That's all quite true. When I said that it could do serious damage if detonated properly, by "detonated properly", I meant if the person setting it off was competent, i.e. if he took the time to collect the powder into a reasonably compact mass and used something significant to ignite it all at once (e.g. a blasting cap, a hammer, etc.). Yeah, strewn loosely in his underpants as this was, there was no chance it was ever going to do anything but burn.
First, the underwear bomber had about 80 grams. The shoe bomber had 50 grams. And 50 grams was enough to blow a hole in the side of an aircraft in controlled tests.
Second, the only reason this was not a devastating explosion is that the bomber did not ignite it properly. As best I understand it, to trigger explosives like PETN, you have to have a starter that burns really hot. If you just light the stuff, most or all of it burns up before it gets hot enough to explode. That's what happened, and since they put the fire out, it never got hot enough to explode at all. Because it is so hard to ignite, for all practical purposes, PETN isn't very useful except in a lighter cord, as a heart medication, or as a secondary charge....
Had it been ignited properly and gone off all at once, 80 grams of PETN is equivalent to about 132 grams of TNT, with a potential explosive force of about 552 kilojoules. That's about a quarter of a stick of dynamite, or nearly an entire hand grenade, not a third of a grenade. I'm pretty sure that's more than enough to kill several people and blow a hole in the side of an airframe. Would it bring the plane down? Probably not, unless the explosion just happened to damage some critical control cables or something. Would it be a very serious disaster? You bet.
That said, there is one technology that could have easily prevented this particular class of attack: an NQR (nuclear quadrupole resonance) machine. It's basically like an MRI but it is designed to pick up the specific resonant frequencies of nitrate-based compounds. Expect these systems to be deployed in the not-too-distant future, and unlike the millimeter wave and backscatter X-Ray systems, NQR doesn't cause cancer and doesn't show your naughty bits in high resolution detail....
If Apple is in violation of GSM patents, then the patent system is even more broken than I thought. If I go buy a Wi-Fi card and stick it in a laptop, install the drivers, and sell the laptop as a Wi-Fi-enabled device, I don't expect to have to pay patent royalties to the Wi-Fi Alliance. I expect that the Wi-Fi chip vendor paid those royalties, and that the cost of those royalties were passed on to the card manufacturer as part of the part cost, and that the card manufacturer then passed the cost on to me as part of the price of the card.
More to the point, the very act of buying a legally licensed chip should implicitly grant a patent license to any and all software technologies required to actually make use that chip. Anything less is patently absurd. To give a car analogy, it would be like selling an engine to a car manufacturer, but using a special connector on the end of the crankshaft and suing the car manufacturer years later for violating a patent on the matching connector.
Beyond that, there aren't a lot of other security measures that will have mass appeal.
I think that you hit the nail on the head there. It's easy to stop terrorism if you have no moral or ethical limitations, but as soon as you limit yourself to what is acceptable, it is almost impossible. For example, you could put a hundred million in a bank account and announce that it will be used to put a price on the heads of the family and friends of anyone who commits an act of terror against the U.S. Then carry out the threat. It won't take long to dry up their supply of volunteers. Or go one step further and nuke their entire village or city. Highly effective, but not at all palatable.
Where did you hear that there were liquids involved? AFAIK, it was a powdered explosive in somebody's underpants. Next time it will just be disguised as heart medication (which it happens to be, BTW).
Even if they updated regularly, it would still be an easy target. Something like six of the top ten browser crasher bugs are in Flash plug-ins. There are so many crasher bugs that nobody can even keep count. When you realize that every single one of those is probably an exploitable attack vector, you quickly understand why I use click2flash. Swiss cheese belongs on sandwiches, not on the public Internet....
Usually they whine because "slightly outside of their comfort zone" in management-speak translates "boss asked me to solve the halting problem today" in geek-speak.
In my experience, programmers usually act that way because you've asked them to do something that they're not entirely convinced is possible, much less feasible, and they're dragging their heels because they aren't assertive enough to call you a moron to your face.
That said, there are people who refuse to do anything outside their job description. Usually, this attitude happens in union shops. If they see enough people acting that way around them, they're going to start acting the same way.
