Why settle for four? If you're gong to step it up, lets do a full cluster of six auxilliary boosters like they discussed early on, and land all seven!
Or, maybe they could design some sort of single "super-heavy" rocket that's the same size as the entire cluster would be - you could fit in even more (or larger!) engines and fuel, while eliminating much of the mass of having several smaller fuel tanks and superstructures...
> and having to carry humans for launches that should have been fully automated were Shuttle's major problems
I'm not sure it *could* have been, given the computer technology of the 1970s and the comparative difficulty of landing a spaceplane. It might have been refit much later, but what would be the point? Replacing a well-tested system with a new experimental system to save a few hundred pounds of payload sounds like a risky and expensive decision to me. It might have saved a few lives, but lives are cheap.
SpaceX was in a very different position as they were designing and testing an entire experimental rocket that was very likely to be destroyed while landing, without the benefit off being a government organization that could spend lives with legal impunity, but with the benefit of an additional 40 years of advancements in computer technology.
As for the rest of the problems - no argument. But that's what happens when a committee of politicians decides your launch system also needs to be capable of doing everything you might possibly want to do in orbit.
Not forgetting, but that comes later, after he's been handed over. He is accused of terrorism after all (the statute of limitations on the CFAA has already run out, but apparently terrorism accusations can extend that)
It is a good reminder of exactly what sort of sadistic illegal treatment the US government is happy to inflect though.
The situation in fictitious media is improving much faster than in reality - but we still have black men being arrested by cops for breaking and entering while entering their own homes in high-end neighborhoods. Being pulled over for driving expensive cars, etc. And of course the news tells a completely different story - a black man killed by cops over what should have been a minor issue, if even that, is almost always a "thug", whereas a white mass-shooter is a "disturbed individual".
I suspect your own country has similar problems, but you'd have to be either very observant, or rude enough to ask a black friend about it directly to really notice.
Unfortunately when trying to eliminate multi-generational problems, "just letting it play out" is unlikely to fix things.
Someone born into poverty, with parents who never went to college or pursued "white-collar" jobs is very unlikely to get instilled with a the strong foundation of cultural behaviors conductive to getting into college and pursuing such careers when they grow up. They're also very unlikely to have the social connections that would give them an advantage in getting in to college and finding a good career. (for example "legacy admissions" give a strong college admissions bias in favor of children of alumni - which is to say primarily a subset of white kids, because that has historically been the majority of students)
Now that's strictly economic discrimination, nothing to do with race directly. But economic discrimination is endemic in our society, with little sign that anyone in power has any interest in eliminating it - so it's the inescapable backdrop of everything else. And generations of racism mean that obvious minorities mostly start out far lower on the economic ladder than white people.
Which means that, even if we could wave a magic wand and completely eliminate racism today, minorities would remain mostly confined to the lower classes for many, many generations to come, simply because they were already concentrated there and our society offers very limited economic mobility. Add in the additional burden of even mild racism, reinforced by the fact that race is a very obvious indicator of probable economic background that's impossible to hide, and you've got a society infected with an enduring systematic racial bias.
A redneck from the deep south who was lucky enough to get out can lose his accent, put on a suit, and pass himself off as someone who "belongs" on an upper-class career path, and no one will guess that his parents were heroin addicts that sent him to bed hungry most nights. A black man has no such option - even if he was born upper class the assumption that he's poor trash trying to hide in a suit will follow him all his life.
To realistically eliminate that bias you must actively "mix up" the population, so that race is no longer an effective predictor of economic status. Which, short of playing "swap a life" at random, seemingly means that you need to give minorities an unfair advantage so that they can climb out of poverty more easily.
Or, we could do something really radical. We could enhance social mobility for everyone. Make sure *any* poor kid has an "unfair" advantage to offset the obviously unfair disadvantage of being poor. Make that powerful enough, and we could mix up society reasonably well within only a few generations. Assuming of course we kept waving that magic wand.
