A) WTF do you mean, "nearly worthless"? It'll mean what it does today: the connection is secured using SSL/TLS. Nothing more and nothing less. HTTPS isn't some special indication that a site is Serious Business or something. It just means that an eavesdropper can't listen in on the connection or intercept the traffic. If you *REALLY* think there's value in that distinction, though, Extended Validation certs (green URL bar) will still exist to take money from people like you. B) Vaguely possible, but not something I'm really worried about. If their server is so insecure that the data they send is easily exposed, then they probably wouldn't have cared about what data they were or were not sending in the first place. Besides, that's *still* better than having *all* the data (including authentication data) be sent in plain text! C) Bullshit. There are many ways around that. The easy (obvious, to anybody who knows anything about the subject) one is to fake up your own CA, install its certificate, and use a proxy server that serves up faked certs signed by your faked up CA. Burp Suite and Fiddler (two common web proxy tools, the first of which is explicitly intended for web security testing) already support doing this and have supported it for years.
i) How do you think it'll do that? The technique these people are using to authenticate domain ownership is better than what some existing "trusted" CAs use... ii) Cry me a fucking river. The world will not miss them. iii) See previous points, including the ones that express "WTF are you talking about?".
Authority: I've been in the information security and penetration testing profession, including lots of tests of web apps, web services, and mobile apps, since 2006.
Actually, there's a pretty damn good reason why Slashdot *should* be private:
You (and I) are logged into this site. That means a unique identifier tied to our Slashdot accounts is sent to the server (in a cookie) with every request we make. This lets Slashdot know who we are, primarily for when we post a comment. The problem is, this unique identifier is sent in plain text; anybody on the same network as you or anywhere in the network between you and Slashdot's servers can see it.
Now, I don't know about you, but it's not *that* hard to get from my Slashdot identity to my real name. I assume everything I post here can be traced back to me. I'm OK with that; if I wanted to post something privately (and for some reason didn't want to post AC) I'd create and use a throwaway account, possibly via TOR + an additional proxy redirect at an Internet café or something (Slashdot blocks known TOR exit nodes, if I recall correctly). However, just because I'm OK with the posts I make being traceable to me does *not* mean I'm OK with just anybody who wants to posting in my name.
Right now, if you and I were on the same local network (wireless or wired), I could use techniques such as ARP spoofing or DNS poisoning to intercept every HTTP request you send to Slashdot, an every response it sends you. I could extract your authentication cookie and use it to make requests that Slashdot would think come from you and would post under your username. I could even have an excellent chance to steal your password; all I would have to do is modify Slashdot's responses to make it look like you aren't signed in. Then, when you go to the login page (which normally sends your password via HTTPS, but is itself served over HTTP), I use a technique called SSL Stripping to modify the login form so that it submits your password over plain-text HTTP (I could then submit that password to Slashdot over HTTPS, as it expects). Now I have your username and password, I can modify your account, I can post as you, and odds are you don't even know you were compromised.
None of that even requires any special skill, not even basic coding. The tools to do it all are pre-built and available for free download.
Well, or you could STOP BUYING DRM SHIT instead, too. If Steam can take away your game library (and they can, and sometimes will) then they're DRM and they're shit, plain and simple. I do not get all this fawning over Steam that I see from so many people in what's normally a very anti-DRM community.
This is why I don't drop a lot of money on a game unless I've been able to trial it. Not pirate it, just trial it. There are, in fact, game devs that release trials of their games.
Most single-player RPGs and adventure games do not, which is kind of odd because it should be pretty easy to figure out a point (in either time or game progression) where if the player is enjoying the game they'll be hooked but which still leaves lots of content. Conversely, damn near all MMOs do offer such a trial, typically with a level cap and/or time cap. While I'm well aware of the differences between MMOs and single-player games, I don't understand why the big devs are so aware of the "get them hooked and they'll pay up" system for MMOs but don't take the obvious adaptation for single-player games.
Well, unless they know their games are shit and don't want people to know that before they buy. But that still doesn't justify pirating the game, just watch other people play (friends or reviewers), or borrow from a friend if possible.
No, PC browsers (with the possible exception of Safari?) don't do anything nearly so braindead, nor do any of the other kinds of PC software that use a JIT (a few examples: Java,.NET, Flash). You allocate the memory, with pages mapped R/W. You emit JIT-compiled code into a page. You re-map the page to R/X! Repeat as more pages are needed. You never, even have a R/W/X page.
