Actually read TFA, enough flew over my head that I can't personally verify the math, but if true, well holy fucking shit. Once someone brute-forces the backdoor "key" used by the NSA, it looks like the entire system is cracked. Even if it takes a while to brute-force, once you have that you can open any encryption using that curve.
Given that cracking this open would be so useful to both other monitoring agencies, and to criminal hackers, it's sure to happen eventually, if it hasn't already. I'm sure China could throw one of their supercomputers at it.
I'd be curious to know just how hard it would be to brute-force the backdoor key itself. There didn't seem to be anything in TFA about that, and I can't figure out the math myself.
I'm in a worse situation - my apartment complex signed a deal with a certain niche ISP by the extremely vague name of "Telcom", to provide internet at a fixed rate (the base package is part of my rent, so I don't even know what they're charging). While we're officially allowed to buy our own if we so choose, a) I'd still be paying Telcom for their TV/Phone/Internet deal, and b) not a single other ISP is actually offering anything to this apartment. Every building bordering it, sure, but even in the months-long hiatus where Telcom couldn't get the building hooked up but the deal had been made, nobody would give me service.
A few months ago, there was a peculiar outage. They have glitches every so often where the connection dies for an hour or so, so I didn't think much of it until I realized Bittorrent was still downloading. A few more investigations showed that pings by IP worked, but not by hostname - but never with an actual DNS error. I didn't bother investigating further, and just set my DNS server to 8.8.8.8 because that was all I could remember off the top of my head. I now suspect they may have been trying to implement something like this, because that's just the kind of scummy move they'd do.
I started keeping track of their uptime last month. By my numbers, they got one nine of reliability - 90% uptime.
I'd switch in a heartbeat as soon as anyone dared to sell me anything else.
From the presence of a PLX chip, it seems they're having to split PCIe lanes.
The Xeon E5-1620 has forty PCIe lanes. Give sixteen to each FirePro card, and you're left with only eight for Thunderbolt and the flash memory. Each Thunderbolt channel uses at least two lanes (they provide four lanes of PCIe 2.0, which is the bandwidth of two lanes of 3.0), so if we assume each port is on its own channel, that's at least twelve lanes. And the SSD is probably using either four or eight lanes as well.
So now not only do we have to figure out how many Thunderbolt buses there are, but we have to figure out how the PCIe lanes are being switched. It could be that heavy Thunderbolt traffic will slow traffic to the graphics cards and/or flash drive, which is a very, very weird symptom. From the positioning I think it more likely that all the TB controllers are being switched, maybe with whatever other PCIe devices are on the I/O board, but I can't say for sure.
Not only that, but I would bet you what almost any Republican would answer yes to the following series of questions:
Do you believe that certain traits can be inherited?
Do you believe that traits regarding socio-economic fitness can be inherited?
Do you believe in survival of the fittest?
The first is pretty much a given. The second and third tie into the social darwinism that's common in the Republican platform. And yet the logical conclusion of the three is evolution. Peculiar, isn't it?
The whole thing is just politics. Even the religious stuff is just politics - that first point was scientifically proven by an Augustinian (ie. Catholic) monk. It's only when it got to humans no longer being the special soul-endowed divinely-created masters of the universe that anyone had a problem with it, and you can easily interpret all of scripture in a way that fits with evolution (believe me, as a former Catholic who never had a problem with evolution, there's plenty of ways to rationalize it).
I see many analogies here to situations where a seller advertizes an incorrect rate, but are legally bound to uphold it. This is a reasonable analogy, but it is still only an analogy. Many seem opposed to the idea of ever having the buyer be at fault because of the obvious possibilities for abuse, but many seem equally opposed to having the customer never be at fault because sometimes they truly are at fault. In both cases debate seems to focus on the intentions of the seller, on what price they were attempting to set.
Rather than focusing on what the seller intended the price to be, let us examine the possible intentions of the customer.
If they deliberately induced the pricing error, then they of course should be required to pay the correct amount. That they did so should be provable in a court of law, of course - and the burden of proof ought to be on the seller here.
If they saw the error, but reasonably assumed it was a promotional discount of some sort, the customer should not be forced to pay the "correct amount". With all the sales and discounts and loyalty programs and other nonsense, it is unreasonable to expect customers to know exactly which ones do or do not apply to them, and further, if sellers were able to force customers to pay for their own errors, there would be a huge potential for abuse (precisely why sellers are required to uphold advertized prices).
