Nope. They did not do so intentionally, because, maybe, just maybe, they had no choice. It wasn't their intention to weaken anything, they were just told "you do it or else we'll do xyz to you".
You must be so confused. It's ransomware: it encrypts your files with a public key. The private key is controlled by the gang. You don't pay, you end up with a bunch of random-looking data substituted for your files, since the gang destroys the unique private key after the time is up. Yes, you're basically just back to where you were, before you "installed" the software. The "bother" is with the software being ransomware. It's malware. It installs itself when you don't pay attention, like most people out there...
It doesn't matter all that much, since the plants, you know, synthesize stuff. If there isn't enough nitrogen in the soil, the yields will be poor, but it's not like you'll get nitrogen-deficient plants. They'll be plant-matter-deficient in general. So talking about "nutrient devoid soils" is quite pointless: it only affects the yields, not the nutritional value of the end product. There'll be less stuff, smaller bulbs or fruit, etc. At least that's my high-school understanding, plant biologists please correct me.
Sure as heck multivitamins will help if you're on a ramen diet, you don't get any water-soluble vitamins from that, only a tiny bit of stuff that's naturally dissolved in chicken fat (or beef fat)! The flavor and the salt should be in split sections of the pouch. I really don't need the salt, nor do most other people.
When I was on a ramen diet (by default, not by choice), I'd get a chicken thigh every once in a while and boil the heck out of it in a small pot with minimum amount of water. I tossed the bones and joint tissues out, chopped the remainder on a plastic cutting board, put it back into the pot. Boiled out as much water as possible, then dehydrated further in the freezer. This was a great replacement lower-sodium chicken flavoring for ramen. A small amount would do (half a teaspoon, say). I'd supplant the fat with a bit of butter. Worked great as we had a freezer at work.
If you want to do things hard way first, you might as well do SDR. The hard part then is the software. Or use a voltage controlled oscillator, and use a potentiometer as your input element - there's plenty of both of those. Heck, be fancy and noncontacty and use an eccentric on the shaft and a light-based angle sensor to derive the tuning voltage. I don't think there's much reason to use variable capacitors for across-the-band tuning in any modern circuit, even if doing it just for kicks. There's a whole bunch of obsolete kinds of parts that were popular once but make no sense anymore. I'd say it doesn't take out any of the fun to use more modern methods, but that's just my opinion, of course.
Hmm, you are right. Then perhaps whatever metal was used in the connector end of things wasn't so great? Perhaps it was getting magnetically saturated? There is a possibility it's all in my head, but I remember rather vividly how easy it was to knock off the original magsafe connector. Now it almost never happens, and try as I might, I still don't see myself using it any differently.
I think that there must be batches of weak magnets out there on Apple-branded MagSafe connectors. I have destroyed two MagSafe plug/cable combos, mostly due to exposure to moisture and ensuing damage to the ID chip embedded in the plug. I've replaced them with chinese off-eBay knock-offs that work great and seem to have magnets much stronger than the original. It is nearly impossible to yank them out by mistake.
Well, maybe those are not knock-offs, just recycled parts or parts swiped off the production line, but they don't look like hang been recycled at all. The replacement involved breaking apart the power supply enclosure, as I didn't want to splice the cable. It was a bit of a pain the first time, I admit. The cable is simply soldered onto the power supply board and trivial to replace once you get to it.
It's not about electrocution risk, it's about the risk of blowing the gold off the connector's pins when you accidentally short-circuit them across, say, the corner of a unibody macbook. You do not want to have the low-impedance DC supply circuit energized until you know the connection has been made. The little spring-loaded pins are quite fragile, short-circuiting across them will make them useless in short order.
Alas, my magsafe I system doesn't turn the power supply off when the load is detached. You can still make some impressive sparks if you touch the connector to the corner of the machine, so this isn't really a feature of magsafe I at least.
There's no such thing as "penetrating the skin". You will always get some current flowing, even if you "touch" the skin across a circuit that has a few millivolts across it - it will simply be too small to affect your nervous system, in most circumstances. The impedance of the circuit dictates what the current will be at a given voltage, and it's the magnitude of the current that matters. Knowing merely the voltage without knowing the impedance is fairly useless. 24V can kill you if you insert the electrodes into the (low impedance) arteries of both forearms:) 48V, a "safe" voltage, can be quite unpleasant if you're wet, even more so if you're wet with saltwater.
