What's the point of this?
The board don't need to know anything about 'cybersecurity.' I don't want an MBA writing firewall rules. All they need to know is how to recognize someone who is qualified and hire them. That's why we have specialists.
1643 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2007
Li-ion batteries are something easy to get wrong. Competition between manufacturers is intense, margins thin. Shoddy construction is a common occurrence, and any breach within the cell that links anode and cathode - however tiny - will rapidly lead to thermal runaway ending in fire and/or explosion. One of the several issues with the Hoverboards recently was traced to very low-quality batteries prone to spontaneous fire in this manner, and given fake Samsung labels. Counterfeits.
The novels retconned the parsec comment. The Kessel run is explained as a smuggling route that skims the 'no hyperspace' region around a black hole - somewhere that Empire police won't go lightly, as only the most experienced pilots can do so safely. The closer a smuggler can get to that region, the better his chances of evading detection. Solo's ability to run the Kessel route at such a close distance shows his ability as a pilot, and his willingness to take risks.
In the film though, it's just a sloppy line.
No, there's just TCP and UDP. Other transport protocols are an option only if you control the network end-to-end, because most devices on the internet these days are behind PAT, and PAT routers are only programmed for TCP and UDP. That's why TCP lasts: When the network is no longer dumb, introducing new technology is a nightmare.
He's never claimed to be a real scientist. Only a science educator and entertainer. He was an engineer before that.
Not all scientists are capable of presenting their field in a way laypeople can understand. Few are, fewer want to. People like Nye work in the media as go-betweens, presenting science in a manner that people can not only understand, but enjoy too.
The whale is a translation error. The ancient Jewish people did not use our classification system: Whales looked like fish, so they were just thought of as very big fish. The word in the story means 'really big fish.' It could be a whale, or it could be a giant fish. There's a section elsewhere that lists bats as a sort of bird for the same reason.
It's still ridiculous. You could imagine a very bored God sitting beside the whale's stomach, continually pulling apart carbon dioxide from Jonah's blood and shoving the oxygen back in.
I'm not sure who, but if anyone of importance at the DHS wants to put an end to Tor, the means by which they could do so is obvious:
1. Wait until they pick up some sufficiently juicy material from a Tor exit. Ideally child abuse imagery.
2. SWAT down the operators door, haul him off publicly, confiscate everything with a battery that he owns.
3. Make sure there is some media coverage. But don't let the Tor thing slip yet - you just want the whole world to know he is a dirty filthy pedo. You don't want an actual trial though, not yet.
4. Once the interest is fading, then release the Tor connection. That'll be ignored by most of the media, but noticed anyone who might consider running an exit node themselves.
5. Have enough charges ready to jail him for a century. Still no trial, but use those to get a plea bargain. I don't know quite what for, there must be some suitable charge.
6. Threw the destroyed man back out - hated by his community, unemployable, with crippling legal costs that he'll never be able to pay off.
7. Allow the story to circulate a bit. Job done: Everyone else in the country will be too terrified to consider running an exit node in future.
If I were a DHS overlord bent on destroying Tor, that's how I'd go about it.
You can't just override - most of these consumer drones have wifi-based control, encryption is trivial. Some models can be hacked.
You could hit them with a jamming signal though - any decent drone will be designed to either stop dead or safely land if communication is lost. You'd need to give police an exemption to radio regulations so they could wield directional high-power jamming guns that'll likely screw up every wireless network in two hundred meters for a few minutes, but after that it's just a matter of getting a police officer to point the jammer at the drone and keep it pointed until the drone is down.
What happens when almost all sales are online? How do the states collect any sales tax at all?
Perhaps this is the idea - many politicians have an ideological opposition to the existence of more than the minimal level of government, and consider it a good tactic to starve the government of funding in order to force the closure of all those social services programs and regulations they decry as communism.
It's fairly common in politics for unrelated issues to get roped together. Especially in America, as the rules government amendments to bills in the Senate are very lax - it's a very frequent practice to stick an unpopular provision into a law that is overwhelmingly popular. This was not one of these cases though: It's just that whoever wrote it figured that both are internet-related taxes, and that means they should go under one law.
