Wow, that sucks. The law in the US varies by state, but I'm not aware of any state where you can be cited for trespassing merely for disobeying a sign or a verbal order. Here, if you disobey the sign or order you will be asked to leave. If you refuse to leave, *then* you are trespassing, but not until then.
In Utah, the state whose law I know best, there's another caveat as well: If you are in a place that was open to the public at the time and were not interfering with the owner's lawful use of his property (i.e. his business) then you are not trespassing even if you refuse to leave. In practice that's the sort of out that you have to exercise in court, because if you refuse to leave the cops will cite you, but you can choose to stand on your rights and fight it in court.
Of course, those sorts of stations wouldn't provide coverage of un-populated areas, water-covered areas, etc., and wouldn't provide the same sort of information, so they're not a replacement. Seems like they would be useful, though.
They really wouldn't be all that useful, because they don't provide any information other than what's happening locally at ground level - a very detailed 2D look at a tiny slice of a 3D system.
Certainly it wouldn't do away with the need for weather balloons and satellites. My friends at NCAR disagree that it wouldn't be useful.
Since the cheapest reliable, accurate and internet enabled sensor suite is about $1500 (I just bought 125 rainwise portaloggers for a company I work for ) exactly who will pay for these sensors?
I'm skeptical they couldn't be purchased in large volume for much less, but you could buy several thousand at that price for the cost of a single satellite, without even considering launch cost. Who? The NWS, obviously, though I might actually be willing to chip in a bit myself. I've been considering installing one of the commercially-available options, actually, just for fun.
Who will do the quality control?
What quality control? Device quality control should be done by the manufacturer. Siting quality control could be done by providing instructions to the homeowner and possibly by sending someone around to take a look.
Please tell me you will provide the networking and support for free?
Networking, absolutely I would donate for free, and power as well. Actually, I would expect that I can use the data it collects for my own purposes, so I guess that would be my payment. As for support, I would expect the NWS would provide maintenance and repairs for their equipment.
Oh by the way how do I get those surface based sensors to give me the pressure/temperature/winds/humidity every 100mb off the surface up 125,000 feet AGL?
You've got to use weather balloons for that, obviously. That's a different part of the problem. One that is also not well-served by satellites either, in fact.
There is no way EVER that a variable tab width solution can result in things being lined up consistently in code.
This isn't true, actually. Not that I think it's a good idea to try to support variable tab widths, but it certainly can be done.
The key is that block level indentation should be done only with tabs, and any extra indentation beyond the block level should be done only with spaces. For example, imagine a C function containing a for loop which contains an if statement whose body contains a function call, which has several arguments and is wrapped. The function declaration should be at indentation level 0. The contents of the function body are at level 1, so the for loop is indented one tab. The body of the loop, and the if statement are at level 2, so two tabs. The function call is at level 3. The arguments that are wrapped to the next line are at level three (three tab stops) PLUS spaces to push them over so they line up under the first argument.
With that approach, changing the tab width will change the block level indentation, and the spaces will keep the rest lined up.
In practice, even with editor support maintaining that sort of whitespace become far more of a burden than it's worth, but it can be done.
you must be having a bad editor.
a tab should expand up to a tab-stop. so
ab[tab]c
a[tab]bc
[tab]abc
should line up the stuff after the tab at the same horizontal position.
Nonsense. A good editor should indent the whole line correctly for the currently-specified style based on the structure of the code, regardless of where your cursor is when you press the tab key. So, assuming each of your "abc"s represents a complete statement and none indicates the beginning or ending of a block, with a good editor, the three lines should all start at the same horizontal position.
But I often don't want it all lined up at the same horizontal position. For example, a function call with several parameters may be long enough that I need to wrap the line, possibly several times. I'd like each parameter starting a new line to line up with the first argument, the one following the open parenthesis. Thus, each of those subsequent lines needs to be indented as far as the first letter of the function name, plus the length of the function name, plus one (for the open paren). Odds are, that indentation level won't be a multiple of the tab width. Even if it happens to work out to be a multiple, as soon as someone changes the tab size, it won't be.
