In case anyone is wondering what ActiveX is, it's essentially a Windows program you download that runs natively on your computer. It gets to draw to the specified element in the browser, which makes it look like it's part of a webpage. There isn't (or wasn't) any kind of sandboxing or security once the ActiveX component was installed - it could do anything it wanted on your computer like any other Windows program, because that's essentially what it was. The only security was whether or not you installed the ActiveX component in the first place. If I remember correctly they are really just DLLs, and used Component Object Model for the standard in which the DLL exposes methods, etc.
The potential for abuse is insane. Say I'm rich. I simply hire some poor guy with zero income to break the law when I need it done (driving me around when I'm in a hurry is a good one). If he gets in trouble I give him a bonus. If he gets caught too many times then I hire some other guy. Really, this is a stupid idea, and will further lead to bias and all kinds of issues with the police. Want to bet people driving more expensive cars get pulled over more often there? Especially in jurisdictions that rely on traffic fine income to support their infrastructure. Cops have latitude in writing tickets, etc. Only going 5-10 over? It's their choice to pull you over or not. They are not *required* to by law, and because of that, the potential for discrimination based on wealth will happen. Maybe you've just a got a cop who financially is in rough shape and he wants to stick it to the man. Well, he'll just wait for a luxury car to come along and bust them for going 5-6 over the limit.
Imagine if the Roanoke colonists decided Antarctica should be their goal. Well that's where Mars colonization plans are today. Of all the reasonable candidates, (Low earth orbit, the Lagrange points, the Moon, Mars, Asteroids) Mars is about the worst. It's at the bottom of the deepest gravity well outside of earth, except for the asteroids it has the longest travel time, and will have the longest development time before it can return resources to the people that invest in it.
Hang on there a second. How do you colonize low earth orbit or the Lagrange points? By your analogy, you're saying the Roanoke colonists should have "colonized" the Atlantic on a big floating platform or something. That isn't colonizing. The point in either the moon or mars is to extract and make use of resources to build habitations, create fuel, food, energy, etc. Hanging out in space in a tin can is not "colonizing" anything, no more than sitting in a raft in the middle of the Atlantic.
Well there's your problem right there...
on
Gigaom Closes Shop
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Gigaom reaches over 6.5 million monthly unique readers and continues to be the leading independent voice that demystifies emerging technology through its news, events and research. We’re a new type of media company with a business model that leverages technology, transparency and access to information. The company’s growth has been propelled by great writers, journalistic integrity, industry depth and audience engagement.
We offer integrated advertising programs across all of our channels: Cloud, Data, Media, Mobile, Science & Energy, Social & Web, and Podcasts. With a strong mobile reach of over 2 million monthly readers, our mobile advertising on Flipboard is highly targeted. With an array of podcasts, newsletters and other custom campaigns, we have a campaign offering to fit any client’s budget and marketing goals.
I don't know who these "6.5 million monthly unique readers" are, but if the regular crowd at Slashdot has never even heard of their site, then they weren't really reaching 6.5 million people, or they were the wrong 6.5 million people. According to their careers page it looks like they had a lot of overhead and tried to run like an old fashioned news company with two offices in major cities. They certainly weren't lean-and-mean.
First of all, the Slashdot headline is wrong. It is "arctic ocean" sized, not antarctic. Second, the article makes another comparison that makes more sense, since Mars and Earth aren't the same size (how big would the arctic ocean be placed on mars? Not something we can visualize). That is the ocean on Mars covered slightly more of the planet than the Atlantic ocean covers on Earth - the Mars ocean covered 19% of the planet, while the Atlantic covers 17% of the Earth. Of course the volume of water and depths are totally different.
Mt Gox is an exchange, and exchanges exchange "real" money for bitcoins, correct? So say I paid $2,000 for bitcoins at Mt Gox, and I left those coins there instead of transferring to my own wallet. Thus if those particular coins went missing, I would have been out exactly the $2,000 I paid for them. Now on the other hand, say I mined bitcoins and transferred to Mt Gox for them to be sold, and those coins went missing. They never had any "real" value attached to them - only whatever resources I claimed to have consumed in generating them. See the difference?
I wonder how much of those bitcoins represented "real" money (as in bitcoins that were purchased via cash), versus bitcoins that had only been mined? If they did not represent actual money that flowed into the system, then perhaps the impetus for tracking them isn't very high?