One of the most famous examples of recent years was a law to block the FCC from enforcing net neutrality regulations - as part of a bill relating to medical benefits for veterans.
Law and sausages, as the expression goes.
Those aren't straps. Cortana just uses surface textures to slightly-disguise that she prefers her human representation in the nude.
The pointless fanservice is pretty blatant, but at least the writers made her a proper character. Sex appeal to the players is just her secondary function.
Not yet - but once the technology matures, someone is eventually going to put together enough information to create an open-source version. It'll probably occupy a few terabytes for the knowledge base though - there's a reason these programs are just front ends to a remote server farm.
It's the free market at work. If consumers have to choose between a £400 domestically-manufactured product and a £100 Chinese product, which will they buy? Even if the Chinese one only lasts half as long, it's still better value. Especially in tech, where things tend to become obsolete before they break down.
Russia does command the greatest weapon a country could hope to use without starting a nuclear war: Valves. Winter is coming, and if Russia were to cut the fuel flow then it would not only cripple the European economy, it'd actually kill people. It'd also utterly destroy the Russian economy, as they are heavily dependent upon fuel exports.
Part of Putin's power comes from being seen as just unstable enough that he might pull a stunt like that. Superweapons are no use if potential enemies believe you will never use them.
"He does not, however, have a right to have his record expunged."
He doesn't, being in the US. If he were in the UK he would, under Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974. But he still wouldn't get the right until four years after completion of his sentence. We passed that act because we recognised that it's almost impossible for an ex-criminal to go straight if they are still regarded as criminal scum by most of society - no company will hire them, and if they can't find legitimate employment then they are left with no choice but to return to crime. The 'witch hunt' problem was recognised even in the seventies, and the internet has only made it worse.
Native Hawaiian politics is a bit of a minefield. Quite a few of them still believe the island is under unlawful US occupation, on the grounds that the prior government never actually signed it over officially - American ships just turned up and took over by virtue of superior weaponry, as they didn't believe the native tribes qualified as a government and thus the land was unclaimed. Even on the mainland US most of the takeover was recognised by agreed upon treaties, though they tended to be signed under threat of genocide or by scamming some native who had no concept of a contractual agreement.
The majority just want to get on with their jobs and don't care what happened to their great-great-great-great-great grandfather any more, but it only takes a few of them to kick up a fuss.
The fun comes when the engine gets a little more advanced. Not turing-test-capable advanced, but enough that it becomes capable of answering queries. Barbie is going to need a knowledge base and turn Siri-for-children. There may also be issues where Barbie answers questions that the parents may not want answered, unless it evades all questions on matters remotely interesting.
These toys already featured in a 'CSI: Cyber' episode, just ramped up a little. In that episode story a hacker-and-burglar team worked together: A hacker would hack the doll and communicate with the child to learn the contents of the property and when the family would be away, and manipulate the child into unlocking a window. The burglar would then use the information and assistance to do his thing.
Be fair to them: They didn't take a full stock of lifeboats because they believed that lifeboats would never be needed, instead designing a ship that was supposed to be unsinkable. A double-walled hull design was almost impervious to breaches, and even if a section did breach there was a system for sealing off entire sections - the ship could float even with multiple compartments flooded. Unsinkable wasn't just an idle boast - it was a design specification. It did take a lot of damage to sink, and that only because of a side-on collision with an iceburg, something that designers didn't anticipate because giant floating lumps of ice are usually easy to see ahead and avoid.
This is a niche product. It's obviously not intended for home use. People with specialised needs will be willing to pay more, and there are plenty of niches for this sort of thing. Large commercial properties - inventory management computers and such. Temporary outdoor events like concerts and festivals that would be able to connect up all their gear with fewer access points.
There are a couple of lines in Sarah Jane Adventures that hint at what some companions are up to.
I'd really like to see what happened to Ace - she was a very eighties character. As the final companion of the classic series she never had her story resolved. She was last seen walking off towards the next adventure with the doctor, and was not there when the series resumed. So what became of her?
