Gosh, you're right. Cowering on the floor and hoping that the attacker will leave you alone is a much better plan. What was I thinking?
-jcr
Sorry to break it to you, but sometimes there are lose-lose situations. In this situation, your idea is about as useful as deciding that tossing grenades into the crowd is a better idea than "cowering on the floor".
Real life isn't a cowboy movie. The good guys don't shoot from the hip, their shots don't always land true, their bullets don't disappear into the ether with no repercussions. And they don't always live to go home afterwards, or live their lives with a clear conscience about what they did. Sometimes hiding is the best thing you can do to survive.
Someone who thinks they're going to be a hero by starting blasting away in a crowded place to down the bad guy is no hero. Ninty-Nine times out of one-hundred, they're simply an added danger to themselves and the people around them.
I'd say that shows very clearly that depending on the cops for protection is a losing strategy. If you want to protect yourself, your friends and loved ones, and innocent people around you, you should carry at all times.
-jcr
So you find yourself in a nightclub one day. It's dark, there are flashing lights on the dance floor, and it's packed to the gills with revellers.
Someone pops in the front door with an AR-15 and starts mowing down people. There are roughly 50 - 100 people between you and the shooter. You have your trusty Glock 17 in its holster. Panicked people are shoving towards you, as more people closer to the shooter and going down.
Given the above, how many shots do you get off before you're dead? How many bystanders do you take down before that AR-15 is trained your way when you miss with the first few shots from being jostled by panicking people, and from shooting in a still dark place?
A gun battle in an crowded, enclosed space is just stupid. Bullets frequently don't go where you expect them to go. And a handgun against something like an AR-15 is suicide.
(Not a gun owner, but a decade ago I did have a job where I was trained to use and had to carry a C7 assault rifle)
Since you consider yourself an expert, would you care to explain why you think that IPv6 is especially routable?
Sure. There are a lot of things that will make IPv6 easier to route:
- Simplified packet processing: there are a variety of features in the IPv6 packet header that simplifies processing by routers. Included here are:
- Fixed header size: unlike IPv4, IPv6 has a fixed packet size of 40 octets, whereas IPv4 packets can vary between 20 and 60 octets,
- Lack of header checksum: IPv6 has no header checksum (thus removing the need to either compute or verify the checksum). This is actually pretty big, as each router hop needs to recompute the checksum as the TTL value is decremented in order to remain valid,
- TTL replaced by Hop Limit: this one is a bit complex. In IPv4, Time-to-Live is specified in the header as the total number of seconds the packet should be routed before it is dropped. This is tricky to compute, so even in IPv4 many nodes simply decrement it by one regardless of how long it has taken to process. In IPv6, this is changed to be a straight hop count; the value in the header basically specifies how many times a packet can hit a router before it is dropped.
- Gets rid of unused fields: IPv6 gets rid of a lot of header fields present in IPv4, such as the IHL, DSCP, ECN, and everything related to fragmentation.
- Lack of fragmentation: IPv6 packets can't be fragmented. Routers don't have to fragment or defragment packets. This can also mean fewer overall packets, and also means the router doesn't have to parse or generate a pile of fragmentation fields and information from the packets being sent/received.
- Traffic Class header field: IPv6 has a field that can be used to differentiate services, and can be used for QoS, allowing the router to more easily prioritize and arrange traffic.
- Flow labelling: IPv6 has a header field for flow labelling, that can be used to do things such as ensure stable routes for packets, such that packets aren't received out-of-order at a destination. This is intended to make streaming data (such as video) more stable, and can replace custom heuristic algorithms at the router layer with something much simpler,
- Jumbogram support: IPv6 packets can be up to (2**32)-1 octets in size (1 byte less than 4GB). While not practical today on the public internet, bigger packets can mean fewer (albeit bigger) packets that need routing,
- CIDR and smarter address allocation: CIDR was invented for IPv4 of course, however IPv4 didn't use CIDR until ten years after Flag Day. Pre-CIDR address allocations were ad-hoc; address blocks were classful (A, B, C). Many of these classful allocations still exist, however because of they way they were assigned, it was (and is) difficult to aggregate these routes. IPv6 came about long after these lessons were learned the hard way, and thus the IANA is being much smarter about what addresses are allocated where in order to better aggregate routes. Thus, a given/32 will be doled out only to a single RIR, who can break it up into smaller units to LIR's, to eventually be broken into/48,/64, and/56's for destination routers. IPv4 also works this way, but with the much bigger address space (and the lack of legacy pre-CIDR allocations), and with smarter allocation policies in place, route aggregation will make the possible mess that is the current state of the IPv4 routing tables significantly saner. From a processing perspective, this means that next hop lookups should be significantly quicker and easier. IPv4 currently has over 610000 prefixes; way more than should be needed. This is partly due to, as addresses have run out, large CIDR blocks being broken up into smaller blocks
You seem to be unclear on the definition of backward compatibility. This means that the old protocol is a subset of the new one. There are countless examples where protocol backward compatibility has been achieved in a useful way. Unfortunately, IPv6 is not one of them.
