Did you miss the whole plugin debacle going on with Chrome?

You know, the "you need to rewrite your plugin using one of our APIs" thing?

Don't even get me started about NaCl and the brillant idea to allow any C/C++ system calls except a few that are blacklisted. Because what could possibly go wrong with that idea?

A large impact in a shallow ocean area might well in every human dying within a decade. Most immediately. It would also first steam clean the planet, and then set an ice age in motion.

Now I'll grant that this is unlikely in any century, less likely by far, in fact, than that we'll do the same thing to ourselves via war or some other means. (War seems the most likely, but it's not the only contender. An escape from a biological warfare lab is a possibility. I'm not counting natural evolution as "doing it to ourselves", but it's happened to other species. In fact it is currently happening to a large number of amphibian species, some of which have already gone extinct.)

But I do consider asteroid impacts worth worrying about. Not worth obsessing about, however, as they are a bit down the ladder when it comes to humanity exterminators.

I also question his method of assigning proper degree of concern. And the reliability of his assertions. E.g. he claims that only one person has ever been hit by a meteor, but there's no evidence that that's true. He should have said only one person is known to have been hit by a meteor. But how many people in remote areas of the planet could have been hit and the reason for death, or even the fact of death, not officially acknowledged? And clearly nobody could cite an instance before around 1700, as even the existence of meteors was denied. So you need to ask what is the probability of someone being hit by a meteor and the fact being officially recognized. This is a quite different question. He performs the same type of factual manipulation (less obviously) in a few other places.

That said, it's not a major concern while other concerns rate higher. But a species ending event is worthy of particular concern over and above the concern over the individual lives lost, as you also need to consider the future lost, and not just a few personal futures, but all human futures.

Who decided? Who decided that corporations were legal persons? It sure wasn't the voters.

It's not the country, It's the drooling morons that we have running the country.

Greed. Pure Greed.

OTOH, using "roll your own crypto" is nortorious for individualized holes and weaknesses. It does tend to mean that the "one size fits all" means of breaking the code won't work, however. Or at least may well not work.

That said, if you have good enough communication to share custom crypto programs, you may be better off using a one-time pad....as that can't even theoretically be broken. But it does require a good source of random numbers (e.g. amplified triode vacum tube with no input so you're just amplifying noise). Such things are reasonably easy to build, but for some reason they aren't normal computer accessories. (Video cams watching a flickering flame are another good source.)

But custom crypto is hard to do correctly. AND it requires good communications to standardize the programs. So if you have the communication, a one time pad is better.

Yep, a few years ago I used to send a LOT of CDR's and DVDR's to friends in Canada I would trade for Cuban Cigars.

I say we take the Politicians money first. That would be the ultimate in honest.

Or, simply configure the pumps to have different IP addresses. Does his boss pour gasoline on him and set him on fire if he changes their IP addresses?

Which is why it should be tied to the car value.

Driving a Bugatti Veyron? you pay $22.50 per mile for the tax.
Driving a 1995 Civic? $0.05 per mile.

Very simple to do, which means the government will completely fuck it up.

I am all for fair compensation, but am I truly frightened when U.S. workers make more in one hour than Mexican workers make in a day.

If jobs are to remain, our workforce must be far more productive than our global competition. We should be demanding more worker education, which would likely impact wages far more than legislative mandate. Simply making the workforce more expensive with no realistic improvements will only enlarge the class of the permanent unemployed.

"Shipping costs would also be prohibitive."

no it's not. jam them in as tight as possible into a $5.95 flat rate box.

Windows has used something called Terminal Services to do remote connections for the last 20 years or so.

They renamed it "Remote Desktop Services" at some point, but if you put a pig in a dress, it's still a pig.

I'm not sure about the OP, but on my work Windows 7 computer, I have no less than 13 versions of Microsoft's C++ libraries installed.

And that's with the versions from Visual Studio 2013 not being listed in Programs and Features for whatever reason. I know they're installed as one of the programs I needed to compile requires them because they're the first versions that have C++11 support.

The point is that each time Microsoft releases a new version, the old versions also stick around. I have 4 x86 and 2 x64 versions of the Visual C++ 2008 / 9.0.x libraries for example.

It's worse than that. The entire basis of the "infinite monkeys theorum" is that given enough random chances even highly improbable things occur. So he was not only wrong, he didn't even understand what he was describing. So why should he be believed where he can't be checked?