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Comment Re:Memorizing site-unique passwords isn't possible (Score 2) 267

The real solution is to use password management software like KeePass, LastPass, or 1Password. Lock your password program with your good password from Diceware, and use unique, truly random passwords for all the websites you've registered on.

At the cost of travelling around with the keys to the kingdom. Imagine you're on vacation and you want to pop into an internet cafe and log into /. because abstinence. Except it has a keylogger/trojan that'll steal your key file and your master password. Now you've compromised your email, online bank, ebay, paypal, steam and all the other passwords that might really matter. Personally I tend to keep three:

1) My mail, because it gets all the password resets.
2) My bank, but it's using two-factor anyway.
3) My "assorted junk" password where I might lose my forum account or whatever that doesn't *really* matter.

I really try not to use the first two on an untrusted device unless I really have to, because afterwards I need to change it. In fact if I know I will need to use it I'll change it on a trusted device up front and restore it later, good memorized passwords are a pain to relearn.

Comment Well past its Best Before date (Score 1) 662

Top Gear was enormous fun at first, but it's gotten stale. It's lost its way. Maybe it is time for a re-think.

Like just about everybody, my picks for a new co-host include Sabine Schmitz and Vicki Butler-Henderson. But they have to look very carefully at the show and decide if its worth continuing first. I'm not convinced it is.

The original Top Gear production morphed in to Fifth Gear, which is definitely jazzed up fro the old Top Gear it started as.

...laura

Comment Re:Still waiting for a "hackability meter" (Score 1) 159

What we need is a meter on a web site describing how much effort they put into server security, how big their target profile is (how many entry points they have) and a sign that says "??? days since a total data breach!", and then the user can decide if they want an account there at all. How's that coming?

Are you secretly planning to use it as a Dunning-Kruger meter and avoid all that self-rate as 10 out of 10? Because if you think you'll get anything else useful out of it, I want some of what you're smoking...

Comment Re:Security is hard... (Score 1) 737

The secure door was not well thought out, IMHO. I have always thought there were better options, such as:

A flight officer should be able to engage a "defer to ground" mode from anywhere on the plane, at any time. Once "defer to ground" mode is engaged the autopilot cannot be disabled without the approval of an air traffic controller, or the consent of more than one (or more than two) flight officer(s). The air traffic controllers can then issue instructions to the autopilot or remotely control the plane or disable the "defer to ground" autopilot.

If the plane is out of range of air traffic control, the autopilot would (in addition to attempting to stabilize any descent) change trajectory to either a.) the closest known safe ground relay or b.) the closest known safe landing site.

In the ordinary course the pilots are in control, with "defer to ground" off by default, and can only be enabled by flight officers on the plane.

Just a thought.

Comment Re:Absolutely crucial (Score 1) 137

A good start would be what is proposed in the press release: Harmonized VAT rates and rules for digital goods.

The problem is that unifying VAT and classifications basically regulating half a tax system without regulating the other half. You can tax income and you can tax consumption and there's pros and cons to both. If we're forced to lower our VAT, the other taxes would probably increase to compensate or the other way around. In addition many of the VAT brackets are made for a specific purpose because the goods are either particularly good or bad for society, like taxing books less (knowledge is good) and tobacco more (very bad for public health).

For example, around here we have about half VAT on food. If we can't keep that exception, prices would rise 10%+ on the spot. So would our taxes, in practice we'd probably funnel that money into agricultural subsidies instead which would make our food cheaper, thus creating an even more heavily protected, subsidized agriculture. And the things we want to punish, just add other taxes instead of VAT, unless the EU wants to regulate all consumption tax. That would be a tough sell, I think.

What products and services end up in what VAT bracket is sometimes controversial, for example here in Norway at the moment there's 0% VAT on buying a physical newspaper and 25% VAT on a digital newspaper, because it doesn't meet the criteria for an exemption. Also eating at a restaurant and takeaway ended up in different brackets, so if you take your burger outside and eat it on the sidewalk it's cheaper than sitting down at McDonald's. We have an exception for culture, they were probably thinking more like theater, opera, concerts but exotic dancers won at court as an "artistic performance".

Not saying it can't happen, but if it does it's a big step on the way towards a "United States of Europe".

Comment Re:Leave then (Score 1) 886

No one is forcing you to associate with anyone. But as a BUSINESS, you will provide the same service to everyone regardless of race/creed/religion/etc.

Funny, that never seems ot work when the elementary school teacher also dances at the local strip club. Then it's never about non-discrimination based on job performance and all about your employer's right to not associate with you anymore. Let's face it, you've picked some attributes that have hardly anything to do with your job performance like race, religion, sex etc. and "blessed" them while other equally irrelevant attributes can get you fired on the spot.

And a white baker should not have to serve a black customer, right? (...) You may not like being "forced" to serve black people.

