It's not so clear cut. On the one hand, assembling things in a factory is likely to be largely automated and a lot cheaper than having people come out to assemble things. On the other hand, shipping flat-packed furniture is a lot more efficient than shipping pre-assembled furniture. That said, the limiting factor is often weight, not size, at least for the last leg of delivery. When I've had flat-packed furniture delivered, I've never seen the delivery lorry more than about a third full (often a lot less), but it has been close to the weight limit. Local delivery vans typically have a gross laden weight of 3.5t, which gives you around 2,500kg once you remove the weight of the vehicle and fuel (probably a bit less, but let's go with that as a round number. Wood is slightly less dense than water, but close enough that we can use that as an approximation. That gives 2.5 square metres of wood that you can carry in the back of one of these things. When it's densely packed, that's not going to fill more than about 20% of the space. Similar calculations apply to delivery lorries, so the only real savings are in warehouse space and long-distance shipping.
This makes sense in the US, where the electrical outlets seem carefully designed to maximise the chance of electrocution. It's monumentally stupid in the UK, where you can't access the live or neutral holes unless you push something of the correct size into the earth socket first. It turns out that the child safety covers can be turned upside down and inserted with just the earth pin to expose the other pins quite easily, at which point any small metal object can be used to touch the live connector.
That said, I managed to connect myself to the mains a few times as a child and it didn't seem to cause any lasting damage. You need to be pretty unlucky for it to flow in such a way that it will cause damage - touching the live pin with one hand and neutral with the other will do it, but that's not easy to arrange accidentally.
One in a million means that there are likely to be around 6,000 people in the world that can unlock your phone. Spread across the world, that's fine, but they're likely to be clustered geographically close to you because people typically migrate slowly and similar phenotypes are likely to be clustered - TFA shows the worst case of this: children of the same parents are often physically similar and many people live near relatives. In contrast, the distribution of fingerprints appears to be fairly uniform - siblings and even monozygotic twins often have completely different fingerprint patterns. This is the same problem as DNA 'fingerprinting'. Statistically, there are likely to be around 50 people in the UK who have the same DNA fingerprint, which seems like a good ratio for law enforcement, but they're similarly likely to be geographically clustered, so you may have 10-20 of them in the same city as the perpetrator, making the false positive rate very high.
Voting for Trump doesn't necessarily mean that they don't hate him, it can just mean that they hated Hilary more (or that they thought that Hilary would continue to boil the frog, whereas Trump might be so bad that there'd be a backlash in the next election).
Faceobook is kind of like the collective hive mind of America
Facebook is a complex tool designed for psychological manipulation. Its entire purpose is to build profiles of individuals that can identify the levers that can be used to influence their opinions and then sell access to those levers. Considering it as a passive entity is woefully naive.
Also in the news this morning, Russia is considering banning Facebook during their next election cycle. I guess they know a little bit about how much influence Facebook can have on an election outcome...
romulans warp technology so their ships could move at higher than sublight speeds (the original bird of preys were impulse only 'sub-like' patrol craft, as covered in... S3 of TOS
Season 1, Balance of Terror, but that episode was full of things that didn't make sense. Part of it was trying to show cold-war era audiences how advanced the modern weapons were by having them describe nuclear bombs as old, yet they still had a few of them on the Enterprise, in spite of having much more powerful (and stable) weapons. It also doesn't explain in any way how there could be a war between Earth and Romulus when the Romulans can only get a tiny fraction of the distance from their own star to the next one, yet the humans can easily get all of the way from Earth to Romulus (nor how you can even have a ship-to-ship battle that isn't totally one-sided when one side can travel faster than light and the other can't). In spite of various ship-to-ship battles, they manage to go the entire war without ever seeing a Romulan - or even recovering a Romulan corpse from a destroyed ship. No boarding actions, no attempts at invasion, yet apparently they were considered a scary enemy.
Finally, the entire premise of the episode - that they absolutely must catch the Romulans before they make it home because otherwise they'll launch a full-scale attack on the Federation makes no sense. Even if they did, it would be years before any Romulan war fleet made it anywhere near a Federation outpost, and at any point in this time the Federation could simply send half a dozen cruisers to drop out of warp, fire a bunch of photon torpedoes, and pop back into warp, as many times as required to destroy the fleet.
