"Disney paid cool 4 billion for the franchise. A completely safe long-term investment in index funds will bring 5-10% annually. Therefore, Star Wars needs to bring 600 million to 1 billion every year to be on par."
You should stay away from things which require math.
The thing is that DIsney no longer has the $4B they would have if they just put the money in the index fund. This means that Disney must recuperate the original money invested PLUS the additional 5-10% to be on par with the original investment. Most companies try to recuperate the cost of an investment over 3 years. This means they would need to bring in $4B over 3 years just to break even. Only a 5% return would put them at $4.6B over three if you did not reinvest the profit. This means that Disney would actually need to pull in excess of $1.5B per year just to break even after 3 years. You have to consider the opportunity cost of buying the franchise. Of course, they presumably acquired other assets with the purchase that could be liquidated to recuperate some of that investment, but I don’t know exactly what they bought in addition to the rights themselves.
If you're doing validation to help the user, that might be fine. But if you're validating for correctness or assuming data has followed all your validation rules, then client-side validation is worthless.
Agreed. Someone can always sniff your APIs and try to attack your web interface, but you ought to validate inputs on client side just for the sake of your customers. The client app should not trust the user to input data correctly and the server should not trust the client to do so either. Don’t trust anyone. It saves your customers waiting for an error response from the server if you can easily determine they input something incorrect.
I know for a fact that Intel notified VMWare of these vulnerabilities and told them they needed to patch ESXi. These can be exploited through a hypervisor.
Google and Microsoft are shielding Intels reputational damage, Intel should be making these announcements, and with detail.
Intel has no right to announce this. Microsoft and Google both found the issue. They reported it to Intel. Intel did make a disclosure, albeit not a very detailed one. Microsoft and Google receive the accolades for telling the world about this problem. This is how it always works in the world of security research. The researcher agrees to postpone publishing while the issue is mitigated and the company they reported to agrees to keep the research in the strictest confidentiality until they publish. It’s only fair.
Intel dont appear keen to supply owners of defective cpus with the tools to choose, but trickle bios settings to verndor who may or maynot retrofit to 10 year old product. My generic chromebook/laptop whose brand went belly up going to be fixed?
Your manufacturer will likely not update the BIOS for any system more than 2-3 years old unless a longer support contract was previously established. However, the fix can be delivered through your OS. Intel has plans to release microcode back to the second gen core processors (sandy bridge). That’s 8-10 years of mitigation.
I want to know what other CPU's were affected.
Intel and ARM. Likely AMD also but no one has said either way to my knowledge. Any other processor? YOu might want to perform the research yourself as less common platforms like PPC and MIPS are not likely to receive much attention from researchers.
I suggest the performance decrease is measured AFTER MS and Goolge recompiled speculative bits out of their base code, so the slowdown figures are less than a like for like.
So update your microcode and OS and enable and disable the change and test for yourself. Everyone’s usage scenarios will be different. It’ll depend entirely on how you use your computer. Whether you need the mitigation enabled or disabled depends entirely on how you use your computer, too.
Intel may actually profit from defective design. Who knows when Intel knew this, and if they did, why did the propogate that design to others,
This type of attack has been known of in theory since the first Pentium (the first processor with this type of speculative execution). But nobody thought it was actually possible until someone proved it was possible. Just like scientists knew about nuclear fission in theory but didn’t know if a nuclear bomb was possible until the first one was built.
Just wait untl Google takes apart the now vulnerable ME engine with disclosures. If they dont, others will.
Now if the ME engine does not have speculative execution and other known CVE's then the why questions become interesting.
There have been PLENTY of advisories related to Intel ME, AMD PSP, and most likely ARM TrustZone. I have seen advisories for the first two. So people are already attacking the ME engine. The same mitigations that are used for side-channel analysis can also be used to mitigate the secure processor on all of those platforms. However, I am positive that more vulnerabilities still exist
Same connection you'd be getting as residential, you're paying for priority support and, i think, no data caps. Doesn't appear to have any other benefits, unless you like a lighter wallet.
I believe you get multiple static IP addresses (at least one, anyway), reverse DNS, and no filtering on your inbound service ports. So you could actually use it as a mail server, for instance. Comcast home networks won’t work that way, and they won’t let you use reverse DNS so even if you bypass it with different ports it just gets sent to/dev/null by the receiving server.
