Now all we need is a functional aircraft...

Typical for a class action suit: millions for the lawyers, gift certificates for the claimants.

Did YOU look at the graph? The bars are comparing all of 2013 against the first half of 2014 (obviously, as the second half is in the future). So the fact that IE already matched last year's record is where the 100% figure comes from - it's another way to say "doubled". Unless the second half of 2014 has a lower exploit rate then the conclusion will be correct.

An interesting view. I don't agree that there are no consultants who understand the use of project management, in fact, more and more consultants come trained in formal methodologies for project management, change management, requirements capture, architecture, etc. And consultants increasingly come in to do more than code: they understand they need to know the business, and that means talking to people and attending meetings instead of coding all day.

Interestingly, I got some gigs as a consultant because I didn't care for project management and following "proper process", but with an understanding of when it's important to document, get agreement, stick to the rules, and think things through. I got hired to do emergency work and innovative (highly volatile) pilot projects that teams of employees or consultants with compartimentalized skillsets and training to follow procedures simply could not complete in a satisfactory manner. Nice work if you can get it...

"We're willing to wipe the slate clean, give you a fresh start. But tell me mr. Anderson, what good is a job if you're unable to speak...?"

I for one welcome our self-compensating robotic overlords. Break a leg!

The same exact reasoning to justify TSA

They're incomparable. TSA is mandated by governments, you have no choice in the matter. Using a particular brand of smartphone is not. You are free to use a smartphone that doesn't use Google services and indeed are free to buy a Nexus 5 and then say "no" to the billion and one "trade data for feature?" prompts that appear when switched on the first time. No government goon is going to step in and insist that you send all your data to Google.

In fact, if you would prefer a smartphone that has a different data/features tradeoff then - conveniently! - Google provides a rather good open source operating system for free that you can use to build one. If others feel the same way you do you can even sell them without paying Google a dime.

Depends how you define "very popular" I guess. The most popular way to bypass state-level censorship in the Arab world and elsewhere is a product called HotSpot Shield. When Turkey blocked Twitter some time ago, HSS experienced 1000% growth and reached 1.1 million installs in the iOS App Store alone within only four days, with 800,000 regular users.

In contrast Tor went from 30,000 to 40,000 "direct connects" from Turkey.

HSS doesn't get much press in the geek world as it's just a plain old VPN run by a company in California that inserts ads into people's web pages to pay for the bandwidth costs. But usage wise it utterly dominates Tor.

RTFS? It says that in the summary. The goal here is to alert people who don't know their internet connection is being used for piracy and who aren't OK with freeloading, parents being the given example.

Believe it or not, there was a time, not too long ago, when a company was defined as a collection of employees and shareholders, rather than exclusively as a collection of shareholders as is the case today. Back then, the definition of what's best for a company included employee welfare as well as shareholder welfare. A company was considered successful if it generated employee wealth as well as shareholder wealth, rather than the exclusive focus on shareholder wealth which prevails today. Companies had planning horizons of decades, which you need in order to offer retirement pensions, which were also commonplace. At some point, all of that went out the window, and except for a few big winners, we are all the poorer for it.

Nothing I have read about Snowden indicates that he is actually some sort of uber-hacker

Except the stuff about how a 29 year old completely pwnd the NSA, probably the most technically sophisticated part of the US Government there is?

Sheesh. Your standards are high. What would it take, exactly?

Additionally, just because you have read nothing about his programming skills doesn't mean he has none. He once mentioned finding XSS holes in some CIA app so apparently he is good enough to do that.

There are already plenty of CA's in countries that are not under US jurisdiction. However, so far the CA's that issued bad certs were all outside the USA, and appear to have only done so because they got hacked and not because they were e.g. forced to by court order.

Unless you have a magical solution to hacking I don't think your new root CA would solve much.

Additionally, citation needed for "routine man in the middle". SSL MITM has been studied by academics at scale. They did not find evidence of much. Governments don't need to MITM SSL for as long as users browse non-SSLd sites like Slashdot and browser exploits exist.

try googletranslating http://lb.ua/news/2014/07/20/2... [lb.ua] - ukrainian army detains 23 terrorists. somehow all 23 turn out to be citizens of the russian federation.

That page is merely reporting a press release from the Ukrainian government in Kiev. Are you suggesting we should treat everything they say as factually true?

let's bisect the other thing you said - "at most Russia is supplying weapons to them".
"at most". as if they were given bows and arrows. they get armoured vehicles. they get... tanks. they get bloody sam systems that can reach targets up to 25km.

Yes. That's what I said. Perhaps this is a language issue.

Whatever is happening in Ukraine it is not a full-blown invasion by Russia in the "classical" style that Iraq or Afghanistan were. That would be far more obvious. It seems to be much more similar to what's been happening in Syria where the west has been supplying weapons, training and expertise to anti-Assad groups there. If you were to say the west has "at most been supplying weapons and training to the Syrian rebels" you would be correct, given that (fortunately) Syria was not invaded by a foreign army.

Not exactly. There is a distinct difference between a soldier and a combatant. A soldier is trained and is a member of a standing military. The separatists can at best be described as "irregulars", or insurgents or rebels if you want to go with slightly more charged terminology.

Yes, really? With that definition it'd be impossible for a new military to ever be created, because anyone who joins and fights with one is not joining a standing army therefore cannot be soldiers. That is obviously nonsense, it must be possible for someone to be a soldier in a newly formed army, which is what it looks like is happening here.

Additionally, you claim that the fighters in Donetsk cannot be soldiers because soldiers are trained, and then immediately claim they're receiving training from Russia. So which is it?

And given the fact that the missiles were launched from inside territory controlled by the rebelsis a very important detail. Why would the Ukrainians have anti-air equipment deployed in an area they do not control, against an enemy with no air power?

You're quite right - it probably was the separatists. This does not change the accuracy of the Wikipedia edit that's being discussed, because unless/until the separatists win, they are still Ukrainians.

Although I'd note that given the amount of bullshit emanating from all sides in this conflict it's hard to really know anything about what's going on. The area of Ukraine that's in revolt is next to the Russian border, which is exactly where you'd expect the Ukrainian military to have had lots of soldiers and equipment stationed. Missiles might have been trucked over the Russian border, or they might simply have been there already. The separatists might be being trained by Russians (this would be unsurprising and not exactly unprecedented - see how the USA supported rebels in Syria), or alternatively they might be operating the equipment without really knowing what they're doing - indeed, having no clue what you're targeting would be rather indicative of not being properly trained, no? Or perhaps they're being trained by people who are ethnically Russian but lived in Ukraine at the time of the rebellion, or one of many other more complex cases that won't neatly fit into the "Putin fired the missiles himself" story the west is busy pushing.

All we can say for sure is that whatever you read about this incident is going to be full-blown propaganda, and should be treated as such.

I don't think Russian state media should be editing Wikipedia entries especially not on matters of current affairs.

But still, interpreted literally the new statement is far more factually correct and unbiased than what it replaced. Whoever shot down the plane, they were "soldiers" or fighters of some variety and almost certainly can be described as Ukrainian, given that everyone seems to agree that the fighters are actually eastern Ukrainians and at most Russia is supplying weapons to them.

The original text, on the other hand, more or less exactly sums up western/west Ukrainian line despite the obvious abuse of the word terrorist to mean "rebel fighter" and the [citation needed] assertion about who did it and the source of the weapons.