So, it looks like the GOP fought tooth and nail against privatizing spaceflight because they wanted to brink the pork home and more or less are dictating rocket design to NASA. Juicy bits here:
What really galled me, though, was that several Republicans blamed Obama for NASA's current mess, including Ralph Hall (R-TX, remember him?). This is grossly and demonstrably unfair and untrue. Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) hammered over and again the idea that Obama is trying to kill the manned space program. That is not true, and in fact the current situation (including the five year gap between the Shuttle and any follow-on rocket system) started in the Bush Administration. Constellation has been in trouble for some time, behind schedule and over-budget. I'm of the opinion that Obama's plan to defund Constellation does not kill the manned space program as Culberson said it will. I have written about this repeatedly: far from killing it, this new direction may save NASA from the mess it finds itself in right now.
What's weird is how Culberson used the bogeyman of Obama to try to gain sympathy for the bill, saying that a yes vote on the bill would stop Obama's plan to dismantle NASA. I find that odd, as much of the bill aligns with Obama's plan for NASA, including defunding Constellation and promoting a new rocket system*. Moreover, I want to point out that Obama's plan, and this bill, funds private space concerns (like SpaceX, which is preparing to launch its Falcon 9 rocket which will be man-rated and capable of flights to the space station). You'd think Republicans would support this, as they have a mantra of privatizing health care, social security, and so many other government efforts. However, many Republicans don't like private space companies. An exception I must note was Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who spoke up about funding private space efforts and how important it is. On most issues he and I disagree strongly, but on this one we agree.
>I think we get spoiled by the wonderful advances in science and forget how hard and how much resources it takes to keep advancing.
That's what Newton was telling Leibniz 300 years ago. Seriously, its called idealizing the past. Science didn't suddenly collapse under its own hubris, but your perception certainly has. The last 15 or so years has been a boon in the astrophysics world.
RIMs real customers are BES using corporate customers. They want quality apps that can be sold with volume licensing. I suspect the people using BIS really aren't their real customers and RIM goes out of their way to discourage the whole "ZOMG MY PHONE IS FUN!!" vibe that defines the non-enterprise market, which is probably a good thing. They're not going to beat Apple and Google at their own game, but certainly they can keep enterprise going and continue to be the "serious" phone for business. If anything, they're more worried about Microsoft than Apple or Google.
>To be honest, I think most people treat the list of permissions much as they treat an EULA
Exactly. I also don't like how all permissions are weighed the same. Why isn't the one to make outgoing phone calls or SMS messages in red? What exactly do some of them mean? Clicking on them does nothing.
Not to mention you can't say "Okay, you can run but no internet access or running in the background."
Permission listings are better than nothing, but frankly, the Pandora app could say "I'm going to send your SS# to one of our servers" and most people would click yes because they just want to hear some music. I don't think there's real pushback here. Consumers arent voting with their dollars and refusing to install apps based on permissions. They'll just put up with whatever to get by.
>that what we know about physics and speed limits is wrong?
I'm sure if you asked these gamblers about the odds of Jesus returning or that miracles are real you'd get similar, if not, better odds. Why do we care that non-experts think aliens are going to land? I can visit io9.com or any other sci-fi site to read "predictions" from mouth breathers with wish fulfillment fantasies.
You're assuming that wormholes are possible and usable for spacetravel. You're just spreading the improbably jelly around and its certainly not helping your case. I hate how people just sit there and assume that magical gates they've seen on their favorite soft sci-fi shows are a given. They're not.
The stuxnet team is most likely the product of a large intelligence department. That is to say a group effort from a nation state, not some independent hacking gods with nothing better to do.
The point is that expertise in scada, coming up with 4 zero days, getting 2 signed driver keys from JMicron and Realtek, and distributing the exploit without the internet to Iranian factories is not something a non-state can do.
Bored engineers came up with 4 zero-day exploits and two stolen keys to sign Realtek and Jmicron drivers? Whoever did this had some serious black-hat resources at his disposal. Most likely a nation state as an individual or group would be able to sell these exploits for a tidy sum.
Its also important to realize that revealing these exploits and compromised keys to the public is a huge opportunity cost. Someone decided that attacking Iran was worth it. That seems like a decision a government would make.
I imagine indoor non-moving devices like routers will just need an address or zip code put in. Its cell phones, laptops, and other mobile devices that'll use GPS or the cell phone network to tell them where they are. Heck, they could broadcast the location in the headers of the wifi packets and have the client just search for them or some other dynamic approach.
The sliver of bandwidth we get with the ISM band is really not very useful in heavy population areas. The shift to 5ghz wifi didn't seem to help as in all the cases I've used it range was borderline useless and N degrades pretty badly. In a spot where G gave me 3 or 4 mbps, N gave me the same or less.
