There's a lot of wiggle room in that phrase. The first is the 'well regulated' part. At the time the constitution was written, 'regulated' meant more or less the same as 'efficient' (as in, a well-regulated machine is one that runs well). The second is that most militias were fairly informal in times of peace and were, often, more of a deterrent than an actual force. Native tribes would be less inclined to attack if everyone in a town owned a gun, and the fledgeling Federal government would be less inclined to send representatives to try to enforce overbearing laws if they'd run into an armed militia (even in theory).
That said, if you want to reduce gun ownership in the USA, then the easiest (and completely legal) tactic would be to class all gun owners as members of a militia and call them up at random to fight in whatever foreign wars are going on at any given time. I bet gun ownership would drop off pretty quickly if people realised that owning a gun meant that they might actually have to be somewhere that people would shoot at them...
Perhaps more importantly, XP hasn't received security fixes for ages. It's irresponsible to be encouraging people to use an OS that's known to be insecure and will never be fixed to connect to the Internet.
Compulsory license in the US applies only to covers: you can't prevent someone else from recording a cover of your song, and paying to a fixed royalty, but there is no compulsory licensing for recordings. You can't use a recording of someone's performance without permission, except as permitted by fair use or an explicit license.
Where does the $50k number come from? It's not like these are ads paid for by a cheque signed by Mr V. Putin Esq. Money laundering is a growth industry in Russia, and creating US organisations that can pay for things using money from Russia isn't exactly hard.
Nope, that's the visible part. The whole point of Facebook is psychological manipulation. The site exists both to collect the data to build psychological profiles that can be used for manipulation and to deliver the messages designed for such manipulation. Advertising is simply the most benign use for this.
Even of the ones they got right, they weren't very right. For example, crop dusters are increasingly being replaced by drones (which can fly lower safely), rather than by big companies using the same tech (as they predict). Newspapers, as you say, don't seem to have gone anywhere, though the online editions are more popular than ever. I'd disagree on used bookstores: any time I travel in the English-speaking world, I pop into a used bookstore to find something to read, and I've not noticed a decline here. There are still a lot of them about and given the recent statistics on the decline in popularity of eBooks, I don't think they're going away any time soon. If anything, telemarketing seems to be on the increase, with cheap VoIP systems making it easy to run a callcenter in India and robodial anyone in the world. Coin-operated arcades are still around. As you say, most of them had already closed 10 years ago, but I've not seen any close since then and I have seen newer ones open.
Google then forked only the WebCore component of Webkit because they wanted to support sandboxing
Except that Google supported sandboxing in a crappy way. Apple implemented sandboxing in WebKit, so every application that uses WebKit gets the benefit. For example, when you view an HTML email in Apple Mail, it's rendered in a separate process that has no network or filesystem access, and the changes to enable this amount to about 4 lines of code (basically, opt into this behaviour and promise that you won't use any of the deprecated APIs that it breaks). In contrast, Chrome puts the sandboxing in the browser, so anyone using Blink has to implement their own sandboxing layer.
If you put the vowels in the top row, aeiou, and then the rest of the letters in alphabetical order, then you'd have a much more efficient code and one that was only marginally harder to remember.
I'd not come across that before, but it's a pretty poor code. In English, the frequency of the letter e is 12.7%, yet it's 6 taps in that code. In contrast, f is only 2.2%, yet is 3 taps. The five most common letters in English are (in order) e, t, a, o, i. In tap code, they are 6, 8, 1, 7, and 6 taps: of the five most common letters, only one requires fewer than the average number of taps. In contrast, in Morse, they are 1, 1, 2, 3, and 2 taps.
The secret is to figure out why a terrorist is terrorising, and tackle their grievances (perceived or otherwise). This is how the Brits severely curtailed the IRA, for example.