What everyone like you who thinks you can create a backwards compatible IPvX always forgets is when it comes to addressing, it's about more than addressing bits, but routability.
I have yet to see a single IPv4 successor proposal that features backwards compatibility that is actually routable. One of the major problems on the Internet today is the routing system is a complete mess. And every "backward compatible" IPv4 successor people like you have proposed only make the situation 100 times worse.
Yes, but how much depends on the application. I haven't found a good scholarly reference on average memory use increase for 64 bit applications, however some rough worst-case scenarios I've found see to indicate a 20% memory increase is considered to be at the high end. Most applications will see much less of an increase.
On the flip side, 64 applications get a lot more registers available to them in x86_64 mode -- eight additional General Purpose Registers. Thus, a compiler can better optimize applications to squeeze more performance out of the processor, by loading more data into registers (or potentially by not having to swap data in and out of registers as frequently as in 32 bit mode).
Most consider this a good trade off. Extra RAM is easy to come by when compared to extra processing speed.
Yeah I think this is by far the biggest "douche vs turd" election I've ever witnessed, and I can't even fathom how it could possibly get even worse than this. Seriously, this year politics in America has probably hit rock bottom.
If I may speak for a second on behalf of everyone in the rest of the world...
America, you have just shy of 325 million residents. I don't know how many of those are natural-born residents eligible to run for US President, but I assume the percentage is fairly high. Let's say at least 275 million people. How is it that from such a huge number that these are the best people you could come up with???
You guys really need to dig deeper for political talent. We in the outside world are getting worried about you if the current crop of clowns is the best you can find!
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter. The world will always need hydrocarbons, so they will always be valuable. They are needed for plastics, chemicals and all kinds of useful things besides fuel.
The world will always need toilet paper. Yet it doesn't really seem all that valuable.
Sure, certain uses for fossil fuels will continue -- passenger and freight airlines, heavy trucks, rail, heavy freighters, and plastics. However, is supply continues to outpace demand -- and that will be true if demand continues to not live up to supply -- then no, hydrocarbons won't be all that valuable (at least on a per unit basis).
We're already seeing this now. As prices have decreased, production has actually risen as companies try to make up for the low price by selling larger quantities. Some smaller producers simply can't keep up, and have already been going out of business, particularly in places where the production costs are high such as here in Canada.
A global oversupply of hydrocarbons also hurts Canada thanks to geography. We only have one easily accessible market, and that's here in North America (and then, primarily Canada and the US). If the Middle East is able to provide a stable supply of sufficient and cheap hydrocarbons to all of Europe, Asia, and Africa due to a decline in demand, that's going to spell major troubles for Canada's hydrocarbon industries. Especially with the US ramping up more capacity via fracking.
Canada's oil is only economical when prices are high, as the cost to extract is amongst the highest in the industry. If world-wide demand drops even 15% in ten years time, it's going to be bad news for Canada's petroleum industry.
I assume by "American Bison" they specifically mean Bison bison bison, as the other species of "American Bison", Bison bison athabascae now only exists in Canada (with some modern transplants from Canada also living in Russia).
I even cooked the bacon without my shirt on too (put it in the oven at 375 about 15-20min until it's golden brown, stays straight, no splattering).
I too appreciate when my shirts stay straight and have no splatters on them, but I think if you just bought your shirts in golden brown colour to begin with you could bake them for just one minute, and they'd still come out toasty warm.
Imagine if one day you met Richard Simmons, and he kept trying to find excuses to start a conversation with you and wouldn't ever leave you alone. This is what it feels like when you have two college classes with a gay guy that keeps trying to flirt with you. Or at least, that was my particular experience.
So in other words, the same feeling pretty much every woman you've ever tried to talk to has felt?
How do you distinguish betwixt an attack keyboard versus the user plugging in a real keyboard?
I'd do it something akin to Bluetooth pairing. The OS needs to pop up a dialog with a set of 12 random letters and numbers, and instruct the user to type the letters/numbers in the dialog on the new keyboard in order to "pair" it (ensuring, of course, the the typed digits come from the new hardware only, and not from an existing keyboard), and that if the device they've plugged in isn't a keyboard, the unplug it immediately.