I can't wait for the new wifi standard to use these frequencies. Now if we can get rid of broadcast television altogether and just move to an IPTV solution and be done with it.
Funny that. My dad has both and if I had to pick I'd say the Alzheimer's, by a wide margin, is hardest on him and his family. Its not just the forgetfulness, which is only one symptom, its the dementia and the loss of basic skills. He more or less lives in a dreamworld, never sure where he is, when it is, who he is. Its worse at night and during the day he seems okay, but he has no idea what is going on. He will sometimes latch onto a conspiracy theory like believing some stranger he just met is trying to hurt him or stole from him 20 years ago. His emotions are more or less out of control. He's lost most of his skills. Its not that he doesn't have the wherewithal to cook, its just he doesn't know how or exactly what an oven is anymore. Alzheimer's is like 100 diseases in one. Its really incredible how much damage it does and we're not even in the late stages.
Cancer on the other hand is difficult, but its not much more than driving him to the hospital for a chemo treatment every few weeks and dealing with the side-effects. If I had to pick, I'd pick cancer without a second thought. The treatments for it are much better. Alzheimer's is a guaranteed slow and painful death sentence that begins with the loss of one's self. I hate to say it, but I think the most humane thing would be if the cancer killed him before the Alzheimer's got worse. At a certain point they just lie in bed, crap themselves, cry, and scream. Man, how I wish there were better treatments or a cure for this. Its fucking awful.
>Remember a time back in the mid-to-earlylate 90's when cookies had a super negative connotation to them?
I remember a couple BS lawsuits from guys who thought they could get rich quick.
I guess there's an argument to tracking cookies, but if you are at war with the ad networks you might as well pull the nuclear option and install adblock and be done with it.
Nowadays, the bigger threat is that these ad networks get hacked frequently and start spreading malware. Its incredible how badly advertising on the net has gotten. Heck, yesterday I ran into a site that with a video ad that started automatically with audio and the mute button disabled.
WindowsCE isn't desktop Windows. Its a small RTOS that can handle touchscreens and GUI apps. While I'm not a big fan, I don't see why it can't be used on devices like these. You're going to have to run some kind of embedded OS on there if you want an advanced featureset (tcpip support, local storage, config menus, etc).
Well, that's WindowsCE not the full blown desktop OS. Its perfectly appropriate for a device like that. Its a RTOS with a small footprint that can drive touchscreen GUI apps. If you're already familiar with Visual Studio its easy to develop for.
>I found that NOT swapping the buttons, but merely changing which hand I hold the mouse with, works beautifully.
I've only known one lefty to do this its the most bizarre thing. The mouse is an unnatural interface and its 100% learned. The button order doesn't matter. Switching them around for them to be "just like the righties" is crazy. The worst part is that Windows remote assistance respected the mouse swap so when I do a RA session with this user, my buttons are reversed also!
Anyway, I'm a lefty. I use a mouse on the right side of my keyboard typically. I can use it on my left. Most lefties are ambidextrous. I'll use my left hand when I'm using photoshop, but that's really optional at this point.
Lots of organizations and most governments have the source to windows, its not like its this closely guarded secret. Considering Stuxnet was found infecting Iranian systems more than anything else, its probably made in the good ol' USA. This thing has NSA written all over it. Its really well-done, I guess my tax dollars are at work.
You know, Foxit does this. It enables 'secure reading mode' when you open a PDF from the browser. Adobe should copy this feature, but instead they keep talking about a complex sandboxing scheme for their app.
I'd rather they put in a mode like this, but they won't. Why? Because all those features it disables have been engineered by Adobe and as such they have performed a defacto extension of the PDF spec. Disabling this feature is admission that Adobe is incompetent and that people can live without js/flash embedding and mailable forms.
So Adobe's management is all about promoting their features and they don't care much about security. They figure the update process will take care of it, but it doesn't. Heck, Reader doesn't even auto-update itself. You need to manually run the updater once and then it lives in your tray asking you to do the update. End users don't update typically. MS learned that the only way to get them to do it is to enable auto-update by default and they've been doing this since XP SP2.
So now everything is hinged on this sandbox mode that lets them have their cake and eat it too. They want all sorts of insecure features and security. They think they can continue business as usual and the sandboxing will protect everyone. Dunno, this seems to be a pretty big gamble to me. Instead of a simple secure reading mode and setting auto-update to default, they're going the sandbox route. I suspect this really won't help and malware writers will find ways outside the sandbox.