It's a recurring problem with SciFi that the writers often seem to have absolutely no sense of scale, but this episode was one of the worst in this regard. Subsequent writers have tried to fix this with various retcon shims, but short of simply pretending that it didn't happen at all, there's only so much that you can do...
I've read this a few times, yet never with any actual examples. What searches does DDG not give a good answer for? I've used it as my primary search engine for almost a decade now and occasionally use their !g or !b shortcuts to rerun a search with Google or Bing if they don't give me a useful result. In every single instance that I've tried, DDG has given me no results (or half a dozen), Google and Bing have both given me pages and pages of results that are completely irrelevant to my search term.
Really? I do a search for Target Pharmacy hours tomorrow. Duckduckgo gives me a page full of links - Google and Bing both give me an answer.
For this search, you're correct, but DDG launched their zero-click box a year or so before Google gained an equivalent. This shows a domain-specific answer (e.g. from Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, a calculator, a code search engine, GitHub, and so on) above the results.
For your specific search, I'm much rather have a link, because I don't know how accurate or how up-to-date Google's scraping of the page is, but I'm pretty confident that the retailer in question will have up-to-date opening hours on their own site.
That's why people like RMS don't like using the moniker IP to describe something
That's one of the reasons. The other is that using the term intellectual property implicitly accepts the idea that it makes sense to treat ideas as a form of property. (Good) Ideas are difficult to create, yet are free to copy, so this model isn't a very good fit and leads to all sorts of weird economic effects when you try. Imagine if Henry Ford had decided to give away cars for free, but to charge a lot for painting them and lobbied the government to require Ford paint on a car before it could be driven on the road. That's the situation we're currently in with most copyrighted goods: the producers do the expensive bit (creating the original) for free and then charge people for the trivial bit (making copies), and by using the term intellectual property, you're implicitly accepting that this is a model that makes sense.
That said, how the hell do you access an encrypted storage area without the key? This sounds like a major fail in design and not a "bug" in the usual sense
The keychain is a separate process. It decrypts your passwords on login and stores them in wired memory with a few flags on the binary that ensure that the OS won't let you attach debuggers and so on to exfiltrate the passwords and keys. It then uses Mach ports to communicate with other processes. The OS adds security headers to the Mach messages (extended versions of the ones that CMU Mach added) that allow the keychain daemon to identify the UID and the binaries of the application that's communicating with it. This also includes the OS-validated signatures of the application binary and all linked binaries. The Keychain daemon maintains an ACL internally that restricts access to the specific entries to specific programs.
I don't know the details of this attack, but there are a number of possibilities. The Mach IPC model doesn't fit very well with the UNIX fork/exec model (neither does the BeOS Binder used in Android) and is a likely source of vulnerabilities. There are a lot of potential confused deputy attacks that might work on this - tricking the keychain daemon into thinking it's talking to something like the Keychain Access app that is allowed to access all keychain entries.
It's also possible, though less likely, that he's found a way of spoofing the security headers on the Mach messages. I say this is less likely for two reasons: it would probably require a kernel-level exploit and it would also give a lot more access to everything (including a way of bypassing the sandboxing mechanisms and so on).
The Keychain API has quite a few issues with regard to security usability, but the biggest one is that it allows client applications to provide the keychain password, rather than requiring that the keychain daemon (or some other trusted process) prompt. This means that anyone who captures the login password can get complete access to the keychain, but also means that users can be trained to expect untrusted applications to ask for a password that grants them root access (it's the same password that sudo accepts, for example). Microsoft is a lot better about this, with UAC prompts always being given by the OS and using the control-alt-delete sequence to validate that they're real. Apple doesn't have anything like this - there's no way that the user can tell that a password prompt box is from the application that they think it is (and is going to be used in the way that they think).
Also the show is also congratulating itself for having the first ever openly gay characters on Star Trek, because movie Sulu doesn't count for reasons.
Sulu wasn't openly gay, but this is only true because Star Trek was cancelled. One of the scripts from season 4 involved a gay wedding.
