Not sure if serious... most people use Windows for porn, Facebook, email, Skype, Netflix and/or YouTube, some music service, and some degree of Word/Excel/whatever. A moderately large handful throw some Photoshop in there, though most don't really *use* it. Think about the kind of things your non-technical friend's non-technical parents (or children) use their computer for. That's what most people use Windows for.
The funny thing is, that's exactly the market that Microsoft went for with Windows RT. A full browser, including Flash, so people can play their Facebook games and watch their online videos. Home version of Office, so people can write their school papers or update their resume or track their budget. Dead-simple-easy-to-use apps for things like Netflix. Photoshop may not have made the cut, but tons of smartphone-app-like image manipulation apps did. "Serious" (as opposed to "casual") gamers were also left out in the cold, but they'd never have bought a machine with such poor specs anyhow. But seriously, Microsoft already tried to make "Windows for the 80% of people who never do even 20% of what a computer can do"... and it hasn't worked out.
Don't go ascribing your tunnel-vision-view of the things *you* use computers for to the populace as a whole, though. The typical Windows user refers to IE as "the Internet".
You can buy laptops pre-loaded with Linux from various suppliers. With that said, even stock Win8.1 isn't anywhere near as hard to use as most people seem to think (or rather, take on faith; most of the detractors have never actually tried using it day-to-day). If you absolutely cannot stand the Start screen and hot corners, they are quite easy to do away with via any number of free or cheap solutions.
Personally, the Start screen is just that thing I see flash up for a moment while I type the first few letters of whatever I'm launching. The only still-in-use version of Windows that I personally find really painful to use is XP, because you have to go find everything you're looking for yourself instead of having the OS instantly find it for you.
Oh, and the line about the warranty is complete bullshit. If you want to be absolutely certain, yank the storage (unless you buy a device where that's not possible) before you send it in. That's actually a good idea anyhow, as if you don't encrypt the drive they will almost certainly go snooping on it, and if you do, they'll probably just reformat it.
FYI, Vista had the "hit Start/WinKey, type a few letters, get program/document/email" feature as well. It was not, contrary to what you imply, introduced in Win7. The rest of what you say I take no exception to, though. I actually don't mind Vista, although I do miss Aero Snap on the rare occasion I use a Vista machine anymore. My biggest gripe about Win8, far and away was the way they segregated the Start search results (into "apps", "settings", and "files") and required extra clicks to move between the categories, which meant I could no longer launch Control Panel-ish stuff as quickly (unless I typed the file name such as "appwiz.cpl" or "diskmgmt.msc" in which case it appeared under "apps"...). That was fixed in 8.1.
Overall though, I care a lot more about the under-the-cover stuff. From a security standpoint, XP and Vista are night and day (ASLR, low IL, ability to run as a standard user - which I did on XP - without tearing your hair out...), and every version since has added additional incremental improvements (although I modify UAC to behave more like Vista's; it's too easy for malware to bypass otherwise and yes, I know what MS says about "not a security boundary" but that's just BS to justify their bug prioritization). Win8's page-combining to reduce memory usage is nice, but RAM is cheap and Vista introduced SuperFetch which (back before I had an SSD) meant that my games and such actually launch *faster* on Vista than on XP, because they were pre-cached in RAM instead of needing to be peeled off the disk after I try to launch them. There's a bunch more, but I've got to go so I'll leave it at that.
The sandboxing is also quite good. I'm far more comfortable downloading a random app from the store than from the web, and I know that any given store app will never try to run elevated or spy on my other activities or anything. It's possible to write a malicious one, of course, but there's very, very little malice that such an app can actually get up to. For example, a malicious video player app could phone home with the title of each movie and whatever identifying info it has about me (IP address, possibly a unique but anonymous ID number) for, oh, purposes of finding people to sue for piracy... but if I switched to using another video player, there's nothing it could do about it. "Modern" apps can't even set their own file associations; they can only register that they are capable of handling a given file type and let the user choose.
With that said, there's no reason that a nice sandbox has to come with the UI issues of "modern" apps. After all, IE has been sandboxed since IE7 on Vista all the way back in 2006. Chrome and Adobe Reader are third-party apps with Windows sandboxes. With a bit of effort setting things up, I can sandbox some other fairly-isolated Windows software, such as games or chat programs, about as well as IE and company (low IL, restricted token, etc.). If Microsoft had avoided making the Windows Store require their silly touch-first interface, and instead simply required that software sold through it be sandboxed using a framework like the one WinRT (the runtime, not the OS) uses, that would have been fine...
No, they actually don't have "the right to they[sic] speed he/she wants to go to[sic]". Obstructing traffic by driving too slow is a ticketable offense, at least in the state of WA. If you're driving below the speed limit and there are people behind you, you are legally obligated to pull over and let them pass.