The IRA was largely curtailed by a huge effort from the intelligence services to compromise members of IRA cells. The extent of this is only now being declassified: huge numbers of IRA members were caught and then released as moles, reporting back on the actions of the other members. The IRA was vulnerable to this kind of attack because it was a fairly well organised group. The current crop of terrorists seem to mostly be people who read something on the Internet and decided to go on a killing spree. That's far harder to combat.
If you want to fight tyranny then the biggest thing that you need to prevent is centralised (government, private, or corporate) control over distribution of information. Keeping small arms in circulation doesn't appear to do anything to prevent this.
Outlawing guns in an area that has wide open borders with no customs or other security checks and is directly adjacent to areas where guns are readily available makes no sense. You might want to compare areas of Europe rather than making an argument that's akin to saying 'look, we made a no-pissing end of the swimming pool, but it's still full of piss, non-pissing swimming pools can't possibly work!'
Why? The CPU that our project uses was originally designed by a single PhD student. With modern HDLs, it's entirely plausible for a single person to design a CPU (if you want to do more than simulate it in software or an FPGA, you need to spend a lot of money, but that's irrelevant to learning how to design one). The RISC-V hardware mailing list seems to have people producing new implementations almost every week.
A simple in-order pipeline is pretty easy. Things get harder when you want to make it superscalar (register renaming is hard, as is parallel decode if you have a variable-length instruction encoding), or if you want to support all of IEEE floating point.
Physical security doesn't always help. I did some consulting for a company a while ago that kept its customer database on a USB stick and only plugged it into a (non-networked) machine whenever it was actually useful. Pretty good security, right up until one of their directors decided he wanted to set up a competing company and walked off with the USB drive. It took about a year of lawsuits to get it back and cost a lot of reputation. The only plus side was that no one wanted to do business with the new company that all of the potential customers knew was founded by someone who was willing to steal data (not a great idea when your main product is secure storage of data).
The CEO is quite correct here: breaches happen all of the time, but that's what makes the Equifax disaster such a sign of obvious incompetence. Good security involves a lot of defence in depth, diversity, and compartmentalisation. Access from the front end should have been rate limited and the IDS should have spotted unusual access patterns (i.e. dumping the entire DB, rather than just requesting random records). Systems that expect to come under attack use different technologies for a subset of the data. Verisign's root DNS servers are a good public example of this kind of architecture: they run Linux and FreeBSD and three different DNS servers. If you want to take down their root, you need an application-level compromise for all three DNS servers and a privilege-escalation vulnerability on both operating systems. Similarly, Amazon uses a load of different versions of Xen and Linux kernels (with security back-ports) for AWS, so if someone finds a vulnerability in Xen then it has to be a long-lived one, because if it was introduced recently then they'll have at least some nodes that aren't affected and can quickly shift all of their VMs over to those while they deploy patches (although that didn't stop one of my colleagues accidentally crashing one of their data centres: it turns out if a VM does something that crashes the hypervisor, it's a really bad idea for fault tolerance infrastructure to restart the VM on another node, and another, and another, until the entire system is down. They've fixed that now). There are well-known best practices for this kind of high-value system and Equifax didn't follow them.
The occupation of Germany by the allies didn't officially end until 1990. Until that point, at least nominally, the US had the legal authority to tell all of the elected German leaders to go home and institute direct rule from Washington DC.
And here you highlight the main danger of this kind of approach: even if you agree with banning hate speech in principle, you are inevitably going to end up in a situation where there is selective enforcement, and that gives far more power to the people who get to choose what to enforce than anyone should be comfortable with a select group wielding.
CFL light bulb was a stupid stop gap measure launched by panicking manufacturer
CFLs were common long before the bans came in. I switched to using them when the cost dropped below the point where they saved enough electricity in a month that they had a lower TCO than free incandescents, even if they lasted only a month. About five years later, incandescents were banned. At that point, about half of the first set of CFLs I'd bought had died and I'd saved well over an order of magnitude more on my electricity bill than I'd spent on CFLs in total.
