Some countries have never relied on such numbers to authenticate you. The SS number (not American, but assume that's what you're talking about), for instance, is the most stupid use of a identifying number that I've ever seen.
Last time I filed tax online was a few years ago and, because I'm in the UK, only because I was self-employed. It required a digital certificate signed by the Government Gateway, which takes all kinds of information to get a login on. Impersonation of me to obtain a tax refund would require some enormous amount of government collusion, or extremely lax data security.
And yet, by not having this easy-to-skim-read magic number that I must never tell anyone, I don't seem to suffer at all.
As an aside, I know someone who went to the US and stayed there. Firstly, they were issued official ID with "illegal immigrant" status written on it in big letters. We found that hilarious. Secondly, they were working and when asked they just gave a made-up SSN to their employer that could not possibly have correlated with any name they gave (being British, they just gave their real name anyway). They were there for 10+ years and it was never queried or investigated.
They were once denied entry to the US when they came back from their home country, though. Being law-abiding to (a certain extent) they waited a year as asked to, went again, and the US authorities okayed their entry.
I don't know what kind of system you're running over there, but SSNs are an absolute joke. Not saying you couldn't live in other countries for a while by making up numbers and moving around, but this person literally worked in the same place for 10 years with a totally made-up SSN because they couldn't be bothered to apply for one, and an ID card that told everyone they were an illegal immigrant. Nothing was ever done about either that actually made any difference.
Presumably someone, somewhere, has an awful lot of money tied against their SSN that they are paying in some way for, and has no way to detect or combat that. Or maybe SSNs that are made up and don't actually exist cannot be detected?
That's great. For this year. What do you intend to do next year?
Unless you desire to live in anarchy with no public services, taxation is necessary. The most sensible, easy-to-understand form of taxation is "income" tax. Give X% of what you have earned to the state (in some countries, 50% is standard!). It's pretty fair, not earning = no pay and millionaires pay for. It's pretty huge amounts of money. It doesn't detract from everyday life.
The problem in the US is that you appear to want everyone to fill in a tax form when the vast majority of the population have official jobs and nothing else of note. In the UK, you don't fill out tax forms. Most people never see one. You work, you "pay-as-you-earn" (so your employer is responsible for working out and paying your tax on the money they are giving you), it's taxed right there at source, and what you end up taking home is yours.
The only time you see a tax form is if you're earning more than ~GBP4000 on top of that as earned income that you haven't declared. Basically, self-employed people and people earning from shares, etc. with the time and money to get an accountant to do their taxes for them. The only time I have ever had to file a tax form is when I was self-employed. I literally wrote my income in one box, could sign off a multitude of stuff in others if I so desired (my work was IT support work, so expenses were basically zero except for the occasional bus ticket), and then was taxed on the difference.
Although the tax laws were horrendously worded, filling out the forms once you knew where to put things was about 20 minutes of work. And you just kept your receipts and invoices for 4 years if you were self-employed so that you could be audited. I was never audited, despite earning a living wage for 10 years that way and never having any other job, before or during - but from what I can tell if I had been, I'd actually have been entitled to an awful lot of refunds because I didn't claim half what I could have. And now it's online so it's even quicker and easier.
Yet I hear my American friends complain at certain times of the year about how they have to all "do their taxes" and it seems quite a stressful time for them. I'm sure the accountants make a fortune during that period.
If taxation is that complex and difficult, you are losing more than you gain from taxation. If the system is struggling under the load, then simplify it. But, to be honest, in the UK your tax forms are normally due something like January, and it'll be Summer before you get anything back precisely because it takes that long to properly check even just the self-employed taxes. Trying to tax the whole country and check their records in a couple of months is a ridiculous proposition, especially when the entire "tax season" (which doesn't exist in the UK - you either never file any taxes at all, or, as a business, you use an accountant who has MONTHS to file stuff for you - finance directors in businesses might get tetchy around April but that's not a taxation cutoff so much as making sure the financial year is wrapped up) is stressful for everyone.
Honestly, I never hear UK people talk about having to do their taxes unless their self-employed. And I've been there. If you want, you can pay some accountant a few hundred, give him your paperwork, and that's the end of it. Even on a rush-job the day before the deadline. It's not stressful at all.
But I see posts from American friends on the Internet where they seem to be under far too much stress about it, every year.
I have a social networking account already, thanks. I have an email account already, thanks I have a cloud storage account already, thanks. I have a search engine already, thanks. I have an instant messenger already, thanks.
When you try to do EVERYTHING, you believe that all your customers will drop everything they have years invested in and run to you. Doesn't work out that way. And if you get over-precious and try to force them to do it, well, that doesn't go down well either.
So run them as separate, independent services that I *can* join together if I want to (it's handy to be able to sign into Google Drive with my old GMail account, for example, but don't FORCE that upon me).
In the same way that if you sell me TV, phone, Internet, water, gas, electricity, burglar alarm and music lessons - and then try to "punish" me for not using one of them, or force me to use one in order to get another - chances are that I won't use any of them. Whereas if you just ran them all as separate services, I might well decide to lump in TV, phone and Internet into a single package for convenience. But you have to think about what happens when I'm perfectly happy with my Internet provider and DO NOT want to change. If your offerings are that inflexible that you won't let me use one without the others - even if the others are useless to me - then I'm likely to find yet-another-company that will do, say, my email without requiring me to sign up to their social network too.
