The difference is, DuckDuckGo is headquartered in Paoli, Pennsylvania. You have to dig through their site a while to find that; try the Hiring section. That means they are subject to US fed/state data retention laws and government requests.

Ixquick is headquartered in The Netherlands and (understandably) boasts about not having provided one byte of data to the US government. They've won EU awards because those governments actually recognize the value of privacy. Please see this page for a reference.

Don't get me wrong, DuckDuckGo sounds good. Sounds like they certainly don't actively track you. But I don't see them bragging that they "keep no data to hand over in the first place" and I would be truly surprised if that is entirely an option for them. Certainly they can't tell the US government to piss up a flagpole if and when fishing expeditions come in.

That's not covered by the fee you paid to run Windows?

Which is why I have no qualms whatsoever about blocking ads and taking multiple technological measures to make myself difficult to track. Let them cry a river about it. The real problem is: what little trust may have been there has been thoroughly eroded by an advertising industry showing time and again that it, as an industry, is completely incapable of being reasonable or otherwise regulating itself.

It's too bad for the marketing majors that they want to offer a "service" I do not need and do not want and have chosen to provide endless examples of "offering" (shoving it down throats) it in the most sleazy and underhanded ways. They'll get along without me, somehow.

Yeah. Currently we're working hard on the problem of operating rooms being doctors' personal playgrounds. Anyone who complains about that, points out that doctors have the expertise, or produces any "practical" reason why surgical procedures were designed that way is, of course, advocating for the evil stranglehold doctors have on performing surgery. The doctors always think that way, you know.

I've been using Startpage for years now. They perform a Google search on your behalf while guarding your privacy. They don't even log your IP address. They're the same company that runs Ixquick.com if you want a truly independent search engine to go with the privacy features (their own indexer, no dependency on Google). Personally I enjoy the idea of getting Google results without the Google tracking for which I never signed an agreement.

Re-read your post. I'll help you out, even.

What happened to your brain in the 60 minutes between your posts? At first you extoll the virtues of the Democrats, and now you claim your original post is about Democrats and Rebulicans being the same. Do you see the discontinuity?

GP has it right. The US was built disregarding the damage we were doing to the environment. Now that we're on top, its easy for us to tell people not to do things. But if anyone else wants to get ahead, they're going to do it the cheap and easy way. Without some sort of alternative financial incentive, greed will drive countries to disregard the environment to ensure their industry evolves. While you can point at Democrats and Republicans and call them angels or devils, the rest of the world is going to do what they want with regards to the environment (and there are a lot more of them than there are of us).

I'm not sure how you can have min/maxing without it unbalancing the PC's. It becomes an arms race between players to find the most powerful, game breaking combos. Spreadsheets, forums, and research on things that can be abused. It leaves the non min/maxers in the dust, and the GM has to find some way to tone up encounters without destroying everyone else.

You can roleplay the smartest/strongest guy around, or you can abuse the rule system to become the strongest/smartest guy around. When your level 5 character has godly powers to influence the game through some clever min/maxing, it really ruins the experience for others.

I'll give you this one. The upside, you can use min/maxing to offset your mechanical flaws. So my martial adept, Gravedigger, used a shovel as a weapon. He had a penalty to fight with it, but I was still able to game the system to still be overpowered.

On a side note, there were enough base classes in 3.5 that you could almost make whatever character you wanted by dipping into them a la carte. See my rogue/scout/ranger/fighter.

In your examples you are not actually proving a negative (that something didn't happen). You are proving that something is not possible or could not have happened.


Possible or not possible are easy by comparison. Proving a negative means, "take this thing that really could have possibly happened, and prove that it didn't happen". A shape cannot both be a triangle and a square. A pure color at a single wavelength cannot both be red and blue. You are drastically underestimating the scope of how difficult it is to prove a negative. "This couldn't have happened because it is impossible" is actually a positive claim and as such, can be proven.

To be fair, this is a perfectly acceptable reference in the given context, and the age only helps the argument not hinders it as you suggest.

Even at 55 years old, the Feynman paper is based on known technology and physics at the time. This provides a high-end boundary to the answer that is only potentially (in this case definately) inaccurate on exactly how much lower the size can actually get.

Our tech has changed, but physics not quite as much.
What we know today about building at the atomic scale is only slightly more detailed than the rough idea that was known all the way back then.