That was a good article. Pretty long with lots of background info and details on how it works. My questions is simply this: why not put this thing out west somewhere (Death Valley, etc) where there is less human and natural vibrations to interfere with it?
First off, the picture is crap. It's overexposed and the white balance is off by a mile. My 10 year old Razr flip phone took better pictures than that.
However, there's still a human perception factor going on. I had looked at the picture on my laptop, and it was clearly white and gold. Then later I pulled the exact same picture up on my iPhone to show it to someone, and it looked black and blue. I then concluded that the picture looked different on my laptop than my phone due to differences in the display. When I got back home I pulled the picture up on both my phone and laptop to do a direct comparison, and both, including on my phone, looked white and gold again.
So I think it depends on whether your eyes are currently adapted to dim indoor lighting or bright outdoor lighting, in addition to the backlight on your device also changing the hue depending on if it's automatically full bright for outdoors or dim for indoors.
I think solar is great - I have some panels on my camper, which is very conducive to solar type use because it's already designed to function off-grid. But let's be realistic. Let's say every home in America stuck a couple thousand watts of solar power on their roof, and wanted to sell the power into the grid (as opposed of having to store it on-site). How is that supposed to work? If no power generation is required by the power company when the sun is shining, but the full normal generation is required the instant clouds sweep over a community or at night, etc, then how is that supposed to work? None of the power generation plants can function in that "instant on / instant off" type of a mode. Particularly not nuclear. The point is, once the adoption reaches some (rather smallish) percentage, there will be some major problems and costs that will have to be addressed.
Regarding the incentives (tax credits and the like), again, once solar hits some critical mass, why would the government provide incentives? The incentives did their job, and got some number of people to adopt solar.
Nothing is stopping anyone from using solar. It's just that it may not be a profitable (as in selling electricity or getting a tax break) endeavor. So don't whine when it can't be used purely for an economical advantage.
The investigation into the intrusion methods described in the document and the sophisticated attacks that Gemalto detected in 2010 and 2011 give us reasonable grounds to believe that an operation by NSA and GCHQ probably happened
The attacks were sophisticated, thus the fact that we were compromised was justified. We will play the victim card straight off. We presume that because the attacks were sophisticated that it was the NSA and GCHQ, although any hacker group and nation-state would give their left arm for our encryption keys. However NSA and GCHQ are scary acronyms, and so we were supposedly up against the most powerful hacking group in the world, again, justifying the fact that they succeeded.
The attacks against Gemalto only breached its office networks and could not have resulted in a massive theft of SIM encryption keys
The attacks resulted in a theft of our SIM encryption keys, although not a "massive" one, whatever "massive" means.
The operation aimed to intercept the encryption keys as they were exchanged between mobile operators and their suppliers globally. By 2010, Gemalto had already widely deployed a secure transfer system with its customers and only rare exceptions to this scheme could have led to theft
Rare exceptions to our scheme led to theft.
In the case of an eventual key theft, the intelligence services would only be able to spy on communications on second generation 2G mobile networks. 3G and 4G networks are not vulnerable to this type of attack
Intelligence services were able to spy on communications on 2G mobile networks, due to this one known particular theft of SIM keys that we managed to discover. Even the most modern cell phones fall back on 3G and 2G mobile networks if 4G is not available, so this could affect any phone.
None of our other products were impacted by this attack
Products of ours were impacted by this particular attack, but at least it wasn't every single product we have.
The best counter-measures to these type of attacks are the systematic encryption of data when stored and in transit, the use of the latest SIM cards and customized algorithms for each operator
We are trying to come up with better counter-measures to prevent them from continuing to access our encryption keys.
I just checked on my Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro I bought a few months ago, and it does not have Superfish as a trusted root certificate authority, as indicated in the screenshot in TFA.
But that has nothing to do with the generation of electricity, only the generation of heat. Surely the system can simply bypass the generators when the power is not needed. The cooling towers and ponds cool the steam / water back down before cycling back into the reactor anyway, regardless of whether the generators are part of the loop or not. An "emergency shutdown" of the reactor should not be necessary just because the electricity is not needed. Sounds like they think there is a high probability of a significant part the grid going down and not requiring all of the available power generation, so they're saving money by shutting it down now and shifting production to the natural gas / coal plants (which can be "turned off" and "turned on" much faster, to save even more money when the grid goes down).