The solution is to indent with tabs to the level of the function call, then use spaces after that (since the length of the function name won't change when the tab size is altered). But getting that mix of whitespace exactly right is pretty difficult, even with good editor support.
If you want your code to look good regardless of tab width you have two options: Regularly test the layout by changing the tab width so you know where it needs to be fixed, or just use spaces.
why do we need satellites, can't we just get our weather from the internet
Obviously ridiculous, but I do have to point out that at least for weather data from populated areas, the Internet is potentially a very useful tool. Scattering large numbers of inexpensive, land-based, Internet-connected weather stations could be done for a tiny fraction of the cost of a satellite launch. I'd be thrilled to install one at my house, for example.
Of course, those sorts of stations wouldn't provide coverage of un-populated areas, water-covered areas, etc., and wouldn't provide the same sort of information, so they're not a replacement. Seems like they would be useful, though.
I use tabs because anyone can set the width to whatever they like (2, 4 or 8 spaces usually).
That only works if you're also careful to use spaces for all additional indentation used to line things up -- and in many cases lining things up can significantly improve readability.
I used tabs for base indentation (to the block depth) and spaces for extra indentation for a while, but even with good editor support I ultimately decided that it just caused me to spend too much time playing with whitespace.
If you want your code to look good no matter what the tab width is there's only one practical way: Don't use tabs, use spaces only.
What distro would you suggest? Keep in mind that this is the FSF, so it must be one that is completely Free. No binary-only blobs and no licenses that would bar you from modifying, redistributing or both. This excludes Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, etc.
Because, whether you agree with their message or not, the fact is that giving away a distribution that is only mostly Free would undermine it.
Now, it's quite possible that Windows 7 is not secure enough for your needs and 8 doesn't improve upon that significantly, but I'm skeptical that 8 is a step backwards in security.
They weren't claiming that Windows 8 is insecure. They said it steals users' security. They're just pointing out (in arguably over-the-top language) that it takes control of users' information away from the users. This probably isn't because of anything specific that it does, it's just because it's closed and therefore unknowable and uncontrollable.
Make ads informative and you'll see people will not only stop blocking them, they'll actually follow the link they provide to learn more about the product.
One very interesting example of this is Google's shift to "skippable" ads on YouTube. I'm sure we'd all rather not have video ads at all, but I've noticed that when advertisers realize they only have a few seconds to hook you before you click the "skip" button, they come up with some pretty entertaining ads. More often than not I don't click "skip".
No, but the possibility that they might die without being able to achieve their goal may.
In any case, if bombers are the concern we should just roll everything back to pre-9/11 security right now. A bomber would have to be exceptionally stupid to target a plane; there are so many places that he or she could easily kill a lot more people without having to deal with *any* security screening, and those other places would actually have more psychological impact. We walk around assuming we're safe from being blown up by terrorists at the mall, at football games, at work, etc. Terrorists would get maximum value from a bomb by proving us wrong there.
But the fact is that even bombs are hard enough to carry off in the US that it's not really worth the effort. 9/11 was about using the airplanes as near-WMD scale bombs, and supposedly that's what all the airport security crap is about preventing. Except that now that passengers know that hijackers should be resisted, that tactic will never work again -- which is a good thing because the security screening the TSA does has no prayer of stopping a similar attack. Oh, and the barred cockpit doors help, too.
Ideologically, I like Lumpy's solution of arming all the passengers (or at least certifying those who are willing to go through training and get a background check -- but honestly that's just because I don't want to hassle with checking my gun, and I know I can pass whatever checks they want to perform). But it's not really necessary. Pre-9/11 airport security was perfectly adequate; we should just go back to that. Minus the ID check, which never has been a security measure.
I do use my phone. I also use my tablet, which is generally either in my hand or in my pocket, not in a bag. That's the nice thing about the 7" table size. I could use a plastic card, certainly, but then I wouldn't get an electronic receipt on my phone and tablet, and I find tapping more convenient than swiping. I'm also hoping there will be a day when I can stop carrying a wallet full of credit cards.
