That was my thought too on reading the headline; "what a terrible analogy". Those who jumped on the hype bandwagon aside, most of the proponents are from math/tech fields and at least have an idea on math and stats. As a result many of them (statistically correctly) refer to lottery tickets as "a tax on the stupid" or some such, which isn't exactly the kind of analogy that's going to inspire confidence in a flagging "investment".
Reading on though, it becomes clearer. The author of the piece doesn't seem to be a fan as they're predicting the value will continue to fall ("as I also pointed out back then, just because the long-term value of bitcoin is more likely to be $100 than $100,000"), so that is precisely the point. FWIW, I agree with the valuation prediction, but not the lottery analogy. Once a crypto currency crashes - as some already have - they don't come back; supporters of the tech move on to the next one that looks promising, and the bagholders will eventually walk away for good as money is finite, after all.
On the plus side, "sunsetting" is clearly a lot of progress compared to some of Linus' previous LKML putdowns so clearly that timeout has had the intended effect in
getting "some assistance on how to understand people's emotions and respond appropriately." "Sunsetting" almost sounds like it would be pleasant experience, maybe with cocktails or something...
After all, why spy at governments, branches of military, banks, political organisations, when you can go right for the real stuff and collect two years of past booking information from some hotel?
Remember the OPM hack from a few years ago? All that data on the names of people working for the US Government in the wind? Now, imagine if you could somehow collate that database with another one that contains the travel records of around half a billion people. Unless working under cover they're going to have loyalty programs just like any other frequent traveller, and knowing even partial travel records of potential foreign agents could prove extremely useful if you were, say, trying to confirm which of all those people on OPM's books were just the routine military/contractor chaff vs. the wheat of the real operators and where they've been.
Don't know if it's still the case, or how that might play out between jurisdictions, but I had to become SC to handle raw satellite imagery on the off-chance they might contain imagery of the type being blurred out here around 20 years ago. (We were leasing use of a former Soviet spy-sat to do large-scale ground surveys of Western Europe for agricultural applications. The resolution we were getting wasn't as good as today's publically accessible imagery, but the mono resolution was still high enough to get a feel for the size and shape of buildings, and I could tell my car was on my driveway when I pulled up the relevent image for a poster sized printout - and yes, I still have it.) If that is still the case, I'd assume that the satellite operators - e.g. DigitalGlobe for many of Google's images - have a team of SC cleared people that do the initial processing of raw images, then those images are passed on to customers like Google to use as they see fit.
That's not the point. Take Incirlik; it's a nuclear bomber capable airbase (e.g. it's *big*) that frequently features in news reports during the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, so there's no way that any foreign intel agencies/terrorists/interested third parties were not aware of it, what it is/was used for, what was stationed there, etc. regardless of whether they are reliant on OSInt or have their own satellites. Likewise the Israeli SAM/Ironshield sites; they pinpoint themselves everytime someone lobs rockets at Tel Aviv or wherever, so there's no way the PLO/Hamas/Iran/etc. don't already know where they are. Ditto the Whitehouse; terrorists locating 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue isn't the issue; it's having them find out where security check points, snipers, and other defenses are to help plan and facilitate an attack. Knowing the location is one thing, but knowing the detail is something else entirely. What makes this a clickbait story is that it makes it seem like the former that matters when it's really the latter that Yandex (and Google, Bing, and every other mapping agency that uses satellite imagery) are succesfully trying to obfuscate.
The "Science" is working exactly as it is supposed to; scientists are putting out data and (mostly) testable theories, other scientists are either repeating and re-inforcing the results, building upon and refining them, or debunking them (which also advances science as a whole). The nonsense here (and elsewhere, Climate is the only field with the problem) isn't the science, which is pretty much settled in terms of the overall direction and is mostly just quibbling over the velocity of the change and how the various contributing factors are sized and apportioned at this this point. The nonsense is two-fold; the overly hysterical politicalisation/reporting of it, including by some of the scientists looking to fluff their egos/push agendas, and those that can't understand the difference between the two but repeat the propaganda anyway.
I'd guess they are meant to call a central location (e.g. building reception or other appointed person) who will then place a single call and act as the point of contact. The idea is that the people in question would have specific training on how to deal with the call, provide the necessary information in a concise manner, and any directions within the site/campus, etc. that might not be on satnav. In some cases - e.g. airports - they'll also want their internal/on-site responders to be notified, rather than the nearest local public emergency services. It's actually quite a common requirement for private PABXs to configure calls to the local and international emergency numbers to automatically redirect to facilitate all that, but you'd need a policy like Tesla's to cover off staff using mobile phones.