Please, for the love of Pete's sake, either get a steady cam or don't attempt the "lead the actors down the hall with the camera while they're talking" shot. There was one shot so bad that it totally pulled me out of the scene. I think the camera guy might have stumbled or ran into someone. It was that bad.
I can fire up a TI-99/4A emulator or an Amiga emulator and run all my old software from three decades ago. Can someone name a general purpose computing platform (IE not including mainframes or supercomputers or other exotic low-volume hardware) whose software we cannot execute using an emulator?
This entire study is a big guesstimate. More than likely they get it right with the top half-dozen polluters, but beyond that the margin of error makes it all guesswork.
“Of course we know these aren’t absolute numbers, but it gives us an idea of the magnitude, and where we might need to focus our efforts to affect the issue,”
The USA, at #20 in the list, is responsible for less than 1% of the global pollution of this kind, according to this study. The USA produces only 3% of the pollution China produces alone. Certainly the margin for error in this type of indirect approximation is no better than 5%, putting the USA on the list at all in just statistical noise.
Further, the major offenders that produce that vast majority of the pollution do so because their very infrastructure results in the trash entering the ocean. Whereas the USA, on the other hand, consists only of "litter" directly from individuals one way or another (probably washing down rivers when they flood, as opposed to actually be dumping straight into the ocean as the official method of industry to get rid of their trash):
The US and Europe are not mismanaging their collected waste, so the plastic trash coming from those countries is due to litter, researchers said.
So putting the USA on that list is one of those things like "You do very well considering your population, the fact that you are the largest consuming nation on the planet, and have extensive coastlines in two oceans, but we hold you to a much higher standard and we know you can do even better, even though reducing your total pollution by 100% will have less than a 1% affect on the pollution entering the oceans."
Come on now, a developer keyboard with no navigation keys? Really? Okay, so you can map multiple key combinations to represent them. Still, no way. If I want to highlight the text to the left of the cursor, I use CTRL-SHIFT-LEFT_ARROW. If I want to select the text from the cursor to the end of the line, I use CTRL-SHIFT-END. I already use those navigation keys in 3-key combos. I don't need it to be a 4-key combo, or something totally proprietary to the point I can only function with any proficiency on a keyboard that there is exactly one of in the entire world.
When I chose my last dev machine a few months ago, I really, really tried to make it a Macbook. I figured I could dual-boot windows and have all my bases covered. I had already tried using my older Macbook as a dev machine, and had given up. Why? No Home, End, PgUp or PgDown keys. As I stated above, I already use 3 key combos with those keys. I'm not about to try and make it a 4 key combo because Apple puts style over functionality. (and of course no Macbooks are touchscreen, and part of my work is making sure that web based multitouch HTML5 works properly on modern touch-screen desktop browsers).
When I was in Middle School in the mid 80s, everyone knew that computers were going to be a major part of the future. At that time, personal computers did not yet have an OS To Rule Them All, and the amount of things one could actually accomplish with a home computer was relatively limited. Pretty much any home computer of that era booted straight into BASIC, and most people perceived computers primarily as things in which people wrote software for to tell it what to do.
At that time schools were trying to make use of computers in the curriculum (beyond Apple IIs playing Oregon Trail and entering LOGO instructions to move the Turtle), and what most schools went with was BASIC programming. Our school had recently "upgraded" from TI-99/4A to Color TRS-80 (which was upsetting to me, because I owned a TI and could program for it very well). So my entire grade of 7th graders spent an entire semester programming in BASIC. Every boy, every girl - all of us. We always worked in teams of two (mostly boys paired up and girls paired up, as is typical at that age). Further, this was commonplace in most schools of the era.
So here is what we *should* have seen. Since we had boys and girls all being equally submersed in the writing of software for hundreds of thousands of children, if boys and girls equally relate to, identify with, and enjoy programming, then we should have seen a surge of that generation of girls also becoming computer scientists. But we did not. When I was in college less than a decade later, my fellow majors in CS consisted of only two females (and I'm friends with both of them on FB still). One does not do anything related to computers at all. The other is still involved in technology, but is more interested in and active in designing artistic elements at the company where she is CTO.
