NASA for decades has been primarily a program to send pork back to all 50 states, by using cost-plus contracts and making sure that as many congress-critters as possible can point to jobs they brought to their district. One report put ARES/SLS spending at $19B to date, and Orion at $13B to date. So we've spent nearly half the adjusted cost of the Apollo program with no hardware in flight yet. And the same report puts NASA overhead at 72% of Orion cost. NASA isn't really trying to return us to space as much as they're trying to run a jobs and pork program. Now I love NASA, have since I was a kid. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to recognize an out of control government program thats been taken over by MBAs and politicians.
1) Any intelligence agency that doesn't look for exploits in commonly used tools isn't doing their job. 2) Kaspersky is a great target for exploit research no matter who you are. 3) Its common practice to keep identified exploits secret for high value zero day attacks JUST like this. 4) Also standard practice to request (or steal) source from domestic (or vulnerable) corps to make exploit location easier.
Not to defend Kaspersky (cause who knows?) but this just sounds like a normal day at the office for this problem space...
Remember, Congress has stated that a term mandated by the Constitution has being only for a "limited period" is perfectly acceptable to set at "forever minus a day"; given such abuse of discretion I'm just shocked, shocked I say that the 9th Circuit decided once again the Constitution means the opposite of what it says. Because its a "living document", and living things can change their mind, right?
There is almost no aspect of the Constitution which hasn't been carved into shreds by numerous court rulings, especially the Bill of Rights. The fourth amendment has been reduced in practice to barely, sort of cover a locked box in a house you own, which LEO may still break into and search under a list of circumstances that grows every year. (Acceptable "exigent circumstances" now includes "I thought I heard something".) And until Immigration and Nationality Act 287(a)(3) is rescinded, Border Patrol can literally ignore the constitution, which is similar to Title 14 section 89 of the United States Code which lets the US Coast Guard conduct unlimited warrantless armed no-knock searches of ANY boat for ANY reason including training.
There are no branches of government which treat the Constitution with anything but utter contempt. This extends throughout most state and federal governments. Try "buying" land and building something on it without asking "master may I" every step of the way...
Apple was a member of Vulkan and those of us who code to GPUs were excited to have a unified target finally coming into view - until Apple withdrew and announced a proprietary alternative. They shouldn't be allowed to influence the standard now.
I used to work for Bethesda, a ZeniMax company. Never seen a more legally aggressive employment agreement, I had to reject initial offer until they added an addendum. Without it was essentially a multi-year multi-industry no-compete phrased to get around state laws banning no-compete clauses...
Between zoning, permits, licensing, environmental impact reports, HOA restrictions, FAA overreach, liability, NIMBY, and a myriad other issues, this is highly unlikely to happen in the modern USA within our generation. Most potentially society changing inventions are not feasible to test or deploy outside of closed corporate labs in this regulatory environment, at least not without the support of some Congress critters and the DOD...
I continue to see articles explaining why for various plausible sounding reasons we need to adjust our raw data to show more climate change than the raw data contains. Can anyone point out any significant examples where the raw data was adjusted to show less climate change? The statistician in me is curious...
This is, like almost all of Microsoft's public announcements, a marketing move. They're trying to convince the millions of straggling PHBs to move to Azure instead of AWS. This effort spans many fronts, including back room short-term discounts on Azure pricing, EA/SA licensing, Office 360 migration discounts, etc...
My own data points as a non-prime customer... - Not that long ago items purchased using "free shipping" arrived at my door 2-4 days after order; now its 2 weeks. - Free shipping orders seem to sit in a queue for up to 10 calendar days before being shipped now. - I've seen items in shopping cart suddenly get flagged as 'we're sorry, this product is now only available for Prime customers' and moved to the second cart. - With paid 2-day shipping, my items hang around 2-4 days before being shipped.
