Would you trust the guys that infected your system, removed your access to files, ransomed the decryption key from you etc. to correctly - and perfectly - restore your untouched data?
Yes, I would. The original authors have (1) the most technical experience with their particular product and (2) strong financial incentive to provide a "good" extortion experience. By contrast, Talos is working from what they can reverse engineer, and they may not be aware of all variants/quirks of the malware.
Blocking the infection vector is infinitely more important than anything else.
They've already owned your machine with the payload of their choosing, and it's probably even self-updating. While I wouldn't exactly trust the malware folks to leave your machine clean, they already have the power to add whatever they want (whether you pay or not).
What's to say that their decrypt / encrypt routine isn't just a smokescreen to infect all your files with something else en-route?
Fair point, but it's more true for EXEs and DLLs than it is for Office documents and text files, so you could do some measured restoration. And again, if they've infected your machine already it would have been simpler and more successful to just silently compromise your files to begin with.
The option of "pay ransom" is really a sign that you've failed yourself.
That's for damn sure, but among homeowners and small business owners, how many people have the skills, time, and discipline to setup offsite, incremental, "pull" backups? And even a "pull" strategy (like mlts mentions in another comment) can be subverted if an attacker is clever enough.
Aside for those who want to get serious about backups: here's one strategy to consider. Combine with a weekly/monthly drive swap-out to offsite location for best effect, and remember that untested backups are no backup at all.
I've always found it funny when people order like that. As if the diet pop is gonna counter the 2234872184732 calories of a double big mac you're about to wolf down.
Big Mac: 530 calories. Large fries (no ketchup): 510 calories. Large coke: 280 calories. I wouldn't ridicule a 20% calorie reduction made by those switching to diet. And that's before refills are taken into account. If you're an obese person who's been drinking full-calorie beverages, a shift like that is enough to start taking weight off, provided you don't "reward" your effort with a HoneyBun later on.
The problem isn't the diet coke (gut bacteria research aside)... it's the other 1040 calories. Hold the mayo (doesn't apply to Big Mac?) and save 100 more calories. Drop the fries for apple slices plus a small bag of potato chips (later that afternoon) and save 200 more calories. Take the stairs for 4-5 stories to get that bag of potato chips from the top floor vending machine and now you've got a little cardio happening.
None of that's going to be enough to get you to your ideal weight, but all you have to do is move the needle a little bit and amazing things will start happening, because you will start being in control of you.
Feminism (once you sweep aside academic verbosity) boils down to some very simple ideas about women being able to vote, have careers, use contraception, etc., and not being predestined to a life of child-rearing/cooking/cleaning whilst subservient to her husband. That feminism has almost been a success in western civilization, though many would like to drag us backwards. Moreover, it bore good fruit for other afflicted parties: if you're Jewish, black, LGBT, disabled, or foreign, you have feminism to thank (in part) for the opportunities afforded to you by modern society.
Are there feminist extremist? Sure. Is society over-correcting for its past? Yes. However, the proper response isn't to jerk backwards and polarize; the proper response is to reaffirm first principles (human rights, equality, due process, etc.) and temper extremism from both ends.
SJW^h^h^h People of all stripes have one thing in common: a relentless drive for conformist groupthink on the issues they fight for.
FTFY... we all feel most comfortable around people who have the same politics/ideology/worldview as us.
Few people are as scary and dangerous as the ones who are convinced that theirs is a righteous battle, and are prepared to fight it, whether their belief flows from religion or from ideals.
I'll buy that.Most injustice (at societal scale) involves either greed or ideology, and the greedy tend to be easier to fight or negotiate with.
And what appears to make the SJW crowd more belligerent is the fact that often they are right, in that there are still plenty of inequities and social injustices.
I'm not sure I follow. Perhaps you are simply saying that because public sympathy largely aligns with "SJW" values, it's harder to temper their extremes w/o being portrayed as an extremist yourself. GamerGate, to the limited degree I've researched it, seems to be an example of it: there are many reasonable voices on the pro-GG side, but their cause has been "helped" (/s) by extreme right-wingers, men's rights groups, and trolling 15-year-olds. Which made it easy for the anti-GG side to tar the whole thing as misogynist (especially since they owned the media outlets being criticized).