Microsoft is increasingly competing with Google apps, yet they consistently play to their weaknesses in doing so. The big selling point for Microsoft should be that you install the software on your own machines, your corporate data never leaves your building. If you want to have cloudy reliability, then you can install Windows Server on a bunch of machines and use HyperV to virtualise them. Instead, they push running stuff on the Azure infrastructure with no migration plan if you want to take it in house, storing data on their servers, Windows 10 telemetry, and integration with one of the Internet's most annoying spammers.
Why does every main character *have*to be a minority woman?
I haven't seen the show, but I'm looking at the cast list. There are 13 actors that the studio considers to be 'main character' enough to warrant a mention. Of these four are women. So your complaint is that the male:female ratio is only 9:4 and you'd rather it were 11:2? 13:0? It's hard to tell the ethnicities of the characters from the black-and-white photos, but it looks as if 8 of them are white males, so is your complaint that only 60% of the main characters are white male?
I've been surprised before, mind you. The Battlestar Galactica remake looked like crap before its premiere too. But it pleasantly surprised me by being the best science fiction show since DS9
...right up until season 4, where it became clear that, although the Cylons had a plan, the writers didn't. Not content with that, it continued in a downward spiral, ending up with an even worse ending than DS9, something previously considered impossible for any science fiction show.
Then having them very religious with elaborate ceremonies just didn’t say warrior culture
I've not seen the show, but I read that they're meant to be an ostracised off-shoot of mainstream Klingon culture. Being unlike the mainstream would seem to fit pretty well there: Klingon Amish.
Part of that was pushback from professional institutions. A huge number of routine diagnoses could be better handled by a nurse and an expert system than by a doctor. Training that involves storing large quantities of data in your head would become less valuable, training that involved accurately differentiating different symptoms and telling when the patient was exaggerating or understating their symptoms would become a lot more valuable. Currently, the former is given to the best-paid people and the latter to the worst-paid in the medical professions.
VR also lacks much utility beyond games. AR is a lot more interesting. I was impressed by a few of the demos of the Microsoft HoloLens (and a similar device from a friend whose startup is producing a competing device), recognising people and surrounding them with metadata and action halos (e.g. send file to a person, exchange contact info, see their calendar to arrange a meeting) and keeping persistent visualisations in fixed locations (e.g. a copy of your to-do list on the fridge). The technology isn't there yet - they're too bulky and not yet high enough resolution - but there's nothing requiring major breakthroughs to achieve, just a few years of incremental improvement.
The definition of AI has been clear and unchanging for forty years or so now, since there were AI researchers using minis at several universities back in the 70s.
That's not really true. Back in the heyday of the MIT AI Labs, the Cyc Project and so on, researchers assumed that we were a decade or so away from producing machines that could reliably pass the Turing Test, using one of a dozen very promising looking approaches. By the early '90s, most of that had faded and most researchers moved away from using the term AI, because it associated them with the overhype of AI from the '70s and '80s and with science fiction. Terms like machine learning became more prevalent.
AI is to machine learning what cold fusion is to low-energy nuclear reactions.
Stallman has, once again, missed the most important thing when you want to ensure widespread adoption (of anything, an idea or a program): incremental adoption. Being able to run the same software on Windows and *NIX makes it very easy to swap out the underlying OS. When I stopped using Windows about 15 years ago, the first thing I did was gradually replace all of the Windows-only programs that I was using with portable applications. Once I'd done that, replacing Windows had almost no impact on my daily computer usage. For about the last six months, I was actually using XFree86 in full-screen mode on my desktop and running all of my desktop apps remotely on a separate FreeBSD machine.
On a plane, you sweat a lot because of the lower air pressure, but don't notice it. It's important to drink a lot of water to keep hydrated, but it's also important to replenish the salt that drinking all that water washes out of your systems. The spicy tomato juice cans have about 50% of your RDA of salt and are great for avoiding headaches after a long flight.
Oh, and gin and tonic is one of the few alcoholic beverages that tastes better at low air pressure.
