Nah, the Neocon delegation must have reached mount Doom and burned the communist manifesto so the great eye of Sauron will now shrink until it disappears and Jupiter implodes thus purging the threat of environmentalism from the face of the universe forever.
If it was so practical, why did they wholly cut funding. Seems like they had a long way to go to make the nuclear design feasible to where the crew was safe.
And how many civilians would fly with a nuclear reactor?
Replacing the nuclear reactor with batteries means A LOT of batteries. So I'm not sure how you can claim the whole idea is feasible just from a working nuclear design.
According to a Discovery Channel documentary:
1) There were two kinds of engine: Indirect Air Cycle that never got off the drawing board and Direct Air Cycle, that was actually built and tested but it emitted radioactive pollution and even back in the 50s and 60s people started to have second thoughts about a hundred or more things like this making regular operational flights spewing radioactive material over the countryside. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... 2) What happens when one crashes? (see pollution concerns raised in point 1). 3) Shielding proved to be a problem. The aircraft power plant was only partially shielded because of weight constraints. The crew sat in "radiation shadows". and the power plant radiated in all other directions. 5) Combat aircraft have been known to have very high peace time attrition rates, a case in point being the F-104 at 30%. (see pollution concerns raised in point 1). 4) The thing would have been a logistical and maintenance nightmare. 5) ICBMs became a more capable and practically unstoppable delivery options. ICBMs were also likely to be a much safer weapons package during handling and in day to day peacetime operation. 6) Nuclear submarines became a viable option. Here weight was no issue so reactors could have full shielding and safety mechanisms. Subs were also way stealthier than any bomber so their combat survivability rating was higher and they carried a bigger war-load.
I figured that all along. It took off on Apple hardware, with almost no pickup on normal PCs. That has finally started to happen a little - some upper end motherboards have 1 or 2 Thunderbolt ports now, and Asus has an add-on board for a few others - but it is really a niche thanks to its odd hardware requirements and lack of early adoption outside of Apple. USB is easier to use, and at least up to 3.0 has been backward compatible with older devices. With an even faster option, as long as they don't screw something up, I don't see how USB could not continue to be the leading connectivity standard.
Try hooking an external SSD up to you machine via USB3 and then via Thunderbolt and you'll see why Thunderbolt is desirable if you are transferring large amounts of data: http://gizmodo.com/5980157/thu.... Take a look at the "Time to write 16.9 Gb of data" row in the table at the bottom and imagine you are transferring 3,4 or 500 Gb. There is about 250 Gb of data on the SSD in my MacBook Pro, large amounts of that data can change frequently meaning long backup times and cutting the time it takes to write that stuff up to disk in half is a major bonus. The problem Thunderbolt has had is not just backwards compatibility, i..e. that here are so many USB 3 devices out there that it is going to take a looooong while to put a dent in the USB monoculture (as you correctly pointed out). Thunderbolt devices have also had a tendency to be more expensive which didn't help either nor did the fact that up until now you have only started to benefit from Thunderbolt for real when using SSDs and they are also expensive which just aggravates the cost problem. When the USB 3 alternative is 2-3 times less expensive than Thunderbolt the choice for the consumer is obvious. If there is going to be a USB standard that is comparable in speed to Thunderbolt, backwards compatible with all the old USB2 and USB3 devices and that has a better connector, Thunderbolt is doomed. Intel should have pushed Thunderbolt way more aggressively i.e. handed out Thunderbolt product licenses liberally, provide motherboard and peripheral manufacturers with incentives or even sell Thunderbolt chips at cost.
Had Snowden only leaked the unconstitutional domestic spying, he would be a hero. It should be very clear now that those leaks were just a cover for treason. His goal seems to be nothing less than the dismantling of our entire intelligence apparatus.
You can't hide an intelligence operation of this scale forever, this was going to come out sooner or later, Snowden is an inevitability. That having been said, while your concern over how the USA's ability to find out what color underwear everybody else is ordering online is a valid one, consider the economic impact of this. I'm sure Cisco and a whole horde of other US based network equipment manufactures were thrilled to the core when they woke up one morning and found out that the NSA just crashed their sales and to add insult to injury ensured that in the long term their overseas competitors will get a whole lot more business as governments and corporations look for secure and preferably domestic sources of network equipment. Maybe the fact that it was all done in the name of patriotism and national security will more than compensate these US businesses for any financial losses that result from this activity?
"In a poor country, only the rich can afford to get fat."
"In a rich country, only the rich can afford to stay thin."
Oh, brother, yet more of those simplified catch phrases Americans are so fond of. What it really takes to thin yourself down is adjusting your diet, exercising and a bit of willpower. Even doing nothing but significantly downscaling your portion sizes and getting a bit more movement will make a difference. Although the claim of lacking willpower is often made, I'm not sure a shortage of willpower is always the only problem. The hard part is actually not dragging yourself to the gym it's changing your diet since everything that's good for you also seems to taste like shit (true up to a point but you can cook tasty and healty food), also processed foods and fast food are designed to be addicting so you'll also have to deal with that addiction. Another demotivating factor is the fact that it's just plain time consuming (and really boring) to exercise sufficiently for it to make a difference. Most of the time I go to the gym (I'm overweight, but on a downard trend) I see most of the people there spending 10 minutes on a treadmill on the lowest setting, lifting 10-20 kg weights and not even breaking a sweat and another 20 minutes just sitting around or wandering aimlessly around (the guys spend a lot of time sitting on the exercise equipment staring at the female gym bunnies). The only ones doing proper exercise are:
[A] the gym bunnies, muscle mountains and that funky group of people that spend half the day in front of those giant mirrors hypnotically admiring themselves while they lift weighs (I call them the 'mirror posers'). [B] a handful of lard-asses such as myself who actually have come to terms with the truth of one of that cheesy axiom: "No pain, no gain" and put in the required daily 60-90 minutes at the gym.
