I've been using Pico CMS recently as an experiment. It too seems pretty nice.

I saw an ad at the station for some company doing personality tests to 'unlock your potential'. That reminded me that I did a bunch of these at the start of my teens at school, primarily as a means to determine the sorts of jobs you might want to look into. I answered those tests in good faith, I wasn't trying to game them, and yet, without exception, they came out as "inconclusive", with no career suggestions at all (I wonder if they refund the test fee for that!?). I sure hope they've improved since then, because they were no use to back then.

...and when the probe sent in my name crashes into said object (deliberately, or due to decaying orbit), I'd prefer that the object in question was contaminated by it as little as possible such that any future missions could look at it in it's original form.

It was gonna be called Stoojcoin, but got changed right at the last moment.

If we make it too easy for him, we don't need him at all. We'd need maybe 10 police officers for the whole country, and they only need to be 'plod' and not some sort of highly trained super-cop. They'd just wait for the computer to text them the name and address of a 'criminal' and they'd go fetch them and throw them in the back of the van.

Honestly, if I need something in order to do my job and stop some systems falling over constantly, I ask for it. The difference is that if my management agree with me and give me something to help me, other people don't lose anything as a result. This guys doing the same as me, but with considerably graver consequences.

You're just a few hundred years too late. Had the technology existed, I'm sure all the things you describe would have been happening during the Crusades.

Rest assured, a lot of people have died in the name of $religion. Thankfully, Christianity has, on the whole, evolved beyond such things )although certain outposts in the US (including the White House) do slip up from time to time). I'll leave the question of Judaism's evolution, and its effect on the Israel/Palestine region to the reader.

I think it's fair to say that just because you're in a club, it doesn't mean that the actions of everyone in that club are things you agree with or support. On occasion, people will join a club in order to give themselves an air of legitimacy, or to give their cause a greater meaning or voice, whilst they continue with a course of action that is contrary to the majority of club members beliefs or support.

I would imagine they're using some sort of bandwidth optimisation between ground and plane (something like a Riverbed, perhaps). They could do the same with encrypted packets, but the hit rate on those is practically zero, so they'd get no gain. Instead, they decrypt on the ground, compress the stream and send it up to the plane, which uncompresses the stream, re-encrypts whatever it needs to and sends it out the clients. They obviously can't use the original cert for that re-encryption, so they use their own self-signed one.

It seems to me this is the first generation of such services. It's got so many compromises it's pretty awful. When they crack the bandwidth to plane, then they won't need to do so much traffic molesting and the service gets a lot more interesting.

...or how about the car works all by itself on major roads and highways. On crappy side roads that aren't properly documented in the GPS maps, let alone suitably paved, lit or maintained, it says "I'm sorry, I can't drive down this road, but you can". A solution like this would mean 80% of all journeys would be 100% autonomous and it would mean the vast majority of accidents would be avoided, as considerably few accidents happen on shitty side roads than they do on the major ones.

I doubt anyone would accept a car that might suddenly say "eek, I can't do this - please take over" while driving 50 down a windy road in the rain. I think we'd all expect it to find a safe place to stop and let us take over from there though.

A good while back, an "overhead cam shaft" was a selling point (maybe not a major one, but it was mentioned openly by dealers/manufacturers). Nowadays, as noted above, the camshaft might as well be in a locked vault at the dealers house for all the serviceability benefits it has.

Things aren't repairable because we don't want them to be. If we all asked manufacturers for service manuals, they'd get around to writing some ;-) Of course, since this is /., I should also mention that DRM is specifically created to stop repairs (or modifications).

Most of the big internet companies do something this (try doing some Google searches over Tor for an example). Things get more complicated when you use a CDN because whilst you can block the IP yourself, the CDN keeps sending their traffic to you. You need to either get the CDN to block as well, or inspect the request that came via the CDN to see if it was actually from a blocked IP (which is more expensive to you than an ordinary block).

The tricky thing about ddos attacks is they they are usually very distributed (vddos?). That means a given IP may only hit you up a few times in an hour, so won't trip your thresholds for abuse. Trying to figure out who's running an infected computer and who isn't is an exercise in futility though (who's to say it's infected?). Getting ISPs to do anything about anything in vaguely close to real time is also futile (even if you see a specific IP abusing you constantly for hours and think it's an 'open and shut case', you'll struggle to get any ISP to do anything about it - whomever it is will probably give up and stop before the ISP even starts to look at the problem).

If I was hired as the CEO, the first thing I'd do is whatever the hell the board asked me to do.

Redphone: https://whispersystems.org/ Not P2P, but beats this offering.

Maybe it's time for reverse-gzip - the rebigulator, if you will. The idea is to start with a small message:

"Hey, fancy going for a pint tonight?" ...encrypt it:

"asdhasdjkhasdkjasdkashdasdwqw" ...rebigulate it:

"dsfshfuykhfferwerrhwerhjkfsdofiueioroeirerqwehqweudyasdadwkljqoeiweorujk" ...send :-)

I have a white, male British friend - it's a bit of a running joke that he gets checked every time. Years ago, he and I went to/from Canada via the US. On departure from London, there were three American goons (yes, imported goons!) doing 'random' bag searches on the way to the gate (extra to the actual security screening). He got checked by all three - presumably the first two were incompetent so the third guy had to do it right. Or maybe the whole system was a complete sham. Should anyone ever want to smuggle anything, just go along with my mate. He'll get checked for everything, you won't get checked for anything and you get to take your contraband wherever you like.

The cock pits of most planes isn't en-suite, so you'd have to fix that up too. I should imagine that external doors cost lots of money and add lots of weight, so less of them makes sense in that regard. Having a door for just 2-3 people to escape from makes that one an expensive door ;-)