Yup. Breaking Bad 2030.

If only that sort of pressure could be re-purposed to start fusion plants....

Maybe we can get deBeers in the energy business. They're very good at creating high amounts of pressure for selling clear rocks made of carbon already.

Yes. And in his case, they may decline to prosecute his escape in the UK.

However, he will still be arrested in the meantime, and the fear of Assange and his supporters is that being in UK custody and unable to travel to somewhere less likely to cooperate with the US means that the US will be able to get their hands on him and have him extradited to the US where there certainly are grounds to arrest him and charge him with something, should the US government want to do so.

It is not clear that the US actually is going to try anything of the sort, but that is the theory, anyway. A lot rides on the US government's supposed efforts to get him in US custody, but I've seen no evidence that the US is trying to do so. There's no charges pending against him in the US right now, and there would have to be in order to get an extradition.

I personally think the US is content to just let him fall on his own face unless he makes more trouble or makes it easy on them by actually travelling to the US.

As we get most of their light in the infrared, they could very well be an actual brown color to our eyes depending on how it was illuminated. If you shined the light of an actual star on it from a short distance, it would probably be a very angry looking Jupiter. If there was no other illumination anywhere nearby, it would probably have a reddish glow like the color of a dying ember while it was fusing. After that, it would be indistinguishable from a gas giant planet.

It needs to be self sustaining by burning its own mass using certain fusion reasons. When stars "start up" there's probably a spark like a fusion explosion somewhere in there that starts the reaction in the first place, but after that, it keeps going.

Theoretically, you could say that if you put together a certain critical mass of fuel and maybe you compressed/nuked it to start it up, you might get a "star" for some period of time like a month or a year or 10,000 years or something, which is why we also have the concept of a "main sequence" star which will have a certain mass and follow the process of becoming a red giant then white dwarf and burn out. Those stars "live" for billions of years, and then peter out as white dwarfs over a trillion or so.

So, you could probably produce a star from something like Jupiter, and I suppose it would be legit, but nuclear explosions don't count as stars themselves.

The Earth is closer to the Sun than it is to Jupiter, so the point is moot no matter what you define Jupiter as.

Jupiter is producing more heat due to convection bringing core heat to the surface, it's not doing fusion. Like on Earth, core heat is due to the extreme pressures and radioactive materials heating the core to high temperatures. None of that pressure is enough to fuse nuclei together, however.

Brown dwarfs will actually do fusion, but only a little of it, and only for a relatively short time since they only have enough mass to fuse heavy hydrogen nuclei, which is the easiest thing that you can fuse. The problem is that there isn't much of the heavy versions of hydrogen, and so you're not going to burn for very long, nor will you burn brightly.

Well, the fleeing part from Sweden is actually not relevant here. He was asked to come back after the fact, which was arguably not aboveboard, but he was legally brought in for an extradition hearing in the UK. He then fled to the embassy.

At this point, by escaping from the UK to the embassy of Ecuador, he's actually in flight from UK law.

As they say, you may well be jailed unjustly, but escape from even an unjust imprisonment is still against the law. They could fix that in court, but guess what, now he's in UK hands and that will give the US time to make their own extradition request.

As convenient as it is, however, I don't actually believe it was originally set up that way and it is in no way clear the US will actually try and extradite him, even if he's taken back by the UK. A lot of people assume that this is what is going to happen, but I'm not sure they want to open that can of worms again.

More to the point, if the US government wants to shut him down, as opposed to make him a martyr, they'll work hard behind the scenes to get this rape case to stick. Bringing him back to the US just gives him a platform again. Having him as a convicted or convicted in public opinion rapist robs him of legitimacy while the US government shrugs and whistles off to the side.

Hell, none of this even requires the rape charge to be trumped up. He could be a jerk, and Sweden has some unusual laws about rape. He might have set himself up for the fall unwittingly. Most people commit felonies at some point without even realizing it because the laws are not always obvious nor do they always match common sense. All the US needed to do was probably ensure that his unwitting felony was detected, as opposed to ignored.

Er. I agree with you on the known failure case, which can be prepared for and alarmed against.

I'm not agreeing with you that no data is better than possibly corrupted data unless you're trying to actually operate a process with that data with no error checking of the recovered data. The disk should not force you to lose your possibly corrupt data, you should do that as part of your process for recovering the disk.

At the point it goes into fail-safe mode, most, if not all of the data is probably just fine and will stay that way if you don't do any writes. You might lose a file here or there, but even if you lose a large percentage of them, if you still have access to any of the data in a read-only mode, it is data that you have not lost.

My suggestion would be a physical switch which would make sure you stopped trying to use the drive. You would then pull the drive, flip the switch into archival fail-safe and you would then have a common sense way to ensure that no one tried to actually keep using bad data without at least thinking about it.

Like chicken.

See how easy that was?

"Nice robe."

It's the size of a small planet. Actually... it IS a small planet. It's not like we are pissing into a kiddie pool here, or disrupting a delicate piece of clockwork.

Doing more than making some scratches on the surface and just under it is unlikely to be within our capabilities for the foreseeable future.

Oddly enough, when we're talking about aliens, they're more likely to know we were there by our trash on the Moon, than they would by us maintaining a nice pristine, clean moon.

Humans: "Don't shoot alien overlord! We are an advanced civilization too!"

Alien: "Uh, I really don't see that. Prove it."

Human: "We have gone to the Moon!"

Alien: "Bullshit. There's *nothing* there I could find"

Human: "Well there's a flag and some landers and a buggy or two. We tried to keep the place tidy".

Alien: "Your moon is the size of what you primates call a 'dwarf planet'. I'm not going looking for one flag on a planet, the very thought is ridiculous. You must think I am stupid. Prepare to die."

The End.

That's right. Pen testers *could* have all those skills, and perhaps you want to hire that level of professional if you need solid gold security, but those people are usually researching new threats, not taking their time setting up testing for a stream of customers.

Most pen testers are there to fulfill pen test requirements in standards like PCI where something like Metasploit would be a sufficient "best effort", and actually pretty decent if you have someone who really knows how to use it. Companies aren't expecting to be 100% secure against the latest custom threat, they just don't want to be taken down by exploits that everyone already knows about where you could legitimately hold the company responsible for not doing due diligence.

Let's face it, we all know that if an intelligence agency, or some very, very good cracker is attacking you with custom code against stuff they discovered through long research or genius level skills, they're going to get in if there is any hole at all. And there almost always is. It's just that those sorts of people don't attack your run of the mill organization. The money in cracking systems is in volume, so unless you are a very, very special snowflake or very, very unlucky, you just accept the risk of the elite cracker and close the many, many vulnerabilities that we do know about. That keeps out the kiddies and the petty criminals, which is your pool of most likely attackers.

Yeah, except you're not going to opt out. Not really. Oh sure, you might opt out of Google or some specific company for some specific purpose, but you're still going to opt-in everywhere else and they're all collecting your data.

You're more likely to be hit with annoyances like targeted sales calls or social engineering from random non-governmental actors than you ever will be by something like the NSA. The NSA doesn't care about you, it doesn't care about me. Not unless you fit a profile, and that profile isn't going to be "person who doesn't like the US government", because that covers 99.9999% of the non-comatose US population at one point or another.