Thinkpad service was amazing back before it was sold to Lenovo. One morning I called for a problem which was covered under warranty, expecting to be without the laptop for maybe a week. FedEx dropped off a shipping box within an hour. I packed it up and called FedEx, who picked it up in 30 minutes. It then flew from California to the IBM service center in Memphis TN I think? They located it right next to the FedEx hub so they could get deliveries earlier and send returns later than FedEx's normal pickup deadline. According to the tracking it arrived around 7pm. Their evening shift fixed the laptop, and got it back to FedEx in just about an hour, who then flew it back to California. Early next morning FedEx gave me my fixed laptop back. Total time I was without it was about 20 hours.
I test nearly autistic, so I had to figure out a lot of the complex rules of social interaction, instead of it being "obvious" like I guess it is to most people.
As an example, my sister gave me a birthday present which I didn't really need. I thanked her (learned that rule pretty early), but told her I didn't really need it. She knows about my social handicap, so explained to me that when you receive a gift, you're supposed to politely accept it whether or not you really want it.
Some years later, a friend gave me a gift which I didn't really need. But remembering what my sister said, I thanked her, politely accepted the gift, and tucked it away in the trunk of my car. Where it sat because, well, I didn't really need it. A few months later the friend saw the gift in the trunk of my car and was livid and upset. She bawled about it to a mutual friend, who came and talked with me about it. The mutual friend said I should've just declined the gift if I didn't want it. I explained what my sister had taught me, and she took a deep breath, and said "yes that's true, but not in this situation."
That day I learned that the rule my sister taught me has an exception. If someone gives you a gift because they like you, accepting it is a sign of being open to reciprocating. And if you're not interested in the person, you're supposed to politely decline the gift as a signal that you're not interested. (Though I'm still a bit unclear how you're supposed to know that the gift is a "like" gift when the person doesn't actually say so when they give it to you.)
Social norms are full of these rules, exceptions to the rules, exceptions to exceptions, exceptions to exceptions to exceptions, etc. It takes quite a bit of brainpower to figure all this out subconsciously so that it's "obvious" without having to learn it the way I have to.
And to point out the elephant in the room, there's another behavior which demands social conformity and also has these complex rules and exceptions, thus requiring a bigger brain.
Language.
That's what I don't get about the press coverage about all this. Russia pays for ads supporting white supremacists and somehow that's part of a conspiracy to get Trump elected. Russia pays for ads supporting BLM and somehow that's also part of a conspiracy to get Trump elected. A 5-year old can spot the problem with the reasoning here.
Historically, elections with higher voter turnout have favored the Democrats. So any apolitical "divisive" ad campaign which enraged more people into voting should actually have had the net effect of helping Democrats to win (i.e. a greater percentage of the enraged Republicans were already going to vote anyway). So either this was a Russian operation to try to get Clinton elected, or it was a Russian operation that had nothing to do with the election.
Along the same lines, Clinton lost because she was a lackluster candidate who couldn't convince enough Democrats to come to the polls and vote. That's how pretty much every election I've taken part in (30 years) has gone. There are substantially fewer registered Republicans than registered Democrats, but a greater percentage of Republicans show up to vote every election. If the Democrats choose a popular (or at least not-unpopular) candidate who can excite an above average percentage of Democrats to bother to vote, the Democrats win. If they choose a lackluster candidate, the Democrats lose.
GHz for GHz, Kaby Lake (Jan 2017 desktop release) is only about 20% faster than Sandy Bridge (Jan 2011 desktop release). 20% improvement in 6 years. I'm still telling people with Sandy Bridge systems not to bother upgrading. Unless you want more cores (i3 to i5 or i7), some of the newer features (like USB-C support), or want lower power consumption, there's no reason to stop using a Sandy Bridge system.
Clock speed has also been relatively static. 3.6-3.9 GHz in 2011 to 4.4-4.5 GHz in 2017. A 19% increase. Combine the two and you get an underwhelming 42% improvement in processor speed in 6 years.
Even as recently as the late 1990s, by the time a system was 6 years old, it was far beyond obsolete. For example, November 1995 saw the release of the 200 MHz Pentium Pro. If you skip ahead 6 years, you find the 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 released in August 2001. A 900% increase just in clock speed in 6 years.
PC sales are lackluster because there's no reason to upgrade at anywhere close to the rate we had to upgrade in the past.
If automakers added a mount which let you view your phone while driving, and you got into an accident while using it while driving, you'd sue the automaker for encouraging dangerous behavior. But if they don't add a mount, forcing you to add it yourself, and you get into an accident while using it while driving, you have only yourself to blame.
Google patched Blueborn within a day, and Samsung (as the major iPhone competitor) rolled out Blueborne fixes within about 2 weeks of it going public.
