grkvlt

People in military uniforms, that are part of a (well-?) organised group armed with small arms and heavy weapons that is currently fighting against other military and paramilitary groups, can not with 100% honesty be called civilians...

I agree; your 1 in 2500 figure gives a slightly different picture of things... About 30x as many travelers being searched.

/* I guess adding mobile and computer searches is wrong though, since some sizable fraction of computer owners have a mobile and would thus have had both searched. So maybe 650-700 searches? Doesn't change the magnitude of the resulting figures much, I suppose. */

FYI, the mechanism you describe is (essentially) how TLS works...

Your `/docs/plan-to-hijack-airnz-plane.txt` file might be seen as slightly dodgy?

Lets not get too excited. There were about 40 million passengers transiting NZ airports last year, according to Wikipedia.[0] The article says roughly 540 devices were searched in the same time period. That's 0.00135% or basically a dozen people per million being searched.

That hardly seems like totalitarian overreach. In fact it seems quite restrained and pretty reasonable - and presumably must be intelligence led, since I rather doubt they are doing this at random...!

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_busiest_airports_i...

Cost of servers to handle millions of TLS connection initialisations and HTTPS stream decryptions, versus simple plain-text streaming...

Not always. I got my Apache commit rights while working for an investment bank, where I was employed specifically to work on open source code, and since then have worked on multiple open source projects on GitHub, and sometimes even for investment bank clients interested in using our open source software. I don't think having a GitHub or Apache account is a hindrance to employment at all, these days.

Initially I assumed this was going to be about how nuclear tests were 'self-declassifying' since all the bomb components, test fixtures and equipment, the tower it was mounted on etc. would be completely vaporized in the explosion, so there was nothing left to classify as secret. Except for that one embarassing time when the UCRL device in test Upshot-Knothole Ruth[0] fizzled and failed to destroy the steel tower it was detonated on...

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Upshot%E2%80%93Knoth...

Yeah, every company in the world wants employees that they can trust, are team players, and so on. At least, I've never seen a job spec for 'Untrustworthy, slightly shifty, loner required. Must be antisocial and lazy. Must have a University degree in science or mathematics and a current drivers license.'

Apparently it was an actual policy that the current United States administration wanted to implement, but I think it got shot down by the Supreme Court or Congress for being unconstitutional. So I guess the point is that it is a genuine example of a thing that governments might want to do...

I was really hoping this might continue with 'six, if you work with IoT devices' or something like that, as in the Larry Miller[0] routine.[1] Never mind, I'll leave the links here anyway...

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Miller_(comedian)

1. https://youtu.be/eceSHKqwUPY?t=18

> Salisbury is the LGBT capital of UK

Firstly, I think Brighton and Hove[0] would have something to say about that. Secondly, this is 2018, and it's quite alright to be gay these days!

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_community_of_Brighton_and...

Really?

Do you regularly lie about your whereabouts to the authorities? Or just feel that you should have the right to do so without being found out"

That doesn't make sense - you would think the machines could track their cashbox balances perfectly, requiring dumping it in a bag, printing a status report/receipt/audit log, and attaching that to the bag. No counting required!

No, there really is a huge difference. It's more like 1.5 times the y-axis space in your example, they could get 6 self service checkouts in the space of 2 staffed ones:

    >|1|   |2|   <    >|1|      |4|<
     | |   | |         |2|      |5|
     | |   | |         |3|      |6|

Or similar. What does slow things down is elderly or people apprehensive of technology, and tourists or others encountering them for the first time...

Hm, not sure about this comparision.

The magnitudinal (?) difference going from millions to billions, being three powers of ten or (approximately) ten powers of two, is exactly the same as from billions to trillions. This works for thinking about countable stuff like populations, amounts of money, piles of grains of sand/rice, marbles and so on. Multiply by a thousand and you're good. However thinking about time periods is different, in that we rarely multiply time periods like this, or when we do we keep the units the same. Generally we don't think of large numbers of seconds as a collection of discrete things.

From your example, people tend to think about '11 days' vs. '11 000 days' or'31 years' vs. '31 000 years' and easily grasp the difference in size. With a bit of practice (and a fondness for Vernor Vinge) it's true that you could gain an intuitive feel for kiloseconds (around 15 minutes) and Megaseconds (around 11 days) although you would have to put up with the strange looks and constant requests for clarification...

