There is nothing about 'java' the language that did that; but it is very hard to deny that vulnerabilities in the implementation of support for embedded java applets have been a huge source of desktop infections. Adobe might be slightly worse; but that's damning by very faint praise.
I'll leave arguing about the merits of the language and the JVM to the experts; but applet support has, quite simply, been painfully unsuitable for use on anything except fully trusted, ideally internal, material more or less forever, and neither Sun nor Oracle ever got it up to snuff for use in a mostly-untrusted web browsing environment.
It sucked for the people in areas deemed insufficiently profitable, though: good old VZ declared their goofy little cellphone-in-a-box 'good enough' and didn't bother with that tedious wire maintenance.
If you have 12 inches of abandoned cable, you just reclassify it as a 'felted conductor structural element' and never touch it again(unless you are doing some serious renovation, in which case you saw it out in chunks as you would any other solid structural material).
If I remember my conspiracy lore correctly, the north pole is where the entrance to the hollow earth(inside which, depending on who you ask, the lost tribes of israel and/or the nazis that didn't end up on the moon or in south america, reside).
Now, what I'd love to see is the crackpot math that explains how GPS works on a flat earth.
You'll notice that the 'government goons' are not doing anything to or against Theranos' R&D arm. They haven't actually made their system work for much yet; but they are free to continue poking at it until they can no longer find the money to do so.
The current inquiries are into Theranos' lab services arm, which is already up and running and (mostly not using their own process to do so) offering various blood tests. For the process that they are researching, efficacy is between them and their investors. For the process that they are already selling, 'wait and see' time is over and we are seeing if they have made the process that they are selling work before selling it.
So, going from a revolutionary plan to do tests with markedly less blood using your super-neat proprietary hardware to not even being able to operate off-the-shelf hardware from competitors well enough to satisfy Medicare?
The AZERTY layout was hammered out for some reason or other involving the typewriter market before the turn of the 20th century. If it's so awful, how did its suckitude escape official comment for this long? Especially weird when several other regions that speak substantial amounts of french have keyboard layouts that they seem happier with.
Aside from 'donations' that basically go to pure astroturfing for somebody's pet project; I'd imagine that a lot of the influence comes not from direct string-attaching(which would indeed get pretty bribey looking pretty quickly); but from the effective leverage of having the city pick up the bulk of the infrastructure and operational costs that would exist across most possible educational setups; but getting the setup you want by donating the marginal cost(in cash or in kind) of whatever your pet project requires.
Since the district is on the hook for educating kiddo either way, it is relatively easy to structure the offer of a donation as a 'free' bonus, rather than a request that all the resources allocated to a given school or student body be reallocated to your pet project; but if you end up only paying for the pet project part, with the district picking up everything else, the effect is similar.
It's also idiotic because(as the TOR project makes no secret of) TOR actually reduces your security in the context of accessing authenticated services and cannot regain the privacy you lose by signing in with account credentials tied to something.
If you are going to log in to some site, you want SSL/TLS: sure, any adversary on the wire will know that you are talking to facebook; but stealing your password or getting the details of what you are doing there will be tricky. TOR is good for making hard to trace connections to random resources; but why would you possibly want an exit node over which you have no control signing in to facebook for you?
Oh, I'd be inclined to agree; but as long as you can get north of 50% support for bombing fictional countries when polling, it's a bit of an uphill sell.
Isn't it cheery how much more time we spend blowing things up abroad now that we have a Department of Defense, unlike our old barbaric ways when we had a Department of War?
Arguably the harvesting and the curating are separate steps. Harvesting is the easy part, curating requires a lot of uranium hexafluoride and fancy centrifuges.
I would assume that, at least for anything large enough, they'd want to go nuclear-navy unless otherwise pressed. That's certainly the most mature option; and if they ever get their lasers and railguns working they aren't exactly going to need less energy in the future.
That said, both the army and the navy would probably be interested if you could get a small hydrocracking/reforming apparatus, sturdy enough for field use with a variety of assorted lipids, for on-site synthesis of fuels in a pinch. No matter how optimistic you are about either classic nuclear, contemporary 'renewables', or both, it's pretty hard to beat hydrocarbons for things like aviation.
