Indeed. It doesn't even take $10,000 - you can build a fusor with less than $500 worth of second-hand equipment. Handy if you need a convenient neutron source, or a bad case of radiation poisoning, but not much else.
The big difference is that physical malicious attacks are unlikely and expensive, and so defending against them normally only makes sense if you're dealing with something very valuable or dangerous. The initial 9/11 attacks succeeded only because it was official policy to comply with terrorists so everyone could go home safely at the end of the day. Once people realized what was going on, later attacks failed as crew and passengers fought back.
In contrast, digital attacks are so cheap and easy to perform from anywhere in the world that they are an inevitable unending background against which all software is developed. If you are designing software where security matters, then securing against regular well-funded attacks by experts working for hostile governments, organized crime and other special-interest groups is just the reality you have to deal with. If you aren't well-versed in how to do that, and still write software where security matters, then you are bad at your job - no matter how good a developer you are in contexts where security doesn't matter.
Yes - provided the nation can avoid paying a major price for allowing them to crash. To that end I think making sure no one bank (or conglomerate) is ever responsible for more than a few percent of the market. I believe 10% market concentration in a single supplier is commonly regarded as the point that a market has definitely consolidated to the point that a free market no longer exists - I'd have no problem banning any one company from doing more than maybe half that much business.
Indeed. I believe part of Bernie's 2016 platform was to have post offices begin also operating as something like very simple, traditional, consumer banks (or maybe credit unions?). Though it seems to me that it might make more sense to simply make it a requirement for all consumer banks to make at least basic no-fee checking accounts available to everyone, just as part of the cost of doing business.
No, mostly they're called people trapped in a bad situation created by the society they live in. Even assuming someone screwed up to create the problem in the first place, how are they supposed to go about putting their life right again when they can't even get paid for working? (How many decent employers do you know that will pay with cash instead of check?)
I do think that society should recognize that it *creates* such people, and work to fix the flaws that produce such people, and make sure that people born into such conditions through no fault of their own, find it easy to leave. "Tough love" only works when a person's problems are of their own creation, not when it's a systemic problem that might keep you trapped just as surely as it traps them, had you been unfortunate enough to be born or stumble into it.
If we want to encourage everyone to be productive members of society, we need to make it *at least* as easy for the poorest among us to be upwardly mobile as it is for most, not more difficult. But we live in a society that throws up a whole lot of barriers to that climb, some of them pretty substantial. I know people who would be financially devastated by earning a 10% raise - it would push them off the "welfare cliff", and not be nearly enough for them to reach to other side. It is to our shame as a society that we allow such traps to exist.
That's a good reason for keeping the banks alive, not a good reason for bailing them out though. Buy them out, to the tune of their existing debt, break them up, and send them on their way, with large low-interest government loans to repay. After imprisoning all the executives that decided their personal profit was more important than national security. And all the regulators who were either incompetent or corrupt enough to not spot the problem sooner.
I know several people who, for various reasons, can't even get a bank account. Had one teller even try to tell me I couldn't cash a check on their behalf (Seriously? They can sign the check over to me, and I can deposit it, right? And I can withdraw cash from my account, right? Okay, then do your damned job.)
Agreed. Unmentioned hardware that would only be useful to the user is one thing. Unmentioned surveillance-capable hardware is something else entirely. At best you get conspiracy theories circulating - and quite possibly you get actual covert surveillance - either by the manufacturer themselves (we all trust Google not to spy on us, right?...Right?), or by hackers of various stripes.
True, but you can protect that basket a lot more efficiently than dozens of separate passwords. Use a key-file as well as a password for added security. Store your more sensitive passwords in a separate PM on a flash drive that you only plug in when you need them, secured by a keyfile on your computer so that an attacker will need access to both to get at your stored passwords.
It still won't protect you from a competent, targeted attack - but there's not really much you can do against those anyway, unless you're the sort to routinely check the firmware on your keyboard to make sure it hasn't been compromised since you last used it. But it will largely protect you against becoming a target of convenience - which is the primary purpose of most security. Like the old adage about bears: you don't have to be able to run faster than the bear, just faster than the slowest person in your group.
Now that would actually be a lovely idea - *if* it used a standard PC video-card slot so that you could easily upgrade the GPU in the future. Somehow though I suspect that's not the case.