In fact, browsers (IE and Chrome at a minimum, probably others) and Flashplayer take things a step further. Since you can generate a huge number of almost-entirely-attacker-controlled instructions by doing operation that will compile down as arithmetic on immediate values (constants), and since x86 (and, to a lesser extent, many ARM systems courtesy of THUMB-2 mode) allows code to be interpreted as a completely different instruction sequence if you enter the binary stream in the middle of an instruction, one technique for getting executable-mapped shellcode into a browser is to have a script that does a ton of arithmetic on carefully chosen constants. Therefore, the above-mentioned JITs (IE, Chrome, Flashplayer, maybe others) use a technique called "constant blinding" where every constant operation is actually emitted as two instructions: a masked constant getting XORed with its mask value to produce the expected constant (in a register), and then an operation on that value. No long sequence of known instructions with attacker-controlled immediates means no way to predict the result of entering an instruction stream at an offset.
If Safari on iOS really is so stupid as to have R/W/X pages just because of its JIT, Apple has fucked up colossally.
On the one hand, that shows off an impressive level of detail, with the eyeballs (not just the very fronts of the eyes) as their own models, for example. On the other hand, WTF? I mean, I've seen games with graphics glitches like that before, usually when there's a video driver issue, so maybe it's just that... but I would expect they could afford to test on the current swath of video cards and at least the most *common* driver selections...
Microsoft also just (today) announced a new edition of VS 2013, called "Community", that is free (like the old Express editions) but is "full-featured" and supports both extensions and multiple languages. In fact, it comes with support for building iOS and Android apps built in, which kind of astonished me.
As far as I can tell, the only difference between Community and Professional, aside from the present of a purchase price, is that Comm is "for non-enterprise application development". I'm not sure where something crosses the line into being an "enterprise", but I think it's quite fair to say you can write and publish mobile apps (including iOS or Android mobile apps) with this as a hobby or independent developer.
Run Linux the same way (far too) many people run Windows, and you'll find it's not that much better, security-wise. Sure, Linux doesn't make downloaded files executable by default... which is why we have http://curlpipesh.tumblr.com/ (or rather, the examples it provides). Linux doesn't run everything as root (unless you run as root, which 10 years ago was "WTF?!? Nobody would do that" and today is becoming more and more common just as it is on Windows) but then, neither does Windows... unless you do something about as intelligent as logging into your Linux system as root (and people do it all the time nonetheless). Besides, not being root isn't a guarantee of any safety; you can do a lot of damage as a normal user. Package managers should, in theory, keep people from falling for "your Flash player is out of date, you need to install this update to view the video" malware, but people who are using Linux the same way they use Windows will install third-party software from outside the repos often enough; most of the commercial Linux games I've seen, for example, require doing this.
Linux is definitely less *targeted* by run-of-the-mill malware, especially the stuff that looks to exploit the day-to-day user, but that doesn't make it more secure. Most of the Flashplayer and Adobe Reader and Java exploits out there can be exploited on Linux just as well as on Windows, but nobody bothers to do so because there isn't any return on the investment (malware is about making money, in nearly every case relevant to a home user). The recent slew of decades-old security vulns in such core packages as bash and X11 (to say nothing of OpenSSL) show that the whole "many eyes" theory doesn't actually mean that open source software is inherently well security-reviewed.
Not sure if you're joking or not... that's literally the plan of the Mars One people (the reality show, not necessarily the death pool). That's how they plan to fund the colony.
So, what prevents this hypothetical 17-year-old from presenting a forged stripping license? I mean, they could check with the licensing agency to see if a given license is valid... but hey, you can do that with a driver's license (or non-driver ID, or passport, or military ID, or whatever other form of government-issued photo ID you care to mention). Why do you need a *different* state-issued piece of paper to provide the same information?
Your scenario describes a situation where the club owners have reason to be concerned about the "legitimacy" of their dancers. Fine, let them submit the paperwork and review the information verifying the valid state-issued ID themselves. YOU DON'T NEED A NEW FORM OF STATE-ISSUED LICENSE FOR THIS! Seriously, it's not that hard to understand. These licenses provide *no* benefit. A concerned business owner could (easily) verify age without it, and an unconcerned one wouldn't give a fuck about the stripping license anyhow.
