Not really. So-called "super-bugs" are objectively no "worse" than regular infections were prior to the development of antibiotics.
Arguably, most of them are at least slightly LESS-bad, because few of them are LITERALLY 100%-resistant... in most cases, it just means bacterial infections that USED to be easily cured with a few days of a single cheap antibiotic like penicillin or tetracycline now require multiple-drug combos like sulfamethoxazole + trimethoprim.
The situation is worse than it was a few years ago, but the sky most certainly isn't falling. Over-prescription is a FAR lesser real-world problem than people who quit taking an antibiotic too early, or putting antibiotics in chicken feed eaten by literally BILLIONS of birds per year.
Zithromax-resistance is mostly due to years of doctors habitually writing prescriptions for too-short courses. The mfr. MASSIVELY oversold its short-course potential & ultimately induced doctors to breed azithromycin-resistant bacteria in just a few years. If every 3- and 5-day course of Zithromax had been 7 or 10 days instead, it would probably STILL be effective against things it's now useless against.
Regardless of blame, Autopilot is probably a net safety improvement for the majority of Tesla owners who use it. They might not be as attentive as they're officially supposed to be when using it, but the car is probably more attentive and adept at avoiding accidents than the nominal human driver would be in real life.
The fact is, being in or near a stopped vehicle on a limited-access road with high-speed freely-flowing traffic is EXTREMELY dangerous under ANY circumstances. Humans don't expect to encounter parked vehicles amidst 80mph traffic, either. That's why emergency vehicles have so many lights to call attention to their presence. Parked cars & emergency vehicles on freeways were getting hit, scraped, sheared, rear-ended, and losing doors LONG before Elon Musk was born.
When a Tesla Autopilot allegedly does it, it's major news. When a human driver does it, it's one of several hundred accidents just like it that happen all the time.
Remodeling a bathroom to support this is harder than you'd think, mostly due to the code issues that arise with floor drains.
In most parts of America, the use of drum traps with floor drains is prohibited in new and remodel construction. Only P-traps are allowed. P-traps need ~20 inches of directly-accessible space below the drain. In some places, you MIGHT be allowed to put the trap a few feet away from the drain... but even then, you'll have an uphill battle with the building department getting it approved (it's frowned upon, even where legal).
As a practical matter, a second-floor floor drain has to sit above a first-floor closet (or at least, someplace where you can get away with dropping the ceiling by a foot to hide the plumbing for the bathroom above, but still access it directly through a hatch).
Could you rig something up with custom flattened plumbing or a pump that might technically work? Probably. Could you actually get anything like that officially approved by a building inspector? Good luck (you'll DEFINITELY need it).
nobody fucking cares if you have 'truer hues' or some other bullshit in your app or web site images. 99% won't even care, or even notice, if you use a higher compression on jpg.. digital tv (especially cable and satellite) is full of compression artifacts and those same people don't see it there either.
Correction: YOU don't see the artifacts & aren't bothered by them. Quite a few programmers do, and find them to be highly objectionable. Ergo, programmers are most highly-motivated to solve problems that annoy programmers, even if "normal people" don't care.
Specific example: telecine judder. "Normal" people see it & think "film look". Programmers see it & think, "how can I change the native framerate to an integer multiple of 24 to match, and/or algorithmically-tween additional synthetic frames to make the motion smoother?"
Er, more like 5 years... 10, tops. Men's formalwear doesn't change multiple times per year, but changes are definitely perceptible over the span of a decade or so. Best-case, a 15 year old tux you bought as an expensive semi-custom outfit will look like a cheap rental tux. And that's assuming it still fits.
A big part of the problem is extreme fragmentation. "Pop" music is, almost by definition, mass-produced and intended to be heard (and purchased) by "everyone".
In the 20th Century, a typical American realistically had *maybe* a dozen FM stations to choose from... 1 or 2 they *liked* (often, with one overwhelming favorite), and maybe 2-4 more they could "stand". Popular songs got played every 1-3 hours. Competition for airtime was *fierce*, and labels made a point of promoting songs that were a) intensely catchy for some, and b) at least semi-tolerable to most. They also spent *enormous* amounts of money producing the recordings & music videos for their chosen hits (you can EASILY identify the 1-3 songs on a 1980s/90s CD that were intended to be hits, vs the filler songs that were more niche & had lower production values).
Fast-forward to today. Musical tastes are so fragmented now, it's almost *impossible* to come up with a song capable of satisfying half of American listeners... no matter what you do, 60% will hate it, and most of the remainder will be ambivalent at best.
So... you grow your market by making songs internationally-appealing. Unfortunately, that means screwing your lyrical complexity & sticking to simple, repetitive English (or some other language w/global market share) that "sounds good", even if it's complete gibberish to a native speaker (e.g., 80-90% of the songs performed by Eurovision artists).
Technology like AutoTune lowers the bar further. In the past, studios would find attractive front men/women & "assist" them in the studio with better singers (who'd be mixed in with them at concerts). Now, they don't bother... with AutoTune, even a BAD singer can sound semi-ok (albeit robotic).
