There is no reason the design of a waste hauling train should wait until a site is identified, thus delaying the removal of the waste from many scattered temporary storage sites. The hauling design and the site identification can proced in parallel.

Indeed: The characteristics of the hauling solution may limit the selection of sites to which the waste could be hauled with acceptable levels of safety. That would argue for the design to PRECEED site selection.

The other replies cover the window-like way of doing things. The other way to do it is to make it so that if you look right, the screen rotates to the right. Usually you have a multiplier, so that a small head rotation translates into a much larger rotation on-screen. Looking backwards might only require turning your head 45 degrees, which allows you to still look to the side and see the screen.

This might sound awkward, but your brain adjusts to it with almost no effort. The main problem I've seen with head-tracking is that stuff on the screen never stands still, which makes it hard to click on small objects. Usually people who use head-trackers need to use a button to pause screen motion, dampen it, etc. Dampening screen motion other than a slight amount to reduce jitter is a bit hard on the eyes I find, since everything you see has a delay attached to it.

Well, in practice all that really is relevant is whether the US government thinks they might be able to produce the data, and whether they can get their hands on him.

Everything else makes for great moral debate, but if you're standing on US soil and the US government really thinks that you have something that they want, then you're going to be in for a world of hurt if you don't produce the goods or convince them that you don't have them.

In practice, the law is whatever the government says it is. It is quite possible that MS will prevail on appeal. If it doesn't, then they'll really be between a rock and a hard place, and companies will basically have to look at incompatible national laws and choose which countries they'll base their operations in. MS would not be suffering this problem if they didn't own so much property in both the US and EU, and desire to sell their products in both markets.

The PRACTICAL question isn't where the corporation is based, or who owns the data they have been entrusted with, but rather with how much money Microsoft has tied up in US assets. The courts can confiscate as much of those as they want until MS complies. Foreign governments can do the same.

When you travel through or own property in some jurisdiction, you're effectively within their control to the extent that you're unwilling to part with it.

Maybe in principle it does, but it practice the sovereignty of any country is whatever that country can enforce it to be.

That very-much depends on the details of the situation. Suppose the US wants the contents of your German safe deposit box.

If the US sent some agents to Germany without cooperation with the German government and they broke into the bank and were caught, then sure they would be arrested and treated as criminals (assuming they lacked diplomatic status), as in your fantasy scenario.

However, they would never do this.

Suppose instead you are in the US on vacation. The US grabs YOU and puts you in their own safe deposit box until you hand over the contents of your box in Germany. It is true that they might not have the means to FORCE you to comply, but they can literally hold you in prison until you die of old age without even charging you with a crime if you do not.

That is the more appropriate analogy here. If MS wants to avoid being subject to US law they should probably avoid having so much of their property in the US, where it is trivially seized.

Well, the US government might ultimately fail in getting the data, but they could confiscate all the assets of Deutsche Bank in the US, which would effectively block them from doing business in the US.

Sure, but if the US Courts are fining them every day the data isn't disclosed, and they don't care if the foreign employees refuse to cooperate, then the company is probably going to pressure those employees in any way that they can. They might even close the foreign datacenter entirely if the courts insist on it. Either that or they could close all their US operations.

Well, whether this survives appeal is anybody's guess. However, if the US Supreme Court upholds it then MS will end up turning over the data. This isn't about making the world bend to his "black-robed will" - this is about making Microsoft bend to it. Once the appeals are exhausted they'll be told to produce the data. If they refuse then they'll be fined a million dollars a day, and the fines will be increased if that doesn't seem to be enough. Eventually Microsoft either goes out of business, or it capitulates.

Sure, after it happens the EU can then start fining them millions or billions of dollars if they want to. But, the only way around something like this is for a company to not own property or assets of any kind in both the US and EU. Courts can seize assets, which basically puts you in your jurisdiction no matter what your principles might otherwise dictate.

So, what solution do you actually advocate then? Right now the NSA/GCHQ can still break the internet, and so can about a million other people. Oh, and everybody gets to pay $100/yr or so for every webserver they run, and virtual hosting is a pain.

