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The Chinese authorities will hold him until they feel he has given them all he knows, then quickly extradite him to the US.

At that point he will probably try to get to Europe. If he makes it, his appeal to those governments on humanitarian grounds may be weakened by the fact the first country he picked practices capital punishment far more than the US (more than every other country in the world combined):

http://www.amnesty.org/en/death-penalty/death-sentences-and-...

He could have fled to Europe in the first place just as easily. For example, US citizens are exempt from visa requirements for short stays (90 days) in France -- la Patrie des droits de l'homme -- from where he would have had direct access to the ECtHR...


http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-n...

Snowden: "Leaving the US was an incredible risk, as NSA employees must declare their foreign travel 30 days in advance and are monitored. There was a distinct possibility I would be interdicted en route, so I had to travel with no advance booking to a country with the cultural and legal framework to allow me to work without being immediately detained. Hong Kong provided that. Iceland could be pushed harder, quicker, before the public could have a chance to make their feelings known, and I would not put that past the current US administration."

He was not charged yet when he went to HK.


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

And there's the whole moratorium currently in place against extradition in HK right now, and they have a British-based judicial system that takes FOREVER (just like ours!), and have an exemption in their extradition treaties for political crimes. HK != PRC.


Every browser seems to implement its own password management scheme. None of them are as good as the same functionality that already exists in the operating system. Browsers should request access to passwords from the OS when needed, perhaps once per session.


Technically the NSA is a part of the DOD. They assist the ODNI which is civilian, although its leadership role is limited.


I think the US government is not on the list because they don't need this program. The NSA finds its exploits directly from the source code, which Microsoft shares with them and many other governments, not second-hand from Microsoft.


I hope Snowden realizes that none of this matters if an FBI agent is sitting beside the reporter as they communicate.


Presumably the contents of the conversation will not be secret. Only the location of Snowden.


An open message to Snowden: this reporter would hand over his private key in a second.


He probably pissed off some member of the royal family, whom are more important to the US than intellectuals.


Although this wasn't news to most people here, keep in mind that the US has always denied doing economic espionage, against China or anyone else. The Snowden leak also revealed that the largest target of US espionage in Europe is Germany -- I can't think of any reason for that other than economic espionage. This certainly raises questions.


There exist proof and verification tools for C, like ACSL and Frama-C, [1] or LCL and Splint. [2,3] Not to mention the myriad of static and dynamic analysis tools. You can prove that a piece of C code does or doesn't contain certain bugs -- this is not the case for higher-level languages (except perhaps Haskell and ML). That is why C is used for highly sensitive projects like avionics.

I would say: learn C and high-level languages.

[1] http://frama-c.com/acsl.html

[2] www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-74.pdf

[3] http://splint.org/


I'm glad I came across this article. I'm learning Python and was given that advice to use multiprocessing rather than threading, but hadn't researched why. Very informative, thanks for sharing.


Well hold on now; there are a lot of times when using threading is easier and faster than using multiprocessing. It depends on what you're doing.

Threading creates new OS-level threads, but whenever your code is being run by the bytecode interpreter, Python holds the global interpreter lock. This is released during I/O operations and a lot of the built-in functions, and you can release it in any C or Cython extension code you write. If you're running into Python speed bottlenecks, you can usually get significant speedups with very little effort by moving the bottlenecky code to Cython and maybe adding a few type declarations.

Multiprocessing spawns a pool of worker processes and doles out tasks to them by serializing the data and using local sockets for IPC. This naturally has a lot of overhead, and there's some subtlety with the data serialization. So, be aware of that. The nice part, though, is that you don't have the GIL, which can sometimes speed things up.


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