You're wrong. Well, you're right up to a point, but you forgot one thing. Those security people are pissed because this has been buried by those dirty politicians and telecom lobbyists. They have an axe to grind, and now several thousand of them just got the keys to GSM.
Crooked politicians should be scared out of their minds by this. I'd give it six months before we start to see tapped GSM phone calls showing up on YouTube, resulting in high-profile congress critters resigning in disgrace. Six months max. Maybe much sooner.
Seconded on the whole web programming thing. I suggest PHP. It's lightweight, has a C-like syntax to make the future transition to C/C++ easier, and integrates easily into an environment that kids already are familiar with (the web). It also has a lighweight notion of classes, making it a perfect choice for introducing OOP without the bloat of Java or the ugliness of C++.
The escape window opens inward like all cabin doors. Given the air pressure gradient, there's no way any person could open it. In fact, if I'm remembering the numbers correctly, there's no way that ten people pulling at once could exert that much force.
Not at all. Use solar power and a small satellite uplink dish. You could potentially do that in a way that is concealed from the ground, is pretty hard to detect, and only has wires between the location of the camera and the location of the uplink gear. Oh, and if those wires get cut, you could immediately dispatch someone to investigate, repair, and apprehend.
I and many others believe that God forgives us solely because of our faith, but that faith must, by necessity, be more than just claiming to believe in something. Faith has to be lived out in our words and in our deeds; without living out our faith, it is not truly faith. Thus, faith is necessary for salvation (and no other specific single thing is necessary), but it is not sufficient.
Protestants, as I have pointed out earlier, do not believe in "work", but faith alone. In their view, work only confirms faith (from which it comes). While we (Catholics) see work and faith as cooperating (see James again).
No, some protestants believe in sola fide. AFAIK, neither the Anglican church nor the Methodist church believe that (in the purest sense, anyway), and both are decidedly protestant. There are two ways of looking at sola fide. One is that faith alone is necessary, one is that faith alone is sufficient. All protestants believe the first, not all believe the second.
A sinner comes to find God, then later murders someone. The evangelicals and the more Lutheran-descended protestants would argue that this person was never truly saved. The Methodist/Anglican way of looking at it is that faith not supported through continued justification is insufficient.
In short, sola fide isn't a binary switch. It's a continuum.
I guess I'll have to test this out, but I'm curious. How are they different, especially in non-IE browsers?
I honestly don't remember. It has been two or three years since I dealt with that one. It was mostly off-by-one-pixel type errors, I think, but again, not something I've dealt with lately. Seems like there was some case I ran into where IE rendered an inner box at about two-thirds the width of all the other browsers or something really bizarre like that, but it was probably a one-off that would literally require reproducing the entire structure just to hit it....:-)
[re border image] Is this something non-web GUIs have right?
Don't know. That's just an annoying nit I noticed a couple of weeks ago.:-)
Since we're talking HTML5, this demo may be relevant. Since we're talking about HTML5, don't complain about "does not work across all browsers". IE6 and Firefox 2.0 surely don't support HTML5. How did I conclude you're also talking about HTML5? Because you mentioned local storage.
Thanks for pointing that out. The HTML5 drag-and-drop stuff is a relatively new addition to the spec and I wasn't aware that it had gone in.
On Linux, at least, backing this up is a trivial shell script.
Being able to back up the files and being able to back them up in a fashion that is useful to the user are two different things, though. For example, if I want to restore that backup into an existing system, the merge of those SQL databases is nontrivial at best, disaster-prone at worst, and insane in general.
There is, however, a standard for drag and drop, and several libraries which emulate it in all browsers.
Son of a gun. After all these years, they finally got around to codifying it in a draft standard for HTML5 a few months ago. About freaking time.
Google "web workers" -- it's not Firefox-specific.
Ah. I didn't realize anybody else had implemented it. Upon further looking, I see Safari 4 does. I retract that statement.
That's by design. What hardware do you need to talk to?
No hardware specifically. I was merely pointing out that there are a number of types of software that JavaScript just plain cannot provide. For example, if I tried to build a computer whose whole programming interface was a browser, even trivial tasks like renaming files or copying photos off a flash drive would not be practical without significantly changing the basic model for interaction between the browser and the hardware.