Oh, sorry. I didn't notice you were the same person I replied to above. Please excuse the repetition (though I'll point out that it was triggered by your repetition:-) ).
The DKIM spec itself (RFC6376) says: "Signers MUST use RSA keys of at least 1024 bits for long-lived keys."
Keep in mind that RFC 6376 was issued in September of 2011. Prior versions did allow 512-bit keys, though they cautioned against them.
It's pretty unequivocal. Google just misconfigured their mailserver.
More likely, I think, is that Google failed to reconfigure their server. When Google started using DKIM, cracking 512-bit keys was significantly harder than it is now. The change is less due to increases in computing power (though that has helped) than it is to the availability of cloud-based compute clusters. Granted that it was always a little risky to use such small keys, it was much more reasonable than it is today.
So my guess is that it went down like this: A few years ago when Google implemented DKIM someone looked at RFC 4871's discussion of key sizes, which says:
o Larger keys impose higher CPU costs to verify and sign email
o Keys can be replaced on a regular basis, thus their lifetime can
be relatively short
o The security goals of this specification are modest compared to
typical goals of other systems that employ digital signatures
... and thought "yeah, we can use 512-bit keys and change them occasionally, that will provide higher performance for less CPU load, and as the RFC says the security goals here really aren't that high". I imagine that the decision to implement DKIM at all may have been a tad controversial given the additional load it was going to place on the servers, so that 512-bit key usage may even have been an important design point. Then the "change them occasionally" bit got dropped on the floor.
Fast-forward a few years, the problem is discovered and fixed -- but this time the engineers decided to make sure it doesn't happen again and jumped to 2048-bit keys even if it required provisioning more capacity.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, and do cryptographic security stuff for Google, but I don't have any more information than the rest of you about how all of this happened. The above is pure speculation based on my 15 years as a security consultant before joining Google. I saw lots of stuff just like it from the few companies I worked with who were actually quite good about security. And even more insanely stupid stuff from all the rest.)
They're the same on the issues that matter. To say that they're actually different on taxes is laughable -- yeah their rhetoric is very different, but what they actually do differs in trivial ways. Oh there are some small segments of the population who would feel a difference, but the overall situation won't be significantly different. I guess there are some real and non-trivial differences on healthcare, but I'm skeptical of the ability of either to do much of substance in that space -- and both of their approaches are wrong, IMO.
Bottom line: Both are big-government authoritarians with aggressive and interventionist foreign policies.
That's a cheap shot... and an inaccurate one. Utah's liquor laws are a bit weird, but they're less restrictive than what you find in many parts of the south, and Utah does ban gambling, but it's hardly alone there either. All in all Utah's "morality" laws are perhaps slightly more conservative than average, but not much. Mormons believe that "Free Agency" -- the right to make moral decisions on one's own -- is an important God-given right. Many draw the line at things like gay marriage which may be interpreted as not just allowing but actually supporting immoral behavior (I personally don't, BTW; I think the solution is for government to get out of marriage entirely), but in general Mormons are pretty middle-of-the-road when it comes to government-enforcement of moral issues.
Many sci-fi worlds envision a future where each of us carries a personal pharmacy all the time, built into our bodies, with different chemicals added all the time, based to some degree on automated adjustments but with some manual control/overrides. I don't think it's all that unlikely, though it definitely makes me uncomfortable. If you think about it, that's how we already work, with the difference that our pharmacy consists of numerous glands of various sorts which inject different hormones into our bloodstream. Is it really that much of a change to augment that process artificially? I don't know. It feels like it to me, but it may not feel that way to my great grandkids.
I cannot deny your personal experience, but its hard to believe that 'suddenly' the human species - you know, the wealthy, Western ones - desperately needs medication to function at a basic level, as you describe.
It's not the species that has changed, it's the definition of basic level function. A brain that zips all over the place isn't an impediment to someone doing manual labor, as long as it also has the ability to focus intently for short periods when not focusing would be dangerous. For a hunter-gatherer, being easily distracted by any noise or movement can be a survival trait -- it's a good thing to flit quickly from observation to observation, staying with each just long enough to categorize it and determine if a reaction is necessary.
