Because that's how the information gets from (wherever it is stored) to (the people who need to access it). The Internet is popular for a reason, and that reason is that it helps people get things done quickly and cheaply.

The alternative, of course, is to have the information and the people physically co-located, so that they can access the information only via an isolated network (or by physically sitting at the computer the information is stored on).

However, the benefits of remote access are so great that in many cases it's seen as being worth the risk of allowing it. Whether or not that assessment is correct or not depends on an estimate of how secure the networks are, but also on an estimate of how aggressive, competent, and numerous any hostile intruders will be. Clearly it's possible to get both of those estimates wrong, but I'm not sure that a knee-jerk response of "pull all the Ethernet cables and return to the 1950s" is going to be a practical solution either, as doing so would likely cause as much disruption as an actual attack.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but probably one good practice would be a lot more red-teaming -- i.e. if your network is vulnerable to intrusion, it's much better to learn how a friendly intruder got in (by asking him) and fix the hole than to pick up the pieces after a hostile intruder nuked your network.

No, stop being an idiot.

"regular users" click on files in a list or 2-d grid. They would not even notice if the filesystem allowed more than one file with the same name, and the certainly do not give a damn about case insensitivity. Even if they type at a terminal they use filename-completion and do not care either.

It is also clear that it has nothing to do with user-friendliness or they would map more common errors, such as multiple spaces to single ones, removing leading and trailing whitespace, or mapping equivalent unicode to the same files. They don't do this because they realize that such complex details of the encoding do not belong in the file system api.

Case-insensitivity is a throwback to ancient ASCII-only systems. If you live in the stone age you may think it is a good idea. If you have been exposed to it all your life you may think it is a good idea. But if you were actually intelligent you would know it is wrong.

All modern systems are capable of storing different strings for filenames in different cases. So no, Linux has it right and Windows has it wrong. Sorry to burst your bubble, but you are simply Wrong, with a capital W.

No. Two different byte strings should identify two different files (unless one or both of them are invalid byte streams). Anything else is introducing complexity into the filesystem and potential bugs and security violations, of which this it an excellent example. Sorry, but Unix has it right, and Microsoft and lots of other systems are *WRONG*.

The new news that the government thinks they did it certainly changes my opinion, though I would be curious exactly what the evidence is. I find it hard to believe they would risk making a stupid blunder of an incorrect accusation, so the info must be pretty good, such as directly from a spy inside NK at the hacker facility.

My gut feeling is this is disgruntled Sony employees. Somebody thought it would sound cool to threaten theaters and are probably amazed at the result.

If that's their biggest problem, they are in better shape than I thought.

Chrome also complains about self-signed https, so you lose. Sorry.

Except NK denied being behind the hacking.

Now there is no reason to believe anything NK says, but I would think they would be very proud of their computer achievements if they had been behind it.

The reason they don't falsely claim they are behind it is because they are worried the actual hackers would be found and then it would be clear they were lying.

If we look at jet aircraft, wear depends on the airframe and the engines, and the airframe seems to be the number of pressurize/depressurize cycles as well as the running hours. Engines get swapped out routinely but when the airframe has enough stress it's time to retire the aircraft lest it suffer catastrophic failure. Rockets are different in scale (much greater stresses) but we can expect the failure points due to age to be those two, with the addition of one main rocket-specific failure point: cryogenic tanks.

How long each will be reliable can be established using ground-based environmental testing. Nobody has the numbers for Falcon 9R yet.

Weight vs. reusable life will become a design decision in rocket design.

Because they wanted to arrest him for drug trafficking.

Deporting him would mean he would probably sneak back or arrange with his friends still in the USA to continue drug trafficking. If you assume that drug trafficking is something that you don't want (and under current USA laws is something the police are supposed to prevent) then this is a totally logical approach.

I suspect the North Korean will not have a problem getting the USA to give him a tourist visa. He *will* have some trouble getting access to ask the USA for one, and for actually getting out of North Korea to use it.

And indeed, some of us are. If you drive an electric car and live near a nuclear power plant, you might be one of them.

http://rationalitate.blogspot....

Seems like Houston has minimum parking requirements and minimum lot sizes, so no.