The problem is the damn carriers. They delay the manufacturer patches while they do their own "testing" and tweaking (i.e. installing software you can't uninstall), sometimes for months. Apple was able to strongarm the carriers into conceding control over software updates on iPhones. None of the Android manufacturers has enough marketing clout to do the same. And Google can't because they've released Android as Open Source. If they try to strongarm the carriers, the carrier can just blow off Google and install a custom version of Android on their phones.
What we need is to break up the vertical integration in the cell phone market. Cell tower networks, cellular service, and cellular phones should all be managed and marketed by different companies. No single company should have their fingers in more than one of those markets.
The problem with the EPA under Obama was that instead of regulating to manage risk, they were often trying to regulate to eliminate risk.
Life will always have risk. The key is to find an acceptable level of risk which doesn't compromise your ability to accomplish things whose benefit exceeds the drawbacks of the risk. If you try to eliminate all risk, you also eliminate all ability to accomplish anything. Vaccines are a perfect example. There's a very tiny chance you will get sick from a vaccine; there's even a tiny chance that you'll die from getting a vaccine. But that risk is tiny compared to the benefit - near-elimination of your chance to die from the disease you're being vaccinated against over the course of your natural life. The risk is worth the reward. But using the logic sometimes used by the Obama EPA, the presence of that tiny risk invalidated its use regardless of the potential benefit.
In other words, it's tolerable for a sick person who might die if they don't get the scans, but it's not ok or 'tolerable' for a healthy person.
That's really the problem. We don't know if it's "tolerable" or not for a healthy person.
The assumption so far has been to err on the side of caution and assume any elevated radiation exposure is harmful. Unfortunately that turns science upside down by setting an unfalsifiable hypothesis as the null hypothesis. You cannot prove that radiation exposure is safe. You can expose 1000 people to the equivalent of 20 CT scans, and if their long-term cancer rate is the same as unexposed people, the nay-sayers can always argue "no you're wrong, it was just luck that none of them got cancer" or "those people weren't a random sample" or a myriad of other possible explanations why your data is wrong.
For science to work properly, the null hypothesis has to be falsifiable. The assumption has to be that increased radiation exposure is safe. And only when you find experimental evidence that a certain level of radiation exposure is dangerous, do you reject that hypothesis at that radiation level.
That only covers the killer-type cheaters (which, granted, is most of them). Explorer and achiever types cheat to gain undeserved praise from other players for their discoveries or gear they've amassed. There's not much cheating among socializers, though they have a disproportionate share of drama and backstabbing. Basically cheating in the social realm, rather than in the game realm.
In practice, some complications arise when executing the attack.
First, not all Wi-Fi clients properly implement the state machine. In
particular, Windows and iOS do not accept retransmissions of message
3 (see Table 1 column 2). This violates the 802.11 standard. As
a result, these implementations are not vulnerable to our key reinstallation
attack against the 4-way handshake. Unfortunately, from
a defenders perspective, both iOS and Windows are still vulnerable
to our attack against the group key handshake
So basically, Windows and iOS were protected for implementing 802.11 incorrectly.
Our attack is especially catastrophic against version 2.4 and above of wpa_supplicant, a Wi-Fi client commonly used on Linux. Here, the client will install an all-zero encryption key instead of reinstalling the real key. This vulnerability appears to be caused by a remark in the Wi-Fi standard that suggests to clear the encryption key from memory once it has been installed for the first time. When the client now receives a retransmitted message 3 of the 4-way handshake, it will reinstall the now-cleared encryption key, effectively installing an all-zero key. Because Android uses wpa_supplicant, Android 6.0 and above also contains this vulnerability. This makes it trivial to intercept and manipulate traffic sent by these Linux and Android devices.
While Android got screwed over by implementing it rigorously.
This should also become a programming example of the difference between setting something to NULL vs setting it to zero. Instead of implementing the encryption key as a string, it shouldn've been implemented as a pointer to the string. And when the standard called for the key to be cleared, the value shouldn've been zeroed out (to prevent it from being recovered in memory), memory released, and the pointer set to NULL (so the software would know the value didn't exist anymore and wouldn't try to use it).
the weakness lies in the protocol's four-way handshake, which securely allows new devices with a pre-shared password to join the network. [...] The bug represents a complete breakdown of the WPA2 protocol, for both personal and enterprise devices
WPA2 enterprise doesn't use a pre-shared key. So which is it? Does the weakness lie with pre-shared key passwords? Or something else which also affects WPA2 enterprise?
Ah, here we go. The answer is "it's complicated." I'm reading through it right now, but as a PSA:
It's illegal to store credit card numbers without the card holder's authorization.
That said, if you check the little box which says "remember my credit card info for future purchases," you've authorized them to store it. You've traded away security for a little convenience.
That's actually another problem caused by Visa/MC. They lobbied for and got laws passed which prohibited merchants from charging a fee for a credit card transaction. Ideally, prices would be cash, and you'd have to pay an extra fee equal to the processing charge if you used a credit card. Then it would be completely clear to customers exactly how much of their purchase price was being diverted to Visa/MC and the processor.