Easy fix: earmark the money. All revenue from gasoline taxes must be invested in providing charging stations for electric vehicles and never hits the general budget.
Would you, by any chance, have a reference to a reliable source for this figure?
I don't have the original source for the number. I heard it in a Royal Institution Christmas Lecture Series ('Faraday Lecture') about 15-20 years ago. The fingerprinting technology may have improved since then, though given how long it takes before a new technique can be approved for use in court, I'd be surprised if it's much different.
When I think of a planet that has much less sunlight than Earth, a thin atmosphere, ultra-fine sand, and 100km/h winds, I don't really think of anywhere on Earth as being similar enough to usefully simulate the conditions.
In some states, that's actually a pretty recent right. For example, in Texas oral sex was covered under the sodomy laws, which were only overturned by a supreme court ruling in 2003 - and even that wasn't a unanimous ruling (6:3). This ruling also had the effect of overturning similar laws in 13 other states. 25 states in total had laws banning oral sex up until the '80s or later.
So, while the people of the USA may be free to suck cocks today, they've had that freedom universally for less time than a number of other rights, such as the end of segregation or universal suffrage.
just like back in the 80s if their VCR flashed "12:00AM" continuously
That doesn't mean that you're an idiot, it can just mean that you're lazy. It's been over a decade since I last had a power cut at home, but in the '80s we'd have at least a brief (under 5 minutes) one every few weeks and the VCR didn't have battery backup for its clock. We'd typically only bother to reset it when we wanted to use the timer record facility.
Ikea ones are pretty easy to follow. We bought a new house about a year ago and did a lot of flatpack assembly. The Ikea directions were in a completely different league to companies like Homebase / Argos (same company now), Wilko, and B&Q. Each step was clear and the diagrams always let you easily see which orientation almost-symmetrical pieces should go and so on. In contrast, every other manufacturer's directions left me swearing.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a lot of wiggle room in that phrase. The first is the 'well regulated' part. At the time the constitution was written, 'regulated' meant more or less the same as 'efficient' (as in, a well-regulated machine is one that runs well). The second is that most militias were fairly informal in times of peace and were, often, more of a deterrent than an actual force. Native tribes would be less inclined to attack if everyone in a town owned a gun, and the fledgeling Federal government would be less inclined to send representatives to try to enforce overbearing laws if they'd run into an armed militia (even in theory).
That said, if you want to reduce gun ownership in the USA, then the easiest (and completely legal) tactic would be to class all gun owners as members of a militia and call them up at random to fight in whatever foreign wars are going on at any given time. I bet gun ownership would drop off pretty quickly if people realised that owning a gun meant that they might actually have to be somewhere that people would shoot at them...
Perhaps more importantly, XP hasn't received security fixes for ages. It's irresponsible to be encouraging people to use an OS that's known to be insecure and will never be fixed to connect to the Internet.
Compulsory license in the US applies only to covers: you can't prevent someone else from recording a cover of your song, and paying to a fixed royalty, but there is no compulsory licensing for recordings. You can't use a recording of someone's performance without permission, except as permitted by fair use or an explicit license.
Where does the $50k number come from? It's not like these are ads paid for by a cheque signed by Mr V. Putin Esq. Money laundering is a growth industry in Russia, and creating US organisations that can pay for things using money from Russia isn't exactly hard.
Not really - the whole point of Facebook is ads
Nope, that's the visible part. The whole point of Facebook is psychological manipulation. The site exists both to collect the data to build psychological profiles that can be used for manipulation and to deliver the messages designed for such manipulation. Advertising is simply the most benign use for this.
Disk Utility is mostly a very thin wrapper around diskutil, so there's a good chance that this is a bug in the underlying frameworks, not the GUI.