This is exactly how I viewed things. I was one of the first GMail accounts, back when they were invite-only and nobody knew they existed. It took over from my Hotmail (primarily because my Hotmail account was trying to tie into my Windows Live account, and into my Microsoft account, etc. etc. etc.). And when G+ came along, I looked and deliberately decided against it. The more the pushed, to more I ignored.
It never got to the point where it became a hassle to opt-out, even when it did become annoying, so I'm still on GMail but not G+. Hence, it's not a shock to me that probably a lot of other people did exactly the same.
Just because you offer "your" Facebook, doesn't mean I'll immediately move everything off my Facebook to change to you. No matter how good you are.
Problem is, technology fast enough to talk to a PCI-Express card wasn't generally available in the 60's. Or 70's. Or probably even 80's. Even with supercomputers of the age.
More likely, nVidia has a wormhole through which they took orders for images to fake, then sent them back into the past.
"But what about the..." is a never-ending argument between conspiracy theorists and debunkers.
Unfortunately, each one that gets knocked down on its face means it's statistically more likely that the debunkers are right and the theorists wrong. We can go to infinity, but after ten or even 5 assertions wiped out with only basic experimentation, the chances of you having been right in the first place go beyond minuscule.
Scientific principle starts with "here's a hypothesis, does it fit the facts?" and goes BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD whenever any element of it is wrong. Conspiracy theorists just keep on pounding ignoring all their previous incorrect assertions until people get bored dealing with them and then "Ah ha! They won't answer!".
If you were wrong about the shadows, and the film, and the radioactivity, and this, that and the other? Chances are you're wrong about all the other minor crap too. And to prove otherwise requires more than just "it's obvious" or flaws are "too numerous to list".
It depends what metal, in what amount, and what configuration.
I can tell you know that a metal-rimmed bowl I put into a microwave sparks like fuck, cracks and crackles, destroys the metal on the rim and makes the kitchen smell of burning metal for a day.
Maybe it's "safe". But it's not a bright thing to do and entirely opposite to the function of a microwave - to heat food quickly. There's no point in heating food quickly if it all tastes of tin (the metal was gold, I think, but the smell was burning tin) because you put the wrong bowl in.
And microwave a CD and see what happens. No it won't explode, but it will arc like fuck and leave little flakes of metal and plastic all over your microwave (and therefore food).
Been there. Done it. Maybe not "dangerous" but still "stupid".
There isn't a solution to that. You have to talk to other points, and you have to do so from a connection you are on. That information, on ANY network in the world, is inevitable.
The only thing you can do is obscure it as much as possible so that people can't tell WHAT you did over the connection, or WHAT you passed to those others. They will be able to know who they were, but unless you can introduce sufficient plausible deniability (with Tor, that's just by using random people as the next hop), you can't do anything about that.
I don't think that's a problem we should waste time trying to solve. You aren't going to be able to obscure your endpoint's knowledge when 100% of the time someone is paying money for that endpoint to be connected to other endpoints. We do not have a darknet.
But it's also not that big a deal. With proper encryption and enough fake / routing data running through your connection with that encryption (and PFS), it's meaningless. All that can happen is someone can say "you were online, and so was John". If that's enough to convict you, you have bigger problems than the protocol of the network you used.
Google won the search wars because it ignored what content providers thought should be top of the listings (but let them buy ads), and put what search USERS should be top of the listings. That's how it got where it is and why it's stayed where it is. That's why there are entire businesses based around trying to get your site to the top of Google without getting chucked off their listings - because it's not as easy as just asking, or paying, or tricking Google.
Hence, if ".buy" suddenly starts getting to tops of listings where you have no reason or interest of it being there, then Google will suffer - as well as ".buy"
Decent search made domain names obsolete. I don't even know the domain of many of my favourite sites, but I know an exact Google search that will list them in the top 10 if I ever need them (e.g. I lose my bookmarks). That's why I don't get why people still are buying anything more than a single, relevant domain for themselves.
Seriously, what difference do you get in search rankings if you search from a mobile? Google knows you're on mobile. You can search for mobile terms. Now how many of those results are actually of ".mobi" sites?
TLD's and domain names are money-grabs. They only have any effect on "dumb" search engines that are already selling your entire front page to the highest bidder.
But, please, what makes you think that Apple, or even Samsung, aren't doing exactly the same?
Apple can install stuff on your device when it feels like it. In fact, you have even less control over an Apple devices and its whims. You'll happily plug in your Exchange details into the Apple device, you have no idea what it is or isn't doing with that. Apple doesn't even have permission systems. You either install, or not. And Apple spyware is just as - if not more - rampant.
So, your concern is really about modern devices, not anything to do with the meat of the story - encryption.
P.S. With Android, you can see the source, and build from clean source, without any Google services whatsoever if you want. People have done it for you. Almost every big-selling Android phone is supported. You can get root access and check everything you like. And then encryption really means something.
