I'm calling it now: the response will be "the White House is not permitted to comment on individual cases (See: "Why We Can't Comment on Bradley Manning", "Why We Can't Comment on this Petition about the Church of Scientology", etc.
Best-case, we get something saying "the case has been referred to the Justice Department and the Attorney General, and the White House is pushing for an indictment".
Agreed. My father actually works for a major company that makes these (among other things - he works in a different department, but uses the things in his line of work). I told him earlier about a story from here about a major flaw in a city's usage of it. His *first* *response* was something along the lines of "what moron decided to plug that thing into a network in the first place?".
The systems were designed and are still designed to be fully isolated from intruders. The authentication is mostly there as an afterthought, to keep the site janitor or a secretary from logging in and seeing what happens when they push the big shiny buttons. The city in question most likely hadn't even changed the password from stock, as it was still three characters long.
Remote login shouldn't ever be permitted, because it shouldn't ever be necessary. A trained operator is always on-site, in many cases because a trained operator is legally required to be on-site 365 days a year.
Yeah, a lot of the blame should fall on the people making these - they should have wisened up to security requirements ten years ago. But part of the blame goes to the people who said "sure, let's plug this into the Internet! What could *possibly* go wrong?"
Cross-platform desktop development is no picnic either. I once had to write a simple computer hardware check script - figure out what's in the machine, check against a list of programs, then spit out some XML. Came out to ~200 lines of Perl code for the Mac version, and ~150 lines of C for the Windows one. Not a single line of code was the same. Did I complain?
Well, yeah, I did complain, but more about how retarded Microsoft's APIs are than about having to rewrite stuff.
I'm also working on a video game in my free time. Currently runs on Windows and Linux, may add Mac to it soon. Had to do quite a bit of tweaking to make stuff work, even though I was using cross-platform libraries. Didn't really mind - making it run on Linux actually forced me to fix several potential problems (Arch's GCC seems to default to more warnings and errors than Cygwin's GCC).
Obviously, the solution is to obtain a secondary biosphere. Frankly, running a species of this importance without redundant biospheres is just reckless and irresponsible.
Right now, stealing copper is easy, and gives a high benefit. Attempts to make it harder to steal have failed, as they profit outweighs the cost. This simultaneously makes it harder to steal (steel cable is harder to cut) and sell (the average *person* doesn't even know how to do electrolysis, let alone the average thief), while also decreasing the profit (copper is about 10x as expensive as steel by mass).
This may also be worth it simply as cheaper cable - while I expect manufacturing costs are a bit higher, material costs would be far lower. If you can buy "theft-resistant" cable for half the price of pure-copper cable, why the hell wouldn't you?
Curiously enough, every attempt to staff the TSA with robots has failed. To quote TSA-02134's post-termination interview, "ERROR: CRASH IN LOGIC.C:1338: INPUT 'GOALS' INCOMPATIBLE WITH PROVIDED METHODS".
Dude, no, seriously. MSE actually works, and well. From personal experience, I can say that it's faster and more effective than AVG; I've heard from others that they switched to it from Avast, Comodo and Kaspersky.
Everything else Microsoft makes is pretty crap - Windows, Office, IIS, MSN - but apparently even Microsoft crap is better than every other antivirus' crap.
Because the micro-ops change every generation, and the decoder is a tiny, tiny part of the chip anyways. It's not large and power-hungry.
Seriously, you'd need at least six different binaries just for the processors Intel has released in the past five years (Presler, Core, Core 2, Nehalem, Westmere, Sandy Bridge). Maybe two more for the Atoms. And then several more for AMD compatibility - I'm not sure how much they've changed over time, but you'd need at least K8, K10, Fusion and Bulldozer.
So that's a dozen different binaries just to get micro-op compatibility with the past five years of processors. Considering even older stuff remains relatively common (*how* many businesses and schools still have Pentium IVs?), there's no way anyone would try to release separate binaries for each of them.
