But it does require extra fuel. I'd have expected that fuel to be more than the weight of a parachute system, though perhaps not: it would be lowering a mostly-empty tin can.

I imagine that it's a bonus to be able to have that kind of precision on your rocket engines: if you can get them down, then it may provide advantages in going up. Certainly it's nice that you've proven that kind of control.

Losing data goes with the territory if you're going to use RAID 0.

In particular, RAID 0 combines disks with no redundancy. It's JUST about capacity and speed, striping the data across several drives on several controllers, so it comes at you faster when you read it and gets shoved out faster when you write it. RAID 0 doesn't even have a parity disk to allow you to recover from failure of one drive or loss of one sector.

That means the failure rate is WORSE than that of an individual disk. If any of the combined disks fails, the total array fails.

(Of course it's still worse if a software bug injects additional failures. B-b But don't assume, because "there's a RAID 0 corruption bug", that there is ANY problem with the similarly-named, but utterly distinct, higher-level RAID configurations which are directed toward reliability, rather than ONLY raw speed and capacity.)

Can you imagine the dystopian dictatorship where trekkies come to power? All of the halls of power full of people walking around in spandex and fake ears and brow ridges, the fed directed to work toward the absolution of currency, the military directed to accelerate development of phasers and for all recruits to undergo "Kobayashi Maru" training.... NASA would finally get their proposed $18,5 billion dollar annual budget passed - except that the bill would have the word "annual" crossed out and the word "monthly" written in its place. National anti-bullying legislation would be passed, probably with a name like Spock's Law. And of course they'd insist on referring to the UN as the United Federation of Planets.

This!

Why not a simple odometer reading? They come up with some algorithm that computes statistically what percentage of odometer usage translates into Oregon road usage... and then just apply that. No privacy concerns. You drive further... you're taxed more. Simple.

It happens I could use remote USB port functionality.

(Right now I want to run, on my laptop, a device that requires a Windows driver and Windows-only software. I have remote access to a Windows platform with the software and driver installed. If I could export a laptop USB port to the Windows machine, it would solve my problem.)

So NetUSB is vulnerable. Is there an open source replacement for it? (Doesn't need to be interworking if there are both a Linux port server and a Windows client-pseudodriver available.)

I skimmed the start of the paper. If I have this right:

  - Essentially all the currently-deployed web servers and modern browsers have the new, much better, encryption.
  - Many current web servers and modern browsers support talking to legacy counterparts that only have the older, "export-grade", crypto, which this attack breaks handily.
  - Such a server/browser pair can be convinced, by a man-in-the-middle who can modify traffic (or perhaps an eavesdropper-in-the-middle who can also inject forged packets) to agree to use the broken crypto - each being fooled into thinking the broken legacy method is the best that's available.
  - When this happens, the browser doesn't mention it - and indicates the connection is secure.

Then they go on to comment that the characteristics of the NSA programs leaked by Snowden look like the NSA already had the paper's crack, or an equivalent, and have been using it regularly for years.

But, with a browser and a web server capable of better encryption technologies, forcing them down to export-grade LEAKS INFORMATION TO THEM that they're being monitored.

So IMHO, rather than JUST disabling the weak crypto, a nice browser feature would be the option for it to pretend it is unpatched and fooled, but put up a BIG, OBVIOUS, indication (like a watermark overlay) that the attack is happening (or it connected to an ancient, vulnerable, server):
  - If only a handful of web sites trip the alarm, either they're using obsolete servers that need upgrading, or their traffic is being monitored by NSA or other spooks.
  - If essentially ALL web sites trip the alarm, the browser user is being monitored by the NSA or other spooks.

The "tap detector" of fictional spy adventures becomes real, at least against this attack.

With this feature, a user under surveillance - by his country's spooks or internal security apparatus, other countries' spooks, identity thieves, corporate espionage operations, or what-have-you, could know he's being monitored, keep quiet about it, lie low for a while and/or find other channels for communication, appear to be squeaky-clean, and waste the tapper's time and resources for months.

Meanwhile, the NSA, or any other spy operation with this capability, would risk exposure to the surveilled time it uses it. A "silent alarm" when this capability is used could do more to rein in improper general surveillance than any amount of legislation and court decisions.