Of course that still means that white people would have a net-downward economic mobility - can't have the minority poor climbing out of poverty without someone else sliding down to taking their place. Not without changing our economic system far more fundamentally. But at least the newly poor would have no more difficulty getting back out again than the minorities did, and know that their poverty is due to their own bad luck and failure rather than minorities getting an unfair advantage. That's how that works, right...?
I suspect Trump surrounded himself with the most intelligent simpering treacherous halfwits that were willing to be publicly associated with his inevitable train-wreck of a presidency should he win.
What I find interesting is that none of his more competent, less-public allies warned him off. Perhaps they did, but he was already committed to collaborating with the Russians. Or perhaps they decided his behavior would provide them with useful leverage down the line when it eventually came to light.
I'm fairly certain that Assanage had no such clearance, so it's not relevant. Manning clearly violated his clearance, but that's not relevant to Assange. And reporters routinely receive and release such classified information (usually with some measure of responsible redaction) without legal repercussion, because there is not actually any law against doing so, even for US citizens, unless it materially aids an enemy of the US.
The only halfway credible claim I've heard against Assange is that by actively encouraging Manning to acquire and share classified documents with him he was acting as a foreign intelligence agent - which is one of those things you really don't want to be accused of without a powerful foreign government protecting you.
> Why can't we use violence to fight whoever we don't like? We can. Anyone can. Capacity for violence is almost always the ultimate arbiter of acceptable behavior.
The thing is, once you enter the realm of "law by right of arms", the person/group capable of the most decisive violence wins. And unless you're a government with legions of heavily armed and well indoctrinated soldiers, spooks, cops, etc. at your command, that's not you.
And one of the first laws most governments enforce is "we have an exclusive right to use violence". There's some good reasons for that, as it disrupts what otherwise tends to become perpetual cycles of revenge and counter-revenge. But it also means that in taking up arms yourself, against anyone, you are challenging the government's primacy, and can expect to be stomped down, if only as an example to discourage more potentially credible threats.
Once you leave the domain of a single cohesive government, such as entering international politics, there is no longer any single entity with an agreed upon monopoly on violence, which inevitably means that the capacity for violence is *always* a subtext in any conflict. Which is why nations around the world routinely violate treaty and trade agreements with impunity when they no longer serve their goals. Refraining from international violence has nothing to do with ethics or morality - it's all about profit and loss. So long as it's more profitable for everyone involved to abide by a treaty than to violate it, the treaty survives. Once that changes for one of the signatories, you can expect them to violate it.
Just as happened when Russia invaded Crimea - doing so was a clear treaty violation, but a valuable strategic move (it gives them much more secure military access to the Mediterranean). They judged that the loss to the other major signatories was less than the losses associated with going to war over it (more profitable to everyone who mattered to avoid war), and so they went for it. And they judged correctly - the U.S. and others did the minimum necessary to defend the Ukraine as outlined by the nuclear nonproliferation treaty they had signed on to - sending a strongly worded letter. Of course that also means they sent a clear message to every other signatory that the treaty was absolutely worthless and they had better start making their own nukes if they wanted a real deterrent, but apparently the threat of more 2-bit nuclear powers arising in order to defend themselves was considered a more acceptable price to pay than war.
I'd go one step further: Making an extradition request, having it granted, and having it be legally sound are *three* different things.
The UK and US have a long and ongoing history of collaborating to circumvent their own laws, such as sharing surveillance collected on each others populations that they're not legally allowed to collect themselves. And the US has already clearly brought serious political pressure to bear on several countries trying to get their hands on Assange. You really think that the only way the UK would honor an extradition request is if it was completely above reproach?
Indeed. And the judge could easily have convicted him on those grounds if it was illegal to do so there. Ear buds mostly make for poor ear plugs, but it's hard to argue they make for nonexistent ones.
If it *wasn't* illegal however, (and your link appears relevant to California, not Canada) then it doesn't really matter how reasonable such a law might be.
As it is, this convoluted interpretation of law seems destined to be on a collision course with smart watches, prescription AR glasses, and any other wearable technology that comes along.
You really want to try to explain how to do that properly to your average user?
