Russia would like for us to continue gifting them with cash for 40-year-old missle motors, it's our own government that doesn't want them any longer. For good reason. That did not cause SpaceX to enter the competitive process, they want the U.S. military as a customer. But it probably did make it go faster.

Also, ULA is flying 1960 technology, stuff that Mercury astronauts used, and only recently came up with concept drawings for something new due to competitive pressure from SpaceX. So, I am sure that folks within the Air Force wished for a better vendor but had no choice.

This ends a situation in which two companies that would otherwise have been competitive bidders decided that it would cost them less to be a monopoly, and created their own cartel. Since they were a sole provider, they persuaded the government to pay them a Billion dollars a year simply so that they would retain the capability to manufacture rockets to government requirements.

Yes, there will be at least that Billion in savings and SpaceX so far seems more than competitive with the prices United Launch Alliance was charging. There will be other bidders eventually, as well.

What if it's a smear job on Take Two? At taxpayer expense?

1. This isn't at taxpayer expense. It is at television owners' expense. Only people with televisions have to pay the television license that funds the BBC, not all taxpayers. To conflate the two is disingenuous.

2. So what if it is inaccurate or a smear job. That is part of having a free press: the right to get it wrong (and if you do, be eviscerated and/or humiliated by everyone else). The BBC has a very good record and deservedly good reputation, because despite the occasional imperfection, by and large their reporting and documentaries are first rate.

This lawsuit is an attempt to undermine the free press and apply inappropriate pressure to the editorial process, and frankly, Rockstar and Take Two deserve a severe smackdown for trying to do so, irrespective of the program's content.

Losing data goes with the territory if you're going to use RAID 0.

In particular, RAID 0 combines disks with no redundancy. It's JUST about capacity and speed, striping the data across several drives on several controllers, so it comes at you faster when you read it and gets shoved out faster when you write it. RAID 0 doesn't even have a parity disk to allow you to recover from failure of one drive or loss of one sector.

That means the failure rate is WORSE than that of an individual disk. If any of the combined disks fails, the total array fails.

(Of course it's still worse if a software bug injects additional failures. B-b But don't assume, because "there's a RAID 0 corruption bug", that there is ANY problem with the similarly-named, but utterly distinct, higher-level RAID configurations which are directed toward reliability, rather than ONLY raw speed and capacity.)

In a nutshell, what they're saying is:

"If we can't control your editorial content in reporting about or dramatizing our behavior, we're going to sue you in an attempt to make it not worth your while to report on or dramatize our behavior"

Fuck them. I hope the BBC has the backbone to stick up to this sort of corporate bullying. If the show isn't flattering to Take Two, they can suck it up like anyone else.

It happens I could use remote USB port functionality.

(Right now I want to run, on my laptop, a device that requires a Windows driver and Windows-only software. I have remote access to a Windows platform with the software and driver installed. If I could export a laptop USB port to the Windows machine, it would solve my problem.)

So NetUSB is vulnerable. Is there an open source replacement for it? (Doesn't need to be interworking if there are both a Linux port server and a Windows client-pseudodriver available.)

I agree. It may only take a few seconds to google, but that's a few seconds unnecessarily wasted because the summary poster was too lazy to provide a definition (though to be fair, with as inaccurate as some summaries have been lately, this isn't the worst offense by far).

I skimmed the start of the paper. If I have this right:

  - Essentially all the currently-deployed web servers and modern browsers have the new, much better, encryption.
  - Many current web servers and modern browsers support talking to legacy counterparts that only have the older, "export-grade", crypto, which this attack breaks handily.
  - Such a server/browser pair can be convinced, by a man-in-the-middle who can modify traffic (or perhaps an eavesdropper-in-the-middle who can also inject forged packets) to agree to use the broken crypto - each being fooled into thinking the broken legacy method is the best that's available.
  - When this happens, the browser doesn't mention it - and indicates the connection is secure.

Then they go on to comment that the characteristics of the NSA programs leaked by Snowden look like the NSA already had the paper's crack, or an equivalent, and have been using it regularly for years.

But, with a browser and a web server capable of better encryption technologies, forcing them down to export-grade LEAKS INFORMATION TO THEM that they're being monitored.

So IMHO, rather than JUST disabling the weak crypto, a nice browser feature would be the option for it to pretend it is unpatched and fooled, but put up a BIG, OBVIOUS, indication (like a watermark overlay) that the attack is happening (or it connected to an ancient, vulnerable, server):
  - If only a handful of web sites trip the alarm, either they're using obsolete servers that need upgrading, or their traffic is being monitored by NSA or other spooks.
  - If essentially ALL web sites trip the alarm, the browser user is being monitored by the NSA or other spooks.

The "tap detector" of fictional spy adventures becomes real, at least against this attack.

With this feature, a user under surveillance - by his country's spooks or internal security apparatus, other countries' spooks, identity thieves, corporate espionage operations, or what-have-you, could know he's being monitored, keep quiet about it, lie low for a while and/or find other channels for communication, appear to be squeaky-clean, and waste the tapper's time and resources for months.

Meanwhile, the NSA, or any other spy operation with this capability, would risk exposure to the surveilled time it uses it. A "silent alarm" when this capability is used could do more to rein in improper general surveillance than any amount of legislation and court decisions.

With open source browsers it should be possible to write a plugin to do this. So we need not wait for the browser maintainers to "fix the problem", and government interference with browser providers will fail. This can be done by ANYBODY with the tech savvy to build such a plugin. (Then, if they distribute it, we get into another spy-vs-spy game of "is this plugin really that function, or a sucker trap that does tapping while it purports to detect tapping?" Oops! The source is open...)

