Yup. In general in a laser battle there are a few key things that will yield an advantage:
1. Armor capable of absorbing shots. That one is pretty obvious, but probably not very practical. 2. Maneuverability - to increase the cross-section of space your ship could be inside when somebody shoots at you. 3. Firepower - to be able to cover more cross-section of space that the other ship could be in.
I suspect that armor is the least useful of these - better to not get hit at all. Ships would close until one or the other reaches a range where its firepower outclasses the other ship's maneuverability.
The basic algorithm is simple - figure out where the ship was at some point in time, then figure out where it could be assuming maximum acceleration from that point, and then pattern that entire region of space with your lasers. As you close the area that you are firing at will get smaller and smaller until you connect.
Also - priority must always be relative. It doesn't matter if project A is high and project B is low. What matters is that A is higher than B. If that is based on an ROI calculation of some sort, then it gets simpler - either a project is worthwhile or it isn't. If it isn't then you should never do it. If it is, then somebody should be finding money to do it. If you have a cashflow issue then the highest ROI gets done first.
Great. How is their Symbian app? Or their Java app? Or their Windows Mobile app? Or their WebOS app? Or, heck, their Windows or OSX app?
That's right, they don't need them, since they still have a perfectly functional website that anybody on those platforms can access, and for most users it is still the primary interface.
I'm glad they finally got their act together with Android, but if anything that just underscores the problem that they had an act to get together in the first place.
Again, I'm not suggesting that native apps aren't useful - and I use them all the time personally. However, I'd actually be happier if Facebook/Google+ just came out with an RSS feed system so that I don't have to use their native app to keep up with the buzz. The last thing I need is an app for every website I browse.
But there's nothing really new here, aside from details, and the idea that your pet solution will replace everything else is as arrogant as it has always been.
I don't recall suggesting that web-based applications would replace everything else. Certainly that is absurd.
And I'm not sure I'd call Gmail or Facebook or Amazon.com pet solutions - they're EXTREMELY popular applications.
Oh, and my preferred way of accessing applications that are not web-enabled when remote is in fact NX, which is basically a thin-client technology. It isn't like I haven't heard of that. However, it is a heck of a lot cleaner to just log into a website than to launch an NX session and then try to use applications that often break simple X11 paradigms like having windows on multiple displays at the same time. That's basically another instance of the same underlying problem - software developers assume that people want to just use a single computer and that it runs a big OS like Windows, OSX, or an X11-based linux distro. Sure, I like using that kind of environment, but it is far from the only situation I encounter.
And I roll out thin-client application solutions at work all the time - for cases where a richer GUI is called for and where the network-dependency is either required in any case or worth having for the sake of not needing to deal with local installs.
As such I would say that it is unethical to force anyone to undergo a procedure with any risk of serious harm or death because, if you are one of the unlucky ones, there is no benefit to anyone which can justify that death.
Doing anything including getting out of bed or remaining in bed is associated with some risk of serious harm or death. So, clearly there has to be some give and take here.
If you force 1000 people to be vaccinated let's suppose that 2 people die and 10 people live who would have otherwise died. However, those 2 people die in a way that likely makes it easier to point to the vaccine as a cause (probably 2 others die also apparently from the vaccine but truly from some other cause). On the other hand, the 10 that benefit likely to do much later in life, and in ways that don't make the benefit so obvious.
So, you can't just look at the person who died and say "well, here are the 5 people who lived because of his sacrifice." The death was not pointless, and statistically it is completely justifiable. However, people aren't good with statistics, and they get very emotional about death.
I am still not convinced that forced medical procedures are therefore automatically unethical, even if they carry some risk of serious injury or death.
Agreed. A big problem is that often there is only a binary allergic/not-allergic list.
