How did this childish rant get moderated 'insightful'?
What is childish is to assume that an angry tone in any way affects the validity of the point. Do you honestly believe the OP's assertion that the damage done 15+ year old Windows XP viruses (pre-SP 2! Windows didn't even come with a firewall back then!) justifies removing all end user control from the update process?
How does this "high security" lock prevent a previous guest from having made a copy of the key?
Dynamically re-keyable mechanical locks have been around for ages. Even Kwikset has one these days. The maid could do it in under 10 seconds. Requires a tiny bit of planning to set it up to be idiot-resistant, but basically on the maids' carts you'd have a series of small labeled boxes, one for each room number, that contain a partition with two keys: the old one and the new one.
I'm going to throw a brick through your window. And then charge you 1500 EUR for auditing the physical security of your home. I presume that's okay with you.
I'm going to install a lock that locks you in your hotel room if it's hacked or loses power, so you'll stand a much increased chance of dying in a fire (and the fire itself may well cause the locks to fail.)
Also, you need to adjust the cost of that window as a percentage of my income comparable to the 1500 EUR vs. the hotel's income. What is that going to come out to? $2.71 or something? Yeah, if I did something extremely stupid and dangerous, I wouldn't mind incurring a very small cost that instantly fixes the inconvenience whilst making me aware of the underlying problem.
I'm not saying we legalize all hacking. I am saying that in this specific case, the hackers have done good on the whole. But yes, I'm one of those radicals who thinks that multimillion dollar corporations shouldn't be able to use their own astonishing incompetence as an excuse for fuckups.
Keycards are the right tool, although of course you have to implement it correctly and not connect it to the internet.
A lot of keycards I've seen appear to be passive RFID as well (tap instead of swipe). This is also moronic design, just waiting for a group of tenacious, technically minded criminals to come along to perfect the art of reading from your pocket at a distance.
Also, they shouldn't even be on an LAN, either. Have the maid do it. The minor convenience of putting it on a LAN is not worth having a single point of failure for all locks in the hotel.
Everyone who was tired of getting slammed with the BLASTER worm, with Nimda, or with the Melissa virus, requested that Windows be more secure. Everyone who fell victim to a buffer overflow, or privilege escalation DEMANDED that it be mitigated. Companies who had windows systems connected to the internet ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED that the propagation of worms not be allowed to continue.
I'm sorry you don't enjoy working with a computer anymore. Did you enjoy it when those above mentioned viruses were running rampant? Which would you rather have, constant attacks from internet zombies, or a small time of inactivity while your OS is being patched?
The stuff you're mentioning was 15+ years ago. That was before Windows 10, before Windows 8, before Windows 7, before Windows Vista. Those were early Windows XP viruses (before Microsoft bothered including a firewall in SP 2.) Hell, Melissa was a 95/98 virus.
Yes, that was a real shitshow back in the early '00s, when systems were getting owned by the millions even if they were just left there idle there with an internet connection, and a few times they were used to launch attacks that brought huge sections of the internet to a crawl.
What the hell does any of that have to do with Windows 10 again? Are things still that bad? Did you just awaken from a coma[1] ?Given 15 years to work on the problem, could the engineers at Microsoft think of no other way to avoid similar incidents of catastrophic ownage moving forward?
Hotel management said that they have now been hit three times by cybercriminals who this time managed to take down the entire key system. The guests could no longer get in or out of the hotel rooms and new key cards could not be programmed.
Bahaha, and I hadn't even seen this yet. They're hard working, too! And they only demanded 1,500 EUR? Hell, the hotel should pay them more than that for security auditing services.
Also, who the hell designs an electronic lock that can lock people in the room if it goes down? Is that even legal in Austria?
Yet according to the hotel, the hackers left a back door open in the system, and tried to attack the systems again.
See, they even offered you a free security audit checkup to verify that you fixed things properly. Try as I might, I just cannot bring myself to dislike these guys.
Brandstaetter said: "We are planning at the next room refurbishment for old-fashioned door locks with real keys. Just like 111 years ago at the time of our great-grandfathers.
Yeah, high security mechanical locks have been around for at least two hundred years now.
And we've known for decades that electronic does not equal high security. Is anyone still selling passive RFID door locks? What about that one expensive electronic lock that could be easily defeated with a $50 magnet?
I'm not sure I could feel any less sympathy for the hotel if they next decided to replace all of their locks with aggressively positioned anti-theft feng shui decorations. I mean, at least that system wouldn't lock guests inside their rooms, possibly killing them if there's a fire.
Are we talking about/etc/hosts or is this some extension called "hosts" you've written?
On/Off for sites is ALL you need
Which is just nonsense. Ad blocking doesn't work properly on a lot of sites if you do that.
And as I previously alluded to, I have found that gstatic.com is required for some sites to function but not for others. So do you choose to block gstatic.com entirely and break a bunch of sites or are you going to let random sites hit up Google (thus letting them track you directly) and run lord knows what scripts that are there? That is an abysmal choice that you're forced to make, instead of whitelisting gstatic only on specific sites that you need it for.
The rest is just blithering, telling me that a Vespa is more fuel efficient than a Boeing 767. By all means, flush your list of explicit blacklisted domains from uBlock into/etc/hosts every once in a while. No reason you can't. Doesn't replace most uBlock's abilities, nor its quick to use UI.