Anecdotal or not, almost everyone I come into contact with who has an iPhone is either living with a smashed screen or had to take it back to Apple to get the screen replaced after smashing it.
I do not see as many, if any, of non-Apple phones that are smashed as easily.
Personally, maybe I'm just not as clumsy, but I've dropped my phone any number of times and even kicked it accidentally as I dropped it and smashed it into a wall... and it wasn't even scratched. I don't think I've ever managed to break a phone like that, and I've had some spectacular drops in the past (plastic covers and batteries flying all over the room, but just put it back together and it worked).
I've worked in several schools that have biometric library systems and the move to cashless canteens has been underway for years (I've never happened to work with one, but that's not because they aren't around).
It is sold as preventing bullying, stopping you having to pay for the cards, etc. The privacy implications came up 10-15 years ago. Nobody, especially parents, really cared.
Hell, five years ago, my daughter's creche had fingerprint entry (I refused to take part, mainly because I saw it as insecure given I could gummi-bear the reader and enter as whoever came in last, but I was apparently the first to complain).
Old news people. It's already in schools all over the UK. There was minimal protest.
1) Yes, it's a general features of RAID's. Multiple devices are reading the data, the "fastest finger first" wins.
2) File server only dependent on your disk format, you mean? I happen to agree here but, if you're doing it at the FS level, then just a standardised RAID layout (such as Linux md / LVM) is the same thing. The non-standard formats that tie you into hardware do so for a reason - the hardware RAID provides things that no software RAID can, sheer speed. (Though, please note, I've happily run Linux software RAID on server-end hardware in production systems without any performance problems).
3) 3 disks dying out of 11? RAID6+1 will actually do better (I think... I can't do the maths just now).
ZFS is cool, don't get me wrong, but it's basically just a RAID fs. The Merkel tree journalling trick just saves having to have battery backup, but whether it works like that in real life failures is another matter entirely.
I don't care how many 1-star reviews a place get. You know what matters? How they respond to them.
I'd rather go to a place that replies politely to every negative review than one that ignores them entirely. And if they are genuinely fake, things such as "We have no record of your stay, but we're sorry that you had trouble" speak a thousand times more to what's actually happening then any amount of ignorance.
Everywhere gets bad reviews. You cannot have perfection. What matters is how you deal with when you fuck up.
Someone's just collected 5m GMail addresses from somewhere.
To be honest, it's more likely that my address has been sold by a Google employee - there's no way I should be getting as much spam as I do to an address that's completely unadvertised and which is only the end-point of various domain forwarding.
Password compromise too? Just sounds like someone's collated all the compromised data from other websites etc. they could find, rather than hacked into GMail somehow.
In this case, one of the scripts on a Tor service pulled data from and thus advertised it's globally-addressable IP address.
Sure, they can improve their processes and pull that script and replace it with a Tor-compatible version - but Tor can't detect this kind of stupidity and fix it for you. If you're stupid enough to put your home address on a Tor service, there's nothing Tor can do about that either.
The most interesting thing about this story is that all the "Tor was somehow broken by a omnipotent government agency" nonsense actually boiled down to "Idiots were giving out their own IP over a Tor service providing illegal content" (which is more often than not the case - I'm not at all convinced that most countries actually have the talent and resources to do what people claim they can, let alone that they routinely do them).
This either proves, when used properly, how effective Tor is, or ineffective the relevant agency is against Tor.
Honestly, I don't care too much about the detail. I don't support the illegal activity that this service was built upon. But I find it worrying that they were that stupid, and that it was that easy to "find" them, and also that the relevant agencies don't seem to have made much progress at all since the days of GCHQ.
All I see in the modern day is unbreakable maths stopping (or severely hindering) anyone but the most stupid people from being caught. I see that as both a good thing (encryption, etc. doing what it was designed to do, and implemented strongly) and a bad thing (our governments are still unable to stop such services because they don't have the talent to infiltrate them).
The analogue signal on a VHS tape corresponds to an exact (enough) representation of a PAL or NTSC signal, which you can capture in as much detail as you like but it will hardly vary.
The storage mechanism may be able to cope with more, but the actual useful data that could ever come out down a cable is limited to a quite precise specification. As such, higher resolution samples aren't going to help.
Also, VHS isn't entirely analogue. It has a magnetic representation on tape that is - again - highly specified to enable readback.
As such, it's not akin to, say, photographic slides or negatives (but even they have a useful resolution beyond which we won't see any advantage in delving), but more akin to storing computer data on audio cassette - something which formats like TZX encompass entirely even if they do not store every single magnetic charge that may be on the tape.
Your magnetic tape is 0's and 1's, by the way. Stored using a helical layout to stripe them around the tape.
Stop whinging about your browser allowing shit and treat data from the Internet as untrusted and unable to initiate actions without your explicit consent.
Does the original magnetic tape have those properties?
Unlikely unless it's S-VHS and even then, I don't think so if it was recorded on any normal household camera (quote from the Wiki: "In VHS, the chroma carrier is both severely bandlimited and rather noisy, a limitation that S-VHS does not address" - and they mention that S-VHS tapes were used to record 20-bit audio, but only if you were prepared to use several minutes of videotape for one minute of audio, so the chances that it recorded colour with even 8-bit accuracy is unlikely).
