Who said anything about breaking it?
I am, now. As this article makes clear, even the expert drivers of the Mars Rover are afraid of breaking it. If some idiot sends control signals with barely a clue what they do, nothing good will happen.
On the other hand, "just being able to tap into the live video feed" as you said in a later comment seems harmless enough. If all you want to do is listen to the transmission, have fun.
Even if a hash was O(1) and took one clock-cycle no matter the password length, a 14+ char password will be safe for a very very long time. If you had EVERY computer in the world working on colliding your hash, to find your password, it would take decades even if they're lucky and found a way to make 500ghz graphite chips.
If you actually pick a totally random password of that length using an alphabet of (26 alphabetic + 10 numeric + 11 punctuation keys) * 2 characters/key (shift) + 1 space character = 95 practical characters, and the hash is >= 92 bits or better yet >= 184 bits so there are relatively few collisions in that search space, then that appears roughly correct. But very few people do that; the passwords are too painful to type. Password crackers work by checking a much smaller search space of likely passwords. That combinatoric implosion makes the search practical without having 10+ million of these magic 500-billion-hashes-per-second chips available.
No. The hard disk, memory, and any other parts accessible through access panels in the bottom of the unit are user-serviceable and swapping them out does not void the warranty of any laptop that I've ever heard of. Maybe an Apple machine, but certainly not a Thinkpad.
Not Apple either. I use third-party RAM and disks with Apple laptops so I've checked on this. According to this support article, they suggest removing third-party equipment as a diagnostic step, and they may charge you a service fee if you ask them for help and the third-party equipment was at fault...all seems reasonable. Nothing about permanently voiding the warranty.
IMHO neither doing anything to the software nor swapping out these sorts of components (as long as you swap them back in prior to RMA) should void your warranty, and other than whoever handled this particular RMA, I haven't heard differently.
TFA has an update saying that the purchase has been refunded, so it sounds like posting to Consumerist is a successful strategy for dealing with these kinds of problems. It's cheaper than getting a hard drive specifically to avoid this, it's better for the community as a whole (as it ensures manufacturers/retailers are publicly reminded when necessary that it's not acceptable to be Linux-hostile), and on average it's less work, although occasionally you might lose the reverse lottery. But there shouldn't be anything stopping you from using the hard drive swapping approach if you prefer it.
If by any chance a Netgear developer reads this, see freshly-filed support case 18723430...
Today I switched my Netgear WNDR3800's Advanced/IPv6 setting to "Auto Config" (as opposed to "Auto Detect", which uses 6to4...ugh) and it (somewhat oddly) doesn't show a WAN IP but does show a LAN IP of 2601:9:yadda:yadda:yadda/64. Seems to actually work
It looks like picking "DHCP" also works...sort of. There's the important caveat that OS X apparently doesn't support DHCPv6. If set my "Internet Connection type" to "DHCP", the laptop I'm typing on doesn't get an IPv6 address with the "LAN Setup" set to either choice, "Use DHCP Server" (unsurprising) or "Auto Config" (which maybe requires the upstream to be using "Auto Config" as well? that smells like a bug in my router's firmware rather than anything more fundamental). So WAN Auto Config / LAN Auto Config is the way to go for me, for now.
I think ipv6 is available across much (maybe most or all) of the Comcast network, but will only be usable with compatible clients with ipv6 DHCP support (and specifically DHCP6-PD for routers.)
More or less. The Comcast blog says "To meet this goal, we launched and enabled IPv6 in over one-third of our broadband network
From what I saw on some Comcast page recently (which I can't find again, sorry), there's no prefix delegation yet, although they claim it's coming.
FWIW, I seem to be in the 1/3rd. Today I switched my Netgear WNDR3800's Advanced/IPv6 setting to "Auto Config" (as opposed to "Auto Detect", which uses 6to4...ugh) and it (somewhat oddly) doesn't show a WAN IP but does show a LAN IP of 2601:9:yadda:yadda:yadda/64. Seems to actually work, and once I disconnected my Mac from the wireless network and reconnected, it had an IPv6 address as well in the same subnet. "ping6 www.google.com" works with round trip times around 20 ms, and Chrome actually uses IPv6 - www.comcast6.net says my IPv6 address at the top of the page where it used to say my IPv4 address.