I'm not sure why you need to put "forced" in quotes. If you're a white supremacist running a self-owned bakery and wouldn't serve a black customer voluntarily, then clearly it's involuntary aka forced. As forced as the health and safety regulations and paying your employees minimum wage I guess, but it's something the government tells you that you must do. Now I know certain libertarians try to make great leaps of logic to act like they're different, but fundamentally they're not. If you want to throw out all government regulation, you also throw out what keeps the baker from refusing to serve the black guy.

Comment Re:Nukes will always be in our back-pocket (Score 1) 228

Your argument sounds roughly like the one I heard was common after WWI, after millions dying in static trench wars they thought barbed wire and machine guns would basically end war since any attacker would be sending their troops into a massive suicidal bullet rain. At the time it was probably true, remember the car was in its very infancy. Except over the next 20 years the Germans created Panzers and Blitzkrieg tactics outmaneuvering and overrunning France in six weeks.

So maybe in the 1950s or 1980s you could send ICBMs and have them reach their destination, but they're always working on laser weapons, missile-destroying missiles like the Patriot missile and a host of other highly classified projects. In case you missed the memo NATO has been working on a ballistic missile shield, allegedly against rogue nations like Iran and North Korea but Russia is also not amused. There might come a time where the "mutually" part of "assured destruction" is no longer valid, it's not like we invented nukes and war is now over, forever. Then you're being extremely naive.

Comment the presentation is BS (Score 5, Interesting) 56

The article follows the youtube presentation and the summary is, for once, accurate (i.e. does not introduce new errors).

The trouble is that the presentation is utter BS. The GaAs devices are NEVER made out of a solid GaAs wafer; the process starts with a plain silicon wafer, on which GaAs is grown epitaxially. The secret sauce is, and always has been, how to minimize the defect density at the Si/GaAs interface.

Such a wafer is more expensive than the plain Si one, but not 1000x more! Oh, and every purchaser would kill to get $5 8" wafers...

Since the Stanford guys are no dummies, I guess that the announcement was deliberately made to sound ridiculous. For what purpose? Time will tell.

Comment Re:No such thing (Score 1) 341

No such thing as a real secret any more, if there ever was. If the "secret" is based on scientific research, it's been published

This may come as a shock to you, but most large companies have a big R&D division that follow the scientific method while rarely or never publishing their work. Intel knows a lot about making CPUs. Boeing knows a lot about making planes. Ford knows a lot about making cars. They're going to use that to make money, not to blab away the details to their competitors. Sure, Intel's processors are based on physics... but good look making a 14nm processor from their PR slides.

Comment Re:How many minutes until this is mandatory? (Score 1) 287

If the conditions are so bad you can't read road signs, you shouldn't be driving.

Under the right conditions snow will stick to the signs looking like these signs even though it's otherwise clear. It doesn't happen often, but when it does I think the self-driving car is pretty much screwed. Humans seem to get by on a combination of routine and heuristics.

Comment Re:Amazing post (Score 2) 496

That they need to eat 10,000 calories a day to sustain them doesn't mean they could eat 2000 kcal and net a -8000 loss. The most strenuous one day event I've done burns 5-6000 kcal, anything less than 3-4000 kcal in and you're likely to run into a proverbial brick wall. It's common to try overdoing it on exercise while cutting the intake and the result is a body with no power at all, that engine needs fuel to work and pure body fat won't do.

But over to the obese people, when I started out I could do maybe 350-400 kcal/hour and I'd probably not last the full hour. And the body feels like total shit afterwards, it's real easy to end up with excessive strain due to weight on muscles and joints that aren't used to it. It's almost like a U-curve, if you're fat and don't strain your body you're pretty comfy. If you're healthy and exercise you're comfy. But in the middle is a rather ugly place. So you come home, feel bloody miserable but hey you exercised and did good so you can give yourself a little bonus right? Turns out the kind of bonus you need on your high-sugar, high-fat diet pretty much negates any calorie benefit.

If you don't start with your intake you'll never get anywhere. Exercise is a nice accelerator, but it's really, really hard to counteract a +500 kcal intake with exercise. And that's not particularly much soda, snacks, sweets and junk food.

Comment Re:eliminate extra sugar (Score 3, Interesting) 496

The thing is, you don't really need to all OCD on the calories, just get it ballpark right.

Veggies and fruit? Mostly <50 kcal/100g
Lean food? 100 kcal/100g.
Average food? 200 kcal/100g.
Fatty food? 300 kcal/100g
Sweets? 400 kcal/100g
Snacks? 500 kcal/100g

Oh and beer 200kcal/0.5L... partying is hard on your weight :/ particularly since it makes me hungry for late night supersized junk food too, which is as stupid as it gets. Volume is also a big thing, when I wanted to binge I could make myself 300 grams of pasta, add 400 grams of sausage and pour a glass of 500 ml sauce over it. That's a 3*350 (uncooked, ~100 cooked)+4*200+5*40 = 2000 kcal dish. I knew it was too much, but I guess I just didn't want to know how much. These days I make about 40% of that and it's still a slightly oversized dinner. So I'd say weighing it is the main thing, you can mostly ballpark how healthy it is.

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