You can block ads and scripts in IE just fine. Heck, there are even built-in ways to do it, using filter lists from folks like EasyList (better known for their popular AdBlock Plus filter list). No need to download an extension (MS calls them "add-ons" but they are much the same thing) as long as you're using IE9 or newer, but ad-blocking and script-filtering are available at least as far back as IE6. There's also options like blocking using a HOSTS file or similar.
Your boss's problem isn't that he uses IE, it's that he doesn't know how to use the Web safely at all. Your problem isn't that your boss likes IE (which does actually have some nice features, such as its tab groupings and translation "accelerator") but that you know one safe way to use the Web (which your boss doesn't like) but are apparently not smart enough to find one that he does like (despite the fact that such things certainly exist).
Using Firefox in its default configuration would be just as vulnerable.
Erm... bullshit? The only thing I'm aware of that's even *close* to what you're saying is that in Win8 and newer, the built-in anti-malware feature (Windows Defender) will remove entries for several well-known domains, including some advertising networks but also things like search engines and such, from the HOSTS file. Either turning off Defender, or setting it to Exclude the HOSTS file, will cause HOSTS to work like normal.
IE has had a built-in ad blocking solution (it's marketed as an anti-tracking solution, but it works fine on ads) since IE8. IE9 and later can even load filters from EasyList (who do the most widely-used AdBlock Plus list) and automatically update it. Extensions (called add-ins, sometimes "Browser Helper Objects") that provide ad-blocking have been available since at least IE6, and probably before.
In the interest of avoiding monoculture, not using IE makes some sense (although these days, anything much more mainstream than Opera has enough users to be an attractive target). In the interest of supporting open-source browsers (or if you believe that the "many eyes..." theory makes up for the relative lack of resources for security testing compared to a major corporation), using Chromium or Firefox makes sense, but they've had exploits as well. In the interest of punishing MS for its past behaviors, using something other than IE makes sense. But complaining that IE can't block ads or similar, well, that really doesn't make any sense at all. IE has more built-in ad blocking than many of its competitors, even though it's turned off be default and most people don't know how to turn it on.
In any case, the exploit that got A_Non_Moose was a JS bug in his PDF reader. You'd do better to recommend he stop using Acrobat (the only reader I know of that not only enables JS by default but turns it back on, silently, each time you update). If his browser was configured to open PDFs in Acrobat automatically, it doesn't matter *what* browser he was using.
Um, what's the difference? If I find, say, a user-after-free vulnerability in a JavaScript runtime (these have been found, and exploited, in the past) and use it overwrite an objects function table with arbitrary code (by, say, creating a long JavaScript string that contains the hex-encoded values of the machine cade that I want to execute) and then calling a function on the overwritten object to gain arbitrary code execution... is that not actually a JavaScript exploit for some reason? Did I merely use JS to "deliver" the exploit in a way that is different from exploiting a vulnerability in the Java applet sandbox?
With all due respect, his post was a lot more insightful than yours. You don't appear to know what you're talking about.
First of all, "deployed the same way" as in "deployed using an HTML <object> or <applet> element that instructs the browser to download and execute the code". The Microsoft Visual C++ redistributable runtime does not include any such mechanism for deploying C++ code. For that matter, not all Java runtime installations do either.
Second, just what do you think ActiveX is programmed in? Hint: it's not its own language. It's a packaging system for COM classes, which are almost without exclusion written in C++, and it *is* possible to deploy and run it in the browser in much the same way as Java applets (object tags). Unlike Java, they run with basically no sandbox but instead require considerable amounts of confirmation before they download. The idea is that they are powerful but unsafe, so only use the ones that you trust. Unfortunately, a number of pre-installed ActiveX controls on Windows have security vulnerabilities in them, so an attacker who finds a way to exploit one of those pre-installed ones doesn't need to get the user to download anything. Hence the way that modern versions of IE require the user to confirm before running an ActiveX control that they've not previously indicated that they trust (and also give you an ability to disable ActiveX completely or only enable it on a site-by-site basis).
I don't care for the Java installer any more than you do, but the security issues with Java applets have literally nothing to do with the language. The only way you could say Java itself is at fault is if you were to argue that Java shouldn't have any OS bindings at all (that is, no ability to access the file system, no ability to create processes, no ability to open network sockets, etc.). This is essentially the situation with JavaScript, of course; while the Java applet sandbox tries to *restrict* the use of functionality like I just mentioned, the JavaScript runtime (as found in browsers) simply lacks APIs to access such risky features. Even there, though, that's not a characteristic of the JavaScript *language* but merely of the sandboxed runtime used to execute JS in the browser. Other uses of JS, ranging from Windows Script Host to Node.JS, are perfectly capable of doing such things.
