I hate it when people carelessly claim that ARM is just as vulnerable as AMD and Intel.
None of the ARM CPUs in my tablets and smartphones incorporate speculative execution, and thus, are immune to these attacks.
A few high performance ARM cores have speculative execution and are theoretically vulnerable. However, the vast majority of battery powered ARM devices do not incorporate high performance ARM cores! Battery powered devices are more concerned about conserving energy than raw execution speed, so manufactures more often than not choose the more power efficient ARM cores that do not incorporate speculative execution.
This is not a tiny, miniscule issue. People have more smart phones than they have cars. This massive fleet of mobile computing devices is going to have security issues that get exploited sooner or later and the handset manufactures aren't going to do jack to close the holes. They want old phones to become trash and force everyone to buy new phones whenever they decide it's time to make some revenue. If this behavior is not monopolistic, anti-competitive, and counter to the public's best interests, then WTF is?
A bootloader locked phone is like a car with the hood welded shut. Most people don't know or care about what's under the hood until it breaks. And once it does, they have a reasonable expectation of being able to take it to the nearest repair guy to get it working again.
It's one of the steps toward that goal. By eliminating the Linux kernel and using only stuff they invented at Google, they can later pull the rug out from under open source software by simply changing the licensing terms to what is now entirely THEIR software.
At the moment, with a Linux kernel underpinning the Android ecosystem, it's impossible for them to completely close the door on open source because plenty of outside Linux developers aren't going to go for that. Get rid of the Linux kernel though and those guys will have no say on future license terms.
Android is far away from Linux, but it still has the Linux kernel at its core. I recently wrote an app that uses Linux ioctls to talk to a USB device from native code in order to achieve minimal latency. Sure, I have to initially get things going from Java to obtain permissions in Android, but once I've got the file descriptor for the USB device I want to talk to, I'm off to the races.
Indeed. I believe Facebook tried this idea of flagging postings they deemed unfactual, and it backfired. The people considered the flag a âbadge of honor" and were quite proud of themselves when they achieved their goal of getting flagged. The same thing is going to happen on YouTube.
I do not fear water contamination nearly as much as I fear being unable to eat anything once they get around to making every crop genetically modified to tear up my guts from the inside.
I can easily filter water to less than 30ppm through reverse osmosis filtering. If that's not good enough, I can distill water to get it down to 0ppm.
Indeed. In insects, the Bt toxins cut holes in the insects' guts and cause them to die. Supposedly, Bt doesn't do the same in humans. Perhaps it doesn't kill us right off the bat, but I suspect it still does some damage to our guts. I am very leery of eating popcorn nowadays because it seems to irritate my guts quite a bit. Which is a shame, because I loved popcorn as a child (back before GMO corn existed).
The whole "gluten free" diet craze and celiac disease may be more of an allergy to genetically modified wheat than gluten, in my opinion. Corn, wheat, and soybeans were some of the first crops to be genetically modified.
This article seems to be slanted toward GMO crops being a good thing. Reducing pesticide sprays SOUNDS like a good thing, until you realize that the GMO plants and produce are pesticides themselves, inside and out. You can NOT wash GMO produce off to reduce your intake of the built-in pesticide. The pesticide is grown by the plant itself, inside and throughout the vegetables you are supposed to eat.
Back in the pre-GMO days, sprayed pesticides could be washed off. Sprayed pesticides are primarily concentrated on the OUTSIDE of vegetables. Husks and pod shells are typically discarded and protect our food from being contaminated by pesticides. It was more labor intensive for the farmers, sure, but the food was likely healthier for consumers.
You're still fooled by Intel's Jedi^H^H^H^Hmarketing mind tricks. Spectre does not affect everyone. Many ARM cores used in tablets and smart phones lack speculative execution features in order to save battery power. Without speculative execution, there is no Spectre. Only the higher performance ARM's implement speculative execution.
Intel has over twice the market cap that Qualcomm has, and yet the the EU is fining Qualcomm (the smaller company) for abusing its "dominant" position, preventing competitors from innovating. Intel makes chips that use far more energy, have serious bugs (meltdown, spectre), and intentional backdoors (Intel Management Engine). That ain't innovation in my eyes -- only the gov't sees these things as "innovation," since they are in the business of clandestine spying, sabotage, and taxation.
