i disagree, outright. their aim is to destroy availability and access to anything that could cause people to have "thoughts" outside of the proscribed and permitted range as dictated by them. in that regard, it *doesn't matter* that the copies are imperfect replicas of the original.

in fact, now that i think about it: a second objection to what you say is that if anyone else notices a discrepancy, they may take a copy of the files and improve on it. so in that regard, the fact that these insane people have endeavoured to destroy the originals actually results in *more* people with access to - and thus thinking about - the origins of the artefacts that were destroyed.

either way, these insane people have *helped* spread the messages that they attempted to suppress. so i think i will mark this story as "stressandeffect".

Audio detection isn't nearly as broken as the article pretends. Sure if all you have is a single mic, then you have no hope. OTOH, with multiple mics, you can *localize* sounds, which means you don't need to recognize the sounds of a drone, just realize that there's some noise coming from something in the air where there shouldn't be anything. With a microphone array, you can actually pinpoint sound sources much weaker than ambient noise. It's certainly not trivial, but within the realm of what's realistic (assuming there aren't simpler solutions).

actually... what's now "top news" for when you search "what happened to the dinosaurs" is... greg's post and associated discussions...

i visited bangalore in 2006, to see a friend living there. he explained that when the trees were cut down in the cities (so that more housing could be built), temperatures soared by an additional 10 *centigrade*. so, the ambient temperature surrounding the cities would be 45 degrees, but in bangalore it would reach *fifty five* centigrade. the point of mentioning this is that it's a much more direct version of how man has an effect on his immediate environment. change the landscape, you change the weather, it's as simple as that. we can learn from that... or simply die. it's our choice.

I do not know a single politician outside the US who would think that even remotely considering pushing an agenda as harebrained as creationism is anything but political suicide. ...well, except in Canada these days. A couple years ago, our minister of *science* was refusing to answer questions about whether he believed in evolution. More recently, Alberta also had a creationist minister of education.. So unfortunately, some of the madness has escaped North of the US.

hang on... didn't bunnie huang do the "chumby", and didn't barbie try doing something like this - putting an interactive wifi and mic aspect into one of their barbie dolls... with a huge back-lash as a result? so (a) why is there an expectation that this will succeed (b) why was the patent granted when there is clear prior art???

this is why debian has the GPG key-signing parties, and why all packages are GPG-signed by the package maintainer when they compile it, why the ftp masters sign the package when it's uploaded, and why the release files which include the checksums of all the packages are also GPG-signed. under this scenario there are an extremely limited number of extremely paranoid methods by which debian may be compromised. even the scenario of "cooperation between long-term sleeper agents within debian's ranks" would have a one-shot opportunity to get away with introducing malicious code, following the discovery of which their GPG keys would be revoked, the perpetrators kicked out of debian, their packages pulled immediately pending a review, and the already-effective procedures reviewed to involve multi-person GPG signing that would make it even harder for compromise to occur in the future.

now, if you recall, there was an announcement a couple of years back that the development of Mozilla's B2G was declared to be "open" to all, so i contributed with a thorough security-conscious review of how to do package distribution. it turns out that Mozilla is *NOT* open - at all. several other contributors have learned that the Mozilla Foundation is in direct violation of its charter.

basically, the Mozilla Foundation *completely* ignored the advice that i gave - which was that the use of SSL as a distribution mechanism would be vulnerable to *exactly* the kinds of attacks that we see the NSA attempting to do on google. they went so far as to enact censorship, preventing and prohibiting me from pointing out the severe security flaws inherent in their chosen method of package distribution. i remain deeply unimpressed with many aspects of so-called "open-ness" of well-funded software libre projects.

http://iopscience.iop.org/0295...

just to throw an appropriate spanner in the works, it's worthwhile mentioning the above article which notes a significant statistical correlation between variations in the measurement of the effect known as "gravity", and the (appx) 6.5 year cyclic variation of the earth's length of day.

now, before you go all "ooer" or "waah! gravity varies! we're all gonna dieeee spinning off into space", it's worthwhile pointing out that the author mentions, in the conclusion, that there *might* be some sort of unknown systemic errors in (a) how gravity is measured (b) how the length of day is measured which *happen* to coincide and give the *impression* that there is a statistical correlation between gravitational variation and the length of the earth's day. he does however state that in light of how the measurements are taken it would seem to be very unlikely that there are such systemic errors.

so, anyway, the point is: gravity appears not to be as simple as we assumed, hence why some long-distance space probes (Pioneer for example) have anomalous unexplained behaviour.

Having lived in Australia a few years, I've been amazed at how good the voting system is (mandatory, with ranking)... and how bad the outcome has been (Howard at the time) despite the good system.

Similar here. One day the connection went out and I called tech support. I told them it was probably related to the technician I had just seen in the neighborhood. They couldn't even track that there was a technician around, so they couldn't help at all. Eventually (with tech support on the phone), I just opened the door and yelled "are you the one that took down my connection?" to the technician outside and he shouted back "yes". Cause identified.

Just what we needed to convince websites to switch to https!