... nowadays believing in facts is having a political position.
You need to capitalize the "f": "... believing in Facts is..." The discussion has been religion-ized - not just politicized - for decades.
Each of the major sides of the discussion believes the other has faked data and promulgated falsehoods disguised as science. People convinced on either side are now beyond sceptical that any alleged scientific results that disagrees with their own paradigm is not more of the same.
It's now going to take decades of actual, OPEN, REPRODUCIBLE research for climate scientists to reestablish enough credibility to convince any significant number of people to substantially change their views. By that time, if those claiming imminent doom are correct, it will be too late for convincing scientific results supporting their side to do any good.
Meanwhile, this process can't even START until "burn the heretic" epithets like "denier" have stopped - or been discredited and ridiculed into a toothless background hum.
It is time to finally star holding engineers criminally and civilly liable,...
Force them to chose between risking jail for a bug or being fired for not following the Pointy Haired Boss' instructions to skip the tetsting and get the damn thing delivered?
What a great idea. Put most of the engineers who would actually do what you want out of work and leave the field to those to dumb to notice or too psychopathic to care.
strcmp() has its own vulnerability. By sending a string without the terminating '\0' you make the strcmp() function read past the buffer.
Only if the string you are comparing it to, which was generated locally, is ALSO not null terminated.
Regardless, the right thing to do with strncmp() is to use either the proper number of digits for the hash (which you can also expect to get with strlen(computed_hash)) or the size of the buffer that received the response.
The bug was in the code to compare the two strings. It used the strncmp function that compares the first N characters of two strings:
strncmp(string1, string2, N)
And applied it to the computed hash and the hash response received from the browser, with N set to the length of the response received from the browser, so something like:
What the programmer should have done is check if the hash coming from the browser has the correct length, 32 characters, before attempting to compare the two strings.
Or even better, the programmer should have used the proper string comparing function, strcmp, that already does that for you and you don't need to supply a length parameter, like this:
strcmp(string1, string2)
That's indeed the correct solution.
But he also could have used strncmp() properly. The strn*() routines' N argument is primarily to keep the routines from overrunning buffers (secondarily look at a subset of a string). So N should have been the expected number of characters for the hash:
strncmp(computed_hash, response, 32)// (Or a suitable manifest constant.)
Just taking the string length from the good string, instead of the argument, would work, too:
Or sizeof(the computed_hash buffer) - but for that one you have to watch out that you don't get the size of a pointer. That would also break it by only comparing the first few bytes (which would make it difficult, but not impossible, to exercise).
Plus the fact that anything in caves or underground has been actively interacting with the surface the entire time, while frozen microbes have been in stasis, unaffected by the passage of time, so that deadly plagues of the distant past, that we've long since lost resistance to, could be suddenly reintroduced.
I'm not all that worried about the revival of ancient diseases from melting permafrost wiping out all mammals, or even all humanity.
For starters, our ancestors already managed to survive them already. I'm far more concerned with the ongoing evolution of new diseases (such as ebola) in the portion of the biosphere that is actively evolving.
As for "not interacting" with the world in an ongoing way, frozen stuff from the far past is constantly being reintroduced as the melting ends of glaciers re-expose stuff that was frozen for millennia.
It may sound far-fetched, but it's possible. Anthrax spores are ridiculously hardy under natural conditions and can survive in their dormant state for years.
And it happens all the time, mostly outside the cities. Anthrax is also called "wool sorter's disease" and several other names. The spores are very hardy and can survive centuries of "ordinary' harsh environments. Changes in weather on a decade scale, which in "good years" bring vegetation and browsing animals to areas that are only intermittently fertile, can also bring an anthrax outbreak, resulting form an animal visit an infected site.
