that one, claims the product senses outside the visual spectrum ("hyper-spectral") and that it can perform remote spectral analysis, but somehow it uses just a good ol' RGB sensor.

Yes, it says that it can differentiate things that a traditional RGB sensor cannot. That means it's NOT a "good ol' RGB sensor".

Color cameras are just black and white ones with a set of filters over the pixels. Traditional color cameras use red, green and blue filters in a Bayer pattern. You can make a "hyperspectral" camera by using narrower filters of specific wavelengths to detect light at those wavelengths. For example, if you know that corn and someone else differ at a certain wavelength, use a filter at that wavelength.

You can also make a hyperspectral line imager by using a slit instead of a round aperture and putting a grating or prism behind it. That turns the slit image into a two-D "image" where the slit is broken down by color. One dimension is along the line, the second is by color. Move the camera so the slit covers the desired imaging area and record the spectrum at each "pixel" in the resulting image. Google for "CAP" and "Archer".

What are they talking about? The article says absolutely nothing about differentiating hand-rolled cigarettes, nothing about tobacco, and nothing about marijuana.

Doesn't work this way. When they find the plants on the property of the official with the government connections, they won't arrest anyone and the local prosecutor will quietly decline to file charges. Nor will they do any civil forfeitures.

And when they find the exact same plants on the property of the hispanic/black guy's property, or that redneck fellow who has already had a few run ins with the law, that's when they slam on the cuffs and knock the suspect around a bit. And charge him with a crime, and take his property.

It will never even occur to the government officials doing this that what they are doing is hippo-critical. After all, they "know" the black/hispanic/white trash guy must be guilty of something, even if not this particular thing. And they "know" that judge or police chief is innocent or a good guy that deserves a break, even if the pot garden looks deliberately cultivated.

The benefit of a free market is that it does the best job at allocating limited resources. Right now 3G and 4G technology is expensive to implement. So it makes sense that it would be put to first use in a place where there is the fastest payback. All during the roll out of these technologies the prices become better known and cheaper. That allows the technology to spread. Think of it this way. Part of your carrier bill helps to pay for all of those towers you pass as you go about your daily life. The more people using that tower the cheaper it is to use it. Now if you live somewhere so remote that you and 5 families you know are the only ones using the tower you would either have to pay more for modern technology or wait until the tech gets cheaper. This is a perfect example of a free market working to allocate limited resources.

The article doesn't say cellular voice coverage isn't available there - it says cellular data coverage isn't there. The aren't the same thing, not even close. Not to mention, the lack of cellular data coverage isn't the same thing as lack of internet access.

I can!
Instantaneous access to current market prices. Farmers who have this access have reported much better returns on their harvests.
Access to emergency services incase of an accident. Some ranches around here don't have even basic cell access.
Instant access to veterinary, horticultural, ect... resources. "Never seen this bug before, is it good or bad for my crops? If I don't squish now will I have to napalm my field later?"
Sound and image recognition programs. Not many people can tell the different between a crow's mating call and their "Holyshit it's a bear!" call.
Maps.
Repair resources. Not everyone knows their quad bolt by bolt, knowing your kawasaki has a loose clutch linkage can save a lot of walking.
Entertainment. Not all cowboys find the great outdoors so incredibly breathtaking that they never get bored, and a horse can navigate by itself better than any californian driver.

It is the free market at work. Not enough people out there to justify building the infrastructure. Less people, less money.

There might not be enough people to justify it for the profit motives of those companies, but those motives are by nature selfish and don't give a damn about the larger socioeconomic picture. What might those few people be able to contribute to society if they actually enjoyed the same connectedness as their urban comrades?

And how much money might be sunk into providing higher-capacity connectivity to those people, only to find that that they don't contribute anything, tovarisch?

Like the GP said, the free market has tunnel vision and doesn't fix shit.