Compared to other "noisy" groups like extreme right wingers, these are the noisiest, most exclusionary, and indeed most violent.
Noisiest? That's subjective, but it seems like staunch right wingers have some powerful megaphones (Fox news, AM radio, plenty of pulpits, etc.). Progressives own more megaphones, but tend to be softer-spoken with them, though a good argument can be made that this is less true as time goes on (MSNBC, for instance). Increasingly, it seems like civilized discourse in our society is just two extremes yelling at each other.
Violent? Whoa whoa whoa... don't see where you're getting this. There's very little ideologically-driven violence in the United States, but notable incidents (Una-bomber, Eric Rudolf, Oklahoma City bombing, various anti-LGBT murders/assaults) are exclusively committed by right-wing actors. (Feel free to enlighten me if I'm wrong.)
And the really scary part is that because the issues they attack are real, this mindset is percolating into the mainstream. Writers being excluded from an association or from an award because they have the wrong ideas. Or in my home country, where no one so much as blinked when a school official stated that "if you have the wrong ideas or are a member of the wrong political party, perhaps you shouldn't be a student or a teacher here"
So it seems like the question is: how, and how much, should we tolerate the intolerant? Legitimate food for thought.
Write your logic in C or C++. Its how cross-platform has been done for decades.
Yep... just like people keep talking about this "car" gizmo when we've had decent horse-and-buggy technology for centuries! I don't understand why anybody would want to cross the country in this proprietary Ford nonsense when--with just a little knowledge of horsemanship, veterinary science, metal-working, carpentry, wilderness survival, food preservation, hunting, and gunsmithing--they could take the slow, dangerous, proven approach!
We (almost) have self-driving cars. Aircraft generally self-drive themselves almost all time now. Why not have self-driving aircraft?
Seems a lot safer for now. Pilot can enter anytime if an emergency of non-standard situation is declared (and verified).
You're not thinking like an attacker... sure, this removes the homicidal co-pilot from the equation, but now you have to worry about the homicidal operators who oversee remote control of the system, not to mention the homicidal engineers/programmers/telecom folks who helped design the system and the homicidal hackers who figure out ways to seize control of it. Those would all be new areas of expertise, too, so you're going to discard the time-hardened crew system we currently use and replace it with a bunch of unknowns; that means flawed designs and fresh incompetence, which means many hard/painful lessons over several decades before aviation safety could return to its current pinnacle.
Basically, commercial aviation has gotten almost as safe as it can get. Make any one aspect safer and you're probably adding more danger than you're taking away. That's not to say we shouldn't try: real engineers and analysts need to study the problems and tackle them, but just about every "internet solution" is naively looking at this one situation without considering the system as a whole.
Military leadership is completely out of touch, believing that the they can put the genie back in the bottle by burying their heads in the sand. (Not unbelievable for a hierarchical/bureaucratic/authoritarian organization helmed by senior citizens.)
Military leadership plans to use NSA intelligence to detect/find future leakers, and a staff-wide ban reduces the background noise/false negative rate in making that detection. (Very believable.)
Military leadership is afraid that the existing leaked materials could spur staffers to make additional leaks. (Also believable, since there's bound to be [scattered throughout the sprawling military-industrial complex] a bunch of folks who've witnessed corruption/wrongdoing/gross incompetence and then subsequently been frustrated by formal channels for redressing such wrongs [or afraid to use such channels].)
I just want to have an infinitely large computer screen with no additional cost beyond buying the VR glasses. I don't give even one tiny shit about the "virtual reality" part. I basically want to be able to set my virtual desktop to some ridiculously large size, then look around at it using the VR glasses as a viewport.
Wouldn't that be a fun Window Manager to write?:-) However, instead of an infinitely large flat surface, I'd rather sit inside a ~6 foot virtual sphere. Important programs go right in front; reference docs, database queries, and utility/diagnostic apps would be to the left and right; email, IM, Facebook, news feed, and other "status"-y applications would be above or below. In hectic/messy work situations, you might end up with apps fully surrounding you, though obviously you'd be able to rotate the sphere with respect to the neutral head/neck position.
Short-term though, you're going to fuck up your eyes using any first-gen consumer VR for 8-10 hrs per day (a la any work situation), and it'll be cheaper/more expedient to just buy an extra monitor.
