> The way a drone strike works is a drone loiters on station for
> weeks on end. During this time the drone's pilots figure out who
> is in the house when [...] the Girl Scouts [...] teenage daughter
> has a boyfriend who sneaks in [...] civilian population [...]

Seriously? Do you belive this? It looks like some soap opera TV drama applied to military actions. I don't think it works like that. For what I see nobody cares about the civilians unless it would be a publicity stunt. For what I see the drone killing policy is just plain chaos fueled by special forces intel - and the chain of command - general the target is in the building - just blow it the fuck up and we have a success, then the order goes down and further down and then it is the sole drone pilot who is given an order to blow something up - but he has objections, maybe the said, hypothetical boyfriend is right now banging, but he has orders - what to do? Run it up the chain of command to the general who has his orders from the intel? Are you joking? Etc.

What you have written would be true if secret intel operations were flawless but for what we know it is just a chaotic bullshit. Man USA invaded another country based on wrong/or misleading political interpretations of wrong intel (I am wrigting about Iraq and Bush administration) and also USA is a big mess of Xteen top secret organisations/agencies and employing about a milion people with access to top secret information...

In general this whole machine powers decisions to use drone killing. Paranoia I would say.

I don't know how you function in what I presume is USA but here in Poland in small to mid sized companies nobody would even consider buying general purpose office printer without knowing that there are cheap substitute toners aviable for that model. I work in small company and we only buy printers for which we can get cheap toners. And the price difference is like 1/2 (!). Right now we go only with Lexmark and annually we do a market research to emerge the cheapest company to supply us with substitute toners. Once we have a contract with such company they are more than willing to take old toner cases from us. And they also do all the paperwork for us to give us receipts of old toners recovery since it is required by law to have such. I don't know anybody who was controlled about this but it is illegal here tu just dump the e-waste in thrash - you ought to have a receipt for every piece of electronics/e-waste you dispose (and also you need it for fiscal reasons).

So I am a bit shocked reading about your toner accumulation policy and your urge to throw them away into trash. :)

You are perfectly OK to choose Uber whenever you like and it is aviable for you but the rest of your post is just invalid.

> Sure, like you said, there are nice taxis therein Poland regulated
> by the government. And then there are all the other scammers around.

And what makes you think that Uber are not scammers? What real jurisdiction Uber has over transport in Poland?

> Now, me as a tourist, I land at Krakow airport and I have
> no clue which is which and I may as well end up in a shitty dirty
> unregulated cab paying 5x the fare

Well I don't know the airport in Kraków but Warsaw airport has like five accepted taxis which can pick you up straight from the terminal. Other ones (if you order them) can drive to further pickup lanes on the airport. So it is really not longer a problem with scammer taxis on aiports in Poland (it used to be). The same is for major railway stations. You can safely pick the ones recommended by airports - they are not the cheapest (in 2,4z per kilometer range) but they are safe.

> call a Uber driver and be sure to arrive at my destination in an accountable
> transport that charges me the minimum fare possible for that trip.

What makes you thint Uber is accountable?

> Guess which one the users choose.

I guess they choose airport aproved taxis.

I'am posting this from Warsaw, Poland. Taxi business here is OK I guess as a client - there are just a loads of taxis everywhere, you can call you favourite and it will come in 10 minutes - always. And it is great. Local regulations require that TAXI to be called TAXi is to have a license - fare with these guys is regulary between 2,60-1,50 (per kilometer +"shutting door" fare). There are also "people transfer" services which are like TAXI but are not formaly these but private lines - they can't have TAXI sign on car but would use something like TAKSI and so on. Also there is a law that anybody who can transport 7 people (large vans with seatings in back) can operate as private transporter. Also you have the thing called "Night Drivers" and it is like a person transfer (legally) but usually somebody with really fancy car shows up and drives you - and then gives you their card so you call them more often.

This is a mess I guess but if you know the differences you can pick the best way for you (which in my case is registered cheapest TAXI - since they can use exclusive lanes for them).

And there also was a case in Kraków in which the city forbided non registered taxis - so they operated as psychological services (sic! - you drive you get an advice). Etc.

Nevertheless I love taxi-and similar services in my city (Warsaw) - I can order whatever the fuck I want. :) TAXI, private transfer, Uber etc. - and get home....

So in my opinion Uber has no chance here (with their 1/4 provision going just about using the app - fuck you uber - clients PAY for tha) since you can get cheap rides anyway... Uber is only strong where old-school style city-regulated TAXIs are strong.

> The laptop niche seems okay,

Except it is not an niche. Personally I haven't used a desktop/workstation computer for like 5 years. And also it have been like 5 years (or more) since notebook shipments exceeded desktop/workstations. Of course in sane IT deployments loss of client computer should not be a problem but still there could be sensitive data there. Even system level stuff like password hashes and so on. Maybe it is rare but security breaches usually involve the weakest link - and be it that if stoling a notebook is easier than breaking in your network then attackers would go and steal that laptop.