If you are serious about loosing weight, get some professional advice, and come to terms with the fact that if your exercise routine does not make you sweat like a pig, your muscles burn and occasionally ache, and leaves you at least a bit out of breath you are probably doing something wrong.
DNA isn't pulling people away from taxonomy so much as replacing it with a vastly superior system. Classical taxonomy is kind of like classical mechanics. It's fine for most purposes, but it's not "complete" and its answers range from slightly inaccurate to flat out wrong depending on the question.
We no longer have to arbitrarily decide "ok, this is a new species because it's different in this way" we can now look at DNA and see exactly how it differs, what it's closest to, who its ancestors are, when it split, and so on. Names are inaccurate representations for humans to use. With DNA, the term "species" itself becomes somewhat irrelevant because we now know the system of species and genetics is much more fluid than that.
I'm not so sure Taxonomy has been replaced, it's just gotten a whole new and better tool and I suppose you could say the geneticists have kind of taken it over. In anthropology ancient DNA extraction where classification into species was done using skeletal morphology, DNA is likely to cause a whole lot of re-arrangement of the taxonomic classifications. When Svante Pääbo found Neanderthal DNA in modern humans he effectively threw the scientific equivalent of a hand grenade into the comfortably organized world of anthropology. His discovery shattered a widely accepted axiom and left a whole lot of people red-faced who'd been postulating that modern human admixture with archaic hominids was unlikely to the point of it being impossible. Technically modern non-African people belong to both the species H. Sapiens and H. Neanderthalensis, so the borderlines between species have all of a sudden become much more fuzzy thanks to geneticists. A really interesting recent development is that geneticists have found traces of extinct hominid populations that are only known from DNA analysis of living humans, not from discovered remains. Africans for example are now know to have interbred with archaic hominid populations but no physical specimens, i.e. skeletal samples of these archaic populations have ever been found so in that sense Africans aren't pure H. Sapients either. So we now have palaeontologist/archaeologists out in the field searching for physical remains of these 'shadow' or 'ghost' populations which has turned the normal practice in their field completely on it's head where you first found the bones and then took them to the lab for (DNA and other) analysis. As we get better at extracting DNA from ancient remains it will completely upend a lot of what we thought we knew about the mechanism of evolution.
The summary seems to think that Alibaba filing for an IPO in the US means that it must be opening operations in the US...actually it just filed in IPO in the US because it's a very large company and China's stock markets are sort of a joke, not really set up for a company of Alibaba's size...
You're already easily able to use alibaba.com in the US. It's kind of cool especially if you want to open your own stall at a flea market. I used taobao.com in China, it's like eBay with better consumer protection. Competing with eBay would take a massive marketing push to build up an entirely new business, basically. What makes taobao.com interesting is all the smaller specialty shops, there's a million logistical reasons why them selling directly from these Chinese shops to US customers would be a total nightmare, the language barrier being the most obvious.
A Joke? Hong Kong is the second largest stock exchange in Asia in terms of market capitalization. It is outdone only by the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It is the sixth largest in the world behind Euronext. And, yes, Hong Kong is also part of the PRC. According to the WSJ the reason Alibaba went to the US is that Hong Kong has a strict one man one vote system whereas in the US: "one set of shareholders—usually including the company's founder—has more rights than another" which would allow the founder to nominate to nominate the majority of the board. Apparently he would not be able to do that in a "one man, one vote" environment.
Maybe the F35 flies faster than a tank and needs a stricter latency.
With sufficient thrust, the tank flies just fine
A flying tank has been built and tested already: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...... but even the crazy Russians only tried that once. Nowadays they are paradropping BMD APCs with the crew on board... any volunteers?
I don't know, there's a guy here on Slashdot who still supports software built on Motif, without any problem. That's the equivalent of being built on Mac Classic. And it will continue to work for the foreseeable future.
I support a few Motif apps at work. but what is this "without any problem" phenomenon you speak of?
Not what the historic numbers say. Not even close.
Most people agree that as the size and power of a government increases, it's methodology approaches that of a Police state. But how is it better to have too little government? There seems to be some sort of mantra that if we could just eliminate government to the point where we'd be back where the US was during the revolutionary war, this would solve all the world's problems. What people tend to forget is that back then government was so small and so powerless that George Washington sat in the snow at Valley Forge, unable to pay his men, unable to feed them and even unable to provide them with shoes, clothes and ammo. The Continental Congress did not have the power to impose taxes or regulate commerce in the colonies. It had to wring support out of the individual states who sometimes blocked support for the Continental Army to further their own petty agendas. Congress then started printing money to finance the war which (surprise, surprise...) led to huge inflation and ruined the economy. The funding that decided the revolutionary war were loans from France, Spain and the Netherlands and donations from private parties. By the end of the revolutionary war the US, unsurprisingly had a huge national debt.
Sales are down because we already have one and don't need two. The things are not nearly as disposable as people seem to think.
I'd have bought an iPad Air or new Mini if it had TouchID. We already have two iPads, but putting the v1 out to pasture would have been worth it to no deal with password entry. Also iOS7 isn't nearly as appealing for an iPad as it was for the iPhone (control center is a must for phones).
