People are posting that Lasik only rarely had adverse effects. Actually the rate of complications is very high. Below are a couple of excerpts from a recent NYTimes article:
"A recent clinical trial by the F.D.A. suggests that the complications experienced by Mr. Ramirez are not uncommon. Nearly half of all people who had healthy eyes before Lasik developed visual aberrations for the first time after the procedure, the trial found. Nearly one-third developed dry eyes, a complication that can cause serious discomfort, for the first time."
and
"Yet few studies have followed patients for more than a few months or a year, and many are authored by surgeons with financial ties to manufacturers that make the lasers. One such study, written by the global medical director for a large laser eye-surgery provider, reported high satisfaction rates among patients five years after Lasik. But the study also found that even after all those years, nearly half had dry eyes at least some of the time. Twenty percent had painful or sore eyes, 40 percent were sensitive to light, and one-third had difficulty driving at night or doing work that required seeing well up close."
I was thinking about Lasik until I read this. No thanks.
I'm of the opinion that practical quantum computing is impossible (see link below for the argument). Start believing this too, and you will have one fewer things to be worried about!
I find it hard to take any article seriously that uses the word "moles" multiple times that isn't discussing a skin issue.
I tried to RTFA, but it appears that semiaccurate.com is down. Heh, haven't seen a site be slashdotted in a long time. I guess by moles you don't mean 6.02310^23?
I'm considering buying a Surface Laptop, but I'm reluctant because they are full of glue and irreparable. (Per ifixit.com "The Surface Laptop is not a laptop. It’s a glue-filled monstrosity. There is nothing about it that is upgradable or long-lasting, and it literally can’t be opened without destroying it.")
My current laptop is 8 years old and runs well - i would expect my new laptop to be in use for a similar length of time... The reason I'm considering the surface laptop is they have a taller screen - their screen ratio is 3:2 rather than 16:9 that everyone else (except Apple) uses.
So I am torn... If I buy one, i will need to also buy an extended warranty of at least 4 years...
It's all well and good to tout personal financial responsibility. However, the information you need to make a wise decision is often not available - because it is being deliberately withheld but the institutions. There are also a lot of predatory institutions out there which intentionally mislead the students.
The only solution I have been able to come up with is this: Require colleges and universities to purchase all non-performing loans at face value. (Note - this does not forgive the students' debt) If their graduates are unable to find adequately-paying jobs and therefore default on their loans, the college will end up buying a lot of bad debt. Raising their tuition/fees won't help because then they will have even more graduates default. This would put downward pressure on the tuition/fees. Also, this would give institutions incentive to help their graduates find work and make rational choices regarding what degree they plan to pursue, etc... A number of institutions would go bankrupt, but that would be a good thing - weeding out the scam artists.
Obviously you would have to craft such a law in a way to close all the loopholes so that the college/university couldn't get out of it...
Judging from the comments so far, I don't think Duolingo is going to have many takers. However, I lived in Pittsburgh for almost 20 years before I moved back to Ca, so I would like to give it my endorsement. We bought a 5 bedroom house in a good school district for $255k. There's a lot to do in the city. It has museums, professional sports teams, good restaurants, etc... Life is less stressful; people are friendly. It's a family-oriented city, and Pittsburgh is often voted "most livable" city in the U.S. by various magazines. Now, the weather is not great, but it also doesn't get a lot of snow in the winter. Certainly it is nothing like what people imagine if they are still thinking steel mills - those all closed 30-40 years ago. The air is clean and the countryside is beautiful. Now, the big players are health care, research, and universities.
It would be great if some drugs we already have could also fight infections. However, we can also develop new antibiotics. We have genetic and molecular biology tools that are light years ahead of what was available when the current crop of antibiotics was developed. Every time a protein mutates so that an antibiotic no longer binds to it, we could develop a new antibiotic that binds to the new protein. This war will never be won, but we don't have to lose it either. All that is lacking is the financial incentive to develop these medications. Because the private sector won't do it, it seems to be that it should become the mission of a government agency such as the NIH.
And of course, because they are serious about security, they won't be including the Intel Management Engine in computers that don't need it, RIGHT????? Fixing Meltdown and Spectre isn't news - everyone knew that they would jump on that one. But how about removing the bug-ridden, back-door infested Intel ME? THAT is what we should insist on every time they try to claim security credibility.