This. It's been a while since I last watched the movie, but IIRC we only saw Deckard perform a single Voight-Kampf test - on Rachel, and he most definitely did NOT shoot her. There's also a relevant fan theory that he may have done a verbal version of the test on Zhora (the woman with the snake) with his questions about holes, and while he did shoot her that was only after she attacked him and in doing so confirmed that she was the replicant he thought he was.
Maybe the author of TFS was thinking of Han Solo and Greedo?
OP specifically gave Bitcoin as a potential example of blockchain's success ("wouldn't that [BTC] count as a success?"), but I think it's pretty clear that at the current time you'd be very hard pressed to call BTC a success, ergo it can't be used as an exemplar for a blockchain success story. The sad part is that the two seem like they are joined at the hip, especially to those outside the tech field, and if BTC crashes and burns then it'll potentially kill blockchain as well.
Personally, I think cryptocurrencies in general are a failed experiment (I cashed out my BTC late last year, just before it peaked), but might get a second chance if another coin can successfully oust BTC as the defacto standard in the public eye and move away from the negative PR surrounding proof of work. Blockchain, however, probably does have some useful applications in things like accounting and voting systems where an indelible public record is required, provided someone can get it all to work, but that seems to be a lot harder than its proponents would have you believe, judging by the results of TFA. Hopefully, if BTC is going to collapse, someone will figure it out before that happens which at least give the tech a chance to distance itself from the fallout that will result.
Not really. *People* have been successful at various ventures involving trading BTC, but they've either cashed out at a profit (e.g. are betting it won't go up any more), are acting as a brokerage so they make money either way as long as it doesn't collapse entirely, or have used it as marketing fluff to pump investment money (above board or not). None of those are really strong indicators of the tech itself being successful.
At best, the jury is still out - if it significantly recovers in value and starts being seen as a worthy long term investment again and/or becomes established as a viable mainstream currency replacement, then perhaps you might be able to make that claim. Right now, however, the general trajectory for BTC - and crypto currencies in general given how all the major alternates generally take a dump in sympathy whenever BTC farts - doesn't look good.
At least one Doge still equals one Doge though, so that's a plus. Right?
The professional miners tend to congregate their server farms where the combination of electricity and hosting costs are cheapest, not where it's greenest, which means a healthy mix of supply types - e.g. mostly renewables in places like Iceland, vs. a healthy dose of carbon-based in places like China. Then you have the illicit miners who don't give a damn because they're not paying for it; all they care about is whether their minerbot's delivery mechanism has a suitable exploit for as many potentially vulnerable targets as possible. Besides basic statistics, the practicalicalities of how crypto-currency works pretty much guarantees there is going to a split between energy types that will fluctuate continually due to basic economics ahead of anything else.
Either way it's moot, because of thermodynamics and conservation of energy (which is also why you should instantly climate change arguments from anyone who claims mankind has a near-zero impact on the climate). All those renewable power supplies still require the consumption of materials and power to build, operate, and cool, with the net result that they damage the environment and contribute to global warming. All that waste heat from processor cycles has to go somewhere...
Honestly is Bitcoin any worse than a portfolio that has biotech stocks?
Impossible to say, since that's comparing a specific product with a class of product - not so much "apples to oranges" as "apples to citrus fruits"; oranges might be good, but lemons and limes not so much. Either way, I wouldn't generally consider *any* of the biotech stocks as something I'd class as a solid "Blue Chip" style investment, at least not yet, as none of them are really established as reliable long term performers (give or take the odd fluctuation, obviously) in the same way that real estate is.
Sure, you could get lucky and buy into the the next GSK, or you could get the next Theranos and end up with nothing, just like a lot of people who you would have expected to have done their due diligence ended up doing. As a speculative part of a larger portfolio, sure, you might as well take a punt on a few long shots (and I do just that with mine), but if the lion's share of your portfolio is high risk you'd better be prepared to write it off as well as cash it in and live the high life.
If you're putting money into an investment every month then you sure as hell shouldn't be going with something as volatile as Bitcoin. Regardless of what you are investing in/gambling with, volatile commodities are something you need to monitor continually and really play the market, ideally buying low and selling high with each and every significant rise and fall. If you're titheing a given amount to your commodity of choice on a regular basis then you want something that's going to have a pretty good chance of a return no matter what - blue chips, government bonds, and so on - and even then, keep an eye on it and be mindful of opportunities to sell of exchange for another commodity.
There's also a lot of desperation amongst the institutional BTC bagholders at this point, especially those who were dumb enough to make significant purchases when it was already over $10k, so there's no way I'm going to be taking the financial advise of this Nigel Green of deVere Group unless he makes it perfectly clear what their BTC position is at the same time. Without that information it's kind of hard to tell whether he genuinely believes it's going to rally or he's just another desperate bagholder hoping to cut his losses.