A single global on-off switch for every domain, with no wildcards and no scripting control, can only duplicate a tiny fraction of what uBlock does. Using hosts as a substitute, you will routinely be left with the choice of completely breaking websites or allowing all manner of stuff that you'd rather not allow. Example1: some sites require domain X to work properly and others don't require domain X but still attempt to connect to it. Example2: forbidding scripts but allowing other content. Example3: cosmetic blocking and first party element blocking.
poor imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
Flattery of whom? Mr. John Hosts, inventor of the hosts file? I'm pretty sure hosts was never intended for this type of security usage. I mean, vanilla hosts doesn't even allow wildcards and thus is often useless as any attacker can just bypass it using a rotating subdomain. (Though you can use dsnmasq instead.) Use it under the hood, sure, but it's clearly not sufficient.
The only reason the Soviets tried to place missiles in Cuba was to counter the American missiles in Turkey. Full stop.
And the only reason Bush Jr. invaded Iraq is because of weapons of mass destruction.
The removal Jupiter missiles was a concession we made. That much we do know. Everything else is pure conjecture as best and blind propaganda swallowing at worst... unless you know of some pre-crisis internal Soviet documents that I'm unaware of that shows Cuba was talked about only after and due to the missiles in Turkey, wasn't talked about before that point, wasn't done at Castro's request in response to the Bay of Pigs, etc.
No more than American marines station in Guantanamo are "on vacation"
The American government never made such a dumbassed claim. The Russian government did regarding Crimea. The Russians have historically been much more brazen and prolific about propaganda than Americans (which is not to say we don't do it.) Claiming retroactively that the Cuban Missile Crisis would not have happened if not for Turkey would be a very obvious and subdued lie, in comparison.
The point of Java is to be cross platform, so I don't understand why it would be limited to IE11 or any browser.
Java was developed by Sun, which was later bought out by Oracle. It turns out Oracle has their own special set of priorities and Java plugin bug fixes was not one of them.
Also, the "point of Java is to be cross platform" thing was just an early PR thing. The point of Java (in practice) was to take C++, remove the "C" and cover any remaining sharp corners with padding.
There's a rather big difference between someone successfully building an industry and the government then simply stealing it from him (i.e. nationalization), and the government setting up its own industry especially since in the case of Norway where said industry ensures that the natural wealth of Norway benefits everyone in the country, instead of just a handful of very rich people.
What is the verb or adjective to describe an industry that the government controls but hasn't 'stolen' if not "nationalize[d]"?
Also, that appears to be a false dichotomy since apparently the oil industry in Norway is a publicly traded company and the Norwegian government only owns 65% of it. This implies an obvious non-theft path to nationalization for an industry that for-profit entity has built up: buy them out. Eminent domain for things other than land is an interesting topic that doesn't come up nearly enough.
I use addblock, ghostery, and noscript to protect myself from viruses
You should try uBlock Origins sometime. Uses the same adblock lists as ABP, allows per-domain rules like noscript and request policy, has a *ton* of other features yet still manages to be snappy, low on RAM usage and very easy to use with one of the best compact pop-up interfaces I've ever seen[1] and an indispensably good "block this element" feature that's much nicer than ABP's ever was. It's also ridiculously easy to toggle between default-deny and default-permit modes, for those times when you're in a rush. There's a lovely trick I quickly discovered wherein you regularly browse in default-deny mode, and whenever you fully set up a site to work properly you go in and redlist (explicit-deny) everything that you didn't needed to whitelist in order to make it work. This takes all of two seconds, but means that if/when you flip over into default-permit mode (or let's say if you're copying the ruleset to a relative's computer, and you know they definitely aren't going to want to mess with this stuff), those sites you've visited and configured will still be fully sanitized with explicit-denies.
Oh yeah, unlike ABP and Ghostery, it's GPL so it's definitely not going to get bought out and fouled up (or rather if it does, a fork will appear.)
The only thing it's sorely lacking is good cookie management. (The related advanced-user extension uMatrix from the same author can deal with cookies, but not in a very fine-grained way as I recall. Self-Destructing Cookies is a good enough option for most people unless you need to manually whitelist specific cookies instead of specific domains.)
1. It will take a few minutes of tinkering with 'advanced mode' turned on, but it's quite intuitive once you understand what's going on: left column global rules, right column local rules (which trump global rules), default behavior (all domains) at the top with domain-specific behavior underneath, three states for each cell (whitelist==green, blacklist==red, whitelist but apply ad filter type rules==gray), lighter red/green/gray cell shading to represent the effects of your default settings if you haven't assigned any explicit manual rule for that domain, and ---s and +++s to give you an idea of the number of requests allowed and blocked. Plus a few separate buttons for overall off/on (site specific), remote font blocking, large media element blocking, etc.
Here are the staples of the modern user interface (in varying degree apply to modern web/and most operating systems such as Windows 10, iOS and even Android):
The mobile catastrophe is the obvious thing to point at, and there's a lot of truth in that. (Infinite scrolling webpages with no auto-incrementing URL piss me off the most.) However, it goes a lot deeper than that. It goes deeper even than the widespread conscious emulation of Apple's "the customer is always wrong" dictatorial style (GNOME, I'm looking at you. But Microsoft and to some extent even Google, too.)
The middle ground of usability--power users, people who want to configure things and experiment with all of the features offered, but don't actually want to code it themselves from scratch--are a woefully underserved segment of the population on any platform. I'd get drunk and rant about something simple like file browsers, but I already did that a while back. Desktop linux (particularly the non-GNOME varieties) is the most configurable by far these days, but it's still just so *stupid* about the simplest of things.