Leaving aside the issue of whether (voluntary) prostitution ought to be the government's concern at all, I still don't see why this requires public records. Want to know the person's age? Ask to see their government-issued photo ID. Driver's licenses, non-driver ID, passports, and so forth all already exist for (among others) that exact purpose. Yes, they can be forged, but what about a driver's license is more forgeable than a nude dancing license? As for criminal background checks, those are a standard part of many hiring processes.
There's no need to license and track this particular form of occupation specifically. None at all.
While I agree in general, just wondering: why concealed carry permits? Just because it's a subset of gun ownership records, or some more specific reason?
The only place I've been matching those conditions (though not the only place to have them, by any means) is Finland.
I don't know how far they were going - the town I was in wasn't 20km on a side, I think - but I definitely saw people on bicycles. It was almost surreal. They're bundled up around the head so much you can barely see their eyes (mouths are just fog-emitting slits), they have thick winter gloves and boots on, and long-sleeved but light shirts and pants. Riding on thick mountain bike tires (excuse me, tyres) across snow that never goes away or even turns to ice in midwinter even if it doesn't snow for two weeks. This is a part of the world where they don't even bother icing the roads because it's so cold that icewater still freezes, and the only traction benefit you'd get from ice would be from its solid crystalline form (for which gravel works better). It did occasionally get above -25C at midday, not that the day as a whole was more than about five-six hours long (which doesn't leave a lot of time for biking). This was in January.
It's a pretty easy way to do something like tweak a Powerpoint slide (maybe there was a typo, or you want to alter your notes for the slide?) on the bus to work, or to add a line in an Excel-based expense report while heading home from lunch. You aren't expected to write long documents on your phone, but being able to make edits is a nice feature.
As for tablets, lots of people have a keyboard (usually Bluetooth) for their tablet. Combined with the often very high resolution of modern tablets (I think iPads run at 2048x1536 or something these days?) and the fact that you're looking at it from much closer than you look at your 20+" monitor (not that 20" is big; I've had laptops nearly that big), there's no reason you couldn't be productive on such a device if you had the right software.
The difference, of course, being that Surfaces and such support keyboards and mice (well, trackpads on the keyboard covers, but you can also use a Bluetooth or USB mouse). Nonetheless, you're right that *for touchscreen use specifically* desktop Office is pretty bad. It's not unusable - I don't have super-tiny fingers yet I don't find the buttons on the ribbon very hard to hit - but it's a definitely inferior experience. Of course, since Office for RT is just an ARM recompile of their x86 code, and runs in the desktop mode on all Win8 systems be they RT or not, this shouldn't come as any surprise.
There is a touchscreen-focused version of OneNote for Win8 / Windows RT "Metro" mode, though.
Yep. As a friend of mine pointed out, if you see somebody on the road driving slow as fuck at 2AM, they're probably high as a kite... and while that's illegal here (I live in Washington, where smoking it is legal but driving afterward is DUI) I'm not terribly worried by it. The people going 70 in a 50 zone and continuously crossing the lane markers are way, way scarier; those are the drunks.
*Which* "core product" are you talking about? Productivity software? Desktop OSes? Server OSes? Web servers? Database servers? Content management software (SharePoint)? Email and "groupware" servers? Software development tools? Encarta, until the Internet made it obsolete? Strategy games? Flight simulators? Any of the other games they've produced?
Or are you just classing all of those under "software"? Maybe "x86 software" so you can exclude Windows RT and Windows Phone? How about Windows Mobile, which was pretty successful in the pre-iPhone smartphone market? Windows CE, which is still embedded in a bunch of tiny systems that need an OS but don't have the hardware for a PC-grade one or the development expertise for a custom one (and which was the core of WinMo)? The Xbox 360 OS, which ran on PowerPC?
Also, citation needed for the claim that Azure is a failure. It has a number of big clients and as far as I know it makes money. It's not number one in the market, but that doesn't mean it's not successful. Similarly, their mice and keyboards still make money, and frankly some of their mice are (still) quite nice.
Courier never even launched. I'm not even sure what market "Foo" you'd have said it to be in.
Surface RT was a flop, but that's largely due to the crippled-by-design OS, but the Surface Pro line has been pretty popular and now makes money, though it hasn't yet paid off the cost to develop it.