More to the point - why should even a skilled user have to do that manually when it's such a fundamental part of safely downloading a file? How many millions of man-hours per year would be wasted doing that easily-automated task, if everyone actually could and did do so for every download?
We're talking about files downloaded from insecure links on secure pages - I'd say it's safe to assume that this is a move designed to discourage putting the user in an unexpectedly dangerous position, rather than provide greater technical defenses. A user downloading a file from a trusted and obviously secure web page (it has the secure icon.) is going to reasonably assume that the file that leaves the server is the same as the file that arrives at their computer, rather than realizing it could have been infected by any router it passed along the way.
And the entire point of intentionally downloading an executable is to run it, so as a developer you can reasonably conclude that any such programs will *definitely* be given *at least* the full range of normal user access, and probably at least the limited elevated access typically requested by an installer. You want to take a guess at what percentage of people actually scan a fresh download from a trusted site for viruses before running it?
I think rather than blocking though, there should be a dialog along the lines of: "WARNING: this download is not secure. Even if you trust this site, the file could be infected by viruses as it crosses the internet to reach you. Are you sure you want to continue?"
That warning could be legitimately given for any http download, but is especially appropriate when the user apparently has a connection safe enough to share banking information over.
>Most sites provide their file hashes over HTTPS. I'm going to have to disagree. In my experience, most sites don't provide hashes, and most users don't know how to check them anyway.
If you're downloading ISOs you're probably a fellow Linux enthusiast, which puts you in a (generally) much more technically competent group, but a group so small as to be largely irrelevant to the attack channels used against the broader population.
Also - even for technical users they're not talking about blocking all HTTP downloads, just the ones posing as HTTPS and being silently degraded behind the scenes. If I click an HTTPS download link, then they I should be able to assume that what was sent is what I receive, and that checking against the hash is redundant - anyone compromising the source file could probably also compromise the displayed hash. Whereas if I download via HTTP, I know the transmission is vulnerable and should check the hash.
An excellent compromise I've seen mentioned many times before, and which would benefit everyone, technical and otherwise, would be to establish a convention that would securely transmit the hash via HTTPS, and then automatically verify it when the download is complete. It could be as easy as adding a "checksum=..." attribute to the link tag.
Obviously the checksum would have to be sent over the encrypted channel, but so long as you do that, sending the data itself unencrypted and cacheable is a non-issue. (well, aside from surveillance)
I've often wondered why such a thing isn't common myself - not just for security purposes, but to reliably and transparently detect accidental transmission errors.
The big difference I see is that executable inherently get pretty much full unrestricted user-level access to the machine, whereas compromised documents rely on exploiting vulnerabilities in applications (i.e. it's somebody else's problem). Those applications are typically constantly being updated to remove vulnerabilities (well, so long as they're not "too big to care about users' needs" at least, which perhaps covers the specific examples you mentioned...)
That said - yeah, it does seem like simply warning on everything would be the better route. Except... there's been a big cross-browser push towards "HTTPS for every page" to avoid browser warnings, while HTTP downloads behind the scenes are probably still a pretty common scenario (no need to rack up the encryption overhead for such comparatively large files, right?), which means the warning would be popping up constantly, with every new font, mp3, etc. downloaded. And any warning shown frequently enough becomes effectively invisible. By (initially at least) focusing on the most vulnerable files they greatly reduce the frequency of the warning for most users, while still raising awareness and pressuring site owners not to silently degrade to unencrypted downloads behind the scenes.
I.e. this is at its core a social solution to a social vulnerability, rather than a strictly technical one.
>(What is true forwards, should also be true in reverse)
Only if the people with the power and access to do so, also have the motive. For now, it seems the report is a closely guarded secret of individuals loyal to the Trump administration.
Yes, please tell us exactly what was in the Mueller Report and what it means. I'm sure you're one of the select inner circle who has actually read the report, and not just heard reports about Barr's obviously biased "summary".
If the report actually exonerated Trump and Co., it would be made public. The fact that it has not says volumes.
