Posts by veti 4489 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2010
Arguments about style are the stuff of holy wars. Nobody wins, everyone suffers, and not one participant in a thousand has the faintest idea what they are fighting about.
There is a coherent rule that acronyms that are pronounced as words (like NASA, NATO, SPAM) are written with an initial capital only, like a proper name. It's not inherently "wrong", nor self-evidently any worse to write them that way. Get over it.
If the result is that companies test each others' products and publish the vulnerabilities they find, then that's a win in itself.
But to my mind the likeliest reaction would be a huge decrease in using prewritten software and an increase in big companies, who can afford it, writing their own special-purpose proprietary software from scratch. If it never gets deployed anywhere public, it won't be tested, therefore the vulnerabilities are much less likely to become known.
Of course it will probably be way buggier than code that has been deployed and used publicly, but hey, at least they'll be able to certify it.
Not entirely true. The story mentions that when the attack is effectively blocked, the attackers purposely drop it rather than burn resources on something futile.
The attackers are clearly exploring the Internet's current best defences, presumably hoping to find weaknesses. But in the process they are also sharing information about their own resources and tactics, which can be used by the defenders. The longer an attack goes on, the more data it reveals about the attackers.
For some reason, the comments on robotics (and AI) stories hereabouts always put me in mind of the quote from Charles Babbage:
Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.
Only Steve Jobs ever made things happen all at once, because he shrouded development in such secrecy that the iPhone actually came as a surprise. For the rest of the world, development is incremental. This is a cool and exciting development. The time to carp about it not being finished and perfect is when Amazon tries to sell you one.
Most licences applied for are granted.
Isn't that a good thing? It suggests that people aren't wasting everyone's time by applying for licences that have no hope of being granted. The commerce dept gets to review everything and denies marginal calls...
Sounds to me like a system working exactly as intended.
I'm not saying that is necessarily the case. I'm saying there's only one piece of actual data presented in this story, and it proves precisely nothing.
Excel is possibly the best single work of software in the world. It is perfect for its job, which is to present information to people.
Unfortunately it's so good that people can't resist using it to analyse, store, exchange and track information, as well. Big mistake. This development is a sad sign of Microsoft actively encouraging this regrettable trend.
By your logic, Americans should have the right to keep and bear arms wherever they go. The second amendment doesn't say anything about geography either.
Actually, not just Americans - the amendment doesn't mention nationality or citizenship, either. It says, simply, "the people". That's everyone. Everywhere.
But nobody tries to apply that interpretation, because it's self-evident bullshit. (Try carrying an assault rifle up to the door of the US embassy in, say, Tunis, see how close you get.) And so is this case. Whatever recourse the subjects of spying may have, the fourth amendment has nothing to do with it.
Assange was either in London, UK, or - if you hold to the "sovereign embassy" theory - in Ecuador.
In neither of these places does US law, including the Fourth Amendment, apply.
When will Americans get it into their heads that merely "being US citizens" gives them the right to enter, live and work in the USA, and that's all. Citizenship in itself confers absolutely no other rights whatsoever.
Case should be dismissed for lack of jurisdiction.
It's a common courtesy to continue calling someone by their exalted rank even after they've quit the job. You'll often see it with, e.g., ambassadors and military types. For example.
And presidents.
Doesn't mean anyone is confused or denying reality. They're just being polite.
Are you saying non-Windows platforms are inherently more secure, or that the early Internet was less vulnerable to DOSsing?
Either way, I don't think that's a defensible position.
Did you, like, read the story or its links at all, before jumping to whatabouts?
All the work to agree "norms" happened precisely *because* everyone knew shit like that was going on. And everyone thought it would be a good idea to establish some kind of limits. Like, e.g., no attacking a country's emergency services.
Doesn't mean everything is meant to be nice and safe. Just that there are supposed to be *some* rules. They still leave plenty of scope for nastiness.
When there's an actual shooting war on, the participants should not be expected to hold back. Moderation in war is imbecility.
I assume that the "volunteers" taking their own action to "support" Ukraine in cyberspace - probably, mostly, haven't thought too hard about what they're doing. And governments like Estonia's are too sympathetic to take a strong line with them, but prefer to turn a blind eye.
Yes, I also assume the Russians won't hesitate to cite this as precedent whenever it suits them. But will it make them do anything they wouldn't have done anyway? - that I doubt.
Norms are only norms if they're enforced. Enforcement relies on a network of shared values and mutual goodwill. That doesn't exist in this case.
Electric windows have been a feature of cars for more than 50 years. And while there have been a handful of tragic child accidents in that time, there are simple design fixes that can pretty much eliminate the danger.
Most obvious, limit the force applied to the window. Make sure the windows only have power when the ignition is on. And make the control either recessed, or take the form of a switch that has to be pushed up to close the window, down to open it.
None of these things requires a control chip.
China should be an instructive test case for the rest of the world, a demonstration of what can happen if you push Internet regulation to their limit. It would be worth knowing, for reference.