Also love the quote about "consumers' concern about the environmental impact" of cardboard boxes. Last time I checked, cardboard comes from trees, a 100% renewable resource. And since cardboard comes from trees, cardboard is completely compostable. Flatten that box, stick it out in the yard, cover it with mulch, and within short order, it will be recycled back into the Earth, ready to grow new trees all over again.
Now, the bubble envelopes that Amazon is replacing cardboard boxes with, they're predominately made out of plastic with a thin paper outside. Plastic is generally made from petroleum products, a not so renewable resource. And plastic does not compost very well.
Big industry LOVES selling new stuff, they HATE when people re-use old stuff. Can't make quarterly sales goals if everybody is re-using old stuff and not buying new.
Now when someone plans a mission to Mars, they'll have to worry about getting hit by his car, on top of all the other natural hazards of going to Mars.
Dead satellites floating around as junk around our planet at least presumably had some beneficial purpose at one time. This orbiting sports car has no such purpose other than satisfying Elon Musk's vanity.
What's worse, this hunk of space junk COULD have provided someone with beneficial use right here on Earth. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would love to have an electric sports car that would be happy to take this thing off his hands for far less than what it's going to cost to launch it into space.
Mod parent up. Toslink's inherent jitter problem means that it is a complete failure for anyone who cares about audio quality. And those are the only people that would bother paying extra for optical equipment vs regular old copper wire.
Yeah, he should just throw his money at Musk. Musk seems to have plenty of big ideas that might potentially benefit mankind, but so far, Musk hasn't made a whole lot of profit trying to bring his ideas to life.
Unfortunately, that's not how Bill Gates thinks. As topwiz mentioned, Bill's philanthropic projects usually involve some form of reach-around scheme where the money he "donates" out of one hand eventually comes back to his companies in the other hand. I'm not sure how this works as a tax avoidance scheme -- normally making transactions incurs taxes whereas just letting money sit still does not.
I think it's more of a public relations trick: make people believe he is donating his vast wealth to the "good of mankind," when really he's just shuffling money from his left pocket to his right pocket. Before he started doing all his "philanthropic" work, he was under quite of bit of pressure from gov't to break up his business. Now, not so much.
Someone has to build those automated systems. Someone has to maintain them. Someone has to upgrade them. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
What you're describing is productivity improvements to the Nth degree such that only a small handful of people are producing everything that the economy has to offer.
Everyone outside of that small handful of productive people will by definition have NOTHING to offer in return to reward the productive few for their effort.
As a member of the productive class, I have no motivation to accept UBI dollars for my produce. The only people that can legitimately trade with me are other producers -- they are the only people that produce anything of value to offer in return for my productive efforts.
Right now, a dollar printed out of thin air and a dollar earned through productive effort are largely indistinguishable.
If the number of people actually producing goods collapses to a small handful, it will become increasingly obvious who's dollar is backed by production and who's dollar is just worthless UBI.
Germany is GMO-free, eh? Well, that's a nice dream. Unfortunately, genes are not something you can simply legislate or otherwise firewall out of your land.
Corn is primarily pollinated by wind. As long as there is wind blowing and dust moving, those GMO genes invented elsewhere can and WILL find their way into fields supposedly GMO-free without any effort by humans to move them there. Keeping them out is likely going to be a fool's errand ending in futility.
There are even lawsuits from Monsanto extracting money from farmers that have patented GMO crops surreptitiously growing on their land. The farmer never paid for GMO seeds, didn't want GMO crops, but the genes found their way into their field anyway, so now these farmers are "infringing" upon Monsanto's GMO patents.
I agree, except at the point where you are willing to trust Microsoft... Windows 10 shows us that Microsoft does not hold our privacy sacrosanct in the least. The leaked NSA tools further prove that relying on Microsoft is not going to protect you from being spied upon, by our gov't AND foreign entities. Even this whole Kaspersky fiasco shows that further NSA tools are likely being stolen, AS THEY ARE BEING WRITTEN!
At the very least, use Linux. Linux may have backdoors too, but at least it's open source, so you and others can at least attempt to identify and close those security holes. Closed source Microsoft products, forget about it. You're never going to be safe there.