If the error is blatantly incorrect, though, I think there is cause to void the contract of sale - the customer could either return the product (at cost to the seller), or pay the difference in pricing. This would have to be a pretty egregiously incorrect price - a $500 item being sold for $0.50, for example, or an item advertized as 10% off being sold for 10% of the price. Even then, I suppose it depends on the standard deviation in prices for similar items - there are some things where even a 100% discount is common enough to not be obviously an error. And again, the burden of proof that the error was obvious to anyone with common sense lies with the seller, not the buyer.
There is, I believe, precedent for this. Contracts signed while one party was unaware of certain highly-relevant facts can be nullified, particularly when the other party deliberately withheld the information. But it is hardly a commonplace event.
1) Defense in depth. Sure, your UPSes should protect against power outages. But what if both mains and UPS fail? They may consider their data important enough that they need to prepare for that situation.
2) Niche hardware. From the sound of it, they aren't a typical server scenario. They required 16GB size as a minimum (incredibly small even for an SSD), and they tested a huge number of power loss cycles. This makes me suspect they aren't doing typical server or desktop stuff, but I haven't the faintest idea what they're actually doing. But perhaps this niche hardware has to operate without a UPS.
I think the places that are trying to justify* switching to real-name commenting are making the all-too-common correlation/causation mistake.
Early places that switched to real-name commenting did see a decrease in trolls and an increase in comment quality. However, this was because early real-name commenting systems were clunky - you had to create your own detailed profile and such - so it kept out those who did not seriously want to comment.
The more recent trend is to enforce real-name commenting by using a Facebook (or, at least in theory, Google+) login. This *decreases* the difficulty of posting, and thus decreases the quality of comments.
Think about it. How many articles have you read where you wanted to post a reply, even just a brief one, only to give up and move on when you realized you would have to create an account, do that whole email verification thing, and maybe pass a Captcha? It's just not worth it, unless you have something really important to say, or if you regularly visit the site and regularly wish to leave comments.
But a Facebook login? Everyone and their grandmother has one of those. Plenty of people have multiple. And you're automatically logged in damn near anywhere. Leaving a comment becomes almost effortless - posting "lol fuk u the holocuast was fak evry1 nos this dumass"** takes only as long as it takes to type. And that's why the commenting sections go to shit when you use Facebook logins.
* I'm not fooled for a second into thinking this is their actual reason - they just want more data to mine.
** Ironically, this took far longer for me to write than any other sentence in this post, because I had to put a lot of thought in to come up with a completely asinine (but still unfortunately realistic) comment and write it so poorly that it was clearly satire.
Bitcoin started as an attempt at an actual currency, the earliest adopters wanted it to become such, and there are a few places now (and many illegal ones) where it can be used to purchase goods. It's spiraled into being mostly speculative - I think if it were only used as a currency it would be trading around $30 - but there's a fundamental element of an actual currency.
Dogecoin started either as a shitty joke, a shitty meme, or an attempt to cash in on the Bitcoin hype bubble. I know of nowhere that actually accepts it, and the only people who have any seem to be people wondering what to do with their now-ineffective GPU Bitcoin mining rigs.
I considered for a bit whether Dogecoin could be used to see how much of Bitcoin's valuation is due to speculation, but there are too many interdependent variables to get any meaningful data out of it. But it isn't even useful for that.
For what its worth, all of my orders came in before Xmas. Some that were actually projected for the vague "December 20-January 3" range ended up being delivered on the 23rd, and the one order that did end up being late was projected for Dec 16 (arriving on the 20th).
So while this issue may be widespread (one anecdote doesn't prove them all wrong), it may be localized to certain regions.
I've found that almost anything imaginable has a niche, it's just a question of whether the niche is able to afford the technology and development thereof.
You just have to figure out situations where the weaknesses become strengths. For instance, translucent displays would be essential for an automotive or aircraft HUD. Or perhaps have a transparent layer on top of a traditional display, for a two-layer effect.
You think touchscreens are bad for haptic feedback? What happens when you don't even get the impact against the screen as feedback that you've actually pressed something?
