They already intentionally lied to the congress and suffered no consequences even after that was found out. What are the odds of what they show is the real full documents or just a redacted, partial, totally false or even a bunch of pages filled with loren ipsum? They already proved that deserve no trust and that don't care at all about it.

US is actually in war with everyone, specially in the cyber realm. They have (or think their have) the upper hand and then is happily going against all the world, not just spying, but infiltrating, planting backdoors, sabotaging, and other activities that in their own opinion deserves decades in jail if is done by civilians. They aren't doing this for preserving the peace, protecting their citizens or attack terrorists, they are doing it because they want war, they profit from it, and they think they can win it, no matter the cost in lives.

They are trying to legalize the war in Syria (that probably they or their associates are instingating) , so they can define hacking as something similar to weapon of mass destruction, and justify intervention in even more countries.

That test doesn't include H.265 at all...

"x265's development is currently too rapid for reliable testing, so I didn't want to focus on it"

It's certainly NOT "meaningless" to have an open source codec for a patented standard. They still get the benefits of multiple vendors focusiing all their efforts on a common code base. And let's not forget that not every country enforces software patents like the US.

That said, it's sad that here on /. We've had a couple of stories about H.265 with NO mention of VP9 which Google has frozen the bitstream on, claims matches or slightly exceeds H.265 across the board, and has a working decoder in Chrome... For the first time, EVER, the patent-free, open source codec is being released at the same time as the proprietary standard version, so it really has a good chance of upstaging the MPEG standard. Yet /. Of all places can't be bothered to mention it... With WebM adoption Opus for audio as well, the patent-free multimedia codecs may actually be superior.

Does Israel block tor?

Read between the lines. An *IT security company* (which includes protecting against Malware and botnets) wrote a press release saying that the recent increase in Tor traffic is due to something it co-incidentally provides a service protecting against.

This is a piece of advertising.

Here, look at this:

Pull up a google search:

http://www.vir.us.com/delete-trojanwin32mevade-b-user-guide-to-remove-trojanwin32mevade-b
> Countries Affected: Germany, USA, China, Switzerland, Canada etc.

Now look at the Tor user numbers from China:

https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-relay-country&start=2013-06-01&end=2013-08-30&country=cn#userstats-relay-country

Why is Mevade creating Tor traffic from places as tiny as Vatican city, and having zero impact from China? When apparently China *is* affected by the botnet, and if past knowledge is any indicator, is probably the world capital of malware?

It doesn't add up.

Ballmer will still be in charge, and this time will be real the "betting the company" on this one. Could be the final push for a company at the edge of the abyss.

Is not about in particular english or german (in fact, most germanic languages should fit, english is one exception), nor a particular country (maybe his TED talk clears a bit some of the concepts, in countries where there are several languages but the same culture have that differences between the speakers of each language), is about a language feature, and how basis in the language change how you see and understand the world. In mandarin chinese you don't go forward and backward in time, but up and down, for some australian language you don't have your subjective left/right/forward/back, but absolute north/south/east/west (and time goes east to west, as the sun). And that change of view implies changes on attitudes, behaviour or even abilities (like better caring about the future or ever knowing where are the cardinal points, unless you go to tricky test situations). And english, spanish or others could have some features that put them over others that as we see them as natural we can't notice them.

Anyway, even if those things are nice, i don't believe that they will ever be adopted into languages that have its own way to do those things. If we want that way to see things to be adopted into our culture, it must be introduced in another way.

So, history's not your strong point, then.

All them Sys Admins now have a private job waiting.

Not of the language by itself, but for the effect on how you see the world or your attitude in certain situations, check the link in my post.

In general complex memes like language (and religion and so on) adapt and evolve. But the main problem in the gp argumentation is the "becoming perfect", there is no perfection in evolution, just better fit for a particular environment (that could change with time). Anyway cultural barriers usually deny adoptions of better language features (i.e. German speakers are better saving money) because tradition, national pride, or whatever.

Like dolphins and sharks (that are around far before mammals), that have a somewhat similar shape? More than having the best shape for a function, having also DNA for genetic code and probably similar decoding engine could explain matches even there.