So... arguably, the 90s WERE a clear musical inflection point. FM Radio still dominated music, big-budget music videos were mandatory, production values for pop-intended songs were high, and non-English markets were mostly irrelevant to American & British record labels.
We still have an occasional blip like Lady Gaga, but now it's ENORMOUSLY harder to pull off the kind of jackpot artists like Madonna & Michael Jackson used to pull off year after year. The American music scene has become more like Europe's, where it's easier to make a living as a musician with your own niche following, but a lot harder to hit the metaphorical jackpot & become an enduring global mega-star (especially if your audience isn't primarily high school & college students subject to immense peer pressure to conform).
Of course. Because we all know New York City would be "greener" & healthier if every apartment burned wood for winter heat, and Manhattan had millions of horses burying its streets under ankle-deep poop daily...
IMHO, Jumpman was the first game that really transcended the "Playability" barrier and broke the "move the joystick one pixel too soon or too late and die" norm that made earlier games so frustrating. I remember seeing Jumpman for the first time & being totally unimpressed by its graphics (to put it mildly), but after agreeing to play a round to appease my best friend, it ended up instantly becoming the favorite and most-enduring game of my childhood. It was the first game I'd ever played for hours because it was genuinely FUN, as opposed to "had awesome graphics and looked cool", or "had a really cool crack screen" (yeah, I had plenty of games in THAT category... of my most favorite Amiga games, probably half were cherished more for the crack screen than the game itself. Amiga had great graphics).
Out of the entire Atari 2600 collection of games that actually existed circa 1982, just about the only ones I still enjoy playing occasionally are Circus Atari (getting to see the stick figures splatter headfirst into the ground almost made up for the frustration of losing a life) and Warlords (the original "party game" if you had an extra pair of paddle controllers). IMHO, those two games were fantastic... I'd KILL for a hypothetical "Atari Flashback 9" that shipped with reimagined paddle controllers built around optical rotary encoders with 16-bit resolution. Such paddles wouldn't be TIA-compatible, of course... but the Flashback systems from 3 onwards have all been running on emulated hardware anyway, so it could just read the optical encoders by modern means, then stuff the result values into the proper phantom TIA registers to make them LOOK (to the game code) like a discharged resistor...
I'm on replacement Nexus 6P #2 due to fucking batteries that lose 60% of their capacity within a few months. Google & Huawei blame each other, I get stuck eating $79 deductibles each time to exchange it, and the replacement phone's battery is ultimately shit, too... new, but ultimately as flawed as the last.
It'll be a very, very long time before I buy another Huawei phone... if ever.
Before anyone gets *too* nostalgic for old games, remember that in the *really* old days (early 80s), game development went something like this:
1. Discover some cool graphics hack that let you do something novel... reuse sprites, change graphics modes mid-screen, animate by changing the color palette, etc.
2. Come up with some excuse to turn it into a game.
3. Create awful, shitty, pointless, and un-fun ports to every other popular system, regardless of viability.
3a. Don't forget CGA, EGA, and Hercules versions, plus Atari ST. And Apple II (non-GS).
Had it not been for Atari's early-80s implosion, we probably would have seen abominations like "Yars Revenge for CGA" (shudder), ignoring the fact that the game's entire reason for EXISTENCE was the "color static" effect.
Ok, I was wrong about the "Javascript in browser is effectively sandboxed" part.
However, I maintain that the risk presented to end users can be wholly mitigated by an update to the browser itself, and requires no performance-killing changes to the underlying OS to achieve the goals an individual user running Windows on his own computer will actually *care* about.
Disabling high-res timers appears to have eliminated the problem insofar as disclosure of browser-managed usernames & passwords is concerned. As far as I can tell, the scope of the vulnerability as it relates to web-delivered Javascript NEVER went beyond the address space of the browser process itself (maybe even further limited to the Javascript host process). So once you've eliminated the timers in your browsers, what's left to justify regarding Meltdown & Spectre as anything besides extremely hard-to-exploit multi-stage complex attacks whose primary real-world risks are mostly limited to:
* enabling users with the ability to run binaries able to defeat constraints imposed by administrators & DRM (or just DRM, if it's truly a single-user non-shared system, and the user IS the computer's local admin)
* potentially enabling code running within a VM to "break out" and read memory of the host PC (which, in all likelihood, would itself have to be code running at ring 0 on the guest OS's VM).
Admins of multi-user (or locked-down) computers SHOULD be concerned about the vulns, and admins of servers hosting multiple containers for different entities probably shouldn't sleep until they're patched. But individuals with their own computers? Patch the browser, and scream to holy hell if Microsoft pushes out a mandatory update that slows down your computer for no reason you genuinely *care* about.
The PoC might have been written "in Javascript", but that doesn't mean it can be exploited by a random script referenced by an untrusted web page somewhere... there are OTHER, more-privileged ways to "run Javascript code", like Windows Scripting Host, server-side jScript, and probably things like browser extensions, Gnome, etc.