Rather, it doesn't make the decisions you want it to make. The people living there choose to do so, knowing the various trade-offs that come with that. They have the pluses of better air quality and less noise, and the minuses of crappy connectivity and more-expensive groceries. I'm sure pizza delivery service sucks out there, too. Going to force Dominos to open stores out in those parts of Nevada where population density drops below half a person per square mile?

Of course. Because Internet Connectivity is the same thing has having a Domino's store nearby.

They are both luxuries, yes. Hard as it is for those of us in the tech world to grasp, there are quite a few people who can get along just fine without a network connection. For that matter, we're not talking about connectivity vs. lack of it, we're talking about broadband vs. dialup/satellite. Actually, the original article was about a lack of 3G coverage. These aren't areas where you're isolated from the world because you can't use email or instant messaging, these are areas where you can't watch YouTube on your cell phone. Call me hard-hearted if you like, but that doesn't come close to justifying intervention in the market, by my standards.

You are, of course, right when you say that the market doesn't make the decision I want it to make. Duh. It makes the decisions that the companies who make up the market want to make. Which, in turn, are predicated on the needs and desires of customers in said market.

Now that we have the Captain Obvious commentary out of the way, why don't we focus on the actual problem?

Your assertion was that the free market didn't "fix" the situation. My point was that just because you think something is a problem, doesn't mean that it is a problem that requires fixing.

Namely, that Internet connectivity these days is a lot more like electricity and roads: a fundamental infrastructure whose cost is far outweighed by the network effect it promotes. At that point, the question of ROI trumps all, and arguing that the market knows best is a ridiculously short-sighted answer.

That's your as-yet-unproven assertion. Failing to see the same things that you do does not qualify as "short-sighted" unless those things are actually there.

Finally, your argument that people choose to live there means they ought to just suck it up... even ignoring the incredible amount of Not-My-Problem attitude that this displays,

As I pointed out, everyone has costs that they have to "suck up", as well as benefits, based on where they live. Those people living someplace should bear those costs as well as reaping those benefits. There's already far too much subsidizing of some areas at the expense of others. We should be rolling such things back, not adding more.

it also ignores the fact that moving has significant costs attached to it: emotional costs of rebuilding your social life, monetary costs of actually moving, and even the requirement of actually finding and having a job in the new area before moving. Those are all real costs that are easy to quantify for someone who is pondering moving.

Putting aside the idea that people in urban areas should be subsidizing wireless broadband for people in rural (or in many cases, near-wilderness) areas in order to spare those folks the costs of moving out of such places, which i absolutely reject, I think you have a major misconception about who lives in these areas. Although I suppose it's theoretically possible, I highly doubt there is anyone living out in the middle of the Mojave, miles away from anybody else, due to being too poor to move to the city; anyone without the ability (and requisite income) to regularly visit a population center for supplies is going to die. Anyone else would save money by moving into town. In Nevada, at least (where I'm at, hence my example bias), the major source of rural employment is mining, whose average salary is almost double the overall average for the state. They don't need other people subsidizing them. Another reason people live in those regions is to get away from the city. Well, if the most important things to you are clean air, privacy, elbow room, being able to see the stars at night, and being able to fire off your guns without anyone caring, go for it. Just be prepared for poor wireless coverage, and don't ask other people to pay for it.

Taking builk testing responsibilities off developers so they can work on more important stuff.

Not quite. Developers often make poor testers. Software tends to get debugged and tuned for the way developers use the software, which is not necessarily how others (in particular customers) will use the software. How many developers have written a piece of code, tested it conscientiously themselves, presented it to others expecting no problems, and watched these other folks find serious bugs within minutes?

Having dedicated testers between developers and customers yields better products, even when the developers take testing seriously.

Actually, that is not necessarily true. I get what you are trying to say, but you seem to gloss over the differences between QA, manual tester, and what the OP was referring to: Software Test Engineer.

