What if we make private space-based internet of things 3D printers from asteroids to capture the carbon?
I don't see how this could work, unless perhaps we leverage machine learning with big data in the gig economy to mount those 3D printers on self-driving cars, running over solar roadways. Then you'd have something.
It certainly is. Several times a year, I make a 1500-mile (each way) trip. I do it in two days, so spending several hours recharging an electric car every few hundred miles is out of the question, and much of the trip is in empty parts of the country where it's hard enough to find gas stations, let alone charging points. There's no practical mass-transit option; the nearest public airport is 135 miles away.
When I go to visit my daughter and her family, it's an 800+ mile drive. I can fly, but she's 100 miles from a major airport. So the mass-transit-or-fake-taxi argument doesn't work there, either. (Not that I'll use a fake-taxi service anyway, but that's a different argument.)
I have family members living in parts of New England where private cars are really the only means of long-distance transportation available - full stop.
None of this will have changed by 2030.
On the other hand, I've never bought a German car, and haven't been chomping at the bit to do so. I might have been interested in the output of Mercedes, BMW, etc. prior to, oh, 2000 or so; but these days it seems like all their models are full of moronic infotainment devices with idiotic user interfaces, and there's little to distinguish them from their competitors.
LeGuin has also complained (in print) about the SF "ghetto" - I think there might be a piece on it in The Language of the Night. The literary-prize establishment letting the occasional exemplar in doesn't mean there isn't a problem.
Of course, many readers, critics, and academics do acknowledge the quality and literary merit (leaving aside for a moment the questions of ontology and aesthetics those raise) of the better sort of science fiction. The prize-awarding types may be slow to catch up, but catch up they eventually will. Many fantasy genres are well-represented by major prizes; Midnight's Children won not only the Booker but the "Booker of Bookers", for example, while Beloved won a Pulitzer (and was short-listed for the National) and undoubtedly contributed to Morrison's Nobel. "Hard" SF probably faces a certain amount of resistance from typical prize committees due to Snowian two-cultures prejudice, but I don't see that lasting.
That said, of course it's important for prominent authors like Robinson and LeGuin to raise the issue. In too many sectors of the art world self-appointed awards committees hold entirely undeserved power as taste-makers, and pointing out their omissions and missteps benefits artists and audiences alike.
The MuckRock article makes a bit too much of the situation.
For the SAC C&C, the Series/1 is a well-documented piece of hardware that shouldn't be difficult to keep running pretty much in perpetuity. Even if we ran out of 8" floppies, it wouldn't be hard to emulate the device with a more modern storage medium.
As for the IRS, why would it suffer "catastrophic systems failure"? They've updated the hardware, and IBM is not going to stop producing System z machines any time soon. 370 assembly language (presumably what the IMF and BMF applications are written in, though the 370 gave way to ESA/390 and now z) really is not that hard - it's a CISC architecture with a straightforward instruction set, and very well documented. I know a number of very good developers with extensive 3xx / z assembly knowledge; I know some myself. And any competent programmer could learn it from the manuals if necessary.
Yes, it seems inevitable that eventually these systems will become more expensive to replace than to maintain. But the replacement cost is higher than some people seem to think, since it has to include equivalent capabilities - particularly in areas like reliability and security - and a lot of testing. Projects to replace legacy systems (what's sometimes called a "rip-and-replace") fail even more often than major greenfield software projects, often at huge cost.
You've got to be a special kind of businessman to lose almost a billion dollars running a casino.
We call that special kind of businessman a "con man".
Trump runs con games, pure and simple. He fleeces investors and suppliers. His aren't sophisticated cons; he's just made them work on a large scale, through a combination of bullying and demagoguery. Pretty standard stuff, really.
init also reaps zombies, since processes whose parent has terminated are reparented to it. And init also has to know whether any of its own children (and not just reparented processes) have exited, so that it can decide whether to respawn them.
Thus init traditionally needed some form of a wait loop or SIGC[H]LD handler, though with a SysV-style implementation it could have just ignored SIGCLD, and with SVR4 it could use SA_NOCLDWAIT to achieve the same thing. SA_NOCLDWAIT was eventually picked up as part of XSI, and XSI was then included in the Single UNIX Specification as an optional but often-provided extension, so these days it's pretty widely available.
init doesn't just start processes for the runlevel and then do nothing. The traditional implementation falls right into a straightforward wait loop. Take a look at section 7.9 in Bach, The Design of the UNIX Operating System.
