Man, you think moderation is a mess now.....

Maybe it was the Radio Shack closest to the NSA labs.

The government in Beijing has been trying to convert the Cantonese-speaking part of the country (which includes Hong Kong) to Mandarin since Mao's day, without much success. Due to development, internal migration, improved transportation and communications, and pressure from the central government, Mandarin is finally displacing Cantonese in some areas. Shenzhen, the high-tech region near Hong Kong, was mostly using Cantonese two decades ago, but is now mostly Mandarin.

Sonic.net does not have data transfer caps. You buy a bandwidth range, and you can use it all 24/7 if you want. Here's what Sonic's CEO says: "My opinion is that caps make little technical sense, and I believe that the fundamental reason for capping is to prevent disruption of the television entertainment business model that feeds the TV screens in most households."

Sonic is one of the few remaining independent US ISPs. They have to lease local circuits from AT&T, but they buy their own upstream bandwidth. In a few areas they have their own fiber to the home, and there they offer gigabit connections for $70 a month.

Mod parent up.

Look at the video around 1:54, where Musk is saying "go in there and do what you need to do". But all the video actually shows is someone spinning the model around and using a visual cutting plane to display cross sections. At no point in that video is new geometry created. What I was expecting to see was a breakthrough in how to do engineering design in 3D. It's not there.

Back in the late 1980s, Autodesk built a virtual reality system as an experiment in CAD. They got about as far as Musk, although at lower resolution - you could look at models and manipulate them with a gloves-and-goggles interface, but trying to draw surfaces in free space was really hard. Some people can do it. They can also do clay models freehand. Today, there's Autodesk Mudbox, a 3D sculpting tool which is used by pros who can visualize clearly and in detail in 3D. Watch this video to see one at work. That's impressive work. Now see something similar done with 3D input devices. It's like trying to sculpt while wearing oven mittens, and the results are awful.

Somebody will eventually make this work, but the computer, not the human, will be doing most of the design.

And that uninstaller will remove the offending program, and silently patch your OS to make sure the back door stays wide open. Cos "national security" is more important than your right to privacy, ya know?

I say we nuke it from orbit.

It's the only way to be sure.

Jesus fucking christ. Your country's economy is in the toilet, your president has broken laws both at home and abroad, your government gets its diplomats killed and then shrugs it off, there are drones everywhere spying on you, all your telephone and internet communications are being listened to, your are on the verge of risking a real war with Russia over Syria, AND THIS IS THE FUCKING SHIT YOU GET MAD ABOUT? American are hopeless. Enjoy your Orwellian future.

There are a surprisingly large number of public key generators with weak random number generators:

• "Debian OpenSSL Package Random Number Generator Weakness"
• "Flaw Found in an Online Encryption Method"
• "NetBSD Intel Hardware Random Number Generator (RNG) Failure Encryption Weakness "
• "PasswordSafe 3.0 weak random number generator allows key recovery attack"

And those are the ones we know about.

For open source systems, the person or persons who inserted the weak code should be identified and kicked off the project. It may just be incompetence, but that's a good reason to keep them out of security-critical areas.

Weak keys don't just let the NSA in. They let the People's Liberation Army of China in, too.

The ACLU, however, has a someone different take on the 2cd Amendment (surprise). Their official position is that the ACLU supports state militias rather than an individual gun right.

That said, the NRA's position here seems something of a reach. There theory sees to be that if the US government can spy on and collect all communications, then they have de facto created a $whatever watch database. The $whatever in this case being guns. This could be expanded to $whatever = stamps, radios, dildos and Hello Kitty paraphernalia.

This gives the government the power of regulating pretty much anything ever mentioned in electronic communications. Personally, I'm not so worried. They have enough trouble rounding up pressure cooker aficionados, much less Hello Kitty perverts.

But sometimes they really are after you.

No, Bitcoin is a slimeball magnet. Most "Bitcoin exchanges" turned out to be ripoff operations. Half of them have gone bust, keeping some or all customer assets. Mt. Gox is having real trouble paying out customer balances; they have at least $4 million in customer funds and stopped paying out US dollars back in June. No "Bitcoin exchange" is registered as a brokerage in any jurisdiction. None publish audited financial statements.

And that's the more legitimate end of the Bitcoin world. It goes downhill from there; the "online wallet" businesses that stole their customers' assets, the various Bitcoin Ponzi schemes, the "mining hardware" vendors with prepaid preorders who never deliver, and the drug dealers on Silk Road.

The lesson of Bitcoin is that anonymous, irrevocable, remote funds transfer is the scammer's dream.

Actually, no. The serious discussions on language standardization still take place on Usenet. The spammers are all gone. If you want to influence the design of C or C++ or Python or Go, that's the place where it's discussed. The major players are on there.

Whatever works for you. My wife and I have separate accounts with the ability of for each of us to look up / transfer funds / whatever to the other account. That way we can keep track of balances individually but keep everything out in the open. We like it that way. YMMV. I cannot even begin to imagine having 15 credit cards ....

It's also turned out to be useful when the banks temporarily screw up one account by locking it for whatever confused reason their computers dream up. Use the other account. We keep the savings account completely separate so that if someone managed to hack into our checking accounts, they could only get to what limited amounts of money we keep there.

I know people that keep accounts in four different banks. They're worried about a bank run and think this way they'll be able to get to some of their money. Personally, if things are that bad, I'm just going to pull the boat out of the harbor and wait for the smoke to clear.

Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When computers first attempt to perceive.