Don't be too sure of that. Purchasers routinely hire security experts to review the security of major acquisitions prior to the buy-out, with various stipulations in the agreement as to what types of findings will be the responsibility of which party. Such a review would likely have found the issue before it was announced publicly.
So few companies are smart enough to bring in security experts *before* they need them.
Actually, TotalA is quite easy to get these days (if you don't mind a pure-digital version) as it is available on Good Old Games (http://gog.com). Along with, I should mention, the entire MoO series (I picked up the first two for a total of a few bucks during their last winter sale). DRM-free, patched and/or packaged (MoO runs in a pre-configured DOSBox) for modern systems, and dirt cheap with re-downloading allowed and patches provided where relevant.
While in many ways 4 was the better game, I really do enjoy the combat system in SE5 more. It's not even just the real-time aspect of it (although that's huge; turn-based tactical combat is pretty exploitable if your ship is fast enough); it's things like needing time to turn and accelerate, having circular firing ranges (so you can skim an enemy fleet on a reciprocal course and unload on them without them being able to pursue, or send in a tightly clustered ball of fighters to kick the ass of a hostile ship without coming into the PD range of its wingmates). With that said, the research system in SE5 is bloody awful. The construction queues and intelligence operations are vaguely SE3-ish, which is good, but oh man the research system sucks.
Just checking: have you played Master of Orion 2? Much like SC2, it's easily the height of the series; MoO1 was good but too early and feels tech-demo-ish today, while MoO3 was boring and has little strategic depth left to the player. The SE series obviously draws heavily from MoO, but in some ways still falls short; despite being an old 16-bit game, MoO2 has things like shield arcs, weapon firing arcs, and ship maneuver (turning) costing movement points, plus a cleverly simple system for handling things like interstellar movement range.
No, I really don't. Let's see... right out of the summary, we get the length of his sentence. (78 months) / (12 months / year) = 6.5 years. "6.5" doesn't really look like a "4" to me.
In fairness, the radiator fins used on spacecraft are kind of like a terrestrial heat sink. There's no fans or anything like them, of course, but the basic concept of moving heat from the part that doesn't want to get too toasty to the part that is designed to accept all that heat and release it into the environment is much the same. The ammonia refrigeration system is required to achieve the actual moving and concentrating of the heat in the radiators, and (unlike the heat sink on a CPU) those radiators will get hotter than any other part of the system, but that's how you get efficient radiative cooling. The rate of direct conduction of heat between materials is also dependent on the difference in their temperatures, but you can build an effective conductive cooling system without requiring a huge temperature difference; not so for radiative cooling.
An interesting case of a sci-fi movie that (very quietly) gets it right: Avatar. Near the beginning of the movie, as the starship approaches Pandora, you can see it has large fins extending out around the engines, glowing red. Those are heat sinks / radiators, so hot that the blackbody radiation has moved beyond the infrared and into the visible spectrum.
The heat sink in your computer would be pretty miserable at dumping waste heat into space. Terrestrial heat sinks typically heat into a fluid, such as the air that your computer's fans blow across the heat sink.
Problem: there is no air (or anything else into which heat may be transferred) in space. Radiative cooling - that is to say, releasing infrared radiation - does occur, but it is *far* slower that conductive cooling. To do that effectively, though, you want a big, hot surface area that is shadowed from all other heat sources in the region (that big fusion reactor the Earth orbits counts as "in the region" here).
To cool an artificial satellite effectively, especially a big one like ISS, you use a heat transfer system (in this case, they apparently use ammonia) to concentrate the heat into radiative cooling surfaces on the shadowed side of the station. This system definitely adds complexity, not to mention generating a bit of heat itself(entropy always increases), but without it, the side of the station facing the sun would cook, and the shadowed side wouldn't get hot enough for effective radiative cooling.
Probably even more so. Remember, for example, DES; the NSA modified the candidate cipher that become DES in a way that many people thought weakened it. Instead, it strengthened it, adding protections against a cryptographic attack that the civilian world would not even discover for years to come. When that technique came to light, and it was discovered how much more vulnerable the pre-NSA version of the then-most-common symmetric cipher suite was than it would otherwise have been, the NSA was hailed as the preventers of the cryptopocalypse. Even now, decades after it became incredibly popular and then was superseded and entered decline (although it's still very widely used, in the form of triple-DES), the only real weakness known in the cipher is its key length (which 3DES mitigates). Maybe the NSA of today has a break for the algorithm. Maybe they even did back when it was being standardized, but for Machiavellian reasons decided to instead strengthen it against the attack they figured would become known sooner, as a way to establish their bona-fides, and held onto the other one.
For myself, though, I doubt it. Before the whole War on Terror bullshit, the NSA probably was a real force for good in the world. Amazing how much can change in a few decades, though...