Of course we have a huge drop in insect populations. What did you expect was going to happen?
One of the genetic modifications done to corn in 1995 was the introduction of genes from bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). These genes make plants themselves produce toxic crystals which destroy insect guts. Thus, farms don't have to spray insecticide anymore, the plants themselves ARE insecticide.
So, did everyone in the room burst out laughing?:-)
Sometimes, a remark like that is totally justified. Unfortunately, in the corporate world and in gov't, it's the "Yes" men that are retained along with their incompetent managers. Those who dare speak the truth are doomed in such organizations.
Fortunately, incompetent organisations usually lose out in the marketplace to more competent competitors, so it all works out in the end (eventually).
Artificial fertilizers don't need soil to hold it. I grow plenty of plants in hydroponics -- NO SOIL at all. I don't even use pebbles or clay marbles, just a pool of fertilizer enriched water with air bubbling through it.
I save time by cooking at home. If I were to eat out every meal, I'd be wasting a ton of time fighting through traffic and waiting in lines, three times a day. I'd also be getting sick because those restaurants are never perfect at hygiene. I've never had food poisoning from a meal I prepared at home, but when I eat out, it's a bit like rolling dice.
With a garden in my backyard, a lot of my food doesn't even need to be cooked -- cooking is a crutch for people eating tough store bought foods that aren't young, fresh, and tender like what I get out of my garden. Plus, I don't have to wait in any lines to "check out" from my garden "grocery store."
Next, I learned about composting my food wastes, which REALLY improves the cleanup efforts of stuff that used to take forever to cleanup manually. It is SO much easier to take my dirty cutting board outside and hose it off at high pressure over the woodchip compost pile than scrubbing it indoors where anything splashing ends up creating potential cross-contamination and more cleanup work.
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I hate it when people carelessly claim that ARM is just as vulnerable as AMD and Intel.
None of the ARM CPUs in my tablets and smartphones incorporate speculative execution, and thus, are immune to these attacks.
A few high performance ARM cores have speculative execution and are theoretically vulnerable. However, the vast majority of battery powered ARM devices do not incorporate high performance ARM cores! Battery powered devices are more concerned about conserving energy than raw execution speed, so manufactures more often than not choose the more power efficient ARM cores that do not incorporate speculative execution.
This is not a tiny, miniscule issue. People have more smart phones than they have cars. This massive fleet of mobile computing devices is going to have security issues that get exploited sooner or later and the handset manufactures aren't going to do jack to close the holes. They want old phones to become trash and force everyone to buy new phones whenever they decide it's time to make some revenue. If this behavior is not monopolistic, anti-competitive, and counter to the public's best interests, then WTF is?
A bootloader locked phone is like a car with the hood welded shut. Most people don't know or care about what's under the hood until it breaks. And once it does, they have a reasonable expectation of being able to take it to the nearest repair guy to get it working again.
It's one of the steps toward that goal. By eliminating the Linux kernel and using only stuff they invented at Google, they can later pull the rug out from under open source software by simply changing the licensing terms to what is now entirely THEIR software.
At the moment, with a Linux kernel underpinning the Android ecosystem, it's impossible for them to completely close the door on open source because plenty of outside Linux developers aren't going to go for that. Get rid of the Linux kernel though and those guys will have no say on future license terms.
"Do No Evil" becomes "Do Know Evil."
Android is far away from Linux, but it still has the Linux kernel at its core. I recently wrote an app that uses Linux ioctls to talk to a USB device from native code in order to achieve minimal latency. Sure, I have to initially get things going from Java to obtain permissions in Android, but once I've got the file descriptor for the USB device I want to talk to, I'm off to the races.
Indeed. I believe Facebook tried this idea of flagging postings they deemed unfactual, and it backfired. The people considered the flag a âbadge of honor" and were quite proud of themselves when they achieved their goal of getting flagged. The same thing is going to happen on YouTube.
I do not fear water contamination nearly as much as I fear being unable to eat anything once they get around to making every crop genetically modified to tear up my guts from the inside.
I can easily filter water to less than 30ppm through reverse osmosis filtering. If that's not good enough, I can distill water to get it down to 0ppm.
