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Comment Re:hmmm (Score 1) 366

Didn't know this fact. But it seems that not many people stopped sending their money faithfully to Switzerland after this case.
In the end it all reduces to the present "image" each country displays regarding keeping data secret: AFAIK Swiss' weren't touched by Snowden's docs, but on the other hand it seems that US agencies have easy access to any data kept in US companies... And perception of "image" is everything and this perception changes with time and marketing :-)

Comment Re:hmmm (Score 1) 366

I didn't say the Swiss system was nice. It isn't. See also what happened a few years ago with the pre-WWII Jew's accounts. However, if you leave an account holder untouched for >63 yrs it is arguable that the contents are archaeology... Perhaps today nobody knows that the holder exists anymore (original owners passed?).
Nevertheless, it is true that Switzerland is a stable country since many centuries, and also is the most prestigious "safe" of the world. A few years ago it was also the country which topped the "implicit spying" on citizens activity (huge number of cameras, dissemination of cards and automatic tolls, ATMs,... all this recorded) but given the recent info arising from the Snowden's docs, and the number of cameras in London, perhaps it is not anymore :-)
Despite (or because) all this, I think that Swiss could easy capitalize on this situation: just a few M&M (Money and Marketing) is needed...

Comment Re:hmmm (Score 2) 366

If I were a Swiss, I would start a "safe databank service" company right now. The slogan would be:
"We kept your money safe (and secret) for hundreds of years; we invented the cuckoo clock; we'll keep your secret data safe for the next thousands of years!!!"
Big business here :-) Kickstart the thing!

Submission + - Walmart shoplifter shot dead by sheriff deputy .. (infowars.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A Harris County Sheriff’s deputy shot and killed a shoplifting suspect who was trying to flee from a Walmart Thursday night. The woman managed to drive to a nearby apartment complex, where she was pronounced dead.

Submission + - US Income Distribution Worst Ever (usatoday.com)

the eric conspiracy writes: In 2012 the highest earning 1% of the US population garnered 19.3% of the US total. This breaks the previous record set in 1928 at 18.7%. In the last three years, 95% of all income gains have gone to the richest 1%. Real income growth between for the top 1% was 86% between 1993 and 2000. For the remainder of the population earnings rose 6.6%. The study also noted that the top 10% of US families had 50% of the total US income.

Income distribution usually worsens as a country first develops due to a shift from agriculture to urban living, then improves as the economy matures. This is known as the Kuznets curve. The current regression of income equity in the US suggests serious social policy failings.

Submission + - The NSA's next move: silencing university professors? (theguardian.com) 2

wabrandsma writes: From the Guardian:

A Johns Hopkins computer science professor blogs on the NSA and is asked to take it down.

A professor in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins, a leading American university, had written a post on his blog, hosted on the university's servers, focused on his area of expertise, which is cryptography. The post was highly critical of the government, specifically the National Security Agency, whose reckless behavior in attacking online security astonished him.

On Monday, he gets a note from the acting dean of the engineering school asking him to take the post down and stop using the NSA logo as clip art in his posts. The email also informs him that if he resists he will need a lawyer.

Why would an academic dean cave under pressure and send the takedown request without careful review, which would have easily discovered, for example, that the classified documents to which the blog post linked were widely available in the public domain?

Submission + - Spider Silk Turned Into Electrical Wire Lead To 'Green' Electronics

ewolfson writes: Florida State University scientists have crafted microscopic wires out of spider silk that can conduct electricity.

The goal is to create new electronics that are as tough as they are eco-friendly. Spider silk is supposedly as strong as steel and as "impenetrable as Kevlar" — but now it can also conduct electricity. To give the spider silk this effect, the scientists coated each silk thread with carbon nanotubes.

The results are super strong conductors that are also fully biodegradable.