I'd ideally like her to come back as a one-episode character (She's too eighties to work any longer than that), initially unidentified - she's older now, she's matured, no longer the punk we knew and not even recognizable. She may wear a suit and work in an office at a steady job, perhaps applying her talent for chemistry as a scientist, but there's still a bit of Ace beneath that - and when she uncovers a world-threatening conspiracy or an alien invasion, she knows it's time to call the number that the Doctor left her all those years ago - because there are days when the world needs a respectable scientist, and there are days when the world needs the Doctor, his trusted companion, and a flask of nitro-nine.
There was a final story planned for Ace, but the series was canceled before it could be made - the Doctor was to sponsor her enrollment at the Time Lord Academy, recognizing what he always saw in her. That she may look, dress, speak and act like a punk street kid, but the appearance is deceptive, and though she may lack the discipline to do well at school she still has the mind of a gifted intellectual. I guess the Time War pretty much kills off that possibility.
This computer simulation River has barely been used. There's a lot of wasted potential. Consider that this character is running on the highest-capacity storage system ever built, with a processor so powerful it occupies the interior of the entire library planet, and has nothing to do but sit around and read the entire collected knowledge of a highly advanced civilization. She's a singularity waiting to happen.
Right now? Brain the size of a planet and they send her to open a door.
That campaign actually worked fairly well. The church is still around, true - but their name is mud. They are a laughing-stock. It's so impaired their ability to recruit that they have had to refocus their expansion on less-developed and non-english-speaking countries where the campaign was not able to reach.
Don't disable the accounts. Just set them so anything they post can only be viewed by themselves so they don't realize they are shouting to no-one. And if you do disable them, set up a 48-hour IP blacklist too. Either way, it gets a bit harder for them to just set up new accounts right away.
I have my own hypothesis on this: Education and exposure to wider ideas makes it more difficult to reconcile the contradictions of moderate religion.
Moderate religion is full of self-contradictory elements. You need to believe that all followers of other religions are going to burn in hell forever, but also respect their freedom of religion - even allow them to raise children doomed to burn, when the compassionate thing would be to kidnap them for their own good. You need to believe in a paradise afterlife, but still value self-preservation. You need to believe you have a book with the words of the all-powerful creator, but only bother to skim through it once or twice a year. You've got to believe that this verse forbidding murder is a divine moral mandate of unquestionable authority, but this verse a little later in the book requiring stoning the gays is safe to ignore. You've got to tolerate the preachers of other religions, even when you know that they are dragging people down to hell with them.
There comes a point when it's too hard to reconcile what one believes they believe with how one acts - and at that point people are forced to either admit they were lying to themselves and abandon the religion altogether, or embrace it to the fullest possible extent become an extremist.
This is barely news by the current crazy-standard of US politics. This is from a speech Trump just made:
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As the hunt for the perpetrators of the attacks in Paris continue, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Monday that he is uniquely qualified to be commander-in-chief because he has an "instinct" for sensing threats.
"In my book I predicted terrorism. Because I can feel it," said Trump, speaking to thousands of supporters packed into Tennessee's Knoxville Convention Center. "I can feel it like I feel a good location .... Nobody knew this kind of terrorism before. But I felt it. And you have to have somebody that has an instinct to lead this country."
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They've got a presidential contender claiming he has the spidey-sense for terrorism - wifi snark is pretty petty beside that.
The PC remains a staple of work, and will be for the forseeable future, but even there sales are not what they were. There's little growth in the market - every company that could benefit from computerisation has already done so. Upgrades also are not what they were. There was a time not long ago when you could barely get a PC delivered before a new one came out with twice the memory and a much faster processor, and new software with ever-rising requirements made sure they sold. It was standard practice for companies to refresh their PCs every two years, three at most. Now? A five-year-old PC is perfectly sufficient. Refresh cycles are slower, and getting more so all the time. Software is also 'good enough' - just look how long it took to get rid of Windows XP.
I'm not so sure. The picture may look like wilderness, but there are practical concerns for datacenters that say you can't put them right in the middle of nowhere. They need transportation connection for the staff, and power connections. Multiple independent power connections, which means a long string of pylons isn't going to cut it. Turn the camera around a bit and you'd probably see a built-up city area not too far away. If it was really isolated it'd just cost far too much to bury power and fiber lines along multiple routes.