>Plenty of Americans with functioning synapses say the same damn thing about the Iraq Clusterfuck, and Terry Jones *IS* a fucking troglodyte.
Pardon me, but my memory of 2003 is pretty good. Plenty of Americans were chomping at the bit to start a war they couldn't afford for reasons based on intel that was obviously massaged. I remember almost zero skepticism about this. Tthe US's view on Islam is pretty low, to the point where we are having a national discourse on why you can't build mosques in certain places.
Please don't make the US out to be this enlightened culture. I'm a liberal atheist. I see this shit all the time. At worst, our culture is this awful strawman, at best we're a religious dominated conservative culture with an itchy trigger finger. Let's not pat ourselves too hard on the back. We're on the long road to sanity and secular enlightenment, and usually we go as much backwards as we do forwards.
On Android you can set flash to run only when request, just like flashblock on Firefox. So, in other words, you don't need your phone provider to refuse to give you access to flash objects. You can simply not activate them. The difference between the iphone and my EVO is that I can watch embedded video that's not supported natively. They can't. Neither of us is viewing flash ads. Choice is good, not bad.
>The reason people still think its a problem is because Microsoft decided you as a customer shouldnt be able to use more than 4 GB memory on 32-bit since Windows 2000 .
MS servers support PAE just fine. The issue with desktops is that MS tested common desktop software and found that PAE is unstable. Server apps are usually written to a higher standard and admins can easily figure out a PAE issue. I don't really see this as a problem. Desktop users can move to a proper 64-bit system with ease nowadays anyway with Vista/7. Your 9 year old version of XP should be replaced anyway.
Not to mention PAE has lots of annoying limits and is at best a band-aid until 64-bit went mainstream and third-party companies were forced to write 64 bit drivers by MS.
Users dont update. MS learned this 10 years ago. Adobe should do what MS does - default to autoupdates on. Power users and admins can manually adjust this, but home users should just sit back and let it update itself.
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So, it looks like the GOP fought tooth and nail against privatizing spaceflight because they wanted to brink the pork home and more or less are dictating rocket design to NASA. Juicy bits here:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/09/30/congress-passes-nasa-authorization-bill-but-id-rather-watch-sausages-being-made/
What really galled me, though, was that several Republicans blamed Obama for NASA's current mess, including Ralph Hall (R-TX, remember him?). This is grossly and demonstrably unfair and untrue. Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) hammered over and again the idea that Obama is trying to kill the manned space program. That is not true, and in fact the current situation (including the five year gap between the Shuttle and any follow-on rocket system) started in the Bush Administration. Constellation has been in trouble for some time, behind schedule and over-budget. I'm of the opinion that Obama's plan to defund Constellation does not kill the manned space program as Culberson said it will. I have written about this repeatedly: far from killing it, this new direction may save NASA from the mess it finds itself in right now.
What's weird is how Culberson used the bogeyman of Obama to try to gain sympathy for the bill, saying that a yes vote on the bill would stop Obama's plan to dismantle NASA. I find that odd, as much of the bill aligns with Obama's plan for NASA, including defunding Constellation and promoting a new rocket system*. Moreover, I want to point out that Obama's plan, and this bill, funds private space concerns (like SpaceX, which is preparing to launch its Falcon 9 rocket which will be man-rated and capable of flights to the space station). You'd think Republicans would support this, as they have a mantra of privatizing health care, social security, and so many other government efforts. However, many Republicans don't like private space companies. An exception I must note was Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who spoke up about funding private space efforts and how important it is. On most issues he and I disagree strongly, but on this one we agree.
>I think we get spoiled by the wonderful advances in science and forget how hard and how much resources it takes to keep advancing.
That's what Newton was telling Leibniz 300 years ago. Seriously, its called idealizing the past. Science didn't suddenly collapse under its own hubris, but your perception certainly has. The last 15 or so years has been a boon in the astrophysics world.
RIMs real customers are BES using corporate customers. They want quality apps that can be sold with volume licensing. I suspect the people using BIS really aren't their real customers and RIM goes out of their way to discourage the whole "ZOMG MY PHONE IS FUN!!" vibe that defines the non-enterprise market, which is probably a good thing. They're not going to beat Apple and Google at their own game, but certainly they can keep enterprise going and continue to be the "serious" phone for business. If anything, they're more worried about Microsoft than Apple or Google.
>To be honest, I think most people treat the list of permissions much as they treat an EULA
Exactly. I also don't like how all permissions are weighed the same. Why isn't the one to make outgoing phone calls or SMS messages in red? What exactly do some of them mean? Clicking on them does nothing.
Not to mention you can't say "Okay, you can run but no internet access or running in the background."
