ISTR that the symptoms of a heart attack have some differences between women and men, and in women, the symptoms can be so subtle they're misdiagnosed more often than in men.
Skylon has never been more than a placeholder. Reaction Engines has been working on the engine only, and current plans include a two-state to orbit vehicle as it'll be a lower-risk development than Skylon, with Skylon penciled in for the 2040 timeframe.
The alternative is democracy, which is the last step towards tyranny, as the majority will always vote to oppress the minority.
This is rubbish.There are plenty of democracies in Western Europe, and none of them are closer to tyranny than the USA. Thanks to a voting system that allows more than two parties to flourish, voters organize in smaller blocks and it's pretty rare for one party to have a 50%+ share of the votes. This means government is done by coalitions of two or more parties. There is no single majority block any more, and any oppression of minorities becomes pretty difficult. Politicians also know that vilifying their opponents is counterproductive because one day they may have to form a coalition with the party they're vilifying now. That means party relations are a lot less toxic than in the USA, and coalition governments spend less time dismantling the work of the previous coalition than is common in the US. Due to the two-party system in the US, it is closer to tyranny (using your definition of 'the majority oppressing the minority') than the West-European democracies.
That's not new, I've been doing Time Machine backups between Macs running OSX 10.6. Maybe the configuration interface has changed a bit (you used to have to mount the backup disk before you could choose it in the Time Machine interface).
We already have pictures of the Apollo landing sites that are far better than what this telescope can make. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has imaged all of the Apollo sites.
Many of the differences between 2002 and now haven't been improvements. Loss of ports, loss of Magsafe, no more matte screens, no more user-replaceable RAM and disk, idiotic design decisions like a keyboard that's bonded to the top shell so it costs $900 to replace. I hope my 2012 MBP stays viable for a few more years, and then it's time for a Hackintosh.
I got tired of waiting for a new model, so a few weeks ago I replaced the 2008 Mini that I used as a media server with a 2012 model that I stacked to the rafters with RAM and disk space. Figures this news would come out now.
We don't need a car every hour of every day, but we do all need cars at about the same time: the time slots at the start and end of a work day. So the number of cars we'd need in total doesn't drop by much.
I'd also be reluctant to share a car because I see how people treat their cars.
I like getting into my own car at the end of the work day. I may not be home yet, but it feels like a piece of home: my car, my choices exclusively. Getting into a rental means being in someone else's environment for another hour (or however long the commute takes).
To make their current offerings usable again, much bigger changes are needed than swapping the colors.
1. Stop overwriting user preferences at each update. 2. Do not, under any circumstances, remove software without consulting the user. If software is incompatible with a system update, don't install the update without express user consent. 3. Stop making idiotic assumptions. If I install a language pack for Office, that doesn't mean you should change the user interface language or the language of the Start menu items. Installing a language pack usually means I just want the ability to use the spell checker and dictionary for that language. 4. While we're on the subject: installing a language pack should not require the removal and reinstallation of the entire Office suite. 5. If you insist on frequent OS updates that require restarts, it is unacceptable to lose state. After an update, I expect to see my desktop in exactly the state it was in: all open applications, and all open documents (including unsaved ones) from before the update should reappear. This is a feature you should really copy from Mac OS. 6. OneDrive must not have the same priority as user processes. OneDrive plus Windows Explorer should not take up 50% CPU on a new, fast laptop. Files should never be inaccessible because Onedrive is syncing. At the first sign of user activity, Onedrive should wait.
I'd much rather have a disheveled delivery guy who handles my packages carefully and diligently, than someone in a pristine uniform who throws my packages around, leaves them in a puddle on my porch, doesn't ring before slipping a 'not home' notice in my mailbox, etc. IOW you're looking at irrelevances.
Exactly. And $10k is just the start. You'll also be leasing 5 Amazon-branded vans. Your Amazon contract will say you can't use those vans to deliver packages for anyone else, so Amazon becomes your only customer, and you're fucked if Amazon takes their business to your competition. 5 vans also means you can't start slowly just with 1 van and yourself as the driver, you'll need to get into personnel management, planning etc. All the joys of company ownership.
Well, yes, of course there is more to it. I've read several books that devote a hundred pages or more to the whole process. The most recent one is 'Station X' by Michael Smith. It's full of direct quotes from people who worked at BP, and it includes several references to the 'standard message' technique. So I don't think it's an embellishment.
