mixmax

that if a tesla has a 1/4 inch protective plate seperating the batteries from the road it's a safe vehicle indeed.

I was simply sharing my personal experience with ramming 1/4 inch plated vehicles into hard immovable objects to give some perspective as to what kind of strength we're talking about.

My boat's hull happens to be made of 1/4 inch metal plate (6mm) which is apparently the same as the protected underside of a Tesla. I've hit a concrete block, gone aground a few times and generally have a bit of excperiencing with impacting hard immovable objects with a vehicle protected by a 1/4 inch metal plate.

It takes a LOT of force to pierce 1/4 inch plate. My boat weighs 12 tons, and it hardly has a dent from the collissions I and previous owners have been in.

I was rather confused since I know more about finance than logging.

In finance, "Widowmaker" means one thing: Shorting Japanese Government Bonds (JGB) and inevitably losing money. Because of Japan’s gigantic national debt, and because the Japanese bond rally has gone on so long, investors have called the top in the Japanese bond market for years, only to get impaled.

thanks for clearing it up.

The bulk of Japanese debt is to large Japanese pension funds, so yes theoretically the government could just declare that the Japanese people wouldn't get their pensions and simply steal them, but somehow I don't think that's going to work...

Btw. There's an interesting problem with the Japanese debt - if you look at Japanese demographics the population is aging rapidly. This means that the pension funds that hold the debt will have to sell out because the money needs to be paid out. Who will they sell to? Every major institution in Japan is already stuffed to the gills with bonds, so there are two options: print money or sell to foreign investors. Printing money is balancimg on a knifes edge ( which is what the Bank of Japan is currently doing). Currently Japan pays an interest of less than 1%, and yet they spend 25% of their turnover just on interest payments. If you print money inflation and thus interest rises. When they reach 4% they will spend 100% of their income just paying interest on their loans. They can of course print more money and keep depreciating their currency, but history shows us that that doesn't end well. Alternatively they can try to sell bonds to foreigners, but somehow I doubt that there are any takers unless the interest rate goes up. As a comparison Greece pays around 8%.

I'm not saying that Japan will definitely go bankrupt, I'm just saying that there are some pretty big red flags, and maneuvering around them is going to be damn hard. Since there are equally hard problems elsewhere in the world economy (as I hinted at above) there's a real chance that something somewhere goes awfully wrong.

They do mean something, and are in fact worrying.

I presume that the HN crowd will understand why, otherwise I'll gladly explain.

Japan is in the gutters and has a debt of 230% of GDP (twice of what Greece has), Spain has youth unemployment exceeding 50%, Greece needs another bailout, Eurozone politics prevent banking union which seems to be a prerequisite for not breaking up the Euro. Those are just off the top of my head.

There are plenty of laarge unsolved financial problems in the world, and with the intercommectedness of finance a problem in one place will inevitably have consequences in other places.

I'm fairly certain we'll see another large crisis within the next 5 years.

I think America is pretty bad - certainly worse than where I happened to be born (Denmark).

An example: Like many other countries we have logging of telecommunications. The difference from the US is that it has been a transparent process. A bill was introduced into parlaiment, it was discussed both in the media and on the floor of parlaiment, then voted on and made into law. I know exactly what is logged, because the process is open. So does the media, and some of the major Danish tech-sites have criticised the way the logging works (it's basically useless for the police).

Personally I don't like the law, but it was an open process; I know exactly who voted yes and no, I know exactly what is being logged, I know from the media debates how the police uses this, etc.

Democracy at work.

The ruggedness part is very true, and I miss that. Some of my carpentr/fishermen/boatbuilder friends still use old Nokias they buy used because they can handle the rough conditions they work in. an Iphone wouldn't last a week.

Back in the day I often used my Nokia 3210 to stir drinks and open bottles. It would take an incredible amount of beating and still just work.