My wife has been to the hospital numerous times and I end up going through the allergy list when she is unable to do so. Half the stuff on the list raises eyebrows because they are medications that she regularly takes. I explain to them that she isn't allergic to them, but that she does have sensitivities that should be considered (lower does, extended-release, avoid if possible, etc). They end up leaving them on the allergy list since they don't know what else to do with them. I try to talk to the doctors often so that they're in the loop, and usually the stuff on the list is more for chronic treatment so it isn't as big a deal.
They really need to have lists that include what actually happens. If a drug makes you really sleepy or nauseous it is a completely different situation than if it causes anaphylaxis. However, I've seen doctors try to get my wife to take a drug in the hospital that we know makes her nauseous when she is already nauseous, and we already know that an extended-release formulation works better for her (but the hospital didn't have it handy). Things like that make me tend to micro-manage the nurses and account for every pill she gets, so that red flags like that can be escalated (especially when it just involves me running home to grab a bottle of pills and have the pharmacy ID it).
I've also spotted cases where nurses try to administer drugs that doctors had intended to stop, despite having electronic everything already implemented (obviously the doctor forgot to update the orders). Again, being present I can have them bug the doctor and get it straightened out.
There has to be some way to cut down on odd mistakes like these. Often they don't turn out to be serious, but they do often prolong a stay and add expense. Plus, you're far more likely to develop some complication from a 5 day stay than a 2 day one (I've had to deal with hospital-induced issues like heart failure, anemia (from thinners), and general loss of sleep/etc). Delays get compounded when a missed order doesn't get caught until you end up waiting another day (patient took a pill that had to be stopped pre-procedure, or some test is booked up, or whatever). In fact, I'd say that 90% of the time I've seen in the hospital amounts to ordering tests at 8AM one day, and then reviewing results and ordering more tests at 8AM the next day. If they just checked the results when they were available you'd cut out half-days of latency all over the place.
Here's where this is somewhat plausible : in some rural stretch of road, far away from a populated area or military base, with terrain on either side of the road unable to support a truck, the terrorists set up their ambush. They stage an accident to cause the trucks to stop, and use fifty caliber or 20 millimeter rifles to disable the engines of the trucks. They then need enough shooters to win a gunbattle against the escorts AND the QRF. Who have heavy weapons and special forces training.
How many might it take? 50 men? A hundred? And all of them have to keep quiet until the attack. NONE of them would survive the retaliation, participating in something like this would be a guaranteed life prison sentence or death penalty. Probably the death penalty.
Not sure that this is all that plausible for a number of reasons:
1. Smuggling in that many people trained for something like this is going to be really tricky. Keeping them out of sight is going to be even trickier - I'm sure the convey has some level of surveillance of the route ahead.
2. Stopping a truck and killing the driver wouldn't be hard. However, I'm sure they operate under a radio-silence-is-bad system so that jamming won't do you any good. Jamming is completely obvious and frankly you'd probably get a slower response if you didn't try it at all. I'm sure military radios are designed to make jamming difficult, though with military-grade equipment you could probably still do it.
3. I'm sure the routes are chosen such that there is some kind of response not far away. No doubt some of that response is discreet and nearby and you're going to be fending off an attack fairly quickly. Kind of hard to mount a recovery operation while bullets are flying pinning you down. If local national guard/etc are on alert beforehand then you only have minutes until helicopters start showing up, and unless you have SAMs with you that is going to ruin any infantry operation pretty quickly. Smuggling in SAMs has to be even harder than smuggling in soldiers.
I doubt they'd even get their hands on the cargo if things were well planned, unless they really did have a well-equipped army with them.
Now, anybody engaging in the theft would be at high risk of being killed in the firefight, but if they were wearing uniform they would not be subject to the death penalty if captured (they would be POWs - it is completely legal to sneak uniformed soldiers into some country). Of course, whatever country supplied the uniforms would not fare well in the likely aftermath, as doing so is an act of war. If done without uniforms then they would be classified as spies, and the Geneva Conventions would not protect them.
Of course, the PAL only stops somebody from using the nuke 15 minutes after stealing it, and then only if the code isn't set to "000000" as it apparently was during the cold war.