To highlight some of the differences:

QA is responsible for "assuring quality". This is different from QC which is "checking quality". More often than not, a good QA is a process expert, with the assumption being that good processes ensure good quality. Their goal is to avoid the problem, not to detect the problem or fix the problem. Where the line gets blurred is the fact that a QA often performs the role of a manual tester. This usually depends on the size of the team.

Manual testing is usually QC - understanding what to test, how to test, and going ahead and testing it. They start off by translating the requirement specification (or user stories if you are agile) into a suite of test cases, add other test cases that might be non-functional or regression related, and finally test the system manually every time before it is released to customers.

Generally (although not always true), a "test engineer" is more of a developer than a tester. They are usually tasked to develop test frameworks using third party tools or even creating their own framework. The former usually involves scripting and lightweight coding and the latter can involve full blown coding. They can be developing a test framework for executing and managing unit tests and functional tests (often white box), and integration tests, regression tests, and performance tests (often black box). While many project teams skimp on devoting this much engineering to testing, it can give huge returns, perhaps even better returns than development can after a certain point.

To be fair, the OP has not mentioned anything else beyond "software test engineer" so the role might very well be manual testing. However, the word "engineer" leads me to believe it is more of a automation role. Having said this, companies often embellish their titles with "engineer" to make it sounds weighty.

A tester needs to be prepared to take home less pay and expect high turnover in his/her dept (if he/she doesn't leave first).

We have a QA dept and they don't stick around more than a year, tops. By the time they really get into the product, they're either fed up with the pay, the hours, or they get switched to another product. QA catches few important bugs because we (a) treat them as second-class citizens and (b) we don't involve them at the beginning of the design cycle.

I've also seen some pretty brutish egos among fellow devs wear out QA staff. Do you want to subject yourself to that?

Sometimes professional testers make poor testers. I worked on a project with a professional tester who did her job conscientiously, wrote test procedures and methodically exercised the software. We also hired some college kids during the summer and assigned them to test the software. They just tried things. The kids found a lot more bugs than the tester.

If you "Like" something on Facebook, Facebook has every right to let your Facebook Friends know you liked that thing.

Perhaps people are finally realizing that the limits placed on corporations regarding the handling of personal data is grossly in favor of the monentization and re-use of their information for purposes which the majority of people would disagree with? If that is so then any government claiming to be "of and by the people" should draft legislation assuring that the traditions and customs of its citizens be upheld.

This case goes to the heart of that, by weighing a legitimate public interest against a private interest which is worth many billions of dollars and built entirely on a misconception by the public of what information may be shared, and what may not be shared. Let's be clear here: Facebook's entire privacy and business model has been under intense scrutiny by privacy advocates because it often intentionally misleads its users, often reverses itself in the face of criticism, and has been a frequent target of high-profile publicity as people became aware of it. All of this strongly indicates that the people using the Facebook service are fully aware (or told) how this information may be used. Now that it is about to become a publicly traded company, it seems essential this matter of law be resolved.

Afterall, once something is on the internet, it doesn't leave. That can be a real problem for anyone searching for a job, should the wrong thing become public. And by real problem, I mean real unemployment and personal hardship. This is not just a matter of "privacy" -- it has fast become a matter of survival.

I know the officially sanctioned slashdot view point is that the user is a stupid worthless victim, or even the product (derp), but I think that when a company acts in a way the majority of users wouldn't expect, despite that they agreed to the incomprehensible terms and conditions, and despite getting the service for "free", then there is something amiss, and buyer beware isn't enough.

Stronger data protection laws are needed to prevent the total rape of people's privacy. In some countries for example, it is illegal to have a box ticked by default to opt into something, and what social networks can do with people's data needs to be ring-fenced.

There is a difference between liking something, endorsing it and shilling for it. For instance, I like my Honda and the dealer from which I bought it, but I made them remove all the dealer stickers from the vehicle as a condition of the sale. They're not paying me to advertise for them.

