As one such stupid person, I can tell you. Oh, how I wish I had the smarts to to go ahead and make a child with my !@#%!@#$ crazy first wife, instead of divorcing her, spending time looking for a right one that will be, well, right, and only then having a child.

I'm sure me, my first wife, and my hypothetical children would have been so much happier for having a younger dad. Obviously, a younger dad is preferrable to growing up in a happy family.

Shachar

Donating for a specific person, in particular for yourself, is a special situation where things are done differently. For example, many of the conditions that would make you ineligible to donate to another person are waived if you are donating for personal use (and the blood is tossed if you wind up not needing it). Though it also depends on what you mean 'my blood was tested...' If you mean that you were tested for blood type and anemia, things that can be done with only the blood from a finger prick, 100% of people receive those tests in any modern medical environment (and even most not so modern ones). If you mean they did a full screening for HIV and other BBPs before you were allowed to give more than a finger prick's worth, then that is a specific situation not covered by general donation rules. For general situations, the written/oral prescreening is a much less expensive solution to having to run a myriad of tests (some cheap, some not so cheap) on a lot of blood that never should have been donated in the first place.

All donors ARE tested for HIV (at least in USA, Canada, and China), but the test is post-donation and not pre-donation. Donated blood is tested for far more than just HIV, as well, and failing that post-donation test can result in a temporary or permanent ban from future donations. Prescreening of donors reduces the cost of testing relative to acceptable donations, which is a useful tool for keeping the cost of the existing donor supply lower than it would be otherwise. The American Red Cross revisits this policy about every 5 years, IIRC, and goes through the math of where the percentage breakpoints are for breakeven results- when any population crosses that line the wrong way, a new question goes on the prescreening survey. Homosexually active men are no more discriminated against than people who got tattoos or ear piercings within a certain time period, or who lived in certain countries (don't be from Cameroon or Nigeria, for example). Want to change that? Try changing the incidence of disease in the indentifiable community below that break point, because manipulating only the math doesn't turn out well in any scenario.

Giving a blood test for all the possible BBPs (blood borne pathogens) and other issues prior to donating is not cheap if the number of donors goes up by any significant amount of people who wouldn't qualify, so a prescreening survey is going to remain the most cost effective way of dealing with these issues and keeping the number of people who would dilute the quality of the blood supply low.

If you don't qualify to pass the written prescreening test, and you still want to donate blood, at least in the USA you can do that. There is a box you can check to indicate that you want your blood disposed of after donation. This is most commonly used by drug users and homosexuals who are donating in the presence of family, co-workers, or friends who the donor feels are not aware of their situation. It wastes staff time and some property (collection bags, etc...), but allows an individual to maintain their privacy for a lower cost than a prescreening blood test would cost.

I found http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

I don't see anything there substantially different than the one shown. Can you elaborate, please?

Shachar

If $15 makes sense, and they are thinking about the future, why not $20? For that matter, why not by fiat define the minimum wage to be $100/hour, and every person will automatically be rich!

Oh, you say, but $100 is ludicrous, even based on what we can foresee for 2021. No one would ever get hired!!! That is a strawman!!! But if that is true, why would $15 make sense and not $14.50, or $14.00... what seems like a living wage to a politician (or a voter, for that matter) is probably very different from a low-skill, low-education high school student (or, worse, dropout) who can't get any job at all, because no employer will take a risk on them at that wage level.

Oh, no problem, we will order employers to hire them....

I have been on both sides of the minimum wage issue, as a recipient and as an employer. Every argument for a flat one-size fits all number is flawed but, no, I don't have a better solution at this time. However, if you send money to my election campaign, I will be very thoughtful in my considerations...

They already did. Beats was only used with the HTC M7. Now, they call the exact same thing "Boomsound". If you use Sprint in the USA, you can also get the HTC One M8/Harmon Kardon Edition, which is actually an improvement over the software that works with the standard M8's boomsound (though I am not sure the hardware changes at all). It also gains the ability to play FLAC files, which Beats didn't give, a free Spotify account for 6 months for "Framily [sic] plan" users, and a nice set of earphones. But as a past Sprint user for over 10 years, I am an ex-Sprint user now and probably forever, and the only reason I would consider getting this phone would be to immediately root it which would negate some of the bonus features that only work on the Sprint Network. If it supported two SIMs, I would seriously consider that, though.

When you figure out how to recall a missile without loss of the airframe and other important explodey-bits, get back to us. Not to mention freaking out a couple of other countries with their own ICBMs when they can't tell if the missile you say is headed over the pole to a given -stan is going to fall short and hit Russia or go wide and hit China, so they have to order their own launches before the descent half of the arc (bonus points for MIRVs).

As for drones, there is a reason why you always try to take out the C&C first when it even a modestly viable option. With the B-52 in stand-off mode, every flight team is its own C&C when things go sideways. Much harder all of them than to take out than a single 'air wing' (not intending to be derisive of drone pilots- a meaningful MOS, but it does bring clarification to ChAir Force) based outside of Las Vegas.

