Who knows? On the other hand, the many eyes argument with ShellShock is dubious: most people who would have recognized it didn't realize the implications as they weren't looking at it from a security standpoint, and few people actually likely touched or had reason to view that part of the code.
This story, on the other hand, is about an actual security audit. In theory, it is more comprehensive, the researchers were looking for bugs, had a security background and agenda, and so would likely have picked up on ShellShock had it been Bash they were auditing rather than TrueCrypt.
I'm not suggesting there's no chance they've missed anything, but I am saying the process is considerably more thorough and less likely to make a mistake. Bear in mind TrueCrypt has had "many eyes" for a decade or so too. And "many eyes" did, eventually, pick up on ShellShock, it just took longer than anyone would hope.
No, it isn't. You see even your high end of 50% (which is absurd BTW) would make a $7 item $14, not $124. For it to be $124, and assuming there are no lawsuits in Canada, lawsuits would have to be about 95% of healthcare costs.
Also bear in mind that the majority of lawsuits related to healthcare are to determine which insurance company foots the bill, not to hand someone $1M for slipping on a wet floor and mildly hurting their butt as they fell as the crude stereotype of healthcare related lawsuits suggests.
How is it more generous? It looks like the same thing: you can use the patents, as long as you create something that complies with the (Java/.NET) standards.
The fact Dalvic wasn't a full JSE implementation was why Oracle sued Google. You could even argue that, given Oracle lost, the Java patent licensing is more generous!
Nothing much, but then you lose the guarantees of service and predictable pricing, and to be honest, finding a reliable plumber or AC person is sufficiently difficult in the real world to ensure that something that makes those guarantees will be popular, even if, on average, it costs a little more than going directly.
It may be a private company, large portions of UK (and US I believe) functions are performed by private contractors and have been since the 1980s.
That said, even if it isn't, this experience is something most of us have suffered over the last 15 years from public and private entities. Most have ended up capitulating under pressure to knock it off with the "IE6 only" BS, in part because Microsoft (yes, Microsoft!) forced the issue with IE7 and its follow-ons, itself in part because too many people liked Firefox for Microsoft's comfort.
It shouldn't surprise anyone there's still "IE only" crap out there. Especially amongst organizations that are (1) large, and (2) constantly cutting their budgets and having to apply "defered maintenance" to everything they do to stop going under.
And those budget cuts are, for the most part, the fault of the same people who insist governments are always incompetent.
I think of all the times anyone has tried to explain it to me, this is the one that clicked. If I'm understanding correctly, they're (electrons, photons, et al) not really either a "particle", as I think of it (like you say, teeny tiny baseballs with well defined boundaries and positions), or a "wave", but entirely different animals that happen to have some, not even all, of the features of both.
No, it's completely understandable and shouldn't even be thought of as strange to seasoned programmers.
The critical issue is there's a difference between calling an I/O function like write, and actually manipulating the IDE control lines on a hard disk. Typically for the former, the operating system is sitting there buffering things up in a relatively simple, uncomplex, way - ie it has some memory allocated, a pointer, and when you call the function all it does is copy the bytes to the memory and increment the pointer as needed. Once either enough time has passed, a critical function has been called, or enough data has been written, the OS then starts manipulating the IDE control lines to write the data.
Now, the comparison becomes "the OS's buffer handling" vs "Your language of choice's string handling and garbage collection algorithms." For C, chances are you're as good as the OS as C's string handling is extremely uncomplicated and bare metal. For almost anything else - such as Python and Java, both tested in this scenario - you're likely to end up with the OS handling some situations more quickly than your language would.
Does it make sense now? It should. There are very few programmers this should surprise. Unfortunately, I know quote a few that will be...
You think you have problems? I'm still trying to get my head around "It's both a particle... AND a wave!". How the f--- does that work? It doesn't even make any sense! It's insane! Wave things are not particles, and particle things are not waves!