This is nothing new. It happens that it's currently a rare thing in the US (where it happens only a couple times a year - low compared to 16 cases of Bubonic Plague in 2015) and Northern Europe. But country folk are aware of it and take precautions. Anthrax, though very serious, is susceptible to antibiotics. The common form of the infection is a characteristic skin lesion (from a spore carried into a skin break), which is easy to diagnose and relatively benign (i.e. only one-in-five die if not treated, as opposed to about half WITH treatment for a Respiratory (inhaled spore) case, or a quarter to two-thirds for gastrointestinal (ate contaminated vegies or diseased meat).
(I heard of one case - not sure if it was anthrax or another long-term spore-forming disease - where someone doing a major cleanup of a historic house where people with the disease had been treated decades before - was apparently exposed when scraping the dirt out from between the cracks of the floorboards.)
Because it's almost unheard of in cities it's a great opportunity for global-warming alarmists to gin up another panic, now that they've got a case they can blame on melting ice. If they can get that meme going they can then yell about global warming at each good-weather outbreak - which means several times a year.
With the next couple of years, we will see the transportation sector drop in emissions, a great deal.
As it has over the past decades.
But measured by the "carbon emitted per unit fuel burned" it still won't change at all - until NO vehicle burns fuel and the measurement blows up by doing a divide by zero.
Engines are more efficient and mileage is greater. Some of the fleet is being switched over to electricity, which doesn't emit any carbon from fuel - at least at the vehicle. More of it is running lower-carbon-per-unit-energy fuel, such as natural gas.
Also: Hybrids are recycling energy from stopping, declerating, or going down hills, using it to replace energy from burning fuel when starting, accelerating, or going up hills.
Actually, it isn't a retarded measure, you just need to understand what it is sayig. Basically it says that our advances in internal combustion technology have made a negligible difference in the amount of carbon emitted while burning petroleum products, or in application terms, technology woun't make petroleum based ICEs much cleaner.
No it does not say that AT ALL.
What it says is that internal combustion engines don't sequester the carbon from the fuel. Essentially every bit of it is burned to carbon dioxide and emitted into the atmosphere.
The transportation sector has made LOTS of progress with respect to emitting less carbon per passenger mile or ton-mile of cargo (even though "carbon" is not the target of most of the improvements). Engines are more efficient and mileage is greater. Some of the fleet is being switched over to electricity, which doesn't emit any carbon from fuel - at least at the vehicle. More of it is running lower-carbon-per-unit-energy fuel, such as natural gas.
But if you insist on measuring carbon emission against unit-of-fuel-consumed, for any given fuel type you will NEVER see ANY CHANGE. A given amount of a given type of fuel will contain a given amount of carbon, and it will all be emitted as the fuel is used.
Turning it off in BIOS basically makes it brain dead. It still loads the lower functions so it can do CPU uCode patch, PMC, and similar, but none of the application level stuff even boots up.
How do we KNOW that?
It's got the port open. If it's really off, why is it open? It's don't SOMETHING with it.
How do we know. for instamce, that turning it off in the BIOS doesn't just make it useless for the owner's IT organization, but still functional when, say, the NSA does the right "port knocking" or other secret-society ritual to tell it that it's time to let the spy in through the back door?
Can you show us the code, and tell us how to check if that's what's really loaded? No, you can't, can you?
It does not seem that long ago when commercial use, fund raising, and advertising were prohibited uses of the internet. When the net was opened up to commercial activity, is when everything started to go downhill rapidly. Then politicians figured out it was a tool for social control, surveillance, and censorship.
Thank Al Gore for that.
His contribution to the Internet was legislation to open it to commercial activity. This was enabling for giving access to the general population for all sorts of uses, rather than restricting it to people with connections to large universities, the military, and companies working on networking technology (such as Xerox and AT&T). But it also legalized unsolicited commercial email.
What's the big deal? Just turn it off in the BIOS.
Then how do you know it's really off?
Also: I see to recall documents that said it didn't turn off. Instead it went back to the new-machine configuration, where it would respond to the first comer with adequate credentials to introduce itself as the IT department of its new owner, just getting around to welcoming it to the network and givig it its first configuration.
