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.

From what I understand, the "island of stability" in terms of super-heavy elements is a relative term - it just means the decay of elements in the island of stability is measured in maybe hundreds of milliseconds instead of a few microseconds.

Well that's the problem!

In the past, a PC gamer would replace their main rig every year to 18 months, and this would drive quite a bit of sales. In fact, ordinary PC users would change their computer every 2 to 3 years because the new ones were much better, and new software was more capable (and a lot more bloated) and wouldn't run well on a 2 year old machine. This started changing in the early 2000s for non-gaming PCs (my non-gaming development box I built in 2002 lasted 7 years - basically until components started to fail). For gamers this started changing towards 2010 - now there's little advantage in changing your gaming rig more than once every 3 or 4 years.

The result - while PC usage is probably still growing a little, PC *buying* is declining rapidly because a machine from 2010 is still good enough even for gamers, and a machine from 2005 is good enough for typical email/browse the web stuff. My main gaming rig now is a decent spec *laptop* with nvidia graphics and an i7, and not a hideously overweight one either like gaming laptops of 5 or 6 years ago. Since hardly anyone buys Windows retail, falling PC sales means falling Windows sales. A Windows license for a normal PC is lasting 6 years or more now as people only replace when components actually fail beyond economic repair, and most every day users are no more likely to buy a Windows upgrade any more than they will switch to Linux. A Windows license on a gaming PC is lasting at least 3 years now, possibly more - when in the past, Microsoft could rely on gamers buying a new Windows license every year to 18 months and non-gamers every 2 to 3 years.

What the fuck. No. Words mean things, and "release to manufacturing" means that the software is ready for Releasing To Manufacturing. It doesn't mean "beta 15", or "we think this might be ready", or "release candidate". It means that it's ready to ship and that this is what will be going out the door on launch day.

Google's infinite betas are a bit of mild industry humor, but "beta" doesn't have an inherent definition. You can stretch it to justify almost anything. But "RTM", "release candidate", and others have very specific, unambiguous meanings. If it's not finished, it's not RTM no matter who the hell says it is.

Even if they get a commercially viable product on the road in 2020, it'll be at least a generation of these things being on the roads before people become comfortable enough with the technology to trust their lives to it en mass.

Once people figure out that you can have sex in the car on the way to work only the lonely will still be driving.