iPod plays mp3s. Anyone who's willing to sell me an mp3, or something I can turn into an mp3, can provide me with a product that plays on my iPod. Where's the lock-in?
It's been years since I read an issue of CR, so maybe it's gotten better, but what stopped me from trusting it as a source on anything was a review of home theater receivers. They took a look at a whole bunch of receivers, some stereo, some Surround, some ProLogic (No AC-3, this was a long time ago), of widely different capabilities and prices, and ended up rating them based on their FM tuner performance.
Although there's an idea... If you speed, you don't get any music or radio. Because, obviously, you need all your attention on the road right then.
What a bunch of fucking nonsense.
Look, traffic engineers know, and have known for a very long time, that the safest speed to set speed limits at is the 85% percentile speed: the speed which 85% of the free-flowing traffic on that particular road travels at or below. This is because the large majority of drivers are reasonable and prudent, and while they wish to reach their destination in a short amount of time, they also wish to remain alive and unwrecked.
If traffic engineers want this speed on a stretch of hypothetical road to drop, they do this by changing the road surface. Narrows, curves, crests, inclines, will all reduce the 85th percentile speed.
Setting a speed limit lower than the 85th percentile speed doesn't reduce the speed at which traffic flows. I'm going to repeat that again, because it sounds vaguely important:
The notion that traveling at the posted limit +5 is more dangerous than traveling at the posted limit, or than traveling at the posted limit -5, is reasonable only if the posted limit reflects the 85% percentile speed.
Sometimes it does. Some states even have it written into their laws that that's how speed limits are determined.
But more often it does not. More often, speed limits are set artificially low, in order to provide a source of revenue for the state. If you set a speed limit below the 85% percentile speed, people will generally ignore it, drive at the speed dictated by road conditions and their ability, and then you can ticket them for speeding.
Here are the actual conclusions of that study I linked to just above:
Based on the free-flow speed data collected for a 24-h period at the experimental and comparison sites in 22 States, posted speed limits were set, on the average, at the 45th percentile speed or below the average speed of traffic
At sites where speed limits were raised, there was an increase of less than 1.5 mi/h (2.4 km/h) for drivers traveling at and below the 75th percentile speed. When the posted limits were raised by 10 and 15 mi/h (16 and 24 km/h), there was a small decrease in the 99th percentile speed.
Raising speed limits in the region of the 85th percentile speed has an extremely beneficial effect on drivers complying with the posted speed limits.
Lowering speed limits in the 33rd percentile speed (the average percentile that speed were posted in this study) provides a noncompliance rate of approximately 67 percent.
Accidents at the 58 experimental sites where speed limits were lowered increased by 5.4 percent. The level of confidence of this estimate is 44 percent. The 95 percent confidence limits for this estimate ranges from a reduction in accidents of 11 percent to an increase of 26 percent.
Accidents at the 41 experimental sites where speed limits were raised decreased by 6.7 percent. The level of confidence of this estimate in 59 percent. The 95 percent confidence limits for this estimate ranges from a reduction in accidents of 21 percent to an increase of 10 percent.
Lowering speed limits more than 5 mi/h (8 km/h) below the 85th percentile speed of traffic did not reduce accidents.
Further supporting the notion that speed limits have everything to do with raising money for the state, and very little to do with road safety.
To be a good driver, you need to know how your car reacts to your control inputs. You provide input X, it responds in manner Y.
Introducing a device which changes Y to, say, Y-5, will impair the ability of people to control their vehicle, because it will change the vehicle's response to their inputs to one they are unfamiliar with.
I had a similar, although not-so-bad experience with bestpricecameras.com. Google searched for the lens I wanted for my D70, a Nikkor 70-300m G lens, they showed up as a sponsored link and claimed to have the lens for $109. I ordered it online through their web page, which indicated the lens was in stock.
I got an email the next day asking me to call and confirm my order. WTF? With most online retailers, you confirm the order by, you know, placing the order and entering your payment information. I fired back an email saying 'consider it confirmed.'