I have the same basic objection to "all-in-one" PCs - a good monitor is worth investing in, and will likely outlast many PCs - unless you integrate the two, and generate a huge additional stream of trash as the fast-evolving tech goes predictably obsolescent, taking a perfectly good screen with it.
Even if you've got the money to burn, and upgrade your monitor as often as your PC, consigning a high-quality monitor to an early grave rather than many years of cherished second-hand value should hurt your heart. It's wanton wealth-destruction.
Agreed. My counterpoint to the article - don't send emails demanding other people's attention unless you have reason to believe that *they* would want to interact with you.
It's far more rude to carelessly demand someone else's attention in the first place than it is to ignore such demands. Attention is a precious resource, paying attention to something disrupts what I'm doing, and sacrifices a slice of my life that I can never get back.
If you do email me, be concise: tell me what you want, and why I should want to give it to you. And do so in as few words as possible because every word I read is costing me a moment of my life. Show that you respect my time and attention, or don't expect me to treat you with any greater respect.
What part of "over the bus" did you not understand? Memory buses are typically orders of magnitude faster than anything else outside the CPU. Typically in the range of 25-60GB/s. By contrast even a PCIe 3.0 lane has a bandwidth of just under 1GB/s. Even a 16x dedicated channel is going to have less than a third of the bandwidth of a fast memory controller, and FAR worse latency.
That's the same reason your CPU has multiple layers of increasingly larger and slower cache sitting between it and RAM - even RAM is abysmally slow, especially when it comes to latency.
Absolutely. But if you've got a video card with high-speed RAM, *plus* lower speed add-on ram as an additional cache against having to transfer data over the bus, then that would almost certainly be an improvement over the high-speed ram alone.
> even if you could stick a standard dimm slot onto the graphics card Now there's an idea. Sure, it'd be less efficient than VRAM, but it would be much more efficient than talking to main memory across the bus. And who doesn't have a few old DIMMS lying around, displaced by other upgrades?
Of course the cost of a DIMM slot or two, and quite possibly a second memory controller to talk to the very different memory might very well outweigh the benefits
That does sound like she's got a clear idea of what your relationship should be, at least for now. Cats can certainly be extremely complex individuals.
Ah, I understand you. That's quite interesting behavior. Is this a contract she volunteered, or something you negotiated?
Leaving the kills is odd. But I guess, what's she going to do with them if she prefers home-cooked meals? It sounds like she probably doesn't really regard you as part of her colony yet, and seems to have a firm idea of how she earns her keep. It sounds like this is a cat that was already an adult when it found you? Perhaps someone in her past managed to communicate that such gifts were unwelcome?
There's certainly much individual variation - but I do stand by my point for a big enough percentage of the population to be a major consideration when discussing populations of stray and feral cats.
Actually that's *exactly* how resonant frequency works - there's just a limiting factor to consider - damping, or how effectively the item in question can shed the energy it's receiving. At non-resonant frequencies internal destructive interference provides its own damping, but that's dramatically reduced or eliminated at resonant frequencies
Fluids are generally great dampers - they'll convert vibrational energy into internal turbulence, and thence heat. Which is why the Earth doesn't shatter, it's basically a big ball of dissimilar fluids with an incredibly thin eggshell crust floating on the outside. (Well, that and the fact that you'd have to accelerate any broken fragments to escape velocity or they'd just re-coallesce - but it'd take something pretty outrageous for that to become a factor - like the impact that created the moon from fragments that couldn't quite escape completely - but that has nothing to do with vibration)
Suspend a completely undamped crystal in a vacuum, agitate it with a tiny signal at its resonant frequency, and the standing waves will just keep building until it shatters. Do the same thing in air (a fluid), and you've got a fair chance that the vibrational energy can be shed as sound waves and dissipated in the air faster than new energy is being added. But not necessarily - hence the glass-shattering effect of singers who can hold a sustained note at their resonant frequency long and loudly enough.
I have rarely seen a cat that doesn't stalk small birds - not all of them can actually catch them, but they'll certainly try. Small being the active word - they tend to learn quickly that a bird the size of a rat is actually a formidable opponent.
I seriously doubt there's any "contract" established - small animals are food, if we don't feed them that's their only option for survival. And if we do feed them, the hunting instincts don't go away.
