The issue isn't whether or not he won, so, nice handwaving there. The issue is the State Of The Union and our international relations.

DoublcClick has such negative value that their servers should be blocked at firewalls, or at least "host.txt". Even if you have AdBlock, blocking them earlier saves bandwidth.

As I said, I've been here for a decade now, and I work for a big company with great perks. It's been good for me, but now that I have a kid, the school-shootings thing is getting more and more worrisome. There's literally nothing I can do to prevent some moron raiding his mother's arsenal and killing my kid if that's how he wants to end his life.

Why this obsession with school shootings? You do realize your kid is far more likely to be murdered outside of school than in school? "Homicide is the second leading cause of death among youth aged 5-18. Data from this study indicate that between 1% and 2% of these deaths happen on school grounds or on the way to or from school." So 98%-99% of homicides of school-aged children happen outside of school. i.e. The place where your kids are safest by far from being shot or killed is in school.

If you look at the chart in the above link, on average fewer than 20 students are murdered each year in school shootings. If you look at causes of death, among 5-14 year olds (page 2), the #15 cause of death kills 18 per year, indicating school shootings doesn't even rank in the top 15. For age 15-24 (high school-college), the #15 cause kills 99 per year, so school shootings probably doesn't even make the top 20 or 30. By far the #1 killer of student-aged children is accidents - outnumbering homicides by nearly an order of magnitude, and school shootings by two orders of magnitude.

It's the media which has a morbid obsession with school shootings, causing them to devote wildly disproportionate amounts of coverage to it relative to other dangers and risks faced by school-aged children. Don't buy into it. Parents' fear of school shootings is completely irrational, just like fear of flying (which is also fed by the media's disproportionate coverage of plane crashes), or child abduction by a stranger (which is the rarest form of kidnapping, and also fed by the media's... well you get the picture).

Given the relative percentages... it's likely that the "harassment escalating to assault" numbers for the men is underreported by a factor of 2.5, which would be about on a par with the underreporting of men being raped in the general population. There's a real cultural stigma to reporting by men, who are, by stereotype and therefore societal norms, "supposed to be" on the other end of the power equation.

They've already screwed the pooch.

They've published the source archive under the original TrueCrypt license. As a result, unless there's a legal entity (person or company) to which all contributors make an assignment of rights, or they keep the commit rights down to a "select group" that has agreed already to relicense the code, they will not be able to later release the code under an alternate license, since all contributions will be derivative works and subject to the TrueCrypt license (as the TrueCrypt license still in the source tree makes clear).

The way you do these things is: sanitize, relicense, THEN announce. Anyone who wants to contribute as a result of the announcement can't, without addressing the relicensing issue without having already picked a new license.

It does. There's a Craiglist-type feature on Bloomberg trading info terminals. Yachts, rentals in the Hamptons, that sort of thing. You can message other people via the Bloomberg system if you see something you like.

There's a paid social network for rich conservatives. This is independent, not a Bloomberg thing. It's only $5/month, which is apparently enough to keep the noise level down.

There's a persistent rumor that there are special news sources for rich people. There are, but they're very narrow. There are lots of newsletters you can buy for $50 to $1000 a month that provide detailed coverage of obscure business subjects. If you really need to know what's going on with bulk carrier leasing, oil drilling equipment activity, or wafer fab capacity shortages, there's a newsletter for that. Offshore Alert, which covers offshore scams, is one of the more readable ones, and you can see the first few lines of each story for free. There are expensive newsletters devoted to security and terrorism, which give the illusion of inside information, but they tend to be marketing tools aimed at rich paranoids.

If you want to know what's going on in the world, read The Economist. After you've been reading it for a year, you'll have a good understanding of how the world works.

In 30 years, the way things are going the UK proper may as well be bankrupt, socially and racially divided, a shadow of its former glory

Frankly, British bankruptcy is always and always has been thirty years off for the thirty odd years I've been paying attention to international politics.

Why go the opposite direction, even if for some reason you really do have the need for those particular properties?

Because for any given hobby... there's always going to be someone out at the end of the bell curve. The photographer with $190k worth of gear who drives a $500 car and lives in a $5k house. The model train enthusiast who builds a 2500sqft house around his 1800sqft train layout. The IT geek with enough horsepower in his basement to run a decent sized ISP.. They're all birds of a feather.

(Disclaimer: Yes, I actually know the first two examples personally.)

I expect that it's a little bit of both. Look however at Kepler and Tycho Brahe. Brahe's observational contributions aided Kepler, but he started well before he was 30. Kepler had his theories before 30, and was aided by Brahe into his 30's proving them out. Counter examples include Newton, and so on. Most Large contributions that aren't ideas themselves are contributions based on the wealth of the contributor, e.g. The Allen Telescope Array.

Reason (a) is motivation to do something that could be big, if the new reason is passion.
Reason (b) is a piss poor reason to do something big; there's no passion involved.
Reason (c) is ennui.