I'd also buy a new iPad for touch ID but I can live without it. I was planning to get the smaller iPad model in 128Gb for extra storage. Now that there will apparently be a 5.5" iPhablet I'll probably just get one of those and buy the big iPad air once I fill the old one up with eBooks.
So, the iOS solution is to not _let_ users install apps from untrustworthy sources.
Android doesn't have a solution... so... there's that.
How is that not an iOS vs Android issue?
Because it's an App store problem. Google Play store and Amazon probably do a pretty good job on security but dozens of others do not. Both OS'es are more or less equally vulnerable and if Apple allowed every Tom, Dick and Harry to sell iOS apps with zero effort to assure that they are selling malware free software Apple would have the exact same malware problem that Google does with Android. Whatever else iTunes may be, as far as malware is concerned, iTunes seems to be a quite trustworthy source. To distill his comment into a single sentence for the catchphrase loving 2/3s of the/. reading public: "When it comes to making life hard for malware authors, walled gardens have their advantages." I'm sure that like your self very few people here agree with that statement so if you'll excuse me, I'm going to pop into the locker room now to don my fire resistant suit.
Bitcoin is a concept. It has no value. People can trade, arbitrage, wield, barter, or exchange for it. It still has no value.
Best fortune to all those making money with Bitcoin. For every one of you someone has lost an almost equal amount. (originally mined bitcoins loss value 0 but it grows exponentially).
And as for the holdback bitcoins created and untouched -- that's why bitcoin will NEVER be a currency. "Oh we invented this so we kept some for ourselves." Yeah, do that. And doom the coin.
E
Nothing has value unless there is a general consensus about it being valuable.Dollars are only pieces of paper that are no longer even backed by gold and that are valuable simply because everybody agrees they are valuable. If that consensus changes dollars become worthless. The same goes for commodities, you can build a huge stockpile of gold worth $100 million that everybody agrees is valuable until one day there is a super volcano eruption, civilization collapses and alluvasudden the general consensus on value shifts to your neighbours $1.000.000 (pre apocalypse value) stockpile of guns, ammo and canned food being way more valuable than your pile of gold.
1. USPS is substantially cheaper for both 2 day and next day domestic service and delivers to EVERY address in the U.S. (unlike any of the private services). The only substantial cost savings realized by using private carriers are for heavy packages sent via ground service.
2. Again, for 1 and 2 day service, there is no effective difference. For ground service, UPS in particular is much much slower than USPS, and FedEx is at best comparable.
3. Package damage rates are actually comparable across all 3 carriers.
4. A matter of opinion, of course, and highly dependent upon your local offices.
And as far as the regulation of postal boxes goes, the point is to protect you from mail tampering, not to "steal" property form you. The USPS has from day 1 of the Republic been considered an essential universal service - why do you think freaking Article 1 of the Constitution empowers Congress to establish the Postal Service? Control over mail receptacles is all about making sure the mail actually gets to its intended recipientes in a timelu manner.
I can agree with point 2 UPS and FedEx aren't that much faster than USPS and certainly not so much faster that they justify the price difference. The last package I got sent by an express service spent a couple of days in a sorting facility somewhere in the southern US before it was finally shipped. The ironic thing is that a book I ordered the same day got shipped all the way from California to Europe by USPS for significantly less money and arrived at my local post office a day or two after UPS coughed up their package. If I get charged a bundle of money for sending something by express service I expect them to work weekends and that includes delivery, over here neither UPS nor FedEx do that (and DHL Express are even worse) so I'm perfectly content paying a fraction of what UPS/FedEx would charge for a relatively minimal difference in delivery time.
I'm betting that it didn't happen, nor did what was in the summary happen. I'm not saying it is a complete lie, but I suspect a great deal of creative license was taken while paraphrasing.
It doesn't surprise me that a news summary on/. would have the authors bias dripping off of it, what does surprise me is that snail mail spammers still exists. I haven't received a piece of snail-mail spam in so long I had forgotten that it used to be a problem here. I suppose market conditions are different in the US.
I see no downside to this. There's no reason for our nuclear silos to be networked or to run modern hardware. If it works, don't fix it.
Related: anyone remember in the pilot of the Battlestar Galactica remake how they explained that the reason there was all that old tech (phones with cords, manual doors) aboard a starship made with technology hundreds of years superior to our own was that they designed it that way on purpose to prevent hacking? Kinda makes you wonder--if there's actually a cyber warfare component to the next major conflict, will the military tech that's developed afterwards end up resembling 1970s (or earlier) era hardware more so than the "futuristic" tech you see in most modern SF?
People keep hyping up drones as the way of the future but I can't help but wonder if that enthusiasm won't be dampened by the first large scale incident of drone formations being hijacked or brought down by hacking or shot down in droves after their command links have been jammed. One good thing about pilots, they are very hard to jam and pretty resistant to hacking. There is a persistent rumour that the RQ-170 (aka. "The Beast of Kandahar") was brought down by jamming its satellite and ground control signals combined with a GPS spoofing attack that fed the drone false GPS data causing it to land in Iran. This may not be true but the mere possibility of this happening on a large scale in the middle of some major future shooting war in an air force where the majority of aircraft are pilotless drones is enough to make one make shudder.
The Romans found out that when you build a society on the assumption of permanent growth, when you stop growing... you stop existing. And today's business leaders, who don't pay attention to history unless it makes them money, are repeating the same mistake.
