Speaking of arrogance, narcissism and sociopathy, Jane ran away like a snivelling coward instead of showing that he wasn't lying when he repeatedly claimed he's happy to admit his mistakes:

... Slashdotters don't think very highly of sock-puppetry. [Jane Q. Public, 2015-03-23]

I didn't "accuse you" but I did suggest the possibility. More than just a possibility, really. And I find the "coincidence" (as I explained above) of him answering for you to be just a bit too unlikely. Actually, I think it's damned near impossible. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2015-03-24]

That might be the most hilarious bit in Jane's comedy act, where he wrongly claims that "there is about a 99.9% probability that "RespekMyAthorati" is a man named "Bryan Killett"".

And yet Jane's 100% wrong, despite being 99.9% certain. As always. And Jane refuses to admit he's wrong. As always. And Jane simultaneously insists that he's happy to admit he's wrong. As always.

But at least Jane finally admitted that Jane is suggesting anything. Baby steps.

Answered here.

I see. So you admit "RespekMyAthorati" is one of your sockpuppet accounts? If not, why are you answering for "him"? [Jane Q. Public, 2015-03-24]

Good grief, Jane. That link goes to my clear statement that I'm not "RespekMyAthorati". So it's difficult to imagine that Jane's asking that question in good faith.

But maybe Jane's chronic amnesia is kicking in again, so Jane might actually be honestly confused... once again. If Jane's actually just honestly confused, Jane should try to remember that I answered Jane's comment because Jane used my real name to wrongly accuse me of being "RespekMyAthorati":

... Is this your amateur attempt at the despicable practice of "doxxing"? Besides: I would estimate in good faith that there is about a 99.9% probability that "RespekMyAthorati" is a man named "Bryan Killett", who demonstrably can't stand to be tied down to one pseudonym like his "Khayman80" account, he thinks it's fun to harass other people using multiple sock-puppet accounts. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2015-03-23]

Sadly, Jane will probably never appreciate the ironic contrast between those first two sentences.

Jane probably also won't appreciate the irony that Jane uses my real name to wrongly accuse me of posing as someone else, while complaining bitterly and threatening to call the police and/or sue whenever I point out that Jane is Lonny Eachus. But again, I'll remember this the next time Jane pretends to be offended whenever I point out that Jane is Lonny Eachus.

... You have also been caught sock-puppeting before. So that should be no surprise to anyone, either. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2015-03-24]

Good grief. Once again, the irony of Lonny Eachus's sock-puppet "Jane Q. Public" wrongly accusing me of sock-puppeting is overwhelming.

Once again, Jane's completely wrong. This "khayman80" account is the only account I use at Slashdot. What Jane actually means is that his crippling paranoia has led Jane/Lonny Eachus to repeatedly and baselessly project his own sock-puppeting onto me.

... And it hardly surprises me that you would contradict yourself. You did it a lot when we were actually having our Spencer discussion. You never admitted it, but as I have stated before, it's all a matter of record. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2015-03-24]

I just explained that "RespekMyAthorati" was wrong, and showed that I'd already disagreed with his statement 6 years ago. A real skeptic might interpret this as evidence against Jane's accusation.

But Jane simply interprets that evidence as support for his accusation. This is known as a 'self-sealing' ideology: "(Keeley 1999, Bale 2007, Sunstein and Vermeule 2009), whereby evidence against a conspiratorial belief is re-interpreted as evidence for that belief."

... And it hardly surprises me that you would contradict yourself. You did it a lot when we were actually having our Spencer discussion. You never admitted it, but as I have stated before, it's all a matter of record. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2015-03-24]

Good grief, Jane. You've been baselessly accusing me of contradicting myself, but if you'd learn how to apply conservation of energy then you'd realize that your accusations are misplaced. For instance, from our Spencer discussion:

... As long as the power used by the source and the power used by the cooler are constant as required, any relationship between them has no bearing on the experiment. [Jane Q. Public, 2014-08-02]

... I was arguing that the input to the heat source was constant but the power to the cooled walls was not stipulated and could be variable. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2015-03-20]

Really? Because you'd previously and wrongly claimed that the power used by the cooler was constant. To the untrained eye, that might look like a contradiction. But I'm sure Jane could grace us with a long-winded evasive pile of nonsense which miraculously concludes that Jane's been perfectly consistent.

