The OS upgrade argument is valid on PCs, and also on Android, where you have an "anything goes!" policy with regards to API usage (to the extent that you can be said to have a policy at all). However, with iOS, it's a lot less forgivable. iOS apps - official ones from the App Store, at least - are required to restrict themselves to approved APIs for third-party use, and go though an approval process before being posted to the store. There's a lot less excuse for the OS to be backwards-incompatible when the walled garden means you have control over what each app is allowed to do.

As for the performance degradation, that was definitely true for a long time, especially in the 90s when PC hardware was improving at a phenomenal rate, but these days OS upgrades have been extremely consumer-focused. Every release of Windows since Vista has actually run *better* on the same hardware than its predecessor, for example; while Win7 technically has a higher "minimum requirements" than Vista (they bumped the min RAM from 512MB to 1GB), that's because people were complaining that Vista ran like shit on less than a gig (true) and the requirement should never have been set that low to begin with. Win7 uses less RAM than Vista did, though. Win8 uses less than Win7, and 8.1 less than 8. I haven't tried the Win10 pre-release but it probably uses, or will use, less RAM once again. I don't use Macs much, but other commenters have pointed out that the same "runs better on the same hardware" improvements applied to many of the early OS X versions... but no longer.

My motherboard (a bit over two years old, gamer-targeted) has the option to boot from USB floppy drive, but I don't believe it has actual headers for a floppy interface. I'm not sure it even has IDE, though. It apparently thinks that 12 SATA3 and 6 SATA2 connectors is enough... well, and a bunch of USB ports and headers, including USB3.

Did you check that the drive itself worked? I've seen the drives go bad from long-term disuse, though admittedly that was in an area where the humidity rarely drops below 90% and the ocean is a few feet away, so it was rather hostile to electronics. We used to need to open up the laptops' keyboards and clean all the contacts about every other month. Good luck trying to fix a modern laptop in a similar situation...

Yeah, I've been reading Schlock for years. Howard Taylor definitely puts more thought into the military applications of long-range teleportation than Star Trek writers ever seem to, but in his canon "Teraport Area Denial" systems were developed extremely quickly. In Star Trek, the state-of-the-art in (artificial) anti-transporter tech seems to be basically their deflector shields. Then again, they never had as strong a reason to try covering really significant chunks of real estate before.

The idea of a transporter that can safely put people (or anything else with about the same mass...) onto planets in other star systems is just too huge a break in the balance of power. It's literally an apocalyptic weapon; unless you can figure out how to put transporter-proof shields around every valuable target you've got (and remember here that a planet counts as a valuable target, if you can beam a big enough antimatter bomb much less some "red matter"). It's a modern stealth bomber when your enemies have nothing newer than steam engines. The Borg don't have anything that comes close to being as effective a weapon, and they have single ships capable of defeating fleets and time travel tech (First Contact).

The lens flares were excessive but were not by any means the major problems with the movies. I actually thought the 2009 film was pretty well done too, for all that the "sci-fi authors have no sense of scale" thing was taken to an absurd level even by Star Trek standards.

Into Darkness contained so much shit I really can't forgive it for the excessive suck, though. The idea of a transporter that can put a few hundred pounds of mass safely on the surface of a planet in another star system, for example, is an absurdly overpowered superweapon along the lines of a modern nuclear missile submarine during WW1. That was far from the only problem with Into Darkness, but it was more than enough. Nothing else in the show makes sense once you have something like that. Then again, with extremely rare exceptions, Star Trek has never appreciated the military prowess of the transporter.

The episode is "Fortunate Son", season 1 episode 10. Directed by LeVar Burton (who has apparently directed a lot of Trek since his days on TNG). http://en.memory-alpha.org/wik...

Of the handful of Enterprise episodes I've seen (most, unfortunately, from season 1), it was one of the better ones. I'm told the show got better in later seasons but I have never seen anything from later than mid-season-2. It's not *all* dross, though.

That was a (reallllllly stupid) bug in Debian/Ubuntu, then. Making it that easy for an attacker to interfere with the update process in a way that leaves no sign of the interference is just plain moronic. Simply blocking the outbound request - about all an attacker can do when it's over TLS - would have been detectable as "hey, where's my update server go?" Allowing the attacker to manipulate the update list - I hope to hell they couldn't manipulate the actual updates, for example to supply outdated DEBs instead of ones that fix bugs - is nothing less than a security vulnerability in the OS. Maybe not a critical one (unless the update packages aren't sent securely) but still a vuln, and a terrible idea.