I'll answer my own question - this is focused on data consumption, not data production, to an even greater degree than touchscreens are; or for situations where an alternative input method will be used (voice, perhaps? I can't envision a mouse+keyboard being used with this)
There are niches for this, obviously, but I definitely don't think it's going to significantly displace existing display tech. It will more be used where current tech cannot.
In August 2001, a FEMA training session discussed the three most likely major natural disasters they would have to deal with in the next decade. They were a terrorist attack in New York, a hurricane hitting New Orleans, and an earthquake on the San Andreas line.
Two of those happened. But nobody is really surprised they were 66% accurate, because with timespans like this, 66% accuracy is trivial. A damn comedy website managed to predict Fukushima to within 200km (they predicted a TEPCO-run reactor on the opposite side of Japan would be struck by an earthquake and tsunami).
Why? Because it turns out that when you look at the situation, the history and the statistics, it's pretty easy to predict the future as long as you don't give a strict time. Just look at science fiction, or even general fiction, to see how people who did their research were able to come up with scenarios plausible enough to actually happen.
Now, the difference here is supposedly that instead of looking at the history and statistics, they were looking at geological data. If they can improve on this technique to get even just a one-year timespan for an earthquake, that would be groundbreaking (pun totally intended). Or if they can use it to predict an earthquake where there isn't a history of earthquakes. As it is, it's useless, but hopefully they can improve it.
The TSA is incompetently criminal - incompetent at their job, and their job isn't per se bad, but it's unnecessary and so poorly-done as to be criminal.
The NSA is effective. They had secret courts set up just to rubber-stamp their authority and even then they couldn't stick to the loosely-written rules. They have near-complete monitoring of communications, and if they don't have their own wet-work outfit, they can get you thrown in Gitmo simply by claiming to have some evidence (I'm not even sure they need to fabricate it anymore).
Comparing the two is like comparing a bunch of teens who loiter and buy cigarettes underage and sometimes shoplift, to the Mafia. You don't want either, but you want the actively dangerous one gone first.
Seriously, though, I wasn't saying that it was the best at any one thing. There are more powerful, more accurate, cheaper, probably even more reliable guns out there. The AK strikes a good balance between all of the important features, even the much less marketable features that are nevertheless critical. As an engineering feat, that's maybe not the Space Shuttle, but it is at least a good piece of engineering. Think "6502", not "POWER7+" - which one changed history more?
As for "number of bullets", that wasn't me, that was a US Army study (can't find it right now, if you really want a citation I can keep digging). I don't fully agree with that, but I do realize that most rounds fired are for suppression, not for effect (where wounding ability does not matter), and that as hard as it is to shoot an automatic AK-47 with any accuracy, it's far, far harder to do so with an M14.
Precisely! Kalashnikov realized (or at least correctly guessed) that accuracy is less important than reliability. US Army studies have shown that most engagements are within 50m, and that the primary determinant in victory is "number of bullets fired". This was part of their justification for moving from the M14 (essentially a magazine-fed M1 Garand with a useless full-auto hacked on) to the M16 - less power at range, less ability to kill in one shot, but capable of firing 30 rounds at automatic in a somewhat-controlled manner, rather than the "two round burst before it turns into an anti-aircraft gun" of the M14.
The AK47 did it earlier, and arguably better, because it made more tradeoffs. The M16 was a good weapon in the lab, but early models in particular failed in the field (even today jams are extremely common after decades of improvement). Too bad for them, almost zero battles have taken place in military laboratories.
The AK47 scored worse on any "benchmark" (for lack of a better term). Less accurate, slower firing, heavier, and so on. But because it's basically the most reliable (and cheap) assault rifle ever made, it's the weapon (or at least weapon design) of choice for almost everyone not wed to the NATO military-industrial complex. Even then, there's a reason there's AK-style weapons chambered in 5.56mm NATO. It's almost become the Linux of the assault-rifle world - you've got variants from the simple (the AK-74, the RPK, the Galil or the dozens of bullpup variants) to the crazy (the Saiga-12 shotgun, various Russian suppressed rifles, even a sniper rifle).
Was Mikhail Kalashnikov a genius? I don't think so, because nothing about it was itself revolutionary, but he was a damn good engineer because he knew what the users actually needed and gave it to them, rather than letting marketing decide on which features to produce.
