Air-traffic authorities should provide for this sort of thing by allowing trained (licensed?) hobbyists to file a flight plan ahead of time, to give the authorities time to say "no, the airspace is busy at the time you requested" or "yes, go ahead, we've put you in the system and will alert other airspace users of your presence. Please use transponder code ABCXYZ."
They do, actually. Rocketry enthusiasts routinely submit NOTAMs (Notice to Airmen) to the FAA for distribution notifying that areas of airspace are to be closed off for rocket flights. Granted, these vehicles routinely reach anywhere from 1000' to 30,000' so they just close it all off.
And I believe in the areas allowed, it's actually marked on charts as restricted airspace so you must fly around it or get permission from the controlling authority.
Of course, the problem is this usually takes place far away from civilization into basically deserted areas (also far away from popular air routes). which takes a lot of fun out of the whole thing when you have to drive 2-3 hours to get to the cleared area, but it means no one is even close to being put in danger.
Right now, we're relying on big sky theory ("see and avoid"). It works, most of the time, until your big sky gets a little crowded. Near misses happen pretty routinely, even under control of ATC. It's also why ADS-B is a new and exciting technology - before that, smaller aircraft don't usually have TCAS systems, while the bigger airlines do. (Proactive pilots routinely purchased "PCAS" Personal Collision Avoidance Systems - basically a portable transponder receiver that works identically to a TCAS except it can't do a TCAS negotiation). A TCAS to TCAS link means two aircraft converging would communicate for a non-conflicting resolution - one will climb, the other emergency descent. A TCAS advisory is considered so important, they are to be immediately obeyed even if it goes against ATC. (In the early days of TCAS, this did cause collisions).
ADS-B tries to provide same but is available to all.
And let's just say TCAS advisories, PCAS advisories and ADS-B traffic displays have been praised by many a pilot.
And that's the point. The biggest weakness of nuclear, and some other technologies, is that a single failure can knock 1GW+ off the grid instantly. You need a lot of spinning backup ready to take over at a moment's notice to cover that eventuality.
We need to develop more storage. Not just for renewables, but for nuclear and pretty much every form of production, so that we don't have to keep spare generating capacity online just in case. If storage can cover us long enough to spin up alternatives then we can save a great deal of energy. It's also useful for allowing the output of a hybrid nuclear/storage plant to load follow.
The challenge of the grid is that supply must equal demand - if people are consuming 100GW of power, you have to generate 100GW. If you generate 99GW, people notice as motors slow and lights dim, and if you do 101GW, people notice when their electrical devices burn out.
It's why we have grids because the supply and demand gets averaged out as the number of generation and consumers increase so imbalances cause much smaller changes - 1GW on and off makes a lot less problems if you're dealing with 10,000GW demand than if you're dealing with 100GW.
But then you get instability as currents start going where you don't quite expect and this can cause oscillations and ripples that cause safety systems to break links.
Utility level storage systems are available - either flywheel or standard batteries. The purpose of which is to provide some robustness - smaller grids use it so sudden changes in load or generation can be tided over by the battery bank. The only problem is obviously the amount of storage is tiny and lifetimes are limited - they really are to help tide over until other generation can be brought online.
NaÃve. More and more "telemetry" is built-in in Apple operating systems, making user spying "legitimate". The iDevices constantly call the mother ship and "backup" your data on the iCloud. The iDevices are running proprietary software so random hacker cannot really tell what it does (are the camera/microphone on? you're sure?).
Maybe you can prevent some of this data leak with a complex set of fine-tuned firewall rules, ensuring you never use anything else than WiFi you control. You'll be one in a million. At the end of the day, the phone's filesystem is encrypted, but who cares if most/all of the sensitive data already has escaped away from it?
Actually, you can turn off all the telemetry in iOS quite easily - there's lots of options to send exactly what you want back to Apple, or not.
And iCloud backups are optional - Apple will set it if you set it up without iTunes so you, the user ALWAYS have a backup. Because if you forget the PIN or need to replace the phone, Apple may try to transfer the data, but if they can't, they can only restore a backup.
If you forget your PIN, Apple will reset the phone back to factory, and help you restore your iCloud backup. If the phone is damaged and data can't be acccessed, Apple will restore from backup.
So if you don't use iTunes, iOS will use iCloud to backup because there are plenty of situations where you can lose all your data.
If you use iTunes, iCloud backups are off by default because it's assumed you want to backup your device via iTunes (which works over WiFi as well). And if you back up to an encrypted iTunes backup, it's even better.
iCloud backups cover basically application data and data like photos and such. iOS will not backup authentication information like passwords and account information to iCloud - Apple has said they do not want that information, and by not backing it up, it means when Apple is forced to hand it over your data, what's not there is not there.
iTunes local backups will cover low-security authentication information like WiFi passwords and such. But the ultimate in comprehensive backups is the iTunes encrypted backup - because it's encrypted, iOS will back up everything including account and authentication information (email accounts and passwords, etc). But these are local backups that don't touch Apple's servers at all.
iOS has a lot of privacy options, and you can completely disable iCloud so iOS will not use it at all - it won't upload anything to it, it would backup to it, etc. The only real privacy leaks are apps, but even those have limited access - you can reset your ID code so app data cannot be linked to one specific device. And if you don't use iCloud, then the only thing Apple can hand over would be your purchase history.
In all seriousness, I wonder when we're going to start responding with tactics like this. Imagine not just fuzzing the data, but imagine software that mimics thousands of these watches sending the fuzzed data back. Which one is the real data?
And start sending wildly strange data too - you can bet their tools aren't going to have robust error checking, so an interesting set of numbers may cause it just segfault.