If it doesn't already exist someone should make an Iphone and/or android app that will let you lock your phone before you go through customs, and only allow you to unlock it at a specified time and/or place. For instance 5 hours after landing at the location of your booked hotel.

That way you won't be able to divulge information held on your phone, even if you wanted to.

While I understand her (1) personal reasons for shutting down Groklaw, this is an extraordinarily bad decision for privacy and democracy.

In the last few weeks quite a few providers of private communications and/or freedom (for some definition of freedom) have shut down. Lavabot, Freedom Hosting, etc. If the US could shut down The Guardian they would.

This leaves fewer and fewer secure channels for private communication, and less and less information about what is actually going on.

This is an incredibly dangerous road to walk down, and is akin to the Intelligentsia leaving Germany in the 20's. We all know how that ended.

(1) edited his to her - thanks for pointing it out rolux

Send me an e-mail, it's in my profile. I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have, and help in any way I can.

Sounds like a great project!

From anecdotal evidence I don't think you're right. Every summer I speak to an average of three strangers a week that stroll by the harbour and ask about how to get a space, how to buy a boat, and how they can go about doing it. But very few people take the plunge. When I tell people how I live most of them are envious (some think I'm crazy too).

I think what's keeping people from doing it is fear. Most people don't have the courage to break with deepheld norms such as living in a house or an apartment.

If you are a little handy and know how to work an angle grinder and a circular saw it's really not that expensive. Plus you have something to do in the weekends :-)

This is a good observation.

I've put some effort into circumventing the zero-sum things, though I haven't thought about it this way before. I live on a boat that I've paid with cash, and thus own. My living expenses come down to harbour rent, electricity and heating in the winter. Over a year that's an average of $300 a month. I live in the smack middle of Copenhagen. On top of this comes living expenses, clothes, etc. But I'm not very materialistic so that's quite cheap too.

The surprising result (for me at least) is that I'm out of the status race, and people envy me for the freedom I've gained. By choice I haven't been working for more than a year, and I can afford it, and don't feel much pressure taking any old job. I'm looking for something interesting, but if it doesn't turn up I can live without. In the meantime I spend time doing all the sideprojects, art things, and hanging out a lot of other people are dreaming about while they slave away.

To quote Fight Club: "the things you own end up owning you"

the irony of a whistleblower trying to escape from the nobel-prize winning president of the United States being nominated for the nobel prize is, well pricelss.

It seems that the JS is checking for firefox and then opening an iframe, which presumably holds some more JS.

Anyone know what that might be, and who has compromised freedom host?

The black swan event of terrorism doesn't need to scale, it's a big one-off event carried out by a few dedicated resourceful people.

A nuclear bomb over New York city, smallpox distributed in all Western major airports, or simultaneous nerve gas attacks in a number of major cities.

Remember this is Internet time (not to be confused with Swatch Internet time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time)) which is a whole different beast to normal time. I clearly remember both my dot-com coach and my advisory board telling me over champagne brunch that Internet time was at least 5 times normal time. This would make it 40 years ago, and not 8.

An explanation for those who've never seen this before:

A long long time ago on an Internet far from here a young man had an idea. His idea was simple but genius. He would make a homepage (as they were called back then) with a grid of 100 by 100 squares each ten pixels across. Each square could hold an image 10x10 pixels. One million pixels.

Back when we didn't have retina displays and Stallmann was still young designers thought 10x10 pixels was plenty to make a pretty picture. You could then buy a square for one hundred dollars; a dollar a pixel. And if people clicked on the pretty picture you had made in your square they would be taken to your homepage. If you had lots of money or worked for one of those new dot-com's you could buy more than one square so your designer could make a bigger picture.

Now, you can probably guess why it was called the million Dollar Homepage (Hint 1000 x 1000 = 1 million), and as you can see all the squares were sold so the architect reached his goal, won his bet and retreated back to the matrix to devise new ingenious devious ideas.

Edit: changed ten dollars to one hundred dollars - thanks for pointing it out jgrubb.