DNSSEC is a lot better than what we have now. Moving to it doesn't prevent us from moving to something even better assuming that somebody figures out what it is.

The only solution to that is to have ICANN be under the control of somebody that everybody can trust. Either that, or give up on having a single root. There isn't any reason that you couldn't hard-code into the browsers the keys of the TLDs, other than it making those keys harder to change.

Of course, that isn't going to help you all that much, because if the NSA needs to impersonate a European domain they'll just nicely ask the government hosting it for the keys and they'll cooperate, since while they all complain about the NSA in public the fact is that they love having access to all that data.

Keep in mind that you would have to have control of the registrar that issued the domain. With SSL today anybody on the trusted CA list can impersonate any website anywhere. With DNSSEC Verisign certainly could impersonate .com websites, and Iran certainly could impersonate .ir websites, but neither party could impersonate the other's websites. That is a BIG reduction in the vulnerability space, even if it isn't perfect.

If the NSA really does has everybody under their thumbs, then face it, you aren't going to be able to evade them using anything likely to ever become mainstream. We can't judge every security improvement solely on whether it solves "the NSA is out to get me."

Well, if they want to launch their rockets from next to schools, then they shouldn't be surprised when their kids get blown up by artillery fire. That is probably their objective in any case - it makes for good PR.

Is firing artillery on schools wrong? Of course. Is firing rockets from nearby a school wrong? Of course. The one is still a consequence of the other.

I don't really see the Palestinians achieving their goals with the methods they're currently using. I get the impression that their plan is to keep blowing up the odd house until God comes down and wipes out the infidels for them. Or maybe they're just happy dying in the attempt.

Conducting military operations 100m away from a civilian building is inappropriate. If a conflict broke out in just about any civilized nation that required basing soldiers within 100m of a hotel, the hotel would be evacuated. Heck, the whole city would probably be evacuated.

Well, then don't launch rockets from within Gaza then. Those rockets generally aren't targeted at military targets anyway, so there is nothing legitimate about firing them off in the first place.

When conducting war you have a responsibility to minimize the danger to non-combatants. That includes not basing your soldiers in close proximity to non-combatants (and 100m is close proximity).

The alternative is to return to tactics like WWII bombing, and that isn't in anybody's interests. Those fighting in Gaza (whatever they want to call themselves) are not acting as soldiers - they're basically acting as terrorists.

Meh, it seems that more and more the blame is shifting to whoever wrote the requirements or the project manager. But, without fixing all that other stuff, there isn't much they can do either.

The whole reason Agile was created was to try to deal with some of these pressures, which many consider unavoidable. The problem is that many companies just don't grok it, and insist on a fixed scope in a fixed time at a fixed cost. This approach fits in better with annual planning cycles. If you have a million dollars, a set of objectives, and a year to achieve those objectives it makes sense from the manager's perspective to tell the developers to just deliver that whole set of objectives. The problem is that after a year it turns out the objectives weren't quite right, the situation was more complex than people realized, a million dollars wasn't quite right, and so on.

I still have several machines that interchange mail with each other and the Internet via uucp mailnet. I poll an ISP twice an hour (or use an alias to force a poll if i don't want the mail to wait.)

I even check my personal mailbox on that domain every couple months. (Every three weeks or so I get another offer to buy my domain name, which has been around since the list of machines that exchanged email fit on three typeset pages.) But you wouldn't BELIEVE the amount of spam that accumulates on an account that has been around since before the first mass mail-merge spam scripts were offerd for sale. (I think I still have a saved copy of that original piece of spam - advertising spam software.) The spammers STILL include that address in their mailing lists.

If the NSA or ISIS ever kills the connected Internet, UUCP mailnet will still work, merrily bucket-brigading email among the hadnful of machines whose mail transfer agents still interconnect by routes that don't just hand the mail off to an Internet hop.

Also: Back when we ran mailing lists over UUCP, the polling delay limited the deluge of mail when someone on the list accidentally forwarded his mail to the list. This gave us time to catch it manually and suspend the account before everybody was buried in repeated messages. B-)