They do it because they want to force a plea deal.

The only reason they include it is for the so-called trial penalty. It is realistic enough that a judge won't throw it out, but it is so extreme that if the guy chooses to attempt a trial the risk is greater. It will be so extreme that he won't want that risk, so he'll choose the plea bargain instead of rolling the dice at a trial.

This is the biggest current flaw in the US legal system. Prosecutors have no stake in the game, no disincentive from adding trumped-up and unrealistic charges. It is something that other nations managed to get right with prosecutors needing to pay for accusations that don't result in convictions. If prosecutors needed to pay some significant penalty money to compensate the accused for every charge that is dismissed, the problem would quickly dry up.

You got it backwards.

The UK entered the mass-surveillance business back before WW1. Pax Brittania meant they could monitor the world with impunity, just like the US does now. Mass surveillance of British citizens entered the public knowledge around WW1, so the government made the GCCS (Government Code and Cypher School) public after the war. It was later named the GCHQ, which is the functional equivalent to the NSA in the United States. Thanks to the CCTV cameras every five meters it is still the most surveilled nation --- the US is not alone in monitoring every phone call.

US mass-surveillance came a bit later, but WW2 saw the industry boom. It entered public knowledge after WW2, which is about the time the NSA was formed. The "Five Eyes" program during World War 2 expanded government surveillance to the global scale. The five nations (UK, US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) are still working together to ensure that when one country can't do the spying, another country will gladly step in and spy for them.

The US joined the UK. Even though the US does an incredible amount of spying around the globe, the UK has been and continues to be the "leader" in homeland surveillance.

You don't see it because the *nix whois app does the both steps for you.

It requires two queries. The first query is to find the registrar that is associated with the name, the second query is to get the data from that registrar.

The current system actually has several problems.

If you have your own domain name, you know how every year you get about 50 emails and postal mailings telling you it is time to renew; they send something that looks like a bill for services but is actually an overpriced DNS transfer agreement. That is one of the problems the proposal is designed to reduce. Sadly it cannot be eliminated, but that abuse of the system will be harder and more expensive to scammers.

The current system is also not fine in that it has too limited of information when you actually do need to contact an organization. Most people don't see it, but when a NOC needs to contact a major domain owner, and needs to do it *NOW*, there is no immediately useful record in the whois data. So the NOC will usually just blackhole the domain until they can eventually reach someone's phone or through email.

For your other concerns, what if they do? Think about each.

Let's assume someone filters the entries from the centralized database. Nothing in the proposal says "kill the existing WHOIS". In fact they should probably keep them running for many years to come because the existing tools will not all change overnight. If a registrar (or a nation) feels threatened, they can keep the service up indefinately (or in the case of governments, order the registrar to keep it running).

Next, lets assume the central authority refuses to accept new entries. What does that mean? The DNS entries would still exist because it is a service contract between the individual and the registrar. If the centralized source rejects them then they're really going to piss people off. NOT collecting information is the opposite of what would happen.

What if they required fees? The proposal actually does recommend fees for certain data, so I suggest you go actually read the proposal. Think about it carefully. If they require fees for information needed by lay people and most small businesses then the backlash would be tremendous. Overnight you would see several competitors. Also because the existing WHOIS services do not need to be removed they such an action by a central source would cause them to fail. But they do recommend charging fees for some things like bulk searches frequently done by scammers and domain squatters. They also recommend charging fees some of the new cross-TLD functionality, which again would otherwise be more abused by scammers and squatters.

I recommend you go read the actual proposal. Don't read it with an eye for OMGWTF SPIES!. Read it with from the perspective of a NOC operations engineer.

From TFA and the report, those fields are recommended to remain public and anonymous. The biggest difference is that they recommend having a single step process instead of the current two-step process of first looking up the registrar and then using that registrar's WHOIS system.

Network abuse mitigation is specifically listed as a use case that should not require an account.

They are not talking about blocking all access to the data.