The 'standard message' is one of the few aspects of the whole decryption effort that is easy to explain to an outsider. I think that explains why it's so often mentioned in stories about Enigma.
Enigma, like all electromechanical encryption devices has a degree of predictability. That predictability can be exploited if you throw enough computing power at it. Several Enigma messages that were not cracked during the war have been decoded by small teams of amateurs using modern computers. So 'can't be cracked is an overstatement'.
Bletchley Park's successes were certainly an important factor in the Allied victory. But those successes didn't just depend on quick decryption. - BP was the first organization to take codebreaking to an industrial scale, and one of the first to experience information overload in a war scenario. They were drowning in radio traffic, and had to make sense of it all for the intel to be of any use. - BP was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war. Any Allied operation that was too obviously the result of information the Allies could only have gotten by reading Enigma, would have compromised all of BP's work. The Germans would have switched to new, better coding machines and BP would have been back at square 1. So elaborate measures were taken to provide plausible explanations for how the Allies got their intel. Reconnaissance efforts were directed toward enemy troop concentrations, for example. Sometimes the Allies couldn't use their intel because no plausible explanation could be fabricated in time. - The Germans occasionally introduced new Enigma variations (the 4-rotor naval and intelligence versions, the steckerboard, new rotors). All BP had to work out how these machines worked, was the encrypted radio messages (and on one memorable occasion, the chance to steal an actual machine from a German U-boot as it sank). It could take months to work out how new rotors were wired. - Once the bombes were up and running, the time to get the day's settings dropped to a few hours, and it became rare for BP not to break the settings for all major networks before the day was over.
"a year" was roughly how long it took to develop the Bombe. The Bombe was an important breakthrough in that it automated a tedious step of the decryption.
Enigma decryption was done like this: 1. Cryptanalysts used various techniques to find a crib: a possible plaintext for a section of one message. Weaknesses in Enigma were exploited to find these cribs. A famous one is the fact that an Enigma can't encrypt a letter as itself, which gives an easy way to do an initial test. Operational weaknesses included the German propensity to send predictable messages like "nothing to report" and "wettervorhersage" which provided nice cribs. 2. The crib was converted (by the cryptanalyst) to a menu. The menu was basically a way to tell the Bombe what links there were between the plaintext and ciphertext. 3. The Bombe ran through all possible wheel settings to find settings that exhibited the links in the menu. 4. The Bombe produced one or more wheel settings, these were tried on the whole message. The correct settings could then be used to decrypt all messages for that radio net and that day.
From the article it looks like this "AI" uses German word lists to find cribs, then feeds those in a Bombe equivalent.
The current tools used by government are called GIS (geographical information systems), and they have existed for several decades now. Chances are, your government has all the digital mapping data you could possibly want, it's just not publishing it.
Sure, I've done that for a few functions, but I don't want to rebuild half the UI just to make the program usable. That should be Microsoft's job, not mine. And I don't use Word often enough to remember Word-specific shortcuts.
For CAD, thin clients tend to suck. I use Microsoft RDP at work. As client software goes, this works a lot better than VNC. But (despite being on Gb Ethernet, with the RDP server in the next room) I still get input lag. Trying to drag the edge of a window becomes hit-and-miss. Other accurate mouse manipulations (such as the ones you have to do all the time when drawing) suffer the same fate.
The ribbon system was somewhat better than Word's unholy mess of unlogical menus and dialogs stacked 3 levels deep. Compared to a well-designed menu system it still stinks though. When you're working in a table for instance, you keep having to switch between 4-5 tabs that each contain 3 functions you need, and a dozen useless ones.
The Ribbon is also optimized for people who remember things visually (so they can find the icon even if it's in a sea of similar-looking icons) to the detriment of people who remember things by name (for whom the menu system with actual descriptions instead of just a cartoon was perfect).
And now that Microsoft has expanded its use to e.g. Windows Explorer in W10, that has gone down the drain as well.
Slashdot Mirror
no, it should be named 'Newton'.
ISTR that the symptoms of a heart attack have some differences between women and men, and in women, the symptoms can be so subtle they're misdiagnosed more often than in men.
Skylon has never been more than a placeholder. Reaction Engines has been working on the engine only, and current plans include a two-state to orbit vehicle as it'll be a lower-risk development than Skylon, with Skylon penciled in for the 2040 timeframe.