A malicious USB stick isn't going to be able to determine the characters displayed on the screen to enter them, and so will be rejected by the OS.
Its funny you mention the micro-USB adapter. On my desk my Mac has 2 Thunderbolt -> DVI adapters sticking out of the, power adapter and a USB -> Ethernet adapter.
You have heard of a generic Thunderbolt hub, right? As Thunderbolt is a bus, many of them have not only Thunderbolt ports, but also USB ports, Firewire ports, audio ports (SPDIF), and even Ethernet ports. And as Thunderbolt can handle video just fine, you can get a standard Thunderbolt to HDMI, DVI, DisplayPort, or even VGA adapter and plug that in as well.
...and presto: you have a docking station for your Mac.
Funny how when its extra cold (snow storms, record cold winters, etc) all we hear is 'weather is not climate'.
However when its extra hot, is seems weather is climate?
Since when has it been extra cold on a global scale? When has it snowed within your lifetime all around the globe simultaneously?
The "extra hot" we're discussing was measured on a global scale. Not local. The average temperature of the entire globe was a new record.
This is the problem with armchair climate deniers. They see a big storm (or cold winter, or whatever) in their country, and presume that it's some sort of argument against global warming. Well guess what -- the globe is significantly bigger than your corner of it. The entirety of the United States could be in a deep freeze, but as the total area of the US is still less than 2% of the entire worlds surface, the wouldn't discount the average global temperature being higher than ever before.
You're conflating local phenomena with a global phenomena. Weather is still not climate.
So sure -- if you're just browsing/., you probably don't need anything higher than 25Mbps. But saying that's all anyone needs discounts the probability that with more bandwidth, new types of applications and usage scenarios can open up.
Could you give us some examples? Outside extreme cases, the highest bandwidth apps only require 3-4Mpbs (and this has nothing to with any Internet standards, we run high def Apps on our 1Gb LAN and we still have nothing requiring more than 5Mbps.
So no, even if you had 1Gbps you couldn't use it if you tried.
Sure I could. I shuttle around AMI images, and do checkouts against large Subversion repos with 11+GB of data in them. I can easily saturate a 1Gb connection.
But that's neither here nor there. If I knew what the next-generation hit application would be, I wouldn't be here chatting with you about it -- I'd be out there writing it. The thing is nobody really knows what sorts of applications we can come up with that benefit from ubiquitous, high bandwidth availability. Perhaps we start working more with applications that can offload their processing needs on-the-fly in a nearly invisible manner. If the network speed were crazy high enough, you could run as if you had completely dynamic RAM online for loads that suddenly require it (that would require an approximately 100Gbps connection, FWIW).
But without those speeds, such applications can't be built. And as they can't be built, we can never know what amazing ideas people could come up with to make use of it. It's like a farmer with a cart and a mule saying "I can move both hay and milk from home to market -- what use would anybody have of an 18 lane paved freeway?". And yet, we have 18 line, paved freeways, and we make use of them all the time.
Back in 1985, 2400bps was fast enough for anyone -- users typically didn't need the kind of speed 4800bps (or -- gasp -- 9600bps) gave you.
But you know what? As more bandwidth became available, developers were able to write different kinds of applications to take advantage of it.
So sure -- if you're just browsing/., you probably don't need anything higher than 25Mbps. But saying that's all anyone needs discounts the probability that with more bandwidth, new types of applications and usage scenarios can open up.
Fortunately, I sit here in Canada with a 120Mbps home cable connection, and don't have to give much of a crap about idiot Senators in the US.
I've seen in the news items of women who were tested for Zika after microcephaly, but that's just confirmation basis (sic).
It's incomplete data, but it isn't confirmation bias.
If the researchers were taking tests of women who gave birth to microcephalic babies, and Zika was not the cause, you'd expect that the women being tested would have some closer-to-even distribution between Zika infected and non-Zika infected, given a suitable sample size.
Now if the testing were done the other way around (checked for microcephaly only in women known to have had the Zika virus), then you'd potentially have confirmation bias if the results appeared to show a correlation. The problem you'd run into here is that without checking against the birth results of mothers who didn't have Zika, you wouldn't know if there were some other cause for the microcephaly.
This of it this way. If you went to a village and rounded up every mother who had a microcephalic baby, and you found that 99+% of them had Zika, there is no confirmation bias. You'd still want to determine how many other mothers infected with Zika had non-microcephalic babies, and you'd further need to determine when during pregnancy the Zika infection began (as it's possible that microcephaly only occurs if caught at or before a certain point of gestation), but the result would point to possible avenues for research.