Even ignoring the highly questionable aspects of the pledge which you carefully omitted from your quote, nationalism is just the grotesquely overgrown brother of tribalism, itself a badly flawed concept. At least within a tribe, it's hard to keep secrets or conceal abuses of power. It still promotes an unthinking herd behavior, a sense of "us vs. them, and clearly they're worse than us or they'd be part of us". At the national level, it fuels wars and xenophobia. It is the tools of propagandists and of those who would re-write history and get away with it (as you yourself noted, with regard to Jackson).
I find it disgusting that a nation which arose out of a rebellion against government mistreatment tries to brainwash its children into giving their allegiance to anything so inherently flawed as a human government. Would you have supported colonial children in the 1770s being required to stand up every day in school, and swear allegiance to the Union Jack, and the monarchy for which it stands? Do you think it's cool that there are probably kids right now swearing their allegiance to the People's Republic of [Korea|China|the Congo|whatever] and the glorious freedom and representation that their government bestows upon them?
Liberty and justice for all? Give me a break! Pure propaganda, and you don't even need to be *that* smart or well-educated to see it for the lie it is; you just need to start from the assumption that the American Way is *not* The One True Way, and look up some facts. Facts like per-capita prison population, or the breakdown of said population relative to the populace at large. Facts like the mere existence of places like Gitmo. Facts like the government's treatment of Snowden, and their hasty effort to scrub from their websites, etc. all mention of the Obama administration's moral and righteous promises to protect and support whistleblowers. Or how about the states where gays, or transgender people, are forced to live as second-class citizens (and, in a handful of very backward parts of the country, criminals)? The very concept that there exists "one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" is a tremendous lie. Teaching our children that such a thing not only exists, but that they live in it; forcing them to chant those lines every weekday of their young lives to the point that they absorb it before they're even old enough to know that sometimes the things you're taught are wrong? That is beyond the pale. It is despicable and deplorable.
Now, actually pledging liberty and justice, that's not so awful. It should still be taught as a *concept* and not as a mantra, but pledging to protect liberty and promote justice is a noble and virtuous thing to say. Too bad that's nowhere in the pledge of allegiance as it stands today, though. No, we were told to pledge allegiance to a flag and a nation, not a concept. We didn't even pledge to uphold the constitution, the way so many civil servants are required to do.
There may be some levels of clearance which require citizenship, but they certainly don't *all* require it. I've known people with Secret who had only just gotten their Green Card and were years from when they would be eligible for citizenship.
That... is a nice idea in general, not just one that makes good business sense. Despite all the times it's been shorted and the number of negative news articles, the price generally bounces back pretty well. If you want to buy TSLA, that's the time to do it!
The Panamanian invasion was centered on a fairly specific area (the Canal Zone, which conveniently borders their major cities, and in which we already had military forces) but I'll fully grant that the post you responded to was hyperbole bordering on bullshit.
Pretty sure Alaska isn't concerned about B-52 carpet bombing. I don't know where the parent of your post (Luckyo) is from, but I suspect it's not the USA. We've never been very concerned about carpet bombing here. Compared to Europe, with its massive numbers of historically hostile political entities packed into easy strike range (with minimal interception time) of each other, on the other hand...
Aside from the fact that Japan was already at war with much of the western world, including a bunch of countries that had been our allies in that big war we'd fought just a couple decades earlier, that's a perfectly reasonable analogy. After all, there's really no difference between the Japanese government, military, and international policy of 70-odd years ago and Brazil's of today... </sarcasm>
You could, in fact, say that the US government betrayed him. In fact, it did so twice. First, when it betrayed all of us, by acting against out interests as a populace and constitutionally mandated rights as citizens. Then, when Snowden saw the depth of the government's betrayal and tried to bring it to light, they betrayed him again (personally, but in a way with consequences for us all) by abandoning all those promises about whistleblowers and choosing to persecute and vilify him instead.
Personally, I doubt he actually has gone over to the Russians. Nationalism is a strong drive, and you don't get to work at the NSA and have a clearance unless you've got a good bit of it. On the other hand, somebody who was as strongly pro-US-government as you seem to be, but a little less blind and righteous about it, may have felt the depth of those betrayals deeper than I would. If it turns out he has gone over, I'm certainly not going to judge him for that. The USA has amply demonstrated it does not deserve his service or support, first in the actions of the NSA, then in the actions of the Obama government in general, and finally in the actions of the populace at large (who have continued apathetically doing nothing of consequence while the whole scandal unfolds, rather than stand up for somebody willing to take such a risk for the sake of freedom).
If only we, the general public, were in as good a position to extend that sort of offer to the NSA. Too bad most people can't be bothered to get off their ass and actually take a hand in their civic duties...
