Posts by The Man Who Fell To Earth 1543 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jan 2012
"You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th Century"
Tsk tsk tsk. The push to go "cashless" isn't for the benefit of the consumer or seller. It's because cash transactions don't have middlemen between the seller & buyer taking a cut of the transaction. The push for a "cashless" society is driven by bankers & payment handlers wanting cuts of every transaction on the planet, and simply drives up the sellers costs & prices for the buyer.
It ain't like in the movies.
The mean atmospheric pressure on Mars is only 0.6% of that of Earth. (Equivalent on Earth of being at an altitude of 22 miles, or about 35 km.) Which is why "violent dust storms" is a joke. At full force, the most "violent" dust storm with 130mpg winds on Mars can barely move one of those thin a plastic shopping bags.
"We are on the verge of an explosion in the number of Internet-connected devices, from smartwatches to connected refrigerators, furniture and thermostats," the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) – a part of the Department of Commerce – enthuses
Given how crappy they are all made & the lack of OS maintenance by their manufacturers, at a minimum I want those things behind a NAT router, not directly exposed to the Internet.
Just saying.
Now how is this different from me gaining entry to a computer system under false pretenses and disabling it's functionality? I believe in the US, I'd be sent to the pokey for violating some combination of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) 18 U.S. Code §1030, the Access Device Fraud Act 18 U.S.C. § 1029, and the Communication Interference Act 18 U.S.C. § 1362, and a few others I'm probably overlooking.
Like all biometrics, once stolen, security is gone forever. The push for biometrics also comes from Law Enforcement & the intelligence services because even in places like the US where the 5th Amendment protects one from having to divulge a password (even if a judge were stupid enough to sign a warrant compelling one to), one has no such protection from having to allow them to take fingerprints, iris scans, DNA, or any other physical measurement (biometric).
Stealing from charities is more common that people think. Usually, the charity quietly fires the embezzler and does not call the cops, because they know the bad publicity will hurt fundraising. Of 6 non-profits I have direct knowledge of the internal workings of, 3 caught embezzlers who'd stolen money in the 5-6 figure range when they had full audits. In all cases, they let the perps walk away to avoid bad publicity. (Hint: Entries in the books for "miscellaneous expenses" should be a red flag at any time. Every entry should specifically say what the expense was & be backed up by receipts. Even with receipts, every vendor should be "validated" and as part of that, copies of it's papers of incorporation should be gathered and it's officers & board looked at. It's not uncommon for people to create fake companies, often in their wife or a relative's name, etc. Proper audits don't stop at arithmetic.)
The article is missing the most important information, namely, how was he caught? Was he ratted out (say, via a ex-wife)? Was he caught when the charity had a professional 3rd party audit? (You'd be surprised how infrequently charities have real audits.)
Inquiring minds want to know.
This type of stuff has been around for years, used by pirates to crack & then duplicate smart cards. There's a whole chip hardening industry based on it. One of the most famous academic papers on this came out of the University of Cambridge in 1999.
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/sc99-tamper.pdf
I would bet the average Facebook employee is too ignorant to recognize that photo when shown it.
I would bet the average Facebook image censor (who probably has some unicorn type job title) is too lacking in curiosity & is too lazy to spend the half second it takes to do an image search to find out its a famous Pulitzer prize winning photo.
And as we have just seen in evidence, Facebook as an organization lacks the common sense to react properly. Especially when it comes to censoring written posts.
Agreed. As someone the other day commented, Jar Jar Abrams has devolved the franchise into generic action flicks with zero character development. It's really bad when the best Star Trek film in the last couple of decades was made by amateurs. I'm talking about Prelude to Axanar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W1_8IV8uhA
Everything with a radar cross section larger than about 2 inches is tracked by NORAD. So the only way the US would not know about it is if the Russians had stealthed it to a radar cross section smaller than that. And that would be pretty hard to do, given how communication antennas work unless they were retractable, or could be turned outward, etc. So you can bet a lot of governments knew about this satellite.
This is why, as Rob Joyce (head of NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) hacking team) said at the Usenix’s Enigma conference in January 2016, you need to think twice before relying on a Cloud provider's security.
Use a wrapper like nCrypted Cloud to transparently locally encrypt/decrypt everything before it goes into your Dropbox/Google Drive/....
This would not be an issue. But Russia has never had Rule of Law, and probably won't for a very long time. The kleptocratic nature of Russia is why they've enshrined protection from extradition into their constitution. (Not that Russia respects many of the other parts of their constitution...)
Maybe it fell out of their pockets when they made some sharecropper wash their clothes in a washing machine the sharecropper had to pay for, using detergent and water the sharecropper had to also pay for, and hope Uber's price would be greater than the sharecropper's total costs.
According to the US Department of Transportation, the average age of cars on American roads is 11.4 years. That fact alone tells you that despite all of the marketing hype, American drivers don't run out an buy (or lease) new cars just because they contain new technology.
http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_26.html_mfd
All this hype reminds me of the Tesla CTO claiming, in 2010, that by 2015 that 20% of cars on the road will be electric. His prediction missed the mark by a factor of 100. The percentage of cars on the road that are electric is 0.2%. Had he bothered to do any due diligence on the average age of cars on the road were in 2010, he'd have known his prediction was impossible to meet.
"That's going to be a barrel of fun if there's 40+ ton of truck 20 feet behind you at 55.99 mph at the time...."
55.99mph is 82.1 feet per second, which if that's your relative speed to the truck, you have 1/4th of a second to react, take control, & do something to avoid a collision.
Which ain't gonna happen.
The US has freedom of speech enshrined in it's Constitution. It's a hard concept to grasp for those who live in authoritarian regimes.
Erdögan is the type that C.S. Lewis had in mind when he said, "Above all else, the Devil cannot stand to be mocked."
The US needs to really evaluate it's relationship with Turkey. Turkey was let into NATO in 1952 simply because the US wanted both listening posts and missiles stationed on the USSR's border. But Turkey has never dealt with the US in any manner other than duplicity. And Turkey has pretty much completely failed to live up to it's NATO obligations in the last decade & a half. The US has enough duplicitous "friends" in the Middle East, but those others don't have the access to the weapons & intelligence that Turkey does through NATO.
NATO should give Turkey the boot, as Turkey adds nothing to NATO at this point. And the US should leave NATO if the rest of the NATO members are not willing to give Turkey the boot. NATO needs the US a lot more than the US needs NATO.
You must be a Millennial, since you seem to think a 300+ year old business model is new & original to Kickstarter. I've got news for you: Nothing about Kickstarters business model is new or innovative. All of the old Natural History books for example, by the likes of Audubon, Humboldt, etc were not printed unless they got a large enough pool of presubscriptions & deposits to fund the printing. A huge number of industries have used a similar "prefunding" concept over the centuries.
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