Dave's course is certain to be interesting.
A good way to get up to speed in research IMHO is to look at the problems in publications, and try to reproduce the indicated work. You can do this with fairly old (5-6 years) publications too, usually at that point data sets etc are available.
Edmund
The freedom of the press belongs to the owner of the press.
Apple obeys Chinese law by not allowing their citizens to bypass censorship , and it obeys US law by providing private information on the Chinese users to the US authorities
Yes, my foot probably contains about two pints of water.
The NSA gets the info, then the CIA takes out selected individuals by lobbying, blackmail or if all fails
The US has argued that the private records of the rest of the world can be searched and divulged at will - why should americans suddenly expect to be treated differently?
If none of the tech-savvy phone corps objected to turning over bulk data, when the process gave them that opportunity, one can conclude that Americans are mostly happy to the surveillance, probably because it gives them an illusion of safety.
I have a tip for our sheepish friends: Appoint a dictator, totalitarian regimes are much better at policing than democracies.
If you like the law, or do not disagree with it, comply.
If you don't like the law, use the democratic process and try and get it changed.
If you don't trust your government, elect another.
And if all else fails, emigrate to China or Russia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS
"BeOS was optimized for digital media work and was written to take advantage of modern hardware facilities such as symmetric multiprocessing by utilizing modular I/O bandwidth, pervasive multithreading, preemptive multitasking and a 64-bit journaling file system known as BFS. The BeOS GUI was developed on the principles of clarity and a clean, uncluttered design.
The API was written in C++ for ease of programming. It has partial POSIX compatibility and access to a command-line interface through Bash, although internally it is not a Unix-derived operating system."
There's a reimplementation, Haiku
https://www.haiku-os.org/
And now comes Act II where intercepted data can be shown in secret to a judge to obtain convictions without the defense being able to review same.
Then in Act III trials will be held in secret chambers with no defense.
Yes, one could have a stateful encryption with a very long state built into a threaded mail reader.
The idea obviously is not to make decryption impossible, it's to slow down mass decryption, thereby making mass mail searches harder and restoring a measure of civil liberties.
They have to track every byte of every peer to peer transaction, in case someone is using modified clients to communicate. $
Also, they are ordered to retain every single phone sex conversation between non US persons, in case blackmail material is required some decades later for commercial or diplomatic purposes.
A "Brand" puts its corporate name behind every product - that's why branding works: The company's managers know that a mediocre product will impact brand perception and thus lessen their future sales of other products.
Look at it this way: Do you want a Mercedes Benz or a Mystery Car? The Mystery Car may be very nice but you need to test it. The Mercedes will probably perform. Now, do you prefer a Chromebook where Google says "This is our Flagship corporate laptop for Google Apps our execs use it, and we lose revenue if it doesn't perform", or a SlackwareBook which says "Entirely GPL, some hackers run this".
yes, there was the famous "bolo propulsion" example, of a satellite made of 2 masses joined by a cable progressively making its orbit more eccentric. This is well known, and as stated only works in curved spacetime.
The NSA is welcome to my emails, if I can have free email
But maybe they are subsidising gmail and hotmail anyway
So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? -- Ayn Rand