Submission + - Why Microsoft's Nokia Deal Is Too Little, Too Late (slashdot.org)

Nerval's Lobster writes: When Microsoft announced last week that it would acquire Nokia for $7.2 billion, it wasn’t exactly a surprise: the two companies had developed such a symbiotic relationship that an all-out merger seemed like the next (and perhaps only) logical step. As the analysts have pointed out, the deal radically expands Microsoft’s headcount (and complicates its corporate hierarchy) at a time when the company is doing its best to compete against Google, Apple, and other tech behemoths—imagine growing a third arm and trying to figure out how to use it while boxing against a crowd of experienced fighters, and you have some idea of the pain that the company faces over the next several quarters. But that's not even the deal's biggest problem: in addition to potentially alienating every other Windows Phone manufacturer by bringing Nokia in-house, the deal does nothing to solve the issue of Windows Phone's piddling market-share — and now Microsoft needs to run a complicated hardware business on top of all its other issues.

Submission + - Windows 8.1 Review: New Version, Same Mess

snydeq writes: If you're stuck with Windows 8, the Windows 8.1 upgrade is a no-brainer, but the fundamental flaws remain, writes Woody Leonhard in his in-depth review of the latest version of Windows 8. 'Windows 8.1 follows Windows 8 in typical Microsoft "version 2.0" fashion, changing a bit of eye candy and dangling several worthwhile improvements — but hardly solving the underlying problem. Touch-loving tablet users are still saddled with a touch-hostile Windows desktop, while point-and-clickers who live and breathe the Windows desktop still can't make Metro go away,' Leonhard writes. 'Windows 8.1 also installs the worst privacy-busting feature Windows has ever seen, and it nukes several key Windows 7 features in its headlong pursuit of SkyDrive profits.'

Submission + - Open Source "Personal Analytics" Options?

CaptainSubtext writes: I am very interested in the new crop of "personal analytics" devices, such as the Jawbone Up, the Fitbit and the Basis watch but I am concerned about giving this sensitive personal data to third parties.

A search has turned up some tantalizing hints but no real solutions, so I was wondering if anyone was working on free and open source software to complement this hardware?

Submission + - "Oddball" asteroid is really a comet (networkworld.com)

coondoggie writes: An international team of scientist s today said a the third largest near-Earth object-believed for 30 years to be an asteroid, is actually a comet. Using the Spitzer Space Telescope operated by the NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the team — led by Michael Mommert of Northern Arizona University and Joshua Emery, assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of Tennessee — looked at images of the rocky object known as 3552 Don Quixote taken in 2009 when it was in orbit closest to the Sun and found it had a coma and a faint tail.

Comment Re:58 Second Burn? (Score 1) 160

To give a practical perspective on meteor sizes, recall that the Chelyabinsk meteor which arrived at Russia this same year had around 15-20 m of diameter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor

And the space rock that carved Meteor Crater (or Barringer crater) in Arizona, around 50 K years ago, had about 40 meters of diameter.
http://www.space.com/834-mystery-arizona-meteor-crater-solved.html

So, a 60 meters meteor will probably create a big, big, hole (depending on the velocity at arrival and landing angle) if it falls to Earth. I also remember reading that the impact in Arizona caused much devastation in the surrounding areas, up to several tens of miles from the crater.

Finally, the meteor that "created" the gulf of Mexico and "killed" most of the dinosaurs, about 66 million years ago, had probably around 10 km of diameter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater

Comment Re:xp still works (Score 1) 520

I still run 3 desktops (2 of them very often, none of those 3 is a server) with Win 2K professional. Only recently I had some problems (recent USB 3.0 pen drives getting a few corrupted files). I've **never** had to reinstall Win2K in 10 yrs, and the only mark of a virus (I got infected only a couple of times) I've ever had was a crippled Excel binary due to "quarantining" in one of the PCs: precisely the one where I'm writing this text.

The only AV I use is some free tool named "Regrun Reanimator-Partizan" (google, perhaps most of you don't know about it - I run a simple scan with it a couple of times a month). The "normal" AVs (free or not) are heavy has hell in 1-core old HW and, besides that, ineffective to recently disclosed attacks.

Then, why switch the machines (or OS)? Well, my HW is 10-yrs old, and the hard disks one of these days will blow. Low memory is also a problem nowadays (the other day I tried to double from 1 GB to 2 GB in one of them and the moron PC stopped booting...), with the bloated memory-eating browsers (and web pages, with Java, Javascript, HTML5 and Flash, all running in parallel). So I'll leave Win2K mostly because of HW issues, not SW issues.

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