(Note: yes, I know, it's true, I've seen the double slit experiment et al, I'm not doubting the science, I'm just saying my brain is too small to understand it. So put me in a position where I have to understand that something is in every state possible until observed, and... well, the worst part is I can visualize it, but only in a way I know deep down is wrong...)
That might actually be an artifact of the same bugs that caused Google recently to embarassingly change searches like "famous female scientists" into "Searching instead for 'famous male scientists'. Click here to search for 'famous female scientists'"
There appears to be a lot of crap in Google's algorithms they're still trying to dig out that assumes synonyms of completely opposite words. Which is one of the many reasons why Google's searches tend to be miss rather than hit nine times in ten these days.
That's because their search system is crap. You ask for a Bluetooth Mouse, they'll search for anything that has Bluetooth, Mouse, or the word "The" in it (yes, I know you didn't type "The" - that's how stupid it is) It's a rare day I search for anything and more than 50% of the first page of searches actually relate to what I wanted - as in, at the very least, have all the keywords I specified.
It has nothing to do with Amazon Basics, which I doubt even makes Amazon any more money than their regular inventory.
No they don't, unless you're using a custom operating system. I installed the Bing app and disable Google services on my old Galaxy Nexus (which runs an official Google version of Android) and now that search box searches using Bing.
In fact it's kinda annoying, because I didn't do either of those in order to get that result (wanted to try the Bing app at one point and happened to have it on my phone, and in an entirely unrelated process was having problems with my handsfree and found the only way to cut off the - broken and unusable anyway - voice dialing was to disable Google search altogether.) But that's besides the point.
Try it. Disable Google Search (Settings -> Apps -> All -> Google Search -> Disable), reboot, install Bing from Google Play, run it, and reboot again. See what happens when you use that box now.
To be honest, the people most ignorant seem to be those who keep going on about how ignorant the other voters are.
Here's a question: what, exactly, do you vote on the basis of.
Is it (a) You believe Candidate A will pass the Good Things I Agree With Bill?
Or is it (b) You believe Candidate A has the judgement and values to make the best decisions for the country?
Most people whining about how ignorant other voters are think (a). They think other voters are ignorant because they haven't educated themselves on exactly what issues are before Congress et al.
But (a) is an utter waste of time. You will never get a candidate, even if they weren't fucking corrupt, who will agree with you on every single issue. Moreover, YOU will never be informed enough because there are far too many issues out there you don't even think about. But you're a software developer (or some other kind of geek) so you ignore that, you think you know everything, you think you've thought of everything, and you complain about the other voters being ignorant.
Whereas, actually, for the most part, the other voters - the ones you keep writing off - have an easy decision to make. Which one do they trust more to make the right decisions.
Actually, they do have an informed enough opinion on that, even if they end up deciding the wisest course of action is to check all the boxes in the {Party they prefer}.
Which is fine, because that's the entire point of political parties anyway.
So knock off the "Too many ignorant people" crap. It reveals much more about the person making the claim than the voting population.
The name behind this Virtual Reality console may surprise you!
(To be followed by 100 comments along the lines of "Anonymous Coward is right. I also made $1,000 from my home by following this easy to follow make money fast sca... plan...")
Funnily enough everyone wants a lot less regulation. What we want are only those regulations we agree with to be in force (and maybe a few extra regulations here and there that we think should exist, though we never think it's anything like the number that'd get cut.)
I think even Stalin was in favor only of the laws he agreed with, and wanted everything else removed from the rule books.
Libertarianism is truly the wildcard of politics. Everyone's a libertarian, at least as defined by the promoters of the concept. The term is meaningless.
What makes your politics are not the number of rules you want, but what rules stay and what rules go.
FWIW Apple has also made a PDA that flopped, and they made several laptop type things in the late 1980s that were commercial disasters too. They went on to produce the iPad and Powerbook (the former didn't even need Steve Jobs to make it a success.) In a parallel with the Powerbook story, IBM also had several failed attempts at a PC compatible portable computer/laptop until they had success with the Thinkpad.