Assign a fixed size to elements which shouldn't grow, assign a percentage to the ones which should. This has been known for years. I'm sure you've found something that's "an utter pain", but what is it?
Among other things, percentages don't always do what you want. For example, if you need a 100 pixel area and a second area beside it that tries to be the same as the remaining size in the enclosing container, different browsers seem to interpret that "100%" subtly differently (with IE typically being the worst offender). Things get even hairier if you want fixed width margin areas. The classic one that's a pain in the ass to get right is trying to specify a border image. Yes, the new border-image tag helps with this, but it still leaves a lot to be desired. For example, there's no way to use a gradient (e.g. -webkit-gradient) as a border with -border-image and still retain the ability to round the borders with -webkit-border-radius. And it's not a bug in Safari; it is a flaw in the spec.
There are all sorts of little quirks when working with the box model. It's not that the box model is fundamentally wrong---it's pretty solid on the whole---but that there are all those little edge cases that keep coming back to bite you on the you-know-what.:-)
...duh?
I can't remember what problems I've had with the button tag, only that I've had problems with it.
What is it about the box model you don't like?
There are just a lot of odd things about it, mainly because not everybody implements it the same way. The whole thing also has an annoying flaw in that it is based on an arbitrary device-independent pixel size, but most browsers don't support fractional pixels, making it really rather problematic to do precise layout, and it doesn't provide a way to work with true physical pixels for when you want to do layout in a less generic fashion.
Regarding the columns stuff, I haven't looked at the CSS3 column bits. That either didn't exist or wasn't supported in Safari the last time I tried to do a columnar layout. (Couldn't care less about IE.)
Local storage is pretty cool, and the CSS animation and stuff doubly so. There's still the problem of having a good way to back up local storage.... *sigh*
That said, it's still not even slightly close to what you can do in a native app. Even if performance was identical, the DOM is beyond half assed as a GUI environment. There's not even a drag and drop mechanism built in that works across all browsers. There's no way to guarantee that your handlers won't get stripped out by some overzealous UI library that you load. Basic functionality like contentEditable (for WYSIWYG editing) is barely supported in any browser, replete with hundreds of serious bugs that make it very hard to deal with. There's no way to set up an automatically recurring callback with a guaranteed period. There's no way to spawn multiple threads of concurrent execution (except for a FireFox-specific mechanism). There's no standard way to talk to hardware. And those are just the huge problems.
Even simple things like specifying which UI elements should grow proportional to the window size is an utter pain. Creating clickable buttons that don't get their text content selected can be rather entertaining. Convincing the browser to not deselect the selected text in a contentEditable region when you do so is doubly so. Then, you have that fun box model that only a committee could love (all of us are dumber than any of us). Don't get me started on trying to do column layouts with CSS. I could go into specifics, but if you've ever tried to build any significant web application, you're already nodding in agreement....:-)
Yeah, it's going in the right direction. It's got a long way to go, unfortunately. Right now, it takes mounds of custom GUI libraries just to get usable UI, mainly working around the fact that the web browser just wasn't designed to do this stuff. When I can write a web app that's lightweight and doesn't require bringing in something as heavyweight as Prototype just to get anything done, we'll be at least in the right ballpark./p>
Mine lasted six or so before I had to jury rig the door switch shut when the cheap plastic parts broke. They don't make them like they used to, but even still, two years would border on comedy.
Which means that you should not be unable to get medical care equal to that of the rich merely because your job pays poorly. At the lowest level of the hierarchy of needs, there are only two ways for you to be treated equally: for those needs to be relatively cheap or for those needs to be provided for everyone.
Secured creditors are creditors who are owed secured debts. A secured debt, by definition, means that the company put up collateral in exchange for obtaining a loan. For that to happen, the company has to have something of value, and for a small, presumably VC-funded company, this is unlikely to be the case beyond maybe a small business loan against the furniture. I guess in the unlikely event that this company owns any real estate, issued secured corporate bonds, or issued certain types of insurance policies (e.g. life insurance), then they might have significant secured debts, but....