And how come no one, and I mean *no one*, is working on a project where the computer bends itself to the user's expectations and not the other way around? Why not set out to design a desktop environment that could duplicate the feel (with a bit less glitter, at least at first) of any common desktop OS? I mean make that user configurable; have one fairly constant UI element that's easy to find and from there the user can change it to look like the latest OS X or Windows 95. Back up your customizations to USB drive or even the cloud, then instantly get access to your preferred setup (or popular setups that others have designed and shared) anywhere. Why the hell not? Not easy, but it's not an impossible-sounding task on its face, and there's surely tons of demand for it. And I can't help but adopt the exact opposite conclusion of the GNOME devs: that by forcing the devs to think and develop with maximum flexibility and modularly, it will (in the long run) be easier to maintain and easier to improve.
Barring something ambitious like that, let me just reiterate that all you folks who develop 'next generation' desktop environments like Unity, GNOME 3, or KDE 5 (which admittedly I haven't used much of yet) should really consider whether your time is better spent trying to force people to care about sexy new paradigms in lieu of doing something simple and amazingly useful like tabs handled by the window manager. Put them on the titlebar itself like Chrome, put them below it, put them above it, put 'em over the task bar, whatever. Let the user customize tab behavior and install tab UI tweaks like you can in web browsers. And all apps would instantly have tabs, right out of the box. Toss in the ability to turn this off (for apps that have tabs implemented internally) and also perhaps an API for tab interaction that new programs to target so that a new process doesn't need to be launched for every tab and bam, you've just done something revolutionary and long-lasting. And it will be so easy to use (or to not use) that no one will hate you for doing it.
Well, almost no one. Havoc Pennington might get a bit upset, but I hear that for every tear he sheds an angel gets its wings.
You jest, but the parallels between the wall and the hyperloop are not skin-deep. Both are naive measures that are touted as magic bullets that won't cost us a dime / will pay for themselves, but in reality they will have mediocre effects. And they'll both end up costing at least four times more than the initial quote.
Are we allowed to say this out loud yet? Or has Musk finished upgrading the RDF he has on loan from Jobs' estate?
There's a stark difference between social democracies that have market economies but high taxes on the wealthy (funnily enough those Nordic countries, as well as New Zealand, actually have lower corporate tax rates compared to the United States) and states that attempt to nationalize industries,
Uhh... and Norway's oil industry is what exactly?
I'm not saying it's "communism", but nationalized industries aren't a communist-only phenomenon. There's a decent argument for direct government control whenever the industry is big enough and hard enough to break into that there really isn't going to be much room for free market magic to appear.
On the other hand, having a few people involved like Musk [that] are very sane...
Keep in mind that you are talking about a man who:
1. Wants to establish a Mars colony in our lifetime and seems to imply that the rocket to get there is the hard part.
2. Wants to run a massive airtight pipe down 300 miles of interstate median, in the most earthquake-prone part of the country, so that a cramped, windowless car with a screaming jet engine on the front can ferry a modest number of people at about twice the speed of maglev. Which, fine. Maybe that will be neat. But then he says it'll be much cheaper than any other solution, and unlike the airport won't involve arduous security delays.
4. Was fired as CEO of Paypal because he wanted to move all of their operations from Unix to Windows in the year 2000. (For those keeping score at home, that would be at least a couple years after Linux was household word among geeks, and yet well before Windows attained anything like mediocre stability.)
I know I'll be modded to oblivion for this because Musk appears to have completed his transformation into Steve Jobs 2.0 but I'm just saying... you have a curious definition of sane.
Yeah, it's a reality distortion field to insist that a specific, local crisis about X not be named about shit that happened months or years earlier. Why stop at Turkey? The west-communism conflict is rooted in the overthrow of the Tsar, so really this should be called the "October Revolution crisis." All I'm saying is not to swallow propaganda whole without question. Tell me, do you believe Russia's explanation that the troops in Crimea were "on vacation", too?
The standoff didn't occur over or near Turkey, and it's certainly debatable whether Russia would have taken no interest in Cuba in the absence of the Jupiters in Turkey. Been a while since I read the details here, but the casual connection to the Bay of Pigs may well stronger than the connection to the Jupiter missiles. So if you wanted to call it "the Cuban crisis" or even something slightly more biased like the "Cuban sovereignty crisis", that might at least pass the sniff test. Pretending that the Soviets had no desire or plans whatsoever to increase their ICBM coverage of America pre-Turkey is not only absurd, it's flatly contradicted by subsequent events.
From my viewpoint, it looks as if Apple has abandoned the high-end computer market. The product line has been stagnating.
Which is really, really strange. I could see Apple execs having problems justifying a lower-end product line, since the margins are trickier and they have to be careful not to tarnish their own image, but for higher end stuff easily they could stuff high end parts in an Apple chassis, charge 20% more than the PC equivalent and call it a day.
With Trump in control, I would bet he'd nuke most of the middle east: "Muslims did it. Even the ones that didn't do it, well they did nothing to stop it, and that's just as bad."
This is just gibbering. The generals are not going to come to Trump asking him to name, off the top of his head, the cities he wants nuked. (He'd probably begin with Agrabah.) If the terrorists came from country X, they might give him a list of targets in country X. He'll probably overreact and it may well involve nukes, but he's not going to nuke "most of the Middle East". The people around him would obviously not let him do that. They can even invoke the "it's against the law to obey an unlawful order" defense if they chose to override Trump's command.