I maintain... if a script in a web page can break out of its browser sandbox and deterministically read arbitrary bytes in RAM, the existence of these two vulnerabilities is the *LEAST* of our security concerns.
When, exactly, did web pages acquire the means of compiling random Javascript into literal x86/AMD64 assembly language? Oh wait... they didn't. WebAssembly is just a buzzword for "Javascript gets pre-optimized into slightly leaner & faster-to-execute intermediate code that's ultimately STILL interpreted by something higher-level than the CPU". If that intermediate code can exploit Spectre, then it's the fault of the intermediate-code's interpreter. And if there IS no real way Spectre could be exploited to perform drive-by attacks using Javascript, then I maintain that neither Spectre nor Meltdown is a serious concern (yet) for individual, non-enterprise users, nor does it justify willingly sacrificing a huge chunk of the computer's performance. We're basically being subjected to slowdowns so our corporate masters can maintain the sanctity of the locks they use to keep us from being in full control of our own computers (a/k/a, "DRM").
Seriously. If I'm logged into Windows on my own computer, that isn't part of an enterprise network or subject to ActiveDirectory policies, with a user account that theoretically has full local admin rights, what -- exactly -- are the patches that suck down 5-30% of the computer's performance actually accomplishing (besides keeping me from being naughty and obtaining DRM decryption keys or bypassing Windows Product Licensing)?
Apple: probably has the same priorities & agenda as Microsoft insofar as DRM and "trusted" computing is concerned. And Apple's culture tends towards "make decisions for users".
Linux: users are free to disable the patch if they'd rather have better performance.
Since the most likely result of the vulnerability to desktop users is being able to defeat kernel-enforced DRM and Windows licensing, it's no surprise Microsoft would push this out as a mandatory update of the highest priority.
Most hearing aids are designed primarily around analog technology. The reason is latency -- digital audio in general, and bluetooth to a HUGE extent -- has WAY more latency than most lower-order analog designs. Latency screws up your ability to "locate" the source of a sound.
The cruel irony of digital audio is that the number of microseconds a digital filter needs to pre-buffer a sample is usually at least double the number of microseconds of lag that a comparable analog filter would introduce (often, 4x or more due to higher-order artifacts). If you're playing pre-recorded audio, it's no big deal... but for realtime signal processing, it's deal-breaking.
The main benefit of monorails is reduced visual bulk & less sunlight blockage.
The problem is, current ADA-imposed egress requirements for NEW monorails require a 3 foot pedestrian foot path, which is why Disney's is a narrow beam, while Las Vegas' is a hulking mass.
If you're an introvert, your room is your refuge. Your clean place to shit. The place you go to recharge *your* batteries. So... it matters quite a bit.
Having a room that's literally adjacent to your primary intended activity means you can go there for 5-15 minutes whenever you feel like it (or to grab a 25c can of Diet Pepsi that you bought at a grocery store from the room's refrigerator, instead of getting ass-raped and paying resort-level prices for 3oz of actual beverage hiding behind a quarter-pound of ice cubes).
Unless you use adhoc aliases (Google it). Then you NEED an extension.
Example: suppose your email address is "foo@bar.net".
You use a unique address for each correspondent, like "foo-potentialspammer@bar.net" (or if you want to be REALLY clever, "foo-potentialspammer$xxxxxxxxxxxx@bar.net", where "xxxxxxxxxxxx" is a 63-bit base36-encoded signature that confirms YOU created the address).
Your mail server sees the "-", matches everything up to it to determine the mailbox, applies any user-defined rules to everything between "-" and "@", then delivers the message if those rules haven't blackholed it.
That way, if some site extorts an email address from you, you can register one like "foo-likelyspammer69@bar.net". If you start getting spam addressed to foo-likelyspammer69@bar.net, you create a rule to nuke email sent to that address and move on.
Ditto, if some otherwise-responsible contact gets his/her addressbook harvested by malware. Nuke the old contact-specific address, and tell them to use a new one going forward. It's a lot easier to say, "dad, you got pwn3d... from now on, email me at foo-fromdad2@bar.net" than it is to change your "real" address and notify everyone you ever converse with.
Anyway, if you do this, you need an extension, because Thunderbird itself doesn't allow you to send email with arbitrary, recipient-specific email addresses (Outlook has never supported it either).
I've been using adhoc aliases for ~15 years. It's the ONLY robust anti-spam tactic capable of effectively dealing with address-harvesting attacks.
Another disincentive: tall buildings that aren't public housing projects are *expensive* to build, even by Bay Area housing prices. In the Bay Area, there's almost zero demand for expensive residential skyscrapers, because the people who could afford to live in them & drive the market in places like New York and Miami don't want to live in them. And adjacent single-family neighborhoods that *might* tolerate an architecturally-spectacular tower for wealthy residents will fight a low-income housing project tooth & nail. Unfortunately, when it comes to building new skyscrapers, there isn't much of a middle ground... you can build nice-but-expensive luxury towers for the ultra-wealthy, or affordable warehouses for the poor. Towers (in the US, at least) don't become "middle class" until they've been around long enough to either become less-desirable for the wealthy, or expensive enough to gentrify and price out the original poor. It's almost unheard of in the US for a brand new skyscraper to target (and be affordable & desirable for) middle-class buyers.