The word you are looking for is inventor. A discoverer is someone who finds something that was there all along.
While I agree with your definitions and word choice, there's really a vague area between the two terms: did Thomas Jefferson invent a better plough, or did he just discover a mathematical shape that offers the least resistant when passed thru a soil aggregate mixture? Did Thomas Edison invent the lightbulb, or did he just discover a filament that emits light when electrified (and then discovere a way to protect it from oils or direct contact with fabrics by housing it in glass... itself the result of a discovery that treating sand in such-and-such a way results in a convenient transparent solid)?
In one sense, every "invention" is merely a discovery about a mathematical truth of the universe... it may be a mathematics that reaches deep into chemistry or the human mind (far past our explicit understanding). You could probably turn it around too and say that every "discovery" is an "invention", which seems intuitively correct for (say) a complex image-compression algorithm, but very incorrect for something like Columbus's "invention" of America.:O
With the Eich issue, they alienated a heck of a lot of conservative and libertarian users who switched to various forks or Chrome afterward in protest.
The Eich issue was an unfortunate overreaction, and one that should cause some introspection for Mozilla employees. Part of being a professional is the ability to work with people who view the world (outside the job) in ways that passionately disagree with. (And I say this as a supporter of marriage equality.)
However, if you're going to choose your browser on philosophical (instead of technical) grounds, there are larger issues at stake that relate much more intimately to the role of the web browser. This Eich thing is a sideshow to bigger issues of freedom, privacy, and open standards. For instance, it's really, really good for end users that Mozilla can participate in the standards-making process as a not-for-profit entity that owns a good chunk of marketshare.
I'd be saying this same thing had history gone the other way... e.g., if Mozilla had kept Eich and liberals had abandoned FireFox for that reason.
I can't believe the bullshit I see from some of the "conservatives" I know who treat this like some kind of commie takeover of the Internet.
This. Republicans claim to worship the free market, but when asked to protect a free market (that has brought a whirlwind of innovation from which all Americans have benefited), they try to eliminate it in favor of entrenched monopolies.
I thought it was so you could purchase illegal contraband without leaving a paper trail. Either way, it's for criminals that are trying to hide activities. That's why I stay away.
Every technology initially attracts attention for how it can be abused. With pagers it was drug dealers; with the internet it was child pr0n; with drones it's terrorists/pervy neighbors/drug traffickers/whatever. With bitcoin, it's black markets.
So I'd caution against being close-minded up front. (It's not as if you're contributing anything novel to the conversation by doing so... somebody parrots this talking point on every bitcoin thread.) We have yet to see how bitcoin will play out in the real world. Personally, while I don't think it's a great investment vehicle and it's a dubious means of wealth storage, it does look useful for wealth transfer.
With Credit Cards, you have a few central banks skimming a huge amount of profit from the bulk of commercial activity, basically inflating costs for all of society. With cash, the government (at taxpayer expense) has to continually print more while exchanging/destroying old notes and simultaneously fighting off counterfeiters. Maybe bitcoin can reduce these overhead costs to society while simultaneously making it easy to conduct a long-distance economic transaction.
I'm not slightly a DNA expert, so this is a question for those who may be. But doesn't the DNA in the seeds degrade ? Does storing them in a vault protect them from stuff that makes them degrade?
Depending on the species, seeds are dried to a suitably low moisture content according to an appropriate protocol. Typically this will be less than 5%. The seeds then are stored at -18C or below. Because seed RNA (like our DNA) degrades with time, the seeds need to be periodically replanted and fresh seeds collected for another round of long-term storage.
The bad news is that recalcitrant seeds can't be stored this way, so no cocoa, mango, avocado, or rubber.
Sensory deprivation experiments where people live without clocks and daylight for more than a few days show that people tend to lengthen their "day".
Came here to say that. I remember one study/book that concluded people "naturally" have a 25-hour clock. Study participants lived in a (working) hospital with randomized staff schedules and all the clocks taken down, so it may not have been as pure as some other experiments on the matter. The participants had to wake up and go to sleep as a group so their schedules stayed in sync.
That trait of unions is pretty much the only real reason anyone is opposed to unions in the first place.