2 weeks later, they still haven't touched my credit card for the lens. I call up, navigate through their voicemail (fortunately it's a 1-800 number, so at least they're eating the cost), and talk to the guy who I'm supposed to call. He tries to upsell me a UV filter, because if I'm using it with a digital camera, and I take photos outside, I'll "get a lot of glare off the CCD." Now, I put UV filters on my lenses anyway, just for the sake of keeping crud off the lens while I'm shooting, so I was planning on picking one up anyway. I asked the price, he said $50. $50, for a filter that goes for $10 at any camera shop around here.
I told him forget the filter, just ship the lens. He said okay.
1 week later, they still haven't hit my card. I call back, ask about the order number, now they tell me it's out of stock. This is while I'm looking at their web page, which claims they have it in stock. I told them to just cancel my order, and fortunately they didn't give me any shit over it, I assume because it was only a $109 lens instead of a $3,000 camera.
Lesson learned: never order from a camera shop in Brooklyn.
A serious flaw that could be exploited by a worm is discovered in Windows. All one needs to write a worm is to know some vague information about the flaw, e.g. where to look for it.
This analogy doesn't work.
This wasn't a flaw being exploited by some immoral third party. This wasn't a bug, this wasn't an unforeseen error in functionality.
This was malware, doing precisely what it was intended to do.
F-Secure was acting in the best interest of the people who had been infected by this rootkit.
No, they weren't. What would have been acting in the best interested of the people who had been infected would be to tell people "You've been infected by a rootkit."
However, they gave Sony BMG a reasonable chance in fixing the security holes, as they do give any other company rightly so.
They do?
They give the authors of viruses and trojans the chance to fix their viruses and trojans before they offer fixes for them?
Oh, they don't do that? Then why should they do that for Sony when Sony deliberately releases malware into the wild?
Once again, this was not a bug. This was malware. You don't notify authors of malware that you've found their stuff, and give them an opportunity to rewrite it to be slightly less mal before you go public. You write a fix, and notify the public.
You're talking about situations where Microsoft has written software intended to do X, where X is a legitimate function, but it contains some flaw which allows third parties to subvert the software to accomplish Y, where Y is some illicit function. Like you say, in some of these cases it's likely that some interested third party finds the flaw, notifies Microsoft so that they can fix it, and then Microsoft does so before the exploit becomes public and the shit hits the fan.
That's not the case here. In this case, Sony wrote software *intended to do Y*, where Y was "perform in a manner identical to malware." You know, to install to the user's system without providing him with an honest accounting of what it's going to do once it's there, to conceal itself from the system, to consume system resources for no reason that benefits the user, to render the system unstable and susceptible to further infection, and to make itself very difficult to uninstall.
It's not a case of buggy software, which would be happily fixed by the author once he is informed of the bugs. It's a case of *malware* which was doing *precisely* what the author intended it to do. It's pure idiocy to expect that Sony was going to say "Whoops, our bad, we didn't realize that would happen, we'll get a fix out immediately," and in fact the story demonstrates they did not take that approach.
There was no reason to sit on this for a month, not while systems were being infected by Sony's software, inadvertantly installed by trusting users. None whatsoever. Again, it wasn't a legitimate software package that contained security holes, it was fucking *malware*. Would you expect Symantec or some other 3rd party company to try to notify and talk things out with a virus author before issuing a fix for his virus? No? Then why would you expect anyone to talk this over with Sony?
Professional courtesy applies between professionals in the same field.
That's not the case here. It's not like Sony designed a piece of software which was intended to be innocuous, but inadvertantly contained bugs that opened up security holes. That *is* the case with IE, and with IE you *can* make the case that it's a good thing to privately notify the vendor of the flaws in their software and give them some time to fix the issue before you trumpet the vulnerability to the world.
But this was malware, plain and fucking simple. The software wasn't bugged. The software did precisely what it was designed to do: install itself to the user's computer without providing him with full information on what it was going to do once it was installed, and once installed to conceal itself from the OS itself, interfering with its routine operations and sending information back to Sony. The fact that it also opens up the user's system to other infections just makes things worse, but even *absent* that, this was *no different* from any other virus or piece of spyware.
So what's this professional courtesy you're blathering about? The makers of security software aren't in the practice of treating virus and malware authors with professional courtesy, and providing them a chance to fix their malware before issuing a public announcement and a fix.