To be sure, by the time they killed off WinMo, it was already being displaced by Android (and to a lesser extent Android). They could have focused on tweaking the UI and OS core while trying to maintain backward compatibility and avoiding losing features (WP7 lacked a lot of features WinMo 6.5 had, though it also had some features 6.5 lacked such as finer-grained permissions than "root" and "not root") and maybe they could have ridden the tail of WinMo into the modern smartphone era, but I'm skeptical.
Meanwhile, Windows Phone has once again thoroughly overtaken Blackberry and is solidly in third place. That's not exactly impressive, but they're well above the noise floor.
Zeppelins and blimps are extremely different things. Zeppelins were fast, high-capacity cargo ships and passenger liners. They were built to go places and deliver cargo, living or otherwise. Structurally, they are rigid and have a narrow front profile, have internal cabins, and are easily capable of going upwind (in the same sense that an airplane is, that is, assuming the wind isn't too strong for the engines). Blimps aren't even close to the same thing, aside from the general concept of being a lighter-than-air craft. They're more similar to hot-air balloons than to zeppelins. We absolutely stopped using zeppelins.
Oh, and FYI, zeppelins were used as military craft. They were extremely hard to shoot down. When the interior is entirely hydrogen - that is, it contains no oxygen - even incendiary rounds don't really do anything. The amount of damage required to reduce their buoyancy sufficiently to bring one down was similarly impressive. Admittedly, using a flammable coating was... unwise, but people flipped their shit over the Hindenburg because it was the first high-profile catastrophe in zeppelin use. Imagine if boats were a new invention and had been seen as almost totally safe for their first decades of use... and then when the technology of rigid floating boats was so new it still seemed revolutionary, the Titanic was built and as soon as it was full of passengers (but still in front of everybody, not out in the middle of the ocean) it exploded. Not sank and killed most of the passengers, exploded and killed everybody. That's what the history of zeppelins looks like.
Not for what zeppelins were used for. Zeppelins were passenger and cargo ships that happened to be lighter than (surface-level) air - "airships" in the truest sense. They were fairly fast and were typically designed to get themselves and their cargo - human or otherwise - from place A to place B.
The blimps that we use today have minimal propulsion and almost no cargo capacity. Their purpose is simply to stay in the air, only slightly more controllable (though with longer time aloft) than a hot air balloon.
If a zeppelin is an ocean liner, a blimp is just a largish navigation beacon, basically a floating lighthouse.
Orbital designed, built, and tested the spacecraft on their own dime (much like SpaceX).
When the government hires and pays a private company to develop a battle tank, it's publicly funded even though the work is done by (private) contractors. Same when the government hires and pays contractors to develop a spacecraft.
When the government buys a Ford Taurus to fit it out as a police cruiser, they're buying a car that was developed privately and is sold to anybody who wants to pay for it, public or private. Even if Ford begins the development with the goal of "let's build a car that'll make a really good police cruiser" (note: I'm picking the Taurus here because I can't imagine why anybody in the private space would want/have wanted one) and hopes to sell a bunch of them to various government agencies, that doesn't make it a government-developed car unless the government paid for the development.
Both the Falcon and Antares rockets are privately developed. A significant number of Falcon launches aren't even remotely government-related. Every aspect of, say, the Atlas V, was developed through government funding as part of the Air Force's EELV program. While the Falcon 9 is (as of half a year ago) certified for EELV launches, it wasn't developed with EELV funding.
Considering that SpaceX is not public (and will not go public until they have demonstrated Earth-to-Mars capability, according to Musk), SpaceX is vastly less shareholder-motivated than a company like Boeing or L-M. They also don't operate on cost-plus government contracts, which means its up to their own engineers to make a profit on the budget they have. If they do well, that's a big profit; if they do poorly they'll go broke. No "this is costing too much and taking too long, we'll need another billion dollars, thanks Mr. Fed..."
Assuming the applicant has the time and money to take them to court over it, yeah. You sue the employer, not the employee doing the hiring. The employer can fire that person or whatever other (legal) disciplinary actions they decide to take, but the employer is still going to be the one on the hook in the courtroom.