There is basically zero chance that a major record label is going to be a secured creditor short of outright fraud. They would be unsecured creditors just like the independent musicians. So chances are, if the independent musicians *know* about the bankruptcy proceeding, they can file a claim for recovery of some portion of that unsecured debt and will probably get something. And if the independent musicians aren't properly notified, they can almost certainly sue the law firm responsible for the bankruptcy filings for gross negligence.
Slashdot Mirror
That's all quite true. When I said that it could do serious damage if detonated properly, by "detonated properly", I meant if the person setting it off was competent, i.e. if he took the time to collect the powder into a reasonably compact mass and used something significant to ignite it all at once (e.g. a blasting cap, a hammer, etc.). Yeah, strewn loosely in his underpants as this was, there was no chance it was ever going to do anything but burn.
Your numbers are way, way off.
First, the underwear bomber had about 80 grams. The shoe bomber had 50 grams. And 50 grams was enough to blow a hole in the side of an aircraft in controlled tests.
Second, the only reason this was not a devastating explosion is that the bomber did not ignite it properly. As best I understand it, to trigger explosives like PETN, you have to have a starter that burns really hot. If you just light the stuff, most or all of it burns up before it gets hot enough to explode. That's what happened, and since they put the fire out, it never got hot enough to explode at all. Because it is so hard to ignite, for all practical purposes, PETN isn't very useful except in a lighter cord, as a heart medication, or as a secondary charge....
Had it been ignited properly and gone off all at once, 80 grams of PETN is equivalent to about 132 grams of TNT, with a potential explosive force of about 552 kilojoules. That's about a quarter of a stick of dynamite, or nearly an entire hand grenade, not a third of a grenade. I'm pretty sure that's more than enough to kill several people and blow a hole in the side of an airframe. Would it bring the plane down? Probably not, unless the explosion just happened to damage some critical control cables or something. Would it be a very serious disaster? You bet.
That said, there is one technology that could have easily prevented this particular class of attack: an NQR (nuclear quadrupole resonance) machine. It's basically like an MRI but it is designed to pick up the specific resonant frequencies of nitrate-based compounds. Expect these systems to be deployed in the not-too-distant future, and unlike the millimeter wave and backscatter X-Ray systems, NQR doesn't cause cancer and doesn't show your naughty bits in high resolution detail....
If Apple is in violation of GSM patents, then the patent system is even more broken than I thought. If I go buy a Wi-Fi card and stick it in a laptop, install the drivers, and sell the laptop as a Wi-Fi-enabled device, I don't expect to have to pay patent royalties to the Wi-Fi Alliance. I expect that the Wi-Fi chip vendor paid those royalties, and that the cost of those royalties were passed on to the card manufacturer as part of the part cost, and that the card manufacturer then passed the cost on to me as part of the price of the card.
More to the point, the very act of buying a legally licensed chip should implicitly grant a patent license to any and all software technologies required to actually make use that chip. Anything less is patently absurd. To give a car analogy, it would be like selling an engine to a car manufacturer, but using a special connector on the end of the crankshaft and suing the car manufacturer years later for violating a patent on the matching connector.
I think that you hit the nail on the head there. It's easy to stop terrorism if you have no moral or ethical limitations, but as soon as you limit yourself to what is acceptable, it is almost impossible. For example, you could put a hundred million in a bank account and announce that it will be used to put a price on the heads of the family and friends of anyone who commits an act of terror against the U.S. Then carry out the threat. It won't take long to dry up their supply of volunteers. Or go one step further and nuke their entire village or city. Highly effective, but not at all palatable.
Where did you hear that there were liquids involved? AFAIK, it was a powdered explosive in somebody's underpants. Next time it will just be disguised as heart medication (which it happens to be, BTW).
Even if they updated regularly, it would still be an easy target. Something like six of the top ten browser crasher bugs are in Flash plug-ins. There are so many crasher bugs that nobody can even keep count. When you realize that every single one of those is probably an exploitable attack vector, you quickly understand why I use click2flash. Swiss cheese belongs on sandwiches, not on the public Internet....
Usually they whine because "slightly outside of their comfort zone" in management-speak translates "boss asked me to solve the halting problem today" in geek-speak.
