As another pointed out, Russia isn't anywhere near the first country to do this; in fact, doesn't the European Union require it Union-wide?

Anyway, I'm most curious how the Kremlin defined "personal". Being that a lot of us are software industry programmers, product managers, etc., it'd be useful to know what kind of changes we need to make to our respective companies' international back-end infrastructure.

A lot of families have more than one car. You could have a large, gasoline powered car to go visit Aunt Mabel or on a camping trip in the Grand Canyon, and a smaller electric car for commuting, runs to the supermarket, etc. The hope is that eventually electric vehicles will have the range, rapid recharge rate, and charging infrastructure that they can compete with and replace gas engines; in the meantime the technology may already be mature enough to compete in particular niches. The nature of disruptive technology is that it initially plays to its strengths and gets a foothold in a market where conventional technology does not perform as well, and as it improves it eventually moves in and takes over from the conventional technology.

That being said, we are a long way away from a fleet that is all-electric or even substantially electric. It's growing rapidly compared to where it was a few years ago (basically, no electric cars), but it's still a tiny segment of the automobile market. According to Wikipedia, .62% of all cars sold in 2013 were electric. Even if that were a much higher figure- say, one-third of all cars sold each year- the average car is around 10 years old. So assume we replace ten percent of the fleet every year, then it would take years to reach a fleet that was one-third electric. Internal combustion engines are not going to go away any time soon. Tesla's stock price is soaring but GM, Ford, and Chevrolet still sell a lot more internal combustion engines than Tesla sells electrics.

No, this bio-robot, a hybrid cyborg construct made from genetically engineered muscle tissue and 3-D printed materials, does not truly walk as such. It does, however, whisper "kill me! kill meeee!!!!" late at night in the lab when the lights are turned out.

They're both big-game hunters, but had a very different approach to it. Neanderthals had stabbing spears; they basically ran up to their prey and stabbed at it. The problem with this approach is that you have to get very close to the prey. It's hard to get close enough to a horse to kill it with a stabbing spear. It might be easier to get close to a slow-moving animal like a mammoth or wooly rhino, but then you face the problem that if it's in range of you, you're in range of the tusks/horns/feet. It's possible to kill large animals this way- saber-toothed cats did- but dangerous.

When Homo sapiens show up, they've got an entirely new technology- the atlatl, or spear-thrower. They can throw a dart 60 feet with enough force to impale a large animal. This means they don't need to get as close to strike. It also means that when they do strike, the prey can't hit back. The difference in build between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis seems to reflect this different hunting strategy. Neanderthals are short and stocky, like wrestlers. Homo sapiens are long and lanky, like basketball players. For the one, strength is key. For the other, speed, agility and long-distance throwing are key.

This may also explain the different effects that the two had on the fauna. When Neanderthals show up, we don't see any major extinctions. When Homo sapiens show up in Eurasia, we see the disappearance of mammoths, wooly rhinos, Irish elk, etc. The run-up-and-stab it hunting approach of Neanderthals wasn't that different from the hunting strategy of saber-toothed cats from the prey's standpoint. Raining sharp sticks of death down from dozens of meters away was radically different than anything the local fauna had ever faced before.

So basically what happened is that someone started typing an email to "Joeblow@gs.com" and got as far as "Joeblow@g" before the autocomplete helpfully added "gmail.com". And then they hit "send". Through a combination of carelessness and cluelessness, this employee managed to put hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars of customer funds at risk. Well, given what happened the last time Goldman made a mistake of this magnitude, it's clear that there's only one course of action for the company. And that's to give this employee a massive bonus.

Actually, I read that the proceedings were _ex-parte_ ... No-IP wasn't even informed that there were any proceedings. Consequently they had zero chance to defend against this forfeiture. And that's exactly how Microsoft wanted it. There's more going on here than malware. My guess is that Microsoft's big media buddies want to use Microsoft as a front for domain seizures under cover of "protecting the public", without having to get their hands dirty or take any PR hits.

You know Russell Peters is a comedian, right? :-) I'll wait for the meta-episode where Peters makes fun of people who got suckered into believing what he said.

It's unquestionable that the U.S. has let this thing loose; the U.S. has perhaps the most advanced cyberwarfare capabilities (at least in terms of offense) as any country on earth, having developed these weapons and techniques they can't complain too much if other countries start using them as well. However the idea is that cyberwarfare, just like conventional warfare, can and should be governed by a code of conduct. The idea would be that targets that would be considered off-limits to conventional attacks would also be off-limits to cyber-attacks. So it would be considered acceptable to attack the enemy's command-and-control network, their radars, their weapons systems, or military shipping and transport... but not to attack civilian infrastructure such as electricity, water supply, trains, banks, the stock market, etc. etc. So far, U.S. actions are consistent with this policy; we have attacked Iran's nuclear facilities but haven't tried to take down their banks or power plants, even though we probably could. You can see this policy in action where the U.S. recently accused a number of Chinese soldiers of engaging in cyberwarfare against the U.S. The issue wasn't that they engaged in cyberwarfare, which we expect the Chinese to do. It was that they were attacking civilian targets for corporate espionage, and the U.S. wanted to send a message that while they expect the military to be attacked by the Chinese, and it's a legitimate target, it's not OK to target U.S. companies.