Depends where the hardware is in your infrastructure and your levels of paranoia/security requirements. A lot of my clients run high-value networks (national infrastructure, etc.) and most are now moving towards dual-vendor perimeter firewall solutions, creating a physical DMZ in between, not the virtual ones you get by applying rules to traffic passing between internal different ports on the same firewall.
One vendor is typically from a Five Eyes country (there's only so many options for this kind of hardware), and the other absolutely will not be - internal firewalls may also be deployed. Rulesets on both with be default deny, and both will be actively monitored for suspicious traffic coming from the other as part of the standard IDS/IPS setup. Even if both are backdoored on behalf of their manufacturer's governments, it's going to be very hard for either country's security services to get into the network through both firewalls, or to successfully exfiltrate data from a compromised box on the inside.
Well, that's the theory at least. If one or both know about the other's backdoors (which is why this is such a terrible idea in the first place, because sooner or later they probably will) then all bets are off.
Depends on your network requirements and your appetite for risk vs. saving time. Most of my clients run engineering networks with strict change control processes so patches are tested first and manually pushed via WSUS only when they're confident they won't cause any issues. I suspect that very few of them will have even pushed out the November security patches yet, let alone a couple of feature updates to amend the date format display for a single country, since they tend to rely on Defence in Depth to provide additional layers of security. Of course, if you don't have WSUS, then you don't have many options since MS doesn't have a simple way to automatically defer installation for a few days after release in case they should release yet another bad patch, although i guess you could do something with scripting.
These two updates are not actually from the official "Patch Tuesday" release, but from a few days prior and are concerned with the introduction of a new "Era" (essentially an Emperor's reign) in Japan. They appear to be functional tweaks concerning how Japanese dates are displayed so, unusally for Microsoft, uninstalling them isn't going to leave your system vulnerable to any known security issues.
I'd question the Great Wall too, since it seems to have been built in multiple stages as a result of organic growth and the integration of several individual projects rather as the result of one single Imperial decree to build a wall the length of China's northern frontier. Another possible example that comes to mind is Gaudi's Sagrada Família in Barcelona, although I suspect that the original intent was that it would have been finished a little sooner than it's actually taking, and there are also a few long-running science experiments that have spanned centuries (e.g. the "Pitch Drop"), if you look beyond construction. It's undeniably a very short list though, with projects where the instigators won't see the results is clearly something that mankind isn't particularly disposed to, which might make sending out our first true interstellar probes a bit of an ask when it comes to funding (upwards of 40 years with current tech), let alone for a multi-century project like trying to terraform Mars.
I don't, but I don't believe over-simplistic armchair accounting either. They might have 350 employees *now*, but how many did they have at the start of the year? According to TFS they've gone from 9 employees to 350 in three years, and these things tend to ramp up faster over time, so it's highly likey they had fewer than 200 employees at the start of the year. It's also a pretty good bet that a lot of those extra employees were only brought on board in the last couple of months in the wake of the explosive growth they experienced following Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub in June and the project exodus from GitHub to GitLab that resulted, which would reduce their total wage costs for year even more.
You don't need to play with the figures too much to get that $10.5M gross into being enough to cover all their operating costs, especially given they don't have any of the traditional OpEx associated with maintaining office space to cover, and allowing for a nominal "starter fee" to cover home office setup costs for each employee and use of online services such as Slack instead. I guess time will tell, but I think it's just about possible that they might be actually be in the black and following the Amazon model of plowing all their profits back into expanding the infrastructure they need to support all the projects they now host.
User data portability is one aspect of the GDPR that seems to have slipped under a lot of people's radar - and companies like Facebook too, it seems - but what Woz is asking for is pretty much echoing the requirements of the GDPR's Article 20: Right to data portability.
Now that the EU's various governments are clearly looking for non-compliance examples that they could turn into additional revenue/legal case studies, they might want to get on that - especially since Zuck seems determined to keep giving the finger to requests from the EU to attend meetings to discuss Facebook's approach to user data, fake news, and political manipulation.
This, but equally I don't think that the SWAT team or local PD in general should get a pass either. Swatting is a thing, they should have been aware of that and started on getting as much due diligence done as possible from the moment the dispatcher decided to send a unit (not even SWAT, any armed unit) to try and avoid this kind of thing. SWAT does not arrive on site instantly, and that gives at least some time to think whether or not things feel right.