I had not realized the lifespan had improved so drastically over the last decade - assuming of course that time proves the estimates valid. I'm dubious, considering the reduction in range that many people have reported with current EVs after only a few years. Notably missing from your cited table is any reference to how large a capacity reduction is considered "still viable" by those estimates. A 50% reduction in something that has only a moderately good range to begin with makes it a far less attractive option, especially to someone who can only afford a single vehicle, and can't afford to rent an alternative when they travel long distances.
Precious few people making minimum wage are going to be spending $20,000 on a car - even $2,000 is a major expense to someone who only makes $10,000 per year, and 25% of the U.S. population makes less than $20,000 per year. Assuming we really want to solve this problem, and we don't just ban gasoline vehicles and say F the poor, we need to be thinking seriously about how well the extreme second-hand market is going to serve them.
Yeah, it's almost like a species whose entire ecology and evolutionary history is built upon a foundation of microbial ecosystems, carries part of that ecosystem with them wherever they go...
Multi-cellular life is the anomaly on Earth - our cells are hopelessly outnumbered by microbes even within our own bodies, and outmassed in the global ecosystem. The microbes were here for billions of years before we arose, and get many thousands of times more generations of evolution per year than we do. Wipe out all complex life, and the microbial world would be rocked, but soon continue on without trouble, though the species that coevolved closely with multicellular life might get wiped out. Wipe out all microbial life, and all multicellural life would go extinct within a few years at most, many within days or weeks.
It never ceases to amaze me that we're starting to seriously consider colonizing another world, without having more than the vaguest idea of the microbiome we need to survive. We could thrive as the only multicellular organism in a microbial "slime world", so long as it was the right kind of slime, and would benefit from the fact that our ecosystem could expand almost instantly to fill any new space as it became available, or to recover from near-total extermination. A diet of only yeast and algae might not be the most appealing of existences, but it would be a deeply robust ecosystem that could easily support us. Establish and nurture the slime, and the rest of the ecosystem can thrive atop it. Treat it as an afterthought, or an enemy, and we'll be perpetually struggling to keep ourselves alive against impossible odds.
The fanciness of the hospital has very little to do with the quality of the health care, your innards really don't care about the view. The only thing that matters for measuring the quality of health care is the quality of the outcome. I'd much rather be operated on by a doctor that uses sharpened paperclips rather than scalpels, *if* they only lose 1% of their patients rather than the usual 10% in the U.S. for the same operation.
Cuba's doctors are in such high demand precisely because they manage to deliver first-class results with such limited resources.
The D's do tend to have a bit of a knee-jerk reaction against voter ID laws, but that's because they have almost always been used to disenfranchise voters.
>What I see are Rs saying "we need voter ID to prevent fraud!" And I have no problem with that *if* they make sure the IDs are free and easy for every citizen to get.
The problem is when you take a harder look at not just what the R's are saying, but the actual details of the laws they're trying to pass, as well as what *else* they're doing - such as shutting down DMV offices in impoverished areas so that poor people have a harder time getting IDs.
There has to be an acceptable free ID, or else getting it amounts to an unconstitutional poll tax. Requiring an hour or two round-trip journey to the nearest DMV isn't easy for someone working 60-80 hours a week to try to build a better life for their kids. Neither is having to walk several miles from the nearest bus stop to get to the polling place. These are all underhanded tactics that were used in the last election, and many elections before that.
Make sure the voter ID law *guarantees* free and easy access to IDs for every citizen, and that those guarantees are 100% implemented *before* ID is required, and I'm on board. I haven't seen any that do that though, and the R's abysmal track record of using voter ID laws for disenfranchisement means I will continue to assume that any such law is intended for that purpose unless overwhelming evidence to the contrary is provided.
Slashdot Mirror
Why settle for four? If you're gong to step it up, lets do a full cluster of six auxilliary boosters like they discussed early on, and land all seven!
Or, maybe they could design some sort of single "super-heavy" rocket that's the same size as the entire cluster would be - you could fit in even more (or larger!) engines and fuel, while eliminating much of the mass of having several smaller fuel tanks and superstructures...