If the ("Impossible" "reactionless") EM drive proves to provide real delta-v for making ongoing orbital mechanics alterations (rather than being a test methodology error), it has been estimated it could be used to make the Earth-to-Mars trip in 70 days. That could put Mars within reach within 8 years.
The tiny force involved (if it's real) would add up to a lot of motion over time - and you wouldn't have to haul along a lot of fuel to be expended - and thus mostly used for hauling fuel.
There was supposed to be a six-month "does it really do this?" orbital test in progress or Real Soon Now. So we should know soon.
So if this works and Trump's ego can get it deployed in time, then, yes, ego-boost WOULD add enough delta-v for a trip. B-)
When I got to college I was able to sneak into a lab and use an ASR33 teletype on the Telex network to remotely log on to Dartmouth to use BASIC.
At my own school it was cards in a window, come back later for the printed output. And you'd better have an account that paid for it.
Didn't really get to 'cut my hacker teeth' until my sophomore year, when some oddball ins-and-outs of contract financing left me with a student job where I had, a couple times a day, the remainder of a one-hour time slot with my work on the machine done, blocked waiting for the other department to do my output's tape-to-print, and a mainframe computer all to my self, on which I could do what I wanted while waiting for the results of the real work (or compile attempt) to be printed.
(What I did with it was talk the hardware tech into getting the paper tape I/O working, then bootstrap up a card-image editor, from scratch, on paper tape, to where it could emulate the Dartmouth BASIC environment - with Fortan on card-deck images in RAM or on a tape library - including the RUN command; Once that was working I'd get one compile/debug turnaround per three-to-five minutes, for a couple hours rather than two per day. This ended up with the lab management impressed and me reassigned to be in charge of the OS, library, and doing much of the lab's software.)
There is a reason that American teenagers aren't working in orchards... if growers paid enough to get teens to take the jobs, nobody would be able to afford fruit.
No. The reason is that the laws (child labor, working conditions) make it impossible for them to use teenagers any more.
Meanwhile the illegals can't complain about working conditions - and will work for less than minimum wage in (those occupations where it applies.)
US citizens needn't apply because they can't compete. (Even if they were willing to work for sub-legal prices and/or in sub-legal conditions, the employer can't risk that they might turn around and demand the missing money or compensation for the conditions.) The illegals, meanwhile, can afford to work that cheaply because social programs can pay for much of the support of them and their families - turning programs intended to help the poor into subsidies for their employers.
Meanwhile, the government's non-enforcement of the laws against the illegals working means that, in highly competitive markets (such as construction contracting), employers are left with a Hobson's choice: Use illegal labor and be competitive, or try to use legal labor and go out of business.
Most employment agreements are such that the company owns it even if it is outside of normal hours. So inventions you come up with on your own time are not yours.
And one of the key reasons Silicon Valley grew up in California is a law that, in effect, says:
- As a matter of the state's compelling interest:
- If you invent something
- on your own time and not using company resources
- and it's not in the company's current or expected immediate future business plan
- you own it
- regardless of what your employment contract says
- and employment contracts have to include a notice of this.
Result: People who invent neat stuff their current company won't be productizing can get get together with a few friends, rent a garage across the street, and build a company to develop the new stuff. So companies bud off new companies, doing somewhat different stuff, like yeast. And the opportunity to get in on the ground floor attracts many other skilled people who might not be as inventive, but still wnt to be some of those "few friends" of the inventors.
Sooner or later I will need a knee replacement. It would be nice to have a tissue one instead of metal and plastic.
I could use one now. I tore a meniscus in my knee a couple years ago, and it's healed as much as it will - which isn't enough. Surgery options only involve cutting it out (which leaves the bones rubbing each other) or replacing the whole joint (which is not only inferior but doesn't last as long a my current life expectancy).
