That assumes they're paying their Excel programmers. More likely they don't have any programmers on staff to pay, they subcontract that tedious and non-core-business detail out to an outsourcing firm in India or China or somewhere.

Sounds like a typical bollix-up: the system was a drastic change from the existing one and difficult to use, and has performance problems on top of that, but management still sent it live and turned the old system off without making sure everyone had thorough training. On top of that they didn't have any extra resources on hand to help with the extra workload as people learned the new program on the job and didn't have anybody familiar with the program on hand to help the users. End result: the entirely predictable train wreck occurred. But of course the management responsible for this will never be held accountable for it. Instead the blame will be put on "the software", instead of the management who signed off on the software being acceptable when it manifestly was not.

I'm minded from earlier cases of problems with Chinese-sourced products that the Chinese attitude is very much "It's the buyer's responsibility to make sure they're getting what they ordered and paid for. If they don't check, it's their fault for being so gullible.". Not exactly the attitude I'd be looking for out of a manufacturing center.

This is just an extension of the kind of coerced upgrade Microsoft's attempted before. With Vista and then with Win7, when they didn't take off on their own MS tried to force the issue by making the latest versions of IE and DirectX and such only available for Vista/7, not XP. This is the same thing: "Upgrade to Win8 or take the heat for running a vulnerable OS.". Thing is, it'll backfire the same way the "no latest DirectX on XP" did. Win7's such a large base that developers can't afford to write code that won't run on it, so they won't be able to use the new Win8-only safe functions. Which means applications will remain vulnerable on Win8, just like on Win7 where they also run.

If they're going to track your cel phone, that means they're assuming you have your cel phone on you. So why not send the authorization code to your cel phone and let you give it to the merchant? That way it doesn't matter if the card's stolen, the merchant can't get an auth code if you aren't present with your phone. Or better yet, have an app that'll let you punch in the merchant's ID and transaction number and initiate the payment from your end, rather than having the merchant handle your card? That makes stealing the card pointless, because just having the card isn't enough to let you make a charge.

Unlike with Lavabit, there's no single master key for TrueCrypt that can be gotten from the developers that'll decrypt any TC partition. The best the NSA could get is the ability to create their own signed binary package with their own modifications and have it appear as the official package on TC's site. The problem with that is that the TC code's open so anybody can build from source and compare with the official build and see that they aren't the same. And any compromise of the source (eg. weakening the cryptography) would be instantly revealed in the diffs. The whole NSL thing sounds dodgy, and doesn't quite fit. It seems more likely that, with Win7 and later moving to supporting only GPT disks, the TC developers found they can't add that support and decided to throw in the towel.

In any case, the version of TC from before this change is still available and as far as anyone can tell is still secure. I'd be leery of switching to other encryption software that's known to be less secure until someone comes up with a definitive vulnerability in 0.71.

They say developers will still be able to install locally. My guess is that if you enable developer mode (checkbox in the extensions page) you can still use local extensions like always.

Kaspersky AV installs it's extensions in Chrome, and frankly I a) don't want to depend on the Chrome Store for them since I can only trust them if they come directly from Kaspersky and b) don't want them disabled since I installed Kaspersky specifically for this purpose. I can see refusing to enable local extensions until the user confirms they ought to be there, but Chrome isn't the only source of browser components on my computer.

Ethanol's got a lower energy density (less energy per gallon) than gasoline. That's chemistry and there's no known way around it, to deliver a given amount of power you have to burn more fuel and the more ethanol in the mix the greater the difference. I do see a hit to gas mileage, it's not significant for highway driving (steady high speed) but it really starts to show up in city driving (lots of stop-and-start, lots of time in low gears for power getting the car moving). Ethanol's also got an oxygen atom in it's structure, which the components of gasoline mostly lack. That results in the same problem as with oxygenated gas: it looks like a leaner mix (more air per unit fuel) to the sensors in the engine, which results in the ECU setting the injectors to run richer (inject more fuel per cycle) to get the programmed ideal air/fuel mixture resulting in higher fuel consumption. Oxygenated gas was a great idea for carbureted engines, but it doesn't play well with modern EFI engines and I don't think there's been a model sold in the US since 2000 that isn't EFI.

