It is not the NSA's job to cause mudslides, or make peoples hair fall out.
It is NSAs JOB to crack (other peoples) security systems. You are not being paranoid, they are out to get you.
Of course, other agencies do this too
Here's a challenge: Find any two versions of Word that will open, between them, all MS doc documents.
I have a friend who has a sideline business reading old Word files. Seriously, we need to get rid of that shit.
The NSA has two conflicting tasks:
(1) Secure national communications.
(2) Break other countries communications.
This made sense in the 1950s when secure encryption was something only the military, spies, etc used. It breaks down badly in the internet, international era.
"They declined to help" hides the fact that _that was their job_. They are the national, even world experts on the problem, and they stood back
and allowed a broken internet security model. Elsewhere, they've made swiss cheese of encryption standards so they could continue to do (2),
at the cost of (1).
The NSA is Broken As Designed and needs to be scrapped.
Yes, the trouble is that independent invention is no defence. And yes, it is the "natural" way of doing the task, used my many if not most in the field.
Hence the conundrum for the patent office: by rights he should be granted the patent, but in effect they will have given Hyatt an incredibly valuable monopoly by virtue of their delay in processing the patent. But they can't think of any valid reason _not_ to give him the patent.
Monopolies are bad. Government makes a monopoly. Results are bad. Are you surprised? I am surprised at your apparent attitude, given the track record of government-managed systems. You think that would be better?
Not necessarily. For example the method used in Former Yugoslavia: the bread business was nationalised to ensure cheap bread for the populace. Two government bread companies were set up (IIRC). They were made to compete with each other, but with within strict rules, so that profit-taking for the benefit of staff salaries was out, but they could find efficiencies and compete. Also, it was legal for private companies to set up and sell other types of bread, but obviously couldn't control the market.
Similarly, Ireland had a nationalized shipping company to ensure shipping happened in Ireland ; during WWII no-one else would ship to Ireland because of the danger, and after the war they needed stable prices. Other companies could compete, but this meant there was a ceiling on prices and there was always someone capable of shipping.
Secondly having spent half my life in the public and half in the private sector, the private-sector is just as bad, it just doesn't have public investigations into waste.
No, You've plenty: we run our climate models on other planets, too. There are operational models running for Mars (to predict dust storms);
Titan, Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Neptune and Uranus have been tested too.
We also have paleoclimates, matching CO2 and temperature patterns against fossil and isotopic records both on Earth and recently on Mars.
We have lots of individual tests: climate model accuracy on a regional scale, when the models are not tuned to this; getting predictions
such as Arctic ampliification right, etc. Getting the magnitude and duration of global cooling in the wake of volcanos such as Pinatubo, etc.
As another poster said, we've plenty of tests that we can do and have done, if you show any imagination.
Getting the result to be deterministic is only the start of the problem. How do you know it is _correct_, or more properly, know the error bounds involved? How much does it matter to your problem?
e.g. If I am doing a 48-hour weather forecast, I can compare my results with observations next week; I can treat numerical error as a part of "model" error along with input observational uncertainty, etc.
I might validate part of my solutions by checking that, for example, the total water content of my planet doesn't change. For a 48-hour forecast, I might tolerate methods that slightly lose water over 48 hours in return for a fast solution. For a climate forecast/projection, this would be unacceptable.
Getting the same answer every time is no comfort if I have no way of knowing if its the right answer.
How do we keep politics out of this?
How do we keep politics out of this?
By keeping science funding at arms length, funded by agencies like NIH and NSF, with politicians setting overarching policy only.
This works most of the time, and elsewhere around the world. The case being quoted is the exception, not the norm, and should be called out
(as it is being) as interference.
Arguing that government shouldn't be involved in science is ignoring that most science is publicly funded, and nearly all privately-funded
science depends on publicly-funded fundamental science that has no immediate applied value (and hence won't be corporately funded)
but is still needed.
"Spying" is misleading when what we're really talking about it mass surveillance.
Its one thing to say "Countries have always spied on each other", when it used to mean having one or two "diplomats" at the embassy and debriefing businessmen when they came back from trips to X. Its a very different affair when intelligence gathering means everyone in the country is effectively targetted (70m phone calls a month is hardly discretely targetting a country).
Mass surveillance is to spying as martial law is to policing. Instead of spying for some slight advantage, slightly corrupting negotiations between friendly countries, we now have NSA ops dictating the landscape: the communications tools used worldwide are by default cracked; the US is setting out to use this advantage to screw its partners, and they're _not_ happy about it. "Business as usual" cannot continue on these terms, and some readjustment is being demanded.
Actually, no.
The EU mandates _a_ standard in the industry. Its up to the industry to pick what the standard is.
Guess what, this is the industry talking to Apple about standardization.
AIUI, the reason micro USB was invented was that, in the event of a break, its the connector / cable end that breaks rather than the plug-end.
Phone chargers / USB cables are relatively cheap. Phones aren't.
"Far ahead" is not a phrase I would normally associate with the Trabant. It was a car that enforced breaks on the user every half hour to get away from the noise of the engine. Made cross-country trips (I did one across Ireland in a friends trabbie once) a bit more of an epic than usual.
He was detained, not arrested, under section 7 of the Terrorism Act.
Part of the point of this is that not having been arrested, he did not have the rights of a suspect who has been arrested.
However he was _required_ to answer all questions, no matter how irrelevant to a case, asked by the police.
Also remember he wasn't entering the UK. He was transiting from Germany to Brazil. So, relevance to a crime?
this was about intimidation, pure and simple.
As all content transfer moves to the internet, the government has now effectively made itself responsible for it.
This isn't a "porn filter", this is a filter for all communications the govt decides it doesn't like. Including porn.
Questions:
(1) Are you going to block playboy.com ?
(2) Can I get playboy vi Amazon.com, Apple Store, Google Play, then? With a prepaid credit card? Why not?
When all this material moves to these sites, are you going to block them ? block tumblr, imgur, etc?
Why not block google.com?
Why am I being expected to out-source my morality to the ISPs webfilter?
Y'know, there may be reasons why I don't want to go to Google Play even though the
I'm _not_ giving access to my location, my contacts, etc.
So, I'm on cyanogenmod and F-Droid for free software.
Remember to say hello to your bank teller.