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure if serious... most people use Windows for porn, Facebook, email, Skype, Netflix and/or YouTube, some music service, and some degree of Word/Excel/whatever. A moderately large handful throw some Photoshop in there, though most don't really *use* it. Think about the kind of things your non-technical friend's non-technical parents (or children) use their computer for. That's what most people use Windows for.
The funny thing is, that's exactly the market that Microsoft went for with Windows RT. A full browser, including Flash, so people can play their Facebook games and watch their online videos. Home version of Office, so people can write their school papers or update their resume or track their budget. Dead-simple-easy-to-use apps for things like Netflix. Photoshop may not have made the cut, but tons of smartphone-app-like image manipulation apps did. "Serious" (as opposed to "casual") gamers were also left out in the cold, but they'd never have bought a machine with such poor specs anyhow. But seriously, Microsoft already tried to make "Windows for the 80% of people who never do even 20% of what a computer can do"... and it hasn't worked out.
Don't go ascribing your tunnel-vision-view of the things *you* use computers for to the populace as a whole, though. The typical Windows user refers to IE as "the Internet".
You can buy laptops pre-loaded with Linux from various suppliers. With that said, even stock Win8.1 isn't anywhere near as hard to use as most people seem to think (or rather, take on faith; most of the detractors have never actually tried using it day-to-day). If you absolutely cannot stand the Start screen and hot corners, they are quite easy to do away with via any number of free or cheap solutions.
Personally, the Start screen is just that thing I see flash up for a moment while I type the first few letters of whatever I'm launching. The only still-in-use version of Windows that I personally find really painful to use is XP, because you have to go find everything you're looking for yourself instead of having the OS instantly find it for you.
Oh, and the line about the warranty is complete bullshit. If you want to be absolutely certain, yank the storage (unless you buy a device where that's not possible) before you send it in. That's actually a good idea anyhow, as if you don't encrypt the drive they will almost certainly go snooping on it, and if you do, they'll probably just reformat it.
FYI, Vista had the "hit Start/WinKey, type a few letters, get program/document/email" feature as well. It was not, contrary to what you imply, introduced in Win7.
The rest of what you say I take no exception to, though. I actually don't mind Vista, although I do miss Aero Snap on the rare occasion I use a Vista machine anymore. My biggest gripe about Win8, far and away was the way they segregated the Start search results (into "apps", "settings", and "files") and required extra clicks to move between the categories, which meant I could no longer launch Control Panel-ish stuff as quickly (unless I typed the file name such as "appwiz.cpl" or "diskmgmt.msc" in which case it appeared under "apps"...). That was fixed in 8.1.
Overall though, I care a lot more about the under-the-cover stuff. From a security standpoint, XP and Vista are night and day (ASLR, low IL, ability to run as a standard user - which I did on XP - without tearing your hair out...), and every version since has added additional incremental improvements (although I modify UAC to behave more like Vista's; it's too easy for malware to bypass otherwise and yes, I know what MS says about "not a security boundary" but that's just BS to justify their bug prioritization). Win8's page-combining to reduce memory usage is nice, but RAM is cheap and Vista introduced SuperFetch which (back before I had an SSD) meant that my games and such actually launch *faster* on Vista than on XP, because they were pre-cached in RAM instead of needing to be peeled off the disk after I try to launch them. There's a bunch more, but I've got to go so I'll leave it at that.
The sandboxing is also quite good. I'm far more comfortable downloading a random app from the store than from the web, and I know that any given store app will never try to run elevated or spy on my other activities or anything. It's possible to write a malicious one, of course, but there's very, very little malice that such an app can actually get up to. For example, a malicious video player app could phone home with the title of each movie and whatever identifying info it has about me (IP address, possibly a unique but anonymous ID number) for, oh, purposes of finding people to sue for piracy... but if I switched to using another video player, there's nothing it could do about it. "Modern" apps can't even set their own file associations; they can only register that they are capable of handling a given file type and let the user choose.
With that said, there's no reason that a nice sandbox has to come with the UI issues of "modern" apps. After all, IE has been sandboxed since IE7 on Vista all the way back in 2006. Chrome and Adobe Reader are third-party apps with Windows sandboxes. With a bit of effort setting things up, I can sandbox some other fairly-isolated Windows software, such as games or chat programs, about as well as IE and company (low IL, restricted token, etc.). If Microsoft had avoided making the Windows Store require their silly touch-first interface, and instead simply required that software sold through it be sandboxed using a framework like the one WinRT (the runtime, not the OS) uses, that would have been fine...
No, they actually don't have "the right to they[sic] speed he/she wants to go to[sic]". Obstructing traffic by driving too slow is a ticketable offense, at least in the state of WA. If you're driving below the speed limit and there are people behind you, you are legally obligated to pull over and let them pass.