In the current case, it would appear that Russia doesn't accept the U.S. argument that civilian infrastructure should be off-limits. Whether the U.S. can complain here or not is debatable. The U.S. has targeted civilian infrastructure during conventional operations; they knocked out the power in Serbia during actions in Kosovo, for example. So the Russians could easily argue- and not without merit- that if it's OK to take out the power in Serbia using a stealth bomber and a conventional bomb, it ought to be OK to turn out the lights in the U.S. using a logic bomb.

To establish guilt in a crime, you try to identify who has means, motive, and opportunity. The working hours provide you information on opportunity; not to say that someone from China or North Korea couldn't attack during Eastern European business hours, but this tends to point to Eastern Europe as being the most likely source.

That brings us to means. Who has the capability to launch a campaign of this scope and duration? Anybody can launch a cyberattack, but relatively few countries have the resources to launch attacks against multiple organizations, in multiple countries, over many years. The big players in cyberwarfare are a relatively exclusive club, and would include the United States, Israel, China, North Korea, and Russia. So our suspect is almost certainly one of those countries.

Which brings us to motive. Who might want to attack these countries? The U.S. has a long list of enemies; certainly China, North Korea, or Russia might be interested in attacking the U.S. or at least having the capability to do so. Having the U.S. on this hit list tells us little. But what about the other countries? They include Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Poland, Romania, Greece, and Serbia. With the exception of Serbia, every single one of those countries is a member of NATO. And NATO was created specifically to counter and deter Russia. So now put it all together: the attacks appear to be coming from Eastern Europe, the only country on the list of cyberwarfare powers in that area is Russia, almost all of the countries are part of a military alliance designed to counter Russia...

I don't know what the hell to think about Obama anymore. The guy we elected was smart, charismatic, capable, articulate; he ran a brilliant campaign that took out the heavily favored Hilary Clinton. He came across as a man with the intelligence, principles, and pragmatism to fix the nations problems... or at least not fuck it up as catastrophically as George W. Bush did. So where the hell did that guy go?

I remember the early Obama speeches when he wasn't just a speaker but an orator, he the fire of a black preacher... he had conviction. That was the inspiring thing about him. Yeah it was pretty words, but he seemed to really believe it. Now he just seems to mouth the speeches, like they're just empty words put there by his speechwriters. At times when people ask him questions he seems barely able to articulate an answer and to fumble for words... more and more, he's that barely-keeping-it-together guy we saw during the second debate against Romney. He seems dejected, run-down... and increasingly it seems like the administration can't do a damn thing right. They're as bad as Bush ever was on drone strikes and warrantless surveillance- worse, in fact- Guantanamo isn't shut, the VA is a clusterfuck, Iraq is falling apart again, the response to the Crimea was half-assed... and now this?

I still like the guy, as a person. I think he means well. But I get the impression that he's burned out, disengaged and depressed, that he spends his days staring at the ceiling of the Oval Office and counting the days until his Presidential Library opens and he gets to take lucrative speaking gigs. And that meanwhile, with the Commander in Chief checked out, the various special interests and agendas are having a field day, and doing what they do best- turning government of the people, for the people, and by the people into the plaything of moneyed special interests, the uber-rich, and the military-industrial complex. Anyway, that's my theory. I think he means well, and he came in trying to fight the machine, but it was one man against an entire machine. And the machine ultimately broke him.

I just want to double-check- are we absolutely, 100% positive that this is a legitimate news story, and not a leaked script for a sequel to Zoolander or the latest Austin Powers movie?

http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/...

There is unquestionably a lot of wasteful military spending, but complete disengagement isn't necessarily the answer. If Obama had moved to support the Syrian moderates earlier- instead of just saying he'd support them and doing fuck-all- then perhaps the Syrian extremists wouldn't have taken over a third of Iraq. If Obama had negotiated to keep on troops in Iraq, perhaps the country wouldn't have fallen apart so quickly. If Obama hadn't completely walked away from Iraq, then maybe Maliki wouldn't have pushed the Sunnis out of power, leaving the country receptive to a takeover by Sunni militants. Powell's Pottery Barn principle also applies here: you break it, you buy it. Maybe we shouldn't have gotten involved in Iraq. Ok, *certainly* we shouldn't have gotten involved. But we did; and it wasn't just a George Dubya Bush thing, pretty much the whole country either supported him, or else was indifferent enough to go along with it. Yes, the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites goes back centuries... but under Saddam they weren't slaughtering each other. The fact that they are now is in large part due to U.S. intervention. As much as Obama and the rest of the U.S. would like to walk away from this disastrous mess, we got involved. We broke it, now we own it.

The idea that there's a technological fix for every problem is a very American attitude, and this idea seems particularly widespread in military circles. The fact of the matter is that the CIA is incompetent, and no amount of technology in the world can fix the fact that our intelligence agency is run by idiots. To cite just a few examples, the CIA screwed up on WMD in Iraq, failed to anticipate the Arab Spring, was caught off-guard by Putin's invasion of Crimea, and despite repeated warnings from the Kurds and others, failed to anticipate the recent moves by ISIS to take territory in Iraq. To be fair, predictions are hard, especially about the future. And it's hard to take credit for crises averted, or things that go on behind the scenes, so it may well be that the CIA occasionally does something right and we don't hear about it. All the same, these idiotic glasses seem to sum up everything that's wrong with the CIA. What next, will they try assassinating someone with an exploding cigar? Oh, wait...