Right now Apple has tried to make a TV set top box twice in the last decade, and most Apple watchers didn't even notice - the original iTV was a Mac mini in a smaller case with a customized Mac OS X. It was replaced a few years later with a device that kinda looked similar, had the exact same name, but was completely different, running iOS with some sort of ARM hardware that may (I genuinely don't know) be based upon one of their portable designs. Neither have been successful yet, but it's evidence Apple isn't averse to trying different things to attack the same market, and it wouldn't surprise me if, if the current generation fails, they'll try yet another redesign and type of product, possibly also called iTV.
I think the whole "A company once tried to make X, it was a flop, therefore they should never try to make X again" thing is a little overblown. Indeed, sometimes the flops are necessary, unless there's huge competitive pressures to stay out of a space, there's no reason to stop trying, learning from each flop.
I don't think we can single out NASA. And it's been going on for a while, it's just the ideological agendas change over time.
At least in the 1950s-1970s, when the Interstate Commerce Commission destroyed the rail system, airlines, and road haulage industries, they were responding to politicians terrified that prices rises would upset their constituents. Now it's politicians terrified that facts might upset their constituents. Different agenda, same stupidity.
It's almost enough to make you a libertarian. Almost. Enough. But that's substituting one system that barely works for something even more stupid.
I suspect you are missing something that's blindingly obvious to Windows 8.1 tablet users but probably not to those who haven't used it. The summary is kinda a kludgy way of introducing the concept, focussing on one implementation detail.
Windows 8.x is implemented as "two worlds". There's the Desktop world, which at the time it appeared Microsoft considered obsolete. And there's the Metro world which acts as a tablet. The two are completely separate - well, they share a file system, but for the most part they're unrelated. Apps living in one world are awkward and clumsy to use if you're using the hardware designed for the other. Apps cannot live in both worlds simultaneously.
Windows 10 removes that distinction, to a certain degree, allowing Metro apps to be written with a UI that works well on both the desktop and the tablet UI. That removes the distinction between the "two worlds" quite considerably. In that environment, you'll want the UI to reflect what devices you're using, not what app you're running. And so the need for a "switch".
In terms of how it's implemented, I'd have thought a "Is a mouse plugged in?" software sensor would make more sense than two icons, but...
No, I'm not. The difference between Firefox and Excel was what I was highlighting. Both a 600M and 16M (I can't be arsed to scroll up and look at the exact figures) will fit quite happy on a 1G laptop and run mostly OK on a 10 year old CPU.
The issue comes in applications. Is James Kendrick really using his Chromebook in the same way as a person with similar hardware would use a Windows or GNU/Linux system? Are you expecting him to be able to edit 3D graphics, or play even a 10 year old FPS, even assuming a port to JavaScript of the latter can be found?
ChromeBooks are seen, for the most part, as heavily stripped down, and as less capable than a ten year old Thinkpad, not because the hardware is incapable of running the same stuff (faster, even) but because the added layers of abstraction are both inherently inefficient, and because the choices of abstraction technology, JS, HTML5, etc, are far from ideal in the efficiency department.
Yes, they're usable, but with a gigabyte of memory and a relatively modern CPU, even if not a top of the line one, you should be able to edit using Google Docs. But, well, Google Docs is... let's just say it's not even comparable to Office 95. Remember that? That ran happily on Pentium 1s, with 32Mb of memory. That's how decrepit the enforced usage of web technologies makes a modern laptop.
What about if they're the best person for the job?
People make mistakes. Everyone does. Most of the time that doesn't result in a criminal conviction. In a small number of cases it does.
More-over, most of the students I went to University with are unconvicted criminals, guilty of serious felonies related to illegal drug use. Around 40% of prisoners are in prison for similar (as in drugs related) non-violent crimes.
What's (seriously) the difference between the two? Why do the guys who spent time get to be blocked from having the jobs given to the other guys, when both DID THE EXACT SAME CRIME?