The purpose of a windowed computing environment is that you can assign any (rectangular) amount of space to a program, in proportion to how much it is being used.
When I wrote that, all I had open was Firefox (two tabs -/. and the G+ post) and Steam (doing some downloads in my other monitor). I gave Firefox 100% of the screen because nothing else needed it.
A website should use as much space as it is given. If I give it only a small area, it should only use that, but if I give it more space, it should actually utilize it instead of making me scroll through several screens of text when all that content could have fit into one.
I just have one thing to say - I'll get back to reading that once I finish this rant:
I'm reading this on a maximised window on a 2560x1440 display. Why the flying fuck is all the content packed into a 500px box? Fully 2/3rds the width of my screen is completely and utterly unused. Even on my secondary 1600x900 monitor, it's wasting half the screen on a grey background.
Seriously, it's nearly 2014, we have electric cars and robots on Mars. And yet Google, pretty much the biggest web corp on the planet, with plenty of talented designers and programmers and everything else, decided their social networking site needs to present posts in a way that works on XGA screens? Not even XGA - that post would fit on straight-up VGA resolution from the late 80s.
Defense, of any sort, requires layers. And with enough layers, each individual layer can have quite a significant failure without compromising the integrity of the whole defense. My browsing habits, AdBlock, browser-based malware blocking, antivirus, and OS-level permission limits - all of those protect me. Each one probably only has a 90% success rate, but that combines to 99.999% effectiveness (assuming each layer is fully independent - in reality, stuff that can break one layer is likely able to break some of the others, so it may only be 99.9% effective, which is still pretty damn good).
I use MSE not because it's the best, but because it's the least intrusive. It nags me to run a scan about once a month, and I think only once has it flagged any malware (false positive - I do scans with MalwareBytes every few months, which is much better at detection and removal but does nothing for real-time protection, and it did not find anything). Other than that, it doesn't put any noticeable load on my system or bother me with meaningless alerts - unlike even "good" AV like AVG.
An anchor that can block a five-story-high tunneling machine? I've seen some massive anchors from old battleships, but to block this it would have to be an order of magnitude larger.
Best bet is either on a giant boulder of some hard rock, or maybe a buried building of some sort. It's not ship debris - this thing is the *size* of some large ships.
I'm living on a 3Mbps connection. Installing one 20GB game? Not bad, although it makes impulse playing impossible.
Installing my full 1.2TB Steam library? Now that was a pain. I actually ended up carting my desktop into to work for a week to download them all, plus the handful of other games on Origin or GoG.
And don't forget updates. With that many games, I usually have a gig or so of updates to download every day.
This doesn't pass the sniff test. What would China gain by *destroying* our economy?
Sure, China planting surveillance software on every computer, I can believe that. But bricking all the computers in the US doesn't make sense as an espionage move, it doesn't make sense as an economic move (do you think anyone would trust Chinese-made computers when rebuilding?), it doesn't make sense as a propaganda move. It might make sense as a military move as a prelude to invasion, but a) China doesn't want that, b) China probably couldn't do it if they wanted to, and c) even if not fired, the risks of such a weapon being uncovered outweighs any benefit.
So it doesn't seem like something China would do. So who could it be? Even the NSA is explicitly calling it a nation-state, so it's not a terrorist group like al-Qaeda. If it's a nation-state, it has to be one that thinks (correctly or not) that they can beat the US when it is inevitably discovered (either before or after the attack). Russia's on that list, but I don't see how they would benefit except, again, as a pre-invasion attack, and our relations aren't that bad yet. North Korea might be dumb enough to think they can get away with it, but for the same reasons they probably don't have the capabilities of developing an attack like this. Iran is probably smart enough not to provoke the US with a direct attack, but maybe I'm wrong, or maybe they thought framing China would work.
Honestly, if someone in the Chinese government got on TV and said "yeah, we made that as a training exercise for defense drills, how the hell did you guys find it in the wild?", I'd believe them more than I'm believing CBS/NSA right now, because that at least makes sense with all the other information.
Especially since it's REAL FUCKING CONVENIENT for the NSA to suddenly have a major "victory" when they're being revealed as basically a bunch of puppy-kicking freedom-hating fascists.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually read TFA, enough flew over my head that I can't personally verify the math, but if true, well holy fucking shit. Once someone brute-forces the backdoor "key" used by the NSA, it looks like the entire system is cracked. Even if it takes a while to brute-force, once you have that you can open any encryption using that curve.