> and having to carry humans for launches that should have been fully automated were Shuttle's major problems
I'm not sure it *could* have been, given the computer technology of the 1970s and the comparative difficulty of landing a spaceplane. It might have been refit much later, but what would be the point? Replacing a well-tested system with a new experimental system to save a few hundred pounds of payload sounds like a risky and expensive decision to me. It might have saved a few lives, but lives are cheap.
SpaceX was in a very different position as they were designing and testing an entire experimental rocket that was very likely to be destroyed while landing, without the benefit off being a government organization that could spend lives with legal impunity, but with the benefit of an additional 40 years of advancements in computer technology.
As for the rest of the problems - no argument. But that's what happens when a committee of politicians decides your launch system also needs to be capable of doing everything you might possibly want to do in orbit.
Not forgetting, but that comes later, after he's been handed over. He is accused of terrorism after all (the statute of limitations on the CFAA has already run out, but apparently terrorism accusations can extend that)
It is a good reminder of exactly what sort of sadistic illegal treatment the US government is happy to inflect though.
The situation in fictitious media is improving much faster than in reality - but we still have black men being arrested by cops for breaking and entering while entering their own homes in high-end neighborhoods. Being pulled over for driving expensive cars, etc. And of course the news tells a completely different story - a black man killed by cops over what should have been a minor issue, if even that, is almost always a "thug", whereas a white mass-shooter is a "disturbed individual".
I suspect your own country has similar problems, but you'd have to be either very observant, or rude enough to ask a black friend about it directly to really notice.
So they have. Wired has an interesting discussion. https://www.wired.com/story/ju...
Dicey at best, since it sounds like he may have only made the offer to crack a password, but the CFAA is extremely broadly worded.
Worse, the statue of limitations ran out years ago, and so they have declared it an act of terrorism in order to get around that little inconvenience.
Terrorism? Seriously? Exactly which civilians were threatened?
Is it any wonder that so many people assume this is a case of the US government exacting revenge for embarrassing it?
That is indeed the problem.
Unfortunately when trying to eliminate multi-generational problems, "just letting it play out" is unlikely to fix things.
Someone born into poverty, with parents who never went to college or pursued "white-collar" jobs is very unlikely to get instilled with a the strong foundation of cultural behaviors conductive to getting into college and pursuing such careers when they grow up. They're also very unlikely to have the social connections that would give them an advantage in getting in to college and finding a good career. (for example "legacy admissions" give a strong college admissions bias in favor of children of alumni - which is to say primarily a subset of white kids, because that has historically been the majority of students)
Now that's strictly economic discrimination, nothing to do with race directly. But economic discrimination is endemic in our society, with little sign that anyone in power has any interest in eliminating it - so it's the inescapable backdrop of everything else. And generations of racism mean that obvious minorities mostly start out far lower on the economic ladder than white people.
Which means that, even if we could wave a magic wand and completely eliminate racism today, minorities would remain mostly confined to the lower classes for many, many generations to come, simply because they were already concentrated there and our society offers very limited economic mobility. Add in the additional burden of even mild racism, reinforced by the fact that race is a very obvious indicator of probable economic background that's impossible to hide, and you've got a society infected with an enduring systematic racial bias.
A redneck from the deep south who was lucky enough to get out can lose his accent, put on a suit, and pass himself off as someone who "belongs" on an upper-class career path, and no one will guess that his parents were heroin addicts that sent him to bed hungry most nights. A black man has no such option - even if he was born upper class the assumption that he's poor trash trying to hide in a suit will follow him all his life.
To realistically eliminate that bias you must actively "mix up" the population, so that race is no longer an effective predictor of economic status. Which, short of playing "swap a life" at random, seemingly means that you need to give minorities an unfair advantage so that they can climb out of poverty more easily.
Or, we could do something really radical. We could enhance social mobility for everyone. Make sure *any* poor kid has an "unfair" advantage to offset the obviously unfair disadvantage of being poor. Make that powerful enough, and we could mix up society reasonably well within only a few generations. Assuming of course we kept waving that magic wand.
