I have a bridge for sale.

Any seasoned geologist can do that these days, we've known about earthquake predictors for quite some time and given the measurements,

Citation required.

If this is true (which I strongly doubt) then the geological press would be more full of it than if NASA launched a faster-then-light space ship and came back with a pointy-eared Buddha. Because there has already been a Buddha, but an effective earthquake prediction methodology would be something startlingly new.

Citation required. Journal name, volume and page number.

I don't know if they stated those predictions in public.

If it's not stated in public, then it is not worth the 30-m high letters in which it wasn't painted on the side of a building in down town Geneva.

Actually, there is a fair point there : there is no recognised forum for posting such predictions. And there are a lot of internet kooks out there who all think that they've got the perfect solution, but not one of them is willing to stand by a "prediction".

Some ground rules have been proposed about what constitutes a prediction. And then the kooks get involved and turn it into a kitten-in-a-washing-machine-with-a-broken-bottle experience for anyone who is in the least bit serious. Little things like : the prediction should be specific with respect to period to which it applies, magnitude of the earthquake predicted, and region that the prediction covers ; secondly, the prediction should be sufficiently precise that the pre-existing records for the area concerned would not predict that event just on statistics. "A magnitude 4.0 in southern California in the next 6 months" isn't a prediction, it's a racing certainty. "A magnitude 5.0 + on the eastern English Channel within the next 6 weeks" is a prediction (there was such an even in the late 17th century, IIRC, and hasn't been one since. So the occurrence of a predicted earthquake there would be pretty remarkable.) And finally, ALL your predictions need to be made public, and your method will be judged on the results of ALL of your predictions. (Some of the kooks use the "predict everything, everywhere, all the time" approach, and think that is effective.Your failed predictions will be counted along with your successes.)

Even getting agreement on these basic points - it's the kitten and the bottle into the washing machine again.

While all geological services are interested in such questions (including the BGS, in whose balliwick the Channel quake mentioned above falls), none of them see any reason for any general system to work. Why? Because they're geologists. As am I. So I can explain why they don't expect a generic system to work:

An earthquake occurs in a natural material which is inhomogeneous - in fact it has a structure that varies on scales ranging from the sub-millimetre to the multiple kilometre (I work at the sub-millimetre to sub-centimetre scale - people pay me to describe that inhomogeneity). The strength of such materials can be predicted in compression reasonably well - to within 20 to 50% ; but not so well in tension ; shear, combining tension, compression and structural homogeneity (absent - see above) is rather more difficult still. Earthquakes can occur because of either tension, compression or shear ; most often shear since it combines the others. Moving from the materials in which the failure occurs, consider the forces involved. They are, oddly enough, variable, because the distribution of forces depends on the action of large scale forces (weight, plate movements, tides, weather (including the last few centuries of rainfall and the last few minutes of barometric pressure)) which are delivered to the rock units that fail by a cascade of intermediate units, each one of which varies in stiffness (Young's modulus, for starters), in it's time variance of behaviour (some rocks "creep", others don't ; look up pictures of "chocolate boudinage", if you want to get a handle on how much rocks can vary) .. oh, and did I mention that the properties vary on scales form sub-millimetre to multiple kilometre?

So, how are we going to attack the problem. Clearly we need to map the rocks and the forces. But there is a problem. You see, rocks are generally opaque. Opaque to visible light ; opaque to anything with a shorter wavelength (and therefore able to measure the small scale variations), unless you can get the rock into a synchrotron beam or industrial X-ray machine. And them do the same for the next couple of millimetres, and then the next ... and finally put it back together again without leaving cracks in it (which will change the rock's response to forces, and it's transmission of forces).

What about longer wavelengths? Well, here we do have some hopes : acoustic energy. It'll pick up variations in mechanical properties on a scale of half the wavelength of the sound used. It's called "seismic". I use it a lot at work. Of course, some countries ban it because it fucks whales ears (we employ a dedicated Marine Mammal Observer when we have guns in the water). And the really interesting high-frequency waves ... err, they interact with the rock and are absorbed. So the further you get from the sound source, the coarser the information that you get back. In practice, at the geologically interesting depths of a handful of kilometres, we simply cannot see a fracture of less than about 10 metres in height.

People are trying to get around the problem of seeing through rock. Oil companies in particular (which you won't be surprised to learn, is my trade). It is a multiple billion dollar industry. And it is far, far, far below the resolution that is necessary.

Just as a matter of interest, what are your proposals for measuring the state of forces in the rocks under your feet? That is, measuring the forces, not speculating about them.

The above are the main reasons why national geological services do not waste their tax-payer-provided funds on earthquake prediction research. The payback from the same money on building protection and emergency response has a far, far better return.

On the other hand, feel free to develop your own proposed methodology. Then you too can get involved with the kooks (I'm not calling you a kook ; everyone else is a kook. They all agree on that!) and post your predictions on an appropriate forum. And IF your predictions work better than chance (your statistics had better be good ; remember Feynman's dictum about fooling yourself ; he meant it to apply to himself, and I'm reasonably sure that you're not much better a scientist than Feynman) then there will be people beating your door down to buy into your method.

Don't expect me to invest.

What trace will we leave behind now that everything has gone digital?