He also stated that one of the qualifications to go is that you have to be able to answer YES to the question, are you prepared to die - he expects it to be VERY dangerous.
Well, that's just unnecessary. Lots of people die with no preparation at all. Even more in dangerous situations. It's super easy.
They should spend their time preparing for the hard stuff.
You want to know what this D-Wave technology represents? A start.
Yes, but a start in the wrong direction, if what we want is general-purpose QC.
Quantum annealing is not general-purpose quantum computing. It's nothing like general-purpose quantum computing. Improving it does not get us closer to general-purpose quantum computing.
Shaft-and-cam analog computers can outperform conventional digital computers on certain classes of problems, too. Where's the Slashdot horde telling us we're all idiots for not investing in them?
Ironically, going in the wrong direction is just the sort of thing that annealing is meant to correct. So think of this as jumping out of the DWave local minimum in search of a more optimal solution.
Alan Kay, who coined the term, was working at Paolo Alto at the time.
It's not clear exactly which term you're claiming Kay coined, but it's largely irrelevant. The idea of object-oriented programming arose from numerous sources during the 1960s, and Kay didn't join PARC until 1970. Equally strong candidates for "inventing" OOP include Sutherland (who did his first work in the area at MIT, and with whom Kay worked at U Utah) and Dahl and Nygaard in Norway. Even if Kay were the first person to write the phrase "object-oriented programming", that's the faintest of justifications for saying OOP was invented in California.
Dijkstra's line is typical for him: memorable, funny, and wrong. Mind you, computer science needs its patron saint of curmudgeonry - probably more than we need any other mythological figure - and Dijkstra did quite a bit of important work too. But his quotable snark is best employed for amusement, not enlightenment.
This was my first thought almost exactly, that they forgot about the shell.
And if you'd read the linked article, you'd see that several of the sources Gewirtz used do, in fact, include "Shell" as a generic category and several list Perl. awk did not place in any of them. Perhaps that means that none of those sources are methodologically sound, but that's not Gewirtz's thesis. He's just doing a little metastudy.
I know R'ing TFA is anathema in Slashdot culture, but really, folks, we'd save a lot of these blindingly-obvious-and-irrelevant posts if y'all would just take 15 seconds to look at the source material.
(On an unrelated note, referring to David Gewirtz as "a tech columnist" is a bit feeble; it's true, but it's not a very useful description.)
I'm in a similar situation. I got a free HP inkjet printer-scanner-copier (left behind by a college student, box never opened) a few years back. I've printed a few things on it, when I was at a secondary office, because it's reasonably portable; but at my main office, all my printing is done on a 1992 HP LaserJet 4M which I manually upgraded to add Postscript support. I've had to buy a few toner cartridges for it, but even after 24 years and tens of thousands of pages (I don't do a lot of printing) it still works fine.
I use it through one of those cheap USB-to-Centronics adapters. Required a bit of kluging to get the appropriate printer drivers installed on Windows and configured, but that was a tiny fraction of the hassle of using the inkjet printer.
I use the inkjet pretty much exclusively for scanning these days.
Unfortunately, it's been widely criticized for serious methodological issues. The Snopes page, which deals primarily with the paper's middlebrow reception (almost exclusively among people who hadn't read it, of course), has a good summary and links.
My take is that it's an interesting start, but 1) it doesn't mean what most people who haven't read it think it means, and 2) there are, indeed, some very serious issues with it. For example, as one of the commenters that Scopes cites points out, the paper makes much hay about "meaningless" statements, without ever defining "meaning" and often applying "meaningless" in ways that are extremely dubious. For the authors, "meaningless" appears to mean roughly what it did to Albert in an old Pogo strip: "I don't understand it and it don't mean nuthin'". I could make a similar complaint about phrases in the paper such as "confuse vagueness for profundity": without a definition of the profound, aside from some handwaving toward some exemplar statements that are "conventionally [citation needed] considered to be profound". Nor, unless I missed something, did they attempt to elicit definitions of profundity from the test subjects, who may have had quite different understandings of the concept.
