The first step at least in some countries isn't so much the income, it is curtailing the industries that actively target the poorest sector of individuals for profit through debt. At least in the US. The whole housing crisis was based on lending large amounts of money to people that could never afford to pay it back and large institutions making money off of the selling of bad debt. This is also done through college mills encouraging the poor to get federal student loans that don't go away even with bankruptcy for a meaningless degree. The latest is sub-prime car loans where they sell a car at well over cost with prohibitive interest rates, make money off the debt, repossess the car, sell it again, and again, and again... Never mind how the pharmaceutical and insurance companies literally create whole new classes of poor when a catastrophic health event occurs... Giving someone a couple hundred bucks a month in Universal Income isn't going to address any of those things. The predatory nature of many of these industries towards the poor with little or no consumer protection is a much larger issue than the relatively simple income/welfare problem. Even the way banks (and payday loans) handle daily transactions all geared around the poor not being able to make good on payments and loans in the US is at issue. Basically when so many groups are actively targeting you for your debt, it's pretty hard to get ahead I would think.
I can't be bothered to remember this, I'll just store it in my BrainPal!
Though if you think about it, we're already offloading memory into our phones, both in storage and as a search tool. I know I don't bother to remember anyones actual phone number anymore, and trivia is essentially only a quick google away!
From the Atlantic article: "If no player EVER finds 49,979,687, the planet won’t ever be grown. The geometry of its trees and lakes, and the length of its quadrupeds’ legs, won’t ever be calculated."
Somehow that all seems very philosophical and kinda sad.:(
To add some numbers (be they what they may) and some citations... We have about 1.1 Billion years until the Sun expands enough to evaporate the oceans. Odds are life would end prior to that processes completion as running up to that would likely be rather unpleasant.
That said given that Humans have only be around for 60,0000 years, and civilization for about 8,000 years... looking at developments, population growth, the odds of any of us lasting that long is probably remote. That said who the hell knows, in that time a lot can happen. Perhaps we will evolve both biologically and technologically to the point of being some sort of celestial being that transverses the universe with only our thoughts or something...
Pretty much this. There are a lot of homeless around where I live. I'd say the cause of that is one of three things in descending order: 1) Mental Issues, 2) Drug Addiction, 3) Personal disaster...
Used to be that folks with mental conditions would be wards of the state and treated in hospitals. As it turns out probably due to a lack of any real funding, that treatment in many cases was horrific and terrible. Since then most of that infrastructure has been removed, but not really replaced with anything. I would say that mental issues are probably driving most of those homeless numbers. Usually it is those that lack supports from family for whatever reason. Could be they tried but just couldn't do it anymore, the expense, or even as people get older they just lack the living family to care for them. Then of course there are those that no matter how much you try, don't want to be helped either and as an individual there isn't much you can do. Add to that the cost of medications they can't afford, or lack of access to medication, etc... Anyway it is a real problem with no easy answers. While some money might help some, it isn't the magic bullet either.
However if society is able to come up with a mental illness strategy/plan that actually works, you could probably solve 2/3's of your homeless problem instantly.
Drug addiction, is well drug addiction. We have methadone clinics aplenty, though I'm conflicted how effective they are in combating the problem. However again, solve the drug problem, and another section of homelessness is solved.
As for the last, well that's harder to pin down. Tragedy does happen, and as the saying goes sometimes someone can just be "down on his luck". Money probably might help on that last score. In the US, I'd imagine the whole catastrophic medical cost that comes out of nowhere is likely a big contributor. The whole insurance system and whatnot needs to be looked at in that regard. Lately it seems some first steps have been made, but probably a long way to go before people do not have to be deathly afraid to get really sick or have a loved one do so.
In addition to material science and structural factors, you might want to re-think the whole "transparent" structure idea. Likely in an environment with little or no atmosphere you would be constantly staring out into the depths of vastness of space that wants to kill you every second of every minute, of every hour, of every day...
So unless your want your habitat to resemble something out of Event Horizon you'd probably be better with opaque walls and video screens decorated with trees, grass, sunshine. sky. and whatnot.