Facebook is making money from the advertising they push out to users and, presumably, from the advertising they stick your photo into, but where's your cut for use of your likeness? Yes, one can simply not "like" a product, but that's besides the point. Even though I might actually like a brand of Vodka and want to tell my friends about it, I don't really want a picture of me shilling for it - unless I specifically agree (and get paid) for it.

I'm sure it's all covered in the Facebook "terms of service", but that doesn't make it right. It's actually a moot point for me as I don't have a Facebook (nor Twitter) account - and never will. (Though there's probably a "shadow" Facebook account - bastards.)

It's even more complicated than the botched summary makes it out to be.

The *plaintiff* was the one to claim that they were famous to their friends (in which case they felt as a celebrity endorsing a product they deserved compensation). Facebook basically argued if they were famous to their friends, then their public expression of a consumer opinion was "newsworthy", in which case the use of their likeness was fair use protected by the First Amendment.

Basically, a bullshit answer to a bullshit lawsuit...

There is the aspect that I might want to anonymously like something.

There is a button for that. It is invisible and right next to the normal Like button. It has very good security. No information is shared with Facebook or your friends.

Hey, if you have a lot of wanderers in your family, check out Project Lifesaver.

They have a wrist-mounted transmitter that lets police and caregivers (who have the receivers) find wandering patients quickly and safely. 100% success rate.

I wrote the code for the transmitters; it was done so well that they didn't need me anymore. (They got Microchip to program them by the reel.)

Lots of outlets are publishing this, one of the more interesting ones was CNN's: http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/09/health/us-cancer-drug-alzheimers/index.html?hpt=he_c2

Check out the quote: "We've fixed Alzheimer's in mice lots of times, so we need to move forward expeditiously but cautiously."

So, would it be safe to say that Alzheimer's in mice is different from that in humans (on some level) so you might want to wait a bit before overdosing on Skin Cancer meds?

myke

No problem, they'll just go off and live with the rats of NIMH.

I disagree entirely. First, you need to distinguish between secondary and higher education; the two are very different here in the US. The submitter said he worked as a lecturer in a polytechnic, so that's university-level, not grade school. Back in the early 90s when I was in college, open-book and open-note tests were totally common; rote memorization was not. Everyone (at least in engineering school) had graphing calculators (mostly the venerable HP48), so trying to prevent students from bringing in stuff on their calculators was an exercise in futility, so in many classes like freshman Chemistry, we were allowed to have one sheet of paper with all the notes we could cram onto it when we took an exam.

By most accounts, our universities are pretty effective at educating people; it's our grade schools that suck and get all the criticism. The main criticism of colleges is that the tuition is much too high (it wasn't nearly as expensive when I attended; it's skyrocketed in the past couple decades for some reason).

Many of my engineering classes allowed "formula sheets" or a "formula card", usually a single sheet of paper or a 4x6 index card, that the student was responsible for formulating themselves.

I used this to completely ace the exam in several of my EE classes where I otherwise would have had great difficulty. (Analog just wasn't my thing while becoming a CompE; I rocked my digital and computer classes.)

My tactic: Virtually all professors provide sets of review problems, and the answers to the review problems (along with all homework questions and mid-terms) were on file with the library. I'd go the library and make copies of those materials. I would then go back to my room and pass-through every single homework assignment, mid-term, and review question, and solve every problem to the point where the remainder of the solution was "busy-work." If, after much staring, I simply could not figure out how the professor got from point A to point B, I simply copied the entire solution to that problem (writing very small with a very sharp pencil if I was confined to a card, or just about 3 rounds of reducing on the copy machine if I wasn't) onto my formula sheet/card.

90% of the time, the problems where I had to copy the solutions wholesale onto the card ended up on the exam (with some trivial parts changed), and I was invariably one of the few people in the class to get it right, despite the fact that I had utterly no idea how the solution worked.

Could a professor put questions on the test that he or she knows aren't easily solved by using the Internet?