If the thieves get the warhead to someplace safe from prying eyes they can take their time and disassemble the thing, and replace the control circuitry with something more primitive. Designing a warhead is hard, but rewiring a detonator is probably fairly easy unless somebody designed the thing to be hard to disassemble without causing a non-critical detonation of the explosives (creating a huge mess and a small scale radioactive disaster, but likely making it pretty hard to figure out how the thing looked before all the explosives went off, and nowhere near the mess of an actual nuclear detonation).
I'm participating on a forum on a linux-based PC that only runs a browser right now. On another tab I have my primary email MUA running - also in a browser. I can fire up another tab and access my P2P software, which is also browser-based. I can access all the same stuff from a windows PC, or my android phone. In some cases I have native apps to provide a cleaner interface, but I always have the web to fall back to, and in most cases it is the primary interface.
Sure, we're not 100% there yet. However, we're pretty close. I'd like to see FOSS catch up in general - half of the big FOSS projects are still all native clients, and they're useless to me unless I'm sitting on a linux-based desktop. Sure, at home that is my main desktop, but I'm not always at home, and it isn't the only thing I use. Where I can I do run my own web-based apps, but the likes of Roundcube are nowhere near being able to compete with Gmail/etc.
I'm not convinced that web platforms are dead. Sure, native apps have been taking off, but when was the last time you saw somebody download Facebook for the PC? They're more popular on phones because of the integration with sensors/contacts/etc that a native app can enable, combined with the slow network and browser speeds on those platforms - the app just is nicer. However, there really isn't much that a native app for something like Facebook or Gmail would add on a full PC.
The problem with native apps is that they're, well, native. I want a seamless experience on my phone, a Windows PC, a linux PC, and so on. It is very hard to find apps that have native clients for all of those platforms in all of their incarnations.
Sure, for some things a native app just makes sense. However, there is quite a bit you can do with pure html and javascript, and doing it that way means that your platform runs ANYWHERE.
You don't need to use Dart or whatever to take advantage of the web. Even if you use dart you can just compile to Javascript anyway.
Would love to use keepass, but it doesn't support all the platforms I'm running on. I'm stuck with Lastpass until that changes. I need support for Chrome on Windows/Linux/ChromeOS, and Chrome and the Android Browser on Android...
That's why I use lastpass - it ignores this setting. I tried hacking the chromium source to block it, but it was too much of a pita, especially since it gets updated every two weeks it seems. Plus, it is multi-browser...
Maybe they didn't have an IDS. Or, maybe they weren't certain it was accurate. If an intruder is roaming around on your LAN (where they shouldn't be anyway), how do you know your logs truly show everything they did?
Bottom line is that a guy who breaks into your house isn't in a good position to argue about how much money you spent checking the contents to make sure nothing was taken. The intruder broke the law, and a judge is not going to give him the benefit of the doubt.
So, how is giving a user an app that steals private data and the ability to block that stealing worse than simply giving them an app that steals private data with no ability to block it at all?
Sure, most users won't make effective use of any tools you give them, but they're not any worse off for it...
For the record, I agree with most people here that the $200k "damage" figure is bs. Unless he infected their system or took down security in some way, that $200k cost was only the cost of patching their preexisting vulnerability.
What about the cost of investigation? How do you know if he infected your system or took down security in some way, unless you investigate? That costs money - if you have a multidisciplinary team of 10 on it (server guys, database guys, application guys, security guys, and a lawyer), it costs you the better part of $1k per hour.
I dunno - I'd have to do a security review to figure that out...
If I walked into work and found in some server log signs of suspicious activity and a possible intrusion I'd report that to senior management. Then this guy would call them up and say "hey, I broke in - I just took some notes and for a fee I'll help you clean up, and don't worry - I didn't do anything other than copy data off your servers while I was in there." Then the managers would ask me "did this guy do anything besides copy data off our servers?" I would have to reply, "I dunno - we'd have to REALLY carefully check all our logs to know for sure, and we should assume that he's got the password files to every box in the server room to be safe." Then the managers would ask "can you change the passwords?" Then I'd answer, "sure, but that means changing the access credentials on all our internal applications, which means testing cycles to ensure we don't break anything else." Then the managers would say "get right on it, and keep a record of all the time anybody spends cleaning up this mess."