Slashdot Mirror
A) WTF do you mean, "nearly worthless"? It'll mean what it does today: the connection is secured using SSL/TLS. Nothing more and nothing less. HTTPS isn't some special indication that a site is Serious Business or something. It just means that an eavesdropper can't listen in on the connection or intercept the traffic. If you *REALLY* think there's value in that distinction, though, Extended Validation certs (green URL bar) will still exist to take money from people like you.
B) Vaguely possible, but not something I'm really worried about. If their server is so insecure that the data they send is easily exposed, then they probably wouldn't have cared about what data they were or were not sending in the first place. Besides, that's *still* better than having *all* the data (including authentication data) be sent in plain text!
C) Bullshit. There are many ways around that. The easy (obvious, to anybody who knows anything about the subject) one is to fake up your own CA, install its certificate, and use a proxy server that serves up faked certs signed by your faked up CA. Burp Suite and Fiddler (two common web proxy tools, the first of which is explicitly intended for web security testing) already support doing this and have supported it for years.
i) How do you think it'll do that? The technique these people are using to authenticate domain ownership is better than what some existing "trusted" CAs use...
ii) Cry me a fucking river. The world will not miss them.
iii) See previous points, including the ones that express "WTF are you talking about?".
Authority: I've been in the information security and penetration testing profession, including lots of tests of web apps, web services, and mobile apps, since 2006.
Actually, there's a pretty damn good reason why Slashdot *should* be private:
You (and I) are logged into this site. That means a unique identifier tied to our Slashdot accounts is sent to the server (in a cookie) with every request we make. This lets Slashdot know who we are, primarily for when we post a comment. The problem is, this unique identifier is sent in plain text; anybody on the same network as you or anywhere in the network between you and Slashdot's servers can see it.
Now, I don't know about you, but it's not *that* hard to get from my Slashdot identity to my real name. I assume everything I post here can be traced back to me. I'm OK with that; if I wanted to post something privately (and for some reason didn't want to post AC) I'd create and use a throwaway account, possibly via TOR + an additional proxy redirect at an Internet café or something (Slashdot blocks known TOR exit nodes, if I recall correctly). However, just because I'm OK with the posts I make being traceable to me does *not* mean I'm OK with just anybody who wants to posting in my name.
Right now, if you and I were on the same local network (wireless or wired), I could use techniques such as ARP spoofing or DNS poisoning to intercept every HTTP request you send to Slashdot, an every response it sends you. I could extract your authentication cookie and use it to make requests that Slashdot would think come from you and would post under your username. I could even have an excellent chance to steal your password; all I would have to do is modify Slashdot's responses to make it look like you aren't signed in. Then, when you go to the login page (which normally sends your password via HTTPS, but is itself served over HTTP), I use a technique called SSL Stripping to modify the login form so that it submits your password over plain-text HTTP (I could then submit that password to Slashdot over HTTPS, as it expects). Now I have your username and password, I can modify your account, I can post as you, and odds are you don't even know you were compromised.
None of that even requires any special skill, not even basic coding. The tools to do it all are pre-built and available for free download.
Well, or you could STOP BUYING DRM SHIT instead, too. If Steam can take away your game library (and they can, and sometimes will) then they're DRM and they're shit, plain and simple. I do not get all this fawning over Steam that I see from so many people in what's normally a very anti-DRM community.
This is why I don't drop a lot of money on a game unless I've been able to trial it. Not pirate it, just trial it. There are, in fact, game devs that release trials of their games.
Most single-player RPGs and adventure games do not, which is kind of odd because it should be pretty easy to figure out a point (in either time or game progression) where if the player is enjoying the game they'll be hooked but which still leaves lots of content. Conversely, damn near all MMOs do offer such a trial, typically with a level cap and/or time cap. While I'm well aware of the differences between MMOs and single-player games, I don't understand why the big devs are so aware of the "get them hooked and they'll pay up" system for MMOs but don't take the obvious adaptation for single-player games.
Well, unless they know their games are shit and don't want people to know that before they buy. But that still doesn't justify pirating the game, just watch other people play (friends or reviewers), or borrow from a friend if possible.
No, PC browsers (with the possible exception of Safari?) don't do anything nearly so braindead, nor do any of the other kinds of PC software that use a JIT (a few examples: Java, .NET, Flash). You allocate the memory, with pages mapped R/W. You emit JIT-compiled code into a page. You re-map the page to R/X! Repeat as more pages are needed. You never, even have a R/W/X page.