Imagine polluting their database with data that crashes all their tools - their nightly analytics fails constantly, they can't load their database, etc. If you scatter the errors throughout they'll have a hard time cleaning up the data...
From the article; "a single leadership decision eliminated salary negotiation for new employees"
Salary transparency is a good idea and it can make gender or racial discrimination more difficult. But what does that have to do with eliminating salary negotiation? Employees (new or old) could still negotiate based on their worth to the company. And transparency would mean that everyone would know what their salary was. So everyone could judge whether the employee was worth what they were being paid. It would be possible for each worker to determine if they were being short-changed because a less talented or less hard-working employee was being paid more. That is exactly the information that is necessary to engage in principled and informed negotiations. And preventing that knowledge is exactly what companies like to do to prevent informed negotiations.
Exactly, salary transparency has nothing to do with salary negotiation. Knowing everyone's salary doesn't mean you still can't negotiate your salary. In fact, usually after it's all public, people start negotiating.
The only reason we don't have it is threefold. First, most companies disallow it because keeping salaries secret benefits them. Second, it's cultural - people would rather talk about their sex lives than money (this is an American thing). Third, it's rooted in the fear that if everyone knows what they're paid, they may face a salary cut because they may be overpaid compared to everyone else.
#3 is a false belief - it turns out employees don't feel like someone is overpaid and call for their salary to be cut, but rather they are underpaid and begin negotiations for a raise.
The units in TFS are messed up. So it's 15.38TB... Assuming the stupid new IEC decimal units, not real 2^40 terabytes. But then performance is measured in MBps, or megabytes per second. TFA compares 1,200 with the typical figure of 550 MBps for consumer SSDs, but that's 2^20 byte megabytes measured by benchmarking software. Who knows if Samsung uses the same units, or is trying to screw up with decimal megabytes.
Which is why you use those "stupid units" so you don't confuse TB/TiB and MB/MiB. Though I just assume it's all decimal because it's not only easier, it makes numbers look bigger and thus, people use it over base-2. Since it's storage, it's almost always in decimal, at that.
Still, 1.2GB/sec is not that impressive - I think even a reasonably priced MacBook already gets that speed off its PCIe SSD, if not higher (1.2-1.7GB/sec). Granted, they're only up to 1/2 TB now in size, so this thing's roughly 30 times bigger, but still.
SATA3 gets 540MB/sec typically fully loaded, so this SSD using SAS is getting a little over twice that. It's why consumer SSDs have started migrating to PCIe.
I was interested to read the other day that a couple of the core developers are now funded by very old-world banking interests. It seems so odd to me to see self-proclaimed Bitcoin evangelists fighting against efforts to spread its adoption.
I think it's more of the "coolness" thing - Bitcoin represents everything traditional fiat money isn't. It's independent! It's cool! It's digital! It's not money! No government!
Now that it's matured though, that counter-culture feel has gone away as it becomes more mainstream. And being mainstream means having to deal with all sorts of issues that you didn't have to worry about. Government interest, regulatory interest, big banks wanting in, etc.,
All of a sudden, that cool counter-culture it's-not-money thing becomes a mainstream item that starts getting a lot of old-world money interest.
Actually... to be serious... did any OS even *have* password protected lock-screens c.a. 1993 ? I don't recall any - and certainly none that had it by default.
I'm certain at least TWO did. Unix (and Unix-like) and Windows NT. Unix with their X terminals often had a lock function implemented a part of xdmcp or something, and NT3.5 was already a multiuser OS. Granted though, NT 3.5 looked a lot like Windows 3.1, so there may have been apprehension since you expect it to crash...
Why do all of their voice-activated prompts require me to repeat the name of the corporation, over and over? I already know I'm using a Google phone, it says so right at the top of every screen, and I have to say their name every time I want to use voice search anyway. It's kind of creepy.
It's really only Google.
I mean, Android uses "OK Google" as the default activation key for their assistant while everyone else is not related to the company. iOS uses "Hey Siri" and I think Amazon uses "Alexa".
I think it's more personable - Siri and Alexa over cold, corporate Google...
At least with mobile payment, you can say you'll pay by credit and just use Apple Pay or Google Wallet or whatever without having to announce what you're using...
it's not though. 160 reps voted in favor for it, 1 voted against it. 38 voted to abstain, and 94 ducked out of the room so they wouldn't have to take a position on the bill (this is common, happens in US all the time).
sounds unanimous to me, or as close as you'll ever get in a democracy.
Those that ducked out of the room to avoid the vote ARE abstaining. They're just not stating so blatantly.
The thing with abstaining instead of "no" is that abstaining does two things. First, you avoid having to take a position - perhaps the bill is bad now, but it could be fixed later. Saying no now and killing it may not be the best idea.
Second, and more importantly, abstaining means you're counted as absent in the vote. In doing so, this could mean the quorum required for a vote is not met. A quorum is when there are considered to be sufficient voters that business can be conducted - for example, should a vote need to be conducted, but only one person shows up, then that person's vote doesn't necessarily count because one person is typically insufficient to have a quorum. It's also why politicians don't try to do "dirty tricks" like wait for when the opposition has a meeting or something to carry out a vote - if they can't get a quorum, the vote can be held, but it's no longer valid.
So by abstaining, they're really saying "this bill has flaws, but it might be the right thing if we can fix them before enactment".
It's fucking ludicrous that a vessel carrying a billion dollars worth of cargo isn't protected by at least a pair of.50 caliber Gatling guns. These pirates should be getting turned into a red mist at 500 yards.