The valuation of bitcoin surged on the assumption that it will become a major currency. However, it's hard to see how bitcoin is going to be good for much of anything. Transactions are too expensive and too slow for it to become a regular currency. Early on, people believed it was an anonymous form of payment - but in fact every transaction is public. It was also supposed to be a democratic currency, but that promise has failed as well because now a few big players hold most of the bitcoins. By all reports, it wastes a tremendous amount of electricity and contributes to global warming.
To quote one economist, "It's not a currency until people are paid with it." I don't see it ever getting there, especially with governments against it. And if it isn't destined to become a currency, then it it is destined to crash, maybe even disappear.
I was planning to upgrade my laptop. But now with the Meltdown and Spectre issues? No thanks - I can wait a couple of years for them to design new chips.
My biggest concern with drone is that they will be used for anonymous crimes. Hopefully this story is an indication that we will be able to track down the owners.
"Security risks AES key compromise As you can imagine, the AES key should be kept secret. It cannot be retrieved from the Yubikey itself (or it should not, at least not with software). It is present in the validation server though, so the security of this server is very important. "
In other words, if the validation server is compromised, they everyone is screwed. This is the same vulnerability that the original poster complained of with RSA tokens and 2FA apps. With the method I described, there would be no validation server, only a database of PUBLIC keys. That would be much more secure.
I've wondered why no one creates a USB/bluetooth device for security that has the ability to encrypt data based on a private key stored on that device. Then there would be no need for a database of private keys (nothing to be compromised except the device itself). I imagine it to work like this:
A new device is manufactured and loaded with the private key. The manufacturer then deletes any record of the private key and loads the public key to a public database.
When you need to identify yourself, the website sends to data to your device for encryption. The data is encrypted by your device using your private key and returned to the sender. The website then decrypts the data with the public key. If it decrypts properly, then you are authenticated. The private key never leaves the device and the public database could be protected by a block chain to prevent tampering.
The question is hard to answer unless we know what your ultimate goal is. Here are a couple of scenarios.
If you don't trust you ISP to keep your surfing private, then a VPN can hide your activity. However, now someone else has your browsing history. Who is that person or people? Hard to know. Personally, I suspect that many VPNs are run by one government or another.
If you trust your ISP, you could get a VPN to connect to your home, to access your NAS, and to browse using your ISP. This protects your information from the WiFi owner, their ISP, and the country you are traveling in. It also means that you can leave your data on your NAS and not have to cross borders with it where it might be searched/copied/seized.
Some people use VPNs to hide their location so that they can get around a services geographical restrictions e.g. Netflix streaming. However, companies are aware of this and many of them block access to their content if you are using a known VPN provider.
"Legally speaking, phone unlocking is a very challenging question—that’s the problem. On the one hand, American citizens can’t be forced to testify against themselves according to the Fifth Amendment. This is the reasoning many defense attorneys use when prosecutors try to force suspects to unlock their iPhones. On the other hand, police and prosecutors are allowed to obtain evidence with a warrant from a judge. A suspect who refuses to supply a passcode—or who say they can’t remember it, as in this week’s Florida cases—could be held in contempt of court.
According to actual legal experts, the phone-unlocking debate is so challenging because the Fifth Amendment defense depends on whether or not the suspect is actually testifying by giving up a passcode or fingerprint. As Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University, explains in The Washington Post, supplying the key to unlock it under a judge’s authority probably shouldn’t count as testimony, if the suspect has admitted that a certain device belongs to them. After all, the very act of supplying a key doesn’t add any new facts to the case. If it’s unclear who owns the locked device, however, things get dicier. Admitting to owning a phone that’s believed to contain incriminating evidence is testimony, because you’re adding new information to the case."
I'm a long-time Netflix subscriber - to the disc service, not the streaming service. Blu-rays look way better than streaming. However, what a lot of people don't know is that the disc selection is vast compared to the streaming selection. I googled it recently and found articles that claimed with streaming you had the choice of 6000 movies, with the disc service the selection was about 96,000 titles.
Unfortunately, the same articles claimed that while the disc-mailing service was very profitable, only a small percentage of netflix's subscribers used it (something like 5%) and that most likely it would go away in the next few years...
So, if you don't like the lmited selection of Netflix's streaming service, get the discs and let's keep it alive!
The goal of projects such as these is to see how people would act if they had a guaranteed income for life. However, the flaw in this pilot (and all similar projects that I have heard of) is that it is only temporary stipend... I would act very differently if I had guaranteed income for 2 years vs for life.
