You missed an explanation - the TrueCrypt devs determined that the community code audit of TrueCrypt would eventually turn up backdoors, or spotty code in places so bizarre it would have to be intentional - and, possibly combined with a National Security Letter, the debs decided to just burn the house to the ground instead of allowing the government to repeatedly burgle it.
Well, obviously, Elon just needs to fund a $970 billion dollar Kickstarter.
I admire Elon Musk. But he's dead wrong. Neil Degrasse Tyson is right.
As others have pointed out, taking your company public means surrendering a significant amount of control over the long term. Board members and share holders like revenue. It's all about the next quarter. They don't like pet projects that are giant money sinks without the remote possibility of a return. Persist on that path post-IPO Elon, and watch yourself be fired from your own company, ala Steve Jobs.
NDGT is spot on the issue of exploration. It takes a government interested in (mostly) pure science without profit motivation.
You want to put people on Mars? I'll tell you what puts people on Mars - the U.S. government thumbing their nose in the face of Chinese ascendancy - Ala Cold War 2: Space Boogaloo.
Let the government, or team of governments blow tax dollars on building Mars mission tech. That tech will filter down to private enterprise years later, so the next generation of Elon Musks can farm minerals off asteroids, or some other future commercial endeavor.
Elon is overreaching with this.
Senators and Representatives blow like the leaves during elections, but our federal institutions persist. Their executive personnel may turn over, but the organization doesn't.
You can have as many Senate hearings and bluster on CSPAN as you like, possibly even terminate and reappoint senior level officials, but the organizational mission of the NSA & CIA is skullfuckery, treachery and manipulation, and the IRS exists to refill the wallet of the federal government every way imaginable.
What will come of this? Well, a probe into data archiving pract Oh look a tornado just wiped out a town out West and one of the Kardashians is pregnant again. Just a sec, gotta look at Reddit on my iPhone. What were you saying?
".. a Fiduciary Responsibility to Maximize Shareholder Value."
Capitalism 101 guys - In America, reaping obscene profit is not only desirable, it's the law!
http://www.litigationandtrial....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Entirely depends where they get their marching orders from.
Kansas? Or Tokyo?
What IS Sprint, now, exactly? They're just a brand name. They were bought out. "Sprint" is the color of the shell that the Softbank hermit crab moved into.
Wikipedia NO, but thorough scouring of the Internet for information coming from peer reviewed medical journals - U.S., and foreign - greatly reduces the informational advantage that physicians used to enjoy over patients. Furthermore it puts up to the minute information in patients' hands, vs. docs who are so overloaded with patients they scarcely get time to go to conferences or view lectures to satisfy continuing education requirements. Doctors also tend be highly opinionated people who quickly discount information shared by lay people.
Several years ago, I was diagnosed with Borellia Burgdorferi (Lyme Disease) by a family practice doctor at a walk-in Urgent Care outpatient facility. After 28 days of Doxycycline - the "standard protocol" - my symptoms returned significantly worse.
Had I followed the generally held beliefs of the medical community, I would probably be in a wheel chair right now, unable to work or function. Instead I aggressively scoured the Internet for more information, for weeks. On an out -of-the-way antiquated looking Lyme support website, I found recommendations for a Lyme specialist 3 1/2 hours away in another state that was willing to risk the wrath of insurance companies and even loss of his medical license by treating patients in the manner known to actually WORK - Profoundly high dosages of combination antibiotics over extended periods of time (many months) and radical dietary changes with added nutritional supplements.
I sit here today - now several years later - in perfect health thanks to "Internet Medical Information" and a courageous doctor that flew in the face of conventional wisdom.
Should you listen to your doctor? Yes. Far more often than not, they are going to be correct. However, "trust but verify" should be your approach- particularly if you are faced with life changing, life altering, or potentially life-ending medical care decisions.
Your physician is but one person, while the internet contains the collected wisdom of millions.
No, because you can never be a child again. So you will never view Star Wars through the lens of the young person you were when Ep. 4/5/6 were released.
Lucas had stuffed teddy bear people, cute robots and cartoonish muppet alien characters in all of the original films. Fans loved them. Lucas put silly characters in Ep. 1/2/3 and they were panned.
Did Star Wars change?
No.
You did.
Gen. Keith Alexander,
Sadly, we have cultures scattered around the world that still bring the middle ages mindset of "large families / large national population = a different kind of wealth and power" to the world table.
We've all probably seen those projections that predict within the next 50 years several middle eastern and african countries will experience such explosive population growth that they will leapfrog 1st world countries like Russia, which is currently 2-3x larger than most of the example countries, but is experiencing slow negative population growth.