But because of the law, merchants are forced to offer the same price for CC and cash. Meaning customers have no clue what percentage of their payment is going to fees. (Actually, they can use a loophole in the law to offer a cash discount. But the additional step introduces enough complexity and expense to the system that most merchants bother. The ones who don't want to pay the CC processing fee simply don't accept credit cards.)
Because in a normal market, something like net neutrality is not needed. People pay an ISP for service. if the ISP tries to throttle certain websites to extort money from those sites, people notice the slowdown, hear from a friend that those sites work just fine on his ISP, and switch to their friend's ISP. It's called giving your customers what the want - a hallmark of what makes a market economy function. Any ISP that tries to selectively throttle sites is shooting themselves in the foot.
The only reason net neutrality is an issue is because local governments have granted certain ISPs a monopoly in their area. Since the customers in that area have no ability to switch to a different ISP, the ISP becomes emboldened to extort money from websites for "access" to their monopolized customers. In other words, net neutrality is government regulation to try to fix a problem created by government regulation. It's not necessary unless you think government-granted monopolies are also necessary.
The problem with Americans isn't that they don't support net neutrality. It's that they assume ISPs are a competitive market, when it's not. Even you have completely missed the fact that the real problem is the local monopolies.
In the past, reviews by film critics held undue influence over ticket sales because regular people couldn't write reviews. They had to rely on reviews in newspapers and magazines to decide which films to see. Only occasionally getting word of mouth at the water cooler. In other words, regular people were tricked into seeing movies which critics liked, but which general audiences might not like.
With the advent of unlimited phone plans, then cell phones, and now the Internet, word of mouth among regular people can now compete with the widespread distribution of publications by critics. And people's decision for what to see has been corrected to weigh the opinion of critics (who are a tiny, tiny subset of the population) in proportion to their representation of the population. Meaning not very much. Most people see the movies their friends and like-minded individuals say they liked, not what the critics liked. In other words, it's not that critics are losing influence per se, it's that they're losing influence they never should've had in the first place (for the purposes of selling movies to the mass market).
This is really the same thing that's been happening to almost everything. Unix/Linux gurus like certain functionality, configurability, and usability from an OS. But the mass market prefers something much more simplified without so many options (or in Apple's case, almost no options). Gearheads like to tweak their car's engine components and ECM to get more or different performance out of it. But the mass market prefers something that reliably turns on every morning and gets them to work and back every day. Professional and semi-pro photographers collect thousands of dollars worth of camera equipment so they can take specific types of photos under nearly every possible circumstance. But the mass market prefers something small and cheap that they can use to take selfies.
The same thing is now happening with movies. The only difference was that due to an unusual and temporary confluence of publicity by the mass media (newspapers and magazines), the movie aficionado and director used to be able to sell their expensive wares to a much wider audience that would be possible if said audience (the mass market) were properly informed of what the rest of the audience really liked. This is now correcting itself. Directors and critics can still make and review finely crafted films for each other, just like gearheads hold events, Linux gurus have open source projects, and photographers have their own exhibitions and specialty websites. But they're not going to get the ticket sales they got in the past. If they want ticket sales, they're going to have to make movies which appeal to the mass market, not to the specialist expert in their field like themselves.
If movies go the way photography has gone, studio-produced films are going to become just a trickle, a tiny segment of the market. Amateur productions, including films and shorts made for YouTube, which appeal to highly specialized segments of the market are going to come to dominate. One of my friends is a YouTube millionaire. She stumbled (literally) upon the market for parents wanting entertaining but educational videos for their young kids to watch. She uploaded her first video in the hopes a PBS station exec would see it and hire her to make the series. But it turned out to be so popular with parents that she was able to take the ad revenue from that first video and produce the entire series herself. And now her small-time studio with a few dozen employees produces these videos for "release" on YouTube, and being paid with ad revenue. That's the future of film-making. Very diversified and specialized, with less room for the big studios churning out blockbusters.
The Space Shuttle was designed under very different assumptions than it ended up operating under. Yes the support infrastructure was ungodly expensive, but the idea was that if you could get the frequency of flights up to about 1 a week, that would amortize those costs to where on a per flight basis it was cheaper than disposable spacecraft. There were two major problems which developed.
First, the Shuttle's design grew tremendously complicated. The tiles, which weren't supposed to pop off, did, and each one of them was unique and replacements had to be custom fabricated. Turnaround time grew from an estimated week to months.
Second, the Shuttle's biggest customer bailed out on it. You have to remember that the Shuttle was conceived in the 1960s and designed in the 1970s. At the time, spy satellites would eject a roll of film, which would be captured in mid-air, developed, and analyzed. Once a spy satellite ran out of film, it was useless. The NRO envisioned the Shuttle as a way to refuel its spy satellites and reload them with new film. That's why the Hubble Space Telescope fit in the Shuttle's cargo bay - HST was about the sale size as a spy satellite, and the Shuttle was designed to hold a spy satellite.