OK, one democracy in Western Europe is as close to tyranny as the US is. The UK, like the US has a two-party system. My point stands.
The alternative is democracy, which is the last step towards tyranny, as the majority will always vote to oppress the minority.
This is rubbish.There are plenty of democracies in Western Europe, and none of them are closer to tyranny than the USA.
Thanks to a voting system that allows more than two parties to flourish, voters organize in smaller blocks and it's pretty rare for one party to have a 50%+ share of the votes. This means government is done by coalitions of two or more parties. There is no single majority block any more, and any oppression of minorities becomes pretty difficult. Politicians also know that vilifying their opponents is counterproductive because one day they may have to form a coalition with the party they're vilifying now. That means party relations are a lot less toxic than in the USA, and coalition governments spend less time dismantling the work of the previous coalition than is common in the US.
Due to the two-party system in the US, it is closer to tyranny (using your definition of 'the majority oppressing the minority') than the West-European democracies.
That's not new, I've been doing Time Machine backups between Macs running OSX 10.6.
Maybe the configuration interface has changed a bit (you used to have to mount the backup disk before you could choose it in the Time Machine interface).
We already have pictures of the Apollo landing sites that are far better than what this telescope can make. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has imaged all of the Apollo sites.
but I'm kinda bummed they used a biological method instead of the laser cannon that was discussed here a few years ago
Many of the differences between 2002 and now haven't been improvements. Loss of ports, loss of Magsafe, no more matte screens, no more user-replaceable RAM and disk, idiotic design decisions like a keyboard that's bonded to the top shell so it costs $900 to replace.
I hope my 2012 MBP stays viable for a few more years, and then it's time for a Hackintosh.
I got tired of waiting for a new model, so a few weeks ago I replaced the 2008 Mini that I used as a media server with a 2012 model that I stacked to the rafters with RAM and disk space. Figures this news would come out now.
We don't need a car every hour of every day, but we do all need cars at about the same time: the time slots at the start and end of a work day. So the number of cars we'd need in total doesn't drop by much.
I'd also be reluctant to share a car because I see how people treat their cars.
I like getting into my own car at the end of the work day. I may not be home yet, but it feels like a piece of home: my car, my choices exclusively.
Getting into a rental means being in someone else's environment for another hour (or however long the commute takes).
If you use the Summon feature while Ludicrous mode is active, the car will do a handbrake turn when arriving at your location.
To make their current offerings usable again, much bigger changes are needed than swapping the colors.
1. Stop overwriting user preferences at each update.
2. Do not, under any circumstances, remove software without consulting the user. If software is incompatible with a system update, don't install the update without express user consent.
3. Stop making idiotic assumptions. If I install a language pack for Office, that doesn't mean you should change the user interface language or the language of the Start menu items. Installing a language pack usually means I just want the ability to use the spell checker and dictionary for that language.
4. While we're on the subject: installing a language pack should not require the removal and reinstallation of the entire Office suite.
5. If you insist on frequent OS updates that require restarts, it is unacceptable to lose state. After an update, I expect to see my desktop in exactly the state it was in: all open applications, and all open documents (including unsaved ones) from before the update should reappear. This is a feature you should really copy from Mac OS.
6. OneDrive must not have the same priority as user processes. OneDrive plus Windows Explorer should not take up 50% CPU on a new, fast laptop. Files should never be inaccessible because Onedrive is syncing. At the first sign of user activity, Onedrive should wait.
I'd much rather have a disheveled delivery guy who handles my packages carefully and diligently, than someone in a pristine uniform who throws my packages around, leaves them in a puddle on my porch, doesn't ring before slipping a 'not home' notice in my mailbox, etc.
IOW you're looking at irrelevances.
Exactly. And $10k is just the start. You'll also be leasing 5 Amazon-branded vans. Your Amazon contract will say you can't use those vans to deliver packages for anyone else, so Amazon becomes your only customer, and you're fucked if Amazon takes their business to your competition. 5 vans also means you can't start slowly just with 1 van and yourself as the driver, you'll need to get into personnel management, planning etc. All the joys of company ownership.
We went from 4423 known asteroids in 1970 to 685231 known asteroids in 2015. So 'tracking what will kill us' is well on its way to becoming a solved problem.