I've only flown on a 787 once, but it's a huge improvement over any other standard-class flight I've been on. The higher pressure is really noticeable - I got about 4 hours of work done, and slept soundly for much of the rest of the time. Oh, and it was the only flight I've been on (including in business) where the skin on the lower halves of my legs didn't dry out and remain itchy for a week afterwards.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not so clear cut. On the one hand, assembling things in a factory is likely to be largely automated and a lot cheaper than having people come out to assemble things. On the other hand, shipping flat-packed furniture is a lot more efficient than shipping pre-assembled furniture. That said, the limiting factor is often weight, not size, at least for the last leg of delivery. When I've had flat-packed furniture delivered, I've never seen the delivery lorry more than about a third full (often a lot less), but it has been close to the weight limit. Local delivery vans typically have a gross laden weight of 3.5t, which gives you around 2,500kg once you remove the weight of the vehicle and fuel (probably a bit less, but let's go with that as a round number. Wood is slightly less dense than water, but close enough that we can use that as an approximation. That gives 2.5 square metres of wood that you can carry in the back of one of these things. When it's densely packed, that's not going to fill more than about 20% of the space. Similar calculations apply to delivery lorries, so the only real savings are in warehouse space and long-distance shipping.
This makes sense in the US, where the electrical outlets seem carefully designed to maximise the chance of electrocution. It's monumentally stupid in the UK, where you can't access the live or neutral holes unless you push something of the correct size into the earth socket first. It turns out that the child safety covers can be turned upside down and inserted with just the earth pin to expose the other pins quite easily, at which point any small metal object can be used to touch the live connector.
That said, I managed to connect myself to the mains a few times as a child and it didn't seem to cause any lasting damage. You need to be pretty unlucky for it to flow in such a way that it will cause damage - touching the live pin with one hand and neutral with the other will do it, but that's not easy to arrange accidentally.
One in a million means that there are likely to be around 6,000 people in the world that can unlock your phone. Spread across the world, that's fine, but they're likely to be clustered geographically close to you because people typically migrate slowly and similar phenotypes are likely to be clustered - TFA shows the worst case of this: children of the same parents are often physically similar and many people live near relatives. In contrast, the distribution of fingerprints appears to be fairly uniform - siblings and even monozygotic twins often have completely different fingerprint patterns. This is the same problem as DNA 'fingerprinting'. Statistically, there are likely to be around 50 people in the UK who have the same DNA fingerprint, which seems like a good ratio for law enforcement, but they're similarly likely to be geographically clustered, so you may have 10-20 of them in the same city as the perpetrator, making the false positive rate very high.
Voting for Trump doesn't necessarily mean that they don't hate him, it can just mean that they hated Hilary more (or that they thought that Hilary would continue to boil the frog, whereas Trump might be so bad that there'd be a backlash in the next election).
Faceobook is kind of like the collective hive mind of America
Facebook is a complex tool designed for psychological manipulation. Its entire purpose is to build profiles of individuals that can identify the levers that can be used to influence their opinions and then sell access to those levers. Considering it as a passive entity is woefully naive.
Also in the news this morning, Russia is considering banning Facebook during their next election cycle. I guess they know a little bit about how much influence Facebook can have on an election outcome...
romulans warp technology so their ships could move at higher than sublight speeds (the original bird of preys were impulse only 'sub-like' patrol craft, as covered in... S3 of TOS
Season 1, Balance of Terror, but that episode was full of things that didn't make sense. Part of it was trying to show cold-war era audiences how advanced the modern weapons were by having them describe nuclear bombs as old, yet they still had a few of them on the Enterprise, in spite of having much more powerful (and stable) weapons. It also doesn't explain in any way how there could be a war between Earth and Romulus when the Romulans can only get a tiny fraction of the distance from their own star to the next one, yet the humans can easily get all of the way from Earth to Romulus (nor how you can even have a ship-to-ship battle that isn't totally one-sided when one side can travel faster than light and the other can't). In spite of various ship-to-ship battles, they manage to go the entire war without ever seeing a Romulan - or even recovering a Romulan corpse from a destroyed ship. No boarding actions, no attempts at invasion, yet apparently they were considered a scary enemy.
Finally, the entire premise of the episode - that they absolutely must catch the Romulans before they make it home because otherwise they'll launch a full-scale attack on the Federation makes no sense. Even if they did, it would be years before any Romulan war fleet made it anywhere near a Federation outpost, and at any point in this time the Federation could simply send half a dozen cruisers to drop out of warp, fire a bunch of photon torpedoes, and pop back into warp, as many times as required to destroy the fleet.