About the only thing smaller we know of today that we didn't know back then was the details of the sub-atomic world - which I should add we still know very little about over all, and certainly not enough to build useful machines using. At a technological level nothing has changed as the sub-atomic is still out of our reach as much now as it was then.

So the atomic scale is what we are discussing.

55 years ago our photolithography methods had a 20 micron feature limit.
14 years ago our newest photolithography methods have a 0.005 micron (aka 100 nm) feature limit. That is a 4000 fold decrease in size.
Today we have 32 nm and 28 nm photolithography methods, making things about 12000 times smaller than was possible using technology from 55 years ago.

Anyways, there are more recent references out there.

One good recent paper is "Molecular Construction Limits" by Robert Bradbury, if you can find it anymore. Sadly Bradbury passed away a couple years ago and his personally hosted archive of papers fell offline. Most archived ones seem pay-walled :/

Probably the best paper on this subject is "Ultimate physical limits to computation" by Seth Lloyd at MIT.
The paper is from 2000 but his current work is on the worlds largest-qbit quantum computer also at MIT - so he is already making my sub-atomic remarks out of date.

His conclusion is purely based on physics alone and ignoring any/all technological capability.

The 'ultimate laptop' is a computer with a mass of one kilogram and a volume of one liter, operating at the fundamental limits of speed and memory capacity fixed by physics.
The ultimate laptop performs [ 5.4258 x 10^50 ] logical operations per second on 10^31 bits.
Although its computational machinery is in fact in a highly specified physical state with zero entropy, while it performs a computation that uses all its resources of energy and memory space it appears to an outside observer to be in a thermal state at 10^9 degrees Kelvin.

There's no reason the populace cannot both a) harden against as many security vulnerabilities as you reasonably can, and b) take back the political power from the ruling elite and institute oversight against massive surveillance and other governmental abuses, including severe criminal penalties against officials supporting them.

There certainly are countermeasures you can (and should) take, but generally, applying technical solutions to political and social problems doesn't work long-term.

Look, just because the guy was allegedly willing to kill someone in cold blood, that doesn't also mean he's willing to do something as drastic as infringe on anyone's intellectual property rights. I mean, let's be fair! There's no need to jump to such extreme conclusions.

Signed,
-- The RIAA/MPAA

That was my first thought before reading the article. Pay the employee, no hassle and red rape to worry about getting caught up in. However, FTFA:

So it may simply be that there was a lot of money to be made by screwing Amtrak out of it.

What I call the genuine form of libertarianism (small 'l') is about maximizing personal freedom, in the "life, liberty, and property" sense. The basic idea is that my right to swing my hand ends at the tip of your nose. Adult people should be able to do whatever they want that does not infringe on the rights of others, and then reap the consequences. For example: if you can manage to responsibly use any drugs you like, you should be able to; if you drive impaired because you refuse to do it responsibly, society has a legitimate reason to apprehend and punish you. Someone else who thinks drug use is always a horrible practice is free to practice that belief by not doing it themselves, but has no legitimate justification for persecuting a responsible user.

Privacy should be this way: your choice. I'm in favor of strong privacy protections in law because right now there is not much choice in the matter. If I want the Googles of the world to have my information, it should be because I knowingly, personally, actively, and deliberately gave it to them myself. Anything less is an infringement of my privacy rights. There is a clear intent behind burying such things in Page Y of a legalese EULA and that intent is to make it as difficult as possible to exercise this choice. A device that transfers my data to someone else on my behalf, by default, without my actively configuring it that way, shows the same intent.

There is a movement or an effort, more prominent and vocal the last several years, to deliberately misrepresent that all libertarian thought is the same thing as anarcho-capitalism. Observe carefully and you'll find that most any idea that, if popular, would threaten the status quo has multitudes of deceptive propaganda-technique-using PR efforts directed against it, the goal of which is to tarnish that idea in the popular mind. Most liberterian philosophies have a concept of inalienable human rights and include the desire for a government, the main purpose of which is to protect those rights. Regulation of business is necessary because otherwise, corporations will use their intense concentrations of wealth, market power, and political clout to infringe on the rights of individuals. This is legitimate and not some kind of control-freak idea or Puritannical fantasy of telling others how to live. Anyone who is against it and represents themselves as the only libertarians in existence (and not a particularly extreme form) is lying to you, it's as simple as that.

I wonder if this is related to the Metro version of Skype being difficult to perform surveillance on.

http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...