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Your ISP can act as a MITM and they can even poison DNS requests.

Other than that, governments can corrupt the certificate-issuing authorities and present you with forged SSL credentials.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/03/researchers-reveal-like...

Between 18 hours to a few days.

Flares can take as little as 15 minutes (with early warning from satellites in L2).

For high energy x-rays there'd be no early warning through other means than forecasting.

Advertising expands as to fill the available computing power. Content may too. There'll always be a place for an optimized browser, even if just to save battery life.

We could attempt to use an "unbound" version of a color sistem (i.e. RGB with -inf..+inf ranges rather than 0-255 for each channel). Even if the display medium can only handle a limited band of colors, more color information may be useful (like in HDR).

The idea would be that human vision is more responsive to ligh intensity than color intensity, and so, to optimize a display medium, we can use more bits for lightness and less for other color information. And to do that, we need a color space that treats lightness as a separate coordinate.

Secondly, designers need a color space that conforms more naturally to human vision.

If your industry is being disrupted by technology, all resistance is... futile. You should hope or work toward getting a tech company to help you monetize your content before it's too late.

Browsers should use two kinds of notifications: "encryption on" (green or red) and "certificate is present" (green or red). Websites that do banking or handle sensitive information should be green/green (SSL-on with verified cert), while ordinary websites could be green/red (SSL-on with self-signed cert).

Do you have a relevant link with the plumber story?

What's next, postmen's union suing too?

I for one am waiting for the breast implant bomber.

The alternative to being taken advantage of is not-working. If it's illegal even to be taken advantage of, it's illegal to work.

Strictly speaking, there is always more work to be done.

The idea is that robotic manufacturing would be the next stage of the industrial revolution. Meaning that lost manufacturing jobs are not necessarily a bad thing, but rather a natural procession to more advanced division of labor. Indeed, the focus on "keeping jobs" at all costs may be harming development.

But we could also say robots are a means to evade the uncompetitive nature of the labor market. By adding restrictions, politicians are forcing businesses to shift their manufacturing to automatic processes rather than human laborers. So we have lower skilled people prevented from working (and sometimes from ever gaining employment), expensive high-skilled technicians and engineers and expensive technology. The free market will route against barriers, often with unintended consequences. For now at least, Chinese laborers are a better alternative to autonomous robots.

That's not enough. As we've seen, government income can occasionally spike. You also need a flexible way to cut expenses further.

It's probably not possible to economize on government budgets, why they periodically go bust (debt is cleared by sticking it to the creditors). It happens more often than people think. In the last century, the US did in 1971, the USSR was bankrupt at the end, Russia itself reneged again in 1998.

The worrying trend is that, to prevent smaller bankruptcies, the US, EU, Japan etc. are prepared to stake their collective solvency. I call that the real systemic risk. What was the terrible scenario evoked by the financial papers back in '08? Could it be any worse than the debt collapse of all the major economies?

This could be a case of a "cartographer's watermark", a purposeful error.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartography#Cartographic_errors

also this: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Copyright_Easter_Eggs#Exa...

We have always been at war with E̶a̶s̶t̶a̶s̶i̶a̶ Eurasia.

So now Workbench costs $2000?

In Las Vegas gamblers get no bailouts.

These machines mean nothing for security for two reasons:

1. Not being able to scan body cavities. At least metal detectors cover that aspect.

2. There is an unlimited number of targets. Terrorists could even hit the queues of people waiting to be scanned. Also, everywhere there are crowds there is a danger. So no matter how secure is made a certain patch of airport, there is no overall security improvement.

You can't "opt out" when you are subjected to a legally-enforced monopoly.

Using the air to fly is the same as using the roads. By your argument, there is no "right to walk" or "right to drive" or "right to take a bus", therefore it would be OK to be made a prisoner by virtue of not being allowed onto public land.

It should be the government and not the individual whose freedom of movement is limited.

UV light would penetrate clouds better.

Indeed, aiming the collimated beam would be a problem, but not an insurmountable one. Given the bandwidth benefits and the relatively small size of the transmitter (compared to microwave), many small (cheap) satellites could serve the same purpose as an Iridium constellation.

It wouldn't work indoors, but neither do satellite microwave links. The reason cell tower signals reach indoors is signal strength. It's prohibitively expensive to place equivalent transmitters into orbit.

I wonder if anyone has in the works an idea of using optical instead of microwave for satellite to Earth communication.

So paradoxically, the Singularity Institute can grow into a great enemy of AI research. Should we deem Ray Kurzweil the first Pope of this anti-science religion?

While these machines may stop terrorists from entering an airplane, it won't stop them from blowing up the crowded lines waiting to be scanned. Then install the machines at the entrance? The terrorists just have to move further outside. Any place with crowds of people is a threat. Nowhere is safe!

We should resurrect Ben Franklin's old adage: "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Remember that the machines don't see inside body cavities. So if you, dear backscatter supporter, want to feel better (but not actually be safer), you should be arguing for complete cavity searches everywhere.

If the youtube window loses focus while in fullscreen, for whatever reason, it reverts back to small web size. This is a PITA for people with multi-monitors who would want to use one screen as a webtv.

So far, workarounds involve hacking the assembly code of the particular flashVM executable (won't work if you update). Another option is to use a flash video downloader and just view your videos offline.

Focus-lockable fullscreen is a must-have feature of webtv.

So what do you do if you require high speed external storage now and not two years from now?

Per Schneier's point, focusing on "threat scenarios" is useless if you have a diffuse threat and unlimited targets.

As an aside, try to look at the history of the definition of terrorism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_terrorism . It's quite difficult to find an all-encompasing term that does not include the US or her allies.

Would you like to provide some examples?

One point of note is that distances beyond 100M ly are difficult to measure and prone to large errors. Beyond 1Bn ly there is nothing but the Hubble Law. It could be that objects observed to have a large redshift (and hence appearing far away by the Hubble Law) are in fact nearby objects.

The ammount of paperwork is astounding. Make simpler, better rules instead of just more regulations!

I think MT is failing because they only allow busiless in the US, which is a tiny market for jobs that pay pennies/hour. But if Amazon managed to open up say, India or China, there would be a much richer ecosystem in place.

An interesting finding is that it costs about $5K-10K to open a US bank account from overseas, post 9/11. Pre 9/11 it was probably around $100.

Although you can use MT credit to buy stuff out of the Amazon store.

This is truly great, second only to a silent GPS navigator.