This stuff goes far, quite far, and to quote Jacob Applebaum: "I can't remember voting on any of this stuff, or even having seen a public debate on it".

How about you?

It all depends on what society at large thinks is a worthwhile price to pay. Take file sharing (of copyrighted files) for example. It's perfectly possible to stamp it out: just legislate to allow the MPAA and RIA to demand all ISP's to install monitoring software and match whatever you upload to a database of signatures of copyrighted works. The Snowdon papers show that it's very likely that the infrastructure is available to do just that.

Encryption is of course to be outlawed for use by private citizens. US-style "damages" will pay for the enforcement effort and file sharing will be killed in short order.

Of course there are such pesky things like the first amendment that would get in the way, but those are only *legal* and *political* obstacles, not technological ones. Which means they can be removed whenever people feel like it. And people's perception of what is or isn't acceptable can be changed by abuses of technology.

For example, it's perfectly possible to legislate that whoever uploads your mug without your consent is liable for damages (freeing the ones pictured from having to prove any actual damages) and legislate that all and any ISPs and hosting companies must give their full cooperation and assist anyone who can show that their picture has been uploaded without their consent to identify the perpetrator. That would also necessitate the end of anonymous internet access.

What you really mean is that you don't wish for this to happen, not that it can't happen for technological (or political) reasons.

If you thought that no amount of political pressure can effectively take away your rights to upload pictures of people, just wait until the first pedophile ring is discovered scouting schools for attractive "candidates" using Google Glasses and putting the lot online for perusal.

Unfortunately people have a way of abusing new technology in ways that lead to hitherto unheard of legal constraints.

The thing with Science is that you amend established theory in the light of new evidence or improved analysis of existing evidence. And that's what we see here.

Of course you never bothered to glance at the article before grabbing your keyboard, but if you had, you would have seen that this study tries to see which hypothesis about what factor was the main driver of climate the best fits the reconstructed temperatures over the past 100 years (based on observations).

The reason why we conduct studies like these isn't to identify the drivers of climate in the past hundred million years. It's to identify the main drivers now and in recent times, such as the past 100 years.

The question of what the driver of climate has been in the past 100 years is one open to investigation and debate. To be blunt: that case wasn't closed after you finished your geophysics course.

Counter to your claim, this study finds that assuming insolation was the main driver of climate over the past 100 years is not consistent with reconstructed temperatures.

I think you do a genuine disservice to any informed debate on what the cause of the (observed) global warming by donning a mantle of quasi-authority and (a) confusing the question of climate drivers on a geological timescale with those happening now and (b) dismissing a study you never even bothered read.

They took every precaution to prevent the world from learning about this sort of thing. If they'd had their way, nobody would know or suspect and everything would be fine.

If you want to blame anyone for having all this come out, blame that tattletale contractor guy with the big usb sticks.

(1) the NSA must be able to detect, identify, and trace people who are involved in threats to state security or criminal acts on basis of their communications

(2) one of the main (and indispensible) tools in such work is social network analysis, i.e. who talks to whom and how often. If people communicate a lot, or if they communicate little but highly significantly then they form a social network and are probably working together

(3a) you don't have the ability to detect and identify social networks on basis of communication unless you have the ability to collect metadata from anyone (i.e. you install technical means to tap everything)

(3b) it's impossible to reliably detect and identify social networks on basis of communication alone without actually using those taps to collect all metadata from everyone.

(4) therefore having reliable detection capabilities and not hoovering everyone's metadata are mutually exclusive.

(5) So unless you allow the NSA unrestricted collection of metadata (including that of all Americans), you prevent the NSA from doing its job

You can agree or disagree with him here (and you're invited to do so) but you either refute this line of reasoning or you accept that you are preventing the NSA from doing its job.

And unless you can refute this reasoning, you end up deciding whether or not to give up certain liberties (i.e. online privacy) in order to gain security. The point being that you will run an additional risk unless you give up those liberties.

Now that's a decision the voters can and should make I think. After all, they're the real stakeholders, not the organizations.

You obviously know more about the situation in Australia than I do, and disabling the freedom of the press will definitely encourage corruption.

From the article however it appears that Australian civil servants regularly misappropriate technical information that comes to them under certain state-security statutes and then turn around and hand it to commercial parties of their choice to develop into products.

I honestly don't understand how these people can sleep at night. As a civil servant you're supposed to serve the people that employ you, not steal their work under cover of security statutes. And as for those "scientists" plagiarising (i.e. putting their own name on) ideas and inventions handed to them by state security ... words fail me.

Plus that gem about that new Aussie law (the Defence Trade Controls Act) that seems so broad that it can criminalise you for innocuous acts like sending an email with an explanation or leaving a server open (think about OSS) with e.g. software or information on potential dual use technology. (See e.g. http://www.uws.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/470072/Defence_Controls_Act_-_Information_v2.pdf and fos a list of controlled goods: http://www.comlaw.gov.au/Details/F2012L02318/be04cd99-b7aa-4f39-a4cb-e35196ffc653)

In all probability the Australian government just wanted to impress the US with its zeal and preparedness to go after proliferators. In doing that they seem to have created a law (the DTCA) that allows communication about just about anything that could possibly find dual use to be retrospectively criminalised.

