There are ~30 million commercial flights and around 2 hijackings per year, so that nobody's tried at Frankfurt might be just statistics. None of the confirmed hijackings since 2001 has casualties, though I suppose there's mysteries like MH370. Even if you assume the worst though, statistically you're far more likely to die from technical malfunction or pilot error. Or external causes like being shot down by a missile like MH17, but I guess that's location dependent. Unless you can bring a bomb on board to take down the plane yourself there's no way people will let you cease control of the craft anymore, so hijacking as we knew it is a past era. Most of it is just preventing a stabbing that could just as well have happened on the bus or tram or subway, it just happens to be up on a plane.

Uh, you do realize the Falcon Heavy has a payload of 13200 kg to Mars and will be more powerful than any current operational rocket?

They have a great plan, but they don't have the money. The Falcon Heavy is funded and should be operational in the first half of next year while NASA is years away from a date that's probably slipping. And I'm not sure why you're saying SpaceX is the one on the drawing board, the boosters are essentially "headless" Falcon 9s while the SLS is a new design. Sure, when or if the SLS flies it'll be in a class of its own we haven't seen since the Saturn V. I wouldn't hold my breath though, while the Falcon Heavy seems very likely that will happen.

Do you have any idea what the error rate for manual data entry is? Typically about 0.5% of the entries will be wrong. Retyping information is a very error prone process.

As long as the character they create is entirely fictional and not based on impersonating someone they know is a friend of the suspect, I'm fine with it. Cops running around trying to "friend" people in my name is not.

You do realize that most "darknets" are built on a "bust one, bust all" model? Pretty much the only security is that the bad guys aren't in your darknet, they've never reached a popularity where there's any plausible deniability. The only other people likely to be in your darknet are the other members of your terrorist cell or whatever you're part of, it has never offered anything for "normal people" for you to hide in. And darknets have actually been used as honeypots, to make clueless people give away their IP to join a private group which turns out to be a sting. It is pretty much the exact opposite of anonymity, it's joining a conspiracy and you're at the mercy of the stupidity of everyone in it.

TOR is trying for something entirely different, which is to keep everyone at arm's length from each other. I talk to you over TOR, you get busted well tough shit they still can't find me. The users don't know the server, the server doesn't know the users. Of course by adding that glue in between you run the risk of the man in the middle working out who both ends of the connection are, but that's the trade-off. TOR is trying to do something extremely hard, it tries to offer low latency - easy to make timing attacks, arbitrary data sizes - easy to make traffic correlation attacks and interactive access - easy to manipulate services into giving responses, accessible to everyone and presumably with poison nodes in the mix. It's trying to do something so hard that you should probably assume it's not possible, not because they have any special inside access.

I actually did look at trying to do better, it was not entirely unlike Freenet done smarter only with onion routing instead of relying on statistical noise. It wouldn't try to be interactive so you could use mixmaster-style systems to avoid timing attacks and (semi-)fixed data block sizes to avoid many correlation attempts but I never felt I got the bad node issue solved well. TOR picks guard nodes, but it only makes you bet on a few horses instead of many. It was still too easy to isolate one node from the rest of the network and have it only talk to bad nodes, at which point any tricks you can play is moot because they see all your traffic. Even a small fraction of the nodes could do that on a catch-and-release basis and I never found any good countermeasures.

Just show him the South Park episode "Freemium isn't free" and he'll learn all about modern game mechanics, along with a few lessons in economics and marketing. Before you know it he will be pushing his game in the school yard like a pro.

False dichotomy, the test may be inconclusive. /pedantry

Well, you would be very wrong. Fraud costs both the retailers and the banks money. The real problem is that issuing new chip cards would cost the banks more than the fraud. Not only are the cards about a dollar more expensive each, and they still have to be re-issued about every three years, but the systems that inject encrypted keys into them, and store the keys on their databases, are very expensive. Banks are notoriously cheap when it comes to spending money that won't make them money.

The other reason EMV hasn't rolled out across the U.S. is that millions of retailers have about 12 million old credit card terminals spread across the country, and most are owned by cheap store owners who don't like being told they have to spend money to replace them. Most retailers have been dragging their feet, not wanting to make an expensive change. But the new members of the breach-of-the-month club are mad about the insecure systems they've been forced to use, and are now championing the rapid switch to EMV instead of fighting it. The smaller retailers are also impacted now, and are no longer resisting.