All joking aside, there has been some preliminary-but-in-all-seriousness poking at the notion of attaching 'sails'(they more closely resemble parasailing sails than classic wooden ship rigging) to cargo ships to supplement the conventional engines.
Even the optimists don't envision a substitution; but modest fuel savings add up when dealing with that many large ships making that many long trips.
Followers of Abrahamic monotheisms(with the exception of the utterly pathetic 'prosperity gospel' types) tend to get pretty jumpy when dealing with agents of Mammon.
Mostly because they come bearing cool toys and are hell to compete against for marketshare.
So long as they help keep oil cheap it is unlikely that they'll be edged out of the market; but that's one of the problems for a lot of the petrostates(not just middle eastern, Venezuela is having a hell of a time with this issue right now): if the product is too expensive, customers have an incentive to leave; but if it stays cheap enough to be attractive, you no longer have the same amount of money to spend on whatever mixture of guns and butter keeps you in office.
It's not entirely clear that Malaysian palm-oil barons will be any less unpleasant; but it'll be a change of scenery.
It seems unlikely that the navy has any particular interest in doing this as a cost saving measure(especially in the near term); and a much greater interest in knowing that they have the option of doing this in the relatively likely event that they'll be called to do something when one or more oil producing regions go further to hell than usual and prices and availability reflect that.
If they happen to save money at some point, so much the better; but the enthusiasm is presumably for being able to set sail with a tested fuel even if the usual supply chains are shot. Plus, testing it in ships is probably a convenient starting point. Big marine engines are less touchy than fighter aircraft or the like.
Unfortunately, it's as politically expedient as it is dubiously effective. Who wants to be weak on defense? Nobody. Who wants to be responsible for dragging us into a quagmire and lots of flag draped coffins? Nobody. It isn't actually clear that you can win much of a war from the air, even when you are willing to use WWII-scale bomber groups and tolerance for massive civilian casualties, much less with a handful of spooks and some model aircraft; but it is a great way of telling voters that you are Really Serious about getting tough on terrorists and ethniclashistan without incurring much real risk.
I imagine that the people within the defense apparatus who write boring theoretical papers that mostly nobody reads will relatively quickly conclude that this sort of thing is of very limited use unless your problem really is just a few irreplaceable guys or you have competent local buddies willing to provide the ground forces for you; but it's a lot harder to see people becoming disillusioned with the political value of the strategy: almost as good for your hawk credentials as a real war; but markedly lower risk and so ill-defined that it's almost as hard to "lose" in any definite way as it is to "win" in some coherent sense.
For accuracy's sake, it's worth noting that all those things occurred in securities and financial services markets, not currencies.
We unfortunately have them, so the effects can't be ignored; but it takes an entire industry of obscurantist derivative pushers to produce the amount of chaos these exchanges handle daily.
Less than one would like; though my impression is that the lack of elegant mathematical core can sometimes encourage greater pragmatism (eg. fraud prevention in payment cards could hardly be more of a farce on a technical level; but everyone knows that, so the system ends up being designed to cope. Over in bitcoin land, you have people who don't understand that you are taking a giant, fundamental, leap when you go from 'having bitcoins' to 'having an account with an exchange that says you have bitcoins", the former being backed by all the neat math, the latter being backed by nothing except a painfully amateur and immature version of the conventional banking and payment systems.
Not every user is this deluded, obviously; but when everyone knows that the entire operation is a bunch of messy hacks aimed at facilitating trade, you have fewer blinkered idealists. In conventional systems there is certainly ample malfeasance, irrationality, and just plain stupidity; but usually several steps removed from the mere currency, It's the fancy finance bits where everyone loses their grip on reality. In the bitcoin environment, once you step outside an encrypted wallet on an atypically secure computer, it's the wild west.
Hasn't the bitcoin ecosystem always been a commendably elegant mathematical design embedded in a community that could be mistaken for a deadpanned absurdist parody of a financial system?
The blockchain concept is pretty cool, and does appear to actually work as advertised, it's just that everything not nailed down mathematically is a bit of a clusterfuck.
Slashdot Mirror
There is nothing about 'java' the language that did that; but it is very hard to deny that vulnerabilities in the implementation of support for embedded java applets have been a huge source of desktop infections. Adobe might be slightly worse; but that's damning by very faint praise.
