That's absolutely horrifying! Glad to hear you've managed to move past it, as it would have absolutely broken me.
My home was searched by the police for something much less serious (buying lab equipment, completely legally), and the experience left me having panic attacks every time there was a knock at the door.
It makes me crazy that police in the U.S. nowadays can get a search warrant permitting seizure of large amounts of valuable computer and networking gear along with digital devices certain to massively disrupt anyone's life - only from buying things which are completely legal to buy and possess. Apparently all it takes is "a suspicious pattern of behaviors" to get a judge to issue an expansive warrant. The "suspicious pattern" is often defined ad hoc by police under no objective standard and never detailed in the warrant request. Judges are really failing in their duties because there are too many cases like this happening.
Depriving people of their valuable property for 8 months or more is also abusively punitive. In warrants that grant seizures of all or most digital devices, judges should require police to return the items within 30 days if they don't either file charges or go back to the judge with good cause for an extension. If police can't get around to actually looking at the evidence they claimed was so crucial in 30 days maybe it's not a high-priority crime. And if having a reasonable time limit makes it too hard to look through so much stuff, they're free to more narrowly tailor their seizure requests so they don't have so much to troll through.
And my experience was in Australia, so the "decline of policing" has well and truly reached out shores as well.
To possibly make this even more frustrating, when I was told I could pick up my gear, the detective in charge said that a few things they found flagged as suspicious:
1. I had / used virtual machines
2. I had "Tor" on my computer(s)
3. I had downloaded stuff from Megaupload
Now I'm not entirely sure whether these comments were based on what they found on my seized gear, or whether these were actually sufficient 'red flags' to make them think the warrant was justified initially, but, my god, how completely out of their depth, and therefore totally unqualified, they are to make life-changing adjudications about these things - and that their access to metadata only makes it more likely that they'll make false positive mistakes (which is just terrible for society overall).
I'm literally not sure what they meant by saying "you have tor on your computer", whether there's evidence of my having visited the dark web, or just having a (way outdated) copy of the tor browser saved somewhere.
And I think the only things I'd ever downloaded from Megaupload were Android ROMs.
Regarding Virtual Machines: I can't even... they're obviously non-technical so couldn't possibly understand, and yet... gah, I can't even...
This is extremely concerning. I was reading this thread thinking thank god this could only happen in the US.
My concern is around the sequence of events that needed to take place for this to happen to you. Also as a former network operator I want to know how laws like the data retention act, identify and disrupt, etc play a role in these situations - ie who triggered what. I think I’ll review your comment history.
Sounds like you have handled it in about as healthy manner as one could hope. I saw that as a compliment.
> [Maxwell] entertained guests at parties with booze, cigars and sailboat trips. Scientists had never seen anything like him.
> “We would get dinner and fine wine, and at the end he would present us a cheque – a few thousand pounds for the society. It was more money than us poor scientists had ever seen.”
Jeffrey Epstein is speculated to be a Mossad agent, but Robert Maxwell was known to be one. Not exactly a innocent patron of the sciences, as GP sort of implies.
It's a somewhat selective history. Off the top of my head:
Kepler developed his ideas while at the University of Graz. [16th century]
Galileo built his first telescopes while a professor at the University of Padua. [16th - 17th century]
Newton did all of his work while at Cambridge (although, admittedly, it took the plague and a lockdown for him to have his annus mirabilis). [17th century]
William of Ockham (of Razor fame) did his work at Oxford. [14th century]
Giordano Bruno did the work that got him burnt at the stake while at the University of Paris (and briefly Oxford). [16th century]
Roger Bacon developed the scientific method while at Oxford. [13th century]
The article does state that professors did do research, but in their free time.
For the examples you listed, were their famous research achievements really part of their university job description?
Otherwise it’s more like Nietzsche working as an undertaker or Einstein working in the patent office just to support themselves. Naturally many such people would opt to be teachers to get by, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the university was a research institution.
Earlier many philosophers and mathematicians were also priests or monks, that’s also a lifestyle that allows for research without worrying about supporting yourself. Similarly during the scientific revolution it was mostly hobbyist aristocrats that drove it, those who had the means to support themselves while doing free research.
It’s the same story with most famous artists actually, even now. Most of open-source even operates that way, and it’s an important foundation of our modern world.
I don’t really know what to do about that, it’s not like giving everyone universal income would work either, most people do not have this impulse. And grant systems are pretty flawed too. But there is some important insight in the observation of how much has been achieved by people trying to do cool things as a hobby. It’s just really hard to support that systematically, almost by definition.
> Similarly during the scientific revolution it was mostly hobbyists aristocrats that drove it, those who had the means to support themselves while doing free research.
I think this is overexaggerated in the popular consciousness. Most of the famous intellectuals weren't really big aristocrats. Yes they mostly didn't come from dirt poor peasant or serf families. But they also weren't, with some exceptions, highest nobility. It was much more common that they secured funding through patronage from or got hired by the aristocrats. The aristocrats didn't really do the hard work themselves, again with some exceptions.