Well, the BIG problem is firearms and every country has a ton of laws around it. It's been debated, and most shipping companies are averse to it because the permits and paperwork involved would basically halt the industry. Especially if you're transiting waters.
It's why they typically use water cannons instead.
Then again, shipping is really just a balance of risks. Every trip they easily lose a few containers overboard - it's a rather large amount once you realize just how much is shipped. And containers aren't typically holding a lot of valuable goods - the entire ship may have billions of dollars of cargo, but each container only has a few million dollars, and that's retail. Most containers have far less valuable goods inside. (Think stuff like toys, t-shirts, etc.).
Valuables like electronics are typically air-shipped because the delays over regular sea shipping are huge. While busy routes may be able to get you a product from factory to local shores in a month (for a direct route), less direct shipments can easily take 2-3 months. Or more, depending on how many stops the ship makes - it can take 3-4 days at each port to offload containers.
Now that we are referring to netflix subscribers by the same name we may need to come up with another name for people who steal at sea. What should we call them? Searates? Picaroons? Thieves?
Well, the nautical version has been around a long time, and the copyright version has been around since the 17th century or so when copyright was first established.
Though I have to admit, this is one of the few times where the two worlds collide...
Maybe we can do what the Navy does - where "pilot" is an overloaded term (one is the sailor who guides ships into port, the other is the aviator)... pilot retains its traditional nautical terminology, while flying pilots are known as naval aviators...
Bottom line is - Who bought that iPhone? If it's you, then yeah, your employer has no business touching your phone w/o your consent. But if it's THEM - like it was for Syed Farook, then not only do they have all rights, but YOU should NOT be using it for non-work purposes.
It's not so simple though.
Yes, if it's the employer's phone, it'll be monitored.
But remember, a lot of people are in the whole "BYOD" (bring your own device) thing where they may not even realize this is happening. So yes, the employees are consenting, but they may not realize just the extent of the consent they've given.
it's a very tricky topic since when you leave, they could remote-wipe your phone
With their current overreach, and the public spectacle they decided to make out of it, they not only cut themselves off from any information that would have been on the phones themselves in the future; they've pretty much assured that anyone using an iPhone as part of a nefarious endeavor will make sure not to upload anything to iCloud going forward. I seem to recall a fable about killing the goose that lays golden eggs.
There are actually many good reasons to do local backups (non-iCloud) through iTunes. And in fact, encrypted local backups make a lot of sense because the iCloud and unencrypted backups do not contain some information Apple deems sensitive.
Examples include e-mail credentials - iCloud will not store your credentials at all. Apple doesn't want it and if they don't collect it, they can't hand it over, either. The same goes with unencrypted backups - again, Apple doesn't want to store the information unencrypted and make it a backdoor into iOS data.
They ARE stored if you use encrypted backups since it's encrypted and the key is different and not necessarily tied to your Apple ID password, PIN or other identifier.
Same as taking an FM transmitter meant for linking to a personal vehicle stereo and hooking the antenna to an amplifier.
Actually, no. The FCC has excluded low-power FM transmitters from requiring licensing, thus making those little FM transmitters for your car perfectly legal. The FCC basically limits their power to 200 feet or less range (the FCC measures output not by mW, but by complete system, so if you have a 200W transmitter with a piss-poor antenna that gives you 200 feet max, that works. Same goes for a 10mW transmitter with efficient antenna).
XM Sirius Radio (back when it was XM Radio) got in trouble because their FM transmitters were way more powerful than that.
But no, FM transmitters have an exception as long as it's limited range. The transmitters still need FCC certification as they are intentional radiators, but license to operate and broadcast on the AM/FM band is not required for low-power FM.
You may not believe it, but/. supported Unicode for probably over 15 years now.
Its just early abuse by posters destined to misuse it forced the implementation of a whitelist of acceptable UTF-8 characters, which basically are all the printables between 32 through 127. Everything else is effectively stripped. Since UTF-8 uses the high-bit to indicate that the codepoint consists of additional bytes,
(The Unicode support came as part of Slashdot.jp way back when.).
If you google for erocS or even 5:erocS, you can try to guess what the Unicode "fun" posters and trolls did that forced the implementation of the whitelist.
Actually, in reading this article.. I wonder how the test was introduced to the subjects. Were they told that the purpose of the test was to pretend that their lives were in danger and act as they would if it were true? Or were they told that the point of the test was to follow the robot. If I am in this test and I am led to believe that the purpose is to follow the robot and I am not absolutely convinced that my life is truly in danger, I am much more likely to follow the original directions.
Funny enough, but testing of airplanes actually has a way to test emergency egress from aircraft that so accurately mimics a real fire, yet keeps everyone pretty much safe.
They do it by saying everyone has to exit, but those who exit first get a higher monetary award. The chaos that ensues has been described as replicating the actual scenario extremely accurately by victims of airplane disasters.
So why aren't there more MLC based flash arrays, especially all-flash models? For storage capacities under 24 TB raw, it would be pretty price competitive to HDD but produce a storage device with insane I/O potential.
Because flash is expensive compared to spinning rust.
24TB of hard drive storage can be had for maybe $1000 or so, 4 x 8TB hard drives in a RAID5 style array.
a 1TB SSD runs around $400. 24TBs of that is $96K, raw storage. Maybe you can get a bulk discount and pay $60k.
Sure, you can buy 2/4 TB SSDs as well, but their price scales pretty much linearly.
And excepting very few SSDs, ALL are using MLC flash - SLC is pretty much reserved for the ultra high end enterprise-grade SSDs.