Being able to drop in a replacement, grown from a printed scaffold of generic materials seeded with my own induced-pluripotent stem cells, would just fix it. (In fact it should fix it to be as good as it was decades ago, or maybe even better than it ever was.)
All [no standard] means is that websites will write their own version, some already have.
Indeed.
Also: In the race between weapons and armor, weapons always (eventually) win.
By creating a standard and getting the bulk of the "content providers" to adopt it, the WWWC creates a single big target that leads to breaking MOST of the DRM simultaneously. Meanwhile, content providers are left with the choice of getting behind the big target or being non-standard.
Which is fine: Like WEP, or a locked screen door, DRM won't protect things forever. But, like a "No Trespassing" sign, it DOES indicate INTENT forever. Intent of the content provider to limit access, and intent of the unauthorized content viewer to bypass that limit. That takes the "I didn't mean to do it." defence away, and gets any legal cases down to examining whether the poster of the No Trespassing sign had the right to limit the access and/or the crosser of the boundary had a right to obtain access.
They're already back. They're used in limb reattachment surgery post-operative treatment.
When limbs are reattached the arteries work well right away but the veins not so much. So they have poor circulation and inadequate oxygenation, especially at the finger and toe tips. This can lead to further cell death, infection, and transplant failure.
Leeches applied to the extremities of the limbs can pull out enough blood and bring in fresh to keep more cells alive and bring more infection-fighting white cells to the area. And leeches do little damage other than draining blood, and provide their own surgical tools and anaesthetic. (It's in their evolutionary interest to not bother the victim into pulling them off while they're feeding, and not leaving wounds that would make him tend to avoid the location later.) So raised-sterile leeches are used, with substantial improvement in reattachment success rates.
To pick up where renewables leave off, you want natural gas (or even petroleum) turbines that can quickly be brought on and off line.
Also: If you really are concerned about carbon dioxide, they produce a lot less of it per unit of energy.
In fossil fuels most of the energy comes from burning the hydrogen to water. Burning the carbon to carbon dioxide provides some, but it's mostly useful for packaging the hydrogen. Oil and gas is essentially long-chain-of-carbon molecules with two hydrogens per carbon and two more to cap the ends of the chain (with occasional tree-structures with the same carbon/hydrogen counts, and the odd ring-shaped or multiply-bonded impurity that''s short one or two pairs of hydrogens.)
So oil is a little over two hydrogens per carbon, gas goes from about 2.5 (butane) to 4 (methane). But coal is essentially just carbon. So gas is best, liquid oil fractions are not as good (though convenient for mobile engines), and coal is worst, on the energy/CO2 production ratio.
Coal is dead.... trying to resurrect something... dying [from] market forces... is [perjorative].
This isn't about trying to resuscitate the coal industry (though if it lets it run a little longer and die more smoothly - rather than being suddenly assassinated in a fit of political vitrual-signaling - it will let the miners and their offspring migrate to other jobs, rather than to government assistance.)
It's about killing off the massive, expensive, and intrusive regulatory infrastructure that no longer serves any purpose. If Big Coal IS being killed by market forces, the government needn't bother killing it off.
It also gives Trump the opportunity to keep a promise to some of his voting base, make political appearances claiming credit for it, and engage in some virtual-signaling of his own (conservative style).
Remember: He didn't promise to bring their jobs back (though if some of the jobs do come back, or existing ones not be ended as soon, it is a bonus). He promised to dismantle the regulations that had already killed jobs - and give a dose of job-killing medicine to the regulators.
I suspect schadenfreud will please his coal-state voters, and the prospect of voter revolts and sweeping reforms may make at least a few future regulators think twice before stomping jackbooted on the faces of those they regulate.
I wonder how much of this stuff is really leftover Adobe metadata and how much is components of malware?
With 20% to 40% of the code/data space of major applications composed of "along for the ride" data that's never interpreted, there's a LOT of room for malware to park itself, its redundant copies, its resources, and its purloined data without having to actually create files of its own.
