The big question is, how the HELL is it possible to lose an entire commercial aircraft in 2014? I've seen some articles to the effect that it's difficult to cover the entire earth with enough radars to track planes over the ocean. OK, sure, but that's the obsolete ACARS system. That's why we have satellite communications. For $150 you can buy a portable GPS beacon from Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Spot-Sat... and then there's a subscription fee which is maybe $100/year. Basically, for $250 your kayak trip sends GPS updates every 5 minutes so it can't be lost at sea, it just seems bizarre that a commercial aircraft carrying 200 people wouldn't have even that minimal sort of tracking ability. And there are companies building similar technology for aircraft- basically, streaming the black-box data in real time over satellite networks. It would be expensive to implement, but how many millions of dollars have been spent on ships and helicopters for the rescue effort?

There a topic that isn't about America? Well can't have that! Spin it to be about America! Redirect all topics to be on America, particularly whining about America!

Seriously, this American-centric bitching is really annoying. People need to knock it off. This is about Russia. That things are happening in America doesn't mean things aren't happening elsewhere. It also doesn't mean those things aren't of interest to the wider world. What is happening in Russia right now is of quite a bit of interest not just to Russians, but to Ukrainians, and to the whole of Europe. Also some people from the US might like to know too because hey, it is nice to be informed about the wider world.

So quit. Quit trying to make every thread about the US. There are lots and lots of those on Slashdot. When something comes up on a foreign country, let it be on that topic. The topic at hand is Russian media/internet censorship not NSA spying. That one is a little further down the front page.

A presidential car would never, ever under normal circumstances be allowed to run close to empty. It must be able to drive the President around all day and still have the range for any emergency that might occur at the worst possible moment and where boarding a helicopter or plane to get out of there is unsafe or unavailable, the nearest safe haven far, far away and getting out to swap cars totally out of the question. Yes, it weighs 20000 pounds and gets 8 MPG but one gallon is about 6 pounds. My guess is that it has a 50-100 gallon gas tank, 300-600 pounds for a 400-800 mile range is still less than half of the Model S's 1200 pound battery pack and I'm sure they always keep the tank over half full. By comparison the Tesla would have to drag around literally tons of batteries. Long, single haul emergency drives is pretty much the worst possible case for an electric.

Even if it was for a "good cause". Let's for a moment even assume that the NSA is an all-holy entity that could never do anything wrong and that we trusted them implicitly, not because our software forces us to but because we genuinely wanted to.

Note the subjunctive.

Even then the security software would be a security hazard. Simply and plainly because there is (at least) one way to access data that is absolutely beyond your control. You cannot even audit the security level of the entity holding the additional key to your data.

If you need to give your non-tech boss a way to understand the severity, that's like having a general key to your office and the safe with all the highly classified and mission critical papers deposited at your local police force. While by itself not a problem (provided you trust your police), they are not required to give you any information concerning the key's storage or whereabouts. You will not be notified how they themselves will keep that key safe, nor do you get any kind of information should that key get stolen. You will not be notified if some potential attacker or burglar, or even a competitor, gets access to that key, legally or illegally.

But last I searched details on this, the actual progress and software availability was close to pathetic...

Obviously, if you think that, then the education system failed you.

Sadly, you are only correct if you are equating "the ability to read (anything)" as literacy. There are states where the functionally illiterate rate is staggering. The figures on the DOE sites are very misleading, since they consider the ability to read "basic prose" to indicate "literacy" - when in reality, the "deeper numbers" indicate "21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can't read.". The numbers are even worse if one expects an adult to read at what's considered an adult level - someplace decently over 50%.

The true situation does indeed impact how well society (in this country) works. And we can see that ignorance, lack of education and lack of literacy driving some lunatic policies.

Seems to depend on a case by case basis.

My math worked out great. Previously I paid 50% of the premium for my company's blue cross PPO group health insurance plan to the tune of $400/mo. It had a $60 copay, $60 drug copay, and $5000 annual deductible.