It is possible though that actually being raised around chickens or other birds may change their attitude - my first cat was actually abandoned by its feral farm-cat mother and raised by chickens, and she was one of the few I've met that didn't stalk birds. Most everything else was still fair game though.
How long have you been using Macs versus Ubuntu? For example - The vast majority of advanced Mac hot keys are completely undiscoverable without Google - as in, literally not documented *anywhere* within the OS - and many of them are for still-fairly-basic functionality that has no mouse-driven equivalent. And good luck finding the advanced configuration options (most of which would be included in the "normal" options on any other OS)
As for your RDC criticisms - I'll let those be, other than to point out that poorly designed applications should not be considered a reflection on the OS.
What are the health hazards of insects typically on a lizard's diet? For most problem insects (termites, roaches, silverfish, bed-bugs, fleas, lice, etc.) house centipedes are about the best predator you can hope for, and completely harmless to humans.
>and the idea that cats hunt everything that moves is nonsense anyway.. Having had cats all my life I must agree. They only hunt anything substantially smaller than them, that they haven't learned will bite back or taste vile. And that's house cats that are driven only by instinct, without the added drive of hunger.
How would the inability to spoof your caller-id information prevent you from communicating with anyone who wanted to hear from you?
Granted, there may be implementation details that could be easily abused for other purposes - can't say I've even glanced at any of the recommended solutions.
>your grandmother should be able to use it with equal utility to a superuser who is hacking the kernel sourcecode. That depends very much on what you mean by "utility" - most of the people I know get very little utility from a computer beyond internet access and maybe some word processing. The ability to run a secure web server or hypervisored virtual machine is completely irrelevant to them.
Ubuntu though does offer an excellent, simple, user interface quite sufficient to most people's needs, one that's arguably both more powerful and easier to use than Windows or MacOS. And certainly far more customizable - even as a power user it's not a bad place to start, you're going to want to replace half the interface for pretty much any distribution anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. It doesn't even take $10,000 - you can build a fusor with less than $500 worth of second-hand equipment. Handy if you need a convenient neutron source, or a bad case of radiation poisoning, but not much else.
Well, there's not all that many Native Americans working at Microsoft, so it's probably mostly imports.
The big difference is that physical malicious attacks are unlikely and expensive, and so defending against them normally only makes sense if you're dealing with something very valuable or dangerous. The initial 9/11 attacks succeeded only because it was official policy to comply with terrorists so everyone could go home safely at the end of the day. Once people realized what was going on, later attacks failed as crew and passengers fought back.
In contrast, digital attacks are so cheap and easy to perform from anywhere in the world that they are an inevitable unending background against which all software is developed. If you are designing software where security matters, then securing against regular well-funded attacks by experts working for hostile governments, organized crime and other special-interest groups is just the reality you have to deal with. If you aren't well-versed in how to do that, and still write software where security matters, then you are bad at your job - no matter how good a developer you are in contexts where security doesn't matter.
Yes - provided the nation can avoid paying a major price for allowing them to crash. To that end I think making sure no one bank (or conglomerate) is ever responsible for more than a few percent of the market. I believe 10% market concentration in a single supplier is commonly regarded as the point that a market has definitely consolidated to the point that a free market no longer exists - I'd have no problem banning any one company from doing more than maybe half that much business.
Indeed. I believe part of Bernie's 2016 platform was to have post offices begin also operating as something like very simple, traditional, consumer banks (or maybe credit unions?). Though it seems to me that it might make more sense to simply make it a requirement for all consumer banks to make at least basic no-fee checking accounts available to everyone, just as part of the cost of doing business.
No, mostly they're called people trapped in a bad situation created by the society they live in. Even assuming someone screwed up to create the problem in the first place, how are they supposed to go about putting their life right again when they can't even get paid for working? (How many decent employers do you know that will pay with cash instead of check?)
I do think that society should recognize that it *creates* such people, and work to fix the flaws that produce such people, and make sure that people born into such conditions through no fault of their own, find it easy to leave. "Tough love" only works when a person's problems are of their own creation, not when it's a systemic problem that might keep you trapped just as surely as it traps them, had you been unfortunate enough to be born or stumble into it.