Let's say next month, North Korea demonstrates huge leaps in nuclear launch capability. I think the likelihood of nuclear strike one way or the other is MUCH higher with Trump as president than any of the past several.
Possibly. NK is the best response to the people who keep talking about Russia, but it depends on just how crazy they are. "Pretty damn crazy", I can hear you say, but I'm not sure they are entirely oblivious to the basic facts of survival. The ruling class has been able to get by well enough by extortion for decades. It doesn't seem likely that they'd blow it all to hell even in the face of a taunting Trump.
But it's not entirely inconceivable. I think a more likely scenario in response to Trump taunting would be a surprise conventional attack on Seoul, wagering that the nuclear threat would prevent us from retaliating. Still a shitshow and a massive tragedy, but not an apocalyptic one.
That was a period when two nuclear superpowers were genuinely considering launching thousands of nuclear warheads at each other; where one bad day might literally end the species.
No. There was and still is a zero percent chance of an extinction level event even if every nuke on earth goes off. We might be able to purposefully create an extinction-level event if we tried to by building tons of enhanced-fallout weapons[1], but I don't believe these have ever been created nor do they have many proponents. But I'm serious: we would have to really be trying to kill every last human on Earth through fallout, and it would still be very tall order to pick off every single islander and transoceanic boater on Earth.
The only other mechanism by which an extinction might occur is nuclear winter, but it's tough to imagine this being severe enough to actually wipe out the species. Given that animal life has repeatedly survived severe particulate-based cooling in the past (triggered by large impactors or supervolcanoes), I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that large forest fires are not going to be enough to kill all of the plants and animals on Earth (and as long as there are some plants and animals still around, humanity will survive.)
Don't get me wrong; I think it's fair enough to refer to the killing of 80%+ of Earth's population as "Doomsday". But it's not extinction.
I think he would make a great president. However, I think he carries just as much influence in his current capacity. The man has done what most governments have failed to do, make a viable mass produced electric car, and launch a satellite into orbit.
Or to put it another way, he privatized NASA talent for profit whilst offering no significant advances in space travel, and he also made some toys for rich people[1]. Oh yes, and he helped create Paypal[2] via the revolutionary method of offering banking services whilst claiming to be exempt from banking regulations.
Those are the 'revolutionary' things he did, all whilst rambling about trips to Mars and other assorted pipe dreams (a phrase I use advisedly) instead of focusing on the technologies that very well could change the world.
The man is at best Steve Jobs 2.0, but for some reason geeks still love him. As far as I can tell, the most important thing he's championed so far is Autopilot. Getting computer-assisted cars on the road ASAP is a big step. He deserves a place in history for that, albeit not an exclusive place. But holy hell, the man is a businessman, not a revolutionary inventor.
1. He's yet to build the cheap mass market electric car that will change the world, even though electric cars easily have the potential to be cheaper and sturdier than ICE cars. I still maintain that this is due to his comparative lack of emphasis on next-generation batteries. I've been hearing about nanowire batteries that could last for many thousands of discharge cycles for 10+ years now, but the man would rather hold press conferences about his pipe dreams.
Hit something really hard (no, even at 900km/h air is not really hard) to stop in fractions of a seconds and you're in deep shit.
A lot of people around here seem to think that regular subsonic air is super compressible or something... no, air is heavy enough and dense enough to be a very serious issue.
However, fluid dynamics are such that it wouldn't be an issue miles away from the site of the breech.
Hyperloops in their current proposed forms are still dumb, though. It's not a matter of "going wrong ==> deathtrap" so much as "going wrong ==> hey, after we've fixed all of this stuff this really isn't terribly convenient or cost-effective at all!"
Allowing remote working solves the issue immediately but it's not compatible with many workplaces.
Actually it's compatible with the overwhelming majority of white collar jobs, although those in charge tend to strenuously deny this due to a mixture of ignorance, delusion and self-preservation.
We are now in more danger of all-out nuclear war than during Cuban Missile Crisis?
Turkish Missile Crisis. The only reason Russia wanted missiles in Cuba was to counter the missiles the U.S. had placed in Turkey. That fact usually gets left out of the American storyline, though....
I hate to correct your "America is just as bad" whatabout-ing, but the crisis was the standoff itself, which did not occur near Turkey but rather near Cuba. Incidentally, during that crisis only one of the sides is known to be armed with nuclear torpedoes, and they came very, very close to firing them at the other side.
Not saying that it was a good idea for us to put Jupiter missiles in Turkey, but trying to retcon the location of the blockade and subsequent standoff is dumb.
"Correlates to" is not the same as "equate to". There are other factors listed under agreeableness, and of course it's entirely possible to have these traits to different degrees, even wildly different degrees.
Furthermore, the word "agreeable" existed before psychology appropriated it. It's ridiculous when uppity botanists try to claim strawberries not only aren't berries but aren't even fruit; it's even more absurd to pretend that the English language takes dictation from the flavor-of-the-month jargon of the proto-science of psychology. Technical jargon does not and should not trump the everyday meaning of words, particularly while psychology is still in its conjectural stage. In another 10 years, the Big Five may well be obsolete.
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How did this childish rant get moderated 'insightful'?