And in exchange for higher taxes on driving, they get the privilege of providing Oregon information on how much they travel and WHERE THEY TRAVEL.

It doesn't have to be that way. There could simply be an annual check of your odometer when you get your annual emissions check, with a bill due for the miles driven in the last year * rate per mile, payable in 60 days, with a slightly higher rate if you'd like to pay in installments. No need for GPS tracking at all.

Of course, they'll no doubt push in the direction of GPS tracking because big brother likes his data, but really, we could have per mile taxation without big brother intrusions if we as a society would stand up and demand it.

The inadequately-configurable trackpads, in positions where they detect the palm resting on the laptop (or brushing them) and randomly jump the cursor or highlight whole paragraphs so the next keystroke replaces them, are no help, either.

What do you mean by inadequately configurable? There's usually an option to disable while typing somewhere.

It's there. It's on. Didn't help. Don't know if it's that Ubuntu 14.04 doesn't support it properly on these two machines or if it doesn't do the job I want done.

What I'm looking for is NOT there: A threshold level for touch sensitivity. If you're going to put a BIG touchpad on a laptop's palm rest, you need to either put it where the palms won't brush it, or you need to make it possible to turn down the sensitivity so that a feather-light brushing of the pad doesn't register as a mouse motion or button click.

Two different manufacturers (Lenovo and Toshiba) have used exactly the same layout, and exactly the same hair trigger, non-adjustable, touchpad sensitivity. (Also exactly the same sort of wafer-thin flat tile keys, which is how we got into this digression.)

The problem I have with current keyboards is not just the short travel and lack of clickyness, but the tiny height of the keys.

Instead of the tall keys with space between them for fingernail clearance, there are these thin squares maybe an eighth of an inch above a solid surface. If I don't keep all my fingernails cut short, when they go past the side of the key they hit the panel and the key doesn't "strike". Letters get dropped. (So I get to pick between typing well and playing the guitar. I pity those who must keyboard for a living but want long nails to maintain their social life.) The short travel means there's little margin for finger variation, so some letters, where my fingers don't depress the keys as far, normally, don't strike, while others, where I support the weight of my hands, do strike when they shouldn't, or strike multiply.

After over a year I haven't been able to adjust. You may have noticed that my spelling has gone to hell as a result: I have to do a lot more correction and sometimes miss fixing things up.

(The inadequately-configurable trackpads, in positions where they detect the palm resting on the laptop (or brushing them) and randomly jump the cursor or highlight whole paragraphs so the next keystroke replaces them, are no help, either.)

On the other hand, when the nails do hit the key, they quickly wear through the top level of black plastic, exposing the backlit transparent light below it. I replaced a laptop about a year ago and after about six months about a half-dozen heavily-used keys had their pretty letters obscured by the giant glow of the scoured away region.

I had been running on older thinkpads and toshibas, with classic keyboard-shaped keys, or at least the little fingertip cup and substantial fingernail clearance. Switching (in a two-dead-laptops-in-two-weeks emergency) to a lenovo z710, then to a company-supplied toshiba s75, both with the stupid "I'm so thin", square, low-travel, no-finger-cup keys has been a disaster.

Of course, none of those things are among the criteria for what causes something to be classified as a religion, ...

That depends on what set of criteria one is using to classify something as religion, doesn't it? B-)

A solar offgrid (or grid-tied with standalone capabilities) would provide power locally until too much stuff failed.

Lead acid batteries last for several years, recent lithium probably for a couple decades. Nickel-Iron batteries are more lossy, but last for centuries, if provided with water to replace evaporation, potentially decades if they have catalytic fill caps to recombine lost hydrox or, say, a reservoir-based automatic watering system. (If their chemistry has a long-term unavoidable failure mode I'm not aware of it.)

Even with the batteries dead (NiFe or otherwise) the system will have power when the sun is out until at least one panel in every series substring is too degraded, shaded, or smashed to provide adequate power.

Semiconductor controllers might go for a decade to centuries, depending mainly on whether the conductive interconnects of the semiconductors are sized to avoid electromigration at the current levels used and what they're using for large capacitors.

Wind generaors have several moving parts to screw up - how many depends on the design. For a simple homebrew one you have the main bearings, yaw bearing, and tail furling-system bearing. Any one of them failing will take it out. (Even the furling bearing: Once that screws up it doesn't furl right and tears apart in the next storm.) There's also the get-the-power-past-the-yawing mechanism (typically a long cable being twisted and manually "unwound" every few years, or a brush mechanism.) Call it a decade without maintenance at the outside.

So some of 'em may run until a nearby lightning strike fries something.

I wonder what the numbers would be if "Progressivism" were also counted as a religion, rather than JUST a philosophy or political affilication? B-)

Think about it: It claims to prescribe what behavior is good or bad, generally expects its adherents to take its pronouncements on faith, and has a lot to say against various religions - just like ("other") competing religions do to their opponents.

I could go on with the similarities. But since they include suppression of competing ideas by pretty much any available mechanism (including arbitrary down-moderation, personal attacks, and flame wars), I'd prefer to keep the discussion light.

They're not alone in this, either. (c.f. any of several political philosophies, right, left, libertarian, authoritarian, moderate, ...) But they're my current candidate for the largest not-advertised-as-religion-religion at the moment. B-)