Did you forget to look at that page before linking to it?
Iron Dome, fully deployed in November 2012, is a system for intercepting medium-range rockets. Count the number of ROCKET fatalities after November 2012. For that matter, look at the number after they STARTED deploying Iron Dome in the first location compared to before they had iron dome.

Iron Dome is not designed to defend against snipers, flu, mortars, or insults. It defends against rockets.

His argument is based on looking at contrails and comparing them to his guess as to the best angle of intercept, then theorizing about what might happen. What actually HAS happened is that thousands of rockets have been fired at Israel and no-one has been killed by them.

Emacs bindings and light weight, eh? Maybe nobody who cares about light weight is accustomed to emacs and vice versa.

There are assorted plugins to integrate vim and other vi-like editors with web browsers. So I might be using vim keystrokes to write this. Alternatively, a vim plugin can also call lynx. I'm not sure why you'd want to do the latter. The former might be handy if just avoid accidentally ending your posts like this. :wq

I'd agree with others who have said local elections are very important. My local fire, police, schools, roads, and job opportunities are more important to me than whatever Washington did today.

I think you've missed the largest difference that online voting might make. Retired people are over-represented in local elections because they take the time to vote, more often than working-age people do. Online voting might make that more balanced or even swing the other way. Retirement age people also have the majority of the money and therefore influence through political donations.

Along the same lines, traditional voting methods mean only people who care enough to take the time to vote do so. (Unless a politician has a pizza party on the voting bus and pays each voter $10 to get on board.) Online voting, if it takes just a few seconds, MIGHT increase the number of votes by people who can't be bothered to take a few minutes to get involved. That could be good or bad. Personally, I think that if you don't know the name of the incumbent, you probably aren't informed enough to make an informed vote and I'd prefer you choose not to vote that time around. I'd hope that everyone gets informed, but if someone isn't interested enough to know what's on the ballot ahead of time, I don't see a need to encourage them to vote anyway.

That's true. On the other hand, normal people are merely annoyed by this. We're also annoyed by the TSA; Senators are accustomed to walking right through. Security is there to protect them, the VIP. The ranking Senator from wherever is likely to be the type of personality that can't believe it someone did it to THEM. "How dare you! Don't you know who I am!" I wouldn't be surprised if a senator or two did something stupid when so greatly offended.

> This is also why the only way we get any changes in gun legislation is if someone shoots one of their kids.
That, and the fact that the numbers show EVERY instance of reactive gun legislation since 1940 has always been counter-productive. It works much better for the politicians to retain it as a campaign issue rather than ending up line the UK, with TWICE as much violent crime after they actually banned guns.

After the fifth try it locos it for 30 seconds. That's why it takes a day to try 10,000 four-digit pins. What it SHOULD do is delay die 30 seconds after the 5th try, 60 seconds after five more, 120 seconds after five more, 240 seconds ..

However, it looks like both companies had general purpose programmers design their security locks, rather than having security professionals do that. Which is a lot like having a handyman design your physical locks, without involving a locksmith. A handyman sometimes* competently INSTALLS a lock, but it should be security professionals designing them.

* very often a handyman or carpenter installs a lock upside down, resulting in early failure of the lock and making it less user-friendly.

Congress didn't much care when the NSA was spying on us peons. Now that Congress-critters are the ones being spied on, I'm thinking they just might do something about it. Thanks for pissing of the right people, CIA.

Last night I programmed a chip to act as a USB keyboard and automatically "press" keys. The system did as you described, identifying it as a keyboard, and creating a node in /dev. Something like /dev/keyboard1. It then proceeded to accept the keyboard events exactly as though I'd typed them, without any confirmation by the user. Confirmation by the user would be problematic in the case of a broken keyboard or mouse - the system can't let you use the new keyboard to confirm itself.

I'm using it to brute force a PIN. Some iPhones and Android devices will now accept an external keyboard. With a 4-digit PIN, it should be guessed by the end of the day.

I bet at least 20% of the USB devices use the same FTDI chip for USB functionality, and another 20% use Atmel AVR microcontrollers. If your malware patched or replaced the Atmel firmware, you could own a lot if systems.

It wouldn't even NEED to continue to work like the original device, so you could just replace the firmware with the Atmel firmware I wrote last night. The user plugs in their webcam or tries to turn it on. The webcam doesn't work anymore. The bad guy doesn't care, at that point he has already owned the machine, just a few seconds after the device was plugged in.

First, let me say I think this will have a cult following like the hackable versions of the WRT54, I don't think MOST people want it. That said, I've never experienced this:

> it's pretty beat up. Screen is scratched and dimming, the case is scuffed and creaky, buttons don't quite work, connectors are getting glitchy, the battery is dying and both CPU and memory are getting old.

I've experienced each one of those, but I don't think more than one ever.
My last phone, I bricked the internal storage when it was only a few months old and it wouldn't boot. Its replacement had very similar specs. Had I purchased a camera module, or IR module, etc. I would definitely have reused them. The device before that, the power button broke. The device was still up-to-date enough, it just couldn't be turned on and off. In both instances, the screen and other parts were fine. I don't think I've scratched up a screen since the days of WAP feature phones with plastic screens. Glass is hard to scratch up.

Of course your experience may be different. That's the point, actually, different strokes for different folks

The other category of use-case other than the hacker/maker types may be preconfigured specialized versions from value added resellers. You may have seen firefighters trying out Google Glass. A firefighter phone would have a water resistant case, an IR camera, which is just a regular camera with the IR filter removed, a very loud speaker, a close-proximity findme feature, etc. It could even have a software defined radio module to use as a radio.

Next door to the fire training field is the search and rescue training center, and nearby the paramedic training. Search and rescue professionals might like some of the features of the firefighter phone and buy one configured with search and rescue modules like an upgraded GPS, compass, and a larger antenna for extended range.

Ps - I with the fire instructors and I'm a step ahead on that particular market. There are many other markets, though - extreme sports fanatics, outdoorsmen, MUSIC phones with great speakers ....

>. I pray, when they die, the ghost of MLK spends eternity bitch-slapping the both of them day in and day out.

  That put a smile on my face. MLK was a leader, one of the best. Jackson is not a leader, he's a whiner. Also a liar. WWhas it Jesse or Sharpton who was about 8 years old when he started calling himself "Reveren"? Either way, they're the same - professional whiners. Where exactly is your church, reverend? I'll try to avoid having my daughter exposed to either of them, lying and telling her she can't do anything because of her complexion.

Basically, your post boils down to "Verizon is bad" and "taxpayer subsidies to Verizon are bad".
I agree on both points. I didn't say Verizon is good. I said Verizon isn't scared of losing customers who use their cell phone as a hotspot to provide their home internet servIce and use 150 GB / month or more.

I wouldn't use Verizon or any other contract carrier. Years ago I switched to an off-brand carrier with no contract. The no-contract carrier charged half as much as Verizon or Sprint, while using Sprint towers. So, fuck Verizon and Sprint. I pay $35 / for "unlimited" with LTE, which is a lot less than Sprint charged.

Here's the weird thing - a few years ago, Sprint bought the no-contract carrier that was competing with them, Boost Mobile. Now, it's actually the same company, Sprint, providing the service for $35 under their Boost brand. When I left Sprint years ago, Sprint charged about $70 for a plan with a few hundred MB. Now, the same company sells me unlimited for half the price. That's what we call a price cut of over 50% that was caused by Boost competing with them. There's not enough competition in the industry, obviously. When there is competition, it cuts my bill in half.

> withdraw (troops, DATA or spies) surreptitiously, especially from a dangerous position

The term is commonly used in info sec.