Actually, yes. e-readers are limited functionality devices that take up the same amount of space as a tablet that can serve as a reader, and much more. Unless the e-reader offers something unique (e-ink...) that the tablet cannot (an e-ink tablet would be pretty crippled in the color display space, at least, commercially available e-ink as I have known about it thus far.)
OTOH, if the tablet can't do what the user needs -- for example, present a readable page in full sunlight -- then the tablet isn't impinging on a putative e-reader's earned-by-actual-capabilities market share, is it?
And if something can't survive in the market, it's now a question of do we have to have it? Because if it can't survive on its own, and we don't have to have what it offers, then who is going to step up and make the things? It becomes a buggy whip. Rightfully so.
It's pretty easy for someone competent in radio engineering to pass the license test, and many thousands of people hold the license today
That is so. I hold two different USG RF licenses (old commercial first class with radar endorsement, amateur extra class.) And I blitzed all the tests (there were a series off them in both cases) so yes, not all that difficult for me.
However, the set of people competent to do what was described about must meet the above criteria, and be of the set of programmers that understands exactly how every layer of wifi is supposed to work and the set of programmers that is conversant with data- and code-hiding / obfuscation techniques. I'm a good programmer -- (about 45 continuous years of experience with many types and sizes of successful projects under my belt), and my debugging skills are right up there as well. I'm very good at seeing that vulnerabilities in my code are minimized. I'm also a good EE, and know RF backwards and forwards. Heck, I write some of the most advanced SDR software out there, so I pretty much eat RF for breakfast.
But I wouldn't be competent to do this job because first, I don't have the hiding / obfuscation chops (and the reason I know that is because I'm a good programmer and realize that's a skill in and of itself...:), nor am I intimately familiar with how wifi works at every level (and I also know that becoming so is non-trivial, because I've skimmed some of the specs.)
So this really doesn't sound like much of a "solution" to me. In practical terms, it doesn't seem achievable. I just don't think there is likely to be a pool of qualified persons being available to fill this kind of role. I suspect that for the workings of a router, you will almost always find a team underneath who (more or less) trust each other for some reason(s), and now we're talking about more risk if we, in turn must trust them and only them.
Closed source opens the door for closed attacks from uncheckable sources, like the NSA. And we know the NSA has been doing things outside the law and outside the acceptable constitutional bounds (and some laws are, in fact, also outside acceptable constitutional bounds.)
So open source for all routers seems to me to be a lot better path to follow. If you're going to mandate anything, I'd say it should be the ability to read the binary out of the depths of the various SOCs that are, or will be, at the core of many routers, as well as from the various types of external ROMs, flashable storage and so on for the types of systems that use them.
This means the router code can be compared bit-for-bit against the code we have been told it is running, and any number of people can then have looked at said code, and in such groups we are much more likely to bring together all the skills required: Joe says there's no obfustcated functionality, Larry says the relevant wifi specs are met, Linda says the networking protocols are okay, Fred tells us that the code itself isn't vulnerable to buffer overruns, Shannon tells us that it isn't going to transmit over the FAA's portion of the 5 MHz band, Mergatroid says what he built from the code that's supposed to be in the router matches every bit of what was actually lifted out of the router. (mind you, that's not perfect either, because a really sneaky team [cough, NSA, cough] could design the hardware to read out one set of code while the router runs something else entirely, but any such "prove it's okay" mechanism has those kinds of limits. Although perhaps Beverly who knows silicon foundry stuff and has access to the right kind of microscope and so forth might be so kind as to look at the die under the microscope and perhaps let us know that it doesn't look like there is a primary/spoof code storage mechanism in there. That, I think, would be one very difficult undertaking, but I'll allow for the possibility, anyway.)
Open source's key strength in re "trust" has almost always been, in a nutshell, "more than one person looks at this." Focusing all trust through one person doesn't leverage that.
Nice, but something that catches the URLs themselves would save you on, for instance, Slashdot or Digg when they link to a paywalled site. Dim any image, make the URL visually poisonous. Ok, AND suck it out of Google, lol. Though I don't know if that would work for their ads.
Might be a good idea to have a list of these, and a browser plugin that colors any link to a paywalled (or obnoxiously overloaded/toxified with ads) in an obvious way. Bright red on black would do it for me.:)
Sure. In the process, going through the aquifer (where it is pretty much guaranteed not to benefit the water's potability), making the ground difficult (or impossible) for plants to grow, out-gassing fumes into the air (oil stinks... ever really take a sniff?), making locomotion over the affected area more difficult, as well as risky (whoops), and of course, unless you like oil-coated, well, everything, it is simply ugly (I'm gonna need some feathers over here for these people.)