The pollution problem can be 80-99% solved with 25 years of sensible regulation. People forget that 50 years ago, cities like Pittsburgh & Cleveland were polluted as badly as China's cities are today. The rivers in northeast Ohio used to be ORANGE in some places, and the whole area had a perpetual "burning" smell, even on days when the pollution wasn't (as) visible. There were times when the pollution in Pittsburgh was *so* bad, the street lights came on mid-afternoon. Apparently, the Cuyahoga River through Cleveland actually *caught fire and burned* sometime in the 70s.
Now, the pollution is basically gone. It didn't happen overnight, but the difference between mid-20th-century and early-21st-century ne Ohio & western Pennsylvania is pretty dramatic.
Tokyo is vast, but its average population density is comparable to Los Angeles (i.e., nothing to sneeze at, but hardly Mumbai or Lagos). Out beyond the urban core, Tokyo is a seemingly-endless sprawling ocean of single-family homes with islands of greater density where a village center used to be before Tokyo swallowed it whole & kept growing.
IMHO, the single WORST offense is when an app or system doesn't even have the courtesy to inform you that a username+password will NEVER succeed without intervention by some specific, identified person or group (and provide contact information for reaching them).
Good: "Unable to log in with these credentials. The username and/or password might be incorrect, or the account might have been disabled. For assistance, please call {someone} at {specific number}."
Bad: "Login failed. Please try again later."
It's one thing to be purposefully vague to make enumeration attacks harder. It's another matter ENTIRELY to tell an outright lie that will do *nothing* to stop a real attacker, but will badly frustrate REAL users. You can remind users of the possibility that an account MIGHT be valid-but-locked-out without explicitly confirming that it IS.
The only valid exception is if lockouts are self-clearing after some period of time (in which case telling them to "try later" would be valid advice).
Almost as bad: "Please contact [sic] Your Administrator". Nobody, and I mean NOBODY who's in a situation that requires "contacting their administrator" EVER knows who "their administrator" is or has their contact information handy. If you can't furnish the helpdesk number in the error message itself, at LEAST have the decency to furnish the number of somebody (available 24/7/365) who CAN figure out whom they need to contact and tell them. This, IMHO, is another major usability sin inflicted on hapless users all the time.
I'm surprised nobody in China (or even the US, since we're STILL pretty competitive for low-volume manufacturing) has started cranking out laser printers with copies of the 1990s-era LaserJet print engine. The patents have all expired, printing technology has gone basically nowhere in 20 years, and old LaserJet consumables are basically commodities by now. The HOME market for printers like this might be small, but small & medium-sized businesses (especially those who print a LOT) and schools would LOVE printers that cost a few hundred bucks, but had almost zero consumables cost.
Worst-case, they'd have to get ISO to codify the consumables for the print engine & give a non-Trademarked name to PCL or PostScript, so they could advertise their standard-compliance without risking a lawsuit for Trademark-infringement.
They could probably even start by giving the printer a "dumb" framebuffer, then do all the rendering/rasterization logic & printserver in a RasPi. So you'd buy the USB-interfaced dumb-framebuffer printer, and pair it with your own Pi-based printserver running GhostScript.
The value of a US Dollar isn't due to the "strength" of the government backing it... it's due to the fact that it's almost infinitely-liquid... you could walk into a remote village in central Africa, and easily find people willing to sell goods & services for US Dollars... AND capable of making change. You can be standing in line at McDonald's in Canada or Belgium, and if there are more than 5 people in line & you only have US dollars, you'll EASILY be able to find someone willing to pay for your lunch with their credit card in exchange for US Dollars, because they'll be buying them from you at a discount compared to what banks charge for currency exchange. And because almost everyone accepts US Dollars, you can trade them directly for goods & services without HAVING to go through an intermediate currency exchange. They're hard enough to counterfeit (with fairly easy detection through relatively low-tech offline means) that people can trade them and feel confident that they're genuine.
Currency exchange is expensive. It has ALWAYS been expensive, going all the way back to ancient Egypt, Persia, and everywhere else. Being able to avoid it is desirable. Using Dollars for everything makes it easy to minimize the need for currency exchange.
Ditto, for the Euro. The main reason why the British opposed the Euro is that they had little reason TO risk switching. Dealing with two dozen currencies when vacationing on the continent was a pain in the ass. Dealing with two currencies (Sterling and Euro)? No big deal. They basically allowed the countries where they vacationed to absorb the cost of changing to Euros, then enjoyed 99% of the benefits of having a common currency without having to do it themselves.
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Not really. So-called "super-bugs" are objectively no "worse" than regular infections were prior to the development of antibiotics.