I don't know. Is there a question which cannot be answered by visiting www.gmail.com and having a helpful friend or highly paid accomplice on the outside write up the solution for you?

If your answer to that question is 'No', then you're starting to see the problem. If your answer is 'Yes', then I have an amazing investment opportunity for you. It's a combination of a perpetual motion machine, time cube, and weight loss device that is made entirely from recycled ophidian extracts...

Absolutely there's a question that can't be answered that way:

"Minwee, on your previous exams you struggled to even articulate the most basic concepts involved in XYZ. Yet here on your final exam you managed to put forth an elegant solution. Please, from memory, walk me through your solution and how you came up with it step-by-step."

The tricky part (and it isn't that tricky) is how to know who's done suspiciously well and who is just a really good student.

For me, when I teach courses, I handle that by giving 2 grades for each assignment. One is the letter grade, the other is a meta-grade that explains why they got that letter. I also mix up assignment types and methods - some are open book, some are spontaneous and WAY too short (2-3 minutes at most) to get any real kind of response from an IRC enabled accomplice, etc.

The meta grade thing is simple: I might have 3 students who do an assignment and get a C. One might have gotten a C because they got an answer that was incorrect BUT they derived it through a process that is sensible and correct (usually just some kind of error they didn't catch); One might have gotten a C because they got a correct answer but their process made no sense; One might have gotten a C because they got the right answer but didn't show their work at all. Over time I develop a profile for each student based on those metas and so I can spot outliers not just in the actual letter grade they got but also in the reason for the grade.

When I have a student who routinely does very well but doesn't show their work, I'll sit with them and ask them to explain their work. If they can't do it adequately I'll remind them that cheating will get them an F for the course and possibly expelled, so I expect that in the future they'll be able to explain how they got those ever-so-correct answers the next time. It's shocking how many "correct but inarticulate" students suddenly become "frequently incorrect but extremely verbose" when they realize I'm on to them.

The other thing is that by and large, cheaters are not very consistent students when it comes to those meta grades, even if their letter grades might be. When I see a student with a very inconsistent pattern, that's another sign I need to have a talk with them.

I figure if a student can both figure out and slide past my system they deserve to get away with it.

Anyway, the thing is that it requires a faculty member who is actually invested in teaching their students rather than just herding them through a course.

I think the point is to give access to the tools that they could use in real life while ensuring that they can still work independently.

Well, in real life, people collaborate on work. So, if you are demanding they do all the work without collaborating, you are already putting artificial limits on the process.

If you are going to put one artificial limit on them, why not two? They don't get to look things up. But that's not fair, is it?

So don't ask questions where they have to look things up. If you have to look up the concepts behind the work you are doing, then you haven't really learned anything, now have you? I'll point out that there is a difference between forgetting the name for some concept (e.g., "Boyle's Law" or "Charles' Law") and what that concept is ("pressure vs. volume of a gas" etc.) If you want to teach the concepts, you'll accept a demonstration of the concept without demanding it be named properly.

Even if you could come up with unique questions, you still have a situation where they could hire someone else to answer the questions for you.

That exists in real life, too. They're called consultants. If you are going to test in "real life" mode, do it. You have to allow consultants.

My suggestions: only let http through and use a white-list for acceptable websites.

You don't get to install anything on my phone, tablet, or latptop. Ain't gonna happen. And if you do, I'll simply use root to get around it. Real life sucks, huh?

It is only a taste of real life, but it should be enough to prepare them.

Real life rarely sets 100 people down in a room and hands them a list of questions to answer. Tests aren't supposed to simulate real life. Write the test to test what you need to test, not test whether they could figure out a way around an artificial limit that isn't going to be there in real life.

When you think about it, this is the ultimate way for a rich person to use their money to flip the bird at other cars as they go by.

* My car is bigger than yours!
* My car is cooler than yours!
* My car is faster than yours!
* My car is greener than yours!

