This is a general problem with devices that are "paired". How do you securely establish the initial connection, when neither side knows anything about the other?

The secure solutions involve some shared secret between the two devices. This requires a secure transmission path between the devices, such as typing in a generated key (like a WPA2 key) or physically carrying a crypto key carrier to each device (this is how serious cryptosystems work).

Semi-secure systems involve things like creating a short period of temporary vulnerability (as with Bluetooth pairing). There's a scheme for sharing between cellphones where you bump the phones together, and they both sense the deceleration at close to the same time.

Or, given the nature of the device as it's physical, it can be a sticker on the device itself. Or given that it has to be connected to a TV, the security pairing code can be displayed on the TV as well and the user enters that code in.

The nature of the Chromecast means there is a secure physical channel to allow such communications to take place.

Take the example of Firefly, amazing critical response, 9.2 imdb rating (#23 by user rating, #28 by number of votes, etc), an absolute fanatic fanbase that actually got the show to break Amazon's top 30 dvd sales list 196 weeks after release.

Average viewers? 4.7 million - 98th on the Nielsen list. Cancelled before the first season ended.

Meanwhile NCIS, one of the most predictable middle of the road bore fests gets 17 million average viewers 11 seasons, 2 spinoff series (5 seasons of NCIS:LA averaging 16.5 million viewers) all 3 are ongoing.

A bit apples and oranges, because Firefly was on Fox and NCIS on CBS. Firefly was forced on Fox (by Joss Whedon, who did Buffy) by tying the next season of Buffy with Firefly - if Fox wanted another season of ever-popular Buffy, they needed to take on Firefly.

It was doomed from the start - Fox execs basically did everything to kill it (the only obligation was to do barely enough to get Buffy).

NCIS, meanwhile, appeals to CBS viewers who skew old. Just because it gets 20+M viewers every week (30M combined) doesn't mean squat - the Neilson ratings on it aren't that high and other shows with smaller viewerships do often beat it. NCIS (and CBS in general, actually) tends to skew old, which means shows like NCIS don't actually get that high a rating (the ad price is midrange for a prime-time show), at least in the 18-49 market to which Neilson (and thus advertisers) care about. Ratings wise, it really means the "core audience" that they care about is about 1/3rd to 1/4th the number of viewers.

The Big Bang Theory is one of the highest rated shows on TV these days. And Firefly getting 4M viewers weekly would be considered quite good these days (well within the top rank, had Fox not decided to really just shit on the series as payback).

And the vast majority of people don't care about literature - they rather go for pulp fiction rather than say, Shakespeare or other literary figure. Because books, movies, TV shows, they can serve multiple roles. From enlightenment, contemplation, to just plain old entertainment and escapism.

So what if Transformers sells? (To be honest, the original TV series and movie weren't great to begin with - they were really half hour long ads and the movie was a way to force everyone to buy new toys). There's actually more depth in the remakes than the original.

The only one problem with this is there are a few good games where you can play it all for free and the in-apps are completely optional.

Sure, the vast majority of freemium games are crap and serve only to milk people of money, but there are some (Jetpack Joyride, say) where not paying is completely an option - you're really just doing a time-money tradeoff. Play it often and you can get everything, play it a little and pay up to get the thing quicker.

So it's not correct to say that game isn't free, either - it can be played completely for free.

Granted, I did say the vast majority of apps don't qualify for this, but there's still a few that can be played completely to completion without investing a single dime.

Then there are ones that offer in-apps that do stuff like remove ads - and that's it. Is it a free app, or a paid app? You can use the full thing either way, just one has ad content on it.

I'm betting this POS machine was basically a full-blown PC hooked up to a cash drawer. It seems to be a popular setup with small businesses (I'm guessing actual cash registers cost a lot - and they're certainly not as versatile).

No, cash registers (the dumb kind) are fairly cheap things - a few hundred bucks tops.

The problem is, the dumb registers don't do more than record sales and all that.

The fancy PC based ones do tons more - they integrate with a backend inventory system to update real-time inventory counts, integrate with ticketing systems so customer orders can be entered in and it gets kicked out to the kitchen with no fuss (handy for restaurants - they key in the order at the front, and the kitchen gets it automatically), etc.

I'm guessing they also can handle time card and time tracking for the cashier currently logged in.

Auto parts stores also integrate into it a vendor inventory query system so they can place orders for parts with vendors right when the customer orders the product, and it'll keep track of customer details so when the part is scanned in, it can be linked back to who ordered it and all that.

And then there's the POS terminal that often is used to scan in parts that arrive - e.g., a bunch of new inventory comes in, anyone can go and scan it into the system and update the transit and on hand counts.

Why haven't all airplanes been upgraded so the black box data is streamed to satellites/ground stations? It's so dumb to have to search for a airplane to find the data, that should be the fallback plan. Hey FAA, you listening?

Politics.

Who do you want to send the data to? If you say use a US satellite network, the US will use it as leverage to get passenger data on all flights (like it already does for all flights that fly over its airspace, even those that don't stop in the US - and there's a not-so-niche market for planes that can fly AROUND the US - Canada to Mexico, for example).

