The government's newest major computer system is healthcare.gov. What kind of weapon you need to take down major, modern government computer systems ? Apparently, Thursdays are you sufficient to take down healthcare.gov.

Super advanced cyber weapons simply aren't needed. How many programmers who ended up working government jobs even know what a "SQL injection" is, much less how to prevent it? One small sample suggests only 20% of government programmers know what it is, and 10% use parameterized queries, leaving most systems open to trivial attacks.

At least as long as you don't switch to the tablet look of it.

Why would you want to do that?

Is there a new rule that desktops have to look the same as tablets now? Why wasn't I consulted?

I'd guesstimate on average, we log about 50-100 attack attempts from Chinese IPs per server per day. Our sample size is only several thousand customer servers, but that's enough to get a rough idea of what's happening on the internet generally.

There IS cyber war going on, much like the Cold War. It's not on the news every day, but it's happening just as much as Reagan was trying to defeat the USSR. The weapons aren't that advanced most of the time simply because they don't need to be - the targets very cooperatively run PHP scripts written by kids with NO security training whatsoever. When your admin interface is open to brute force and SQL injection attacks, advanced weapons aren't needed. The secretary of state and chairman of the senate defense committee have the same unpatched Linksys router at home as any random person. How many high level bureaucrats have VoIP at home? VoIP "protected" by Netgear's firewall?

The Arrow Impossibility theorem only demonstrates that our notions of a "perfect" political system are broken. It does *not* mean its impossible to devise a system of government that is responsive to the desires of the majority.

Sure the Federal government is *involved*, but *how* it is involved surely makes a difference. The Federal Government actually *runs* security at airports. It does not run non-military health care facilities. It doesn't even provide insurance except to its employees and their families and the poor. It's actual participation in health care and health care decisions is quite limited.

The Federal government involvement in health care, broadly speaking, is limited to the following five areas:

(1) Mandates individual coverage for US residents.
(2) Sets minimal standards for what must be covered to meet the mandate.
(3) Subsidizes low income insurance premiums
(4) Provides free alternative insurance for households making less than 133% of the poverty line *in participating states*.
(5) Provides a health care "exchange" on which consumers can shop for insurance *in states that decline to provide this service to their citizens*.

That's it. Obamacare is a private sector based health care scheme -- essentially the same scheme, in fact, developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation for Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole in 1996. There is no way to ensure the bulk of Americans have routine health care with *less* federal involvement than what is outlined above.

Because it's easy to mistake one's personal biases for sound judgment about what is "good".

I won't sit here and defend every design decision in javascript, but it's a lot more sophisticated than meets the eye. I think of it more like Lisp than Java; it encourages (among skilled programmers) a functional programming style, which turns out to be both under-used as a programming paradigm and very nicely fitted to the kind of event-driven tasks people use javascript for.

If you aren't writing higher order functions in javascript (functions that take functions as values or return them as values) you aren't fluent in javascript and aren't qualified to pass judgment on it.

Not once you factor in the cost of shipping in a lot of cases. I'm typically looking for the best price including cost of delivery and the cost difference between Prime and non-Prime is often minimal to non-existent.

What I don't get though is that Amazon provides basically no incentive to use slower shipping methods. I use Prime and there are times when I don't really need the product in a hurry but the cost is the same for 2 day shipping or regular ground. If Amazon would throw me a bone (discount, bonus merch, whatever) I'd be willing to order some things without the 2 day shipping.

The thing is, 99% of the time, I don't care about getting things quickly, but I joined Prime last summer because I needed to buy a bunch of things for a trip to Europe, and I wanted to make sure stuff arrived in time. I initially planned to cancel it after a year, but I've tried the Prime Instant Video, and now I'm debating.

Either way, if it goes over the price of Netflix ($96 annually), I can't imagine choosing to stay with Prime over Netflix. The two-day shipping benefit is only significant if you would ordinarily have paid for two-day shipping. Otherwise, it's just not a very enticing perk unless you know you're going to need to buy a lot of gear in a short period of time. And that doesn't lead to continuous customer revenue. It leads to people buying it for just long enough to get the job done, then dropping it, which raises the cost for Amazon, which means they'll raise the price, and then even fewer people will buy it when it isn't absolutely necessary.

What really matters is the streaming service. And in that regard, Amazon's offering doesn't compare too favorably. Netflix has more content, and fewer encoding problems. There was one episode of Buffy where the video was jerky on every device I own, and I've watched a few TV shows where Amazon incorrectly encoded 16:9 content as letterboxed 4:3 content, so I get four black bars on my TV. That was excusable ten years ago. Now, it's just negligent.

And the Netflix iOS app actually works over cellular connections, unlike Prime, which deliberately refuses to work. That means if I were using Netflix, I could watch stuff on my phone while away from home as part of my unlimited data package. With Amazon, I have use my laptop, where I have a tethering data limit of about three hours of video.

So I've been debating whether to continue Prime even at $79 or jump to Netflix for only a few dollars more. Raise the price to $119, and they'll make my decision a lot easier.

It does to some extent but there are limits. It cannot go below the variable cost of delivering the product. In reality you can only amortize the fixed costs down so much as well since volume is never infinite.

And once we've done in "platform", we can start the campaign against "system". By the time we're done engineers will only be able to talk about software using mime.

I've noticed a tendency recently of adjectives being pared down to adjectival nouns. At first it was just Republican politicians talking about the the "Democrat Party", but it seems to have spread all over the place. I was at truck stop last year which boasted "artisan egg breakfast sandwiches"; my reaction was that I'd rather take the artisan egg home and see what hatched out.

Err... Humans can't have aspirin anymore? Granted it's become less popular for pain relief now that acetaminophen and ibuprofen are available, but plenty of people are taking baby aspirin regularly for heart attack and stroke prevention.

I've seen different maps define it differently, but most maps of Reykjanes include all the way up to Mosfellsbær (to go any further is to be on Kjalarnes). But then again, when most people want to talk about closer to Reykjavík they talk about either Reykjavík or Höfuðborgarsvæði... so I'm not sure if technically it's part. Either way, it's close. There are known magma chambers that are considered a threat to Reykjavík if they went off.

These eruptions aren't little point effects. As the fact that they've poured out hundreds of square kilometers of lava fields should be pointed out. ;) Hafnarfjörður and parts of Reykjavík are on top of relatively young lava fields. Hraunbær (Lava Town) is just to my south. And thats just about flooding with lava, let alone ash and gas consequences. So yeah, it's a serious matter - it's just one unlikely to be affected for the worse by drilling.

It was actually just Cameron being his usual thick-as-shit self. He requested that the drives be destroyed personally, apparently not realizing or understanding how little effect it would have. In fact it most likely had the opposite effect, ensuring that more material and this kind of negative publicity was put out. He really is a dumb fuck sometimes.

He said black powder. Black powder is potassium NITRATE aka kno3.
A little charcoal, a lot of potassium nitrate, and a pinch of sulfur.