I've been laid off once, but fortunately, it was handled extremely well. The CEO of the company (it was fairly small), called us to a meeting where he sat with us in a room and explained the situation and why it was being done, answering any questions we had afterwards. It's hard to get mad at someone when they're completely transparent about the whole thing, and I had a lot of respect for both him and the company for handling it that way. It still sucked, but it sucked in a way that didn't leave a bitter taste in your mouth.
Note: he didn't use any euphemisms to describe what was happening.
I'll just point out that the "trusted" certificate "authorities" have repeatedly proven themselves to be untrustworthy and unauthoritative.
No shit, which is why I mentioned that this could be circumvented if the private keys are compromised. Compromised certificate authorities are definitely the Achilles heel of the system, and my concern is that we trust far too many of them at this point, and there's little to prevent one root from impersonating another.
Even so, code-signing still generally does it's job reasonably well, as most hackers don't have the resources or skills to acquire private root certificate keys. No system is completely foolproof of course. However, when breaches occur, it's not the encryption itself that breaks, which means that things can be made secure again with new certificates. Annoying, yes, but probably not catastrophic, except to the reputation of the certificate authority with lost control of their keys.
That's a long way away from the "signing process will be hacked in a few hours," and you damn well know it.
It's probably easier to simulate the practical environment and mechanics of an aircraft than a hang glider, in which you're directing the flight controls with your body instead of a mechanical flight stick or yoke. Unless you've got a virtual hang glider controller hooked up in a large virtual environment, I can see how it might not work so well. On the contrary, you can create a reasonable flight simulator experience with a PC and some reasonably inexpensive accessories.
In nearly all other forms of flight, simulators are used extensively to good effect, so I'd be careful about generalizing the lessons learned by one hang-gliding instructor.
Launching tons of nuclear waste would consume many, many times the number of tons of rocket fuel - not exactly the most carbon-friendly approach.
Moreover, while it's hugely expensive to send payloads into low earth orbit (thousands of dollars a pound), it's even more ridiculously expensive to push a payload completely out of earth orbit. Incidentally, if you're going to push it into space, you might as well just throw it into the sun.
There's also the teensy problem that rockets still accidentally explode on occasion. Who wants to be showered with 50 tons of highly radioactive material after a rocket malfunctions?
It's apparently not completely clear, but despite my initial sentence, I'm agreeing with you for the most part - hence, the arguments to increase output from carbon-free sources. I was just trying to make the point that you have to look at whether electricity makes sense as a gas alternative on a region-by-region basis. I think most people are aware that no single solution, including electric cars, is going to solve our problems.
Speak for yourself. Eighty percent of my region's power is generated by carbon free sources - mostly hydro, with a bit of wind and nuclear. The rest of you either need to get more solar where it's sunny and bright most of the year, or for those with a less than ideal climate, kick the hippies in the nuts and start building some nuclear plants. Nuclear waste is a problem, but a manageable one... the lesser of two evils, so to speak.
Of course, you're correct in that if your electricity still comes from coal, you might as well stick with an efficient gas-powered car for now.
My next car is almost certainly going to be electric, although I'm not going to trade in my completely-paid-for gas powered car until it actually needs replacing.
I think it is safe to presume the signing process will be hacked in a matter of hours.
Code signing uses the same cryptographic technology as SSL-TLS, and is used by many operating systems already (the notable exception being Linux). The only real way for this system to be subverted is the same as for the web - for a trusted certificate authority to either lose or misuse their private keys, which would allow a certificate to be spoofed.
So, no, the signing system isn't going to be hacked. Code signing isn't a new feature. It's already been a part of Windows for many years. This is just an additional enterprise feature that happens to use it.
And it worked fairly well for their railway system. It's not completely without flaws, or without regulations and subsidies, but private companies have demonstrated an ability to create both effective and profitable transportation systems which government run companies could never manage to do. Deregulation and privatization are not panaceas, but they can and do work well when done smartly. Japan seems to at least have a track record of success in this area.
