Ethanol's got a lower energy density (less energy per gallon) than gasoline. That's chemistry and there's no known way around it, to deliver a given amount of power you have to burn more fuel and the more ethanol in the mix the greater the difference. I do see a hit to gas mileage, it's not significant for highway driving (steady high speed) but it really starts to show up in city driving (lots of stop-and-start, lots of time in low gears for power getting the car moving). Ethanol's also got an oxygen atom in it's structure, which the components of gasoline mostly lack. That results in the same problem as with oxygenated gas: it looks like a leaner mix (more air per unit fuel) to the sensors in the engine, which results in the ECU setting the injectors to run richer (inject more fuel per cycle) to get the programmed ideal air/fuel mixture resulting in higher fuel consumption. Oxygenated gas was a great idea for carbureted engines, but it doesn't play well with modern EFI engines and I don't think there's been a model sold in the US since 2000 that isn't EFI.

Before the Navy goes this route, they need to sit down and read the short story collection "I, Robot" by Isaac Asimov. Everyone's familiar with Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics. They seem reasonable. Yet, every story in that collection (and in fact most of Asimov's robots stories) is about how the 3 Laws fail in practice. If you want to try doing a better job of writing ethical rules for robots than Isaac, you'd better be familiar with how to work through all the ways those rules can backfire on you. For instance, that question of the soldier who needs traction to avoid death. If you write the rules to allow the robot to inflict pain to prevent worse, what happens when a unit's ordered into a situation that'll result in a lot of them dying and the robot decides that inflicting the pain of broken legs (which can be repaired) will prevent those deaths? That's entirely in line with the rule you gave it, after all...

I think in these cases it'd be even simpler: the letters don't actually spell out what part of the patent is infringed or how the recipient infringes it. It'd be the equivalent of sending a letter saying the recipient's violated a contract and has to pay penalties or face a lawsuit, without saying what contract, with who, or how the recipient's violated it. The state should be able to deal with that aspect of it without going anywhere near the patent itself, that kind of behavior should constitute bad faith even if the underlying patent's valid.

A lot of trolls do send out letters without any basis, because a lot of people will take a cheap settlement rather than spend the money to fight it, go through discovery and all it's costs, and get the suit dismissed. Take a look at the SCO v. IBM lawsuit, where the SCO executives were fairly explicit about not caring whether their claims would stand up or not because it'd cost IBM more to fight and win than to settle so they figured IBM would just settle. Anti-patent-troll laws aimed at this sort of vague accusation help because it forces trolls to be explicit up front about what they're accusing their victims of which gives their victims more opportunity to knock the accusations down early on before it gets expensive.

The problem is that if you do this, you remove all your slack. If you cut it to just enough people to do the work if they work 100% of the time, the first time someone calls in sick you don't have enough people to do the work. If you get a sudden spike in business because of a holiday or special, you don't have enough people to handle the extra work. If something goes wrong, you don't have anybody to assign to handle it without leaving you short-handed. And that's before you even get to the need for workers to take breaks during the day to avoid burning out.

It's the same problem that's plagued just-in-time delivery of inventory. Sure it saves money to have stock and raw materials delivered just as they're needed. But the moment a storm or a port strike or anything delays deliveries, you're in a world of hurt because you don't have any inventory on hand to tide you over. Sure it's saved you money, but it's made your business much more fragile and the costs of even one shut-down can easily eat up any savings.

Technically they didn't leak private files, because the files weren't ever private. They were public with the URLs not published in an index anywhere, so you had to know the URL to access them. Dropbox and Box simply forgot that those URLs would appear in HTTP Referer headers, exposing them in the logs of any site linked to from within those "private" documents. Security by obscurity... isn't.

A document isn't private unless it requires at least some kind of authentication to access it, eg. setting up HTTP authentication, or using a system like Google Drive uses where you have to be logged in on your Google account to see documents shared with you.

