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User: zippthorne

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  1. Re:"consultancy" on Apple Now the World's Most Valuable Brand, Knocks Off Coca-Cola · · Score: 1

    The value of the brand is held by the brand owner, not by the customer. If someone actually pays $650 for a $120 blazer because it came from Brooks Bros, the value of the brand was indeed $530 to brooks bros.

  2. Re:As a business history geek .... on Apple Now the World's Most Valuable Brand, Knocks Off Coca-Cola · · Score: 0

    Same thing that will happen if the Democrats shut down the government tonight by failing to pass the House's bill in the Senate.

    Same thing that happened in the 90s when the government "shut down."

    Pretty much nothing of consequence.

    Why assume that one party's failure to cave to the other party makes that party responsible, anyway?

  3. Re:Obligatory Steve Jobs quote on Apple Now the World's Most Valuable Brand, Knocks Off Coca-Cola · · Score: 1

    Wasn't Palm Pilot created by engineers who had worked on the Newton?

  4. Re: Obligatory Steve Jobs quote on Apple Now the World's Most Valuable Brand, Knocks Off Coca-Cola · · Score: 1

    but you can use a bluetooth gps receiver with the cached maps (or a gps accessory designed to plug into the device's connector port, but then you're stuck when they switch to a new connector...)

  5. Re:Designer Prescott Harvey... on An Animated, Open Letter To J.J. Abrams About Star Wars · · Score: 1

    Exactly the point. Star wars was fun. That whole swashbuckling adventure/heroes journey thing clicked, and was (and still is) great fun to watch. Then, Empire Strikes Back was good. Return of the Jedi was also a movie.

    Episodes 1-3 weren't fun. They were cynical re-hash of the original trilogy.

  6. Re:Anti-oil propaganda on Underwater Sonar Linked To Whale Deaths · · Score: 1

    Interfere with, perhaps, but significantly interfere? Windmills need to be spaced pretty far apart or they'll interfere with each other, and the blades themselves comprise a very small percentage of the disk area, although I suppose it could be a little more if you consider the area swept in the time it takes a migrating bird to traverse its thickness.

    The chance of a bird strike is surely proportional to the area blocked by rotors compared to the area birds actually fly through. It would take a huge population of birds to have a chance of even a few hitting the blades.

    The real problem with windmills is that the power generated doesn't correspond to the loads, resulting in requiring duplication of capacity using the very technologies you're trying to replace with windmills in the first place.

  7. The casino doesn't play poker. on Two Years In Prison For Using Infrared Contact Lenses To Cheat At Poker · · Score: 1

    It runs poker tables, you play against the other players. If he was cheating at poker, he wasn't cheating the casino.

    The casino does play blackjack, though.

  8. Re:Why do we even go to these orgs anymore... on Did NIST Cripple SHA-3? · · Score: 1

    They shouldn't keep trying because strong encryption is good for domestic commerce and international trade. Since all wars are, ultimately, economic - when you run out of the ability to continue fighting, you're done - anything that weakens commerce should require significant, tangible and measurable benefits to justify.

    Weakening the economy deliberately only makes sense if your enemy is the people who compose it....

  9. Re:Sherlock Holmes responds, "Duh!" on Metadata On How You Drive Also Reveals Where You Drive · · Score: 2

    Judging by all the police procedurals and the two Sherlock Holmes TV shows (one in the US, one in the UK), (and setting aside the generic steampunk movies they made instead of Iron Man 4 and 5), either most people don't see him that way, or Hollywood is really trying to portray that sort of thing as acceptable.

  10. Re:On the plus side... on Why iOS 7 Is Making Some Users Feel 'Sick' · · Score: 1

    Are you comparing the subsidized price of an android phone to the unsubsidized price of an iPhone?

  11. Re:Can't you turn the effects off? on Why iOS 7 Is Making Some Users Feel 'Sick' · · Score: 2

    Wasn't Windows XP the most successful software Microsoft has ever produced?

  12. Re:Hurricane season is just about over. on As Hurricane Season Looms, It's Disaster-Preparedness Time · · Score: 1

    Depends on where you live. It shouldn't be a straight multiple of the rebuild cost.

    It should be something more like:

      {rebuild and cleanup cost} * {probability of destruction over insured interval} + sum { {repair and cleanup cost}_i * {probability of damage over insured interval}_i} + {administrative costs and profit for insurer}

    Which obviously depends strongly on both the construction of the building and the environmental conditions of its location.

  13. Re:Hurricane season is just about over. on As Hurricane Season Looms, It's Disaster-Preparedness Time · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A lot of florida is not at risk. The problem is that the insurance rates for the truly risky locations don't reflect the genuine cost of living there, so the wealthy people who can afford coastal property are effectively being subsidized - either they get insurance at too-low of a rate to match the risk, or they forego it and lean on the federal and state disaster relief programs.