If you get into something solely to satisfy (a), you have a chance at greatness; if you do it for the other two reasons, even in part, you are unlikely to have the fire to spark the necessary effort. For example, the OP's willingness to dedicate 10 hours a week from a 24x7 = 168 total hours in a week really speaks to the idea of someone acting out a dilettante reason, rather than a reason of passion. Excluding sleeping, you could probably argue for 86 hours a week for a passion, and that's less than 11% of the "every moment of every day" you'd expect with a passion.

This.

I read through the comments to find this comment so that I didn't just post a duplicate if someone else had covered the ground.

Let me be really blunt about the amount of time you are intending to invest in this project. If you were taking a college course, you should expect to spend 2 hours out of class for each hour you spend in class, and given that you only have 10 hours to dedicate to the idea, that's effectively 3 credit hours for every interval. So if you picked a community college, and they offered all the classes you needed, you should expect to have your Bachelor's of Science in any given degree field in about 23 years. That gets you to the necessary 210 credit hours for an Astronomy degree.

Let's say, though that you are a super genius, and can do 1:1 instead of 1:2 for in/out of class. That only cuts your time by 1/3, which means that you get that degree in 15 years instead.

Now add to this that most major contributions in any scientific field occur before someone hits their mid 20's; there are exceptions, but let's say again that you are exceptional. What contributions do you expect to be able to make after age 61 / 53, with your shiny new Bachelor's, since you're unlikely to find someone to hire you at that age, and you're unlikely to be able to afford instrument time on the necessary equipment on your own?

It's built into Android as well, typically accessible from the Setup/Security & Screen Lock menu. However, it is not the default in Android, the boot-up sequence is a bit hokey when you turn it on, it really slows down access to the underlying storage, and the keys aren't stored securely. Also, most telco's load crapware onto your Android phone that cannot be removed and that often includes backing up to the telco or phone vendor... and those backups are not even remotely secure.

On Apple devices the encryption keys are stored on a secure chip, the encryption is non-optional, and telcos can't insert crapware onto the device to de-secure it.

The only issue with Apple devices is that if you use iCloud backups, the iCloud backup is accessible to Apple with a warrant. They could fix that too, and probably will at some point. Apple also usually closes security holes relatively quickly, which is why the credit card companies and banks prefer that you use an iOS device for commerce.

-Matt

The thing is, I don't think most people realize just how much sugar is in sweetened beverages. When you eat a slice of pie or a scoop of ice cream, your brain quantifies it as a discrete amount of sustenance and naturally limits your intake. But for some reason when you're drinking, people rationalize that "it's mostly water" and overconsume. I didn't realize it myself until I ordered a regular iced tea because the restaurant didn't carry sweetened, and tried to sweeten it myself to taste. After 4 packets of sugar went in and it still tasted bland, I realized that there's a heckuva lot more sugar in these sweetened drinks than I'd thought.

Both sides are likely lying.

You don't acknowledge damage when you're in a state of combat. That's just giving away intelligence to the enemy for free. It's like when CBS reported the exact location of Iraq's first scud missile strike against Israel. Why would you freely give the enemy information verifying their attack worked and thus help them improve future attacks? That's just stupid.

The people claiming Snowden's disclosures have compromised intelligence gathering methods are either committing treason by confirming to the enemy that their obfuscation methods are working, or know that it hasn't and are lying through their teeth to misdirect the enemy, or don't know anything and are lying by pretending to know in order to score political points.

Likewise, the people claiming Snowden's disclosures haven't compromised intelligence are either committing treason by confirming to the enemy that their obfuscation methods have been unsuccessful and they need to try something else, or know that it has a has and are lying through their teeth to misdirect the enemy, or don't know anything and are lying by pretending to know in order to score political points.

I tend to believe anybody who really knows is also smart enough to know not to reveal that info (and not commit treason) and are keeping their mouth shut. And so anybody who's claiming "with certainty" one way or the other is likely lying.

As much as the government wants these powers, and wants them in secret, this is really a policy decision which needs to be made by the citizens. They need to decide if off-the-shelf products should provide end-level encryption by default, or if the government should always have a back-door into all encrypted products. Not politicians, not the police, and certainly not secret government courts. Society at large needs to decide which is more important - personal privacy, or the government's ability to obtain evidence of laws being broken in communications mediums and storage devices.

This move by Apple puts the debate squarely in the public's eye, instead of hidden in esoteric cryptography forums and secret government courts.

Standard data forensics procedure is to write-protect any storage device which contains evidence, copy it bit-for-bit, and do all the decrypting and data analysis from the copy. The 10-try limit may protect your data from a random thief who lifts your phone, but the only way it's going to protect you from the government or any other technically-capable hacker is if Apple baked the limit into the flash memory-reading hardware.

And there's always this.