My point is, using time intervals separated by the orders of magnitude in question is a poor way to get a feel for what billions and trillions of things (e.g. dollars spent on war) and you would be better off thinking about what a billion dollars might get you.

In fact, at USD 200 million each, it gets you five brand new Boeing 767-300ER jets. So, now thinking about the 1.5 trillion from the OP, that gives 7 500 of them. If you split up all the people alive in the world today into groups of one million, each group could have its very own 767. There would be eleven for Belgium and about three for Wales, the traditional country-sized units. Alternatively you could build two Shards[0] for a billion, and three thousand for one war. If you built all of those in Belgium, you'd probably annoy people, though.

If you prefer, you could convert it all to Gummi Bears! They are about USD 0.01 in bulk, and weigh about 2.5g each. So a billion dollars worth of them would weigh 250 000 tonnes, about equivalent to the gross tonnage of an oil tanker like the Globtik Tokyo[1] which was the largest supertanker in the world when launched in 1972. Our war equivalent in Gummi Bears is 250 million tonnes, for which the obvious object for comparison is the Great Pyramid of Giza[2] so the sweets would weigh the same as about forty pyramids.

I forget what my point was, now...

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shard

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globtik_Tokyo

2. https://sciencing.com/much-did-pyramids-weigh-7499289.html

Dangerous. What happens when your incredibly clever internal algorithm decides a customer is liable to lose money and you pocket their cash, and the trade goes a huge amount the other way? The customer demands their 1000% profits, and sues you when you can't pay up.

Also, if you really had this super always correct algorithm, just use it to place short trades or options trades based on what it predicts across the market and sit back and rake in the cash.

> repugnant attributes [...] sexagenarian

You do realise that a sexagenarian[0] is just someone in their sixties, right?

0. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sexagenarian

Nope, named for Emmy Noether.[0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem

1. Because an 'event horizon' is not a physical boundary, it's more like a boundary that separates events that we can observe and events that we will never see in this universe, ever - that is, in this universe we can't know anything about events that happen beyond this horizon.

Ah, makes more sense. Of course, 'captain knows about FTL' is not necessarily a given, much like 'driver knows about internal combustion engine' for cars - he may just be pressing buttons randomly (cf. the Heechee series by Frederick Pohl[0]) for instance.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heechee

But they are shown a painting which is pretty obviously just whatever the person creating it wanted it to be, nobody would ever accept it as a perfect record of reality. I don't understand how photography comes into things?

There's an xkcd (sorry, but I promise it's relevant) that graphs something similar to this[0] but using 'number of years from the time the story was written' as the second axis. If you look at it you can see a line indicating 'stories set in 2015' at the top of the graph - it would be interesting to plot a series of these isochronology lines and compare the stories that lie on them, although for SF you probably need more detail at the top right...

0. https://xkcd.com/1491/

It's more that the people who do this do more than just buying a single ticket with positive expected value - as described in the article.

True, +EV is useless if the variance is huge, as is the case with lotteries.

Of course governments must keep secrets. These are things like order of battle details for the military; location and other details for nuclear weapons; names and addresses of intelligence officers, informants or defectors; algorithms for decryption of foreign ciphers; and so on. However, in western democracies the secrecy is usually time limited. For example in the United Kingdom we have the 30-year rule[0] which provides for public release of confidential government documents after 30 years (and they are moving to 20 years now) which is a good compromise between transparency and the need for operational secrecy and security.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-year_rule

Because diplomats. The Vienna convention[0] means that they are exempt from interference by foreign governments an d their agencies. Of course, the assumption is that diplomats are not acting 'nefariously' but if it turns out they are, the host country has recourse to various options, including expulsion...

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Diplomati...

I guess because amortized over, say 5 years, that's just equivalent to a $15k p.a. salary (or $36k today) and that's a maximum for him. Hardly 'fuck-you money' really, and I think it might even be less than the average wage in the US...?

I don't know, mine contains a request from Her Brittanic Majesty's Secretary of State, in the name of Her Majesty, that I should be allowed 'to pass freely without let or hindrance' and says nothing about requiring me to be inconvenienced and held up...

Yes, but apart from that, what have the Romans, er, Bell Labs ever given us?