Before you lambast Apple for poor engineering decisions, think carefully about the ramifications of using shared third-party libraries. DLLs have their own problems - hence the well known term "DLL Hell".
Does Apple have to sign and push the 3rd party shared library itself? That would be the only safe solution I can think of, because otherwise you're giving apps the ability to modify each others' code, which is clearly a recipe for potential abuse. Apple can't realistically take the responsibility for monitoring, compiling, and pushing updates for third-party libraries, which would be nearly impossible to do in practice. Alternatively, there's no way Apple could allow the apps themselves to update the shared libraries, because then a single app could break or even hack thousands of other apps with a bad update. Delegating that authority to a third-party (like the library developer) is equally problematic, because there's no way for them to properly test any changes before pushing them, and the potential for abuse still exists.
DLLs make a lot of sense for shared systems libraries, but as far as third-party libraries, they'd be a practical nightmare.
The number of people traveling on all US flights in total is about 1.75 million daily. By contrast, the Tokyo subway system alone carries over 8 million passengers daily, while the greater Tokyo railway system carries 40 million passengers every day, using nearly 900 stations to embark and disembark. The simple fact is that there's no practical way to do any sort of security screening for mass transit on that scale anyhow, even had they wished to.
Ah, so no possibility of any confirmation bias there, of course.
I really hate it when headlines declare something like this as a fact, when clearly everyone involved is just promoting competing theories. The headline should really read 3.46-Billion-Year-Old 'Fossils' May Not Have Been Created By Life Forms. Just because someone published a paper disputing one theory and promoting another doesn't mean we can automatically assume it to be factual.
Anime is like any other product, in that 80% of it is mediocre at best and garbage at worst (ecchi or otherwise). In addition to Crunchyroll, I also subscribe to Funimation, as I occasionally enjoy English dubs, and they have a pretty decent library of their older shows too. Unfortunately, I can't say much for their Xbox 360 app. It barely qualifies as serviceable. I'm not sure if the other platforms are any better. The best part is that those services are inexpensive enough that it's not to painful to the wallet to subscribe to both.
Also, like GP, I'm never going to use Hulu until they provide an ad-free service. Subscription + ads? Screw that.
Absolutely. NASA and Star Trek have a long history together. Ask the current crop of NASA engineers about what inspired them, and I'm going to bet a good many of them will talk about Star Trek. It's no coincidence that the first space shuttle was named Enterprise. Likewise, Star Trek has a history of taking the best current theories of NASA engineers and physicists, and at least throwing around enough plausible-sounding techno-babble (e.g. the Heisenberg compensator in the transporters) to make the geeks happy.
It will stick because it was purposefully designed and deployed for practical use among a very broad audience. Objective-C would likely still be a niche language were it not the native language for developing products on Apple platforms. This mass deployment for Apple devices essentially assures it's success - along with the fact that it looks like a pretty decent language on its own merits.
Ugh, no... I get your point, but we don't want horizontal monopolies any more than we want vertical monopolies. Let's just say that perhaps they should be split BOTH ways.
Planetes was a cool anime until near the end when the characters all when off the damn rails.
Anyhow, the headline and description are terrible. The plan is not "blasting" debris out of space. They're using the lasers to degrade the orbit. The atmosphere would then destroy the debris. Of course, using lasers to "burn", "propel", or "push" the debris out of orbit doesn't sound nearly as sexy as "blasting" it. So, for everyone talking about how "blasting" will simply create more debris, it's not an issue.
Seattle has the most screwed-up local leadership you can imagine. The mayor is busy building tent cities for the homeless and waging war on car commuters, but can't take time out to get their internet infrastructure up to twenty-first century standards. The mayor talked about doing something about it last year, but nothing's happened so far.
