Bitrot is a myth in modern times. Floppies and cheap-ass tape drives from the 90s had this problem, but anything reasonably modern (GMR) will read what you wrote until mechanical failure.
This isn't just wrong, it's laughably wrong. ZFS has proven that a wide variety of chipset bugs, firmware bugs, actual mechanical failure, etc are still present and actively corrupting our data. It applies to HDDs and flash. Worse, this corruption in most cases appears randomly over time so your proposal to verify the written data immediately is useless.
Prior to the widespread deployment of this new generation of check-summing filesystems, I made the same faulty assumption you made: that data isn't subject to bit rot and will reproduce what was written.
ZFS or BTRFS will disabuse you of these notions very quickly. (Be sure to turn on idle scrubbing).
It also appears that the error rate is roughly constant but storage densities are increasing, so the bit errors per GB stored per month are increasing as well.
Microsoft needs to move ReFS down to consumer euro ducts ASAP. BTRFS needs to become the Linux default FS. Apple needs to get with the program already and adopt a modern filesystem.
Apple's influence on the industry strikes again. Even if Apple isn't the first to take up some technology or improve a design, they are a trendsetter.
Once Apple ships magnetic power connectors that stop laptops from being pulled off desks or they ship a solid metal, reversible, extensible/future-proof connector, everyone else decides to jump on the bandwagon. Ultrabooks (read: MacBook Air clone) are another example.
Honestly, look at the USB 3 micro connector... it has to be the ugliest connector design ever imagined. They waited until after releasing that abomination on the world to suddenly decide reversibility and future-proofing were a good idea. I hope their wonderful redesign adopts the Lightning-style solid metal shape. The plug itself is much stronger, less subject to getting bent, smashed, etc, and naturally allows the socket to be sturdier. Smart moves when you are talking about a billion hairless apes smashing connectors into sockets as if they were rocks. How can you see the images of people putting coffee cups in their CD-ROM trays, busted-off mini-TOSlink connectors, etc and think any of the existing USB connectors are intelligently designed?
Apple thinks primarily about user's experience and is willing to toss legacy technology in the trash to streamline it. The USB-IF decided that USB 3 mircro had to be backwards-compatible with USB 2 micro so they just slapped a second port on the side and called it a day. If Apple makes a change, you're stuck with it so get over your floppy disk obsession and buy a USB memory stick. For everyone else, if Generic Vendor #9548 doesn't keep supporting your $9.99 USB 2 micro car charger, someone else will so any changes risk alienating users and failing to see any adoption, making manufacturers risk-averse.
When the first retina models went to soldered-on RAM, it was obviously that all MacBook Pros would ship this way in the future.
I miss the upgradability, but I ran the numbers on my non-retina 15" into which I installed two 512GB SSDs and 16GB RAM (the max you can do with two SODIMM slots due to current DRAM density and JDEC standards). It turns out that an equivalent retina MBP with 1TB SSD and 16 GB RAM is roughly the same price (within 10% of the cost).
Not having swappable batteries and RAM means you don't need a reinforced frame, rugged connectors, screw holes, and cover. That's all space that can be used for more battery and/or reducing size and weight. It's a trade-off, but ultimately I consider it to be worth it.
Plus I rather enjoy having a nice Mac OS GUI that I don't have to worry about, but can run macports and build Unix utilities from a terminal window.
I am surprised because I would have bet good money that the utilities would have arranged things so they bought back electricity at a lower rate than it cost them to generate the same amount of power - isn't that sort of conniving how corporations usually manage things here? - but in this case it works to the benefit of the customer.
This varies a lot by state. In Arizona, any excess is carried over into the next month to offset your usage at the retail rate. At the end of the year, if you still have excess then the excess is cashed out at the wholesale rate, which is far lower. In Texas, any excess is simply gifted to the power company for free.
In reality, almost no one generates enough solar to totally offset their bill because such a large panel install is still cost-prohibitive unless you are willing to make some large sacrifices on the usage side (and with your wallet). Further, solar generates its maximum energy during the most expensive peak hours (in the south/southwest, A/C is the largest electric load by far and matches up roughly with peak sunshine on most days). At that time of day, the utility may even pay more than your retail rate for at least a few hours due to high demand, resulting in free money for the utility!
If they made this fee contingent on zeroing out your bill then perhaps it would be justified (e.g.: if you had carryover, then they can deduct $5 from the carryover to pay for infrastructure). In Texas, it would never be justified because excess power is free to the utility.
The reality is they want to charge this fee to pad their profit margin. It really is that simple.
If a whole-home solar install ever got down to $10,000 (to cover 75-80% of the home's electric usage) you can expect to see utilities everywhere engaging in all sorts of nasty tricks to jack up fees, taxes, get burdensome regulations passed, etc to make sure the barriers to entry are still very high. At that price, all new homes will simply start including solar and it will become a common remodel ala replacing windows and floors. In that scenario, the $3 million+ they spent will pale in comparison to the flood of lobbying dollars.
Toyota had no software testing procedures, no peer review, etc. The secondary backup CPU code was provided by a third party in compiled form, Toyota never examined it.
Their coding standards were ad hoc and they failed to follow them. Simple static analysis tools found massive numbers of errors.
They used over ten thousand global variables, with numerous confirmed race conditions, nested locks, etc.
Their watchdog merely checked that the system was running and did not respond to task failures or CPU overload conditions so would not bother to reset the ECU, even if most of the tasks crashed. Since this is the basic function of a watchdog, they may as well not have had one.
They claimed to be using ECC memory but did not, so anything from single bit errors to whole page corruption were undetected and uncorrected.
A bunch of logic was jammed in one spaghetti task that was both responsible for calculating the throttle position, running various failsafes, and recording diagnostic error codes. Any failure of this task was undetected by the watchdog and disabled most of the failsafes. Due to no ECC and the stack issue below, a single bit error would turn off the runnable flag for this task and cause it to stop being scheduled for CPU time. No error codes would be recorded.
They did not do any logging (eg of OS task scheduler state, number of ECU resets, etc), not even in the event of a crash or ECU reset.
The code contained various recursive paths and no effort was made to prevent stack overflows. Worse, the RTOS kernel data structures were located immediately after the 4K stack, so stack overflows could smash these structures, including disabling tasks from running.
They were supposed to be using mirroring of variables to detect memory smashing/corruption (write A and XOR A to separate locations, then compare them on read to make sure they match). They were not doing this for some critical variables for some inexplicable reason, including the throttle position so any memory corruption could write a max throttle value and be undetected.
Instead of using the certified, audited version of the RTOS like most auto makers, they used an unverified version.
Thanks to not bothering to review the OS code, they had no idea the OS data structures were not mirrored. A single bit flip can start or stop a task, even a life-safety critical one.
These are just some of the massive glaring failures at every level of specifying, coding, and testing a safety-critical embedded system.
