Nothing I have read about Snowden indicates that he is actually some sort of uber-hacker

Except the stuff about how a 29 year old completely pwnd the NSA, probably the most technically sophisticated part of the US Government there is?

Sheesh. Your standards are high. What would it take, exactly?

Additionally, just because you have read nothing about his programming skills doesn't mean he has none. He once mentioned finding XSS holes in some CIA app so apparently he is good enough to do that.

There are already plenty of CA's in countries that are not under US jurisdiction. However, so far the CA's that issued bad certs were all outside the USA, and appear to have only done so because they got hacked and not because they were e.g. forced to by court order.

Unless you have a magical solution to hacking I don't think your new root CA would solve much.

Additionally, citation needed for "routine man in the middle". SSL MITM has been studied by academics at scale. They did not find evidence of much. Governments don't need to MITM SSL for as long as users browse non-SSLd sites like Slashdot and browser exploits exist.

try googletranslating http://lb.ua/news/2014/07/20/2... [lb.ua] - ukrainian army detains 23 terrorists. somehow all 23 turn out to be citizens of the russian federation.

That page is merely reporting a press release from the Ukrainian government in Kiev. Are you suggesting we should treat everything they say as factually true?

let's bisect the other thing you said - "at most Russia is supplying weapons to them".
"at most". as if they were given bows and arrows. they get armoured vehicles. they get... tanks. they get bloody sam systems that can reach targets up to 25km.

Yes. That's what I said. Perhaps this is a language issue.

Whatever is happening in Ukraine it is not a full-blown invasion by Russia in the "classical" style that Iraq or Afghanistan were. That would be far more obvious. It seems to be much more similar to what's been happening in Syria where the west has been supplying weapons, training and expertise to anti-Assad groups there. If you were to say the west has "at most been supplying weapons and training to the Syrian rebels" you would be correct, given that (fortunately) Syria was not invaded by a foreign army.

Not exactly. There is a distinct difference between a soldier and a combatant. A soldier is trained and is a member of a standing military. The separatists can at best be described as "irregulars", or insurgents or rebels if you want to go with slightly more charged terminology.

Yes, really? With that definition it'd be impossible for a new military to ever be created, because anyone who joins and fights with one is not joining a standing army therefore cannot be soldiers. That is obviously nonsense, it must be possible for someone to be a soldier in a newly formed army, which is what it looks like is happening here.

Additionally, you claim that the fighters in Donetsk cannot be soldiers because soldiers are trained, and then immediately claim they're receiving training from Russia. So which is it?

And given the fact that the missiles were launched from inside territory controlled by the rebelsis a very important detail. Why would the Ukrainians have anti-air equipment deployed in an area they do not control, against an enemy with no air power?

You're quite right - it probably was the separatists. This does not change the accuracy of the Wikipedia edit that's being discussed, because unless/until the separatists win, they are still Ukrainians.

Although I'd note that given the amount of bullshit emanating from all sides in this conflict it's hard to really know anything about what's going on. The area of Ukraine that's in revolt is next to the Russian border, which is exactly where you'd expect the Ukrainian military to have had lots of soldiers and equipment stationed. Missiles might have been trucked over the Russian border, or they might simply have been there already. The separatists might be being trained by Russians (this would be unsurprising and not exactly unprecedented - see how the USA supported rebels in Syria), or alternatively they might be operating the equipment without really knowing what they're doing - indeed, having no clue what you're targeting would be rather indicative of not being properly trained, no? Or perhaps they're being trained by people who are ethnically Russian but lived in Ukraine at the time of the rebellion, or one of many other more complex cases that won't neatly fit into the "Putin fired the missiles himself" story the west is busy pushing.

All we can say for sure is that whatever you read about this incident is going to be full-blown propaganda, and should be treated as such.

I don't think Russian state media should be editing Wikipedia entries especially not on matters of current affairs.

But still, interpreted literally the new statement is far more factually correct and unbiased than what it replaced. Whoever shot down the plane, they were "soldiers" or fighters of some variety and almost certainly can be described as Ukrainian, given that everyone seems to agree that the fighters are actually eastern Ukrainians and at most Russia is supplying weapons to them.

The original text, on the other hand, more or less exactly sums up western/west Ukrainian line despite the obvious abuse of the word terrorist to mean "rebel fighter" and the [citation needed] assertion about who did it and the source of the weapons.

There is no need to get rid of Tor: in theory, Tor could have a "hidden service policy" mechanism not much different to the exit policy mechanism. HS Policies would allow a node operator to state that they aren't willing to act as an introduction point for a list of hidden services (or point to lists maintained elsewhere to stop fast-flux type behaviour).

