People need to get over this notion that next year a car will drive itself and you'll sit in the back with a Martini and the paper. That probably wont happen in our lifetimes

It'll happen during the next decade. Bet against Dr. Moore at your own peril.

(granted, the government will lag 20 years behind the technology, so we'll still have drunk drivers killing people when the autopilots would have been safer)

gosh, it'd be rather un-aerodynamic without the nose-cone. I rather suspect they'll wait to deorbit until the timing is right for the desired landing zone.

Unless there's a crazy-orbit launch with no good rendezvous, in which case landing on a barge is still going to be much cheaper than building a new rocket by an order of magnitude. This is good enough reason to proceed with clearing the patent. That and spanking BO's deserving ass.

There was a period in the early 00's when one of the my company's manager would periodically walk through my office door and the first words out of his mouth was "I just read about this patent..." and I'd stop him right there.

"This is going to be one of those things where the extent of the filer's 'invention' was to take something people were doing with LORAN fifty years ago, cross out 'LORAN' and write in 'GPS', isn't it?"

"Well," he'd begin.

"I don't want to hear about it. It's guaranteed to be invalid on the basis of obviousness, but if they get lucky in court and I've actually read or even heard about that specific patent they'll be able to take us to the cleaners."

You'd be amazed at some of the technology patents the patent office grants. Stuff anyone who'd been a practicing engineer for more than a few months would laugh his ass off at if he were patent examiner.

His family has requested that donations be made in his memory to one of the following charities

Everychild Foundation http://everychildfoundation.or...
P.O. Box 1808
Pacific Palisades, CA 90272

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Foundation http://www.copdfoundation.org/
20 F Street NW, Suite 200-A
Washington, D.C. 20001

Beit T’Shuvah Treatment Center http://www.beittshuvah.org/tre...
8831 Venice Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034

Bay-Nimoy Early Childhood Center at Temple Israel of Hollywood http://www.tiohnurseryschool.o...
7300 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90046

Source: http://www.startrek.com/articl...

I am currently an avid Android user.

I used to be an avid Windows Mobile user. WM5/6 were actually, when they existed, the MOST power-user/business-friendly mobile OSes out there. They were more geek-friendly than any of the horrifically locked-down "Linux-based" mobile OSes.

Then Microsoft dropped WP7 on the world - an OS which was unusable for nearly 100% of the core WM5/WM6 user base. At the same time, Android was coming onto the scene, which had everything that WM5/WM6's core user base wanted. MS never recovered, they utterly screwed up. NEVER alienate the majority of your core user base, even if it's trying to reach a "new" audience - especially when the "new" audience you're targeting is already drooling over a competitor (Apple).

How it was initially deployed is known only to its makers, but Stuxnet was designed to enter an isolated facility on a USB drive. Once on the LAN it would propagate to other computers, and potentially to other networks via an infected laptop, which is how it ended upon the Internet.

You can use your imagination as to how they got the USB into the target facility. It might have been as simple as dropping the USB stick in the parking lot of a vendor, but given the resources needed to create the worm itself you can't rule out some kind of black bag job or human asset.

It works for bombs and tanks, but not for computer networks and communications. It might have even worked in the time of telegraphs and snail mail letters. But for encryption, it doesn't work. A cipher is either weak, or strong. You can compromise a foreign postal system without affecting the security of your own, but you can't secretly build a backdoor into an encryption algorithm that works only for you.

Now you're trying to reverse the chain of causality just to make a cute finishing sentence. :-)

I really don't see that as a the most vulnerable point. Not by a long shot. Tapping a digital fiber link wouldn't be like US submarines tapping Soviet analog telephone cables. The data on the link can be encrypted and authenticated at either end such that it's not really practical to modify or impersonate without the kind of assets in the organization that would make an inside job a lot simpler.

The real problem is human factors. Air-gapping sensitive systems is a sound idea in principle but in practice it often fails because it's too cumbersome for users who then undermine the system. And Stuxnet showed that it's possible for a sufficiently advanced opponent to target systems of the far side of an air gap.

So the problem is with the notion that separate parallel systems separated from the outside world are a "simple" solution. They're a potential solution, but if you want to have confidence in that solution there's a lot of work analyzing and policing the behavior of the people who use, maintain, and produce the equipment.

The thing that stood out for me re-reading Mistress recently was that Heinlein was an utter troglodyte about gender roles. He was progressive for his time, but his treatment of women really stands out, and not in a good way, when reading his books with a modern sensibility.

Mine can't even start a swap partition if it's in fstab, if it happens to be an LVM volume. So glad distros decided it was production ready.

I'd argue it's still a useful sense, no matter how desperately we try to rationalize it away.

While certainly the danger from someone you know isn't zero, strangers are many, many times more dangerous in many contexts.

Just because we've industrialized the proximity of strangers with our cities, doesn't change the simple fact that strangers are more risky than people you know. And while skin-color doesn't equate to "someone I know", even a 5% benefit is likely evolutionarily impactful.

What's curious is that these studies also tend to show that in the US adult black-skinned individuals LIKEWISE act preferentially to white-skinned individuals*, suggesting that it's not just identificatory friend-or-foe at work, but likely learned behavior from experience.
*I'd be interested in seeing comparisons of the results from adults vs pre-socialized children, but I've never seen them presented in a controlled enough fashion to say they're comparable.

Bad historians have done this forever, carefully culling information to fit the predetermined narrative that they're trying to present. Don't get me wrong, sometimes this can be done in a way that makes history more entertaining & easier to understand as long as it's highlighted as what it is, but the tenor of modern (particularly American, particularly ) teaching of history is very much a linear, determinate thing: this happened, so then THIS happened, which logically led to that.

HIstory - even recent history - *must* be understood in-context. Frankly, that's what makes GOOD study of history a really hard thing. Monday-morning quarterbacking happens whether the event was last night or 1000 years ago. The people of, for example, Dark Ages Europe are practically aliens from another planet, in terms of how they saw the world; to interpret their choices (or worse, to render moral judgement on their actions) solely through the postmodern view of 2015 would be ludicrous, yet it happens constantly.

"History is written by the winners" has always been true; the internet has simply made it a sport everyone can enjoy. It's no longer academic historians fighting closeted battles over esoteric issues within their field, it's the subject of daily conversation.

Further, with the astonishingly short memory/attention span of the modern American electorate, tendentious people are able to get away with the constant revisionist presentation of events within recent memory.

Hell, half the political conversations I have, the first effort is simply to establish SOME common basis of accepted facts upon which we can even constructively argue.

Idiocracy is truly approaching.

Oh, but its people *vanished*. Like freaking David Copperfield.

They didn't die off or move or even, gosh, "left". *Poof* - probably beamed up to the Mayan God's mothership for slave labor.