Then who do you want to trust with the data? It streamed to a satellite network, and now it's gotta be stored somewhere. Store it on a US server and be subject through PATRIOT act requests on everything else? You know it's coming.

Satellite bandwidth is cheap, and we already have the technology to stream it. In fact, we have deployable black boxes - FDRs and CVRs that are mounted on the outside of the fuselage, so on impact, they detach from the aircraft. If the aircraft sinks, the recorders conveniently float (add in 408MHz locators with GPS making it easy to find). If it's on land, the recorders are separate from the wreckage so they're not subject to the potential data-destroying fire, water, heat, impact, or crush damage. Again, trackers make it easier to locate.

And it's been tested technology - the military almost exclusively uses it on all their planes (including fighter jets).

This is a big step towards re-writing history. It begins with ignoring it, or by actively hiding it. I give it 1 year before we hear of attempts by politicians to cover embarrasing stories that are relevant information to the public, or before corporations hide unpleasant past events such as oil spills (corporations are people too, these days). True, search engines aren't the sole gateways to information, but nowadays people assume that if something isn't found on the first search results page it's probably not important.

It happens already actually - off line.

The whole "right to be forgotten" is an implementation of the fact that over time, whatever happened people naturally forget about, and getting at those records is hard enough that the effort usually isn't worthwhile.

The Internet, though, is an ever-expanding pile of information, that stuff you did 10 years ago will haunt you for the rest of your life. It's so valuable a resource that industries that traditionally would've just let things slide because they happened so long abo the evidence is sketchy now has access to all the information that most people have long forgotten.

The right to be forgotten doesn't remove content, it just means that the link between the content and the specific search gets broken. There can still be searches that bring up the content (e.g., "BP" may not bring up the oil spill, but "oil spill 2010" can bring it up).

I suppose a common example would be employers who google every prospective employees, only to see that 10, 20, 30+ years ago they did something "bad" and declining to interview because of it. (Generally most content is undated, so determining how long ago something happened can be quite difficult).

Of course, there are also people who google their dates, etc.

And even before this ruling, brand management companies knew how to bury content - just because you did something horrible 3 years ago, doesn't mean you have it have it sit as the 4th link on Google. With a bit of SEO and other techniques, you can bury those past events farther down the line (remembering 90% of the people stop at the first page, and barely any reach the 3rd or 4th page of results, so if you get it page 15, it's buried, or forgotten).

Well it runs on Windows obviously. With the number of reported infections, the speed with which it happened, and the fact that it is a Trojan (meaning you need to trick the user into running it), it can only be Windows. There wouldn't be 11,000 Linux users tricked into running it in 24 hours even if it would run correctly on all their distros because we know Linux users are too smart to run Trojans. Hell, there probably weren't 11,000 Linux machines with users sitting in front of them to BE tricked into running it in that amount of time. With Macs - well every Mac user will tell you they don't get Trojans or viruses. That leaves Windows. Lots of doofuses to be tricked there.

Well, it's easy to trick users into running questionable binaries. I mean, all you need to do is call it a crack or keygen for an app, rename it a few million times to cover the popular apps, movies and other content, and you're done.

Hell, those "download helpers" that file lockers sometimes provide? Guess what!

And most malware these days are Trojans. It's a lot easier to trick a user than to try to find a vulnerability in the OS. Even Windows is far harder to break into. Hell, good malware is userspace nowadays to avoid running into UAC dialogs.

PowerPC was pushed by the AIM alliance: Apple, IBM, Motorola. The latter two developed and produced chips. Apple had some input. The goal was an ISA that made it easy to emulate both m68k and i386.

I don't think the ISA was a goal, because PowerPC was really just a subset of the POWER architecture that IBM currently had in their mainframes and servers.

In fact, after PowerPC was released, the minor changes to the ISA that were done were re-incorporated back into the POWER ISA to make POWER binary compatible with PowerPC. (This still continues to this day - the POWER architecture remains compatible with PowerPC).

The PPC601 was fairly... interesting. The interrupt controller was basically identical to the one IBM had and was programmed in the same way. Basically the AIM alliance was late and they cut corners on that part by simply lifting IBM's design and using that code. The 603 went with a redesigned interrupt controller.

The linked paper did mention password managers in passing, but dismissed them as being vulnerable to client-side malware which could compromise all your passwords. That assumption is true if you're running your password manager on a Windows system, I suppose, which is likely the only thing the "Redmond researchers" are even aware of. But if you keep your password manager on a separate device or run it under a secure sandbox in a secure OS, you're much better off than the paper implies.

Yeah, if you keep your passwords on an isolated system, great. But most people don't do that - they use client side systems, cloud syncing, etc., so that the password manager will auto-fill in the password for them.

Isolating your passwords to a secure device is fine and all, but it also removes a lot of the convenience of it because now you have this gadget you have to carry around, access, copy the password manually, etc.