If it was a 2 year income, I would pocket the money and keep working. If it was guaranteed life-long income, I might stop working (depending on how much money it was).
The results of this pilot will be more or less useless.
I think calling it a disaster is an exaggeration. Most of the problems described will be fixed in time: The spped will improve (already at some merchants is it quite acceptable). Also, as everyone migrates to the system, the confusion over insert vs swipe will go away as well...
These IMHO are the REAL problems:
1) The roll-out has been slow. Every article I've read says that the scanners and software are very expensive so a lot of merchants can't afford to adopt it or are delaying adoption. This is just stupid greed. The credit card companies should provide these at cost they would be dirt-cheap. Merchants would snap them up.
2) In Europe, where they have had this system forever (actually theirs is better - chip and pin!), it has not decreased crime. It has just pushed the fraud to online internet merchants. On the internet, you just provide your credit card numbers just like you always did. Why doesn't Visa and MC provide everyone with a free USB-powered reader to use at home on the internet? Sure, it would be a substantial one-time cost. The reasons then don't are #1 and #4.
3) The credit card companies adopted chip and signature which still leaves your card vulnerable to being stolen. They should have used chip and PIN (like Target does BTW), but they were too afraid it would "confuse" consumers and they would use their credit cards less. WTF? REALLY???
4) Why do these problems exist at all? Because these credit cards are a stop-gap measure. The credit card companies assume that people will pay for everything with their phones in 5 years, and credit cards will be obsolete, so there was no incentive to spend the money to do it right.
I looked at that credit card. However, if you read the reviews, people are saying that if you don't carry a balance, then, at some point, they are going to drop your credit limit to just above your balance for that month. This results in you having a maxed-out credit card and tanks your credit score. No thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
People are posting that Lasik only rarely had adverse effects. Actually the rate of complications is very high. Below are a couple of excerpts from a recent NYTimes article:
"A recent clinical trial by the F.D.A. suggests that the complications experienced by Mr. Ramirez are not uncommon.
Nearly half of all people who had healthy eyes before Lasik developed visual aberrations for the first time after the procedure, the trial found. Nearly one-third developed dry eyes, a complication that can cause serious discomfort, for the first time."
and
"Yet few studies have followed patients for more than a few months or a year, and many are authored by surgeons with financial ties to manufacturers that make the lasers.
One such study, written by the global medical director for a large laser eye-surgery provider, reported high satisfaction rates among patients five years after Lasik.
But the study also found that even after all those years, nearly half had dry eyes at least some of the time. Twenty percent had painful or sore eyes, 40 percent were sensitive to light, and one-third had difficulty driving at night or doing work that required seeing well up close."
I was thinking about Lasik until I read this. No thanks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...
I'm of the opinion that practical quantum computing is impossible (see link below for the argument). Start believing this too, and you will have one fewer things to be worried about!
https://spectrum.ieee.org/comp...
I find it hard to take any article seriously that uses the word "moles" multiple times that isn't discussing a skin issue.
I tried to RTFA, but it appears that semiaccurate.com is down. Heh, haven't seen a site be slashdotted in a long time. I guess by moles you don't mean 6.02310^23?
I'm considering buying a Surface Laptop, but I'm reluctant because they are full of glue and irreparable. (Per ifixit.com "The Surface Laptop is not a laptop. It’s a glue-filled monstrosity. There is nothing about it that is upgradable or long-lasting, and it literally can’t be opened without destroying it.")
My current laptop is 8 years old and runs well - i would expect my new laptop to be in use for a similar length of time... The reason I'm considering the surface laptop is they have a taller screen - their screen ratio is 3:2 rather than 16:9 that everyone else (except Apple) uses.
So I am torn... If I buy one, i will need to also buy an extended warranty of at least 4 years...
It's all well and good to tout personal financial responsibility. However, the information you need to make a wise decision is often not available - because it is being deliberately withheld but the institutions. There are also a lot of predatory institutions out there which intentionally mislead the students.
The only solution I have been able to come up with is this: Require colleges and universities to purchase all non-performing loans at face value. (Note - this does not forgive the students' debt) If their graduates are unable to find adequately-paying jobs and therefore default on their loans, the college will end up buying a lot of bad debt. Raising their tuition/fees won't help because then they will have even more graduates default. This would put downward pressure on the tuition/fees. Also, this would give institutions incentive to help their graduates find work and make rational choices regarding what degree they plan to pursue, etc... A number of institutions would go bankrupt, but that would be a good thing - weeding out the scam artists.