Like the others, I'd be interested to see actual (US) court records of discrimination against ex-cons being illegal. There's an entire infrastructure out there focused on ensuring potential employers can find out if a person has a record or not. And while some professions may actually require discrimination to comply with, not contradict the law (such as high security positions), that doesn't explain why it's available for virtually everything.
(Of course, you may be talking about Canada which would have laws like that, because they tend to be a little more socially responsible.)
Google's not flying the drones, so they don't fall under the FAA's jurisdiction.
Unfortunately the ruling makes perfect sense. That doesn't mean the rules themselves make perfect sense, but I'd imagine the pressure would be against the FAA increasing the number of things that fall under "non-commercial therefore more liberally regulated" use. And it's hard to come up with a better set of rules that wouldn't have loopholes so large you could fly a 747 loaded with freight through.
If it only replaces part of the application, it seems to be unlikely that the reduction is enough to counter the fact the same app now has to run under several levels of abstraction, each considerably less efficient even excluding lower levels of abstraction - ie an application written in Javascript, even if somehow compiled to machine code - is always going to be memory intensive* compared to a well written C++ application than the layer below it.
It sounds to be that NaCl is more of a hack to try to reduce the disadvantages of the environment, not a fix for the problem altogether.
* I've done a lot of thought on this, because I actually like JavaScript, it's a nice, clean, free form OO language, and most of its ostensible public critics tend actually to be criticizing the DOM and other stuff that's not actually JS but a product of the fact it's usually used within a web browser, rather than the language itself. Certain features, such as the way JS handles closures and 'eval' type scopes, make it very, very, difficult to implement at a low level that doesn't ultimately involve large amounts of metadata being held in memory, and large amounts of otherwise ready for garbage collection information that a compiler has no way of knowing will not be used in future. It's a beautiful prototype, but it'd be nice to see someone who knows what they're doing actually knock together a "Web Scripting Language 1.0" that is almost as free form and just as flexible but with less overhead.
Seems... awkward. That option isn't available for other (for example, third party) applications presumably, and in any case, doesn't that leave Google maintaining two entirely different code bases for the same product, that aren't even written in the same language or using similar design concepts?
Slashdot Mirror
Who knows? On the other hand, the many eyes argument with ShellShock is dubious: most people who would have recognized it didn't realize the implications as they weren't looking at it from a security standpoint, and few people actually likely touched or had reason to view that part of the code.
This story, on the other hand, is about an actual security audit. In theory, it is more comprehensive, the researchers were looking for bugs, had a security background and agenda, and so would likely have picked up on ShellShock had it been Bash they were auditing rather than TrueCrypt.
I'm not suggesting there's no chance they've missed anything, but I am saying the process is considerably more thorough and less likely to make a mistake. Bear in mind TrueCrypt has had "many eyes" for a decade or so too. And "many eyes" did, eventually, pick up on ShellShock, it just took longer than anyone would hope.
No, it isn't. You see even your high end of 50% (which is absurd BTW) would make a $7 item $14, not $124. For it to be $124, and assuming there are no lawsuits in Canada, lawsuits would have to be about 95% of healthcare costs.
Also bear in mind that the majority of lawsuits related to healthcare are to determine which insurance company foots the bill, not to hand someone $1M for slipping on a wet floor and mildly hurting their butt as they fell as the crude stereotype of healthcare related lawsuits suggests.
How is it more generous? It looks like the same thing: you can use the patents, as long as you create something that complies with the (Java/.NET) standards.
The fact Dalvic wasn't a full JSE implementation was why Oracle sued Google. You could even argue that, given Oracle lost, the Java patent licensing is more generous!
Nothing much, but then you lose the guarantees of service and predictable pricing, and to be honest, finding a reliable plumber or AC person is sufficiently difficult in the real world to ensure that something that makes those guarantees will be popular, even if, on average, it costs a little more than going directly.