Given that cracking this open would be so useful to both other monitoring agencies, and to criminal hackers, it's sure to happen eventually, if it hasn't already. I'm sure China could throw one of their supercomputers at it.
I'd be curious to know just how hard it would be to brute-force the backdoor key itself. There didn't seem to be anything in TFA about that, and I can't figure out the math myself.
I'm in a worse situation - my apartment complex signed a deal with a certain niche ISP by the extremely vague name of "Telcom", to provide internet at a fixed rate (the base package is part of my rent, so I don't even know what they're charging). While we're officially allowed to buy our own if we so choose, a) I'd still be paying Telcom for their TV/Phone/Internet deal, and b) not a single other ISP is actually offering anything to this apartment. Every building bordering it, sure, but even in the months-long hiatus where Telcom couldn't get the building hooked up but the deal had been made, nobody would give me service.
A few months ago, there was a peculiar outage. They have glitches every so often where the connection dies for an hour or so, so I didn't think much of it until I realized Bittorrent was still downloading. A few more investigations showed that pings by IP worked, but not by hostname - but never with an actual DNS error. I didn't bother investigating further, and just set my DNS server to 8.8.8.8 because that was all I could remember off the top of my head. I now suspect they may have been trying to implement something like this, because that's just the kind of scummy move they'd do.
I started keeping track of their uptime last month. By my numbers, they got one nine of reliability - 90% uptime.
I'd switch in a heartbeat as soon as anyone dared to sell me anything else.
From the presence of a PLX chip, it seems they're having to split PCIe lanes.
The Xeon E5-1620 has forty PCIe lanes. Give sixteen to each FirePro card, and you're left with only eight for Thunderbolt and the flash memory. Each Thunderbolt channel uses at least two lanes (they provide four lanes of PCIe 2.0, which is the bandwidth of two lanes of 3.0), so if we assume each port is on its own channel, that's at least twelve lanes. And the SSD is probably using either four or eight lanes as well.
So now not only do we have to figure out how many Thunderbolt buses there are, but we have to figure out how the PCIe lanes are being switched. It could be that heavy Thunderbolt traffic will slow traffic to the graphics cards and/or flash drive, which is a very, very weird symptom. From the positioning I think it more likely that all the TB controllers are being switched, maybe with whatever other PCIe devices are on the I/O board, but I can't say for sure.
Not only that, but I would bet you what almost any Republican would answer yes to the following series of questions:
Do you believe that certain traits can be inherited?
Do you believe that traits regarding socio-economic fitness can be inherited?
Do you believe in survival of the fittest?
The first is pretty much a given. The second and third tie into the social darwinism that's common in the Republican platform. And yet the logical conclusion of the three is evolution. Peculiar, isn't it?
The whole thing is just politics. Even the religious stuff is just politics - that first point was scientifically proven by an Augustinian (ie. Catholic) monk. It's only when it got to humans no longer being the special soul-endowed divinely-created masters of the universe that anyone had a problem with it, and you can easily interpret all of scripture in a way that fits with evolution (believe me, as a former Catholic who never had a problem with evolution, there's plenty of ways to rationalize it).
I see many analogies here to situations where a seller advertizes an incorrect rate, but are legally bound to uphold it. This is a reasonable analogy, but it is still only an analogy. Many seem opposed to the idea of ever having the buyer be at fault because of the obvious possibilities for abuse, but many seem equally opposed to having the customer never be at fault because sometimes they truly are at fault. In both cases debate seems to focus on the intentions of the seller, on what price they were attempting to set.
Rather than focusing on what the seller intended the price to be, let us examine the possible intentions of the customer.
If they deliberately induced the pricing error, then they of course should be required to pay the correct amount. That they did so should be provable in a court of law, of course - and the burden of proof ought to be on the seller here.
If they saw the error, but reasonably assumed it was a promotional discount of some sort, the customer should not be forced to pay the "correct amount". With all the sales and discounts and loyalty programs and other nonsense, it is unreasonable to expect customers to know exactly which ones do or do not apply to them, and further, if sellers were able to force customers to pay for their own errors, there would be a huge potential for abuse (precisely why sellers are required to uphold advertized prices).