Obviously you would have to craft such a law in a way to close all the loopholes so that the college/university couldn't get out of it...
Judging from the comments so far, I don't think Duolingo is going to have many takers. However, I lived in Pittsburgh for almost 20 years before I moved back to Ca, so I would like to give it my endorsement. We bought a 5 bedroom house in a good school district for $255k. There's a lot to do in the city. It has museums, professional sports teams, good restaurants, etc... Life is less stressful; people are friendly. It's a family-oriented city, and Pittsburgh is often voted "most livable" city in the U.S. by various magazines. Now, the weather is not great, but it also doesn't get a lot of snow in the winter. Certainly it is nothing like what people imagine if they are still thinking steel mills - those all closed 30-40 years ago. The air is clean and the countryside is beautiful. Now, the big players are health care, research, and universities.
It would be great if some drugs we already have could also fight infections. However, we can also develop new antibiotics. We have genetic and molecular biology tools that are light years ahead of what was available when the current crop of antibiotics was developed. Every time a protein mutates so that an antibiotic no longer binds to it, we could develop a new antibiotic that binds to the new protein. This war will never be won, but we don't have to lose it either. All that is lacking is the financial incentive to develop these medications. Because the private sector won't do it, it seems to be that it should become the mission of a government agency such as the NIH.
should have said "Bixby." That will teach me not to post from my phone.
âoeBixbyâ. Now there is a horrible name IMHO.
And of course, because they are serious about security, they won't be including the Intel Management Engine in computers that don't need it, RIGHT????? Fixing Meltdown and Spectre isn't news - everyone knew that they would jump on that one. But how about removing the bug-ridden, back-door infested Intel ME? THAT is what we should insist on every time they try to claim security credibility.
The valuation of bitcoin surged on the assumption that it will become a major currency. However, it's hard to see how bitcoin is going to be good for much of anything. Transactions are too expensive and too slow for it to become a regular currency. Early on, people believed it was an anonymous form of payment - but in fact every transaction is public. It was also supposed to be a democratic currency, but that promise has failed as well because now a few big players hold most of the bitcoins. By all reports, it wastes a tremendous amount of electricity and contributes to global warming.
To quote one economist, "It's not a currency until people are paid with it." I don't see it ever getting there, especially with governments against it. And if it isn't destined to become a currency, then it it is destined to crash, maybe even disappear.
I was planning to upgrade my laptop. But now with the Meltdown and Spectre issues? No thanks - I can wait a couple of years for them to design new chips.
My biggest concern with drone is that they will be used for anonymous crimes. Hopefully this story is an indication that we will be able to track down the owners.
Is this a problem iPhones too, or is this just an android problem?
I thought that Linus personally approves all the changes to the kernel. So didn't he approve the changes he is complaining about?
No, I think you are wrong. From this website describing Yubikey:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/ind...
I found this:
"Security risks
AES key compromise
As you can imagine, the AES key should be kept secret. It cannot be retrieved from the Yubikey itself (or it should not, at least not with software). It is present in the validation server though, so the security of this server is very important. "
In other words, if the validation server is compromised, they everyone is screwed. This is the same vulnerability that the original poster complained of with RSA tokens and 2FA apps. With the method I described, there would be no validation server, only a database of PUBLIC keys. That would be much more secure.
I've wondered why no one creates a USB/bluetooth device for security that has the ability to encrypt data based on a private key stored on that device. Then there would be no need for a database of private keys (nothing to be compromised except the device itself). I imagine it to work like this:
A new device is manufactured and loaded with the private key. The manufacturer then deletes any record of the private key and loads the public key to a public database.
When you need to identify yourself, the website sends to data to your device for encryption. The data is encrypted by your device using your private key and returned to the sender. The website then decrypts the data with the public key. If it decrypts properly, then you are authenticated. The private key never leaves the device and the public database could be protected by a block chain to prevent tampering.
Thoughts?
The question is hard to answer unless we know what your ultimate goal is. Here are a couple of scenarios.
If you don't trust you ISP to keep your surfing private, then a VPN can hide your activity. However, now someone else has your browsing history. Who is that person or people? Hard to know. Personally, I suspect that many VPNs are run by one government or another.
