Circulation of papers in Japan has always been ridiculously higher in Japan than in the US. Some of those papers have daily circulations of eight figures---no American paper has ever achieved circulation figures like that, past or present. The local paper that I get (the Shizuoka Shinbun) has a daily circulation of over 700,000 (vs 900,000 for the New York Times), and it's not even read nationally like the Yomiuri, Mainichi, Asahi, Nikkei, etc.
Just an observation: the biggest newspaper in Finland, Helsingin Sanomat, has daily circulation of little over 400,000 copies - and the population of Finland is just over 5 million people. I suspect there aren't many newspapers with higher circulation/population ratios. (Yeah, other papers have high circulation figures here, too, always have.)
And they also have both free and paid content - but no problems against linking to the latter, rather the opposite: they hope links will bring more subscribers.
No one bought a PS3 specifically for the otheros feature. It was a pointless feature which had nothing to do with its basic operation or the reason it was purchased.
I beg to differ. I have installed Linux on 20 PS3s that were purchased for the very purpose of running Linux, and they've never been used for anything else after purchase. (The free games that came with them were given away.)
Why not just set the SSH config to AllowRootLogin = no?
Or, if you need root ssh for things like backup, allow just key authentication, preferably for all users but at least for root:
Match user=root
PasswordAuthentication=no
Also, ssh access for root (at least) should be restricted to known IPs:
Match Address=192.168.0.1/24
PermitRootLogin=yes
If the only places where root password can be used are physical console and su, it is no longer much of a security risk as compared to unlimited sudo in a single-user machine.
That said, leaving root password unset by default may still be a sensible choice. I would be happier with sudo, however, if it could be configured to use a smartcard or similar instead of just re-entering same password (indeed in some cases I've used "ssh root@localhost" with sshd configured to accept only smartcard authentication instead of sudo). But most people don't have smartcards, all alternatives are compromises.
This goes against all claims that you become addicted very quickly.
Some studies have indicated the tendency to get addicted with nicotine is hereditary (ditto with heroin): some people (around 70% if memory serves) get addicted very easily, others rarely or not at all. Maybe you're one of the latter group.
It's still Google turning round to a country and saying "Your laws are wrong".
Of course. And Google (and everybody else) should do exactly that to every country whose laws are wrong
Now, most laws are really neither right or wrong in this sense, they're just different ways of doing things - but if you believe in right and wrong in the first place, you cannot avoid considering some laws to be wrong as well (against human rights, say) and then you should say so and and act accordingly, whoever or whatever you are.
As for child porn, the proper reason for banning it isn't the (admittedly disgusting) nature of the material as such but the fact that making it is child abuse. If you think it's just an arbitrary line between what kind of material is and what isn't acceptable as such, you're already too far down the slippery slope. Remember the Australian MP wanted to ban sex films with small-breasted women because they'd titillate pedophiles?
Authentication can exist just fine without encryption, but if you want privacy you must have both authentication and encryption.
Encryption without authentication isn't worthless, however: it won't protect you from a targeted attack, but it will help against those throwing their nets far and wide in the hope of seeing something interesting. If all http sessions were encrypted and https differed only by having authentication too, it would make blackhats' lives significantly harder without any obvious downside. In particular it would help also those seriously concerned about privacy by making encrypted communication less conspicuous.
Of course it could cause false sense of security in some - but looking at how the vast majority of people trust even unencrypted communications, indeed many trust http more than https with self-encrypted keys, I can't see how it could get worse. Just show the lock symbol or whatever only with authenticated communications but encrypt everything anyway, and everybody would be better off (except spooks and perhaps certificate sellers).
It's public information [...] And, of course, recording and publishing these things is simply recording and publishing a list of facts; a practice which has long been protected by various laws and rulings.
Not everywhere. In many European jurisdictions at least it is not at all obvious that publishing a list made of publicly available information is legal. In particular, if it is considered "personal information" about people, creating a new compilation of it falls under various personal data protection laws - even if every individual piece of information in there is publicly available somewhere.
I don't know of any place that'd considered AP SIDs to be personal information in that sense, though - but it wouldn't surprise me either.
The signal power will reduce by the cube of distance from the masts
Square of the distance, actually.
it's neighbours
That looks possessive to me, not plural; the grammar is fine (or am I missing something?).
Unlike with nouns, the possessive of "it" is "its", without apostrophe, and "it's" is abbreviation of "it is". Plural is "they".
The best way to accelerate a Macintoy is at 9.8 meters per second per second.