Tor already accepts that not all relay operators will want to support all kinds of behaviour and that some kinds of traffic can be abusive, that's why they implement exit policies which allow exits to ban port and IP ranges. Taking this philosophy to hidden services seems like the next natural step. After all, Tor volunteers are ultimately acting as human shields for other people's anonymous behaviour. Requiring them to shield everything just restricts the number of people who would be willing to donate bandwidth to general privacy but are not interested in enabling botnets.

Not sure what you're getting at, but the Azul collector is well known for pulling off apparently magical GC performance. They do it with a lot of very clever computer science that involves, amongst other things, modifications to the kernel. I believe they also used to use custom chips with extended instruction sets designed to interop well with their custom JVM. Not sure if they still do that. The result is that they can do things like GC a 20 gigabyte heap in a handful of milliseconds. GC doesn't have to suck.

Ripple, before the name was bought by a Silicon Valley company and changed into something a bit different, was more or less exactly this.

There's a video on the original web page that explains this concept quite nicely. You could set up debt relationships between people and denominated in any currency, including ones you invent on the fly like hours of The Real Mike's time. However it never really took off in a big way, perhaps because it was rather complicated, and bootstrapping such a system from the internet (full of strangers who don't know each other, don't trust each other and may not even exist) is presumably very difficult.

However if the concept sounds interesting you could do worse than check out the original thinking by Ryan Fugger behind Ripple. Satoshi once told me that Ripple was interesting because it was the only system that does something with trust other than centralise it.

Yes the question posed is ridiculous, akin to asking how long is a piece of string.

Regardless, the submitter has created a space in which we can choose either to flame him/her (achieving nothing) or we can choose to have an interesting and useful debate on things like how companies slow down as they scale, whether there should be mandatory size limits on companies a la KSR's Red Mars trilogy, to what extent this move is an indictment of the Ballmer era, to what extent Microsoft's competitors i.e. Google might be suffering over-staffing and so on. Many interesting topics.

So. Who's first?

Both Russia and the USA have a history of supporting rebellions and shooting down passenger jets. America's was an Iranian Airbus.

An Xbox is just one firmware update from being an Android TV box.

Well, I don't know if anything in economics is provable per se, but Europe (more specifically the UK) is going through this debate right now. The EU is a giant free trade zone. How valuable is that? People who do business all think it's essential, but people are who are just employees aren't so sure. Let the debate commence.

Whatever the reason, they still boosted domestic production and economic growth.

That may have been true in the USA (hard to say given the lack of in-depth statistics back then and difficulty of knowing the impacts of such things even today) but it probably wasn't the case abroad. Sure, the USA didn't care one whit back then about the impact of tariffs on British or European manufacturers, nor did they care much if Americans couldn't afford superior foreign-made products for a while. They valued economic independence more, and given their situation that was understandable.

But putting military concerns to one side, free trade theory is correct. Those tariffs made the world as a whole economically worse off. If governments could be trusted not to use their economies as weapons of war, it'd be better for everyone if tariffs were reduced and removed, because it makes people wealthier in the long run and that's why every so often countries and trading blocs try to engage in free trade treaties.

Of course the problem is, governments do so love using economics as a weapon .... the USA more than most. So tariffs will continue to have non-economic justifications for the forseeable future, of the form "yes it makes us less wealthy, but the upsides are worth it".

Banning loss leaders (a.k.a. market dumping) seems like an inherently attractive fix to improve free markets, but it's fraught with difficulty.

The most obvious problem is R&D costs. I do market research and decide that people would be willing to pay $100 for a widget. But said widget does not yet exist, so I spend a million dollars to develop it, and then start selling it for $100 a pop. I calculate it will take several years to break even but that's OK, because I'm a businessman who thinks long term and we like those sorts of people don't we?

I think you can see where this is going - the business runs at a loss for several years, to build the market and spread out the development costs. Eventually I can reduce the price of my widget because I paid off the R&D costs. But until then I'm still in the red.

Amazon is no different. If they make no profit, it's because they choose to charge low prices, build the market and develop new products all at the same time, instead of cashing out. Though actually I think you're distorting history by saying they "muscled their way into the market". Amazon was one of the first online stores. There was no market to muscle in to, nobody else was doing what they were doing. Bezos pretty much created a new market from scratch.

And sometimes it is, despite the supposed inefficiencies. That's what the French government thinks, and there are similar opinions in other European countries.

If governments could reflect the diversity of opinions in their population perfectly ever time, the world would be a simpler place.

In practice they tend to reflect the opinions of a very specific group of people - politicians (closely followed by bureaucrats) who are e.g. typically older and wealthier than the average man on the street.

There's an interesting article by an author on the topic, called "Don’t Support Your Local Bookseller: Buying books on Amazon is better for authors, better for the economy, and better for you". Worth reading, at least.