Simple, stick the certs in the DNSSEC records. Then only registrars between you and the root can spoof you. If you don't trust the USA, then pick a registrar in a country you do trust, and now the USA can't spoof your records.

If you want convenience you'll always have to trust somebody, but with the DNSSEC proposal only a few companies could spoof any particular website (with the list being different for each website). The Chinese government couldn't spoof nsa.gov, and the NSA couldn't spoof government.cn.

The root still involves some challenges, but that is high-profile and doesn't need to change much, so there are a lot of options there which won't scale up to the entire DNS tree.

Its trivial to get Windows to recognize a Linux partition and refrain from telling people to format those volumes.

The article seems to conflate content knowledge with being smart.

I would argue that raw analytical skills are much more important than content knowledge. Being able to regurgitate information is only marginally useful, and its most important value is that you're equipped with a framework and a lens through which to examine problems.

However, absent analytical capabilities, your ability to use your knowledge and past experiences to solve problems is severely limited.

Google makes people think they are knowledgeable, which is not necessarily the same as being "smart".

No kidding. MS still pursues violators of that silly long-filename patent. And they STILL demand a cut from Android distributors for other patents they refuse to disclose to the community!

Couldn't see OPAL V2 / eDrive support anywhere. Shame because I think it's an essential feature of any SSD these days.

OPAL V2 allows the drive to encrypt using a user supplied key, with near zero performance loss.

Okay, the flash looks good, how about the controller? Often the controller dies long before the flash does.

I may have "triggered" you, but it was not an inaccurate statement that did that.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

These articles have spiked in your own media as well largely in sympathy with the US media response.

Not my observation. These articles always come by on a regular basis. We have our own politicians with their own agendas over here and they bring up stuff like this semi regularly. Besides it makes good copy and encourages people to buy papers.

As to hiring someone without knowing qualifications... you'd have to focus on really low level entry level jobs for that. I struggle to think of any job where they really don't care.

You seem to have misunderstood the point I was trying to make. By focussing on the minutae of the example you lose sight of the bigger picture on how people estimate things badly due to a lack of understanding of probability and statistics.

I think a more reasonable solution would be to segregate the sexes until college. Not socially of course but give them different classes. You could even have them in the same building if you really wanted to but the nature of the classes should be tailored to the way each sex thinks.

Firstly two things. What you have proposed is anti-male. Boys do better in mixed classes, where as girls do better in single sex classes.

Secondly, you're doing the classic damaging thing of "women are different on average to men" == "all women are different from all men". They may have different means, but the variance is large and so there is a lot of overlap. If you uniformly treat girls one way and boys another you do a strong disservice to a very large fraction of both.

The correct thing to do of course is to tailor it somewhat to the person in question.

Why? Because they're not equally represented in the halls of power and boardrooms. Never mind that they're not equally represented on street corners picking food out of trash cans either. Never mind that women are not equally represented on death row waiting to ride the lightning.

There is so much wrong with that I don't even know where to begin. The answer to inequality is not more inequality. If women are undrerepresented in power, that is a problem. If there are too many men on death row, that is also a problem. One doesn't balance out the other, it just makes the world twice as fucked up.

You don't get karmic justice fucking up a few guys to counterbalance a few guys in power in order to somehow make it average out relative to women.

The machine is still deterministic. You can predict with 100% certainty that if the condition on the evaluation is true, it will do A, and if not it will do B. You can even determine what the condition will be by running all the steps of the program until you get to that statement. That is determinism.

The only way you could have a "computer" that wasn't deterministic would be if its operation were influenced by randomness (true randomness - not algorithmic pseudo-randomness). Such a device would not be a Turing Machine.

In fact, whether it is possible to really build a finite Turing Machine depends on whether the universe is actually deterministic. Any computer exists in the physical world, and is subject to things like cosmic rays that can impact logic decisions apart from the content of memory, or for that matter change the content of memory apart from the program design, etc. So, if the cosmic rays are non-deterministic then it is not possible to build true a finite Turing Machine. (By "finite" I mean a machine with only limited tape length - a true Turing machine requires limitless memory.)