Well considering the strategy was to essentially pay 2.25$ to get each person to sign up for a free account... Not sure how great that strategy is... Then again I have no idea, perhaps that is good value for your money. I guess the key to that metric is did those 8,000 accounts generate more than 18,000$ in profit for Jet?
While I'm critical of the "science" used to come to their conclusion, I don't find it all that unreasonable to assume given current consumption of resources, and population growth, why resource consumption wouldn't also grow at a similar rate.
The whole yearly allotment thing is a bunch of mental flossing. They seem to be trying to do everything at the macro level and make some general assumptions. They might be better off simply looking at many multiple individual cases around the world, coming up with a formula based on that as a predictor, and then correlating it simply to population growth. Even that is going to ignore a significant amount of factors which can impact the results such as distribution and waste, etc... All this on data you are also assuming is correct.
Any intention to move VLC to a media centre/media server type application?
With windows 10 nixing the WMC, many users have had to find alternatives, it might be a prime opportunity. While WMC was terrible in many respects it was pretty widely used. You really had to work your codecs in magical ways to make it play most formats. I've since moved to Plex, which is great, but has some of its own issues with some formats. VLC however plays everything and the kitchen sink I've found, if nothing else will play it, VLC will. That said however, most of us don't want to sit in front of our computers anymore and watch videos either.
The one thing I've found with automation to solve repetitive tasks is that the are two things that can happen to make the time savings spiral out of control. 1) is other people getting a hold of it, using it for something it was never intended to be used for, as part of some system, which know by default you have to try and support or something. 2) Is when whoever you are providing it to see the results and how good they are, they want more, then differently, then formatted a certain way, then changes again, etc... forever until you throw yourself off a bridge. I guess that last one is where the job security comes in.
That second link while not something I use specifically, is more less what I do in my head for everything I've had to do more less twice. Sometimes it is a bit of a guessing game to try to figure out how many times you'll have to do something to make it worth the effort. In most/many I've sort of defaulted to, might as well, you never know sort of attitude. I do find myself taking a big sigh when I decide NOT to automate something, and it is usually "fcsk it I'll just do it manually" sort of thing.
Of course if you are really lazy you don't bother commenting any of them!
I have 5th Gen (as per your example) scripts I wrote more than a decade ago that I still use and work. However without doing a bunch of work to go through it, I've sort of forgotten exactly what some of them do, only that I need to run them at a certain point for particular processes...
Anyway I agree. I'd rather be lazy by that definition than to plod through the same work each year and be labeled hard working. I recall several instances where someone wanted some help, and I took a task they did that took 3 weeks of manual editing, and did it all in about a hour or so, and after that could do it in seconds if required to. Not sure if that is a definition of "smart", but as someone who is able to do it so perhaps "capable" is a better term. That said, it isn't great for job security as you can automate yourself out of a job (or other people). There was a Slashdot story of exactly that, though most dotters questioned the authenticity of the story. That said I have a whole library of personal ones I use that I don't really share around a lot either.
As the saying goes "Work smarter, not harder..." words to live by I say! Does it make me more productive? Probably a little, but that is assuming I use that saved time to do something productive rather than say post something on Slashdot for likely no more purpose than hearing myself talk so to speak. However, there is the advantage to your work when someone needs something I can produce it ultra quick (provided it is something I have done before or similar enough that I can modify an existing one to do the job).
Could also be an indication of competitive people, who might have a portion be just as competitive academically. Could also be that many online games have portions that might involve doing some math to figure out optimal DPS configurations, or creative parts that might attract that sort. Could also be just an indicator some have easy access to a computer and Google.
I know back when I was a kid playing computer games and going "online" (BBS), required actually learning things just to get things to work properly and I'm sure that probably helped in certain academic respects. Then again, as you say I also had parents that could afford to buy me a computer (and support another phone line after much screaming!:)
The left wants show them because it will likely show he is an unscrupulous billionaire. I would bet everything will be legal or at least reasonable defensible. I also bet if you looked at all billionaires 99% of them would also show that they are unscrupulous. So not really all that shocking I don't think. If Trump eventually does do it, he'll simple say, I follow the legal rules, it isn't my fault all the rules are in my favor, if you could do it wouldn't you?. If you want change who better to change the rules than someone that knows how to take advantage of them. Hillary has pretty much agreed to keep the status quo with wall street meaning such rules aren't about to change anytime soon under her.
