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Comment Re:CSS variables? (Score 3, Informative) 256

CSS Variables are actually better described as CSS Custom Properties. They aren't just SASS-style global macros, they're far more powerful. Different elements can have different values for the same custom property, and custom property values set on an element are inherited by its descendants, respecting dynamic DOM changes etc. Custom property values can be set dynamically by scripts and those changes are of course automatically inherited.

Comment "Isolate from the Internet" is hard (Score 2) 245

Air-gap alone is not enough. Stuxnet travelled via USB sticks. And if your hardware (or anything connected to it) has a wireless interface on it (Bluetooth, Wifi, etc), you have a problem ... an operator might bring a hacked phone within range, for example.

Simplifying the hardware down to fixed-function IC or analog reduces the attack surface much more than attempts to isolate the hardware from the Internet.

Comment Re:first (Score 1) 325

The US is not occupying South Korea. South Korea has its own democratically elected government running the country.

A subset of South Koreans don't like the presence of US bases. But with the constant, explicitly stated threats from North Korea, as a nation they'd be suicidal to push US forces out.

Comment Re:They're atheists... (Score 1) 325

Thanks for being honest about the implications of your position in that last sentence.

The fact that religion, politics, and anything else people care about can be abused to build a power base does not mean those things are in themselves bad. Nor does it mean we should abolish them and become apathetic drudges. Even if the latter was desirable and worked, it's a Prisoner's Dilemma where the first defector conquers the world. So much for freedom.

Comment Re:If (Score 2) 183

Please, no, not more squandering of funds on meaningless manned missions driven not by science or long-term goals but by absurd "human spirit" PR to get more funding for more meaningless missions.

We need a self-sustaining human presence off this planet, but all paths to get there require robotic mining and construction outside the Earth's gravity well, and that is what we need to be investing in.

Comment Standards-olatry (Score 1) 249

I thought standards were there to implement not argue with

This sentiment is very wrong. It's easy to generate a standard that is no good, and the W3C is often not good at keeping out bogus standards. If we followed this sentiment browsers would burn resources implementing all kinds of useless things like XHTML2, XSL-FO, etc etc etc. "Browsers implement it" is an important and completely reasonable test of validity for any spec, alongside "Web developers use it".

Comment Re:Job limit. (Score 4, Insightful) 732

The pace of innovation and automation is only going to speed up, but people's ability to retrain isn't going to speed up much. At some point, maybe not far away, we'll be eliminating classes of jobs faster than people can train for new ones. What happens if, by the time you've learned to do a new job well, it's likely to be obsolete? And then at some point we'll reach the situation where most people simply aren't capable of doing any useful job as well as a machine no matter how much they train.

It's ironic that both extreme left-wing and extreme right-wing people believe the fallacy that people are endlessly reprogrammable labour units. Extreme right-wingers believe it because they want to believe people who aren't successful are lazy. Extreme left-wingers believe in a mythical world where every person is a special soul who can achieve anything if they're just given the right assistance.

Comment FWIW the NSA did not weaken DES (Score 2) 207

From the article:

Nor are reports of intelligence agencies weakening encryption systems anything new -- concerns about NSA influence over the Data Encryption Standard (DES), reach back about four decades.

While this is true, it's a dumb example to bring up, since it turned out those concerns were misplaced. The serious concerns were that the NSA's choice of S-box values had somehow introduced a backdoor, but since the early 1990s we've known that the NSA's S-box values actualy *strengthened* DES against differential cryptanalysis (an attack which was not publicly known at the time).

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