What is childish is to assume that an angry tone in any way affects the validity of the point. Do you honestly believe the OP's assertion that the damage done 15+ year old Windows XP viruses (pre-SP 2! Windows didn't even come with a firewall back then!) justifies removing all end user control from the update process?
How does this "high security" lock prevent a previous guest from having made a copy of the key?
Dynamically re-keyable mechanical locks have been around for ages. Even Kwikset has one these days. The maid could do it in under 10 seconds. Requires a tiny bit of planning to set it up to be idiot-resistant, but basically on the maids' carts you'd have a series of small labeled boxes, one for each room number, that contain a partition with two keys: the old one and the new one.
I'm going to throw a brick through your window. And then charge you 1500 EUR for auditing the physical security of your home. I presume that's okay with you.
I'm going to install a lock that locks you in your hotel room if it's hacked or loses power, so you'll stand a much increased chance of dying in a fire (and the fire itself may well cause the locks to fail.)
Also, you need to adjust the cost of that window as a percentage of my income comparable to the 1500 EUR vs. the hotel's income. What is that going to come out to? $2.71 or something? Yeah, if I did something extremely stupid and dangerous, I wouldn't mind incurring a very small cost that instantly fixes the inconvenience whilst making me aware of the underlying problem.
I'm not saying we legalize all hacking. I am saying that in this specific case, the hackers have done good on the whole. But yes, I'm one of those radicals who thinks that multimillion dollar corporations shouldn't be able to use their own astonishing incompetence as an excuse for fuckups.
Keycards are the right tool, although of course you have to implement it correctly and not connect it to the internet.
A lot of keycards I've seen appear to be passive RFID as well (tap instead of swipe). This is also moronic design, just waiting for a group of tenacious, technically minded criminals to come along to perfect the art of reading from your pocket at a distance.
Also, they shouldn't even be on an LAN, either. Have the maid do it. The minor convenience of putting it on a LAN is not worth having a single point of failure for all locks in the hotel.
Everyone who was tired of getting slammed with the BLASTER worm, with Nimda, or with the Melissa virus, requested that Windows be more secure. Everyone who fell victim to a buffer overflow, or privilege escalation DEMANDED that it be mitigated. Companies who had windows systems connected to the internet ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED that the propagation of worms not be allowed to continue.
I'm sorry you don't enjoy working with a computer anymore. Did you enjoy it when those above mentioned viruses were running rampant? Which would you rather have, constant attacks from internet zombies, or a small time of inactivity while your OS is being patched?
The stuff you're mentioning was 15+ years ago. That was before Windows 10, before Windows 8, before Windows 7, before Windows Vista. Those were early Windows XP viruses (before Microsoft bothered including a firewall in SP 2.) Hell, Melissa was a 95/98 virus.
Yes, that was a real shitshow back in the early '00s, when systems were getting owned by the millions even if they were just left there idle there with an internet connection, and a few times they were used to launch attacks that brought huge sections of the internet to a crawl.
What the hell does any of that have to do with Windows 10 again? Are things still that bad? Did you just awaken from a coma[1] ?Given 15 years to work on the problem, could the engineers at Microsoft think of no other way to avoid similar incidents of catastrophic ownage moving forward?
1. If so, you're in for some real treats...
Hotel management said that they have now been hit three times by cybercriminals who this time managed to take down the entire key system. The guests could no longer get in or out of the hotel rooms and new key cards could not be programmed.
Bahaha, and I hadn't even seen this yet. They're hard working, too! And they only demanded 1,500 EUR? Hell, the hotel should pay them more than that for security auditing services.
Also, who the hell designs an electronic lock that can lock people in the room if it goes down? Is that even legal in Austria?
Yet according to the hotel, the hackers left a back door open in the system, and tried to attack the systems again.
See, they even offered you a free security audit checkup to verify that you fixed things properly. Try as I might, I just cannot bring myself to dislike these guys.
Brandstaetter said: "We are planning at the next room refurbishment for old-fashioned door locks with real keys. Just like 111 years ago at the time of our great-grandfathers.
Yeah, high security mechanical locks have been around for at least two hundred years now.
And we've known for decades that electronic does not equal high security. Is anyone still selling passive RFID door locks? What about that one expensive electronic lock that could be easily defeated with a $50 magnet?
I'm not sure I could feel any less sympathy for the hotel if they next decided to replace all of their locks with aggressively positioned anti-theft feng shui decorations. I mean, at least that system wouldn't lock guests inside their rooms, possibly killing them if there's a fire.
Sometimes, try as I might, I simply cannot prevent myself from cheering wholeheartedly for the criminal.
Must be a character flaw.
imitating my ware
Are we talking about /etc/hosts or is this some extension called "hosts" you've written?
On/Off for sites is ALL you need
Which is just nonsense. Ad blocking doesn't work properly on a lot of sites if you do that.
/etc/hosts every once in a while. No reason you can't. Doesn't replace most uBlock's abilities, nor its quick to use UI.
And as I previously alluded to, I have found that gstatic.com is required for some sites to function but not for others. So do you choose to block gstatic.com entirely and break a bunch of sites or are you going to let random sites hit up Google (thus letting them track you directly) and run lord knows what scripts that are there? That is an abysmal choice that you're forced to make, instead of whitelisting gstatic only on specific sites that you need it for.