Many people would gladly sacrifice 50% CPU performance, in exchange for more secure and stable processors.
But Intel and its OEMs are reluctant to even give us consumers the choice to obtain decent microcode security fixes that slow down our computers too much.
Intel already provides the NSA with the ME backdoor, so why won't they at least try harder to close the other security holes?
Read the advisory. They DID give you the option to choose and recommend that vendors ship with it disabled as it's only needed in specific circumstances.
To me, the biggest condemnation of Trump is not that he's ill-informed - Lots of people are ill-informed on lots of things - It's that he has little interest in actually becoming informed. Obama read for hours each night - Briefing papers, books - You name it. Trump reads nothing.
What are you talking about? He subscribes to Playboy for the articles! Not the pictures. He reads. You must be Melania's friend.
Maybe if you have some horrible laptop with no base and crackly highs you might hear Yanny.
I honestly thought that it was a trick the first time I listened. I had my device on cellulary service and, with pretty decent headphones heard “Yanny”. A few minutes later I was inside and on Wi-FI (with a different IP address, obviously), and it was so clearly Laurel I thought it was a completely different clip. So now I wonder if perhaps there was some issue with my cellular provider recompressing the audio or something. I have no idea.
...and giving anyone who asks cell phone location data (without verifying the veracity of a warrant), Securus is a truly predatory company.
WHat are you talking about?? They always make sure the warrant is valid before they do anything. It's just that the only warrants they accept must say things like "e pluribus unum" and must have a unique serial number that is generated and validated by US Mint.
Don’t worry about bike lanes. In my experience, Bird riders just use the sidewalk and weave in and out of pedestrians illegally anyway. And we all know the sidewalks will get shoveled.
Because Bird scooters are rented using a mobile app, homeless people are unlikely to be able to rent them, and Bird should feel bad about that. (However, the writer also opines that nobody needs a Bird scooter, since it's no real trouble to walk a mile instead of riding a scooter for a mile.)
It's a stupid article and I feel stupider for having read it.
A lot of the homeless in my area have smart phones but they probably could not rent a bird scooter anyway for lack of driver’s license and credit card required to create an account
Every week there's another article about some ridiculous new shit literally thousands of people are doing that's ruining everything, and it's absolutely never relevant outside either LA or SF. When are we sending these assholes back to their home planet?
I can confirm that there are plenty of Bird riding dumb asses in my locale and I’m not on the Best Coast at all. But there are a lot of bicyclist assholes that do the exact same things the Bird riders do, and are just as guilty of breaking the laws surrounding their conveyance as the bird operators.
You can't foresee what would happen if you go to the bakery. You might have an accident and lose an eye or a leg or your life. Or you can find the love of your life. Or the one that would "peck your soul out". It's called life. It's my decision. I don't worry about google having my shit. It's enough to be worried about insecticides, pesticides, food additives, carcinogens, worried about radon gas, worried about asbestos, worried about saving endangered species.
Well of course you cannot. There are only two guarantees in life: death and taxes. But there is a huge difference between a random chance event at a bakery and the irrevocable loss of privacy that comes from Google sucking up all that data about you. One is an instantaneous moment that will come and go. The other never disappears. And therein lies the problem. You may someday wish that Google did not know so much about you but you will have no way to undo that. If you want the bakery to stop knowing your taste in breads or pastries, you just pick a new bakery and they’ll eventually forget you ever came there.
Tim Cook, like so many others, does not seem to understand that Trump's not actually implementing most tariffs, he is just using them as a tool - asking fir China to reduce import fees or else he'll implement the tariffs. Because Trump is kind of crazy, the Chinese can't tell if he will or not so they actually back off.
He also walked away with a $500M loan from the Chinese government to build a resort in Indonesia. But you’re right, he totally did all of this to reduce China’s import tariffs on US products.
Or he considered the all the advantaages he gets from google collecting and managing his own data for him in an interesting manner, and then weighs that against google selling that data for advertisements, and decided it was worth it. You know, like a rational adult would think through anything.
I don’t see how anyone could make such an “adult” decisions seeing as no one can foresee in what ways that data may be used against them in the long run. Sure you could imagine most ways, but who knows what life events will occur that could make that data harmful to the GP? What if he angered that authoritative regime from his old country and they hacked Google’s server and used that data to harm him or his family? I am sure he would totally think it was worth having his photos automatically geotagged for him.
