Comment Re:I hate these misleading statements... (Score 3, Insightful) 388
They're removing security clearance from someone who is clearly easily bought. What's the problem?
Comment Re:Entrapment is lazy policing (Score 1) 388
Stupid and greedy is a good definition of someone who should not have security clearance.
Comment Re:I want something simpler. (Score 1) 247
You know that a smartphone with NFC can generally duplicate a RFID token, right?
Comment Re:This is laughable... (Score 0) 455
Yet we still can't answer basic questions about ourselves like 'why do we require sleep?' or 'what is a healthy diet?'. I think it is the height of arrogance to think we can achieve in a few decades what took nature billions of years. Today's computers are intelligent in the same way that a parrot is fluent in language.
Comment Re:Mod parent up. (Score 1) 176
The founder should be a subject matter expert. They should be the one guiding the product to the first release. Unless the product is a compiler it doesn't matter much if they can code. They need to have a vision of what the product will be, not what widgets are required for every function.
Comment Re:The Fix: Buy good Chocolate! (Score 4, Insightful) 323
I'd say chocolate is more like coffee. There are a few snobs who will happily pay incredible prices for what they're told is the best quality, a lot of people who want something that tastes right, and the majority that have never tasted it without drowning it in milk and sugar.
The Downside to Low Gas Prices 554
HughPickens.com writes Pat Garofalo writes in an op-ed in US News & World Report that with the recent drop in oil prices, there's something policymakers can do that will offset at least some of the negative effects of the currently low prices, while also removing a constant thorn in the side of American transportation and infrastructure policy: Raise the gas tax. The current 18.4 cent per gallon gas tax has not been raised since 1993, making it about 11 cents per gallon today, in constant dollars. Plus, as fuel efficiency has gotten better and Americans have started driving less, the tax has naturally raised less revenue anyway. And that's a problem because the tax fills the Highway Trust Fund, which is, not to put too fine a point on it, broke so that in recent years Congress has had to patch it time and time again to fill the gap. According to the Tax Policy Center's Howard Gleckman, if Congress doesn't make a move, "it will fumble one of those rare opportunities when the economic and policy stars align almost perfectly." The increase can be phased in slowly, a few cents per month, perhaps, so that the price of gas doesn't jump overnight. When prices eventually do creep back up thanks to economic factors, hopefully the tax will hardly be noticed.
Consumers are already starting to buy the sort of gas-guzzling vehicles, including Hummers, that had been going out of style as gas prices rose; that's bad for both the environment and consumers, because gas prices are inevitably going to increase again. According to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, taxes last year, even before the current drop in prices, made up 12 percent of the cost of a gallon of gasoline, down from 28 percent in 2000. And compared to other developed countries, US gas taxes are pretty much a joke. While we're at it, an even better idea, as a recent report from the Urban Institute makes clear, would be indexing the gas tax to inflation, so this problem doesn't consistently arise. "The status quo simply isn't sustainable, from an infrastructure or environmental perspective," concludes Garofalo. "So raise the gas tax now; someday down the line, it will look like a brilliant move."
Consumers are already starting to buy the sort of gas-guzzling vehicles, including Hummers, that had been going out of style as gas prices rose; that's bad for both the environment and consumers, because gas prices are inevitably going to increase again. According to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, taxes last year, even before the current drop in prices, made up 12 percent of the cost of a gallon of gasoline, down from 28 percent in 2000. And compared to other developed countries, US gas taxes are pretty much a joke. While we're at it, an even better idea, as a recent report from the Urban Institute makes clear, would be indexing the gas tax to inflation, so this problem doesn't consistently arise. "The status quo simply isn't sustainable, from an infrastructure or environmental perspective," concludes Garofalo. "So raise the gas tax now; someday down the line, it will look like a brilliant move."
Comment Re:No. (Score 2) 206
Video ads are exactly as blockable as image ads. If it's served from the same domain as the content it's hard to block, otherwise it's easy.
Comment Re:Number is irrelevant compared to severity (Score 1) 170
I would guess that they release when it is likely that they themselves are exposed, or when it is possible that the exploit is already used by others, which may increase their chance of being caught. Their ideal exploit to keep secret is probably in the realm of mathematical cryptographic weaknesses, random number generators being weighted, and other things that are really hard to find and hard to determine if your data has been exposed.
Comment Re:Ought to bring down ... (Score 4, Interesting) 151
I worked in IT for a police force for a time. These systems have already been in place for more than 10 years, Ford is just making them an option on the Interceptor rather than requiring an after-market solution. And yes, police do get in shit for going 50kph over the speed limit without their siren on. Not that that stopped some of them.
Comment Re:Because they don't want to. (Score 4, Informative) 265
There are lots of legitimate sites that send emails on behalf of someone not on the domain. A lot of 'email this content to someone' links work that way. Maybe Microsoft understands how email is used in the real world far better than you do.
Killer Whales Caught On Tape Speaking Dolphin 152
sciencehabit writes Two years ago, scientists showed that dolphins imitate the sounds of whales. Now, it seems, whales have returned the favor. Researchers analyzed the vocal repertoires of 10 captive orcas, three of which lived with bottlenose dolphins and the rest with their own kind. Of the 1551 vocalizations these seven latter orcas made, more than 95% were the typical pulsed calls of killer whales. In contrast, the three orcas that had only dolphins as pals busily whistled and emitted dolphinlike click trains and terminal buzzes, the scientists report in the October issue of The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. The findings make orcas one of the few species of animals that, like humans, is capable of vocal learning (video)—a talent considered a key underpinning of language."
Comment Re:So, it has come to this. (Score 1) 742
That's interesting. Here in Ontario it's the opposite, people are almost always let go without cause and given at least the minimum severance required by law so they won't sue. I'm not a business owner, but I think the employment insurance payments are set based only on an employee's pay. Fascinating how much small differences in similar government programs can affect behavior.
Comment Re:Not surprising (Score 3, Interesting) 392
You haven't worked much as a developer. Having built systems used by tens of millions of users I guarantee you that every time Amazon rolls out an update to the store or cloud software there's an ops person biting their nails hoping the system doesn't die. When Google released Gmail they only allowed each user to invite a certain number of friends in order to slowly ramp up the system. Writing any software that is made to have millions of users on day one is really fucking hard.
On top of that steps 2 and 3 require interacting with external systems who may also not be able to handle load well, and probably use a combination of buggy and poorly documented interfaces, and step 5 requires reading a bill so long that the people who voted for it didn't bother to read it. You're grossly trivializing the problem.
On top of that steps 2 and 3 require interacting with external systems who may also not be able to handle load well, and probably use a combination of buggy and poorly documented interfaces, and step 5 requires reading a bill so long that the people who voted for it didn't bother to read it. You're grossly trivializing the problem.
Comment Re:Standards (Score 1) 152
It's worse than that. Large companies will lobby government to make sure that not only government contractors must be certified on the standard, so must anyone who sells to certain regulated industries. Want to sell to airlines or food processors, even if it's non-critical software? Hope you're certified.