Anonymous call? Long distance call? Caller seems to know details that they shouldn't have? No proven history of priors for the address? No proven history of priors for the resident(s), if known? Kids in the house? Is it Stupid O'clock meaning people might not be thinking too clearly, let alone when someone hammers on their front door with guns? If the answer to any of those kind of questions are "yes" (and AFAIK in this case *all* of the above were except maybe the two on priors), then the responders need to act with a little more discretion than just assuming any vague switch they don't like is a justification to unload a weapon on centre mass. In this specific case you can maybe blame lack of training/poor information and cut them a *little* slack for that, but that horse has now bolted and the publicity here should have both prompted a review of police procedures and given potential swatters food for thought lest they become the next Tyler Barriss. The next time this happens (and I'm pretty sure it will), then it it shouldn't just be the swatter that gets the face the courts; those that mistakenly pulled the trigger *and* those responsible for the training that led them to do so need their time in court/jail as well.
Oh, that was absolutely the game alright, but you have to keep in mind who the "users" and "product" are when applied to Twitter, or any other social media platform. By making that number front and centre they basically incentivised their product to encourage more product to join the platform so Twitter would become a more appealling platform for their actual users, the advertisers. Now that their product is starting to lose faith in traditional social media platforms of course Twitter wants to make it all about the quality. And, to be clear, we're talking about the quality of how well they understand their product's interactions with other elements of the product and their shared likes for targetted advertising, not the quality of tweets. Frankly, I think this is a calculated move by Dorsey, aimed squarely at the marketing companies and Wall Street; "never mind the width; feel the quality... and *please* keep the money coming!"
There's a la carte and a la carte. What most consumers wanted was the ability to pick specific channels - or even shows - from a single menu that was more nuanced than bundles of channels under banners like "Drama", "Movies", "Sports", and so on; why pay for all the drama channels if you only want to watch CSI, for instance? All this new model does is change those bundles from types of shows to vendors of shows - "CBS", "Disney", "HBO", and so on - consumers are still being asked to pay for bundles that contain multiple shows they have no interest in.
When cord cutting meant Netflix and/or Amazon Prime and most content people cared about could be obtained there using something approaching to the a la carte (PAYG) model they wanted all was good; the use of BitTorrent, Kodi hacks, and other alternative means of acquiring content even went into decline. Then every man and his dog with studio decided that they wanted to cut out the middleman rather than just license content to multiple providers like Amazon and Netflix because it meant a little more projected profit, and we're back to square one - screw the consumer. Needless to say, the use of BitTorrent etc. is climbing again, and I hope it continues to do so - maybe if it wipes out enough studio's projected profits they'll see the light and we might get a true one stop shop a la carte system. Of course, since this is Hollywood we're talking about, that's probably about as likely as the average Disney plot.
Totally agree with the sentiment also, but I doubt very much they will fail. Despite Disney's media content being essentially one giant advert for Disney's merchandising departments, far too many parents are going to cave in and buy it because it'll keep their kids quiet, out of trouble, and let them avoid doing some actual parenting.
Closer to home and the demographics more commonly represented here on Slashdot, CBS All Access was panned when when it was announced too, with lots of comments along the lines of "I won't pay another sub just for 'Star Trek: Discovery' (and maybe CSI:whatever)" here and elsewhere, yet it still has about 2mil. US subscribers mostly gained on the back of Discovery. By comparison Disney owns the Marvel, Pixar, *and* Star Wars franchises (amongst others), all of which have a large overlap in popularity with those who watch Trek. Should Disney decide to stream all series from those franchises on Disney+ one day before general release to cable, etc., then I can easily see them being the service that many will pay for then mop up the few other shows they watch from less legal sources.
I don't think the math works with current battery tech, although there's a lot of conflicting results in studies because of the number of factors involved. Obviously you have to supply the energy to the batteries in the first place and since no system is 100% efficient that means wasteage, and wear and tear on the batteries resulting in earlier replacements to factor in - which means you need to start thinking about the energy consumed by the battery supply chain. Another major consideration is that not all locations are physically wired to allow power to flow from homes/businesses to the grid, and that's before you factor in any metering for billing credit purposes.
On top of all that, you've also got the psychological factor. People expect their car to be ready to go when required, and even with a safety net of any discharge to the grid will not take their car's battery below (say) 75% charge, that's still a 25% variance in how far the car will be able to go without requiring a top-up. While they'd presumably be able to set the threshold to ensure their morning commute, apparently that's enough ambiguity to trigger range anxiety to the point that many electric car owners would set a minimal contribution, or opt out entirely.
That's not to say a distributed battery system - using cars, powerwalls, or whatever else, won't work, or even be implemented, eventually, but I think there's a lot of infrastructure to be built, technology advances that need to happen, and consumer adoption to be encouraged before it can.
