If the comments here are right, it wasn't the technologies Silk Road is based on that caused the issue, it was that he used dumb things like gmail addresses and mailing fake documents to his physical address. So the underlying technology stands firm, and it is now well know the he made millions from it.

There are two ways you can remove a weed. One way is to carefully dig it up, roots and all, and put it in the incinerator. The second way is to wait into it had flowers, then hit it with a weed wacker; spreading it seeds far and wide. This looks like the latter.

If I didn't know better I say someone in the Department of Justice is trying to set themselves up for a job for life. But I do know better. They aren't that smart.

They loose 20% of their capacity - when they are fully charged or fully discharged. Quoting Wikipedia:

Loss rates vary by temperature: 6% loss at 0 C (32 F), 20% at 25 C (77 F), and 35% at 40 C (104 F). When stored at 40%–60% charge level, the capacity loss is reduced to 2%, 4%, and 15%, respectively.

And yes, that is real. On reading that 5 years ago I decided to store my laptop's battery in the backpack, at 50% charge, unless I planned to use it. It still has 2/3's of charge today.

All that aside, again quoting Wikipedia on the ESS - the Tesla's battery system:

The ESS is expected to retain 70% capacity after 5 years and 50,000 miles (80,000 km) of driving (10,000 miles (16,000 km) driven each year). However, a July 2013 study found that even after 100,000 miles, Roadster batteries still have 80%-85% capacity and the only significant factor is mileage (not temperature)

As it happens, 80%-85% after 100,000 means 80%-85% after 500 cycles, which just happens to fit the characteristics of a LiMn battery. So there is nothing remarkable about the Telsa's performance. It's just today's battery technology done right. Granted, given it is almost always done wrong, this is a major achievement.

Quite true. The Minister for Industry is in charge of Science, and in particular the CSIRO. Which is how we end up with the minister in charge of CSIRO having no mention of educational attainments on his Wikipedia Page (does he have any?), and is climate skeptic.

I don't know what lots translates to in the US, but here in Australian it translates to a ballot paper 1.0 meter wide. The polling booths are 0.6ms wide, so you can lay the thing flat. The number of candidates exceeded our printing technology (or maybe the ballot paper had to fit into the ballot box - I don't know), but its put a maximum size on the ballot paper. The only option to fit every candidate on was to reduce the point size of the print. The had to reduce it to 6 point to make it fit.

Humans can't read 6 point. So the had to issue magnifying glasses so we could read the damned things.

Still, that isn't the problem. We have two more complications. We have preferential voting. This means you have to number every box from 1 to the number of candidates. It works wonderfully well the number of candidates is sane - far better than the US system of first past the post.

Only in the senate the number of candidates isn't sane. It is literally near impossible to mark 100 candidates without duplication or missing a number. To have a hope you have to spend ages double checking and triple checking, and if you make a mistake you can't correct it. Corrections on a ballot paper invalid it. You have to ask for a new ballot sheet and start again, and pray you don't make a different bloody mistake.

Are you getting the idea now? It is clear it is near impossible for a human to make a valid full senate vote? Good. Because what happens next leads us to the current situation, where a man who had a video of him & his mates flinging kangaroo poo at each other up on YouTube during the election got elected to the current Australian federal senate.

Because it is impossible to fill in, they had to simplify it. What they did seems fair enough. They introduced "above the line" voting. To vote above the line you effectively delegate your vote a 1 party. In other words you mark one box. The party has submitted a full senate vote to the Electoral Commission earlier, and that is used as your full preferential senate vote. You can still do a full preferential vote by filling in every square below the line, but you would have to be completely anal.

So, think about it. How do you game this system? If you are a big party it isn't easy, but if you aren't so tied down by ethics you create lots of little parties with confusingly similar names. The Electoral Commission helpfully colludes with you by randomising those names on the ballot sheet. So the voter is confronted to 20 to 30 names of parties most of which he has never heard of before, on a piece of paper so wide he can't lay it flat in the ballot box so he can read them in a single pass. Naturally lots of mistakes are made. The preferential system means if a small party doesn't get in, their votes (which remember they control now) flow to another party of their choice. It doesn't take much imagination to how they might make their choices.

There is one final twist. For the senate, you aren't electing 1 person. You are electing 6. The 1st 5 winners have almost certainly gobbled up more than 90% of the votes, so the last one is determined by tiny fraction.

The really sad part of all of this is while the extra complexity of preferential voting is more than worth it when electing one candidate, it is a complete waste of time when electing 6.

Anyway, don't lecture us Aussie's on how to completely fuck up a voting system. We have all of you beat by a large margin.

footage of him in a kangaroo poo fight

Yes, he is evidently a man of some character. It seems he enjoys dropping other peoples pants, hitting them with sticks, and spitting on the camera man. And he did have clip up on YouTube of him partaking in root poo fight.

But look on the bright side. Given the state Australian politics over the past 3 years this might be a plus. Surely he was just planning ahead, and picking up survival skills.

I wonder what his position is on the how VDSL vectoring will effect competition in the broadband wholesale market?

Thanks, this finally explains how SSL interception proxies are able to intercept my traffic at sites I work at.

No, I didn't explain that. But since you are so nice about it I will. When the corporation owns the hardware they can install anything they want. What they install is a self signed certificate with the signing bit set into the browser, and they tell the browser this cert is a CA. There are so many CA's there days you would have to be an actuary to spot it in the list. When your browser contacts https://www.host.com/ you automagically get a cert authorised by that self signed cert.

In the end you trust whoever firefox or whatever trusts says you should trust as CA's. That normally works. Except when someone else installs Firefox. Then you trust whoever they say you should trust, because they can edit the CA list Firefox / Chrome / whatever has.

