The group thing only raises the challenge a little. Now an enemy nation needs to recruit a group of people that work together instead of a lone individual. But that might also not be necessary depending on how tightly people work together. I seem to remember that Manning actually downloaded and burned the files he stole while working in an open area with other individuals interacting with him.

The estimate for the cost of licensing fees per user sounds way out of whack at $20 per month. I would expect something in the range of $5 maybe running up to $10. Afterall that cost needs to be at or under what people actually pay for the service.

Even if it did end up costing Apple $1 Billion dollars to pay the licensing for that first 3 months it'd very likely end up being worth it to them in the long run provided it is successful. They've got plenty of money in cash and creating further lockin for their customers is what they are all about.

I didn't read her post on tumbler but from the article I read she wasn't pulling her music from iTunes. She's just keeping it out of Apple Music which is their new streaming service. She's still selling music through plenty of other storefronts, brick and mortar as well as digital. Not that she would likely miss 3 months of income very much.

It isn't that it is self evidently true, it's that by simply posing the question you appear to be so idiotic as to dumbfound the person you question.

The numeric symbols and arithmetic signs you are using are very clearly and universally defined. It is only when used in certain very specific contexts by people too lazy to make up different symbols to express a non-standard meaning that there is any reason to presume that they mean anything other than the normal and obvious definitions.

You might as well argue with a shop keeper that you can pay for your groceries with your musty old gym shoes because you've redefined them as representing a gold bar, and you are actually being overly generous by overpaying.

It pretty much comes down to how far do you dare trust your employees. Network security can only get you so far. It ultimately boils down to trusting people not to take your secrets whether they are on physical media or in their head and share or sell them.

So far as I understand it there are only a few reasons people commit espionage; loyalty to something else whether it be a principle or nation, money, or boredom. You can screen people for those things but eventually you come to a point where you just have to hope nobody sells out. The folks that can do the most damage typically aren't paid all that well, certainly not when it comes to another nation state possibly willing to spend millions to turn someone.

The rush hour traffic was pretty bad when I lived there around the turn of the century. That said I thought the highway system with expressways and such was a very nice design. The problem was just that at rush hours it gets overly congested, otherwise it worked very well for getting most places quickly. Most of the people I met though that worked in Tech either lived in the immediate area and weren't commuting from SF, or lived much further out but used public transit for most of the commute. As I recall there were light rail stations right by some of the largest employers of the day. I knew a guy that commuted from Hollister using the rail system for most of the trip and just played games on his laptop the whole way.

I wouldn't mind the dirt so much in NYC, but the smell is just incredible, and it's ever present. It's only after getting accustomed to the smells above that the subway becomes tolerable. And despite the subway being buried the heat down there is worse than on the street.

I've never been to London, but if I had to choose between Silicon Valley and NYC, I would definitely go with Silicon Valley. I lived all over the San Jose area for a couple years and Mountain View/Sunnyvale/Cupertino/Los Altos were all rather pleasant compared to NYC.

If you are willing to accept a sufficiently low enough quality of life I suppose that is true. But how are you paying for your utilities and entertainment equipment?

I've got a few friends and relatives who are currently on various government assistance programs, and working minimum wage jobs. I'm a pretty lazy guy and I'd love to be able to stay home and play games all day. But there is no way I'd be willing to accept their quality of life and living conditions to get that.

I'm curious to actually see how much extra revenue it will generate. I'm of half a mind to predict that it won't raise revenues by that much. I haven't met very many poor people that didn't have cable TV and an internet connection. I don't doubt that there are lots of people who don't have a broadband connection but I suspect that might be more an issue of not having the service available. In fact the only family I can think of that I know that I know doesn't have a broadband connection lives out in the boonies where satelite is the only option.

Even assuming that all of that 24% was deliberate fraud and that those made it through the system, 24% isn't the 50% that was being contested. In fact 24% isn't even half of the 50% that was being claimed.

They could be smoking a joint once a week and growing their own.

At what point do we say that a poor person is spending too much on their own wants and not on their children's needs, and so cut off assistance? It's a devious issue because once you deny the person with the objectionable habit social assistance you are also denying their children the same assistance because of association. There isn't any good way to provide for the children without passing that assistance to their guardian. You could forcibly remove the children from that persons custody but doing so has some possibly severe consequences for the children psychologically, and physically, given the high rates of abuse in foster care and group homes.

In reality the lines can get very blurry and trying to define that line with a simple drug test is absurd. If it is actually a matter of saving kids then we need a much more indepth evaluation of each individual case probably by one or more social worker and possibly a couple lawyers and a judge. That all gets pretty expensive, even more expensive than the drug testing and of course begs for larger government. Which of course is why many of the folks pushing for drug testing of welfare recipients are just pushing for the tests. It allows for their expression of moral indignation with a relatively minor cost and no real positive impact, ignoring the fact that it's probably just cheapest and least harmful to not bother testing at all.

I tried playing the first Mass Effect and just couldn't get into it. I liked the world building and setting. The alien that prefaced everything he said with a statement indicating his intended emotional context was hilarious. But the game play just sucked. Maybe it was an issue of playing it on a PC but actually playing the game was tedious and just not fun at all. I think I only ever got in one session where I read a ton of the ingame encyclopedia stuff and expored all the conversation I could with that alien. But the next day I just couldn't bring myself to play it when I had tons of other games with fun gameplay.

I wouldn't bet on it. I had a friend who was enlisted as a computer programmer in the AF. When the Army was having trouble finding enough people to fill all the deployment slots they had to fill they started sucking up Air Force people to fill those slots. So my friend who's computer programming job ostensibly fell under the Communications umbrella got sent to some outpost in Afghanistan to be a radio operator and because he was a Sergeant was expected to know how to run a Comms center supporting all kinds of patrols out in the field that were taking fire, as well as go on those patrols and act as their radio man. To me that demonstrated just the kind of idiocy that you can get when it isn't your own ass on the line. Some moron decided that Army communications troops and Air Force communications trooops were identical and was perfectly content to endanger a couple hundred folks by using them as such.

They also deploy lots of people to work outside of their trained fields of expertise doing everything from escorting third country nationals to driving trucks on convoys. You should absolutely not join any branch of the military, including the Coast Guard, if you don't want to be potentially sent to whatever hell hole the government decides we need to wage war in. You may not be forced to take up arms and shoot at people but once you are in they own you and will send you wherever they want regardless of logic or principle.

I'm a hard determinist so I'll have to disagree. People are just as determinisistic as machines. Just because we are ignorant of the incredible intricacies of our own minds and bodies doesn't mean they are magically different and exempt from the laws of physics.

Except you don't need that kind of resolution across the entire field of view. You'd you need that kind of resolution in the center and as you get further away from that point you can have lower and lower resolution. I have no idea how you'd build a screen with that though. An alternative though would be to use lenses to take a smaller display and stretch it out to cover the full 210 degrees. That would also require some funny drivers though that would be squishing the outside 45 degree arcs or whatever into a narrower part of the the display than they proportionatly represent.