In my experience, programmers usually act that way because you've asked them to do something that they're not entirely convinced is possible, much less feasible, and they're dragging their heels because they aren't assertive enough to call you a moron to your face.
That said, there are people who refuse to do anything outside their job description. Usually, this attitude happens in union shops. If they see enough people acting that way around them, they're going to start acting the same way.
You're wrong. Well, you're right up to a point, but you forgot one thing. Those security people are pissed because this has been buried by those dirty politicians and telecom lobbyists. They have an axe to grind, and now several thousand of them just got the keys to GSM.
Crooked politicians should be scared out of their minds by this. I'd give it six months before we start to see tapped GSM phone calls showing up on YouTube, resulting in high-profile congress critters resigning in disgrace. Six months max. Maybe much sooner.
Seconded on the whole web programming thing. I suggest PHP. It's lightweight, has a C-like syntax to make the future transition to C/C++ easier, and integrates easily into an environment that kids already are familiar with (the web). It also has a lighweight notion of classes, making it a perfect choice for introducing OOP without the bloat of Java or the ugliness of C++.
The escape window opens inward like all cabin doors. Given the air pressure gradient, there's no way any person could open it. In fact, if I'm remembering the numbers correctly, there's no way that ten people pulling at once could exert that much force.
Not at all. Use solar power and a small satellite uplink dish. You could potentially do that in a way that is concealed from the ground, is pretty hard to detect, and only has wires between the location of the camera and the location of the uplink gear. Oh, and if those wires get cut, you could immediately dispatch someone to investigate, repair, and apprehend.
I and many others believe that God forgives us solely because of our faith, but that faith must, by necessity, be more than just claiming to believe in something. Faith has to be lived out in our words and in our deeds; without living out our faith, it is not truly faith. Thus, faith is necessary for salvation (and no other specific single thing is necessary), but it is not sufficient.
In Catholic high schools? Probably....
No, some protestants believe in sola fide. AFAIK, neither the Anglican church nor the Methodist church believe that (in the purest sense, anyway), and both are decidedly protestant. There are two ways of looking at sola fide. One is that faith alone is necessary, one is that faith alone is sufficient. All protestants believe the first, not all believe the second.
A sinner comes to find God, then later murders someone. The evangelicals and the more Lutheran-descended protestants would argue that this person was never truly saved. The Methodist/Anglican way of looking at it is that faith not supported through continued justification is insufficient.
In short, sola fide isn't a binary switch. It's a continuum.
I honestly don't remember. It has been two or three years since I dealt with that one. It was mostly off-by-one-pixel type errors, I think, but again, not something I've dealt with lately. Seems like there was some case I ran into where IE rendered an inner box at about two-thirds the width of all the other browsers or something really bizarre like that, but it was probably a one-off that would literally require reproducing the entire structure just to hit it.... :-)
Don't know. That's just an annoying nit I noticed a couple of weeks ago. :-)
Thanks for pointing that out. The HTML5 drag-and-drop stuff is a relatively new addition to the spec and I wasn't aware that it had gone in.
Being able to back up the files and being able to back them up in a fashion that is useful to the user are two different things, though. For example, if I want to restore that backup into an existing system, the merge of those SQL databases is nontrivial at best, disaster-prone at worst, and insane in general.
Son of a gun. After all these years, they finally got around to codifying it in a draft standard for HTML5 a few months ago. About freaking time.
Ah. I didn't realize anybody else had implemented it. Upon further looking, I see Safari 4 does. I retract that statement.
No hardware specifically. I was merely pointing out that there are a number of types of software that JavaScript just plain cannot provide. For example, if I tried to build a computer whose whole programming interface was a browser, even trivial tasks like renaming files or copying photos off a flash drive would not be practical without significantly changing the basic model for interaction between the browser and the hardware.