Researchers at Berkeley said that they can modestly alter audio files "to cancel out the sound that the speech recognition system was supposed to hear and replace it with a sound that would be transcribed differently by machines while being nearly undetectable to the human ear."
But did these so-called researchers see what Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant do when they play the audio clip backwards? What kind of half-assed research is this?
Ohhh I hate those automated phone systems that make you speak into them. Even if I can do something through the system I have now defaulted to say nothing but “Customer Service” until I get a person on the phone. Because those machine suck and if I know I can do something through the phone system and I call at my desk at work, the last thing I want to do is have to shout what I need instead of just hitting ‘1’ or something like that. So if you’re going to make me get up and go somewhere private to use your phone system, you’d better be putting me in touch with a real human being and not a stupid machine. And then if they send me a survey about the call I always complain about the phone system
So what, pointing out a pretty common observation is now racist?
That wouldn't be, instead you blatantly stated the equivalent to "only rich paranoid crackers care", the fact that you think this "observation" (vs. being actually OPINION) is in any way common just highlights what a racist piece of shit you really are.
I didn't even read the rest of your post because while racists are allowed to say what they like, I certainly don't have to read anything from anyone who judges people based on skin color. It's inside that matters man...
I'll let you have the last word since racists do like to ramble on to prove whatever crazy thing they think others want to hear.
First of all, the GP is not me. Secondly, it's generally true. Like all stereotypes. Did I say that all white rich people are paranoid? Or that people of other races are not paranoid? No. But it's the white paranoid people that call the police because they see someone of another race. I'd like to see evidence of a case where this is not true, if you have one. But instead of admitting that people can generally act like racist assholes, you're saying that I am racist against white people?
Do you not think that people of color might have reason to be concerned about property theft or break-ins? Do they not deserve some security also?
So what, pointing out a pretty common observation is now racist? I’ve never heard of a black person of any class calling up the police when someone wanders through their neighborhood because they don’t “fit in.” But that happens all over the US. I’ve seen it in liberal California, NYC, the deep South, everywhere. And what is the usual factor for someone supposedly not fitting into a neighborhood? Skin color. I’ve seen it happen to a friend of mine who is black and a medical doctor, and I’ve seen it happen to high school kids who are just wandering through a neighborhood exploring their boundaries on the way to a park. It was also likely the reason that Treyvon Martin was shot. He might have been a thug but he was followed for ‘not fitting in’ long before any sort of crime was obviously committed.
And did you stop to consider the fact that the people who live in high crime low income areas usually don’t have the disposable income to buy a security system such as this? No, the people that have these sorts of systems are generally upper-middle class people who are absolutely paranoid. I’ve worked with many of them. A security camera isn’t going to save your life. Sure it might help catch a criminal after the fact but that’s the limit of the “protection” that they provide. Someone may hesitate to commit a crime because of a camera, but others may just throw on a ski mask and do whatever they planned to do anyway.
What I don't get about spectre, meltdown, and now this- is why any *single user* computer cares about accessing the user's own data, regardless of what ring they are in.
Isn't this only a problem for servers and multiple user computers? Why patch user level OS for this?
For a variety of reasons. For one thing, the same kernel may be used in both single and multi-user environments. For another, what’s the point of having a root account, with sudo, or UAC, or whatever your access restriction is if a malicious program can easily circumvent those protections and operate at ring -1 or whatever ring that exception is handled at? Just remember that even a single-user may not realize what instructions are being executed on their machine through javascript, or some piece of software that they downloaded. This could be used to open up the entire system to the malicious user’s control by disabling security settings or enabling services that would have required a privilege escalation to complete.
All users caring about line endings had probably migrated to Notepad++ 10 years ago, right ?
Nope. I just don’t open up anything but Word documents on my Windows machine. Visual Studio already handles the line endings, though it does always try to convert to Windows line endings.
While some of what you experienced is over-the-top, neighbors being diligent about their safety and being informed regarding activities in their community does make a difference. Keeping crime low takes an organized effort. It doesn't happen by itself.
To put it another way, in many communities one can walk alone at 3 am and have virtually zero worry of being a victim of crime. Can one do that on a *consistent* basis anywhere in LA? Presumably not. Before responding that in some areas of LA one can walk alone at 3 am, ask yourself why that is. Gated community? Wealthier area? Private security?