With open source browsers it should be possible to write a plugin to do this. So we need not wait for the browser maintainers to "fix the problem", and government interference with browser providers will fail. This can be done by ANYBODY with the tech savvy to build such a plugin. (Then, if they distribute it, we get into another spy-vs-spy game of "is this plugin really that function, or a sucker trap that does tapping while it purports to detect tapping?" Oops! The source is open...)

Good thought. I really like having a wifi remote for my Roku. Line of sight stops being an issue.

The crux, as I see it, is that an add-on box is clunky compared to a TV. It's a thing that has to be installed. That's not vastly hard, but it's a power cord and a data cable, and it just kinda hangs off of your TV. That's not elegant. (Note: I don't have an Apple TV, but I don't get the impression that they have any better solution than my Roku does.)

They can certainly make the software better, but I can see why they would want to sell you an entire television to make the entire user experience just right. It's kinda too bad that it just doesn't add enough value to a TV to make it worth the trouble. Apple has always succeeded best when they could make their solutions elegant, in ways that seem obvious yet nobody had done them until Apple did.

I do like your idea for improving the iPod, though perhaps an audio indicator ("You have ten minutes of play time remaining") would be easier, since it's just a software update. I suspect that they won't be refreshing that line very often. I, for one, have switched to using my phone, finally putting my much-beloved fourth-generation Nano to bed. (It was the last one before it became an iOS device, which meant that it was perfectly optimized for playing music and nothing else. But my phone does a better job, especially since it has wi-fi built in, and I am going to be carrying it around anyway.)

Licensed, legitimate, crab companies also use the high barrier of entry in many places to keep out competitors in order to artificially inflate prices. They lobby like crazy to make sure that things stay the way they have been.

I think it's interesting that people take this stance against Uber. I thought "we" usually like the upstart guys that are overthrowing established monopolies...

Don't cry for the cab companies...

The summary makes it sound like all of the bills are AGAINST ride sharing... but that's not the case. For instance, in Massachusetts(which is highlighted in the summary) Uber is actively campaigning FOR the regulation bill.

Why?

Because the bill states once and for all that ride sharing is a legal activity. Yes, it puts some protections in place: but not much beyond what Uber already provides.

As someone that uses Uber quite a bit (2-3 times per month) I welcome the new legislation as long as it allows Uber to continue to operate. Regulation is not all bad, as long as it is fair and reasonable.

Oddities in the US political system mean that the only stable governing system is two political parties.

One of those parties is currently ruled by fear. Whatever Fox tells them to fear, they will fear. Even if it makes no logical sense. Members of that party are currently terrified that routine military exercises are a pretext for the federal government conquering Texas. Never mind that Texas is already conquered and subject to the federal government. There's also gems like "Get your government hands out of my Medicare!!". Medicare being the government program to provide health insurance to the elderly.

Much of the medical and pharmaceutical industries paid to generate a great deal of fear over government-backed healthcare. So members of that party are utterly against it. Despite the fact that the massively convoluted system created to keep those entities in business while providing more health insurance is actually working.

ISPs have not yet paid to generate a great deal of fear over government-provided Internet service.

That's a riot. Thanks for that.

It's the corporate cash, rather than the consumers. A lot of it is sitting in the Fed itself. Bank reserves with the Fed have skyrocketed:
https://research.stlouisfed.or...

They've been sitting at about 3 trillion dollars. They could invest that in new products, but they don't seem to think that the consumers have the money to make that investment worthwhile. I think they're wrong. Consumers are starting to borrow again:

https://research.stlouisfed.or...

after a substantial blip during the crisis itself.

So I think (and I believe you agree with me) that this is really caused by the investor class failing to invest. That's an odd economic choice, since that kind of stagnation should mean that inflation gradually eats their nest egg. They've managed to keep inflation low. The Fed is offering free money, and instead they're putting their cash into the bank.

A lot of economists would say that it's time for even more forcible inflationary measures, since the current low rates only barely seem to be staving off deflation. The Fed hasn't been willing to go that far (they'd rather that the legislature do it if the investors won't), but they have repeatedly refused to raise interest rates. That's the action they take when they're afraid of inflation; it's the punch bowl they take away when the party gets going. And this party is stuck; it's not completely moribund but it's getting mediocre small talk (and many are shut out entirely.)

Actually, only around 20,000 genes, spread over 3 billion base pairs. They knew how many base pairs they were looking for; the fact that it was a mere 20k genes came as a substantial surprise.