Either way Trump gets media attention, which he enjoys and turns to his advantage.
For the eventual photo of Kim Jung Un actually planting the flag personally on the moon.
He won't be wearing a spacesuit however. Being a god he doesn't require air, but he occasionally breaths so that he might feel closer to his subjects...
The launch vehicle will be named "Pegasus" because it will be an actual Pegasus that Kim Jung Un tamed using his natural charisma.
First I've heard of "sovereign control" which sounds like BS to me.
Anyway this issue has been around for a very long time now and isn't really all that complicated. I've looked into a number of cloud based systems as possible solutions for government projects, but they all run into the same problem.
Bottom line is that Canada has quite good Privacy Laws. The Government as custodian of a lot of personal information has a responsibility to ensure that that information is protected.
The issue first came about really as soon as the US passed the Patriot Act. It effectively gives the US government access to information stored on US soil (for a variety of reasons and methods), as it it subject to US law. So I guess you could call that "sovereign control"... but really all that means is that due to US law essentially not being compatible with Canadian law, it is required to keep things on Canadian soil.
There has been various attempts by US companies to get around this, such as providing technology and the means to host it yourself in your own cloud, but really that sort of defeats one of the big reasons for using cloud technology in the first place (i.e. you don't have to bother hosting it yourself or have to have the infrastructure to do it).
Anyway this issue has been around for a long time. The Feds probably just got around to adopting a "strategy" to guide consistent application of existing policy. I suspect probably because you had some rogue project managers using US based cloud services because it was easier and cheaper than going though the proper processes...
"cost 10% of a subway system and use 30% less energy than current bus technologies."
OK I get that it costs less way less than a subway system. However that is only because they are exorbitantly expensive, usually because they are being built under existing development. 30% less energy than current bus technology? Not so sure of that, given construction costs, repairs/downtime, infrastructure costs, and for very low values of what "current bus technology" is. I'll throw out my own statistic, I bet it will also be 100% less flexible than current bus technology also.
It is a novelty to be sure. Though I think it is fantastic that they built it anyway!:)
While I don't totally agree, I think it is true that it has formed a feedback loop (get money from IP regulation, lobby regulators for more IP) where it has pushed the regulation into the absurd.
Some protection adds value and incentive, too much just stifles innovation.
I have a theory about why Marvel has largely been more successful than DC. I don't think it is really all the writers or the movie makers fault. I believe the fault is a factor of two things. Firstly while not total, a very large chunk of the viewers of said movies are an older audience, who for nostalgia reasons desire to see super heros of their youth. The problem with that is they are no longer kids anymore, but need to be able to still connect with the movie, that is to say that the movie needs to be more "adult" than for "kids". The second factor influences the first in that if you look at the growth of heros in DC VS Marvel over the years (say the last 20), in general many of the Marvel heros "matured", where as most of those in DC did not, other than a few examples, and some of those in weird "alternate" universes that are generally seen as not cannon (i.e. Supes in Red Son is pretty dark, but no one is going to take that as anything but an interesting spin off).