You won't get mildly electrocuted by a plug with 16V potential difference across it. Even if you're very wet with seawater, you might feel a slight tingle at best. The potential to Earth is at worst in the same ballpark, if it isn't potential-free to Earth to start with (as in isolated from Earth).
There's this thing called aesthetics. It's often a matter of personal taste, even. Basically you're saying that when it comes to computing, personal preferences and taste be damned. Now go crawl back under the rock you came out from under.
Ah, I have another Radio Shack story from 1989. I went to a store with my dad, and there was another customer with a question that my dad, as an EE, was able to answer. He then asked the clerk, perhaps a tad naively, something along the lines of why didn't he know this or that about the products he sold. The answer was "If I knew it, I wouldn't be working here now, would I?". Still gives me a chuckle, but there's a lesson there: ultimately, corporations are keeping their employees just passably able to do their jobs. RadioShack, as well as many other corporations, don't care much for people with anything but most rudimentary knowledge for customer-facing positions. They want to keep their costs as low as possible, no matter how many people are pissed off. As long as "few enough" are pissed that the company is afloat, everything is considered peachy. That's a bit sad.
There's this moment when you're acting out when you cross from plausible belief to total, in-your-face disbelief. Does NSA seriously imply that such an attack would have lasting consequences? Do they really think that there wouldn't be many BIOS recovery solutions popping up left, right and center literally within hours? My bet is that within a week there'd be a thriving BIOS recovery business going on all around us, and the damage would be well contained in spite of whatever bullshit the clueless media would be spewing around.
There is a unwritiable "brain stem" part of the BIOS, which knows only one thing: if the main BIOS mass fails to boot, read first file from floppy disk and overwrite BIOS with it.
I'd like some thing tangible to back it up, since I think it's bullshit. There may have been some bioses like that, maybe even popular ones, but this is not the case anymore since at the minimum such a thing would need at least a minimal USB stack with it - it wouldn't be anywhere near "small" anymore.
The real deal is not BIOS or anything, but XP going out of support, and plenty of XP-running hardware simply has no driver support for Windows 7. At work we still have a bunch of XP-running machines that we will replace simply because it's cheaper to replace them than have me and/or another IT guy here spend time doing driver testing on obsolete hardware.
Same applies to a gun. You can take someone down with a gun if you don't care much for your life, same as if that person was good with a knife. Arguably close-quarters gun use requires less training to be lethal, but man, I've seen rather low-key (not para/military!) people who, with a knife, are pretty much unapproachable without the approacher being dealt serious damage. Arguably, people might be more inclined to run after someone with a knife, but hey, that's only a psychological effect and has no source in reality: they can be taken out by a skilled knife-wielder just as if he/she had a gun.
I've seen a recording of an experiment done with zip ties with real human participants, and that's why I even bother to mention them. I'd say they are a diversion so big that it almost guarantees untouchability. Scenario: you run up to someone and in about 400ms they have a zip tie tightly wrapped around their neck. Then you move on to the next target, as long as they are 20-30ft away. Whoever was next to that first person who is now in the process of collapsing will help them first, they won't he chasing no assailant. In the right hands and circumstances a bunch of zip ties is almost a perfect weapon.
Are you nuts? How can you, with a straight face, recommend a product that you can't fucking buy? There's no "buy now" link on their site. End of story. It's vaporware as far as individual users are concerned. Their sales people would probably laugh you out of the room if you called them up and said "well, I need it for my old mum".
There are two kinds of software: software that you can individually buy by instantly paying online, and software that you can't. The latter usually is a big fucking mess in some way. That's been my experience. The exceptions are few and far between. Usually the reason it's not available for instant purchase is precisely that it's a mess so bad that making it easily available would expose it for the crap it often is.
Mainly because MS Office by default drags in the entire, unwanted in this case, operating system with it.
Practically speaking, though, MS Office 2010 works great on wine, even on OS X, so I wouldn't worry. And I personally would NOT advise anyone to use MS Office for Mac. It's a disaster - all the purported compatibility benefits simply aren't there, since it's a separate code base. If you really want office on OS X or Linux, use it via wine. Otherwise, use libreoffice and be done with it.
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Nope. They did not do so intentionally, because, maybe, just maybe, they had no choice. It wasn't their intention to weaken anything, they were just told "you do it or else we'll do xyz to you".
'Twas detector malfunction, please accept my apologies ;)
MAC authorization is not even remotely sufficient in my view. 802.1x is the minimum you need.
