Larry Page addresses PRISM - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html <comment><USER2> I can't understand the repeated use of "direct access". It's the kind of language a lawyer would use to qualify a patent clause.

\- We do not provide direct access to our servers.

\- We do not provide direct access nor is there a backdoor.

\- O, but we do still pipe all of your data to external NSA servers. </sarc>

Every company named (I'm not just picking on Google here) has come out with the same overarching statement. "We do not provide direct access". It just smells of being rehearsed, and carefully coordinated to select such language.

<comment><USER3>
        Until this week's reports, we had never heard of the
        broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that
        appears to have required them to hand over millions of
        users' call records. We were very surprised to learn
        that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google
        is disclosing information about our users' Internet
        activity on such a scale is completely false.

I'm not sure how much more strongly you'd like that worded. It seems pretty complete to me.

<comment><USER4> It's exactly the kind of denial you'd expect them to issue if they were legally required to deny any involvement.

<comment><USER5> Really? You don't see any difference between the denial posted by Google's CEO vs. the way that (say) Verizon responded? Here's Verizon's response: [http://www.businessinsider.com/verizons-memo-to-workers- abou...](http://www.businessinsider.com/verizons-memo-to-workers-about- nsa-2013-6)

<comment><USER6> Thought twice about posting this, but am I the only one who feels really queasy about someone like Matt Cutts jumping directly into conversations about their own company on HN (especially when it could be connoted as being part of damage control)? He's hardly rank-and-file. I think it is plain old creepy, YMMV.

<comment><USER7> Yes, you might be the only person here to suggest Matt Cutts is ever unwelcome on any HN thread.

<comment><USER6> Heh, did you get out of the wrong side of bed today? I don't spend all day reading HN comments - sorry if my knowledge of responses to Matt Cutts' posts isn't as comprehensive and magnificent as your own. When I posted this, nobody else had said anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For all those complaining about the language of this and other denials, what could possibly satisfy you? This seems as blanket as possible.

"Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don't follow the correct process."

"We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users' Internet activity on such a scale [as of the Verizon order] is completely false."

Finally, NSLs cannot compel an organization to lie like this, and doing so would be very legally dangerous for Google.

It's amazing how little critical thinking HN does when we see something that confirms our beliefs.

<comment><USER9> Obama confirmed in a press conference that PRISM exists, so concluding the program is imaginary would seem to require a fair lack of critical thinking.

<comment><USER10> Could you quote/link to Obama's confirmation that Prism exists, and also the claim that it is imaginary?

<comment><USER11> > Could you quote/link to Obama's confirmation that Prism exists

I'll give you gizmodo because it has specifically the quotes [http://gizmodo.com/president-obamas-prism-response-wont- make...](http://gizmodo.com/president-obamas-prism-response-wont-make-you- feel-on-511912648)

<comment><USER8> None of those seem to have anything to do with PRISM. This is a confusing situation, because two secret surveillance programs were leaked on subsequent days. These seem to be related to the first leaked program, which involves collection of Verizon's call metadata. That seems pretty clear-cut. Verizon has issued a non-denial, it's in line with what we've known about the NSA's conduct since 9/11, and various members of congress and the executive branch have commented on it.

PRISM is a completely separate issue and one I'm much more skeptical about. I also haven't seen anybody specifically admit to PRISM's existence, so I'd be interested if you can find a better source.

<comment><USER11> I stand corrected

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I worked IT for a medium sized university we were asked by the DOJ to install switches that copied all internet traffic directly to an unspecified government server. We were told all ISPs (anyone providing internet to more than 100 persons) were told to do this as well.

We refused to comply obviously as the request was absurd, but in the small print of the request we were told we were not allowed to speak of the request and were to deny any involvement if asked under some unknown penalty.

I wouldn't be surprised if special terms of Google's interaction with any government agencies has a similar clause.

<comment><USER13> Please throw out an estimate of how big you think a mirror of all Google's network traffic might be.

<comment><USER14> The NSA's Utah data center was designed to host more storage _than existed on the entire planet_ at the time. Sheer volume of data is among the least of their concerns.

<comment><USER13> OK, so you can read wikipedia, but does it make any sense? A single 65MW datacenter with only 100ksqft of machine room space can hold all of the data in the world? That's not even as much power as one of Facebook's facilities in Oregon.

Remember when IBM announced they'd built the largest filesystem in history? That was only 120PB. A YB is 10 million times bigger than that.

Consider also that a YB is 1000x the entire storage industry output from 2012. So under your theory there is a parallel hard disk drive industry consisting of at least 99% of all hard disk production on Earth.

<comment><USER4> >" A single 65MW datacenter with only 100ksqft of machine room space can hold all of the data in the world? That's not even as much power as one of Facebook's facilities in Oregon."

You're off by a factor of 10-15 on the square footage. Per the wiki page, "The planned structure is 1 million or 1.5 million square feet."

<comment><USER13> "According to USACE, the center will have 100,000 square feet of raised-floor data center space and more than 900,000 square feet of technical support and administrative space."

Typical government installation. 90% overhead.

[http://defensesystems.com/Articles/2011/01/07/NSA-spy- cyber-...](http://defensesystems.com/Articles/2011/01/07/NSA-spy-cyber- intelligence-data-center-Utah.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't want any more fluff "no direct access" emails. I just want these questions to be answered with a YES/NO:

1\. Is there any way that someone outside of Google, can get a copy of an email I sent from my gmail to my own gmail, without a warrant that specifies my exact gmail address?

2\. If I delete my Google search history, is there any way for anyone to access this history, with or without a warrant?

3\. If I make a Google search from an incognito window, is there any way for Google to connect it to my Google account via my IP address? I know I've done this in the past to prevent spambots from creating fake accounts. Can Google connect these dots if someone sends them an NSL?

If the answer to any of this is YES, I am going to have to rethink my entire online life.

<comment><USER16> You're asking very broad questions with only negative (ie: unprovable) answers. I don't think any company could ever say there is "no" way anybody can every get your search history after you delete it.They don't immediately run out and shred all the hard drives storing your data every time you delete something. Data would always be recoverable with some extreme amount of effort.

<comment><USER15> What about Q1?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Personally, I'm really glad that Google published such a clear, plain-spoken post to tackle this issue head on.

This whole issue makes me want to donate a bunch of money to the EFF. If anyone else feels the same way, you can donate to the EFF here: [https://supporters.eff.org/donate](https://supporters.eff.org/donate) and I believe a lot of employers will match contributions.

<comment><USER15> EFF is certainly doing a great job right now, so donations are definitely going to help.

Let me ask you this - do you feel 100% comfortable that nobody outside of Google can read your personal gmail?

<comment><USER5> Me personally? I do. I still want Google to up the number of key bits on our SSL connections, plus explore how to make the connection even more secure though. But yes, I'm quite confident.

<comment><USER17> It looks like the security team is currently working on upping the SSL bits.

[http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2013/05/changes- to-...](http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2013/05/changes-to-our-ssl- certificates.html)

<comment><USER5> 2048 bits! Woohoo!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> General Clapper point-blank lied - or provided a legally-truthful answer so contorted it may as well have been a lie - to Representative Wyden when questioned about NSA phone-data collection just a few months ago. You can't take any statement by any authority figure on these types of programs at face value.

Obviously this opens the door to all kinds of unfalsifiable, paranoid conspiracy madness, but that is a _direct consequence_ of the government's unrelenting commitment to maximum secrecy.

</comment><comment><USER19> What a lot of people haven't considered is that it's likely that the NSA had a big breakthrough on Integer Factorization and their capable of breaking RSA public key crypto (used everywhere you see HTTPS)

Then they can just save all your encrypted traffic and break it on demand.

We all need to start considering moving to Elliptic Curve Cryptography.

<comment><USER20> Why is this at all likely?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am going to guess that PRISM is a system which receives and parses the data files from those companies that are produced as a result of warrants/subpoenas/national security letters. So the excerpt from the NSA document that the Washington Post gave—"Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple" — may refer only to some kind of secure file transfer (private circuit with NSA hardware encryption, maybe).

It's just a guess, but it could fit with the relatively low cost figure given ($20 Million).

</comment><comment><USER22> Aren't these the same words we've been hearing from the others, ones that ignore the concept of a front door, push mechanism to satisfy government demands that cannot be revealed without committing a felony?*

I'd be a _bit_ happier if we were to hear from Soviet refugee Sergey Brin....

* That's one of the terrible things about doing _everything_ in secret; we know that _if_ Google is subject to a broad demand from a National Security Letter they _can 't_ tell us that without suffering terrible penalties. The government has set up a situation where we literally are not able to trust the words of Google et. al.---at least prior to a major figure deciding to pay that penalty for the greater good. Which history tells us requires a rare courage.

</comment><comment><USER23> There's a new kind of Birther or Truther, let's call them PRISMers. No amount of denials or evidence to the contrary, no matter how they are worded or exposed, will satisfy PRISMers that Google is not uploading all user activity to the NSA. It's just impossible to repair the harm that's been done to the brand by the government.

For some people, I doubt trust can ever be regained. Companies affected by this PRISM program should sue the US Government for damages, or at least sue them until it is completely declassified.

</comment><comment><USER24> Disclaimer: I don't know the truth about anything that's going on.

First, I'm not a US citizen. So, it seems I just have to assume that NSA is certainly tracking me.