Here's a statement: Statements have meaning the way fruit has pie. Profound, pseudo-profound bullshit, or something else? Justify your answer by displaying an understanding of linguistics, epistemology, psychology, semiotics, and rhetoric. Responses on a postcard.
When they learn to create a web site that works without Javascript loaded from a dozen external domains, I'll be glad to take a look.
Lordy, but I'm tired of web developers who don't create POSH sites that degrade gracefully when scripting is disabled. For a handful of RIAs that's understandable - they can't do anything useful without scripting - but for everyone else it's inexcusable laziness.
Well, I too have anecdotes in the opposite direction, so not sure what to say.
I am: this whole religious war is vapid. I've yet to see anyone in one of these threads post any actual evidence. It's all opinion, anecdote, vague references to use cases, and general handwaving (when it's not simply childish insults).
Now, if someone has some actual data from a methodologically-sound study to show that one of the options - punctuation pairs or whitespace or what have you - is demonstrably superior or inferior, with good probability, then I'll be glad to take a look. But comments like "curly braces... are the mark of a sane language" carry no weight, and neither does the feeble "40 years a programmer" attempt to establish ethos. (I've been a professional programmer for three decades, and a student and amateur for a good number of years before that. So what?)
I also haven't seen anyone mention other alternatives. There are languages that use keyword pairs, such as the shell languages that adopted ALGOL's reverse-spelling quirk (if/fi, case/esac, etc.), or COBOL-85's scope terminators like end-if and end-perform. It's quite possible those are more human-readable (less likely to be overlooked) than curly braces; simple editors can't do trivial pair matching, but modern parsing ones can, and do.
(Or there's COBOL's traditional non-paired punctuation scope termination, but I think nearly everyone agrees that one actually is a Bad Thing. Oh, the number of overlooked periods in classic COBOL code...)
Ugh. How do I get Slashdot to use normal bullets for LI elements in a UL? Tried sticking a style="list-item-type: disc" attribute in the UL tag but that didn't help. I'm using POT as my commenting style.
There are a number of obstacles, as I see it, to the consumer market (at least) bringing economic pressure to companies to improve IT security:
As you noted, a lack of competition.
Consumers don't have a lot of technical knowledge to use in discriminating among firms' security positions, even after breaches are published. And before there's a public incident, consumers have little information on which to act (there's very little transparency).
Consumers take on cognitive load and opportunity costs when they have to decide among producers. That's a cost to the consumer (market correction is a mechanism that shifts costs among producers, but it comes with, in effect, a tax on consumers). That makes consumers tend to stick with producers they've used before (brand loyalty) or purchase based on other criteria such as price.
Breaches are common, so consumers become desensitized. Even when they perceive a difference in security posture among competitors, they don't assign it much weight, because breaches are perceived as normal.
Most of those apply to the business market as well. In theory, businesses have incentives to be more diligent, which should make that market more prone to correction; in practice, business purchasing is largely driven by short-term costs and human foible.
It appears to me that the court has used a completely made-up "national security exception" to override a clear constitutional right.
Specifically, it was two judges (Davis and Graves) overriding a clear constitutional right. (I know, some people are arguing it's two rights. I don't think it's all that clear one way or the other whether the 2nd should apply here, but IANAL, much less a constitutional-law expert.)
The decision is worth at least a quick skim, particularly the long dissent from Jones. She gets in some good lines about protecting freedom of expression, but also some good technical points about things like the definition of "export".
In case anyone's curious, but not curious enough to spend ten seconds looking it up: Davis (majority) and Jones (dissenting) are Reagan appointees, and Graves (majority) is an Obama appointee. Which just goes to show that often it doesn't really matter who appointed a judge, I suppose. Of course, the past several administrations haven't been terribly keen on civil rights, regardless of party. We love us some police state.
Cancer is a collective noun for a whole host of diseases all with different causes, which just happen to have one, single tiny thing in common.
So true. "Cancer" just refers to any condition where cytogenesis (cell reproduction) outpaces apoptosis (cell destruction) in any mode other than what we consider normal growth.
There's some reason to believe that even healthy people are always, to some extent, cancerous - that we develop little cancers (inappropriate surges of cytogenesis) which our bodies are then able to suppress, through interventions of the immune and endocrine systems, and possibly other mechanisms (cellular signalling, epigenetic, etc.).