Arguably, most of them are at least slightly LESS-bad, because few of them are LITERALLY 100%-resistant... in most cases, it just means bacterial infections that USED to be easily cured with a few days of a single cheap antibiotic like penicillin or tetracycline now require multiple-drug combos like sulfamethoxazole + trimethoprim.
The situation is worse than it was a few years ago, but the sky most certainly isn't falling. Over-prescription is a FAR lesser real-world problem than people who quit taking an antibiotic too early, or putting antibiotics in chicken feed eaten by literally BILLIONS of birds per year.
Zithromax-resistance is mostly due to years of doctors habitually writing prescriptions for too-short courses. The mfr. MASSIVELY oversold its short-course potential & ultimately induced doctors to breed azithromycin-resistant bacteria in just a few years. If every 3- and 5-day course of Zithromax had been 7 or 10 days instead, it would probably STILL be effective against things it's now useless against.
Regardless of blame, Autopilot is probably a net safety improvement for the majority of Tesla owners who use it. They might not be as attentive as they're officially supposed to be when using it, but the car is probably more attentive and adept at avoiding accidents than the nominal human driver would be in real life.
The fact is, being in or near a stopped vehicle on a limited-access road with high-speed freely-flowing traffic is EXTREMELY dangerous under ANY circumstances. Humans don't expect to encounter parked vehicles amidst 80mph traffic, either. That's why emergency vehicles have so many lights to call attention to their presence. Parked cars & emergency vehicles on freeways were getting hit, scraped, sheared, rear-ended, and losing doors LONG before Elon Musk was born.
When a Tesla Autopilot allegedly does it, it's major news. When a human driver does it, it's one of several hundred accidents just like it that happen all the time.
Remodeling a bathroom to support this is harder than you'd think, mostly due to the code issues that arise with floor drains.
In most parts of America, the use of drum traps with floor drains is prohibited in new and remodel construction. Only P-traps are allowed. P-traps need ~20 inches of directly-accessible space below the drain. In some places, you MIGHT be allowed to put the trap a few feet away from the drain... but even then, you'll have an uphill battle with the building department getting it approved (it's frowned upon, even where legal).
As a practical matter, a second-floor floor drain has to sit above a first-floor closet (or at least, someplace where you can get away with dropping the ceiling by a foot to hide the plumbing for the bathroom above, but still access it directly through a hatch).
Could you rig something up with custom flattened plumbing or a pump that might technically work? Probably. Could you actually get anything like that officially approved by a building inspector? Good luck (you'll DEFINITELY need it).
nobody fucking cares if you have 'truer hues' or some other bullshit in your app or web site images. 99% won't even care, or even notice, if you use a higher compression on jpg.. digital tv (especially cable and satellite) is full of compression artifacts and those same people don't see it there either.
Correction: YOU don't see the artifacts & aren't bothered by them. Quite a few programmers do, and find them to be highly objectionable. Ergo, programmers are most highly-motivated to solve problems that annoy programmers, even if "normal people" don't care.
Specific example: telecine judder. "Normal" people see it & think "film look". Programmers see it & think, "how can I change the native framerate to an integer multiple of 24 to match, and/or algorithmically-tween additional synthetic frames to make the motion smoother?"
Er, more like 5 years... 10, tops. Men's formalwear doesn't change multiple times per year, but changes are definitely perceptible over the span of a decade or so. Best-case, a 15 year old tux you bought as an expensive semi-custom outfit will look like a cheap rental tux. And that's assuming it still fits.
Still, compared to women, we're lucky.
A big part of the problem is extreme fragmentation. "Pop" music is, almost by definition, mass-produced and intended to be heard (and purchased) by "everyone".
In the 20th Century, a typical American realistically had *maybe* a dozen FM stations to choose from... 1 or 2 they *liked* (often, with one overwhelming favorite), and maybe 2-4 more they could "stand". Popular songs got played every 1-3 hours. Competition for airtime was *fierce*, and labels made a point of promoting songs that were a) intensely catchy for some, and b) at least semi-tolerable to most. They also spent *enormous* amounts of money producing the recordings & music videos for their chosen hits (you can EASILY identify the 1-3 songs on a 1980s/90s CD that were intended to be hits, vs the filler songs that were more niche & had lower production values).
Fast-forward to today. Musical tastes are so fragmented now, it's almost *impossible* to come up with a song capable of satisfying half of American listeners... no matter what you do, 60% will hate it, and most of the remainder will be ambivalent at best.
So... you grow your market by making songs internationally-appealing. Unfortunately, that means screwing your lyrical complexity & sticking to simple, repetitive English (or some other language w/global market share) that "sounds good", even if it's complete gibberish to a native speaker (e.g., 80-90% of the songs performed by Eurovision artists).
Technology like AutoTune lowers the bar further. In the past, studios would find attractive front men/women & "assist" them in the studio with better singers (who'd be mixed in with them at concerts). Now, they don't bother... with AutoTune, even a BAD singer can sound semi-ok (albeit robotic).