I'll leave arguing about the merits of the language and the JVM to the experts; but applet support has, quite simply, been painfully unsuitable for use on anything except fully trusted, ideally internal, material more or less forever, and neither Sun nor Oracle ever got it up to snuff for use in a mostly-untrusted web browsing environment.
It sucked for the people in areas deemed insufficiently profitable, though: good old VZ declared their goofy little cellphone-in-a-box 'good enough' and didn't bother with that tedious wire maintenance.
Isn't this what hungry grad students are for?
If you have 12 inches of abandoned cable, you just reclassify it as a 'felted conductor structural element' and never touch it again(unless you are doing some serious renovation, in which case you saw it out in chunks as you would any other solid structural material).
I'm mostly wondering about how they keep the constellation in orbit. Did NASA just glue it to the sphere of fixed stars?
If I remember my conspiracy lore correctly, the north pole is where the entrance to the hollow earth(inside which, depending on who you ask, the lost tribes of israel and/or the nazis that didn't end up on the moon or in south america, reside).
Now, what I'd love to see is the crackpot math that explains how GPS works on a flat earth.
You'll notice that the 'government goons' are not doing anything to or against Theranos' R&D arm. They haven't actually made their system work for much yet; but they are free to continue poking at it until they can no longer find the money to do so.
The current inquiries are into Theranos' lab services arm, which is already up and running and (mostly not using their own process to do so) offering various blood tests. For the process that they are researching, efficacy is between them and their investors. For the process that they are already selling, 'wait and see' time is over and we are seeing if they have made the process that they are selling work before selling it.
So, going from a revolutionary plan to do tests with markedly less blood using your super-neat proprietary hardware to not even being able to operate off-the-shelf hardware from competitors well enough to satisfy Medicare?
I guess we can't all be disrupters...
The AZERTY layout was hammered out for some reason or other involving the typewriter market before the turn of the 20th century. If it's so awful, how did its suckitude escape official comment for this long? Especially weird when several other regions that speak substantial amounts of french have keyboard layouts that they seem happier with.
Aside from 'donations' that basically go to pure astroturfing for somebody's pet project; I'd imagine that a lot of the influence comes not from direct string-attaching(which would indeed get pretty bribey looking pretty quickly); but from the effective leverage of having the city pick up the bulk of the infrastructure and operational costs that would exist across most possible educational setups; but getting the setup you want by donating the marginal cost(in cash or in kind) of whatever your pet project requires.
Since the district is on the hook for educating kiddo either way, it is relatively easy to structure the offer of a donation as a 'free' bonus, rather than a request that all the resources allocated to a given school or student body be reallocated to your pet project; but if you end up only paying for the pet project part, with the district picking up everything else, the effect is similar.
The only good ads are dead ads, so these 780 million are arguably better than the ones that Google spared.
It's also idiotic because(as the TOR project makes no secret of) TOR actually reduces your security in the context of accessing authenticated services and cannot regain the privacy you lose by signing in with account credentials tied to something.
If you are going to log in to some site, you want SSL/TLS: sure, any adversary on the wire will know that you are talking to facebook; but stealing your password or getting the details of what you are doing there will be tricky. TOR is good for making hard to trace connections to random resources; but why would you possibly want an exit node over which you have no control signing in to facebook for you?
That's Horrible!
Sent from my iPhone.
Oh, I'd be inclined to agree; but as long as you can get north of 50% support for bombing fictional countries when polling, it's a bit of an uphill sell.
Isn't it cheery how much more time we spend blowing things up abroad now that we have a Department of Defense, unlike our old barbaric ways when we had a Department of War?
Arguably the harvesting and the curating are separate steps. Harvesting is the easy part, curating requires a lot of uranium hexafluoride and fancy centrifuges.
I would assume that, at least for anything large enough, they'd want to go nuclear-navy unless otherwise pressed. That's certainly the most mature option; and if they ever get their lasers and railguns working they aren't exactly going to need less energy in the future.
That said, both the army and the navy would probably be interested if you could get a small hydrocracking/reforming apparatus, sturdy enough for field use with a variety of assorted lipids, for on-site synthesis of fuels in a pinch. No matter how optimistic you are about either classic nuclear, contemporary 'renewables', or both, it's pretty hard to beat hydrocarbons for things like aviation.
