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US Secretary of State Calls Climate Change 'Weapon of Mass Destruction' 401

Posted by samzenpus
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Arshad Mohammed reports on Reuters from Jakarta that US Secretary of State John Kerry warned Indonesians that man-made climate change could threaten their entire way of life, deriding those who doubted the existence of 'perhaps the world's most fearsome weapon of mass destruction' and describing those who do not accept that human activity causes global warming as 'shoddy scientists' and 'extreme ideologues'. 'Because of climate change, it's no secret that today Indonesia is ... one of the most vulnerable countries on Earth. It's not an exaggeration to say that the entire way of life that you live and love is at risk,' said Kerry. 'In a sense, climate change can now be considered another weapon of mass destruction, perhaps even the world's most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.' In Beijing on Friday, Kerry announced that China and the United States had agreed to intensify information-sharing and policy discussions on their plans to limit greenhouse gas emissions after 2020. At home, Kerry faces a politically tricky decision on whether to allow the Keystone XL pipeline after a State Department report played down the impact the Keystone pipeline would have on climate change. However Kerry showed little patience for skeptics in his speech. 'We just don't have time to let a few loud interest groups hijack the climate conversation,' said Kerry. 'I'm talking about big companies that like it the way it is, that don't want to change, and spend a lot of money to keep you and me and everybody from doing what we know we need to do.'"

+ - Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?->

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg (971356) writes "In February 2011, the global Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated the last blocks of IPv4 address space to the five regional Internet registries. At the time, experts warned that within months all available IPv4 addresses in the world would be distributed to ISPs. Soon after that, unless everyone upgraded to IPv6, the world would be facing a crisis that would hamper Internet connectivity for everyone. That crisis would be exacerbated by the skyrocketing demand for IP addresses due to a variety of factors: the Internet of Things (refrigerators needing their own IP address); wearables (watches and glasses demanding connectivity); BYOD (the explosion of mobile devices allowed to connect to the corporate network); and the increase in smartphone use in developing countries. So, here we are three years later and the American Registry for Internet Numbers is still doling out IPv4 addresses in the United States and Canada. Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?"
Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:law of energy in a VR (Score 1) 745

by c0lo (#46265703) Attached to: Mathematician: Is Our Universe a Simulation?
Seems there's a difference between our starting position:
* you seem to use "VR" in a "simulated game environ - proper causality be damned if no player is looking, otherwise something plausible is good enough" meaning
* I tended to favour the meaning of "reality model - can't afford to do a real experiment, I'd like to determine some possible behaviours of the system, I'm using a computer for that"

+ - Facebook analizes the impact of love on their business-> 3

Submitted by c0lo
c0lo (1497653) writes "Facebook might understand your romantic prospects better than you do.

In a blog post, the company’s team of data scientists announced with hard numbers that hints at budding relationships before the relationships start.

A subsequent blog entry offerrs an insight on break-ups: it is the last of a series of 6 blogposts that ran last week on the "love" theme (if you are un US single, you may be interested in this one for cities with an extreme male/female singles ratio)."

Link to Original Source

+ - Join the Process Identifier Preservation Society today! ->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Process Identifiers (PIDs) are a scarce resource. On Linux they are only 15 bits by default. The Process Identifier Preservation Society (PIPS) aims to reduce abuse and wastage of the PID space. To join the society please read the following advice.

Several languages generally allow you to run all your code in one process. Some of the code that you might want to incorporate or use is not available in the form of ELF libraries or language specific libraries but only in the form of ELF binaries or interpreted scripts. As a result using additional PID space is sometimes unavoidable. Many languages have multiple methods of starting external processes and usually some of them waste PID space by running commands in a shell. You can avoid those methods or use the exec builtin to preserve the shell PID. It might be tempting to explicitly use shell in languages that don't allow implicit shell use but that just wastes extra PIDs.

You should also do most of the above to avoid shell metacharacter injection attacks that usually allow arbitrary code execution. Dear language authors, don't allow running external processes in shell, kthxbye!"

Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:Not good (Score 1) 133

by c0lo (#46265429) Attached to: Australia and NSA Gain Comprehensive Access To Indonesian Phone System

I'm Australian and the last thing we need right now is to piss off the Indonesians further. I kinda wish these documents were kept under wraps forever to be honest.

I'm Australian and I kinda wished that the Aussie spooks wouldn't be so damned interested about Indonesian shrimp trade.: call me stupid, but I believe knowing this is not making Australia more secure.

Comment: Re:Turnabout is fair play (Score 1) 133

by c0lo (#46265411) Attached to: Australia and NSA Gain Comprehensive Access To Indonesian Phone System

"Intelligence is judged like in sport, two boxers fighting in the ring. They punch and they counter-punch... They attack and they defend themselves, but it is in the ring — the ring of intelligence. If the officials, in this case politicians, interfere in the case, that is wrong. That is very wrong."

Now that it is in the political arena, the politicians have overreacted, he said. ....

"I hope that both our leaders, SBY as well as Tony Abbott should not be too emotional... Please do not deteriorate [the relationship] because of a very small thing. This is a very technical thing."

Translation "spooks to govt: Give us your money and keep your dirty noses out of our game: it's none of your business, you see... it's too technical for you to even understand something".
The only thing that wasn't explicitly said is "... or else".

And this should function as a justification for what NSA is doing? Is it meant to offer me (a citizen which pays taxes these damn'd spooks live on) assurances of a responsible behavior consistent with respect of human rights and liberties?
Pray tell, exactly how the info about the Indonesian shrimp and clove cigarettes trade is something that justifies the violation of lawyer-client confidentiality?

Comment: Re:In other words - they were doing their job (Score 2) 133

by c0lo (#46265371) Attached to: Australia and NSA Gain Comprehensive Access To Indonesian Phone System

2. Assuming this is not this, how can a country maintain military intelligence without doing this?


Oh, yes. That's un-possible. Poor US Army, what it could do if missing the critical information about the Indonesian trade of shrimp and cloves cigarettes?

The law firm was advising Indonesia in relation to trade disputes with the US over the export of shrimp and clove cigarettes. In the latter case the World Trade Organization ruled the United States had violated international trade laws.

According to the classified document, Australian intelligence agents covertly monitored talks between Indonesian officials and the law firm, and offered to share the information obtained with America’s National Security Agency (NSA).

Foreign Minister Natalegawa admitted on Monday that he was perplexed by the claims, the latest in a string of damming revelations about the extent of Australia’s espionage activities in the region.

"I find that a bit mind-boggling and a bit difficult how I can connect or reconcile discussion about shrimps and how it impacts on Australia’s security,” Natalegawa told reporters at a joint press conference with US Secretary of State John Kerry, who is on a two-day visit to Jakarta.

Comment: Re:John Perkins (Score 1) 133

by c0lo (#46265141) Attached to: Australia and NSA Gain Comprehensive Access To Indonesian Phone System

You seem to have missed the context. Note this statement that I was responding to:

Listening in on dialogues relating to trade disputes has capitalism written all over it.

Two can be picky about the context. The original context:

What's the bet that the US administration has less control over its intelligence machinations than the capitalists (wanted to say oligarchy...)?

Regarding your:

Pretty much every major country is going to try to gather intelligence on matters important to it. Do you deny that?

What could be so important for a major and supposedly democratic country to disregard the liberties of all and any person in this world, their own citizens included?
What could be so important that the spying is extended to the officials of another country they are not at war with and neither made a threat with war ?

I don't know what I dislike the most:
* the idea that US administration doesn't have enough control over NSA; or
* the idea the US administration is complicit... nay, scratch that... is deliberately asking NSA to do all these things.

Comment: Re:John Perkins (Score 1) 133

by c0lo (#46264633) Attached to: Australia and NSA Gain Comprehensive Access To Indonesian Phone System

So you think that the Indonesians don't do that sort of thing? Or the Chinese (communists)? Or the Soviets back in the day? LOL .....

Pissing context again? Is it indeed desirable to have NSA winning the competition with the NKVD of the older days?
It becomes boring... com'on, what parents you have that didn't teach you this is not a valid justification for wrong-doings.