Isn’t the idea of an aristocratic scientists with a lower class sidekick (actual scientist) doing all the work part of the trope, though? Actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure I can come up with any examples. But, I thought that was the whole thing.
Indeed, the way I expressed it was an oversimplification. I generally wanted to make the point that they were people that weren’t forced to have a tiring full-time job just to get by, and that research was not really their job, with patronage as middle ground.
I think that's also not fully true. The trope is that the rich nobles were swimming in money and in their boredom they just tinkered and did hobby stuff and then this resulted in the discoveries.
But for example Galileo from Wikipedia:
> Three of Galileo's five siblings survived infancy. The youngest, Michelangelo (or Michelagnolo), also became a lutenist and composer who added to Galileo's financial burdens for the rest of his life.[22] Michelangelo was unable to contribute his fair share of their father's promised dowries to their brothers-in-law, who later attempted to seek legal remedies for payments due. Michelangelo also occasionally had to borrow funds from Galileo to support his musical endeavours and excursions. These financial burdens may have contributed to Galileo's early desire to develop inventions that would bring him additional income.[23]
Or Kepler:
> His grandfather, Sebald Kepler, had been Lord Mayor of the city. By the time Johannes was born, the Kepler family fortune was in decline. His father, Heinrich Kepler, earned a precarious living as a mercenary, and he left the family when Johannes was five years old. He was believed to have died in the Eighty Years' War in the Netherlands. His mother, Katharina Guldenmann, an innkeeper's daughter, was a healer and herbalist.
I think the pattern is less that they were so free from concern that they started to research, and more that they worked hard to get funded. And often incidental jobs, like calculating easter and astrology stuff (Kepler in Prague) and to the science as a bonus. Similar to how artists were mostly commissioned (like Leonardo) but also did their own "passion projects".
The typical intellectual was not some duke or baron or huge lord or the son of such. They had to be somewhat stable of course, but that's also true today. Today's professors also don't typically come from abject poverty.
Thanks for elaborating on it, it’s good to learn. The trope though is more about the Enlightenment, Scientific Revolution and Royal Society era. But yeah they were never actual nobility, just upper-middle class. And indeed during the Renaissance and early modern period it was much more about patronage. A number of Greek philosophers were also wealthy, although others were simply frugal.
Nevertheless, my general point stands in that their research was almost never their job and they needed other means to support themselves, just like artists. And this was true throughout history until the paradigm shift described in OP’s article.
Still, it may be surprising to learn that these weren't doing their famous work within the university system: Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Descartes, Pascal, Huygens, Leibniz, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Leeuwenhoek, Halley, Spinoza, Hobbes, Cavendish.
Kepler didn't get a professorship and did his most famous work (elliptical orbits, Kepler's Laws) later in Prague as imperial mathematician.
Newton is the main one who indeed was a prof in Cambridge during his main works.
It could be that interest in research itself is a relatively recent development. A lot of scholarship amounted to study of past scholarship, until science came along. Empirical science as we know it was barely a century old when Newton came along.
I'm a neuroscientist by training, and that doesn't match my understanding (although the definitions might have changed).
Inflammation would be an instance of nociceptive pain, and an NSAID would alleviate it by reducing the inflammation; and most tissue damage will result in inflammation.
Neuropathic pain, on the other hand, would be due to damage of the nerves themselves, and NSAIDs are completely useless here (ask anyone with sciatica or other nerve entrapment)
I'm happy to take that correction - I have no training in any relevant field - I was just trying to follow the description in TFA, which links indirectly to my link above in the second paragraph or so as 'nociceptive pain'; from which I inferred that's all it's talking about and existing non-opioids must therefore not target that.
Perhaps non-inflammatory (or generically) nociceptive pain killing is the point. (Which is getting a bit specific for such a broad title isn't it. Does 'painkiller' ordinarily have such a narrow meaning in your experience?)
If you contextualise the outmoded ideas as part of the Great Conversation [1], and the story of how we reached our current understanding, rather than objective statements of fact, then they becomes a lot more valuable and worthy of study.
My physics teacher in the 1980s (sadly RIP a few years ago[1]) told me that the location of telephone exchanges was a UK state secret. The theory was that the Russians would nuke them destroying the country's ability to communicate, but as their location was a secret that outcome could be prevented. 40+ years on, I wonder if any of that was actually true?
In hindsight, that does seem a little ridiculous; yet it was indeed the thinking. One could see where the exchanges were by simple dint of visiting a place. Soviet spies would just have had to walk around a bit.
Of course, nuclear weapons wouldn't even have had to specifically target exchanges in order to disrupt electronic communications as they already were by the 1980s.
It was amusing to learn a decade ago that the U.S.S.R. military had far more complete maps of many parts of the U.K. than Ordnance Survey published. Apparently down to Soviet spies just walking around a bit, playing tourist.
U.S.S.R. military had far more complete maps of many parts of the U.K. than Ordnance Survey published.