Slashdot Mirror
... nowadays believing in facts is having a political position.
You need to capitalize the "f": "... believing in Facts is ..." The discussion has been religion-ized - not just politicized - for decades.
Each of the major sides of the discussion believes the other has faked data and promulgated falsehoods disguised as science. People convinced on either side are now beyond sceptical that any alleged scientific results that disagrees with their own paradigm is not more of the same.
It's now going to take decades of actual, OPEN, REPRODUCIBLE research for climate scientists to reestablish enough credibility to convince any significant number of people to substantially change their views. By that time, if those claiming imminent doom are correct, it will be too late for convincing scientific results supporting their side to do any good.
Meanwhile, this process can't even START until "burn the heretic" epithets like "denier" have stopped - or been discredited and ridiculed into a toothless background hum.
... when the settled science of climate change ...
"settled science" is an oxymoron.
If you're using it, you already drank the kool aid.
I'm curious what it's using for an init system.
Perhaps this is partly in reaction to the migration of the major Linux distributions to systemd.
It is time to finally star holding engineers criminally and civilly liable, ...
Force them to chose between risking jail for a bug or being fired for not following the Pointy Haired Boss' instructions to skip the tetsting and get the damn thing delivered?
What a great idea. Put most of the engineers who would actually do what you want out of work and leave the field to those to dumb to notice or too psychopathic to care.
strcmp() has its own vulnerability. By sending a string without the terminating '\0' you make the strcmp() function read past the buffer.
Only if the string you are comparing it to, which was generated locally, is ALSO not null terminated.
Regardless, the right thing to do with strncmp() is to use either the proper number of digits for the hash (which you can also expect to get with strlen(computed_hash)) or the size of the buffer that received the response.
That's indeed the correct solution.
But he also could have used strncmp() properly. The strn*() routines' N argument is primarily to keep the routines from overrunning buffers (secondarily look at a subset of a string). So N should have been the expected number of characters for the hash:
strncmp(computed_hash, response, 32) // (Or a suitable manifest constant.)
Just taking the string length from the good string, instead of the argument, would work, too:
strncmp(computed_hash, response, strlen(computed_hash))
Or sizeof(the computed_hash buffer) - but for that one you have to watch out that you don't get the size of a pointer. That would also break it by only comparing the first few bytes (which would make it difficult, but not impossible, to exercise).
Plus the fact that anything in caves or underground has been actively interacting with the surface the entire time, while frozen microbes have been in stasis, unaffected by the passage of time, so that deadly plagues of the distant past, that we've long since lost resistance to, could be suddenly reintroduced.
I'm not all that worried about the revival of ancient diseases from melting permafrost wiping out all mammals, or even all humanity.
For starters, our ancestors already managed to survive them already. I'm far more concerned with the ongoing evolution of new diseases (such as ebola) in the portion of the biosphere that is actively evolving.
As for "not interacting" with the world in an ongoing way, frozen stuff from the far past is constantly being reintroduced as the melting ends of glaciers re-expose stuff that was frozen for millennia.
It may sound far-fetched, but it's possible. Anthrax spores are ridiculously hardy under natural conditions and can survive in their dormant state for years.
And it happens all the time, mostly outside the cities. Anthrax is also called "wool sorter's disease" and several other names. The spores are very hardy and can survive centuries of "ordinary' harsh environments. Changes in weather on a decade scale, which in "good years" bring vegetation and browsing animals to areas that are only intermittently fertile, can also bring an anthrax outbreak, resulting form an animal visit an infected site.
This is nothing new. It happens that it's currently a rare thing in the US (where it happens only a couple times a year - low compared to 16 cases of Bubonic Plague in 2015) and Northern Europe. But country folk are aware of it and take precautions. Anthrax, though very serious, is susceptible to antibiotics. The common form of the infection is a characteristic skin lesion (from a spore carried into a skin break), which is easy to diagnose and relatively benign (i.e. only one-in-five die if not treated, as opposed to about half WITH treatment for a Respiratory (inhaled spore) case, or a quarter to two-thirds for gastrointestinal (ate contaminated vegies or diseased meat).