Trump is the end result of lots of people feeling disenfranchised and angry over many, many years. To be fair, there's a lot to be angry about, but I don't think that Trump's supporters are really thinking this one through. People who are angry rarely do. They just want "something" to be done.
Welcome to the second wave of "Hope and Change" as a political platform.
Trump is leading because he's managing to be different. By speaking his mind, and saying whatever he wants. That's what Trump is going for and that's what people are seeing in him. He's not being careful and trying to PC it up, or anything.
Of course, we don't know how Trump will behave if he's in office. The public doesn't care - he's just a breath of fresh air compared to the tired old politicians for life. (And yes, Trump has been the leader of the things people are complaining about - buying up companies, shutting them down and laying everyone off, etc. Disney's just Trump-lite).
And look at what is being said - it's all economic. The religious/gun-nut/etc faction of the Republicans are downright scared of Trump because they know of all the candidates, if the popularity holds, they are in trouble.
But I am one data point. What you're missing is that Valve is not targeting PC gamers right now. They're trying to break into the console market, where nobody cares what the OS is, as long as it works. Linux gaming is a fringe benefit. So you're both right and wrong. People won't change their OS, but they might buy steam machines...
Unlikely, unless someone subsidizes steam machines hard. Because a steam machine really costs a TON of money compared to a PS4 or Xbone. Toss in a decade's worth of premium membership (PS+ or Xbox Live Gold) and you'll approach the cost of a decent steam machine.
You have to remember the goal is to have a machine last around 10 years or so for a console (both the PS3 and Xbox360 are around that age), so an equivalent steam machine should last just as long for that price. Unfortunately, the cheap steam machines with their i3 processors and midrange graphics are unlikely to do it. To get something better you have to spend over $1000+. Which is equivalent to a PS4 + 12 years of PS+, or an Xbone + 10 years of Xbox Live.
And even the legendary advantages of Steam are going away - the steam sales aren't all that great, and both Sony and Microsoft are giving away fairly decent games with their premium memberships (I will say Sony is more Indie-oriented, while Microsoft seems to give more mainstream games).
I suppose a question is - what is Valve working on? Given like the last game they released was years ago...
Yep. Last time I flew I had a nice shoving match with the person in front of me, culminating with actually having to talk to the stupid arrogant fuck. I don't like to talk to people who are any of those things, but someone who repeatedly smashes your knees with their seat without looking back to see what's happening after the first time needs to go out an airlock, let alone out the door of an airplane without a chute. Then they gave me dirty looks about it, as if I set the spacing of the seats or as if I were the one who gave away the exit row and bulkhead seats to short people, when both are the airline's fault. Americans are getting bigger, but American air companies are taking away space. What do people think will happen?
I develop small bladder syndrome. Getting up with the guy in front reclined? Almost impossible and you'll bump and shake the seat just maneuvering in and out. Any sleep the guy plans on getting gets done in 15 minute blocks before another vigorous shake, bump and rattle wakes him up again.
Of course, perhaps they should just take away the ability to recline - it would make for a simpler seat in the end which would let them stuff more people in.
AMD will eventually probably get a driver out, they were one of the driving forces behind Vulkan, however they suck at drivers so it always seems to take them a long time.
Actually, AMD already supports Vulkan - it was based on their proprietary Mantis APIs. And it actually makes AMD shine if you use their draw-call optimizations (The only game using it, The Talos Principle, doesn't) compared to NVidia - the AMD GPUs are faster if you properly use it.
And it is completely, absolutely, 100% unnecessary.
o Plug in not-yet configured device.
o Shortly thereafter, it accepts DHCP configuration. Now it has an IP.
o Then it vomits out a tiny UDP (broadcast) packet every 60 seconds or so that says "I'm a WackyWidget and my IP is Yad.daY.yad.daY"
o You start app, it listens for the UDP packet, when it hears it, it begins comm via TCP at the IP identified in the UDP broadcast. UDP broadcasts then cease until, or unless, the TCP (and possibly the DHCP) connection is dropped, in which case, begin again at whatever step is needed.
That's it. That's ALL of it. You need nothing more for an IP camera, a smart power plug, a smart lightbulb, an aquarium controller, the garage door opener, etc., etc., ad infinitum.
If you THEN want to expose WackyWidget to the WAN, you could enable that separately.
If you were out of your damned mind.
If you haven't yet figured out that "the cloud" is nothing but a way to take/get things from you -- money, data, ownership of media, etc. -- then you really need to look at all this harder.
which makes the device useless to the people who buy it. People buy security cameras with IP connectivity so they can view their camera from a remote location, for alerts and the ability to view and control devices remotely.
Like you have a camera on your front door. It sends you an alert someone is there, to which you access your camera to see who it is. Generally, this is useful if the UPS or FedEx guy comes while you're at work, at which point you can ask them to drop the package off in the garage (which you open and close remotely). No package left on the door stop, and the garage door is closed by you so it's safe and waiting for you.
And that's the reason why people are going for the "cloud" stuff. Sure there's probably a few lazy asses using it inside their home (or their home is a huge mansion that takes 10 minutes to get from one side to the other), but the key selling point of this "IoT" devices is remote access.
Remotely turn on the lights. Remotely turn on the heat or AC so you come home to a warm or cool house. View cameras and recordings while you're out.
What you propose is secure, but gives consumers none of that. They're buying it for the remote accessibility and giving them only local access until they do a bunch of fancy stuff is basically counter to what consumers are buying the things for.
According to the article, this is a government issued phone, issued by his employer. As such, there is no "privacy" issue as anything on the phone belongs to the government. If this was his personal phone, that might be a different situation. But, now, after hearing this, it sounds like the government is asking Apple to allow them into their own phone that may have data related to a crime that one of their employees committed. That is not a personal privacy issue.
