Ka pai. Thank goodness most Treaty settlements made these days are signed under "full and final" terms.

As a Kiwi I once heard some talk that the indigenous Maori were all for a New Zealand Constitution as it would enshrine the Treaty of Waitangi. However, someone pointed out that this would also limit the extent of the Treaty of Waitangi, whereas now it is kinda amorphous as to what it covers (Maori apparently had ownership rights of radio waves for TV and radio, and required compensation for the use of use). Note, I'm part NZ-Maori. I'm just pointing out something interesting I heard about the maneuverings of interested parties for a NZ Constitution and why one sector of society supported it and then dropped support. Perhaps what I heard was wrong - but it seems plausible to me.

I also heard that the multi-culturalists seem to think that Sharia is 'harmless' and should be recognized in a New Zealand Constitution. This is such a bad idea I'm surprised it had not been slapped down violently straight away - but the 'left' (Labour and Greens, in NZ political terms) is full of people who are staggeringly fact-free, and only think in the most 'woolly' of terms (let's hold hands and sing kumbaya with jihadis, eh?). Sharia has been trying to make inroads into NZ:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/4366743/Sharia-decision-lets-baby-boy-into-NZ
http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/politics/6406555/Collins-dismisses-call-to-establish-Islamic-tourism
Sorry to wander slightly off-topic in my response to post about the NZ Constitution. I'm just trying to point out to fellow kiwis that 'Godzone' is as much under threat by the Cultural Jihad of stealth Sharia as anywhere else (US, Britain etc) except that we have even weaker Free Speech protections than elsewhere.

New Zealand Governments are generally benign. Putting in spying on citizens with very few legal protections and hoping that the Government will always be benign is stupid. Hopefully someone will have a bright idea on how to stop this (anyone?).

Did you read the article?

There's no doubt that the structure of effective stories has been studied for millenia, but what's different about this is the degree of detail with which its laid out, including not only the key elements (15, not three or five), their exact sequence and even their timing to a fairly high degree of precision.

Aside: Something that has occurred to me of late (while watching discussion about the Zimmerman trial, actually), is that I think humans have a tendency to fit real-world events into neat, narrative structures that have the same three-act form as good stories. I'm wondering if any news story that achieves really broad penetration of a large population's collective psyche doesn't end up getting "adjusted" until it fits a smooth, memorable narrative arc. This became apparent to me in the case of the Zimmerman trial when I realized that those who argued for guilty and not-guilty verdicts were discussing two rather different versions of the narrative, each of which followed a traditional storytelling arc, and neither of which was overly concerned about including facts that didn't fit the arc. The whole sequence of events, especially when the focus is on the actual evidence, makes a rather lumpy, disjointed tale with false starts and inconvenient edges, but the pro- and anti-Zimmerman stories are both much smoother.

I'm going to start watching to see if that phenomenon arises frequently.

Who noticed the essay following the formula before the end when it pointed it out? I didn't notice until the "all is lost" section, but perhaps more astute readers saw the pattern earlier.

Those numbers would be a lot more meaningful except that Britain's murder rate was much, much lower than the US's even before they passed restrictive gun laws. In fact, since the UK has clamped down and the US has been relaxing restrictions, the gap has actually closed considerably (note that I'm not claiming that the changes in gun laws caused the closure of the gap; there's evidence that they are correlated, but the evidence is somewhat equivocal). The murder rate in the UK has risen slightly* while that in the US has fallen dramatically, in fact in 2013 it's expected to reach the lowest rate in over a century -- though that will still be almost triple the UK's rate.

The fact is that murder isn't related to the availability of better tools to commit murder, because adequate tools are absolutely everywhere. It's culture that drives murder, and the US has a more violent culture than the UK.

* The UK murder rate rose consistently and gradually from 1960 through about 2000, when it spiked sharply, peaking in the early 2000s. Since then it's been declining fairly rapidly, and has dropped to early 80s levels. Note that a significant chunk of the 2002 peak was attributable to Dr. Harold Shipman, but even if you subtract the deaths he likely caused, there's still a fairly sharp spike in the murder rate following the 1997 handgun ban.

