Comment In 3...2...1... (Score 4, Insightful) 215
... somebody exploits this to write malware that's truly a bitch to reverse-engineer.
... somebody exploits this to write malware that's truly a bitch to reverse-engineer.
Not to defend Ross Ulbricht, but given what's coming to light, does anybody really doubt that HSBC enabled more drug trafficking than a dozen Silk Roads? And that's not even counting things like the arms trade and tax evasion.
Steal ten thousand dollars and you go to jail for decades. Steal ten billion and you get a slap on the wrist and an engraved invitation to the next campaign fundraising dinner.
The juxtaposition of this article with the previous one on hacking cars made me realize: If you can hack into a self-driving car, you could steal it without having to physically break into it.
Why would you bother to steal it, when you can get one any time you want with an app?
Estrogen replacement therapy in women (about the closest equivalent to testosterone therapy in men) was shown to increase the risk of breast cancer.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. People get old, and there is no magic bullet to stop it.
I for one welcome our testosterone-enhanced geriatric libertarian overlords!
It's hard to say we live in a free country when the government can take such drastic measures on a whim.
Why the fuck do whackjob Libertarians insist on turning literally everything into an argument about "freedom"? There is probably no more classically legitimate function of government than to build and maintain the fucking roads. And maintenance includes closing them off when they're unsafe, so morons trying to exercise their "freedom" don't get themselves (or rescue crews) killed.
For fuck's sake.
It just isn't possible to predict this stuff precisely. But you can't put a travel ban in place once the storm has actually started -- it would be too late. You have to do it pre-emptively for it to be effective.
The defining feature of a technological civilization is the capacity to intensively “harvest” energy. But the basic physics of energy, heat and work known as thermodynamics tell us that waste, or what we physicists call entropy, must be generated and dumped back into the environment in the process. Human civilization currently harvests around 100 billion megawatt hours of energy each year and dumps 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the planetary system, which is why the atmosphere is holding more heat and the oceans are acidifying.
All forms of intensive energy-harvesting will have feedbacks, even if some are more powerful than others. A study by scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, found that extracting energy from wind power on a huge scale can cause its own global climate consequences. When it comes to building world-girdling civilizations, there are no planetary free lunches.
By studying these nearby planets, we’ve discovered general rules for both climate and climate change (PDF). These rules, based in physics and chemistry, must apply to any species, anywhere, taking up energy-harvesting and civilization-building in a big way. For example, any species climbing up the technological ladder by harvesting energy through combustion must alter the chemical makeup of its atmosphere to some degree. Combustion always produces chemical byproducts, and those byproducts can’t just disappear
If the encryption is provided as a black-box by the cloud provider, I will never trust it. Besides, it is brain-dead easy to mount an encfs volume on Dropbox. Just give me disk space. I'll encrypt it myself before you ever see it, ok?
An N of 1800 isn't unacceptable, but the thing is studies like this very often use rigged questions designed to produce the answer the authors want.
The N of the study isn't the only thing affecting the statistical significance. A response rate that low tells you that you very likely have hidden selection bias. In this case, the only people responding might well have been blowhard assholes with nothing better to do than respond to random surveys somebody emailed to them.
From TFA:
Only 6.5% of the 28,210 academics who were contacted provided usable data. But the authors say they corrected for that single-digit response rate, which they note is typical for surveys of academics, by weighting the respondents’ scores.
Translation: the study is total bullshit.
This article sums it up pretty well.
Everybody likes to blame the decline of bricks-and-mortar retail on the internet, and that may have some truth to it, but I think that a pretty substantial part of the problem is the influence of douchebag MBAs who have turned companies like Radio Shack, Sears, Office Depot, Best Buy, etc. etc. into dystopian hellholes of despair and horror. Try shopping at Sears in the last few years? The fear and desperation are palpable. I can understand in the current economy why the employees might not quit en masse, but why on earth would any customer voluntarily subject themselves to that?
UNIX is hot. It's more than hot. It's steaming. It's quicksilver lightning with a laserbeam kicker. -- Michael Jay Tucker