So for example DC Batman was successful more less because there was plenty of examples of him being pretty dark prior to the movie (and the type of hero he was to begin with). However many of the kiddy or silly heros have a harder time transitioning to a more adult theme. Take Green Lantern for example. At the very core, this is a pretty silly superhero. He thinks of a big mallet hammer and bonks bad guys on the head. It is hard to make that really all that relateable to an adult audience. Shazam is another example. While there was that one example of a pretty dark Shazam battling Superman, for the most part you have a hero that is a kid, who turns into a man with powers, by a wizard on command. Pretty silly and hard to translate to an adult audience. However on the Marvel side of things, take a very similar hero in Thor. In the original, it was about a old blind guy with a cane that found a hammer, who can turn into "Thor" by wielding it. Over the years, this morphed into Thor being an actual God who interacts with humanity. My personal favorite version (Ultimate I believe), is where they leave Thor's origin as somewhat ambiguous, where Thor believes he is the God of Thunder from Azguard, however much of the other Avengers think he is a mutant, or just some guy with superpowers who is a bit crazy/nuts/delusional but fights for good so they don't really press the issue too much. Another example on the other side of things is Marvel's Fantastic 4. There have been a lot of swings and misses, and terrible movies made. Again, not so much with perhaps the movies themselves (though I don't think they did themselves a lot of favors either), but the heros themselves are pretty silly, and never really matured. It is hard to take a movie like that seriously no matter how well they might have produced it (which none really were anyway).
As an extreme example It'd be like DC making a "Wonder Twins" movie and then wondering why it wasn't all that successful with an adult audience.... Then trying again however making it dark and brooding, Zan addicted to opium and having to defeat his own daemons while Jayna suffers from severe depression issues brought on by a terrible childhood... Then wondering why the audience found it ridiculous. Form of a script, shape of a movie!
If a hacker is able to "brute force" your password, you have bigger problems than password security. For starters either A) Your system security is terrible, B) they physically own your hardware, or C) Your admin accounts are too vulnerable.
Brute Force is exactly that, hard. Most uses don't have access to much. Should someone manage to crack mine, well big deal really. Most organizations have many thousands of passwords, to brute force them all is unrealistic anyway. Ideally they would target someone with high level admin privileges, but then there should be additional security around those.
As we've see time and again, most "breaches" come in two flavors, and neither of them will be influenced one iota by complex 30 day rotation passwords. Breaches usually occur by A) inside jobs by someone already in a position to do so like an admin, or B) something truly mind boggling stupid like storing important data in an unencrypted text file which is left for public view on a website, or on a USB left in the back seat of a cab or something dumb. I guess the third possible situation would be that of social engineering where someone simply convinces someone with access to give them the information voluntarily. Either way, making all your users go through what amounts to security theater every 30 days isn't going to help.
I've come to understand that security is less about the "protection" of data, and more about the justification of the existence of security and the ability to blame someone. The security drones will simply mouth "I told you so, you need us even more", and "this wouldn't happen if security policy was followed", and "Person A is all to blame, not security", even though none of that actually protected the actual data itself.
As the comic the Watchmen illustrates, "who watches the watchmen", the most recent high level example of Edward Snowden is a perfect example. One of the largest breaches is by someone in security, with enhanced privileges, with no additional safeguards in place to prevent it. After the fact, the fault is all on Edward, which isn't totally unplaced, but given the material involved, shouldn't there have been appropriate security in place to prevent it in the first place. At the same time having the thousands of NSA drones have 15 long complex passwords that need changing every 5 days (or whatever it is they have) would not have changed a thing.
As a last final broadside: One of the major vulnerabilities that this practice enables is exactly that "lockout". You will have a large percentage of your organizations users forget their password on any given day. This leads to probably the most IT calls by far for anything (another reason to do it, you increase the need for more IT, AND easily solve thousands of "tickets" for performance reviews). Typically the IT folks that handle these are lower paid, less experienced, poorly trained, and frequently replaced personnel. Meaning they likely (particularly after the 10,000th call) don't care all that much, and are much more susceptible to the social engineering method. Sure you can put in system level safeguards, sending it only VIA email and verification etc... However if something goes wrong, and they have a timer and a quota of tickets to fill by the end of the day, and someone is working from home and their email isn't working right, but the have all the contact information, and needs immediate access for a very important project, etc.... Well not everyone will fall for that, but try it a few times with a few different people, and someone might.
Slashdot Mirror
Was going to post something similar , however you said it a bit more poetically than I might lol!
