I agree on the TV seasons point, but I'd much prefer a full season on one piece of media. Blu-ray works like this in some cases, but only for short seasons, or where the video quality isn't high definition.

For backups, what you really want is the whole backup to fit on one piece of media. Backing up with a dozen blu-ray disks seems pretty lame to me, when I can just pull out a USB3 portable hard drive and run a full backup unattended in less a quarter the time.

I've always wondered why blu-ray left a such bad taste in my mouth. The parent should be modded +5 Informative.

This seems good in theory, however, of late I've found myself just using USB3 hard drives and thumb drives to do the same far more quickly and easily. And since a typical 2.5" hard drive is equivalent to 20+ blu-ray disks, they consume far less space, and it's far easier to manage larger subsets of your collection in bigger bundles.

Sneaker net is also quicker and easier with high density hard drives, as people like to make copies of things they receive, and mounting a hard drive and copying what they want is far simpler than the effort of sorting through multiple disks. Unless of course you're just sending a single file or two, and for that we have tiny reusable thumb drives (or Dropbox and the like for those that only seem to exist online).

There might be a niche market for people that create endless videos with their cameras, and like to distribute them to multiple friends at low cost. But, that is equivalent to how blu-ray is being used now. It will also dwindle with the current trend as people with tablets/netbooks/etc stare at you strangely as you try to give them the disk, and ask you if you'd kindly send them a Dropbox link.

It is unlikely that the controller is able to set multiple cross signal lights to green at the same time. I did some work on one these systems about 20 years ago, and it contained circuitry (and physical switches to set the system) to lock out that kind of thing from happening (due to either a bug in the code, a failed code update, or in this case a hack). I assume newer units would have a small supervisory microcontroller to detect other anomalies, but either way if something went wrong the circuitry forced all light stacks to flash orange.

This doesn't mean there aren't safety critical systems out there that have been designed by cowboy or non-embedded coders (like the current crop of ATMs that are far slower and unresponsive than previous models and probably have never felt the touch of an embedded systems expert).

But, it is unlikely that a hack can cause accidents, beyond frustrating motorists by setting the lights red, or forcing one set continuously green.

The one thing that completely broke continuity with three of those timeline events was because they cast a 10 year old kid as Anakin. Lucas then went and made up some bullshit that Anakin made C3PO to establish the kid as some kind of boy genius. A droid that for some reason was identical to every other factory made protocol droid out there.

If he'd have just cast Anakin with an actor in their twenties, and kept C3PO and R2D2 as droid friends from an unknown era of the Naboo palace we wouldn't have had to put up with:

1. Annoying kid / boy genius messiah
2. Teen angst
3. Ridiculous teen romance with an older woman
4. More teen angst
5. Noooooooooo

So I guess it's out of the question to get her to write the new scripts?

Even though the light/brightness is F/2, the depth of field scales with the size of the sensor (which is listed as 1"). So compared to a full frame camera, this device has a crop factor of around 2.5. That means the F/2 is equivalent to a 35mm full frame camera with a maximum aperture size of F/5.

So having a super narrow depth of field with good background defocus will require a larger distance between the object and the background, and a smaller distance between the camera and the object. This'll be ok for macro photography with narrow depth of field, or standard photography where medium field depths are desired.

Smaller sensors also have smaller collection areas and therefore smaller pixels per unit area, so the light collected versus the noise (signal to noise) isn't as good as a larger sensor.

This camera will be good for complex scenes in reasonable light that require refocusing after the fact. Possibly sports photography where a different set of players can be brought into crystal clear focus.

And of course the charger had to change as those new devices which much bigger batteries needed a much gruntier supply to charge them in a reasonable amount of time. At least Apple's chargers are backwards compatible, so you can charge all your old devices with the latest charger as long as you keep your old cables.

Microcode is still patchable if a problem is found, which puts it in the same boat as the BIOS / OS kernel / etc, which albeit difficult to inspect, can still be inspected and loaded back to a known state.

Whereas a hardware backdoor cannot be inspected by standard means, and may be more insidious such as a 'leaky' crypto engine. It's possible that a direct hardware exploit requires a microcode 'helper', but that is only one protection level removed from requiring a machine code helper.

Microcode is simply a lower level machine code than the x86 machine code generated by the assemblers/compilers.

The problem with the obvious kind of hardware backdoor in the CPU is that it needs to interact with an unknown and otherwise complex operating system. And that is extremely difficult to do without associated exploit software running on the same system.

The real problematic standalone hardware 'backdoors' would be things like predictable patterns from a hardware random number generator, secret ways to override memory protection, a way to expose the private/secret keys in crypto hardware, etc.

Those more subtle 'backdoors' could then be further exploited by user land code for nefarious purposes. User land code that would have otherwise posed no danger to the system or the user.

That being said, if a 'hole' like that is discovered, it may be able to be partially worked around by trying to detect the use of the trigger patterns required to activate it, or by modifying the driver/system code that rely on those features.

It doesn't look like they went out of their way to hide it as such. But, they did try to change its operating mode from remotely exploitable at any time by anyone, to only usable by someone on the local ethernet segment. Unfortunately, as most here are aware, that kind of 'fix' isn't a solid solution, and still remains exploitable.

Doesn't really matter, as the EULA can't effectively waive legal responsibility/requirements. A company can try to use an EULA to overtly say or infer that you don't have a particular right, but it can never absolve itself of observing that right.

The problem with Tom Andersons, is that they're like rabbits and tend to multiply in your collection.

You could space the curved magnets around the periphery so they could be loosened by twisting. You could include a gentle depression on the perimeter to allow a release button on the lens to make that twist easier to perform when unlocked and much harder when locked. The lens would probably also need an outer weather seal that doubled as a soften auto-retractable snap buffer, so bringing the lens close wouldn't just snap on and shatter anything on either part. Also twisting on/off should partially clean the surface to avoid excessive build up from clogging the interface. It would be a good idea to include a dummy cover for when there is no lens attached to avoid crap getting into the sensor or onto the ring contact points.

Also note that a good lens attachment needs to pass power and a comms signal to control the aperture hole size, auto-focus motors, possible a remote shutter, and zoom motors if it's a zoom lens. This might be able to be done with an inductive coupling running at a few megahertz, or using a direct magnetic drive of these movements by putting the motor armature in the camera/phone and a second magnet selector to determine which element the motor controls, or maybe a couple of these motors. But, to keep the size down in the camera/phone for people that don't walk around with a lens attached all the time, it would probably be more compact if the contacts where physical connections. This must be done so the twisting action of attaching the lens partially cleans the contacts on insertion.

There are just so many cool an IMO obvious ways of doing this type of thing that it would be fun to work for a company trying to do this.

Come on, 1 week is far too short. How would the lawyers be able to survive without years of ongoing litigation?