This IS a personal privacy issue. Not so much for the phone in question (the guy is dead, though sometimes the dead want their privacy), but everyone else's privacy.
Because it's not just one phone, it's 15 more phones they want Apple to unlock. We don't know why those phones are there, but they're there. And another couple of hundred if you expand it from DoJ to LEOs all over the country.
Heck, if you travel - want your phone searched just like your laptop? Doesn't matter if you object or anything.
Tim Cook knows once the software is written, it's game over. It doesn't matter if just this once it works on this phone and everything destroyed (documentation, software, source code, servers, computers, etc) - you can do it once, you can do it over and over and over again. The software must not be allowed to exist.
Apple doesn't want the data. In fact, it's the government's phone, and if they take it to an Apple store, the geniuses will simply wipe and reset the phone since you're supposed to have a backup of it. Apple makes it easy to back up your phone in case anything bad happens (alas, backing up Android is far harder). You can back it up to iTunes, encrypted even (and there's lots of good reasons for that - encrypted backups store EVERYTHING, including credentials. Regular iTunes backups don't store credentials). If you trust Apple, you can back up to iCloud. Or use both, because Apple intentionally makes it impossible to recover - the only way is to wipe and restore. Which is why an iPhone today can back up to either every time you charge it and it's connected to WiFi.
That's why the software doesn't exist. Apple doesn't want it to exist, and they make it so for Joe Q. Average, they won't lose all their data by offering multiple ways to back up their data. Lose your phone? Wipe it! The backup's there for you to recover.
And anyone find it funny that the government/FBI changed the password? Isn't the first line of action on a lost phone to wipe it remotely?
This is one more case of DRM making life harder for the consumer. I live in a country with spotty, slow internet access. If I can't watch my movies without getting online, then I won't buy them.
It's actually kind of ironic, really.
Because these days, no one's ripping Blu-Rays to upload them for torrents - they're ripping them off streaming, rental or digital download sites. And the big irony is, they're all around 8-10GB. Why is this ironic? Because just a decade ago, we had a great big "High Definition Format War" where it was HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray. And a decade later, Blu-Ray sales are pretty much flat, because everyone's going digital with it, and on average, they can fit on a DVD-9, an old 20 year old format!
Yes, the quality's not so good, but people do not want to download Blu-Rays. I do. I have a bunch of Blu-Ray rips, and when people see them, they say yes, they want them. Then they see they're 30-50GB and it's no thanks. They ask why I don't just use the 8-10 GB high-quality versions. It's all they use and all they want.
Shutting down SlySoft doesn't do a thing - few people were downloading the full rips (mostly enthusiasts), and the pirates know they can just get it off online sites that provide it in a far more downloadable format because most people don't want Blu-Ray quality. 8-10GB provides "good enough" quality and they can fit 3-5 times as many on their hard drive as storing rips.
I know - I have media players that do BD-ISOs and have to use the largest hard drives I can find for them, and they still don't hold all that much.
UHD Blu-Rays not being cracked? I'm pretty sure it only affects people like me who are crazy enough to want the full thing. Because for most people, they can just torrent the 4K rips already. (And no, the HDFury products are not used for that - why bother when HDCP 2.2 strippers are sold all over Amazon?)
Which really puts it in perspective - few people are going to buy physical media. Those people are generally enthusiasts and will buy and use products like AnyDVD and DVDFab and whatnot to have it on file servers in their home.
Joe Q. Public not want or care about these rips - they're too big and unwieldy. Why bother with a 60GB UHD Blu-Ray rip when you can just get it off torrents for say, 15GB? Just like they prefer the 8-10GB HD movies over 50GB rips or 25GB re-encodes,
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They do, actually. Rocketry enthusiasts routinely submit NOTAMs (Notice to Airmen) to the FAA for distribution notifying that areas of airspace are to be closed off for rocket flights. Granted, these vehicles routinely reach anywhere from 1000' to 30,000' so they just close it all off.
And I believe in the areas allowed, it's actually marked on charts as restricted airspace so you must fly around it or get permission from the controlling authority.
Of course, the problem is this usually takes place far away from civilization into basically deserted areas (also far away from popular air routes). which takes a lot of fun out of the whole thing when you have to drive 2-3 hours to get to the cleared area, but it means no one is even close to being put in danger.
Right now, we're relying on big sky theory ("see and avoid"). It works, most of the time, until your big sky gets a little crowded. Near misses happen pretty routinely, even under control of ATC. It's also why ADS-B is a new and exciting technology - before that, smaller aircraft don't usually have TCAS systems, while the bigger airlines do. (Proactive pilots routinely purchased "PCAS" Personal Collision Avoidance Systems - basically a portable transponder receiver that works identically to a TCAS except it can't do a TCAS negotiation). A TCAS to TCAS link means two aircraft converging would communicate for a non-conflicting resolution - one will climb, the other emergency descent. A TCAS advisory is considered so important, they are to be immediately obeyed even if it goes against ATC. (In the early days of TCAS, this did cause collisions).
ADS-B tries to provide same but is available to all.
And let's just say TCAS advisories, PCAS advisories and ADS-B traffic displays have been praised by many a pilot.
The challenge of the grid is that supply must equal demand - if people are consuming 100GW of power, you have to generate 100GW. If you generate 99GW, people notice as motors slow and lights dim, and if you do 101GW, people notice when their electrical devices burn out.
It's why we have grids because the supply and demand gets averaged out as the number of generation and consumers increase so imbalances cause much smaller changes - 1GW on and off makes a lot less problems if you're dealing with 10,000GW demand than if you're dealing with 100GW.