The first step at least in some countries isn't so much the income, it is curtailing the industries that actively target the poorest sector of individuals for profit through debt. At least in the US. The whole housing crisis was based on lending large amounts of money to people that could never afford to pay it back and large institutions making money off of the selling of bad debt. This is also done through college mills encouraging the poor to get federal student loans that don't go away even with bankruptcy for a meaningless degree. The latest is sub-prime car loans where they sell a car at well over cost with prohibitive interest rates, make money off the debt, repossess the car, sell it again, and again, and again... Never mind how the pharmaceutical and insurance companies literally create whole new classes of poor when a catastrophic health event occurs... Giving someone a couple hundred bucks a month in Universal Income isn't going to address any of those things. The predatory nature of many of these industries towards the poor with little or no consumer protection is a much larger issue than the relatively simple income/welfare problem. Even the way banks (and payday loans) handle daily transactions all geared around the poor not being able to make good on payments and loans in the US is at issue. Basically when so many groups are actively targeting you for your debt, it's pretty hard to get ahead I would think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I can't be bothered to remember this, I'll just store it in my BrainPal!
Though if you think about it, we're already offloading memory into our phones, both in storage and as a search tool. I know I don't bother to remember anyones actual phone number anymore, and trivia is essentially only a quick google away!
From the Atlantic article: "If no player EVER finds 49,979,687, the planet won’t ever be grown. The geometry of its trees and lakes, and the length of its quadrupeds’ legs, won’t ever be calculated."
Somehow that all seems very philosophical and kinda sad. :(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
To add some numbers (be they what they may) and some citations... We have about 1.1 Billion years until the Sun expands enough to evaporate the oceans. Odds are life would end prior to that processes completion as running up to that would likely be rather unpleasant.
That said given that Humans have only be around for 60,0000 years, and civilization for about 8,000 years... looking at developments, population growth, the odds of any of us lasting that long is probably remote. That said who the hell knows, in that time a lot can happen. Perhaps we will evolve both biologically and technologically to the point of being some sort of celestial being that transverses the universe with only our thoughts or something...
Wasn't this the guy that said 640k should be good enough for anyone?
Time to him to put his money where his mouth is!
Pretty much this. There are a lot of homeless around where I live. I'd say the cause of that is one of three things in descending order: 1) Mental Issues, 2) Drug Addiction, 3) Personal disaster...
Used to be that folks with mental conditions would be wards of the state and treated in hospitals. As it turns out probably due to a lack of any real funding, that treatment in many cases was horrific and terrible. Since then most of that infrastructure has been removed, but not really replaced with anything. I would say that mental issues are probably driving most of those homeless numbers. Usually it is those that lack supports from family for whatever reason. Could be they tried but just couldn't do it anymore, the expense, or even as people get older they just lack the living family to care for them. Then of course there are those that no matter how much you try, don't want to be helped either and as an individual there isn't much you can do. Add to that the cost of medications they can't afford, or lack of access to medication, etc... Anyway it is a real problem with no easy answers. While some money might help some, it isn't the magic bullet either.
However if society is able to come up with a mental illness strategy/plan that actually works, you could probably solve 2/3's of your homeless problem instantly.
Drug addiction, is well drug addiction. We have methadone clinics aplenty, though I'm conflicted how effective they are in combating the problem. However again, solve the drug problem, and another section of homelessness is solved.
As for the last, well that's harder to pin down. Tragedy does happen, and as the saying goes sometimes someone can just be "down on his luck". Money probably might help on that last score. In the US, I'd imagine the whole catastrophic medical cost that comes out of nowhere is likely a big contributor. The whole insurance system and whatnot needs to be looked at in that regard. Lately it seems some first steps have been made, but probably a long way to go before people do not have to be deathly afraid to get really sick or have a loved one do so.
In addition to material science and structural factors, you might want to re-think the whole "transparent" structure idea. Likely in an environment with little or no atmosphere you would be constantly staring out into the depths of vastness of space that wants to kill you every second of every minute, of every hour, of every day...
So unless your want your habitat to resemble something out of Event Horizon you'd probably be better with opaque walls and video screens decorated with trees, grass, sunshine. sky. and whatnot.