That and bad PR. I had to do a job at an industrial site in a room with very poor chairs. We wheeled in better ones from an adjacent conference room, but then had to put them back and suffer back pain for ~2 days until the union could be bothered to wheel some over from a storage facility. A woman I know got written up for moving debris out of the path of her cart... debris that had been placed there by union members to purposely bait her (as a somewhat dumpy, absent-minded individual she was a natural target for practical jokes). Another man had the audacity to plug in his own telephone at a new job, and had to lie-lie-lie about it to the union guy who showed up to do it ~3 days later.
I know that unions hold charity events and make other positive contributions to the workplace, but extreme nitpicking on trivial work and fraternalistic pranks won't help reverse America's trending negative sentiment toward them.
I've come to like the flatter look. How many bevels, gradients, shadows, and reflections do you need to show that a button is a button? In an Android app, a simple black and white icon is usually sufficient. Desktop apps may benefit from a little more polish, but the long term trend has been to use less and less "chrome" to indicate that a screen region is actionable. (If you're old enough, you'll remember how simple/lightweight hyperlinks were when you encountered them for the first time... just some blue text and an underline!)
If anything, these Windows 10 icons aren't flat and "iconic" enough. They should be aiming for something even simpler, like how the Visual Studio 2012/2013 designers used mostly simple silhouettes, with a handful of subdued colors for visual separation and emphasis. (The proposed Windows 10 icons are also just ugly. And what's up with turning the folder sideways?)
I think there's a parallel here to Edward Tufte's aesthetic that every piece of ink on a graph/chart must convey something meaningful about the data to the user. Any unnecessary element is chartjunk. Smartphones have forced us to apply the same thinking to UI design, and while some designers will inevitably take it too far (like Android did with the triangle/circle/square thing in KLP), we're headed in the right direction. Our chief scarcity is human attention, so it makes sense to generally de-empasize UI elements to the point where they don't ask for more of the user's attention then they deserve.
I've heard that "element hiding helper" can assist with this. However, it's also easy to right-click on an item in FireFox, select "Inspect Element" and then figure out a rule to hide the content (though you'll have to consult the documentation). For instance, Slashdot has a "Site Notice" that will appear at the top of every page (unless you accept the cookies/whatever to suppress showing it). I added the rule "slashdot.org##div#sitenotice" to suppress it (though it has since been added to EasyList).
For those who are unfamiliar with it, Request Policy works a lot like NoScript... it lists the domains that the page is trying to load *any* content from (not just scripts), and you whitelist which cross-domain loads you want to allow. On slashdot, for instance, I'm allowing requests to fsdn.com, but disallowing them to gstatic.com and scorecardreasearch.com.
I use it myself, but I can't recommend it. Too much of the web breaks. Credit card payments that bounce to a payment processor's website are especially problematic (I've gotten double-billed at least once). And using it in front of other people is especially awkward when I have to fiddle with a new site for a few minutes to get it to work. Also, I don't know that this provides that much better privacy than AdBlock+EasyPrivacy or some of the host-file blacklists.
Maybe with some extra development Request Policy could be a lot easier. Integration with (or incorporation into) NoScript and/or a community of well-maintained whitelists would make a big difference.
Supposedly the Bill of Rights was controversial in its day because many of the founding fathers thought it would be unnecessary: the population would zealously guard their hard-earned liberty and the various protections of the Constitution (representational government, separation of powers, etc.) would prevent tyranny. In fact, they feared that by enumerating freedoms they would inadvertently limit them, which is why they ultimately included the 9th amendment to say "hey, this isn't an exhaustive list" [though the practical effect of the 9th has been null].
Fortunately, the Bill of Rights was passed despite being "redundant", and the courts have brought it into play several times when lawmakers worked up particularly nasty bills. Unfortunately, the courts have also weasel-worded their way into listing several exceptions to these amendments (especially where 1, 2, and 4 are concerned).
Slashdot Mirror
So form over function again? Seems silly... just to make it teh pretty
Silly, silly Apple with their billions and billions of dollars made by paying extremely close attention to teh pretties.
Would you trust the guys that infected your system, removed your access to files, ransomed the decryption key from you etc. to correctly - and perfectly - restore your untouched data?