That's what makes it even sadder. True but oh so sad...
You must be so confused. It's ransomware: it encrypts your files with a public key. The private key is controlled by the gang. You don't pay, you end up with a bunch of random-looking data substituted for your files, since the gang destroys the unique private key after the time is up. Yes, you're basically just back to where you were, before you "installed" the software. The "bother" is with the software being ransomware. It's malware. It installs itself when you don't pay attention, like most people out there...
now everything is grown on nutrient devoid soils
It doesn't matter all that much, since the plants, you know, synthesize stuff. If there isn't enough nitrogen in the soil, the yields will be poor, but it's not like you'll get nitrogen-deficient plants. They'll be plant-matter-deficient in general. So talking about "nutrient devoid soils" is quite pointless: it only affects the yields, not the nutritional value of the end product. There'll be less stuff, smaller bulbs or fruit, etc. At least that's my high-school understanding, plant biologists please correct me.
Sure as heck multivitamins will help if you're on a ramen diet, you don't get any water-soluble vitamins from that, only a tiny bit of stuff that's naturally dissolved in chicken fat (or beef fat)! The flavor and the salt should be in split sections of the pouch. I really don't need the salt, nor do most other people.
When I was on a ramen diet (by default, not by choice), I'd get a chicken thigh every once in a while and boil the heck out of it in a small pot with minimum amount of water. I tossed the bones and joint tissues out, chopped the remainder on a plastic cutting board, put it back into the pot. Boiled out as much water as possible, then dehydrated further in the freezer. This was a great replacement lower-sodium chicken flavoring for ramen. A small amount would do (half a teaspoon, say). I'd supplant the fat with a bit of butter. Worked great as we had a freezer at work.
Yes, especially that many modern "diets" are anything but balanced.
If you want to do things hard way first, you might as well do SDR. The hard part then is the software. Or use a voltage controlled oscillator, and use a potentiometer as your input element - there's plenty of both of those. Heck, be fancy and noncontacty and use an eccentric on the shaft and a light-based angle sensor to derive the tuning voltage. I don't think there's much reason to use variable capacitors for across-the-band tuning in any modern circuit, even if doing it just for kicks. There's a whole bunch of obsolete kinds of parts that were popular once but make no sense anymore. I'd say it doesn't take out any of the fun to use more modern methods, but that's just my opinion, of course.
Hmm, you are right. Then perhaps whatever metal was used in the connector end of things wasn't so great? Perhaps it was getting magnetically saturated? There is a possibility it's all in my head, but I remember rather vividly how easy it was to knock off the original magsafe connector. Now it almost never happens, and try as I might, I still don't see myself using it any differently.
I think that there must be batches of weak magnets out there on Apple-branded MagSafe connectors. I have destroyed two MagSafe plug/cable combos, mostly due to exposure to moisture and ensuing damage to the ID chip embedded in the plug. I've replaced them with chinese off-eBay knock-offs that work great and seem to have magnets much stronger than the original. It is nearly impossible to yank them out by mistake.
Well, maybe those are not knock-offs, just recycled parts or parts swiped off the production line, but they don't look like hang been recycled at all. The replacement involved breaking apart the power supply enclosure, as I didn't want to splice the cable. It was a bit of a pain the first time, I admit. The cable is simply soldered onto the power supply board and trivial to replace once you get to it.
It's not about electrocution risk, it's about the risk of blowing the gold off the connector's pins when you accidentally short-circuit them across, say, the corner of a unibody macbook. You do not want to have the low-impedance DC supply circuit energized until you know the connection has been made. The little spring-loaded pins are quite fragile, short-circuiting across them will make them useless in short order.
Alas, my magsafe I system doesn't turn the power supply off when the load is detached. You can still make some impressive sparks if you touch the connector to the corner of the machine, so this isn't really a feature of magsafe I at least.
There's no such thing as "penetrating the skin". You will always get some current flowing, even if you "touch" the skin across a circuit that has a few millivolts across it - it will simply be too small to affect your nervous system, in most circumstances. The impedance of the circuit dictates what the current will be at a given voltage, and it's the magnitude of the current that matters. Knowing merely the voltage without knowing the impedance is fairly useless. 24V can kill you if you insert the electrodes into the (low impedance) arteries of both forearms :) 48V, a "safe" voltage, can be quite unpleasant if you're wet, even more so if you're wet with saltwater.