If, however, you rounded up all of the women who had Zika during their pregnancy, and found that 80% of them had microcephalic babies and stopped there, then you'd have a case of confirmation bias. It could turn out that 80% of non-Zika infected mothers also had microcephalic babies. That is confirmation bias. What you called "confirmation bias" is good research methods. It's certainly not the end of the research, but correlations are not confirmation biases in and of themselves.
But why aren't we seeing the same thing in Africa or Asia? It's not like the Zika virus in Brazil has had thousands of years to mutate into a version that causes microcephaly, but not the original strain in Africa and Southeast Asia. It's the same virus.
First off, it doesn't take a thousand years for a virus to mutate. Influenza mutates on a yearly basis, for example. And as a general rule, any organism that finds itself in a different environment faces different selective pressures, which may influence the mutation rate, or at the very least, the likelihood of a mutation being more fit for the environment than the pre-mutated strain.
If the cause were due to chemicals, you should see an equal number of non-Zika infected mothers giving birth to children with microcephaly. That doesn't seem to be happening from what I've read. There is no data pointing towards chemicals being involved in any manner. Obviously more diagnosis and testing is needed -- as yet we don't know whether or not Zika has mutated in South America, how the virus is passing the placental barrier, or the exact action which is causing the microcephaly once infected. Wild guesses won't get us closer to a solution to these outstanding questions.
Long response: I should be the one who decides whether my local network appears to the outside as a single IP address, or multiple. Also, fuck you.
Short response: Okay.
Long response: Don't go around bitching to the rest of us when developers decide it's no longer cost effective for them to run STUN servers or include thousands of extra lines of code into their products to work around your broken-ass NAT implementation after everyone else has moved on. In the post-NAT world, all of those work-arounds you rely upon daily are going to go bye-bye.
Valid question. I used to install Quicktime... 4? On my Pentium 2 MMX 200mhz computer back in the mid 1990's so I could watch movie trailers on Apple's website in middle school. That's the last time I installed Quicktime that I can remember. I'm honestly curious what purpose it serves today? Is it a web browser plugin or what? I haven't even thought of Quicktime in YEARS.... let alone had a reason to use it...
My understanding is that versions of iTunes prior to 10.5 required Quicktime. Quicktime has always been more than a video player -- it's an entire multimedia framework, with APIs for doing a whole host of multimedia playback, editing, and conversion capabilities. It was the main multimedia framework for Mac OS X up until 10.7 (Lion).
iTunes would have used it for both media playback, as well as for transcoding video from various formats/sizes for various Apple devices (iPhone, AppleTV, etc.). Newer versions no longer require Quicktime so far as I'm aware -- however, this article is about people who aren't keeping their software up-to-date, so it wouldn't be surprising to learn that they're still running older OS's and older versions of iTunes.
Perhaps I am mistaken, but doesn't the Canadian Charter include a stipulation in it that essentially says, "The government can ignore any of these rights if they so choose"?
That's the short version.
The longer version is somewhat more nuanced. No Government or government agency can just willy-nilly ignore someones Charter Rights, and then declare "Notwithstanding Clause!". The cause pertains to legislation in specific. So which you could pass legislation that violates certain Charter rights (but not all of them, which I'll get to in a minute), you can't just randomly violate peoples rights on a whim, and use Section 33 as a defence.
Section 33 also only pertains to very specific rights, and not all of them. Namely, those in Section 2 (Fundamental Freedoms), Sections 7 - 14 (Legal Rights), and Section 15 (Equality Rights). Not covered are Sections 3 - 5 (Democratize Rights), Section 6 (Mobility Rights), Sections 16 - 22 (Official Languages), or Section 23 (Minority Language Education Rights).
Further to all of that, Section 33 specifically states that any such legislation automatically ceases to function after five years. A Parliament or Legislature may re-enact any such legislation that is about to expire; any such re-enacted legislation has the same five year expiry date. Thus any legislation that goes agains the Charter has the opportunity of being repealed by democratic means (as Parliament and Legislature are limited to five-year terms under Section 4, which is one of the sections that cannot be overridden by Notwithstanding legislation, if the people have a problem with Notwithstanding legislation, they can vote in a new government int he next general election to repeal or let it expire).
Not specifically stated in the act (but upheld by case law) is that a government can only apply Section 33 to legislation it has the authority to enact. Thus, for example, in the year 2000 the Alberta Legislature tried to use Section 33 to make same-sex marriage illegal in their province; the Supreme Court held that the legislation was null-and-void as only Parliament has the authority to enact legislation pertaining to marriage. This of course, could also work the other way -- the Federal Government wouldn't be able to use Section 33 to invalidate something under Provincial jurisdiction.