I live in a community that actually probably has a higher crime rate than LA. I live in a very urban area and I walk around alone at 3am all the time and never even get hassled by the homeless people. During the day? The homeless people all hassle the hell out of you, but they’re very docile and polite at night. And no, no gates in my neighborhood, no private security, none of that. There certainly is crime in my neighborhood, but it usually consists of car burglaries. And no, I don’t walk around with a gun or anything else to defend myself. And how do I know when something suspicious is going on? Well, I happen to know my neighbors, at least by sight. Did I interrogate them when I moved in, or they moved in? No. I just pay attention when I am out and about. I know the homeless people who live in my neighborhood, and I know when someone is a new transient to the area. The usual homeless people all know me, and every once and a while I’ll buy one of them lunch or dinner. And I feel perfectly safe because I know what is normal in my neighborhood without being a complete asshole about it.
Oh and it has nothing to do with police activity, either. I rarely see a cop in my area after 10pmish unless it’s a Friday or Saturday night. They’re usually busier on the more suburban part of towns, both the wealthier part and the poorer part. The people in my neighborhood are, admittedly mostly middle class, but the area has a lot of amenities and activities that draw people in from other parts of the city and even from other nearby states.
When I see something double-spacing, I recognize that person as someone who is generally old enough to have learned on a typewriter (or the first generations of word processing), and who doesn't engage heavily with IT..
Those are both very poor assumptions. My school district growing up required double spacing for all papers. My university did, too. And I can tell you right now that personal computers were a thing before I was born. I sit at a computer all day, writing software and I double space everything that I write. It’s a habit that will never go away. I personally think it looks cleaner, too. But you feel free to use whatever spacing you prefer. Just don’t assume that someone double spaces because they grew up with typewriters! I’ve never used a typewriter for anything other than a toy in antique stores as a child.
Oh and to be clear, I grew up in Silicon Valley and we had computers in the classroom when I was in elementary.
Slashdot Mirror
"Disney paid cool 4 billion for the franchise. A completely safe long-term investment in index funds will bring 5-10% annually. Therefore, Star Wars needs to bring 600 million to 1 billion every year to be on par." You should stay away from things which require math.
The thing is that DIsney no longer has the $4B they would have if they just put the money in the index fund. This means that Disney must recuperate the original money invested PLUS the additional 5-10% to be on par with the original investment. Most companies try to recuperate the cost of an investment over 3 years. This means they would need to bring in $4B over 3 years just to break even. Only a 5% return would put them at $4.6B over three if you did not reinvest the profit. This means that Disney would actually need to pull in excess of $1.5B per year just to break even after 3 years. You have to consider the opportunity cost of buying the franchise. Of course, they presumably acquired other assets with the purchase that could be liquidated to recuperate some of that investment, but I don’t know exactly what they bought in addition to the rights themselves.
If you're doing validation to help the user, that might be fine. But if you're validating for correctness or assuming data has followed all your validation rules, then client-side validation is worthless.
Agreed. Someone can always sniff your APIs and try to attack your web interface, but you ought to validate inputs on client side just for the sake of your customers. The client app should not trust the user to input data correctly and the server should not trust the client to do so either. Don’t trust anyone. It saves your customers waiting for an error response from the server if you can easily determine they input something incorrect.
emacs is "a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor"
And they still haven't patched the Spectre v3a exploits. I'll stick with Linux until they can keep up to date.
It should not effect kernel or hypervisor.
I know for a fact that Intel notified VMWare of these vulnerabilities and told them they needed to patch ESXi. These can be exploited through a hypervisor.
Google and Microsoft are shielding Intels reputational damage, Intel should be making these announcements, and with detail.
Intel has no right to announce this. Microsoft and Google both found the issue. They reported it to Intel. Intel did make a disclosure, albeit not a very detailed one. Microsoft and Google receive the accolades for telling the world about this problem. This is how it always works in the world of security research. The researcher agrees to postpone publishing while the issue is mitigated and the company they reported to agrees to keep the research in the strictest confidentiality until they publish. It’s only fair.
Intel dont appear keen to supply owners of defective cpus with the tools to choose, but trickle bios settings to verndor who may or maynot retrofit to 10 year old product. My generic chromebook/laptop whose brand went belly up going to be fixed?