If a guy breaks into one of my servers, I'm not going to assume he's nice just because he claims to be. $200k isn't a lot to burn through when employees with overhead cost $90/hr.
Just on a whim, where do you come down on the abortion debate?
That's a bit of a mess. On the one hand killing your kids because they're inconvenient is despicable. On the other hand we let people do far worse to them and then everybody else has to deal with the mess.
The affordable socialism solution to this is fairly straightforward - implanted contraception for everybody and it is only removed if you're issued a reproduction license. Social programs get generally funded out of license fees. So, anybody who doesn't want to have kids doesn't have to pay for running schools, and so on. If you want to have kids you get a share in the risk that they'll have problems, and you won't bear much more or less than that share no matter how it turns out (at least not financially). To encourage diversity beyond children of sociopaths who are good at accumulating money there could be "scholarships" based on any number of criteria, and perhaps even a lottery as well. Those who elect to just buy their way in end up paying a bit more so that their kids can live in a functional next generation.
We'll never see any of that happen, or a clean solution to the abortion problem. Most people would rather just deal with the unmanaged mess until society collapses under the weight of its entitlement programs than try to engineer a society that is sustainable.
Apparently the DEA has banned creating the precursor and prefers to dole it out itself. Sure, you can synthesize anything, but that doesn't help if people with shotguns keep arresting you and your workers.
Such things are beyond the scope of archaeology. What is the point of debating them? Everybody already knows that people can't walk on water or rise from the dead. Either it happened anyway, or it didn't, but at this point the best you can do is philosophical argument.
Arguing over whether a particular person was governor is something that at least is potentially verifiable.
Buses aren't driverless. That's why they have to stop at stop lights and other cars get in their way.
If they were part of a driverless transportation system then they'd basically start where your trip originates and proceed in a fairly direct route to where you are going, travelling at near top speed the entire time minus the odd slowdown to time intersections with other traffic. Your typical 20 minute work commute would take 5-10 mins...
That's OK, I don't trust you either. How about we just keep everybody off the road but me?
Face it - life is full of compromises. I doubt that autonomous cars are ready to take over yet, but I fully support getting manual drivers off the road once they are. I'll take the odd automatic car crash a few times a year over the daily massacres and huge auto insurance bills combined with long commutes that we face right now.
If cars were fully automated traffic control would be massively better - we'd spend far less gas and time getting from point A to point B. Time in vehicles would also be much more productive since nobody would have to drive.
Hey, I hate Facebook, but I'd like to stay in touch with my family who refuses to use anything else, and syncing contact photos is nice as well. If I can do that without uploading excess personal data, all the better...
That last point is REALLY dumb. It actually applies to a lesser degree to non-controlled-substances. I've had to plan for vacations when pills were going to run out and nobody is willing to give you a refill early/etc, which means trying to refill stuff on vacation. Usually you end up with only a few days of overlap to work with. And that is on stuff that nobody would abuse.
The rules are far too paternalistic. In the case of controlled substances they're even worse. A doctor asked somebody I know to take sudafed daily over a longish period of time to try to deal with a problem and we basically had to time refills carefully to not run afoul of DEA rules. If you go to a place that has its act together they'll usually prevent you from breaking the rules. If you don't and manage to get stuff dispensed too early the DEA has been known to kick down doors.
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Yup. In general in a laser battle there are a few key things that will yield an advantage:
1. Armor capable of absorbing shots. That one is pretty obvious, but probably not very practical.
2. Maneuverability - to increase the cross-section of space your ship could be inside when somebody shoots at you.
3. Firepower - to be able to cover more cross-section of space that the other ship could be in.
I suspect that armor is the least useful of these - better to not get hit at all. Ships would close until one or the other reaches a range where its firepower outclasses the other ship's maneuverability.