It may be a private company, large portions of UK (and US I believe) functions are performed by private contractors and have been since the 1980s.
That said, even if it isn't, this experience is something most of us have suffered over the last 15 years from public and private entities. Most have ended up capitulating under pressure to knock it off with the "IE6 only" BS, in part because Microsoft (yes, Microsoft!) forced the issue with IE7 and its follow-ons, itself in part because too many people liked Firefox for Microsoft's comfort.
It shouldn't surprise anyone there's still "IE only" crap out there. Especially amongst organizations that are (1) large, and (2) constantly cutting their budgets and having to apply "defered maintenance" to everything they do to stop going under.
And those budget cuts are, for the most part, the fault of the same people who insist governments are always incompetent.
I think of all the times anyone has tried to explain it to me, this is the one that clicked. If I'm understanding correctly, they're (electrons, photons, et al) not really either a "particle", as I think of it (like you say, teeny tiny baseballs with well defined boundaries and positions), or a "wave", but entirely different animals that happen to have some, not even all, of the features of both.
Thanks (assuming I didn't misunderstand!)
No, it's completely understandable and shouldn't even be thought of as strange to seasoned programmers.
The critical issue is there's a difference between calling an I/O function like write, and actually manipulating the IDE control lines on a hard disk. Typically for the former, the operating system is sitting there buffering things up in a relatively simple, uncomplex, way - ie it has some memory allocated, a pointer, and when you call the function all it does is copy the bytes to the memory and increment the pointer as needed. Once either enough time has passed, a critical function has been called, or enough data has been written, the OS then starts manipulating the IDE control lines to write the data.
Now, the comparison becomes "the OS's buffer handling" vs "Your language of choice's string handling and garbage collection algorithms." For C, chances are you're as good as the OS as C's string handling is extremely uncomplicated and bare metal. For almost anything else - such as Python and Java, both tested in this scenario - you're likely to end up with the OS handling some situations more quickly than your language would.
Does it make sense now? It should. There are very few programmers this should surprise. Unfortunately, I know quote a few that will be...
You think you have problems? I'm still trying to get my head around "It's both a particle... AND a wave!". How the f--- does that work? It doesn't even make any sense! It's insane! Wave things are not particles, and particle things are not waves!
(Note: yes, I know, it's true, I've seen the double slit experiment et al, I'm not doubting the science, I'm just saying my brain is too small to understand it. So put me in a position where I have to understand that something is in every state possible until observed, and... well, the worst part is I can visualize it, but only in a way I know deep down is wrong...)
That might actually be an artifact of the same bugs that caused Google recently to embarassingly change searches like "famous female scientists" into "Searching instead for 'famous male scientists'. Click here to search for 'famous female scientists'"
There appears to be a lot of crap in Google's algorithms they're still trying to dig out that assumes synonyms of completely opposite words. Which is one of the many reasons why Google's searches tend to be miss rather than hit nine times in ten these days.
That's because their search system is crap. You ask for a Bluetooth Mouse, they'll search for anything that has Bluetooth, Mouse, or the word "The" in it (yes, I know you didn't type "The" - that's how stupid it is) It's a rare day I search for anything and more than 50% of the first page of searches actually relate to what I wanted - as in, at the very least, have all the keywords I specified.
It has nothing to do with Amazon Basics, which I doubt even makes Amazon any more money than their regular inventory.
No they don't, unless you're using a custom operating system. I installed the Bing app and disable Google services on my old Galaxy Nexus (which runs an official Google version of Android) and now that search box searches using Bing.
In fact it's kinda annoying, because I didn't do either of those in order to get that result (wanted to try the Bing app at one point and happened to have it on my phone, and in an entirely unrelated process was having problems with my handsfree and found the only way to cut off the - broken and unusable anyway - voice dialing was to disable Google search altogether.) But that's besides the point.