Now to the topic of spying on US citizens, considering how no one seems to have ever heard about PRISM, the breaking of this story based on flimsy evidence seems to me like an attempt to side track from the real and confirmed story of NSA accessing Call Data Records from Verizon of millions of citizens (The industry calls it CDRs, why have we started calling it "Metadata" since yesterday).

I wouldn't be surprised (though I have no evidence at all) that the PRISM story was planted to change the public discourse.

</comment><comment><USER25> > _Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the > law._

Which is what is in question, no? If being in accordance with the law means keeping secret the requests you do serve, even if broad, means you're still handing out the information. You just don't have to put it in your, "transparency report."

Can't really say any of this is even remotely surprising given what we, in the industry of software development, know about what kind of information can be gathered and how vast volumes of it can be processed and analyzed.

</comment><comment><USER26> In his remarks today Obama said "Now, with respect to the Internet and emails, this does not apply to U.S. citizens, and it does not apply to people living in the United States."

He's clearly stating that they do read non-American's emails. So how do they do it if they don't have access to Google's servers?

BTW, if you run a company outside of America you'd be crazy to rely on Google since the US could be reading your emails for corporate espionage purposes. I think in the long run these revelations are very threatening to Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER27> > BTW, if you run a company outside of America you'd be crazy to rely on > Google since the US could be reading your emails for corporate espionage > purposes.

The US _could be_ spying on activities, including email transmissions, that happen wholly outside of the US, as well.

The only reason PRISM, et al., are newsworthy is that there are expectations and widely-perceived legal/constitutional limitations of US government _domestic_ surveillance that don't exist for foreign surveillance.

<comment><USER26> If my company is outside the US I can try to use infrastructure that at least makes it harder for the US to gain access. If, for example, the US is spying on European allies' infrastructure it would be a diplomatically damaging revelation and the European governments would try to fight it off. If I use a Silicon Valley service I know for a fact that the US can read my data at will without any recourse on my part.

It makes no sense to use Google which is why I'm saying this is threatening to Silicon Valley. Think of it this way, do you think a Chinese email service could become trusted enough to become globally competitive?

<comment><USER27> > If my company is outside the US I can try to use infrastructure that at > least makes it harder for the US to gain access.

Which is great, if you have a decent idea of the NSA's (and the US intelligence establishment in general) capabilities. If not, you're essentially fumbling around in the dark trying to make that kind of infrastructure selection. (And, of course, the US intelligence community isn't the only threat, China -- through whom much traffic that neither originates in nor terminates in China is routed -- has to be a consideration, particularly, but they aren't the only other threat, either.)

If you don't have a system where you have strong theoretical guarantees of end-to-end security and integrity with the data sent over untrusted infrastructure, its security against any of the major threats really relies more than anything on them just not caring about it, and if you think that you are meaningfully buying security by choosing between Google or one of their competitors for basic services, you are probably deluding yourself.

<comment><USER26> Hey look, I'm already being proven right [http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/07/europe- surveillanc...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/07/europe-surveillance- prism-idUSL5N0EJ31S20130607)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This was a TOP SECRET document that leaked out. Page may be well in position not only to deny any knowledge of PRISM, but even further publicly deny Google worked or works with PRISM/NSA.

The way the government bends the law for some years now just to punish everyone they feel like, either through imprisonment, scrutiny or simply by wasting years of their lives, savings of their lives and leaving them with a huge lawyer's bill, I wouldn't be surprised if Page had no choice than to lie on the record. And guess what; if, arguendo, he did, he will be pardoned later on. What would you choose? Admit to a secret program ran by secret agency and face brutal consequences (fines, imprisonment, charge with espionage or maybe capital punishment? (why not? why wouldn't government go after Page "proving" that by admitting US sees everything everyone types to Google, it tipped over some terrorist somewhere that stopped using Google and because of that government lost a track of him until he blew himself up in the middle of crowded street. You get the drift)), or perhaps come up as a good patriot and tell the truth. We already have one that told the truth. He spent 3 years in solitary confinement and may be facing life sentence or capital punishment.

People need to understand. This is too big of a secret even for someone like Page to come up and admit.

</comment><comment><USER29> Okay, HN, how can Google provide a compelling denial that they're not participating in PRISM as described in the leak?

If we're to be a country where innocence is presumed and guilt is proven, we must consider what Larry Page would write in the case that Google is _not_ supplying any sort of un-warranted feed to NSA. Would it be any different?

</comment><comment><USER15> If this entire PRISM thing is fabrication, then it is the best thing to have happened to personal liberties and Internet privacy since encryption. Until the recent shooting in CA, all the major networks were going on and on about PRISM. No amount of money could have bought the kind of attention PRISM is getting.

</comment><comment><USER30> Some of the comments here just shows that people will believe what they want to believe.

There's nothing Google, Apple, Facebook, etc can say that some people won't poke holes into.

<comment><USER31> That's the frustrating state of the law. Gag orders make it very difficult to trust public communications like this. With secret, fairly unaccountable courts that statistically appear to rubber-stamp government requests, it's hard to discount the possibility of the NSA having, say, the authority to say "Google, you will post the following PR release now" as part of one of these orders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Why is everyone so suspicious of Google to begin with? Is there a shred of evidence to lend any credibility to the accusations thus far? Given how Google's technology works, I imagine it would be quite an expense to provide the kind of access the govt. would want and Google hasn't been exactly overly enthused with having to comply with BS government requests(e.g. see how they deal with requests to scrub search results).

<comment><USER4> The President getting on national television and acknowledging that the program exists is a pretty big shred of evidence.

<comment><USER32> He said nothing about Google, which is the topic of the OP.

<comment><USER4> In case you missed it, this is the program he acknowledged - Note the three Google products whose logos feature prominently in the leaked doc: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech- giants-n...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa- data)

<comment><USER32> I missed the pictures of the slides. That said, there are ways to target these services without involving the companies directly. Up to and including espionage itself.

<comment><USER4> One of the earlier articles discussed the government's concerns about keeping the program secret, lest they lose the cooperation of their private sector partners. That isn't a concern that they'd have if they were implementing the program through espionage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Regardless of the wording, no statement from Google (or Facebook, Apple, etc) is really going to be believed. A denial from innocence is indistinguishable from a denial which is legally compelled by the language of an order form the government.

But to be honest, I don't bear any ill will toward Google on this. Based on their behavior in the past, I'm willing to believe that if this program existed, they pushed back to the extent they felt they could... but if they eventually complied, it's difficult to blame them, given the threats the government is capable of making.

Unfortunately, the only place to resolve this is at the government level, if it can be resolved at all.

</comment><comment><USER34> One thing I'd think about: If Google is lying or misrepresenting the truth here, then it would be phenomenally foolish to put out a denial under Larry's name as it just did.

Specifically, the personal integrity of the founders -- especially vis-a-vis these kinds of issues -- is one of the bedrocks of Google's culture. If a statement like this was proven out to be a deliberate misrepresentation (even if not an outright lie) it would cause IMO severe harm to Google morale.

</comment><comment><USER35> Here's an idea. Instead of telling us what you DON'T do, tell us what you DO do.

<comment><USER31> They're legally barred from doing so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Watch this: [http://youtu.be/oYNXVgYhPOc](http://youtu.be/oYNXVgYhPOc)

The key phrase is "in the United States" so they just replicate the data outside the United States and you've got yourself a data 'black site' outside the jurisdiction of US law. No direct access. No laws broken. Open access to the NSA.

<comment><USER37> Ireland?

<comment><USER38> The dark side of the moon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> \- What indirect access does Google provide to the government?

\- What lawful data does Google automatically provide to the government without any requests?

\- Can the government can ask Google for data once, and then Google is required to constantly supply data, periodically? If so, what is that data?

\- What data does Google provide to the government upon request?

<comment><USER40> [http://www.google.com/transparencyreport&#x2F](http://www.google.com/transparencyreport&#x2F);

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is absolutely crammed with weasel wording. With notes:

First, we have not joined [Maybe you didn't "join", but instead merely participated in?] any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access [How about indirect access? What is "direct access", anyway?] to our servers [The reporting suggests the NSA provided some hardware. So I guess it's not your servers, huh?]. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access [There's that weird term again] or a "back door" [With quotes. Nice.] to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday [This one is especially bad. Apparently the NSA didn't tell them the program was called 'PRISM'?]

Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law [Note that the government also claims this program is in accordance with the law]. Our legal team reviews each and every request [What's the scope of a request?], and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don't follow the correct process. Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users' data [Not what the reports are suggesting] are false, period. Until this week's reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users' call records [Which is wholly unrelated to PRISM and Google.]. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users' Internet activity on such a scale is completely false [Such a scale being what, exactly? All of your users' data?].

Note what it doesn't answer:

Does Google provide data to the NSA?

Does the NSA have resources in Google data centers?

Does Google know what these reports about the NSA spying on our Google accounts are all about?

It really doesn't answer those. Lame.

</comment><comment><USER42> With Clapper's admission that Prism is real, I don't understand why it's still a debate as to whether Google / Facebook / Microsoft / Apple are involved.

What Internet companies are they getting information from, such that they wouldn't target the top dozen companies that account for the radical majority of anything you'd want to bother tapping into? Who do people think they're talking about? Excite? Some small local ISP?

They got Verizon and AT&T to sign on to massive scale spying. If they can do that, they can get Google and Facebook and so on. These companies simply have no choice in the matter. You'll recall that Google's anti-trust inquiry recently, conveniently, went away with barely a slap on the wrist.

</comment><comment><USER14> There's that "direct access to our servers" verbiage again. I love how these people apparently think that denying doing something that's not the thing that everyone is talking about is going to distract and mollify the public...