The irony is that EMV readers for the small retailers are far, far cheaper than the old terminals, and the rates for using new companies like Square, Intuit, and PayPal are much lower than the typical old bank rates for the old credit card readers.

That's how Chip and PIN works. Your account number is still fixed, but your authorization to spend from it (your PIN) is encrypted by the chip, and is valid only for a single transaction. There are still kinks with non-electronic transactions, but those can be solved.

Look for it to be all over the US by October of next year.

From what they've said before they expect you to eventually return to pick up your original batteries on your way home, though they haven't said how long you can keep driving on your loaners. If you don't they'll create some kind of fee to offset the condition between the battery pack you had and the one you got. If you're permanently relocating and make arrangements I'm sure they'll offer some kind of system to choose a battery in roughly the condition you had if you want it to be free or to swap for a brand new one if you want to restore max range at your final destination. Otherwise you could swap a 7 years old/100k miles battery for an almost new one for free, that wouldn't be right.

If your commute involves a battery swap for a Tesla you should really consider changing jobs. I'm guessing it's more about the weekend rush, Friday afternoon lots of cars will be going on long range trips and return Sunday evening, I'm guessing a battery swap pad is a lot more involved than a gas station pump so they won't have very many of them. They did run a test here recently driving a Tesla ~1000 miles and they said it all worked well but there was a lot of waiting, for every 2-3 hours of driving there's was one hour of charging. I know that when we drive to the capital it takes ~7 hours and we have one 30-45 minute stop, if they could swap batteries on at least one stop they'd be down to one hour charging per 4-6 hours of driving which would roughly be the break time we'd want with an ICE car too. But Friday afternoon I'm one of a thousand lemmings trying to get out of the city, it better go fast.

The first amendment only says "Congress shall make no law..." but everybody understands you don't have much freedom of speech if you end up hanging from the nearest tree afterwards. Because the law isn't supposed to shield me from lawful retaliation like a boycott only retaliation that's already illegal you don't need a specific law for that. But everybody realizes that targeted action against those who exercise a particular freedom is trying to encroach on that freedom. Of course the government can just wash their hands and say we weren't the angry mob holding the rope, but it wouldn't be a very good government.

Any time you refrain from a lawful action because of the risk or threat of illegal action is a failure of the system of law IMHO. If I can't walk through a part of the city at night they're failing to keep the street safe. If they can't show this movie at the cinema without the risk of terrorism they're failing to keep the country safe. At least if it's a genuine risk and not chicken little screaming that the sky is falling, I mean you can't expect them to be everywhere and prevent every crime everyone's trying to commit. And I don't want to sell out all my rights in an attempt to make it so either. There could be a price for not caving but there's a price for caving too, the terrorists don't need to take away your freedoms if your too afraid to use them anyway.

Supply, demand, taxes, and regulations all combine to control the prices. If people are willing to pay X, and you're selling all your product, why would you reduce prices? All it would do is lower their profits; if they're even making any.

My guess is there are a lot of hidden factors, like big insurance costs. Most insurance policies have an exemption so they don't pay out if you're doing something illegal. This means they may have to self-insure, or find a company willing to take on the risk of a federal bust - and that likely isn't cheap. Maybe the state has a tax rate designed to keep the costs high to minimize chronic abuse. Maybe the costs of physical security are high. Likely all of the above will continue to keep prices very high.

It's harder to carry a trunkful of "gambling" back across the border to sell to the people back home.

Pot is a noun. Gambling is a verb.

Funny, since Linux does everything it can to break a canonical name model with symlinks. In fact, you could mimic a case-insensitive system with 2^n symlinks like /foo/bar/COnFiG -> /foo/bar/config. And the captialization is the cause of errors in mixed environments:

1) Create file on Windows called "Foobar.txt".
2) Copy it to your Linux machine.
3) Rename it to "FooBar.txt"
4) Do lots of work on the text
5) Copy it to your Linux machine
6) Copy the Linux directory back to Windows.

There's now a 50-50 chance that your work just got overwritten by old crap from step 2). Of course you might argue that Windows is the problem here since it wouldn't happen on two Linux systems, but then it wouldn't happen on two Windows systems either. They just don't play nice with each other.