The basic algorithm is simple - figure out where the ship was at some point in time, then figure out where it could be assuming maximum acceleration from that point, and then pattern that entire region of space with your lasers. As you close the area that you are firing at will get smaller and smaller until you connect.
Agreed.
Also - priority must always be relative. It doesn't matter if project A is high and project B is low. What matters is that A is higher than B. If that is based on an ROI calculation of some sort, then it gets simpler - either a project is worthwhile or it isn't. If it isn't then you should never do it. If it is, then somebody should be finding money to do it. If you have a cashflow issue then the highest ROI gets done first.
Great. How is their Symbian app? Or their Java app? Or their Windows Mobile app? Or their WebOS app? Or, heck, their Windows or OSX app?
That's right, they don't need them, since they still have a perfectly functional website that anybody on those platforms can access, and for most users it is still the primary interface.
I'm glad they finally got their act together with Android, but if anything that just underscores the problem that they had an act to get together in the first place.
Again, I'm not suggesting that native apps aren't useful - and I use them all the time personally. However, I'd actually be happier if Facebook/Google+ just came out with an RSS feed system so that I don't have to use their native app to keep up with the buzz. The last thing I need is an app for every website I browse.
But there's nothing really new here, aside from details, and the idea that your pet solution will replace everything else is as arrogant as it has always been.
I don't recall suggesting that web-based applications would replace everything else. Certainly that is absurd.
And I'm not sure I'd call Gmail or Facebook or Amazon.com pet solutions - they're EXTREMELY popular applications.
Oh, and my preferred way of accessing applications that are not web-enabled when remote is in fact NX, which is basically a thin-client technology. It isn't like I haven't heard of that. However, it is a heck of a lot cleaner to just log into a website than to launch an NX session and then try to use applications that often break simple X11 paradigms like having windows on multiple displays at the same time. That's basically another instance of the same underlying problem - software developers assume that people want to just use a single computer and that it runs a big OS like Windows, OSX, or an X11-based linux distro. Sure, I like using that kind of environment, but it is far from the only situation I encounter.
And I roll out thin-client application solutions at work all the time - for cases where a richer GUI is called for and where the network-dependency is either required in any case or worth having for the sake of not needing to deal with local installs.
As such I would say that it is unethical to force anyone to undergo a procedure with any risk of serious harm or death because, if you are one of the unlucky ones, there is no benefit to anyone which can justify that death.
Doing anything including getting out of bed or remaining in bed is associated with some risk of serious harm or death. So, clearly there has to be some give and take here.
If you force 1000 people to be vaccinated let's suppose that 2 people die and 10 people live who would have otherwise died. However, those 2 people die in a way that likely makes it easier to point to the vaccine as a cause (probably 2 others die also apparently from the vaccine but truly from some other cause). On the other hand, the 10 that benefit likely to do much later in life, and in ways that don't make the benefit so obvious.
So, you can't just look at the person who died and say "well, here are the 5 people who lived because of his sacrifice." The death was not pointless, and statistically it is completely justifiable. However, people aren't good with statistics, and they get very emotional about death.
I am still not convinced that forced medical procedures are therefore automatically unethical, even if they carry some risk of serious injury or death.
Games are one of those situations where native clients almost always work better - unless the game really doesn't need much horsepower.
Extending web APIs universally to provide access to more sensors would probably address many other situations.
I'm not saying that there isn't any place for native apps - only that web-based ones have many advantages and should not be overlooked.
Agreed. A big problem is that often there is only a binary allergic/not-allergic list.