The reason we haven't cured cancer is because nothing could possibly do that - no single treatment can deal with so many different diseases, all with different causes (many of which are unknown).
"nothing could possibly do that" doesn't necessarily follow - that is, we can imagine some hypothetical technology that is able to selectively suppress or correct unwanted cytogenesis. That there are many different types and causes of cancer doesn't by itself prove a generic "cure" is impossible. It does make it seem extremely unlikely, though. Certainly it couldn't be anything straightforward like a class of drugs.
According to the linked article (which is a PR piece, not a journal paper, so should be taken with a whole bunch of salt), the 10-year cure prediction came from Jasmin Fisher; and her claim appears to be that in a decade we'll have technology that monitors the body closely and continuously and can detect cancerous modes very early on, and so be able to intervene at the first stage. That's more "rolling maintenance" than "cure", but, hey, it's worked to some extent for things like diabetes and HIV. And it's a rather more limited claim than an unqualified "cancer will be cured".
Now, how much Microsoft's effort will actually contribute to getting us to that point remains to be seen.
HSTS isn't relevant in this case (HTTPS using the Fiddler certificate is still HTTPS), but it does seem like HPKP isn't working correctly there. Assuming you'd previously visited your site without Fiddler interpositioning, within the pinning max-age interval.
Oh, wait: I should have checked the docs first. Mozilla says:
Firefox (and Chrome) disable Pin Validation for Pinned Hosts whose validated certificate chain terminates at a user-defined trust anchor (rather than a built-in trust anchor). This means that for users who imported custom root certificates all pinning violations are ignored.
(https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Public_Key_Pinning, emphasis in original)
The Fiddler root certificate was installed by you, so it's a user-defined trust anchor, so any chain that terminates in it is ignored for HPKP.
I understand this is convenient for developers and web admins, but it is something of a hole in HPKP. Just use a little of the ol' social engineering to get the victim to install your certificate, and you can bypass HPKP entirely. Still, HPKP prunes some significant branches of the attack tree, so it remains useful.
Slashdot Mirror
What if we make private space-based internet of things 3D printers from asteroids to capture the carbon?
I don't see how this could work, unless perhaps we leverage machine learning with big data in the gig economy to mount those 3D printers on self-driving cars, running over solar roadways. Then you'd have something.
That empty space is a real issue.
It certainly is. Several times a year, I make a 1500-mile (each way) trip. I do it in two days, so spending several hours recharging an electric car every few hundred miles is out of the question, and much of the trip is in empty parts of the country where it's hard enough to find gas stations, let alone charging points. There's no practical mass-transit option; the nearest public airport is 135 miles away.
When I go to visit my daughter and her family, it's an 800+ mile drive. I can fly, but she's 100 miles from a major airport. So the mass-transit-or-fake-taxi argument doesn't work there, either. (Not that I'll use a fake-taxi service anyway, but that's a different argument.)
I have family members living in parts of New England where private cars are really the only means of long-distance transportation available - full stop.
None of this will have changed by 2030.
On the other hand, I've never bought a German car, and haven't been chomping at the bit to do so. I might have been interested in the output of Mercedes, BMW, etc. prior to, oh, 2000 or so; but these days it seems like all their models are full of moronic infotainment devices with idiotic user interfaces, and there's little to distinguish them from their competitors.
This claim is idiotic, both because it's wildly untrue and because literary awards aren't bestowed by "average literary nerd/professor/author[s]".
LeGuin has also complained (in print) about the SF "ghetto" - I think there might be a piece on it in The Language of the Night. The literary-prize establishment letting the occasional exemplar in doesn't mean there isn't a problem.
Of course, many readers, critics, and academics do acknowledge the quality and literary merit (leaving aside for a moment the questions of ontology and aesthetics those raise) of the better sort of science fiction. The prize-awarding types may be slow to catch up, but catch up they eventually will. Many fantasy genres are well-represented by major prizes; Midnight's Children won not only the Booker but the "Booker of Bookers", for example, while Beloved won a Pulitzer (and was short-listed for the National) and undoubtedly contributed to Morrison's Nobel. "Hard" SF probably faces a certain amount of resistance from typical prize committees due to Snowian two-cultures prejudice, but I don't see that lasting.
