We know that the developers were pretty sure that the last [real] version [i.e., 7.1a] of TrueCrypt was still secure.

We know the auditors also think 7.1a is secure.

Don't computerize the simple mechanical parts of a car. Just DON'T. You're collective playlists aren't worth the inevitable police and attacker control and surveillance of our cars.

No, you and you, you can't outsmart them. You can't be God King of Koding and Do It Right. There is always a way, if you permit freaking Turning machines to control your vehicle, for someone to take control.

A machine, a successful, elegant device that occupies the lowest possible fail state, is one that has as few moving parts as possible. Any turing box, by which I mean a programmable computer, that connects in is a complete failure of design if it is not utterly necessary. Brakes, steering, locks. and acceleration have been mechanical systems for over a century and a half. No need to interface hundreds of computers, sensors, and telematic holes into something that already WORKS.

Well, there is that, hardly worth the quarter of a cent or whatever it comes to. But if such a case can get a court to tack on a significantly painful asshole penalty... it might discourage others.

"...at least in the case where the "copyright holder" decides to monetize rather than take the video down..."

Seems to me that a case could be made that per the DMCA, they owe you 3x damages.

Oh, wait, you didn't need to pass a test for that.

I'm just trying to think how that would have been possible. I think back then there was a medical exception you could plead for. I didn't. I passed the 20 WPM test fair and square and got K6BP as a vanity call, long before there was any way to get that call without passing a 20 WPM test.

Unfortunately, ARRL did fight to keep those code speeds in place, and to keep code requirements, for the last several decades that I know of and probably continuously since 1936. Of course there was all of the regulation around incentive licensing, where code speeds were given a primary role. Just a few years ago, they sent Rod Stafford to the final IARU meeting on the code issue with one mission: preventing an international vote for removal of S25.5 . They lost.

I am not blaming this on ARRL staff and officers. Many of them have privately told me of their support, including some directors and their First VP, now SK. It's the membership that has been the problem.

I am having a lot of trouble believing the government agency and NGO thing, as well. I talked with some corporate emergency managers as part of my opposition to the encryption proceeding (we won that too, by the way, and I dragged an unwilling ARRL, who had said they would not comment, into the fight). Big hospitals, etc.

What I got from the corporate folks was that their management was resistant to using Radio Amateurs regardless of what the law was. Not that they were chomping at the bit waiting to be able to carry HIPAA-protected emergency information via encrypted Amateur radio. Indeed, if you read the encryption proceeding, public agencies and corporations hardly commented at all. That point was made very clearly in FCC's statement - the agencies that were theorized by Amateurs to want encryption didn't show any interest in the proceeding.

So, I am having trouble believing that the federal agency and NGO thing is real because of that.

Neonicotines aren't showing any sort of impact on honeybees. In continental areas where they're banned (bees travel like 3 miles; banning them in half the fucking EU means you don't have any neonicotines 10 years later).

We actually think a new parasite evolved somewhere about 2009...

Not necessarily.

We believe now there's a new parasitic fly evolved to prey on honeybees. Honeybees are well-studied; it's unlikely we'd have missed this parasite in the past 5000 years, so it must be relatively new. The parasite is a tiny fly which injects eggs into the back of the bee's neck (roughly), which hatch into 8-12 new parasites. The bees typically fly toward light when infested; however, if one fails to leave the hive in this way, you have a dozen new parasites infecting a dozen bees and, should more than one of those bees stay in the hive, it propagates out at an alarming rate: the damn things reproduce like fruit flies, so in a few short week they infest the entire hive, and all the bees leave and die--which is the pattern behavior of CCD.

The bees that don't die have been swapping genetics around every time their queens die. Suddenly, with 60% of all bees gone, there's a lot of nectar. They fill up their hives and start packing nectar into brood comb; thus they start swarming, sometimes 3-5 swarms or more in the beginning of the year. That means 3-5 new queens per hive, each mating with 8-15 drones from multiple other hives. These are the bees that didn't die.

They trade genetics like crazy. Such extreme selection pressure would lead to rapidly filling queens with genetics to resist the new parasite. With multiple mating, the queen could produce 2/3 of her workers fatally susceptible to parasites, and 1/3 not. If the hive weakens, they'll decide they don't like the queen, kill her, and raise a new one--possibly from one of the 1/3 of eggs immune to parasites, meaning stronger genetics. The queen makes drones as clones of herself, so such a new queen would both produce more immune bees (and likely not get killed by a colony angry at its poor survival rates) and spread such stronger genetics all over the place.

Give it time and they'll proliferate their resistance. They always do. It's really fucking hard to extinct honeybees; you have to get them *all* in one pass.

Monoculture is a dumb theory. Back 150 years ago, the Italians were the bee of choice. Today, people vary between Italians, Russians, Buckfast, Germans, Carnies ... some have MH or VSH genes, and most are wild-mated with local bees to obtain genetic memory of the local climate (that is: bees with instinctive behaviors adapted for local survival are the ones flying around wild mating with your virgin queens).

We have more genetic diversity now than ever. Even with colonies vanishing, the bees swap genetics like crazy--every time a queen dies (every 7 years for a hive, roughly), and rapidly when they swarm due to massive reductions in the bee population (meaning lots of available nectar). It's actually hard to lose genetic traits in the honeybee population.

We've got "survivor" strains which survive CCD. Many of them have MH and VSH genes, although MH dilutes quickly. The gene pool has rapidly improved.

When honey bees die off, there's an excess of available nectar due to fewer pollinators. Hives fill with bees, who start packing brood comb with collected honey; in response, they raise a new queen. The old queen takes 1/3 of the bees and leaves, while the old hive grows a replacement. You now have two hives. A hive can swarm 3-5 times easily if conditions persist to drive swarm behavior.

Bees really don't go extinct very easily. They rapidly replace any lost colonies, rebounding the population in a few short months. It's always the survivors who rebound. In this latest round, we've started to suspect evolution of a new plague of parasitic flies, each of which infects one live bee and produces 8-12 offspring; hives which go unaffected or which resist the parasite will spread, immediately requiring broad mating--the virgin queen goes out to find a bunch of drones (not all from the same hive, either) to get busy with, then comes back laying eggs. Each time a hive collapses, its genetics have already been passed on many times, and its capacity for nectar consumption is left as surplus for another hive to expand and fill in. Even a new plague of parasitic flies can't extinct honey bees, and hardly manages to cut away at their genetic diversity.

Brish student loans are paid off at a rate based on your income, they are also automatically written off after a set period (the exact set period has varied, for new english and welsh* student loans now it's 30 years, prior to that it was 25 years and prior to that it was at state retirement age). In recent years both tuition fees and loan interest rates have risen sharply while the set period before the loan is written off has been shortened. Claims from different bodies as to what proportion of students will be able to replay their loans vary.

Personally this seems to some extent like an accounting trick to make the current government budget look better at the expense of running up liabilities for future governments to deal with. Rather than subsidising the university education upfront or subsidising the interest on the loans year by year they are kicking the can down the road so some future government will have to pay the cost of writing off those debts.

* Rules in scotland and northern ireland are different.

Or it could mean that in each case she was good but not quite good enough to beat the competition.