Heh. Both of my numbers are 8/3x yours, so my ratio is identical.

7*log10(32 GiB / 1 KiB) + 10 = 62. I'm glad I'm not that old :-)

I clicked the link expecting to find something interesting and novel, perhaps something on par with Kocher's Differential Power Analysis attack, or better. But this guy spent three years to discover that there are a small number of ancient SIMs, not yet removed from service, which use 1DES for securing applet loading? Actually, I'm sure he did no such thing. Typical bad reporting, exacerbated by bad slashdot editing.

It looks to me like his talk is really about countermeasures to mitigate the risk for these ancient SIMs, on the assumption that they can't be replaced immediately. That's worthy of research and a talk, though it's hardly front-page material.

Yeah, that's the real problem in a nutshell: They are becoming OWAT, and ordinary police weapons and tactics should not look like military weapons and tactics.

Yes, that's the true tragedy of the Branch Davidian saga, and the one that motivates conspiracy theorists to believe that the government really wanted to kill them all, and manufactured circumstances to allow it. I tend to attribute such things to stupidity rather than malice, but the argument isn't completely without merit.

And if someone is breaking your door down in the middle of the night, what choice will give you a better result? If it's the police and you shoot back, you'll be carried by six. If if's not the police and you surrender, you may be carried by six.

Or they could, you know, just grab him when he leaves the house to go to work, or to the grocery store. Yeah, it'll cost a little overtime since he'll have to be watched for a couple of days, but that'll be a lot cheaper than the department invests in equipping and training the SWAT team -- and one hell of a lot safer.

It doesn't offer the police officers the same rush, though, which is why they'll argue they really need to gear up and break down his door.

I'm surprised the (otherwise excellent) article neglected to include the Cato Institute's map of botched paramilitary police raids.

This really is a serious problem. I teach home defense along with my concealed weapon permit classes, and the question always comes up "If someone is breaking into my house, how do I know if it's the police?" The answer, of course, is that you can't know, but if you guess wrong it could cost you your life. Good luck.

In my opinion, raids are simply too risky to be justified unless there's an imminent threat to an innocent's life. The reason for using aggressive entry tactics in the vast majority of cases is to prevent the destruction of evidence. That's simply not a good enough reason the kind of high-risk situation the aggressive tactics produce.

I think there are very rare circumstances in which SWAT really is appropriate, and we should scale SWAT capabilities appropriately. Perhaps each US state should have a single group of state troopers who form such an elite force, and are equipped with transportation that allows them to respond quickly anywhere in the state. A big, populous state like California may need two or three such units. But when every podunk PD has its own SWAT team, their mere existence is going to guaranteed that they get used for all sorts of other things. They're too expensive, and too cool (to the police), to just leave sitting around all the time.

The real trick to efficient GPU programming is trying to keep as much in video memory as you can - by optimizing the textures you use (I'm a GLSL game developer, so this is *the* critical performance issue). I would also recommend OpenCL over CUDA. OpenGL has shown a longevity that made working with it worthwhile, and with billions of mobile devices using alongside PCs (Win/Linux) and Macs it seems that OpenCL could very well have the same longevity too. Since your time is a very precious thing it is worth investing that time in something that will be around for a long time and is be cross-platform (mobiles and tablets are the current fad, the browser with WebGL creating amazing apps could well be the next one).

As for libraries, I use the JoGL bindings for Java. That allows my application (a jet combat flight simulator in development) to work cross-platform with almost no porting effort. Using Java makes using lots of CPU cores easy, but the performance constraint is never the CPU, it is the GPU - so by using Java to save development time on routine stuff (heap-based resource management under multi-threading) and spend some of the saved time on optimizing the GPU code (which is the performance critical stuff).

No, you don't get it. Stealing from people is fine. Screwing with the government, however...