For some reason people are obsessed with finding a single reason for the disintegration of the Roman empire but the truth is that there were many causes: the incompetence of emperors, the decline of the Roman military, the increasing military sophistication of the barbarian tribes, separatism among those barbarians that were absorbed, the fact that the influx of barbarians became to great for the empire to absorb, pandemics and warfare that destroyed the tax base which in turn magnified the military problems and it also caused governmental organizations and institutions to collapse, the list goes on and on. Another point is that much of the Roman world never really disappeared, it just came under new management. Although you saw urban decline in many parts of what used to be the empire a lot of Roman culture survived. A whole lot of stuff went up in flames but many of the barbarian kings that took over the various parts of the western empire often went out of their way to make sure to preserve as much as possible of the Roman governmental bureaucracy, industry, trade and educational institutions as they could. The more archaeologists research the 'dark ages' the more clear it becomes that they weren't actually as dark as we used to be taught in school.
We found out that by keeping the time- and storyline, we could not cram enough cuddly merchandising crap into the show. Expect a lot more fluffy aliens, cutsie droids, and if you thought that Episode 1 was an overblown trailer and ad for the podracer computer game, we have a big surprise for you in Episode 7!
I can only agree with you there, the extent to which boosting merchendising sales has taken priority over making a good film sucks ass. Antoher thing I hate is when film sequels and in particular TV scifi shows get cancelled and you are left with a half told story because some beancounting corporate functionary did an Excel session and determined that the fucking merchandise sales weren't good enough even thought he film/show itself was quite well received by the viewing public. Some of us actually watch a film for the sake of the story being told and not because we like 2-3 hour infomercials.
You seriously think that black hats bother with reading millions of lines of code in the hope of finding an exploit when all they have to do is play with the data sent to services/applications and see if it misbehaves. Which is why exploits are equally found among closed and open softwares.
Generally I still think that open source projects have an advantage over closed source because there are more eyes on the code in a FOSS project. That being said shit does and will happen and unfortunately even in open source projects sometimes a whole lot of shit manages to pile up before it finally hits the fan which of course then results in a particularly big and very stinky mess like Heartbleed. What the OpenSSL team seems to have failed to do is to perform a really serious amount of destructive testing on their library which, as you pointed out is essentially what black hats do to find these kinds of vulnerabilities anyway. This is not surprising since quality assurance and testing seems to be a bit of a poor relations many FOSS projects just like it is in the closed source community. Another thing I'd try if I was a black hat is to run some kind of static code analyser on the codebase that can identify this kind of problem so that might be another thing the OpenSSL team can try if they aren't doing it already. Finally, when something is as widely used and fundamental to the workings of the internet and online commerce as OpenSSL is one would expect that perhaps some of the big beneficiaries of the OpenSSL project like Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook etc. could foot the bill to do some suitably paranoid amount of quality assurance on it and other such FOSS projects. After all it's not like any of them is short of cash now is it and maybe these corporations could invest some of that cash they avoid paying in taxes to make everybody's digital lives a little safer by offering bounties for OpenSSL bugs? (...and yes, I know that expecting corporations to show communal responsibility is a long shot but hope springs eternal)
Spy agency's job is to spy. It'd be remiss of them not to use such a security hole.
The question is, would he allow the NSA to exploit a similar vulnerability against Americans. And I think we already know the answer to that one too.
No, the role of the NSA is not just to gather SIGINT, the NSA iis also tasked with preventing unfriendly entities from gathering SIGINT which is why the NSA initiated and open sourced SE Linux just to cite one example. So the question here is should the NSA put every single American SSL using business at risk for years on end to protect a single source of SIGINT? After all, foreign intelligence services may not have to budget of the NSA but they are not stupid either, they can discover bugs like Heartbleed just as easily as the NSA can and might well use it sufficiently stealthily for the NSA not to notice that they aren't the only ones sitting on this vulnerability. When do the costs of spying outweigh the benefits?
So the IRS missed a deadline they knew was coming... I wonder what they would do to any of us in a similar but different situation?
he IRS isn't the only SNAFU out there by any stretch of the imagination. They are in good company along with many members of the much vaunted and ever efficient private sector when it comes to missing this particular deadline.
The average person's ability to "invest tomorrow" is piss poor, that's why they need a push sometimes. Investing in the short term now in renewable energy is going to result in significant price decreases in the future, especially when you consider the likely future path of oil prices.
The people who made a killing on Google/Apple stocks were the ones who got in early and took a risk. Is it any different with renewables? The ones who get in early are the ones who reap the most benefits. Whoever invests in renewables research and development now, when it is painful and expensive, will be the one who comes out on top later when everybody else is forced to make that transition in a third of the time and with much more pain than you can do it now because these early adopters will be sitting on mature technology and the means to mass produce it and everybody else will either be doing lots of business with them or frantically playing catch-up.
Renewables also have a political dimension. If anybody in Germany thought the Energiewende was expensive (and a lot of people do), they have now had cause to reconsider as they watch Vlad Putin sitting in Moscow with his hand on the gas valve threatening to shut it off unless the NATO powers feed him the Ukraine on a plate.
Slashdot Mirror
Must be global warming...
Nah, the Neocon delegation must have reached mount Doom and burned the communist manifesto so the great eye of Sauron will now shrink until it disappears and Jupiter implodes thus purging the threat of environmentalism from the face of the universe forever.