Well considering the strategy was to essentially pay 2.25$ to get each person to sign up for a free account... Not sure how great that strategy is... Then again I have no idea, perhaps that is good value for your money. I guess the key to that metric is did those 8,000 accounts generate more than 18,000$ in profit for Jet?
While I'm critical of the "science" used to come to their conclusion, I don't find it all that unreasonable to assume given current consumption of resources, and population growth, why resource consumption wouldn't also grow at a similar rate.
The whole yearly allotment thing is a bunch of mental flossing. They seem to be trying to do everything at the macro level and make some general assumptions. They might be better off simply looking at many multiple individual cases around the world, coming up with a formula based on that as a predictor, and then correlating it simply to population growth. Even that is going to ignore a significant amount of factors which can impact the results such as distribution and waste, etc... All this on data you are also assuming is correct.
Any intention to move VLC to a media centre/media server type application?
With windows 10 nixing the WMC, many users have had to find alternatives, it might be a prime opportunity. While WMC was terrible in many respects it was pretty widely used. You really had to work your codecs in magical ways to make it play most formats. I've since moved to Plex, which is great, but has some of its own issues with some formats. VLC however plays everything and the kitchen sink I've found, if nothing else will play it, VLC will. That said however, most of us don't want to sit in front of our computers anymore and watch videos either.
https://xkcd.com/1319/
also
https://xkcd.com/1205/
The one thing I've found with automation to solve repetitive tasks is that the are two things that can happen to make the time savings spiral out of control. 1) is other people getting a hold of it, using it for something it was never intended to be used for, as part of some system, which know by default you have to try and support or something. 2) Is when whoever you are providing it to see the results and how good they are, they want more, then differently, then formatted a certain way, then changes again, etc... forever until you throw yourself off a bridge. I guess that last one is where the job security comes in.
That second link while not something I use specifically, is more less what I do in my head for everything I've had to do more less twice. Sometimes it is a bit of a guessing game to try to figure out how many times you'll have to do something to make it worth the effort. In most/many I've sort of defaulted to, might as well, you never know sort of attitude. I do find myself taking a big sigh when I decide NOT to automate something, and it is usually "fcsk it I'll just do it manually" sort of thing.
Of course if you are really lazy you don't bother commenting any of them!
I have 5th Gen (as per your example) scripts I wrote more than a decade ago that I still use and work. However without doing a bunch of work to go through it, I've sort of forgotten exactly what some of them do, only that I need to run them at a certain point for particular processes...
Anyway I agree. I'd rather be lazy by that definition than to plod through the same work each year and be labeled hard working. I recall several instances where someone wanted some help, and I took a task they did that took 3 weeks of manual editing, and did it all in about a hour or so, and after that could do it in seconds if required to. Not sure if that is a definition of "smart", but as someone who is able to do it so perhaps "capable" is a better term. That said, it isn't great for job security as you can automate yourself out of a job (or other people). There was a Slashdot story of exactly that, though most dotters questioned the authenticity of the story. That said I have a whole library of personal ones I use that I don't really share around a lot either.
As the saying goes "Work smarter, not harder..." words to live by I say! Does it make me more productive? Probably a little, but that is assuming I use that saved time to do something productive rather than say post something on Slashdot for likely no more purpose than hearing myself talk so to speak. However, there is the advantage to your work when someone needs something I can produce it ultra quick (provided it is something I have done before or similar enough that I can modify an existing one to do the job).
Probably, one of the major indicators it seems.
Could also be an indication of competitive people, who might have a portion be just as competitive academically.
Could also be that many online games have portions that might involve doing some math to figure out optimal DPS configurations, or creative parts that might attract that sort.
Could also be just an indicator some have easy access to a computer and Google.
I know back when I was a kid playing computer games and going "online" (BBS), required actually learning things just to get things to work properly and I'm sure that probably helped in certain academic respects. Then again, as you say I also had parents that could afford to buy me a computer (and support another phone line after much screaming!:)
The left wants show them because it will likely show he is an unscrupulous billionaire. I would bet everything will be legal or at least reasonable defensible. I also bet if you looked at all billionaires 99% of them would also show that they are unscrupulous. So not really all that shocking I don't think. If Trump eventually does do it, he'll simple say, I follow the legal rules, it isn't my fault all the rules are in my favor, if you could do it wouldn't you?. If you want change who better to change the rules than someone that knows how to take advantage of them. Hillary has pretty much agreed to keep the status quo with wall street meaning such rules aren't about to change anytime soon under her.