Well, yes, of course there is more to it. I've read several books that devote a hundred pages or more to the whole process. The most recent one is 'Station X' by Michael Smith. It's full of direct quotes from people who worked at BP, and it includes several references to the 'standard message' technique. So I don't think it's an embellishment.
The 'standard message' is one of the few aspects of the whole decryption effort that is easy to explain to an outsider. I think that explains why it's so often mentioned in stories about Enigma.
Enigma, like all electromechanical encryption devices has a degree of predictability. That predictability can be exploited if you throw enough computing power at it. Several Enigma messages that were not cracked during the war have been decoded by small teams of amateurs using modern computers. So 'can't be cracked is an overstatement'.
Bletchley Park's successes were certainly an important factor in the Allied victory. But those successes didn't just depend on quick decryption.
- BP was the first organization to take codebreaking to an industrial scale, and one of the first to experience information overload in a war scenario. They were drowning in radio traffic, and had to make sense of it all for the intel to be of any use.
- BP was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war. Any Allied operation that was too obviously the result of information the Allies could only have gotten by reading Enigma, would have compromised all of BP's work. The Germans would have switched to new, better coding machines and BP would have been back at square 1. So elaborate measures were taken to provide plausible explanations for how the Allies got their intel. Reconnaissance efforts were directed toward enemy troop concentrations, for example. Sometimes the Allies couldn't use their intel because no plausible explanation could be fabricated in time.
- The Germans occasionally introduced new Enigma variations (the 4-rotor naval and intelligence versions, the steckerboard, new rotors). All BP had to work out how these machines worked, was the encrypted radio messages (and on one memorable occasion, the chance to steal an actual machine from a German U-boot as it sank). It could take months to work out how new rotors were wired.
- Once the bombes were up and running, the time to get the day's settings dropped to a few hours, and it became rare for BP not to break the settings for all major networks before the day was over.
"a year" was roughly how long it took to develop the Bombe. The Bombe was an important breakthrough in that it automated a tedious step of the decryption.
Enigma decryption was done like this:
1. Cryptanalysts used various techniques to find a crib: a possible plaintext for a section of one message. Weaknesses in Enigma were exploited to find these cribs. A famous one is the fact that an Enigma can't encrypt a letter as itself, which gives an easy way to do an initial test. Operational weaknesses included the German propensity to send predictable messages like "nothing to report" and "wettervorhersage" which provided nice cribs.
2. The crib was converted (by the cryptanalyst) to a menu. The menu was basically a way to tell the Bombe what links there were between the plaintext and ciphertext.
3. The Bombe ran through all possible wheel settings to find settings that exhibited the links in the menu.
4. The Bombe produced one or more wheel settings, these were tried on the whole message. The correct settings could then be used to decrypt all messages for that radio net and that day.
From the article it looks like this "AI" uses German word lists to find cribs, then feeds those in a Bombe equivalent.
To borrow a /. comment from the Hayabusa 1 mission, "That's one fast motorcycle, and one hell of a ramp"
Don't drink while driving. You should be paying attention to the road.
The current tools used by government are called GIS (geographical information systems), and they have existed for several decades now. Chances are, your government has all the digital mapping data you could possibly want, it's just not publishing it.
Sure, I've done that for a few functions, but I don't want to rebuild half the UI just to make the program usable. That should be Microsoft's job, not mine.
And I don't use Word often enough to remember Word-specific shortcuts.
For CAD, thin clients tend to suck. I use Microsoft RDP at work. As client software goes, this works a lot better than VNC. But (despite being on Gb Ethernet, with the RDP server in the next room) I still get input lag. Trying to drag the edge of a window becomes hit-and-miss. Other accurate mouse manipulations (such as the ones you have to do all the time when drawing) suffer the same fate.
The ribbon system was somewhat better than Word's unholy mess of unlogical menus and dialogs stacked 3 levels deep. Compared to a well-designed menu system it still stinks though.
When you're working in a table for instance, you keep having to switch between 4-5 tabs that each contain 3 functions you need, and a dozen useless ones.
The Ribbon is also optimized for people who remember things visually (so they can find the icon even if it's in a sea of similar-looking icons) to the detriment of people who remember things by name (for whom the menu system with actual descriptions instead of just a cartoon was perfect).
And now that Microsoft has expanded its use to e.g. Windows Explorer in W10, that has gone down the drain as well.