Try it. Disable Google Search (Settings -> Apps -> All -> Google Search -> Disable), reboot, install Bing from Google Play, run it, and reboot again. See what happens when you use that box now.
To be honest, the people most ignorant seem to be those who keep going on about how ignorant the other voters are.
Here's a question: what, exactly, do you vote on the basis of.
Is it (a) You believe Candidate A will pass the Good Things I Agree With Bill?
Or is it (b) You believe Candidate A has the judgement and values to make the best decisions for the country?
Most people whining about how ignorant other voters are think (a). They think other voters are ignorant because they haven't educated themselves on exactly what issues are before Congress et al.
But (a) is an utter waste of time. You will never get a candidate, even if they weren't fucking corrupt, who will agree with you on every single issue. Moreover, YOU will never be informed enough because there are far too many issues out there you don't even think about. But you're a software developer (or some other kind of geek) so you ignore that, you think you know everything, you think you've thought of everything, and you complain about the other voters being ignorant.
Whereas, actually, for the most part, the other voters - the ones you keep writing off - have an easy decision to make. Which one do they trust more to make the right decisions.
Actually, they do have an informed enough opinion on that, even if they end up deciding the wisest course of action is to check all the boxes in the {Party they prefer}.
Which is fine, because that's the entire point of political parties anyway.
So knock off the "Too many ignorant people" crap. It reveals much more about the person making the claim than the voting population.
The name behind this Virtual Reality console may surprise you!
(To be followed by 100 comments along the lines of "Anonymous Coward is right. I also made $1,000 from my home by following this easy to follow make money fast sca... plan...")
Perhaps that logic explains why the third XBox is called the XBox one...
Funnily enough everyone wants a lot less regulation. What we want are only those regulations we agree with to be in force (and maybe a few extra regulations here and there that we think should exist, though we never think it's anything like the number that'd get cut.)
I think even Stalin was in favor only of the laws he agreed with, and wanted everything else removed from the rule books.
Libertarianism is truly the wildcard of politics. Everyone's a libertarian, at least as defined by the promoters of the concept. The term is meaningless.
What makes your politics are not the number of rules you want, but what rules stay and what rules go.
This is good news for Bitcoin!
FWIW Apple has also made a PDA that flopped, and they made several laptop type things in the late 1980s that were commercial disasters too. They went on to produce the iPad and Powerbook (the former didn't even need Steve Jobs to make it a success.) In a parallel with the Powerbook story, IBM also had several failed attempts at a PC compatible portable computer/laptop until they had success with the Thinkpad.
Right now Apple has tried to make a TV set top box twice in the last decade, and most Apple watchers didn't even notice - the original iTV was a Mac mini in a smaller case with a customized Mac OS X. It was replaced a few years later with a device that kinda looked similar, had the exact same name, but was completely different, running iOS with some sort of ARM hardware that may (I genuinely don't know) be based upon one of their portable designs. Neither have been successful yet, but it's evidence Apple isn't averse to trying different things to attack the same market, and it wouldn't surprise me if, if the current generation fails, they'll try yet another redesign and type of product, possibly also called iTV.
I think the whole "A company once tried to make X, it was a flop, therefore they should never try to make X again" thing is a little overblown. Indeed, sometimes the flops are necessary, unless there's huge competitive pressures to stay out of a space, there's no reason to stop trying, learning from each flop.
I don't think we can single out NASA. And it's been going on for a while, it's just the ideological agendas change over time.
At least in the 1950s-1970s, when the Interstate Commerce Commission destroyed the rail system, airlines, and road haulage industries, they were responding to politicians terrified that prices rises would upset their constituents. Now it's politicians terrified that facts might upset their constituents. Different agenda, same stupidity.
It's almost enough to make you a libertarian. Almost. Enough. But that's substituting one system that barely works for something even more stupid.
I suspect you are missing something that's blindingly obvious to Windows 8.1 tablet users but probably not to those who haven't used it. The summary is kinda a kludgy way of introducing the concept, focussing on one implementation detail.