So... arguably, the 90s WERE a clear musical inflection point. FM Radio still dominated music, big-budget music videos were mandatory, production values for pop-intended songs were high, and non-English markets were mostly irrelevant to American & British record labels.
We still have an occasional blip like Lady Gaga, but now it's ENORMOUSLY harder to pull off the kind of jackpot artists like Madonna & Michael Jackson used to pull off year after year. The American music scene has become more like Europe's, where it's easier to make a living as a musician with your own niche following, but a lot harder to hit the metaphorical jackpot & become an enduring global mega-star (especially if your audience isn't primarily high school & college students subject to immense peer pressure to conform).
Of course. Because we all know New York City would be "greener" & healthier if every apartment burned wood for winter heat, and Manhattan had millions of horses burying its streets under ankle-deep poop daily...
http://www.historic-uk.com/His...
IMHO, Jumpman was the first game that really transcended the "Playability" barrier and broke the "move the joystick one pixel too soon or too late and die" norm that made earlier games so frustrating. I remember seeing Jumpman for the first time & being totally unimpressed by its graphics (to put it mildly), but after agreeing to play a round to appease my best friend, it ended up instantly becoming the favorite and most-enduring game of my childhood. It was the first game I'd ever played for hours because it was genuinely FUN, as opposed to "had awesome graphics and looked cool", or "had a really cool crack screen" (yeah, I had plenty of games in THAT category... of my most favorite Amiga games, probably half were cherished more for the crack screen than the game itself. Amiga had great graphics).
Out of the entire Atari 2600 collection of games that actually existed circa 1982, just about the only ones I still enjoy playing occasionally are Circus Atari (getting to see the stick figures splatter headfirst into the ground almost made up for the frustration of losing a life) and Warlords (the original "party game" if you had an extra pair of paddle controllers). IMHO, those two games were fantastic... I'd KILL for a hypothetical "Atari Flashback 9" that shipped with reimagined paddle controllers built around optical rotary encoders with 16-bit resolution. Such paddles wouldn't be TIA-compatible, of course... but the Flashback systems from 3 onwards have all been running on emulated hardware anyway, so it could just read the optical encoders by modern means, then stuff the result values into the proper phantom TIA registers to make them LOOK (to the game code) like a discharged resistor...
I'm on replacement Nexus 6P #2 due to fucking batteries that lose 60% of their capacity within a few months. Google & Huawei blame each other, I get stuck eating $79 deductibles each time to exchange it, and the replacement phone's battery is ultimately shit, too... new, but ultimately as flawed as the last.
It'll be a very, very long time before I buy another Huawei phone... if ever.
Before anyone gets *too* nostalgic for old games, remember that in the *really* old days (early 80s), game development went something like this:
1. Discover some cool graphics hack that let you do something novel... reuse sprites, change graphics modes mid-screen, animate by changing the color palette, etc.
2. Come up with some excuse to turn it into a game.
3. Create awful, shitty, pointless, and un-fun ports to every other popular system, regardless of viability.
3a. Don't forget CGA, EGA, and Hercules versions, plus Atari ST. And Apple II (non-GS).
Had it not been for Atari's early-80s implosion, we probably would have seen abominations like "Yars Revenge for CGA" (shudder), ignoring the fact that the game's entire reason for EXISTENCE was the "color static" effect.
Ok, I was wrong about the "Javascript in browser is effectively sandboxed" part.
However, I maintain that the risk presented to end users can be wholly mitigated by an update to the browser itself, and requires no performance-killing changes to the underlying OS to achieve the goals an individual user running Windows on his own computer will actually *care* about.
Disabling high-res timers appears to have eliminated the problem insofar as disclosure of browser-managed usernames & passwords is concerned. As far as I can tell, the scope of the vulnerability as it relates to web-delivered Javascript NEVER went beyond the address space of the browser process itself (maybe even further limited to the Javascript host process). So once you've eliminated the timers in your browsers, what's left to justify regarding Meltdown & Spectre as anything besides extremely hard-to-exploit multi-stage complex attacks whose primary real-world risks are mostly limited to:
* enabling users with the ability to run binaries able to defeat constraints imposed by administrators & DRM (or just DRM, if it's truly a single-user non-shared system, and the user IS the computer's local admin)
* potentially enabling code running within a VM to "break out" and read memory of the host PC (which, in all likelihood, would itself have to be code running at ring 0 on the guest OS's VM).
Admins of multi-user (or locked-down) computers SHOULD be concerned about the vulns, and admins of servers hosting multiple containers for different entities probably shouldn't sleep until they're patched. But individuals with their own computers? Patch the browser, and scream to holy hell if Microsoft pushes out a mandatory update that slows down your computer for no reason you genuinely *care* about.
The PoC might have been written "in Javascript", but that doesn't mean it can be exploited by a random script referenced by an untrusted web page somewhere... there are OTHER, more-privileged ways to "run Javascript code", like Windows Scripting Host, server-side jScript, and probably things like browser extensions, Gnome, etc.