It is also important to note that at the Federal level, no Federal Government has ever used Section 33; indeed, previous Parliaments have sworn that they will never use it. That doesn't have any real protection in law, of course -- but to do so would be political suicide.
None of the above should be read as my endorsing section 33. I don't. I understand the political expediency that caused it to be (at the time it seemed like it was add Section 33, or not have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms at all...), and I have a pretty good handle on its legal standing and the politics surrounding it, but like a lot of Canadians I would like nothing more than to see it repealed. We are fortunate that it is rarely used by the Provinces, and has never been used by the Federal Parliament, but an even better long-term protection would be to scrap it altogether. Unfortunately, doing so requires agreement from the ten Provinces, and as we know from experience, you can't open up Constitutional negotiations to change anything like this without everyone coming out of the woodwork demanding that all of their changes be discussed (and accepted) as well.
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Gosh, you're right. Cowering on the floor and hoping that the attacker will leave you alone is a much better plan. What was I thinking?
-jcr
Sorry to break it to you, but sometimes there are lose-lose situations. In this situation, your idea is about as useful as deciding that tossing grenades into the crowd is a better idea than "cowering on the floor".
Real life isn't a cowboy movie. The good guys don't shoot from the hip, their shots don't always land true, their bullets don't disappear into the ether with no repercussions. And they don't always live to go home afterwards, or live their lives with a clear conscience about what they did. Sometimes hiding is the best thing you can do to survive.
Someone who thinks they're going to be a hero by starting blasting away in a crowded place to down the bad guy is no hero. Ninty-Nine times out of one-hundred, they're simply an added danger to themselves and the people around them.
Yaz
Serious question.
Because...Constitution. Serious answer.
Yaz
I'd say that shows very clearly that depending on the cops for protection is a losing strategy. If you want to protect yourself, your friends and loved ones, and innocent people around you, you should carry at all times.
-jcr
So you find yourself in a nightclub one day. It's dark, there are flashing lights on the dance floor, and it's packed to the gills with revellers.
Someone pops in the front door with an AR-15 and starts mowing down people. There are roughly 50 - 100 people between you and the shooter. You have your trusty Glock 17 in its holster. Panicked people are shoving towards you, as more people closer to the shooter and going down.
Given the above, how many shots do you get off before you're dead? How many bystanders do you take down before that AR-15 is trained your way when you miss with the first few shots from being jostled by panicking people, and from shooting in a still dark place?
A gun battle in an crowded, enclosed space is just stupid. Bullets frequently don't go where you expect them to go. And a handgun against something like an AR-15 is suicide.
(Not a gun owner, but a decade ago I did have a job where I was trained to use and had to carry a C7 assault rifle)
Yaz
Since you consider yourself an expert, would you care to explain why you think that IPv6 is especially routable?
Sure. There are a lot of things that will make IPv6 easier to route:
You seem to be unclear on the definition of backward compatibility. This means that the old protocol is a subset of the new one. There are countless examples where protocol backward compatibility has been achieved in a useful way. Unfortunately, IPv6 is not one of them.
What everyone like you who thinks you can create a backwards compatible IPvX always forgets is when it comes to addressing, it's about more than addressing bits, but routability.
I have yet to see a single IPv4 successor proposal that features backwards compatibility that is actually routable. One of the major problems on the Internet today is the routing system is a complete mess. And every "backward compatible" IPv4 successor people like you have proposed only make the situation 100 times worse .
IPv6 makes routing significantly easier. Routing an IPv6 packet requires less processing overhead, permitting routers to be much more efficient.
Please leave protocol design to the experts.
Yaz
Sure that would mean using more memory?
Yes, but how much depends on the application. I haven't found a good scholarly reference on average memory use increase for 64 bit applications, however some rough worst-case scenarios I've found see to indicate a 20% memory increase is considered to be at the high end. Most applications will see much less of an increase.
On the flip side, 64 applications get a lot more registers available to them in x86_64 mode -- eight additional General Purpose Registers. Thus, a compiler can better optimize applications to squeeze more performance out of the processor, by loading more data into registers (or potentially by not having to swap data in and out of registers as frequently as in 32 bit mode).
Most consider this a good trade off. Extra RAM is easy to come by when compared to extra processing speed.
Yaz
Yeah I think this is by far the biggest "douche vs turd" election I've ever witnessed, and I can't even fathom how it could possibly get even worse than this. Seriously, this year politics in America has probably hit rock bottom.
If I may speak for a second on behalf of everyone in the rest of the world...
