the topic adequacy police has spoken

we have to move on now

delete your comments and find a new topic

if the self-appoint judge disapproves again, you need to abandon that thread too

i'm sorry folks, but the topic adequacy police is in charge here, we all know that

honest question:

why don't they just go after siberia?

130 million russians (and shrinking, population wise and economically) versus 1.3 billion chinese (and growing, population wise and economically) sounds like good odds

why piss so much over tiny reefs off the philippines when one good thrust can increase you country's size by a third or more, with fertile resources

siberia is even closer to beijing than it is is to moscow

the chinese claim islands off the philippines because some asshole put it on a map once

certainly they can find some ancient map of siberia in their archives, since that's apparently all the justification the chinese need to claim land

well said

false complacency is as dangerous as false alarmism

propaganda is never made up. it's always truth

or rather, half-truth

completely true statements, with context and certain facts omitted, so as to suggest something else entirely

there is never a need to lie. just carefully omit certain facts

well that sounds nice except that history teaches us that warmongers often come out on top in civil wars and continue the carnage abroad after consolidating power

...at least in this day and age. The trick is to remember that any information that is recorded to any form of media, can be stolen, copied, or given away. If you want to maintain something in privacy, it can't leave your head. You can't write it down, or draw, or paint the idea. You can't make a tape of it or a video of it. You can't say it to your lover or spouse.

Of course that makes it incredibly difficult to act on what you maintain in privacy, but that is more of a problem of getting others to work with you in suport of that idea.

There is a presumption of privacy codified in law, however that presumption does not seem to be all that relavent to our current state of govornment or business, so you are pretty much stuck with what you can control. At the moment that's pretty much restricted to what's in your head.

No, I'm not much happy with that either.

The wage gap is a symptom, not the problem. The problem is self entitled democracies, and the fiat money banks created to accommodate populist demands. It'd be like trying to cover up herion convulsions, with seizure medication. It reminds me of the old south. When the plantation masters beat the fuck out of their slaves, they wanted to micro-regulate the treatment of slaves, instead of getting rid of slavery. In retrospect, the people advocated those regulations, were just prolonging the problem, and head so far up their fucking ass, they were beyond stupid.

Today, our fiat/populist systems create all these credit bubbles, housing bubbles, stock bubbles, excessive government debt, high prices, inflated executive pay. And these retards want to go around regulating everything, instead of attacking the problem at the source. Fuck them, just fuck them. Irrelevant worthless idiots who will accomplish nothing anyhow.

Yeah, great. So the idiots who want free movies will get DPI implemented across the board, thus dramatically lowering the bar for all other kinds of censorship in future. This whole thing reminds me of the drug war. These tele-addicts simply don't have any lines they won't cross in order to get their fix, and attempts to stop them thus spiral downards into ever harsher and more aggressive monitoring and control.

BITTORRENT USERS - JUST BUY THE DAMN MOVIES ALREADY.

As I read the comments, it looks like people are missing a bet on what the practice that the cariers are doing can provide.

People are noting that techincally competent people can easily bypass the restrictions, and others are noting that the vast majority of the public is not sufficiently technically competent to work around it.

I'm reminded a bit of the drug dealer situation in most places. It's trivially easy for most people to find a supplier for nearly any drug that someone has an interest in getting. Most people don't go looking for them for whatever reason, but it's not because they don't know where to go, or at least if they thought about it a bit they could figure it out. The same is likely to be true of media content.

So, user George doesn't know how to get around these filters, but it's likely that one of George's friends does, or one of George's friends knows someone who can. If this ever became a significant issue, I suspect that people would set up secure chat servers (or even a https based site) where they let their neighbors know they can request whatever movie they are interested in, and through a bot on the server they get back a link to the file already downloaded, or to the file being downloaded, and they can start watching. The link may be to a torrent proxy that goes and gets the bits of the files from other people offering the same sort of a service, and none of the people providing this service actually have copies of the files maintained on their systems either. (Yes, that somewhat defeats the purpose of a torrent, but the idea is to provide a service to end users, not necessarily be a good torrent netizen.) To reduce the likelyhood that the person providing the service is adversly affected, he or she may require that the 'customer' run a torrent proxy on their system that the load of torrent traffic gets distributed across. Better operators will do something like build their software package to prevent spam bots from running on the customer's computers. That may even be all that the customer is asking for from the service provider, and the torrent operation may be going on completely transparently to them.