Our environment has changed dramatically over the last few hundred years, in fact it's changed dramatically over the last 50 years. My great-grandparents were farmers. My grandparents did manual labor and operated heavy machinery. My parents worked in offices, but the majority of their work was face-to-face human interaction. I work in an office and the vast bulk of my day is spend reading and writing (e-mail, documentation and code).
Now, that's not to say that there weren't people who did almost nothing but read and write hundreds of years ago, but they were a small, self-selected subset, and there are still a fair number of manual labor jobs today. But the ratios have changed dramatically. While human beings are adaptable generalists as a species, specific individuals do have built-in strengths and weaknesses and to a large degree we "adapt" by finding a niche that fits what we're good at. But as the opportunity ratios have changed -- orders of magnitude faster than any change evolution can keep up with, not to mention the fact that we've largely removed fitness selection as an evolutionary force -- that has become harder for people.
It's not at all unreasonable to think that the next step in adaptation is the application of our intellect to modify the way our bodies and brains function, to better fit the new reality we've created. Such a step is risky, of course, and pretty much guaranteed to include nume
...If the engine in your '57 Chevy blows up, you can still get it repaired and replaced...
Well, yes, but Chevy's not currently making engines for it or offering warranty support. Are you saying I should be able to take my 56 year old automobile back to the manufacturer and have them replace the carb with a fuel injection system?
No, what he's saying is that Chevy shouldn't be able to prevent you from installing a new engine in your '57 just because they no longer support the platform.
Which is why car analogies often turn goofy when talking about software and licenses - cars are treated as tangible, durable goods, whereas software (which, if you have a CD, is a tangible, durable good) is not treated in the same manner.
But... WHY is it different? Why is it that I (well, someone who knows their way around a machine shop) can manufacture replacement parts, or even modify and improve that '57 Chevy engine, but we're all reliant on MS to fix problems or make enhancements to Windows XP?
I assert that it's because the way we've applied copyright law to software is insane.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage publication, not so that the publisher can make money, but so that the new ideas and, eventually, the actual content can flow into the public domain. The reason society cares to expend the effort to enforce copyright laws is, ultimately, to enrich the public domain.
Applying that concept to software in the way we have, however, is utterly broken. First it's broken because the bulk of the interesting ideas in software are hidden due to binary-only distribution. Imagine if an author could write and sell a book but somehow keep secret his innovations in plot, characterization, imagery, style, sentence structure and word choice, thereby preventing other authors from gleaning any good ideas.
Second, it's broken because copyright is insanely long. It's crazy long for books, music and movies, but given the pace of change in the world of software it's downright ridiculous. How relevant is a 100 year-old piece of software? Well, we don't know because there isn't any software that old, but it's pretty clear that except to some sort of future software historians it will be utterly worthless.
If both of those problems were fixed, if software could only obtain copyright protection if the source were published (or at least escrowed with the Library of Congress or similar until expiration), and if copyright terms were of reasonable duration (say, 10 years, and that's being generous), then in fact you could maintain Windows XP yourself, just like you can that old Chevy.
In both cases, it's likely that for most people it will be cheaper and better to buy and use new stuff, but those who really felt the need, or the desire, to stay with the old could do that if they wanted.
Another thing... how is WINE doing these days at emulating the 32-bit API from WinXP? WINE always lags, for obvious reasons, but it seems likely that the support for XP apps is probably quite good. Linux might be the best option for a modern OS that runs those old apps.
So this company managed to Microsoft our asses using Linux. Bravo. For the record, during evaluation six years ago, I said "no." They never listen to me, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, that sucks. The law in the US varies by state, but I'm not aware of any state where you can be cited for trespassing merely for disobeying a sign or a verbal order. Here, if you disobey the sign or order you will be asked to leave. If you refuse to leave, *then* you are trespassing, but not until then.