But then you get instability as currents start going where you don't quite expect and this can cause oscillations and ripples that cause safety systems to break links.
Utility level storage systems are available - either flywheel or standard batteries. The purpose of which is to provide some robustness - smaller grids use it so sudden changes in load or generation can be tided over by the battery bank. The only problem is obviously the amount of storage is tiny and lifetimes are limited - they really are to help tide over until other generation can be brought online.
Actually, you can turn off all the telemetry in iOS quite easily - there's lots of options to send exactly what you want back to Apple, or not.
And iCloud backups are optional - Apple will set it if you set it up without iTunes so you, the user ALWAYS have a backup. Because if you forget the PIN or need to replace the phone, Apple may try to transfer the data, but if they can't, they can only restore a backup.
If you forget your PIN, Apple will reset the phone back to factory, and help you restore your iCloud backup. If the phone is damaged and data can't be acccessed, Apple will restore from backup.
So if you don't use iTunes, iOS will use iCloud to backup because there are plenty of situations where you can lose all your data.
If you use iTunes, iCloud backups are off by default because it's assumed you want to backup your device via iTunes (which works over WiFi as well). And if you back up to an encrypted iTunes backup, it's even better.
iCloud backups cover basically application data and data like photos and such. iOS will not backup authentication information like passwords and account information to iCloud - Apple has said they do not want that information, and by not backing it up, it means when Apple is forced to hand it over your data, what's not there is not there.
iTunes local backups will cover low-security authentication information like WiFi passwords and such. But the ultimate in comprehensive backups is the iTunes encrypted backup - because it's encrypted, iOS will back up everything including account and authentication information (email accounts and passwords, etc). But these are local backups that don't touch Apple's servers at all.
iOS has a lot of privacy options, and you can completely disable iCloud so iOS will not use it at all - it won't upload anything to it, it would backup to it, etc. The only real privacy leaks are apps, but even those have limited access - you can reset your ID code so app data cannot be linked to one specific device. And if you don't use iCloud, then the only thing Apple can hand over would be your purchase history.
And start sending wildly strange data too - you can bet their tools aren't going to have robust error checking, so an interesting set of numbers may cause it just segfault.
Imagine polluting their database with data that crashes all their tools - their nightly analytics fails constantly, they can't load their database, etc. If you scatter the errors throughout they'll have a hard time cleaning up the data...
Exactly, salary transparency has nothing to do with salary negotiation. Knowing everyone's salary doesn't mean you still can't negotiate your salary. In fact, usually after it's all public, people start negotiating.
The only reason we don't have it is threefold. First, most companies disallow it because keeping salaries secret benefits them. Second, it's cultural - people would rather talk about their sex lives than money (this is an American thing). Third, it's rooted in the fear that if everyone knows what they're paid, they may face a salary cut because they may be overpaid compared to everyone else.
#3 is a false belief - it turns out employees don't feel like someone is overpaid and call for their salary to be cut, but rather they are underpaid and begin negotiations for a raise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
In short, open salaries actually encourage salary negotiations.
Which is why you use those "stupid units" so you don't confuse TB/TiB and MB/MiB. Though I just assume it's all decimal because it's not only easier, it makes numbers look bigger and thus, people use it over base-2. Since it's storage, it's almost always in decimal, at that.
Still, 1.2GB/sec is not that impressive - I think even a reasonably priced MacBook already gets that speed off its PCIe SSD, if not higher (1.2-1.7GB/sec). Granted, they're only up to 1/2 TB now in size, so this thing's roughly 30 times bigger, but still.
SATA3 gets 540MB/sec typically fully loaded, so this SSD using SAS is getting a little over twice that. It's why consumer SSDs have started migrating to PCIe.
I think it's more of the "coolness" thing - Bitcoin represents everything traditional fiat money isn't. It's independent! It's cool! It's digital! It's not money! No government!
Now that it's matured though, that counter-culture feel has gone away as it becomes more mainstream. And being mainstream means having to deal with all sorts of issues that you didn't have to worry about. Government interest, regulatory interest, big banks wanting in, etc.,
All of a sudden, that cool counter-culture it's-not-money thing becomes a mainstream item that starts getting a lot of old-world money interest.
I'm certain at least TWO did. Unix (and Unix-like) and Windows NT. Unix with their X terminals often had a lock function implemented a part of xdmcp or something, and NT3.5 was already a multiuser OS. Granted though, NT 3.5 looked a lot like Windows 3.1, so there may have been apprehension since you expect it to crash...
It's really only Google.
I mean, Android uses "OK Google" as the default activation key for their assistant while everyone else is not related to the company. iOS uses "Hey Siri" and I think Amazon uses "Alexa".
I think it's more personable - Siri and Alexa over cold, corporate Google...
At least with mobile payment, you can say you'll pay by credit and just use Apple Pay or Google Wallet or whatever without having to announce what you're using...
Those that ducked out of the room to avoid the vote ARE abstaining. They're just not stating so blatantly.
The thing with abstaining instead of "no" is that abstaining does two things. First, you avoid having to take a position - perhaps the bill is bad now, but it could be fixed later. Saying no now and killing it may not be the best idea.
Second, and more importantly, abstaining means you're counted as absent in the vote. In doing so, this could mean the quorum required for a vote is not met. A quorum is when there are considered to be sufficient voters that business can be conducted - for example, should a vote need to be conducted, but only one person shows up, then that person's vote doesn't necessarily count because one person is typically insufficient to have a quorum. It's also why politicians don't try to do "dirty tricks" like wait for when the opposition has a meeting or something to carry out a vote - if they can't get a quorum, the vote can be held, but it's no longer valid.