I am now confident in saying at least some of the unintended acceleration events with Toyota vehicles were caused by software failures due to gross incompetence and negligence on the part of Toyota. They stumbled into writing software, piling hack on top of hack, never bothering to implement any testing, peer review, documentation, specifications, or even the slightest hint that they even considered the software something worth noticing.
The suggestion that Nintendo should release on iOS and Android would be suicide. The sales figures for the 3DS have already proven the nuts that keep saying Nintendo should release Pokemon the iPhone are insane short term thinkers
Total sales worldwide:
1989 - 2003 GameBoy / Color / Advance / SP: 200 million ~14.2m/yr 2004 - 2010 Nintendo DS: 153 million ~21.8m/yr 2011 - Present Nintendo 3DS / XL / 2DS: 32 million ~10.6m/yr
The GameBoy had a slower ramp up as handheld gaming started getting mainstream traction. Nintendo DS appears to have been the peak. Something happened during its release... around 2007 I think, though I'm having trouble recalling just what was released around then... oh wait, the iPhone followed shortly after by Android. The 3DS can't even match the GameBoy's sales figures and continues to fall.
The question is how big is the market for handheld gaming systems given that cell phones are eviscerating the market and a generation of kids is growing up without knowing who Nintendo is or why they should care (hint: more 10 year olds know what Angry Birds is than who Mario is!)
My contention is that the market is not large enough to sustain Nintendo's hardware development costs and they will be forced to exit the market after the next handheld system flops (or possibly the system after that). People who think everything is just fine must believe Nintendo can survive on ~2 million/year sales or possibly even less. If they do survive, the systems will be limited to almost entirely Nintendo games with relatively few 3rd party titles due to the small install base.
There is a short window of opportunity where those of us who grew up with Nintendo are young enough to buy games for nostalgia or are just starting to have kids and be looking to introduce them to gaming. If Nintendo were to release a Mario game designed for iOS now (and charge a premium price, say 7.99-9.99) we'd all buy it, sending it rocketing to the top of the charts. This would bring it to the notice of current young gamers, introducing a new generation to Nintendo characters, setting them up for sequels. Some of them might become hardcore Nintendo fans, willing to shell out for Nintendo hardware (controller accessories, cases, or even dedicated handheld gaming systems) thus expanding Nintendo's market. The point of Mario on iOS isn't to match the revenue of the 3DS; much like Google and Android, it exists to ensure their continued survival, access to the market, and expand their potential customer base and brand awareness. Once that window closes (sometime in the next 5 years), it may be gone forever.
TL;DR: My first kid was just born. I will never buy him a handheld gaming device, even though I owned a GameBoy, GB Color, and GB Advance in my day. I will just give him my old cell phone. The games are $1-10, if he drops it in the toilet I can just re-download his games for free, etc. Everyone I know with kids is doing the same thing. When I say "Mario" to my 7 yr old nephew, he asks me "Who's that?". You know what he does have? Angry Birds posters, because that's what all his friends have.
Does anyone know if they handle the look-alike issue or are we still stuck with URLs that appear to be latin "paypal.com", but with the "y" replaced by a greek lower gamma (Î) #x3b3, "p" replaced with cyrillic Er (Ñ) #x440, or some other equivalent that appears identical?
I understand why it's a hard issue: the cyrillic lowercase Er looks *identical* to latin p so they can be mapped to the same character, but the greek lower gamma isn't the exact same glyph as latin lower y, they just look close enough that a user might not notice. Would it be a slight to greek users to force greek domain names to use a misshapen lower gamma? Then what do you do with greek alpha, where the capital matches the latin glyph exactly but the lower does not?
Then there's the issue that every computer everywhere can enter latin characters, but not everyone has software for or how to use stuff like Chinese characters or Japanese Hirigana. Keeping to basic latin characters makes entering domain names universal, though I understand why that's convenient for an English speaker like me to say. I'd be curious to hear from some people who have non-European first languages how much having to use latin domain names seems to bother the average computer user and whether there is any actual cry for international domain names in their country? How difficult/easy is it to enter latin characters on your keyboard layout? Does it present a barrier to entry for the less educated/literate, or does everyone remember their English classes from school?
This may just be some crossed wires; the company tasked with handling the trademarks, legal papers, etc is just doing what they believe they are supposed to do: stop anyone from getting a Vendor ID, then subverting the normal USB process by sublicensing Product IDs. It is totally understandable that this would subvert the process and take control away from the USB-IF.
USB-IF does offer some VID blocks for testing, hobbyist, etc purposes.
They are also more than happy to sell you a VID block for $5000, even if you never bother to get a device certified or use the USB logo and trademarks.
What they are not currently setup to do is offer a "small" block at a cheaper price to someone who wants to sell a product commercially, but one that has a very limited run. It seems like they could easily set aside one VID for this purpose, then "subnet" that into different PID blocks. Offer a set of 10 PIDs for $100 for small companies. Would that not solve the problem?
You have to remember: USB-IF is not making money here; it is a non-profit itself. The fees go toward covering their costs.
The system appears secure; hacking it requires injecting your own certificate into the trusted roots on the device.
Further, forging messages requires you compromise the private key which is only contained on the device (Apple doesn't know it). The public key is submitted to Apple's push CA which generates a certificate. The public part of your key is what other devices see when they get a copy of your certificate. So far, so good.
The issue is, of course, that Apple controls the CA so in theory if the government ordered them to issue a certificate in your name to the government, the gov could then monitor your communications or forge your identity.
Apple claims not to be able to read iMessages and that appears to be true, and as far as I'm aware not even the Patriot act requires them to issue forged certificates (aka allow the government to impersonate you digitally). So insofar as the law works and is followed, there is no legal authority to compel Apple to issue bunk certificates.
For the curious, when you send a message it contacts Apple and requests the list of public certs for a given URI (telephone number, email address, etc). Apple responds with a list of the public certs issued to each of your registered devices, which the client then uses to send messages encrypted with that public key to each, and also signed with your own private key. The receiver does a similar lookup and uses your public key to validate the signature (proving you sent the message and that it was sent from the correct device even), then uses its own private key to decrypt the message you encrypted with the public key.
I'm not sure how this could be improved. No matter what you do, someone has to be in charge of saying "The certificate for mobile number xxx-yyy-zzzz is..." and that gives you a chain of trust problem. The alternative is requiring every iMessage user to meet face-to-face to exchange keys before sending any messages.
Jabber servers can read your IMs! So can Yahoo! So can AOL!
Oh wait, this is Apple. Nevermind, carry on with the hysterics.
(FYI: No matter what scheme you devise, key management always gets you because if Apple doesn't have the keys, it makes iMessage much, much harder to use. If they do, then someone can snoop the messages. If you use a chain of trust, who ever sits at the top of the chain can be compromised. In an ideal world, people would learn about crypto keys and understand how to manage them, but you'd have to meet face to face to avoid mistaken identities).
Why is SciAm claiming the post was off-topic (clearly a bullshit excuse given other bloggers posts) then claiming it was due to legal reasons?