If it was so practical, why did they wholly cut funding. Seems like they had a long way to go to make the nuclear design feasible to where the crew was safe.
And how many civilians would fly with a nuclear reactor?
Replacing the nuclear reactor with batteries means A LOT of batteries. So I'm not sure how you can claim the whole idea is feasible just from a working nuclear design.
According to a Discovery Channel documentary:
1) There were two kinds of engine: Indirect Air Cycle that never got off the drawing board and Direct Air Cycle, that was actually built and tested but it emitted radioactive pollution and even back in the 50s and 60s people started to have second thoughts about a hundred or more things like this making regular operational flights spewing radioactive material over the countryside. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
2) What happens when one crashes? (see pollution concerns raised in point 1).
3) Shielding proved to be a problem. The aircraft power plant was only partially shielded because of weight constraints. The crew sat in "radiation shadows". and the power plant radiated in all other directions.
5) Combat aircraft have been known to have very high peace time attrition rates, a case in point being the F-104 at 30%. (see pollution concerns raised in point 1).
4) The thing would have been a logistical and maintenance nightmare.
5) ICBMs became a more capable and practically unstoppable delivery options. ICBMs were also likely to be a much safer weapons package during handling and in day to day peacetime operation.
6) Nuclear submarines became a viable option. Here weight was no issue so reactors could have full shielding and safety mechanisms. Subs were also way stealthier than any bomber so their combat survivability rating was higher and they carried a bigger war-load.
maybe.
but for voting of the parliamentary DO NOT FUCKING USE INTERNET VOTING.
why?
NSA..... nuff said.
I figured that all along. It took off on Apple hardware, with almost no pickup on normal PCs. That has finally started to happen a little - some upper end motherboards have 1 or 2 Thunderbolt ports now, and Asus has an add-on board for a few others - but it is really a niche thanks to its odd hardware requirements and lack of early adoption outside of Apple. USB is easier to use, and at least up to 3.0 has been backward compatible with older devices. With an even faster option, as long as they don't screw something up, I don't see how USB could not continue to be the leading connectivity standard.
Try hooking an external SSD up to you machine via USB3 and then via Thunderbolt and you'll see why Thunderbolt is desirable if you are transferring large amounts of data: http://gizmodo.com/5980157/thu.... Take a look at the "Time to write 16.9 Gb of data" row in the table at the bottom and imagine you are transferring 3,4 or 500 Gb. There is about 250 Gb of data on the SSD in my MacBook Pro, large amounts of that data can change frequently meaning long backup times and cutting the time it takes to write that stuff up to disk in half is a major bonus. The problem Thunderbolt has had is not just backwards compatibility, i..e. that here are so many USB 3 devices out there that it is going to take a looooong while to put a dent in the USB monoculture (as you correctly pointed out). Thunderbolt devices have also had a tendency to be more expensive which didn't help either nor did the fact that up until now you have only started to benefit from Thunderbolt for real when using SSDs and they are also expensive which just aggravates the cost problem. When the USB 3 alternative is 2-3 times less expensive than Thunderbolt the choice for the consumer is obvious. If there is going to be a USB standard that is comparable in speed to Thunderbolt, backwards compatible with all the old USB2 and USB3 devices and that has a better connector, Thunderbolt is doomed. Intel should have pushed Thunderbolt way more aggressively i.e. handed out Thunderbolt product licenses liberally, provide motherboard and peripheral manufacturers with incentives or even sell Thunderbolt chips at cost.
These are telecommunications companies. Sanity doesn't figure in to their business plan.
You have clearly never worked for an investment bank.
Had Snowden only leaked the unconstitutional domestic spying, he would be a hero. It should be very clear now that those leaks were just a cover for treason. His goal seems to be nothing less than the dismantling of our entire intelligence apparatus.
You can't hide an intelligence operation of this scale forever, this was going to come out sooner or later, Snowden is an inevitability. That having been said, while your concern over how the USA's ability to find out what color underwear everybody else is ordering online is a valid one, consider the economic impact of this. I'm sure Cisco and a whole horde of other US based network equipment manufactures were thrilled to the core when they woke up one morning and found out that the NSA just crashed their sales and to add insult to injury ensured that in the long term their overseas competitors will get a whole lot more business as governments and corporations look for secure and preferably domestic sources of network equipment. Maybe the fact that it was all done in the name of patriotism and national security will more than compensate these US businesses for any financial losses that result from this activity?
They also say:
"In a poor country, only the rich can afford to get fat."
"In a rich country, only the rich can afford to stay thin."
Oh, brother, yet more of those simplified catch phrases Americans are so fond of. What it really takes to thin yourself down is adjusting your diet, exercising and a bit of willpower. Even doing nothing but significantly downscaling your portion sizes and getting a bit more movement will make a difference. Although the claim of lacking willpower is often made, I'm not sure a shortage of willpower is always the only problem. The hard part is actually not dragging yourself to the gym it's changing your diet since everything that's good for you also seems to taste like shit (true up to a point but you can cook tasty and healty food), also processed foods and fast food are designed to be addicting so you'll also have to deal with that addiction. Another demotivating factor is the fact that it's just plain time consuming (and really boring) to exercise sufficiently for it to make a difference. Most of the time I go to the gym (I'm overweight, but on a downard trend) I see most of the people there spending 10 minutes on a treadmill on the lowest setting, lifting 10-20 kg weights and not even breaking a sweat and another 20 minutes just sitting around or wandering aimlessly around (the guys spend a lot of time sitting on the exercise equipment staring at the female gym bunnies). The only ones doing proper exercise are:
[A] the gym bunnies, muscle mountains and that funky group of people that spend half the day in front of those giant mirrors hypnotically admiring themselves while they lift weighs (I call them the 'mirror posers').
