jimworm

Someone else already noticed that the external pictures were easily identified. The location is no longer secret.

Mitochondria maybe.

I use Firefox on Android for its proxy settings, so I can SSH tunnel out of China.

80%? Are you sure it's not 60%, the percentage that's not in Holland?

It would be very worrying if someone on a random phone call managed to recover any information on public email from the NSA. At least now we know that the NSA seems to be safe against very poorly executed social engineering.

How wonderfully ironic.

These two points are the most horrifying in my eyes, being enough for the PM to install himself as king by having complete surveillance over all the kingmaker positions within parliament. Expose a marital affair here, schedule meetings during a dental appointment there, and it's enough leverage to apply huge influence over the laws that are created. Now that it's completely legal, there's nothing anybody can do to stop it.

After the US and UK have been revealed as full of state-sponsored security holes, and the software patent idea being banned earlier this year, I was considering moving back to NZ. But now that this law has passed, what's the difference? NZ's just as full of spies, except with very few jobs and slow, expensive internet.

"Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."

-George Orwell, 1984

Anecdotal evidence: most articles I find on Baidu Baike are copied straight out of Wikipedia, but many articles on Chinese topics have extra information added.

1. Increase efficiency.

2. Reduce leak surface area.

3. Would-be whistleblowers might be more tempted to exchange information for money, ie become spies, at which point you could nail them and nobody bats an eyelid.

4. At least spies sell their information in secret instead of blurting it out all over the place.

5. Dead people/prisoners don't count in unemployment statistics.

It's a win-win-win-win-win situation. Brilliant move.

Yes, just turn on the SSH to a server in a country that isn't China. You are relying on the citizens of other countries defending their Internet from their government. If nobody did that there will soon be no such places to SSH to.

I'm in China too, and my current annoyances are 1. other people exercising their freedom to park their cars on the pavement and leaving me no place to walk; 2. always being last in line no matter my position, even in hospitals; and 3. the middle-aged lady behind me at the checkout constantly trying to jam her shopping cart up my ass to due to 2. Once I can afford to drive a Lamborghini and the law stops applying to me things will be great, but that day's not today.

In 2011, Huawei offered to give roughly 50MM GBP's worth of mobile equipment to the London Underground as a gift, which the UK declined due to "national security" reasons.

In 2013, the UK is going to pay Huawei to filter all its Internet traffic.

The Chinese list would lead to instant political death, because that'll block Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and some Google+ services. A large number of businesses in the UK that rely on those services will soon follow Mr Cameron to the grave.

On the plus side, the message that the Internet is not a toy to be taken away at will would swiftly and surely be delivered, via the medium of being dragged out into the streets by an angry mob.

Needs more emphasis that the left column is the one to avoid.

That is a theoretical possibility, and a highly unlikely and unobserved possibility at that. Real life mutations aren't like in children's cartoons. Most of the genetic material in a multicellular organism do not belong to germ cells, and most mutations caused by ionizing radiation either cause death of the cell or no effect at all, especially in eukaryotic chromosomes. Cancer, highly unlikely itself, is many orders of magnitude more likely than any inheritable effect.

Studies of the Chernobyl disaster have not found evidence of teratogenic effects in humans [1], and neither have studies of survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings [2].

The malevolent-sounding yet meaningless phrase "fades your genes" is nothing short of nonsense, especially in reference to inheritable teratogenic effects. The number of special places in hearts can do nothing to alter that judgement.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10440782

[2] http://www.rerf.jp/radefx/genetics_e/birthdef.html

If the sole effect of voting is to choose a winner, then you're probably right. But I think that's not the only effect that comes out of counting the votes. It's the one place where voters actually lay their cards on the table, or rather cast their votes in the ballot box. Votes are not a limitless resource to voters, unlike words or even opinion polls, and it is an important form of communication to other voters in the next election.