I think we're seeing the overall, general difference between male and female here. I think it's obvious that different talents and thus careers seem to carry with them trends in certain kinds of personalities. Generally, do musicians, artists, executives, managers and computer science people each seem to have personality tendencies that go along with their career? Those tendencies aren't "learned" by being in the career - those individuals had those traits before they entered their profession. So it is my belief that, generally, the typical female does not relate to software development. Perhaps it is because male and female brains are indeed physiologically different in various ways, and it is more enjoyable and / or natural for a male brain to think in a single-track mode required to deeply delve into one specific thought process for a long time while developing software. Or maybe it's for other reasons along that line.
Regardless, my point is simple. Why is anyone trying to point fingers at our educational system instead of just admitting men and women are different, and women just simply may not like software development?
What value does the MPAA possibly offer that could come anywhere close to commanding such regal sums annually?
Lobbying. And the MPAA has done a tremendous job, which is why all of Disney's characters are still under copyright half a century after Disney died, and nearly a century after they were first created. $20 million from each of the 6 big studios is a pittance in return. FTA:
Under tightened government ethics rules, the building’s screening room [MPAA's in Washington DC], though still active, is no longer the scene of lavish movie-and-dinner nights that were once popular with lawmakers.
So they had a "lavish" theater where they would wine and dine lawmakers, and most certainly let lawmakers rub elbows with A-list celebrities, over the decades before more stringent rules were put in place. You bet that influenced laws that keep extending copyright in favor of the MPAAs constituents.
Hype much? If your JavaScript isn't portable enough to run on a modern mobile browser than you suck. The fact that they can make something happen that is supposed to happen by default doesn't exactly excite me.
Just think if MS would have done this over a decade ago when they released C# /.NET. It could have nearly replaced Java. I could see 3rd party "standards" created for widgets that would be cross-platform (like Swing, etc, for Java), that people could use to create their cross-platform windowed GUI type apps. The formal Windows APIs would be used for people wanting to create full blown Windows-only apps. However all the core functionality (non-gui stuff) would be cross-platform and if written properly could have driven both the "Swing"-ish community created GUI, as well as the official Windows GUI stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
In case anyone is wondering what ActiveX is, it's essentially a Windows program you download that runs natively on your computer. It gets to draw to the specified element in the browser, which makes it look like it's part of a webpage. There isn't (or wasn't) any kind of sandboxing or security once the ActiveX component was installed - it could do anything it wanted on your computer like any other Windows program, because that's essentially what it was. The only security was whether or not you installed the ActiveX component in the first place. If I remember correctly they are really just DLLs, and used Component Object Model for the standard in which the DLL exposes methods, etc.
They should rename themselves ComputerWare. Think about it.
The potential for abuse is insane. Say I'm rich. I simply hire some poor guy with zero income to break the law when I need it done (driving me around when I'm in a hurry is a good one). If he gets in trouble I give him a bonus. If he gets caught too many times then I hire some other guy. Really, this is a stupid idea, and will further lead to bias and all kinds of issues with the police. Want to bet people driving more expensive cars get pulled over more often there? Especially in jurisdictions that rely on traffic fine income to support their infrastructure. Cops have latitude in writing tickets, etc. Only going 5-10 over? It's their choice to pull you over or not. They are not *required* to by law, and because of that, the potential for discrimination based on wealth will happen. Maybe you've just a got a cop who financially is in rough shape and he wants to stick it to the man. Well, he'll just wait for a luxury car to come along and bust them for going 5-6 over the limit.
Stupid idea.
Imagine if the Roanoke colonists decided Antarctica should be their goal. Well that's where Mars colonization plans are today. Of all the reasonable candidates, (Low earth orbit, the Lagrange points, the Moon, Mars, Asteroids) Mars is about the worst. It's at the bottom of the deepest gravity well outside of earth, except for the asteroids it has the longest travel time, and will have the longest development time before it can return resources to the people that invest in it.
Hang on there a second. How do you colonize low earth orbit or the Lagrange points? By your analogy, you're saying the Roanoke colonists should have "colonized" the Atlantic on a big floating platform or something. That isn't colonizing. The point in either the moon or mars is to extract and make use of resources to build habitations, create fuel, food, energy, etc. Hanging out in space in a tin can is not "colonizing" anything, no more than sitting in a raft in the middle of the Atlantic.
Gigaom reaches over 6.5 million monthly unique readers and continues to be the leading independent voice that demystifies emerging technology through its news, events and research. We’re a new type of media company with a business model that leverages technology, transparency and access to information. The company’s growth has been propelled by great writers, journalistic integrity, industry depth and audience engagement.