But once the CCD was developed and the spy satellites could simply radio images back down to earth, film became obsolete. Without the ability to turn around shuttles in a week, and without a customer to pay for more frequent Shuttle flights, its operations slowed down to about 5 launches per year - 1/10th the frequency the bean counters assumed when OKing it. The costs which were supposed to be amortized never were, and turned it into one of the most expensive launch systems in history.
You're underestimating the huge scale of a Yellowstone eruption. This isn't like injecting dye into an existing current. It's like opening a fire hydrant in the middle of an existing current. The quantity of ash and ejecta would spread out radially, partially overriding the jet stream. Ashfall patterns from past eruptions confirm this - California will be covered.
Deciding which principles to defend based on who else will be "on your side" is a throwback to the elementary school playground where everyone wanted to be picked on the team with the cool kids.
Pick the side whose principles you believe in. Don't worry about who else is on your side - it simply doesn't matter. I believe in free speech so I defend it, even though it sometimes puts me on the same side as Nazi sympathizers. MAFIAA vs Kim Dotcom was easy because there were long-established rules for foreign asset seizure and extradition, which the U.S. (under pressure from the MAFIAA) violated or got the New Zealand government to ignore. If you believed in due process, you were on Kim Dotcom's side. If you believed the ends justified the means, you were on the MAFIAA's side. The proper venue for the MAFIAA to address their grievances was in the New Zealand court system. Basically charging Kim Dotcom with copyright violation in New Zealand.
For online gambling, it basically resolves down to the right to spend your money in whatever way you see fit, vs people needing to be protected because a gambling addiction supersedes your ability to make rational decisions on how to spend your money. Decide for yourself which you think is more important, and that's your side. (Do note that this is the same fundamental conflict found in smoking, addictive substance abuse, people spending too much time on Internet games, etc. Unless you come up with a very nuanced rationale for which principle takes precedence, the side you pick here is the same side you pick for these other issues.)
A "corporate" death penalty just means the company is dissolved, and the shareholders lose money (capital). But the individuals responsible for causing the problems in the first place just dust off their resumes and go to work for other companies. It may may you feel better, but it doesn't accomplish anything. And in fact it may makes things worse because (assuming this corporation was egregiously worse than its competitors) the bad guys who caused the problem are now scattered throughout hundreds of different companies instead of all concentrated in one place that you can avoid or be extremely cautious around.
You have to understand that a corporation is just a paper entity. It doesn't really exist. A bunch of people decide to work together instead of as individuals, and "the corporation" is just a dotted line drawn around that group of individuals. It exists because although Bob and Frank want to work together, Bob doesn't want to be personally liable for Frank's screwups and vice versa. To really effect change, you need to allow gross negligence like this to pierce the corporate veil, and punish the individuals responsible for the bad decisions with fines and jail time.
Hackers breaking into celebrities' phones not to steal nudie pics, but to insert unsent wills in the drafts section leaving everything to themselves as "the nice guy I met at Starbucks" in the event of the celebrity's random death.
That's the problem though. This isn't your secret data. This is data that's shared between you and another party. And the other party is the one opting to share it with the credit agency.
Logically, arguing that the other party shouldn't be allowed to share this info without your permission, is equivalent to arguing that you shouldn't be allowed to write a Yelp review of a restaurant without first getting the restaurant's permission.
I really don't get the crowd who's always on about security/privacy here.
I don't think many people here are always on about security/privacy. Just like not many people here think security/privacy never matters. People just want the option of holding certain discussions in private. Because sometimes security/privacy matters.
Unfortunately, very few of these online communications tools give you a trustworthy "secure" or "encrypted" option - trustworthy enough to exclude the author/server from monitoring your communications. Back in the early days of the Internet, some friends and I set up a private IRC channel to discuss some personal matters. About a half hour in, an uninvited mod left a derogatory remark - he'd been abusing his mod privileges to evesdrop on our "private" channel. We never used IRC again. Once your credibility is shot like that, you're never getting it back.
Likewise, if you surreptitiously install the ability to monitor conversations users think are private and confidential, your credibility is shot. While you're correct it's unreasonable and counterproductive to expect security/privacy all the time, it's completely reasonable to expect it some of the time at your own choosing. The presumption has been that this is true for Skype because it's encrypted. But submitter is correctly providing a PSA by pointing out that this is not the case, and that Microsoft has the ability to listen in. People need to use something other than Skype if they're going to discuss something they wish to keep private.
It's nothing like audiophiles. No matter your distance from an audio source, you cannot hear above about 22 kHz. So there's no point encoding at higher than 44 kHz. Ever.
But whether video exceeds the resolving capability of your eye depends on resolution and screen size and viewing distance. I have a 42" 1080p HDTV which is fine for most of my viewing. But on my projector which throws a 12' image, 1080p is woefully inadequate. The pixels are completely obvious and it's like viewing a movie through a screen mesh. I'm anxiously waiting for 4k projectors to come down in price, but at this screen size I suspect the optimal resolution is closer to 8k.