</comment><comment><USER37> I think the US government can put enough pressure on any CEO of any company in the United States to lie about information collection efforts that such denial is meaningless.

</comment><comment><USER43> Just because the government has access to Google's servers doesn't mean Google gave them that access.

We're all big kids, if you read that the Chinese/Russian/whatever government had access to information straight from Facebook's servers most people wouldn't doubt it for a second and most people would assume they took it through hacking.

So how can you be surprised that NSA is listening to your Skype calls? Maybe they're using a backdoor made for them, maybe they're using a backdoor MS put in for synergy, maybe they threw a million gpus at it for a few years... And maybe they got permissions from MS, or maybe they social hacked it[1], maybe they take it before it gets to MS's servers. Some of those might be illegal and some not but anyone who's surprised or suddenly outraged has been living under a rock since forever.

[1] _" It is generally done via secret arrangements not with the company, but with the employees. The company does not provide back-door access, but the people do. The trick is to place people with excellent tech skills and dual loyalties into strategic locations in the company. These 'assets' will then execute the work required in secret, and spare the company and most all of their workmates the embarrassment"_

[http://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/001431.html](http://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/001431.html)

I don't see any citation or evidence given for this so this persons claim could just be idle speculation but it's along the lines of what I'd assume. The NSA treats your privacy as a math problem and routes around it.

</comment><comment><USER44> Could the NSA have recruited Google employees as moles? The company might not be providing "direct access", but an individual employee might be able to.

What kind of security do companies like Google and Facebook have to protect private user data from employees? I remember reading that Facebook used to (?) allow unfettered access to all private user data until (surprise!) some creepy employees began stalking people.

</comment><comment><USER45> The obvious issue here is that if the order was similar to Verizon's, Google wouldn't be allowed to admit its existence anyway.

</comment><comment><USER46> Everyone please also go read Mark Zuckerberg's response:

[https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10100828955847631](https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10100828955847631)

Now look at it side-by-side with Larry Page's response. Anyone with half a brain should be scared by this. It really scares me as well. I put more of my trust in Google, and perhaps even Facebook then I place in the Government, or the phone companies, or others. However, these definitely look like they are created from the same template. Very worrying coming from Page and Zuckerberg like this at the exact same time. I just hope there really isn't a man behind the curtain pulling the strings of such powerful figures in technology today.

Does anyone know if there could have been a meeting between these CEOs to decide how they were going to respond. Perhaps they all decided to make their responses uniform together, instead of some external source telling them what to do.

</comment><comment><USER47> >Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law.

This is problematic when the government decides the law means you have to give them your data, you can't say no, you can't say anything about it, and if asked you must deny it.

In this day and age, who knows who's telling the truth. When lying becomes law, truth no longer exists.

</comment><comment><USER48> While I enjoy my tinfoil hat, it seems that they're being open about the access given. This being said, if I didn't trust Google I wouldn't use them. I accept that I am trading certain information about me (interests, usage etc) for the bevvy of free services they provide.

What sort of information about me would the NSA be interested in?

</comment><comment><USER49> I think they are probably replicating their content in realtime onto government servers, so _technically_ Google et al don't give the NSA any "direct" server access. In practice it's way more convenient to house all that data directly under the NSA/DHS/whatever umbrella than to connect to Google every time they need something.

Using piecemeal "direct access" would also hurt the government's data mining ambitions, so there are a lot of factors that suggest internet companies are simply obligated to stream all their data into a gov black box. This way, everybody wins: the government gets warrant-less, hassle-free access to absolutely everything, the internet companies get freedom from search warrants and NSLs, and they get to use the canned "direct access" denial line which is technically true but is still actually a huge lie.

</comment><comment><USER50> Missing from this cynical legal response, is the outrage towards the government for spying on all our private communications [ both legally and illegally ]

Google could have used their platform to campaign for better laws : a 'free speech + question mark' logo on their home page outlining their concerns would have been consistent with 'Dont be Evil'.. but they didn't even do that.

A not-just-non-evil-but-actively-good Google should have said to the Government : "No, you may not have any access to our customers data - you need to physically raid our buildings with a warrant to prise that from our stewardship. You need to hold us as a company in contempt of court."

How much better is the US than China ? : how can there be a democracy without both free speech and a right to private conversation ?

</comment><comment><USER51> Very carefully worded & not a denial of the allegations.

</comment><comment><USER52> (At least) one party did not tell the truth - opinions?

<comment><USER53> There's two middlemen layers in this game of telephone:

1\. What the leaker communicated to news outlets 2\. What the news outlets communicated to us

It seems likely that exact terms and technical capabilities have been misunderstood or misinterpreted. Already, there are common misconceptions arising from the public's interpretation of the news...for example, conflating the NSA's deal with Verizon to the PRISM program. And there's also the natural confusion that generally arises in any discussion of government surveillance programs...some people seem to be surprised that the NSA is spying on foreign communications, when that is pretty much NSA's _raison d 'etre_.

I think we should take Page as a clear denial, that is, that he's not weaseling out on a technicality. That doesn't mean he couldn't be flat out lying, of course. I think it's also a believable that if Google were to participate in a program like PRISM, that Page would be one of the people in the know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> "Tech companies might have also denied knowledge of the full scope of cooperation with national security officials because employees whose job it is to comply with FISA requests are not allowed to discuss the details even with others at the company, and in some cases have national security clearance, according to both a former senior government official and a lawyer representing a technology company. "

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech- companies-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies- bristling-concede-to-government-surveillance-efforts.html?_r=0)

</comment><comment><USER55> Several of the largest telephone carriers in the United States knowingly and voluntarily assisted the National Security Agency in illegally spying, the online companies I feel have more too lose if they took that kind of mindless attitude. Online companies monetize user data so consumers may lose faith in the companies ability to protect their data from government if they have "direct access". Online firms adopted a aggressive, pro-privacy legal theories. The problem isn't about direct access, the friendly benefits the intelligence community gets with current structuring of federal law is what needs to be changed for more respect to privacy in our society.

</comment><comment><USER56> Ok, let's read this closely. It doesn't seem to me like Larry and David are _really_ denying much of anything.

"Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a "back door" to the information stored in our data centers."

Sure, that's fine. But the fact that the initial PPT gives a specific date on which Google cooperation began already suggests that Google may be handing over data, not that the gov't is sucking it all down automatically.

Also, they say "data centers" in particular. Data travels over lots of other pipes.

"We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday."

Not surprising the NSA wouldn't tell them the secret code name of the project in their discussions.

"we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don't follow the correct process."

This is an enormous loophole. "in accordance to the law" could mean anything, and with automated review systems the volume of data passing through could be massive.

"Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users' data are false, period."

Not providing "open-ended acces" does not mean not providing _any_ access.

"We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist."

But not surprised to learn that other not-so-broad orders exist. How broad is too broad?

"Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users' Internet activity on such a scale is completely false."

Not "on such a scale", but on a slightly smaller scale, sure.

"there needs to be a more transparent approach"

In other words, we wish we could tell you about everything we're doing with the NSA, but we aren't allowed to.

Really this doesn't read like any sort of denial at all.

</comment><comment><USER57> "We put that in our transparency report " _whenever possible_ ". :)

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm sure many people have said the same thing much more eloquently than I can, but what I find extra depressing in all this is that we all obviously want to take advantage of the possibilities that the Internet gives us, but while people are prosecuted right and left for sharing a song the government (any government) can do things on a scale which we can only dream of. We're all connected, but has it empowered us or has it made us into a bunch of sheep?

What happened to the government working for us, the people? Yes, I'm sure I'm naive, but still.

I don't see this getting better before it gets worse. Sorry.

</comment><comment><USER59> This from the same guy who once gave away access to anyone's data to impress friends.

His quote:

Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks.

He has no credibility.

[http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2010/05/report- zuc...](http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2010/05/report-zuckerberg- called-facebook-users-who-trust-him-dumb/24459&#x2F);

[http://www.newser.com/story/88716/zuckerberg-once-mocked- dum...](http://www.newser.com/story/88716/zuckerberg-once-mocked-dumb-users- over-trust.html)

<comment><USER60> Not the same guy at all...

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Zuckerberg would never give away private info just to impress friends:

[http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2010/05/report- zuc...](http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2010/05/report-zuckerberg- called-facebook-users-who-trust-him-dumb/24459&#x2F);

[http://www.newser.com/story/88716/zuckerberg-once-mocked- dum...](http://www.newser.com/story/88716/zuckerberg-once-mocked-dumb-users- over-trust.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> It's disturbing how similar the language of the different denials is. While individually they are quite convincing (to me, anyway), when you read them one after the other they all have the same "voice". It starts to sound like Orwellian newspeak, exactly how it would sound if all these statements were coordinated by a shadowy background figure.

It may be just an unfortunate coincidence of timing and nature of lawyer laden executive language - but together these statements almost become counterproductive.

</comment><comment><USER61> Google doesn't know what the program is called inside the NSA, that is not earth shattering news. The problem is they don't need to "know" any of this. Hypothetically; If I was approached by the NSA for access to my users data... I would ask or come up with, at a minimum, some kind of Plausible Deniability... its the only sane option given the nature of these requests.

Ie. "Never heard of it... We push back as much as we can... See these push- backs in our transparency report. Feel Better?"

</comment><comment><USER62> So the gmail access given to government agencies, that allegedly enabled the Chinese to hack it in 2010 - as reported by CNN ([http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/23/schneier.google.ha...](http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/23/schneier.google.hacking/index.html)) was just a figment of Bruce Schneier's imagination?