You won't get mildly electrocuted by a plug with 16V potential difference across it. Even if you're very wet with seawater, you might feel a slight tingle at best. The potential to Earth is at worst in the same ballpark, if it isn't potential-free to Earth to start with (as in isolated from Earth).
There's this thing called aesthetics. It's often a matter of personal taste, even. Basically you're saying that when it comes to computing, personal preferences and taste be damned. Now go crawl back under the rock you came out from under.
Ah, I have another Radio Shack story from 1989. I went to a store with my dad, and there was another customer with a question that my dad, as an EE, was able to answer. He then asked the clerk, perhaps a tad naively, something along the lines of why didn't he know this or that about the products he sold. The answer was "If I knew it, I wouldn't be working here now, would I?". Still gives me a chuckle, but there's a lesson there: ultimately, corporations are keeping their employees just passably able to do their jobs. RadioShack, as well as many other corporations, don't care much for people with anything but most rudimentary knowledge for customer-facing positions. They want to keep their costs as low as possible, no matter how many people are pissed off. As long as "few enough" are pissed that the company is afloat, everything is considered peachy. That's a bit sad.
the theory was that electrons travelled through conductors at almost the speed of light
I don't know when did you learn that, but no physicist worth their salt would say that by mid 1930s at the latest, I'd hope.
These days you buy a radio on a chip, who cares about variable caps? It's digitally tuned. If you really insist, use a varicap.
There's this moment when you're acting out when you cross from plausible belief to total, in-your-face disbelief. Does NSA seriously imply that such an attack would have lasting consequences? Do they really think that there wouldn't be many BIOS recovery solutions popping up left, right and center literally within hours? My bet is that within a week there'd be a thriving BIOS recovery business going on all around us, and the damage would be well contained in spite of whatever bullshit the clueless media would be spewing around.
There is a unwritiable "brain stem" part of the BIOS, which knows only one thing: if the main BIOS mass fails to boot, read first file from floppy disk and overwrite BIOS with it.
I'd like some thing tangible to back it up, since I think it's bullshit. There may have been some bioses like that, maybe even popular ones, but this is not the case anymore since at the minimum such a thing would need at least a minimal USB stack with it - it wouldn't be anywhere near "small" anymore.
The real deal is not BIOS or anything, but XP going out of support, and plenty of XP-running hardware simply has no driver support for Windows 7. At work we still have a bunch of XP-running machines that we will replace simply because it's cheaper to replace them than have me and/or another IT guy here spend time doing driver testing on obsolete hardware.
Same applies to a gun. You can take someone down with a gun if you don't care much for your life, same as if that person was good with a knife. Arguably close-quarters gun use requires less training to be lethal, but man, I've seen rather low-key (not para/military!) people who, with a knife, are pretty much unapproachable without the approacher being dealt serious damage. Arguably, people might be more inclined to run after someone with a knife, but hey, that's only a psychological effect and has no source in reality: they can be taken out by a skilled knife-wielder just as if he/she had a gun.
I've seen a recording of an experiment done with zip ties with real human participants, and that's why I even bother to mention them. I'd say they are a diversion so big that it almost guarantees untouchability. Scenario: you run up to someone and in about 400ms they have a zip tie tightly wrapped around their neck. Then you move on to the next target, as long as they are 20-30ft away. Whoever was next to that first person who is now in the process of collapsing will help them first, they won't he chasing no assailant. In the right hands and circumstances a bunch of zip ties is almost a perfect weapon.
To me that's all within the same order of magnitude, so no real increase. It's all hovering about 0.1 shooters/million.
Are you nuts? How can you, with a straight face, recommend a product that you can't fucking buy? There's no "buy now" link on their site. End of story. It's vaporware as far as individual users are concerned. Their sales people would probably laugh you out of the room if you called them up and said "well, I need it for my old mum".
There are two kinds of software: software that you can individually buy by instantly paying online, and software that you can't. The latter usually is a big fucking mess in some way. That's been my experience. The exceptions are few and far between. Usually the reason it's not available for instant purchase is precisely that it's a mess so bad that making it easily available would expose it for the crap it often is.
Mainly because MS Office by default drags in the entire, unwanted in this case, operating system with it.
Practically speaking, though, MS Office 2010 works great on wine, even on OS X, so I wouldn't worry. And I personally would NOT advise anyone to use MS Office for Mac. It's a disaster - all the purported compatibility benefits simply aren't there, since it's a separate code base. If you really want office on OS X or Linux, use it via wine. Otherwise, use libreoffice and be done with it.