For me, this all happened RIGHT as I was about to finally purchase Prime. Since I noticed this, I will never purchase Prime. And I've started shopping around for all my large purchases again, which are now made mostly elsewhere.
heh, probably the same, I don't know of any other kbonin's at SSI, I was there from late gold box to shortly before the big sell out. I spent most of the next decade in games (EA, Bethesda, some startups) before moving to enterprise security, came to learn FAR more than I wished about the messes at Microsoft. From having to reverse engineer Word to figure out just how it could scroll the screen faster than the public APIs do (pre GDI, Word was using a hack of outputting to a printer driver with certain flag settings to get to screen,) to pretty much every subsequent generation, right through Azure today. Microsoft is an amazingly predatory corporation. The previous generation of "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" has just moved to "Microsoft". Intelligent at capturing as much revenue as possible, but quite predatory. Between their loss of mobile and the crashing importance of the desktop, I'm looking forward to them collapsing. Until then I have to keep supporting Azure, but even the most obtuse PHB will eventually get upset at the huge and increasing percentage of revenue Microsoft siphons off your product on Azure vs. AWS.
Microsoft has decided they own your computer, so (&*#^%$ em... Been using Windows desktop since 3.1, mostly for work and gaming, helped move the games industry off DOS4GW to Windows a long time ago. And this sort of crap has moved me from Win 10 to dual boot Win10/Linux Mint, soon to remove the Win10 partition. I've moved almost my work onto Mint, only use Win10 when I have to run a Windows app, and the few left there I'll be exploring Wine or relocating into a Win10 VM. Steam provided great Linux versions of enough of my games I no longer need Windows, and my job is moving from C++ on Windows + Linux to JS on Azure & AWS, so no longer need Windows desktop for anything bur work corporate apps and have throwaway laptop for that. Good riddance. Will be helping all interested friends make the same transition.
Part of me wants to joke about China continuing to move to its own walled garden to control information flow. But then I think about the abysmal state of the media in the US, how most all major news organizations are now for-profit puppets pushing propaganda designed to enrich their owners, even to the point of demonstrating complicity in what would have been a major scandal (you see proof of election fraud and you fire the people collecting the data proving its occurring? really???), and I wonder if anything of value was lost. Media has gone from the "fourth branch of government", providing a historically critical check and balance, to yet another tool of those pulling the strings behind government. I wonder how many people realize the extent to which worldwide institutions are failing...
Historically, nations that follow these sorts of practices become self-limiting in their ability to cause widespread geopolitical problems, at least pushing it out a few generations. Other nations have stunted their technical and scientific growth massively in the past, for reasons which make little sense today, like China destroying the largest navy in the known history of the earth in 1525 and banning construction of ships with more than two masts.
I love how every new cool thing HAS to live offsite in some cloud, i.e. in completely opaque manner by an increasingly remote corporation, that far more often than not views its cool thing as nothing more than yet another vector to collect data about its users and market that data to advertisers and aggregators, since that's becoming more profitable than selling cool things. We're becoming surrounded by untrustworthy devices and platforms funneling away all the data they can. Nobody really cares about knowing what sort of cat pictures we prefer, but the power and control possible by proper analysis of all of this data, even in aggregate, is becoming somewhat alarming. AI may have cool potential (I study it myself), but I'm worried about the modern application and misuse of tools facilitating deeper interactions and the analysis thereof... No major modern corporation (or government) has demonstrated itself to be trustworthy in any traditional sense, and many border on psychopathic...
So Apple can just hire some properly placed officials to speak about something, and pay a nice speaking fee, like $225k US. Since the US doesn't consider speaking fees to be bribes for its officials, it should be OK for US companies too, right?
Stingrays, (aka Cell-site simulators, IMSI catchers) also violate these FCC regulations and ARE in WIDE use by law enforcement in the US from the federal level all the way down to small town police departments and many misc. state and federal agencies. And I'd argue that intercepting, monitoring, and recording all cell activity in an area, almost always without a warrant, is a far more egregious crime than just jamming cell devices nearby. But its been made pretty clear the laws no longer apply to those who "enforce them" on the plebes...