My wife has been to the hospital numerous times and I end up going through the allergy list when she is unable to do so. Half the stuff on the list raises eyebrows because they are medications that she regularly takes. I explain to them that she isn't allergic to them, but that she does have sensitivities that should be considered (lower does, extended-release, avoid if possible, etc). They end up leaving them on the allergy list since they don't know what else to do with them. I try to talk to the doctors often so that they're in the loop, and usually the stuff on the list is more for chronic treatment so it isn't as big a deal.
They really need to have lists that include what actually happens. If a drug makes you really sleepy or nauseous it is a completely different situation than if it causes anaphylaxis. However, I've seen doctors try to get my wife to take a drug in the hospital that we know makes her nauseous when she is already nauseous, and we already know that an extended-release formulation works better for her (but the hospital didn't have it handy). Things like that make me tend to micro-manage the nurses and account for every pill she gets, so that red flags like that can be escalated (especially when it just involves me running home to grab a bottle of pills and have the pharmacy ID it).
I've also spotted cases where nurses try to administer drugs that doctors had intended to stop, despite having electronic everything already implemented (obviously the doctor forgot to update the orders). Again, being present I can have them bug the doctor and get it straightened out.
There has to be some way to cut down on odd mistakes like these. Often they don't turn out to be serious, but they do often prolong a stay and add expense. Plus, you're far more likely to develop some complication from a 5 day stay than a 2 day one (I've had to deal with hospital-induced issues like heart failure, anemia (from thinners), and general loss of sleep/etc). Delays get compounded when a missed order doesn't get caught until you end up waiting another day (patient took a pill that had to be stopped pre-procedure, or some test is booked up, or whatever). In fact, I'd say that 90% of the time I've seen in the hospital amounts to ordering tests at 8AM one day, and then reviewing results and ordering more tests at 8AM the next day. If they just checked the results when they were available you'd cut out half-days of latency all over the place.
Here's where this is somewhat plausible : in some rural stretch of road, far away from a populated area or military base, with terrain on either side of the road unable to support a truck, the terrorists set up their ambush. They stage an accident to cause the trucks to stop, and use fifty caliber or 20 millimeter rifles to disable the engines of the trucks. They then need enough shooters to win a gunbattle against the escorts AND the QRF. Who have heavy weapons and special forces training.
How many might it take? 50 men? A hundred? And all of them have to keep quiet until the attack. NONE of them would survive the retaliation, participating in something like this would be a guaranteed life prison sentence or death penalty. Probably the death penalty.
Not sure that this is all that plausible for a number of reasons:
1. Smuggling in that many people trained for something like this is going to be really tricky. Keeping them out of sight is going to be even trickier - I'm sure the convey has some level of surveillance of the route ahead.
2. Stopping a truck and killing the driver wouldn't be hard. However, I'm sure they operate under a radio-silence-is-bad system so that jamming won't do you any good. Jamming is completely obvious and frankly you'd probably get a slower response if you didn't try it at all. I'm sure military radios are designed to make jamming difficult, though with military-grade equipment you could probably still do it.
3. I'm sure the routes are chosen such that there is some kind of response not far away. No doubt some of that response is discreet and nearby and you're going to be fending off an attack fairly quickly. Kind of hard to mount a recovery operation while bullets are flying pinning you down. If local national guard/etc are on alert beforehand then you only have minutes until helicopters start showing up, and unless you have SAMs with you that is going to ruin any infantry operation pretty quickly. Smuggling in SAMs has to be even harder than smuggling in soldiers.
I doubt they'd even get their hands on the cargo if things were well planned, unless they really did have a well-equipped army with them.
Now, anybody engaging in the theft would be at high risk of being killed in the firefight, but if they were wearing uniform they would not be subject to the death penalty if captured (they would be POWs - it is completely legal to sneak uniformed soldiers into some country). Of course, whatever country supplied the uniforms would not fare well in the likely aftermath, as doing so is an act of war. If done without uniforms then they would be classified as spies, and the Geneva Conventions would not protect them.
Of course, the PAL only stops somebody from using the nuke 15 minutes after stealing it, and then only if the code isn't set to "000000" as it apparently was during the cold war.
