This. Where are my mod points when I need them? Mod parent up!

You seem to believe that all hacks are due to finding flaws in listening daemons/open services. That's definitely not the case, and the era when any complex network could be thought as separated into inside, DMZ and external parts is long over. Your browser has many vulnerabilities, yet it doesn't "listen" on a port.

Any such a drone would have sensors that process incoming data (visual, IR, radar, GPS, etc.). Simply by the fact that it processes external data makes such a sensor potentially vulnerable to external threats; it doesn't have an open port that you can firewall, it simply has to read external data and it is in theory vulnerable.

For example, imagine finding a flaw in the image recognition software; "hacking" the drone could simply mean showing it an appropriate picture (which can easily be done remotely). Yes, doing a full 'gain-control' hack is hard, but we're talking here about state-actors with enough resources.

My argument was not that the US intervention was wrong (or right). That's a very complex issue.

I was simply responding to the GP which seemed to put the blame fully on the looters - that, I believe, is wrong.

That's not quite right.

The problem is that US went in and replaced the security structure (policy, army, etc.) of the Iraqi state with its own troops. However, in the process of doing so, they provided this only for some parts of the country.

Look at it this way: before US went in, Iraqi police (probably) protected the universities. After US went in, noone did. Yes, of course, the looters are the ones that actually stole the stuff, but US has its own part to blame in this, IMHO.

So I can't relate to your situation, but what got me out of being bored with my project and in general with writing code was learning something entirely new. In my case, it was *finally* learning functional programming, and starting on an associated path to (re)learning some math concepts.

Whether that works for other people, I have no idea, but it did work for me, and made me enthusiastic again about simply writing code.

They are pretty much using the 'current solution' everywhere

Sure, but that's exactly what I was referring to---the ability to catch up to the 'current solution', across many fields; I didn't mean to say they are advancing above the current solution, not at all.

Even for just catching up, I think they've done a good job at it, and my point is that maybe there is a relation between this and not having NIH. That was what I trying to say :)

Folks in Asia have almost zero "not-invented-here" issues, whereas it's pretty prevalent all over the U.S.'

Hmm, could this explain how Asia was able to move so quickly in the past decades? Yes, it means that you steal (either figuratively or literaly) ideas more often, but it also means that you'll always try to use what it's best, without being hang-up on the current solution.

Anyway, I thought about the relation/contrast between being "liberal" with other peoples ideas and having a NIH syndrome, and I find this interesting.

Sorry, indeed realised after posting. I'm still surprised about the original parent's statement though (.net and JVM in relation to OCaml and Haskell??)

Not sure what you mean by "native code". Haskell and Ocaml can both be compiled down to native code. What exactly do you want and is lacking in these two?

Wrong. Fission of elements heavier than iron produces energy, but their fusion would consume it. Fission of elements lighter than iron consumes energy, but their fusion produces energy.

Really, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion describes it pretty clearly, no need to speculate.

Uh... PNG is *always* lossless, the compression level only affects the tradeoff between compression/decompression level and savings achieved (a la gzip -1..9). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics for more details.

regards,
iustin

So pray tell me, what does the GPL *force* you to do?

So I see these benchmarks between expensive SSDs and cheaper harddrives, but I'm yet to see a benchmark between some more appropriate price configurations: SDDs versus mechanical harddrives in RAID with battery-backed NVRAM, where the random write penalty is much much lower. Does anyone know of any?

iustin

* Who is performing third party security audits (no one?).
...

It always amazes me when people read a puff-piece full of buzzwords and devoid of any content, yet come away completely reassured.

Ah, but a "third party security audit" is all it takes for you to feel safe?

Given my experience with such audits, please, keep external auditors as far away as possible.

Look at the fmask and dmask mount options for the fat/ntfs family.

regards,
iustin