> except laptops get hacked just like desktops way more often than they get stolen and offlined

True. Probably spear-phishing or something like that would be easier than physically stealing a notebook. But stealing is still possible so you should protect also that vector of attack.

It's funny that IRRC the guy behind SilkRoad was captured using his laptop. The FBI tracked him and waited for opportunity to seize his notebook without possibility for him to shut it down (as it was encrypted). The lesson here is maybe to have some low-range personal device like bluetooth LE smartband that makes the computer to shut down where you are not close to it (like very close). And also don't tell anybody about it. ;)

Oh and for the Silkroad guy it would be wiser to operate from a country in which FBI has no jurisdiction... ;)

I don't know why are you hostile? :) If you could describe a situation in which allowing divide by zero would be deadly. I don't disagree with you - I AGREE - YOU DONT DIVIDE BY ZERO - BASIC MATH. But also I wonder how one can explain this to another by example on how it could be deadly (a airplane example, nuclear powerplant maybe)?

It runs on Linux.

> so a vulnerability in one process cannot give you access to the content of the other

Unless it is a kernel vulnerability in LXC that allows you to escape the container.

But you are right about POSIX.

IMO containers are not about security - if you wanted security you would go with designs that were built with it in mind from hardware to software.

Containers and microservice architecture allow faster and better managed deployments of services in large distributed scale (aka the cloud) and this is the main selling point.

> I'm not a PS4 (or any other console) fanboy, but I read this and can't help wonder:
> It there anything that stops a user from replacing the hard drive in a PS4 with a larger
> drive themselves (wonky interfaces? self destruct when opened cases? magic formatting
> of the drive that can't readily be duplicated?)? Is it a typical 3.5 inch drive or a smaller drive?

It is no problem to replace PS4 disk. You just get compatible (in size - 2,5", max 9,5mm tall, similar performance - nothing fancy, you can even pop SSD) drive, open the console, pop in the new drive, download and install OS from USB flashdrive and it is done. There are plenty of guides on Internet if you Google it. You can also buy an accessory which adds 500gb storage to PS4.

Also you wouldn't be buing entire new PS4 system if you were short on storage. So this is not the case here.

So really this is not a big news. I don't quite get why they haven't launched with a bigger drive but it just normal that they release new hardware revision later after launch and adress problems (like limited storage) - it is for people who _do_not_own_PS4_yet_.

As I know from my job experience large scale IT deployments inside their WAN networks can filter whatever the fuck they want. Sudden appearance of ADP as an enterprise deployable package - who the fuck cares? We are right now black/white listing all the stuff we need. Who needs to introduce something like ADP that probably can mess with loads of internal services and need to be tested if you could just not use it? if an user has a problem with advertisements he/she is probably far away of what he/she should be doing on their workstation.

> Growing up in the 80's, I played video games quite frequently. Now, though, I find myself avoiding them.

You were (I assume) a child then so you've liked playing games in general. I guess if you were your 80's age now you would be gaming since games now are AWESOME... if you have time for gaming (which you don't)..

> One reason is cost. I realize the cost really has probably not gone
> up that significantly from the NES days, but at that time it was my
> parents paying for a new console and games. Now I have to figure
> out how to justify a $60 game.

That is how I've justified building RaspberryPi ($40) +2 classic controllers ($6) +SD card ($4) and RetroPie ($0) and some hacking (and maybe a charger and HDMI cable and so on) so I casually can play Contra or Bomberman with my girlfriend and it rocks PLUS I get a feeling that I am a geek which is nice. ;)

> No, you don't just ignore this problem and you absolutely don't put a system wide
> rule in effect to ignore the problem. If you get such an error it indicates a very
> fundamental problem wit the logic of the program. It is not trivial, and in real world
> situations could be deadly.

First of all I don't object you - you just don't divide by zero cause math. And it is it.

But could you please describe one (or more if you wish) situation in which such behavior could be deadly?

Seriously I briefly thinked about it in this context (programing) and can't think of any serious practical aplication. I know I feel bad about myself about it... but I really don't know.

I only have experience with customer grade SSDs and not with enterprise ones. But as it comes for customer SSDs most of the ones I've used or maintained caused no problems. But I recall one HP made drive that used crash after about a year - total data loss after a year of usage. Reformat and the drive was ok - another year passed and crash and data loss. As it turned out the disk had some encryption procedures in firmware which were faulty - firmware upgrade (hopefully) fixed it but also said firmware update required to erease all data. I've always had decent backups as monthly system image and daily data so recovery was easy. But I am aware that SSD drives are much less reliable than HDDs due to controller/firmware problems. And this is IMHO a general known fact.