Of course that still means that white people would have a net-downward economic mobility - can't have the minority poor climbing out of poverty without someone else sliding down to taking their place. Not without changing our economic system far more fundamentally. But at least the newly poor would have no more difficulty getting back out again than the minorities did, and know that their poverty is due to their own bad luck and failure rather than minorities getting an unfair advantage. That's how that works, right...?
I suspect Trump surrounded himself with the most intelligent simpering treacherous halfwits that were willing to be publicly associated with his inevitable train-wreck of a presidency should he win.
What I find interesting is that none of his more competent, less-public allies warned him off. Perhaps they did, but he was already committed to collaborating with the Russians. Or perhaps they decided his behavior would provide them with useful leverage down the line when it eventually came to light.
And exactly what crime did Assange commit in US jurisdiction?
I'm fairly certain that Assanage had no such clearance, so it's not relevant. Manning clearly violated his clearance, but that's not relevant to Assange. And reporters routinely receive and release such classified information (usually with some measure of responsible redaction) without legal repercussion, because there is not actually any law against doing so, even for US citizens, unless it materially aids an enemy of the US.
The only halfway credible claim I've heard against Assange is that by actively encouraging Manning to acquire and share classified documents with him he was acting as a foreign intelligence agent - which is one of those things you really don't want to be accused of without a powerful foreign government protecting you.
> Why can't we use violence to fight whoever we don't like?
We can. Anyone can. Capacity for violence is almost always the ultimate arbiter of acceptable behavior.
The thing is, once you enter the realm of "law by right of arms", the person/group capable of the most decisive violence wins. And unless you're a government with legions of heavily armed and well indoctrinated soldiers, spooks, cops, etc. at your command, that's not you.
And one of the first laws most governments enforce is "we have an exclusive right to use violence". There's some good reasons for that, as it disrupts what otherwise tends to become perpetual cycles of revenge and counter-revenge. But it also means that in taking up arms yourself, against anyone, you are challenging the government's primacy, and can expect to be stomped down, if only as an example to discourage more potentially credible threats.
Once you leave the domain of a single cohesive government, such as entering international politics, there is no longer any single entity with an agreed upon monopoly on violence, which inevitably means that the capacity for violence is *always* a subtext in any conflict. Which is why nations around the world routinely violate treaty and trade agreements with impunity when they no longer serve their goals. Refraining from international violence has nothing to do with ethics or morality - it's all about profit and loss. So long as it's more profitable for everyone involved to abide by a treaty than to violate it, the treaty survives. Once that changes for one of the signatories, you can expect them to violate it.
Just as happened when Russia invaded Crimea - doing so was a clear treaty violation, but a valuable strategic move (it gives them much more secure military access to the Mediterranean). They judged that the loss to the other major signatories was less than the losses associated with going to war over it (more profitable to everyone who mattered to avoid war), and so they went for it. And they judged correctly - the U.S. and others did the minimum necessary to defend the Ukraine as outlined by the nuclear nonproliferation treaty they had signed on to - sending a strongly worded letter. Of course that also means they sent a clear message to every other signatory that the treaty was absolutely worthless and they had better start making their own nukes if they wanted a real deterrent, but apparently the threat of more 2-bit nuclear powers arising in order to defend themselves was considered a more acceptable price to pay than war.
I'd go one step further:
Making an extradition request, having it granted, and having it be legally sound are *three* different things.
The UK and US have a long and ongoing history of collaborating to circumvent their own laws, such as sharing surveillance collected on each others populations that they're not legally allowed to collect themselves. And the US has already clearly brought serious political pressure to bear on several countries trying to get their hands on Assange. You really think that the only way the UK would honor an extradition request is if it was completely above reproach?
Indeed. And the judge could easily have convicted him on those grounds if it was illegal to do so there. Ear buds mostly make for poor ear plugs, but it's hard to argue they make for nonexistent ones.
If it *wasn't* illegal however, (and your link appears relevant to California, not Canada) then it doesn't really matter how reasonable such a law might be.