Some day, hopefully none of this will be necessary. It won't be in our lifetimes, though. Until then, Semper Fi, and, thank you, Dad and all other veterans.

The BUF (Big Ugly F*cker) and the Warthog earned their nicknames honestly, but I bet if the person who nicknamed the A-10 had been from the southern USA, it would have been nicknamed the Armadillo for the bathtub, with the double bonus of being only slightly better in a beauty contest than a warthog. Although there is the wrong speed bump metaphor going on with the name Armadillo...

Both of those platforms have a niche which no other can compete with yet. Wikipedia has the following to say about the A-10, though: In the House Armed Services Committee's markup of the FY 2015 budget, language was included that to allow the retirement of the A-10 fleet. The markup limited the availability of funds for retirement unless each plane could be kept in type-1000 storage, meaning they could be readily reactivated if needed. Even with this condition, the markup did not specifically prohibit the Air Force from retiring the fleet in FY 2015. The day following the HASC markup, the Senate refused the idea of placing the A-10 in any type of storage and reaffirmed its position that the fleet be kept fully active. Shortly after, the HASC passed an amendment to their markup blocking A-10 retirement. It stipulates that the fleet cannot be retired or even stored until the U.S. Comptroller General completes certifications and studies on other Air Force platforms used to perform CAS. Assessments will include cost per plane for conducting CAS missions, identifying if other aircraft able to successfully perform the mission, and the capabilities of each plane used in that role. The Senate Armed Services Committee markup would direct $320 million saved from personnel cuts to keep the A-10 flying. Both chambers of Congress have now drafted plans to keep the A-10 in Air Force service for at least another year.

At least another year... hopefully we can keep that going until there is a true replacement for the ground pounder's best friend.

Why not provide an actual link?

Shachar

I used to work for a company called "Gteko". Don't bother looking them up - they were acquired several years ago. They sold bundled software (OEM) to a handful of companies, all of them huge. One of those was AOL. This is over a decade ago.

The incident in question took place after I left, so I don't know the specifics. The bottom line is, they screwed up a server deployment that affected the AOL front page for all AOL customers. After that was finally fixed, the company's CEO, expecting pretty much to be shown the door, walked into a meeting with several AOL high execs.

The meeting started with the following sentence:
"Let's see how we can make sure this never happens again"

Even when it's something less "close" to you than an employee, it is sometimes worth it to not terminate someone who made a mistake, even a serious one.

My current employer, Akamai, has a motto effectively saying: It's okay to screw up, so long as that screwup results in a procedure that will prevent anyone from making the same mistake again.

Shachar

Posted it as a question there already.

Here's the thing, however. From reading the article, it seems that DH was not, itself, broken. Here's the problem, however: DH is used for forward reference security. It is used to ensure that an adversary that captured the encrypted communication cannot be decrypted later, even if the RSA key is later compromised

Which means that whether DH has already been broken is a moot question. The real question is whether it is likely to be broken in the near future (where what "near" means depends on what you're actually encrypting).

Here is what Schneier usually has to say about that: Attacks always get better over time.

Of course, the main problem with replacing DH is that we don't really have anything better on hand.

Shachar

RSA does not rely on discrete log. It rather relies on discrete root.

Dlog is the base, however, to almost any other public key algorithm out there which isn't elliptic curve. This includes Diffie Hellman, El-Gamal, DSA, Schnor and I'm sure others as well.

My reading of the article is that those are not yet borken, per se (spelling mistake left in intentionally). Since Diffie Hellman is primarily used for forward reference security, however (i.e. - figuring out a session key that will not be compromised even if the private key later is), the question is not whether it is safe today. The question is whether it will remain safe for the foreseeable future.

If attacks on dlog are beginning to become practical, the answer is "less and less".

Shachar

I really really skimmed the article, but I think it all boils to this one algorithm. If Diffie Hellman is at risk, then all of our "perfect forward security" reliance of SSL is gone.

Shachar

Had I not been able to postpone the migration for as long as I have, I would probably have agreed with you. I tried at least two of the versions you mentioned, and reached conclusions substantially similar to yours. None the less, modern KDE 4 is okay (after some getting used to).

Shachar

KDE 4, when it first came out, was horrid. I delayed upgrade as long as I could.

Today, however, I don't think that's still true. If your hardware doesn't have 3D you might think otherwise, but I find current KDE 4 useful and functional. I even enable some of the actual effects. There are a few of them (highlight active window, magic lamp minimize) actually contribute to my intuition of what's going on.

Not everything is perfect, but the only feature I still miss from KDE 3 is the different color for the active window's title bar. It is possible, but not worth the trouble, to achieve that effect on KDE 4, but it's not the same. Turns out you can make do without (but, as I said, it's better with).

Shachar