Oh and blaming not telling the author on poor cell phone reception... Right. Someone can click the delete button but can't be bothered to send an email?
It's just lies and more lies, a non-apology, and bullshit. I don't buy it for a second.
My bet: someone at biology online emailed SciAm to complain and SciAm was more than happy to censor Dr Lee. Now that they've been caught, they are furiously trying to backpedal and pretend it's all just a big misunderstanding.
I'm canceling my subscription, I don't want any part of such a two-faced crappy organization.
This is just one of those things that the government really doesn't do all that well. Private organizations live and die by their profit margin, so they make damn sure shit works and it works affordably.
I cannot let this comment pass. Sorry, but anyone who's worked for a large corporate beauracracy knows this is nonsense. They are just as large, Byzantine, and wasteful. That's simply how large human organizations function.
If admins aren't allowed to check log files, what happens if you experience a hack? What if a new zero-day vulnerability is released during the shutdown? What if the server room AC goes out?
The only safe thing to do is shut it down until the Republicans stop trying to negotiate with a gun to everyone's head.
If you check the design, the fingerprint image itself is never stored anywhere. The fingerprint profile is only stored on silicon in the A7 chip. There is no API to access that data, only flags to tell you that it exists (so the OS can discover there are four stored prints and their names, but nothing about the actual fingerprints themselves).
Apple touts the fact that the fingerprint is never sent over the network as a feature but in reality it can't send it over the network even if it wants to, nor can any application access it.
If you think Apple is lying... well... There must be some level of trust somewhere or we may as well give up. I tend to draw the line at the CPU because if that is compromised or includes back doors, we are all screwed anyway.
So if I pay the WSJ to reprint my press release (which is what Segate did), will Slashdot post my marketing copy too?
Let's compare this drive to the size of an iPad mini (because I'm familiar with that tablet, insert your own tablet of choice).
This drive is 2.5" still; that's huge compared to the size of an iPad mini, 512GB of surface-mounted flash is half that size or less.
It is 5mm thick, the iPad mini is 7.2mm thick. Would there even be room for the screen? 512GB of flash is less than half that.
It weighs 1/3 of the weight of an iPad mini as well. 512G of flash is a rounding error by comparison.
In short, this is a company that was caught flat-footed by the rise of SSDs because they were too busy thinking about how to preserve their hard drive business. Now they are desperately trying to push spinning rust to the limit and still falling well short. The only thing they can do is sell them for dirt-cheap prices. That also probably means the scaling of hard drives will slow or stop at this generation as SSD sales cut the profit out of that market, thus reducing the capital available for R&D and deployment of new HDD technologies.
I'm in an all-flash household now, I have no desire to go back to spinning disks. I don't have a lot of data points to back it up but so far I have zero failures in the past three years since I installed my first SSD, compared to no less than four HDD failures in the previous three year period.
Most notably, in a comprehensive review of studies, Alice Eagly and colleagues showed that female managers are more likely to elicit respect and pride from their followers, communicate their vision effectively, empower and mentor subordinates, and approach problem-solving in a more flexible and creative way (all characteristics of "transformational leadership"), as well as fairly reward direct reports. In contrast, male managers are statistically less likely to bond or connect with their subordinates, and they are relatively more inept at rewarding them for their actual performance. Although these findings may reflect a sampling bias that requires women to be more qualified and competent than men in order to be chosen as leaders, there is no way of really knowing until this bias is eliminated.
The bolded part hits the nail on the head for me. In the software development field (as well as management) currently a woman must exert more effort to get noticed so there is a huge selection bias that makes the women more likely to be top of the line, versus your average male manager or programmer. Any woman who isn't gets pushed out of the field or passed over.
We will know when we've arrived when we have a good mix of incompetent, average, and excellent female software developers and managers... Just like we have with men today.
As for why a relatively balanced field (Computer Science) turned into a male-dominated one, I think the period when nerds and geeky stuff weren't cool put a lot of social pressure on women to stay away and now the cycle just perpetuates itself. Even if 29 of 32 guys in a CompSci class are normal non-creepers, as soon as a girl shows up she gets the full attention of the 3 total creepers, who stalk her, follow her around campus, etc... Or the one dude who constantly talks down to her and says software is for guys only. In reality it takes only one asshole to drive the girl away and perpetuate the cycle.
Personally I'd like to see more women entering the field so I try to call out the creepers and assholes whenever I encounter them. One voice of reason often puts a stop to it.
People are irrational. They ask stupid questions that make no sense. They use slang that confuses the communication. They have horrible grammar and spelling. And overseeing it all is a language fraught with multiple meanings for words depending on the context, which may well include sentences and paragraphs leading up to the sentence being analyzed.
Is it any surprise that computers can't "understand" what we mean, given the minefield of language?
Even if you came up with a regular easy to parse grammar it wouldn't help. Even if you fed the computer all known information about alligators and hurdles in that standard format it wouldn't help. That's the point... Now that we are starting to do much better at parsing and reproducing speech, it turns out that isn't really the hard problem.
It's pretty simple. If you target iPad you have two form factors and retina/non-retina, though you can really just do retina and let it downscale if you want. There are only 2-3 CPU/GPU profiles. That covers over half the tablet market, depending on who's numbers you believe.
On Android, you have to target 20 different devices, maybe more, just to get the majority of Android tablets. If you want 90% then the list gets much longer.
Sprint has been weighed down by the horrible acquisition of Nextel. They were paying for two networks but only one network's worth of customers.
The loss of these subscribers was intentional and predicted well in advance as Sprint finally shutdown the Nextel platform. They already recaptured the more valuable customers onto the Sprint platform and made a strategic decision to let some go because the equipment fees and/or discounts made it unprofitable to keep them.
Part of the financial write downs was paying lease termination fees on backhaul and sites to shut down redundant Nextel locations. They won't ever post a quarter like this again; the Nextel bleeding has finally been stopped and their cost structure will only improve going forward. If you check the Sprint platform, they are still adding subscribers and revenue is up.
They have also closed the Clearwire deal, allowing them to move forward deploying 2.5Ghz spectrum but that won't really bear fruit until next year when handsets start shipping with support for those frequencies. Now that iDEN SMR 850Mhz is shut down, they can deploy the 3x3 LTE channel in that space which should make a huge diffence for indoor coverage. They have been planning this during Network Vision (their modernization effort that is running fiber to every tower along with LTE) to deploy the Nextel spectrum. All the newer handsets already support it, including the iPhone 5. At the newest upgraded towers they don't even have to roll a truck, the equipment is already installed and can even have the downtilt remotely adjusted.
They aren't stupid... Network Vision is running fiber to almost every tower with microwave bounces for the few that can't get it. The backhaul is all minimum 1Gbps, software upgradable, so they can just turn on more backhaul with a keystroke... The old network was all T1s, requiring a 4-6 week wait on the phone company. The new antennas are more sensitive, can be remotely tilted, and support more frequencies. The LTE gear is all software-upgradable to LTE-Advanced.