Or was it just "indirect access", as in via some other company?

</comment><comment><USER63> > First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or > any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. > government does not have direct access or a "back door" to the information > stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until > yesterday.

Right, but government-hired contractors are not 'the government'. So while this could be true, users' data could still be being intercepted.

</comment><comment><USER64> Wow, so many weasel words.

So what would satisfy me?

"We minimize intrusions into our users' privacy by encrypting their data on the client side with good crypto algorithms and secure keys that assuming a secure client system are under the full control of our users."

Followed by a list of types of data, and which types are or are not encrypted in this way.

That comes close. It's not exactly PR-speak, but captures the spirit I would hope for.

Google could at least try harder to be proactive about protecting privacy.

</comment><comment><USER65> It just occurred to me: the "data liberation" thing they have which lets you download your own data... would be terribly useful for such requests. What better way to scrape the entirety of the various storage systems than to have a team who does nothing but that?

The team itself wouldn't even need to know about it. Just keep them funded and let them stay current on supporting the latest doodad, and it stays useful to the nefarious spy work as well.

</comment><comment><USER66> We should really read what the Times has to say about this before we engage in armchair investigation.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech- companies-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies- bristling-concede-to-government-surveillance-efforts.html)

</comment><comment><USER67> The last paragraph sound to me like: "Oh guys, we'd love to tell you what they force us to do, but we can't because we're under gag order.".

Especially the final sentence is explicit:

         But the level of secrecy around the current legal
         procedures undermines the freedoms we all cherish.

Am I reading this wrong?

</comment><comment><USER46> This just looks like it was crafted from the same template as Mark Zuckerberg's response! Very worrying coming from Page and Zuckerberg, (and I hear other CEOs) like this at the exact same time. I just hope there really isn't a man behind the curtain pulling the strings of such powerful figures in technology today.

</comment><comment><USER68> At some point, I think - perhaps this is only wishful thinking, but I do think it nonetheless - someone from one of these companies will simply come out in a TV interview and spill the beans.

Just make a big enough stir, be explicit about what threats were levied, and tell us all. It would be impossible to prosecute them after that shitstorm.

</comment><comment><USER69> IDK, if the gov't has core network switch access and is sniffing all of the packets, that's "back door" enough for my mind.

I'm wouldn't be surprised if none of these companies was involved, and it's just a case that the NSA is simply harvesting and processing all of their traffic for a net same result.

</comment><comment><USER70> The denials sound like a politician denying he had an affair...and in the end it turns out to be true. PRISM at least expresses the intent of the government, which trashes our right to privacy, probable cause,etc. The only right to privacy these days is if you're having an abortion.

</comment><comment><USER71> There's some undertone about having Drummond listed as the co-author.

When the chief legal officer co-authors a post with a ceo, it means that each word has been carefully chosen, because each of these statements carries serious consequences if they get it wrong.

</comment><comment><USER72> Couldn't a huge amount of metadata be gleaned by just monitoring the size, disposition, and timing of encrypted traffic. That sort of information would only be useful to government and would give them the ability to deny everything.

</comment><comment><USER73> Sure thing, Larry. So you won't be afraid to swear as such under oath nor sign a contract stipulating multibillion dollar penalties should this in any way prove to be a lie or deception, right?

</comment><comment><USER74> Hopefully all this spurs more transparency like Larry suggests. We're certainly on the wrong side of a slippery slope right now. -(says a Canuck who has to deal with this stuff to)

</comment><comment><USER75> I assume the government would require them to deny involvement, just like companies aren't (weren't?) allowed to discuss NSLs. Consequently, I view the denials as meaningless.

<comment><USER76> So then what could these companies do to convince you, short of giving you physical access to all of their datacenters and shell access to all of their servers?

<comment><USER75> Nothing, that's the problem. What needs to happen is for these programs to be brought in to the sunlight and for Congress to make it explicitly legal for people to discuss them, regardless of any previous prohibition. Then I might be able to believe a denial, or at least accept it as meaningful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> "Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law"

Well, now I feel better. Oh wait, PRISM is technically legal since it's supposedly authorized by the senate?

</comment><comment><USER78> If these companies truly were innocent they would immediately sue press for slander. The fact that they all posted a denial that are all exactly same worded says everything imo.

</comment><comment><USER79> If Google is forced to turn over data to the government, but precluded from discussing it due to national security laws then the denial really doesn't mean anything. Right?

</comment><comment><USER80> Qualified statement "direct". Of course they are not providing "direct" access to production servers. What about "copies"?

</comment><comment><USER81> I trust Google more than the U.S. Gov't.

Who's lying? Confused?

<comment><USER82> If you don't trust the government how can you trust google in a situation like this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5838921](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5838921)

</comment><comment><USER84> "Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law."

Would be much better if this were "only when required to by law".

</comment><comment><USER85> Does anyone care, outside of tech circles? Most people don't seem to care, even though they understand what's happening

</comment><comment><USER86> I had to chuckle at Mr Page using the "royal we":

"As Google's CEO and Chief Legal Officer, we wanted you to have the facts."

</comment><comment><USER87> Is it just me or did the personal statements by Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg have similar format and language?

<comment><USER88> indeed, very similar like a government script ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> Google gave the Chinese gov direct access that's how they got hacked.

</comment><comment><USER90> It is very possible that Google is lying or, at best, bending the truth.

</comment><comment><USER91> Maybe the larger point is that they don't need permission

</comment><comment><USER92> A nice $10M donation to the EFF would help me believe him.

</comment><comment><USER93> Drafted at Bilderberg 2013

</comment><comment><USER94> yeah but what about Google's Irish branch?

</comment><comment><USER95> principiis obsta et respice finem

</comment><comment><USER96> I have a completely different take on this.

While something along the general lines of 'Prism' probably exists, in aggregate, across different NSA programs, I believe the presentation slides are fake and were created / leaked by the executive branch.

Here's my reasoning:

The Slides \</comment><comment>----

Who is the audience????

Who were these slides prepared for? Who is the target audience? If real, the information is obviously very, very sensitive- so it follows that the original audience would have been very, very high level.

But who at that high of a level needs this type of explanation for a project that started years ago?? It reads more like something you would create for someone that has never heard of it. Doesn't make sense.

Slide Design

Gee- nice of the creator to put the logos of each of the companies at the top of the slide- of every slide. Which leads me to ask...

Where are the rest of the slides?

Was it only a 4 slide presentation? Who gives super-high level presentations with only 4 slides? If there were more than 4 slides, were the company logos across the top of EVERY page? Does that even make sense?

It's also interesting that the 4 slides present such a simple, easy to understand story line- it reads like the target audience is a school tour - not super-secret-high-level-officials-(hearing about it for the first time).

Prism Logo

Who made the logo? The NSA graphic design office? Seriously, why would a program like that have a logo? For marketing purposes??

Prism has a web page!

From the bottom of slide 3- "Complete list and details on Prism web page: Go PRISMFAA" A web page? Even if it's private to the NSA it's absurd.

The Political Angle (motive) \</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

IRS - Big Government Story

The IRS / Tea Party story was looking very, very bad for the administration. It's one thing for Republicans / Libertarians to say big government is bad - you play that off as partisan politics. The average person goes about their day.

The IRS is different- EVERYONE deals with the IRS. The narrative was a simple one - IRS abuses power to attack political enemies. That scares people- pretty much everyone.

The Obama administration is all about big government - they don't see it as a bad thing. They believe government is in a unique position to help people. If the electorate turns against 'big government', whatever agenda Obama has for the next 3 year would be finished. The IRS story is a very big deal.

Incredibly Savvy Political Operators

The Obama political team is a force to be reckoned with. Between incredible political savvy and incredible data analysis, they have taken the political game to an entirely new level. They are very, very good.

How does one 'fix' this problem? A tried and true solution is for a bigger story to come along and eclipse the 'problem' story. In the Wag The Dog world, you would start a war. But that's just a movie.

What would be a perfect story? How about a story that simultaneously eclipses the IRS story, while blurring the big government issue?

That's just what happened. The NSA story is at an abstract level the same as the IRS story- it's about big government run amok. However, by rolling the two together Obama can claim 'security' as a trump card. It only really applies to the NSA part of the story - but the press isn't big on subtle distinctions, so no worries there.

Timing

Is it a coincidence the Washington Post broke the story just as the evening news was starting on the West Coast? IE - the end of the day's news cycle? That gives a full day for the press to roll the IRS stories up and for the President to make a presidential statement about security. Sum it all up on the evening news and gee - look at that - it's Friday. Time for a summer weekend.

Denials \</comment><comment>-

All the firms listed in the slide presentation header have denied the story. Yes the language they used is very similar but at the same time it is the same language used by the press ("direct access"). The denials sound pretty believable to me. Even if Larry Page were under some gag order, I doubt he'd say something along the lines of 'I've never heard of it.' I think he'd follow the letter of the law (gag order), but not the spirit.

This is a long post - and my first post (long time lurker though).

In a nutshell:

The slide presentation looks very 'Made for TV' The timing is SUPER convenient.

Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER97> Larry Page: "the U.S. government does not have direct access"

Apple: "We do not provide any government agency with direct access"

Facebook: "We do not provide any government organization with direct access"

Yahoo: "We do not provide the government with direct access"

Remarkably consistent - as if it was coordinated, or scripted by an attorney...

