Well from a business perspective, during his tenure he tried to capitalise on MS’ dominant position on desktop and server in order to promote dominance on the emerging mobile-client platform. This he or the company he presided upon failed to do, and he retired after the “screw up”.

But that does not mean that he must continue dumbly advocating that there be strict adherence to what he tried, and failed, to do. After all, consistency is only a value if you are not a screw-up.

He continues to be MS’ largest single investor. That gives him a large vested interest in advocating that it behave rationally, even when rationality in this sub-game is at odds with the strategy he pursued previously.

Ideally MS would have succeeded in perpetuating its dominance to the new platform. It did not, so now it’s the case to do something else which is at cross-purposes with what would have formerly been ideal. This is not evidence of fallacious thinking; much the contrary.

I wonder to what extent enhancing the privations of incarceration further the social aim of rehabilitating the individual as opposed to exacting revenge. Of course this is an ancient question and pretty irresolvable question, but insofar as curtailing activity and enhancing safety continue to be conflated, it remains current.

Incidentally, this was also why people were so wary of outsiders: because they lacked a known history attesting to their character, and because one always wondered what incentive had caused them to favour the uncertainties of leaving their town to venture elsewhere. It is also the root origin of patronymics.

In several credited (*cough*) theories it is also the origin of money: allowing people deemed to be “credit risks” (which is to say, without a known history nor a certainty of future reciprocation) to engage in transactions.

Just sayin’.

I am one of them. Who are the other two?

Yes, Italy's internet legislation is entirely crappy (as is most Italian legislation).

No, I doubt that anybody has designs on screwing up european legislation just so the shittiest law prevails.

1) Amusingly enough Matteo Renzi is actually unelected, insofar as he is the third prime minister to be nominated by the Italian President (and then confirmed by a vote of confidence in Parliament) since the last election.

2) Judging by polls, he would (probably) be confirmed in the role by a popular election if elections were held right now with the current electoral law.

He is also the first to readily recognise the absurdity of this situation, and is actually making a very controversial effort to reform the constitution and the electoral law so as to avoid this situation arising again in the future (and, most likely, cementing the advantage he currently has, as per point 2).

I actually know one of the auditors who signs off on the Ãconsolidated errorsÃ(TM) totals. He tells me itÃ(TM)s one of the most rigorous accounting protocols heÃ(TM)s ever seen and worked under.

But I don’t so I’ll have to hope some mod heed my request.

That’s a valid (and fairly chilling) reference, but insofar as the two tracking systems/transponders were deactivated at different times and deliberately it seems quite obvious that nothing of a sudden or accidental nature occurred - at least not at the outset of the episode. Of course something catastrophic or at the very least final must have occurred later on because well aeroplanes don’t stay aloft indefinitely.

Let’s take your scenario: a proton/anti-proton pair of virtual particles pops into existence from the quantum vacuum near the event horizon and the anti-proton spirals into the black hole, meaning that the proton no longer has it’s antiparticle to annihilate against. (Clearly we’re talking about energy in terms of mass-energy terms here.)

OK, the original virtual-particle pair ‘borrowed’ energy from the vacuum; that debt must be paid back because the universe’s energy must be conserved. If the energy can no longer be ‘returned’ by annihilating the virtual particles, the ‘energy debt’ must be subtracted from the mass-energy of the black hole. This, essentially, is the process of Hawking radiation that causes a black hole to evaporate: it’s kind of like cosmic repo-men demanding dues from the black hole. The universe wants to be made whole and it gets it’s due from wherever it can. If the repo-men can’t find you and repossess your unpaid television, they annoy your old folks instead.

Here’s where the quantum-information question arises: is there any ‘information’ contained in that debt repayment? The classical view says ‘no’: it’s just the right amount of mass-energy, but all other parameters are random (spin, charge, bla bla bla). Quantum mechanics cannot accept that and insists that the information must be expressed as energy radiating with exactly the right characteristics. As if the dollars extracted from your parents must also, in some sense, carry a hint of that TV you haven’t paid for.

It was thanks to American manpower and equipment that the allies successfully opened a second front by invading Sicily in the summer of 1943 (and later a third front by invading Normandy in 1944), thus drawing away German forces that might’ve otherwise been directed towards the Eastern Front with possibly decisive effect. Stalingrad might’ve been a momentary (though expensive) setback for the German war effort if it weren’t for the fact that they never again had sufficient troops available to concentrate on the problem. And this, of course, is because of American intervention in the European war.

At least I substantiated my opinion with a summary of key points an opponent would need to successfully address if he were (to my satisfaction, anyway) argue the opposite case. The original poster’s statement was an unsubstantiated bolt from the blue stated with almost religious fervour and conviction.

As for national pride: I’m a hybrid european, half british and half italian. I am certainly not in the habit of promoting the USA and it’s foreign policy. But merit must be given when merit is due: the USA saved our continental asses. And we must be forever grateful for that, whatever the motive might’ve been or might be said to have been.

I meant electromechanical bombes.

The Colossus was useless at decrypting Enigma traffic: that was handled by the electronic bombes.

Colossus was constructed to break Lorenz/Tunny traffic: a much more advanced system designed for encrypting teleprinter five-bit Baudot-code teleprinter transmissions. Dilettantes will harp on Tunny’s greater number of rotors, but it was a far more radical departure than might at first appear. As many subsequent stream-ciphers, Tunny XORed cleartext to a cryptostream. Amongst other things, that meant that there was no restriction against a character in the ciphertext being the same as the corresponding character in the cleartext, a flaw which allowed skilled cryptographers to infer what might, conceivably, be contained within a given stretch of text.

Two sets of ‘wheels’ were summed independently to a five-bit cleartext word. One set was advanced on every word and one advanced only if another wheel’s value was !FALSE (this wheel itself advanced on every word). This meant, amongst other things, that sometimes part of the keystream did not increment, and this in turn had a discernible effect upon the statistical distribution of the difference between successive ciphertext words.

Reconstructing the keystream from these distributions is how Tunny was broken, and that is the task that Colossus was designed to automate. (Mumbling about Colossus’ Turing-Completeness is fundamentally ill-posed, as no machine has the infinite memory capacity envisioned by Turing. I will however emphasise that Colossus lacked a stored program facility, a concept that was only developed much later.)

All your coincidence does is give us a reliable means of estimating how many people out there are reading Cryptonomicon at any given moment in time. It’s not freaky at all. It’s just the consequence of the vast number of humans currently alive.