In fact, browsers (IE and Chrome at a minimum, probably others) and Flashplayer take things a step further. Since you can generate a huge number of almost-entirely-attacker-controlled instructions by doing operation that will compile down as arithmetic on immediate values (constants), and since x86 (and, to a lesser extent, many ARM systems courtesy of THUMB-2 mode) allows code to be interpreted as a completely different instruction sequence if you enter the binary stream in the middle of an instruction, one technique for getting executable-mapped shellcode into a browser is to have a script that does a ton of arithmetic on carefully chosen constants. Therefore, the above-mentioned JITs (IE, Chrome, Flashplayer, maybe others) use a technique called "constant blinding" where every constant operation is actually emitted as two instructions: a masked constant getting XORed with its mask value to produce the expected constant (in a register), and then an operation on that value. No long sequence of known instructions with attacker-controlled immediates means no way to predict the result of entering an instruction stream at an offset.
If Safari on iOS really is so stupid as to have R/W/X pages just because of its JIT, Apple has fucked up colossally.
On the one hand, that shows off an impressive level of detail, with the eyeballs (not just the very fronts of the eyes) as their own models, for example.
On the other hand, WTF? I mean, I've seen games with graphics glitches like that before, usually when there's a video driver issue, so maybe it's just that... but I would expect they could afford to test on the current swath of video cards and at least the most *common* driver selections...
Microsoft also just (today) announced a new edition of VS 2013, called "Community", that is free (like the old Express editions) but is "full-featured" and supports both extensions and multiple languages. In fact, it comes with support for building iOS and Android apps built in, which kind of astonished me.
As far as I can tell, the only difference between Community and Professional, aside from the present of a purchase price, is that Comm is "for non-enterprise application development". I'm not sure where something crosses the line into being an "enterprise", but I think it's quite fair to say you can write and publish mobile apps (including iOS or Android mobile apps) with this as a hobby or independent developer.
http://www.visualstudio.com/en...
Run Linux the same way (far too) many people run Windows, and you'll find it's not that much better, security-wise. Sure, Linux doesn't make downloaded files executable by default... which is why we have http://curlpipesh.tumblr.com/ (or rather, the examples it provides). Linux doesn't run everything as root (unless you run as root, which 10 years ago was "WTF?!? Nobody would do that" and today is becoming more and more common just as it is on Windows) but then, neither does Windows... unless you do something about as intelligent as logging into your Linux system as root (and people do it all the time nonetheless). Besides, not being root isn't a guarantee of any safety; you can do a lot of damage as a normal user. Package managers should, in theory, keep people from falling for "your Flash player is out of date, you need to install this update to view the video" malware, but people who are using Linux the same way they use Windows will install third-party software from outside the repos often enough; most of the commercial Linux games I've seen, for example, require doing this.
Linux is definitely less *targeted* by run-of-the-mill malware, especially the stuff that looks to exploit the day-to-day user, but that doesn't make it more secure. Most of the Flashplayer and Adobe Reader and Java exploits out there can be exploited on Linux just as well as on Windows, but nobody bothers to do so because there isn't any return on the investment (malware is about making money, in nearly every case relevant to a home user). The recent slew of decades-old security vulns in such core packages as bash and X11 (to say nothing of OpenSSL) show that the whole "many eyes" theory doesn't actually mean that open source software is inherently well security-reviewed.
Not sure if you're joking or not... that's literally the plan of the Mars One people (the reality show, not necessarily the death pool). That's how they plan to fund the colony.
So, what prevents this hypothetical 17-year-old from presenting a forged stripping license? I mean, they could check with the licensing agency to see if a given license is valid... but hey, you can do that with a driver's license (or non-driver ID, or passport, or military ID, or whatever other form of government-issued photo ID you care to mention). Why do you need a *different* state-issued piece of paper to provide the same information?
Your scenario describes a situation where the club owners have reason to be concerned about the "legitimacy" of their dancers. Fine, let them submit the paperwork and review the information verifying the valid state-issued ID themselves. YOU DON'T NEED A NEW FORM OF STATE-ISSUED LICENSE FOR THIS! Seriously, it's not that hard to understand. These licenses provide *no* benefit. A concerned business owner could (easily) verify age without it, and an unconcerned one wouldn't give a fuck about the stripping license anyhow.
Come back when you have a non-bullshit excuse.