You have to think mathematically - significant digits. If the original only have 3 significant digits, there's absolutely NO POINT in worrying about anything with 3 or more significant digits handling it. All you're preserving is error anyway.
You know what? Digitise it yourself if you're that worried. Get a capture card (good luck finding one that captures RAW), plug it into a high-end VHS player, stick it all in 32-bit PNG channels if you want. The end result will be so insignificantly different to your original but will cost ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more.
I'm with you on quality, I get that, and you want to get that stuff off tape sooner rather than later if it holds any kind of emotional significance to you (chances are, your holiday tapes from the 80's will never be played again once you're dead, and only a handful of times until then). But you're really trying to go too far because you've heard some things on audiophile/videophile websites and the like and think you have to do that.
You know what? The extra time spent with your family, and the extra money to follow the kid's hobbies, will more than make up for any theoretical loss in the MPEG encoding of some home movies. And, at the end of the day, so long as you can see who the people in the movie are and what's happening, who cares about the fine detail? You can't Bladerunner it back to 4K, so what you do now will not degrade in the future. And, chances are, what you do now is higher quality than anything on the original tapes anyway (unless you intend to capture the missing parts of the TV interlace somehow?).
Give it up. Buy a GBP20 adaptor from your local store. Buy a slide-and-film scanner while you're there. Have a night in with the family where you're all doing one job - scanning, sorting, cleaning, labelling, filing, archiving - and get everything you have in your archives digitised. Copy it to friends and family (who, honestly, really won't care but will be polite). Then forget about it until little Johnny is 18 and you want to embarrass him in front of his girlfriend.
Re:bringing in more H1Bs will solve this problem
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The age-old fallacy that what specifics you teach people has any correlation to their future careers.
If you're a programmer, the language does not matter. It's literally that simple. You could WRITE your own language if it came to it.
If you're not, learning some language that's a passing fad is hardly worth worrying about compared to one that went out with the Ark.
In the same way that all my science classes taught me that Pluto was a planet, all my CS classes taught me about languages from the 60's that aren't in use any more. Literally, by the time you get to the workplace the language does not matter. It's like a car mechanic who's repaired some Fords in the past... it won't help him much on the new Fords or on other models if he can't use the underlying skills instead of the rote teaching.
Course languages should not be chosen to suit employers who - generally speaking - by the time those students graduate will be demanding something else. They should be chosen to promote understanding and completeness and practicality (I'm not saying we should all teach a language that doesn't exist outside of academia, for example). Just for the simple matter of students being able to obtain a compiler and get to grips with it at home, if nothing else.
But saying that business should dictate the languages taught is nonsensical. Things used in business are generally a BAD IDEA. We know they are. Because they are quick, cheap and dirty. That shouldn't be the basis of an education, especially when - as you hint at - it's the theory that matters.
For the record, I have been "officially" taught BBC BASIC, Visual Basic 3.0 and Java. And I have a degree in CS. Only one of those is close to a useful language any more, and that's the one being ridiculed in the previous article for it's use in the world's most popular brand of smartphones nowadays. If anything keeps me in a job, it's C, SQL, and the ability to quickly read example code from any language (PHP, Ruby, Perl, VB, C#, you name it) and knock up something that works by knowing that they are all pretty much the same at the bottom.
Course languages have almost zero correlation to future success. Business is already suspicious of people who do a 3-year CS degree and then tell you they can program anything in Java. It honestly doesn't matter what the language is, so business shouldn't be dictating it.
Re:bringing in more H1Bs will solve this problem
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What employers demand should not dictate what universities teach.
Otherwise we are quite literally giving a bunch of people McDonald's certifications and telling them that's an education.
You can have the speed of native code, if you deal with the problems of native code (device compatibility, non-portability, security, etc.)
Or you can have the security and cross-platformness of some standardised intermediary language that basically runs as a VM at a slightly slower pace.
To be honest, I think Carmack's best work is long behind him, but there's also a need to develop on appropriate devices. If you need a device to be that fast and powerful, then aiming at smartphones and tablets probably isn't the best idea at the moment - they aren't the cutting edge of the market and won't be for a long time. In the same way that aiming at the 286 probably wouldn't have been the best idea for Doom, or that aiming only for software rendering probably wasn't the best idea for Quake.
Get the code going and providing something people want, and they will either buy devices that can run it, or ask you what you need for a port to work. By the time you're finished, the speed you're after will be available in the next device to launch.
Isn't this how cutting-edge development has always worked? Had to have huge resources and powerful machines totally unlike those seen before to make the software run at the speeds you need while you're developing it. Then a year after release, everyone has those devices and soon people are calling your code "old"?
Which will work fine right up until the point that one person is genetically un-human and then we'll have no end of arguments (and maybe even bloodshed) on our hands.
DNA is also a bit of a problem - are you talking mitochondrial DNA, etc? Because you don't have "one" DNA in your body. You have several thousand, minimum. Thus you are instantly several thousand species in a single individual and actually your largest amount of DNA probably isn't "you", as such.
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Some countries have never relied on such numbers to authenticate you. The SS number (not American, but assume that's what you're talking about), for instance, is the most stupid use of a identifying number that I've ever seen.