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That was my thought too on reading the headline; "what a terrible analogy". Those who jumped on the hype bandwagon aside, most of the proponents are from math/tech fields and at least have an idea on math and stats. As a result many of them (statistically correctly) refer to lottery tickets as "a tax on the stupid" or some such, which isn't exactly the kind of analogy that's going to inspire confidence in a flagging "investment".
Reading on though, it becomes clearer. The author of the piece doesn't seem to be a fan as they're predicting the value will continue to fall ("as I also pointed out back then, just because the long-term value of bitcoin is more likely to be $100 than $100,000"), so that is precisely the point. FWIW, I agree with the valuation prediction, but not the lottery analogy. Once a crypto currency crashes - as some already have - they don't come back; supporters of the tech move on to the next one that looks promising, and the bagholders will eventually walk away for good as money is finite, after all.
On the plus side, "sunsetting" is clearly a lot of progress compared to some of Linus' previous LKML putdowns so clearly that timeout has had the intended effect in getting "some assistance on how to understand people's emotions and respond appropriately." "Sunsetting" almost sounds like it would be pleasant experience, maybe with cocktails or something...
Remember the OPM hack from a few years ago? All that data on the names of people working for the US Government in the wind? Now, imagine if you could somehow collate that database with another one that contains the travel records of around half a billion people. Unless working under cover they're going to have loyalty programs just like any other frequent traveller, and knowing even partial travel records of potential foreign agents could prove extremely useful if you were, say, trying to confirm which of all those people on OPM's books were just the routine military/contractor chaff vs. the wheat of the real operators and where they've been.
Don't know if it's still the case, or how that might play out between jurisdictions, but I had to become SC to handle raw satellite imagery on the off-chance they might contain imagery of the type being blurred out here around 20 years ago. (We were leasing use of a former Soviet spy-sat to do large-scale ground surveys of Western Europe for agricultural applications. The resolution we were getting wasn't as good as today's publically accessible imagery, but the mono resolution was still high enough to get a feel for the size and shape of buildings, and I could tell my car was on my driveway when I pulled up the relevent image for a poster sized printout - and yes, I still have it.) If that is still the case, I'd assume that the satellite operators - e.g. DigitalGlobe for many of Google's images - have a team of SC cleared people that do the initial processing of raw images, then those images are passed on to customers like Google to use as they see fit.
That's not the point. Take Incirlik; it's a nuclear bomber capable airbase (e.g. it's *big*) that frequently features in news reports during the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, so there's no way that any foreign intel agencies/terrorists/interested third parties were not aware of it, what it is/was used for, what was stationed there, etc. regardless of whether they are reliant on OSInt or have their own satellites. Likewise the Israeli SAM/Ironshield sites; they pinpoint themselves everytime someone lobs rockets at Tel Aviv or wherever, so there's no way the PLO/Hamas/Iran/etc. don't already know where they are. Ditto the Whitehouse; terrorists locating 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue isn't the issue; it's having them find out where security check points, snipers, and other defenses are to help plan and facilitate an attack. Knowing the location is one thing, but knowing the detail is something else entirely. What makes this a clickbait story is that it makes it seem like the former that matters when it's really the latter that Yandex (and Google, Bing, and every other mapping agency that uses satellite imagery) are succesfully trying to obfuscate.
The "Science" is working exactly as it is supposed to; scientists are putting out data and (mostly) testable theories, other scientists are either repeating and re-inforcing the results, building upon and refining them, or debunking them (which also advances science as a whole). The nonsense here (and elsewhere, Climate is the only field with the problem) isn't the science, which is pretty much settled in terms of the overall direction and is mostly just quibbling over the velocity of the change and how the various contributing factors are sized and apportioned at this this point. The nonsense is two-fold; the overly hysterical politicalisation/reporting of it, including by some of the scientists looking to fluff their egos/push agendas, and those that can't understand the difference between the two but repeat the propaganda anyway.
I'd guess they are meant to call a central location (e.g. building reception or other appointed person) who will then place a single call and act as the point of contact. The idea is that the people in question would have specific training on how to deal with the call, provide the necessary information in a concise manner, and any directions within the site/campus, etc. that might not be on satnav. In some cases - e.g. airports - they'll also want their internal /on-site responders to be notified, rather than the nearest local public emergency services. It's actually quite a common requirement for private PABXs to configure calls to the local and international emergency numbers to automatically redirect to facilitate all that, but you'd need a policy like Tesla's to cover off staff using mobile phones.
