Haven't been following it too closely, but I don't really see the new start menu as all that inspiring. I think that Win7 was a genuine improvement over XP. Having an in-focus search box when you hit the start key was actually a bit like having a command line, etc.

All those tiles just make everything appear less distinct and harder to find, and it seems like I'll be able to fit less stuff on my screen.

I'd be interested in a comparison of what percent of that spending directly benefits the intended recipient.

In the US somebody who simply doesn't want to work has no real benefits available to them. That means that you spend a lot of effort trying to regulate the bottom end of the employment food chain, because people are desperate for jobs.

Also, healthcare is a big area of public benefit spending in Europe, but costs are much lower there. That means that you get a lot more care per dollar spent than you get in the US. Also, in the US it is hard to get socialized medicine unless you're elderly or disabled.

I don't think you can measure the strength of social programs merely in the amount of money spent.

They would need to be very well-compensated. Lots of people would still choose to work. They'd probably work a lot less, and they wouldn't put up with nonsense. You're not going to live in luxury on basic income, so there will always be incentive to do more.

I think this is because of a misguided desire to turn employment into some kind of welfare system.

I think a better approach is to combine a super-efficient hands-off capitalist economy with a highly socialized government. Regulation on business should just be to deal with externalities (pollution/etc) and to prevent the formation of monopolies (which even conservative economists will agree destroy free markets).

Then have a decent tax rate on that economy and use that to fund strong social protections, including programs like basic income. That alone would eliminate the need for a lot of business regulation. There is no need to have a minimum wage or safety protections in the workplace when people can still live reasonably comfortably without a job. Employers who offer only a pittance won't be able to hire anybody, and if an employee walks into the workplace and sees frightening conditions, they'll just quit.

In such a system there would be plenty of risk-taking, and the wealthy will be able to earn great deals of money. They would of course then pay a large portion of that back in taxes. However, we won't begrudge them the odd private jet if everybody gets decent healthcare and a roof over their head.

The problem with the US is that our social programs are even weaker than in Europe, and so are worker protections. We have that strong economy as a result, but the money just goes into the hands of a few instead of benefitting the many.

I think this is part of a more general problem. You see it more in lousy countries like South Africa, but the same thing really happens to a lesser degree everywhere.

In every country lots of people are born and die every year, and many people come and go. Those who are born tend to have abilities that fall onto various bell curves, generally reflective of the people who are already there, and the same is true of those who die. Those who come and go are not distributed in the same way. Those with a lot of talent/resources are much more mobile than those who lack these. If the country is a desirable place to live for those with the means to move, then there will be a net flow of these populations into the country. If the country is undesirable for the mobile to live in, then they will tend to leave.

So, if a country has lousy conditions or taxes mobile populations higher than other countries, then it will tend to lose these mobile populations. The problem is that these are also the people who are most able to pay taxes. People who are unable to earn much of an income or who are needy (disabled, etc) tend to stick around. That creates a downward spiral as those who are able to work leave, and those who are unable to work accumulate, and thus increase the demands on those who remain and still pay taxes.

The usual solution to this is to make it more difficult for people to leave on their own. The only other solutions I'm aware of basically amount to begging, or just neglecting those in need so that those who are well off don't have to pay for them and thus don't have as much incentive to leave.

Well, that and the fact that everybody has a dream of spending half their life working overtime, and the other half of their life not working at all but living as if they had the same kind of income. Everybody wants investment growth and is investing a LOT of money, and that tends to create bubbles. I suspect that when all those people start trying to live off of all that saved money the results won't be pretty. Suddenly we move from labor surplus to labor shortage, but we still have that surplus of money lying around.

Just open up the terminal and rewire the display and keypad to go to a different computer, while not touching anything else. The POS terminal sends to the card reader the total bill of $1000. The MITM computer displays on the terminal screen a request to authorize a payment of $10.95, and passes the PIN input to the reader's computer. The reader dutifully passes along the PIN and transaction for $1000 to the credit card, which dutifully notices that the reader is completely valid and authorizes the transaction.

It is just the analog hole in another form. No matter how much you certify the hardware/etc in the end the part that interacts with the human being is just some contact switches and a screen that emits/reflects/whatever light. If you somehow stuck a CPU in the LCD display itself then you'd just bury the original display in the device and stick a new display on the front completely unconnected to the real display, and if for some reason you needed to know what was on the original display you could read it with a camera.

And those are attacks possible without actually messing with the fancier electronics in the reader. If you can attack the actual reader CPU you can do even more.

Sure, but the interface between the chip and its owner is completely MITM'ed by the reader. There is no way for the chip to know whether the transaction it is being asked to authorize by the reader is the one the account holder wants to authorize.

All the chip does is prove that it is present, or maybe accept a PIN number first.