Yes, your ISP shouldn't be intercepting your HTTP requests. But your OS should *never* be using plaintext HTTP for anything remotely serious.

A good point indeed. I'd be more worried about somebody in top physical condition and well-trained in any offensive martial art than about the average person with a box cutter. Yes, technically the blade can do more damage, but the trained fighter is still going to be a lot harder to stop.

Similarly, I'd be more worried about somebody with a short-barreled semi-automatic pistol than somebody with an AK-47 or a .50 sniper rifle. The rifles have way more firepower and probably more magazine capacity, sure, but they're also unwieldy as hell in the confines of an airplane, and the whole "walk very close behind somebody with your weapon muzzle just behind their heart, telling them what to do" deception is really hard to pull off when your weapon is three feet long.

Of course, the TSA is not, and never has been, focused on what an intelligent person would be worried about. It's merely the natural symbiote of the fearmongering politicians: make the populace terrified, and then show yourself to be doing something about it! The fact that it lets you divert lots of tax dollars to your buddies who make fancy scanning machines is the cherry on top...

Not only does it let you lock the gun, but there is no way in hell any airport or airline is going to let themselves be "the one who lost a passenger's gun", because that means some criminal somewhere just got their hands on a firearm that they were responsible for transporting safely. If you want your luggage to arrive safely, a starter pistol or flare gun or similar are probably among the best insurance options you can buy.

Just because .NET APIs call down to Win32 APIs, which call down to NT APIs, doesn't mean that they aren't all different APIs. Same for the POSIX APIs (which, like Win32, chain to native NT APIs). The POSIX ones always specify OBJ_CASE_INSENSITIVE, the Win32 ones do if you specify FILE_FLAG_POSIX_SEMANTICS, and I don't even know if .NET supports enforcing case-sensitivity... but they are still separate APIs. Nobody in their right mind writes user-mode software against the native NT API unless they absolutely have to, and not only because it's prone to occasionally changing in non-backward-compatible ways.

So does Windows, though you may confuse the Win32 API if you use it. NTFS is case-preserving and the native APIs are case-sensitive. Win32 functions can use FILE_FLAG_POSIX_SEMANTICS to require case-sensitivity, and Interix (Microsoft's POSIX-on-NT environment that runs in the Subsystem for Unix Applications or SUA) does so by default. I don't know of any way to make Win32 case-sensitive by default without doing some kind of crazy hooking of the relevant APIs or installing a filter driver to enforce it.

Actually, Microsoft themselves has an API for accessing NTFS drives in a case-sensitive manner, and I'm not talking about the native NT API or even the FILE_FLAG_POSIX_SEMANTICS Win32 file API flag. All versions of NT from 3.1 (the first) to 6.2 (Win8; it was removed from 8.1) have support for a POSIX operating environment - basically a full Unix-like OS running atop the NT kernel - and for proper Unix-like-ness it is case sensitive.

Mind you, Win32 programs do tend to get confused by it all. For example, CMD's "dir" command will list both "test.txt" and "TEST.TXT" in the same directory, and even correctly note if they have different sizes or datestamps. However, the "type" command (print file contents) on *either* name (or some other-cased version of the name) will instead print the contents of one of the files - doesn't matter what you type, the OS will pick - and it will print it twice (once for each copy of the file with that name).

I've been using the Interix (name of the Unix-like operating environment that runs in the NT POSIX subsystem, as reported by the uname command) build of git for years now. I should probably stop - the repo my package manager used has died, and I haven't bothered to set up a different package manager yet so my packages are outdated - but I am, humorously enough, not vulnerable to this particular attack even with that outdated version.

I was just about to say... this is a preview. I wouldn't expect pre-release versions of the new feature to be rolled out across all platforms. We can hope that it will happen once the feature leaves beta, though.

And no navy and airforce large enough to protect it as they make their way across the pacific.

I'm imagining an attack sub commander shooting his tubes empty blowing away converted fishing boats loaded down with soldiers and then wondering what the hell to do about the rest of them. On the other hand, we have torp bombers as well, and those can just go back to bas to re-arm. As you say, it's not like North Korea has the air force or navy to protect them against a carrier group.

But yeah, South Korea is in a shitty situation. Strong economy, high-tech society, powerful allies... and within bombardment range of enough heavy artillery to basically reduce their capitol city if NK decides to let all their crazy out.