You can block ads and scripts in IE just fine. Heck, there are even built-in ways to do it, using filter lists from folks like EasyList (better known for their popular AdBlock Plus filter list). No need to download an extension (MS calls them "add-ons" but they are much the same thing) as long as you're using IE9 or newer, but ad-blocking and script-filtering are available at least as far back as IE6. There's also options like blocking using a HOSTS file or similar.
Your boss's problem isn't that he uses IE, it's that he doesn't know how to use the Web safely at all. Your problem isn't that your boss likes IE (which does actually have some nice features, such as its tab groupings and translation "accelerator") but that you know one safe way to use the Web (which your boss doesn't like) but are apparently not smart enough to find one that he does like (despite the fact that such things certainly exist).
Using Firefox in its default configuration would be just as vulnerable.
Erm... bullshit? The only thing I'm aware of that's even *close* to what you're saying is that in Win8 and newer, the built-in anti-malware feature (Windows Defender) will remove entries for several well-known domains, including some advertising networks but also things like search engines and such, from the HOSTS file. Either turning off Defender, or setting it to Exclude the HOSTS file, will cause HOSTS to work like normal.
IE has had a built-in ad blocking solution (it's marketed as an anti-tracking solution, but it works fine on ads) since IE8. IE9 and later can even load filters from EasyList (who do the most widely-used AdBlock Plus list) and automatically update it. Extensions (called add-ins, sometimes "Browser Helper Objects") that provide ad-blocking have been available since at least IE6, and probably before.
In the interest of avoiding monoculture, not using IE makes some sense (although these days, anything much more mainstream than Opera has enough users to be an attractive target).
In the interest of supporting open-source browsers (or if you believe that the "many eyes..." theory makes up for the relative lack of resources for security testing compared to a major corporation), using Chromium or Firefox makes sense, but they've had exploits as well.
In the interest of punishing MS for its past behaviors, using something other than IE makes sense.
But complaining that IE can't block ads or similar, well, that really doesn't make any sense at all. IE has more built-in ad blocking than many of its competitors, even though it's turned off be default and most people don't know how to turn it on.
In any case, the exploit that got A_Non_Moose was a JS bug in his PDF reader. You'd do better to recommend he stop using Acrobat (the only reader I know of that not only enables JS by default but turns it back on, silently, each time you update). If his browser was configured to open PDFs in Acrobat automatically, it doesn't matter *what* browser he was using.
Um, what's the difference? If I find, say, a user-after-free vulnerability in a JavaScript runtime (these have been found, and exploited, in the past) and use it overwrite an objects function table with arbitrary code (by, say, creating a long JavaScript string that contains the hex-encoded values of the machine cade that I want to execute) and then calling a function on the overwritten object to gain arbitrary code execution... is that not actually a JavaScript exploit for some reason? Did I merely use JS to "deliver" the exploit in a way that is different from exploiting a vulnerability in the Java applet sandbox?
With all due respect, his post was a lot more insightful than yours. You don't appear to know what you're talking about.
First of all, "deployed the same way" as in "deployed using an HTML <object> or <applet> element that instructs the browser to download and execute the code". The Microsoft Visual C++ redistributable runtime does not include any such mechanism for deploying C++ code. For that matter, not all Java runtime installations do either.
Second, just what do you think ActiveX is programmed in? Hint: it's not its own language. It's a packaging system for COM classes, which are almost without exclusion written in C++, and it *is* possible to deploy and run it in the browser in much the same way as Java applets (object tags). Unlike Java, they run with basically no sandbox but instead require considerable amounts of confirmation before they download. The idea is that they are powerful but unsafe, so only use the ones that you trust. Unfortunately, a number of pre-installed ActiveX controls on Windows have security vulnerabilities in them, so an attacker who finds a way to exploit one of those pre-installed ones doesn't need to get the user to download anything. Hence the way that modern versions of IE require the user to confirm before running an ActiveX control that they've not previously indicated that they trust (and also give you an ability to disable ActiveX completely or only enable it on a site-by-site basis).
I don't care for the Java installer any more than you do, but the security issues with Java applets have literally nothing to do with the language. The only way you could say Java itself is at fault is if you were to argue that Java shouldn't have any OS bindings at all (that is, no ability to access the file system, no ability to create processes, no ability to open network sockets, etc.). This is essentially the situation with JavaScript, of course; while the Java applet sandbox tries to *restrict* the use of functionality like I just mentioned, the JavaScript runtime (as found in browsers) simply lacks APIs to access such risky features. Even there, though, that's not a characteristic of the JavaScript *language* but merely of the sandboxed runtime used to execute JS in the browser. Other uses of JS, ranging from Windows Script Host to Node.JS, are perfectly capable of doing such things.