That said, of course it's important for prominent authors like Robinson and LeGuin to raise the issue. In too many sectors of the art world self-appointed awards committees hold entirely undeserved power as taste-makers, and pointing out their omissions and missteps benefits artists and audiences alike.
The MuckRock article makes a bit too much of the situation.
For the SAC C&C, the Series/1 is a well-documented piece of hardware that shouldn't be difficult to keep running pretty much in perpetuity. Even if we ran out of 8" floppies, it wouldn't be hard to emulate the device with a more modern storage medium.
As for the IRS, why would it suffer "catastrophic systems failure"? They've updated the hardware, and IBM is not going to stop producing System z machines any time soon. 370 assembly language (presumably what the IMF and BMF applications are written in, though the 370 gave way to ESA/390 and now z) really is not that hard - it's a CISC architecture with a straightforward instruction set, and very well documented. I know a number of very good developers with extensive 3xx / z assembly knowledge; I know some myself. And any competent programmer could learn it from the manuals if necessary.
Yes, it seems inevitable that eventually these systems will become more expensive to replace than to maintain. But the replacement cost is higher than some people seem to think, since it has to include equivalent capabilities - particularly in areas like reliability and security - and a lot of testing. Projects to replace legacy systems (what's sometimes called a "rip-and-replace") fail even more often than major greenfield software projects, often at huge cost.
I find it rather fascinating that you think editorializing isn't part of the job of "the media". Care to support that thesis?
You've got to be a special kind of businessman to lose almost a billion dollars running a casino.
We call that special kind of businessman a "con man".
Trump runs con games, pure and simple. He fleeces investors and suppliers. His aren't sophisticated cons; he's just made them work on a large scale, through a combination of bullying and demagoguery. Pretty standard stuff, really.
init also reaps zombies, since processes whose parent has terminated are reparented to it. And init also has to know whether any of its own children (and not just reparented processes) have exited, so that it can decide whether to respawn them.
Thus init traditionally needed some form of a wait loop or SIGC[H]LD handler, though with a SysV-style implementation it could have just ignored SIGCLD, and with SVR4 it could use SA_NOCLDWAIT to achieve the same thing. SA_NOCLDWAIT was eventually picked up as part of XSI, and XSI was then included in the Single UNIX Specification as an optional but often-provided extension, so these days it's pretty widely available.
init doesn't just start processes for the runlevel and then do nothing. The traditional implementation falls right into a straightforward wait loop. Take a look at section 7.9 in Bach, The Design of the UNIX Operating System.
The worst part is you couldn't program C++ on the C65.
If the code I've seen is representative, most C++ programmers can't "program C++" on anything.
He also stated that one of the qualifications to go is that you have to be able to answer YES to the question, are you prepared to die - he expects it to be VERY dangerous.
Well, that's just unnecessary. Lots of people die with no preparation at all. Even more in dangerous situations. It's super easy.
They should spend their time preparing for the hard stuff.
You want to know what this D-Wave technology represents? A start.
Yes, but a start in the wrong direction, if what we want is general-purpose QC.
Quantum annealing is not general-purpose quantum computing. It's nothing like general-purpose quantum computing. Improving it does not get us closer to general-purpose quantum computing.
Shaft-and-cam analog computers can outperform conventional digital computers on certain classes of problems, too. Where's the Slashdot horde telling us we're all idiots for not investing in them?
Ironically, going in the wrong direction is just the sort of thing that annealing is meant to correct. So think of this as jumping out of the DWave local minimum in search of a more optimal solution.
Alan Kay, who coined the term, was working at Paolo Alto at the time.
It's not clear exactly which term you're claiming Kay coined, but it's largely irrelevant. The idea of object-oriented programming arose from numerous sources during the 1960s, and Kay didn't join PARC until 1970. Equally strong candidates for "inventing" OOP include Sutherland (who did his first work in the area at MIT, and with whom Kay worked at U Utah) and Dahl and Nygaard in Norway. Even if Kay were the first person to write the phrase "object-oriented programming", that's the faintest of justifications for saying OOP was invented in California.