The rest is just blithering, telling me that a Vespa is more fuel efficient than a Boeing 767. By all means, flush your list of explicit blacklisted domains from uBlock into
poor imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
Flattery of whom? Mr. John Hosts, inventor of the hosts file? I'm pretty sure hosts was never intended for this type of security usage. I mean, vanilla hosts doesn't even allow wildcards and thus is often useless as any attacker can just bypass it using a rotating subdomain. (Though you can use dsnmasq instead.) Use it under the hood, sure, but it's clearly not sufficient.
The only reason the Soviets tried to place missiles in Cuba was to counter the American missiles in Turkey. Full stop.
And the only reason Bush Jr. invaded Iraq is because of weapons of mass destruction.
The removal Jupiter missiles was a concession we made. That much we do know. Everything else is pure conjecture as best and blind propaganda swallowing at worst... unless you know of some pre-crisis internal Soviet documents that I'm unaware of that shows Cuba was talked about only after and due to the missiles in Turkey, wasn't talked about before that point, wasn't done at Castro's request in response to the Bay of Pigs, etc.
No more than American marines station in Guantanamo are "on vacation"
The American government never made such a dumbassed claim. The Russian government did regarding Crimea. The Russians have historically been much more brazen and prolific about propaganda than Americans (which is not to say we don't do it.) Claiming retroactively that the Cuban Missile Crisis would not have happened if not for Turkey would be a very obvious and subdued lie, in comparison.
The point of Java is to be cross platform, so I don't understand why it would be limited to IE11 or any browser.
Java was developed by Sun, which was later bought out by Oracle. It turns out Oracle has their own special set of priorities and Java plugin bug fixes was not one of them.
Also, the "point of Java is to be cross platform" thing was just an early PR thing. The point of Java (in practice) was to take C++, remove the "C" and cover any remaining sharp corners with padding.
There's a rather big difference between someone successfully building an industry and the government then simply stealing it from him (i.e. nationalization), and the government setting up its own industry especially since in the case of Norway where said industry ensures that the natural wealth of Norway benefits everyone in the country, instead of just a handful of very rich people.
What is the verb or adjective to describe an industry that the government controls but hasn't 'stolen' if not "nationalize[d]"?
Also, that appears to be a false dichotomy since apparently the oil industry in Norway is a publicly traded company and the Norwegian government only owns 65% of it. This implies an obvious non-theft path to nationalization for an industry that for-profit entity has built up: buy them out. Eminent domain for things other than land is an interesting topic that doesn't come up nearly enough.
I use addblock, ghostery, and noscript to protect myself from viruses
You should try uBlock Origins sometime. Uses the same adblock lists as ABP, allows per-domain rules like noscript and request policy, has a *ton* of other features yet still manages to be snappy, low on RAM usage and very easy to use with one of the best compact pop-up interfaces I've ever seen[1] and an indispensably good "block this element" feature that's much nicer than ABP's ever was. It's also ridiculously easy to toggle between default-deny and default-permit modes, for those times when you're in a rush. There's a lovely trick I quickly discovered wherein you regularly browse in default-deny mode, and whenever you fully set up a site to work properly you go in and redlist (explicit-deny) everything that you didn't needed to whitelist in order to make it work. This takes all of two seconds, but means that if/when you flip over into default-permit mode (or let's say if you're copying the ruleset to a relative's computer, and you know they definitely aren't going to want to mess with this stuff), those sites you've visited and configured will still be fully sanitized with explicit-denies.
Oh yeah, unlike ABP and Ghostery, it's GPL so it's definitely not going to get bought out and fouled up (or rather if it does, a fork will appear.)
The only thing it's sorely lacking is good cookie management. (The related advanced-user extension uMatrix from the same author can deal with cookies, but not in a very fine-grained way as I recall. Self-Destructing Cookies is a good enough option for most people unless you need to manually whitelist specific cookies instead of specific domains.)
1. It will take a few minutes of tinkering with 'advanced mode' turned on, but it's quite intuitive once you understand what's going on: left column global rules, right column local rules (which trump global rules), default behavior (all domains) at the top with domain-specific behavior underneath, three states for each cell (whitelist==green, blacklist==red, whitelist but apply ad filter type rules==gray), lighter red/green/gray cell shading to represent the effects of your default settings if you haven't assigned any explicit manual rule for that domain, and ---s and +++s to give you an idea of the number of requests allowed and blocked. Plus a few separate buttons for overall off/on (site specific), remote font blocking, large media element blocking, etc.
Yup, yup. -1 Troll, -1 Offtopic for daring to imply that Elon Musk might not be superlatively sane.
Here are the staples of the modern user interface (in varying degree apply to modern web/and most operating systems such as Windows 10, iOS and even Android):
The mobile catastrophe is the obvious thing to point at, and there's a lot of truth in that. (Infinite scrolling webpages with no auto-incrementing URL piss me off the most.) However, it goes a lot deeper than that. It goes deeper even than the widespread conscious emulation of Apple's "the customer is always wrong" dictatorial style (GNOME, I'm looking at you. But Microsoft and to some extent even Google, too.)
The middle ground of usability--power users, people who want to configure things and experiment with all of the features offered, but don't actually want to code it themselves from scratch--are a woefully underserved segment of the population on any platform. I'd get drunk and rant about something simple like file browsers, but I already did that a while back. Desktop linux (particularly the non-GNOME varieties) is the most configurable by far these days, but it's still just so *stupid* about the simplest of things.