They had two major problems. LTE equipment wasn't ready prior to their must-build deadlines for the 2.5Ghz spectrum and they were severely hampered in capital spending due to the Nextel boat anchor. They foisted off the 2.5Ghz spectrum on some investors to help offset the cost and protect the spectrum, probably knowing WiMax was a dead end. Boost was a way to help offset the cost of iDEN with prepaid customers they could jettison later.
Now that SoftBank has solved the capital problem, they own the 2.5Ghz spectrum again, and they are rolling out fiber/LTE, they should be able to challenge the dualopoly on equal footing relatively soon. My city is one of the LTE launch markets and the difference between the old and new networks is night and day.
Once you understand these things, you realize that Sprint is a good play, albeit somewhat risky. The market just goes off headlines (often completely bogus ones, see every Apple story ever) and freaks out. Those are excellent buying opportunities if you understand what is really going on with a company.
This is getting way into the weeds but the reason for polygamy (and conversely the reason it must be banned today) is that the death rate among males was quite high in earlier times, usually through war but sometimes through deaths on hunts, etc.
If you look at the polygamist communities in western countries today, they all have some rigid set of rules or structure that allows them to kick out most young males... Even then that sometimes isn't enough, requiring the existing men to marry younger and younger.
Human birth rates are close to 1:1 and without a lot of war to kill off the young men you simply can't sustain a polygamous society.
So basically the signature only verifies the first instance of a file it finds in the archive, but when extracted it extracts the latest. In fact ZIP (and RAR IIRC) allow overwriting a file with a newer version later in the archive; probably a hold-over from the floppy-swapping and/or tape days when you needed such abilities.
Reminds me of the chimera file exploits that use the fact that many common file formats like ZIP and PDF will ignore extraneous data, scan into the file looking for a header, etc to make one file appear to be a valid file of many types. Often, virus scanners fail to notice this and will scan eg the PDF while ignoring the ZIP payload, but unzip utilities just scan forward until they find the ZIP header.
The real fail here will be the fact that at least half (if not 80-90%) of all Android devices won't have a patch released *period*, never mind people bothering to install the patch.
An Israeli style system will NEVER be implemented in the US because it runs totally contrary to the politically-correct postmodernist identity politics narrative that drives our current political monologue (no, not dialogue).
Suggesting it will be met with screeches of "RACISM!", the person suggesting it will forever be chased and shamed from the limelight, and we will continue staffing our airport security with fat, sticky-fingered illiterate highschool dropouts that barely speak understandable english and use their union to protect their do-nothing jobs while extorting more and more taxpayer money from the very people subjected to them.
That's asinine conservative clap-trap. What you are discussing is typical LEO profiling in the USA where dark skin is used as a cheap and poor substitute by the lazy and incompetent, which blinds us to very real threats (Timothy McVeigh anyone?). Racism doesn't just harm minorities, it also blinds us to both the potential achievements/contributions of the minority group *and* makes us ignore the threats that look like the majority.
An Israeli-style system requires a literal army of very personable, often friendly, intelligence officers who walk around both in plain clothes and uniforms, chatting people up about their life, their family, their trip. That's true profiling. You have to get a feel for the person and whether they are being evasive or acting nervously. Red flags mean extra screening. As others have pointed out, they use tricks like having an attractive woman chat up a single man, without him even being aware that he's being profiled (at least at first). This means you can't pay crap wages and demonize them as tax-sucking leeches; you need decent pay and benefits.
Typical conservative nonsense... cut taxes, use the resulting deficit to justify cutting workers, hours, and benefits, demonize government employees, then point to an under-staffed and demoralized agency as proof government doesn't work, thus justifying cutting back even further. Use the small surplus in boom times to justify another tax cut, then wait for the inevitable downturn and temporary deficit to justify repeating the cycle all over again. Make sure to throw in rants about political correctness, drum up a fake "war on Christmas", etc for good measure. It would be laughable if it weren't so predictable.
Intel *does* make custom chips for outside people, contrary to what some people are saying. They sub out spare capacity, especially in older fabs. They just don't make them on their newest foundry processes (the ones that would be actually useful to a company like Apple) for a variety of reasons, the chief one being the newest processes are generally full to capacity. Even if there were some space available it wouldn't be near enough to satisfy Apple's demand for A-series chips. You have to remember, an A-series chip requires on the order of 150,000,000 units in the first year.
Apple has the cash hoard to get into the foundry business if they wanted, but it would take at least a decade to hire engineers and gain the experience necessary to cost-effectively produce stuff like 14nm 3D transistor chips, assuming you can navigate the patent minefield.
The only way such a deal would work is if Apple funded a new Intel foundry to produce Apple chips in some kind of long-term deal, but that would probably require Apple to spend double on the processors to give Intel the fat margins they want to even consider the idea.
I fully agree that in some magical world where this kind of deal happens it would give Apple a permanent advantage in the phone space, as no one would be able to come close to the performance and performance-per-watt of an A7-type chip made on Intel's latest 22, 14, or 10nm process; it would make all other phones look like a joke.
In the early days, people debated whether uncertainty was just a practical issue of imperfect measuring devices/methods or a fundamental feature of the system.
We now know that it is a fundamental feature. Even if you had a perfect measuring device that did not disturb the system being measured, the act of measuring in any capacity is subject to uncertainty and collapsing of the wave function.
Despite the fact that it seems to violate our common sense (developed at room temperatures with macroscopic physical forces, thus unsuited for quantum reasoning), the world at that tiny level really is probabilistic. It is not a side-effect of our measurement methods or anything else... It simply works that way. Reality as we know it is just a side-effect of all those quantum states interacting and causing wave function collapse... Same reason a quantum computer is harder and harder to make the more bits it has.
Vaccines have a great reputation, largely resulting from the highly successful campaigns with smallpox and polio. However, these were done in a less litigious era, and unlike today's medical practice, they could operate without the fear of gigantic lawsuits if something went wrong.
I know that makes a great right-wing talking point, but in fact vaccine makers are shielded from almost all liability, barring gross misconduct.
Congress created the vaccine court that evaluates people who may have been injured by a vaccination (no action is 100% free of side effects in 100% of people 100% of the time, including taking no action which in the case of the target diseases is millions of deaths and maimings or stuff like allergic reactions in the case of giving vaccines).
If you are injured by a vaccination, the vaccine court awards compensation, up to and including lifetime medical care if needed.
Part of the reason these diseases are coming back is the anti-vaccination conspiracy nut jobs. If herd immunity drops below a certain percentage then the disease can persist and grow. Above that line and you have essentially 100% protection even though some people can't or won't get the vaccine (and some people who do don't develop perfect immunity). Unfortunately so many people are willing to but "JUST ASKING QUESTIONS" and "TEACH THE CONTROVERSY" bullshit that we are below the herd immunity line for some diseases. We can look forward to a lot more dead and crippled kids before Jenny McCarthy and Andrew Wakefield's body counts are tallied.