In Utah, the state whose law I know best, there's another caveat as well: If you are in a place that was open to the public at the time and were not interfering with the owner's lawful use of his property (i.e. his business) then you are not trespassing even if you refuse to leave. In practice that's the sort of out that you have to exercise in court, because if you refuse to leave the cops will cite you, but you can choose to stand on your rights and fight it in court.
They really wouldn't be all that useful, because they don't provide any information other than what's happening locally at ground level - a very detailed 2D look at a tiny slice of a 3D system.
Certainly it wouldn't do away with the need for weather balloons and satellites. My friends at NCAR disagree that it wouldn't be useful.
Since the cheapest reliable, accurate and internet enabled sensor suite is about $1500 (I just bought 125 rainwise portaloggers for a company I work for ) exactly who will pay for these sensors?
I'm skeptical they couldn't be purchased in large volume for much less, but you could buy several thousand at that price for the cost of a single satellite, without even considering launch cost. Who? The NWS, obviously, though I might actually be willing to chip in a bit myself. I've been considering installing one of the commercially-available options, actually, just for fun.
Who will do the quality control?
What quality control? Device quality control should be done by the manufacturer. Siting quality control could be done by providing instructions to the homeowner and possibly by sending someone around to take a look.
Please tell me you will provide the networking and support for free?
Networking, absolutely I would donate for free, and power as well. Actually, I would expect that I can use the data it collects for my own purposes, so I guess that would be my payment. As for support, I would expect the NWS would provide maintenance and repairs for their equipment.
Oh by the way how do I get those surface based sensors to give me the pressure/temperature/winds/humidity every 100mb off the surface up 125,000 feet AGL?
You've got to use weather balloons for that, obviously. That's a different part of the problem. One that is also not well-served by satellites either, in fact.
There is no way EVER that a variable tab width solution can result in things being lined up consistently in code.
This isn't true, actually. Not that I think it's a good idea to try to support variable tab widths, but it certainly can be done.
The key is that block level indentation should be done only with tabs, and any extra indentation beyond the block level should be done only with spaces. For example, imagine a C function containing a for loop which contains an if statement whose body contains a function call, which has several arguments and is wrapped. The function declaration should be at indentation level 0. The contents of the function body are at level 1, so the for loop is indented one tab. The body of the loop, and the if statement are at level 2, so two tabs. The function call is at level 3. The arguments that are wrapped to the next line are at level three (three tab stops) PLUS spaces to push them over so they line up under the first argument.
With that approach, changing the tab width will change the block level indentation, and the spaces will keep the rest lined up.
In practice, even with editor support maintaining that sort of whitespace become far more of a burden than it's worth, but it can be done.
you must be having a bad editor. a tab should expand up to a tab-stop. so
ab[tab]c a[tab]bc [tab]abc
should line up the stuff after the tab at the same horizontal position.
Nonsense. A good editor should indent the whole line correctly for the currently-specified style based on the structure of the code, regardless of where your cursor is when you press the tab key. So, assuming each of your "abc"s represents a complete statement and none indicates the beginning or ending of a block, with a good editor, the three lines should all start at the same horizontal position.
But I often don't want it all lined up at the same horizontal position. For example, a function call with several parameters may be long enough that I need to wrap the line, possibly several times. I'd like each parameter starting a new line to line up with the first argument, the one following the open parenthesis. Thus, each of those subsequent lines needs to be indented as far as the first letter of the function name, plus the length of the function name, plus one (for the open paren). Odds are, that indentation level won't be a multiple of the tab width. Even if it happens to work out to be a multiple, as soon as someone changes the tab size, it won't be.
The solution is to indent with tabs to the level of the function call, then use spaces after that (since the length of the function name won't change when the tab size is altered). But getting that mix of whitespace exactly right is pretty difficult, even with good editor support.
If you want your code to look good regardless of tab width you have two options: Regularly test the layout by changing the tab width so you know where it needs to be fixed, or just use spaces.
why do we need satellites, can't we just get our weather from the internet
Obviously ridiculous, but I do have to point out that at least for weather data from populated areas, the Internet is potentially a very useful tool. Scattering large numbers of inexpensive, land-based, Internet-connected weather stations could be done for a tiny fraction of the cost of a satellite launch. I'd be thrilled to install one at my house, for example.