Permission listings are better than nothing, but frankly, the Pandora app could say "I'm going to send your SS# to one of our servers" and most people would click yes because they just want to hear some music. I don't think there's real pushback here. Consumers arent voting with their dollars and refusing to install apps based on permissions. They'll just put up with whatever to get by.
>that what we know about physics and speed limits is wrong?
I'm sure if you asked these gamblers about the odds of Jesus returning or that miracles are real you'd get similar, if not, better odds. Why do we care that non-experts think aliens are going to land? I can visit io9.com or any other sci-fi site to read "predictions" from mouth breathers with wish fulfillment fantasies.
You're assuming that wormholes are possible and usable for spacetravel. You're just spreading the improbably jelly around and its certainly not helping your case. I hate how people just sit there and assume that magical gates they've seen on their favorite soft sci-fi shows are a given. They're not.
Or is another "Download gdggdsf.exe" and moronic users click on Run?
So far I've only see "drive by download" which is 100% meaningless. Would it kill them to tell us what exploit, if any is being used?
The stuxnet team is most likely the product of a large intelligence department. That is to say a group effort from a nation state, not some independent hacking gods with nothing better to do.
The point is that expertise in scada, coming up with 4 zero days, getting 2 signed driver keys from JMicron and Realtek, and distributing the exploit without the internet to Iranian factories is not something a non-state can do.
Bored engineers came up with 4 zero-day exploits and two stolen keys to sign Realtek and Jmicron drivers? Whoever did this had some serious black-hat resources at his disposal. Most likely a nation state as an individual or group would be able to sell these exploits for a tidy sum.
Its also important to realize that revealing these exploits and compromised keys to the public is a huge opportunity cost. Someone decided that attacking Iran was worth it. That seems like a decision a government would make.
Hell didn't freeze over, Americans just voted in a competent party. 8 years of GOP rule makes you forget how government is supposed to be.
I imagine indoor non-moving devices like routers will just need an address or zip code put in. Its cell phones, laptops, and other mobile devices that'll use GPS or the cell phone network to tell them where they are. Heck, they could broadcast the location in the headers of the wifi packets and have the client just search for them or some other dynamic approach.
The sliver of bandwidth we get with the ISM band is really not very useful in heavy population areas. The shift to 5ghz wifi didn't seem to help as in all the cases I've used it range was borderline useless and N degrades pretty badly. In a spot where G gave me 3 or 4 mbps, N gave me the same or less.
I can't wait for the new wifi standard to use these frequencies. Now if we can get rid of broadcast television altogether and just move to an IPTV solution and be done with it.
Funny that. My dad has both and if I had to pick I'd say the Alzheimer's, by a wide margin, is hardest on him and his family. Its not just the forgetfulness, which is only one symptom, its the dementia and the loss of basic skills. He more or less lives in a dreamworld, never sure where he is, when it is, who he is. Its worse at night and during the day he seems okay, but he has no idea what is going on. He will sometimes latch onto a conspiracy theory like believing some stranger he just met is trying to hurt him or stole from him 20 years ago. His emotions are more or less out of control. He's lost most of his skills. Its not that he doesn't have the wherewithal to cook, its just he doesn't know how or exactly what an oven is anymore. Alzheimer's is like 100 diseases in one. Its really incredible how much damage it does and we're not even in the late stages.
Cancer on the other hand is difficult, but its not much more than driving him to the hospital for a chemo treatment every few weeks and dealing with the side-effects. If I had to pick, I'd pick cancer without a second thought. The treatments for it are much better. Alzheimer's is a guaranteed slow and painful death sentence that begins with the loss of one's self. I hate to say it, but I think the most humane thing would be if the cancer killed him before the Alzheimer's got worse. At a certain point they just lie in bed, crap themselves, cry, and scream. Man, how I wish there were better treatments or a cure for this. Its fucking awful.
>Remember a time back in the mid-to-earlylate 90's when cookies had a super negative connotation to them?
I remember a couple BS lawsuits from guys who thought they could get rich quick.
I guess there's an argument to tracking cookies, but if you are at war with the ad networks you might as well pull the nuclear option and install adblock and be done with it.
Nowadays, the bigger threat is that these ad networks get hacked frequently and start spreading malware. Its incredible how badly advertising on the net has gotten. Heck, yesterday I ran into a site that with a video ad that started automatically with audio and the mute button disabled.
WindowsCE isn't desktop Windows. Its a small RTOS that can handle touchscreens and GUI apps. While I'm not a big fan, I don't see why it can't be used on devices like these. You're going to have to run some kind of embedded OS on there if you want an advanced featureset (tcpip support, local storage, config menus, etc).