Whereas a client side password manager you just visit the website, go to the manager, click a couple of times and it's autofilled. And many have the ability to grab passwords from the web form and save it so it's a lot less risk.

And people love to put it on a Dropbox or other cloud service so they can use their password manager anywhere and have it up to date.

So no, it's just moving the vulnerability to that one point. And it doesn't matter if you run Windows, Linux, OS X, BSD, whatever. They're all vulnerable.

Hell, iOS and Android are seeing copycat clones of popular password managers like 1Password and the like (nevermind the SEO creeps who make it so finding the official site harder by forcing their way up the Google ranks and sponsored ads hoping that you'd mistakenly click on the fake trojaned version they offer instead of the original).

I see Apple's flat style is continuing to be copied^H^H^H used as inspiration for UI developers.

Geez, it's not Apple UI innovation - not by a long shot. It started with Microsoft first (flat tiles!), then moved to Android. iOS is actually the laggard here (mostly at the behest of a bunch of over bored journalists who see "new and shiny" as "innovative" rather than "if it works, don't fix it').

Apple only caved because (noisy) journalists were calling OS X and iOS "tired" and "dated" because they looked pretty much the same over the years, while Microsoft and Google were "innovating" in UI design by going all flat so it looks "fresh and different".

For the record, I preferred the old look, I like my faux 3D, and while skeumorphism was a bit over the top with stitched leather and green felt, it still felt a bit more casual than today's flat designs that give an air of formality.

So it is working as long as you count "not allowed" as "working".

The reason was it was first full Unicode, then a bunch of trolls abused it to screw up page formatting, which was switched to a blacklist. Then they figured out other ways to abuse the codepoints to do even stranger things to the layout, at which points the devs simply gave up and switched it to a whitelist.

It was only until about 2 or 3 years ago that the whitelist was applied on comment entry - you could still find the old comments that screwed up the layout and see them. But as of then, they switched it so display also went through the filter (or they filtered all the comments) so even those comments don't screw up anymore.

If you want, use Google to search for "erocS", or even prepend it with a colon, and optionally a number (e.g., 5:erocS).

E.g. - http://hardware.slashdot.org/c...
http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...

Just like clbuttic, erocS is actually the reverse of "Score", which if you look at the header of a comment, you'll understand what they did.

I think he means that Over the air (OTA) broadcast is a pure uncompressed signal of HDTV 1080i quality. The cable company has to compress the signal to get so many channels to get to the subscriber. Some feel there is a loss in quality vs OTA but depending on who you talk to it's not something people will notice.

No, OTA is also compressed video (you have to compress it).

It's just that in a 6MHz channel, most OTA stations only broadcast one channel, so it gets the full 20Mbps available of that channel.

In a cable system, each 6MHz channel also gives around 20Mbps. however, instead of just having one channel take the entire bandwidth, they squeeze in three, four or more HD channels in that slot, so they get 6, 5 or less Mbps each. Even more now that they're switching to h.264 on a bunch of channels.

This results in much over compression as there just aren't enough bits left so picture quality degrades.

Just because something on the computer takes more or less time doesn't mean the user isn't adapting and overlapping other behaviors during those 3 seconds. Do a controlled experiment and come back when you have real data.

3 seconds is long enough to be annoying, and short enough that an annoyed user will take longer than 3 seconds.

After the update, they'll waste 3 seconds each time. Then after a week, they'll use those 3 seconds to respond to a text on their cellphone, or an IM, or browse Facebook. So now that 3 second time takes 20 seconds to a minute because the user got bored waiting, switched to something else, then switched back much later.

So now that 3 seconds cost up to 60 seconds.

And if that happens often enough (100 minutes is over an hour), that 100 records may turn into 90 records.

Of course, it makes the assumption that the record opening time is instant - you click it, and it responds instantly. Now you click it and wait. Which makes a huge difference - it actually gives the appearance of slowness if you clicked and it instantly displayed versus you clicked and now have a wait. Most users would find a way to occupy themselves in that wait that takes far longer than 3 seconds.

Skills become obsolete or can be automated. If you rely on skills you have to dedicate yourself to a lifetime of learning.

Depends on the skill. If it's a specific skill like web programming, yes, it will get outdated. But if it's a soft skill like communications (written, verbal), continuous learning, etc., well, those skills NEVER get obsolete.

Also, you should never stop learning. Just because you're in the workforce doesn't mean you stop learning about new stuff. Or improving other skills.

Even if you know everything you need to know about your job, learn something new. Take up a new hobby, learn a new skill that doesn't apply. Even if you never need the skill, just learn it for the sake of learning. (Experience is a form of learning, too, and being able to relate other areas to what you know is extremely valuable).

It's on the list. Right after adding SSL and UNICODE support, and before fixing Beta.

SSL is supported. Subscribers only feature though.

Unicode is also supported. It does actually work, just that the whitelist of allowable Unicode codepoints is small. Adding in extra codepoints is on an as-needed basis. You're not likely to see those new emoji anytime soon.