We offer integrated advertising programs across all of our channels: Cloud, Data, Media, Mobile, Science & Energy, Social & Web, and Podcasts. With a strong mobile reach of over 2 million monthly readers, our mobile advertising on Flipboard is highly targeted. With an array of podcasts, newsletters and other custom campaigns, we have a campaign offering to fit any client’s budget and marketing goals.
I don't know who these "6.5 million monthly unique readers" are, but if the regular crowd at Slashdot has never even heard of their site, then they weren't really reaching 6.5 million people, or they were the wrong 6.5 million people. According to their careers page it looks like they had a lot of overhead and tried to run like an old fashioned news company with two offices in major cities. They certainly weren't lean-and-mean.
https://about.gigaom.com/caree...
But evolution seems to have mainly selected biomolecules that are quantum critical,
I like the way this evolution guy did things. Great decisions. Maybe someday I'll get to meet him / her.
First of all, the Slashdot headline is wrong. It is "arctic ocean" sized, not antarctic. Second, the article makes another comparison that makes more sense, since Mars and Earth aren't the same size (how big would the arctic ocean be placed on mars? Not something we can visualize). That is the ocean on Mars covered slightly more of the planet than the Atlantic ocean covers on Earth - the Mars ocean covered 19% of the planet, while the Atlantic covers 17% of the Earth. Of course the volume of water and depths are totally different.
Mt Gox is an exchange, and exchanges exchange "real" money for bitcoins, correct? So say I paid $2,000 for bitcoins at Mt Gox, and I left those coins there instead of transferring to my own wallet. Thus if those particular coins went missing, I would have been out exactly the $2,000 I paid for them. Now on the other hand, say I mined bitcoins and transferred to Mt Gox for them to be sold, and those coins went missing. They never had any "real" value attached to them - only whatever resources I claimed to have consumed in generating them. See the difference?
I wonder how much of those bitcoins represented "real" money (as in bitcoins that were purchased via cash), versus bitcoins that had only been mined? If they did not represent actual money that flowed into the system, then perhaps the impetus for tracking them isn't very high?
That was a good article. Pretty long with lots of background info and details on how it works. My questions is simply this: why not put this thing out west somewhere (Death Valley, etc) where there is less human and natural vibrations to interfere with it?
Wow, I never realized Russia was that bad of a place to live. This speaks volumes.
First off, the picture is crap. It's overexposed and the white balance is off by a mile. My 10 year old Razr flip phone took better pictures than that.
However, there's still a human perception factor going on. I had looked at the picture on my laptop, and it was clearly white and gold. Then later I pulled the exact same picture up on my iPhone to show it to someone, and it looked black and blue. I then concluded that the picture looked different on my laptop than my phone due to differences in the display. When I got back home I pulled the picture up on both my phone and laptop to do a direct comparison, and both, including on my phone, looked white and gold again.
So I think it depends on whether your eyes are currently adapted to dim indoor lighting or bright outdoor lighting, in addition to the backlight on your device also changing the hue depending on if it's automatically full bright for outdoors or dim for indoors.
I think solar is great - I have some panels on my camper, which is very conducive to solar type use because it's already designed to function off-grid. But let's be realistic. Let's say every home in America stuck a couple thousand watts of solar power on their roof, and wanted to sell the power into the grid (as opposed of having to store it on-site). How is that supposed to work? If no power generation is required by the power company when the sun is shining, but the full normal generation is required the instant clouds sweep over a community or at night, etc, then how is that supposed to work? None of the power generation plants can function in that "instant on / instant off" type of a mode. Particularly not nuclear. The point is, once the adoption reaches some (rather smallish) percentage, there will be some major problems and costs that will have to be addressed.
Regarding the incentives (tax credits and the like), again, once solar hits some critical mass, why would the government provide incentives? The incentives did their job, and got some number of people to adopt solar.
Nothing is stopping anyone from using solar. It's just that it may not be a profitable (as in selling electricity or getting a tax break) endeavor. So don't whine when it can't be used purely for an economical advantage.