The only way to stay clear seems to be to either have a legal department vet each and every communication outside Australia (including accessible servers). Otherwise you put your head on the chopping block and all you can do is hope nobody will (with hindsight !) find cause to bring down the axe.

This is a school of legislation that goes back to the best traditions of the Crown asserting its Sovereign Rights over its subjects. Just put in a catch-all article and see if you're going to invoke it afterwards. Result: ease of legislation for the Government and everybody else has to live in fear of being prosecuted and can only hope for leniency and good will on part of the Government.

Now the US has got many things wrong, but this isn't one of them.

Only it now manifests as a lack of ethics in legislation.

Given that we're asking this question on a US forum we can take it as granted that 60% of the readers couldn't find either country on a map and that 90% have zero knowledge of their political and historical position. So about 90% will be ill-equipped to understand where Singapore's and South-Korea's self-interests might lie. But now that the question is asked, we can remedy that.

South Korea, needs the US to help defend themselves against neighbours who would be prepared to wage a full-scale war against them (North Korea). The US are pretty much the only ally of note and value they have, and they know it.

Singapore is surrounded by neighbours that completely dwarf them (Malaysia, Indonesia) only 50 years ago encompassed them (Malaysia), have an Islamic majority (Malaysia) or a virulent Islamic minority (Indonesia) and are debating whether to become a fully Islamic state (Malaysia).

Both countries have brought about an economic boom and depend on security (i.e. the absence of shooting wars), good trade relations with the West, open sea lanes and suchlike.

In both cases a critical part of their national security is having accurate information on what their neighbours are really up to. And in both cases the only serious partner is the US. As a stabilizing factor, a main ally, or a party with whom to trade information that they themselves cannot collect (like e.g. satellite coverage, ocean reconnaissance, comprehensive traffic monitoring etc. etc.).

For countries like that, helping the US eavesdrop on message traffic makes an uncommon lot of sense and is a small price to pay.

Whilst Snowden's relevations may have a beneficial effect on US *domestic* intelligence oversight, having such data-collection arrangements splattered on the front page are detrimental to the collective national security of the US, Singapore, and Korea.

Turn it any way you want, knowing what people are up to gives you a head start in dealing with them, and the US have been a stabilizing factor in Asia for 60 years or so. Eroding this data-collection capability is the price we pay for openness. I'm not certain if the price is too steep, all I'm saying is that it's a very real price we pay. Even if not everybody realises it or wants to hear about it.

News is (mostly) about what actually happened.

Let's not confuse the two

You might have heard about the difference between software that's "done" and software that's "work-in-progress" (or "half-baked" to use a less charitable term).

As a compiler *user* (as opposed to a compiler hobbyist) I'm not in the least interested in any work-in-progress in-the-repository stuff because I don't want to waste my time stumbling into all the bugs. So until and unless the GCC is officially released as 4.9, it doesn't exist for me.

I'm perfectly aware that GCC isn't a commercial product, which is all the more reason to stay away from "cutting edge" stuff. I'm happy to let 'em work on that and I'll take a look at it after it's done (and others have verified that this particular cutting edge stuff actually cuts the mustard, so to speak).

Good of you to note that GCC doesn't do press-releases. Only the kind of article that Phoronix published looks for all the world like a press-release to me. Phoronix however is Phoronix ... geek territory with people avidly lapping up the latest new year's resolutions on part of tool makers. It's a specialist audience.

Only ... echoing such articles on Slashdot suggests that it has some news value to a more general audience. Unfortunately that's not the case with half-baked stuff like this it's-in-the-repositories code. If it were done, it wouldn't be "in-the-repository", ok? It would have been *released*.

I'm not particularly interested in what people (GCC in this case) say they'll (probably) include in the next release.

Why not wait until they've actually released the new version and we have something to test? Or better yet, someone has done the tests for us and is writing about the results.

Can anybody explain to multi-billionaires Hung Ho, Baksheesh Kapor, and Rubel Gazpromovitch why they should file their claims in Washington rather than with their local government?

What you're talking about is the distribution of the sample means of r1, r2, r3 respectively. Those are asymptotically normally distributed, but that's not what we're talking about here.

What we were talking about is whether: r1, r2, and r3 can all be normally distributed. The reason being that people investigating the size, weight, and surface area of berries may *assume* (appealing to the Central Limit Theorem) that the quantity they're investigating can be modeled adequately through a normal distribution, and proceed to apply statistical tests based on dealing with normal distributions. For example by comparing the effect of fertilizer on berry size and weight. And it's clear that the distributions of r1, r2, and r3 cannot all be distributed normally.

So statistical tests based on the assumption that they are normally distributed will operate outside their guaranteed area of applicability, which may or may not cause them to be in error.

So it gives you a very valid excuse to assume that the value distribution of some quantity occurring in nature will follow a Normal distribution when you know nothing else about it.

But there's the crux: it remains an assumption; a hypothesis, and fortunately it's usually a *testable* hypothesis. It's the responsibility of a researcher to check if it holds, and to see how problematic it is when it doesn't.

If something has a normal distribution, its square or its square root (or another power) doesn't have a Normal distribution. Take for example the diameter, surface area, and volume of berries. The diameter (goes with the radius, r), the surface area (goes with r^2), and the volume of berries (goes with r^3). They cannot all be Normally distributed at the same time, so assuming any of them is starts you out on shaky foundation.