If the general attorney has to step up to the podium and assure an American public that a whistleblower won't be killed or tortured you've got a country in dire straits.

Especially since it seems that not all Americans believe him.

It's already there, developed by the US military no less. It's called Tor. If the installing and usability was improved it might catch on for normal people concerned about their privacy.

Congratulations to the stack exchange team for getting this going. It's an incredibly good idea, maybe you could patent it?

I just copied the first paragraph from the Wikipedia article, which happpened to be about life expectancy which is often seen as a proxy for quality of healthcare. Fair or not.

Here are some other excerpts from the article:

- The United States is among the few industrialized nations in the world that does not guarantee access to health care for its population.

- lack of health insurance causes roughly 48,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United States

- In 2007, 62.1% of filers for bankruptcies claimed high medical expenses.

- A 2013 study found that about 25% of all senior citizens declare bankruptcy due to medical expenses, and 43% are forced to mortgage or sell their primary residence.

These quotes are just from the first paragraph of the article... There are many more if you read it through.

For an outside observer it's blatantly obvious that you have a broken system, and it's inexlicable why you keep defending it.

While this is a great and heartbreaking story that makes me proud to be an active member of HN it's also a symptom of the totally broken US healthcare system.

From wikipedia:

The United States life expectancy of 78.4 years at birth, up from 75.2 years in 1990, ranks it 50th among 221 nations, and 27th out of the 34 industrialized OECD countries, down from 20th in 1990. Of 17 high-income countries studied by the National Institutes of Health in 2013, the United States had the highest or near-highest prevalence of infant mortality, heart and lung disease, sexually transmitted infections, adolescent pregnancies, injuries, homicides, and disability. Together, such issues place the U.S. at the bottom of the list for life expectancy. On average, a U.S. male can be expected to live almost four fewer years than those in the top-ranked country.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the United States spent more on health care per capita ($8,608), and more on health care as percentage of its GDP (17.9%), than any other nation in 2011. The Commonwealth Fund ranked the United States last in the quality of health care among similar countries, and notes U.S. care costs the most.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_the_United_State...

I think that this line of thinking is part of the problem in the US. The lack of capital punishment in Norway is a feature not a bug, and if you look at the results it's a good feature. Norway has very low crimerates compared to the US, far fewer homicides and almost no problems with guns and violence.

The Unites States has a mentality of punishing the perpetrators, often very hard, in order to gain revenge and maybe act as a deterrent to others. This is why the US is one of the onlycountries in the world that use capital punishment, and the country in the world where most people are in prison.

Unfortunately research shows that this doesn't work, as evidenced by crimerates and homicides in the US. Norway takes a different approach, and instead of looking for revenge they ask "how do we prevent this from happening again". This is why there is no capital punishment, why you see drug offenders in nice rehabilitation homes, and why Breivik was convicted like any other murderer within the Norweigan system.

The Norweigan system works, and the American doesn't. Just look at the numbers.

As a scandinavian I totally agree. The US should learn from Norway and the Breivik mass shooting to see how one deals with madmen. Capture them, put them before a judge just like every other criminal and then unceremoniously lock them up.

If the best advice in the US is to avoid the police you've got a very serious problem. It sounds like travel advice from a third-world country.

Their primary income is from the support organisation. It costs 100 Danish kroner a month (roughly $20) and there are around 700 members. So they live on roughly $14.000 a month, or $170.000 a year.

Needless to say there is a lot of ingenuity in costcutting, a lot of parts from home-depot....

yes - it was hilarious! Rejsekortet is such an embarrasment to Denmark, my only constellation is that I once had sex with the CEO's daughter.

You can of course test subsystems, how they play with each other, I/O, etc. But the main job of actually sending the rocket straight up is not testable. You could build simulations, but they wouldn't help much since there are so many parameters, unknowns, etc. that building an accurate simulation would probably be as expensive as a test.

Besides, tests are much more fun!