If the thieves get the warhead to someplace safe from prying eyes they can take their time and disassemble the thing, and replace the control circuitry with something more primitive. Designing a warhead is hard, but rewiring a detonator is probably fairly easy unless somebody designed the thing to be hard to disassemble without causing a non-critical detonation of the explosives (creating a huge mess and a small scale radioactive disaster, but likely making it pretty hard to figure out how the thing looked before all the explosives went off, and nowhere near the mess of an actual nuclear detonation).
I'm participating on a forum on a linux-based PC that only runs a browser right now. On another tab I have my primary email MUA running - also in a browser. I can fire up another tab and access my P2P software, which is also browser-based. I can access all the same stuff from a windows PC, or my android phone. In some cases I have native apps to provide a cleaner interface, but I always have the web to fall back to, and in most cases it is the primary interface.
Sure, we're not 100% there yet. However, we're pretty close. I'd like to see FOSS catch up in general - half of the big FOSS projects are still all native clients, and they're useless to me unless I'm sitting on a linux-based desktop. Sure, at home that is my main desktop, but I'm not always at home, and it isn't the only thing I use. Where I can I do run my own web-based apps, but the likes of Roundcube are nowhere near being able to compete with Gmail/etc.
I'm not convinced that web platforms are dead. Sure, native apps have been taking off, but when was the last time you saw somebody download Facebook for the PC? They're more popular on phones because of the integration with sensors/contacts/etc that a native app can enable, combined with the slow network and browser speeds on those platforms - the app just is nicer. However, there really isn't much that a native app for something like Facebook or Gmail would add on a full PC.
The problem with native apps is that they're, well, native. I want a seamless experience on my phone, a Windows PC, a linux PC, and so on. It is very hard to find apps that have native clients for all of those platforms in all of their incarnations.
Sure, for some things a native app just makes sense. However, there is quite a bit you can do with pure html and javascript, and doing it that way means that your platform runs ANYWHERE.
You don't need to use Dart or whatever to take advantage of the web. Even if you use dart you can just compile to Javascript anyway.
Would love to use keepass, but it doesn't support all the platforms I'm running on. I'm stuck with Lastpass until that changes. I need support for Chrome on Windows/Linux/ChromeOS, and Chrome and the Android Browser on Android...
That's why I use lastpass - it ignores this setting. I tried hacking the chromium source to block it, but it was too much of a pita, especially since it gets updated every two weeks it seems. Plus, it is multi-browser...
Maybe they didn't have an IDS. Or, maybe they weren't certain it was accurate. If an intruder is roaming around on your LAN (where they shouldn't be anyway), how do you know your logs truly show everything they did?
Bottom line is that a guy who breaks into your house isn't in a good position to argue about how much money you spent checking the contents to make sure nothing was taken. The intruder broke the law, and a judge is not going to give him the benefit of the doubt.
So, how is giving a user an app that steals private data and the ability to block that stealing worse than simply giving them an app that steals private data with no ability to block it at all?
Sure, most users won't make effective use of any tools you give them, but they're not any worse off for it...
For the record, I agree with most people here that the $200k "damage" figure is bs. Unless he infected their system or took down security in some way, that $200k cost was only the cost of patching their preexisting vulnerability.
What about the cost of investigation? How do you know if he infected your system or took down security in some way, unless you investigate? That costs money - if you have a multidisciplinary team of 10 on it (server guys, database guys, application guys, security guys, and a lawyer), it costs you the better part of $1k per hour.
Did he cause damage or reveal it?
I dunno - I'd have to do a security review to figure that out...