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Bitrot is a myth in modern times. Floppies and cheap-ass tape drives from the 90s had this problem, but anything reasonably modern (GMR) will read what you wrote until mechanical failure.
This isn't just wrong, it's laughably wrong. ZFS has proven that a wide variety of chipset bugs, firmware bugs, actual mechanical failure, etc are still present and actively corrupting our data. It applies to HDDs and flash. Worse, this corruption in most cases appears randomly over time so your proposal to verify the written data immediately is useless.
Prior to the widespread deployment of this new generation of check-summing filesystems, I made the same faulty assumption you made: that data isn't subject to bit rot and will reproduce what was written.
ZFS or BTRFS will disabuse you of these notions very quickly. (Be sure to turn on idle scrubbing).
It also appears that the error rate is roughly constant but storage densities are increasing, so the bit errors per GB stored per month are increasing as well.
Microsoft needs to move ReFS down to consumer euro ducts ASAP. BTRFS needs to become the Linux default FS. Apple needs to get with the program already and adopt a modern filesystem.
Apple's influence on the industry strikes again. Even if Apple isn't the first to take up some technology or improve a design, they are a trendsetter.
Once Apple ships magnetic power connectors that stop laptops from being pulled off desks or they ship a solid metal, reversible, extensible/future-proof connector, everyone else decides to jump on the bandwagon. Ultrabooks (read: MacBook Air clone) are another example.
Honestly, look at the USB 3 micro connector... it has to be the ugliest connector design ever imagined. They waited until after releasing that abomination on the world to suddenly decide reversibility and future-proofing were a good idea. I hope their wonderful redesign adopts the Lightning-style solid metal shape. The plug itself is much stronger, less subject to getting bent, smashed, etc, and naturally allows the socket to be sturdier. Smart moves when you are talking about a billion hairless apes smashing connectors into sockets as if they were rocks. How can you see the images of people putting coffee cups in their CD-ROM trays, busted-off mini-TOSlink connectors, etc and think any of the existing USB connectors are intelligently designed?
Apple thinks primarily about user's experience and is willing to toss legacy technology in the trash to streamline it. The USB-IF decided that USB 3 mircro had to be backwards-compatible with USB 2 micro so they just slapped a second port on the side and called it a day. If Apple makes a change, you're stuck with it so get over your floppy disk obsession and buy a USB memory stick. For everyone else, if Generic Vendor #9548 doesn't keep supporting your $9.99 USB 2 micro car charger, someone else will so any changes risk alienating users and failing to see any adoption, making manufacturers risk-averse.
When the first retina models went to soldered-on RAM, it was obviously that all MacBook Pros would ship this way in the future.
I miss the upgradability, but I ran the numbers on my non-retina 15" into which I installed two 512GB SSDs and 16GB RAM (the max you can do with two SODIMM slots due to current DRAM density and JDEC standards). It turns out that an equivalent retina MBP with 1TB SSD and 16 GB RAM is roughly the same price (within 10% of the cost).
Not having swappable batteries and RAM means you don't need a reinforced frame, rugged connectors, screw holes, and cover. That's all space that can be used for more battery and/or reducing size and weight. It's a trade-off, but ultimately I consider it to be worth it.
Plus I rather enjoy having a nice Mac OS GUI that I don't have to worry about, but can run macports and build Unix utilities from a terminal window.
I am surprised because I would have bet good money that the utilities would have arranged things so they bought back electricity at a lower rate than it cost them to generate the same amount of power - isn't that sort of conniving how corporations usually manage things here? - but in this case it works to the benefit of the customer.
This varies a lot by state. In Arizona, any excess is carried over into the next month to offset your usage at the retail rate. At the end of the year, if you still have excess then the excess is cashed out at the wholesale rate, which is far lower. In Texas, any excess is simply gifted to the power company for free.
In reality, almost no one generates enough solar to totally offset their bill because such a large panel install is still cost-prohibitive unless you are willing to make some large sacrifices on the usage side (and with your wallet). Further, solar generates its maximum energy during the most expensive peak hours (in the south/southwest, A/C is the largest electric load by far and matches up roughly with peak sunshine on most days). At that time of day, the utility may even pay more than your retail rate for at least a few hours due to high demand, resulting in free money for the utility!
If they made this fee contingent on zeroing out your bill then perhaps it would be justified (e.g.: if you had carryover, then they can deduct $5 from the carryover to pay for infrastructure). In Texas, it would never be justified because excess power is free to the utility.
The reality is they want to charge this fee to pad their profit margin. It really is that simple.
If a whole-home solar install ever got down to $10,000 (to cover 75-80% of the home's electric usage) you can expect to see utilities everywhere engaging in all sorts of nasty tricks to jack up fees, taxes, get burdensome regulations passed, etc to make sure the barriers to entry are still very high. At that price, all new homes will simply start including solar and it will become a common remodel ala replacing windows and floors. In that scenario, the $3 million+ they spent will pale in comparison to the flood of lobbying dollars.
Couple of details here:
Toyota had no software testing procedures, no peer review, etc. The secondary backup CPU code was provided by a third party in compiled form, Toyota never examined it.
Their coding standards were ad hoc and they failed to follow them. Simple static analysis tools found massive numbers of errors.
They used over ten thousand global variables, with numerous confirmed race conditions, nested locks, etc.
Their watchdog merely checked that the system was running and did not respond to task failures or CPU overload conditions so would not bother to reset the ECU, even if most of the tasks crashed. Since this is the basic function of a watchdog, they may as well not have had one.
They claimed to be using ECC memory but did not, so anything from single bit errors to whole page corruption were undetected and uncorrected.
A bunch of logic was jammed in one spaghetti task that was both responsible for calculating the throttle position, running various failsafes, and recording diagnostic error codes. Any failure of this task was undetected by the watchdog and disabled most of the failsafes. Due to no ECC and the stack issue below, a single bit error would turn off the runnable flag for this task and cause it to stop being scheduled for CPU time. No error codes would be recorded.
They did not do any logging (eg of OS task scheduler state, number of ECU resets, etc), not even in the event of a crash or ECU reset.
The code contained various recursive paths and no effort was made to prevent stack overflows. Worse, the RTOS kernel data structures were located immediately after the 4K stack, so stack overflows could smash these structures, including disabling tasks from running.
They were supposed to be using mirroring of variables to detect memory smashing/corruption (write A and XOR A to separate locations, then compare them on read to make sure they match). They were not doing this for some critical variables for some inexplicable reason, including the throttle position so any memory corruption could write a max throttle value and be undetected.
Instead of using the certified, audited version of the RTOS like most auto makers, they used an unverified version.
Thanks to not bothering to review the OS code, they had no idea the OS data structures were not mirrored. A single bit flip can start or stop a task, even a life-safety critical one.
These are just some of the massive glaring failures at every level of specifying, coding, and testing a safety-critical embedded system.