The same goes for VR headsets. Because the screens cover such a wide angle of view, (110 degrees on Samsung's latest), the pixel size is far larger than your eye's resolving capability. 20/20 vision can resolve line pairs with about 1 arc-minute of separation. So the optimal resolution for a VR screen 110 degrees wide is 110*60*2 = 13,200 pixels wide. We're not gonna get there for at least a couple more decades.
Slashdot Mirror
They were being conservative. 30 MW / 20,000 homes = 1500 Watts per home.
That's higher than the average U.S. home's consumption. 10812 kWh per year / 8766 hours per year = 1233 Watts per home.
Thinkpad service was amazing back before it was sold to Lenovo. One morning I called for a problem which was covered under warranty, expecting to be without the laptop for maybe a week. FedEx dropped off a shipping box within an hour. I packed it up and called FedEx, who picked it up in 30 minutes. It then flew from California to the IBM service center in Memphis TN I think? They located it right next to the FedEx hub so they could get deliveries earlier and send returns later than FedEx's normal pickup deadline. According to the tracking it arrived around 7pm. Their evening shift fixed the laptop, and got it back to FedEx in just about an hour, who then flew it back to California. Early next morning FedEx gave me my fixed laptop back. Total time I was without it was about 20 hours.
I test nearly autistic, so I had to figure out a lot of the complex rules of social interaction, instead of it being "obvious" like I guess it is to most people.
As an example, my sister gave me a birthday present which I didn't really need. I thanked her (learned that rule pretty early), but told her I didn't really need it. She knows about my social handicap, so explained to me that when you receive a gift, you're supposed to politely accept it whether or not you really want it.
Some years later, a friend gave me a gift which I didn't really need. But remembering what my sister said, I thanked her, politely accepted the gift, and tucked it away in the trunk of my car. Where it sat because, well, I didn't really need it. A few months later the friend saw the gift in the trunk of my car and was livid and upset. She bawled about it to a mutual friend, who came and talked with me about it. The mutual friend said I should've just declined the gift if I didn't want it. I explained what my sister had taught me, and she took a deep breath, and said "yes that's true, but not in this situation."
That day I learned that the rule my sister taught me has an exception. If someone gives you a gift because they like you, accepting it is a sign of being open to reciprocating. And if you're not interested in the person, you're supposed to politely decline the gift as a signal that you're not interested. (Though I'm still a bit unclear how you're supposed to know that the gift is a "like" gift when the person doesn't actually say so when they give it to you.)
Social norms are full of these rules, exceptions to the rules, exceptions to exceptions, exceptions to exceptions to exceptions, etc. It takes quite a bit of brainpower to figure all this out subconsciously so that it's "obvious" without having to learn it the way I have to.
And to point out the elephant in the room, there's another behavior which demands social conformity and also has these complex rules and exceptions, thus requiring a bigger brain. Language.
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dolphin.
That's what I don't get about the press coverage about all this. Russia pays for ads supporting white supremacists and somehow that's part of a conspiracy to get Trump elected. Russia pays for ads supporting BLM and somehow that's also part of a conspiracy to get Trump elected. A 5-year old can spot the problem with the reasoning here.
Historically, elections with higher voter turnout have favored the Democrats. So any apolitical "divisive" ad campaign which enraged more people into voting should actually have had the net effect of helping Democrats to win (i.e. a greater percentage of the enraged Republicans were already going to vote anyway). So either this was a Russian operation to try to get Clinton elected, or it was a Russian operation that had nothing to do with the election.
Along the same lines, Clinton lost because she was a lackluster candidate who couldn't convince enough Democrats to come to the polls and vote. That's how pretty much every election I've taken part in (30 years) has gone. There are substantially fewer registered Republicans than registered Democrats, but a greater percentage of Republicans show up to vote every election. If the Democrats choose a popular (or at least not-unpopular) candidate who can excite an above average percentage of Democrats to bother to vote, the Democrats win. If they choose a lackluster candidate, the Democrats lose.
GHz for GHz, Kaby Lake (Jan 2017 desktop release) is only about 20% faster than Sandy Bridge (Jan 2011 desktop release). 20% improvement in 6 years. I'm still telling people with Sandy Bridge systems not to bother upgrading. Unless you want more cores (i3 to i5 or i7), some of the newer features (like USB-C support), or want lower power consumption, there's no reason to stop using a Sandy Bridge system.
Clock speed has also been relatively static. 3.6-3.9 GHz in 2011 to 4.4-4.5 GHz in 2017. A 19% increase. Combine the two and you get an underwhelming 42% improvement in processor speed in 6 years.
Even as recently as the late 1990s, by the time a system was 6 years old, it was far beyond obsolete. For example, November 1995 saw the release of the 200 MHz Pentium Pro. If you skip ahead 6 years, you find the 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 released in August 2001. A 900% increase just in clock speed in 6 years.