Dijkstra's line is typical for him: memorable, funny, and wrong. Mind you, computer science needs its patron saint of curmudgeonry - probably more than we need any other mythological figure - and Dijkstra did quite a bit of important work too. But his quotable snark is best employed for amusement, not enlightenment.
This was my first thought almost exactly, that they forgot about the shell.
And if you'd read the linked article, you'd see that several of the sources Gewirtz used do, in fact, include "Shell" as a generic category and several list Perl. awk did not place in any of them. Perhaps that means that none of those sources are methodologically sound, but that's not Gewirtz's thesis. He's just doing a little metastudy.
I know R'ing TFA is anathema in Slashdot culture, but really, folks, we'd save a lot of these blindingly-obvious-and-irrelevant posts if y'all would just take 15 seconds to look at the source material.
(On an unrelated note, referring to David Gewirtz as "a tech columnist" is a bit feeble; it's true, but it's not a very useful description.)
I'm in a similar situation. I got a free HP inkjet printer-scanner-copier (left behind by a college student, box never opened) a few years back. I've printed a few things on it, when I was at a secondary office, because it's reasonably portable; but at my main office, all my printing is done on a 1992 HP LaserJet 4M which I manually upgraded to add Postscript support. I've had to buy a few toner cartridges for it, but even after 24 years and tens of thousands of pages (I don't do a lot of printing) it still works fine.
I use it through one of those cheap USB-to-Centronics adapters. Required a bit of kluging to get the appropriate printer drivers installed on Windows and configured, but that was a tiny fraction of the hassle of using the inkjet printer.
I use the inkjet pretty much exclusively for scanning these days.
"A great undertaking, nobody to know what it is."
All the fun is in behavioral economics.
Unfortunately, it's been widely criticized for serious methodological issues. The Snopes page, which deals primarily with the paper's middlebrow reception (almost exclusively among people who hadn't read it, of course), has a good summary and links.
My take is that it's an interesting start, but 1) it doesn't mean what most people who haven't read it think it means, and 2) there are, indeed, some very serious issues with it. For example, as one of the commenters that Scopes cites points out, the paper makes much hay about "meaningless" statements, without ever defining "meaning" and often applying "meaningless" in ways that are extremely dubious. For the authors, "meaningless" appears to mean roughly what it did to Albert in an old Pogo strip: "I don't understand it and it don't mean nuthin'". I could make a similar complaint about phrases in the paper such as "confuse vagueness for profundity": without a definition of the profound, aside from some handwaving toward some exemplar statements that are "conventionally [citation needed] considered to be profound". Nor, unless I missed something, did they attempt to elicit definitions of profundity from the test subjects, who may have had quite different understandings of the concept.
Here's a statement: Statements have meaning the way fruit has pie. Profound, pseudo-profound bullshit, or something else? Justify your answer by displaying an understanding of linguistics, epistemology, psychology, semiotics, and rhetoric. Responses on a postcard.
When they learn to create a web site that works without Javascript loaded from a dozen external domains, I'll be glad to take a look.
Lordy, but I'm tired of web developers who don't create POSH sites that degrade gracefully when scripting is disabled. For a handful of RIAs that's understandable - they can't do anything useful without scripting - but for everyone else it's inexcusable laziness.
Well, I too have anecdotes in the opposite direction, so not sure what to say.
I am: this whole religious war is vapid. I've yet to see anyone in one of these threads post any actual evidence. It's all opinion, anecdote, vague references to use cases, and general handwaving (when it's not simply childish insults).
Now, if someone has some actual data from a methodologically-sound study to show that one of the options - punctuation pairs or whitespace or what have you - is demonstrably superior or inferior, with good probability, then I'll be glad to take a look. But comments like "curly braces ... are the mark of a sane language" carry no weight, and neither does the feeble "40 years a programmer" attempt to establish ethos. (I've been a professional programmer for three decades, and a student and amateur for a good number of years before that. So what?)
I also haven't seen anyone mention other alternatives. There are languages that use keyword pairs, such as the shell languages that adopted ALGOL's reverse-spelling quirk (if/fi, case/esac, etc.), or COBOL-85's scope terminators like end-if and end-perform. It's quite possible those are more human-readable (less likely to be overlooked) than curly braces; simple editors can't do trivial pair matching, but modern parsing ones can, and do.