And how come no one, and I mean *no one*, is working on a project where the computer bends itself to the user's expectations and not the other way around? Why not set out to design a desktop environment that could duplicate the feel (with a bit less glitter, at least at first) of any common desktop OS? I mean make that user configurable; have one fairly constant UI element that's easy to find and from there the user can change it to look like the latest OS X or Windows 95. Back up your customizations to USB drive or even the cloud, then instantly get access to your preferred setup (or popular setups that others have designed and shared) anywhere. Why the hell not? Not easy, but it's not an impossible-sounding task on its face, and there's surely tons of demand for it. And I can't help but adopt the exact opposite conclusion of the GNOME devs: that by forcing the devs to think and develop with maximum flexibility and modularly, it will (in the long run) be easier to maintain and easier to improve.
Barring something ambitious like that, let me just reiterate that all you folks who develop 'next generation' desktop environments like Unity, GNOME 3, or KDE 5 (which admittedly I haven't used much of yet) should really consider whether your time is better spent trying to force people to care about sexy new paradigms in lieu of doing something simple and amazingly useful like tabs handled by the window manager. Put them on the titlebar itself like Chrome, put them below it, put them above it, put 'em over the task bar, whatever. Let the user customize tab behavior and install tab UI tweaks like you can in web browsers. And all apps would instantly have tabs, right out of the box. Toss in the ability to turn this off (for apps that have tabs implemented internally) and also perhaps an API for tab interaction that new programs to target so that a new process doesn't need to be launched for every tab and bam, you've just done something revolutionary and long-lasting. And it will be so easy to use (or to not use) that no one will hate you for doing it.
Well, almost no one. Havoc Pennington might get a bit upset, but I hear that for every tear he sheds an angel gets its wings.
You jest, but the parallels between the wall and the hyperloop are not skin-deep. Both are naive measures that are touted as magic bullets that won't cost us a dime / will pay for themselves, but in reality they will have mediocre effects. And they'll both end up costing at least four times more than the initial quote.
Are we allowed to say this out loud yet? Or has Musk finished upgrading the RDF he has on loan from Jobs' estate?
There's a stark difference between social democracies that have market economies but high taxes on the wealthy (funnily enough those Nordic countries, as well as New Zealand, actually have lower corporate tax rates compared to the United States) and states that attempt to nationalize industries,
Uhh... and Norway's oil industry is what exactly?
I'm not saying it's "communism", but nationalized industries aren't a communist-only phenomenon. There's a decent argument for direct government control whenever the industry is big enough and hard enough to break into that there really isn't going to be much room for free market magic to appear.
Last mile internet connectivity, for example...
On the other hand, having a few people involved like Musk [that] are very sane...
Keep in mind that you are talking about a man who:
1. Wants to establish a Mars colony in our lifetime and seems to imply that the rocket to get there is the hard part.
2. Wants to run a massive airtight pipe down 300 miles of interstate median, in the most earthquake-prone part of the country, so that a cramped, windowless car with a screaming jet engine on the front can ferry a modest number of people at about twice the speed of maglev. Which, fine. Maybe that will be neat. But then he says it'll be much cheaper than any other solution, and unlike the airport won't involve arduous security delays.
3. Thinks that his competitors are sniping his rockets or something
4. Was fired as CEO of Paypal because he wanted to move all of their operations from Unix to Windows in the year 2000. (For those keeping score at home, that would be at least a couple years after Linux was household word among geeks, and yet well before Windows attained anything like mediocre stability.)
I know I'll be modded to oblivion for this because Musk appears to have completed his transformation into Steve Jobs 2.0 but I'm just saying... you have a curious definition of sane.
Yeah, it's a reality distortion field to insist that a specific, local crisis about X not be named about shit that happened months or years earlier. Why stop at Turkey? The west-communism conflict is rooted in the overthrow of the Tsar, so really this should be called the "October Revolution crisis." All I'm saying is not to swallow propaganda whole without question. Tell me, do you believe Russia's explanation that the troops in Crimea were "on vacation", too?
The standoff didn't occur over or near Turkey, and it's certainly debatable whether Russia would have taken no interest in Cuba in the absence of the Jupiters in Turkey. Been a while since I read the details here, but the casual connection to the Bay of Pigs may well stronger than the connection to the Jupiter missiles. So if you wanted to call it "the Cuban crisis" or even something slightly more biased like the "Cuban sovereignty crisis", that might at least pass the sniff test. Pretending that the Soviets had no desire or plans whatsoever to increase their ICBM coverage of America pre-Turkey is not only absurd, it's flatly contradicted by subsequent events.
From my viewpoint, it looks as if Apple has abandoned the high-end computer market. The product line has been stagnating.
Which is really, really strange. I could see Apple execs having problems justifying a lower-end product line, since the margins are trickier and they have to be careful not to tarnish their own image, but for higher end stuff easily they could stuff high end parts in an Apple chassis, charge 20% more than the PC equivalent and call it a day.
With Trump in control, I would bet he'd nuke most of the middle east: "Muslims did it. Even the ones that didn't do it, well they did nothing to stop it, and that's just as bad."
This is just gibbering. The generals are not going to come to Trump asking him to name, off the top of his head, the cities he wants nuked. (He'd probably begin with Agrabah.) If the terrorists came from country X, they might give him a list of targets in country X. He'll probably overreact and it may well involve nukes, but he's not going to nuke "most of the Middle East". The people around him would obviously not let him do that. They can even invoke the "it's against the law to obey an unlawful order" defense if they chose to override Trump's command.
