Why don't we just incorporate them?

Then they'll legally be people, and they can get their own driver's licenses!

It's a fun gedanken experiment, but I'm not sure the Lisa Pathfinder will be successful; the quadrupole formula requires that the plane of polarization be distinct, and that the orbit be an ellipse. The Lisa experiment has some fundamental assumptions about a collision being the wave source, rather than an orbital source.

It'd totally be a bummer to spend all that money and not see anything because the detector happens to be in a 2D plane coinciding with a detectable event, and the lack of additional planes made it invisible.

Personally, I have to believe that we have a fundamental misunderstanding of something, because we otherwise should have seen them in one of our existing detectors, if they were there to be seen. I don't think the longer baseline Lisa gives us is going to help detect something that we are fundamentally getting wrong somehow.

I used to joke with some of my friends that there's be two great reasons Michelson-Morely might not have shown anything:

(1) The reference frame is sufficiently pinned by the gravity well of the Earth that we don't see any drift through the "luminiferous aether" because we are frame-dragging at a higher degree than the equipment is capable of distinguishing.

(2) The Earth *really is the center of the Universe*, so also: no drift relative to the universe's inertial frame.

It may be that we won't see gravity waves (if any exist) until we get a device pretty far out into interstellar space.

It works for bombs and tanks, but not for computer networks and communications. It might have even worked in the time of telegraphs and snail mail letters. But for encryption, it doesn't work. A cipher is either weak, or strong. You can compromise a foreign postal system without affecting the security of your own, but you can't secretly build a backdoor into an encryption algorithm that works only for you.

Now you're trying to reverse the chain of causality just to make a cute finishing sentence. :-)

It'll be interesting to see how this works out. I'm not certain that a planar detector will work out like they hope.

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is an interesting, thoughtful story.

Hollywood doesn't do interesting and thoughtful.

QED

I'd be much more confident if this was being done in England or Scandinavia (cf Real Humans).

...laura

I currently work for a small (50 employees) engineering company. One person in my present team's weekly standup is in Montreal, Canada. Three are in New York, USA. Three are in London, England. The rest are in Glasgow, Scotland. In my last job, with a major international bank, one standup member was in Chennai, India; three in Geneva, Switzerland. One in London, England. And the rest in Glasgow. In the real world 'everyone in one room' just isn't going to happen.

Everyone knows about the evil bit. That's what prompted me to write the bracket remark. But it's not quite the same as a "we're from the NSA, nothing to see here" flag.

What's with the clickbait headlines? By itself, the headline is total BS. The actual statement made, however, is spot on. The hole in your security doesn't care who exploits it. There's no "good guy" flag in IP headers (though I'm sure some April 1st RFC will soon introduce it).

What worries me most is that we could win this fight, if it weren't for our own governments deciding to betray us. There are vastly more people interested in secure communication and other people not being able to spy on or subvert our computers and mobile devices than there are people interested in compromised communications and systems (basically only criminals and some deluded, criminal-if-the-laws-were-right elements of governments).

There is just one problem to Bruce's argument: The largest and most powerful spy agency in the world disagrees with his fundamental assumption. We often forget that the NSA has two missions, and they are exactly the two things that Bruce argues cannot co-exist: To secure the computing infrastructure of the US against foreign espionage, and to provide espionage on foreign communication.
The NSA believes, and/or is tasked with exactly these two things that Bruce says (and I agree) are mutually exclusive. No surprise they've gone rogue, their very mission statement is a recipe for a mental breakdown through cognitive dissonance.

I imagine, using standard journalists' practice, the Guardian phoned up the NSA and said 'we've found this in your documents. Would you like to comment?' That's what professional journalists do.

Doesn't it depend a lot on what you refactor, when and how?

I have 3 year old code that I would like to refactor because I've since switched framework (from CodeIgniter to Symfony 2) and it would bring it in line with all my other projects, allowing me more easy code-reuse and not maintaining two frameworks both on servers and in my mind. But it's largely a convenience factor and I would agree that it will probably not improve code quality very much.

But I also have 12+ year old code written in plain PHP with my own simple database abstraction layer. I'm quite certain that refactoring that would do a world of good.

Alternately... your site could be more relevant, then it would have a higher ranking.

Apparently, you are unaware that German police are already tapping Skype calls...

http://www.pcworld.com/article...

September 8, 2011, the day they were acquired by Google?

Uh... Yahoo uses Bing as their search engine provider. So you can "change your habits for Google with Bing or Bing".

Sure they do. They can hire an SEO company to link-farm them, and then Google will shut their ass down, like they did to JC Penney.

http://fortune.com/2011/02/14/...

It's absolutely, totally, a negative control knob, but if some dumbass wants to turn that knob, they surely can. And the result is totally and completely predictable.