America, you have just shy of 325 million residents. I don't know how many of those are natural-born residents eligible to run for US President, but I assume the percentage is fairly high. Let's say at least 275 million people. How is it that from such a huge number that these are the best people you could come up with???
You guys really need to dig deeper for political talent. We in the outside world are getting worried about you if the current crop of clowns is the best you can find!
Yaz
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter. The world will always need hydrocarbons, so they will always be valuable. They are needed for plastics, chemicals and all kinds of useful things besides fuel.
The world will always need toilet paper. Yet it doesn't really seem all that valuable.
Sure, certain uses for fossil fuels will continue -- passenger and freight airlines, heavy trucks, rail, heavy freighters, and plastics. However, is supply continues to outpace demand -- and that will be true if demand continues to not live up to supply -- then no, hydrocarbons won't be all that valuable (at least on a per unit basis).
We're already seeing this now. As prices have decreased, production has actually risen as companies try to make up for the low price by selling larger quantities. Some smaller producers simply can't keep up, and have already been going out of business, particularly in places where the production costs are high such as here in Canada.
A global oversupply of hydrocarbons also hurts Canada thanks to geography. We only have one easily accessible market, and that's here in North America (and then, primarily Canada and the US). If the Middle East is able to provide a stable supply of sufficient and cheap hydrocarbons to all of Europe, Asia, and Africa due to a decline in demand, that's going to spell major troubles for Canada's hydrocarbon industries. Especially with the US ramping up more capacity via fracking.
Canada's oil is only economical when prices are high, as the cost to extract is amongst the highest in the industry. If world-wide demand drops even 15% in ten years time, it's going to be bad news for Canada's petroleum industry.
Yaz
The great majority (if not all) of wars was caused by self-serving leaders, and never by incompetence.
Apparently you aren't familiar with the Pig War of 1859!
Yaz
I assume by "American Bison" they specifically mean Bison bison bison, as the other species of "American Bison", Bison bison athabascae now only exists in Canada (with some modern transplants from Canada also living in Russia).
Yaz
I even cooked the bacon without my shirt on too (put it in the oven at 375 about 15-20min until it's golden brown, stays straight, no splattering).
I too appreciate when my shirts stay straight and have no splatters on them, but I think if you just bought your shirts in golden brown colour to begin with you could bake them for just one minute, and they'd still come out toasty warm.
Yaz
Imagine if one day you met Richard Simmons, and he kept trying to find excuses to start a conversation with you and wouldn't ever leave you alone. This is what it feels like when you have two college classes with a gay guy that keeps trying to flirt with you. Or at least, that was my particular experience.
So in other words, the same feeling pretty much every woman you've ever tried to talk to has felt?
Yaz
How do you distinguish betwixt an attack keyboard versus the user plugging in a real keyboard?
I'd do it something akin to Bluetooth pairing. The OS needs to pop up a dialog with a set of 12 random letters and numbers, and instruct the user to type the letters/numbers in the dialog on the new keyboard in order to "pair" it (ensuring, of course, the the typed digits come from the new hardware only, and not from an existing keyboard), and that if the device they've plugged in isn't a keyboard, the unplug it immediately.
A malicious USB stick isn't going to be able to determine the characters displayed on the screen to enter them, and so will be rejected by the OS.
Yaz
Its funny you mention the micro-USB adapter. On my desk my Mac has 2 Thunderbolt -> DVI adapters sticking out of the, power adapter and a USB -> Ethernet adapter.
You have heard of a generic Thunderbolt hub, right? As Thunderbolt is a bus, many of them have not only Thunderbolt ports, but also USB ports, Firewire ports, audio ports (SPDIF), and even Ethernet ports. And as Thunderbolt can handle video just fine, you can get a standard Thunderbolt to HDMI, DVI, DisplayPort, or even VGA adapter and plug that in as well.
...and presto: you have a docking station for your Mac.
Yaz
If you want to make sure you're not hit with these ads, follow these steps to disable Windows Spotlight: buy a Mac (or install Linux!)
FTFY.
Yaz
Funny how when its extra cold (snow storms, record cold winters, etc) all we hear is 'weather is not climate'. However when its extra hot, is seems weather is climate?
Since when has it been extra cold on a global scale? When has it snowed within your lifetime all around the globe simultaneously?
The "extra hot" we're discussing was measured on a global scale. Not local. The average temperature of the entire globe was a new record.
This is the problem with armchair climate deniers. They see a big storm (or cold winter, or whatever) in their country, and presume that it's some sort of argument against global warming. Well guess what -- the globe is significantly bigger than your corner of it. The entirety of the United States could be in a deep freeze, but as the total area of the US is still less than 2% of the entire worlds surface, the wouldn't discount the average global temperature being higher than ever before.