This. It's been a while since I last watched the movie, but IIRC we only saw Deckard perform a single Voight-Kampf test - on Rachel, and he most definitely did NOT shoot her. There's also a relevant fan theory that he may have done a verbal version of the test on Zhora (the woman with the snake) with his questions about holes, and while he did shoot her that was only after she attacked him and in doing so confirmed that she was the replicant he thought he was.
Maybe the author of TFS was thinking of Han Solo and Greedo?
They already have such a test built in. You just need to look at their lips and see if they are moving.
OP specifically gave Bitcoin as a potential example of blockchain's success ("wouldn't that [BTC] count as a success?"), but I think it's pretty clear that at the current time you'd be very hard pressed to call BTC a success, ergo it can't be used as an exemplar for a blockchain success story. The sad part is that the two seem like they are joined at the hip, especially to those outside the tech field, and if BTC crashes and burns then it'll potentially kill blockchain as well.
Personally, I think cryptocurrencies in general are a failed experiment (I cashed out my BTC late last year, just before it peaked), but might get a second chance if another coin can successfully oust BTC as the defacto standard in the public eye and move away from the negative PR surrounding proof of work. Blockchain, however, probably does have some useful applications in things like accounting and voting systems where an indelible public record is required, provided someone can get it all to work, but that seems to be a lot harder than its proponents would have you believe, judging by the results of TFA. Hopefully, if BTC is going to collapse, someone will figure it out before that happens which at least give the tech a chance to distance itself from the fallout that will result.
Not really. *People* have been successful at various ventures involving trading BTC, but they've either cashed out at a profit (e.g. are betting it won't go up any more), are acting as a brokerage so they make money either way as long as it doesn't collapse entirely, or have used it as marketing fluff to pump investment money (above board or not). None of those are really strong indicators of the tech itself being successful.
At best, the jury is still out - if it significantly recovers in value and starts being seen as a worthy long term investment again and/or becomes established as a viable mainstream currency replacement, then perhaps you might be able to make that claim. Right now, however, the general trajectory for BTC - and crypto currencies in general given how all the major alternates generally take a dump in sympathy whenever BTC farts - doesn't look good.
At least one Doge still equals one Doge though, so that's a plus. Right?
The professional miners tend to congregate their server farms where the combination of electricity and hosting costs are cheapest, not where it's greenest, which means a healthy mix of supply types - e.g. mostly renewables in places like Iceland, vs. a healthy dose of carbon-based in places like China. Then you have the illicit miners who don't give a damn because they're not paying for it; all they care about is whether their minerbot's delivery mechanism has a suitable exploit for as many potentially vulnerable targets as possible. Besides basic statistics, the practicalicalities of how crypto-currency works pretty much guarantees there is going to a split between energy types that will fluctuate continually due to basic economics ahead of anything else.
Either way it's moot, because of thermodynamics and conservation of energy (which is also why you should instantly climate change arguments from anyone who claims mankind has a near-zero impact on the climate). All those renewable power supplies still require the consumption of materials and power to build, operate, and cool, with the net result that they damage the environment and contribute to global warming. All that waste heat from processor cycles has to go somewhere...
Impossible to say, since that's comparing a specific product with a class of product - not so much "apples to oranges" as "apples to citrus fruits"; oranges might be good, but lemons and limes not so much. Either way, I wouldn't generally consider *any* of the biotech stocks as something I'd class as a solid "Blue Chip" style investment, at least not yet, as none of them are really established as reliable long term performers (give or take the odd fluctuation, obviously) in the same way that real estate is.
Sure, you could get lucky and buy into the the next GSK, or you could get the next Theranos and end up with nothing, just like a lot of people who you would have expected to have done their due diligence ended up doing. As a speculative part of a larger portfolio, sure, you might as well take a punt on a few long shots (and I do just that with mine), but if the lion's share of your portfolio is high risk you'd better be prepared to write it off as well as cash it in and live the high life.
If you're putting money into an investment every month then you sure as hell shouldn't be going with something as volatile as Bitcoin. Regardless of what you are investing in/gambling with, volatile commodities are something you need to monitor continually and really play the market, ideally buying low and selling high with each and every significant rise and fall. If you're titheing a given amount to your commodity of choice on a regular basis then you want something that's going to have a pretty good chance of a return no matter what - blue chips, government bonds, and so on - and even then, keep an eye on it and be mindful of opportunities to sell of exchange for another commodity.
There's also a lot of desperation amongst the institutional BTC bagholders at this point, especially those who were dumb enough to make significant purchases when it was already over $10k, so there's no way I'm going to be taking the financial advise of this Nigel Green of deVere Group unless he makes it perfectly clear what their BTC position is at the same time. Without that information it's kind of hard to tell whether he genuinely believes it's going to rally or he's just another desperate bagholder hoping to cut his losses.