It's a recurring problem with SciFi that the writers often seem to have absolutely no sense of scale, but this episode was one of the worst in this regard. Subsequent writers have tried to fix this with various retcon shims, but short of simply pretending that it didn't happen at all, there's only so much that you can do...
No even slightly competent science advisor got anywhere near these plot lines.
So, you're saying that it respects established Star Trek canon?
I've read this a few times, yet never with any actual examples. What searches does DDG not give a good answer for? I've used it as my primary search engine for almost a decade now and occasionally use their !g or !b shortcuts to rerun a search with Google or Bing if they don't give me a useful result. In every single instance that I've tried, DDG has given me no results (or half a dozen), Google and Bing have both given me pages and pages of results that are completely irrelevant to my search term.
Really? I do a search for Target Pharmacy hours tomorrow. Duckduckgo gives me a page full of links - Google and Bing both give me an answer.
For this search, you're correct, but DDG launched their zero-click box a year or so before Google gained an equivalent. This shows a domain-specific answer (e.g. from Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, a calculator, a code search engine, GitHub, and so on) above the results.
For your specific search, I'm much rather have a link, because I don't know how accurate or how up-to-date Google's scraping of the page is, but I'm pretty confident that the retailer in question will have up-to-date opening hours on their own site.
That's why people like RMS don't like using the moniker IP to describe something
That's one of the reasons. The other is that using the term intellectual property implicitly accepts the idea that it makes sense to treat ideas as a form of property. (Good) Ideas are difficult to create, yet are free to copy, so this model isn't a very good fit and leads to all sorts of weird economic effects when you try. Imagine if Henry Ford had decided to give away cars for free, but to charge a lot for painting them and lobbied the government to require Ford paint on a car before it could be driven on the road. That's the situation we're currently in with most copyrighted goods: the producers do the expensive bit (creating the original) for free and then charge people for the trivial bit (making copies), and by using the term intellectual property, you're implicitly accepting that this is a model that makes sense.
That said, how the hell do you access an encrypted storage area without the key? This sounds like a major fail in design and not a "bug" in the usual sense
The keychain is a separate process. It decrypts your passwords on login and stores them in wired memory with a few flags on the binary that ensure that the OS won't let you attach debuggers and so on to exfiltrate the passwords and keys. It then uses Mach ports to communicate with other processes. The OS adds security headers to the Mach messages (extended versions of the ones that CMU Mach added) that allow the keychain daemon to identify the UID and the binaries of the application that's communicating with it. This also includes the OS-validated signatures of the application binary and all linked binaries. The Keychain daemon maintains an ACL internally that restricts access to the specific entries to specific programs.
I don't know the details of this attack, but there are a number of possibilities. The Mach IPC model doesn't fit very well with the UNIX fork/exec model (neither does the BeOS Binder used in Android) and is a likely source of vulnerabilities. There are a lot of potential confused deputy attacks that might work on this - tricking the keychain daemon into thinking it's talking to something like the Keychain Access app that is allowed to access all keychain entries.
It's also possible, though less likely, that he's found a way of spoofing the security headers on the Mach messages. I say this is less likely for two reasons: it would probably require a kernel-level exploit and it would also give a lot more access to everything (including a way of bypassing the sandboxing mechanisms and so on).
The Keychain API has quite a few issues with regard to security usability, but the biggest one is that it allows client applications to provide the keychain password, rather than requiring that the keychain daemon (or some other trusted process) prompt. This means that anyone who captures the login password can get complete access to the keychain, but also means that users can be trained to expect untrusted applications to ask for a password that grants them root access (it's the same password that sudo accepts, for example). Microsoft is a lot better about this, with UAC prompts always being given by the OS and using the control-alt-delete sequence to validate that they're real. Apple doesn't have anything like this - there's no way that the user can tell that a password prompt box is from the application that they think it is (and is going to be used in the way that they think).
Also the show is also congratulating itself for having the first ever openly gay characters on Star Trek, because movie Sulu doesn't count for reasons.
Sulu wasn't openly gay, but this is only true because Star Trek was cancelled. One of the scripts from season 4 involved a gay wedding.