You're conflating local phenomena with a global phenomena. Weather is still not climate.
Yaz
So sure -- if you're just browsing /., you probably don't need anything higher than 25Mbps. But saying that's all anyone needs discounts the probability that with more bandwidth, new types of applications and usage scenarios can open up.
Could you give us some examples? Outside extreme cases, the highest bandwidth apps only require 3-4Mpbs (and this has nothing to with any Internet standards, we run high def Apps on our 1Gb LAN and we still have nothing requiring more than 5Mbps. So no, even if you had 1Gbps you couldn't use it if you tried.
Sure I could. I shuttle around AMI images, and do checkouts against large Subversion repos with 11+GB of data in them. I can easily saturate a 1Gb connection.
But that's neither here nor there. If I knew what the next-generation hit application would be, I wouldn't be here chatting with you about it -- I'd be out there writing it. The thing is nobody really knows what sorts of applications we can come up with that benefit from ubiquitous, high bandwidth availability. Perhaps we start working more with applications that can offload their processing needs on-the-fly in a nearly invisible manner. If the network speed were crazy high enough, you could run as if you had completely dynamic RAM online for loads that suddenly require it (that would require an approximately 100Gbps connection, FWIW).
But without those speeds, such applications can't be built. And as they can't be built, we can never know what amazing ideas people could come up with to make use of it. It's like a farmer with a cart and a mule saying "I can move both hay and milk from home to market -- what use would anybody have of an 18 lane paved freeway?". And yet, we have 18 line, paved freeways, and we make use of them all the time.
Yaz
Back in 1985, 2400bps was fast enough for anyone -- users typically didn't need the kind of speed 4800bps (or -- gasp -- 9600bps) gave you.
But you know what? As more bandwidth became available, developers were able to write different kinds of applications to take advantage of it.
So sure -- if you're just browsing /., you probably don't need anything higher than 25Mbps. But saying that's all anyone needs discounts the probability that with more bandwidth, new types of applications and usage scenarios can open up.
Fortunately, I sit here in Canada with a 120Mbps home cable connection, and don't have to give much of a crap about idiot Senators in the US.
Yaz
I've seen in the news items of women who were tested for Zika after microcephaly, but that's just confirmation basis (sic).
It's incomplete data, but it isn't confirmation bias.
If the researchers were taking tests of women who gave birth to microcephalic babies, and Zika was not the cause, you'd expect that the women being tested would have some closer-to-even distribution between Zika infected and non-Zika infected, given a suitable sample size.
Now if the testing were done the other way around (checked for microcephaly only in women known to have had the Zika virus), then you'd potentially have confirmation bias if the results appeared to show a correlation. The problem you'd run into here is that without checking against the birth results of mothers who didn't have Zika, you wouldn't know if there were some other cause for the microcephaly.
This of it this way. If you went to a village and rounded up every mother who had a microcephalic baby, and you found that 99+% of them had Zika, there is no confirmation bias. You'd still want to determine how many other mothers infected with Zika had non-microcephalic babies, and you'd further need to determine when during pregnancy the Zika infection began (as it's possible that microcephaly only occurs if caught at or before a certain point of gestation), but the result would point to possible avenues for research.
If, however, you rounded up all of the women who had Zika during their pregnancy, and found that 80% of them had microcephalic babies and stopped there, then you'd have a case of confirmation bias. It could turn out that 80% of non-Zika infected mothers also had microcephalic babies. That is confirmation bias. What you called "confirmation bias" is good research methods. It's certainly not the end of the research, but correlations are not confirmation biases in and of themselves.
Yaz
(Aren't all babies) [b]orn with abnormally small heads?
If all babies were born with small heads, we wouldn't classify it as abnormal, would we?
Yaz
But why aren't we seeing the same thing in Africa or Asia? It's not like the Zika virus in Brazil has had thousands of years to mutate into a version that causes microcephaly, but not the original strain in Africa and Southeast Asia. It's the same virus.
First off, it doesn't take a thousand years for a virus to mutate. Influenza mutates on a yearly basis, for example. And as a general rule, any organism that finds itself in a different environment faces different selective pressures, which may influence the mutation rate, or at the very least, the likelihood of a mutation being more fit for the environment than the pre-mutated strain.
If the cause were due to chemicals, you should see an equal number of non-Zika infected mothers giving birth to children with microcephaly. That doesn't seem to be happening from what I've read. There is no data pointing towards chemicals being involved in any manner. Obviously more diagnosis and testing is needed -- as yet we don't know whether or not Zika has mutated in South America, how the virus is passing the placental barrier, or the exact action which is causing the microcephaly once infected. Wild guesses won't get us closer to a solution to these outstanding questions.