I maintain... if a script in a web page can break out of its browser sandbox and deterministically read arbitrary bytes in RAM, the existence of these two vulnerabilities is the *LEAST* of our security concerns.
When, exactly, did web pages acquire the means of compiling random Javascript into literal x86/AMD64 assembly language? Oh wait... they didn't. WebAssembly is just a buzzword for "Javascript gets pre-optimized into slightly leaner & faster-to-execute intermediate code that's ultimately STILL interpreted by something higher-level than the CPU". If that intermediate code can exploit Spectre, then it's the fault of the intermediate-code's interpreter. And if there IS no real way Spectre could be exploited to perform drive-by attacks using Javascript, then I maintain that neither Spectre nor Meltdown is a serious concern (yet) for individual, non-enterprise users, nor does it justify willingly sacrificing a huge chunk of the computer's performance. We're basically being subjected to slowdowns so our corporate masters can maintain the sanctity of the locks they use to keep us from being in full control of our own computers (a/k/a, "DRM").
Seriously. If I'm logged into Windows on my own computer, that isn't part of an enterprise network or subject to ActiveDirectory policies, with a user account that theoretically has full local admin rights, what -- exactly -- are the patches that suck down 5-30% of the computer's performance actually accomplishing (besides keeping me from being naughty and obtaining DRM decryption keys or bypassing Windows Product Licensing)?
Apple: probably has the same priorities & agenda as Microsoft insofar as DRM and "trusted" computing is concerned. And Apple's culture tends towards "make decisions for users".
Linux: users are free to disable the patch if they'd rather have better performance.
Since the most likely result of the vulnerability to desktop users is being able to defeat kernel-enforced DRM and Windows licensing, it's no surprise Microsoft would push this out as a mandatory update of the highest priority.
Most hearing aids are designed primarily around analog technology. The reason is latency -- digital audio in general, and bluetooth to a HUGE extent -- has WAY more latency than most lower-order analog designs. Latency screws up your ability to "locate" the source of a sound.
The cruel irony of digital audio is that the number of microseconds a digital filter needs to pre-buffer a sample is usually at least double the number of microseconds of lag that a comparable analog filter would introduce (often, 4x or more due to higher-order artifacts). If you're playing pre-recorded audio, it's no big deal... but for realtime signal processing, it's deal-breaking.
The main benefit of monorails is reduced visual bulk & less sunlight blockage.
The problem is, current ADA-imposed egress requirements for NEW monorails require a 3 foot pedestrian foot path, which is why Disney's is a narrow beam, while Las Vegas' is a hulking mass.
> Room's just a place to sleep.
If you're an extrovert, maybe.
If you're an introvert, your room is your refuge. Your clean place to shit. The place you go to recharge *your* batteries. So... it matters quite a bit.
Having a room that's literally adjacent to your primary intended activity means you can go there for 5-15 minutes whenever you feel like it (or to grab a 25c can of Diet Pepsi that you bought at a grocery store from the room's refrigerator, instead of getting ass-raped and paying resort-level prices for 3oz of actual beverage hiding behind a quarter-pound of ice cubes).
Unless you use adhoc aliases (Google it). Then you NEED an extension.
Example: suppose your email address is "foo@bar.net".
You use a unique address for each correspondent, like "foo-potentialspammer@bar.net" (or if you want to be REALLY clever, "foo-potentialspammer$xxxxxxxxxxxx@bar.net", where "xxxxxxxxxxxx" is a 63-bit base36-encoded signature that confirms YOU created the address).
Your mail server sees the "-", matches everything up to it to determine the mailbox, applies any user-defined rules to everything between "-" and "@", then delivers the message if those rules haven't blackholed it.
That way, if some site extorts an email address from you, you can register one like "foo-likelyspammer69@bar.net". If you start getting spam addressed to foo-likelyspammer69@bar.net, you create a rule to nuke email sent to that address and move on.
Ditto, if some otherwise-responsible contact gets his/her addressbook harvested by malware. Nuke the old contact-specific address, and tell them to use a new one going forward. It's a lot easier to say, "dad, you got pwn3d... from now on, email me at foo-fromdad2@bar.net" than it is to change your "real" address and notify everyone you ever converse with.
Anyway, if you do this, you need an extension, because Thunderbird itself doesn't allow you to send email with arbitrary, recipient-specific email addresses (Outlook has never supported it either).
I've been using adhoc aliases for ~15 years. It's the ONLY robust anti-spam tactic capable of effectively dealing with address-harvesting attacks.