Yes, I would. The original authors have (1) the most technical experience with their particular product and (2) strong financial incentive to provide a "good" extortion experience. By contrast, Talos is working from what they can reverse engineer, and they may not be aware of all variants/quirks of the malware.
Blocking the infection vector is infinitely more important than anything else.
They've already owned your machine with the payload of their choosing, and it's probably even self-updating. While I wouldn't exactly trust the malware folks to leave your machine clean, they already have the power to add whatever they want (whether you pay or not).
What's to say that their decrypt / encrypt routine isn't just a smokescreen to infect all your files with something else en-route?
Fair point, but it's more true for EXEs and DLLs than it is for Office documents and text files, so you could do some measured restoration. And again, if they've infected your machine already it would have been simpler and more successful to just silently compromise your files to begin with.
The option of "pay ransom" is really a sign that you've failed yourself.
That's for damn sure, but among homeowners and small business owners, how many people have the skills, time, and discipline to setup offsite, incremental, "pull" backups? And even a "pull" strategy (like mlts mentions in another comment) can be subverted if an attacker is clever enough.
Aside for those who want to get serious about backups: here's one strategy to consider. Combine with a weekly/monthly drive swap-out to offsite location for best effect, and remember that untested backups are no backup at all.
I've always found it funny when people order like that. As if the diet pop is gonna counter the 2234872184732 calories of a double big mac you're about to wolf down.
Big Mac: 530 calories. Large fries (no ketchup): 510 calories. Large coke: 280 calories. I wouldn't ridicule a 20% calorie reduction made by those switching to diet. And that's before refills are taken into account. If you're an obese person who's been drinking full-calorie beverages, a shift like that is enough to start taking weight off, provided you don't "reward" your effort with a HoneyBun later on.
The problem isn't the diet coke (gut bacteria research aside)... it's the other 1040 calories. Hold the mayo (doesn't apply to Big Mac?) and save 100 more calories. Drop the fries for apple slices plus a small bag of potato chips (later that afternoon) and save 200 more calories. Take the stairs for 4-5 stories to get that bag of potato chips from the top floor vending machine and now you've got a little cardio happening.
None of that's going to be enough to get you to your ideal weight, but all you have to do is move the needle a little bit and amazing things will start happening, because you will start being in control of you.
Watch this: How to stop screwing yourself over (Mel Robbins).
For habit-building, gold stars on a calendar can work surprisingly well. (I use an Android app called Routinely.)
Finally /r/GetMotivated has the occasional gem that's worth reading.
Feminism ruins society again...
Feminism (once you sweep aside academic verbosity) boils down to some very simple ideas about women being able to vote, have careers, use contraception, etc., and not being predestined to a life of child-rearing/cooking/cleaning whilst subservient to her husband. That feminism has almost been a success in western civilization, though many would like to drag us backwards. Moreover, it bore good fruit for other afflicted parties: if you're Jewish, black, LGBT, disabled, or foreign, you have feminism to thank (in part) for the opportunities afforded to you by modern society.
Are there feminist extremist? Sure. Is society over-correcting for its past? Yes. However, the proper response isn't to jerk backwards and polarize; the proper response is to reaffirm first principles (human rights, equality, due process, etc.) and temper extremism from both ends.
Because SJW's want the world to be what they *want* it to be, not what it actually *is*.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anaïs Nin (attrib.)
He's gay and claims to be a Christian. Pretty hypocritical if you ask me (or Moses or Jesus or the Apostle Paul).
Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same. -- Luke 3:11
How many shirts do you own, PRMan?
SJW^h^h^h People of all stripes have one thing in common: a relentless drive for conformist groupthink on the issues they fight for.
FTFY... we all feel most comfortable around people who have the same politics/ideology/worldview as us.
Few people are as scary and dangerous as the ones who are convinced that theirs is a righteous battle, and are prepared to fight it, whether their belief flows from religion or from ideals.
I'll buy that.Most injustice (at societal scale) involves either greed or ideology, and the greedy tend to be easier to fight or negotiate with.
And what appears to make the SJW crowd more belligerent is the fact that often they are right, in that there are still plenty of inequities and social injustices.