Indeed. In insects, the Bt toxins cut holes in the insects' guts and cause them to die. Supposedly, Bt doesn't do the same in humans. Perhaps it doesn't kill us right off the bat, but I suspect it still does some damage to our guts. I am very leery of eating popcorn nowadays because it seems to irritate my guts quite a bit. Which is a shame, because I loved popcorn as a child (back before GMO corn existed).
The whole "gluten free" diet craze and celiac disease may be more of an allergy to genetically modified wheat than gluten, in my opinion. Corn, wheat, and soybeans were some of the first crops to be genetically modified.
This article seems to be slanted toward GMO crops being a good thing. Reducing pesticide sprays SOUNDS like a good thing, until you realize that the GMO plants and produce are pesticides themselves, inside and out. You can NOT wash GMO produce off to reduce your intake of the built-in pesticide. The pesticide is grown by the plant itself, inside and throughout the vegetables you are supposed to eat.
Back in the pre-GMO days, sprayed pesticides could be washed off. Sprayed pesticides are primarily concentrated on the OUTSIDE of vegetables. Husks and pod shells are typically discarded and protect our food from being contaminated by pesticides. It was more labor intensive for the farmers, sure, but the food was likely healthier for consumers.
You're still fooled by Intel's Jedi^H^H^H^Hmarketing mind tricks. Spectre does not affect everyone. Many ARM cores used in tablets and smart phones lack speculative execution features in order to save battery power. Without speculative execution, there is no Spectre. Only the higher performance ARM's implement speculative execution.
Intel has over twice the market cap that Qualcomm has, and yet the the EU is fining Qualcomm (the smaller company) for abusing its "dominant" position, preventing competitors from innovating. Intel makes chips that use far more energy, have serious bugs (meltdown, spectre), and intentional backdoors (Intel Management Engine). That ain't innovation in my eyes -- only the gov't sees these things as "innovation," since they are in the business of clandestine spying, sabotage, and taxation.
Also love the quote about "consumers' concern about the environmental impact" of cardboard boxes. Last time I checked, cardboard comes from trees, a 100% renewable resource. And since cardboard comes from trees, cardboard is completely compostable. Flatten that box, stick it out in the yard, cover it with mulch, and within short order, it will be recycled back into the Earth, ready to grow new trees all over again.
Now, the bubble envelopes that Amazon is replacing cardboard boxes with, they're predominately made out of plastic with a thin paper outside. Plastic is generally made from petroleum products, a not so renewable resource. And plastic does not compost very well.
This is what happens when Microsoft and big government collude to put recycling company CEO's in jail.
Big industry LOVES selling new stuff, they HATE when people re-use old stuff. Can't make quarterly sales goals if everybody is re-using old stuff and not buying new.
Mod parent up.
Now when someone plans a mission to Mars, they'll have to worry about getting hit by his car, on top of all the other natural hazards of going to Mars.
Dead satellites floating around as junk around our planet at least presumably had some beneficial purpose at one time. This orbiting sports car has no such purpose other than satisfying Elon Musk's vanity.
What's worse, this hunk of space junk COULD have provided someone with beneficial use right here on Earth. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would love to have an electric sports car that would be happy to take this thing off his hands for far less than what it's going to cost to launch it into space.
Elon Musk, jerk of the year.
Mod parent up. Toslink's inherent jitter problem means that it is a complete failure for anyone who cares about audio quality. And those are the only people that would bother paying extra for optical equipment vs regular old copper wire.
Yeah, he should just throw his money at Musk. Musk seems to have plenty of big ideas that might potentially benefit mankind, but so far, Musk hasn't made a whole lot of profit trying to bring his ideas to life.
Unfortunately, that's not how Bill Gates thinks. As topwiz mentioned, Bill's philanthropic projects usually involve some form of reach-around scheme where the money he "donates" out of one hand eventually comes back to his companies in the other hand. I'm not sure how this works as a tax avoidance scheme -- normally making transactions incurs taxes whereas just letting money sit still does not.
I think it's more of a public relations trick: make people believe he is donating his vast wealth to the "good of mankind," when really he's just shuffling money from his left pocket to his right pocket. Before he started doing all his "philanthropic" work, he was under quite of bit of pressure from gov't to break up his business. Now, not so much.
They won't be employed. That's the problem. The solution is Agenda 21 (depopulation).