    Anyone deliberately living in the Category 1 flood zone should not get state or federal money when their houses are wrecked, regardless of whether they have been built sturdily or not. Cat 1 storms happen all over florida almost every year.

    The price of insurance should be allowed to rise and fall to reflect the actual risk and cost of each location, sending pricing signals to people who would build in risky areas. Otherwise, you don't really have insurance. You have a subsidy of people living in risky areas paid for by people who choose more sensible locations. The price of insurance in the sensible locations should basically be so cheap that no one would bother not getting it....

  14. Re:Should be 0% or 100% on Microsoft: We Offer Up User Data To Law Enforcement 2 Percent of the Time · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And if you had broken the law by giving them the data, would you subsequently have been under investigation?

    Are your choices basically,

    1. Refuse without a court order, the legally correct thing to do, earning their ire and petty retributive investigations of yourself later
    2. Give them the data when they ask, regardless of court order, opening yourself up to prosecution for that very act?
  15. Re:Why do we even go to these orgs anymore... on Did NIST Cripple SHA-3? · · Score: 1

    Why do we have to go with Schneier? Why not have a standardized version of all the final candidate algorithms?

  16. Re:Why do we even go to these orgs anymore... on Did NIST Cripple SHA-3? · · Score: 1

    But it doesn't have to be a NIST standard. It could be an ISO or ANSI standard (encryption may be used at least as much for communication as for storage, so that might make sense), for instance. ISO probably makes more sense anyway, as NIST is a purely US standards organization.

    Then we can be in the weird position where only the NSA uses the NSA-weakened algorithms...

  17. Changed Gaming Forever? on Myst Was Supposed To Change the Face of Gaming. What Is Its Legacy? · · Score: 0

    More like "one of the worst games ever"

    It was a pile of photographs (they literally used photo-like borders for the images) that you click through. It was like a web-based choose your own adventure novel, without the novel....

    There weren't even very many of them. I'm not sure where people are getting this "huge, open-ended world" bit.

    I suppose you could consider it a precursor to the FMV click-adventures that they had so much trouble giving away during the "try to fill a CD, but compress the hell out of it anyway, because no one has a quad speed yet to read it or a graphics card to show it" mid 90s...

  18. Re:I'm a little confused about GTA 5 on GTA V Proves a Lot of Parents Still Don't Know or Care About ESRB Ratings · · Score: 1

    ... but biology is still taboo.

    Unfortunately, so is math, physics, chemistry, civics, ...

  19. Re:shallow learning curve on The Other Pong · · Score: 1

    Why does everyone plot "learning curves" with experience on the independent axis?

  20. Re:In other news on Apple Starts Blocking Unauthorized Lightning Cables With iOS 7 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    a cable doesn't have to worry about any of that. It is the USB socket device that must worry about those things.

    The cable should just be bundled wires with a connector. It doesn't have to step down anything.

  21. Re:Weird KVM. on Another British Bank Hit By KVM Crooks · · Score: 1

    There are plenty of practices that "if that's the case, you're already screwed." If you're relying on someone running a business not to choose them, and they appear to be cheaper than doing things the right way, then I think I can state quite confidently, "you're already screwed."

    Your security needs are not the same as the bank's business needs. They need you to believe that your money is secure, and they need the regulators to believe that they are in compliance with any regulations or making good-faith efforts to be in compliance.

    They will invariably choose what they believe to be the least cost method of satisfying those requirements, and they may chose not based on costs to the organization as a whole, but rather the costs for a specific decision maker within the organization.

  22. No it isn't on Another British Bank Hit By KVM Crooks · · Score: 1

    All that duplication of OS, and you get the perceived benefit of increased separation, but you've still go a thing running that launches other things, all on the same machine, only now with the overhead of running the first thing inside another thing inside itself....

    The only security benefit is in the thing that contains the thing that runs the stuff. If this piece of software sufficiently segregates the running applications, then it is secure, if it does not, then you're in the same boat as before except you need three times the hardware just to get started.

    A well-designed operating system would keep the applications just as separate with only 1x the overhead of an operating system. The fact that we're using VM's all over the place is clear evidence that we haven't got operating systems figured out right now.

  23. Re:Weird KVM. on Another British Bank Hit By KVM Crooks · · Score: 1

    is the MAC in the encrypted part of the packets? I was under the impression it was in the plaintext portion....

  24. Re:Sounds like the audio world's failure too on LucasFilm Combines Video Games and Movies To Eliminate Post-Production · · Score: 1

    The billions those sequels made, sadly, refutes your assertion.

  25. Re:Broken Arrow. on USAF Almost Nuked North Carolina In 1961 – Declassified Document · · Score: 3, Funny

    They killed an unarmed cow? How could they?