Don't let Sony's size or financial wealth entitle them to professional courtesy. In this instance, they acted no different from a script kiddy, and deserve exactly the same courtesy: none at all. The people who inadvertently infected their systems with Sony's malware because they were foolish enough to trust a large corporation not to write such immoral software and install it without their knowledge or permission are the ones who deserve the courtesty of a rapid announcement and fix.
This does work pretty well. Right now, I'm listening to Norwegian Death Metal:
"Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features vocals similar to cats being tortured, drum tracks with the subtlety of a wrecking ball, a bare modicum of musical talent, and a complete disregard for human life."
only 4% of Internet users can flag 100% of phishing e-mails
I took the test the linked-to article cited as the source of data for that 4% claim. I only scored 80%. Does that mean I flagged only 80% of phish attempts? No, it doesn't. I flagged 100% of the phishing attempts as exactly what they were.
I had two false-positives, which lowered my score. But false-positives are quite a bit safer than false-negatives. In each case, the 'legitimate' email linked to different domains than the origin; the one from Bank of America linked to bankofamerica1.com, and the one from CapitalOne linked to a really odd domain, bfi0.com. That second one is a *huge* red flag, regardless of the content of the email, you'd have to be very trusting or do some extra research in order to *not* flag it as a phishing attempt.
Only 4% of users might score a 100% on that quiz, but that's not at all the same thing as saying that only 4% of users can't flag all phishing scams as such.
It was safety concerns to the *airline's* insurance company.
It was an operating airport. Using a parked jet to try to blow a car over is a great way to risk FOD to other aircraft landing or taking off from that airport.
If you can prove he's a terrorist, arrest him and charge him. You don't get to just arbitrarily hold onto someone's property until such point as you gather enough evidence to charge him.
Once you've copied the guy's drive, you don't really need to hold onto it for another several months to analyze the data. Give him the drive back, peruse at your leisure, subject to judicial oversight.
"It still boggles the mind that any divide by zero error on NT would cause a system to crash, let alone" 27 end-user terminals, said Gil Young, corporate network engineer for a systems integration firm in Orlando, Fla. "I don't care what operating system, computer or application I'm using, I should be able to type in a zero and expect the computer not to crash, especially if that zero is to represent a closed valve."
There are no "Aegis class" cruisers. Aegis is a ship combat system, specifically an AN/SPY-1 radar system, a computer based command-and-control system, and one of a number of missile systems either in current-tech VLS cells or older cylindrical magazines and launchers.
The Aegis system can be found on Ticonderoga-class cruisers and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers in the USN, Kongo-class destroyers in the IJN, and some Spanish frigate whose designation I forget.
The ship we're talking about is the USS Yorktown, CG-48, and the problem was pretty much as you describe. A user input an erroneous zero value for some quantitity (fuel pressure, I think), and the system ate itself and took the engines offline.
The Yorktown was decommissioned last year. Shame that the practice of using Windows in ship-critical systems wasn't.
For potential severity, this one's worse than a few they listed.
Basically, the Navy was running critical ship systems on a Windows NT platform, and a divide-by-zero in a database caused a buffer overrun that resulted in a shutdown of the engines, leaving the ship dead in the water for 2.5 hours.
Fortunately, it was on maneuvers off of Cape Charles, and not at war off the coast of Yemen or something. Scratch a billion-dollar destroyer and most of her crew because of an NT bug, in that case.
Coca Cola company *never* got a patent on cola; in fact their recipe is a closely guarded company secret. Why is that?
Because patents require disclosure.
If you come up with a recipe, you have several choices. One is to patent it, in which case you're assured of the exclusive rights for a set period of time, but also know that after that time, anyone can make what you patented and give it away, if they want.
Another choice is to keep the recipe secret, in which case you're assured of the exclusive rights for as long as you can keep it secret, but also know that if someone else reverse-engineers or otherwise duplicates your recipe, they can make it and give it away, if they want.
Nestle made the former choice. Coca-Cola made the latter. That doesn't say anything about the relative merits of either choice.
Where is the benefit of granting patents on recipes?
The same as the benefit of granting patents on anything else.