So by abstaining, they're really saying "this bill has flaws, but it might be the right thing if we can fix them before enactment".
Well, the BIG problem is firearms and every country has a ton of laws around it. It's been debated, and most shipping companies are averse to it because the permits and paperwork involved would basically halt the industry. Especially if you're transiting waters.
It's why they typically use water cannons instead.
Then again, shipping is really just a balance of risks. Every trip they easily lose a few containers overboard - it's a rather large amount once you realize just how much is shipped. And containers aren't typically holding a lot of valuable goods - the entire ship may have billions of dollars of cargo, but each container only has a few million dollars, and that's retail. Most containers have far less valuable goods inside. (Think stuff like toys, t-shirts, etc.).
Valuables like electronics are typically air-shipped because the delays over regular sea shipping are huge. While busy routes may be able to get you a product from factory to local shores in a month (for a direct route), less direct shipments can easily take 2-3 months. Or more, depending on how many stops the ship makes - it can take 3-4 days at each port to offload containers.
Well, the nautical version has been around a long time, and the copyright version has been around since the 17th century or so when copyright was first established.
Though I have to admit, this is one of the few times where the two worlds collide...
Maybe we can do what the Navy does - where "pilot" is an overloaded term (one is the sailor who guides ships into port, the other is the aviator)... pilot retains its traditional nautical terminology, while flying pilots are known as naval aviators...
It's not so simple though.
Yes, if it's the employer's phone, it'll be monitored.
But remember, a lot of people are in the whole "BYOD" (bring your own device) thing where they may not even realize this is happening. So yes, the employees are consenting, but they may not realize just the extent of the consent they've given.
it's a very tricky topic since when you leave, they could remote-wipe your phone
There are actually many good reasons to do local backups (non-iCloud) through iTunes. And in fact, encrypted local backups make a lot of sense because the iCloud and unencrypted backups do not contain some information Apple deems sensitive.
Examples include e-mail credentials - iCloud will not store your credentials at all. Apple doesn't want it and if they don't collect it, they can't hand it over, either. The same goes with unencrypted backups - again, Apple doesn't want to store the information unencrypted and make it a backdoor into iOS data.
They ARE stored if you use encrypted backups since it's encrypted and the key is different and not necessarily tied to your Apple ID password, PIN or other identifier.
Actually, no. The FCC has excluded low-power FM transmitters from requiring licensing, thus making those little FM transmitters for your car perfectly legal. The FCC basically limits their power to 200 feet or less range (the FCC measures output not by mW, but by complete system, so if you have a 200W transmitter with a piss-poor antenna that gives you 200 feet max, that works. Same goes for a 10mW transmitter with efficient antenna).
XM Sirius Radio (back when it was XM Radio) got in trouble because their FM transmitters were way more powerful than that.
But no, FM transmitters have an exception as long as it's limited range. The transmitters still need FCC certification as they are intentional radiators, but license to operate and broadcast on the AM/FM band is not required for low-power FM.
You may not believe it, but /. supported Unicode for probably over 15 years now.
Its just early abuse by posters destined to misuse it forced the implementation of a whitelist of acceptable UTF-8 characters, which basically are all the printables between 32 through 127. Everything else is effectively stripped. Since UTF-8 uses the high-bit to indicate that the codepoint consists of additional bytes,
(The Unicode support came as part of Slashdot.jp way back when.).
If you google for erocS or even 5:erocS, you can try to guess what the Unicode "fun" posters and trolls did that forced the implementation of the whitelist.
Funny enough, but testing of airplanes actually has a way to test emergency egress from aircraft that so accurately mimics a real fire, yet keeps everyone pretty much safe.
They do it by saying everyone has to exit, but those who exit first get a higher monetary award. The chaos that ensues has been described as replicating the actual scenario extremely accurately by victims of airplane disasters.
Question is - did the researchers do that?
Because flash is expensive compared to spinning rust.
24TB of hard drive storage can be had for maybe $1000 or so, 4 x 8TB hard drives in a RAID5 style array.
a 1TB SSD runs around $400. 24TBs of that is $96K, raw storage. Maybe you can get a bulk discount and pay $60k.
Sure, you can buy 2/4 TB SSDs as well, but their price scales pretty much linearly.
And excepting very few SSDs, ALL are using MLC flash - SLC is pretty much reserved for the ultra high end enterprise-grade SSDs.
Trump is leading because he's managing to be different. By speaking his mind, and saying whatever he wants. That's what Trump is going for and that's what people are seeing in him. He's not being careful and trying to PC it up, or anything.
Of course, we don't know how Trump will behave if he's in office. The public doesn't care - he's just a breath of fresh air compared to the tired old politicians for life. (And yes, Trump has been the leader of the things people are complaining about - buying up companies, shutting them down and laying everyone off, etc. Disney's just Trump-lite).
And look at what is being said - it's all economic. The religious/gun-nut/etc faction of the Republicans are downright scared of Trump because they know of all the candidates, if the popularity holds, they are in trouble.
Unlikely, unless someone subsidizes steam machines hard. Because a steam machine really costs a TON of money compared to a PS4 or Xbone. Toss in a decade's worth of premium membership (PS+ or Xbox Live Gold) and you'll approach the cost of a decent steam machine.
You have to remember the goal is to have a machine last around 10 years or so for a console (both the PS3 and Xbox360 are around that age), so an equivalent steam machine should last just as long for that price. Unfortunately, the cheap steam machines with their i3 processors and midrange graphics are unlikely to do it. To get something better you have to spend over $1000+. Which is equivalent to a PS4 + 12 years of PS+, or an Xbone + 10 years of Xbox Live.
