Don't forget the Islamic State, which also counts oil as its primary source of income. Saudi Arabia has no shortage of reasons to drive down oil prices.

At this rate we'll need a metadata database metadatabase.

Less complexity, less weight (and gets lighter as you use it). No pumps, no power source for pumps, no return lines, just a pressurized tank and a few valves.

Of course, you have to know how much you'll need before the flight, and the longer you'll need it the lesser the savings over a traditional system.

Looks like most of my Kerbal Space Program landings.

edit: the above was supposed to be a reply to another post by gstoddart in this thread. It doesn't make as much sense in this context, sorry

I know a few people like you, who always buy the lowest-end junk because "they'll have to upgrade it soon anyway". It's a self-fulfilling prophecy; they constantly curse their lousy crap and spend more throwing it away and replacing it every 18 months than I spend on decent gear that lasts 6-8 years.

But you should never buy first generation bleeding edge stuff either. The iPad 1G sucked, because mobile phone parts were very poor five years ago. It wasn't 'planned obsolescence', Apple didn't go out of their way to put inferior parts into it, they put in what existed at the time. Now that tablets are a 'thing' and chip designers are seriously targeting them, much better stuff exists-- the current iPad has 8 times the RAM and 10-20x the CPU performance of your model. Software designers would have to cripple their apps/sites to support both the latest hardware and yours, and you're not a big enough market for them to care.

On the other hand, if you'd just waited a bit and got the iPad 2, it would still be supported. Hell, it would still be *sold*, four years after its first release, in the form of the iPad Mini.

http://www.theguardian.com/com...

Then the attacker types cp -R / /Volumes/NSA\ Data\ VacuumTM/

Sorry to reply to myself, but after reading the full details on this vulnerability it's not like the previous Thunderbolt exploits I've seen, and my prior advice may not be sufficient protection.

It uses a string of vulnerabilities to flash itself into the firmware using Diagnostic Mode, which exists outside the protection of FileVault. To fully secure yourself you probably need to set a firmware password... not as easy as turning on FileVault, but it should only take a couple minutes on a modern Mac: instructions

Hopefully Apple will take steps to close the vulnerabilities but it's not likely to affect many people; it requires prolonged physical access to the machine, multiple reboots and connection of hardware, and finally the cooperation of the user (logging in again) for the attacker to steal any useful information. Virtually any machine could be compromised under the same circumstances.

During the Mac OOBE it prompts you to turn it on.

And if you *don't* encrypt your hard drive or set a firmware password, it's not like anyone with physical access needs a fancy thunderbolt bootkit to compromise your PC.

FileVault 2 disables DMA over FireWire/Thunderbolt when no user is logged in or the machine is locked.

If you want an extra layer of security, execute this command:

sudo pmset -a destroyfvkeyonstandby 1 hibernatemode 25

...and your Mac will erase its decryption key from RAM every time it goes to sleep.

It all comes down to economic efficiency. Manufacturing costs have plummeted while labor costs have skyrocketed, so it's not a productive use of one's time to repair. Time is expensive, stuff is cheap.

Repair isn't the only skill that's suffered; we've forgotten how to farm, forgotten how to weave our own clothing, forgotten how to do many things that were required of a household a century or two ago. It's also why we get connected halfway around the world for customer service and don't get our fuel pumped and windshield washed by a whistling attendant.

Whether this is ultimately good or bad depends on your point of view, but unless we run short of raw materials, drive up costs via pollution taxes, or see an economic meltdown in the west it's not likely to change course. Rising wages in China and other industrial companies will only do so much before factories switch to robot labor.

There's a big difference between allowing something and requiring it. I think OO was the natural evolution of concepts like interfaces and namespacing, but what sets it apart is that it insists (so far as it can) the developer encapsulate information, while procedural languages at best suggest it.

Of course it's possible to write clear code in any paradigm, and some of the most beautiful code I've ever seen has been purely procedural, but that is unfortunately the exception. Most code I read is pretty poor, and the worst OO code I've encountered is far ahead of the worst procedural code in terms of readability and maintainability. I'll take the kludginess of OO over the heroic measures it takes to keep a large C project from turning into an unintelligible mess.

OO isn't about anthropomorphism, it's about isolation and providing a clear API. If this was a large scale project with fifty people working on code that could move students, I don't want them implementing fifty different versions of move_student that will break whenever the Student or Classroom model changes.

I know it's trendy to hate on things that have been around a while, and OO indeed isn't the answer to everything, but it's still a useful way of keeping a complex program from getting out of control.

Sorry if that came off a bit harsh, but it should be fairly obvious that multifocal lenses are not suited for viewing objects at a fixed distance. Everyone I know with 'progressive' lenses dislikes them; they find them disorienting and only wear them because they want a single pair for all purposes and hate the look of bifocals.

Your eyes are not something to be trifled with; get a pair of proper conventional lenses that suit the distance you will be working at and save yourself the misery of 90% of your vision being out of focus all the time.