Hell, a few days is likely, and it'll get worse (or better), as in this bit from Charles Stross's Accelerando:
"Well." Manfred picks up his coffee and takes a sip. Grimaces. "Pam wanted a divorce settlement, didn't she? The most valuable assets I own are the rights to a whole bunch of recategorized work-for-hire that slipped through the CCAA's fingers a few years back. Part of the twentieth century's cultural heritage that got locked away by the music industry in the last decade - Janis Joplin, the Doors, that sort of thing. Artists who weren't around to defend themselves anymore. When the music cartels went bust, the rights went for a walk. I took them over originally with the idea of setting the music free. Giving it back to the public domain, as it were."
Annette nods at the guards, one of whom nods back and starts muttering and buzzing into a throat mike. Manfred continues. "I was working on a solution to the central planning paradox - how to interface a centrally planned enclave to a market economy. My good friend Gianni Vittoria suggested that such a shell game could have alternative uses. So I've not freed the music. Instead, I signed the rights over to various actors and threads running inside the agalmic holdings network - currently one million, forty-eight thousand, five hundred and seventy-five companies. They swap rights rapidly - the rights to any given song are resident in a given company for, oh, all of fifty milliseconds at a time. Now understand, I don't own these companies. I don't even have a financial interest in them anymore. I've deeded my share of the profits to Pam, here. I'm getting out of the biz, Gianni's suggested something rather more challenging for me to do instead."
He takes another mouthful of coffee. The recording Mafiya goon glares at him. Pam glares at him. Annette stands against one wall, looking amused. "Perhaps you'd like to sort it out between you?" he asks. Aside, to Glashwiecz: "I trust you'll drop your denial of service attack before I set the Italian parliament on you? By the way, you'll find the book value of the intellectual property assets I deeded to Pamela - by the value these gentlemen place on them - is somewhere in excess of a billion dollars. As that's rather more than ninety-nine-point-nine percent of my assets, you'll probably want to look elsewhere for your fees."
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They laughed at Einstein, they laughed at Edison, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
This guy's in the Bozo brigade. I'm not disputing that his back aches. I am disputing the wealth of bullshit in the article:
However, managing dielectric stress on the body is "controversial" i.e. pooh-poohed by authorities. But this does not stop independent inventors from creating and offering for sale various devices which are intended to mitigate this stress, whether to make interior spaces more comfortable for sufferers (ref.), or to attach to cellphones (ref.), or to be worn on the body such as purple plates (ref.), orgonite pendants (ref.), and diodes (ref.). It is up to users to examine the data presented in support of these devices, and to decide for themselves whether to get these devices and run them through various investigations of their own, and or to use them personally. The "Harmonic Protector" (ref) did not register any activity using an "orgone meter" (ref). However, a reading taken using a sophisticated software package known as "Life Assessment" technology (ref), which is designed to analyze the balance of energies in the meridians, indicated a modest beneficial effect from this HP when it is interacting with a human body. (Ref)
He's a bullshit artist, and he's selling a product. No different than Simpson & Son's Patented Energizing Moisturizing Tantalizing Romanticizing Surprising, Herprizing Revitalizing Tonic. The term might be vulgar, but it's a hell of a lot more to the point than just calling it "snake oil."
Indeed, that is often something that is reported by people who sustain injuries.
No shit, really? I've never heard that.[/sarcasm]
Sparky, what makes it bullshit is his analysis, which involves claims that it's because of the dielectric stress of a storm that's hundreds of miles away. Pretty much every single statement in his article is purest, unmitigated, grade-D bullshit.
Could Slashdot's editors please learn to tell the difference between science and pseudoscience? Is it too much to ask that editors, if not posters, RTFA?
Check this bullshit out:
On a more personal note, some years ago I sustained a back injury due to an auto accident, which appears to have made me more sensitive to coming weather changes. In the week before these storms I start swallowing Tylenol or similar painkillers because the symptoms make it hard for me to sleep. This was not barometric because at the time there nothing of that sort had yet been detected in my area. It is electromagnetic.
Here is a clue for the detection of the process. The capacitance charge was forming that set up the storm, and it was this charge causes me pain! It is known as dielectric stress. Because this concept is outside the reductionistic-chemical paradigm that governs the drug industry, this not usually discussed by medical science. But those who work with cellular bio-electricity will understand this concept. This dielectric stress clearly affects chemical reactions and energy conversions in bodily cells, in addition to being well known to engineers for its effects on electrical systems and materials used in electronic devices.