Don't be too sure of that. Purchasers routinely hire security experts to review the security of major acquisitions prior to the buy-out, with various stipulations in the agreement as to what types of findings will be the responsibility of which party. Such a review would likely have found the issue before it was announced publicly.
So few companies are smart enough to bring in security experts *before* they need them.
Actually, TotalA is quite easy to get these days (if you don't mind a pure-digital version) as it is available on Good Old Games (http://gog.com). Along with, I should mention, the entire MoO series (I picked up the first two for a total of a few bucks during their last winter sale). DRM-free, patched and/or packaged (MoO runs in a pre-configured DOSBox) for modern systems, and dirt cheap with re-downloading allowed and patches provided where relevant.
While in many ways 4 was the better game, I really do enjoy the combat system in SE5 more. It's not even just the real-time aspect of it (although that's huge; turn-based tactical combat is pretty exploitable if your ship is fast enough); it's things like needing time to turn and accelerate, having circular firing ranges (so you can skim an enemy fleet on a reciprocal course and unload on them without them being able to pursue, or send in a tightly clustered ball of fighters to kick the ass of a hostile ship without coming into the PD range of its wingmates). With that said, the research system in SE5 is bloody awful. The construction queues and intelligence operations are vaguely SE3-ish, which is good, but oh man the research system sucks.
Just checking: have you played Master of Orion 2? Much like SC2, it's easily the height of the series; MoO1 was good but too early and feels tech-demo-ish today, while MoO3 was boring and has little strategic depth left to the player. The SE series obviously draws heavily from MoO, but in some ways still falls short; despite being an old 16-bit game, MoO2 has things like shield arcs, weapon firing arcs, and ship maneuver (turning) costing movement points, plus a cleverly simple system for handling things like interstellar movement range.
No, I really don't. Let's see... right out of the summary, we get the length of his sentence. (78 months) / (12 months / year) = 6.5 years. "6.5" doesn't really look like a "4" to me.
In fairness, the radiator fins used on spacecraft are kind of like a terrestrial heat sink. There's no fans or anything like them, of course, but the basic concept of moving heat from the part that doesn't want to get too toasty to the part that is designed to accept all that heat and release it into the environment is much the same. The ammonia refrigeration system is required to achieve the actual moving and concentrating of the heat in the radiators, and (unlike the heat sink on a CPU) those radiators will get hotter than any other part of the system, but that's how you get efficient radiative cooling. The rate of direct conduction of heat between materials is also dependent on the difference in their temperatures, but you can build an effective conductive cooling system without requiring a huge temperature difference; not so for radiative cooling.
An interesting case of a sci-fi movie that (very quietly) gets it right: Avatar. Near the beginning of the movie, as the starship approaches Pandora, you can see it has large fins extending out around the engines, glowing red. Those are heat sinks / radiators, so hot that the blackbody radiation has moved beyond the infrared and into the visible spectrum.
The heat sink in your computer would be pretty miserable at dumping waste heat into space. Terrestrial heat sinks typically heat into a fluid, such as the air that your computer's fans blow across the heat sink.
Problem: there is no air (or anything else into which heat may be transferred) in space. Radiative cooling - that is to say, releasing infrared radiation - does occur, but it is *far* slower that conductive cooling. To do that effectively, though, you want a big, hot surface area that is shadowed from all other heat sources in the region (that big fusion reactor the Earth orbits counts as "in the region" here).
To cool an artificial satellite effectively, especially a big one like ISS, you use a heat transfer system (in this case, they apparently use ammonia) to concentrate the heat into radiative cooling surfaces on the shadowed side of the station. This system definitely adds complexity, not to mention generating a bit of heat itself(entropy always increases), but without it, the side of the station facing the sun would cook, and the shadowed side wouldn't get hot enough for effective radiative cooling.
Probably even more so. Remember, for example, DES; the NSA modified the candidate cipher that become DES in a way that many people thought weakened it. Instead, it strengthened it, adding protections against a cryptographic attack that the civilian world would not even discover for years to come. When that technique came to light, and it was discovered how much more vulnerable the pre-NSA version of the then-most-common symmetric cipher suite was than it would otherwise have been, the NSA was hailed as the preventers of the cryptopocalypse. Even now, decades after it became incredibly popular and then was superseded and entered decline (although it's still very widely used, in the form of triple-DES), the only real weakness known in the cipher is its key length (which 3DES mitigates). Maybe the NSA of today has a break for the algorithm. Maybe they even did back when it was being standardized, but for Machiavellian reasons decided to instead strengthen it against the attack they figured would become known sooner, as a way to establish their bona-fides, and held onto the other one.
For myself, though, I doubt it. Before the whole War on Terror bullshit, the NSA probably was a real force for good in the world. Amazing how much can change in a few decades, though...