IP is the biggest problem in being to operate even a small scale business without running a loss. UL (, CE) and FCC are relatively modest engineering and financial hurdles, they just require consideration during design and paying certification labs. For a simple product that's under $100k, been there many times, actually kind of fun (other than writing the check.) The problem is if you're making something really simple like an outlet or dimmer, it has to compete against the $10 Chinese devices with X10 or ZigBee support, and it costs YOU that much to have it made there and shipped here, so how do you make any money? You can't with such lower end devices. If you do manage to innovate sufficiently to charge $20, then thanks to IP knock-offs can appear here for $11 before your prototypes arrive you hoped to get certified. Meanwhile the knock-offs with fake UL, CE, and FCC stamps start appearing at WallMart, and when you try and get them to sell yours they inform you they already have a cheaper supplier. Who is a shell company owned by the company you contracted to make yours.
As a developer of custom hardware and software, I'd LOVE to make products in this space. However: 1) Most people are trained to look for cheapest prices for devices, which are (for the most part) made in third-world sweatshops. 2) To provide a competitive price, you have to manufacture in volume in third-world sweatshops. 3) Due to lack of functioning IP protections in third-world countries, manufacturing there means instantly creating many competitors you cant compete with. 4) If you're willing to give up most of the world markets, you can still only compete against imports by spending lots on lawyers for ITC import games.
In their defense, "cloud" components provide a way to monetize the product in a manner somewhat resistant to third-world knockoffs and late shift runs to your competitors, as well as provide a user-friendly front end that you can tune without requiring the customers to update software, which is always a nightmare. That said, there is NO moral defense against the wholesale "all your data belongs to us, we can sell anything to anyone as long as we anonymize (sic) it" games that are played today. That said, for most modern corporations there are no such thing as morals.
I'm not aware of realistic ways to bring such products to market that are price competitive AND can provide sufficient income stream to recover initial investments, cover ongoing operating costs for a small team, and turn even a modest profit. Not in this world.
Slashdot Mirror
NASA for decades has been primarily a program to send pork back to all 50 states, by using cost-plus contracts and making sure that as many congress-critters as possible can point to jobs they brought to their district. One report put ARES/SLS spending at $19B to date, and Orion at $13B to date. So we've spent nearly half the adjusted cost of the Apollo program with no hardware in flight yet. And the same report puts NASA overhead at 72% of Orion cost. NASA isn't really trying to return us to space as much as they're trying to run a jobs and pork program. Now I love NASA, have since I was a kid. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to recognize an out of control government program thats been taken over by MBAs and politicians.
1) Any intelligence agency that doesn't look for exploits in commonly used tools isn't doing their job.
2) Kaspersky is a great target for exploit research no matter who you are.
3) Its common practice to keep identified exploits secret for high value zero day attacks JUST like this.
4) Also standard practice to request (or steal) source from domestic (or vulnerable) corps to make exploit location easier.
Not to defend Kaspersky (cause who knows?) but this just sounds like a normal day at the office for this problem space...
Remember, Congress has stated that a term mandated by the Constitution has being only for a "limited period" is perfectly acceptable to set at "forever minus a day"; given such abuse of discretion I'm just shocked, shocked I say that the 9th Circuit decided once again the Constitution means the opposite of what it says. Because its a "living document", and living things can change their mind, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/06...
There is almost no aspect of the Constitution which hasn't been carved into shreds by numerous court rulings, especially the Bill of Rights. The fourth amendment has been reduced in practice to barely, sort of cover a locked box in a house you own, which LEO may still break into and search under a list of circumstances that grows every year. (Acceptable "exigent circumstances" now includes "I thought I heard something".) And until Immigration and Nationality Act 287(a)(3) is rescinded, Border Patrol can literally ignore the constitution, which is similar to Title 14 section 89 of the United States Code which lets the US Coast Guard conduct unlimited warrantless armed no-knock searches of ANY boat for ANY reason including training.
There are no branches of government which treat the Constitution with anything but utter contempt. This extends throughout most state and federal governments. Try "buying" land and building something on it without asking "master may I" every step of the way...
Apple was a member of Vulkan and those of us who code to GPUs were excited to have a unified target finally coming into view - until Apple withdrew and announced a proprietary alternative. They shouldn't be allowed to influence the standard now.
