I will admit that this was my first reaction upon hearing it too - blame the politicians for not having set up laws to stop this. However when you think about things more it is extremely hard to come up with any rules to fix this unless you tax the revenue of companies rather than their profits. I don't see anyway that you can easily differentiate between a genuine expense for a company vs. a profit moving expense designed to make the purchasing company unprofitable while making the selling company profitable.

The only way I could see this working would be to pass a general law forbidding the movement of profits by this method and giving the Inland Revenue the power to decide when this has taken place. This would be a very vague law with potentially far reaching consequences that gave government a lot of power. However when it comes to these large, multinational companies I'm not sure there is any other way because they can use their army of lawyers to devise a way around any concrete, well defined law that does not enforce a general principle.

The point is that the people making the deal are not physically located in Ireland. The negotiation, sale etc. is all taking place in the UK. They then twist the law to the point where they can legally claim it took place in Ireland. Also while you might be able to decide whose laws are used to negotiate disputes regarding the contract you cannot decide whose laws apply to taxation resulting from the contract.

They are following the absolute letter of the law and using it to get around their social responsibilities to support the society in which they operate which is immoral, or to put it another way evil. So I'm guessing they have had the same lawyers figure out how to get around their "do no evil" rule.

Better hope they are not made in China otherwise that will be an external communication and they will be able to track exactly who ordered them!

They are not signed in Ireland they are signed in the UK where both parties live and work. You should not be allowed to just arbitrarily decide which countries laws apply when everything is taking place in the UK unless you are going to give individuals the same power and I can go shopping for the country with the lowest income tax rate too. The problem is that large, international companies can afford enough lawyers that they twist laws into knots to get out of paying their share of society's infrastructure costs.

They are following their own laws: that is quite literally the problem. Despite the best efforts of the US government, and apparently to the surprise of some of its citizens, the US constitution does dot apply to other countries like the UK. It is perhaps even more surprising that it often does not seem to always apply in the US as well but that's a different issue to the one being discussed here.

My guess is that there was probably some Victorian-era law on the books passed back when international communication was a rare and uncommon thing which allowed the government to monitor such rare events. Fast forward 100 years and suddenly a huge fraction of everyone's communication is international. So for a group called "Privacy International" the sad irony is that there is no international privacy in the UK.

No a C&D is threatening you with being sued for large amounts of money and is written to be as threatening as possible in order to get you to back down. In civilized society when making a request of someone you do not normally start by immediately threatening them with the consequences of not complying. This generally tends to be counterproductive because it antagonizes people who will then either do the minimum possible to comply with your demand and/or figure out a way around your demand which causes the maximum inconvenience for you while complying with the letter of what is required by law. In addition a company which relies of customers wanting to shop there is not going to gain business by antagonizing its customers. We all understand that a company has to protect its trademarks but it does not have to be (or hire) a jerk to do so.

There is always a risk of complications with a vaccine even for adults. The question is not whether there is any risk from having the vaccine but whether the risk is less than the risk from catching the disease. According to the US CDC there were 48,277 cases of Whooping Cough with 20 fatalities mainly in babies under 3 months.

The only rate of serious complications from a vaccine I could find is for the MMR where 1 in a million develop encephalitis which is a serious condition but that has to be compared to a 1 in a thousand rate of encephalitis from measles alone. Assuming the whooping cough vaccine has a similar serious complication rate that puts the likelihood of death at below 1 in a million vs. 1 in 25,000 for the disease. So I'll take my chance with the vaccine (and already did when I was a kid!).

So instead of trying to persuade people that there is zero risk from vaccines, which is simply not true, we should instead be educating them about the relative risks of the vaccine (almost none) compared to the disease (typically a far higher chance of death and/or permanent disability). One of the biggest ironies of vaccines though has to be that some people don't get vaccinated because they don't see serious diseases like measles as a threat to be worried about anymore. Doh!

As well as the vulnerabilities to early cracking you mention this approach is also very vulnerable to permanent loss. If someone does not want you to ever retrieve the data all they need to do if fire a high energy electron beam at the same target any time between you sending the signal and its return. Assuming the energy is high enough to minimize dispersion, and they fire enough electrons then you will never receive the signal and so never be able to retrieve the data.

What exactly DID he do? It looks like he simply built a MindCuber and added a few tweaks. This is not at all impressive. The reason I recognized it for what it is is that my 10 year old son did almost exactly the same thing: built the MindCuber from the available instructions and ran the code. It looks like this kid added a few tweaks but other than that it is almost identical to the published plans.

Things are getting really bad if a primary school kid who can build a complex Lego kit from instructions is now such a rarity that it's newsworthy. Now if he had designed and built it from scratch including the algorithm to solve the cube then I would be impressed but building a lego robot from available instructions? Really?

$900 is one battery, you need 5 for a 15,000 km range hence you are out by a factor of five. Since, as others have pointed out, getting 6l/100 km is a bit of a stretch so it may be closer to a factor of 4 rather than 5. Really what we need is a real cost for the battery. The $900 price is just to make it the same cost as Li-ion with the huge benefit of massive range and instant recharge by replacement. If retail replacement cost is much less than this then you start to have an electric car which can really be competitive on both cost and range with a petrol one. At $225/battery you reach parity with petrol but this is barely above the cost of 100 kg of raw aluminium so it seems unlikely to be achievable.