And even the legendary advantages of Steam are going away - the steam sales aren't all that great, and both Sony and Microsoft are giving away fairly decent games with their premium memberships (I will say Sony is more Indie-oriented, while Microsoft seems to give more mainstream games).
I suppose a question is - what is Valve working on? Given like the last game they released was years ago...
I develop small bladder syndrome. Getting up with the guy in front reclined? Almost impossible and you'll bump and shake the seat just maneuvering in and out. Any sleep the guy plans on getting gets done in 15 minute blocks before another vigorous shake, bump and rattle wakes him up again.
Of course, perhaps they should just take away the ability to recline - it would make for a simpler seat in the end which would let them stuff more people in.
Actually, AMD already supports Vulkan - it was based on their proprietary Mantis APIs. And it actually makes AMD shine if you use their draw-call optimizations (The only game using it, The Talos Principle, doesn't) compared to NVidia - the AMD GPUs are faster if you properly use it.
which makes the device useless to the people who buy it. People buy security cameras with IP connectivity so they can view their camera from a remote location, for alerts and the ability to view and control devices remotely.
Like you have a camera on your front door. It sends you an alert someone is there, to which you access your camera to see who it is. Generally, this is useful if the UPS or FedEx guy comes while you're at work, at which point you can ask them to drop the package off in the garage (which you open and close remotely). No package left on the door stop, and the garage door is closed by you so it's safe and waiting for you.
And that's the reason why people are going for the "cloud" stuff. Sure there's probably a few lazy asses using it inside their home (or their home is a huge mansion that takes 10 minutes to get from one side to the other), but the key selling point of this "IoT" devices is remote access.
Remotely turn on the lights. Remotely turn on the heat or AC so you come home to a warm or cool house. View cameras and recordings while you're out.
What you propose is secure, but gives consumers none of that. They're buying it for the remote accessibility and giving them only local access until they do a bunch of fancy stuff is basically counter to what consumers are buying the things for.
This IS a personal privacy issue. Not so much for the phone in question (the guy is dead, though sometimes the dead want their privacy), but everyone else's privacy.
Because it's not just one phone, it's 15 more phones they want Apple to unlock. We don't know why those phones are there, but they're there. And another couple of hundred if you expand it from DoJ to LEOs all over the country.
Heck, if you travel - want your phone searched just like your laptop? Doesn't matter if you object or anything.
Tim Cook knows once the software is written, it's game over. It doesn't matter if just this once it works on this phone and everything destroyed (documentation, software, source code, servers, computers, etc) - you can do it once, you can do it over and over and over again. The software must not be allowed to exist.
Apple doesn't want the data. In fact, it's the government's phone, and if they take it to an Apple store, the geniuses will simply wipe and reset the phone since you're supposed to have a backup of it. Apple makes it easy to back up your phone in case anything bad happens (alas, backing up Android is far harder). You can back it up to iTunes, encrypted even (and there's lots of good reasons for that - encrypted backups store EVERYTHING, including credentials. Regular iTunes backups don't store credentials). If you trust Apple, you can back up to iCloud. Or use both, because Apple intentionally makes it impossible to recover - the only way is to wipe and restore. Which is why an iPhone today can back up to either every time you charge it and it's connected to WiFi.
That's why the software doesn't exist. Apple doesn't want it to exist, and they make it so for Joe Q. Average, they won't lose all their data by offering multiple ways to back up their data. Lose your phone? Wipe it! The backup's there for you to recover.
And anyone find it funny that the government/FBI changed the password? Isn't the first line of action on a lost phone to wipe it remotely?
It's actually kind of ironic, really.
Because these days, no one's ripping Blu-Rays to upload them for torrents - they're ripping them off streaming, rental or digital download sites. And the big irony is, they're all around 8-10GB. Why is this ironic? Because just a decade ago, we had a great big "High Definition Format War" where it was HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray. And a decade later, Blu-Ray sales are pretty much flat, because everyone's going digital with it, and on average, they can fit on a DVD-9, an old 20 year old format!
Yes, the quality's not so good, but people do not want to download Blu-Rays. I do. I have a bunch of Blu-Ray rips, and when people see them, they say yes, they want them. Then they see they're 30-50GB and it's no thanks. They ask why I don't just use the 8-10 GB high-quality versions. It's all they use and all they want.
Shutting down SlySoft doesn't do a thing - few people were downloading the full rips (mostly enthusiasts), and the pirates know they can just get it off online sites that provide it in a far more downloadable format because most people don't want Blu-Ray quality. 8-10GB provides "good enough" quality and they can fit 3-5 times as many on their hard drive as storing rips.
I know - I have media players that do BD-ISOs and have to use the largest hard drives I can find for them, and they still don't hold all that much.
UHD Blu-Rays not being cracked? I'm pretty sure it only affects people like me who are crazy enough to want the full thing. Because for most people, they can just torrent the 4K rips already. (And no, the HDFury products are not used for that - why bother when HDCP 2.2 strippers are sold all over Amazon?)
Which really puts it in perspective - few people are going to buy physical media. Those people are generally enthusiasts and will buy and use products like AnyDVD and DVDFab and whatnot to have it on file servers in their home.
Joe Q. Public not want or care about these rips - they're too big and unwieldy. Why bother with a 60GB UHD Blu-Ray rip when you can just get it off torrents for say, 15GB? Just like they prefer the 8-10GB HD movies over 50GB rips or 25GB re-encodes,