Wat?

I assume from your absurd statement that you consider invading Afghanistan and Iraq, then replacing their governments, is not "conquering"? Because ..... ? Because they installed a new government and then left, sorta, except they still routinely fly drones and air-strike anyone in those countries they see fit, which no truly independent country would tolerate.

Even if you use such a stupid definition of "conquer", you're attacking a straw man. I said invade, not conquer. It's indisputable that America has routinely invaded countries far away from their own borders over and over again. Any regime that boils down to "those who use military force against others gets sanctioned" would result in America being entirely cut off from the world economy for years. That clearly won't happen so this is just another case of American (and to some extent European) hypocrisy at work. Either do it consistently or don't do it at all. Preferably not at all - sanctions are based on the idea that punishing huge swathes of ordinary citizens on both sides will somehow bring about political change. How many people really believe the people are in charge of their governments foreign policies in countries like the USA?

If they wish to engage to aggression against other country's sovereignty, they should do it without the rest of the world helping fund them.

Better be careful what you wish for. If the rest of the world applied that standard to the USA and UK they'd have nobody to buy their bonds at all. You don't want China deciding to flex their economic muscles by playing with the bond market next time America invades some random country, do you?

Given that all our leaders in both the west and Russia are pathological liars, I'm always interested to find the other side of the story. Not that our media makes it easy.

This slashdot story reports what's happening as fact. But as far as I can tell what we have is actually only quotes from Kiev, the same people who have been claiming that Russia was invading for weeks. The same people who claimed that a convoy of aid was actually full of soldiers and military equipment, even after it was repeatedly spot checked by journalists and found to contain exactly what Russia claimed it did (food and aid). This is coming just days after Poroshenko dissolved his Parliament, there were apparently rising protests against conscription into the Ukrainian army, and the separatists were able to make progress.

Just to make things even more complicated: simultaneous with the claim that Russian troops are crossing into Ukraine, RT is claiming that Ukrainian troops crossed into Russia, in order to defect, and the Ukranian government admits this.

This comment on the Guardian story (which incidentally is much less biased than this Slashdot article and presents this as an accusation by Kiev) is what got me to look for these stories and I think interesting enough to quote in full:

Nothing really to explain. Ukraine troops, left without leadership and provisions, have been deserting and losing ground all week. Now that people are demonstrating in Kiev calling for Poroshenko's resignation, he's calling invasion.

- Close to 2,000 Ukraine combatants have put down their guns and asked for asylum in Russia.
- In the last 4 or 5 days, the DPR army has encircled and captured more than 7,000 troops, and all the hardware they possessed.
- On the 24th we all saw thousands of these defeated troops marched through Donesk city centre.

Now they have close to 80 tanks, and various other armored vehicles, all acquired from defeated Ukraine troops, and are sweeping over eastern Ukraine.

Poroshenko was given billions of dollars, and some how failed to pay pensions, salaries, or to send adequate supplies to the forces. He's losing this war, that's all.

And civil unrest becomes vastly more likely in a future with runaway global warming and the climatic changes, floods, draughts, food shortages, rising sea levels, mass extinctions, habitat destruction, economic upheavals and the like it will bring. Nuclear power, wind, solar, hydro and geothermal are ALL essential to combat it.

CO2's atmospheric lifetime is something like 1,000 years. How come those who fret about the longevity of nuclear waste never seem to talk about this? With fast reactors that burn the actinides (including plutonium) as fuel, the remaining fission products decay to the level of the original uranium ore (while being considerably more compact) in only a few hundred years, much less than the atmospheric lifetime of CO2.

The hype about "carbon capture" is just that -- hype. But it serves one useful purpose: its utter impracticality shows just how minor the nuclear waste "problem" is by comparison.

Not far from Yucca Mountain you will find hundreds if not thousands of craters under which are buried the fission and activation products of decades of US nuclear testing. They're not reprocessed and contained in silica glass, they were simply mixed (quite violently) with the soil and rock. And yet they don't seem to go anywhere. There is no need for Yucca Mountain to contain reactor waste for even a hundred years because it will surely be removed and burned as fuel in fast reactors. Once people wake up to the fact that global warming is a vastly greater threat than nuclear power, and that nuclear power is just as essential as wind, solar, geothermal and hydro in combating it, people will realize that "spent" fuel from light water reactors is far too valuable to just throw away.

Even with cheap solar and wind we will still need nuclear, at least until somebody perfects a cheap, reliable and long-lived utility scale battery. Otherwise we'll never be able to retire all the CO2-belching fossil-fuel plants to match the varying supply with the varying demand.