[B] a handful of lard-asses such as myself who actually have come to terms with the truth of one of that cheesy axiom: "No pain, no gain" and put in the required daily 60-90 minutes at the gym.
If you are serious about loosing weight, get some professional advice, and come to terms with the fact that if your exercise routine does not make you sweat like a pig, your muscles burn and occasionally ache, and leaves you at least a bit out of breath you are probably doing something wrong.
That's my 0.02 € anyway...
DNA isn't pulling people away from taxonomy so much as replacing it with a vastly superior system. Classical taxonomy is kind of like classical mechanics. It's fine for most purposes, but it's not "complete" and its answers range from slightly inaccurate to flat out wrong depending on the question.
We no longer have to arbitrarily decide "ok, this is a new species because it's different in this way" we can now look at DNA and see exactly how it differs, what it's closest to, who its ancestors are, when it split, and so on. Names are inaccurate representations for humans to use. With DNA, the term "species" itself becomes somewhat irrelevant because we now know the system of species and genetics is much more fluid than that.
I'm not so sure Taxonomy has been replaced, it's just gotten a whole new and better tool and I suppose you could say the geneticists have kind of taken it over. In anthropology ancient DNA extraction where classification into species was done using skeletal morphology, DNA is likely to cause a whole lot of re-arrangement of the taxonomic classifications. When Svante Pääbo found Neanderthal DNA in modern humans he effectively threw the scientific equivalent of a hand grenade into the comfortably organized world of anthropology. His discovery shattered a widely accepted axiom and left a whole lot of people red-faced who'd been postulating that modern human admixture with archaic hominids was unlikely to the point of it being impossible. Technically modern non-African people belong to both the species H. Sapiens and H. Neanderthalensis, so the borderlines between species have all of a sudden become much more fuzzy thanks to geneticists. A really interesting recent development is that geneticists have found traces of extinct hominid populations that are only known from DNA analysis of living humans, not from discovered remains. Africans for example are now know to have interbred with archaic hominid populations but no physical specimens, i.e. skeletal samples of these archaic populations have ever been found so in that sense Africans aren't pure H. Sapients either. So we now have palaeontologist/archaeologists out in the field searching for physical remains of these 'shadow' or 'ghost' populations which has turned the normal practice in their field completely on it's head where you first found the bones and then took them to the lab for (DNA and other) analysis. As we get better at extracting DNA from ancient remains it will completely upend a lot of what we thought we knew about the mechanism of evolution.
The summary seems to think that Alibaba filing for an IPO in the US means that it must be opening operations in the US...actually it just filed in IPO in the US because it's a very large company and China's stock markets are sort of a joke, not really set up for a company of Alibaba's size...
You're already easily able to use alibaba.com in the US. It's kind of cool especially if you want to open your own stall at a flea market. I used taobao.com in China, it's like eBay with better consumer protection. Competing with eBay would take a massive marketing push to build up an entirely new business, basically. What makes taobao.com interesting is all the smaller specialty shops, there's a million logistical reasons why them selling directly from these Chinese shops to US customers would be a total nightmare, the language barrier being the most obvious.
A Joke? Hong Kong is the second largest stock exchange in Asia in terms of market capitalization. It is outdone only by the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It is the sixth largest in the world behind Euronext. And, yes, Hong Kong is also part of the PRC. According to the WSJ the reason Alibaba went to the US is that Hong Kong has a strict one man one vote system whereas in the US: "one set of shareholders—usually including the company's founder—has more rights than another" which would allow the founder to nominate to nominate the majority of the board. Apparently he would not be able to do that in a "one man, one vote" environment.
As far as apocalypses go, that's one lame-sounding apocalypse.
how many heads were on that beast in revelations? about 8.1?
Seven heads, ten horns...
Maybe the F35 flies faster than a tank and needs a stricter latency.
With sufficient thrust, the tank flies just fine
A flying tank has been built and tested already: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... ... but even the crazy Russians only tried that once. Nowadays they are paradropping BMD APCs with the crew on board... any volunteers?
I don't know, there's a guy here on Slashdot who still supports software built on Motif, without any problem. That's the equivalent of being built on Mac Classic. And it will continue to work for the foreseeable future.
I support a few Motif apps at work. but what is this "without any problem" phenomenon you speak of?
Not what the historic numbers say. Not even close.
Most people agree that as the size and power of a government increases, it's methodology approaches that of a Police state. But how is it better to have too little government? There seems to be some sort of mantra that if we could just eliminate government to the point where we'd be back where the US was during the revolutionary war, this would solve all the world's problems. What people tend to forget is that back then government was so small and so powerless that George Washington sat in the snow at Valley Forge, unable to pay his men, unable to feed them and even unable to provide them with shoes, clothes and ammo. The Continental Congress did not have the power to impose taxes or regulate commerce in the colonies. It had to wring support out of the individual states who sometimes blocked support for the Continental Army to further their own petty agendas. Congress then started printing money to finance the war which (surprise, surprise...) led to huge inflation and ruined the economy. The funding that decided the revolutionary war were loans from France, Spain and the Netherlands and donations from private parties. By the end of the revolutionary war the US, unsurprisingly had a huge national debt.