Actually, all they need is the CA to sign a cert with the "allowed to sign" bit set. Then they can MITM anyone. Given TrustWave sold one of these to a company not so long ago, I doubt it would be hard to find a CA willing to pony up. Given some CA's in the world are government owned organisations, this has almost certainly happened somewhere already.

As others have said, what keeps the current PKI system working isn't the inherent trustworthiness CA's (they aren't trustworthy), or because NSA has scruples (it doesn't). Its the fact that in time they will almost be certainly found out.

Where I live at least, in Australia, I am not sure what proportion of SSL connections are already MITM'ed. But it would have to be above 10%. All schools do it, many government offices do it, many businesses do it.

The thing all these organisations have in common is they own the computers they are compromising. The corollary is if you care about your privacy, you need to use only hardware you control. But this has been known for years. What this story makes plain is you must also use software "you control", otherwise NSA and others will backdoor it just as eagerly as they have done with the hardware. You can't absolutely control all software you use of course, but open source is a good proxy.

We are absolute, miserable failures at buying software.

True, but give some bureaucracies credit - they are at least trying to work around that problem. The NSW police for example have trialled stealing it instead of buying it.

From http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/01/employer-tipped-off-police-in-pressure-cookerbackpack-gate-not-google/:

Suffolk County Criminal Intelligence Detectives received a tip from a Bay Shore based computer company regarding suspicious computer searches conducted by a recently released employee. The former employee’s computer searches took place on this employee’s workplace computer. On that computer, the employee searched the terms “pressure cooker bombs” and “backpacks.”

I actually agree with almost everything Drew wrote with the exception of his GC statements

I'm courious. Drew said two things about GC:

• - It's slower than manual memory allocation in memory constrained environments.
• - It's faster than manual memory allocation where there 5x or more of actual memory usage.

He didn't say GC always introduces huge latencies, probably because given an incremental GC and enough memory it doesn't. So which of the two assertions are you disagreeing with?

Or to put is another way, going by Drew's data if EA had lots of memory for whatever they were putting in the GC heap and their primary consideration was speed, they would have been far better off using GC.

The biggest weakness in Drew's argument that GC is and will remain dominant cause is IMHO the assumption that a phone will always be memory constrained. We have 2G phones now. 4G can't be far away. You can hardly call 4G "memory constrained". If mobile slowness were just caused by GC, my guess is at 4G most apps will have far more than 5x their memory requirements, so GC should actually help. I'm also guessing mobile will remain slow. The trifecta that ensures this is:

• - JavaScript is and will always remain a slow language, for the reasons Drew says.
• - CPU speed on mobile will remain slow, again for the reasons he says, and
• - The one thing area of improvement we are seeing in mobile, the growing in the number of cores, doesn't help JavaScript can't use because it's single threaded.

DRM cannot be open-source, for an obvious reason: If it were, you could just comment out the 'don't copy' line and recompile.

You are suffering from a delusion - you believe DRM works. Yet we all know perfect DRM is an impossibility. If it wasn't obvious 10 years ago, surely after 10 years of watching every deployed DRM scheme being cracked it must be obvious to blind Freddie now. All those cracked DRM schemes were closed source.

Publishing the DRM scheme as open source rather than closed source will, at best, delay the crack by a year or so. And what practicle difference will that make? None. They live and survive with piracy now. Yes, you can recompile FireFox, but 99% of the world's population can't. You might say that isn't an issue - they just download a "cracked" version of firefox from someone other than Mozilla. But you know what, they can just download cracked version of IE too. But most people don't because it comes with risks - as in you will be using that same browser to do your banking. So most people stay honest.

And that's the best they can ever hope to achieve - keeping the honest people honest. We now know that's good enough - because that's all they have now with Silverlight.

I'm not sure I understand what the fuss is all about. Our nice little series of tubes is not going to be diminished if "the movie studios remove movies from the web" in any significant way

For most here the fuss isn't about what the movie studios want - everybody knows they are self interested control freaks who don't have a clue how the internet, markets or piracy work. The fuss about the W3C. They seem to have lost the plot.

The W3C's job is to standardise the web, so web content can be viewed on any platform, any OS, any device and looks much the same. So if the W3C comes up with a DRM scheme, we all expect it to run on everything. This probably means the only DRM "blessed" by the W3C would be software only, which I am sure the moguls would hate. But the W3C wasn't created to brown nose media moguls, it's an engineering organisation whose mission is to come up with standards that will work everywhere. Yet here they proposing something that won't work everywhere and is exactly what the media moguls want. WTF?

I should stop there, but I won't. The really annoying part about this wouldn't be that hard to come up DRM that is good enough, and yet still appease the arse holes. The arse holes want DRM that encrypts the complete path so it can't be cracked, and pure software DRM can always be cracked. The only minor nit with the request is it is an impossible ask. All DRM can be cracked by definition. Why they still demand the impossible after every fucking DRM scheme deployed by them in the last decade has been cracked is utterly beyond me. Watching an engineering organisation like the W3C pander to such fantasies makes me ashamed of my profession.

The W3C could come up with a single standardised software only DRM that worked on every device, and add a few knobs for the twits who insist that making it impossible for some potential customers to view their product is a good idea. Yes, that software only DRM will be cracked, just like every other DRM scheme. But we know it is good enough because that is what they have now with Flash and Silverlight. So everyone would be happy. The world can get along with modest DRM that keeps the honest people from temptation, the W3C can stick to their remit, and the twits can send themselves broke by trying to defy physics. And as you say, no one gives a shit about the twits.