PC sales are lackluster because there's no reason to upgrade at anywhere close to the rate we had to upgrade in the past.
If automakers added a mount which let you view your phone while driving, and you got into an accident while using it while driving, you'd sue the automaker for encouraging dangerous behavior. But if they don't add a mount, forcing you to add it yourself, and you get into an accident while using it while driving, you have only yourself to blame.
Google patched Blueborn within a day, and Samsung (as the major iPhone competitor) rolled out Blueborne fixes within about 2 weeks of it going public.
The problem is the damn carriers. They delay the manufacturer patches while they do their own "testing" and tweaking (i.e. installing software you can't uninstall), sometimes for months. Apple was able to strongarm the carriers into conceding control over software updates on iPhones. None of the Android manufacturers has enough marketing clout to do the same. And Google can't because they've released Android as Open Source. If they try to strongarm the carriers, the carrier can just blow off Google and install a custom version of Android on their phones.
What we need is to break up the vertical integration in the cell phone market. Cell tower networks, cellular service, and cellular phones should all be managed and marketed by different companies. No single company should have their fingers in more than one of those markets.
The problem with the EPA under Obama was that instead of regulating to manage risk, they were often trying to regulate to eliminate risk.
Life will always have risk. The key is to find an acceptable level of risk which doesn't compromise your ability to accomplish things whose benefit exceeds the drawbacks of the risk. If you try to eliminate all risk, you also eliminate all ability to accomplish anything. Vaccines are a perfect example. There's a very tiny chance you will get sick from a vaccine; there's even a tiny chance that you'll die from getting a vaccine. But that risk is tiny compared to the benefit - near-elimination of your chance to die from the disease you're being vaccinated against over the course of your natural life. The risk is worth the reward. But using the logic sometimes used by the Obama EPA, the presence of that tiny risk invalidated its use regardless of the potential benefit.
tl;dr - Some risks are worth taking.
That's really the problem. We don't know if it's "tolerable" or not for a healthy person.
The assumption so far has been to err on the side of caution and assume any elevated radiation exposure is harmful. Unfortunately that turns science upside down by setting an unfalsifiable hypothesis as the null hypothesis. You cannot prove that radiation exposure is safe. You can expose 1000 people to the equivalent of 20 CT scans, and if their long-term cancer rate is the same as unexposed people, the nay-sayers can always argue "no you're wrong, it was just luck that none of them got cancer" or "those people weren't a random sample" or a myriad of other possible explanations why your data is wrong.
For science to work properly, the null hypothesis has to be falsifiable. The assumption has to be that increased radiation exposure is safe. And only when you find experimental evidence that a certain level of radiation exposure is dangerous, do you reject that hypothesis at that radiation level.
That only covers the killer-type cheaters (which, granted, is most of them). Explorer and achiever types cheat to gain undeserved praise from other players for their discoveries or gear they've amassed. There's not much cheating among socializers, though they have a disproportionate share of drama and backstabbing. Basically cheating in the social realm, rather than in the game realm.
So basically, Windows and iOS were protected for implementing 802.11 incorrectly.
While Android got screwed over by implementing it rigorously.
This should also become a programming example of the difference between setting something to NULL vs setting it to zero. Instead of implementing the encryption key as a string, it shouldn've been implemented as a pointer to the string. And when the standard called for the key to be cleared, the value shouldn've been zeroed out (to prevent it from being recovered in memory), memory released, and the pointer set to NULL (so the software would know the value didn't exist anymore and wouldn't try to use it).
WPA2 enterprise doesn't use a pre-shared key. So which is it? Does the weakness lie with pre-shared key passwords? Or something else which also affects WPA2 enterprise?
Ah, here we go. The answer is "it's complicated." I'm reading through it right now, but as a PSA:
In the future can we link to original source articles or responses by authoritative organizations, instead of trade rags?
It's illegal to store credit card numbers without the card holder's authorization.
That said, if you check the little box which says "remember my credit card info for future purchases," you've authorized them to store it. You've traded away security for a little convenience.
That's actually another problem caused by Visa/MC. They lobbied for and got laws passed which prohibited merchants from charging a fee for a credit card transaction. Ideally, prices would be cash, and you'd have to pay an extra fee equal to the processing charge if you used a credit card. Then it would be completely clear to customers exactly how much of their purchase price was being diverted to Visa/MC and the processor.
But because of the law, merchants are forced to offer the same price for CC and cash. Meaning customers have no clue what percentage of their payment is going to fees. (Actually, they can use a loophole in the law to offer a cash discount. But the additional step introduces enough complexity and expense to the system that most merchants bother. The ones who don't want to pay the CC processing fee simply don't accept credit cards.)