Sales are down because we already have one and don't need two. The things are not nearly as disposable as people seem to think.
I'd have bought an iPad Air or new Mini if it had TouchID. We already have two iPads, but putting the v1 out to pasture would have been worth it to no deal with password entry. Also iOS7 isn't nearly as appealing for an iPad as it was for the iPhone (control center is a must for phones).
I'd also buy a new iPad for touch ID but I can live without it. I was planning to get the smaller iPad model in 128Gb for extra storage. Now that there will apparently be a 5.5" iPhablet I'll probably just get one of those and buy the big iPad air once I fill the old one up with eBooks.
So, the iOS solution is to not _let_ users install apps from untrustworthy sources.
Android doesn't have a solution... so... there's that.
How is that not an iOS vs Android issue?
Because it's an App store problem. Google Play store and Amazon probably do a pretty good job on security but dozens of others do not. Both OS'es are more or less equally vulnerable and if Apple allowed every Tom, Dick and Harry to sell iOS apps with zero effort to assure that they are selling malware free software Apple would have the exact same malware problem that Google does with Android. Whatever else iTunes may be, as far as malware is concerned, iTunes seems to be a quite trustworthy source. To distill his comment into a single sentence for the catchphrase loving 2/3s of the /. reading public: "When it comes to making life hard for malware authors, walled gardens have their advantages." I'm sure that like your self very few people here agree with that statement so if you'll excuse me, I'm going to pop into the locker room now to don my fire resistant suit.
To "invest" is to put money where value is.
Bitcoin is a concept. It has no value. People can trade, arbitrage, wield, barter, or exchange for it.
It still has no value.
Best fortune to all those making money with Bitcoin. For every one of you someone has lost
an almost equal amount. (originally mined bitcoins loss value 0 but it grows exponentially).
And as for the holdback bitcoins created and untouched -- that's why bitcoin will NEVER be a currency.
"Oh we invented this so we kept some for ourselves." Yeah, do that. And doom the coin.
E
Nothing has value unless there is a general consensus about it being valuable.Dollars are only pieces of paper that are no longer even backed by gold and that are valuable simply because everybody agrees they are valuable. If that consensus changes dollars become worthless. The same goes for commodities, you can build a huge stockpile of gold worth $100 million that everybody agrees is valuable until one day there is a super volcano eruption, civilization collapses and alluvasudden the general consensus on value shifts to your neighbours $1.000.000 (pre apocalypse value) stockpile of guns, ammo and canned food being way more valuable than your pile of gold.
Of your 4 points, only the last even may be true.
1. USPS is substantially cheaper for both 2 day and next day domestic service and delivers to EVERY address in the U.S. (unlike any of the private services). The only substantial cost savings realized by using private carriers are for heavy packages sent via ground service.
2. Again, for 1 and 2 day service, there is no effective difference. For ground service, UPS in particular is much much slower than USPS, and FedEx is at best comparable.
3. Package damage rates are actually comparable across all 3 carriers.
4. A matter of opinion, of course, and highly dependent upon your local offices.
And as far as the regulation of postal boxes goes, the point is to protect you from mail tampering, not to "steal" property form you. The USPS has from day 1 of the Republic been considered an essential universal service - why do you think freaking Article 1 of the Constitution empowers Congress to establish the Postal Service? Control over mail receptacles is all about making sure the mail actually gets to its intended recipientes in a timelu manner.
I can agree with point 2 UPS and FedEx aren't that much faster than USPS and certainly not so much faster that they justify the price difference. The last package I got sent by an express service spent a couple of days in a sorting facility somewhere in the southern US before it was finally shipped. The ironic thing is that a book I ordered the same day got shipped all the way from California to Europe by USPS for significantly less money and arrived at my local post office a day or two after UPS coughed up their package. If I get charged a bundle of money for sending something by express service I expect them to work weekends and that includes delivery, over here neither UPS nor FedEx do that (and DHL Express are even worse) so I'm perfectly content paying a fraction of what UPS/FedEx would charge for a relatively minimal difference in delivery time.
I'm betting that it didn't happen, nor did what was in the summary happen. I'm not saying it is a complete lie, but I suspect a great deal of creative license was taken while paraphrasing.
It doesn't surprise me that a news summary on /. would have the authors bias dripping off of it, what does surprise me is that snail mail spammers still exists. I haven't received a piece of snail-mail spam in so long I had forgotten that it used to be a problem here. I suppose market conditions are different in the US.
I see no downside to this. There's no reason for our nuclear silos to be networked or to run modern hardware. If it works, don't fix it.
Related: anyone remember in the pilot of the Battlestar Galactica remake how they explained that the reason there was all that old tech (phones with cords, manual doors) aboard a starship made with technology hundreds of years superior to our own was that they designed it that way on purpose to prevent hacking? Kinda makes you wonder--if there's actually a cyber warfare component to the next major conflict, will the military tech that's developed afterwards end up resembling 1970s (or earlier) era hardware more so than the "futuristic" tech you see in most modern SF?
People keep hyping up drones as the way of the future but I can't help but wonder if that enthusiasm won't be dampened by the first large scale incident of drone formations being hijacked or brought down by hacking or shot down in droves after their command links have been jammed. One good thing about pilots, they are very hard to jam and pretty resistant to hacking. There is a persistent rumour that the RQ-170 (aka. "The Beast of Kandahar") was brought down by jamming its satellite and ground control signals combined with a GPS spoofing attack that fed the drone false GPS data causing it to land in Iran. This may not be true but the mere possibility of this happening on a large scale in the middle of some major future shooting war in an air force where the majority of aircraft are pilotless drones is enough to make one make shudder.