Last time I filed tax online was a few years ago and, because I'm in the UK, only because I was self-employed. It required a digital certificate signed by the Government Gateway, which takes all kinds of information to get a login on. Impersonation of me to obtain a tax refund would require some enormous amount of government collusion, or extremely lax data security.
And yet, by not having this easy-to-skim-read magic number that I must never tell anyone, I don't seem to suffer at all.
As an aside, I know someone who went to the US and stayed there. Firstly, they were issued official ID with "illegal immigrant" status written on it in big letters. We found that hilarious. Secondly, they were working and when asked they just gave a made-up SSN to their employer that could not possibly have correlated with any name they gave (being British, they just gave their real name anyway). They were there for 10+ years and it was never queried or investigated.
They were once denied entry to the US when they came back from their home country, though. Being law-abiding to (a certain extent) they waited a year as asked to, went again, and the US authorities okayed their entry.
I don't know what kind of system you're running over there, but SSNs are an absolute joke. Not saying you couldn't live in other countries for a while by making up numbers and moving around, but this person literally worked in the same place for 10 years with a totally made-up SSN because they couldn't be bothered to apply for one, and an ID card that told everyone they were an illegal immigrant. Nothing was ever done about either that actually made any difference.
Presumably someone, somewhere, has an awful lot of money tied against their SSN that they are paying in some way for, and has no way to detect or combat that. Or maybe SSNs that are made up and don't actually exist cannot be detected?
That's great. For this year. What do you intend to do next year?
Unless you desire to live in anarchy with no public services, taxation is necessary. The most sensible, easy-to-understand form of taxation is "income" tax. Give X% of what you have earned to the state (in some countries, 50% is standard!). It's pretty fair, not earning = no pay and millionaires pay for. It's pretty huge amounts of money. It doesn't detract from everyday life.
The problem in the US is that you appear to want everyone to fill in a tax form when the vast majority of the population have official jobs and nothing else of note. In the UK, you don't fill out tax forms. Most people never see one. You work, you "pay-as-you-earn" (so your employer is responsible for working out and paying your tax on the money they are giving you), it's taxed right there at source, and what you end up taking home is yours.
The only time you see a tax form is if you're earning more than ~GBP4000 on top of that as earned income that you haven't declared. Basically, self-employed people and people earning from shares, etc. with the time and money to get an accountant to do their taxes for them. The only time I have ever had to file a tax form is when I was self-employed. I literally wrote my income in one box, could sign off a multitude of stuff in others if I so desired (my work was IT support work, so expenses were basically zero except for the occasional bus ticket), and then was taxed on the difference.
Although the tax laws were horrendously worded, filling out the forms once you knew where to put things was about 20 minutes of work. And you just kept your receipts and invoices for 4 years if you were self-employed so that you could be audited. I was never audited, despite earning a living wage for 10 years that way and never having any other job, before or during - but from what I can tell if I had been, I'd actually have been entitled to an awful lot of refunds because I didn't claim half what I could have. And now it's online so it's even quicker and easier.
Yet I hear my American friends complain at certain times of the year about how they have to all "do their taxes" and it seems quite a stressful time for them. I'm sure the accountants make a fortune during that period.
If taxation is that complex and difficult, you are losing more than you gain from taxation. If the system is struggling under the load, then simplify it. But, to be honest, in the UK your tax forms are normally due something like January, and it'll be Summer before you get anything back precisely because it takes that long to properly check even just the self-employed taxes. Trying to tax the whole country and check their records in a couple of months is a ridiculous proposition, especially when the entire "tax season" (which doesn't exist in the UK - you either never file any taxes at all, or, as a business, you use an accountant who has MONTHS to file stuff for you - finance directors in businesses might get tetchy around April but that's not a taxation cutoff so much as making sure the financial year is wrapped up) is stressful for everyone.
Honestly, I never hear UK people talk about having to do their taxes unless their self-employed. And I've been there. If you want, you can pay some accountant a few hundred, give him your paperwork, and that's the end of it. Even on a rush-job the day before the deadline. It's not stressful at all.
But I see posts from American friends on the Internet where they seem to be under far too much stress about it, every year.
I have a social networking account already, thanks.
I have an email account already, thanks
I have a cloud storage account already, thanks.
I have a search engine already, thanks.
I have an instant messenger already, thanks.
When you try to do EVERYTHING, you believe that all your customers will drop everything they have years invested in and run to you. Doesn't work out that way. And if you get over-precious and try to force them to do it, well, that doesn't go down well either.
So run them as separate, independent services that I *can* join together if I want to (it's handy to be able to sign into Google Drive with my old GMail account, for example, but don't FORCE that upon me).
In the same way that if you sell me TV, phone, Internet, water, gas, electricity, burglar alarm and music lessons - and then try to "punish" me for not using one of them, or force me to use one in order to get another - chances are that I won't use any of them. Whereas if you just ran them all as separate services, I might well decide to lump in TV, phone and Internet into a single package for convenience. But you have to think about what happens when I'm perfectly happy with my Internet provider and DO NOT want to change. If your offerings are that inflexible that you won't let me use one without the others - even if the others are useless to me - then I'm likely to find yet-another-company that will do, say, my email without requiring me to sign up to their social network too.