<comment><USER98> It's not "direct" access, it's access through a one-way live xml feed

<comment><USER99> Please ... it will be binary format. Even the government isn't so wasteful to transmit data as xml. And if it did you could easily find where the servers were located by the 5 nuclear power plants needed to power such parsing.

<comment><USER100> I hate to tell you this, but the government has never been concerned enough with overhead to not use something like XML. Frankly its probably tab deliminated ASCII. We'd be lucky to see a binary protocol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> A few thoughts: It's unlikely that he cannot deny or admit giving data to NSA /FBI, because he both admitted and denied, albeit with weasel words. No "backdoor" and "no direct access" but maybe from the front door and indirect access :). I _suspect_ that NSA has live access to Google /FB / MS for certain cases, tracking every online move for certain individuals. That's why it costs just $20 million, maybe they created a portal from which they track Person A going from site to site, what he searches for, who he calls, and what he types.

Larry smells the end of his company's "trust us with all your data...all your life on cloud...search while logged in...visit pages with Google Analytics...it's secure" etc. etc etc. While NSA might not catalog everything you do, Google does and everything is there for NSA's and FBI's asking. The more information Google and Facebook (to pick two of the largest) have stored, the worst it is for us. They know EVERYTHING about pages you visit, how long you stay there, what you searched for, what places you went to (Android) what you emailed, foods you liked, what your ordered from ebay, and so on. A treasure trove for NSA, a nightmare for us.

Start thinking! Stay logged out of Google and FB, use hosts file, Ghostery etc to block and make NSA's and FBI's life as hard as possible.

What's good for Google is good for NSA, but not necessarily for you. NSA would love Google Now, wouldn't they?

</comment><comment><USER102> If Google is not part of PRISM where is the lawsuit for damaging the image of Google and putting their Trademark in a document that is fake a lie... Where is that slander, PR lawsuit? Google you have billions, if its not true file a lawsuit we will believe you then.

</comment><comment><USER103> > Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law.

Great! So if the law - namely the Patriot Act - states the Government has the authority to spy on all your users emails, your legal team reviews it, says it's ok according to the law and you cooperate. Is that how it works?</comment>


SQLite 3.33 - <AUTHOR> https://www.sqlite.org/releaselog/3_33_0.html <comment><USER2> SQLite 3.33 also increases the maximum size of a SQLite database file from 140TB to 281TB: [https://www.sqlite.org/releaselog/3_33_0.html](https://www.sqlite.org/releaselog/3_33_0.html)

I asked about this on the SQLite forum and D. Richard Hipp said "This change was in response to a customer request. They still have a factor of 4 before reaching the old upper limit, but asked for additional headroom." [https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/8e40a7f588428077d7f073c00...](https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/8e40a7f588428077d7f073c004f704467e947c372ad507b7324c92ad7a118da8)

<comment><USER3> That is kind of entertaining to think someone can store a 281TB SQLite file and I am still waiting for companies to sell 1PB hard drives.

Back in 2010 I thought yeah soon we will have 50TB hard drives then 500TB and someday I can have 1PB it will be all I will need! Sadly no such change. I would be happy to be in the 10s of TBs rage for under 200 dollars.

Games are getting stupid wasteful. Someone told me Fortnite is almost 90GB or so and I flinched considering GTA5 is around that range and offers a loooot more rich gameplay and features! What a wasteful game resource wise.

<comment><USER4> Kids these days.

My first hard drive was an 8" 20MB drive. That's about 9.5 x 4.6 x 14.2 inches and weighed about 20 pounds. Only cost me $6000, in 1981. And with that massive capacity, I never did run out of room.

Now I have a 200GB MicroSD in my phone. It cost $75. Haven't run out of room on that one either.

<comment><USER5> Along those lines:

[https://youtu.be/hiLlNzxDfAg?t=714](https://youtu.be/hiLlNzxDfAg?t=714)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Decimal type, finally. Now SQLite is 100x easier to use in finance.

<comment><USER7> That's brilliant! I've been waiting for this for years.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you appreciate SQL, the example (update inventory from daily sales) is a thing of beauty.

<comment><USER8> Is "GROUP BY 2" a shorthand for "GROUP BY itemId", the second column in the FROM SELECT? Not sure I've seen that syntax before.

<comment><USER9> You can mention columns from the select clause by ordinal in group by and order by clauses, in lieu of restating the full expression. Very helpful with complex expressions, but IMO not the greatest for readability, so I tend to only use it in ad hoc queries. It's part of SQL-92, but I believe it is deprecated.

Many interpreters let you use a column alias from the select clause in the group and order clauses. This has better readability IMO but I'm not sure it's in the SQL-92 standard, but I believe it is now standardized.

<comment><USER10> > Many interpreters let you use a column alias from the select clause in the > group and order clauses. This has better readability IMO but I'm not sure > it's in the SQL-92 standard, but I believe it is now standardized.

Not sure if it's standardised, but Postgres doesn't let you do this (rather irritatingly).

<comment><USER11> No, PostgreSQL definitely lets you do this.

> An expression used inside a grouping_element can be an input column name, or > the name or ordinal number of an output column (SELECT list item), or an > arbitrary expression formed from input-column values. [0]

> Each expression can be the name or ordinal number of an output column > (SELECT list item), or it can be an arbitrary expression formed from input- > column values. [1]

Perhaps you are thinking of trying to use an output column name in a WHERE clause?

[0]: [https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql- select.html#SQL-...](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql- select.html#SQL-GROUPBY)

[1]: [https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql- select.html#SQL-...](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql- select.html#SQL-ORDERBY)

<comment><USER10> > Perhaps you are thinking of trying to use an output column name in a WHERE > clause?

Yeah, I think I am thinking about this.

Its pretty frustrating because the actual query engine is perfectly capable of executing fairly complex SQL expressions efficiently (they're not really that complex computationally, but they are syntactically because of SQL's verbosity), but the code becomes quite unmaintainable if you use too many of them.

For example, the following expression:

        ROUND((
          (EXTRACT(EPOCH FROM (s.end_time - s.start_time)) / 60) -- Shift length in minutes
            - (FLOOR((EXTRACT(EPOCH FROM (s.end_time - s.start_time)) / 60) / 380) * 20) -- Break length in minutes
        )::numeric / 60 , 2) as hours_planned,

It repeats the sub-expression `EXTRACT(EPOCH FROM (s.end_time - s.start_time)) / 60)`. If I could name that sub expression and reference it multiple times then the overall expression would be a _lot_ more readable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As someone who uses SQL Server at work, I was surprised to find that this wasn't a standard feature in other DB engines. I use it all the time! Glad to see it spreading.

<comment><USER13> Postgres has this too afaik?

Yeah![1] with some caveats, that also apply to the sqlite implementation if im not mistaken:

 _When a FROM clause is present, what essentially happens is that the target table is joined to the tables mentioned in the from_item list, and each output row of the join represents an update operation for the target table. When using FROM you should ensure that the join produces at most one output row for each row to be modified. In other words, a target row shouldn 't join to more than one row from the other table(s). If it does, then only one of the join rows will be used to update the target row, but which one will be used is not readily predictable._

[https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql- update.html](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-update.html)

<comment><USER14> The release notes are directly referencing that they copied us / PG: "Support for UPDATE FROM following the PostgreSQL syntax. The sqlite folks have done that a few times, and I think that's good. No need to unnecessarily proliferate more variants of doing the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm intrigued by the decimal extension. I thought SQLite was IEEE double only, but it handles 64-bit integers, and now decimals. They don't seem to be fully incorporated into the documentation yet, and decimal.c leaves me with questions, so I guess I'll just have to play around with it.

<comment><USER16> Decimals are represented as strings.

They have add, sub, mul and sum functions for text strings as well as comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Oh, decimal support is landing!

I have a lot of stuff dancing around the lacking of decimals in sqlite, so this is so welcoming!

</comment><comment> stef-13013 This software is a piece of magic...

</comment><comment><USER18> Is SQLite capable of supporting multiple writes to the database from different processes at the same time?

This question is purely around INSERTS - no UPDATES.

Anything I should be aware of? Looking to write data from multiple services to an SQLite file.

<comment><USER19> I think that this applies to all modifying operations - INSERTs, UPDATEs, DELETEs.

It's perfectly ok to write to sqlite from different processes in the same time, but to achieve good results it's better to:

* use WAL mode - so the readers and writers do not block (you can turn on it with `PRAGMA journal_mode=WAL;` in CLI, and it's better to add `PRAGMA main.synchronous=NORMAL;` also).

* all concurrent writes will be queued by sqlite3 lib and done in sequential manner, and if any write attempt will wait longer that BUSY_TIMEOUT ( see [https://www.sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_busy_timeout](https://www.sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_busy_timeout) ) , it will return error.