The problem is, we haven't seen much agricultural, industrial, structural or political stability or foreign policy good will within many of the countries slated to "grow explosively", so good news, everyone! War, famine, destruction, genocide, mans' inhumanity to man - it'll just keep right on trucking as we add more and more and more players to a finite-sized playing field.
- Children. Title solves global population problems. Two children to replace two parents, with the odd accident or illness to either parents or children statistically causing slow population shrink.
Japanese families tend to be fairly careful with money, and as a result - as used to be the case with many WW2 generation elderly Americans - are sitting on piles of assets. What will occur is simply the balloon "inflate / deflate" effect. You work your entire life to amass savings and assets, you become elderly and require medical care or living assistance, and the balloon begins to deflate.
So, good news, unemployed Japanese youth - Head off to city college and pick up that 2 year nursing assistant certification or complete a 4 year degree in anything medically relevant, and their deflating balloon will inflate yours.
(Joke) you can just fast forward about 100 years, when the entire Western world will just be a giant medical service economy with only 3 types of entities: Elderly, people providing medical or living assistance to elderly, and semi sentient robots doing everything else.
As the Dalai Lama once said, paraphrased, "People in their youth spend their health pursuing money only to become elderly and spend their money pursuing health."
On one hand, you can look at this and wonder why anyone would want to undertake the incredible expense of a sub oceanic tunnel across the Bering Strait. What, with Anchorage already housing one of the world's busiest international airports, particularly for cargo aircraft.
However, completion of such a tunnel would have profound, long-reaching consequences, both negative and positive:
Chinese manufactured goods would presumably have shipping time cut in half. Even given the considerable distances, a 2km long freight train maintaining 110 km/h is a wee bit faster than a stacked & loaded Maersk container ship wallowing across the girth of the Pacific at a leisurely 20 km/h, and those trains can be run back to back separated only by a few km with basic logistics tools.
Rail and Trucking distribution arteries from Alaska down to the lower 48 would become among the busiest in the world.
American manufacturing jobs would be murdered. Already bled nearly to death, the ability to Skype an engineer in Guangdong, email schematics and have 14 boxcars of finished goods on your back dock in less than 2 weeks would be a deathblow to a lot of American jobs.
The economies of the U.S. and China would become increasingly tightly woven together, possibly creating a stabilizing effect diminishing the possibility of armed conflict - essentially the draft purpose of the European Union, after Germany went out on two world tours. The U.S. would be the loser in this scenario, as Chinas ascendancy would only continue on the world stage, while the U.S. ability to project and maintain power would suffer in the face of a diminished economy.
Americas incredible military would become unaffordable, and go through many rounds of contractions, until the U.S ends up a peer to countries like Russia or combined UK, FR and Germany - regionally powerful, globally insignificant.
So essentially this tunnel represents another step in a trade arrangement largely favoring only one partner, leading the other to contract, economy foundering, military eventually becoming unsustainable at current levels, heading into France-like levels of global insignificance excepting cultural impact.
Rome 2.0
Wait, wha.. OH! For a second I thought this was another zany article about John.
"Figuring Out the iPad's Place" ?
The bathroom. So you can browse while you download.
For years we've had snobbish hipster tech journalists gleefully informing us that we are now in the "Post-PC era", that our watt-hungry desktop dinosaurs are on the way out, that they are being replaced by a constellation of sexy, small gadgets like smartphones and tablets.
Except it isn't happening.
Every one of those goddamned articles was written on a laptop or desktop computer. You, fair reader, do your job or schoolwork on a laptop or desktop PC. The many limitations of tablets makes the idea of performing any meaningful work on them downright laughable.
I have an iPad Air and Zagg keyboard case for it. Toys. Both of them, toys. Poor keyboard experience meets poor word processing experience (unless having Lou Ferrigno sized deltoids from constant arm extension is your thing) meets horrendously poor multitasking meets a giant bucket of buyers remorse.
If I didn't really enjoy playing Hearthstone on my iPad Air, I would have eBayed it weeks ago. I rarely use it for anything else.
With factory refurb'd Macbook Airs popping up on Apple's "Special Deals" page now at $599 (when in stock), the argument for buying a $500 iPad Toy to play Angry Birds on the toilet and watch "Sherlock" on that flight to Denver to visit your in-laws just.. doesn't make good sense anymore, when for $100 more you can get a real computer.
So my operating theory is - Not only are people holding on to the tablets they already own, softening sales of new models, but they have also already discovered they're horrible to type on, make overweight poor quality e-readers, have games that you tire of after 1 hour and you feel no urgent need to run out and drop $500 on a new one that will only continue to do all those things poorly, but is a tiny bit thinner.
Credit ... is the only enduring testimonial to man's confidence in man. -- James Blish