If true, this is a Microsoft level move: "increasing our market share is more important than your security or privacy".
I used to work for Bethesda, a ZeniMax company. Never seen a more legally aggressive employment agreement, I had to reject initial offer until they added an addendum. Without it was essentially a multi-year multi-industry no-compete phrased to get around state laws banning no-compete clauses...
Between zoning, permits, licensing, environmental impact reports, HOA restrictions, FAA overreach, liability, NIMBY, and a myriad other issues, this is highly unlikely to happen in the modern USA within our generation. Most potentially society changing inventions are not feasible to test or deploy outside of closed corporate labs in this regulatory environment, at least not without the support of some Congress critters and the DOD...
All the constraints the SEC put on it preclude it from being of much use - https://www.sec.gov/info/small...
I continue to see articles explaining why for various plausible sounding reasons we need to adjust our raw data to show more climate change than the raw data contains. Can anyone point out any significant examples where the raw data was adjusted to show less climate change? The statistician in me is curious...
This is, like almost all of Microsoft's public announcements, a marketing move. They're trying to convince the millions of straggling PHBs to move to Azure instead of AWS. This effort spans many fronts, including back room short-term discounts on Azure pricing, EA/SA licensing, Office 360 migration discounts, etc...
My own data points as a non-prime customer...
- Not that long ago items purchased using "free shipping" arrived at my door 2-4 days after order; now its 2 weeks.
- Free shipping orders seem to sit in a queue for up to 10 calendar days before being shipped now.
- I've seen items in shopping cart suddenly get flagged as 'we're sorry, this product is now only available for Prime customers' and moved to the second cart.
- With paid 2-day shipping, my items hang around 2-4 days before being shipped.
For me, this all happened RIGHT as I was about to finally purchase Prime. Since I noticed this, I will never purchase Prime. And I've started shopping around for all my large purchases again, which are now made mostly elsewhere.
I think 'it "embiggens" their experiments' is more appropriate. And less grammer snobberastic.
You probably believe it takes 30 seconds of connection before a phone call is traceable, too...
heh, probably the same, I don't know of any other kbonin's at SSI, I was there from late gold box to shortly before the big sell out. I spent most of the next decade in games (EA, Bethesda, some startups) before moving to enterprise security, came to learn FAR more than I wished about the messes at Microsoft. From having to reverse engineer Word to figure out just how it could scroll the screen faster than the public APIs do (pre GDI, Word was using a hack of outputting to a printer driver with certain flag settings to get to screen,) to pretty much every subsequent generation, right through Azure today. Microsoft is an amazingly predatory corporation. The previous generation of "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" has just moved to "Microsoft". Intelligent at capturing as much revenue as possible, but quite predatory. Between their loss of mobile and the crashing importance of the desktop, I'm looking forward to them collapsing. Until then I have to keep supporting Azure, but even the most obtuse PHB will eventually get upset at the huge and increasing percentage of revenue Microsoft siphons off your product on Azure vs. AWS.
Microsoft has decided they own your computer, so (&*#^%$ em...
Been using Windows desktop since 3.1, mostly for work and gaming, helped move the games industry off DOS4GW to Windows a long time ago. And this sort of crap has moved me from Win 10 to dual boot Win10/Linux Mint, soon to remove the Win10 partition. I've moved almost my work onto Mint, only use Win10 when I have to run a Windows app, and the few left there I'll be exploring Wine or relocating into a Win10 VM. Steam provided great Linux versions of enough of my games I no longer need Windows, and my job is moving from C++ on Windows + Linux to JS on Azure & AWS, so no longer need Windows desktop for anything bur work corporate apps and have throwaway laptop for that. Good riddance.
Will be helping all interested friends make the same transition.
Part of me wants to joke about China continuing to move to its own walled garden to control information flow. But then I think about the abysmal state of the media in the US, how most all major news organizations are now for-profit puppets pushing propaganda designed to enrich their owners, even to the point of demonstrating complicity in what would have been a major scandal (you see proof of election fraud and you fire the people collecting the data proving its occurring? really???), and I wonder if anything of value was lost. Media has gone from the "fourth branch of government", providing a historically critical check and balance, to yet another tool of those pulling the strings behind government. I wonder how many people realize the extent to which worldwide institutions are failing...