Of course, those sorts of stations wouldn't provide coverage of un-populated areas, water-covered areas, etc., and wouldn't provide the same sort of information, so they're not a replacement. Seems like they would be useful, though.
I use tabs because anyone can set the width to whatever they like (2, 4 or 8 spaces usually).
That only works if you're also careful to use spaces for all additional indentation used to line things up -- and in many cases lining things up can significantly improve readability.
I used tabs for base indentation (to the block depth) and spaces for extra indentation for a while, but even with good editor support I ultimately decided that it just caused me to spend too much time playing with whitespace.
If you want your code to look good no matter what the tab width is there's only one practical way: Don't use tabs, use spaces only.
What distro would you suggest? Keep in mind that this is the FSF, so it must be one that is completely Free. No binary-only blobs and no licenses that would bar you from modifying, redistributing or both. This excludes Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, etc.
Because, whether you agree with their message or not, the fact is that giving away a distribution that is only mostly Free would undermine it.
Citation needed.
Now, it's quite possible that Windows 7 is not secure enough for your needs and 8 doesn't improve upon that significantly, but I'm skeptical that 8 is a step backwards in security.
They weren't claiming that Windows 8 is insecure. They said it steals users' security. They're just pointing out (in arguably over-the-top language) that it takes control of users' information away from the users. This probably isn't because of anything specific that it does, it's just because it's closed and therefore unknowable and uncontrollable.
There are other entities, though, that while ostracized for being 'Left', 'Socialist', etc. are actually willing to stand up for people's rights.
And where are they on the question of the TSA's approach to airport security? Silent, AFAICT.
Begs the question of if you've actually gone and done any research or you're just throwing it out there.
"Raises", not "begs". Begging the question is different.
As for whether or not I've done any research... 30 minutes with Google, that's about it. But I notice that you didn't provide any links.
Make ads informative and you'll see people will not only stop blocking them, they'll actually follow the link they provide to learn more about the product.
One very interesting example of this is Google's shift to "skippable" ads on YouTube. I'm sure we'd all rather not have video ads at all, but I've noticed that when advertisers realize they only have a few seconds to hook you before you click the "skip" button, they come up with some pretty entertaining ads. More often than not I don't click "skip".
There are other entities, though, that while ostracized for being 'Left', 'Socialist', etc. are actually willing to stand up for people's rights.
And where are they on the question of the TSA's approach to airport security? Silent, AFAICT.
No, but the possibility that they might die without being able to achieve their goal may.
In any case, if bombers are the concern we should just roll everything back to pre-9/11 security right now. A bomber would have to be exceptionally stupid to target a plane; there are so many places that he or she could easily kill a lot more people without having to deal with *any* security screening, and those other places would actually have more psychological impact. We walk around assuming we're safe from being blown up by terrorists at the mall, at football games, at work, etc. Terrorists would get maximum value from a bomb by proving us wrong there.
But the fact is that even bombs are hard enough to carry off in the US that it's not really worth the effort. 9/11 was about using the airplanes as near-WMD scale bombs, and supposedly that's what all the airport security crap is about preventing. Except that now that passengers know that hijackers should be resisted, that tactic will never work again -- which is a good thing because the security screening the TSA does has no prayer of stopping a similar attack. Oh, and the barred cockpit doors help, too.
Ideologically, I like Lumpy's solution of arming all the passengers (or at least certifying those who are willing to go through training and get a background check -- but honestly that's just because I don't want to hassle with checking my gun, and I know I can pass whatever checks they want to perform). But it's not really necessary. Pre-9/11 airport security was perfectly adequate; we should just go back to that. Minus the ID check, which never has been a security measure.
I do use my phone. I also use my tablet, which is generally either in my hand or in my pocket, not in a bag. That's the nice thing about the 7" table size. I could use a plastic card, certainly, but then I wouldn't get an electronic receipt on my phone and tablet, and I find tapping more convenient than swiping. I'm also hoping there will be a day when I can stop carrying a wallet full of credit cards.