I'm not sure I follow. Perhaps you are simply saying that because public sympathy largely aligns with "SJW" values, it's harder to temper their extremes w/o being portrayed as an extremist yourself. GamerGate, to the limited degree I've researched it, seems to be an example of it: there are many reasonable voices on the pro-GG side, but their cause has been "helped" (/s) by extreme right-wingers, men's rights groups, and trolling 15-year-olds. Which made it easy for the anti-GG side to tar the whole thing as misogynist (especially since they owned the media outlets being criticized).
Compared to other "noisy" groups like extreme right wingers, these are the noisiest, most exclusionary, and indeed most violent.
Noisiest? That's subjective, but it seems like staunch right wingers have some powerful megaphones (Fox news, AM radio, plenty of pulpits, etc.). Progressives own more megaphones, but tend to be softer-spoken with them, though a good argument can be made that this is less true as time goes on (MSNBC, for instance). Increasingly, it seems like civilized discourse in our society is just two extremes yelling at each other.
Violent? Whoa whoa whoa... don't see where you're getting this. There's very little ideologically-driven violence in the United States, but notable incidents (Una-bomber, Eric Rudolf, Oklahoma City bombing, various anti-LGBT murders/assaults) are exclusively committed by right-wing actors. (Feel free to enlighten me if I'm wrong.)
And the really scary part is that because the issues they attack are real, this mindset is percolating into the mainstream. Writers being excluded from an association or from an award because they have the wrong ideas. Or in my home country, where no one so much as blinked when a school official stated that "if you have the wrong ideas or are a member of the wrong political party, perhaps you shouldn't be a student or a teacher here"
So it seems like the question is: how, and how much, should we tolerate the intolerant? Legitimate food for thought.
Write your logic in C or C++. Its how cross-platform has been done for decades.
Yep... just like people keep talking about this "car" gizmo when we've had decent horse-and-buggy technology for centuries! I don't understand why anybody would want to cross the country in this proprietary Ford nonsense when--with just a little knowledge of horsemanship, veterinary science, metal-working, carpentry, wilderness survival, food preservation, hunting, and gunsmithing--they could take the slow, dangerous, proven approach!
We (almost) have self-driving cars. Aircraft generally self-drive themselves almost all time now. Why not have self-driving aircraft?
Seems a lot safer for now. Pilot can enter anytime if an emergency of non-standard situation is declared (and verified).
You're not thinking like an attacker... sure, this removes the homicidal co-pilot from the equation, but now you have to worry about the homicidal operators who oversee remote control of the system, not to mention the homicidal engineers/programmers/telecom folks who helped design the system and the homicidal hackers who figure out ways to seize control of it. Those would all be new areas of expertise, too, so you're going to discard the time-hardened crew system we currently use and replace it with a bunch of unknowns; that means flawed designs and fresh incompetence, which means many hard/painful lessons over several decades before aviation safety could return to its current pinnacle.
Basically, commercial aviation has gotten almost as safe as it can get. Make any one aspect safer and you're probably adding more danger than you're taking away. That's not to say we shouldn't try: real engineers and analysts need to study the problems and tackle them, but just about every "internet solution" is naively looking at this one situation without considering the system as a whole.
It always amazes me when people try and censor stuff that is already public.
What's most egregious is when the US military banned their staff from viewing Wikileaks. This suggests one of several possibilities:
I just want to have an infinitely large computer screen with no additional cost beyond buying the VR glasses. I don't give even one tiny shit about the "virtual reality" part. I basically want to be able to set my virtual desktop to some ridiculously large size, then look around at it using the VR glasses as a viewport.
Wouldn't that be a fun Window Manager to write? :-) However, instead of an infinitely large flat surface, I'd rather sit inside a ~6 foot virtual sphere. Important programs go right in front; reference docs, database queries, and utility/diagnostic apps would be to the left and right; email, IM, Facebook, news feed, and other "status"-y applications would be above or below. In hectic/messy work situations, you might end up with apps fully surrounding you, though obviously you'd be able to rotate the sphere with respect to the neutral head/neck position.
Short-term though, you're going to fuck up your eyes using any first-gen consumer VR for 8-10 hrs per day (a la any work situation), and it'll be cheaper/more expedient to just buy an extra monitor.
The word you are looking for is inventor. A discoverer is someone who finds something that was there all along.