The Romans found out that when you build a society on the assumption of permanent growth, when you stop growing... you stop existing. And today's business leaders, who don't pay attention to history unless it makes them money, are repeating the same mistake.
For some reason people are obsessed with finding a single reason for the disintegration of the Roman empire but the truth is that there were many causes: the incompetence of emperors, the decline of the Roman military, the increasing military sophistication of the barbarian tribes, separatism among those barbarians that were absorbed, the fact that the influx of barbarians became to great for the empire to absorb, pandemics and warfare that destroyed the tax base which in turn magnified the military problems and it also caused governmental organizations and institutions to collapse, the list goes on and on. Another point is that much of the Roman world never really disappeared, it just came under new management. Although you saw urban decline in many parts of what used to be the empire a lot of Roman culture survived. A whole lot of stuff went up in flames but many of the barbarian kings that took over the various parts of the western empire often went out of their way to make sure to preserve as much as possible of the Roman governmental bureaucracy, industry, trade and educational institutions as they could. The more archaeologists research the 'dark ages' the more clear it becomes that they weren't actually as dark as we used to be taught in school.
We found out that by keeping the time- and storyline, we could not cram enough cuddly merchandising crap into the show. Expect a lot more fluffy aliens, cutsie droids, and if you thought that Episode 1 was an overblown trailer and ad for the podracer computer game, we have a big surprise for you in Episode 7!
I can only agree with you there, the extent to which boosting merchendising sales has taken priority over making a good film sucks ass. Antoher thing I hate is when film sequels and in particular TV scifi shows get cancelled and you are left with a half told story because some beancounting corporate functionary did an Excel session and determined that the fucking merchandise sales weren't good enough even thought he film/show itself was quite well received by the viewing public. Some of us actually watch a film for the sake of the story being told and not because we like 2-3 hour infomercials.
You seriously think that black hats bother with reading millions of lines of code in the hope of finding an exploit when all they have to do is play with the data sent to services/applications and see if it misbehaves. Which is why exploits are equally found among closed and open softwares.
Generally I still think that open source projects have an advantage over closed source because there are more eyes on the code in a FOSS project. That being said shit does and will happen and unfortunately even in open source projects sometimes a whole lot of shit manages to pile up before it finally hits the fan which of course then results in a particularly big and very stinky mess like Heartbleed. What the OpenSSL team seems to have failed to do is to perform a really serious amount of destructive testing on their library which, as you pointed out is essentially what black hats do to find these kinds of vulnerabilities anyway. This is not surprising since quality assurance and testing seems to be a bit of a poor relations many FOSS projects just like it is in the closed source community. Another thing I'd try if I was a black hat is to run some kind of static code analyser on the codebase that can identify this kind of problem so that might be another thing the OpenSSL team can try if they aren't doing it already. Finally, when something is as widely used and fundamental to the workings of the internet and online commerce as OpenSSL is one would expect that perhaps some of the big beneficiaries of the OpenSSL project like Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook etc. could foot the bill to do some suitably paranoid amount of quality assurance on it and other such FOSS projects. After all it's not like any of them is short of cash now is it and maybe these corporations could invest some of that cash they avoid paying in taxes to make everybody's digital lives a little safer by offering bounties for OpenSSL bugs? (...and yes, I know that expecting corporations to show communal responsibility is a long shot but hope springs eternal)
Spy agency's job is to spy. It'd be remiss of them not to use such a security hole.
The question is, would he allow the NSA to exploit a similar vulnerability against Americans. And I think we already know the answer to that one too.
No, the role of the NSA is not just to gather SIGINT, the NSA iis also tasked with preventing unfriendly entities from gathering SIGINT which is why the NSA initiated and open sourced SE Linux just to cite one example. So the question here is should the NSA put every single American SSL using business at risk for years on end to protect a single source of SIGINT? After all, foreign intelligence services may not have to budget of the NSA but they are not stupid either, they can discover bugs like Heartbleed just as easily as the NSA can and might well use it sufficiently stealthily for the NSA not to notice that they aren't the only ones sitting on this vulnerability. When do the costs of spying outweigh the benefits?
So the IRS missed a deadline they knew was coming... I wonder what they would do to any of us in a similar but different situation?
he IRS isn't the only SNAFU out there by any stretch of the imagination. They are in good company along with many members of the much vaunted and ever efficient private sector when it comes to missing this particular deadline.
The average person's ability to "invest tomorrow" is piss poor, that's why they need a push sometimes. Investing in the short term now in renewable energy is going to result in significant price decreases in the future, especially when you consider the likely future path of oil prices.
The people who made a killing on Google/Apple stocks were the ones who got in early and took a risk. Is it any different with renewables? The ones who get in early are the ones who reap the most benefits. Whoever invests in renewables research and development now, when it is painful and expensive, will be the one who comes out on top later when everybody else is forced to make that transition in a third of the time and with much more pain than you can do it now because these early adopters will be sitting on mature technology and the means to mass produce it and everybody else will either be doing lots of business with them or frantically playing catch-up.
Case in point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Renewables also have a political dimension. If anybody in Germany thought the Energiewende was expensive (and a lot of people do), they have now had cause to reconsider as they watch Vlad Putin sitting in Moscow with his hand on the gas valve threatening to shut it off unless the NATO powers feed him the Ukraine on a plate.