Even of the ones they got right, they weren't very right. For example, crop dusters are increasingly being replaced by drones (which can fly lower safely), rather than by big companies using the same tech (as they predict). Newspapers, as you say, don't seem to have gone anywhere, though the online editions are more popular than ever. I'd disagree on used bookstores: any time I travel in the English-speaking world, I pop into a used bookstore to find something to read, and I've not noticed a decline here. There are still a lot of them about and given the recent statistics on the decline in popularity of eBooks, I don't think they're going away any time soon. If anything, telemarketing seems to be on the increase, with cheap VoIP systems making it easy to run a callcenter in India and robodial anyone in the world. Coin-operated arcades are still around. As you say, most of them had already closed 10 years ago, but I've not seen any close since then and I have seen newer ones open.
Google then forked only the WebCore component of Webkit because they wanted to support sandboxing
Except that Google supported sandboxing in a crappy way. Apple implemented sandboxing in WebKit, so every application that uses WebKit gets the benefit. For example, when you view an HTML email in Apple Mail, it's rendered in a separate process that has no network or filesystem access, and the changes to enable this amount to about 4 lines of code (basically, opt into this behaviour and promise that you won't use any of the deprecated APIs that it breaks). In contrast, Chrome puts the sandboxing in the browser, so anyone using Blink has to implement their own sandboxing layer.
If you put the vowels in the top row, aeiou, and then the rest of the letters in alphabetical order, then you'd have a much more efficient code and one that was only marginally harder to remember.
I'd not come across that before, but it's a pretty poor code. In English, the frequency of the letter e is 12.7%, yet it's 6 taps in that code. In contrast, f is only 2.2%, yet is 3 taps. The five most common letters in English are (in order) e, t, a, o, i. In tap code, they are 6, 8, 1, 7, and 6 taps: of the five most common letters, only one requires fewer than the average number of taps. In contrast, in Morse, they are 1, 1, 2, 3, and 2 taps.
The secret is to figure out why a terrorist is terrorising, and tackle their grievances (perceived or otherwise). This is how the Brits severely curtailed the IRA, for example.
The IRA was largely curtailed by a huge effort from the intelligence services to compromise members of IRA cells. The extent of this is only now being declassified: huge numbers of IRA members were caught and then released as moles, reporting back on the actions of the other members. The IRA was vulnerable to this kind of attack because it was a fairly well organised group. The current crop of terrorists seem to mostly be people who read something on the Internet and decided to go on a killing spree. That's far harder to combat.
If you want to fight tyranny then the biggest thing that you need to prevent is centralised (government, private, or corporate) control over distribution of information. Keeping small arms in circulation doesn't appear to do anything to prevent this.
Outlawing guns in an area that has wide open borders with no customs or other security checks and is directly adjacent to areas where guns are readily available makes no sense. You might want to compare areas of Europe rather than making an argument that's akin to saying 'look, we made a no-pissing end of the swimming pool, but it's still full of piss, non-pissing swimming pools can't possibly work!'
Why? The CPU that our project uses was originally designed by a single PhD student. With modern HDLs, it's entirely plausible for a single person to design a CPU (if you want to do more than simulate it in software or an FPGA, you need to spend a lot of money, but that's irrelevant to learning how to design one). The RISC-V hardware mailing list seems to have people producing new implementations almost every week.
A simple in-order pipeline is pretty easy. Things get harder when you want to make it superscalar (register renaming is hard, as is parallel decode if you have a variable-length instruction encoding), or if you want to support all of IEEE floating point.
Physical security doesn't always help. I did some consulting for a company a while ago that kept its customer database on a USB stick and only plugged it into a (non-networked) machine whenever it was actually useful. Pretty good security, right up until one of their directors decided he wanted to set up a competing company and walked off with the USB drive. It took about a year of lawsuits to get it back and cost a lot of reputation. The only plus side was that no one wanted to do business with the new company that all of the potential customers knew was founded by someone who was willing to steal data (not a great idea when your main product is secure storage of data).