Depends where the hardware is in your infrastructure and your levels of paranoia/security requirements. A lot of my clients run high-value networks (national infrastructure, etc.) and most are now moving towards dual-vendor perimeter firewall solutions, creating a physical DMZ in between, not the virtual ones you get by applying rules to traffic passing between internal different ports on the same firewall.
One vendor is typically from a Five Eyes country (there's only so many options for this kind of hardware), and the other absolutely will not be - internal firewalls may also be deployed. Rulesets on both with be default deny, and both will be actively monitored for suspicious traffic coming from the other as part of the standard IDS/IPS setup. Even if both are backdoored on behalf of their manufacturer's governments, it's going to be very hard for either country's security services to get into the network through both firewalls, or to successfully exfiltrate data from a compromised box on the inside.
Well, that's the theory at least. If one or both know about the other's backdoors (which is why this is such a terrible idea in the first place, because sooner or later they probably will) then all bets are off.
Depends on your network requirements and your appetite for risk vs. saving time. Most of my clients run engineering networks with strict change control processes so patches are tested first and manually pushed via WSUS only when they're confident they won't cause any issues. I suspect that very few of them will have even pushed out the November security patches yet, let alone a couple of feature updates to amend the date format display for a single country, since they tend to rely on Defence in Depth to provide additional layers of security. Of course, if you don't have WSUS, then you don't have many options since MS doesn't have a simple way to automatically defer installation for a few days after release in case they should release yet another bad patch, although i guess you could do something with scripting.
These two updates are not actually from the official "Patch Tuesday" release, but from a few days prior and are concerned with the introduction of a new "Era" (essentially an Emperor's reign) in Japan. They appear to be functional tweaks concerning how Japanese dates are displayed so, unusally for Microsoft, uninstalling them isn't going to leave your system vulnerable to any known security issues.
I'd question the Great Wall too, since it seems to have been built in multiple stages as a result of organic growth and the integration of several individual projects rather as the result of one single Imperial decree to build a wall the length of China's northern frontier. Another possible example that comes to mind is Gaudi's Sagrada Família in Barcelona, although I suspect that the original intent was that it would have been finished a little sooner than it's actually taking, and there are also a few long-running science experiments that have spanned centuries (e.g. the "Pitch Drop"), if you look beyond construction. It's undeniably a very short list though, with projects where the instigators won't see the results is clearly something that mankind isn't particularly disposed to, which might make sending out our first true interstellar probes a bit of an ask when it comes to funding (upwards of 40 years with current tech), let alone for a multi-century project like trying to terraform Mars.
I don't, but I don't believe over-simplistic armchair accounting either. They might have 350 employees *now*, but how many did they have at the start of the year? According to TFS they've gone from 9 employees to 350 in three years, and these things tend to ramp up faster over time, so it's highly likey they had fewer than 200 employees at the start of the year. It's also a pretty good bet that a lot of those extra employees were only brought on board in the last couple of months in the wake of the explosive growth they experienced following Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub in June and the project exodus from GitHub to GitLab that resulted, which would reduce their total wage costs for year even more.
You don't need to play with the figures too much to get that $10.5M gross into being enough to cover all their operating costs, especially given they don't have any of the traditional OpEx associated with maintaining office space to cover, and allowing for a nominal "starter fee" to cover home office setup costs for each employee and use of online services such as Slack instead. I guess time will tell, but I think it's just about possible that they might be actually be in the black and following the Amazon model of plowing all their profits back into expanding the infrastructure they need to support all the projects they now host.
User data portability is one aspect of the GDPR that seems to have slipped under a lot of people's radar - and companies like Facebook too, it seems - but what Woz is asking for is pretty much echoing the requirements of the GDPR's Article 20: Right to data portability. Now that the EU's various governments are clearly looking for non-compliance examples that they could turn into additional revenue/legal case studies, they might want to get on that - especially since Zuck seems determined to keep giving the finger to requests from the EU to attend meetings to discuss Facebook's approach to user data, fake news, and political manipulation.
This, but equally I don't think that the SWAT team or local PD in general should get a pass either. Swatting is a thing, they should have been aware of that and started on getting as much due diligence done as possible from the moment the dispatcher decided to send a unit (not even SWAT, any armed unit) to try and avoid this kind of thing. SWAT does not arrive on site instantly, and that gives at least some time to think whether or not things feel right.