I've had good luck with an Ion cassette-to-USB deck for ripping an old tape collection to digital on the computer. They've got a VHS-to-USB one as well: http://www.ionaudio.com/products/details/vcr-2-pc.

Any standard that's effective and easy to use will not be accepted by the advertising industry, so making the "success" of a standard contingent on that last is nonsense. The DNT standard does serve one useful purpose whether or not it's accepted: it provides a single, easy-to-interpret, unambiguous indication to advertisers as to whether or not the user has consented to tracking. It removes their ability to say "Well, they didn't say otherwise so we assumed they're OK with it.". It does that whether or not they honor it, and it gives us a good talking point when it comes to policy and regulatory discussions: "The DNT standard exists. It's in use. It's easy to interpret on their side. They're the only ones sticking their fingers in their ears going "Na Na Na Can't hear you!".". That makes regulation an easier sell.

There's a simple app to eliminate cel phone use while driving. It comes standard on every model of cel phone I know of, requires no sign-up and has a dead-simple user interface.

The app? The "silent" mode.

I think the fact that it's an American company being ordered to produce the data factors in here. The judge does have jurisdiction over the company, which makes it a different situation from ordering a company in another country to turn over data stored there. If you want to get out of a country's legal jurisdiction, you need to be out of their jurisdiction.

The problem is that you run into situations like one I ran into during the last security evaluation:

1. An e-mail from the company's HR e-mail address says that I need to click on a link within the e-mail to view information from HR that I'm required to review and respond to.
2. An e-mail from the company's HR e-mail address says that I need to click on a link within the e-mail to view information from HR that I'm required to review and respond to.

One of those is a legitimate message from an executive and failure to follow it's instructions will result in possible termination. The other is a fake from IT Security. I have described all significant differences in the messages. Now, tell me which one is which?

The above, in a nutshell, is the problem with most attempts to enforce security policy: the people making policy in the company ignore the security policies when deciding how to do things.

First off, stop worrying about passwords. Most malware doesn't get into systems by way of an attacker cracking passwords. It comes in in ways that bypass passwords entirely, either by getting a user to run it or by getting the user to give the attacker their password.

Second, look at your management culture. Do you expect your employees to routinely click on links in e-mail? Look for things like HR or IT sending e-mails that instruct people to follow links they've provided, or "secure" or "encrypted" e-mail systems that store the messages on Web servers and expect your employees to use a link to get at the contents of the "secure" or "encrypted" message. If you find such things, realize that you're training your employees to be insecure, because you're training them to expect to do as a normal part of their job exactly what the malware will need them to do to infect their systems. Start by removing such things from your management culture. If you need encrypted e-mail, do it within your own e-mail system so that users never need to follow links to read encrypted or secured e-mail. Outlook and Exchange offer this directly. If you need to give employees links to internal web applications or documents, create a Web page or site with a directory of links and train your employees to use a bookmark in their browser to access that site and navigate to the appropriate section where you'll put all the new links they need.

Third, look at your IT policies. Not the ones you wrote, the ones you expect employees to follow. If your policy manuals say "No user-installed software." but your actual policies require users to get and install software from outside, you have a problem. It can be as innocuous as sending zipped archives while not having a program to handle them pre-installed on user computers. It can be as pervasive as not having your IT able to support the myriad of tools your developers need, most of which will by definition not be the kind of thing most desktops would need. But every time you have a situation where what you expect of your employees requires software you didn't pre-install on their systems and where it'd negatively impact an employee's job performance and more importantly their performance evaluations if they refused to install that needed software themselves, you're creating security problems. Sit down and decide how you're going to address this, then address it. It can be as simple as a page of "approved" links to sites you know are safe and where employees can get all that useful software that gets used every day.