Unfortunately, for it to fulfil that role, we would need to have reports we can trust from inside the system. I don't see any plausible way of getting those.
I think they'd be fine with that, at least at this point. If you care enough about your repos to do that, then fine, keep them.
But GitLab suspects, and I suspect, that there are a non-trivial number of users who no longer care about their repos at all. Maybe they've got bored and moved on with their lives. Maybe they're dead. Who could tell?
According to StatCounter, it's the third most popular browser behind Chrome and Safari - ahead of Firefox, Samsung and Opera.
And please nobody say "people need to use it once to download a proper browser", because that's obvious, hackneyed, silly and untrue. I repeat, Edge gets more day-to-day usage than Firefox. It deserves some respect.
All I'm saying is, if you can't be bothered to make yourself heard, you shouldn't be too surprised - or indignant - when those who can, get to set the agenda.
But it's your choice. Don't try to tell yourself you're powerless, because there is something you could do. You're choosing not to do it.
You misspelled "victimisation".
Sometimes all that's needed is some group it's OK to be evil to. Being evil to migrants or criminals is controversial. By intersecting the two sets, it doesn't actually become much less so, but it does double the conviction of your own supporters, and that makes it much easier.
Yep. You'd think, for such an application, it would be easier to scan a fingerprint than a face. (Hey, fingerprint scanning is mature technology with way fewer issues than facial recognition.) But that would be to miss an opportunity to develop new tech, doubtless handing contracts to some useful supporters in the process.
The groups that de facto have power and influence will destroy any movement that works against their interest.
That's clearly not true, or Brexit would never have been contentious. Either it would have died stillborn, or it would have passed overwhelmingly.
Electorally, I recommend picking a party and getting involved in it. For all the talk about "power and influence", "big money", "dark money" etc., there is still real political power to be had by committing actual time. Every party needs people who will do that, and it will generally bend (at least somewhat) to accommodate them.
Most bulk buyers of electricity use contracts that specify how much they are going to pay for, each half hour (or whatever period their market uses) of each day. Most electricity generated and sold on the wholesale market is priced this way.
But there's also a spot market, to account for things like weather that can't be predicted with confidence several weeks in advance. The spot market is where the exciting price fluctuations happen. This is the marginal price, and only a small amount of power is actually traded at that price.
When the spot price rises, someone with a contract has the option to cut back their consumption and sell part of their capacity to another buyer (such as ERCOT). That's a private arrangement between the two buyers. It's also not that unusual, and my guess is it's only making news because of the crypto angle.
I'd like to see how the author came up with that cost estimate. Specifically, how he costed the >200 TWh of storage and the TW-capacity global (i.e. trans-oceanic) transmission grid, and what he has allowed for losses during storage and transmission. And what assumptions he made about the cost of land to put all this infrastructure on. Also the maintenance and depreciation of the solar panels themselves...
Once we've thrashed all that out, we can begin to think about the politics. Which specific Saharan country should be entrusted with producing all the world's energy? How would we ensure that countries couldn't hold a "downstream" country to ransom by threatening to cut its supply?
Once we've answered those, then we can begin thinking about little details like who, specifically, is going to build and run this thing. I can't offhand think of any engineering company that has ever delivered a project of 0.1% of this scale for less than 400% of its original budget.
How many people drive a car that's more than 25 years old? And how many of those do it because they can't afford anything else? (My experience is that cars get kinda expensive to maintain sometime before that age.)
The plan for the combustion fleet isn't to ban them from the roads, but simply to let them wear out.. What's important is that we stop making new ones.
I think that is the answer. The idea seems to be for every wind or solar installation above a certain size to have its own dedicated battery (or other storage) backup.
Which sounds expensive to me, but what do I know.
What I'm looking forward to is how the US military is going to zero its carbon emissions by 2050. If they can do it, truly we all can.
And you are guilty of equally gross exaggeration in the opposite direction.
Typically, something like 15% of the retail price goes to the performers. Then there's the writers, who will also be on a percentage. The shop that sells the CD, if there's physical media, will pocket maybe 40-50% - hey, they have costs y'know. (This is why online distribution is just as popular with the industry as it is with consumers.)
Then the various uncredited session musicians, engineers etc. involved in the production need to be paid. To say nothing of publicity, video production and the other expected expenses of modern music.
Then, if there's anything left over - and by this time there very often isn't - the publisher starts to make a profit. For maybe one song in a thousand, that profit is very handsome - enough to pay for the other 999 songs they need to produce to get lucky.
No more than usual. And it certainly wasn't "pro-Clinton", otherwise she'd have a way better reputation than she does.
It was certainly "anti-Trump", but Trump himself went to a deal of trouble to make sure of that. The sheer novelty of this approach took most of his opponents by surprise, and enabled him to swing the election. In this he was certainly supported by the Russians, and I'm quite sure they made a difference, but how much is unquantifiable.
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