Windows 8.x is implemented as "two worlds". There's the Desktop world, which at the time it appeared Microsoft considered obsolete. And there's the Metro world which acts as a tablet. The two are completely separate - well, they share a file system, but for the most part they're unrelated. Apps living in one world are awkward and clumsy to use if you're using the hardware designed for the other. Apps cannot live in both worlds simultaneously.
Windows 10 removes that distinction, to a certain degree, allowing Metro apps to be written with a UI that works well on both the desktop and the tablet UI. That removes the distinction between the "two worlds" quite considerably. In that environment, you'll want the UI to reflect what devices you're using, not what app you're running. And so the need for a "switch".
In terms of how it's implemented, I'd have thought a "Is a mouse plugged in?" software sensor would make more sense than two icons, but...
No, I'm not. The difference between Firefox and Excel was what I was highlighting. Both a 600M and 16M (I can't be arsed to scroll up and look at the exact figures) will fit quite happy on a 1G laptop and run mostly OK on a 10 year old CPU.
The issue comes in applications. Is James Kendrick really using his Chromebook in the same way as a person with similar hardware would use a Windows or GNU/Linux system? Are you expecting him to be able to edit 3D graphics, or play even a 10 year old FPS, even assuming a port to JavaScript of the latter can be found?
ChromeBooks are seen, for the most part, as heavily stripped down, and as less capable than a ten year old Thinkpad, not because the hardware is incapable of running the same stuff (faster, even) but because the added layers of abstraction are both inherently inefficient, and because the choices of abstraction technology, JS, HTML5, etc, are far from ideal in the efficiency department.
Yes, they're usable, but with a gigabyte of memory and a relatively modern CPU, even if not a top of the line one, you should be able to edit using Google Docs. But, well, Google Docs is... let's just say it's not even comparable to Office 95. Remember that? That ran happily on Pentium 1s, with 32Mb of memory. That's how decrepit the enforced usage of web technologies makes a modern laptop.
What about if they're the best person for the job?
People make mistakes. Everyone does. Most of the time that doesn't result in a criminal conviction. In a small number of cases it does.
More-over, most of the students I went to University with are unconvicted criminals, guilty of serious felonies related to illegal drug use. Around 40% of prisoners are in prison for similar (as in drugs related) non-violent crimes.
What's (seriously) the difference between the two? Why do the guys who spent time get to be blocked from having the jobs given to the other guys, when both DID THE EXACT SAME CRIME?
Like the others, I'd be interested to see actual (US) court records of discrimination against ex-cons being illegal. There's an entire infrastructure out there focused on ensuring potential employers can find out if a person has a record or not. And while some professions may actually require discrimination to comply with, not contradict the law (such as high security positions), that doesn't explain why it's available for virtually everything.
(Of course, you may be talking about Canada which would have laws like that, because they tend to be a little more socially responsible.)
Google's not flying the drones, so they don't fall under the FAA's jurisdiction.
Unfortunately the ruling makes perfect sense. That doesn't mean the rules themselves make perfect sense, but I'd imagine the pressure would be against the FAA increasing the number of things that fall under "non-commercial therefore more liberally regulated" use. And it's hard to come up with a better set of rules that wouldn't have loopholes so large you could fly a 747 loaded with freight through.
If it only replaces part of the application, it seems to be unlikely that the reduction is enough to counter the fact the same app now has to run under several levels of abstraction, each considerably less efficient even excluding lower levels of abstraction - ie an application written in Javascript, even if somehow compiled to machine code - is always going to be memory intensive* compared to a well written C++ application than the layer below it.
It sounds to be that NaCl is more of a hack to try to reduce the disadvantages of the environment, not a fix for the problem altogether.
Seems... awkward. That option isn't available for other (for example, third party) applications presumably, and in any case, doesn't that leave Google maintaining two entirely different code bases for the same product, that aren't even written in the same language or using similar design concepts?