Etc, all at once. The other car might possibly best them in one category, but definitely not all. You just *know* there are plenty of rich people who would throw down money on something like that.

Having just watched Revenge of the Electric Car recently, they came very close, to the point where they almost couldn't make payroll, and were only saved by Musk handing over the last of his money, which was basically completely gone because he had already dumped it all into Tesla and SpaceX. If the documentaries depictions of events (and the things Musk says in the documentary) are to be believed, the company came within inches of blowing up, and they did have layoffs. These days, they're in far more favourable shape (in terms of resiliency) than they were back then.

Probably not as bad as you would think. Electric motors are very efficient at giving high torque, while for a gas engine it's really inefficient when doing the same.

The assumption was a steady 55 mph, so is certainly the maximum possible range, so I'm sure the actual range would be less if you were driving in the city.

Optional for power users who want them, not required for simple tasks like mounting an image where a mouse click will do.

And that's the way it's been on almost any Linux distribution, for quite a while. On Ubuntu 10.04, I just right click on an ISO file and select the mount option. Then it appears as a new drive on the desktop. It works about the same, whether you're using a Gnome desktop, or KDE, or LXDE, or xfce. Probably also on other desktop environments or window managers, but those are the ones I'm familiar with.

Of course, with Linux, you can ALSO do it via the command line. This is very useful on a headless (no GUI) machine, which Windows curiously lacks support for.

Considering the commands were about mounting an ISO file, why the hell would I want 1) mount to automatically detect a filesystem inside a file; 2) mount it as read-only on a predefined location?

Because that's what 99% of people who are mounting an ISO file need.

I actually sometimes use files as raw devices for writing (for example, if I need to demonstrate how ZFS resiliency works, a couple of files and mount allows me to quicly show how it works instead of having to use physical devices)?

For that kind of thing, you'd use additional parameters. His point was that the default should be to automatically do whatever is most reasonable for most users. If you know better, by all means, use your knowledge to specify the exact switches in advance.

Don't forget that the US State Department is the de-facto sponsor of TOR.
TOR gets most of its funding from groups that get most of their funding from the State Dept.

Wasn't it the Government that first created it?

The US government also funded the Taliban (to fight the Russians) and the Israeli goverment funded Hamas (to fight the PLO).

How do you hide something unreadable within something readable? ... damn, you're going to make me RTFA, aren't you? :P

As I read the blurb (I have no inside knowledge) they're not making the PAYLOAD look unencrypted. They're circumventing the type-of-flow identification mechanisms built into router filtering by encapsulating the encrypted data within an outer layer (and addressed to the port of) another protocol. (They may even have put a layer on top of the existing service so that, unless it identifies the flow as an encapsulated TOR flow, it actually PERFORMS the service.)

The result would be that, if they intercept the flow and try to parse it as what it purports to be, it may not make sense. But if their router look at the parts of the packets that are characteristic of what the flow purports to be, it will identify it as normal traffic and let it through. And if the router tries doing something like a keyword search through the bodies of the packets it won't get hits because the bodies are encrypted.

You can use this approach with any protocol that can handle the traffic patters of a TOR connection (possibly with added padding packets to make the characteristics look more like the purported flow).

Downsides might be:

1) If you do a masked TOR only server on the port they might try to connect to the purported flow and detect that this server is not what it seems.

2) If you do a diverting pancake you need a way to flag for the pancake that this is the masked TOR flow. If that's well known they might write a filter for it. (Eric Wustrow, Scott Wolchok, Ian Goldberg, and J. Alex Halderman have developed a steganographic method for applying such a tag. It is embedded in their own "TELEX" network-based firewall bypasser but might be adapted to this purpose. paper a href="https://telex.cc/"code")

"If we can't parse it, it gets blocked."

In the old days, Cuban international phone calls were monitored. At least one person started talking a language other than English or Spanish and the operator broke in and told them to speak English or Spanish or get cut off.