I am now confident in saying at least some of the unintended acceleration events with Toyota vehicles were caused by software failures due to gross incompetence and negligence on the part of Toyota. They stumbled into writing software, piling hack on top of hack, never bothering to implement any testing, peer review, documentation, specifications, or even the slightest hint that they even considered the software something worth noticing.
The suggestion that Nintendo should release on iOS and Android would be suicide. The sales figures for the 3DS have already proven the nuts that keep saying Nintendo should release Pokemon the iPhone are insane short term thinkers
Total sales worldwide:
1989 - 2003 GameBoy / Color / Advance / SP: 200 million ~14.2m/yr
2004 - 2010 Nintendo DS: 153 million ~21.8m/yr
2011 - Present Nintendo 3DS / XL / 2DS: 32 million ~10.6m/yr
The GameBoy had a slower ramp up as handheld gaming started getting mainstream traction. Nintendo DS appears to have been the peak. Something happened during its release... around 2007 I think, though I'm having trouble recalling just what was released around then... oh wait, the iPhone followed shortly after by Android. The 3DS can't even match the GameBoy's sales figures and continues to fall.
The question is how big is the market for handheld gaming systems given that cell phones are eviscerating the market and a generation of kids is growing up without knowing who Nintendo is or why they should care (hint: more 10 year olds know what Angry Birds is than who Mario is!)
My contention is that the market is not large enough to sustain Nintendo's hardware development costs and they will be forced to exit the market after the next handheld system flops (or possibly the system after that). People who think everything is just fine must believe Nintendo can survive on ~2 million/year sales or possibly even less. If they do survive, the systems will be limited to almost entirely Nintendo games with relatively few 3rd party titles due to the small install base.
There is a short window of opportunity where those of us who grew up with Nintendo are young enough to buy games for nostalgia or are just starting to have kids and be looking to introduce them to gaming. If Nintendo were to release a Mario game designed for iOS now (and charge a premium price, say 7.99-9.99) we'd all buy it, sending it rocketing to the top of the charts. This would bring it to the notice of current young gamers, introducing a new generation to Nintendo characters, setting them up for sequels. Some of them might become hardcore Nintendo fans, willing to shell out for Nintendo hardware (controller accessories, cases, or even dedicated handheld gaming systems) thus expanding Nintendo's market. The point of Mario on iOS isn't to match the revenue of the 3DS; much like Google and Android, it exists to ensure their continued survival, access to the market, and expand their potential customer base and brand awareness. Once that window closes (sometime in the next 5 years), it may be gone forever.
TL;DR: My first kid was just born. I will never buy him a handheld gaming device, even though I owned a GameBoy, GB Color, and GB Advance in my day. I will just give him my old cell phone. The games are $1-10, if he drops it in the toilet I can just re-download his games for free, etc. Everyone I know with kids is doing the same thing. When I say "Mario" to my 7 yr old nephew, he asks me "Who's that?". You know what he does have? Angry Birds posters, because that's what all his friends have.
Does anyone know if they handle the look-alike issue or are we still stuck with URLs that appear to be latin "paypal.com", but with the "y" replaced by a greek lower gamma (Î) #x3b3, "p" replaced with cyrillic Er (Ñ) #x440, or some other equivalent that appears identical?
I understand why it's a hard issue: the cyrillic lowercase Er looks *identical* to latin p so they can be mapped to the same character, but the greek lower gamma isn't the exact same glyph as latin lower y, they just look close enough that a user might not notice. Would it be a slight to greek users to force greek domain names to use a misshapen lower gamma? Then what do you do with greek alpha, where the capital matches the latin glyph exactly but the lower does not?
Then there's the issue that every computer everywhere can enter latin characters, but not everyone has software for or how to use stuff like Chinese characters or Japanese Hirigana. Keeping to basic latin characters makes entering domain names universal, though I understand why that's convenient for an English speaker like me to say. I'd be curious to hear from some people who have non-European first languages how much having to use latin domain names seems to bother the average computer user and whether there is any actual cry for international domain names in their country? How difficult/easy is it to enter latin characters on your keyboard layout? Does it present a barrier to entry for the less educated/literate, or does everyone remember their English classes from school?
This may just be some crossed wires; the company tasked with handling the trademarks, legal papers, etc is just doing what they believe they are supposed to do: stop anyone from getting a Vendor ID, then subverting the normal USB process by sublicensing Product IDs. It is totally understandable that this would subvert the process and take control away from the USB-IF.
USB-IF does offer some VID blocks for testing, hobbyist, etc purposes.
They are also more than happy to sell you a VID block for $5000, even if you never bother to get a device certified or use the USB logo and trademarks.
What they are not currently setup to do is offer a "small" block at a cheaper price to someone who wants to sell a product commercially, but one that has a very limited run. It seems like they could easily set aside one VID for this purpose, then "subnet" that into different PID blocks. Offer a set of 10 PIDs for $100 for small companies. Would that not solve the problem?
You have to remember: USB-IF is not making money here; it is a non-profit itself. The fees go toward covering their costs.
The system appears secure; hacking it requires injecting your own certificate into the trusted roots on the device.
Further, forging messages requires you compromise the private key which is only contained on the device (Apple doesn't know it). The public key is submitted to Apple's push CA which generates a certificate. The public part of your key is what other devices see when they get a copy of your certificate. So far, so good.
The issue is, of course, that Apple controls the CA so in theory if the government ordered them to issue a certificate in your name to the government, the gov could then monitor your communications or forge your identity.
Apple claims not to be able to read iMessages and that appears to be true, and as far as I'm aware not even the Patriot act requires them to issue forged certificates (aka allow the government to impersonate you digitally). So insofar as the law works and is followed, there is no legal authority to compel Apple to issue bunk certificates.
For the curious, when you send a message it contacts Apple and requests the list of public certs for a given URI (telephone number, email address, etc). Apple responds with a list of the public certs issued to each of your registered devices, which the client then uses to send messages encrypted with that public key to each, and also signed with your own private key. The receiver does a similar lookup and uses your public key to validate the signature (proving you sent the message and that it was sent from the correct device even), then uses its own private key to decrypt the message you encrypted with the public key.
I'm not sure how this could be improved. No matter what you do, someone has to be in charge of saying "The certificate for mobile number xxx-yyy-zzzz is ..." and that gives you a chain of trust problem. The alternative is requiring every iMessage user to meet face-to-face to exchange keys before sending any messages.
Google can read your email!
Jabber servers can read your IMs! So can Yahoo! So can AOL!
Oh wait, this is Apple. Nevermind, carry on with the hysterics.
(FYI: No matter what scheme you devise, key management always gets you because if Apple doesn't have the keys, it makes iMessage much, much harder to use. If they do, then someone can snoop the messages. If you use a chain of trust, who ever sits at the top of the chain can be compromised. In an ideal world, people would learn about crypto keys and understand how to manage them, but you'd have to meet face to face to avoid mistaken identities).
Why is SciAm claiming the post was off-topic (clearly a bullshit excuse given other bloggers posts) then claiming it was due to legal reasons?