As it is, this convoluted interpretation of law seems destined to be on a collision course with smart watches, prescription AR glasses, and any other wearable technology that comes along.
You really want to try to explain how to do that properly to your average user?
More to the point - why should even a skilled user have to do that manually when it's such a fundamental part of safely downloading a file? How many millions of man-hours per year would be wasted doing that easily-automated task, if everyone actually could and did do so for every download?
We're talking about files downloaded from insecure links on secure pages - I'd say it's safe to assume that this is a move designed to discourage putting the user in an unexpectedly dangerous position, rather than provide greater technical defenses. A user downloading a file from a trusted and obviously secure web page (it has the secure icon.) is going to reasonably assume that the file that leaves the server is the same as the file that arrives at their computer, rather than realizing it could have been infected by any router it passed along the way.
And the entire point of intentionally downloading an executable is to run it, so as a developer you can reasonably conclude that any such programs will *definitely* be given *at least* the full range of normal user access, and probably at least the limited elevated access typically requested by an installer. You want to take a guess at what percentage of people actually scan a fresh download from a trusted site for viruses before running it?
I think rather than blocking though, there should be a dialog along the lines of: "WARNING: this download is not secure. Even if you trust this site, the file could be infected by viruses as it crosses the internet to reach you. Are you sure you want to continue?"
That warning could be legitimately given for any http download, but is especially appropriate when the user apparently has a connection safe enough to share banking information over.
>Most sites provide their file hashes over HTTPS.
I'm going to have to disagree. In my experience, most sites don't provide hashes, and most users don't know how to check them anyway.
If you're downloading ISOs you're probably a fellow Linux enthusiast, which puts you in a (generally) much more technically competent group, but a group so small as to be largely irrelevant to the attack channels used against the broader population.
Also - even for technical users they're not talking about blocking all HTTP downloads, just the ones posing as HTTPS and being silently degraded behind the scenes. If I click an HTTPS download link, then they I should be able to assume that what was sent is what I receive, and that checking against the hash is redundant - anyone compromising the source file could probably also compromise the displayed hash. Whereas if I download via HTTP, I know the transmission is vulnerable and should check the hash.
An excellent compromise I've seen mentioned many times before, and which would benefit everyone, technical and otherwise, would be to establish a convention that would securely transmit the hash via HTTPS, and then automatically verify it when the download is complete. It could be as easy as adding a "checksum=..." attribute to the link tag.
I'm not seeing it.
Obviously the checksum would have to be sent over the encrypted channel, but so long as you do that, sending the data itself unencrypted and cacheable is a non-issue. (well, aside from surveillance)
I've often wondered why such a thing isn't common myself - not just for security purposes, but to reliably and transparently detect accidental transmission errors.
The big difference I see is that executable inherently get pretty much full unrestricted user-level access to the machine, whereas compromised documents rely on exploiting vulnerabilities in applications (i.e. it's somebody else's problem). Those applications are typically constantly being updated to remove vulnerabilities (well, so long as they're not "too big to care about users' needs" at least, which perhaps covers the specific examples you mentioned...)
That said - yeah, it does seem like simply warning on everything would be the better route. Except... there's been a big cross-browser push towards "HTTPS for every page" to avoid browser warnings, while HTTP downloads behind the scenes are probably still a pretty common scenario (no need to rack up the encryption overhead for such comparatively large files, right?), which means the warning would be popping up constantly, with every new font, mp3, etc. downloaded. And any warning shown frequently enough becomes effectively invisible. By (initially at least) focusing on the most vulnerable files they greatly reduce the frequency of the warning for most users, while still raising awareness and pressuring site owners not to silently degrade to unencrypted downloads behind the scenes.
I.e. this is at its core a social solution to a social vulnerability, rather than a strictly technical one.
Sad, but utterly predictable when the mainstream browsers are are built atop an HTML engine made by an advertising company.
>(What is true forwards, should also be true in reverse)
Only if the people with the power and access to do so, also have the motive. For now, it seems the report is a closely guarded secret of individuals loyal to the Trump administration.