Of course, Seattle keeps electing these people, so it's really on their heads. I live in the Eastside (Eastern Seattle suburbs) where we have no such ridiculous restrictions, and as such, most people have FIOS running right to their homes.
A rejection of the deal would be a blow to Comcast, which has sought to gain valuable cable assets in major U.S. cities including New York and Los Angeles, where Time Warner Cable is dominant. Expanding Comcast’s broadband Internet and video footprint would help it better compete with satellite, Web and telecommunications competitors that have taken hundreds of thousands of TV subscribers from the Philadelphia-based company in recent years.
Or, Comcast, you could stop treating your customers like poop you scrape off your sole and instead offer competitive and innovative services at a reasonable price. Maybe then your customers wouldn't flee from you at the first opportunity they get. Just a thought.
Perhaps because all the modern devices are meant to work with your fingers and not with a stylus? Scribbling with a fingertip isn't all that effective, and even when you get a stylus, they don't work all that well because they have to simulate a fat, soft finger.
They're not doing it out of a sense of freedom or charity, so forgive me if I don't swoon with joy...
If that's the bar you're setting, no business will ever live up to those expectations. You're absolutely correct that this is simply a pragmatic strategy, made to help secure their place in an era where Windows no longer is the dominant platform. I'm completely fine with that. I don't expect Microsoft to suddenly turn into nice guys. I do expect them to act consistently with their own interests, and right now, that means accepting that they need to embrace a cross-platform development strategy. That's good news for those who enjoy using.NET on Windows platforms, and would like to port that code to other platforms as well.
As a general rule, it's not unreasonable for a for-profit business to also embrace open source strategies. Isn't that what open advocates have been saying for years? Haven't many other companies demonstrated this in practice? The only reason it's so strange is that this is Microsoft, which has historically been the antithesis of open source. Still, a good business strategy is a good business strategy regardless of who it comes from. Frankly, I'm amazing that MS has had such a turn-around in attitude in such a short time, and I suspect it has a chance to prevent them from languishing as a Windows-only vendor as many felt they would, with the inevitable decline and stagnation that would entail.
She's going to do that anyhow. Just last week, I saw a local story about a guy who lost control of his car while using his smartphone, and naturally, killed someone else and injured several more in their car instead of offing himself. Personally, I know I'm a good and safe driver (no tickets or accidents in decades), but I have very little confidence in others' driving. I want other people to have these systems in their cars, because it's more likely to save my life than the idiot that's busy tapping away on their phone while on the freeway.
I'm not sure if the camera pointed back at the driver is going to catch on, because I think people will be a bit uncomfortable having their car continuously watching them, but I think the outward-facing systems are going to be standard equipment in fairly short order. These are all just slow, incremental changes towards self-driving cars. We'll eventually be giving up more and more manual control of our cars, and as a result, driving is going to become safer and safer.
Nowadays, when someone says "democracy", it's highly likely they're simply referring to the over-arching type of government in which power is vested in the citizenry. This happens to include republics like the US, as well as "pure democracies", in which every citizen takes part in the governing process, and many other variations as well, like the UK's constitutional monarchy.
Note that historically, the term "democracy" has often been used to refer to "direct democracy". This was certainly true in the times and writings of the US founding fathers. Nowadays, the reverse is probably true. If you want to get stupidly technical or pedantic, the US could probably be considered a "hybrid", because while we clearly utilize a republic for most of our governing machinery, over half our states also have ballot initiatives, which are a form of direct democracy.
I think it's perfectly fine to call the US a "democracy", so long as we recognize that we're obviously using the umbrella term and not a "direct democracy".
FIDE regulations actually allow for the revocation of titles in cases of cheating. They absolutely should revoke his grandmaster status. Leaving it intact, even with a footnote, is insulting to anyone who earned that title legitimately. Why leave the official title intact if he's banned for life anyhow?