All joking aside, there has been some preliminary-but-in-all-seriousness poking at the notion of attaching 'sails'(they more closely resemble parasailing sails than classic wooden ship rigging) to cargo ships to supplement the conventional engines.
Even the optimists don't envision a substitution; but modest fuel savings add up when dealing with that many large ships making that many long trips.
Followers of Abrahamic monotheisms(with the exception of the utterly pathetic 'prosperity gospel' types) tend to get pretty jumpy when dealing with agents of Mammon.
Mostly because they come bearing cool toys and are hell to compete against for marketshare.
Artisinally harvested from the remains of supernovae, just for you.
So long as they help keep oil cheap it is unlikely that they'll be edged out of the market; but that's one of the problems for a lot of the petrostates(not just middle eastern, Venezuela is having a hell of a time with this issue right now): if the product is too expensive, customers have an incentive to leave; but if it stays cheap enough to be attractive, you no longer have the same amount of money to spend on whatever mixture of guns and butter keeps you in office.
It's not entirely clear that Malaysian palm-oil barons will be any less unpleasant; but it'll be a change of scenery.
It seems unlikely that the navy has any particular interest in doing this as a cost saving measure(especially in the near term); and a much greater interest in knowing that they have the option of doing this in the relatively likely event that they'll be called to do something when one or more oil producing regions go further to hell than usual and prices and availability reflect that.
If they happen to save money at some point, so much the better; but the enthusiasm is presumably for being able to set sail with a tested fuel even if the usual supply chains are shot. Plus, testing it in ships is probably a convenient starting point. Big marine engines are less touchy than fighter aircraft or the like.
Unfortunately, it's as politically expedient as it is dubiously effective. Who wants to be weak on defense? Nobody. Who wants to be responsible for dragging us into a quagmire and lots of flag draped coffins? Nobody. It isn't actually clear that you can win much of a war from the air, even when you are willing to use WWII-scale bomber groups and tolerance for massive civilian casualties, much less with a handful of spooks and some model aircraft; but it is a great way of telling voters that you are Really Serious about getting tough on terrorists and ethniclashistan without incurring much real risk.
I imagine that the people within the defense apparatus who write boring theoretical papers that mostly nobody reads will relatively quickly conclude that this sort of thing is of very limited use unless your problem really is just a few irreplaceable guys or you have competent local buddies willing to provide the ground forces for you; but it's a lot harder to see people becoming disillusioned with the political value of the strategy: almost as good for your hawk credentials as a real war; but markedly lower risk and so ill-defined that it's almost as hard to "lose" in any definite way as it is to "win" in some coherent sense.
For accuracy's sake, it's worth noting that all those things occurred in securities and financial services markets, not currencies.
We unfortunately have them, so the effects can't be ignored; but it takes an entire industry of obscurantist derivative pushers to produce the amount of chaos these exchanges handle daily.
Less than one would like; though my impression is that the lack of elegant mathematical core can sometimes encourage greater pragmatism (eg. fraud prevention in payment cards could hardly be more of a farce on a technical level; but everyone knows that, so the system ends up being designed to cope. Over in bitcoin land, you have people who don't understand that you are taking a giant, fundamental, leap when you go from 'having bitcoins' to 'having an account with an exchange that says you have bitcoins", the former being backed by all the neat math, the latter being backed by nothing except a painfully amateur and immature version of the conventional banking and payment systems.
Not every user is this deluded, obviously; but when everyone knows that the entire operation is a bunch of messy hacks aimed at facilitating trade, you have fewer blinkered idealists. In conventional systems there is certainly ample malfeasance, irrationality, and just plain stupidity; but usually several steps removed from the mere currency, It's the fancy finance bits where everyone loses their grip on reality. In the bitcoin environment, once you step outside an encrypted wallet on an atypically secure computer, it's the wild west.
Hasn't the bitcoin ecosystem always been a commendably elegant mathematical design embedded in a community that could be mistaken for a deadpanned absurdist parody of a financial system?
The blockchain concept is pretty cool, and does appear to actually work as advertised, it's just that everything not nailed down mathematically is a bit of a clusterfuck.