Yes, please tell us exactly what was in the Mueller Report and what it means. I'm sure you're one of the select inner circle who has actually read the report, and not just heard reports about Barr's obviously biased "summary".
If the report actually exonerated Trump and Co., it would be made public. The fact that it has not says volumes.
I had not realized the lifespan had improved so drastically over the last decade - assuming of course that time proves the estimates valid. I'm dubious, considering the reduction in range that many people have reported with current EVs after only a few years. Notably missing from your cited table is any reference to how large a capacity reduction is considered "still viable" by those estimates. A 50% reduction in something that has only a moderately good range to begin with makes it a far less attractive option, especially to someone who can only afford a single vehicle, and can't afford to rent an alternative when they travel long distances.
Precious few people making minimum wage are going to be spending $20,000 on a car - even $2,000 is a major expense to someone who only makes $10,000 per year, and 25% of the U.S. population makes less than $20,000 per year. Assuming we really want to solve this problem, and we don't just ban gasoline vehicles and say F the poor, we need to be thinking seriously about how well the extreme second-hand market is going to serve them.
Yeah, it's almost like a species whose entire ecology and evolutionary history is built upon a foundation of microbial ecosystems, carries part of that ecosystem with them wherever they go...
Multi-cellular life is the anomaly on Earth - our cells are hopelessly outnumbered by microbes even within our own bodies, and outmassed in the global ecosystem. The microbes were here for billions of years before we arose, and get many thousands of times more generations of evolution per year than we do. Wipe out all complex life, and the microbial world would be rocked, but soon continue on without trouble, though the species that coevolved closely with multicellular life might get wiped out. Wipe out all microbial life, and all multicellural life would go extinct within a few years at most, many within days or weeks.
It never ceases to amaze me that we're starting to seriously consider colonizing another world, without having more than the vaguest idea of the microbiome we need to survive. We could thrive as the only multicellular organism in a microbial "slime world", so long as it was the right kind of slime, and would benefit from the fact that our ecosystem could expand almost instantly to fill any new space as it became available, or to recover from near-total extermination. A diet of only yeast and algae might not be the most appealing of existences, but it would be a deeply robust ecosystem that could easily support us. Establish and nurture the slime, and the rest of the ecosystem can thrive atop it. Treat it as an afterthought, or an enemy, and we'll be perpetually struggling to keep ourselves alive against impossible odds.
The fanciness of the hospital has very little to do with the quality of the health care, your innards really don't care about the view. The only thing that matters for measuring the quality of health care is the quality of the outcome. I'd much rather be operated on by a doctor that uses sharpened paperclips rather than scalpels, *if* they only lose 1% of their patients rather than the usual 10% in the U.S. for the same operation.
Cuba's doctors are in such high demand precisely because they manage to deliver first-class results with such limited resources.
The D's do tend to have a bit of a knee-jerk reaction against voter ID laws, but that's because they have almost always been used to disenfranchise voters.
>What I see are Rs saying "we need voter ID to prevent fraud!"
And I have no problem with that *if* they make sure the IDs are free and easy for every citizen to get.
The problem is when you take a harder look at not just what the R's are saying, but the actual details of the laws they're trying to pass, as well as what *else* they're doing - such as shutting down DMV offices in impoverished areas so that poor people have a harder time getting IDs.
There has to be an acceptable free ID, or else getting it amounts to an unconstitutional poll tax. Requiring an hour or two round-trip journey to the nearest DMV isn't easy for someone working 60-80 hours a week to try to build a better life for their kids. Neither is having to walk several miles from the nearest bus stop to get to the polling place. These are all underhanded tactics that were used in the last election, and many elections before that.
Make sure the voter ID law *guarantees* free and easy access to IDs for every citizen, and that those guarantees are 100% implemented *before* ID is required, and I'm on board. I haven't seen any that do that though, and the R's abysmal track record of using voter ID laws for disenfranchisement means I will continue to assume that any such law is intended for that purpose unless overwhelming evidence to the contrary is provided.