Search engine companies frequently bid on being the default search provider for a browser, with the exception of IE and Chrome which, as they are made by companies that also make search engines, don't offer themselves up to the competition.
If a browser has higher market share, they can get more money from the search engines, because they're worth more.
The fact that they're revisiting the whole "this will break the internet" aspect means they're paying at least lip service to public opinion. Which means that it's causing enough bad publicity for Congress that they're increasingly likely not to pass it.
If they were really intent on passing it, they'd try to sneak it through with as little debate or even thought as possible. Delays like this means they just might actually listen to their constituency for once.
Tommorows headlines: Politics Microsoft iPad China Nuclear Cat
Arguments in comment threads will continue much as they have, since few people read even the summary before wading into the flamewars. The only complaint they'll have tomorrow is not knowing whether to argue about nuclear power, or nuclear weapons, in the "Nuclear" story.
Even allowing for China to have a margin of error a hundred times that of America's, you're looking at a maximum inaccuracy of ~12 million people, not 300.
I'm pretty sure making pro-American video games is better than invading and occupying countries for decades at a time. I am 100% in favor of military-sponsored video games replacing our current military strategies.
Note that it does not specifically say who is doing the seeing. As life on other planets remains entirely theoretical (while human exploration of space is historically proven possible), the logical assumption is that a human, or a human-designed camera, is doing the viewing, and thus would invalidate the need to factor for alien biologies.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it's hilarious.
Yeah except for the part where he wasn't arrested, or detained...
*looks up at headline*
Senator Rand Paul Detained by the TSA
*facepalm*
Problem is, now they've given him an anecdote. And anecdotal evidence is quite convincing in politics, even if it's logically invalid.
violate your civil rights
Not the only thing they violate.
I'm calling it now: the response will be "the White House is not permitted to comment on individual cases (See: "Why We Can't Comment on Bradley Manning", "Why We Can't Comment on this Petition about the Church of Scientology", etc.
Best-case, we get something saying "the case has been referred to the Justice Department and the Attorney General, and the White House is pushing for an indictment".
Agreed. My father actually works for a major company that makes these (among other things - he works in a different department, but uses the things in his line of work). I told him earlier about a story from here about a major flaw in a city's usage of it. His *first* *response* was something along the lines of "what moron decided to plug that thing into a network in the first place?".
The systems were designed and are still designed to be fully isolated from intruders. The authentication is mostly there as an afterthought, to keep the site janitor or a secretary from logging in and seeing what happens when they push the big shiny buttons. The city in question most likely hadn't even changed the password from stock, as it was still three characters long.
Remote login shouldn't ever be permitted, because it shouldn't ever be necessary. A trained operator is always on-site, in many cases because a trained operator is legally required to be on-site 365 days a year.
Yeah, a lot of the blame should fall on the people making these - they should have wisened up to security requirements ten years ago. But part of the blame goes to the people who said "sure, let's plug this into the Internet! What could *possibly* go wrong?"
Cross-platform desktop development is no picnic either. I once had to write a simple computer hardware check script - figure out what's in the machine, check against a list of programs, then spit out some XML. Came out to ~200 lines of Perl code for the Mac version, and ~150 lines of C for the Windows one. Not a single line of code was the same. Did I complain?
Well, yeah, I did complain, but more about how retarded Microsoft's APIs are than about having to rewrite stuff.
I'm also working on a video game in my free time. Currently runs on Windows and Linux, may add Mac to it soon. Had to do quite a bit of tweaking to make stuff work, even though I was using cross-platform libraries. Didn't really mind - making it run on Linux actually forced me to fix several potential problems (Arch's GCC seems to default to more warnings and errors than Cygwin's GCC).
Dammit! The revolution is starting without me!
Year of Linux on the Desktop.
all the biosphere we have.
Obviously, the solution is to obtain a secondary biosphere. Frankly, running a species of this importance without redundant biospheres is just reckless and irresponsible.