If we want to encourage everyone to be productive members of society, we need to make it *at least* as easy for the poorest among us to be upwardly mobile as it is for most, not more difficult. But we live in a society that throws up a whole lot of barriers to that climb, some of them pretty substantial. I know people who would be financially devastated by earning a 10% raise - it would push them off the "welfare cliff", and not be nearly enough for them to reach to other side. It is to our shame as a society that we allow such traps to exist.
That's a good reason for keeping the banks alive, not a good reason for bailing them out though. Buy them out, to the tune of their existing debt, break them up, and send them on their way, with large low-interest government loans to repay. After imprisoning all the executives that decided their personal profit was more important than national security. And all the regulators who were either incompetent or corrupt enough to not spot the problem sooner.
I know several people who, for various reasons, can't even get a bank account. Had one teller even try to tell me I couldn't cash a check on their behalf (Seriously? They can sign the check over to me, and I can deposit it, right? And I can withdraw cash from my account, right? Okay, then do your damned job.)
Agreed. Unmentioned hardware that would only be useful to the user is one thing. Unmentioned surveillance-capable hardware is something else entirely. At best you get conspiracy theories circulating - and quite possibly you get actual covert surveillance - either by the manufacturer themselves (we all trust Google not to spy on us, right?...Right?), or by hackers of various stripes.
True, but you can protect that basket a lot more efficiently than dozens of separate passwords. Use a key-file as well as a password for added security. Store your more sensitive passwords in a separate PM on a flash drive that you only plug in when you need them, secured by a keyfile on your computer so that an attacker will need access to both to get at your stored passwords.
It still won't protect you from a competent, targeted attack - but there's not really much you can do against those anyway, unless you're the sort to routinely check the firmware on your keyboard to make sure it hasn't been compromised since you last used it. But it will largely protect you against becoming a target of convenience - which is the primary purpose of most security. Like the old adage about bears: you don't have to be able to run faster than the bear, just faster than the slowest person in your group.
Now that would actually be a lovely idea - *if* it used a standard PC video-card slot so that you could easily upgrade the GPU in the future. Somehow though I suspect that's not the case.
I have the same basic objection to "all-in-one" PCs - a good monitor is worth investing in, and will likely outlast many PCs - unless you integrate the two, and generate a huge additional stream of trash as the fast-evolving tech goes predictably obsolescent, taking a perfectly good screen with it.
Even if you've got the money to burn, and upgrade your monitor as often as your PC, consigning a high-quality monitor to an early grave rather than many years of cherished second-hand value should hurt your heart. It's wanton wealth-destruction.
Agreed. My counterpoint to the article - don't send emails demanding other people's attention unless you have reason to believe that *they* would want to interact with you.
It's far more rude to carelessly demand someone else's attention in the first place than it is to ignore such demands. Attention is a precious resource, paying attention to something disrupts what I'm doing, and sacrifices a slice of my life that I can never get back.
If you do email me, be concise: tell me what you want, and why I should want to give it to you. And do so in as few words as possible because every word I read is costing me a moment of my life. Show that you respect my time and attention, or don't expect me to treat you with any greater respect.
What part of "over the bus" did you not understand? Memory buses are typically orders of magnitude faster than anything else outside the CPU. Typically in the range of 25-60GB/s. By contrast even a PCIe 3.0 lane has a bandwidth of just under 1GB/s. Even a 16x dedicated channel is going to have less than a third of the bandwidth of a fast memory controller, and FAR worse latency.
That's the same reason your CPU has multiple layers of increasingly larger and slower cache sitting between it and RAM - even RAM is abysmally slow, especially when it comes to latency.
Absolutely. But if you've got a video card with high-speed RAM, *plus* lower speed add-on ram as an additional cache against having to transfer data over the bus, then that would almost certainly be an improvement over the high-speed ram alone.
> even if you could stick a standard dimm slot onto the graphics card
Now there's an idea. Sure, it'd be less efficient than VRAM, but it would be much more efficient than talking to main memory across the bus. And who doesn't have a few old DIMMS lying around, displaced by other upgrades?
Of course the cost of a DIMM slot or two, and quite possibly a second memory controller to talk to the very different memory might very well outweigh the benefits
That does sound like she's got a clear idea of what your relationship should be, at least for now. Cats can certainly be extremely complex individuals.