Let's say next month, North Korea demonstrates huge leaps in nuclear launch capability. I think the likelihood of nuclear strike one way or the other is MUCH higher with Trump as president than any of the past several.
Possibly. NK is the best response to the people who keep talking about Russia, but it depends on just how crazy they are. "Pretty damn crazy", I can hear you say, but I'm not sure they are entirely oblivious to the basic facts of survival. The ruling class has been able to get by well enough by extortion for decades. It doesn't seem likely that they'd blow it all to hell even in the face of a taunting Trump.
But it's not entirely inconceivable. I think a more likely scenario in response to Trump taunting would be a surprise conventional attack on Seoul, wagering that the nuclear threat would prevent us from retaliating. Still a shitshow and a massive tragedy, but not an apocalyptic one.
That was a period when two nuclear superpowers were genuinely considering launching thousands of nuclear warheads at each other; where one bad day might literally end the species.
No. There was and still is a zero percent chance of an extinction level event even if every nuke on earth goes off. We might be able to purposefully create an extinction-level event if we tried to by building tons of enhanced-fallout weapons[1], but I don't believe these have ever been created nor do they have many proponents. But I'm serious: we would have to really be trying to kill every last human on Earth through fallout, and it would still be very tall order to pick off every single islander and transoceanic boater on Earth.
The only other mechanism by which an extinction might occur is nuclear winter, but it's tough to imagine this being severe enough to actually wipe out the species. Given that animal life has repeatedly survived severe particulate-based cooling in the past (triggered by large impactors or supervolcanoes), I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that large forest fires are not going to be enough to kill all of the plants and animals on Earth (and as long as there are some plants and animals still around, humanity will survive.)
Don't get me wrong; I think it's fair enough to refer to the killing of 80%+ of Earth's population as "Doomsday". But it's not extinction.
1. Not to be confused with "neutron bombs".
please PLEASE run for president next time.
I think he would make a great president. However, I think he carries just as much influence in his current capacity. The man has done what most governments have failed to do, make a viable mass produced electric car, and launch a satellite into orbit.
Or to put it another way, he privatized NASA talent for profit whilst offering no significant advances in space travel, and he also made some toys for rich people[1]. Oh yes, and he helped create Paypal[2] via the revolutionary method of offering banking services whilst claiming to be exempt from banking regulations.
Those are the 'revolutionary' things he did, all whilst rambling about trips to Mars and other assorted pipe dreams (a phrase I use advisedly) instead of focusing on the technologies that very well could change the world.
The man is at best Steve Jobs 2.0, but for some reason geeks still love him. As far as I can tell, the most important thing he's championed so far is Autopilot. Getting computer-assisted cars on the road ASAP is a big step. He deserves a place in history for that, albeit not an exclusive place. But holy hell, the man is a businessman, not a revolutionary inventor.
1. He's yet to build the cheap mass market electric car that will change the world, even though electric cars easily have the potential to be cheaper and sturdier than ICE cars. I still maintain that this is due to his comparative lack of emphasis on next-generation batteries. I've been hearing about nanowire batteries that could last for many thousands of discharge cycles for 10+ years now, but the man would rather hold press conferences about his pipe dreams.
2. He lost his role at the helm of Paypal because he strongly wanted to change their infrastructure from UNIX to Windows (at around the same time Linux was beginning to take off.) Hooray for the Geek God, amIright?
Hit something really hard (no, even at 900km/h air is not really hard) to stop in fractions of a seconds and you're in deep shit.
A lot of people around here seem to think that regular subsonic air is super compressible or something... no, air is heavy enough and dense enough to be a very serious issue.
However, fluid dynamics are such that it wouldn't be an issue miles away from the site of the breech.
Hyperloops in their current proposed forms are still dumb, though. It's not a matter of "going wrong ==> deathtrap" so much as "going wrong ==> hey, after we've fixed all of this stuff this really isn't terribly convenient or cost-effective at all!"
Allowing remote working solves the issue immediately but it's not compatible with many workplaces.
Actually it's compatible with the overwhelming majority of white collar jobs, although those in charge tend to strenuously deny this due to a mixture of ignorance, delusion and self-preservation.
Turkish Missile Crisis. The only reason Russia wanted missiles in Cuba was to counter the missiles the U.S. had placed in Turkey. That fact usually gets left out of the American storyline, though....
I hate to correct your "America is just as bad" whatabout-ing, but the crisis was the standoff itself, which did not occur near Turkey but rather near Cuba. Incidentally, during that crisis only one of the sides is known to be armed with nuclear torpedoes, and they came very, very close to firing them at the other side.
Not saying that it was a good idea for us to put Jupiter missiles in Turkey, but trying to retcon the location of the blockade and subsequent standoff is dumb.
In short, no.
"Correlates to" is not the same as "equate to". There are other factors listed under agreeableness, and of course it's entirely possible to have these traits to different degrees, even wildly different degrees.
Furthermore, the word "agreeable" existed before psychology appropriated it. It's ridiculous when uppity botanists try to claim strawberries not only aren't berries but aren't even fruit; it's even more absurd to pretend that the English language takes dictation from the flavor-of-the-month jargon of the proto-science of psychology. Technical jargon does not and should not trump the everyday meaning of words, particularly while psychology is still in its conjectural stage. In another 10 years, the Big Five may well be obsolete.