OK, what should a politician do in a case where science has not reached a consensus? Going one way or the other is making a scientific judgment.
If you don't want to be a scientist but need to make a decision, you should generally go with what the vast majority of scientists believe, in this case that anthropogenic climate change is real. You should first accept there's some possibility you'll be wrong and do a bit of of cost/benefit analysis:
I don't know what $X is or what else we'd do with that money, but at first glance it seems pretty clear to me that politicians should be acting as if this is real.
No, in science, you modify your model and conclusions based on changing evidence. The difference here is that you're holding your conclusion constant and changing the reason you claim it's true every time your reason is found to be untrue.
In science, you form a new falsifiable hypothesis after your previous one was falsified. You don't just change your answer to a binary question like "is climate change real and anthropogenic?" and never question it again. If there's an idea that you don't believe, you keep probing at it until you're satisfied. Otherwise scientific thought would be basically dead. Imagine if I said "I have a perpetual motion machine!" and you said "are you sure it's gaining energy?" and we determined that it was...and you said "well, okay, then, perpetual machine proven", without questioning if that energy is coming in from an outside source...that would certainly be unscientific. So what makes this different? That you believe it? That's no good. Science is about independent thought, not about agreeing with blueg3 all the time.
Call these people stubborn, call them consistently wrong, call them outvoted and on the fringe of modern science, call them motivated by grants from industries that want to deny this, whatever, but I don't think it's right to say they are completely unscientific as long as they are still able to form new potentially useful hypotheses. Just keep disproving the hypotheses and sooner or later they'll go away, as has been true in many scientific debates in the past.
No they're not honest scientific dissenters. The evidence is that they shift from one unsupported hypothesis to another as their ideas are disproven by data and careful analysis.
That's how you know they're scientists. If they were religious people, they'd form hypotheses that are not actually falsifiable or they would persist in believing them after they were falsified.
Of course, ideally they'd perform the experiments to test their own hypotheses, but not doing so makes means they are (at best) otherwise occupied/having trouble getting grants or (at worst) lazy, not unscientific.
Stock compensation will require an immediate tax payment ONLY if it is without conditions. If, for example, the company granting the stock to you puts a two year period in which you must maintain employment before you can sell the stock then you can avoid immediate payment of taxes and it gives you time to take advantage of some benefits (though it gets pretty hairy from that point trying to claim value reductions or reduced value for the limitation of liquidity).
You lost me. I get paid in part like this - stock units that vest after so much time has passed provided I still work there. The stock units don't all make it to my brokerage account at vesting time; some disappear to pay the taxes just like when I'm paid in cash. Matching income and withholdings show up on my W2. Maybe there's something trickier (/more sleazy) I or my employer could be doing, but I don't think what you're saying is always true. Ehh, maybe I will consult a CPA next time as you suggest, just to see...
In response to your other comment about being able to take a like amount of cash and buy the stock at fair-market value to achieve the same tax rate that is not true because you would expose yourself to double taxation
... If you received a million dollars in cash you would end up paying your income taxes on that amount and then capital gains taxes on the stock as well.
How is that double taxation? The initial investment and the gains are different money. Each dollar is only taxed once, right?
One of the real brilliant things these billionaires do is, after covering basic taxes, not sell the stock at all. If you don't sell it you avoid tax consequences. Larry Ellison "borrowed" against the value of his stock to buy his giant yacht and doesn't pay a dime in taxes. If he keeps them for his whole life he can pass them to his heirs and the income tax will never have been paid (heirs only pay a tax on appreciation of value since the death of the owner, often a fraction of the true value of the stock).
Brilliant, maybe; also disgraceful. There's little point in blaming Larry Ellison for trying this - he is what he is, and that's certainly not someone who will change his behavior in response to my opinion of him - but I wish we didn't allow it. I'd like to see Congress make a real effort to stop "coddling the super-rich", to use Warren Buffett's phrase. In this case, why do heirs not inherit his "cost basis"?
Taxed at an extraordinarily low rate...