It's a cost-benefit thing.
Right now, stealing copper is easy, and gives a high benefit. Attempts to make it harder to steal have failed, as they profit outweighs the cost. This simultaneously makes it harder to steal (steel cable is harder to cut) and sell (the average *person* doesn't even know how to do electrolysis, let alone the average thief), while also decreasing the profit (copper is about 10x as expensive as steel by mass).
This may also be worth it simply as cheaper cable - while I expect manufacturing costs are a bit higher, material costs would be far lower. If you can buy "theft-resistant" cable for half the price of pure-copper cable, why the hell wouldn't you?
Keeping a modicum of peace by use of terror, violence and fear?
I'd say we're supposed to be Batman.
Curiously enough, every attempt to staff the TSA with robots has failed. To quote TSA-02134's post-termination interview, "ERROR: CRASH IN LOGIC.C:1338: INPUT 'GOALS' INCOMPATIBLE WITH PROVIDED METHODS".
Dude, no, seriously. MSE actually works, and well. From personal experience, I can say that it's faster and more effective than AVG; I've heard from others that they switched to it from Avast, Comodo and Kaspersky.
Everything else Microsoft makes is pretty crap - Windows, Office, IIS, MSN - but apparently even Microsoft crap is better than every other antivirus' crap.
Yeah! And you could even implement it in hardware and microcode to make it even faster.
Because the micro-ops change every generation, and the decoder is a tiny, tiny part of the chip anyways. It's not large and power-hungry.
Seriously, you'd need at least six different binaries just for the processors Intel has released in the past five years (Presler, Core, Core 2, Nehalem, Westmere, Sandy Bridge). Maybe two more for the Atoms. And then several more for AMD compatibility - I'm not sure how much they've changed over time, but you'd need at least K8, K10, Fusion and Bulldozer.
So that's a dozen different binaries just to get micro-op compatibility with the past five years of processors. Considering even older stuff remains relatively common (*how* many businesses and schools still have Pentium IVs?), there's no way anyone would try to release separate binaries for each of them.
No. Firefox is, at least for now.
Search engine companies frequently bid on being the default search provider for a browser, with the exception of IE and Chrome which, as they are made by companies that also make search engines, don't offer themselves up to the competition.
If a browser has higher market share, they can get more money from the search engines, because they're worth more.
I've played Daikatana, E.T. and DNF. Trust me, I'd rather play them again than get shipped out to some desert to get shot at.
The fact that they're revisiting the whole "this will break the internet" aspect means they're paying at least lip service to public opinion. Which means that it's causing enough bad publicity for Congress that they're increasingly likely not to pass it.
If they were really intent on passing it, they'd try to sneak it through with as little debate or even thought as possible. Delays like this means they just might actually listen to their constituency for once.
Tommorows headlines:
Politics
Microsoft
iPad
China
Nuclear
Cat
Arguments in comment threads will continue much as they have, since few people read even the summary before wading into the flamewars. The only complaint they'll have tomorrow is not knowing whether to argue about nuclear power, or nuclear weapons, in the "Nuclear" story.
Would you want somebody to replace your voice with 'something a bit more more modern'?
Yes, please.
Wikipedia cites 1.3 billion
The margin of error in the US census is 0.009%.
Even allowing for China to have a margin of error a hundred times that of America's, you're looking at a maximum inaccuracy of ~12 million people, not 300.
I'm pretty sure making pro-American video games is better than invading and occupying countries for decades at a time. I am 100% in favor of military-sponsored video games replacing our current military strategies.
"What Does Sunset On an Alien World Look Like?"
Note that it does not specifically say who is doing the seeing. As life on other planets remains entirely theoretical (while human exploration of space is historically proven possible), the logical assumption is that a human, or a human-designed camera, is doing the viewing, and thus would invalidate the need to factor for alien biologies.
The question wasn't "what do aliens see on a sunset on their world?", but "what would we see on a sunset on an alien world?"