Leaving aside the issue of whether (voluntary) prostitution ought to be the government's concern at all, I still don't see why this requires public records. Want to know the person's age? Ask to see their government-issued photo ID. Driver's licenses, non-driver ID, passports, and so forth all already exist for (among others) that exact purpose. Yes, they can be forged, but what about a driver's license is more forgeable than a nude dancing license? As for criminal background checks, those are a standard part of many hiring processes.
There's no need to license and track this particular form of occupation specifically. None at all.
While I agree in general, just wondering: why concealed carry permits? Just because it's a subset of gun ownership records, or some more specific reason?
The only place I've been matching those conditions (though not the only place to have them, by any means) is Finland.
I don't know how far they were going - the town I was in wasn't 20km on a side, I think - but I definitely saw people on bicycles. It was almost surreal. They're bundled up around the head so much you can barely see their eyes (mouths are just fog-emitting slits), they have thick winter gloves and boots on, and long-sleeved but light shirts and pants. Riding on thick mountain bike tires (excuse me, tyres) across snow that never goes away or even turns to ice in midwinter even if it doesn't snow for two weeks. This is a part of the world where they don't even bother icing the roads because it's so cold that icewater still freezes, and the only traction benefit you'd get from ice would be from its solid crystalline form (for which gravel works better). It did occasionally get above -25C at midday, not that the day as a whole was more than about five-six hours long (which doesn't leave a lot of time for biking). This was in January.
I have definitely tweaked Powerpoint slides and Excel spreadsheets on my phone. That was one of the key features of Windows phones.
Of course, they haven't sold too well so far, so maybe more people think like you than think like me. It was definitely useful, though.
It's a pretty easy way to do something like tweak a Powerpoint slide (maybe there was a typo, or you want to alter your notes for the slide?) on the bus to work, or to add a line in an Excel-based expense report while heading home from lunch. You aren't expected to write long documents on your phone, but being able to make edits is a nice feature.
As for tablets, lots of people have a keyboard (usually Bluetooth) for their tablet. Combined with the often very high resolution of modern tablets (I think iPads run at 2048x1536 or something these days?) and the fact that you're looking at it from much closer than you look at your 20+" monitor (not that 20" is big; I've had laptops nearly that big), there's no reason you couldn't be productive on such a device if you had the right software.
The difference, of course, being that Surfaces and such support keyboards and mice (well, trackpads on the keyboard covers, but you can also use a Bluetooth or USB mouse). Nonetheless, you're right that *for touchscreen use specifically* desktop Office is pretty bad. It's not unusable - I don't have super-tiny fingers yet I don't find the buttons on the ribbon very hard to hit - but it's a definitely inferior experience. Of course, since Office for RT is just an ARM recompile of their x86 code, and runs in the desktop mode on all Win8 systems be they RT or not, this shouldn't come as any surprise.
There is a touchscreen-focused version of OneNote for Win8 / Windows RT "Metro" mode, though.
Yep. As a friend of mine pointed out, if you see somebody on the road driving slow as fuck at 2AM, they're probably high as a kite... and while that's illegal here (I live in Washington, where smoking it is legal but driving afterward is DUI) I'm not terribly worried by it. The people going 70 in a 50 zone and continuously crossing the lane markers are way, way scarier; those are the drunks.
My maps were printed on origami, you insensitive clod!
*Which* "core product" are you talking about? Productivity software? Desktop OSes? Server OSes? Web servers? Database servers? Content management software (SharePoint)? Email and "groupware" servers? Software development tools? Encarta, until the Internet made it obsolete? Strategy games? Flight simulators? Any of the other games they've produced?
Or are you just classing all of those under "software"? Maybe "x86 software" so you can exclude Windows RT and Windows Phone? How about Windows Mobile, which was pretty successful in the pre-iPhone smartphone market? Windows CE, which is still embedded in a bunch of tiny systems that need an OS but don't have the hardware for a PC-grade one or the development expertise for a custom one (and which was the core of WinMo)? The Xbox 360 OS, which ran on PowerPC?
Also, citation needed for the claim that Azure is a failure. It has a number of big clients and as far as I know it makes money. It's not number one in the market, but that doesn't mean it's not successful. Similarly, their mice and keyboards still make money, and frankly some of their mice are (still) quite nice.
Courier never even launched. I'm not even sure what market "Foo" you'd have said it to be in.