This is exactly how I viewed things. I was one of the first GMail accounts, back when they were invite-only and nobody knew they existed. It took over from my Hotmail (primarily because my Hotmail account was trying to tie into my Windows Live account, and into my Microsoft account, etc. etc. etc.). And when G+ came along, I looked and deliberately decided against it. The more the pushed, to more I ignored.
It never got to the point where it became a hassle to opt-out, even when it did become annoying, so I'm still on GMail but not G+. Hence, it's not a shock to me that probably a lot of other people did exactly the same.
Just because you offer "your" Facebook, doesn't mean I'll immediately move everything off my Facebook to change to you. No matter how good you are.
Problem is, technology fast enough to talk to a PCI-Express card wasn't generally available in the 60's. Or 70's. Or probably even 80's. Even with supercomputers of the age.
More likely, nVidia has a wormhole through which they took orders for images to fake, then sent them back into the past.
"But what about the..." is a never-ending argument between conspiracy theorists and debunkers.
Unfortunately, each one that gets knocked down on its face means it's statistically more likely that the debunkers are right and the theorists wrong. We can go to infinity, but after ten or even 5 assertions wiped out with only basic experimentation, the chances of you having been right in the first place go beyond minuscule.
Scientific principle starts with "here's a hypothesis, does it fit the facts?" and goes BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD whenever any element of it is wrong. Conspiracy theorists just keep on pounding ignoring all their previous incorrect assertions until people get bored dealing with them and then "Ah ha! They won't answer!".
If you were wrong about the shadows, and the film, and the radioactivity, and this, that and the other? Chances are you're wrong about all the other minor crap too. And to prove otherwise requires more than just "it's obvious" or flaws are "too numerous to list".
It depends what metal, in what amount, and what configuration.
I can tell you know that a metal-rimmed bowl I put into a microwave sparks like fuck, cracks and crackles, destroys the metal on the rim and makes the kitchen smell of burning metal for a day.
Maybe it's "safe". But it's not a bright thing to do and entirely opposite to the function of a microwave - to heat food quickly. There's no point in heating food quickly if it all tastes of tin (the metal was gold, I think, but the smell was burning tin) because you put the wrong bowl in.
And microwave a CD and see what happens. No it won't explode, but it will arc like fuck and leave little flakes of metal and plastic all over your microwave (and therefore food).
Been there. Done it. Maybe not "dangerous" but still "stupid".
There isn't a solution to that. You have to talk to other points, and you have to do so from a connection you are on. That information, on ANY network in the world, is inevitable.
The only thing you can do is obscure it as much as possible so that people can't tell WHAT you did over the connection, or WHAT you passed to those others. They will be able to know who they were, but unless you can introduce sufficient plausible deniability (with Tor, that's just by using random people as the next hop), you can't do anything about that.
I don't think that's a problem we should waste time trying to solve. You aren't going to be able to obscure your endpoint's knowledge when 100% of the time someone is paying money for that endpoint to be connected to other endpoints. We do not have a darknet.
But it's also not that big a deal. With proper encryption and enough fake / routing data running through your connection with that encryption (and PFS), it's meaningless. All that can happen is someone can say "you were online, and so was John". If that's enough to convict you, you have bigger problems than the protocol of the network you used.
Google won the search wars because it ignored what content providers thought should be top of the listings (but let them buy ads), and put what search USERS should be top of the listings. That's how it got where it is and why it's stayed where it is. That's why there are entire businesses based around trying to get your site to the top of Google without getting chucked off their listings - because it's not as easy as just asking, or paying, or tricking Google.
Hence, if ".buy" suddenly starts getting to tops of listings where you have no reason or interest of it being there, then Google will suffer - as well as ".buy"
Decent search made domain names obsolete. I don't even know the domain of many of my favourite sites, but I know an exact Google search that will list them in the top 10 if I ever need them (e.g. I lose my bookmarks). That's why I don't get why people still are buying anything more than a single, relevant domain for themselves.
Seriously, what difference do you get in search rankings if you search from a mobile? Google knows you're on mobile. You can search for mobile terms. Now how many of those results are actually of ".mobi" sites?
TLD's and domain names are money-grabs. They only have any effect on "dumb" search engines that are already selling your entire front page to the highest bidder.
Agreed.
But, please, what makes you think that Apple, or even Samsung, aren't doing exactly the same?
Apple can install stuff on your device when it feels like it. In fact, you have even less control over an Apple devices and its whims. You'll happily plug in your Exchange details into the Apple device, you have no idea what it is or isn't doing with that. Apple doesn't even have permission systems. You either install, or not. And Apple spyware is just as - if not more - rampant.
So, your concern is really about modern devices, not anything to do with the meat of the story - encryption.
P.S. With Android, you can see the source, and build from clean source, without any Google services whatsoever if you want. People have done it for you. Almost every big-selling Android phone is supported. You can get root access and check everything you like. And then encryption really means something.
"significantly"
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
I really shouldn't be getting my tech news from sites that are basically a day behind BBC News.
Anecdotal or not, almost everyone I come into contact with who has an iPhone is either living with a smashed screen or had to take it back to Apple to get the screen replaced after smashing it.
