The reason you can't see it isn't that the drop isn't significant. It's because it's only been a week, and on a 10 year scale, it's just that last pixel on the graph. Meanwhile, it has shifted the entire graph upwards.
Today's announcement is simply the inevitable switch from "Search and Rescue" to a "Recovery" effort. It's been 2 weeks, someone had to make the call that the possibility of finding people alive has diminished to the point beyond hope.
As a "Recovery" effort, the pace will continue, but they will no longer risk lives to find the wreckage.
Reason would dictate that if the plane had truly landed somewhere, it would have been found by now. Wild theories of said plane flying under some other similar plane to avoid radar detection would have been figured out already and would have not caused us to go on any wild goose chases in the Indian Ocean.
The only action possible against the federal government for copyright violation is an action in the Court of Federal Claims to recover money damages. [1]
If they get rid of the service and the data pre-emptively, they can safely destroy the data. Once they've recieved an NSL, they have to comply with the order and provide the data (or at least the metadata) or be in contempt of court.
In a statement to TechCrunch about whether the shut down was only because Silent Circle felt email was insecure, CEO Michael Janke tells us
“It goes deeper than that. There are some very high profile people on Silent Circle- and I mean very targeted people- as well as heads of state, human rights groups, reporters, special operations units from many countries. We wanted to be proactive because we knew USG would come after us due to the sheer amount of people who use us- let alone the “highly targeted high profile people”. They are completely secure and clean on Silent Phone, Silent Text and Silent Eyes, but email is broken because govt can force us to turn over what we have. So to protect everyone and to drive them to use the other three peer to peer products- we made the decision to do this before men on [SIC] suits show up. Now- they are completely shut down- nothing they can get from us or try and force from us- we literally have nothing anywhere.”
Interesting strategy. So, while they were not able to store the content of the emails, they still retained the metadata. That metadata could be subject to subpoena, and if they destroyed the data after a request, they'd be in contempt of court. Dropping the service pre-emptively lets them delete all the data before they are asked for it.
Would be great to be able to deploy to multiple locations with one button. Even better, to deploy to an arbitrary number of locations based on how many cloud instances are running at the moment.
Also, maybe a multi-stage deployment.. One button to push from Dev to Staging, another from Staging to Production.
> Since the 1890s, U.S. customary units (the mile, pound, teaspoon, etc.) have all been defined in terms of their metric equivalents.
I don't know what the "official" definition is, but pounds are most often defined as 0.45359 kg. The problem is, pounds and kilograms are fundamentally different.
A pound is a measurement of weight (or the force that gravity exerts on an object), while kilograms are measures of mass. When you are measuring different things, we run into all kinds of issues of translation. You almost never hear of a pound being converted to "newtons" which would probably be more accurate.