(I heard of one case - not sure if it was anthrax or another long-term spore-forming disease - where someone doing a major cleanup of a historic house where people with the disease had been treated decades before - was apparently exposed when scraping the dirt out from between the cracks of the floorboards.)
Because it's almost unheard of in cities it's a great opportunity for global-warming alarmists to gin up another panic, now that they've got a case they can blame on melting ice. If they can get that meme going they can then yell about global warming at each good-weather outbreak - which means several times a year.
With the next couple of years, we will see the transportation sector drop in emissions, a great deal.
As it has over the past decades.
But measured by the "carbon emitted per unit fuel burned" it still won't change at all - until NO vehicle burns fuel and the measurement blows up by doing a divide by zero.
Engines are more efficient and mileage is greater. Some of the fleet is being switched over to electricity, which doesn't emit any carbon from fuel - at least at the vehicle. More of it is running lower-carbon-per-unit-energy fuel, such as natural gas.
Also: Hybrids are recycling energy from stopping, declerating, or going down hills, using it to replace energy from burning fuel when starting, accelerating, or going up hills.
Actually, it isn't a retarded measure, you just need to understand what it is sayig. Basically it says that our advances in internal combustion technology have made a negligible difference in the amount of carbon emitted while burning petroleum products, or in application terms, technology woun't make petroleum based ICEs much cleaner.
No it does not say that AT ALL.
What it says is that internal combustion engines don't sequester the carbon from the fuel. Essentially every bit of it is burned to carbon dioxide and emitted into the atmosphere.
The transportation sector has made LOTS of progress with respect to emitting less carbon per passenger mile or ton-mile of cargo (even though "carbon" is not the target of most of the improvements). Engines are more efficient and mileage is greater. Some of the fleet is being switched over to electricity, which doesn't emit any carbon from fuel - at least at the vehicle. More of it is running lower-carbon-per-unit-energy fuel, such as natural gas.
But if you insist on measuring carbon emission against unit-of-fuel-consumed, for any given fuel type you will NEVER see ANY CHANGE. A given amount of a given type of fuel will contain a given amount of carbon, and it will all be emitted as the fuel is used.
Nyah!
Turning it off in BIOS basically makes it brain dead.
It still loads the lower functions so it can do CPU uCode patch, PMC, and similar, but none of the application level stuff even boots up.
How do we KNOW that?
It's got the port open. If it's really off, why is it open? It's don't SOMETHING with it.
How do we know. for instamce, that turning it off in the BIOS doesn't just make it useless for the owner's IT organization, but still functional when, say, the NSA does the right "port knocking" or other secret-society ritual to tell it that it's time to let the spy in through the back door?
Can you show us the code, and tell us how to check if that's what's really loaded? No, you can't, can you?
It does not seem that long ago when commercial use, fund raising, and advertising were prohibited uses of the internet. When the net was opened up to commercial activity, is when everything started to go downhill rapidly. Then politicians figured out it was a tool for social control, surveillance, and censorship.
Thank Al Gore for that.
His contribution to the Internet was legislation to open it to commercial activity. This was enabling for giving access to the general population for all sorts of uses, rather than restricting it to people with connections to large universities, the military, and companies working on networking technology (such as Xerox and AT&T). But it also legalized unsolicited commercial email.
So what Al Gore did was legalize spam.
What's the big deal? Just turn it off in the BIOS.
Then how do you know it's really off?
Also: I see to recall documents that said it didn't turn off. Instead it went back to the new-machine configuration, where it would respond to the first comer with adequate credentials to introduce itself as the IT department of its new owner, just getting around to welcoming it to the network and givig it its first configuration.
Isn't that about how log I've been griping on Slashdot about AMT?
But will ego-boost add enough delta-v for a trip?