Before the Navy goes this route, they need to sit down and read the short story collection "I, Robot" by Isaac Asimov. Everyone's familiar with Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics. They seem reasonable. Yet, every story in that collection (and in fact most of Asimov's robots stories) is about how the 3 Laws fail in practice. If you want to try doing a better job of writing ethical rules for robots than Isaac, you'd better be familiar with how to work through all the ways those rules can backfire on you. For instance, that question of the soldier who needs traction to avoid death. If you write the rules to allow the robot to inflict pain to prevent worse, what happens when a unit's ordered into a situation that'll result in a lot of them dying and the robot decides that inflicting the pain of broken legs (which can be repaired) will prevent those deaths? That's entirely in line with the rule you gave it, after all...

I think in these cases it'd be even simpler: the letters don't actually spell out what part of the patent is infringed or how the recipient infringes it. It'd be the equivalent of sending a letter saying the recipient's violated a contract and has to pay penalties or face a lawsuit, without saying what contract, with who, or how the recipient's violated it. The state should be able to deal with that aspect of it without going anywhere near the patent itself, that kind of behavior should constitute bad faith even if the underlying patent's valid.

A lot of trolls do send out letters without any basis, because a lot of people will take a cheap settlement rather than spend the money to fight it, go through discovery and all it's costs, and get the suit dismissed. Take a look at the SCO v. IBM lawsuit, where the SCO executives were fairly explicit about not caring whether their claims would stand up or not because it'd cost IBM more to fight and win than to settle so they figured IBM would just settle. Anti-patent-troll laws aimed at this sort of vague accusation help because it forces trolls to be explicit up front about what they're accusing their victims of which gives their victims more opportunity to knock the accusations down early on before it gets expensive.

The problem is that if you do this, you remove all your slack. If you cut it to just enough people to do the work if they work 100% of the time, the first time someone calls in sick you don't have enough people to do the work. If you get a sudden spike in business because of a holiday or special, you don't have enough people to handle the extra work. If something goes wrong, you don't have anybody to assign to handle it without leaving you short-handed. And that's before you even get to the need for workers to take breaks during the day to avoid burning out.

It's the same problem that's plagued just-in-time delivery of inventory. Sure it saves money to have stock and raw materials delivered just as they're needed. But the moment a storm or a port strike or anything delays deliveries, you're in a world of hurt because you don't have any inventory on hand to tide you over. Sure it's saved you money, but it's made your business much more fragile and the costs of even one shut-down can easily eat up any savings.

Technically they didn't leak private files, because the files weren't ever private. They were public with the URLs not published in an index anywhere, so you had to know the URL to access them. Dropbox and Box simply forgot that those URLs would appear in HTTP Referer headers, exposing them in the logs of any site linked to from within those "private" documents. Security by obscurity... isn't.

A document isn't private unless it requires at least some kind of authentication to access it, eg. setting up HTTP authentication, or using a system like Google Drive uses where you have to be logged in on your Google account to see documents shared with you.

I've had good luck with an Ion cassette-to-USB deck for ripping an old tape collection to digital on the computer. They've got a VHS-to-USB one as well: http://www.ionaudio.com/products/details/vcr-2-pc.

Any standard that's effective and easy to use will not be accepted by the advertising industry, so making the "success" of a standard contingent on that last is nonsense. The DNT standard does serve one useful purpose whether or not it's accepted: it provides a single, easy-to-interpret, unambiguous indication to advertisers as to whether or not the user has consented to tracking. It removes their ability to say "Well, they didn't say otherwise so we assumed they're OK with it.". It does that whether or not they honor it, and it gives us a good talking point when it comes to policy and regulatory discussions: "The DNT standard exists. It's in use. It's easy to interpret on their side. They're the only ones sticking their fingers in their ears going "Na Na Na Can't hear you!".". That makes regulation an easier sell.