This is where gaming the voting system hurts democracy. Simply voting for the biggest bloc that is not your vision of pure evil is short-sighted, and causes the voters lose their independence - important for a voting system to arrive at an optimum result [1], and it also destroys the only credible method of communicating the lack of confidence in the system to each other [2]. Everybody knowing that everybody else knows that everybody have lost faith in the main blocs is not sufficient to create real change, but it certainly is necessary.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd

[2] https://youtu.be/3-son3EJTrU?t=8m13s

Security cameras are quite often placed at the entrance/exit. Having your device connect and making a DHCP request as you walk in seems like a legitimate concern.

I think another parameter is the long-lasting data corruption in the network. Unclean power fades the processor channel on your hard drive.

EDIT: this is a sarcastic response to a comment that backs up an assertion with nonsense.

As a nomad, those address questions would be impossible for me to answer. This is particularly relevant because in 2013 I've started using Airbnb 100% of the time. Any others like me hit by this requirement will have to stop using Airbnb altogether, and while it's certain that we'll be a very small minority of users, we might still add up to a significant percentage in lost revenue.

While software that violates other countries' patents cannot be sold to those countries, the sale of software is not the only use of software. The visual effects industry for example can sell their visual effects, and this is a major part of the NZ software ecosystem.

As a kiwi in Europe I can say that this will affect any future decision on where I'll base my business.

That is until the US comes in with their bullying tactics and buy our PM with 5 minutes of facetime with Obama.

A review with references to the ease of fear learning in primates.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/cd/12_1/ohman.c...

Male teachers are probably the most vulnerable targets to such attacks. If you're male and a teacher, it's probably best to use a different name in all non-professional activities (said only partially in jest).

That said, he should've announced his name on a press release associated with this news story and took advantage of the Google juice of the mainstream press (EDIT: oh he did).

Quite possible, especially because there's a safe haven of antibiotic-free medium just across the border, and the likelihood of a beneficial mutation is correlated with the number of individuals present.

In a properly-applied therapeutic situation, there is no such safe haven, and one hopes that the subject's immune system would be able to exterminate the much smaller load once the antibiotic's done its job, instead of leaving any stragglers behind to develop resistance.

If by "risk" you meant the horizontal transfer of resistance, then I point you at genomic studies of horizontal gene transfer across bacteria. It happens with such regularity that the concept of a species cannot be naively applied to bacteria.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=horizontal+gene+transfe...

While true, it is also irrelevant. All known antibiotics belong to a very small number of classes by their mode of action. Resistance genes often confers resistance to not just one antibiotic, but an entire class, for example mecA in MRSA. Therefore it is possible for a bacterium to develop resistance to all therapeutic antibiotics without ever having encountered the exact types.

What's more alarming is that bacteria frequently exchange genetic material between species. Just because the resistance genes have not been discovered in a pathogen does not mean that the gene cannot be easily and instantly transferred from another species, and the chance of that happening is greatly increased if the environment is flooded with resistance genes due to selection by human use of antibiotics.

Excellent video. What would be even more powerful is if they repeated the experiment, but with the 1000x agar right next to the antibiotic-free medium to illustrate what happens when antibiotics are used properly.

Ah, la douche écossaise. Good for the circulation, says wikipedia.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douche_%C3%A9cossaise

Imagine the ease of getting someone legally murdered with 15g (less than a tablespoonful) of heroin, simply by getting it in/on their car or hotel room. Journalists in Singapore probably don't sleep very well.

Heathrow has the most aggressive Skytrax campaigning I've seen (note: some compared with nearly none) in the 7 of the top 10 airports I've been to, which might have something to do with it. It's definitely not in the same league as the likes of Incheon and Hong Kong in my experience.

One serious issue in Heathrow is that gate numbers are not shown (not even printed on your boarding pass) until 30 minutes before departure, and the gates are supposed to close 15 minutes before departure, but it takes 20 minutes to walk to some of the gates from the waiting area. Of course they bend the rules so that people make it to their flights, but what happens when they don't?

Free spaces to sleep, free showers, free internet, easy navigation.