Fourth, evaluate your software update policies and IT budget and staffing. If your IT department doesn't have the staff or the budget to monitor the vendors of all the software in use in your organization, test changes and push updates out to your desktops and servers, you need to re-evaluate your IT budget and staffing levels. You need to get most updates installed within 30 days of their release, and you need to be able to get major critical security updates analyzed, tested and deployed within 24 hours. Your IT staff can't do that if security updates are a side item they're expected to handle in between doing everything else. If management wants security to be a priority, they need to back up their words with the resources and budget departments need to make it a priority.

Yes, a lot of that comes back to management. Attitudes towards security come from the top. More importantly, they come from what those at the top do and expect rather than from what they say.

I'm minded though of a saying: "The superior pilot uses his superior piloting judgement to avoid needing to demonstrate his superior piloting skill.". The study tends to bear that out too, as they comment that the decline disappears when you look only at the end results (the score). And in the end, if you're better at juggling dozens of things at once and react faster than your opponent and consistently lose to him, you're consistently losing to him.

That, though, is talking about the development environment itself. Yes, there the developers should be in control of the machines. DevOps, though, is about having developers actually doing operations tasks in the production environment. That's a bad thing, because what developers are good at is very very bad in production. You don't want developers alpha-testing code and fixes where a failed test brings all of your customers to a screeching halt while the developer does a few more iterations to get his fix working right. Plus, frankly most of Operations is boring and tedious (or at least it should be) and as a developer I have little or no interest in making it my day job. I want to solve the problem of making the deployment scripts bulletproof and go on to the next problem, not spend my day watching instances spin down and up (because if I did my job right, that's all the Ops people are going to need to do).

The difference is between developers knowing the operations side and being the operations side. Developers need to know the operations side to know how to write software that Ops can install and manage. And they should be involved in the development environment and installation in the testing environment so any gotchas can be addressed quickly and the developers know exactly what happened and can go back and make sure it doesn't happen again (especially in production). And of course when things really go pear-shaped during production deployments it never hurts to have the developers on tap to tell Ops whether there's a simple, quick workaround that'll salvage the deployment or whether it's time to roll back until they can fix the problem. But those are a far cry from developers doing Operations support and administration work on a daily basis. Frankly they're two radically different skill-sets. They're related, sure, but having a developer doing Ops as a regular job is like having Kelly Johnson keeping a fleet of Piper Cubs in shape. Sure he can do it, and technically he can probably do it better than a regular mechanic, but in a month or so he'd be bored to tears and walking out to go work somewhere where they'd actually let him do his job designing and building planes like the SR-71.

This doesn't really change it, because think how a proprietary SSL library would've handled this. The vulnerability was found specifically because the source code was available and someone other than the owners went looking for problems. When was the last time you saw the source code for a piece of proprietary software available for anyone to look at? If it's available at all, it's under strict license terms that would've prevented anyone finding this vulnerability from saying anything to anyone about it. And the vendor, not wanting the PR problem that admitting to a problem would cause, would do exactly what they've done with so many other vulnerabilities in the past: sit on it and do nothing about it, to avoid giving anyone a hint that there's a problem. We'd still have been vulnerable, but we wouldn't know about it and wouldn't know we needed to do something to protect ourselves. Is that really more secure?

And if proprietary software is written so well that such vulnerabilities aren't as common, then why is it that the largest number of vulnerabilities are reported in proprietary software? And that despite more people being able to look for vulnerabilities in open-source software. In fact, being a professional software developer and knowing people working in the field, I'm fairly sure the average piece of proprietary software is of worse quality than the average open-source project. It's the inevitable effect of hiring the lowest-cost developers you can find combined with treating the fixing of bugs as a cost and prioritizing adding new features over fixing problems that nobody's complained about yet. And with nobody outside the company ever seeing the code, you're not going to be embarrassed or mocked for just how absolutely horrid that code is. The Daily WTF is based on reality, remember, and from personal experience I can tell you they aren't exaggerating. If anything, like Dilbert they're toning it down until it's semi-believable.