Oh and blaming not telling the author on poor cell phone reception... Right. Someone can click the delete button but can't be bothered to send an email?
It's just lies and more lies, a non-apology, and bullshit. I don't buy it for a second.
My bet: someone at biology online emailed SciAm to complain and SciAm was more than happy to censor Dr Lee. Now that they've been caught, they are furiously trying to backpedal and pretend it's all just a big misunderstanding.
I'm canceling my subscription, I don't want any part of such a two-faced crappy organization.
This is just one of those things that the government really doesn't do all that well. Private organizations live and die by their profit margin, so they make damn sure shit works and it works affordably.
I cannot let this comment pass. Sorry, but anyone who's worked for a large corporate beauracracy knows this is nonsense. They are just as large, Byzantine, and wasteful. That's simply how large human organizations function.
If admins aren't allowed to check log files, what happens if you experience a hack? What if a new zero-day vulnerability is released during the shutdown? What if the server room AC goes out?
The only safe thing to do is shut it down until the Republicans stop trying to negotiate with a gun to everyone's head.
If you check the design, the fingerprint image itself is never stored anywhere. The fingerprint profile is only stored on silicon in the A7 chip. There is no API to access that data, only flags to tell you that it exists (so the OS can discover there are four stored prints and their names, but nothing about the actual fingerprints themselves).
Apple touts the fact that the fingerprint is never sent over the network as a feature but in reality it can't send it over the network even if it wants to, nor can any application access it.
If you think Apple is lying... well... There must be some level of trust somewhere or we may as well give up. I tend to draw the line at the CPU because if that is compromised or includes back doors, we are all screwed anyway.
So if I pay the WSJ to reprint my press release (which is what Segate did), will Slashdot post my marketing copy too?
Let's compare this drive to the size of an iPad mini (because I'm familiar with that tablet, insert your own tablet of choice).
This drive is 2.5" still; that's huge compared to the size of an iPad mini, 512GB of surface-mounted flash is half that size or less.
It is 5mm thick, the iPad mini is 7.2mm thick. Would there even be room for the screen? 512GB of flash is less than half that.
It weighs 1/3 of the weight of an iPad mini as well. 512G of flash is a rounding error by comparison.
In short, this is a company that was caught flat-footed by the rise of SSDs because they were too busy thinking about how to preserve their hard drive business. Now they are desperately trying to push spinning rust to the limit and still falling well short. The only thing they can do is sell them for dirt-cheap prices. That also probably means the scaling of hard drives will slow or stop at this generation as SSD sales cut the profit out of that market, thus reducing the capital available for R&D and deployment of new HDD technologies.
I'm in an all-flash household now, I have no desire to go back to spinning disks. I don't have a lot of data points to back it up but so far I have zero failures in the past three years since I installed my first SSD, compared to no less than four HDD failures in the previous three year period.
Most notably, in a comprehensive review of studies, Alice Eagly and colleagues showed that female managers are more likely to elicit respect and pride from their followers, communicate their vision effectively, empower and mentor subordinates, and approach problem-solving in a more flexible and creative way (all characteristics of "transformational leadership"), as well as fairly reward direct reports. In contrast, male managers are statistically less likely to bond or connect with their subordinates, and they are relatively more inept at rewarding them for their actual performance. Although these findings may reflect a sampling bias that requires women to be more qualified and competent than men in order to be chosen as leaders, there is no way of really knowing until this bias is eliminated.
The bolded part hits the nail on the head for me. In the software development field (as well as management) currently a woman must exert more effort to get noticed so there is a huge selection bias that makes the women more likely to be top of the line, versus your average male manager or programmer. Any woman who isn't gets pushed out of the field or passed over.
We will know when we've arrived when we have a good mix of incompetent, average, and excellent female software developers and managers... Just like we have with men today.
As for why a relatively balanced field (Computer Science) turned into a male-dominated one, I think the period when nerds and geeky stuff weren't cool put a lot of social pressure on women to stay away and now the cycle just perpetuates itself. Even if 29 of 32 guys in a CompSci class are normal non-creepers, as soon as a girl shows up she gets the full attention of the 3 total creepers, who stalk her, follow her around campus, etc... Or the one dude who constantly talks down to her and says software is for guys only. In reality it takes only one asshole to drive the girl away and perpetuate the cycle.
Personally I'd like to see more women entering the field so I try to call out the creepers and assholes whenever I encounter them. One voice of reason often puts a stop to it.
People are irrational. They ask stupid questions that make no sense. They use slang that confuses the communication. They have horrible grammar and spelling. And overseeing it all is a language fraught with multiple meanings for words depending on the context, which may well include sentences and paragraphs leading up to the sentence being analyzed.
Is it any surprise that computers can't "understand" what we mean, given the minefield of language?
Even if you came up with a regular easy to parse grammar it wouldn't help. Even if you fed the computer all known information about alligators and hurdles in that standard format it wouldn't help. That's the point... Now that we are starting to do much better at parsing and reproducing speech, it turns out that isn't really the hard problem.
It's pretty simple. If you target iPad you have two form factors and retina/non-retina, though you can really just do retina and let it downscale if you want. There are only 2-3 CPU/GPU profiles. That covers over half the tablet market, depending on who's numbers you believe.
On Android, you have to target 20 different devices, maybe more, just to get the majority of Android tablets. If you want 90% then the list gets much longer.
Sprint has been weighed down by the horrible acquisition of Nextel. They were paying for two networks but only one network's worth of customers.
The loss of these subscribers was intentional and predicted well in advance as Sprint finally shutdown the Nextel platform. They already recaptured the more valuable customers onto the Sprint platform and made a strategic decision to let some go because the equipment fees and/or discounts made it unprofitable to keep them.
Part of the financial write downs was paying lease termination fees on backhaul and sites to shut down redundant Nextel locations. They won't ever post a quarter like this again; the Nextel bleeding has finally been stopped and their cost structure will only improve going forward. If you check the Sprint platform, they are still adding subscribers and revenue is up.
They have also closed the Clearwire deal, allowing them to move forward deploying 2.5Ghz spectrum but that won't really bear fruit until next year when handsets start shipping with support for those frequencies. Now that iDEN SMR 850Mhz is shut down, they can deploy the 3x3 LTE channel in that space which should make a huge diffence for indoor coverage. They have been planning this during Network Vision (their modernization effort that is running fiber to every tower along with LTE) to deploy the Nextel spectrum. All the newer handsets already support it, including the iPhone 5. At the newest upgraded towers they don't even have to roll a truck, the equipment is already installed and can even have the downtilt remotely adjusted.
They aren't stupid... Network Vision is running fiber to almost every tower with microwave bounces for the few that can't get it. The backhaul is all minimum 1Gbps, software upgradable, so they can just turn on more backhaul with a keystroke... The old network was all T1s, requiring a 4-6 week wait on the phone company. The new antennas are more sensitive, can be remotely tilted, and support more frequencies. The LTE gear is all software-upgradable to LTE-Advanced.