If the error is blatantly incorrect, though, I think there is cause to void the contract of sale - the customer could either return the product (at cost to the seller), or pay the difference in pricing. This would have to be a pretty egregiously incorrect price - a $500 item being sold for $0.50, for example, or an item advertized as 10% off being sold for 10% of the price. Even then, I suppose it depends on the standard deviation in prices for similar items - there are some things where even a 100% discount is common enough to not be obviously an error. And again, the burden of proof that the error was obvious to anyone with common sense lies with the seller, not the buyer.
There is, I believe, precedent for this. Contracts signed while one party was unaware of certain highly-relevant facts can be nullified, particularly when the other party deliberately withheld the information. But it is hardly a commonplace event.
Two reasons:
1) Defense in depth. Sure, your UPSes should protect against power outages. But what if both mains and UPS fail? They may consider their data important enough that they need to prepare for that situation.
2) Niche hardware. From the sound of it, they aren't a typical server scenario. They required 16GB size as a minimum (incredibly small even for an SSD), and they tested a huge number of power loss cycles. This makes me suspect they aren't doing typical server or desktop stuff, but I haven't the faintest idea what they're actually doing. But perhaps this niche hardware has to operate without a UPS.
I think the places that are trying to justify* switching to real-name commenting are making the all-too-common correlation/causation mistake.
Early places that switched to real-name commenting did see a decrease in trolls and an increase in comment quality. However, this was because early real-name commenting systems were clunky - you had to create your own detailed profile and such - so it kept out those who did not seriously want to comment.
The more recent trend is to enforce real-name commenting by using a Facebook (or, at least in theory, Google+) login. This *decreases* the difficulty of posting, and thus decreases the quality of comments.
Think about it. How many articles have you read where you wanted to post a reply, even just a brief one, only to give up and move on when you realized you would have to create an account, do that whole email verification thing, and maybe pass a Captcha? It's just not worth it, unless you have something really important to say, or if you regularly visit the site and regularly wish to leave comments.
But a Facebook login? Everyone and their grandmother has one of those. Plenty of people have multiple. And you're automatically logged in damn near anywhere. Leaving a comment becomes almost effortless - posting "lol fuk u the holocuast was fak evry1 nos this dumass"** takes only as long as it takes to type. And that's why the commenting sections go to shit when you use Facebook logins.
* I'm not fooled for a second into thinking this is their actual reason - they just want more data to mine.
** Ironically, this took far longer for me to write than any other sentence in this post, because I had to put a lot of thought in to come up with a completely asinine (but still unfortunately realistic) comment and write it so poorly that it was clearly satire.
Bitcoin started as an attempt at an actual currency, the earliest adopters wanted it to become such, and there are a few places now (and many illegal ones) where it can be used to purchase goods. It's spiraled into being mostly speculative - I think if it were only used as a currency it would be trading around $30 - but there's a fundamental element of an actual currency.
Dogecoin started either as a shitty joke, a shitty meme, or an attempt to cash in on the Bitcoin hype bubble. I know of nowhere that actually accepts it, and the only people who have any seem to be people wondering what to do with their now-ineffective GPU Bitcoin mining rigs.
I considered for a bit whether Dogecoin could be used to see how much of Bitcoin's valuation is due to speculation, but there are too many interdependent variables to get any meaningful data out of it. But it isn't even useful for that.
Nonsense, we just need longer cables!
For what its worth, all of my orders came in before Xmas. Some that were actually projected for the vague "December 20-January 3" range ended up being delivered on the 23rd, and the one order that did end up being late was projected for Dec 16 (arriving on the 20th).
So while this issue may be widespread (one anecdote doesn't prove them all wrong), it may be localized to certain regions.
I've found that almost anything imaginable has a niche, it's just a question of whether the niche is able to afford the technology and development thereof.
You just have to figure out situations where the weaknesses become strengths. For instance, translucent displays would be essential for an automotive or aircraft HUD. Or perhaps have a transparent layer on top of a traditional display, for a two-layer effect.
You think touchscreens are bad for haptic feedback? What happens when you don't even get the impact against the screen as feedback that you've actually pressed something?
