With older (PPC?) based Macs, to update the firmware you had to power off the machine, then turn it on by holding the power button until you got an extra beep or sound. This would physically un-write-protect the firmware EPROM so that it could be updated by open firmware.

In their quest to make everything as "user friendly" as possible, they took out this hardware security feature, allowing the update to just happen without any physical action.

Bad Apple, no donut.

If it comes down to military force stopping loss of assets for failure to pay debt, then you're saying "stop all international trade with me this instant".

Russia imports nearly 40% of its food. So, say hello to the largest famine of this century.

GDP comparisons:

Major pro-sanctions players:
US: 16,8T
EU: 17,5T
Japan: 4,9T

Major anti-sanctions players:
Russia: 2,1T
China: 9,5T

Just ignoring the whole fiat currency issue and controlling the global banking system which act as large multipliers, China is simply not comparable to the economic pressure being levied against Russia.

China's in this thing with Russia for precisely one thing: China. They're taking advantage of a weakened Russia to strike deals that they never would have gotten before. A good example is the "Power of Siberia" gas pipeline deal that they signed for a few years back. China's been trying for years to get Russia to bite at bargain-basement prices that leave almost no profit for Gazprom (perhaps even a slight negative that would have to be somewhat subsidized by the government's gas royalties), and Russia had been refusing. Then they sign the exact same deal they'd been refusing a few months ago and herald it as a great victory.

China has Russia in an excellent position and is going to squeeze every drop of potential profit out of their bad situation that they can. And Russia will herald it as a glorious blow to the west all the way down.

That said - even China's GDP doesn't compare to the sanction imposers (US + Europe + Japan + misc), all the leverage multipliers of global banking and fiat currency that the sanction imposers have aside. Even if China's goal was to break sanctions - which it's not - it's just not big enough, it's a third their size. And Russia a trivial fraction of that. And the multipliers of controlling the banking system and a fiat currency are very real. Throw trade into the picture, forget it - Moscow is closer to Newfoundland and Liberia than it is to Beijing. There's a giant barren wasteland between the two. They have a border but it's more of a barrier than a facilitator for trade.

As the very article linked by Slashdot put it:

"In the current conditions, any help is very welcome," Vladimir Miklashevsky, a strategist at Danske Bank A/S, said by e-mail. "Yet, it can't substitute the losses of the Russian banking system and economy from western sanctions."

Voice mail etiquette.

(speak slowly and distinctly here) Hi. This is (your name). My number is (your number).

(speak normally here) Now state the situation as clearly as you can. But be brief. This is a message. Not exposition.

End with repeating your name (slowly and clearly) and your phone number.

Thank you.

The easiest way to do this is to realize that you MIGHT run into voice mail before you pick up the phone. Go through the message in your head before dialing. This will cut down on the uh and um and huh and em and other noises.

You're right! That's, um, the, uh, problem.

"People north of 40 are schizophrenic about voice mail," says Michael Schrage.

Bullshit. I'm old and I hate voice mail. No one knows how to leave a message and they're just going to follow up with an email or come see you in person anyway.

If you're just going to leave a message that says "call me back" then send an email or a text or an IM. Or use the scheduling function in email to set up an appointment with me.

The worst offender was a manager I worked with some years ago. He would do the stream-of-consciousness thing whenever he got voicemail and you'd end up with 10 sentences covering 10 different topics. Which I would then turn into 10 different email messages and send back to him.

It's communication! It is NOT the same as talking. Just because you're talking does NOT mean you're communicating.

Hotels will make you pay just to use an electrical outlet in a meeting room.

They charge for every little tiny thing, simply because business execs will just sign off on all of it and not care about a "paltry" $100 "outlet usage" fee.

Meanwhile, these fees can be big problems for smaller budget conventions, such as fandom cons. The artist alley at half the furry cons I've been to have a policy keeping artists from plugging in their stuff to charge because the con gets dinged hundreds of dollars in penalties by the hotel.

It truly is a non-customer-friendly business if you're not a big company flush with cash.

I have this sinking suspicion that this could be the common state of affairs for the Internet's forseeable future -- various unknown parties constantly breaking various things on the Internet, with the rest of us never really figuring out who is doing what to whom, or why.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a global game of Core War, being played on everyone's servers, forever. :P

It looks like what will change is that the orangutan will live in a wildlife sanctuary rather than in a zoo.

Whether that is significant or not depends on the difference in quality-of-life (for an orangutan) between living in a cage (or small zoo enclosure) vs living in a larger outdoor environment. I'd imagine that the orangutan's quality of life will improve significantly, but that's only a layman's guess since I don't claim any expertise on orangutans. I suppose the test would be to give the orangutan the option of either lifestyle, and see which one she seems to prefer.

The difference with a 3d moulder being that, instead of taking a couple hours to 3d print a mould, then stop your production line and manually install the new mould in place of the old, then start it back up again you could effectively instantly form 3d mould (via microactuators or whatnot), do a 15 minute production run and make a couple hundred parts, then move on to mass producing the next part you need with no break in-between. Your "factory" could be in full production mode nonstop yet have a single line produce many dozens of different types of parts over the course of a day.

When one thinks of space colony applications, it quickly becomes clear how essential such a thing will be. Even if you try to simplify, you're still going to have tends to hundreds of thousands of types of parts that will wear out with time. Let's say 100k unique types of of parts with a mean lifespan of 3 years - that's probably pretty realistic for a colony. That means you'll have to produce a new type of part every 15 minutes nonstop - with quantities varying from one-offs to the tens of thousands, depending on the part. Now think of how big your typical production line is and how much mass that means transporting from earth. Clearly, rapid production flexibility is critical! (same applies to all steps of the chain, including robotic assembly)

(and yes, I know a single moulder or whatnot cannot achieve all possible production jobs, real production lines involve many types of materials and many processes... it's just an example of a common production mechanism :) )

(as another side note, it should even be possible to make 3d moulds for metals. Carbon fiber cloth - or better, graphite fiber cloth - can tolerate temperatures hotter than many metals, but still has stretch and could be shaped with an array of actuators).

I'm not sure about how that was decided, but I will note that an older definition of the word was "A temporary bed made from [straw] bedding arranged on the floor, especially for a child". Perhaps they envisioned the wooden frames as temporary beds for products to rest on?

The line of customers to the $50 battery-swap option will definitely become less steady, yes. Unless you think that there aren't any people who, given the option, would choose to keep the $50 rather than spend it? Granted, these are Tesla drivers we're talking about here, but still ;^)

Okay... next question is: how much would it cost to hire the necessary people to do what was done to Sony? I'm guessing that would be in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly up to a million?

Given the amount of money North Korea spends on nuclear weapons development, I don't see any reason why they wouldn't or couldn't spend a relatively small amount on this.

I can't quite see why this is being made out to be such a scandal. So she asked a colleague if a black guy might be interested in films starring black characters. Okay, it's a bit naive, but scandalous? Really?

It's not like she said anything insensitive to Obama; she merely asked a colleague for advice about how to act appropriately. I'd think that recognizing your ignorance in advance and correcting it would be preferable to ignoring it and then blurting out something stupid/embarrassing to the POTUS.

I'm probably missing some critical detail, but to me it seems like the only thing she's guilty of is not having enough experience interacting with black people in a social context. That's a weakness, to be sure, but if it's a sin then it's a sin that a lot of other people are also guilty of. I think this is a pretty good example of why people are so reluctant to enter any discussion about race -- anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion.

There are tons of online services already like iMaterialize and Shapeways - they do really excellent work.