If the ("Impossible" "reactionless") EM drive proves to provide real delta-v for making ongoing orbital mechanics alterations (rather than being a test methodology error), it has been estimated it could be used to make the Earth-to-Mars trip in 70 days. That could put Mars within reach within 8 years.
The tiny force involved (if it's real) would add up to a lot of motion over time - and you wouldn't have to haul along a lot of fuel to be expended - and thus mostly used for hauling fuel.
There was supposed to be a six-month "does it really do this?" orbital test in progress or Real Soon Now. So we should know soon.
So if this works and Trump's ego can get it deployed in time, then, yes, ego-boost WOULD add enough delta-v for a trip. B-)
When I got to college I was able to sneak into a lab and use an ASR33 teletype on the Telex network to remotely log on to Dartmouth to use BASIC.
At my own school it was cards in a window, come back later for the printed output. And you'd better have an account that paid for it.
Didn't really get to 'cut my hacker teeth' until my sophomore year, when some oddball ins-and-outs of contract financing left me with a student job where I had, a couple times a day, the remainder of a one-hour time slot with my work on the machine done, blocked waiting for the other department to do my output's tape-to-print, and a mainframe computer all to my self, on which I could do what I wanted while waiting for the results of the real work (or compile attempt) to be printed.
(What I did with it was talk the hardware tech into getting the paper tape I/O working, then bootstrap up a card-image editor, from scratch, on paper tape, to where it could emulate the Dartmouth BASIC environment - with Fortan on card-deck images in RAM or on a tape library - including the RUN command; Once that was working I'd get one compile/debug turnaround per three-to-five minutes, for a couple hours rather than two per day. This ended up with the lab management impressed and me reassigned to be in charge of the OS, library, and doing much of the lab's software.)
There is a reason that American teenagers aren't working in orchards... if growers paid enough to get teens to take the jobs, nobody would be able to afford fruit.
No. The reason is that the laws (child labor, working conditions) make it impossible for them to use teenagers any more.
Meanwhile the illegals can't complain about working conditions - and will work for less than minimum wage in (those occupations where it applies.)
US citizens needn't apply because they can't compete. (Even if they were willing to work for sub-legal prices and/or in sub-legal conditions, the employer can't risk that they might turn around and demand the missing money or compensation for the conditions.) The illegals, meanwhile, can afford to work that cheaply because social programs can pay for much of the support of them and their families - turning programs intended to help the poor into subsidies for their employers.
Meanwhile, the government's non-enforcement of the laws against the illegals working means that, in highly competitive markets (such as construction contracting), employers are left with a Hobson's choice: Use illegal labor and be competitive, or try to use legal labor and go out of business.
Most employment agreements are such that the company owns it even if it is outside of normal hours. So inventions you come up with on your own time are not yours.
And one of the key reasons Silicon Valley grew up in California is a law that, in effect, says:
- As a matter of the state's compelling interest:
- If you invent something
- on your own time and not using company resources
- and it's not in the company's current or expected immediate future business plan
- you own it
- regardless of what your employment contract says
- and employment contracts have to include a notice of this.
Result: People who invent neat stuff their current company won't be productizing can get get together with a few friends, rent a garage across the street, and build a company to develop the new stuff. So companies bud off new companies, doing somewhat different stuff, like yeast. And the opportunity to get in on the ground floor attracts many other skilled people who might not be as inventive, but still wnt to be some of those "few friends" of the inventors.
Sooner or later I will need a knee replacement. It would be nice to have a tissue one instead of metal and plastic.
I could use one now. I tore a meniscus in my knee a couple years ago, and it's healed as much as it will - which isn't enough. Surgery options only involve cutting it out (which leaves the bones rubbing each other) or replacing the whole joint (which is not only inferior but doesn't last as long a my current life expectancy).
Being able to drop in a replacement, grown from a printed scaffold of generic materials seeded with my own induced-pluripotent stem cells, would just fix it. (In fact it should fix it to be as good as it was decades ago, or maybe even better than it ever was.)