Microsoft is increasingly competing with Google apps, yet they consistently play to their weaknesses in doing so. The big selling point for Microsoft should be that you install the software on your own machines, your corporate data never leaves your building. If you want to have cloudy reliability, then you can install Windows Server on a bunch of machines and use HyperV to virtualise them. Instead, they push running stuff on the Azure infrastructure with no migration plan if you want to take it in house, storing data on their servers, Windows 10 telemetry, and integration with one of the Internet's most annoying spammers.
Why does every main character *have*to be a minority woman?
I haven't seen the show, but I'm looking at the cast list. There are 13 actors that the studio considers to be 'main character' enough to warrant a mention. Of these four are women. So your complaint is that the male:female ratio is only 9:4 and you'd rather it were 11:2? 13:0? It's hard to tell the ethnicities of the characters from the black-and-white photos, but it looks as if 8 of them are white males, so is your complaint that only 60% of the main characters are white male?
I've been surprised before, mind you. The Battlestar Galactica remake looked like crap before its premiere too. But it pleasantly surprised me by being the best science fiction show since DS9
...right up until season 4, where it became clear that, although the Cylons had a plan, the writers didn't. Not content with that, it continued in a downward spiral, ending up with an even worse ending than DS9, something previously considered impossible for any science fiction show.
Then having them very religious with elaborate ceremonies just didn’t say warrior culture
I've not seen the show, but I read that they're meant to be an ostracised off-shoot of mainstream Klingon culture. Being unlike the mainstream would seem to fit pretty well there: Klingon Amish.
Part of that was pushback from professional institutions. A huge number of routine diagnoses could be better handled by a nurse and an expert system than by a doctor. Training that involves storing large quantities of data in your head would become less valuable, training that involved accurately differentiating different symptoms and telling when the patient was exaggerating or understating their symptoms would become a lot more valuable. Currently, the former is given to the best-paid people and the latter to the worst-paid in the medical professions.
VR also lacks much utility beyond games. AR is a lot more interesting. I was impressed by a few of the demos of the Microsoft HoloLens (and a similar device from a friend whose startup is producing a competing device), recognising people and surrounding them with metadata and action halos (e.g. send file to a person, exchange contact info, see their calendar to arrange a meeting) and keeping persistent visualisations in fixed locations (e.g. a copy of your to-do list on the fridge). The technology isn't there yet - they're too bulky and not yet high enough resolution - but there's nothing requiring major breakthroughs to achieve, just a few years of incremental improvement.
The definition of AI has been clear and unchanging for forty years or so now, since there were AI researchers using minis at several universities back in the 70s.
That's not really true. Back in the heyday of the MIT AI Labs, the Cyc Project and so on, researchers assumed that we were a decade or so away from producing machines that could reliably pass the Turing Test, using one of a dozen very promising looking approaches. By the early '90s, most of that had faded and most researchers moved away from using the term AI, because it associated them with the overhype of AI from the '70s and '80s and with science fiction. Terms like machine learning became more prevalent.
AI is to machine learning what cold fusion is to low-energy nuclear reactions.
Stallman has, once again, missed the most important thing when you want to ensure widespread adoption (of anything, an idea or a program): incremental adoption. Being able to run the same software on Windows and *NIX makes it very easy to swap out the underlying OS. When I stopped using Windows about 15 years ago, the first thing I did was gradually replace all of the Windows-only programs that I was using with portable applications. Once I'd done that, replacing Windows had almost no impact on my daily computer usage. For about the last six months, I was actually using XFree86 in full-screen mode on my desktop and running all of my desktop apps remotely on a separate FreeBSD machine.
I honestly can't tell if this thread is satire.
Moist modern sedans weigh this easy
Yes, but what about their dry weight?
On a plane, you sweat a lot because of the lower air pressure, but don't notice it. It's important to drink a lot of water to keep hydrated, but it's also important to replenish the salt that drinking all that water washes out of your systems. The spicy tomato juice cans have about 50% of your RDA of salt and are great for avoiding headaches after a long flight.
Oh, and gin and tonic is one of the few alcoholic beverages that tastes better at low air pressure.
I've only flown on a 787 once, but it's a huge improvement over any other standard-class flight I've been on. The higher pressure is really noticeable - I got about 4 hours of work done, and slept soundly for much of the rest of the time. Oh, and it was the only flight I've been on (including in business) where the skin on the lower halves of my legs didn't dry out and remain itchy for a week afterwards.