I'll answer my own question - this is focused on data consumption, not data production, to an even greater degree than touchscreens are; or for situations where an alternative input method will be used (voice, perhaps? I can't envision a mouse+keyboard being used with this)
There are niches for this, obviously, but I definitely don't think it's going to significantly displace existing display tech. It will more be used where current tech cannot.
In August 2001, a FEMA training session discussed the three most likely major natural disasters they would have to deal with in the next decade. They were a terrorist attack in New York, a hurricane hitting New Orleans, and an earthquake on the San Andreas line.
Two of those happened. But nobody is really surprised they were 66% accurate, because with timespans like this, 66% accuracy is trivial. A damn comedy website managed to predict Fukushima to within 200km (they predicted a TEPCO-run reactor on the opposite side of Japan would be struck by an earthquake and tsunami).
Why? Because it turns out that when you look at the situation, the history and the statistics, it's pretty easy to predict the future as long as you don't give a strict time. Just look at science fiction, or even general fiction, to see how people who did their research were able to come up with scenarios plausible enough to actually happen.
Now, the difference here is supposedly that instead of looking at the history and statistics, they were looking at geological data. If they can improve on this technique to get even just a one-year timespan for an earthquake, that would be groundbreaking (pun totally intended). Or if they can use it to predict an earthquake where there isn't a history of earthquakes. As it is, it's useless, but hopefully they can improve it.
The TSA is incompetently criminal - incompetent at their job, and their job isn't per se bad, but it's unnecessary and so poorly-done as to be criminal.
The NSA is effective. They had secret courts set up just to rubber-stamp their authority and even then they couldn't stick to the loosely-written rules. They have near-complete monitoring of communications, and if they don't have their own wet-work outfit, they can get you thrown in Gitmo simply by claiming to have some evidence (I'm not even sure they need to fabricate it anymore).
Comparing the two is like comparing a bunch of teens who loiter and buy cigarettes underage and sometimes shoplift, to the Mafia. You don't want either, but you want the actively dangerous one gone first.
It's cheap. It works. What more do you want?
Seriously, though, I wasn't saying that it was the best at any one thing. There are more powerful, more accurate, cheaper, probably even more reliable guns out there. The AK strikes a good balance between all of the important features, even the much less marketable features that are nevertheless critical. As an engineering feat, that's maybe not the Space Shuttle, but it is at least a good piece of engineering. Think "6502", not "POWER7+" - which one changed history more?
As for "number of bullets", that wasn't me, that was a US Army study (can't find it right now, if you really want a citation I can keep digging). I don't fully agree with that, but I do realize that most rounds fired are for suppression, not for effect (where wounding ability does not matter), and that as hard as it is to shoot an automatic AK-47 with any accuracy, it's far, far harder to do so with an M14.
Precisely! Kalashnikov realized (or at least correctly guessed) that accuracy is less important than reliability. US Army studies have shown that most engagements are within 50m, and that the primary determinant in victory is "number of bullets fired". This was part of their justification for moving from the M14 (essentially a magazine-fed M1 Garand with a useless full-auto hacked on) to the M16 - less power at range, less ability to kill in one shot, but capable of firing 30 rounds at automatic in a somewhat-controlled manner, rather than the "two round burst before it turns into an anti-aircraft gun" of the M14.
The AK47 did it earlier, and arguably better, because it made more tradeoffs. The M16 was a good weapon in the lab, but early models in particular failed in the field (even today jams are extremely common after decades of improvement). Too bad for them, almost zero battles have taken place in military laboratories.
The AK47 scored worse on any "benchmark" (for lack of a better term). Less accurate, slower firing, heavier, and so on. But because it's basically the most reliable (and cheap) assault rifle ever made, it's the weapon (or at least weapon design) of choice for almost everyone not wed to the NATO military-industrial complex. Even then, there's a reason there's AK-style weapons chambered in 5.56mm NATO. It's almost become the Linux of the assault-rifle world - you've got variants from the simple (the AK-74, the RPK, the Galil or the dozens of bullpup variants) to the crazy (the Saiga-12 shotgun, various Russian suppressed rifles, even a sniper rifle).
Was Mikhail Kalashnikov a genius? I don't think so, because nothing about it was itself revolutionary, but he was a damn good engineer because he knew what the users actually needed and gave it to them, rather than letting marketing decide on which features to produce.
The purpose of a windowed computing environment is that you can assign any (rectangular) amount of space to a program, in proportion to how much it is being used.