Translation of what they really said:
The investigation into the intrusion methods described in the document and the sophisticated attacks that Gemalto detected in 2010 and 2011 give us reasonable grounds to believe that an operation by NSA and GCHQ probably happened
The attacks were sophisticated, thus the fact that we were compromised was justified. We will play the victim card straight off. We presume that because the attacks were sophisticated that it was the NSA and GCHQ, although any hacker group and nation-state would give their left arm for our encryption keys. However NSA and GCHQ are scary acronyms, and so we were supposedly up against the most powerful hacking group in the world, again, justifying the fact that they succeeded.
The attacks against Gemalto only breached its office networks and could not have resulted in a massive theft of SIM encryption keys
The attacks resulted in a theft of our SIM encryption keys, although not a "massive" one, whatever "massive" means.
The operation aimed to intercept the encryption keys as they were exchanged between mobile operators and their suppliers globally. By 2010, Gemalto had already widely deployed a secure transfer system with its customers and only rare exceptions to this scheme could have led to theft
Rare exceptions to our scheme led to theft.
In the case of an eventual key theft, the intelligence services would only be able to spy on communications on second generation 2G mobile networks. 3G and 4G networks are not vulnerable to this type of attack
Intelligence services were able to spy on communications on 2G mobile networks, due to this one known particular theft of SIM keys that we managed to discover. Even the most modern cell phones fall back on 3G and 2G mobile networks if 4G is not available, so this could affect any phone.
None of our other products were impacted by this attack
Products of ours were impacted by this particular attack, but at least it wasn't every single product we have.
The best counter-measures to these type of attacks are the systematic encryption of data when stored and in transit, the use of the latest SIM cards and customized algorithms for each operator
We are trying to come up with better counter-measures to prevent them from continuing to access our encryption keys.
I just checked on my Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro I bought a few months ago, and it does not have Superfish as a trusted root certificate authority, as indicated in the screenshot in TFA.
But that has nothing to do with the generation of electricity, only the generation of heat. Surely the system can simply bypass the generators when the power is not needed. The cooling towers and ponds cool the steam / water back down before cycling back into the reactor anyway, regardless of whether the generators are part of the loop or not. An "emergency shutdown" of the reactor should not be necessary just because the electricity is not needed. Sounds like they think there is a high probability of a significant part the grid going down and not requiring all of the available power generation, so they're saving money by shutting it down now and shifting production to the natural gas / coal plants (which can be "turned off" and "turned on" much faster, to save even more money when the grid goes down).
Please, for the love of Pete's sake, either get a steady cam or don't attempt the "lead the actors down the hall with the camera while they're talking" shot. There was one shot so bad that it totally pulled me out of the scene. I think the camera guy might have stumbled or ran into someone. It was that bad.
I can fire up a TI-99/4A emulator or an Amiga emulator and run all my old software from three decades ago. Can someone name a general purpose computing platform (IE not including mainframes or supercomputers or other exotic low-volume hardware) whose software we cannot execute using an emulator?
This entire study is a big guesstimate. More than likely they get it right with the top half-dozen polluters, but beyond that the margin of error makes it all guesswork.
“Of course we know these aren’t absolute numbers, but it gives us an idea of the magnitude, and where we might need to focus our efforts to affect the issue,”
The USA, at #20 in the list, is responsible for less than 1% of the global pollution of this kind, according to this study. The USA produces only 3% of the pollution China produces alone. Certainly the margin for error in this type of indirect approximation is no better than 5%, putting the USA on the list at all in just statistical noise.
Further, the major offenders that produce that vast majority of the pollution do so because their very infrastructure results in the trash entering the ocean. Whereas the USA, on the other hand, consists only of "litter" directly from individuals one way or another (probably washing down rivers when they flood, as opposed to actually be dumping straight into the ocean as the official method of industry to get rid of their trash):
The US and Europe are not mismanaging their collected waste, so the plastic trash coming from those countries is due to litter, researchers said.
So putting the USA on that list is one of those things like "You do very well considering your population, the fact that you are the largest consuming nation on the planet, and have extensive coastlines in two oceans, but we hold you to a much higher standard and we know you can do even better, even though reducing your total pollution by 100% will have less than a 1% affect on the pollution entering the oceans."