Sure does. But that's an awful low bar to cross.
Mostly I was just making sure you didn't overlook a comment with a possible answer.
Ah, I understand you. That's quite interesting behavior. Is this a contract she volunteered, or something you negotiated?
Leaving the kills is odd. But I guess, what's she going to do with them if she prefers home-cooked meals? It sounds like she probably doesn't really regard you as part of her colony yet, and seems to have a firm idea of how she earns her keep. It sounds like this is a cat that was already an adult when it found you? Perhaps someone in her past managed to communicate that such gifts were unwelcome?
There's certainly much individual variation - but I do stand by my point for a big enough percentage of the population to be a major consideration when discussing populations of stray and feral cats.
There's at least one example listed near the top of this discussion
Actually that's *exactly* how resonant frequency works - there's just a limiting factor to consider - damping, or how effectively the item in question can shed the energy it's receiving. At non-resonant frequencies internal destructive interference provides its own damping, but that's dramatically reduced or eliminated at resonant frequencies
Fluids are generally great dampers - they'll convert vibrational energy into internal turbulence, and thence heat. Which is why the Earth doesn't shatter, it's basically a big ball of dissimilar fluids with an incredibly thin eggshell crust floating on the outside. (Well, that and the fact that you'd have to accelerate any broken fragments to escape velocity or they'd just re-coallesce - but it'd take something pretty outrageous for that to become a factor - like the impact that created the moon from fragments that couldn't quite escape completely - but that has nothing to do with vibration)
Suspend a completely undamped crystal in a vacuum, agitate it with a tiny signal at its resonant frequency, and the standing waves will just keep building until it shatters. Do the same thing in air (a fluid), and you've got a fair chance that the vibrational energy can be shed as sound waves and dissipated in the air faster than new energy is being added. But not necessarily - hence the glass-shattering effect of singers who can hold a sustained note at their resonant frequency long and loudly enough.
I have rarely seen a cat that doesn't stalk small birds - not all of them can actually catch them, but they'll certainly try. Small being the active word - they tend to learn quickly that a bird the size of a rat is actually a formidable opponent.
I seriously doubt there's any "contract" established - small animals are food, if we don't feed them that's their only option for survival. And if we do feed them, the hunting instincts don't go away.
It is possible though that actually being raised around chickens or other birds may change their attitude - my first cat was actually abandoned by its feral farm-cat mother and raised by chickens, and she was one of the few I've met that didn't stalk birds. Most everything else was still fair game though.
How long have you been using Macs versus Ubuntu? For example - The vast majority of advanced Mac hot keys are completely undiscoverable without Google - as in, literally not documented *anywhere* within the OS - and many of them are for still-fairly-basic functionality that has no mouse-driven equivalent. And good luck finding the advanced configuration options (most of which would be included in the "normal" options on any other OS)
As for your RDC criticisms - I'll let those be, other than to point out that poorly designed applications should not be considered a reflection on the OS.
What are the health hazards of insects typically on a lizard's diet? For most problem insects (termites, roaches, silverfish, bed-bugs, fleas, lice, etc.) house centipedes are about the best predator you can hope for, and completely harmless to humans.
>and the idea that cats hunt everything that moves is nonsense anyway ..
Having had cats all my life I must agree. They only hunt anything substantially smaller than them, that they haven't learned will bite back or taste vile. And that's house cats that are driven only by instinct, without the added drive of hunger.
How would the inability to spoof your caller-id information prevent you from communicating with anyone who wanted to hear from you?
Granted, there may be implementation details that could be easily abused for other purposes - can't say I've even glanced at any of the recommended solutions.
>your grandmother should be able to use it with equal utility to a superuser who is hacking the kernel sourcecode.
That depends very much on what you mean by "utility" - most of the people I know get very little utility from a computer beyond internet access and maybe some word processing. The ability to run a secure web server or hypervisored virtual machine is completely irrelevant to them.
Ubuntu though does offer an excellent, simple, user interface quite sufficient to most people's needs, one that's arguably both more powerful and easier to use than Windows or MacOS. And certainly far more customizable - even as a power user it's not a bad place to start, you're going to want to replace half the interface for pretty much any distribution anyway.