Your manufacturer will likely not update the BIOS for any system more than 2-3 years old unless a longer support contract was previously established. However, the fix can be delivered through your OS. Intel has plans to release microcode back to the second gen core processors (sandy bridge). That’s 8-10 years of mitigation.
I want to know what other CPU's were affected.
Intel and ARM. Likely AMD also but no one has said either way to my knowledge. Any other processor? YOu might want to perform the research yourself as less common platforms like PPC and MIPS are not likely to receive much attention from researchers.
I suggest the performance decrease is measured AFTER MS and Goolge recompiled speculative bits out of their base code, so the slowdown figures are less than a like for like.
So update your microcode and OS and enable and disable the change and test for yourself. Everyone’s usage scenarios will be different. It’ll depend entirely on how you use your computer. Whether you need the mitigation enabled or disabled depends entirely on how you use your computer, too.
Intel may actually profit from defective design. Who knows when Intel knew this, and if they did, why did the propogate that design to others,
This type of attack has been known of in theory since the first Pentium (the first processor with this type of speculative execution). But nobody thought it was actually possible until someone proved it was possible. Just like scientists knew about nuclear fission in theory but didn’t know if a nuclear bomb was possible until the first one was built.
Just wait untl Google takes apart the now vulnerable ME engine with disclosures. If they dont, others will.
Now if the ME engine does not have speculative execution and other known CVE's then the why questions become interesting.
There have been PLENTY of advisories related to Intel ME, AMD PSP, and most likely ARM TrustZone. I have seen advisories for the first two. So people are already attacking the ME engine. The same mitigations that are used for side-channel analysis can also be used to mitigate the secure processor on all of those platforms. However, I am positive that more vulnerabilities still exist
Same connection you'd be getting as residential, you're paying for priority support and, i think, no data caps. Doesn't appear to have any other benefits, unless you like a lighter wallet.
I believe you get multiple static IP addresses (at least one, anyway), reverse DNS, and no filtering on your inbound service ports. So you could actually use it as a mail server, for instance. Comcast home networks won’t work that way, and they won’t let you use reverse DNS so even if you bypass it with different ports it just gets sent to /dev/null by the receiving server.
... Security or Performance.
Not everyone is a gamer, video editor, etc.
Many people would gladly sacrifice 50% CPU performance, in exchange for more secure and stable processors.
But Intel and its OEMs are reluctant to even give us consumers the choice to obtain decent microcode security fixes that slow down our computers too much.
Intel already provides the NSA with the ME backdoor, so why won't they at least try harder to close the other security holes?
Read the advisory. They DID give you the option to choose and recommend that vendors ship with it disabled as it's only needed in specific circumstances.
To me, the biggest condemnation of Trump is not that he's ill-informed - Lots of people are ill-informed on lots of things - It's that he has little interest in actually becoming informed. Obama read for hours each night - Briefing papers, books - You name it. Trump reads nothing.
What are you talking about? He subscribes to Playboy for the articles! Not the pictures. He reads. You must be Melania's friend.
Maybe if you have some horrible laptop with no base and crackly highs you might hear Yanny.
I honestly thought that it was a trick the first time I listened. I had my device on cellulary service and, with pretty decent headphones heard “Yanny”. A few minutes later I was inside and on Wi-FI (with a different IP address, obviously), and it was so clearly Laurel I thought it was a completely different clip. So now I wonder if perhaps there was some issue with my cellular provider recompressing the audio or something. I have no idea.
Big Tea.
I pity the fool who doesn't wake up to a nice cup of Earl Grey Tea.
...and giving anyone who asks cell phone location data (without verifying the veracity of a warrant), Securus is a truly predatory company.
WHat are you talking about?? They always make sure the warrant is valid before they do anything. It's just that the only warrants they accept must say things like "e pluribus unum" and must have a unique serial number that is generated and validated by US Mint.
Bike lanes can be plowed. Montreal does it.
Don’t worry about bike lanes. In my experience, Bird riders just use the sidewalk and weave in and out of pedestrians illegally anyway. And we all know the sidewalks will get shoveled.
Because Bird scooters are rented using a mobile app, homeless people are unlikely to be able to rent them, and Bird should feel bad about that. (However, the writer also opines that nobody needs a Bird scooter, since it's no real trouble to walk a mile instead of riding a scooter for a mile.)
It's a stupid article and I feel stupider for having read it.