A good indicator for scientific and commercial development is the discovery of a natural process like this. If the number of "hits" from doing a search on "dielectric stress" is any indication, the control and measurement of this process is a subject of great interest for scientists and engineers working in technology development and quality control.
What a heaping plate of crud. This is embarassing.
Slashdot Mirror
What fucking lock-in scheme?
iPod plays mp3s. Anyone who's willing to sell me an mp3, or something I can turn into an mp3, can provide me with a product that plays on my iPod. Where's the lock-in?
Agreed.
It's been years since I read an issue of CR, so maybe it's gotten better, but what stopped me from trusting it as a source on anything was a review of home theater receivers. They took a look at a whole bunch of receivers, some stereo, some Surround, some ProLogic (No AC-3, this was a long time ago), of widely different capabilities and prices, and ended up rating them based on their FM tuner performance.
What a bunch of fucking nonsense.
Look, traffic engineers know, and have known for a very long time, that the safest speed to set speed limits at is the 85% percentile speed: the speed which 85% of the free-flowing traffic on that particular road travels at or below. This is because the large majority of drivers are reasonable and prudent, and while they wish to reach their destination in a short amount of time, they also wish to remain alive and unwrecked.
If traffic engineers want this speed on a stretch of hypothetical road to drop, they do this by changing the road surface. Narrows, curves, crests, inclines, will all reduce the 85th percentile speed.
Setting a speed limit lower than the 85th percentile speed doesn't reduce the speed at which traffic flows. I'm going to repeat that again, because it sounds vaguely important:
Changing the speed limit doesn't change how fast people drive. The safe speed for a road is determined by the road design and the road conditions, and *not* by some arbitrary number on a sign.
The notion that traveling at the posted limit +5 is more dangerous than traveling at the posted limit, or than traveling at the posted limit -5, is reasonable only if the posted limit reflects the 85% percentile speed.
Sometimes it does. Some states even have it written into their laws that that's how speed limits are determined.
But more often it does not. More often, speed limits are set artificially low, in order to provide a source of revenue for the state. If you set a speed limit below the 85% percentile speed, people will generally ignore it, drive at the speed dictated by road conditions and their ability, and then you can ticket them for speeding.
Here are the actual conclusions of that study I linked to just above:
Further supporting the notion that speed limits have everything to do with raising money for the state, and very little to do with road safety.
To be a good driver, you need to know how your car reacts to your control inputs. You provide input X, it responds in manner Y.
Introducing a device which changes Y to, say, Y-5, will impair the ability of people to control their vehicle, because it will change the vehicle's response to their inputs to one they are unfamiliar with.
This is a really dumb idea.
I had a similar, although not-so-bad experience with bestpricecameras.com. Google searched for the lens I wanted for my D70, a Nikkor 70-300m G lens, they showed up as a sponsored link and claimed to have the lens for $109. I ordered it online through their web page, which indicated the lens was in stock.
I got an email the next day asking me to call and confirm my order. WTF? With most online retailers, you confirm the order by, you know, placing the order and entering your payment information. I fired back an email saying 'consider it confirmed.'
2 weeks later, they still haven't touched my credit card for the lens. I call up, navigate through their voicemail (fortunately it's a 1-800 number, so at least they're eating the cost), and talk to the guy who I'm supposed to call. He tries to upsell me a UV filter, because if I'm using it with a digital camera, and I take photos outside, I'll "get a lot of glare off the CCD." Now, I put UV filters on my lenses anyway, just for the sake of keeping crud off the lens while I'm shooting, so I was planning on picking one up anyway. I asked the price, he said $50. $50, for a filter that goes for $10 at any camera shop around here.
I told him forget the filter, just ship the lens. He said okay.
1 week later, they still haven't hit my card. I call back, ask about the order number, now they tell me it's out of stock. This is while I'm looking at their web page, which claims they have it in stock. I told them to just cancel my order, and fortunately they didn't give me any shit over it, I assume because it was only a $109 lens instead of a $3,000 camera.
Lesson learned: never order from a camera shop in Brooklyn.
A serious flaw that could be exploited by a worm is discovered in Windows. All one needs to write a worm is to know some vague information about the flaw, e.g. where to look for it.
This analogy doesn't work.
This wasn't a flaw being exploited by some immoral third party. This wasn't a bug, this wasn't an unforeseen error in functionality.