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I've been laid off once, but fortunately, it was handled extremely well. The CEO of the company (it was fairly small), called us to a meeting where he sat with us in a room and explained the situation and why it was being done, answering any questions we had afterwards. It's hard to get mad at someone when they're completely transparent about the whole thing, and I had a lot of respect for both him and the company for handling it that way. It still sucked, but it sucked in a way that didn't leave a bitter taste in your mouth.
Note: he didn't use any euphemisms to describe what was happening.
I'll just point out that the "trusted" certificate "authorities" have repeatedly proven themselves to be untrustworthy and unauthoritative.
No shit, which is why I mentioned that this could be circumvented if the private keys are compromised. Compromised certificate authorities are definitely the Achilles heel of the system, and my concern is that we trust far too many of them at this point, and there's little to prevent one root from impersonating another.
Even so, code-signing still generally does it's job reasonably well, as most hackers don't have the resources or skills to acquire private root certificate keys. No system is completely foolproof of course. However, when breaches occur, it's not the encryption itself that breaks, which means that things can be made secure again with new certificates. Annoying, yes, but probably not catastrophic, except to the reputation of the certificate authority with lost control of their keys.
That's a long way away from the "signing process will be hacked in a few hours," and you damn well know it.
I guess we'll just have to agree to agree then. Agreed?
It's probably easier to simulate the practical environment and mechanics of an aircraft than a hang glider, in which you're directing the flight controls with your body instead of a mechanical flight stick or yoke. Unless you've got a virtual hang glider controller hooked up in a large virtual environment, I can see how it might not work so well. On the contrary, you can create a reasonable flight simulator experience with a PC and some reasonably inexpensive accessories.
In nearly all other forms of flight, simulators are used extensively to good effect, so I'd be careful about generalizing the lessons learned by one hang-gliding instructor.
Three problems: carbon, cost, and safety.
Launching tons of nuclear waste would consume many, many times the number of tons of rocket fuel - not exactly the most carbon-friendly approach.
Moreover, while it's hugely expensive to send payloads into low earth orbit (thousands of dollars a pound), it's even more ridiculously expensive to push a payload completely out of earth orbit. Incidentally, if you're going to push it into space, you might as well just throw it into the sun.
There's also the teensy problem that rockets still accidentally explode on occasion. Who wants to be showered with 50 tons of highly radioactive material after a rocket malfunctions?
It's apparently not completely clear, but despite my initial sentence, I'm agreeing with you for the most part - hence, the arguments to increase output from carbon-free sources. I was just trying to make the point that you have to look at whether electricity makes sense as a gas alternative on a region-by-region basis. I think most people are aware that no single solution, including electric cars, is going to solve our problems.
Speak for yourself. Eighty percent of my region's power is generated by carbon free sources - mostly hydro, with a bit of wind and nuclear. The rest of you either need to get more solar where it's sunny and bright most of the year, or for those with a less than ideal climate, kick the hippies in the nuts and start building some nuclear plants. Nuclear waste is a problem, but a manageable one... the lesser of two evils, so to speak.
Of course, you're correct in that if your electricity still comes from coal, you might as well stick with an efficient gas-powered car for now.
My next car is almost certainly going to be electric, although I'm not going to trade in my completely-paid-for gas powered car until it actually needs replacing.
I think it is safe to presume the signing process will be hacked in a matter of hours.
Code signing uses the same cryptographic technology as SSL-TLS, and is used by many operating systems already (the notable exception being Linux). The only real way for this system to be subverted is the same as for the web - for a trusted certificate authority to either lose or misuse their private keys, which would allow a certificate to be spoofed.
So, no, the signing system isn't going to be hacked. Code signing isn't a new feature. It's already been a part of Windows for many years. This is just an additional enterprise feature that happens to use it.
And it worked fairly well for their railway system. It's not completely without flaws, or without regulations and subsidies, but private companies have demonstrated an ability to create both effective and profitable transportation systems which government run companies could never manage to do. Deregulation and privatization are not panaceas, but they can and do work well when done smartly. Japan seems to at least have a track record of success in this area.