Historically, nations that follow these sorts of practices become self-limiting in their ability to cause widespread geopolitical problems, at least pushing it out a few generations. Other nations have stunted their technical and scientific growth massively in the past, for reasons which make little sense today, like China destroying the largest navy in the known history of the earth in 1525 and banning construction of ships with more than two masts.
I love how every new cool thing HAS to live offsite in some cloud, i.e. in completely opaque manner by an increasingly remote corporation, that far more often than not views its cool thing as nothing more than yet another vector to collect data about its users and market that data to advertisers and aggregators, since that's becoming more profitable than selling cool things. We're becoming surrounded by untrustworthy devices and platforms funneling away all the data they can. Nobody really cares about knowing what sort of cat pictures we prefer, but the power and control possible by proper analysis of all of this data, even in aggregate, is becoming somewhat alarming. AI may have cool potential (I study it myself), but I'm worried about the modern application and misuse of tools facilitating deeper interactions and the analysis thereof... No major modern corporation (or government) has demonstrated itself to be trustworthy in any traditional sense, and many border on psychopathic...
(Hence my example of $225k, which is apparently Hillary's most common ask / "what they offered" fee...)
So Apple can just hire some properly placed officials to speak about something, and pay a nice speaking fee, like $225k US. Since the US doesn't consider speaking fees to be bribes for its officials, it should be OK for US companies too, right?
Stingrays, (aka Cell-site simulators, IMSI catchers) also violate these FCC regulations and ARE in WIDE use by law enforcement in the US from the federal level all the way down to small town police departments and many misc. state and federal agencies. And I'd argue that intercepting, monitoring, and recording all cell activity in an area, almost always without a warrant, is a far more egregious crime than just jamming cell devices nearby. But its been made pretty clear the laws no longer apply to those who "enforce them" on the plebes...
IP is the biggest problem in being to operate even a small scale business without running a loss. UL (, CE) and FCC are relatively modest engineering and financial hurdles, they just require consideration during design and paying certification labs. For a simple product that's under $100k, been there many times, actually kind of fun (other than writing the check.) The problem is if you're making something really simple like an outlet or dimmer, it has to compete against the $10 Chinese devices with X10 or ZigBee support, and it costs YOU that much to have it made there and shipped here, so how do you make any money? You can't with such lower end devices. If you do manage to innovate sufficiently to charge $20, then thanks to IP knock-offs can appear here for $11 before your prototypes arrive you hoped to get certified. Meanwhile the knock-offs with fake UL, CE, and FCC stamps start appearing at WallMart, and when you try and get them to sell yours they inform you they already have a cheaper supplier. Who is a shell company owned by the company you contracted to make yours.
As a developer of custom hardware and software, I'd LOVE to make products in this space. However:
1) Most people are trained to look for cheapest prices for devices, which are (for the most part) made in third-world sweatshops.
2) To provide a competitive price, you have to manufacture in volume in third-world sweatshops.
3) Due to lack of functioning IP protections in third-world countries, manufacturing there means instantly creating many competitors you cant compete with.
4) If you're willing to give up most of the world markets, you can still only compete against imports by spending lots on lawyers for ITC import games.
In their defense, "cloud" components provide a way to monetize the product in a manner somewhat resistant to third-world knockoffs and late shift runs to your competitors, as well as provide a user-friendly front end that you can tune without requiring the customers to update software, which is always a nightmare. That said, there is NO moral defense against the wholesale "all your data belongs to us, we can sell anything to anyone as long as we anonymize (sic) it" games that are played today. That said, for most modern corporations there are no such thing as morals.
I'm not aware of realistic ways to bring such products to market that are price competitive AND can provide sufficient income stream to recover initial investments, cover ongoing operating costs for a small team, and turn even a modest profit. Not in this world.