I've repeatedly explained that only the power passing through a boundary is included in the energy conservation equation across that boundary. I've even linked to textbooks so Jane can verify that this is how "conservation of energy" works.

If Jane ever reads and understands those textbooks, he'd know that the cooler power isn't relevant for the same reason that he could know that a crayon mark doesn't cross the lines in a coloring book. Again, this is really basic physics.

And again, inserting the standard physics definition of the word "net" into Jane's equation reproduces the energy conservation equation Jane's still adamantly rejecting. That's another independent way to see that Jane should consider the possibility that only power passing through a boundary should be included in the energy conservation equation across that boundary.

... I will state again what I have stated so many times before: I don't mind admitting that I am wrong, but first I have to be shown that I am indeed wrong. [Jane Q. Public, 2013-05-06]

I don't know about you, but if I say something that is incorrect, I appreciate being corrected. As long as it's done politely. ... I can be stubborn, but i someone can show me I'm wrong, I'm willing to change. But all too often, they've just tried to TELL me I'm wrong, rather than showing me I'm wrong. That's the difference. [Lonny Eachus, 2014-02-07]

Really? I showed that you were wrong about GPS by writing down the equations showing that 4 satellite locks are required unless the GPS receiver has an atomic clock, but you couldn't bring yourself to admit that you were wrong. Will you do that now, or were you lying when you said you're willing to admit that you're wrong?

... I've made mistakes here and admitted them when they've been pointed out to me. But unless I made a recognizable blunder, I won't admit to being wrong unless someone actually shows that I am. Insults don't quite make it over that line. [Jane Q. Public, 2015-02-27]

Insults like these?

... If you show that I was wrong or ignorant of some subject, I'll happily admit it and correct myself. But calling names doesn't cut it, and I doubt you can do the other. [Jane Q. Public, 2015-03-05]

... Unlike you, while I certainly have made mistakes, and changed my mind on some issues over the years, I have been happy to admit it when that actually happens. [Jane Q. Public, 2015-03-24]

Good grief, Jane. The last time you made this absurd claim, I listed several examples where I've admitted mistakes.

Again, it's so ironically meta for you to argue endlessly that you admit your mistakes. For instance, after I debunked your lecture on neutrino oscillation, you repeatedly claimed that I missed where you admitted you were wrong. Despite the fact that the last quote in my post was the closest example I could find to a genuine admission that you'd been wrong. Even then, you manufactured unwarranted doubt by inserting words like could and theoretically. At the same time, you made additional claims which were never challenged, like equating the MSW effect with lasers.

You even repeatedly refused to answer my simple question: when you asked "why didn't you bother to repeat the part...?" you actually meant that I had repeated that part and responded to it?

If you're actually happy to admit mistakes, couldn't you start by answering that very simple question?

So much so that they even have a name for it: Maskirovka. The term was originally used just for camouflage, and the uses of it seem entirely in keeping with ordinary warfare. The disinformation campaign around D-Day would have been a brilliant example of maskirovka.

But the Russians do it before a war, and even during active hostilities as a way to demand that they be treated as if they were non-combatants. It's going on right now, pretending that they aren't engaging in war against Ukraine. It's so traditional in the culture that it's not even really something we can blame them for, exactly. But it means that our actions and reactions have to be calibrated around the fact that this is part of the way they view the world.

Convenient that warehouse workers tend to have excellent lawyers and be in a strong position to handle the time and trouble of contesting legal matters, isn't it?

I'm sure that they've given considerable thought to subtly discouraging very heavy use, and looked at how different users actually tend to use online storage space, along with how much opportunity for additional profit there might be(eg. a 'photo storage' user might be a good candidate for being sold prints or something, while a 'generic files' user might not); and I imagine that lack of block level control helps. It would be interesting to know what the number-crunching looked like to arrive at those price points; though I'm sure that those data are not going to be public anytime soon.

However, I suspect that it's also there, at least in part, because this service is a relatively thin skin of consumer-friendly abstraction layer on top of S3, which is also object based. Amazon does have a block storage offering; but they only seem particularly interested in people using block storage 'devices' as disks on EC2 instances, rather than on farming them out over the web.

There is nothing stopping you from configuring the OS on an EC2 instance to function as a file server and getting remote access to block storage that way; but it doesn't seem to be the encouraged use case.