Yes and no.
My understanding is that if an employer gives you stock outright as part of your compensation, you must pay federal earned income tax on the fair-market value of the stock as of when they gave it to you, which would be 35% for the last dollar earned by someone in the top tax bracket. You also pay federal capital gains tax on any increase in price since then, up to 35% if you held the stock less than a year, likely 15% if you held it more than a year. (It could be 0% if more than a year and your income is less than a certain amount, but if so you probably don't have any stock anyway.)
You might say the 15% is an extraordinary low rate, but then again, if you were just paid a like amount of cash, you could have used it to buy the stock at its fair-market value and achieved the same overall tax rate anyway. The real trick is to (1) have enough spare money that you don't need this income for at least a year, possibly a lot longer depending on market conditions, and to (2) know what stocks will gain so dramatically that your initial investment seems insignificant. If you can do those things on most of your income, the low tax rate is just the icing on the extraordinarily large cake you can easily afford to have and eat, too...
Of course there are some loopholes, but I think they're only practical for "job-creators" like Mitt Romney, not regular folk like you and me. (And for the record, some of my income was considered long-term capital gains, but apparently not nearly as much as Romney's; my tax rate was much higher.)
Mod parent up. There is no way this doesn't come out hung jury. It just takes one white supremacist to find his way onto that jury.
The facts of the case as I understand them are that Martin was walking along, Zimmerman thought Martin was up to no good, called 911, pursued Martin against the 911 operator's advice with a gun, and stupidly created a situation where one person attacked the other (conflicting reports on who attacked who), and felt he had to use his gun. Does that match your understanding / what you expect an honest jury to find?
Assuming so, I think the jury will just say he's not guilty of second-degree murder. (Presumably the hypothetical white supremacist would go along with that.) They would have been a lot more likely to find him guilty of voluntary manslaughter due to "imperfect self-defense":
Imperfect self-defense: Allowed only in a limited number of jurisdictions in the United States, self-defense is a complete defense to murder.[clarification needed (see talk page)] However, a person who acted in self defense with an honest but unreasonable belief that deadly force was necessary to do so could still be convicted of voluntary manslaughter or deliberate homicide committed without criminal malice. Malice is found if a person killed intentionally and without legal excuse or mitigation.
"An honest but unreasonable belief that deadly force was necessary" is as good a description of the situation as any. It seems like the prosecutor was overcorrecting the lack of action until now and overreached in going for second-degree murder instead of voluntary manslaughter.
The statement about mean IQ is somewhat accurate. However, there are subtle issues going on here.
... So in this single issue he is hitting on a potentially true statement, but even that statement is somewhat misguided.
You're way too generous. The statement may be true, but in context it was more than misguided. It was racist. Compare these statements:
I don't believe in facts we shouldn't be allowed to say, but I do believe that an unbiased, intellectually honest person would never present those facts in the way this guy did.
The message, if the USA Legal System manages to delivery it, will be : "We will catch you, no matter how much time it takes."
We will catch you and then do what?
Even if IBM gets amount they are seeking, $1.3B is only 0.60% of MSFT's market cap today. Microsoft's business has been climbing the exponential-like part of the logistic curve for 17 years since this happened; their market cap grew from $23.06B on 1 Jan 1994 to $216.78B now. Dollar figures that were meaningful then are just not meaningful now. By pushing the damages out 18 years, Microsoft got a giant interest-free loan from the government which they were able to invest into their illegal, profitable, and fast-growing business.
We need to be able to deter corporate actions contrary to the common interest (ones which are anticompetitive, risky to the economy at large, environmentally damaging, harmful to consumers, or exploitative of employees). If not through our legal system, then how will we accomplish this? If through our legal system, it needs to be quick or at the very least have damages structured in a way to have much more teeth years later. In particular, if the damages were structured as "$XB or $XB*(market cap when paid)/(market cap when alleged violation took place), whichever is greater", the second half of the 'or' would kick in and make the damages nearly 10X greater. That would be 5.6% of MSFT's market capitalization (or $12.2B). I'm not sure that'd be enough to act as a real deterrent, but it'd be much closer anyway.
If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