Source: Something I read in a reputable newspaper or magazine back in the 1970s or 1980s.

Don't expect the public attention to drop so soon in Germany. People there are very careful about protection of private data and information. They have a somewhat bad historical background about state lurking into private lives and filtering/accumulating information... and they are not about to forget it. Anything that goes into that direction gets strong opposition - and the stage generally weights in favor of the private life protection.

Now, in Germany, is happening exactly what the copyright lobby feared : people are looking into it. They is a reason why they tried to push it under the table and they failed. Now there is a good chance ACTA never goes through in Germany. And if it doesn't pass in Germany, it loses a lot of interest within the EU.

The European Parliament (at the top of the food chain) is already deeply suspicious of what the Commision is doing with ACTA and asked them to clean their act up in March of last year.

Some quotes from the report:

2. Expresses its concern over the lack of a transparent process in the conduct of the ACTA negotiations, a state of affairs at odds with the letter and spirit of the TFEU; is deeply concerned that no legal base was established before the start of the ACTA negotiations and that parliamentary approval for the negotiating mandate was not sought;

3. Calls on the Commission and the Council to grant public and parliamentary access to ACTA negotiation texts and summaries, in accordance with the Treaty and with Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001 of 30 May 2001 regarding public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents;

4. Calls on the Commission and the Council to engage proactively with ACTA negotiation partners to rule out any further negotiations which are confidential as a matter of course and to inform Parliament fully and in a timely manner about its initiatives in this regard; expects the Commission to make proposals prior to the next negotiation round in New Zealand in April 2010, to demand that the issue of transparency is put on the agenda of that meeting and to refer the outcome of the negotiation round to Parliament immediately following its conclusion;

5. Stresses that, unless Parliament is immediately and fully informed at all stages of the negotiations, it reserves its right to take suitable action, including bringing a case before the Court of Justice in order to safeguard its prerogatives;

6. Deplores the calculated choice of the parties not to negotiate through well-established international bodies, such as WIPO and WTO, which have established frameworks for public information and consultation;

7. Calls on the Commission to conduct an impact assessment of the implementation of ACTA with regard to fundamental rights and data protection, ongoing EU efforts to harmonise IPR enforcement measures, and e-commerce, prior to any EU agreement on a consolidated ACTA treaty text, and to consult with Parliament in a timely manner about the results of the assessment;

I'm pretty sure the Commission hasn't done any of that, so if the Parliament gets involved again it's doomed. Hopefully this weekend's protests will help get that done.

Germany has joined Latvia, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia

This has happened before, and it didn't turn out well.

On page 7 of the photo gallery they quote the theater's CEO that they'll be using 1570mm film, which commentors were quick to point really means 15/70 sprockets per frame/width. The idea of film as wide as a compact car is interesting to envision, though.

Maybe it's the font but I did a double-take when I read it...

Dunno...but if you're British I believe it's about a third of the size of Wales.

Not true, actually. I recall hearing about an experiment that some IMAX engineers did a few years back, where they put black and white squares in a checker pattern up on the screen. They started with a 2x2 grid of squares, then went to 4x4, then 8x8, etc., but they ended up stopping well before they ever hit 4K because the screen had become gray. What that meant was that the film was not able to provide the level of contrast actually necessary to discern the shapes any longer. In other words, the level of detail it provided was below that of a 4K image.

Of course, the problem with 4K is that the details are so small, even at the scale of IMAX, that viewers would need to sit in the first five or so rows to really be able to appreciate any difference at all. And, as was noted in the video, lighting and quality concerns are still major factors with digitial projectors, more so than the issues with resolution.

Analog has some advantages, to be sure, but they mostly are in the fact that it can provide good enough resolution without other compromises. Digital resolutions surpassed IMAX several years ago, but digital projectors still have enough drawbacks that analog continues to have a place in some of these theaters, though time is running out for that.