Snippet

      # setting things up...
      itroot@l7490:/tmp$ grep -i pragma ~/.sqliterc
      PRAGMA journal_mode=WAL;
      PRAGMA main.synchronous=NORMAL;
      PRAGMA busy_timeout=1000;
      itroot@l7490:/tmp$ sqlite3 test.sqlite 'CREATE TABLE records (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, record TEXT);' > /dev/null 2>&1

      # running 10 parallel processes that inserts numbers from 1 to 1000...
      itroot@l7490:/tmp$ echo {1..1000} | xargs -n1 -d' ' -P 10 -i% sqlite3 test.sqlite 'INSERT INTO records (record) VALUES (%);' >/dev/null 2>&1

      # getting number of records
      itroot@l7490:/tmp$ sqlite3 test.sqlite 'SELECT count(*) FROM records;'
      count(*) = 1000

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> UPDATE FROM is a nice extension. In Oracle I've done similar things with an UPSERT/MERGE statement. The linked example of:

      UPDATE inventory
         SET quantity = quantity - daily.amt
        FROM (SELECT sum(quantity) AS amt, itemId FROM sales GROUP BY 2) AS daily
       WHERE inventory.itemId = daily.itemId;

Could be done with MERGE using:

      MERGE INTO inventory i
      USING (
        SELECT
          SUM(quantity) AS amt
        , itemId
        FROM sales
        GROUP BY 2
      ) daily
      ON (
        i.itemId = daily.itemId
      )
      WHEN MATCHED THEN UPDATE
        SET i.quantity = i.quantity - daily.amt;

</comment><comment><USER5> As a data point, the nightly builds of DB Browser for SQLite now include SQLite 3.33:

[https://nightlies.sqlitebrowser.org/latest/](https://nightlies.sqlitebrowser.org/latest/)

</comment><comment><USER21> SQLite is great because I don't want to run a database server if I don't need to and whenever it seems like I might have to give up and run a database server instead I find a configuration option in SQLite that solves my scaling problem or performance problem or concurrency problem. I don't like to recompile SQLite to set compile time options but I'm perfectly capable of doing it though.

I wish WAL mode were the default. I wish read only WAL mode were easier to do without putting the database file in a sticky directory. Oh well.

<comment><USER22> Why do you need read only WAL mode? Or do you just mean some processes are read only, while others can write?

<comment><USER21> The real reason I need WAL mode is so I can read the database while vacuum is running.

The web server runs unprivileged and only needs read permission. Insert and vacuum are done as a user which has write permission.

The documentation says read only WAL mode is possible if there is write permission on the directory. So I put the database file in its own directory and set the mode of the database file to 0664 and set the mode of the directory to 3777. So an unprivileged process has permission to create WAL files which become group writable.

<comment><USER22> Thank you for explaining.

<comment><USER23> My understanding is that this is because a temporary file needs to be created next to the db in WAL mode so write permissions are necessary on on directory. ([https://www.sqlite.org/tempfiles.html](https://www.sqlite.org/tempfiles.html), search for 'WAL')

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is useful but the clunkyness of using FROM/WHERE vs JOIN ... USING has always annoyed me in Postgres, which they've based this on. The MySQL version is sort of what my brain expects.

<comment><USER25> I wonder if they could just make this syntax work in Postgres:

        UPDATE inventory
        SET quantity = inventory.quantity - daily.amt
        FROM
            (SELECT sum(quantity) AS amt, itemId FROM sales GROUP BY 2) daily USING( itemId );

Basically just allowing a ON/USING clause after the first FROM entry as if it was joining to the table being updated.

Otherwise it's kind of annoying when you end up joining to several tables in the update, but have to use the WHERE clause to join back to the main table.

<comment><USER26> Personally I prefer UPDATE JOIN as I've used it in mysql:

      UPDATE inventory
      INNER JOIN (SELECT sum(quantity) AS amt, itemId FROM sales GROUP BY 2) AS daily USING (itemId)
      SET quantity = quantity - daily.amt;

I had thought postgres could do it this way without the extra FROM syntax, but apparently not.

<comment><USER25> The idea of being able to update multiple tables in a single query this way is intriguing to me! But I like the fact that the Postgresql syntax makes it crystal clear which table is being updated.

<comment><USER27> In fact, MySQL allows update of multiple tables. [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4361774/mysql-update- mul...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4361774/mysql-update-multiple- tables-with-one-query)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Nice feature, I hate having to work around it with subqueries or worse

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. It would be interesting to compare the UPDATE FROM query plan with the equivalent subquery-based update.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Bummer, Python 3.9.0 RC1 just missed it! It bundles SQLite 3.32.3. Ah well, I guess we can look forward to it in 3.9.1 in a few months.

</comment><comment><USER30> Is UPDATE FROM part of ISO SQL or is it just a very popular extension?

<comment><USER31> Going by the SQLite documentation it isn't.

[https://www.sqlite.org/lang_update.html](https://www.sqlite.org/lang_update.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> [https://www.sqlite.org/releaselog/3_33_0.html](https://www.sqlite.org/releaselog/3_33_0.html)

</comment><comment><USER33> Fossil also got a new release today: [https://fossil- scm.org/home/uv/download.html](https://fossil-scm.org/home/uv/download.html)

</comment><comment><USER34> a better link to the changes in this ver than what the entry provides: [https://www.sqlite.org/releaselog/3_33_0.html](https://www.sqlite.org/releaselog/3_33_0.html)

</comment><comment><USER35> Interesting. Great for Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS), but I could see this leading to a reduction in data normalization for a lot of teams not using CQRS too. CQRS is a great tool - but the complexity is high so you only want to use it where you need it.

CQRS overused a lot though, like using a $75k surveillance robotic dog from Boston Dynamics [[https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial- robo...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial- robots/boston-dynamics-spot-robot-dog-now-available)] (Massive Dynamics?) to see who's at the door, when you could have just looked through the peephole.

I could see this feature becoming the CQRS of the SQL world for a while, used in many places where it should be considered harmful, in addition to the places where it is helpful.

<comment><USER36> I don't understand why you focus on CQRS; I don't think it's specifically related? At least, not any more related than say, materialized views are useful for CQRS.

I'd expect a CQRS system on top of SQL to be implemented using a single event table and a lot of triggers, each triggering a different aggregate.

<comment><USER35> Not sure why I got downvoted. Also, Domain Driven Design (which is where I've usually seen aggregates discussed), Event Sourcing, and CQRS are three different things that might be used together in an implementation but don't have to be.

The reason I noted how it's great for CQRS is that I've usually seen CQRS implemented with two data models. One is queried, and one is modified via commands. The one that's queried is updated according to some strategy, sometimes on an event triggered by the command model being modified. This this you could trigger and update on your query model when your command model is changed, all within SQL.

<comment><USER36> I think you're mostly downvoted because:

* It's only about CQRS, which in no way was mentioned in the article;

* You're not properly qualifying _why_ this feature is so important for CQRS;

* In the same breath, you're also claiming it's overused and complex, while in fact you're the one who's "promoting" it.

I agree that in my reply, I was actually thinking about ES + CQRS rather than pure CQRS, but the gist of my comment still stands: I would expect a CQRS implementation to work with triggers (for incremental updates) _or_ materialized views (one table insert-only, the "view" is kept in sync automatically by the database, which is what users query). Could you elaborate on why you think this new feature is better than those two approaches?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The HTML5 appcache is the New Bootloader - <AUTHOR> http://kjpgit.github.io/posts/the-html5-appcache-is-the-new-bootloader.html

<comment><USER2> This seems like a pretty bizarre solution. Careful design of updates to be resilient to ordering errors seems like the _appropriate_ response here -- for instance, using the remote site like a content-addressible cache, rather than a name-addressible cache.

In response to a cache that provides only bare minimums for functionality, the author seems to be suggesting throwing away all the the cache logic that browser vendors have gone to implement for you, and instead rewriting one's own cache atop LocalStorage and IndexedDB. This seems like a pretty concerning reaction -- or am I simply misreading the author's conclusion?

<comment><USER3> Do you mind elaborating on content addressable vs name addressable? I did a quick google search on "name addressable cache" and did not find anything.

<comment><USER4> What he means is, instead of having a file you name

        myscript.js

you name it

        myscript-[sha1 hash of contents].js

and you set its cache header to expire at some improbably point in the far far future. If you should happen to update the contents of your script file- the sha1 hash will change, and thus its name and its _cache entry_ will also change, in lockstep with its contents. The only fiddly part of this approach is you must also update all references to the new version of the file. If you're clever you can automate this with templates and build systems.

What this guarantees is that if your index.html and app cache manifest refer to myscript-[some specific sha1], you're guaranteed that the contents of the script are consistent with what that index.html file expects there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's standard deployment practice, but unfortunately with appcache, nothing links index.html to any specific version of the manifest. You can't even query it to see what version of the manifest you have. So you can end up with index.html trying to include a script of hashv1.js, but manifest has hashv2.js.

This can happen if clients are updating to app version 2 just as you are deploying v3. It's totally racy.

EDIT: I have a python script that _proves it_. It basically does new deployments (using only new, versioned .js files) while the browser reloads. I will be updating the post in the near future.

EDIT: Post updated with the test script and screenshot of what blows up.

<comment><USER4> what if the manifest.appcache is content addressable ? e.g. manifest-[version- number].appcache the appcache semantics are convoluted enough that I must admit I don't know what would happen. Would you visit index.html and it loads the old version of index.html linking to the old version of the cache manifest-- forever?

Perhaps the old version of the manifest gets a comment incremented to force the browser to update index.html? or some tricky javascript forces it? Either way it seems, naively like you could link an index.html version to a manifest version via the manifest's filename.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see what you mean. But, at this point I'm not really interested in dicking around with it any more :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I had a play around in this area a few years ago. I had a tiny index.html that had just this script in the body.

      var s=localStorage["bootstrap"];
      if (s) {eval(s);} else {
        var t="But you are not carrying the axe!
";
    	  t+='Get the Axe';
    	  document.body.innerHTML=t;
       }

[http://fingswotidun.com/notanos/](http://fingswotidun.com/notanos/)

Ultimately I found that I needed a server side because of URLs and the same- origin policy. There were just some things that browsers expected to fetch from a URL rather than have the data arrive by other means.