Either way Trump gets media attention, which he enjoys and turns to his advantage.
lol!
totally stealing that for future use sometime...
For the eventual photo of Kim Jung Un actually planting the flag personally on the moon.
He won't be wearing a spacesuit however. Being a god he doesn't require air, but he occasionally breaths so that he might feel closer to his subjects...
The launch vehicle will be named "Pegasus" because it will be an actual Pegasus that Kim Jung Un tamed using his natural charisma.
Should be Hillary Clinton's election slogan... :)
First I've heard of "sovereign control" which sounds like BS to me.
Anyway this issue has been around for a very long time now and isn't really all that complicated. I've looked into a number of cloud based systems as possible solutions for government projects, but they all run into the same problem.
Bottom line is that Canada has quite good Privacy Laws. The Government as custodian of a lot of personal information has a responsibility to ensure that that information is protected.
The issue first came about really as soon as the US passed the Patriot Act. It effectively gives the US government access to information stored on US soil (for a variety of reasons and methods), as it it subject to US law. So I guess you could call that "sovereign control"... but really all that means is that due to US law essentially not being compatible with Canadian law, it is required to keep things on Canadian soil.
There has been various attempts by US companies to get around this, such as providing technology and the means to host it yourself in your own cloud, but really that sort of defeats one of the big reasons for using cloud technology in the first place (i.e. you don't have to bother hosting it yourself or have to have the infrastructure to do it).
Anyway this issue has been around for a long time. The Feds probably just got around to adopting a "strategy" to guide consistent application of existing policy. I suspect probably because you had some rogue project managers using US based cloud services because it was easier and cheaper than going though the proper processes...
"cost 10% of a subway system and use 30% less energy than current bus technologies."
OK I get that it costs less way less than a subway system. However that is only because they are exorbitantly expensive, usually because they are being built under existing development. 30% less energy than current bus technology? Not so sure of that, given construction costs, repairs/downtime, infrastructure costs, and for very low values of what "current bus technology" is. I'll throw out my own statistic, I bet it will also be 100% less flexible than current bus technology also.
It is a novelty to be sure. Though I think it is fantastic that they built it anyway! :)
Going from a disorderly conduct charge (which could be anything), to getting shot, just sad.
Hard to defend anyone who pulls a shotgun, but what a waste.
"a report published by Black Market Watch and the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime."
Seems legit and unbiased to me...
While I don't totally agree, I think it is true that it has formed a feedback loop (get money from IP regulation, lobby regulators for more IP) where it has pushed the regulation into the absurd.
Some protection adds value and incentive, too much just stifles innovation.
I have a theory about why Marvel has largely been more successful than DC. I don't think it is really all the writers or the movie makers fault. I believe the fault is a factor of two things. Firstly while not total, a very large chunk of the viewers of said movies are an older audience, who for nostalgia reasons desire to see super heros of their youth. The problem with that is they are no longer kids anymore, but need to be able to still connect with the movie, that is to say that the movie needs to be more "adult" than for "kids". The second factor influences the first in that if you look at the growth of heros in DC VS Marvel over the years (say the last 20), in general many of the Marvel heros "matured", where as most of those in DC did not, other than a few examples, and some of those in weird "alternate" universes that are generally seen as not cannon (i.e. Supes in Red Son is pretty dark, but no one is going to take that as anything but an interesting spin off).
