But first off, don't be stupid. Sanitize/Sterilize ALL of your data PRIOR to starting your trip.

They cannot find what you are not carrying.

And it doesn't take more then two Buckyballs to kill you. The whole problem with Buckyballs is that their danger isn't obvious. They look like a toy, play like a toy, are packaged like toy and when swallowed might kill you.

Lego blocks don't kill you when you eat them.

I personally find the concept kind of odd.

I'm going to guess that you've never been in the military.

Think about a conscript. His country is at war because of his politicians. His personal beliefs don't matter. He either fights or he, at best, is in jail. Remember the kids who went to Canada instead of being drafted to fight in Vietnam?

So the least that the professional soldiers and responsible politicians can do is to make basic rules so that that kid can get back to his pre-war life with as much of his body still intact as possible.

Chemical weapons are a problem because they usually do not kill. It takes a LOT of chemicals and the right environment to kill. But they do tear up lungs and eyes and nervous systems. So the casualties may be able to move themselves but they cannot pick up their old lives again.

Now imagine the impact that has on a country AFTER the war. Thousands and thousands of disabled citizens that have trouble working.

What Reuters revealed is that their involvement doesn't come out in open court, because the police make up some alternative explanation of how they got the evidence. So they wouldn't have to reveal anything.

Also, the hack was somewhat sophisticated. If not the NSA then who?

Good question - what good is Tor?

Well, one interesting thing we learned lately is that some element of what can only be US law enforcement felt the need to exploit a Firefox bug in order to deanonymize some Tor users. Given that we know (thanks to Reuters) that the NSA works with other LE agencies, it therefore stands to reason that they are at this time NOT capable of entirely deanonymizing Tor via network traffic analysis, either because they don't have a global view of traffic, or their tools aren't capable of it, or the problem is a lot harder than it sounds (it's all encrypted so you have to rely on correlation attacks).

So for now at least it's the best that is available.

Ah yes. They claim he had the password on him, which directly contradicts statements by Greenwald that Miranda didn't have any passwords. They also claim that out of tens of thousands of documents they so far recovered less than 100, which implies to me that there may have been many passwords and they don't know the important ones. Also, these people have a track record of lying, constantly, whereas the journalists don't. So we'll see. Regardless, the assumption that intelligence agencies have better security than the Guardian seems unwarranted. The files were down successfully without the owners noticing, and the journalists have been reading them on clean machines that were never connected to the internet. Sounds to me like they have better procedures than the spies do.

Damn! You beat me to it. Anyway, from TFA:

Strands, as Nick Hawes of the University of Birmingham said, will "develop novel approaches to extract spatio-temporal structure from sensor data gathered during months of autonomous operation," to develop intelligence that can then "exploit [those] structures to yield adaptive behavior in highly demanding, real-world security and care scenarios."

The key problem with that is that the subjects the robot is studying will know that they are being studied and will be able to alter their behaviour to change what the robot "learns".

Commercial satellites are not space exploration any more than a commercial flight from London to Paris is exploration.

No, *for profit* space exploration won't happen (at least any time soon). You can still have private not-for-profit things. Private does not necessarily imply profit motive. If Musk can get enough of his ultra-rich buddies excited enough to fund (for example) a Mars exploration mission, then it could be done privately. Of course this is a big "if" and the probability of it happening is somewhere close to zero.

Elon Musk *does* have a degree in physics.

He's right, you won't have businesses trying to establish a colony on Mars.

However, that doesn't necessarily mean there is a probability of zero that Elon Musk can't talk a bunch of his very rich buddies to helping bankroll a mission to Mars, in other words, private but not commercial. (The probability is probably close to zero, but it is non-zero). In reality you'd probably find that NASA also provides something (and probably quite a lot of something) towards a Mars mission that had its origins outside of government.

You can have private travel to somewhere without it being commercial.

The vast majority of helicopter crashes happen at 30 mph or less. Takeoff and landing accidents (from hover), loss of tailrotor effectiveness, settling with power, botched autorotations...these all tend to happen with the helicopter travelling at 30 mph or less.

Pity you don't seem to know jack shit about helicopters before unloading on a useful test.

Yep. You got it.

A few years ago I developed a state of the art obfuscation system for JavaScript. It goes far beyond what you might normally see (renaming variables, etc) and is used for anti-spam purposes. I expected the obfuscation to get cracked by spammers eventually as anyone who had succeeded could have directly profited off that success, but in fact although there were many attempts over the years none were successful. When done well, software obfuscation is a powerful tool. It has a bad rap because so many people do it badly - there is precious little information out there about how to build really good obfuscations, so you get a lot of wheel reinvention.

Nuclear winter -> global warming? A bit of a non-sequitur, don't you think?

I think everyone, even conservatives, can agree that nuclear war and its consequences would be really bad. You don't need to be a bleeding heart liberal to dislike the idea of nuclear war.