When I wrote that, all I had open was Firefox (two tabs - /. and the G+ post) and Steam (doing some downloads in my other monitor). I gave Firefox 100% of the screen because nothing else needed it.
A website should use as much space as it is given. If I give it only a small area, it should only use that, but if I give it more space, it should actually utilize it instead of making me scroll through several screens of text when all that content could have fit into one.
I just have one thing to say - I'll get back to reading that once I finish this rant:
I'm reading this on a maximised window on a 2560x1440 display. Why the flying fuck is all the content packed into a 500px box? Fully 2/3rds the width of my screen is completely and utterly unused. Even on my secondary 1600x900 monitor, it's wasting half the screen on a grey background.
Seriously, it's nearly 2014, we have electric cars and robots on Mars. And yet Google, pretty much the biggest web corp on the planet, with plenty of talented designers and programmers and everything else, decided their social networking site needs to present posts in a way that works on XGA screens? Not even XGA - that post would fit on straight-up VGA resolution from the late 80s.
More to the point:
Defense, of any sort, requires layers. And with enough layers, each individual layer can have quite a significant failure without compromising the integrity of the whole defense. My browsing habits, AdBlock, browser-based malware blocking, antivirus, and OS-level permission limits - all of those protect me. Each one probably only has a 90% success rate, but that combines to 99.999% effectiveness (assuming each layer is fully independent - in reality, stuff that can break one layer is likely able to break some of the others, so it may only be 99.9% effective, which is still pretty damn good).
I use MSE not because it's the best, but because it's the least intrusive. It nags me to run a scan about once a month, and I think only once has it flagged any malware (false positive - I do scans with MalwareBytes every few months, which is much better at detection and removal but does nothing for real-time protection, and it did not find anything). Other than that, it doesn't put any noticeable load on my system or bother me with meaningless alerts - unlike even "good" AV like AVG.
If it was better, why would the NSA have to pay them to use it?
An anchor that can block a five-story-high tunneling machine? I've seen some massive anchors from old battleships, but to block this it would have to be an order of magnitude larger.
Best bet is either on a giant boulder of some hard rock, or maybe a buried building of some sort. It's not ship debris - this thing is the *size* of some large ships.
I think a better comparison is to ADS diving, in more ways than one.
I'm living on a 3Mbps connection. Installing one 20GB game? Not bad, although it makes impulse playing impossible.
Installing my full 1.2TB Steam library? Now that was a pain. I actually ended up carting my desktop into to work for a week to download them all, plus the handful of other games on Origin or GoG.
And don't forget updates. With that many games, I usually have a gig or so of updates to download every day.
Well, some people like watching train wrecks...
This doesn't pass the sniff test. What would China gain by *destroying* our economy?
Sure, China planting surveillance software on every computer, I can believe that. But bricking all the computers in the US doesn't make sense as an espionage move, it doesn't make sense as an economic move (do you think anyone would trust Chinese-made computers when rebuilding?), it doesn't make sense as a propaganda move. It might make sense as a military move as a prelude to invasion, but a) China doesn't want that, b) China probably couldn't do it if they wanted to, and c) even if not fired, the risks of such a weapon being uncovered outweighs any benefit.
So it doesn't seem like something China would do. So who could it be? Even the NSA is explicitly calling it a nation-state, so it's not a terrorist group like al-Qaeda. If it's a nation-state, it has to be one that thinks (correctly or not) that they can beat the US when it is inevitably discovered (either before or after the attack). Russia's on that list, but I don't see how they would benefit except, again, as a pre-invasion attack, and our relations aren't that bad yet. North Korea might be dumb enough to think they can get away with it, but for the same reasons they probably don't have the capabilities of developing an attack like this. Iran is probably smart enough not to provoke the US with a direct attack, but maybe I'm wrong, or maybe they thought framing China would work.
Honestly, if someone in the Chinese government got on TV and said "yeah, we made that as a training exercise for defense drills, how the hell did you guys find it in the wild?", I'd believe them more than I'm believing CBS/NSA right now, because that at least makes sense with all the other information.
Especially since it's REAL FUCKING CONVENIENT for the NSA to suddenly have a major "victory" when they're being revealed as basically a bunch of puppy-kicking freedom-hating fascists.