They had two major problems. LTE equipment wasn't ready prior to their must-build deadlines for the 2.5Ghz spectrum and they were severely hampered in capital spending due to the Nextel boat anchor. They foisted off the 2.5Ghz spectrum on some investors to help offset the cost and protect the spectrum, probably knowing WiMax was a dead end. Boost was a way to help offset the cost of iDEN with prepaid customers they could jettison later.
Now that SoftBank has solved the capital problem, they own the 2.5Ghz spectrum again, and they are rolling out fiber/LTE, they should be able to challenge the dualopoly on equal footing relatively soon. My city is one of the LTE launch markets and the difference between the old and new networks is night and day.
Once you understand these things, you realize that Sprint is a good play, albeit somewhat risky. The market just goes off headlines (often completely bogus ones, see every Apple story ever) and freaks out. Those are excellent buying opportunities if you understand what is really going on with a company.
This is getting way into the weeds but the reason for polygamy (and conversely the reason it must be banned today) is that the death rate among males was quite high in earlier times, usually through war but sometimes through deaths on hunts, etc.
If you look at the polygamist communities in western countries today, they all have some rigid set of rules or structure that allows them to kick out most young males... Even then that sometimes isn't enough, requiring the existing men to marry younger and younger.
Human birth rates are close to 1:1 and without a lot of war to kill off the young men you simply can't sustain a polygamous society.
So basically the signature only verifies the first instance of a file it finds in the archive, but when extracted it extracts the latest. In fact ZIP (and RAR IIRC) allow overwriting a file with a newer version later in the archive; probably a hold-over from the floppy-swapping and/or tape days when you needed such abilities.
Reminds me of the chimera file exploits that use the fact that many common file formats like ZIP and PDF will ignore extraneous data, scan into the file looking for a header, etc to make one file appear to be a valid file of many types. Often, virus scanners fail to notice this and will scan eg the PDF while ignoring the ZIP payload, but unzip utilities just scan forward until they find the ZIP header.
The real fail here will be the fact that at least half (if not 80-90%) of all Android devices won't have a patch released *period*, never mind people bothering to install the patch.
An Israeli style system will NEVER be implemented in the US because it runs totally contrary to the politically-correct postmodernist identity politics narrative that drives our current political monologue (no, not dialogue).
Suggesting it will be met with screeches of "RACISM!", the person suggesting it will forever be chased and shamed from the limelight, and we will continue staffing our airport security with fat, sticky-fingered illiterate highschool dropouts that barely speak understandable english and use their union to protect their do-nothing jobs while extorting more and more taxpayer money from the very people subjected to them.
That's asinine conservative clap-trap. What you are discussing is typical LEO profiling in the USA where dark skin is used as a cheap and poor substitute by the lazy and incompetent, which blinds us to very real threats (Timothy McVeigh anyone?). Racism doesn't just harm minorities, it also blinds us to both the potential achievements/contributions of the minority group *and* makes us ignore the threats that look like the majority.
An Israeli-style system requires a literal army of very personable, often friendly, intelligence officers who walk around both in plain clothes and uniforms, chatting people up about their life, their family, their trip. That's true profiling. You have to get a feel for the person and whether they are being evasive or acting nervously. Red flags mean extra screening. As others have pointed out, they use tricks like having an attractive woman chat up a single man, without him even being aware that he's being profiled (at least at first). This means you can't pay crap wages and demonize them as tax-sucking leeches; you need decent pay and benefits.
Typical conservative nonsense... cut taxes, use the resulting deficit to justify cutting workers, hours, and benefits, demonize government employees, then point to an under-staffed and demoralized agency as proof government doesn't work, thus justifying cutting back even further. Use the small surplus in boom times to justify another tax cut, then wait for the inevitable downturn and temporary deficit to justify repeating the cycle all over again. Make sure to throw in rants about political correctness, drum up a fake "war on Christmas", etc for good measure. It would be laughable if it weren't so predictable.
Intel *does* make custom chips for outside people, contrary to what some people are saying. They sub out spare capacity, especially in older fabs. They just don't make them on their newest foundry processes (the ones that would be actually useful to a company like Apple) for a variety of reasons, the chief one being the newest processes are generally full to capacity. Even if there were some space available it wouldn't be near enough to satisfy Apple's demand for A-series chips. You have to remember, an A-series chip requires on the order of 150,000,000 units in the first year.
Apple has the cash hoard to get into the foundry business if they wanted, but it would take at least a decade to hire engineers and gain the experience necessary to cost-effectively produce stuff like 14nm 3D transistor chips, assuming you can navigate the patent minefield.
The only way such a deal would work is if Apple funded a new Intel foundry to produce Apple chips in some kind of long-term deal, but that would probably require Apple to spend double on the processors to give Intel the fat margins they want to even consider the idea.
I fully agree that in some magical world where this kind of deal happens it would give Apple a permanent advantage in the phone space, as no one would be able to come close to the performance and performance-per-watt of an A7-type chip made on Intel's latest 22, 14, or 10nm process; it would make all other phones look like a joke.
It just isn't going to happen.
In the early days, people debated whether uncertainty was just a practical issue of imperfect measuring devices/methods or a fundamental feature of the system.
We now know that it is a fundamental feature. Even if you had a perfect measuring device that did not disturb the system being measured, the act of measuring in any capacity is subject to uncertainty and collapsing of the wave function.
Despite the fact that it seems to violate our common sense (developed at room temperatures with macroscopic physical forces, thus unsuited for quantum reasoning), the world at that tiny level really is probabilistic. It is not a side-effect of our measurement methods or anything else... It simply works that way. Reality as we know it is just a side-effect of all those quantum states interacting and causing wave function collapse... Same reason a quantum computer is harder and harder to make the more bits it has.
Vaccines have a great reputation, largely resulting from the highly successful campaigns with smallpox and polio. However, these were done in a less litigious era, and unlike today's medical practice, they could operate without the fear of gigantic lawsuits if something went wrong.
I know that makes a great right-wing talking point, but in fact vaccine makers are shielded from almost all liability, barring gross misconduct.
Congress created the vaccine court that evaluates people who may have been injured by a vaccination (no action is 100% free of side effects in 100% of people 100% of the time, including taking no action which in the case of the target diseases is millions of deaths and maimings or stuff like allergic reactions in the case of giving vaccines).
If you are injured by a vaccination, the vaccine court awards compensation, up to and including lifetime medical care if needed.
Part of the reason these diseases are coming back is the anti-vaccination conspiracy nut jobs. If herd immunity drops below a certain percentage then the disease can persist and grow. Above that line and you have essentially 100% protection even though some people can't or won't get the vaccine (and some people who do don't develop perfect immunity). Unfortunately so many people are willing to but "JUST ASKING QUESTIONS" and "TEACH THE CONTROVERSY" bullshit that we are below the herd immunity line for some diseases. We can look forward to a lot more dead and crippled kids before Jenny McCarthy and Andrew Wakefield's body counts are tallied.