What makes you think that everything has gone digital? We still make machines, build buildings, carve up the landscape. Those are going to last. The "plastic layer" in the rocks is metaphorical, but we as sure as hell are going to leave a major geochemical mark. And a shorter-live radiological trace. We've started a major climate change which shows every sign of being as significant as the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which we've understood for a bit more than a decade now, but we've recognised for more like one and a half centuries.

Our civilisation will remain in the archaeological record, don't you worry. Your twitter feed may be gone, but that is unlikely to make it to the next decade, even without the untimely death of yourself or the civilisation that we live in.

So, even if you do consult, make sure you negotiate your terms wisely.

The submitter already stated that he (or she? I didn't notice. Damn you, English and your lack of implicitly gendered verbs!) is young, so they don't have that option available to them. Also, being young, they know that those rules don't apply to them.

Let him or her enjoy the cluebat of growing up in peace.

I don't know if a CDL is a qualifier or not but almost all non commercial insurance policies have a disclaimer stating they will not cover any commercial use of the vehicle. Pizza delivery drivers run into this all the time. They either need a special rider policy for their car or pretend the 20 pizzas in the back are there because he forgot to put them in the fridge.

Essentially the same laws in the UK too. Your regular insurance covers you for "Social, domestic and pleasure" use of your vehicle, and that's it. Commuting to work - yes, that's covered. If your work is primarily something else, but you do a lot of travelling to locations ... that can be a bit iffy (a friend runs about 20 bakeries, and visits each one about once a week. Sometimes he uses his car, other times he uses the one of the work's delivery vans to double the administrative work with delivery of [whatever], and he always fills out the vehicles usage log so he can defend that the car isn't primarily being used for work ; he's had this fight with insurance companies in the past.)

Many people get caught by this every year. They sign a contract for their insurance and then go out and break the contract ... and are surprised to find out that it means what it says in the contract.

(1) Being best in the world (or within the top couple of dozen) never hurts.

(2) Make sure that your skills are needed on the site of the work, and your job doesn't depend on having communications. We've lost 75% of our communicatinos because of the crane operator putting a load through one of the satellite radomes, so my work on this vessel is safe until the end of the contract.)

(3) multiple languages help. Anything other than English (I have moderate French and Spanish, a smidgin of Swahili and a dash of Russian) is an advantage against people who only have English.

(4) Get used to travelling. I'm half-way through this trip, with another month to go. Maybe more - who knows ? (No-one. Anywhere.)

Ummm, they're the main bits of advice I can give you.

What? You want to go to your home every night, and you work in communications of some sort? Well then, sir, you are in direct competition with millions of people all over the world who also intend to go home at night and work in communications. Many of them live in a lower cost economy than you do (in fact, precisely half of them live in a below-median cost-of-living economy. That is what "median" means.), and so you are, irrevocably, vulnerable to losing your job to them. It's called globalisation. Welcome to the brave new world. No, you cannot leave.

install it in a VM instead, or does it detect that one as well?

Since TFA (more than TFS) mentions that these various attacks are in response to the virus "realising" that it is running in a "sand box" type environment, then I's expect it to detect many un-stealthed VM environments too.

I read TFA for about 5 minutes before I came across something remotely interesting. I got it that the malware had substantial checks to make it *harder* for an investigator (virus researcher, forensics investigator after a break-in) to understand what the virus is doing, and that the virus writer wasn't particularly interested in hiding from the user, but in avoiding being analysed by specialists. Fixing an MBR - trivial. User's home directory encrypted - well whoopie-dee, as if that's going to faze a decent investigator (they'll probably put the home directory on the network and sniff to record write instructions but not necessarily carry them out). So that's a [SHRUG]. But this :

If Rombertik detects an instance of Firefox, Chrome, or Internet Explorer,

So, virus writers really are getting over the IE monopoly? I hadn't noticed, not having used Windows for myself for several years, and not having used IE for even longer, if at all possible to use anything else.

So the hot female receptionist had the hot female sysadmin sucking up to her ( I chose my words carefully) by repairing her computer instead of caning her pert little behind (I choose, etc) and telling her she's a naughty girl and to never do that again.

Perfectly reasonable scenario. I'm sure I've seen it in some of those "training videos".

Ooooo, internet tiger here!

Looks like an internet kitty-video to me. So thet'd be "Ahhhh", not "Oooooh"

Does AC want a tummy rub?

I learned the roads in my town on foot and push bike, and spend about 3 times as much time on the bike as in the car. Which neatly disposes of traffic alerts (route around any problems down side streets) and weather problems (if you don't have your rain coat with you, you're going to get cold and wet, always).

Do you not have a health care system?

Who could be so crass as to attempt to profit from someone else's pain.

Oh, of course - you use arms manufacturers for your medical care. That explains it. Bizarre, but it's your country. Just don't ask me to go there.

As I can understand it, the magnets are purely for holding the phone to the sticky pad. So, wouldn't the degree of magnetisation be altered by rotating the device between 2 or 4 different positions from one charging connection to the next?

(My phone - stays in the jacket pocket when I'm driving. The jacket is laying on the back seat, or hanging behind me. No, I can't use my phone when I'm driving. But it's illegal anyway, so, "meh!"

The license plate reader image from the article shows a category for "other" along with "tax scofflaw". "Other" says nothing but fishing expedition to me. Unbelievable.

I noticed that too. Not being an American, what is a "scofflaw"? Is it an execution offence?

Adobe Reader can view PDFs instead of just freezing the computer solid and then crashing? Well, whodathunkit?