(Or there's COBOL's traditional non-paired punctuation scope termination, but I think nearly everyone agrees that one actually is a Bad Thing. Oh, the number of overlooked periods in classic COBOL code...)
Ugh. How do I get Slashdot to use normal bullets for LI elements in a UL? Tried sticking a style="list-item-type: disc" attribute in the UL tag but that didn't help. I'm using POT as my commenting style.
I don't think the market will solve this one.
There are a number of obstacles, as I see it, to the consumer market (at least) bringing economic pressure to companies to improve IT security:
Most of those apply to the business market as well. In theory, businesses have incentives to be more diligent, which should make that market more prone to correction; in practice, business purchasing is largely driven by short-term costs and human foible.
So stupid. Apple didn't cover up the jack, they removed it.
You have to buy a jack at an electronics store and glue it to the side of the phone.
I did it, and it works fine. Sound's a little faint unless you turn the volume up all the way.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to the cargo plane I'm building out of rocks and bamboo.
It appears to me that the court has used a completely made-up "national security exception" to override a clear constitutional right.
Specifically, it was two judges (Davis and Graves) overriding a clear constitutional right. (I know, some people are arguing it's two rights. I don't think it's all that clear one way or the other whether the 2nd should apply here, but IANAL, much less a constitutional-law expert.)
The decision is worth at least a quick skim, particularly the long dissent from Jones. She gets in some good lines about protecting freedom of expression, but also some good technical points about things like the definition of "export".
In case anyone's curious, but not curious enough to spend ten seconds looking it up: Davis (majority) and Jones (dissenting) are Reagan appointees, and Graves (majority) is an Obama appointee. Which just goes to show that often it doesn't really matter who appointed a judge, I suppose. Of course, the past several administrations haven't been terribly keen on civil rights, regardless of party. We love us some police state.
Cancer is a collective noun for a whole host of diseases all with different causes, which just happen to have one, single tiny thing in common.
So true. "Cancer" just refers to any condition where cytogenesis (cell reproduction) outpaces apoptosis (cell destruction) in any mode other than what we consider normal growth.
There's some reason to believe that even healthy people are always, to some extent, cancerous - that we develop little cancers (inappropriate surges of cytogenesis) which our bodies are then able to suppress, through interventions of the immune and endocrine systems, and possibly other mechanisms (cellular signalling, epigenetic, etc.).
The reason we haven't cured cancer is because nothing could possibly do that - no single treatment can deal with so many different diseases, all with different causes (many of which are unknown).
"nothing could possibly do that" doesn't necessarily follow - that is, we can imagine some hypothetical technology that is able to selectively suppress or correct unwanted cytogenesis. That there are many different types and causes of cancer doesn't by itself prove a generic "cure" is impossible. It does make it seem extremely unlikely, though. Certainly it couldn't be anything straightforward like a class of drugs.
According to the linked article (which is a PR piece, not a journal paper, so should be taken with a whole bunch of salt), the 10-year cure prediction came from Jasmin Fisher; and her claim appears to be that in a decade we'll have technology that monitors the body closely and continuously and can detect cancerous modes very early on, and so be able to intervene at the first stage. That's more "rolling maintenance" than "cure", but, hey, it's worked to some extent for things like diabetes and HIV. And it's a rather more limited claim than an unqualified "cancer will be cured".
Now, how much Microsoft's effort will actually contribute to getting us to that point remains to be seen.
Is the .jpg top level domain the ultimate url shortener for images?
No, it loses to .j by two characters.
I propose the .© TLD. Then linkers can't claim they didn't know it was under copyright.
HSTS isn't relevant in this case (HTTPS using the Fiddler certificate is still HTTPS), but it does seem like HPKP isn't working correctly there. Assuming you'd previously visited your site without Fiddler interpositioning, within the pinning max-age interval.
Oh, wait: I should have checked the docs first. Mozilla says:
(https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Public_Key_Pinning, emphasis in original)
The Fiddler root certificate was installed by you, so it's a user-defined trust anchor, so any chain that terminates in it is ignored for HPKP.
I understand this is convenient for developers and web admins, but it is something of a hole in HPKP. Just use a little of the ol' social engineering to get the victim to install your certificate, and you can bypass HPKP entirely. Still, HPKP prunes some significant branches of the attack tree, so it remains useful.