Because in a normal market, something like net neutrality is not needed. People pay an ISP for service. if the ISP tries to throttle certain websites to extort money from those sites, people notice the slowdown, hear from a friend that those sites work just fine on his ISP, and switch to their friend's ISP. It's called giving your customers what the want - a hallmark of what makes a market economy function. Any ISP that tries to selectively throttle sites is shooting themselves in the foot.
The only reason net neutrality is an issue is because local governments have granted certain ISPs a monopoly in their area. Since the customers in that area have no ability to switch to a different ISP, the ISP becomes emboldened to extort money from websites for "access" to their monopolized customers. In other words, net neutrality is government regulation to try to fix a problem created by government regulation. It's not necessary unless you think government-granted monopolies are also necessary.
The problem with Americans isn't that they don't support net neutrality. It's that they assume ISPs are a competitive market, when it's not. Even you have completely missed the fact that the real problem is the local monopolies.
In the past, reviews by film critics held undue influence over ticket sales because regular people couldn't write reviews. They had to rely on reviews in newspapers and magazines to decide which films to see. Only occasionally getting word of mouth at the water cooler. In other words, regular people were tricked into seeing movies which critics liked, but which general audiences might not like.
With the advent of unlimited phone plans, then cell phones, and now the Internet, word of mouth among regular people can now compete with the widespread distribution of publications by critics. And people's decision for what to see has been corrected to weigh the opinion of critics (who are a tiny, tiny subset of the population) in proportion to their representation of the population. Meaning not very much. Most people see the movies their friends and like-minded individuals say they liked, not what the critics liked. In other words, it's not that critics are losing influence per se, it's that they're losing influence they never should've had in the first place (for the purposes of selling movies to the mass market).
This is really the same thing that's been happening to almost everything. Unix/Linux gurus like certain functionality, configurability, and usability from an OS. But the mass market prefers something much more simplified without so many options (or in Apple's case, almost no options). Gearheads like to tweak their car's engine components and ECM to get more or different performance out of it. But the mass market prefers something that reliably turns on every morning and gets them to work and back every day. Professional and semi-pro photographers collect thousands of dollars worth of camera equipment so they can take specific types of photos under nearly every possible circumstance. But the mass market prefers something small and cheap that they can use to take selfies.
The same thing is now happening with movies. The only difference was that due to an unusual and temporary confluence of publicity by the mass media (newspapers and magazines), the movie aficionado and director used to be able to sell their expensive wares to a much wider audience that would be possible if said audience (the mass market) were properly informed of what the rest of the audience really liked. This is now correcting itself. Directors and critics can still make and review finely crafted films for each other, just like gearheads hold events, Linux gurus have open source projects, and photographers have their own exhibitions and specialty websites. But they're not going to get the ticket sales they got in the past. If they want ticket sales, they're going to have to make movies which appeal to the mass market, not to the specialist expert in their field like themselves.
If movies go the way photography has gone, studio-produced films are going to become just a trickle, a tiny segment of the market. Amateur productions, including films and shorts made for YouTube, which appeal to highly specialized segments of the market are going to come to dominate. One of my friends is a YouTube millionaire. She stumbled (literally) upon the market for parents wanting entertaining but educational videos for their young kids to watch. She uploaded her first video in the hopes a PBS station exec would see it and hire her to make the series. But it turned out to be so popular with parents that she was able to take the ad revenue from that first video and produce the entire series herself. And now her small-time studio with a few dozen employees produces these videos for "release" on YouTube, and being paid with ad revenue. That's the future of film-making. Very diversified and specialized, with less room for the big studios churning out blockbusters.
The Space Shuttle was designed under very different assumptions than it ended up operating under. Yes the support infrastructure was ungodly expensive, but the idea was that if you could get the frequency of flights up to about 1 a week, that would amortize those costs to where on a per flight basis it was cheaper than disposable spacecraft. There were two major problems which developed.
First, the Shuttle's design grew tremendously complicated. The tiles, which weren't supposed to pop off, did, and each one of them was unique and replacements had to be custom fabricated. Turnaround time grew from an estimated week to months.
Second, the Shuttle's biggest customer bailed out on it. You have to remember that the Shuttle was conceived in the 1960s and designed in the 1970s. At the time, spy satellites would eject a roll of film, which would be captured in mid-air, developed, and analyzed. Once a spy satellite ran out of film, it was useless. The NRO envisioned the Shuttle as a way to refuel its spy satellites and reload them with new film. That's why the Hubble Space Telescope fit in the Shuttle's cargo bay - HST was about the sale size as a spy satellite, and the Shuttle was designed to hold a spy satellite.
But once the CCD was developed and the spy satellites could simply radio images back down to earth, film became obsolete. Without the ability to turn around shuttles in a week, and without a customer to pay for more frequent Shuttle flights, its operations slowed down to about 5 launches per year - 1/10th the frequency the bean counters assumed when OKing it. The costs which were supposed to be amortized never were, and turned it into one of the most expensive launch systems in history.