But, yes, there is a vague, probably-never-happen outside chance that oil from this central repo might wind up in an underground oil deposit similar to that from whence it was extracted. So there's that.
I don't mind paywalls. They let me know these sites don't want me as a visitor. I'm good with that. Such things simply generate a reflexive "okthxbai", and that's the end of that.
The "Suggested Apps" fluffy nomenclature reminds me of another recent instance from Microsoft:
The XBox One offers something Microsoft calls an "Energy-Saving Feature" where it doesn't listen for your voice to turn it on.
Previously, manufacturers, and consumers, have clumsily and misleadingly calling this feature "the off switch." Microsoft has saved them, bless their civic-minded hearts.
When not in "energy saving mode" (meaning, it's on), the XBox One draws quite a bit of power. Because, you, know. It's on.:)
You do realize if there's a major spill, the problem can extend beyond loss of oil and money, don't you?
We can hope the berms and so forth work, but in the case of an earthquake, the ground's integrity can be disrupted, so it's not a sure bet by any means.
There is certainly reason for concern.
As for Slashdot's choice of stories, meh. Don't like the headline, don't read.
Sadly, no.:( Although I like Trevor Noah well enough to keep watching, I thought -- still think -- Stewart was about as good as you can get at the job he created. Not that I agreed with everything he said, or thought all the takes they took on various issues were correct, but damn he could make me laugh. Credit to the show's writers as well, of course, but Stewart's delivery is what made it work. What a sly way he had about him as a comic. Gave great face, as it were.
<you know the tone I'm using here>My son, the astronaut. He never calls. He never writes. Something about delays, transmission delays maybe, i don't know, but never calls, doesn't write eithuh, no never, and what am I, chopped liveh? He couldn't stay on earth, and take care of his mother, like a good boy, no, he had to go gallavanting all over like a big shot, while I sit here, no one to take care of me... Not like my husband, Mortimer. Mortimer! MORTIMER! BRING ME MY TEA!<end tone>
So, what exactly in my post are you objecting to, or denigrating?
Just curious.
I wasn't the one who described one food as a "chemical shitstorm" with the implication that other foods aren't also "chemical shitstorms." That was tachdab1
But meat in reasonable portions is naturally good for you.
Oh, I agree. However, I also recognize that eating meat is a little hard on the animal that supplied it, at least the way we're doing it now, which is to say, we're killing them.
While I would welcome a veggie burger that actually tasted like meat, I'm feeling dubious that it actually does. Until it does, I put my charitable donations towards development of tech that may be able to (eventually) provide meat raised without a host animal. The tech is nascent, but they're working on it pretty hard. If it comes to pass, I will very happily partake. Because it's not meat I have a problem with. It's killing animals.
Not a bad idea to stop raising huge herds of animals, either. They're a pretty serious problem, environmentally speaking.
This can be said about pretty much any scientific field
No, it really can't. If there's a shadow of a tree on a building from a street lamp, I can look between the lamp and the building and locate the tree in a perfectly empirical, down-to-earth (ha!) manner, as well as knowing very well that the light is coming from the lamp.
If there's a little spinning object with an irregular topology out there between us and this star, we can't tell. We can't tell if it's a star at all -- all we can do is look at the spectrum and say, well, it looks like a star. All we get locally is the result of the occlusion, or whatever is actually causing the variation of intensity, which might just be a stellar process we've not run into previously. So we have to work with the idea of "what do we think might cause that", which may, or may not, give us the correct answer. Hence the speculation about Dyson spheres or other intervening objects. Low probability? Sure. But reasonable to consider? Certainly. One thing such consideration may do is give us reason to rule it out, which is also valuable. Particularly in the light (ha!) of information we can't otherwise explain as meeting known expectations based on previous observations. Process of elimination is a great tool.
Don't get me wrong - I am a huge admirer of science, and am truly impressed by the deductive reasoning that comes into play, but that doesn't mean we've always got it right. And I think it's pretty much a given that the further away we are, and the less data we have, and the less we know about everything between us and whatever we're looking at, the less certain our deductions must be.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, yes. e-readers are limited functionality devices that take up the same amount of space as a tablet that can serve as a reader, and much more. Unless the e-reader offers something unique (e-ink...) that the tablet cannot (an e-ink tablet would be pretty crippled in the color display space, at least, commercially available e-ink as I have known about it thus far.)
OTOH, if the tablet can't do what the user needs -- for example, present a readable page in full sunlight -- then the tablet isn't impinging on a putative e-reader's earned-by-actual-capabilities market share, is it?