Actually I don't think it is possible to solve it at a fundamental level. The laws of physics are invariant under time. In fact this symmetry is what gives us conservation of energy. What this means is that any physical system must work the same regardless of when it is operated. The result is that the only way to make such a temporal crypto algorithm would be to use a tamper-proof physical device which will measure the passage of time - you cannot develop a time lock algorithm which will only run when the time is X since no physical system can measure absolute time only a change in time.

Since making something like that would be exceedingly hard, if not impossible, to make tamper proof you are reliant on how securely the device is stored which is pretty much the system which already exists. All you can do, as you suggest, is make it hard to assemble the pieces before the correct time.

*** Relevance fight! ***

Rosin yer bows fiddlers, hike yer skirts ladies and sweep out the pit, smoke dem crawdads while you got 'em... we're gonna have open source pit 'relevance wraslin' tonite!

Over in the corner Papa Snuff Daddy is totin' his signed binary drivers, he's a real tootin' feller. He installs clean and you can see he's runnin' but yo better watch out for his kernel panic hold, it'll get ya good. And when he gets ya, whatch gonna do, patch him? He's been patched so many times but the scars don't show 'cuz he wore out his version number years ago.

In the other corner we have the astounding Patefacio Radix Maximus Mesa! He is 'open', he is 'sourced', 'committed' to victory! You can clearly see he has the biggest package, but does he know how to use it? This feller is so smug he wants you to patch him! An when the proverbial shit hits the coolin' appatarus, who would you rather have out in the woods with ya, far away from dem vendor websites? Lets just say if Maximus panics you could fix him yerself in time. Or if you can't chop off the part of him that don't work. Ha, he heard me say that, only jokin' fella, now he's ready to fight!

The musicians were poised with their instruments. They were ready to go. It would only be a few seconds now, I wrote.

It is really very simple. The colors of the days and the watermelons go like this --

Monday: red watermelons.
Tuesday: golden watermelons.
Wednesday: gray watermelons.
Thursday: black, soundless watermelons.
Friday: white watermelons.
Saturday: blue watermelons.
Sunday: brown watermelons.

A so sad, too bad story of genius... it reminds me of some of the tales told in the Cosmos and Connections series (Sagan, Tyson and Burke) of astronomical and physics visionaries, folks glimpsed truths that became essential building blocks of our modern understanding of the world, and yet in their own time this information was of little or no practical use.

I've been down some of the rabbit holes of Xanadu in my own algorithmic doodles which centered around 'compressing' information by changing tokens into references to tokens down to the rudiments of language, which is going too far because you lose useful context, and have witnessed some of the grandest experiments in whole encapsulation -- such as the replication versioning disaster that was Microsoft OLE (object linking and embedding), where burned-in OS paths to data (on my computer, not necessarily yours) create a fragile web of things on disk and things inside other things that is easily broken, leaving us with data cobwebs flapping in the wind.

Sadly, and with utmost sympathy -- it's a beautiful dream-- but I believe that many of these concepts are dangerous and should be abandoned.

These are extremes. Make lots of copies, knowing some will evolve and diverge... and try to smarten the analysis so after the fact you can reconcile diffs, but it's a separate process and you're screwed if non-trivial transformations occur. Or centralize and impose a System (as Xanadu attempts) with a battery of willing monkeys feeding knowledge into the system, correctly applying transclusion down to some atomic level, and on the seventh day He looked down upon it and saw that it was Good...

But you're screwed with Xanadu. You're screwed as a species because you have distilled a knowledge base into a few high-tech points of failure. Where knowledge survives over history through massive and often wasteful replication, oops there goes the Library of Alexandria, oops there goes another rubber tree, you're putting all your intellectual eggs a few baskets. Baskets held in Xanadu servers that are so pointer and reference rich that a raw dump of the damned thing wouldn't make any sense at all.

Xanadu screws you as a person because we assimilate knowledge via a narrative process. Books render completely and we read. We need lectures to learn, great lectures that illuminate and inspire. Good lecturers are those whose minds unroll knowledge into talking-streams. They cannot and will not (instead) engage in some process of hashing out every sentence they utter, completely researching and correctly embedding the underlying link to the utterance of the person who said it last to first, and did not necessarily say it better. When faced with the task of applying tranny-links to their work they would likely just fall silent.

Because (since we are each alone in the mind) there is no one way to say anything, and no distilled 'true' method of thinking. Not even in German. It's treatises, sermons and pulpits all the way down.

If you are excited by the Xanadu concept and think fewer points of failure are better, please take a moment to view this exquisite and amazing visit with Computer Zero. It is from the 1975 movie Rollerball, and what the hell is it doing there, it is true genius and is creepy as hell.

Zero was a 'memory pool', an actual Xanadu Server! It had all the books, all the knowledge, all the connections, and yet -- it was absent-minded and going insane, losing things, mumbling. If there had been a sequel to Rollerball world 100 years hence, it would surely have been a medieval society.

Make a zillion copies of everything. Re-tell in your own words. There's no time for linking or data trans-substantiation, just replicate data like rabbits and we'll fix it in the mix. Or let the kids sort it out.

Some type of triggered fission in the heavy elements of the meteorite? And gamma emitter with a short half life of minutes is being created and left in the trail, such as Barium-137?

That makes a lot of sense. The other advantage is that it also reduces the weight of the car by several 100 kg which will increase performance and efficiency.