You're underestimating the huge scale of a Yellowstone eruption. This isn't like injecting dye into an existing current. It's like opening a fire hydrant in the middle of an existing current. The quantity of ash and ejecta would spread out radially, partially overriding the jet stream. Ashfall patterns from past eruptions confirm this - California will be covered.
Deciding which principles to defend based on who else will be "on your side" is a throwback to the elementary school playground where everyone wanted to be picked on the team with the cool kids.
Pick the side whose principles you believe in. Don't worry about who else is on your side - it simply doesn't matter. I believe in free speech so I defend it, even though it sometimes puts me on the same side as Nazi sympathizers. MAFIAA vs Kim Dotcom was easy because there were long-established rules for foreign asset seizure and extradition, which the U.S. (under pressure from the MAFIAA) violated or got the New Zealand government to ignore. If you believed in due process, you were on Kim Dotcom's side. If you believed the ends justified the means, you were on the MAFIAA's side. The proper venue for the MAFIAA to address their grievances was in the New Zealand court system. Basically charging Kim Dotcom with copyright violation in New Zealand.
For online gambling, it basically resolves down to the right to spend your money in whatever way you see fit, vs people needing to be protected because a gambling addiction supersedes your ability to make rational decisions on how to spend your money. Decide for yourself which you think is more important, and that's your side. (Do note that this is the same fundamental conflict found in smoking, addictive substance abuse, people spending too much time on Internet games, etc. Unless you come up with a very nuanced rationale for which principle takes precedence, the side you pick here is the same side you pick for these other issues.)
A "corporate" death penalty just means the company is dissolved, and the shareholders lose money (capital). But the individuals responsible for causing the problems in the first place just dust off their resumes and go to work for other companies. It may may you feel better, but it doesn't accomplish anything. And in fact it may makes things worse because (assuming this corporation was egregiously worse than its competitors) the bad guys who caused the problem are now scattered throughout hundreds of different companies instead of all concentrated in one place that you can avoid or be extremely cautious around.
You have to understand that a corporation is just a paper entity. It doesn't really exist. A bunch of people decide to work together instead of as individuals, and "the corporation" is just a dotted line drawn around that group of individuals. It exists because although Bob and Frank want to work together, Bob doesn't want to be personally liable for Frank's screwups and vice versa. To really effect change, you need to allow gross negligence like this to pierce the corporate veil, and punish the individuals responsible for the bad decisions with fines and jail time.
Hackers breaking into celebrities' phones not to steal nudie pics, but to insert unsent wills in the drafts section leaving everything to themselves as "the nice guy I met at Starbucks" in the event of the celebrity's random death.
That's the problem though. This isn't your secret data. This is data that's shared between you and another party. And the other party is the one opting to share it with the credit agency.
Logically, arguing that the other party shouldn't be allowed to share this info without your permission, is equivalent to arguing that you shouldn't be allowed to write a Yelp review of a restaurant without first getting the restaurant's permission.
I don't think many people here are always on about security/privacy. Just like not many people here think security/privacy never matters. People just want the option of holding certain discussions in private. Because sometimes security/privacy matters.
Unfortunately, very few of these online communications tools give you a trustworthy "secure" or "encrypted" option - trustworthy enough to exclude the author/server from monitoring your communications. Back in the early days of the Internet, some friends and I set up a private IRC channel to discuss some personal matters. About a half hour in, an uninvited mod left a derogatory remark - he'd been abusing his mod privileges to evesdrop on our "private" channel. We never used IRC again. Once your credibility is shot like that, you're never getting it back.
Likewise, if you surreptitiously install the ability to monitor conversations users think are private and confidential, your credibility is shot. While you're correct it's unreasonable and counterproductive to expect security/privacy all the time, it's completely reasonable to expect it some of the time at your own choosing. The presumption has been that this is true for Skype because it's encrypted. But submitter is correctly providing a PSA by pointing out that this is not the case, and that Microsoft has the ability to listen in. People need to use something other than Skype if they're going to discuss something they wish to keep private.
It's nothing like audiophiles. No matter your distance from an audio source, you cannot hear above about 22 kHz. So there's no point encoding at higher than 44 kHz. Ever.
But whether video exceeds the resolving capability of your eye depends on resolution and screen size and viewing distance. I have a 42" 1080p HDTV which is fine for most of my viewing. But on my projector which throws a 12' image, 1080p is woefully inadequate. The pixels are completely obvious and it's like viewing a movie through a screen mesh. I'm anxiously waiting for 4k projectors to come down in price, but at this screen size I suspect the optimal resolution is closer to 8k.
The same goes for VR headsets. Because the screens cover such a wide angle of view, (110 degrees on Samsung's latest), the pixel size is far larger than your eye's resolving capability. 20/20 vision can resolve line pairs with about 1 arc-minute of separation. So the optimal resolution for a VR screen 110 degrees wide is 110*60*2 = 13,200 pixels wide. We're not gonna get there for at least a couple more decades.