A lot of the homeless in my area have smart phones but they probably could not rent a bird scooter anyway for lack of driver’s license and credit card required to create an account
Every week there's another article about some ridiculous new shit literally thousands of people are doing that's ruining everything, and it's absolutely never relevant outside either LA or SF. When are we sending these assholes back to their home planet?
I can confirm that there are plenty of Bird riding dumb asses in my locale and I’m not on the Best Coast at all. But there are a lot of bicyclist assholes that do the exact same things the Bird riders do, and are just as guilty of breaking the laws surrounding their conveyance as the bird operators.
You can't foresee what would happen if you go to the bakery. You might have an accident and lose an eye or a leg or your life. Or you can find the love of your life. Or the one that would "peck your soul out". It's called life. It's my decision. I don't worry about google having my shit. It's enough to be worried about insecticides, pesticides, food additives, carcinogens, worried about radon gas, worried about asbestos, worried about saving endangered species.
Well of course you cannot. There are only two guarantees in life: death and taxes. But there is a huge difference between a random chance event at a bakery and the irrevocable loss of privacy that comes from Google sucking up all that data about you. One is an instantaneous moment that will come and go. The other never disappears. And therein lies the problem. You may someday wish that Google did not know so much about you but you will have no way to undo that. If you want the bakery to stop knowing your taste in breads or pastries, you just pick a new bakery and they’ll eventually forget you ever came there.
Tim Cook, like so many others, does not seem to understand that Trump's not actually implementing most tariffs, he is just using them as a tool - asking fir China to reduce import fees or else he'll implement the tariffs. Because Trump is kind of crazy, the Chinese can't tell if he will or not so they actually back off.
Trump's use of tariffs as a threat is working.
He also walked away with a $500M loan from the Chinese government to build a resort in Indonesia. But you’re right, he totally did all of this to reduce China’s import tariffs on US products.
Or he considered the all the advantaages he gets from google collecting and managing his own data for him in an interesting manner, and then weighs that against google selling that data for advertisements, and decided it was worth it. You know, like a rational adult would think through anything.
I don’t see how anyone could make such an “adult” decisions seeing as no one can foresee in what ways that data may be used against them in the long run. Sure you could imagine most ways, but who knows what life events will occur that could make that data harmful to the GP? What if he angered that authoritative regime from his old country and they hacked Google’s server and used that data to harm him or his family? I am sure he would totally think it was worth having his photos automatically geotagged for him.
Researchers at Berkeley said that they can modestly alter audio files "to cancel out the sound that the speech recognition system was supposed to hear and replace it with a sound that would be transcribed differently by machines while being nearly undetectable to the human ear."
But did these so-called researchers see what Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant do when they play the audio clip backwards? What kind of half-assed research is this?
Ohhh I hate those automated phone systems that make you speak into them. Even if I can do something through the system I have now defaulted to say nothing but “Customer Service” until I get a person on the phone. Because those machine suck and if I know I can do something through the phone system and I call at my desk at work, the last thing I want to do is have to shout what I need instead of just hitting ‘1’ or something like that. So if you’re going to make me get up and go somewhere private to use your phone system, you’d better be putting me in touch with a real human being and not a stupid machine. And then if they send me a survey about the call I always complain about the phone system
So what, pointing out a pretty common observation is now racist?
That wouldn't be, instead you blatantly stated the equivalent to "only rich paranoid crackers care", the fact that you think this "observation" (vs. being actually OPINION) is in any way common just highlights what a racist piece of shit you really are.
I didn't even read the rest of your post because while racists are allowed to say what they like, I certainly don't have to read anything from anyone who judges people based on skin color. It's inside that matters man...
I'll let you have the last word since racists do like to ramble on to prove whatever crazy thing they think others want to hear.
First of all, the GP is not me. Secondly, it's generally true. Like all stereotypes. Did I say that all white rich people are paranoid? Or that people of other races are not paranoid? No. But it's the white paranoid people that call the police because they see someone of another race. I'd like to see evidence of a case where this is not true, if you have one. But instead of admitting that people can generally act like racist assholes, you're saying that I am racist against white people?
How very racist of you.
Do you not think that people of color might have reason to be concerned about property theft or break-ins? Do they not deserve some security also?