If I walked into work and found in some server log signs of suspicious activity and a possible intrusion I'd report that to senior management. Then this guy would call them up and say "hey, I broke in - I just took some notes and for a fee I'll help you clean up, and don't worry - I didn't do anything other than copy data off your servers while I was in there." Then the managers would ask me "did this guy do anything besides copy data off our servers?" I would have to reply, "I dunno - we'd have to REALLY carefully check all our logs to know for sure, and we should assume that he's got the password files to every box in the server room to be safe." Then the managers would ask "can you change the passwords?" Then I'd answer, "sure, but that means changing the access credentials on all our internal applications, which means testing cycles to ensure we don't break anything else." Then the managers would say "get right on it, and keep a record of all the time anybody spends cleaning up this mess."
If a guy breaks into one of my servers, I'm not going to assume he's nice just because he claims to be. $200k isn't a lot to burn through when employees with overhead cost $90/hr.
Just on a whim, where do you come down on the abortion debate?
That's a bit of a mess. On the one hand killing your kids because they're inconvenient is despicable. On the other hand we let people do far worse to them and then everybody else has to deal with the mess.
The affordable socialism solution to this is fairly straightforward - implanted contraception for everybody and it is only removed if you're issued a reproduction license. Social programs get generally funded out of license fees. So, anybody who doesn't want to have kids doesn't have to pay for running schools, and so on. If you want to have kids you get a share in the risk that they'll have problems, and you won't bear much more or less than that share no matter how it turns out (at least not financially). To encourage diversity beyond children of sociopaths who are good at accumulating money there could be "scholarships" based on any number of criteria, and perhaps even a lottery as well. Those who elect to just buy their way in end up paying a bit more so that their kids can live in a functional next generation.
We'll never see any of that happen, or a clean solution to the abortion problem. Most people would rather just deal with the unmanaged mess until society collapses under the weight of its entitlement programs than try to engineer a society that is sustainable.
What's wrong with email? You can attach anything you want,
That's great for sending out info, but it isn't very useful for receiving info if everybody else is posting it on Facebook.
If you can convince 40 bazillion people to stop using facebook more power to you - I stopped posting on it ages ago.
Apparently the DEA has banned creating the precursor and prefers to dole it out itself. Sure, you can synthesize anything, but that doesn't help if people with shotguns keep arresting you and your workers.
Such things are beyond the scope of archaeology. What is the point of debating them? Everybody already knows that people can't walk on water or rise from the dead. Either it happened anyway, or it didn't, but at this point the best you can do is philosophical argument.
Arguing over whether a particular person was governor is something that at least is potentially verifiable.
Buses aren't driverless. That's why they have to stop at stop lights and other cars get in their way.
If they were part of a driverless transportation system then they'd basically start where your trip originates and proceed in a fairly direct route to where you are going, travelling at near top speed the entire time minus the odd slowdown to time intersections with other traffic. Your typical 20 minute work commute would take 5-10 mins...
That's OK, I don't trust you either. How about we just keep everybody off the road but me?
Face it - life is full of compromises. I doubt that autonomous cars are ready to take over yet, but I fully support getting manual drivers off the road once they are. I'll take the odd automatic car crash a few times a year over the daily massacres and huge auto insurance bills combined with long commutes that we face right now.
If cars were fully automated traffic control would be massively better - we'd spend far less gas and time getting from point A to point B. Time in vehicles would also be much more productive since nobody would have to drive.
Hey, I hate Facebook, but I'd like to stay in touch with my family who refuses to use anything else, and syncing contact photos is nice as well. If I can do that without uploading excess personal data, all the better...
That last point is REALLY dumb. It actually applies to a lesser degree to non-controlled-substances. I've had to plan for vacations when pills were going to run out and nobody is willing to give you a refill early/etc, which means trying to refill stuff on vacation. Usually you end up with only a few days of overlap to work with. And that is on stuff that nobody would abuse.
The rules are far too paternalistic. In the case of controlled substances they're even worse. A doctor asked somebody I know to take sudafed daily over a longish period of time to try to deal with a problem and we basically had to time refills carefully to not run afoul of DEA rules. If you go to a place that has its act together they'll usually prevent you from breaking the rules. If you don't and manage to get stuff dispensed too early the DEA has been known to kick down doors.