I know, that seems complex. But from an end user perspective for the movies, it looks like I log into a secure web server, identify the movie I want to watch, and get a link to that movie. I click on that link, and I start watching the movie. Perhaps George texts or IMs a movie title to Bill, who texts back a URL that George then enters in their web browser, or even follows right on their phone or pc.

In time a network of providers of the service will exist, or several networks. It might be done through something like IRC, and the various providers will check to see who's closest to the end user and get a link close to them.

A lot of banks outside the EU already are pretty secure, using hardware second factors to authorize logins and wire transfers to unknown/new destinations.

If you see bank details being sold that only have a username/password, it's probably an American bank. The 2-factor auth system used outside the USA is based on EMV (it's a variant called CAP). In the US they never deployed EMV aka chip and PIN so the banks don't have any pre-existing secure hardware issued to end users they can auth themselves with.

I'm going to echo that you need to know what the exam criteria are. There are exams that have the limitation that the only capabilities that your calculator is allowed to have are plus, minus, multiply and divide, which would eliminate all of the scientific capabilities listed through this thread. Often those exams don't really need a calculator at all, except to allow the person taking the test to feel that they can check the result that they got through other methods.

As for having the ability to use a slide rule, I've found that pretty much everything I need to do that I can use a slide rule for, can be handled just as fast using a basic four function calculator. An exception would be figuring out square roots, which on a four function calculator involves a lot of trial and error, and for a slide rule is essentially a single slide to solve.

Both are breakable, and neither functions very well as a defensive tool in situations where batteries are unavailable.

:%s/there/their/g
ZZ

Hey, considering that your phone is communicating your contact list through your cell phone carrier with Apple, Google or Microsoft (a couple of other possibilities of course, but pretty much all of them happening across your phone carrier data infrastructure) it's likely that your contact's pictures are already being indexed by the NSA.

It's there ass on the line when you call, or they call you.

If the bursts happened 10 billion years ago were common all over at that time, (as was asked by the ggp a/c) then the observations would be dirstributed much more randomly across the sky than observation indicates. Observation suggests that the large number of gama ray bursts that happened 10 billion years ago, appear to have happened across a region of space that is heavily weighted in one direction. A circle with a radius of 10 billion light years has a circumfrence of 2*pi*10 billion light years, or a bit over 68 billion light years. In that circumfrence, a region of 4 billion light years spans (4/68 * 360 = 360/17 = ~ 21.17) or just over 21 degrees of arc. This is a little more than the arc of the sky that the sky moves in a period of an hour.

That is not to say that we are not observing gamma ray bursts in other directions at an approximate distance of 10 billion light years, just that there appears to be an unusually large number from within this region of space at that time.

You have asked a separate question, which is 'if aliens did the same measurement far away, would they see a sphere-like structure centered around us or them?' While I think it's a reasonable question, it does have an ambiguity, and based on my understanding of Einstein's general relativity law may not be such a reasonable question. The ambituity is 'far away', what is 'far away'? Accross the solar system, galaxy, or the visible limit of the universe?

However a thought experiment based on the question seems to me to be reasonable. Let's assume that some level of simultaniousness can exist. (which has problems I won't get into.) Let's presume that both the cluster of events we're seeing, and we, have a sphere 10 billion years in diamater centered on each of us. There should be a 'ring' where those two spheres intersect, that is 10 billion years from each of us. Take a point on that ring, and lets assume your aliens are there. That point would appear to us to be some 60 degrees across the sky from this cluster of events some 10 billion years ago. What would they see across the sky at a distance of some 10 billion light years? Well, we know they won't be seeing us for at least another 9.5+billion years. Additionally what we are seeing as an arc of approx 4 billion light years across is unlikely to be a perfect match for what they see at 10 billion light years, however we'll allow for the fact that they should see some variation of what we see. That said, a sphere some 4 billion light years across from the point in common 10 billion light years away from each of us, would still span an arc of approx 21 degrees for them, as it does for us. Based on the information I'm mentally working with, they are likely to see a cluster of gamma ray bursts from within this region as well. They are likely seeing a different appearance of the structure than we do, but they would be seeing it from a different angle anyway. They are unlikely to be able to perceive the events as a sphere around either of us, just as we do not perceive of this structure as a sphere around us, or anyone else at this time.

Does that help? (And if someone with a better understanding of cosmology than I have want's to pipe in with a correction, I'm OK with that.)