Although amusing, note that its than the Ordnance Survey published. I.E. they had the data, it was just classified. Also, it's fairly clear that the Soviet maps were mostly derived from OS maps. Looking at my street, for example, they have it in a pre-WWII configuration which they could only have got by starting from a rather old OS map. So they clearly only checked for differences in areas they thought important, such as government or military areas - they didn't have people mapping the whole UK. Still it's probably true that one can get more information about certain areas in these Soviet maps than in extant OS maps.
I looked up the local telephone exchange on this site for the town where I grew up. It's a big building. I went past it thousands of times and never knew what it was. It can't have been auspiciously labeled in any way or I would have poked around as a curious geeky kid.
> the location of telephone exchanges was a UK state secret
I found myself wondering whether the locations of electricty substations powering critical infrastructure might count as "secret", for instance the three[0] substations that power Heathrow Airport.
Obviously one of them isn't secret any more more, having gone up in flames rather spectacularly on 21 March 2025.
The dullness is eerily consistent. Even in the age of privatisation, when everything is a brand, these buildings are devoid of markings. So it might well be true, we just stopped worrying about it once the cold war was officially over (once we realized the Russians already knew everything they needed anyway).
>As our [1978] trial started, witness after witness from security sites tried to claim that openly published information was in fact secret. In a typical interchange, one Sigint unit chief was shown a road sign outside his base:
> Q: Is that the name of your unit?
> A: I cannot answer that question, that is a secret.
> Q: Is that the board which passers-by on the main road see outside your unit’s base?
> A: Yes.
> Q: Read it out to the jury, please.
> A: I cannot do that. It is a secret.
>Official panic set in. The foreign secretary who GCHQ had bullied into having us accused of spying wrote that “almost any accommodation is to be preferred” to allowing our trial to continue. A Ministry of Defense report in September 1978, now released, disclosed that the “prosecuting counsel has come to the view that there have been so many published references to the information Campbell has acquired and the conclusions he has drawn from it that the chances of success with [the collection charge] are not good.”
>My lawyer overheard the exasperated prosecutor saying that he would allow the government to continue with the espionage charge against me “over [his] dead body.” The judge, a no-nonsense Welsh lawyer, was also fed up with the secrecy pantomime. He demanded the government scrap the espionage charges. They did.
GCHQ and Me, My Life Unmasking British Eavesdroppers -- Duncan Campbell
Wait, what? What else were people supposed to assume about the purpose of a huge tower with very noticeable horn antennas (widely used for long-distance phone calls over line-of-sight microwave at the time)?
I used to follow dozens of blogs back when most sites supported RSS.
I love reading thoughtfully crafted content, but I don't want my inbox filled with email alerts, and I don't have time to check every blog's website to see if they've posted anything recently.
I had a good few feeds that had errors that prevented them from parsing. I examine the flaws and parse them anyway. Then one day I discover a website had dropped rss support long ago but I had it in my aggregator?? I open the feed url I was using and it just redirected to the index.html took a minute to realize what was going on. If it couldn't find <item> or anything like it it would look for anything similar, if it couldn't find <link> or <guide> it would search for <a>, if it couldn't find a <title> it would take the text from the <a> or use the url and lastly if it couldn't find or parse <pubdate> it would look inf the item url had something like /2025/ in it, prerably /months/ and /day/ with it.
So that was what was going on. It could find links on the frontpage and it could parse titles and dates from those.
A surprising number of sites still support RSS even though they don't have an icon or a link to the feed in the UI - so it's worth checking the page source to see if there's a feed URL.
It's one of the big things I'll credit Wordpress for - they enable RSS by default so a lot of sites support it without even meaning to.
Lots of websites still have RSS... even I have RSS on my website, took me half a day to figure out how to do it all by myself. The site is generated using code I wrote myself... and it was quite easy to generate the XML needed from all pages - which is all you need for a RSS feed.
I feel MOST blogs still use RSS/Atom. Back in the day, Feedly had a migration from Google Reader which involved just logging in via your Google Account. All your feeds were there. It's been rock solid for me ever since.
Now they've expanded into threat intelligence and I'll get popups asking me if I'm interested in the latest CVE or whatever, but I just dismiss those and read my blogs and comics. Not shilling, in fact I work for a competitor, but I use it every day!
RSS is still alive and well! I even keep a public rss river feed of a bunch of sites I like so I can share my curation with others: https://infoscope.disinfo.zone - of course this has an RSS feed too...
Well, plastic came from the underground (as oil) and to the underground should return, as much as possible. You could argue that when plastic waste is not burned, a corresponding amount of fossil fuels are extracted from the underground to make up the difference, but I think the existence of renewable energy sources makes the replacement ratio (waste plastic to new fossil fuels) much less than 1 to 1.
If we are going to phase out fossils, we might just as well as phase out plastics last. (By burning it.) It the meantime, figure out how to make plastic less toxic and also how to use less of it.
That assumes that it does not decay in the landfill.
Even if that is true today, I don't think we can rule out the evolution of bacteria etc. (possibly bio-engineered) to feed on plastics.
It's barely one step removed from just being burned in an incinerator, it's maybe recycling in a very strict sense but it's definitely misleading to say that.
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