I agree that waste in casks at nuclear power plants is reasonably safe but it would still be better to move it to Yucca Mountain. If nothing else, security would be a lot cheaper. It's utterly ridiculous that all that money was spent on a waste repository that, thanks to NIMBYism on the part of Nevada politicians, doesn't look like it'll be used any time soon. At least nuclear waste is the one form of toxic waste that will eventually go away on its own. Arsenic, mercury, lead, thallium and other chemical poisons remain toxic forever.

Here's a more technical discussion from NHTSA. At page 74-75, the data elements of the Basic Safety Message I and II are listed. The BSM Part I message doesn't contain the vehicle ID, but it does contain latitude and longitude. The BSM Part II message has the vehicle's VIN. So this is explicitly not anonymous.

Back in the 1980s, when Caltrans was working on something similar, they used a random ID which was generated each time the ignition was switched on. That's all that's needed for safety purposes. This system has a totally unnecessary tracking feature.

Most of this stuff only works if all vehicles are equipped. It also relies heavily on very accurate GPS positions. However, there's no new sensing - no vehicle radar or LIDAR. The head of Google's autonomous car program is on record as being against V2V systems, because they don't provide reliable data for automatic driving and have the wrong sensors.

If something is going to be required, it should be "smart cruise" anti-collision radar. That's already on many high-end cars and has a good track record. It's really good at eliminating rear-end collisions, and starts braking earlier in other situations such as a car coming out of a cross street. Mercedes did a study once that showed that about half of all collisions are eliminated if braking starts 500ms earlier.

V2V communications should be an extension of vehicle radar. It's possible to send data from one radar to another. Identify-Friend-Foe systems do that, as does TCAS for aircraft. The useful data would be something like "Vehicle N to vehicle M. I see you at range 120m, closing rate 5m/sec, bearing 110 relative. No collision predicted". A reply would be "Vehicle M to vehicle N. I see you at range 120m, closing rate 5m/sec, bearing 205 relative. No collision predicted". That sort of info doesn't involve tracking; it's just what's needed to know what the other cars are doing. It's also independent of GPS. Useful additional info would be "This vehicle is a bus/delivery truck, is stopped, and will probably be moving in 5 seconds.", telling you that the big vehicle ahead is about to move and you don't need to change lanes to go around it.

Encrypted Media Extensions lands in 38. This is what Netflix's using in their new HTML5 player. So hopefully, finally, Netflix on Linux.

Now if they can just get Java working on Linux again we'd be all set.

I understand why 64 bit can improve performance on x86 platforms because the 64-bit transition also rolled in other improvements like more registers.

I understand why 64 bit can improve the performance of security mitigations by making guessed addresses more likely to result in a controlled crash rather than arbitrary memory scribbling.

I cannot think of any reason why switching to 64 bit builds should halve the crash rate, unless this is just a side effect of 64 bit hardware being newer and less crappy overall. Can anyone else explain this to me?

Nah. It just takes more crashes before the exploit achieves penetration.

(Address space randomization is a terrible idea. It's a desperation measure and an excuse for not fixing problems. In exchange for making penetration slightly harder, you give up repeatable crash bug behavior.)

The Slashdot article doesn't tell me what MediaGoblin does, or what it's for. Nether does the MediaGoblin site. The documentation, in typical Gnu syle, starts out with "how to participate" and continues with installation instructions.

It's sort of like Wordpress, but with different features and support for streaming media. There's a list of sites that use it. Of the public sites listed, all but one are demos of MediaGoblin. The first site on the list that isn't a a demo and works is this set of baby pictures. There's one site that lets you upload stuff. It's a collection of uploaded pictures with no organization.

This seems to be a publishing system for people with nothing to say.

Let's take a humongous game: 10 gigs. How long does it take for an in game, low compression, high quality video stream to be a whole lot more downloading time than those 10 gigs? And remember that predictive streaming can take 4 times more bandwidth than regular streaming. I would be surprised if you don't get to 10 gigs in a few hours.

I just can't see a world where, on average, you save bandwidth by streaming games. Quite the opposite, in fact: This system is a non-starter in a world of bandwidth caps.

The bandwidth problem is not on the way out (it's bigger than you think, but it's still small), but on the way in. It's a 1080p video stream that has to be compressed on the fly that cannot do any significant amount of buffering. Netflix already eats bandwidth for lunch, and that with compression algorithms that can run for as long as you want to optimize bandwidth use. So we get weaker compression, and we send a user 4 frames for every frame they see, so 8 times the bandwidth of Netflix for the same image quality.

So yeah, if there are data caps, they better be in the multi-terabyte a month range, or you just can't use this system at all.