And if something can't survive in the market, it's now a question of do we have to have it? Because if it can't survive on its own, and we don't have to have what it offers, then who is going to step up and make the things? It becomes a buggy whip. Rightfully so.
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Well, certainly funny, if so -- and sad at the same time -- but obscure to me, I'm afraid.
That is so. I hold two different USG RF licenses (old commercial first class with radar endorsement, amateur extra class.) And I blitzed all the tests (there were a series off them in both cases) so yes, not all that difficult for me.
However, the set of people competent to do what was described about must meet the above criteria, and be of the set of programmers that understands exactly how every layer of wifi is supposed to work and the set of programmers that is conversant with data- and code-hiding / obfuscation techniques. I'm a good programmer -- (about 45 continuous years of experience with many types and sizes of successful projects under my belt), and my debugging skills are right up there as well. I'm very good at seeing that vulnerabilities in my code are minimized. I'm also a good EE, and know RF backwards and forwards. Heck, I write some of the most advanced SDR software out there, so I pretty much eat RF for breakfast.
But I wouldn't be competent to do this job because first, I don't have the hiding / obfuscation chops (and the reason I know that is because I'm a good programmer and realize that's a skill in and of itself... :), nor am I intimately familiar with how wifi works at every level (and I also know that becoming so is non-trivial, because I've skimmed some of the specs.)
So this really doesn't sound like much of a "solution" to me. In practical terms, it doesn't seem achievable. I just don't think there is likely to be a pool of qualified persons being available to fill this kind of role. I suspect that for the workings of a router, you will almost always find a team underneath who (more or less) trust each other for some reason(s), and now we're talking about more risk if we, in turn must trust them and only them.
Closed source opens the door for closed attacks from uncheckable sources, like the NSA. And we know the NSA has been doing things outside the law and outside the acceptable constitutional bounds (and some laws are, in fact, also outside acceptable constitutional bounds.)
So open source for all routers seems to me to be a lot better path to follow. If you're going to mandate anything, I'd say it should be the ability to read the binary out of the depths of the various SOCs that are, or will be, at the core of many routers, as well as from the various types of external ROMs, flashable storage and so on for the types of systems that use them.
This means the router code can be compared bit-for-bit against the code we have been told it is running, and any number of people can then have looked at said code, and in such groups we are much more likely to bring together all the skills required: Joe says there's no obfustcated functionality, Larry says the relevant wifi specs are met, Linda says the networking protocols are okay, Fred tells us that the code itself isn't vulnerable to buffer overruns, Shannon tells us that it isn't going to transmit over the FAA's portion of the 5 MHz band, Mergatroid says what he built from the code that's supposed to be in the router matches every bit of what was actually lifted out of the router. (mind you, that's not perfect either, because a really sneaky team [cough, NSA, cough] could design the hardware to read out one set of code while the router runs something else entirely, but any such "prove it's okay" mechanism has those kinds of limits. Although perhaps Beverly who knows silicon foundry stuff and has access to the right kind of microscope and so forth might be so kind as to look at the die under the microscope and perhaps let us know that it doesn't look like there is a primary/spoof code storage mechanism in there. That, I think, would be one very difficult undertaking, but I'll allow for the possibility, anyway.)
Open source's key strength in re "trust" has almost always been, in a nutshell, "more than one person looks at this." Focusing all trust through one person doesn't leverage that.
IMHO
Nice, but something that catches the URLs themselves would save you on, for instance, Slashdot or Digg when they link to a paywalled site. Dim any image, make the URL visually poisonous. Ok, AND suck it out of Google, lol. Though I don't know if that would work for their ads.
Might be a good idea to have a list of these, and a browser plugin that colors any link to a paywalled (or obnoxiously overloaded/toxified with ads) in an obvious way. Bright red on black would do it for me. :)
Sure. In the process, going through the aquifer (where it is pretty much guaranteed not to benefit the water's potability), making the ground difficult (or impossible) for plants to grow, out-gassing fumes into the air (oil stinks... ever really take a sniff?), making locomotion over the affected area more difficult, as well as risky (whoops), and of course, unless you like oil-coated, well, everything, it is simply ugly (I'm gonna need some feathers over here for these people.)
But, yes, there is a vague, probably-never-happen outside chance that oil from this central repo might wind up in an underground oil deposit similar to that from whence it was extracted. So there's that.
I don't mind paywalls. They let me know these sites don't want me as a visitor. I'm good with that. Such things simply generate a reflexive "okthxbai", and that's the end of that.
The "Suggested Apps" fluffy nomenclature reminds me of another recent instance from Microsoft:
The XBox One offers something Microsoft calls an "Energy-Saving Feature" where it doesn't listen for your voice to turn it on.
