There is a long history of this type of incident at SFO. Check the Accident section of the Wiki entry,. Probably the best known of these types of incidents was the Japan Airlines Flight 2 incident in 1968. The pilot landed his plane in the bay 2.5 miles short of the runway. Amazingly, there were no injuries, and because the he landing gear was extended, most of them didn't even get wet. I was going to say everyone walked away, but actually they had to wait for boats to pick them up. Furthermore, the plane was salvaged and returned to service.

When asked what happened, the pilot stated "As you Americans say, I fucked up."

Hmm, good to know. I guess the news report I read about this scheme being mandatory must have been wrong.
The point I was trying to make though is that this type of traffic detection is possible and has been implemented. See my comment below for what my own ISP does to encrypted traffic.

Umm, my local ISP does this now. Well actually it throttles all encrypted traffic so much it makes it hard to use. A colegue of mine discovered he could not use his banks encrypted site at home, but had no problems at work. A cryptic reply from the ISPs tech support implies that certain sites are white-listed, and that his bank's site had been added to the white-list. Immediately afterword, he had no problems accessing his bank's encrypted web site. And its not just ssh connections. Certain games use encryped communications to talk to their servers, which led to problems as well, the most prominent was WoW, which uses a bit-torrent like protocol to transfer game updates.

This news is old, and the ISP has said that it will stop, but the point I am making is that it is technically feasible to do this, and the Powers that Be don't care if the internet is usable or not by the little people (you and me).

It has been said that the Internet routes around problems (censorship), however there are plenty of choke-points (transoceanic cables for example) where a reverse DNS look-up could be used to filter the IP addresses of the packets going through. And before you say encrypted VPN, the technology already exists and is being used to detect and block encrypted traffic (Pakistan and Turkey) on the network.

Yes it is possible to get around these countermeasures, but it will not be easy and probably result in a significant decrease in transmission speeds (sending and receiving). And when these techniques become widely known, they will be blocked in turn.

In short, this legislation will break the Internet. Laughing at the dumb politicians who don't understand technology is a dangerous thing to do because there are no simple workarounds that will keep the Internet working the way we know it if this passes.

I agree. The prevailing theory of why the Moon's sides are so different is because the tidal lock caused the magma flows on the near side. This smoothed things out on the near side while as you stated, the far side was exposed to more meteor impacts. Also, the magma flows are thought to be relatively (in geographic and astronomical terms) recent and possibly ongoing, hence erasing any signs of older impacts under the lava.

What probably happened here is someone decided to model what would happen if the Earth had multiple moons and then realized they would eventually collide.

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing thinks this conference is an attempt to push Sarkozy's agenda to control the Internet.

Umm. I think that depends on which standard version of C++ you are using.
Classes in C++ were originally implemented as a C struct with function pointers for the methods. (Long Long ago in a ... ) and the public/private aspect was hacked on top. I haven't kept up with the latest C++ standards to know how much this has changed over time but I do believe that this is one of the areas where it is now very different from the old implementation and as a result inherently incompatible with C.

There was actually a language called C+. No one has used it since the mid 80s though.
It was an early attempt at extending C. C plus more I think was what they were calling it.
I may be showing my age here, but I remember reading about it in Byte Magazine (OK I am defiantly showing my age) .

It arises when the salesman tell the clueless management that "This product will solve all your problems!"

Bonus points if the salesman admits that he doesn't need to know your problems before selling it to you.

The pictures of the SAGE doesn't do it justice. It had some really cutting edge features for the 1950s, including a GUI accessed via a light gun and an ashtray (both built in).

Enigma started out as a commercial product marketed to commercial entities (mid 1930's) and early versions were sold to the public. IIRC, technical details were published (patents, etc) and it was from these commercial models that the Poles did a lot of their work. When Poland was invaded, the Polish cryptography team made its way to England and helped kickstart the Allied effort.

After figuring out how the machines worked, it became a simple matter to brute force the machines (try every combination) using mechanical means, ie the Bombes. This was simpler then it sounds because of some exploitable weaknesses (the same letter will never encryt to itself, the wiring in the disks wasn't changed, etc) The Bombes tried every possible combination of settings of an encoded message looking for the string "EIN" (German for one, Turring himself was said to have come up with this neat little hack) These possible decrypts were passed on to a human to check if the made sense. Remember that this was all done with a mechanical system. Late in the war, when the Germans were changing their codes every hour, this system was able to keep up.

A few years back, Canadian Customs blocked an expansion of WotC's board game 'RoboRally'
It might have had something with the expansion's title that was clearly displayed on the side of the shipping boxes.

The name: "Radioactive Waste"

Umm, its a lot more complicated then that. The addresses are resolved using DNS server, so you could have competing DNS updates changing the addresses on the fly. (Ky send update changing the ip to a Ky site, the gambling site owner sending a competing request changing the ip back to their original site, and so on) It would be like sending two letters (to the same address) one minute apart, and having the first arrive in Paris, while the next letter get sent to Ky. I don't think the DNS system was set up or designed for this kind of thing (automated competing update requests would resemble a DNS DoS attack), so it would cause lots of problems.

The trump here is that the top level DNS server for the .com space is located in the US, whereas the off-shore gambling sites are not, so Kentucky has a legal advantage here.

btw, this is not the first time this has happened. A few months (years) back, a Spanish travel agency had its .com domain name seized because it arranged tours of Cuba (for Europeans) because the .com registry was located in the US.

Is it any wonder that the rest of the world wants an international body overseeing the internet.