I do not see as many, if any, of non-Apple phones that are smashed as easily.
Personally, maybe I'm just not as clumsy, but I've dropped my phone any number of times and even kicked it accidentally as I dropped it and smashed it into a wall... and it wasn't even scratched. I don't think I've ever managed to break a phone like that, and I've had some spectacular drops in the past (plastic covers and batteries flying all over the room, but just put it back together and it worked).
I work in IT in English schools.
Welcome to a decade ago.
I've worked in several schools that have biometric library systems and the move to cashless canteens has been underway for years (I've never happened to work with one, but that's not because they aren't around).
It is sold as preventing bullying, stopping you having to pay for the cards, etc. The privacy implications came up 10-15 years ago. Nobody, especially parents, really cared.
Hell, five years ago, my daughter's creche had fingerprint entry (I refused to take part, mainly because I saw it as insecure given I could gummi-bear the reader and enter as whoever came in last, but I was apparently the first to complain).
Old news people. It's already in schools all over the UK. There was minimal protest.
1) Yes, it's a general features of RAID's. Multiple devices are reading the data, the "fastest finger first" wins.
2) File server only dependent on your disk format, you mean? I happen to agree here but, if you're doing it at the FS level, then just a standardised RAID layout (such as Linux md / LVM) is the same thing. The non-standard formats that tie you into hardware do so for a reason - the hardware RAID provides things that no software RAID can, sheer speed. (Though, please note, I've happily run Linux software RAID on server-end hardware in production systems without any performance problems).
3) 3 disks dying out of 11? RAID6+1 will actually do better (I think... I can't do the maths just now).
ZFS is cool, don't get me wrong, but it's basically just a RAID fs. The Merkel tree journalling trick just saves having to have battery backup, but whether it works like that in real life failures is another matter entirely.
I don't care how many 1-star reviews a place get. You know what matters? How they respond to them.
I'd rather go to a place that replies politely to every negative review than one that ignores them entirely. And if they are genuinely fake, things such as "We have no record of your stay, but we're sorry that you had trouble" speak a thousand times more to what's actually happening then any amount of ignorance.
Everywhere gets bad reviews. You cannot have perfection. What matters is how you deal with when you fuck up.
Same for me, same for my brother.
Someone's just collected 5m GMail addresses from somewhere.
To be honest, it's more likely that my address has been sold by a Google employee - there's no way I should be getting as much spam as I do to an address that's completely unadvertised and which is only the end-point of various domain forwarding.
Password compromise too? Just sounds like someone's collated all the compromised data from other websites etc. they could find, rather than hacked into GMail somehow.
Yes, but HMS Please Don't Hurt Me doesn't have the same kind of ring to it.
Security software cannot fix stupidity.
In this case, one of the scripts on a Tor service pulled data from and thus advertised it's globally-addressable IP address.
Sure, they can improve their processes and pull that script and replace it with a Tor-compatible version - but Tor can't detect this kind of stupidity and fix it for you. If you're stupid enough to put your home address on a Tor service, there's nothing Tor can do about that either.
The most interesting thing about this story is that all the "Tor was somehow broken by a omnipotent government agency" nonsense actually boiled down to "Idiots were giving out their own IP over a Tor service providing illegal content" (which is more often than not the case - I'm not at all convinced that most countries actually have the talent and resources to do what people claim they can, let alone that they routinely do them).
This either proves, when used properly, how effective Tor is, or ineffective the relevant agency is against Tor.
Honestly, I don't care too much about the detail. I don't support the illegal activity that this service was built upon. But I find it worrying that they were that stupid, and that it was that easy to "find" them, and also that the relevant agencies don't seem to have made much progress at all since the days of GCHQ.
All I see in the modern day is unbreakable maths stopping (or severely hindering) anyone but the most stupid people from being caught. I see that as both a good thing (encryption, etc. doing what it was designed to do, and implemented strongly) and a bad thing (our governments are still unable to stop such services because they don't have the talent to infiltrate them).
The analogue signal on a VHS tape corresponds to an exact (enough) representation of a PAL or NTSC signal, which you can capture in as much detail as you like but it will hardly vary.
The storage mechanism may be able to cope with more, but the actual useful data that could ever come out down a cable is limited to a quite precise specification. As such, higher resolution samples aren't going to help.
Also, VHS isn't entirely analogue. It has a magnetic representation on tape that is - again - highly specified to enable readback.
As such, it's not akin to, say, photographic slides or negatives (but even they have a useful resolution beyond which we won't see any advantage in delving), but more akin to storing computer data on audio cassette - something which formats like TZX encompass entirely even if they do not store every single magnetic charge that may be on the tape.
Your magnetic tape is 0's and 1's, by the way. Stored using a helical layout to stripe them around the tape.
Same here.
Stop whinging about your browser allowing shit and treat data from the Internet as untrusted and unable to initiate actions without your explicit consent.
Does the original magnetic tape have those properties?