So what, pointing out a pretty common observation is now racist? I’ve never heard of a black person of any class calling up the police when someone wanders through their neighborhood because they don’t “fit in.” But that happens all over the US. I’ve seen it in liberal California, NYC, the deep South, everywhere. And what is the usual factor for someone supposedly not fitting into a neighborhood? Skin color. I’ve seen it happen to a friend of mine who is black and a medical doctor, and I’ve seen it happen to high school kids who are just wandering through a neighborhood exploring their boundaries on the way to a park. It was also likely the reason that Treyvon Martin was shot. He might have been a thug but he was followed for ‘not fitting in’ long before any sort of crime was obviously committed.
And did you stop to consider the fact that the people who live in high crime low income areas usually don’t have the disposable income to buy a security system such as this? No, the people that have these sorts of systems are generally upper-middle class people who are absolutely paranoid. I’ve worked with many of them. A security camera isn’t going to save your life. Sure it might help catch a criminal after the fact but that’s the limit of the “protection” that they provide. Someone may hesitate to commit a crime because of a camera, but others may just throw on a ski mask and do whatever they planned to do anyway.
What I don't get about spectre, meltdown, and now this- is why any *single user* computer cares about accessing the user's own data, regardless of what ring they are in.
Isn't this only a problem for servers and multiple user computers? Why patch user level OS for this?
For a variety of reasons. For one thing, the same kernel may be used in both single and multi-user environments. For another, what’s the point of having a root account, with sudo, or UAC, or whatever your access restriction is if a malicious program can easily circumvent those protections and operate at ring -1 or whatever ring that exception is handled at? Just remember that even a single-user may not realize what instructions are being executed on their machine through javascript, or some piece of software that they downloaded. This could be used to open up the entire system to the malicious user’s control by disabling security settings or enabling services that would have required a privilege escalation to complete.
All users caring about line endings had probably migrated to Notepad++ 10 years ago, right ?
Nope. I just don’t open up anything but Word documents on my Windows machine. Visual Studio already handles the line endings, though it does always try to convert to Windows line endings.
While some of what you experienced is over-the-top, neighbors being diligent about their safety and being informed regarding activities in their community does make a difference. Keeping crime low takes an organized effort. It doesn't happen by itself.
To put it another way, in many communities one can walk alone at 3 am and have virtually zero worry of being a victim of crime. Can one do that on a *consistent* basis anywhere in LA? Presumably not. Before responding that in some areas of LA one can walk alone at 3 am, ask yourself why that is. Gated community? Wealthier area? Private security?
I live in a community that actually probably has a higher crime rate than LA. I live in a very urban area and I walk around alone at 3am all the time and never even get hassled by the homeless people. During the day? The homeless people all hassle the hell out of you, but they’re very docile and polite at night. And no, no gates in my neighborhood, no private security, none of that. There certainly is crime in my neighborhood, but it usually consists of car burglaries. And no, I don’t walk around with a gun or anything else to defend myself. And how do I know when something suspicious is going on? Well, I happen to know my neighbors, at least by sight. Did I interrogate them when I moved in, or they moved in? No. I just pay attention when I am out and about. I know the homeless people who live in my neighborhood, and I know when someone is a new transient to the area. The usual homeless people all know me, and every once and a while I’ll buy one of them lunch or dinner. And I feel perfectly safe because I know what is normal in my neighborhood without being a complete asshole about it.
Oh and it has nothing to do with police activity, either. I rarely see a cop in my area after 10pmish unless it’s a Friday or Saturday night. They’re usually busier on the more suburban part of towns, both the wealthier part and the poorer part. The people in my neighborhood are, admittedly mostly middle class, but the area has a lot of amenities and activities that draw people in from other parts of the city and even from other nearby states.
When I see something double-spacing, I recognize that person as someone who is generally old enough to have learned on a typewriter (or the first generations of word processing), and who doesn't engage heavily with IT. .
Those are both very poor assumptions. My school district growing up required double spacing for all papers. My university did, too. And I can tell you right now that personal computers were a thing before I was born. I sit at a computer all day, writing software and I double space everything that I write. It’s a habit that will never go away. I personally think it looks cleaner, too. But you feel free to use whatever spacing you prefer. Just don’t assume that someone double spaces because they grew up with typewriters! I’ve never used a typewriter for anything other than a toy in antique stores as a child.
Oh and to be clear, I grew up in Silicon Valley and we had computers in the classroom when I was in elementary.