Among other things, percentages don't always do what you want. For example, if you need a 100 pixel area and a second area beside it that tries to be the same as the remaining size in the enclosing container, different browsers seem to interpret that "100%" subtly differently (with IE typically being the worst offender). Things get even hairier if you want fixed width margin areas. The classic one that's a pain in the ass to get right is trying to specify a border image. Yes, the new border-image tag helps with this, but it still leaves a lot to be desired. For example, there's no way to use a gradient (e.g. -webkit-gradient) as a border with -border-image and still retain the ability to round the borders with -webkit-border-radius. And it's not a bug in Safari; it is a flaw in the spec.
There are all sorts of little quirks when working with the box model. It's not that the box model is fundamentally wrong---it's pretty solid on the whole---but that there are all those little edge cases that keep coming back to bite you on the you-know-what. :-)
I can't remember what problems I've had with the button tag, only that I've had problems with it.
There are just a lot of odd things about it, mainly because not everybody implements it the same way. The whole thing also has an annoying flaw in that it is based on an arbitrary device-independent pixel size, but most browsers don't support fractional pixels, making it really rather problematic to do precise layout, and it doesn't provide a way to work with true physical pixels for when you want to do layout in a less generic fashion.
Regarding the columns stuff, I haven't looked at the CSS3 column bits. That either didn't exist or wasn't supported in Safari the last time I tried to do a columnar layout. (Couldn't care less about IE.)
Local storage is pretty cool, and the CSS animation and stuff doubly so. There's still the problem of having a good way to back up local storage.... *sigh*
That said, it's still not even slightly close to what you can do in a native app. Even if performance was identical, the DOM is beyond half assed as a GUI environment. There's not even a drag and drop mechanism built in that works across all browsers. There's no way to guarantee that your handlers won't get stripped out by some overzealous UI library that you load. Basic functionality like contentEditable (for WYSIWYG editing) is barely supported in any browser, replete with hundreds of serious bugs that make it very hard to deal with. There's no way to set up an automatically recurring callback with a guaranteed period. There's no way to spawn multiple threads of concurrent execution (except for a FireFox-specific mechanism). There's no standard way to talk to hardware. And those are just the huge problems.
Even simple things like specifying which UI elements should grow proportional to the window size is an utter pain. Creating clickable buttons that don't get their text content selected can be rather entertaining. Convincing the browser to not deselect the selected text in a contentEditable region when you do so is doubly so. Then, you have that fun box model that only a committee could love (all of us are dumber than any of us). Don't get me started on trying to do column layouts with CSS. I could go into specifics, but if you've ever tried to build any significant web application, you're already nodding in agreement.... :-)
Yeah, it's going in the right direction. It's got a long way to go, unfortunately. Right now, it takes mounds of custom GUI libraries just to get usable UI, mainly working around the fact that the web browser just wasn't designed to do this stuff. When I can write a web app that's lightweight and doesn't require bringing in something as heavyweight as Prototype just to get anything done, we'll be at least in the right ballpark./p>
Mine lasted six or so before I had to jury rig the door switch shut when the cheap plastic parts broke. They don't make them like they used to, but even still, two years would border on comedy.
Which means that you should not be unable to get medical care equal to that of the rich merely because your job pays poorly. At the lowest level of the hierarchy of needs, there are only two ways for you to be treated equally: for those needs to be relatively cheap or for those needs to be provided for everyone.
Secured creditors are creditors who are owed secured debts. A secured debt, by definition, means that the company put up collateral in exchange for obtaining a loan. For that to happen, the company has to have something of value, and for a small, presumably VC-funded company, this is unlikely to be the case beyond maybe a small business loan against the furniture. I guess in the unlikely event that this company owns any real estate, issued secured corporate bonds, or issued certain types of insurance policies (e.g. life insurance), then they might have significant secured debts, but....
There is basically zero chance that a major record label is going to be a secured creditor short of outright fraud. They would be unsecured creditors just like the independent musicians. So chances are, if the independent musicians *know* about the bankruptcy proceeding, they can file a claim for recovery of some portion of that unsecured debt and will probably get something. And if the independent musicians aren't properly notified, they can almost certainly sue the law firm responsible for the bankruptcy filings for gross negligence.
And the GNU toolchain folks expect to have a working compiler front end by some time early next year.
No, no, embarrassment over his or her love of Britney Spears's music was almost certainly the *reason* that he or she used Tor....
Not to my knowledge.