If you trust your ISP, you could get a VPN to connect to your home, to access your NAS, and to browse using your ISP. This protects your information from the WiFi owner, their ISP, and the country you are traveling in. It also means that you can leave your data on your NAS and not have to cross borders with it where it might be searched/copied/seized.
Some people use VPNs to hide their location so that they can get around a services geographical restrictions e.g. Netflix streaming. However, companies are aware of this and many of them block access to their content if you are using a known VPN provider.
No he was jailed because he can't remember the password. He can't tell the judge something he doesn't know.
Gizmodo actually posted a much more informative story than slashdot. The 5th amendment issue is summarized thus:
http://gizmodo.com/can-we-plea...
"Legally speaking, phone unlocking is a very challenging question—that’s the problem. On the one hand, American citizens can’t be forced to testify against themselves according to the Fifth Amendment. This is the reasoning many defense attorneys use when prosecutors try to force suspects to unlock their iPhones. On the other hand, police and prosecutors are allowed to obtain evidence with a warrant from a judge. A suspect who refuses to supply a passcode—or who say they can’t remember it, as in this week’s Florida cases—could be held in contempt of court.
According to actual legal experts, the phone-unlocking debate is so challenging because the Fifth Amendment defense depends on whether or not the suspect is actually testifying by giving up a passcode or fingerprint. As Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University, explains in The Washington Post, supplying the key to unlock it under a judge’s authority probably shouldn’t count as testimony, if the suspect has admitted that a certain device belongs to them. After all, the very act of supplying a key doesn’t add any new facts to the case. If it’s unclear who owns the locked device, however, things get dicier. Admitting to owning a phone that’s believed to contain incriminating evidence is testimony, because you’re adding new information to the case."
I'm a long-time Netflix subscriber - to the disc service, not the streaming service. Blu-rays look way better than streaming. However, what a lot of people don't know is that the disc selection is vast compared to the streaming selection. I googled it recently and found articles that claimed with streaming you had the choice of 6000 movies, with the disc service the selection was about 96,000 titles.
Unfortunately, the same articles claimed that while the disc-mailing service was very profitable, only a small percentage of netflix's subscribers used it (something like 5%) and that most likely it would go away in the next few years...
So, if you don't like the lmited selection of Netflix's streaming service, get the discs and let's keep it alive!
The goal of projects such as these is to see how people would act if they had a guaranteed income for life. However, the flaw in this pilot (and all similar projects that I have heard of) is that it is only temporary stipend... I would act very differently if I had guaranteed income for 2 years vs for life.
If it was a 2 year income, I would pocket the money and keep working.
If it was guaranteed life-long income, I might stop working (depending on how much money it was).
The results of this pilot will be more or less useless.
I think calling it a disaster is an exaggeration. Most of the problems described will be fixed in time: The spped will improve (already at some merchants is it quite acceptable). Also, as everyone migrates to the system, the confusion over insert vs swipe will go away as well...
These IMHO are the REAL problems:
1) The roll-out has been slow. Every article I've read says that the scanners and software are very expensive so a lot of merchants can't afford to adopt it or are delaying adoption. This is just stupid greed. The credit card companies should provide these at cost they would be dirt-cheap. Merchants would snap them up.
2) In Europe, where they have had this system forever (actually theirs is better - chip and pin!), it has not decreased crime. It has just pushed the fraud to online internet merchants. On the internet, you just provide your credit card numbers just like you always did. Why doesn't Visa and MC provide everyone with a free USB-powered reader to use at home on the internet? Sure, it would be a substantial one-time cost. The reasons then don't are #1 and #4.
3) The credit card companies adopted chip and signature which still leaves your card vulnerable to being stolen. They should have used chip and PIN (like Target does BTW), but they were too afraid it would "confuse" consumers and they would use their credit cards less. WTF? REALLY???
4) Why do these problems exist at all? Because these credit cards are a stop-gap measure. The credit card companies assume that people will pay for everything with their phones in 5 years, and credit cards will be obsolete, so there was no incentive to spend the money to do it right.
Amazon Fire TV with Kodi - works great
I looked at that credit card. However, if you read the reviews, people are saying that if you don't carry a balance, then, at some point, they are going to drop your credit limit to just above your balance for that month. This results in you having a maxed-out credit card and tanks your credit score. No thanks.