The existence of the Halting Problem REQUIRES determinism. The Halting machine itself is deterministic. Given the current state of the machine, you can perfectly predict the next step of the machine. You just can't predict whether it will ever finish running without walking through the steps until it stops (assuming it does, and you'll never know if you ran it long enough).

Determinism is more about knowledge of the current state and the rules the game operates by.

Amazon.com is doing just fine with retail over the internet.

All you have to do is walk into any police station and say, "I am an american and Castro is the devil"

Instant free room!

That's true, which is why there aren't any enforceable patents on software, nor are any being issued now. There are patents on machines that implement software, but not on the software itself.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. The "US patent court"? You mean the Appeal Board at the USPTO? And no, it wasn't anything "outside the normal courts" - it was the Supreme Court in Diamond v. Diehr that said that inventions aren't excluded from patentability merely because they use software. And the PTAB wasn't involved in that one at all.

Notice that none of those are actually complaining about the establishment of a unitary court or patent, nor are they saying that this legalizes software patents, which it doesn't. Instead, they say that this could "restart the debate" over software patents. In fact, if you only read the fear-mongering, bolded "software patents are fully enforceable across Europe" in the second quote, you might miss the fact that it's saying that pro-software patent groups want that result, not that it actually exists now.

Mr. Henrion is apparently so strongly opposed to software patents that he's seeing them everywhere he turns. The Unitary Patent is not an "attempt to legalize software patents," it's an attempt to harmonize the current patent system in Europe, which is a silly mishmash of union-wide and nation-specific laws. Specifically, right now, you file a patent application with the European Patent Office, which examines it. If it's allowed, then it doesn't become a patent, as there is no "European patent". Instead, you then also have to file patent applications in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Greece, Italy, Austria, Belgium, etc., etc., paying national patent fees to each country. Those countries will rubber-stamp the patent as allowed based on the European Patent Office's decision to grant, so there's nothing added - it's just a way for each country to grab additional fees.

Of course, as a result of those individual country fees, hardly anyone files for patent protection in, say, Luxembourg, or Albania, or Latvia, because the markets aren't big enough to justify several thousand in fees per country (except in pharma, where they can just charge thousands of dollars per dose of medicine and get the costs back easily). In fact, generally, high tech inventors only get protection in the UK, France, and Germany.

As a result of not having patent protection in those other countries, companies also don't invest in those other countries... You're not going to open a manufacturing plant in, say, Portugal, even if the labor is really cheap, if you have no patent protection there and your competitor can simply open a plant across the street and spy through your windows. Nor are you really going to focus marketing efforts in those countries, if your competitor can simply buy the product and reverse engineer it. So, you end up with 1st world Europe in UK/FR/DE, and 2nd (or 3rd) world Europe everywhere else.

The Unitary Patent, on the other hand, is an actual European Patent. Rather than nationalizing in each individual country, you get a single European Patent that is enforceable everywhere in Europe. It doesn't make software patents legal - and in fact, software patenting is explicitly not allowed in Europe already, and this doesn't change anything about it - it just makes the filing and fees more straightforward, while extending protection into those other countries.

The other thing it does - and Slashdot should like this - is that it creates a Unified Patent Court that hears cases on infringement and validity of European patents. And it's not just one old fart in a black robe who doesn't use email and 12 idiots who had the day off from work, it's actually panels of three specialist judges who only hear patent cases and have appropriate scientific or engineering backgrounds (there's a mechanical division, a chemical division, and an electrical division).

Now, there is some opposition to the Unitary Patent, but it's not "zomg, this legalizes software!" Instead, it's coming from companies in those countries that no one bothers getting a patent in that actually are doing reverse engineering of competitor's products. And yeah, they should be upset, because this would force them to come up with their own inventions rather than just stealing everyone else's.

Disclaimer: I am a U.S. patent attorney, I'm not your attorney, this is not legal advice, etc.

There's no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaints, and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now.

What do you mean you've never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven's sake, mankind, it's only four light years away, you know! I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that's your own regard. Energise the demolition beams! God, I don't know⦠apathetic bloody planet, I've no sympathy at allâ¦