All [no standard] means is that websites will write their own version, some already have.
Indeed.
Also: In the race between weapons and armor, weapons always (eventually) win.
By creating a standard and getting the bulk of the "content providers" to adopt it, the WWWC creates a single big target that leads to breaking MOST of the DRM simultaneously. Meanwhile, content providers are left with the choice of getting behind the big target or being non-standard.
Which is fine: Like WEP, or a locked screen door, DRM won't protect things forever. But, like a "No Trespassing" sign, it DOES indicate INTENT forever. Intent of the content provider to limit access, and intent of the unauthorized content viewer to bypass that limit. That takes the "I didn't mean to do it." defence away, and gets any legal cases down to examining whether the poster of the No Trespassing sign had the right to limit the access and/or the crosser of the boundary had a right to obtain access.
When will Trump bring back leeching?
They're already back. They're used in limb reattachment surgery post-operative treatment.
When limbs are reattached the arteries work well right away but the veins not so much. So they have poor circulation and inadequate oxygenation, especially at the finger and toe tips. This can lead to further cell death, infection, and transplant failure.
Leeches applied to the extremities of the limbs can pull out enough blood and bring in fresh to keep more cells alive and bring more infection-fighting white cells to the area. And leeches do little damage other than draining blood, and provide their own surgical tools and anaesthetic. (It's in their evolutionary interest to not bother the victim into pulling them off while they're feeding, and not leaving wounds that would make him tend to avoid the location later.) So raised-sterile leeches are used, with substantial improvement in reattachment success rates.
To pick up where renewables leave off, you want natural gas (or even petroleum) turbines that can quickly be brought on and off line.
Also: If you really are concerned about carbon dioxide, they produce a lot less of it per unit of energy.
In fossil fuels most of the energy comes from burning the hydrogen to water. Burning the carbon to carbon dioxide provides some, but it's mostly useful for packaging the hydrogen. Oil and gas is essentially long-chain-of-carbon molecules with two hydrogens per carbon and two more to cap the ends of the chain (with occasional tree-structures with the same carbon/hydrogen counts, and the odd ring-shaped or multiply-bonded impurity that''s short one or two pairs of hydrogens.)
So oil is a little over two hydrogens per carbon, gas goes from about 2.5 (butane) to 4 (methane). But coal is essentially just carbon. So gas is best, liquid oil fractions are not as good (though convenient for mobile engines), and coal is worst, on the energy/CO2 production ratio.
Coal is dead. ... trying to resurrect something ... dying [from] market forces ... is [perjorative].
This isn't about trying to resuscitate the coal industry (though if it lets it run a little longer and die more smoothly - rather than being suddenly assassinated in a fit of political vitrual-signaling - it will let the miners and their offspring migrate to other jobs, rather than to government assistance.)
It's about killing off the massive, expensive, and intrusive regulatory infrastructure that no longer serves any purpose.
If Big Coal IS being killed by market forces, the government needn't bother killing it off.
It also gives Trump the opportunity to keep a promise to some of his voting base, make political appearances claiming credit for it, and engage in some virtual-signaling of his own (conservative style).
Remember: He didn't promise to bring their jobs back (though if some of the jobs do come back, or existing ones not be ended as soon, it is a bonus). He promised to dismantle the regulations that had already killed jobs - and give a dose of job-killing medicine to the regulators.
I suspect schadenfreud will please his coal-state voters, and the prospect of voter revolts and sweeping reforms may make at least a few future regulators think twice before stomping jackbooted on the faces of those they regulate.
I wonder how much of this stuff is really leftover Adobe metadata and how much is components of malware?
With 20% to 40% of the code/data space of major applications composed of "along for the ride" data that's never interpreted, there's a LOT of room for malware to park itself, its redundant copies, its resources, and its purloined data without having to actually create files of its own.