While I agree with your definitions and word choice, there's really a vague area between the two terms: did Thomas Jefferson invent a better plough, or did he just discover a mathematical shape that offers the least resistant when passed thru a soil aggregate mixture? Did Thomas Edison invent the lightbulb, or did he just discover a filament that emits light when electrified (and then discovere a way to protect it from oils or direct contact with fabrics by housing it in glass... itself the result of a discovery that treating sand in such-and-such a way results in a convenient transparent solid)?
In one sense, every "invention" is merely a discovery about a mathematical truth of the universe... it may be a mathematics that reaches deep into chemistry or the human mind (far past our explicit understanding). You could probably turn it around too and say that every "discovery" is an "invention", which seems intuitively correct for (say) a complex image-compression algorithm, but very incorrect for something like Columbus's "invention" of America. :O
With the Eich issue, they alienated a heck of a lot of conservative and libertarian users who switched to various forks or Chrome afterward in protest.
The Eich issue was an unfortunate overreaction, and one that should cause some introspection for Mozilla employees. Part of being a professional is the ability to work with people who view the world (outside the job) in ways that passionately disagree with. (And I say this as a supporter of marriage equality.)
However, if you're going to choose your browser on philosophical (instead of technical) grounds, there are larger issues at stake that relate much more intimately to the role of the web browser. This Eich thing is a sideshow to bigger issues of freedom, privacy, and open standards. For instance, it's really, really good for end users that Mozilla can participate in the standards-making process as a not-for-profit entity that owns a good chunk of marketshare.
I'd be saying this same thing had history gone the other way... e.g., if Mozilla had kept Eich and liberals had abandoned FireFox for that reason.
I can't believe the bullshit I see from some of the "conservatives" I know who treat this like some kind of commie takeover of the Internet.
This. Republicans claim to worship the free market, but when asked to protect a free market (that has brought a whirlwind of innovation from which all Americans have benefited), they try to eliminate it in favor of entrenched monopolies.
But seriously, that's pretty fun. I hope they don't screw it up.
Meh... fuck it. Just give me the huge-ass launch canon reigning boulders down across planet earth. That'd be cool.
I thought it was so you could purchase illegal contraband without leaving a paper trail. Either way, it's for criminals that are trying to hide activities. That's why I stay away.
Every technology initially attracts attention for how it can be abused. With pagers it was drug dealers; with the internet it was child pr0n; with drones it's terrorists/pervy neighbors/drug traffickers/whatever. With bitcoin, it's black markets.
So I'd caution against being close-minded up front. (It's not as if you're contributing anything novel to the conversation by doing so... somebody parrots this talking point on every bitcoin thread.) We have yet to see how bitcoin will play out in the real world. Personally, while I don't think it's a great investment vehicle and it's a dubious means of wealth storage, it does look useful for wealth transfer.
With Credit Cards, you have a few central banks skimming a huge amount of profit from the bulk of commercial activity, basically inflating costs for all of society. With cash, the government (at taxpayer expense) has to continually print more while exchanging/destroying old notes and simultaneously fighting off counterfeiters. Maybe bitcoin can reduce these overhead costs to society while simultaneously making it easy to conduct a long-distance economic transaction.
I'm not slightly a DNA expert, so this is a question for those who may be. But doesn't the DNA in the seeds degrade ? Does storing them in a vault protect them from stuff that makes them degrade?
Quoting the Wikipedia article on seed banks:
Depending on the species, seeds are dried to a suitably low moisture content according to an appropriate protocol. Typically this will be less than 5%. The seeds then are stored at -18C or below. Because seed RNA (like our DNA) degrades with time, the seeds need to be periodically replanted and fresh seeds collected for another round of long-term storage.
The bad news is that recalcitrant seeds can't be stored this way, so no cocoa, mango, avocado, or rubber.
Sensory deprivation experiments where people live without clocks and daylight for more than a few days show that people tend to lengthen their "day".
Came here to say that. I remember one study/book that concluded people "naturally" have a 25-hour clock. Study participants lived in a (working) hospital with randomized staff schedules and all the clocks taken down, so it may not have been as pure as some other experiments on the matter. The participants had to wake up and go to sleep as a group so their schedules stayed in sync.