Unlikely unless it's S-VHS and even then, I don't think so if it was recorded on any normal household camera (quote from the Wiki: "In VHS, the chroma carrier is both severely bandlimited and rather noisy, a limitation that S-VHS does not address" - and they mention that S-VHS tapes were used to record 20-bit audio, but only if you were prepared to use several minutes of videotape for one minute of audio, so the chances that it recorded colour with even 8-bit accuracy is unlikely).
You have to think mathematically - significant digits. If the original only have 3 significant digits, there's absolutely NO POINT in worrying about anything with 3 or more significant digits handling it. All you're preserving is error anyway.
You know what? Digitise it yourself if you're that worried. Get a capture card (good luck finding one that captures RAW), plug it into a high-end VHS player, stick it all in 32-bit PNG channels if you want. The end result will be so insignificantly different to your original but will cost ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more.
I'm with you on quality, I get that, and you want to get that stuff off tape sooner rather than later if it holds any kind of emotional significance to you (chances are, your holiday tapes from the 80's will never be played again once you're dead, and only a handful of times until then). But you're really trying to go too far because you've heard some things on audiophile/videophile websites and the like and think you have to do that.
You know what? The extra time spent with your family, and the extra money to follow the kid's hobbies, will more than make up for any theoretical loss in the MPEG encoding of some home movies. And, at the end of the day, so long as you can see who the people in the movie are and what's happening, who cares about the fine detail? You can't Bladerunner it back to 4K, so what you do now will not degrade in the future. And, chances are, what you do now is higher quality than anything on the original tapes anyway (unless you intend to capture the missing parts of the TV interlace somehow?).
Give it up. Buy a GBP20 adaptor from your local store. Buy a slide-and-film scanner while you're there. Have a night in with the family where you're all doing one job - scanning, sorting, cleaning, labelling, filing, archiving - and get everything you have in your archives digitised. Copy it to friends and family (who, honestly, really won't care but will be polite). Then forget about it until little Johnny is 18 and you want to embarrass him in front of his girlfriend.
The age-old fallacy that what specifics you teach people has any correlation to their future careers.
If you're a programmer, the language does not matter. It's literally that simple. You could WRITE your own language if it came to it.
If you're not, learning some language that's a passing fad is hardly worth worrying about compared to one that went out with the Ark.
In the same way that all my science classes taught me that Pluto was a planet, all my CS classes taught me about languages from the 60's that aren't in use any more. Literally, by the time you get to the workplace the language does not matter. It's like a car mechanic who's repaired some Fords in the past... it won't help him much on the new Fords or on other models if he can't use the underlying skills instead of the rote teaching.
Course languages should not be chosen to suit employers who - generally speaking - by the time those students graduate will be demanding something else. They should be chosen to promote understanding and completeness and practicality (I'm not saying we should all teach a language that doesn't exist outside of academia, for example). Just for the simple matter of students being able to obtain a compiler and get to grips with it at home, if nothing else.
But saying that business should dictate the languages taught is nonsensical. Things used in business are generally a BAD IDEA. We know they are. Because they are quick, cheap and dirty. That shouldn't be the basis of an education, especially when - as you hint at - it's the theory that matters.
For the record, I have been "officially" taught BBC BASIC, Visual Basic 3.0 and Java. And I have a degree in CS. Only one of those is close to a useful language any more, and that's the one being ridiculed in the previous article for it's use in the world's most popular brand of smartphones nowadays. If anything keeps me in a job, it's C, SQL, and the ability to quickly read example code from any language (PHP, Ruby, Perl, VB, C#, you name it) and knock up something that works by knowing that they are all pretty much the same at the bottom.
Course languages have almost zero correlation to future success. Business is already suspicious of people who do a 3-year CS degree and then tell you they can program anything in Java. It honestly doesn't matter what the language is, so business shouldn't be dictating it.
What employers demand should not dictate what universities teach.
Otherwise we are quite literally giving a bunch of people McDonald's certifications and telling them that's an education.
It's back to the age-old arguments.
You can have the speed of native code, if you deal with the problems of native code (device compatibility, non-portability, security, etc.)
Or you can have the security and cross-platformness of some standardised intermediary language that basically runs as a VM at a slightly slower pace.
To be honest, I think Carmack's best work is long behind him, but there's also a need to develop on appropriate devices. If you need a device to be that fast and powerful, then aiming at smartphones and tablets probably isn't the best idea at the moment - they aren't the cutting edge of the market and won't be for a long time. In the same way that aiming at the 286 probably wouldn't have been the best idea for Doom, or that aiming only for software rendering probably wasn't the best idea for Quake.
Get the code going and providing something people want, and they will either buy devices that can run it, or ask you what you need for a port to work. By the time you're finished, the speed you're after will be available in the next device to launch.
Isn't this how cutting-edge development has always worked? Had to have huge resources and powerful machines totally unlike those seen before to make the software run at the speeds you need while you're developing it. Then a year after release, everyone has those devices and soon people are calling your code "old"?
Which will work fine right up until the point that one person is genetically un-human and then we'll have no end of arguments (and maybe even bloodshed) on our hands.
DNA is also a bit of a problem - are you talking mitochondrial DNA, etc? Because you don't have "one" DNA in your body. You have several thousand, minimum. Thus you are instantly several thousand species in a single individual and actually your largest amount of DNA probably isn't "you", as such.