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Comment Re:I don't like the phrase 'Conspiracy Theory' (Score 1) 152

Nope, conspiracies don't ever happen.

The 9/11 hijackers did not plan their actions in advance. Just by sheer coincidence, 19 people just happened to be taking those four plane flights. And by coincidence (no coordination) they all got the same spontaneous idea at the same time, an idea they had never spoken about before: let's hijack the plane and crash it.

Crazy people babble on about "evidence" like people taking flight lessons, sharing vehicles, etc. but we know those things cannot possibly be true, because conspiracies are not real.

If you have a hypothesis of x and then find lots of supporting evidence for x and it becomes the prevailing explanation, that creates a theory of x, but there's one exception: when x is a conspiracy. Conspiracies are a special case, because they don't really happen.

Comment Does it matter? (Score 4, Insightful) 43

Regardless of whatever budget Congress sets, the majority party has already been clear that they have no intent to enforce it. If the president uses the NASA money for something else, or even just puts it into his own personal pocket, we can be confident that he won't be impeached, and if impeached, he won't be convicted.

The only thing that matters is the total budget. The president is free to spend that total however he wishes. This isn't the law as written, but it's the law defacto. If voters have a problem with that (do they?) they can choose a different party to be the majority.

Comment Re:U2 album fiasco all over again (Score 2) 78

Last I heard, Apple sales haven't plummeted and thrown them into bankruptcy, so it sounds like they learned the lesson just fine: it's fine to show people ads. People might complain a little bit, but they won't stop buying. Cost is $0 and ad revenue is presumably more than $0.

If someone is stuck with your proprietary software and you aren't showing them ads, then you're leaving money on the table. What're they gonna do, fork it out?

Comment Black hole maximum rotation speed (Score 1) 41

the outer edge of the mass exceeding the speed of light

That intuitively makes sense, but I thought part of the black hole cheat is that it doesn't have an edge. I thought they were literally singularities, with a circumference of zero. Apparently not the case?

How a thing with a circumference of zero could meaningfully "rotate" is beyond me, but I thought this (and many other suspected properties of rotating black holes) was supposed to be beyond my ignorant layman understanding!

Comment Choose protocol before choosing implementation (Score 2) 30

An adversary can coerce a proprietary software producer to compromise the code. That's what we're going to see here.

An adversary cannot time-travel to when a protocol was invented, and compromise the protocol. (Though I guess the NSA can come kind of close to that, by "helping" as it's being developed, w/out the time-travel part.) That's what we're not going to see here.

Ergo, proprietary apps will remain unable to provide secure messaging, but secure messaging will remain available to people who want it.

Comment Re:seen this movie before (Score 1) 277

Selecting office software is not a political statement

That's right, it's not a statement. It's just a position. You either hold the position that it's ok to be dependent on a third party and it's ok to fail if that third party turns against you, or you hold the position that it's not ok and you would prefer to stay up no matter what adversaries want.

It only becomes a statement once you tell someone that security and reliability are among your values. ;-)

Comment Re:Hmm. and what about everything else ? (Score 2) 277

Scale isn't the main problem, interoperability is. If you've solved interoperability (i.e. you've got SPF, DKIM, etc working so gmail.com and outlook.com will receive emails sent from your system) then you're in good shape.

Not that running large systems is necessarily easy, but it doesn't have enemies the way interoperability has enemies. Scale is a merely conventional problem that Google and Microsoft aren't making worse for Linux users. Nobody's pushing back, trying to make you fail; your only foe is savage reality.

And man-vs-savage-reality is a pretty nice conflict to be involved in, compared to man-vs-man.

Comment How would one measure this? (Score 4, Insightful) 54

How do they measure this? Did all the pirates magically agree to put Google Analytics on their web pages and share reporting with Muso? Or, in accordance with The Pirate Code (?!) do all pirate pages request the browser load http://muso.com/arr-trackme-1x... and (again, in accordance with The Pirate Code, I guess) the visitors configure their browsers to whitelist and load it? I am skeptical of any third parties who claim they "track" pirate site visits.

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