You're right. It's SHIFT-END. I can do them without thinking, but I can't seem to describe them. :)
Come on now, a developer keyboard with no navigation keys? Really? Okay, so you can map multiple key combinations to represent them. Still, no way. If I want to highlight the text to the left of the cursor, I use CTRL-SHIFT-LEFT_ARROW. If I want to select the text from the cursor to the end of the line, I use CTRL-SHIFT-END. I already use those navigation keys in 3-key combos. I don't need it to be a 4-key combo, or something totally proprietary to the point I can only function with any proficiency on a keyboard that there is exactly one of in the entire world.
When I chose my last dev machine a few months ago, I really, really tried to make it a Macbook. I figured I could dual-boot windows and have all my bases covered. I had already tried using my older Macbook as a dev machine, and had given up. Why? No Home, End, PgUp or PgDown keys. As I stated above, I already use 3 key combos with those keys. I'm not about to try and make it a 4 key combo because Apple puts style over functionality. (and of course no Macbooks are touchscreen, and part of my work is making sure that web based multitouch HTML5 works properly on modern touch-screen desktop browsers).
When I was in Middle School in the mid 80s, everyone knew that computers were going to be a major part of the future. At that time, personal computers did not yet have an OS To Rule Them All, and the amount of things one could actually accomplish with a home computer was relatively limited. Pretty much any home computer of that era booted straight into BASIC, and most people perceived computers primarily as things in which people wrote software for to tell it what to do.
At that time schools were trying to make use of computers in the curriculum (beyond Apple IIs playing Oregon Trail and entering LOGO instructions to move the Turtle), and what most schools went with was BASIC programming. Our school had recently "upgraded" from TI-99/4A to Color TRS-80 (which was upsetting to me, because I owned a TI and could program for it very well). So my entire grade of 7th graders spent an entire semester programming in BASIC. Every boy, every girl - all of us. We always worked in teams of two (mostly boys paired up and girls paired up, as is typical at that age). Further, this was commonplace in most schools of the era.
So here is what we *should* have seen. Since we had boys and girls all being equally submersed in the writing of software for hundreds of thousands of children, if boys and girls equally relate to, identify with, and enjoy programming, then we should have seen a surge of that generation of girls also becoming computer scientists. But we did not. When I was in college less than a decade later, my fellow majors in CS consisted of only two females (and I'm friends with both of them on FB still). One does not do anything related to computers at all. The other is still involved in technology, but is more interested in and active in designing artistic elements at the company where she is CTO.
I think we're seeing the overall, general difference between male and female here. I think it's obvious that different talents and thus careers seem to carry with them trends in certain kinds of personalities. Generally, do musicians, artists, executives, managers and computer science people each seem to have personality tendencies that go along with their career? Those tendencies aren't "learned" by being in the career - those individuals had those traits before they entered their profession. So it is my belief that, generally, the typical female does not relate to software development. Perhaps it is because male and female brains are indeed physiologically different in various ways, and it is more enjoyable and / or natural for a male brain to think in a single-track mode required to deeply delve into one specific thought process for a long time while developing software. Or maybe it's for other reasons along that line.
Regardless, my point is simple. Why is anyone trying to point fingers at our educational system instead of just admitting men and women are different, and women just simply may not like software development?
What value does the MPAA possibly offer that could come anywhere close to commanding such regal sums annually?
Lobbying. And the MPAA has done a tremendous job, which is why all of Disney's characters are still under copyright half a century after Disney died, and nearly a century after they were first created. $20 million from each of the 6 big studios is a pittance in return. FTA:
Under tightened government ethics rules, the building’s screening room [MPAA's in Washington DC], though still active, is no longer the scene of lavish movie-and-dinner nights that were once popular with lawmakers.
So they had a "lavish" theater where they would wine and dine lawmakers, and most certainly let lawmakers rub elbows with A-list celebrities, over the decades before more stringent rules were put in place. You bet that influenced laws that keep extending copyright in favor of the MPAAs constituents.
Hype much? If your JavaScript isn't portable enough to run on a modern mobile browser than you suck. The fact that they can make something happen that is supposed to happen by default doesn't exactly excite me.
Just think if MS would have done this over a decade ago when they released C# / .NET. It could have nearly replaced Java. I could see 3rd party "standards" created for widgets that would be cross-platform (like Swing, etc, for Java), that people could use to create their cross-platform windowed GUI type apps. The formal Windows APIs would be used for people wanting to create full blown Windows-only apps. However all the core functionality (non-gui stuff) would be cross-platform and if written properly could have driven both the "Swing"-ish community created GUI, as well as the official Windows GUI stuff.