They propose keeping a good portion of the existing data available through anonymous public requests, exactly the way current WHOIS system works today. The big difference is that there will be a single source; you won't need to do the two-step process currently in place.

They are also proposing adding additional contact fields that have been frequently requested for WHOIS data.

They are also proposing limiting access to some data, in particular limiting the data traditionally used to scam people with fake DNS renewals. In particular it does not talk about refusing access, simply limiting the requests to authenticated users to prevent thinks like bulk-searches that scammers frequently use. The report recommends only limited fields require authenticated access, not those used commonly by individuals or by website administrators for abuse mitigation.

Finally, they are proposing adding new advanced search capabilities that are useful for ISPs (and also private and government surveillance) that are not currently available, but will be very useful for domain abusers spanning many TLDs.

They are likely habitable in the same way both Mars and Venus are habitable.

We most likely would need to provide our own self-enclosed biosphere, but that is not completely unreasonable.

The key thing is temperature. Mercury is 400'C during the day. Uranus is -150'C during the day. In either case the travelers will need to continuously heat or cool their biosphere using a lot of energy. Trying to keep the biosphere warm during interstellar travel will be an issue since interstellar space is around -260C according to Wikipedia, but the journey would likely be short relative to a permanent settlement on a nicely warmed planet. You've got to keep the biosphere warm or have everything in some sort of cryogenic state, but that is only during transit.

By the time we have the ability for interstellar human travel 22 light years away, constructing a self-contained bubble of Earth-life on the planet will be a small thing.

In that respect, by once we have the ability to transport human life through interstellar distances the planets seem very habitable.

Ummm...nope.

Requested date: 04-August-2012
Released date: 29-May-2013
Posted date: 24-June-2013

Requested date: 02-August-2012
Released date: 11-June-2013
Posted date: 24-June-2013

Except I wasn't talking about gas emissions from volcanoes.

I was talking about the basic frequency of volcanic and geologic activity. Let's just say "Earthquakes" so we can stay clear of preconceptions.

Earthquake frequency is steadily rising, and this, among the other non-emission related items indicated, are tightly linked to the climate change events we are experiencing today.

People are clinging to the belief that climate change MUST be our fault, and therefore is also within our power to fix.

It isn't.

As for reading about sun spots. . , I suggest you do some.

Poland agreed to the advanced missile defense systems, including advanced radar stations. They get a pass.

Kenya is safe as long as our coffee prices remain low. Starbucks just announced a price increase, so they better watch their asses.

Uh,no. Not even close.

Rare Earth elements aren't "rare", in that there isn't a lot of them. They just don't lump together in easily mineable concentrations. The United States, Russia and Australia (at least) have mega-craploads of rare-earth elements. It is just cheaper to source them from China.

Educate thyself and read paragraph two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_element

If you look at the homepage it's obvious that same block of script was placed at the bottom right corner but was removed, they just forgot to remove it from the career center page =)

Sounds like your admins are incompetent, my users have none of those problems (ok app load times are a bit long at 35-50 seconds average for the first app on a silo). The advantage is that the apps just work and that they can be used from anywhere, we recently had a power outage at our HQ campus, instead of sitting around doing nothing everyone was able to go home and work from there.

IBM doesn't care about hardware sales, they've sold the desktop business to Lonovo and were recently shopping the server unit as well. IBM is and always has been a services company, they used hardware as a way to do it from the beginning but now most of the engagements come from software. These days hardware is just a way to sell software which sells services.

I agree. I had this argument with my grandfather once, who was complaining how everyone was fat today. I told him it was HIS fault. His entire generation, because of the combination of Great Depression and Dust Bowl, was taught to waste nothing in the way of food.

For the entire lives my parents were told, 3 times a day "clean your plate". I was told that constantly as well.

Combine it with a grandmother for whom an overflowing table was not only a sign of pride but of success and wealth, and we can easily see how we got to size XXL.

I've been in a couple of restaurants where the portions were big enough to feed a small village.

Then the whole CO2/global warming issue should be solved.