Before you lambast Apple for poor engineering decisions, think carefully about the ramifications of using shared third-party libraries. DLLs have their own problems - hence the well known term "DLL Hell".
Does Apple have to sign and push the 3rd party shared library itself? That would be the only safe solution I can think of, because otherwise you're giving apps the ability to modify each others' code, which is clearly a recipe for potential abuse. Apple can't realistically take the responsibility for monitoring, compiling, and pushing updates for third-party libraries, which would be nearly impossible to do in practice. Alternatively, there's no way Apple could allow the apps themselves to update the shared libraries, because then a single app could break or even hack thousands of other apps with a bad update. Delegating that authority to a third-party (like the library developer) is equally problematic, because there's no way for them to properly test any changes before pushing them, and the potential for abuse still exists.
DLLs make a lot of sense for shared systems libraries, but as far as third-party libraries, they'd be a practical nightmare.
The number of people traveling on all US flights in total is about 1.75 million daily. By contrast, the Tokyo subway system alone carries over 8 million passengers daily, while the greater Tokyo railway system carries 40 million passengers every day, using nearly 900 stations to embark and disembark. The simple fact is that there's no practical way to do any sort of security screening for mass transit on that scale anyhow, even had they wished to.
Ah, so no possibility of any confirmation bias there, of course.
I really hate it when headlines declare something like this as a fact, when clearly everyone involved is just promoting competing theories. The headline should really read 3.46-Billion-Year-Old 'Fossils' May Not Have Been Created By Life Forms. Just because someone published a paper disputing one theory and promoting another doesn't mean we can automatically assume it to be factual.
Anime is like any other product, in that 80% of it is mediocre at best and garbage at worst (ecchi or otherwise). In addition to Crunchyroll, I also subscribe to Funimation, as I occasionally enjoy English dubs, and they have a pretty decent library of their older shows too. Unfortunately, I can't say much for their Xbox 360 app. It barely qualifies as serviceable. I'm not sure if the other platforms are any better. The best part is that those services are inexpensive enough that it's not to painful to the wallet to subscribe to both.
Also, like GP, I'm never going to use Hulu until they provide an ad-free service. Subscription + ads? Screw that.
Absolutely. NASA and Star Trek have a long history together. Ask the current crop of NASA engineers about what inspired them, and I'm going to bet a good many of them will talk about Star Trek. It's no coincidence that the first space shuttle was named Enterprise. Likewise, Star Trek has a history of taking the best current theories of NASA engineers and physicists, and at least throwing around enough plausible-sounding techno-babble (e.g. the Heisenberg compensator in the transporters) to make the geeks happy.
It will stick because it was purposefully designed and deployed for practical use among a very broad audience. Objective-C would likely still be a niche language were it not the native language for developing products on Apple platforms. This mass deployment for Apple devices essentially assures it's success - along with the fact that it looks like a pretty decent language on its own merits.
Ugh, no... I get your point, but we don't want horizontal monopolies any more than we want vertical monopolies. Let's just say that perhaps they should be split BOTH ways.
Planetes was a cool anime until near the end when the characters all when off the damn rails.
Anyhow, the headline and description are terrible. The plan is not "blasting" debris out of space. They're using the lasers to degrade the orbit. The atmosphere would then destroy the debris. Of course, using lasers to "burn", "propel", or "push" the debris out of orbit doesn't sound nearly as sexy as "blasting" it. So, for everyone talking about how "blasting" will simply create more debris, it's not an issue.
Seattle has the most screwed-up local leadership you can imagine. The mayor is busy building tent cities for the homeless and waging war on car commuters, but can't take time out to get their internet infrastructure up to twenty-first century standards. The mayor talked about doing something about it last year, but nothing's happened so far.
