I think so too. The article from theatlantic also mentioned protecting proprietary technology.

The addition of high-tech components to everyday items makes production more complicated, and that means U.S. production is more attractive, not just because manufacturers now have more proprietary technology to protect, but because American workers are more skilled, on average, than their Chinese counterparts.

Aside from handing over patents, I've read that it is routine for Chinese factories to secretly sell authentic brand products to counterfeiters. It's hard to compete with counterfeiters when they're selling the real thing at a discount.

This sounds like another case of The Insourcing Boom. Companies are finally seeing at the total cost of outsourcing. Cook mentioned that Apple already has to make some parts in the US and pay to ship them out to the manufacturing plants overseas, and that's only one of the common costs.

The interview doesn't go into a lot of details on Apple's move to US manufacturing, but a big part of the outsourcing cost is what you lose when you separate your product development from the manufacturing process. This comment from Tim Cook speaks to that:

In addition, we have hundreds of people that reside in China in the plants on a full-time basis that are helping with manufacturing and working on manufacturing process and so forth. The truth is we couldn’t innovate at the speed we do if we viewed manufacturing as this disconnected thing. It’s integrated. So it’s a part of our process.

I'm guessing this move to insource is not philanthropic, it's a smart business decision in the long run, just like General Electric's.

It says that XKCD passwords (at least 18 lower case characters) would take insane amounts of time to crack, but it doesn't give numbers for a rainbow table attack; that's where an attacker makes all combinations of 1 to 4 words from a list of common ones and tries those first. They would also try word separators like spaces, underscores, dashes and even odd symbols. Those don't add much to the total search space though.

A rainbow table attack would reduce XKCD passwords to about 2048^4 (most use 4 words from a list of 2048 common ones). That's a search space of 1.76×10^13. That would take about 54 centuries of online cracking, 30 minutes of offline cracking and 1.5 seconds of offline mega-cluster hacking. That's not so good.

If you stick a single symbol character into the middle of one of your words (@, #, %, &, etc.), the rainbow attack fails and the search space goes back up to 2.66 x 10^35, or 8.45 hundred billion centuries to crack offline with a mega-cluster. Effectively uncrackable.

Even three words with a random symbol would take 1.18 thousand centuries offline with a mega-cluster. I think I'll go with that from now on.

The Palladium RPG aims more for realism and combat simulation. It can get tedious, but it's pretty flexible in the amount of detail you can enforce.

They also have a lot of books that apply their system to completely different settings like modern day and sci-fi. Heroes Unlimited and Ninjas and Superspies work pretty well together.

This discussion thread is only for those of us who do not read the article. There will be another post later that actually links to the article to allow those annoying fact checkers to join in.

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Read just one of their reviews and you'll learn about all of the most important things to look for in a camera. Their camera database is amazing for narrowing down your options once you have an idea of your price range and what you want.