Oh, sorry. I didn't notice you were the same person I replied to above. Please excuse the repetition (though I'll point out that it was triggered by your repetition :-) ).
Keep in mind that RFC 6367 was issued in September 2011. Prior versions did allow 512-bit keys.
The DKIM spec itself (RFC6376) says: "Signers MUST use RSA keys of at least 1024 bits for long-lived keys."
Keep in mind that RFC 6376 was issued in September of 2011. Prior versions did allow 512-bit keys, though they cautioned against them.
It's pretty unequivocal. Google just misconfigured their mailserver.
More likely, I think, is that Google failed to reconfigure their server. When Google started using DKIM, cracking 512-bit keys was significantly harder than it is now. The change is less due to increases in computing power (though that has helped) than it is to the availability of cloud-based compute clusters. Granted that it was always a little risky to use such small keys, it was much more reasonable than it is today.
So my guess is that it went down like this: A few years ago when Google implemented DKIM someone looked at RFC 4871's discussion of key sizes, which says:
... and thought "yeah, we can use 512-bit keys and change them occasionally, that will provide higher performance for less CPU load, and as the RFC says the security goals here really aren't that high". I imagine that the decision to implement DKIM at all may have been a tad controversial given the additional load it was going to place on the servers, so that 512-bit key usage may even have been an important design point. Then the "change them occasionally" bit got dropped on the floor.
Fast-forward a few years, the problem is discovered and fixed -- but this time the engineers decided to make sure it doesn't happen again and jumped to 2048-bit keys even if it required provisioning more capacity.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, and do cryptographic security stuff for Google, but I don't have any more information than the rest of you about how all of this happened. The above is pure speculation based on my 15 years as a security consultant before joining Google. I saw lots of stuff just like it from the few companies I worked with who were actually quite good about security. And even more insanely stupid stuff from all the rest.)
He forgot NFC. I forgot NFC. Microsoft forgot NFC on the Surface. Nokia forgot NFC. Amazon forgot NFC.
What's NFC actually useful for, exactly?
I regularly use NFC on my Nexus 7 to buy stuff, at Home Depot, 7-11, Petco, Best Buy, Walgreens... and more places all the time. It's slick.
They're the same on the issues that matter. To say that they're actually different on taxes is laughable -- yeah their rhetoric is very different, but what they actually do differs in trivial ways. Oh there are some small segments of the population who would feel a difference, but the overall situation won't be significantly different. I guess there are some real and non-trivial differences on healthcare, but I'm skeptical of the ability of either to do much of substance in that space -- and both of their approaches are wrong, IMO.
Bottom line: Both are big-government authoritarians with aggressive and interventionist foreign policies.
There's a reason sane people don't live in Utah.
That's a cheap shot... and an inaccurate one. Utah's liquor laws are a bit weird, but they're less restrictive than what you find in many parts of the south, and Utah does ban gambling, but it's hardly alone there either. All in all Utah's "morality" laws are perhaps slightly more conservative than average, but not much. Mormons believe that "Free Agency" -- the right to make moral decisions on one's own -- is an important God-given right. Many draw the line at things like gay marriage which may be interpreted as not just allowing but actually supporting immoral behavior (I personally don't, BTW; I think the solution is for government to get out of marriage entirely), but in general Mormons are pretty middle-of-the-road when it comes to government-enforcement of moral issues.
Many sci-fi worlds envision a future where each of us carries a personal pharmacy all the time, built into our bodies, with different chemicals added all the time, based to some degree on automated adjustments but with some manual control/overrides. I don't think it's all that unlikely, though it definitely makes me uncomfortable. If you think about it, that's how we already work, with the difference that our pharmacy consists of numerous glands of various sorts which inject different hormones into our bloodstream. Is it really that much of a change to augment that process artificially? I don't know. It feels like it to me, but it may not feel that way to my great grandkids.