Previously, manufacturers, and consumers, have clumsily and misleadingly calling this feature "the off switch." Microsoft has saved them, bless their civic-minded hearts.
When not in "energy saving mode" (meaning, it's on), the XBox One draws quite a bit of power. Because, you, know. It's on. :)
Guess he'd better keep that information... private... then.
Earthen dams. Earthquakes. Doesn't seem like the one could be counted on to respect the other.
You do realize if there's a major spill, the problem can extend beyond loss of oil and money, don't you?
We can hope the berms and so forth work, but in the case of an earthquake, the ground's integrity can be disrupted, so it's not a sure bet by any means.
There is certainly reason for concern.
As for Slashdot's choice of stories, meh. Don't like the headline, don't read.
And I was responding to the illogic of the poster. So, your criticism of my response was based on...?
Sadly, no. :( Although I like Trevor Noah well enough to keep watching, I thought -- still think -- Stewart was about as good as you can get at the job he created. Not that I agreed with everything he said, or thought all the takes they took on various issues were correct, but damn he could make me laugh. Credit to the show's writers as well, of course, but Stewart's delivery is what made it work. What a sly way he had about him as a comic. Gave great face, as it were.
You should see what my dog does in parks...
<you know the tone I'm using here>My son, the astronaut. He never calls. He never writes. Something about delays, transmission delays maybe, i don't know, but never calls, doesn't write eithuh, no never, and what am I, chopped liveh? He couldn't stay on earth, and take care of his mother, like a good boy, no, he had to go gallavanting all over like a big shot, while I sit here, no one to take care of me... Not like my husband, Mortimer. Mortimer! MORTIMER! BRING ME MY TEA!<end tone>
Er... are there Pak in "Shipstar"? The blurb doesn't seem to indicate that, but I'd read it in a heartbeat if so...
So, what exactly in my post are you objecting to, or denigrating?
Just curious.
I wasn't the one who described one food as a "chemical shitstorm" with the implication that other foods aren't also "chemical shitstorms." That was tachdab1
Oh, I agree. However, I also recognize that eating meat is a little hard on the animal that supplied it, at least the way we're doing it now, which is to say, we're killing them.
While I would welcome a veggie burger that actually tasted like meat, I'm feeling dubious that it actually does. Until it does, I put my charitable donations towards development of tech that may be able to (eventually) provide meat raised without a host animal. The tech is nascent, but they're working on it pretty hard. If it comes to pass, I will very happily partake. Because it's not meat I have a problem with. It's killing animals.
Not a bad idea to stop raising huge herds of animals, either. They're a pretty serious problem, environmentally speaking.
You're just not using enough garlic. They should taste like garlic chicken.
True spoiler alert: it's algae. The whole "people" thing? Just Hollywood screwing up a good SF story. As usual. No more than that.
Harry Harrison: Make Room, Make Room
Read it. I guarantee it will be a better experience than that ridiculous movie ever was.
In soviet russia, cow posts you, kid.
I'm sorry to have to be the one to break it to you, but everything you eat -- and drink -- is a chemical shitstorm.
"Foods. Chemistry." That's like saying "Oceans. Water." No, wait. It's actually like saying "Oceans. Chemistry." :)
No, you just need one, in the right place, spinning. :)
Ah, the Pak. You win the Internets today, sir or madam. You should be awarded an honorary Tree-of-Life simulacrum.
No, it really can't. If there's a shadow of a tree on a building from a street lamp, I can look between the lamp and the building and locate the tree in a perfectly empirical, down-to-earth (ha!) manner, as well as knowing very well that the light is coming from the lamp.
If there's a little spinning object with an irregular topology out there between us and this star, we can't tell. We can't tell if it's a star at all -- all we can do is look at the spectrum and say, well, it looks like a star. All we get locally is the result of the occlusion, or whatever is actually causing the variation of intensity, which might just be a stellar process we've not run into previously. So we have to work with the idea of "what do we think might cause that", which may, or may not, give us the correct answer. Hence the speculation about Dyson spheres or other intervening objects. Low probability? Sure. But reasonable to consider? Certainly. One thing such consideration may do is give us reason to rule it out, which is also valuable. Particularly in the light (ha!) of information we can't otherwise explain as meeting known expectations based on previous observations. Process of elimination is a great tool.
Don't get me wrong - I am a huge admirer of science, and am truly impressed by the deductive reasoning that comes into play, but that doesn't mean we've always got it right. And I think it's pretty much a given that the further away we are, and the less data we have, and the less we know about everything between us and whatever we're looking at, the less certain our deductions must be.