Surface RT was a flop, but that's largely due to the crippled-by-design OS, but the Surface Pro line has been pretty popular and now makes money, though it hasn't yet paid off the cost to develop it.
To be sure, by the time they killed off WinMo, it was already being displaced by Android (and to a lesser extent Android). They could have focused on tweaking the UI and OS core while trying to maintain backward compatibility and avoiding losing features (WP7 lacked a lot of features WinMo 6.5 had, though it also had some features 6.5 lacked such as finer-grained permissions than "root" and "not root") and maybe they could have ridden the tail of WinMo into the modern smartphone era, but I'm skeptical.
Meanwhile, Windows Phone has once again thoroughly overtaken Blackberry and is solidly in third place. That's not exactly impressive, but they're well above the noise floor.
Zeppelins and blimps are extremely different things. Zeppelins were fast, high-capacity cargo ships and passenger liners. They were built to go places and deliver cargo, living or otherwise. Structurally, they are rigid and have a narrow front profile, have internal cabins, and are easily capable of going upwind (in the same sense that an airplane is, that is, assuming the wind isn't too strong for the engines). Blimps aren't even close to the same thing, aside from the general concept of being a lighter-than-air craft. They're more similar to hot-air balloons than to zeppelins. We absolutely stopped using zeppelins.
Oh, and FYI, zeppelins were used as military craft. They were extremely hard to shoot down. When the interior is entirely hydrogen - that is, it contains no oxygen - even incendiary rounds don't really do anything. The amount of damage required to reduce their buoyancy sufficiently to bring one down was similarly impressive. Admittedly, using a flammable coating was... unwise, but people flipped their shit over the Hindenburg because it was the first high-profile catastrophe in zeppelin use. Imagine if boats were a new invention and had been seen as almost totally safe for their first decades of use... and then when the technology of rigid floating boats was so new it still seemed revolutionary, the Titanic was built and as soon as it was full of passengers (but still in front of everybody, not out in the middle of the ocean) it exploded. Not sank and killed most of the passengers, exploded and killed everybody. That's what the history of zeppelins looks like.
Not for what zeppelins were used for. Zeppelins were passenger and cargo ships that happened to be lighter than (surface-level) air - "airships" in the truest sense. They were fairly fast and were typically designed to get themselves and their cargo - human or otherwise - from place A to place B.
The blimps that we use today have minimal propulsion and almost no cargo capacity. Their purpose is simply to stay in the air, only slightly more controllable (though with longer time aloft) than a hot air balloon.
If a zeppelin is an ocean liner, a blimp is just a largish navigation beacon, basically a floating lighthouse.
Orbital designed, built, and tested the spacecraft on their own dime (much like SpaceX).
When the government hires and pays a private company to develop a battle tank, it's publicly funded even though the work is done by (private) contractors. Same when the government hires and pays contractors to develop a spacecraft.
When the government buys a Ford Taurus to fit it out as a police cruiser, they're buying a car that was developed privately and is sold to anybody who wants to pay for it, public or private. Even if Ford begins the development with the goal of "let's build a car that'll make a really good police cruiser" (note: I'm picking the Taurus here because I can't imagine why anybody in the private space would want/have wanted one) and hopes to sell a bunch of them to various government agencies, that doesn't make it a government-developed car unless the government paid for the development.
Both the Falcon and Antares rockets are privately developed. A significant number of Falcon launches aren't even remotely government-related. Every aspect of, say, the Atlas V, was developed through government funding as part of the Air Force's EELV program. While the Falcon 9 is (as of half a year ago) certified for EELV launches, it wasn't developed with EELV funding.
Considering that SpaceX is not public (and will not go public until they have demonstrated Earth-to-Mars capability, according to Musk), SpaceX is vastly less shareholder-motivated than a company like Boeing or L-M. They also don't operate on cost-plus government contracts, which means its up to their own engineers to make a profit on the budget they have. If they do well, that's a big profit; if they do poorly they'll go broke. No "this is costing too much and taking too long, we'll need another billion dollars, thanks Mr. Fed..."
Assuming the applicant has the time and money to take them to court over it, yeah. You sue the employer, not the employee doing the hiring. The employer can fire that person or whatever other (legal) disciplinary actions they decide to take, but the employer is still going to be the one on the hook in the courtroom.