This was malware, doing precisely what it was intended to do.
F-Secure was acting in the best interest of the people who had been infected by this rootkit.
No, they weren't. What would have been acting in the best interested of the people who had been infected would be to tell people "You've been infected by a rootkit."
However, they gave Sony BMG a reasonable chance in fixing the security holes, as they do give any other company rightly so.
They do?
They give the authors of viruses and trojans the chance to fix their viruses and trojans before they offer fixes for them?
Oh, they don't do that? Then why should they do that for Sony when Sony deliberately releases malware into the wild?
Once again, this was not a bug. This was malware. You don't notify authors of malware that you've found their stuff, and give them an opportunity to rewrite it to be slightly less mal before you go public. You write a fix, and notify the public.
Again, different situation.
You're talking about situations where Microsoft has written software intended to do X, where X is a legitimate function, but it contains some flaw which allows third parties to subvert the software to accomplish Y, where Y is some illicit function. Like you say, in some of these cases it's likely that some interested third party finds the flaw, notifies Microsoft so that they can fix it, and then Microsoft does so before the exploit becomes public and the shit hits the fan.
That's not the case here. In this case, Sony wrote software *intended to do Y*, where Y was "perform in a manner identical to malware." You know, to install to the user's system without providing him with an honest accounting of what it's going to do once it's there, to conceal itself from the system, to consume system resources for no reason that benefits the user, to render the system unstable and susceptible to further infection, and to make itself very difficult to uninstall.
It's not a case of buggy software, which would be happily fixed by the author once he is informed of the bugs. It's a case of *malware* which was doing *precisely* what the author intended it to do. It's pure idiocy to expect that Sony was going to say "Whoops, our bad, we didn't realize that would happen, we'll get a fix out immediately," and in fact the story demonstrates they did not take that approach.
There was no reason to sit on this for a month, not while systems were being infected by Sony's software, inadvertantly installed by trusting users. None whatsoever. Again, it wasn't a legitimate software package that contained security holes, it was fucking *malware*. Would you expect Symantec or some other 3rd party company to try to notify and talk things out with a virus author before issuing a fix for his virus? No? Then why would you expect anyone to talk this over with Sony?
Its called proffesional courtesey.
Professional courtesy applies between professionals in the same field.
That's not the case here. It's not like Sony designed a piece of software which was intended to be innocuous, but inadvertantly contained bugs that opened up security holes. That *is* the case with IE, and with IE you *can* make the case that it's a good thing to privately notify the vendor of the flaws in their software and give them some time to fix the issue before you trumpet the vulnerability to the world.
But this was malware, plain and fucking simple. The software wasn't bugged. The software did precisely what it was designed to do: install itself to the user's computer without providing him with full information on what it was going to do once it was installed, and once installed to conceal itself from the OS itself, interfering with its routine operations and sending information back to Sony. The fact that it also opens up the user's system to other infections just makes things worse, but even *absent* that, this was *no different* from any other virus or piece of spyware.
So what's this professional courtesy you're blathering about? The makers of security software aren't in the practice of treating virus and malware authors with professional courtesy, and providing them a chance to fix their malware before issuing a public announcement and a fix.
Don't let Sony's size or financial wealth entitle them to professional courtesy. In this instance, they acted no different from a script kiddy, and deserve exactly the same courtesy: none at all. The people who inadvertently infected their systems with Sony's malware because they were foolish enough to trust a large corporation not to write such immoral software and install it without their knowledge or permission are the ones who deserve the courtesty of a rapid announcement and fix.
This does work pretty well. Right now, I'm listening to Norwegian Death Metal:
"Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features vocals similar to cats being tortured, drum tracks with the subtlety of a wrecking ball, a bare modicum of musical talent, and a complete disregard for human life."
only 4% of Internet users can flag 100% of phishing e-mails
I took the test the linked-to article cited as the source of data for that 4% claim. I only scored 80%. Does that mean I flagged only 80% of phish attempts? No, it doesn't. I flagged 100% of the phishing attempts as exactly what they were.
I had two false-positives, which lowered my score. But false-positives are quite a bit safer than false-negatives. In each case, the 'legitimate' email linked to different domains than the origin; the one from Bank of America linked to bankofamerica1.com, and the one from CapitalOne linked to a really odd domain, bfi0.com. That second one is a *huge* red flag, regardless of the content of the email, you'd have to be very trusting or do some extra research in order to *not* flag it as a phishing attempt.