Now I pay $350/mo for a blue cross Silver PPO with the same doctors I had before. It has a $30 copay, $150 drug copay (the drug copay seems to be where the insurance companies are really jacking up prices, I guess since they can't stop you from signing up if you're already sick) and I think a $4000 annual deductible. Thanks to my employer not being an asshole and giving me the other $400/mo it used to contribute towards my insurance, I'm coming out on top even after the extra $150/mo for my meds.

go home Sean Young, you're drunk

According to the latest market statistics 66% of PCs overall use embedded graphics. Even Steam has a 16% Intel share and probably some AMD APUs that aren't separated out. I don't know about you but anything "serious" I do like work doesn't push the GPU one bit, the only thing that does is gaming. And not everybody is a gamer or their idea of gaming is more like Candy Crush. On that note, I loved The Walking Dead, here's the system requirements:

Windows Operating system: Windows XP / Vista / Windows 7
Processor: 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent
Memory: 3 GB RAM
Video Card: ATI or NVidia card w/ 512 MB RAM
Direct X 9.0c
Audio card required

Oh so that's like any CPU and graphics card made in the last 10 years or so. What about something like Civilization V (okay it's a bit old but there's no Civ6 yet)

Operating System: Windows XP SP3/ Windows Vista SP2/ Windows 7
Processor: Dual Core CPU
Memory: 2GB RAM
Hard Disk Space: 8 GB Free
DVD-ROM Drive: Required for disc-based installation
Video: 256 MB ATI HD2600 XT or better, 256 MB nVidia 7900 GS or better, or Core i3 or better integrated graphics
Sound: DirectX 9.0c-compatible sound card
DirectX: DirectX version 9.0c

Scary requirements yeah? What about World of Warcraft, that's some million gamers:

Windows XP / Windows Vista / Windows® 7 / Windows 8 / Windows 8.1 with the latest service pack
Intel Pentium D or AMD Athlon 64 X2
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 or
ATI Radeon X1600 Pro (256 MB)
2 GB RAM (1 GB Windows XP)

I could go on, but long story short unless you're into the latest and greatest 3D games no it's not really required. Sure I need a discrete graphics card, but I know I'm in the minority. And I just need it to run Skyrim and stuff like that, I don't need the worst SLI/CF setup for twitcher FPS games either.

I think that says more about their politics than their broadband...

1. Start your own cryptocurrency
2. Make the world use it (Implementation: ???)
3. Profit!

Granted, it was much the same with Bitcoin but there everybody was pooling their work and pulling in the same direction, so either Bitcoins would fly or cryptocurrencies would crash and burn. What does 100 copycat currencies run by people who figured the best way to get in early is to start a new currency get you? It reminds me of the guy who in the dotcom boom made a 1000x1000 pixel page of pure ads and sold space at $1/pixel. He made almost a million dollars because it became a "thing" to see, creating money out of thin air. Of course afterwards there were tons of DIY kits and whatever to set up your own page, naturally they all bombed. Who'd really watch a copycat page with nothing but ads? These "altcoins" are the same kind of halo hype, my guess is most if not all of these will be worth $0 in five years.

Exactly. I very much doubt he has 20TB of data that changes very often, plug in a 4TB external drive, fill it to the brim, take note of what you've backed up. This is how I used to do it with CD-R/DVD-Rs back in the day, I had one "incoming" directory and one "archived" directory. When I had enough to burn a full disc I'd burn it and move it. Keep a text file saying what's on the different discs. It's very very low tech but it's simple and it works. Unless he's for some reason keeping a 20TB database at home with random changes everywhere.

While it eventually only had one unreadable file on one unreadable disc, what I found was that with old discs the drive would spin up and down and finally read it very, very slowly like 30-60 minutes to read a single CD/DVD. So in practice what should have been a one night's job turned into a couple weeks. Never again, now I'm backing up to HDDs and if it spins up at least it'll probably finish in reasonable time. Oh, and you don't have to swap TB drives that often...