Yaz
I have a rather mundane, obvious reply to this article. But I can't be bothered to type it all out right now.
Please come back tomorrow, when I write an instant "+5 Insightful" comment in its place.
Yaz
The Internet is probably better off without NAT
Short response: Fuck you.
Long response: I should be the one who decides whether my local network appears to the outside as a single IP address, or multiple. Also, fuck you.
Short response: Okay.
Long response: Don't go around bitching to the rest of us when developers decide it's no longer cost effective for them to run STUN servers or include thousands of extra lines of code into their products to work around your broken-ass NAT implementation after everyone else has moved on. In the post-NAT world, all of those work-arounds you rely upon daily are going to go bye-bye.
Yaz
Valid question. I used to install Quicktime... 4? On my Pentium 2 MMX 200mhz computer back in the mid 1990's so I could watch movie trailers on Apple's website in middle school. That's the last time I installed Quicktime that I can remember. I'm honestly curious what purpose it serves today? Is it a web browser plugin or what? I haven't even thought of Quicktime in YEARS.... let alone had a reason to use it...
My understanding is that versions of iTunes prior to 10.5 required Quicktime. Quicktime has always been more than a video player -- it's an entire multimedia framework, with APIs for doing a whole host of multimedia playback, editing, and conversion capabilities. It was the main multimedia framework for Mac OS X up until 10.7 (Lion).
iTunes would have used it for both media playback, as well as for transcoding video from various formats/sizes for various Apple devices (iPhone, AppleTV, etc.). Newer versions no longer require Quicktime so far as I'm aware -- however, this article is about people who aren't keeping their software up-to-date, so it wouldn't be surprising to learn that they're still running older OS's and older versions of iTunes.
Yaz
Perhaps I am mistaken, but doesn't the Canadian Charter include a stipulation in it that essentially says, "The government can ignore any of these rights if they so choose"?
That's the short version.
The longer version is somewhat more nuanced. No Government or government agency can just willy-nilly ignore someones Charter Rights, and then declare "Notwithstanding Clause!". The cause pertains to legislation in specific. So which you could pass legislation that violates certain Charter rights (but not all of them, which I'll get to in a minute), you can't just randomly violate peoples rights on a whim, and use Section 33 as a defence.
Section 33 also only pertains to very specific rights, and not all of them. Namely, those in Section 2 (Fundamental Freedoms), Sections 7 - 14 (Legal Rights), and Section 15 (Equality Rights). Not covered are Sections 3 - 5 (Democratize Rights), Section 6 (Mobility Rights), Sections 16 - 22 (Official Languages), or Section 23 (Minority Language Education Rights).
Further to all of that, Section 33 specifically states that any such legislation automatically ceases to function after five years. A Parliament or Legislature may re-enact any such legislation that is about to expire; any such re-enacted legislation has the same five year expiry date. Thus any legislation that goes agains the Charter has the opportunity of being repealed by democratic means (as Parliament and Legislature are limited to five-year terms under Section 4, which is one of the sections that cannot be overridden by Notwithstanding legislation, if the people have a problem with Notwithstanding legislation, they can vote in a new government int he next general election to repeal or let it expire).
Not specifically stated in the act (but upheld by case law) is that a government can only apply Section 33 to legislation it has the authority to enact. Thus, for example, in the year 2000 the Alberta Legislature tried to use Section 33 to make same-sex marriage illegal in their province; the Supreme Court held that the legislation was null-and-void as only Parliament has the authority to enact legislation pertaining to marriage. This of course, could also work the other way -- the Federal Government wouldn't be able to use Section 33 to invalidate something under Provincial jurisdiction.
It is also important to note that at the Federal level, no Federal Government has ever used Section 33; indeed, previous Parliaments have sworn that they will never use it. That doesn't have any real protection in law, of course -- but to do so would be political suicide.
None of the above should be read as my endorsing section 33. I don't. I understand the political expediency that caused it to be (at the time it seemed like it was add Section 33, or not have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms at all...), and I have a pretty good handle on its legal standing and the politics surrounding it, but like a lot of Canadians I would like nothing more than to see it repealed. We are fortunate that it is rarely used by the Provinces, and has never been used by the Federal Parliament, but an even better long-term protection would be to scrap it altogether. Unfortunately, doing so requires agreement from the ten Provinces, and as we know from experience, you can't open up Constitutional negotiations to change anything like this without everyone coming out of the woodwork demanding that all of their changes be discussed (and accepted) as well.
Yaz