Another disincentive: tall buildings that aren't public housing projects are *expensive* to build, even by Bay Area housing prices. In the Bay Area, there's almost zero demand for expensive residential skyscrapers, because the people who could afford to live in them & drive the market in places like New York and Miami don't want to live in them. And adjacent single-family neighborhoods that *might* tolerate an architecturally-spectacular tower for wealthy residents will fight a low-income housing project tooth & nail. Unfortunately, when it comes to building new skyscrapers, there isn't much of a middle ground... you can build nice-but-expensive luxury towers for the ultra-wealthy, or affordable warehouses for the poor. Towers (in the US, at least) don't become "middle class" until they've been around long enough to either become less-desirable for the wealthy, or expensive enough to gentrify and price out the original poor. It's almost unheard of in the US for a brand new skyscraper to target (and be affordable & desirable for) middle-class buyers.
The pollution problem can be 80-99% solved with 25 years of sensible regulation. People forget that 50 years ago, cities like Pittsburgh & Cleveland were polluted as badly as China's cities are today. The rivers in northeast Ohio used to be ORANGE in some places, and the whole area had a perpetual "burning" smell, even on days when the pollution wasn't (as) visible. There were times when the pollution in Pittsburgh was *so* bad, the street lights came on mid-afternoon. Apparently, the Cuyahoga River through Cleveland actually *caught fire and burned* sometime in the 70s.
Now, the pollution is basically gone. It didn't happen overnight, but the difference between mid-20th-century and early-21st-century ne Ohio & western Pennsylvania is pretty dramatic.
Tokyo is vast, but its average population density is comparable to Los Angeles (i.e., nothing to sneeze at, but hardly Mumbai or Lagos). Out beyond the urban core, Tokyo is a seemingly-endless sprawling ocean of single-family homes with islands of greater density where a village center used to be before Tokyo swallowed it whole & kept growing.
IMHO, the single WORST offense is when an app or system doesn't even have the courtesy to inform you that a username+password will NEVER succeed without intervention by some specific, identified person or group (and provide contact information for reaching them).
Good: "Unable to log in with these credentials. The username and/or password might be incorrect, or the account might have been disabled. For assistance, please call {someone} at {specific number}."
Bad: "Login failed. Please try again later."
It's one thing to be purposefully vague to make enumeration attacks harder. It's another matter ENTIRELY to tell an outright lie that will do *nothing* to stop a real attacker, but will badly frustrate REAL users. You can remind users of the possibility that an account MIGHT be valid-but-locked-out without explicitly confirming that it IS.
The only valid exception is if lockouts are self-clearing after some period of time (in which case telling them to "try later" would be valid advice).
Almost as bad: "Please contact [sic] Your Administrator". Nobody, and I mean NOBODY who's in a situation that requires "contacting their administrator" EVER knows who "their administrator" is or has their contact information handy. If you can't furnish the helpdesk number in the error message itself, at LEAST have the decency to furnish the number of somebody (available 24/7/365) who CAN figure out whom they need to contact and tell them. This, IMHO, is another major usability sin inflicted on hapless users all the time.
I'm surprised nobody in China (or even the US, since we're STILL pretty competitive for low-volume manufacturing) has started cranking out laser printers with copies of the 1990s-era LaserJet print engine. The patents have all expired, printing technology has gone basically nowhere in 20 years, and old LaserJet consumables are basically commodities by now. The HOME market for printers like this might be small, but small & medium-sized businesses (especially those who print a LOT) and schools would LOVE printers that cost a few hundred bucks, but had almost zero consumables cost.
Worst-case, they'd have to get ISO to codify the consumables for the print engine & give a non-Trademarked name to PCL or PostScript, so they could advertise their standard-compliance without risking a lawsuit for Trademark-infringement.
They could probably even start by giving the printer a "dumb" framebuffer, then do all the rendering/rasterization logic & printserver in a RasPi. So you'd buy the USB-interfaced dumb-framebuffer printer, and pair it with your own Pi-based printserver running GhostScript.
The value of a US Dollar isn't due to the "strength" of the government backing it... it's due to the fact that it's almost infinitely-liquid... you could walk into a remote village in central Africa, and easily find people willing to sell goods & services for US Dollars... AND capable of making change. You can be standing in line at McDonald's in Canada or Belgium, and if there are more than 5 people in line & you only have US dollars, you'll EASILY be able to find someone willing to pay for your lunch with their credit card in exchange for US Dollars, because they'll be buying them from you at a discount compared to what banks charge for currency exchange. And because almost everyone accepts US Dollars, you can trade them directly for goods & services without HAVING to go through an intermediate currency exchange. They're hard enough to counterfeit (with fairly easy detection through relatively low-tech offline means) that people can trade them and feel confident that they're genuine.
Currency exchange is expensive. It has ALWAYS been expensive, going all the way back to ancient Egypt, Persia, and everywhere else. Being able to avoid it is desirable. Using Dollars for everything makes it easy to minimize the need for currency exchange.
Ditto, for the Euro. The main reason why the British opposed the Euro is that they had little reason TO risk switching. Dealing with two dozen currencies when vacationing on the continent was a pain in the ass. Dealing with two currencies (Sterling and Euro)? No big deal. They basically allowed the countries where they vacationed to absorb the cost of changing to Euros, then enjoyed 99% of the benefits of having a common currency without having to do it themselves.