I don't know nearly enough about large-scale storage to say why they prefer object based storage over block based storage; but my understanding is that, even in the paid seats, object based storage is very much what they are offering, for anything externally accessed, with their block-based offering more or less there to allow you to configure the 'disks' in your EC2 'server' with a bit more granularity.

While this air crash was undeniably tragic, the focus on the lockability of cockpit doors seems to be ignoring a fairly basic consideration: Who do you trust more: the people you hired to fly the plane or everybody who purchased a ticket to ride it?

That doesn't rule out the possibility of problematic pilots; but it seems very, very, likely indeed that you are better off with a system where you can robustly lock the door, rather than one where blocking access is difficult. There may be room for other improvements, in hiring, training, navigation system safety overrides, etc. but this one just doesn't seem very hard.

Not that I know of, just my feeble attempt at a joke. It seems like absolutely every other outfit that doesn't own a fab and wants to build an ARM hires TMSC to do it; so when I read about an Asteroid Redirect Mission, I was immediately struck by the image of NASA licensing some IP blocks and having TSMC slap out some wafers.

That sounds disconcertingly similar to the situation among people who fly confederate flags to represent their 'culture'. Only in french-ish.

Just ask anyone who got stuck with a 'Canadian Multilingual Standard' keyboard layout...

Based on their API reference 3rd-party apps that do whatever you want on the client side certainly look doable enough.

Obviously, the various stuff about "Access your files on all your devices!" and "Build into all your Amazon devices!" and whatnot is going to be less useful, so they are clearly expecting most customers to not do that(and implicitly encouraging them not to); but the service itself doesn't appear to have any objections to you dropping encrypted blobs into it.

(Now, what Amazon would do if you were to use something like PNGdrive, to get the advantages of the rather more expensive 'unlimited files' tier using only the 'unlimited photos' tier, I don't know; but I suspect that they would be less happy...)

Oops, I meant to write that "Jane seems to be saying he isn't lecturing scientists about what scientists think."

Lecturing scientists about science is Jane's other hobby.

For some reason Jane doesn't seem to grasp the irony of him lecturing scientists about what scientists think.

Since you consider yourself to be a scientist, maybe I can use you for an example of how scientists think? You have VERY frequently demonstrated that you appear to think repeating the same false thing in public over and over again somehow makes it more true. I assure you, it's not. [Jane Q. Public, 2015-03-26]

Good grief. When have I ever said false things? Since Jane claims this happens "VERY frequently" it should be easy to link to a single, solitary example.

Jane seems to be saying he isn't lecturing scientists about science. That's absurd, Jane. You're lecturing me about what scientists think right here! In fact, you just accused me of knowingly lying because I've pointed out that your baseless accusations about what scientists think are... baseless accusations.

Jane seems to be stuck in a recursive loop where his baseless accusations of fraudulent bullshit lies spawn more baseless accusations of lying.

The ironic icing on this cake is the fact that Jane still hasn't admitted he was wrong when he repeated the same false Sky Dragon Slayer things in public over and over.

What's at risk is often forgotten, every web site wants you to register just to post a fucking one line comment on a story. I use a junk email and a fixed password for all of them. Even if someone cracks it, all I have lost is a registration I didn't want in the first place.

Not in any services I subscribe to.

What does "password strength" really mean?

If people used a textual representation of number obtained from a reliable hardware random number generator then the meaning would be unambiguous. It's the number of digits in that number. But most people don't do that (perhaps more should).

So what does it mean to say that a password has so many bits of entropy? Well, I guess it means how many truly random bits it would take to index their password from the universe of passwords the user considered. This is more an exercise in psychology than it is in mathematics. You have to figure out how users generate passwords or discount passwords. For example requiring a mix of upper and lower case letters doesn't add as much entropy as you'd think, because most users are mediocre typists who'll avoid using the shift key too often. Requiring digits means that many people will just "0" for "o" and "1" for "L".

So it's really easy to concoct passwords which you know are bad, because you know the methods used to select which passwords you'd consider; if the developers of the strength meter don't take your particular generation algorithm into account the meter will show the password to be stronger than you know it to be.

I'm imagining a kind of competitive tomboy/sibling rivalry thing, with the girl not always winning, but showing she can give as good as she gets. It'd put a "new" (ish) spin on the old Top Gear formula.