UBI is a short term distraction. Agenda 21 is the final destination.
Someone has to build those automated systems. Someone has to maintain them. Someone has to upgrade them. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
What you're describing is productivity improvements to the Nth degree such that only a small handful of people are producing everything that the economy has to offer.
Everyone outside of that small handful of productive people will by definition have NOTHING to offer in return to reward the productive few for their effort.
As a member of the productive class, I have no motivation to accept UBI dollars for my produce. The only people that can legitimately trade with me are other producers -- they are the only people that produce anything of value to offer in return for my productive efforts.
Right now, a dollar printed out of thin air and a dollar earned through productive effort are largely indistinguishable.
If the number of people actually producing goods collapses to a small handful, it will become increasingly obvious who's dollar is backed by production and who's dollar is just worthless UBI.
UBI solves nothing.
You and I may have useful things to do and interests to pursue. But a lot of people don't have any such inclination.
If UBI becomes reality, I'm betting we're going to see a whole lot more alcohol consumption and drug use.
Somebody has to work to produce all those things people on UBI are going to consume. Why should I have to work and pay for other people's good time?
Germany is GMO-free, eh? Well, that's a nice dream. Unfortunately, genes are not something you can simply legislate or otherwise firewall out of your land.
Corn is primarily pollinated by wind. As long as there is wind blowing and dust moving, those GMO genes invented elsewhere can and WILL find their way into fields supposedly GMO-free without any effort by humans to move them there. Keeping them out is likely going to be a fool's errand ending in futility.
There are even lawsuits from Monsanto extracting money from farmers that have patented GMO crops surreptitiously growing on their land. The farmer never paid for GMO seeds, didn't want GMO crops, but the genes found their way into their field anyway, so now these farmers are "infringing" upon Monsanto's GMO patents.
I agree, except at the point where you are willing to trust Microsoft... Windows 10 shows us that Microsoft does not hold our privacy sacrosanct in the least. The leaked NSA tools further prove that relying on Microsoft is not going to protect you from being spied upon, by our gov't AND foreign entities. Even this whole Kaspersky fiasco shows that further NSA tools are likely being stolen, AS THEY ARE BEING WRITTEN!
At the very least, use Linux. Linux may have backdoors too, but at least it's open source, so you and others can at least attempt to identify and close those security holes. Closed source Microsoft products, forget about it. You're never going to be safe there.
No civilian assassinations eh? Seth Rich was a US citizen.
Of course we have a huge drop in insect populations. What did you expect was going to happen?
One of the genetic modifications done to corn in 1995 was the introduction of genes from bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). These genes make plants themselves produce toxic crystals which destroy insect guts. Thus, farms don't have to spray insecticide anymore, the plants themselves ARE insecticide.
So, did everyone in the room burst out laughing? :-)
Sometimes, a remark like that is totally justified. Unfortunately, in the corporate world and in gov't, it's the "Yes" men that are retained along with their incompetent managers. Those who dare speak the truth are doomed in such organizations.
Fortunately, incompetent organisations usually lose out in the marketplace to more competent competitors, so it all works out in the end (eventually).
Time will tell...
Artificial fertilizers don't need soil to hold it. I grow plenty of plants in hydroponics -- NO SOIL at all. I don't even use pebbles or clay marbles, just a pool of fertilizer enriched water with air bubbling through it.
I save time by cooking at home. If I were to eat out every meal, I'd be wasting a ton of time fighting through traffic and waiting in lines, three times a day. I'd also be getting sick because those restaurants are never perfect at hygiene. I've never had food poisoning from a meal I prepared at home, but when I eat out, it's a bit like rolling dice.
With a garden in my backyard, a lot of my food doesn't even need to be cooked -- cooking is a crutch for people eating tough store bought foods that aren't young, fresh, and tender like what I get out of my garden. Plus, I don't have to wait in any lines to "check out" from my garden "grocery store."
Next, I learned about composting my food wastes, which REALLY improves the cleanup efforts of stuff that used to take forever to cleanup manually. It is SO much easier to take my dirty cutting board outside and hose it off at high pressure over the woodchip compost pile than scrubbing it indoors where anything splashing ends up creating potential cross-contamination and more cleanup work.