These sats are going into LEO, not GEO, so their position in the sky won't be fixed. I imagine you'll used a phased array antenna to track them. The good points being: lower latency, no requirement to see the southern horizon specifically. The bad point being that you'll need a view of a bigger chunk of the sky to avoid signal dropouts as the satellites move - how big a chunk depends on how many satellites they have up there (and therefore how many are above the horizon at the same time). If they have enough satellites, it may work out better for you.

Although crazies keep voting for UKIP, who have said they want to legalise firearms...

Great! $malware got read access to your bank details.

So now instead of having a single copy of the file, you have a separate copy saved by each application that has been used to process it - creating a mountain of almost-identical files that the user has to keep track of is not a user friendly way of doing things.

Better is to have a versioned filesystem - each time a file is changed (by any application!) the delta is saved and the filesystem keeps the old data hidden away. Most of the time everything behaves as normal - you have one copy of a file, no matter how many times it is edited. If you need to roll back some changes then you just ask to see previous versions of that file, much like a source control system. And indeed, there are a number of file systems that do exactly this - if you care about such things there's nothing stopping you doing it.

It doesn't stop malware reading your files or modifying them, but it does mean you can recover the unmodified versions... but then doing backups (which everyone should be doing anyway) gives you similar protection.

Because anything else would require popping up numerous "would you like to allow this application to do $foo" boxes, and then you end up training the user to just hit "yes" on everything because it's too damned annoying to make a decision every time when the vast vast majority of access requests really are legitimate.

Sandboxing based on applications making their own decisions and being relatively trustworthy might not be a bad plan though - i.e. if your web browser has an immutable list of files it needs access to, and you trust your web browser, that provides some level of protection when some malware compromises the browser, so long as the immutable list really is immutable and the malware can't modify it.

Well no, if you can roll back everything that happened between the "all clear" scan and the "you've been cracked" scan then that's certainly much better than nothing.

You don't know what most software ACTUALLY does, even if you did install it - most software people use is closed source, but even the open source is a black box unless you actually audit it.

I suspect a manned Mars mission will always be "a bit silly" at any point until people start actually doing it. And whilst I can't really point to much tangible return on the investment, "blue skies" project do have a habit of producing some quite unexpected returns.

To my mind, governments seem to be mostly concerned with themselves at the moment, with nothing to unify those in power towards some common (non-selfish) goal. With the few top-richest people being as rich as they are now I wouldn't be surprised if a few of them banded together to put together a manned Mars mission long before any government (so long as they do so before a revolution comes and redistributes the wealth a bit more fairly).

And what about research that takes longer than 5-10 years to come to fruition (which actually isn't very long)?

Lets take fusion research as an example - that has spent decades sucking money out of governments and has produced very little return on that investment. It may never produce much return. But if we ever do crack fusion for commercial power generation, that would be a serious game changer - probably a big enough return to justify a couple of hundred years of otherwise fruitless investment.

Umm, I don't agree with my taxes being spent on "National Defence" (when I can sum up the current "defence" ideas as "go into foreign countries and blow up some brown people").

Guess what - you don't get to choose what your tax gets spent on. In theory, it should be apportioned democratically, but even that doesn't happen - a significant number of people objected to the Iraq war and were ignored.

The problem with NASA is largely the senators dictating how the money will be spent, which leads to a huge amount of wastage. The shuttle is a good example - NASA could only get the funding if they made a space craft that fitted some fairly mutually exclusive specifications - the result was a space craft that could do none of those things especially well and almost certainly more expensively than building several separate craft tailored to specific jobs.

Look at the A-3 test stand as another example: it was designed for the Constallation programme, and when Obama cancelled the programme the partially constructed test stand was of no use. Congress demanded that NASA keep constructing this useless piece of hardware and they spent about $200M on it _after_ it was known that there was no use for it. How can you expect NASA to be value for money when it is treated as a jobs creation programme and forced to waste money like that?

SLS is probably another good example - insanely expensive, not least because congress are actually dictating the engineering requirements, and no doubt the government will order NASA to scrap it before completion, completely wasting all the money that was invested in it. Despite its huge cost, I kinda hope that SLS doesn't get scrapped, because then at least the money has gone into something that can be used instead of yet another useless cancelled project.

Far better would be to just give NASA a lump of money and tell them to do with it as they please - the money would still end up invested in paying people to do jobs (the jobs might not be in the various senator's chosen locations, but they would still happen), and we'd probably have a lot more science at the end of it instead of a huge pile of half-completed scrapped projects.

*sigh*

The conversation was about it being so very cheap to roll out SSL because its trivial to get free SSL certificates. I'm not criticising StartSSL, I'm simply stating that it *isn't* trivial to get wildcard certificates. So the whole "you should use SSL everywhere coz it's free" premise kinda falls down there, since it isn't in fact free.

Not true. Firefox blocked _short_ self signed certs (and yes, it's a stupid move - stick up a big warning by all means, but blocking them completely is insane. Lots of people now can't use FireFox to access legitimate networking hardware that uses short self signed certs). However, make a sensibly long self signed cert and it works fine as it always did.

If your browser is vulnerable to injected malware then you're pretty much screwed already - an attacker just needs to trick you into visiting their site (which can have a perfectly legitimate SSL cert), no MITM injection required.

IE taught us that this kind of thing doesn't happen quickly - web developers _still_ have to deal with IE's buggy rendering, despite good alternatives having been available for 15 years. Ok, IE has got better but it's still not great. Users don't see this stuff as a browser problem - if your website doesn't work right then the users see it as a problem with your website.

And whilst I use StartSSL, it's a pain that you can't get free wildcard certs for your domain...

Well, it is pretty much like real life, but I'm not sure we want to be teaching kids "this is the crap you can expect fom life" rather than inspiring them to do more.

I did take a slight exception to this though:

As far as I can tell from the story, Steven and Brian did nothing wrong at all - clueless Barbie fucks things up and then asks them to fix it, which they do. This bit of the story would probably be pretty similar if you replace Barbie with any clueless person (male or female) who's just infected a bunch of computers with a virus. What were they supposed to do in this situation?

The maintainers (you call them "an elite crowd") of some distros have made the decision to use systemd because they think that's the right thing to do - someone has to make the decision, and if not the maintainers, who? Or would you prefer that the maintainers decide to do something that they think isn't right?

No one is forcing anyone to use systemd - the source is there for anyone to use as they see fit; Some distros have decided that systemd is the right way to go, some have decided to use other inits, you can either choose the distro (from a wide selection) that suits your purposes the most, or you can even make your own, no one is forcing you to use one particular distro.

Note: I don't really have any opinions about systemd, I currently use Fedora and it seems to work ok, but if I have problems then I can switch distros.

Why not Debian Stable? Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses systemd, so it must be good enough for enterprise use, so why it it not good enough for Debian Stable?