For a time I used a WebDav server to be a dumb server. Eventually the system evolved into [https://github.com/Lerc/notanos](https://github.com/Lerc/notanos) Which uses it's own custom server [https://github.com/Lerc/userserv](https://github.com/Lerc/userserv) which uses your unix login and statically serves files that your logged-in user is allowed to see.

</comment><comment><USER6> AppCache is notoriously broken[0] (or really hard to work with), which is one of the reasons that the new ServiceWorker API was created[1]. ServiceWorker allows you to run a script in the background that can intercept network requests for specified paths, allowing you to create a pretty solid offline strategy (it also does some other interesting things, like push notifications, geofencing, and background sync).

There was a short video about ServiceWorker at the recent Google I/O that you can check out for an overview[2].

[0]: [http://alistapart.com/article/application-cache-is-a- doucheb...](http://alistapart.com/article/application-cache-is-a-douchebag)

[1]: [https://github.com/slightlyoff/ServiceWorker/blob/master/exp...](https://github.com/slightlyoff/ServiceWorker/blob/master/explainer.md)

[2]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uQMl7mFB6g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uQMl7mFB6g)

<comment><USER7> AppCache is relatively new right? Is there no chance of pulling it out of the wild before making a headache in 20 years?

<comment><USER6> Well, it's "new" in the same way that HTML5 is new. It's been around for a few years.

The last time period that I played around with it was when iOS 3 was out, and it was horribly buggy (if you failed to download all of the things listed in the cache in the first go, then it would break and would refuse to ever try again). By iOS 4 it was less broken, but still weird.

Since it's been out there for a while it would probably be difficult to remove. Because of its brokenness I doubt that it ever got much usage, but there is probably some people out there that rely on it.

What I hope is that after ServiceWorker is better supported, someone can build out the old AppCache behaviour in JavaScript using the ServiceWorker APIs, and then we can use that for compatibility and remove AppCache from the browser itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ok everybody says the spec is broken.But the spec is not being fixed either.

The OP says : only put index.html in the appcache file.

But what about if I want my app to work offline,do I really need to go and shove everything in local storage?

So what's the point of appcache then ? and who went along with that spec at first place?

This specific issue infuriates me.It makes creating offline web app so complicated ,it's like the people writing the spec didnt want developpers to write offline apps.

Just fix the damn spec.

<comment><USER9> It is not that hard to just fix the few things that are broken in appcache. But it's more fun to start over with ServiceWorker ([https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/So...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/Social_API/Service_worker_API_reference)).

I'm cautiously optimistic about SW, but sad that we didn't just fix the bugs however many years ago so that we at least had something that worked in the meantime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't understand what need the appcache system fulfils. Within HTTP there is already a reasonable caching system. True, as mentioned in the post, the browser may occasionally clear the cache or elements of it; but that would be an argument for adding something like a `persist` flag to the `Cache-Control` header which would serve the exact same purpose, in addition to being backwards compatible with older browsers.

<comment><USER4> The whole point is to enable the browser to be a full proper app platform- that includes enabling web apps to work OFFLINE. The behaviour of a browser without app cache is to fail to display content _even if it is cached_ if your connection happens to be offline. the html5 app cache addresses that- and is the "standardised" alternative to google gears' local "offline" web server.</comment></comment>


Secretive fusion company claims reactor breakthrough - <AUTHOR> http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2015/08/secretive-fusion-company-makes-reactor-breakthrough <comment><USER2> I keep wondering why this talk doesn't get more traction?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk6z1vP4Eo8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk6z1vP4Eo8)

Published on Aug 22, 2012 Google Tech Talks November 9, 2006

ABSTRACT This is not your father's fusion reactor! Forget everything you know about conventional thinking on nuclear fusion: high-temperature plasmas, steam turbines, neutron radiation and even nuclear waste are a thing of the past. Goodbye thermonuclear fusion; hello inertial electrostatic confinement fusion (IEC), an old idea that's been made new. While the international community debates the fate of the politically-turmoiled $12 billion ITER (an experimental thermonuclear reactor), simple IEC reactors are being built as high-school science fair projects.

Dr. Robert Bussard, former Asst. Director of the Atomic Energy Commission and founder of Energy Matter Conversion Corporation (EMC2), has spent 17 years perfecting IEC, a fusion process that converts hydrogen and boron directly into electricity producing helium as the only waste product. Most of this work was funded by the Department of Defense, the details of which have been under seal... until now.

Dr. Bussard will discuss his recent results and details of this potentially world-altering technology, whose conception dates back as far as 1924, and even includes a reactor design by Philo T. Farnsworth (inventor of the scanning television).

Can a 100 MW fusion reactor be built for less than Google's annual electricity bill? Come see what's possible when you think outside the thermonuclear box and ignore the herd.

Google engEDU Speaker: Dr. Robert Bussard

<comment><USER3> Edit (whack entire previous post): See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell#History) , which is current up to January of this year. That includes a link to a presentation in January 2015 to Microsoft Research: [http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=238...](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=238715&r=1)

I just found out about that video in the course of checking this comment out, so I have not watched it. No idea what's in it.

Edit edit: Digging around an ethusiast forum at [http://www.talk- polywell.org/bb/viewforum.php?f=10](http://www.talk- polywell.org/bb/viewforum.php?f=10) , I see there's also a paper at arxiv.org from Jun 1, 2015: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.0133](http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.0133)

<comment><USER4> I've watched both the 'Should Google Go Nuclear?' and Microsoft Research videos on this topic.

Both are pretty good. The Google video has Bussard in it and was made not long before he died.

The Microsoft paper talks about, well a lot of things, but I recall one of the key research items was cusp confinement. The problem with using magnets to control a plasma is the plasma will reject the magnetic field as its density increases. The wiffle ball shape of the resulting plasma of the polywell allows the field lines to penetrate the plasma even at higher density.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In short: Tri Alpha demonstrated plasma confined for 5ms. So their concept works.

Their next step is burning D-T fuel (needs 10x temperature increase). Their goal is burning H-B fuel which requires much higher temperatures, but has numerous advantages.

Update: "Tri Alpha is backed by Sam Altman, among other things." -> not at all.

<comment><USER6> ::shudders:: Tri Alpha is not backed by me.

Helion is though, which I think has a much better chance of producing commercial fusion power!

<comment><USER7> Regardless of who eventually nails it, it's something that Earth desperately needs _yesterday._

<comment><USER6> That part I can agree with!

<comment><USER8> Are you backing any thorium reactor projects?

<comment><USER6> UPower will be able to use thorium.

<comment><USER8> Very interesting, thanks for the tip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They showed a "stable" reaction of 5 ms, which is quite good.

The video was quite nicely done. I recommend watching.

Caveat: As with all fusion companies, they're only 10-20 years from being ready to market : )

<comment><USER10> _" Caveat: As with all fusion companies, they're only 10-20 years from being ready to market : )"_

And always have been ;-)

<comment><USER11> No no, for the longest time it was 30 years.

<comment><USER12> I do recall that it was said to be 50 years out and that was at an industry fair in the mid eighties; so we _are_ getting closer ;-}

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Fusion is one of those areas that would benefit greatly from Public R&D. It's really sad that we've spent almost nothing on fusion research for the purposes of producing affordable electricity in the last 20 years.[1][2][3]

1\. The NIF is and always has been a sideshow for the Nuclear Weapons development research that goes on there.

2\. US last serious investment was the TFTR back in the 90s. [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/20/fusion-energy- react...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/20/fusion-energy- reactor_n_6438772.html)

3\. IMO ITER is a joke, too large scale.

<comment><USER14> You have a fantastic mindset in that you can call multiple billions of dollars "almost nothing"

Presumably, the operative fact here is that it would mostly be other people's money, and no one minds spending that wildly

<comment><USER15> Yes, it is almost nothing when you look at the estimated spending required to achieve fusion:

[http://i.imgur.com/FR0TsYF.png](http://i.imgur.com/FR0TsYF.png)

<comment><USER16> That graph is dug out whenever the feasibility of fusion is discussed. It's a prediction from 1976 – you should know how credible decade-long predictions on the progress of unproven technologies are.

<comment><USER17> How does this address the graph? It probably doesn't predict the current situation, but it certainly is consistent with it, that fusion funding is below the "fusion never" line, and look, we have no fusion.

<comment><USER18> I could be wrong, but the projections are extrapolations based on _obviously_ overly optimistic assumptions about the a) the federal government's desire to fund large, multiyear scientific projects b) the ease of creating an economically scalable fusion reactor

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The summer of 1999 on the way to E&M class I rode the same bus to the physics building as Dr. Hendrik Monkhorst. He is one of the founders of Tri Alpha Energy, and I remember chatting with him about about aneutronic fusion. It was very eye opening for a 19 year old undergraduate. I remember him espousing commercialization within ten years, which now seems like prototypical professorial optimism. It is an exciting milestone to see them have successful confinement for a solid length of time.

</comment><comment><USER20> Dumb question but since they are still only working on how to contain the reaction, how exactly do you extract power from fusion?

<comment><USER21> Same way you produce electricity from any heat source: steam turbines.

<comment><USER22> Interestingly, that isn't necessarily the case with aneutronic fusion ...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion#Methods_for_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion#Methods_for_energy_capture)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Fusion: only twenty years away. Always.

<comment><USER15> Those estimates might have worked out if funding wasn't continuously being cut.