Well, that's WindowsCE not the full blown desktop OS. Its perfectly appropriate for a device like that. Its a RTOS with a small footprint that can drive touchscreen GUI apps. If you're already familiar with Visual Studio its easy to develop for.
>Come on, Google, put some creative thought into solving these problems..
How about infrastructure that shoots backs? That'll make BillyJoe and BillyBob think twice about damaging equipment that isn't theirs.
"Google would like to announce its new gOS. It comes equipped with Lotus Notes and a machine gun."
>I found that NOT swapping the buttons, but merely changing which hand I hold the mouse with, works beautifully.
I've only known one lefty to do this its the most bizarre thing. The mouse is an unnatural interface and its 100% learned. The button order doesn't matter. Switching them around for them to be "just like the righties" is crazy. The worst part is that Windows remote assistance respected the mouse swap so when I do a RA session with this user, my buttons are reversed also!
Anyway, I'm a lefty. I use a mouse on the right side of my keyboard typically. I can use it on my left. Most lefties are ambidextrous. I'll use my left hand when I'm using photoshop, but that's really optional at this point.
>et molested by a stranger(some studies suggest that the child knows the perpetrator about 90% of the time).
Typically, they call him "Father" at Church.
Lots of organizations and most governments have the source to windows, its not like its this closely guarded secret. Considering Stuxnet was found infecting Iranian systems more than anything else, its probably made in the good ol' USA. This thing has NSA written all over it. Its really well-done, I guess my tax dollars are at work.
You know, Foxit does this. It enables 'secure reading mode' when you open a PDF from the browser. Adobe should copy this feature, but instead they keep talking about a complex sandboxing scheme for their app.
I'd rather they put in a mode like this, but they won't. Why? Because all those features it disables have been engineered by Adobe and as such they have performed a defacto extension of the PDF spec. Disabling this feature is admission that Adobe is incompetent and that people can live without js/flash embedding and mailable forms.
So Adobe's management is all about promoting their features and they don't care much about security. They figure the update process will take care of it, but it doesn't. Heck, Reader doesn't even auto-update itself. You need to manually run the updater once and then it lives in your tray asking you to do the update. End users don't update typically. MS learned that the only way to get them to do it is to enable auto-update by default and they've been doing this since XP SP2.
So now everything is hinged on this sandbox mode that lets them have their cake and eat it too. They want all sorts of insecure features and security. They think they can continue business as usual and the sandboxing will protect everyone. Dunno, this seems to be a pretty big gamble to me. Instead of a simple secure reading mode and setting auto-update to default, they're going the sandbox route. I suspect this really won't help and malware writers will find ways outside the sandbox.
>Plenty of Americans with functioning synapses say the same damn thing about the Iraq Clusterfuck, and Terry Jones *IS* a fucking troglodyte.
Pardon me, but my memory of 2003 is pretty good. Plenty of Americans were chomping at the bit to start a war they couldn't afford for reasons based on intel that was obviously massaged. I remember almost zero skepticism about this. Tthe US's view on Islam is pretty low, to the point where we are having a national discourse on why you can't build mosques in certain places.
Please don't make the US out to be this enlightened culture. I'm a liberal atheist. I see this shit all the time. At worst, our culture is this awful strawman, at best we're a religious dominated conservative culture with an itchy trigger finger. Let's not pat ourselves too hard on the back. We're on the long road to sanity and secular enlightenment, and usually we go as much backwards as we do forwards.
>Also glad that Flash applets are not allowed...
On Android you can set flash to run only when request, just like flashblock on Firefox. So, in other words, you don't need your phone provider to refuse to give you access to flash objects. You can simply not activate them. The difference between the iphone and my EVO is that I can watch embedded video that's not supported natively. They can't. Neither of us is viewing flash ads. Choice is good, not bad.
>The reason people still think its a problem is because Microsoft decided you as a customer shouldnt be able to use more than 4 GB memory on 32-bit since Windows 2000 .
MS servers support PAE just fine. The issue with desktops is that MS tested common desktop software and found that PAE is unstable. Server apps are usually written to a higher standard and admins can easily figure out a PAE issue. I don't really see this as a problem. Desktop users can move to a proper 64-bit system with ease nowadays anyway with Vista/7. Your 9 year old version of XP should be replaced anyway.
Not to mention PAE has lots of annoying limits and is at best a band-aid until 64-bit went mainstream and third-party companies were forced to write 64 bit drivers by MS.
Users dont update. MS learned this 10 years ago. Adobe should do what MS does - default to autoupdates on. Power users and admins can manually adjust this, but home users should just sit back and let it update itself.