And I won't argue that the US banks are worse than the rest of the world. I just think that chip-and-PIN alone is really far short of what could be done to secure cards.

He never claimed the drive got full. He said that the issue occurs when you've written a drive's worth of data. You can write a drive's worth of data without filling up even 1% of the drive, if you just overwrite one logical block in-place repeatedly.

Of course the drive erases a block when you overwrite it. The whole point of trim is that it improves performance when this is done. If you overwrite a 512-byte block that isn't trimmed the drive has to erase the surrounding 4K worth of blocks, and then rewrite the previous data back along with your 512-bytes worth of new data. Then if you write to the next 512-byte block 10min later it repeats the process. For wear-leveling it might move blocks around, but you still have the issue in some form.

You only can get away with the "implicit trim" strategy completely if you only write in multiples of the SSD erase block size, aligned to SSD erase block boundaries, and the drive actually is designed to let that happen.

Just what problems would you expect to see? Not using TRIM doesn't cause failures. It can result in premature wear, and lower performance. It doesn't make the drive magically fail long before it should, and unless you did some kind of comparative benchmark you might not notice the performance drop.

No idea in general, but I'd think that a log-based filesystem would be fairly immune to this kind of nonsense since it would only issue TRIMs very rarely, and then only for huge areas of the disk at a time. They don't overwrite random blocks in-place constantly.

If the problem is that the drive doesn't follow the spec for TRIM, I'd rather just disable TRIM than try to keep using it with a different filesystem. That seems a bit like playing Russian Roulette. Are you really that sure that ReiserFS won't have the same problem (unless it just doesn't use TRIM anyway, in which case it is no better than ext4 without TRIM).

Well, it is missing support for ChromeOS (which also requires running in the browser). :)

And I don't really see it as any more secure. Somebody can hack into Lastpass, and somebody can hack into Google. Both are likely fairly robust with their security. Apparently Lastpass is fairly up-front about intrusions.

And nothing prevents you from using a keyfile with lastpass. Just copy/paste it into the password prompt right after typing in your memorized portion of the password. :)

I'd say that keepass is at best equivalent to lastpass if you're able to access the passwords from multiple systems, and if you don't implement it well you could be worse off.

Strange. Had issues with my first post and managed to repost it in the wrong place, with the original apparently going up after all...

Apologies for the noise.

Infrastructure is incredibly vulnerable.

Some big problems:

1. It is distributed all over the place, often just hanging on poles or with little protection beyond a fence.
2. Cost-efficiency often results in minimal redundancy.
3. Cost-efficiency often results in minimal inventory of spares and capacity to make repairs.

Take out a couple of big transformers with a rifle and you could cut power over a very large area with a very lengthy repair time. Take out a fair number of them and you'll exhaust the supply of spares and now you could be talking months of problems (perhaps cannibalizing from other sites at reduced capacity across the grid, and if you take out enough you might just have to leave large areas blacked/browned-out).

Fiber is also difficult to repair. If you had a determined attack you could probably rapidly outpace the ability to locate and repair cuts.

Of course any kind of serious or sustained attack would draw attention and you'd find security improved. However, you could probably do a lot of damage before that happened.

I think the best solution is to build more redundancy into infrastructure, and more capacity for repair. That also makes infrastructure more robust against other kinds of failure. It does cost money, and when you have privatization it requires some kind of way to pay those costs. The government could just buy capacity that it can make available in the event of a disaster. Of course, that would need to be real capacity, and not something that just gets oversubscribed (government buys 1GW of power but doesn't use it, utility just under-provisions by 1GW and sends the government the bill).

Infrastructure is incredibly vulnerable.

Some big problems:

1. It is distributed all over the place, often just hanging on poles or with little protection beyond a fence.
2. Cost-efficiency often results in minimal redundancy.
3. Cost-efficiency often results in minimal inventory of spares and capacity to make repairs.

Take out a couple of big transformers with a rifle and you could cut power over a very large area with a very lengthy repair time. Take out a fair number of them and you'll exhaust the supply of spares and now you could be talking months of problems (perhaps cannibalizing from other sites at reduced capacity across the grid, and if you take out enough you might just have to leave large areas blacked/browned-out).

Fiber is also difficult to repair. If you had a determined attack you could probably rapidly outpace the ability to locate and repair cuts.

Of course any kind of serious or sustained attack would draw attention and you'd find security improved. However, you could probably do a lot of damage before that happened.

I think the best solution is to build more redundancy into infrastructure, and more capacity for repair. That also makes infrastructure more robust against other kinds of failure. It does cost money, and when you have privatization it requires some kind of way to pay those costs. The government could just buy capacity that it can make available in the event of a disaster. Of course, that would need to be real capacity, and not something that just gets oversubscribed (government buys 1GW of power but doesn't use it, utility just under-provisions by 1GW and sends the government the bill).