Of course, Seattle keeps electing these people, so it's really on their heads. I live in the Eastside (Eastern Seattle suburbs) where we have no such ridiculous restrictions, and as such, most people have FIOS running right to their homes.
A rejection of the deal would be a blow to Comcast, which has sought to gain valuable cable assets in major U.S. cities including New York and Los Angeles, where Time Warner Cable is dominant. Expanding Comcast’s broadband Internet and video footprint would help it better compete with satellite, Web and telecommunications competitors that have taken hundreds of thousands of TV subscribers from the Philadelphia-based company in recent years.
Or, Comcast, you could stop treating your customers like poop you scrape off your sole and instead offer competitive and innovative services at a reasonable price. Maybe then your customers wouldn't flee from you at the first opportunity they get. Just a thought.
Perhaps because all the modern devices are meant to work with your fingers and not with a stylus? Scribbling with a fingertip isn't all that effective, and even when you get a stylus, they don't work all that well because they have to simulate a fat, soft finger.
They're not doing it out of a sense of freedom or charity, so forgive me if I don't swoon with joy...
If that's the bar you're setting, no business will ever live up to those expectations. You're absolutely correct that this is simply a pragmatic strategy, made to help secure their place in an era where Windows no longer is the dominant platform. I'm completely fine with that. I don't expect Microsoft to suddenly turn into nice guys. I do expect them to act consistently with their own interests, and right now, that means accepting that they need to embrace a cross-platform development strategy. That's good news for those who enjoy using .NET on Windows platforms, and would like to port that code to other platforms as well.
As a general rule, it's not unreasonable for a for-profit business to also embrace open source strategies. Isn't that what open advocates have been saying for years? Haven't many other companies demonstrated this in practice? The only reason it's so strange is that this is Microsoft, which has historically been the antithesis of open source. Still, a good business strategy is a good business strategy regardless of who it comes from. Frankly, I'm amazing that MS has had such a turn-around in attitude in such a short time, and I suspect it has a chance to prevent them from languishing as a Windows-only vendor as many felt they would, with the inevitable decline and stagnation that would entail.
" shut down " in the "start" menu
They fixed that, didn't you hear? In Windows 8, the option to shut down the computer is now logically found under Settings.
She's going to do that anyhow. Just last week, I saw a local story about a guy who lost control of his car while using his smartphone, and naturally, killed someone else and injured several more in their car instead of offing himself. Personally, I know I'm a good and safe driver (no tickets or accidents in decades), but I have very little confidence in others' driving. I want other people to have these systems in their cars, because it's more likely to save my life than the idiot that's busy tapping away on their phone while on the freeway.
I'm not sure if the camera pointed back at the driver is going to catch on, because I think people will be a bit uncomfortable having their car continuously watching them, but I think the outward-facing systems are going to be standard equipment in fairly short order. These are all just slow, incremental changes towards self-driving cars. We'll eventually be giving up more and more manual control of our cars, and as a result, driving is going to become safer and safer.
Nowadays, when someone says "democracy", it's highly likely they're simply referring to the over-arching type of government in which power is vested in the citizenry. This happens to include republics like the US, as well as "pure democracies", in which every citizen takes part in the governing process, and many other variations as well, like the UK's constitutional monarchy.
Note that historically, the term "democracy" has often been used to refer to "direct democracy". This was certainly true in the times and writings of the US founding fathers. Nowadays, the reverse is probably true. If you want to get stupidly technical or pedantic, the US could probably be considered a "hybrid", because while we clearly utilize a republic for most of our governing machinery, over half our states also have ballot initiatives, which are a form of direct democracy.
I think it's perfectly fine to call the US a "democracy", so long as we recognize that we're obviously using the umbrella term and not a "direct democracy".
FIDE regulations actually allow for the revocation of titles in cases of cheating. They absolutely should revoke his grandmaster status. Leaving it intact, even with a footnote, is insulting to anyone who earned that title legitimately. Why leave the official title intact if he's banned for life anyhow?