I cannot deny your personal experience, but its hard to believe that 'suddenly' the human species - you know, the wealthy, Western ones - desperately needs medication to function at a basic level, as you describe.
It's not the species that has changed, it's the definition of basic level function. A brain that zips all over the place isn't an impediment to someone doing manual labor, as long as it also has the ability to focus intently for short periods when not focusing would be dangerous. For a hunter-gatherer, being easily distracted by any noise or movement can be a survival trait -- it's a good thing to flit quickly from observation to observation, staying with each just long enough to categorize it and determine if a reaction is necessary.
Our environment has changed dramatically over the last few hundred years, in fact it's changed dramatically over the last 50 years. My great-grandparents were farmers. My grandparents did manual labor and operated heavy machinery. My parents worked in offices, but the majority of their work was face-to-face human interaction. I work in an office and the vast bulk of my day is spend reading and writing (e-mail, documentation and code).
Now, that's not to say that there weren't people who did almost nothing but read and write hundreds of years ago, but they were a small, self-selected subset, and there are still a fair number of manual labor jobs today. But the ratios have changed dramatically. While human beings are adaptable generalists as a species, specific individuals do have built-in strengths and weaknesses and to a large degree we "adapt" by finding a niche that fits what we're good at. But as the opportunity ratios have changed -- orders of magnitude faster than any change evolution can keep up with, not to mention the fact that we've largely removed fitness selection as an evolutionary force -- that has become harder for people.
It's not at all unreasonable to think that the next step in adaptation is the application of our intellect to modify the way our bodies and brains function, to better fit the new reality we've created. Such a step is risky, of course, and pretty much guaranteed to include nume
Well, yes, but Chevy's not currently making engines for it or offering warranty support. Are you saying I should be able to take my 56 year old automobile back to the manufacturer and have them replace the carb with a fuel injection system?
No, what he's saying is that Chevy shouldn't be able to prevent you from installing a new engine in your '57 just because they no longer support the platform. Which is why car analogies often turn goofy when talking about software and licenses - cars are treated as tangible, durable goods, whereas software (which, if you have a CD, is a tangible, durable good) is not treated in the same manner.
But... WHY is it different? Why is it that I (well, someone who knows their way around a machine shop) can manufacture replacement parts, or even modify and improve that '57 Chevy engine, but we're all reliant on MS to fix problems or make enhancements to Windows XP?
I assert that it's because the way we've applied copyright law to software is insane.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage publication, not so that the publisher can make money, but so that the new ideas and, eventually, the actual content can flow into the public domain. The reason society cares to expend the effort to enforce copyright laws is, ultimately, to enrich the public domain.
Applying that concept to software in the way we have, however, is utterly broken. First it's broken because the bulk of the interesting ideas in software are hidden due to binary-only distribution. Imagine if an author could write and sell a book but somehow keep secret his innovations in plot, characterization, imagery, style, sentence structure and word choice, thereby preventing other authors from gleaning any good ideas.
Second, it's broken because copyright is insanely long. It's crazy long for books, music and movies, but given the pace of change in the world of software it's downright ridiculous. How relevant is a 100 year-old piece of software? Well, we don't know because there isn't any software that old, but it's pretty clear that except to some sort of future software historians it will be utterly worthless.
If both of those problems were fixed, if software could only obtain copyright protection if the source were published (or at least escrowed with the Library of Congress or similar until expiration), and if copyright terms were of reasonable duration (say, 10 years, and that's being generous), then in fact you could maintain Windows XP yourself, just like you can that old Chevy.
In both cases, it's likely that for most people it will be cheaper and better to buy and use new stuff, but those who really felt the need, or the desire, to stay with the old could do that if they wanted.
Another thing... how is WINE doing these days at emulating the 32-bit API from WinXP? WINE always lags, for obvious reasons, but it seems likely that the support for XP apps is probably quite good. Linux might be the best option for a modern OS that runs those old apps.
So this company managed to Microsoft our asses using Linux. Bravo. For the record, during evaluation six years ago, I said "no." They never listen to me, though.
WSI?
No.
Must be WSI.