Even ignoring the highly questionable aspects of the pledge which you carefully omitted from your quote, nationalism is just the grotesquely overgrown brother of tribalism, itself a badly flawed concept. At least within a tribe, it's hard to keep secrets or conceal abuses of power. It still promotes an unthinking herd behavior, a sense of "us vs. them, and clearly they're worse than us or they'd be part of us". At the national level, it fuels wars and xenophobia. It is the tools of propagandists and of those who would re-write history and get away with it (as you yourself noted, with regard to Jackson).
I find it disgusting that a nation which arose out of a rebellion against government mistreatment tries to brainwash its children into giving their allegiance to anything so inherently flawed as a human government. Would you have supported colonial children in the 1770s being required to stand up every day in school, and swear allegiance to the Union Jack, and the monarchy for which it stands? Do you think it's cool that there are probably kids right now swearing their allegiance to the People's Republic of [Korea|China|the Congo|whatever] and the glorious freedom and representation that their government bestows upon them?
Liberty and justice for all? Give me a break! Pure propaganda, and you don't even need to be *that* smart or well-educated to see it for the lie it is; you just need to start from the assumption that the American Way is *not* The One True Way, and look up some facts. Facts like per-capita prison population, or the breakdown of said population relative to the populace at large. Facts like the mere existence of places like Gitmo. Facts like the government's treatment of Snowden, and their hasty effort to scrub from their websites, etc. all mention of the Obama administration's moral and righteous promises to protect and support whistleblowers. Or how about the states where gays, or transgender people, are forced to live as second-class citizens (and, in a handful of very backward parts of the country, criminals)? The very concept that there exists "one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" is a tremendous lie. Teaching our children that such a thing not only exists, but that they live in it; forcing them to chant those lines every weekday of their young lives to the point that they absorb it before they're even old enough to know that sometimes the things you're taught are wrong? That is beyond the pale. It is despicable and deplorable.
Now, actually pledging liberty and justice, that's not so awful. It should still be taught as a *concept* and not as a mantra, but pledging to protect liberty and promote justice is a noble and virtuous thing to say. Too bad that's nowhere in the pledge of allegiance as it stands today, though. No, we were told to pledge allegiance to a flag and a nation, not a concept. We didn't even pledge to uphold the constitution, the way so many civil servants are required to do.
There may be some levels of clearance which require citizenship, but they certainly don't *all* require it. I've known people with Secret who had only just gotten their Green Card and were years from when they would be eligible for citizenship.
That... is a nice idea in general, not just one that makes good business sense. Despite all the times it's been shorted and the number of negative news articles, the price generally bounces back pretty well. If you want to buy TSLA, that's the time to do it!
The Panamanian invasion was centered on a fairly specific area (the Canal Zone, which conveniently borders their major cities, and in which we already had military forces) but I'll fully grant that the post you responded to was hyperbole bordering on bullshit.
Pretty sure Alaska isn't concerned about B-52 carpet bombing. I don't know where the parent of your post (Luckyo) is from, but I suspect it's not the USA. We've never been very concerned about carpet bombing here. Compared to Europe, with its massive numbers of historically hostile political entities packed into easy strike range (with minimal interception time) of each other, on the other hand...
Aside from the fact that Japan was already at war with much of the western world, including a bunch of countries that had been our allies in that big war we'd fought just a couple decades earlier, that's a perfectly reasonable analogy. After all, there's really no difference between the Japanese government, military, and international policy of 70-odd years ago and Brazil's of today... </sarcasm>
You could, in fact, say that the US government betrayed him. In fact, it did so twice. First, when it betrayed all of us, by acting against out interests as a populace and constitutionally mandated rights as citizens. Then, when Snowden saw the depth of the government's betrayal and tried to bring it to light, they betrayed him again (personally, but in a way with consequences for us all) by abandoning all those promises about whistleblowers and choosing to persecute and vilify him instead.
Personally, I doubt he actually has gone over to the Russians. Nationalism is a strong drive, and you don't get to work at the NSA and have a clearance unless you've got a good bit of it. On the other hand, somebody who was as strongly pro-US-government as you seem to be, but a little less blind and righteous about it, may have felt the depth of those betrayals deeper than I would. If it turns out he has gone over, I'm certainly not going to judge him for that. The USA has amply demonstrated it does not deserve his service or support, first in the actions of the NSA, then in the actions of the Obama government in general, and finally in the actions of the populace at large (who have continued apathetically doing nothing of consequence while the whole scandal unfolds, rather than stand up for somebody willing to take such a risk for the sake of freedom).
'tis a lovely bit of irony, isn't it?
If only we, the general public, were in as good a position to extend that sort of offer to the NSA. Too bad most people can't be bothered to get off their ass and actually take a hand in their civic duties...