The CEO is quite correct here: breaches happen all of the time, but that's what makes the Equifax disaster such a sign of obvious incompetence. Good security involves a lot of defence in depth, diversity, and compartmentalisation. Access from the front end should have been rate limited and the IDS should have spotted unusual access patterns (i.e. dumping the entire DB, rather than just requesting random records). Systems that expect to come under attack use different technologies for a subset of the data. Verisign's root DNS servers are a good public example of this kind of architecture: they run Linux and FreeBSD and three different DNS servers. If you want to take down their root, you need an application-level compromise for all three DNS servers and a privilege-escalation vulnerability on both operating systems. Similarly, Amazon uses a load of different versions of Xen and Linux kernels (with security back-ports) for AWS, so if someone finds a vulnerability in Xen then it has to be a long-lived one, because if it was introduced recently then they'll have at least some nodes that aren't affected and can quickly shift all of their VMs over to those while they deploy patches (although that didn't stop one of my colleagues accidentally crashing one of their data centres: it turns out if a VM does something that crashes the hypervisor, it's a really bad idea for fault tolerance infrastructure to restart the VM on another node, and another, and another, until the entire system is down. They've fixed that now). There are well-known best practices for this kind of high-value system and Equifax didn't follow them.
Name one war that the USA has won, where they did not have the French as allies.
The occupation of Germany by the allies didn't officially end until 1990. Until that point, at least nominally, the US had the legal authority to tell all of the elected German leaders to go home and institute direct rule from Washington DC.
And here you highlight the main danger of this kind of approach: even if you agree with banning hate speech in principle, you are inevitably going to end up in a situation where there is selective enforcement, and that gives far more power to the people who get to choose what to enforce than anyone should be comfortable with a select group wielding.
CFL light bulb was a stupid stop gap measure launched by panicking manufacturer
CFLs were common long before the bans came in. I switched to using them when the cost dropped below the point where they saved enough electricity in a month that they had a lower TCO than free incandescents, even if they lasted only a month. About five years later, incandescents were banned. At that point, about half of the first set of CFLs I'd bought had died and I'd saved well over an order of magnitude more on my electricity bill than I'd spent on CFLs in total.
Easy fix: earmark the money. All revenue from gasoline taxes must be invested in providing charging stations for electric vehicles and never hits the general budget.
Would you, by any chance, have a reference to a reliable source for this figure?
I don't have the original source for the number. I heard it in a Royal Institution Christmas Lecture Series ('Faraday Lecture') about 15-20 years ago. The fingerprinting technology may have improved since then, though given how long it takes before a new technique can be approved for use in court, I'd be surprised if it's much different.
When I think of a planet that has much less sunlight than Earth, a thin atmosphere, ultra-fine sand, and 100km/h winds, I don't really think of anywhere on Earth as being similar enough to usefully simulate the conditions.
In some states, that's actually a pretty recent right. For example, in Texas oral sex was covered under the sodomy laws, which were only overturned by a supreme court ruling in 2003 - and even that wasn't a unanimous ruling (6:3). This ruling also had the effect of overturning similar laws in 13 other states. 25 states in total had laws banning oral sex up until the '80s or later.
So, while the people of the USA may be free to suck cocks today, they've had that freedom universally for less time than a number of other rights, such as the end of segregation or universal suffrage.
just like back in the 80s if their VCR flashed "12:00AM" continuously
That doesn't mean that you're an idiot, it can just mean that you're lazy. It's been over a decade since I last had a power cut at home, but in the '80s we'd have at least a brief (under 5 minutes) one every few weeks and the VCR didn't have battery backup for its clock. We'd typically only bother to reset it when we wanted to use the timer record facility.
Ikea ones are pretty easy to follow. We bought a new house about a year ago and did a lot of flatpack assembly. The Ikea directions were in a completely different league to companies like Homebase / Argos (same company now), Wilko, and B&Q. Each step was clear and the diagrams always let you easily see which orientation almost-symmetrical pieces should go and so on. In contrast, every other manufacturer's directions left me swearing.