So for example DC Batman was successful more less because there was plenty of examples of him being pretty dark prior to the movie (and the type of hero he was to begin with). However many of the kiddy or silly heros have a harder time transitioning to a more adult theme. Take Green Lantern for example. At the very core, this is a pretty silly superhero. He thinks of a big mallet hammer and bonks bad guys on the head. It is hard to make that really all that relateable to an adult audience. Shazam is another example. While there was that one example of a pretty dark Shazam battling Superman, for the most part you have a hero that is a kid, who turns into a man with powers, by a wizard on command. Pretty silly and hard to translate to an adult audience. However on the Marvel side of things, take a very similar hero in Thor. In the original, it was about a old blind guy with a cane that found a hammer, who can turn into "Thor" by wielding it. Over the years, this morphed into Thor being an actual God who interacts with humanity. My personal favorite version (Ultimate I believe), is where they leave Thor's origin as somewhat ambiguous, where Thor believes he is the God of Thunder from Azguard, however much of the other Avengers think he is a mutant, or just some guy with superpowers who is a bit crazy/nuts/delusional but fights for good so they don't really press the issue too much. Another example on the other side of things is Marvel's Fantastic 4. There have been a lot of swings and misses, and terrible movies made. Again, not so much with perhaps the movies themselves (though I don't think they did themselves a lot of favors either), but the heros themselves are pretty silly, and never really matured. It is hard to take a movie like that seriously no matter how well they might have produced it (which none really were anyway).
As an extreme example It'd be like DC making a "Wonder Twins" movie and then wondering why it wasn't all that successful with an adult audience.... Then trying again however making it dark and brooding, Zan addicted to opium and having to defeat his own daemons while Jayna suffers from severe depression issues brought on by a terrible childhood... Then wondering why the audience found it ridiculous. Form of a script, shape of a movie!
If a hacker is able to "brute force" your password, you have bigger problems than password security. For starters either A) Your system security is terrible, B) they physically own your hardware, or C) Your admin accounts are too vulnerable.
Brute Force is exactly that, hard. Most uses don't have access to much. Should someone manage to crack mine, well big deal really. Most organizations have many thousands of passwords, to brute force them all is unrealistic anyway. Ideally they would target someone with high level admin privileges, but then there should be additional security around those.
As we've see time and again, most "breaches" come in two flavors, and neither of them will be influenced one iota by complex 30 day rotation passwords. Breaches usually occur by A) inside jobs by someone already in a position to do so like an admin, or B) something truly mind boggling stupid like storing important data in an unencrypted text file which is left for public view on a website, or on a USB left in the back seat of a cab or something dumb. I guess the third possible situation would be that of social engineering where someone simply convinces someone with access to give them the information voluntarily. Either way, making all your users go through what amounts to security theater every 30 days isn't going to help.
I've come to understand that security is less about the "protection" of data, and more about the justification of the existence of security and the ability to blame someone. The security drones will simply mouth "I told you so, you need us even more", and "this wouldn't happen if security policy was followed", and "Person A is all to blame, not security", even though none of that actually protected the actual data itself.
As the comic the Watchmen illustrates, "who watches the watchmen", the most recent high level example of Edward Snowden is a perfect example. One of the largest breaches is by someone in security, with enhanced privileges, with no additional safeguards in place to prevent it. After the fact, the fault is all on Edward, which isn't totally unplaced, but given the material involved, shouldn't there have been appropriate security in place to prevent it in the first place. At the same time having the thousands of NSA drones have 15 long complex passwords that need changing every 5 days (or whatever it is they have) would not have changed a thing.
As a last final broadside: One of the major vulnerabilities that this practice enables is exactly that "lockout". You will have a large percentage of your organizations users forget their password on any given day. This leads to probably the most IT calls by far for anything (another reason to do it, you increase the need for more IT, AND easily solve thousands of "tickets" for performance reviews). Typically the IT folks that handle these are lower paid, less experienced, poorly trained, and frequently replaced personnel. Meaning they likely (particularly after the 10,000th call) don't care all that much, and are much more susceptible to the social engineering method. Sure you can put in system level safeguards, sending it only VIA email and verification etc... However if something goes wrong, and they have a timer and a quota of tickets to fill by the end of the day, and someone is working from home and their email isn't working right, but the have all the contact information, and needs immediate access for a very important project, etc.... Well not everyone will fall for that, but try it a few times with a few different people, and someone might.