[http://i.imgur.com/FR0TsYF.png](http://i.imgur.com/FR0TsYF.png)

<comment><USER24> Wow. We don't even spend a billion a year on Fusion research...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Perhaps a stupid question, but why does the plasma need to stay confined for long periods of time? If you can devise a process that performs a full power- generating cycle, then no matter how long (or short) that cycle takes, you will get net power out of it.

<comment><USER26> I believe there are two things:

1\. Ions in the plasma need to interact with each other for enough fusion reactions to occur. For this to happen, the plasma needs to be somewhat dense and the temperature needs to be very high. If the plasma escapes, the temperature and densities fall off rapidly, and the nuclear fusion rate drops quickly. (Nuclear fusion has an incredibly steep temperature dependence --- the triple alpha process, for instance, goes as T^28 or something like that).

2\. When the plasma escapes, it interacts with whatever is containing it and can destroy it very quickly.

But I'm an astrophysicist, not a nuclear physicist, so I could very well be wrong. Plasma confinement is much easier in stars. Just let the gravity do the work for you. :)

<comment><USER25> 1\. This is, I would say, still no reason why the whole cycle can't be performed in a very short time-frame.

2\. If the plasma escapes, I would say you could dump it into a large tank (like a reservoir of water), and extract energy from it.

<comment><USER27> I forgot to address this in my earlier comment, but you don't worry about the plasma escaping -- it is very delicate, generally orders of magnitude less dense than air. Rather, keeping it alive is the difficult part. If the plasma hits the wall of a fusion device in an uncontrolled manner, it will dump all its energy into it. If the plasma picks up too many impurities, it will radiate energy away in the form of bremsstrahlung. It is hard to keep the ions hot enough to fuse while there are many phenomena conspiring against you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > hydrogen-boron fusion, which will require ion temperatures above 3 billion > degrees Celsius

3 billion degrees... that blows my mind.

<comment><USER29> Reminds me of this BBC infographic on hottest temperatures in the universe, [http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc.com/future/bespoke/20131218-tempera...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc.com/future/bespoke/20131218-temperature/assets/images/temperature.png) , very enlightening.

<comment><USER30> Great infographic, but unfortunately it misses my favorite juxtaposition of temperatures:

Surface temperature of a red dwarf star (e.g. Wolf 359) 2500 C

Melting point of tungsten: 3400 C

I find the idea of making balloon-like objects out of tungsten and gas, with a density less than that of the star's photosphere, and floating them around on the surface of a star to be intriguing. It would be a great location to put a heat engine. A totally sci-fi idea, I know, but still interesting to think about.

<comment><USER31> Umm, actually, a "heat engine" needs both the source of heat and a place to dump the waste heat into, so the surface of a star would be a bad place to build one.

The only way of dumping heat would be to radiate it out to space, but "radiation" is a very inefficient way of losing heat. Unless I'm missing some really clever trick, soon your radiator will become about as hot as the surrounding gas, at which point the efficiency (= (T_hot - T_cold) / T_hot) drops to near zero.

* Not a physicist, so I might be wrong. :P

<comment><USER30> You are correct that a heat pump needs both a heat source and heat sink. However, radiation is quite effective at transmitting heat at high temperatures. Black-body radiators emit as the fourth power of the temperature, although real objects never emit quite as efficiently as ideal black-bodies. It works pretty well for stars, though, since radiation is how they lose the vast majority of their energy.

If the photosphere above the heat engine was opaque, then the heat engine would not work. So it makes sense to keep the heat engine near or above the top of the photosphere, without going high enough to overheat near the top of the chromosphere.

It's mainly just a fun idea. I have no plans of trying to build one in the near future. :)

* I am a physicist, but that is no protection against being wrong. ;)

<comment><USER32> FYI David Brin explored this idea in the novel 'Sundiver' (1980)[1]. In the novel a laser is used to radiate heat out into space. This is the first book of the Uplift Trilogy. Incidentally, the second book, 'Startide Rising' is really great imo, and won a bunch of awards.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundiver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundiver)

<comment><USER30> Aye, actually Sundiver is my favorite of David's books. I think his writing is better in later books, but I enjoy the audacious technical ideas and the classic 'closed room mystery' plot.

I met David earlier this year at the NASA NIAC symposium, and spent a nice afternoon hanging out with him and Joe Haldeman and his wife. Very nice people! We toured the Swampworks and launch sites at KSC, and talked about practical methods for moving planets. It was a very enjoyable day.

<comment><USER32> Very cool. You seem to be familiar with him and his work, so I'll ask this; I seem to recall that him and Vernor Vinge have sidelines doing 'scenario planning' for government agencies, is that something you've ever heard of? I've always wondered what that consisted of. Maybe I'm just searching for a reason to explain Vinge lack of productivety and imagined that?

<comment><USER30> I'm sorry. but I don't know much about that. However, you could ask them about it. Most sci-fi authors I have spoken with are very open to answering questions, as long as they are addressed in a respectful manner. I don't know about Vernor Vinge, but I know that David Brin has a website that you could email him at.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Call us when they're not so secretive.

</comment><comment><USER34> The cure for cancer and the solution to climate change announced on HN on the same day! ;)

<comment><USER35> Come back tomorrow and you can experience it again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> If only any of these passes the lab stage to start with engineering... ITER is the only fusion machine 10-20 years away from demonstration, in 2015, and it's too big to fail.

</comment><comment><USER37> A 23m long machine is far too big to mount on a Delorean. They'll need to fix that.

<comment><USER38> While that is somewhat in jest, there are potentials for fusion to first make it as a power source for spacecraft.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_rocket#Electricity_gene...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_rocket#Electricity_generation_vs._direct_thrust)

This has the advantage of not needing a power recovery system and the actual power can be external (like solar) and the fusion engine would act more like a souped-up ion engine (with correspondingly ultra-low thrust).</comment></comment>


Kotlin Development for Android – The Good, the Bad, the Ugly - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/keepsafe-engineering/kotlin-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-bf5f09b87e6f#.fx7t47ady <comment><USER2> "Where did the memory leaks come from? In order to implement VectorDrawable inflation, the support library authors needed to update the way Context.getDrawable is implemented. But that function is final, so they had to make every View create a new copy of a Resources wrapper that could handle VectorDrawables. Besides being a large amount of work, this caused the various wrapped Resources to become out of sync, and to use a large amount of memory due to the duplication. If that function wasn't final, that mess wouldn't have happened."

Yup yup yup. Best practices are guidelines, not law.

<comment><USER3> Maybe it made sense at the time to make the function final to make it run a little bit faster ? This is framework code where some aggressive optimizations can be justified. It also made sense to limit what people could do with this function .. it was not intented to be hacked around.

Finally, it was not a memory leak but a big increase in memory useage.

It is kinda sad that we still have to support API < 21 phones and IMO that's the real issue here.</comment></comment>


Rating RateMyProfessors.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/04/rating-ratemypr.html <comment><USER3> "The best way to get good ratings is to be relatively easy on grades, good looking or both"

"Last year, a scholarly study found a high correlation between RateMyProfessors.com and a university's own system of student evaluations."

This is not "another victory for Web 2.0". This shows that both systems are flawed because they are both correlated with the wrong metrics!

</comment><comment><USER4> Student ratings on the Internet correlate with student ratings on paper? Great.

It would be interesting to study what happens to students whose teachers have a reputation as smart, but tough graders, versus the opposite. RrateMyProfessors would have the data on that (if they could get information on student income).

</comment><comment><USER5> "OMG, dont take profesor smiths class. he was to hard on grades. u will regret it 4eva!!!"

<comment><USER6> Actually at the CS department at my university we used RateMyProfessor to avoid truly bad professors, it was not just about grades you seem to be implying. We used it as a tool to protect ourselves as consumers from a business which was taking advantage of its customers by hiring trash and passing them off as professors. That's not to say all the professors were like that, but the CS department was being run that way. I'm not kidding - <USER2> school was even investigated by the FBI for the number of registered sex offenders the CS department hired as instructors.

So it was more like, "OMG! dont take professor smiths class. he harasses women and the school does nothing about it."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I currently have a professor whom other students warned me about. I can see why, she weeds out the bullshit. I think she's great.</comment>


Eye Bombers: Humanizing everything - <AUTHOR> http://eyebombers.tumblr.com/

<comment><USER2> Thanks. Nice and funny.

In child I playing in "seems as face" of cars.</comment>


Did you happen to lose something in the Amstel River? Within the past 500 years? - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180703-01/?p=99155 <comment><USER2> Discussed previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17439832](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17439832)</comment>


Compile&Run in over 50 langs from Ada to Whitespace without downloads. - <AUTHOR> http://ideone.com/samples

<comment><USER2> I think this is totally awesome, although only only useful for a few situations.

I've only really seen services like this (specifically, most popularly, <http://codepad.org>) used to demonstrate test cases when people are asking for help with their code. The "IDEdroid" app listed on ideone's API page (<http://ideone.com/api>) looks interesting though, but yet again, it is an only marginally useful application.

<comment><AUTHOR> IDEdroid seems to be cool, thank you for the link.

But I can not agree with marginality. First, the situation when people are asking for help is quite common. Second, there are more cases when such services might be useful: experimenting with a new language, comparing/demonstrating the behaviour of a particular compiler, sharing groups of pastes (lecture examples?), and more.

<comment><USER2> Oh yep, you've got some great applications there. Maybe ideone should advertise how they intend to be used instead of putting the creative requirement on the user?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Oz compiler seems to work: <http://ideone.com/PTZiV></comment>