Anonymous call? Long distance call? Caller seems to know details that they shouldn't have? No proven history of priors for the address? No proven history of priors for the resident(s), if known? Kids in the house? Is it Stupid O'clock meaning people might not be thinking too clearly, let alone when someone hammers on their front door with guns? If the answer to any of those kind of questions are "yes" (and AFAIK in this case *all* of the above were except maybe the two on priors), then the responders need to act with a little more discretion than just assuming any vague switch they don't like is a justification to unload a weapon on centre mass. In this specific case you can maybe blame lack of training/poor information and cut them a *little* slack for that, but that horse has now bolted and the publicity here should have both prompted a review of police procedures and given potential swatters food for thought lest they become the next Tyler Barriss. The next time this happens (and I'm pretty sure it will), then it it shouldn't just be the swatter that gets the face the courts; those that mistakenly pulled the trigger *and* those responsible for the training that led them to do so need their time in court/jail as well.
Oh, that was absolutely the game alright, but you have to keep in mind who the "users" and "product" are when applied to Twitter, or any other social media platform. By making that number front and centre they basically incentivised their product to encourage more product to join the platform so Twitter would become a more appealling platform for their actual users, the advertisers. Now that their product is starting to lose faith in traditional social media platforms of course Twitter wants to make it all about the quality. And, to be clear, we're talking about the quality of how well they understand their product's interactions with other elements of the product and their shared likes for targetted advertising, not the quality of tweets. Frankly, I think this is a calculated move by Dorsey, aimed squarely at the marketing companies and Wall Street; "never mind the width; feel the quality... and *please* keep the money coming!"
There's a la carte and a la carte. What most consumers wanted was the ability to pick specific channels - or even shows - from a single menu that was more nuanced than bundles of channels under banners like "Drama", "Movies", "Sports", and so on; why pay for all the drama channels if you only want to watch CSI, for instance? All this new model does is change those bundles from types of shows to vendors of shows - "CBS", "Disney", "HBO", and so on - consumers are still being asked to pay for bundles that contain multiple shows they have no interest in.
When cord cutting meant Netflix and/or Amazon Prime and most content people cared about could be obtained there using something approaching to the a la carte (PAYG) model they wanted all was good; the use of BitTorrent, Kodi hacks, and other alternative means of acquiring content even went into decline. Then every man and his dog with studio decided that they wanted to cut out the middleman rather than just license content to multiple providers like Amazon and Netflix because it meant a little more projected profit, and we're back to square one - screw the consumer. Needless to say, the use of BitTorrent etc. is climbing again, and I hope it continues to do so - maybe if it wipes out enough studio's projected profits they'll see the light and we might get a true one stop shop a la carte system. Of course, since this is Hollywood we're talking about, that's probably about as likely as the average Disney plot.
Totally agree with the sentiment also, but I doubt very much they will fail. Despite Disney's media content being essentially one giant advert for Disney's merchandising departments, far too many parents are going to cave in and buy it because it'll keep their kids quiet, out of trouble, and let them avoid doing some actual parenting.
Closer to home and the demographics more commonly represented here on Slashdot, CBS All Access was panned when when it was announced too, with lots of comments along the lines of "I won't pay another sub just for 'Star Trek: Discovery' (and maybe CSI:whatever)" here and elsewhere, yet it still has about 2mil. US subscribers mostly gained on the back of Discovery. By comparison Disney owns the Marvel, Pixar, *and* Star Wars franchises (amongst others), all of which have a large overlap in popularity with those who watch Trek. Should Disney decide to stream all series from those franchises on Disney+ one day before general release to cable, etc., then I can easily see them being the service that many will pay for then mop up the few other shows they watch from less legal sources.
I don't think the math works with current battery tech, although there's a lot of conflicting results in studies because of the number of factors involved. Obviously you have to supply the energy to the batteries in the first place and since no system is 100% efficient that means wasteage, and wear and tear on the batteries resulting in earlier replacements to factor in - which means you need to start thinking about the energy consumed by the battery supply chain. Another major consideration is that not all locations are physically wired to allow power to flow from homes/businesses to the grid, and that's before you factor in any metering for billing credit purposes.
On top of all that, you've also got the psychological factor. People expect their car to be ready to go when required, and even with a safety net of any discharge to the grid will not take their car's battery below (say) 75% charge, that's still a 25% variance in how far the car will be able to go without requiring a top-up. While they'd presumably be able to set the threshold to ensure their morning commute, apparently that's enough ambiguity to trigger range anxiety to the point that many electric car owners would set a minimal contribution, or opt out entirely.
That's not to say a distributed battery system - using cars, powerwalls, or whatever else, won't work, or even be implemented, eventually, but I think there's a lot of infrastructure to be built, technology advances that need to happen, and consumer adoption to be encouraged before it can.