That trait of unions is pretty much the only real reason anyone is opposed to unions in the first place.
That and bad PR. I had to do a job at an industrial site in a room with very poor chairs. We wheeled in better ones from an adjacent conference room, but then had to put them back and suffer back pain for ~2 days until the union could be bothered to wheel some over from a storage facility. A woman I know got written up for moving debris out of the path of her cart... debris that had been placed there by union members to purposely bait her (as a somewhat dumpy, absent-minded individual she was a natural target for practical jokes). Another man had the audacity to plug in his own telephone at a new job, and had to lie-lie-lie about it to the union guy who showed up to do it ~3 days later.
I know that unions hold charity events and make other positive contributions to the workplace, but extreme nitpicking on trivial work and fraternalistic pranks won't help reverse America's trending negative sentiment toward them.
'Flat' UI design is BAD design, plain and simple.
I've come to like the flatter look. How many bevels, gradients, shadows, and reflections do you need to show that a button is a button? In an Android app, a simple black and white icon is usually sufficient. Desktop apps may benefit from a little more polish, but the long term trend has been to use less and less "chrome" to indicate that a screen region is actionable. (If you're old enough, you'll remember how simple/lightweight hyperlinks were when you encountered them for the first time... just some blue text and an underline!)
If anything, these Windows 10 icons aren't flat and "iconic" enough. They should be aiming for something even simpler, like how the Visual Studio 2012/2013 designers used mostly simple silhouettes, with a handful of subdued colors for visual separation and emphasis. (The proposed Windows 10 icons are also just ugly. And what's up with turning the folder sideways?)
I think there's a parallel here to Edward Tufte's aesthetic that every piece of ink on a graph/chart must convey something meaningful about the data to the user. Any unnecessary element is chartjunk. Smartphones have forced us to apply the same thinking to UI design, and while some designers will inevitably take it too far (like Android did with the triangle/circle/square thing in KLP), we're headed in the right direction. Our chief scarcity is human attention, so it makes sense to generally de-empasize UI elements to the point where they don't ask for more of the user's attention then they deserve.
I've heard that "element hiding helper" can assist with this. However, it's also easy to right-click on an item in FireFox, select "Inspect Element" and then figure out a rule to hide the content (though you'll have to consult the documentation). For instance, Slashdot has a "Site Notice" that will appear at the top of every page (unless you accept the cookies/whatever to suppress showing it). I added the rule "slashdot.org##div#sitenotice" to suppress it (though it has since been added to EasyList).
Request Policy is my #1 mandatory extension.
For those who are unfamiliar with it, Request Policy works a lot like NoScript... it lists the domains that the page is trying to load *any* content from (not just scripts), and you whitelist which cross-domain loads you want to allow. On slashdot, for instance, I'm allowing requests to fsdn.com, but disallowing them to gstatic.com and scorecardreasearch.com.
I use it myself, but I can't recommend it. Too much of the web breaks. Credit card payments that bounce to a payment processor's website are especially problematic (I've gotten double-billed at least once). And using it in front of other people is especially awkward when I have to fiddle with a new site for a few minutes to get it to work. Also, I don't know that this provides that much better privacy than AdBlock+EasyPrivacy or some of the host-file blacklists.
Maybe with some extra development Request Policy could be a lot easier. Integration with (or incorporation into) NoScript and/or a community of well-maintained whitelists would make a big difference.
He feels it is redundant.
Supposedly the Bill of Rights was controversial in its day because many of the founding fathers thought it would be unnecessary: the population would zealously guard their hard-earned liberty and the various protections of the Constitution (representational government, separation of powers, etc.) would prevent tyranny. In fact, they feared that by enumerating freedoms they would inadvertently limit them, which is why they ultimately included the 9th amendment to say "hey, this isn't an exhaustive list" [though the practical effect of the 9th has been null].
Fortunately, the Bill of Rights was passed despite being "redundant", and the courts have brought it into play several times when lawmakers worked up particularly nasty bills. Unfortunately, the courts have also weasel-worded their way into listing several exceptions to these amendments (especially where 1, 2, and 4 are concerned).
There are so many...or, is it really just one Islam that does it all.
Looks to me like there's also >1.4 billion Muslims who didn't do any of those things today.