The whole thing is just hype. Enormous time and money? Deployment aside, I could DEVELOP something like this BY MYSELF. Virtual file systems? I wrote one on Fuse on a whim, to intercept disk access calls and check against policy. Exploiting a kernel driver? Same as exploiting anything else; it's a zero-day malware. Hundreds of CNC servers? Vanilla botnet--a deployment issue. Detecting iPhones and doing weird shit? Yeah, I work in DevOps; I have a server that detects mobile phones and redirects them to a mobile site.

Software of a given size doesn't require special time or money; it requires skill. Creating a full MacOSX clone with a BSD-like kernel and DPDF windowing system? That requires a ton of time and expert skill effort, because it's millions of lines of complex code. Creating a Windows 7 clone? Same. Creating a Linux clone from scratch? Same. Creating a WinAMP clone? Much less time and effort. Creating a FileZilla clone? Similar to a WinAMP clone. Creating a computer worm? It's a few thousand lines of code; it's single-person basement work for anyone familiar with the various techniques involved.

All of these technological breakthroughs were old in 1999.

The sky is blue, the president is black, and Russia is bombing Ukraine. None of that is relevant, either.

You cannot demonstrate that no new technology is required to create a colony on Mars. Economic viability, perhaps. Technology? The primary concern is energy; anything from a nuclear power plant to space lasers can handle that. In 1964, we demonstrated an electric helicopter powered by pointing a big microwave dish at and using a rectifier and antenna to convert the microwave beam into an electrical potential; microwave beam power transmission is well-established and proven, but prohibitively expensive.

We have a sealed habitat up in orbit around the Earth. We can readily build a giant sealed habitation dome on Mars. We use LED lights for high-efficiency electricity-to-plant-mass conversion here at home; orbital solar with microwave beam transmission would power an artificial sun readily. New Zealand is growing chickens at a rate of 1.3fcr, producing 1 pound of chicken meat per 1.3 pounds of chicken feed: you can have meat and grain. Air and water purification technology exist already. Again, it's prohibitively expensive, but technologically reachable.

You can theorize that the martian atmosphere may provide technological challenges that exceed these things; but the only way to demonstrably prove that we can't do it with current technology is to build a model in a Martian environment. If we have the technology to maintain a terrestrial simulated Martian environment, then we also have the technology to maintain a Martian simulated terrestrial environment; this won't help us to simulate things like solar-orbital power, however, due to atmospheric scattering not present on Mars, and long distances present in the Mars orbit-to-surface path.

You cannot demonstrably prove that we don't have the technology to maintain an independent Mars colony; you can only theorize.

Life insurance money.

You cannot demonstrate that; you can only conjecture it.

Ace Attorney: Steam Edition

Seawall was adequate to anything Japan had seen for 1000 years. Japan is a 6.0 earthquake region, and took a 9.7; everything was built to handle at least 8.0, which was considered ridiculous. Resulting tsunami from the localized 9+ earthquake was out of scope, and never supposed to happen, in the same way a 15.0 earthquake is never supposed to happen.

Whoever brings the most money wins.

Replacing our Welfare system with a Citizen's Dividend will revitalize capitalism. The profits of the entire economy, from the lowest wage worker to the strongest business, will be taxed to provide a base payment to every natural-born American citizen above age 18; this provides just enough to make a profit by renting them housing and selling them food, clothing, soap, and the like. While the divide between rich and poor may grow and shrink, the dividend will always be of the total, and so unaffected by who gets what proportion of the nation's income; the market will always automatically support the poor, as doing so is nearly a $2 trillion industry, and growing with inflation and with the increasing wealth of the nation.

This is a patch to make free market Capitalism solve poverty. Solving poverty will reduce crime, physical and mental health problems, loss of economic opportunity, and all forms of inequality: it diminishes all other social problems.

This is exactly why we need the Internet Facebook Archive to preserve these things: so we can remember who you really were.

It's radio. The radio chipset is controlled by firmware which can be buggy and hackable, thus is updated through drivers. In a lot of hardware (for example: Broadcom SOCs), radio hardware (wifi, GSM, etc.) has no standing ROM: a 50MHz ARM or Atmel controller has its 32KB of RAM loaded with a small, real-time OS running an IO system to communicate with the radio and the OS.

Consequentially, it's typically possible to overload the firmware and directly control the radio: the radio waves are controlled by software, and that software has to put the IEMI into the radio packet. You just reprogram the software.

To give you some perspective: CPUs load microcode at boot, either from OS drivers or from the BIOS, to patch CPU flaws. You can add or overload CPU instructions from within an OS, to a limited degree. The same reasoning applies: you might find a way to send a signal to the phone and take control of the radio chipset; you might find a division bug in a CPU; etc.

Hardware is built all kinds of weird ways.

I used to write in a language that I had reduced to strings of numbers. Instead of writing out the full command, I had listings of pairs of numbers.

It's not that; the author is patently insane.

The author is saying that "if (a

Crap dangling around a program isn't just necessary for it to run. All those keywords, function calls, common APIs, and the like tell the program what to do with the data you're telling it to manipulate.

A cell phone's IEMI can be reprogrammed through the engineering console, at least on Android phones.

The kill switch is OS activated. I have mine disabled. Power the phone off, bring it up into the boot loader, wipe, then disable kill switch from within phone; or install cyanogenmod.

But in the morning I'll be sober and happy, but you will still be bitter.