Only 4% of users might score a 100% on that quiz, but that's not at all the same thing as saying that only 4% of users can't flag all phishing scams as such.
It was safety concerns to the *airline's* insurance company.
It was an operating airport. Using a parked jet to try to blow a car over is a great way to risk FOD to other aircraft landing or taking off from that airport.
Have you bought one yet?
If you can prove he's a terrorist, arrest him and charge him. You don't get to just arbitrarily hold onto someone's property until such point as you gather enough evidence to charge him.
Once you've copied the guy's drive, you don't really need to hold onto it for another several months to analyze the data. Give him the drive back, peruse at your leisure, subject to judicial oversight.
There are no "Aegis class" cruisers. Aegis is a ship combat system, specifically an AN/SPY-1 radar system, a computer based command-and-control system, and one of a number of missile systems either in current-tech VLS cells or older cylindrical magazines and launchers.
The Aegis system can be found on Ticonderoga-class cruisers and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers in the USN, Kongo-class destroyers in the IJN, and some Spanish frigate whose designation I forget.
The ship we're talking about is the USS Yorktown, CG-48, and the problem was pretty much as you describe. A user input an erroneous zero value for some quantitity (fuel pressure, I think), and the system ate itself and took the engines offline.
The Yorktown was decommissioned last year. Shame that the practice of using Windows in ship-critical systems wasn't.
For potential severity, this one's worse than a few they listed.
Basically, the Navy was running critical ship systems on a Windows NT platform, and a divide-by-zero in a database caused a buffer overrun that resulted in a shutdown of the engines, leaving the ship dead in the water for 2.5 hours.
Fortunately, it was on maneuvers off of Cape Charles, and not at war off the coast of Yemen or something. Scratch a billion-dollar destroyer and most of her crew because of an NT bug, in that case.
Coca Cola company *never* got a patent on cola; in fact their recipe is a closely guarded company secret. Why is that?
Because patents require disclosure.
If you come up with a recipe, you have several choices. One is to patent it, in which case you're assured of the exclusive rights for a set period of time, but also know that after that time, anyone can make what you patented and give it away, if they want.
Another choice is to keep the recipe secret, in which case you're assured of the exclusive rights for as long as you can keep it secret, but also know that if someone else reverse-engineers or otherwise duplicates your recipe, they can make it and give it away, if they want.
Nestle made the former choice. Coca-Cola made the latter. That doesn't say anything about the relative merits of either choice.
Where is the benefit of granting patents on recipes?
The same as the benefit of granting patents on anything else.
Hell, a few days is likely, and it'll get worse (or better), as in this bit from Charles Stross's Accelerando:
This guy's in the Bozo brigade. I'm not disputing that his back aches. I am disputing the wealth of bullshit in the article:
He's a bullshit artist, and he's selling a product. No different than Simpson & Son's Patented Energizing Moisturizing Tantalizing Romanticizing Surprising, Herprizing Revitalizing Tonic. The term might be vulgar, but it's a hell of a lot more to the point than just calling it "snake oil."
Indeed, that is often something that is reported by people who sustain injuries.
No shit, really? I've never heard that.[/sarcasm]
Sparky, what makes it bullshit is his analysis, which involves claims that it's because of the dielectric stress of a storm that's hundreds of miles away. Pretty much every single statement in his article is purest, unmitigated, grade-D bullshit.
Check this bullshit out:
What a heaping plate of crud. This is embarassing.
And I assume the converse is as well, namely that pointing out that it's *not* stealing is to sound morally OK.
Well, no, that's utter nonsense. A great variety of things that aren't stealing are morally wrong, after all.
Copyright violation, on the other hand, isn't victimless.
I just downloaded a Woody Guthrie mp3.
Who's the victim?
Then why not call it "anal rape," or "kidnapping"?
Because words mean things, that's why. And because of that fact, calling it 'stealing' is stupid, just like calling it 'murder' would be.
Man, are you stupid. The entire freaking Sun is filled with metal oxide.
Moron.
The sun is considerably too hot to allow for the existence of chemical compounds.