If someone is producing a modpack with 100+ mods and not giving you instructions on how to make MC use more memory, then they are an asshat. Now go forth and google for how to make MC use more memory with your 64 bit Java.

If you're worried about that, you can firewall off all non-IPSEC traffic... and still enjoy WiFi

You do realize that this is completely besides the point, right? The question was whether the US had anything to do with the problem in Iran, and the answer is yes, yes it did. Even if everyone involved in that decision is dead, we still have to live with the consequences today. I should not have to explain this to you.

Well, I didn't mean to imply that it was difficult, just that it's slightly less available. What's being pushed in people's faces is not Windows 7.

So you're saying all those messages I get from the mailing list are a hallucination?

I can't imagine that the DoD would be happy with DHS clowns guarding something that they actually cared about. Though, if the alternative is G4S, maybe they'd take it. I'd certainly want to be rid of whoever thought that training with doctored MILES gear was adequate.

The atmosphere does have 900 degree sulfuric acid at the surface and just above. It also has a surface pressure like being a mile underwater. Carbon dioxide is actually a fluid at that pressure, not a gas.

However at the altitude where the atmospheric pressure is like Earth's, it's not actually livable by itself, but it it isn't a hellish, crushing inferno either. It may well offer advantages over Mars. Having gravity be Earth-similar is important for long term habitation. More of an atmosphere to deal with radiation without having to bore into the surface is pretty useful as well.

More to the point, you don't have to have a fragile balloon or something to keep the settlement up there. Venus is made up of a lot more CO2 by far than Earth is. Carbon Dioxide is heavier than either Nitrogen or Oxygen. Your settlement's air supply would literally be your flotation gas. The only "no fail" tech you would need, would be the same no fail tech you'd need to live on Mars. And with significant CO2, you have a much more ready supply of something that can be turned into Oxygen with scrubbers than you would on a comparatively airless Mars.

I read that in the sense of, "Let's say that I'm in the position of being a general manager", as a hypothetical rather than something to be taken literally.

By the time off-world colonies are viable, pollution on Earth will be a non-issue, because the exact same technology needed to sustain an offworld colony is the technology that would allow us to clean and recycle absolutely everything here on Earth. Because that's exactly what you need for a self-sustaining offworld colony: recycled everything. On Earth, we're lucky enough to have a natural biosphere that gives us tons of recycling capacity for free: just dump wastewaster and CO2 and feces into the wilderness and, like a miracle, fresh air blows back, clean water falls from the sky, and food grows out of what was once someone's shit. Up to a certain capacity at least. If we can't even manage to recycle the excess of ours that that massive free hand up nature gives us can't handle, then we're nowhere close to being able to settle offworld where we have to do all of that work ourselves.

Like you say, Antarctica or the desert or, hell, the ocean floor, would all be a cakewalk compared to anywhere off Earth.

There is good reason to settle offworld when we can (not keeping all our eggs in one basket), but until we're capable of even settling all of the comparably idyllic places on our own planet that aren't "worth settling" at the current difficulty levels, then we don't stand a chance of settling anywhere offworld.

It's not floating by hull displacement like a boat does. It's not pushing out the higher-density lower atmosphere and letting the lower-dentity higher atmosphere fill in; that wouldn't even make sense, we're talking about a continual gradient of gasses, there is no liquid surface to float on. You just fill it with Earth-sea-level-density gasses, which are less dense than much of Venus' atmosphere, and then let it float where it floats, which will be up around the range of where those same gasses exist on Venus. The weight of the hull will drag it down some, but size is largely irrelevant to that. The weight of the hull is like the weight of the rubber in a balloon. How big you inflate the balloon isn't really important; the fact that it's filled with helium and thus lighter than sea-level air is what matters.

The 'feature' occurred on Windows Phone first, not sure exactly what version. I assume that it made a great pitch to prospective carriers, since they all love offloading customers onto anything that isn't their data network as often as possible, and typing passwords into your phone is a pain, so automating it likely increases network offload considerably.

Just as they say, in the context of backups, that 'if it isn't automated it won't happen'; there is likely to be a considerable difference in the rate of unintended leakage between a 'yeah, I guess I did tell Bob the password, he could pass it on' and 'the password spreads through your entire social group like a bad chain email'.

This sort of 'friend/acquaintance' attack attack is also exactly where slightly-too-automatic automation makes it really easy to bypass what limited good sense about security humans do have.

If, say, Alice and Bob have just had a messy breakup; it would be fairly obvious to any mutual friend of the two that sharing one's wifi password with the other, or a known friend/agent of the other, is something that they wouldn't like. They might do it anyway; because people are assholes like that sometimes; but it would be deliberate. Social-engineering somebody in that situation into telling you the password might be vaguely tricky. Social-engineering them into making you enough of a contact/friend/whatever on the services that this 'wifi sense' system uses to receive the password should be absolutely trivial; quite possibly already done.

I suspect that it isn't for nothing that this 'feature' first appeared on Windows Phone; carriers adore the idea of getting the filthy customers off the cell data networks they pay for and onto wifi as often as they can, and don't much care about a bit of collateral damage inflicted by dumb implementations.

His mistake was simple. He decided to be irreplaceable because he didn't think anyone could do as good a job as he could. You can't do that. That never, ever works out well for you.

Now, a startup founder is a really important person for their company, of course. However, even they need to work towards limiting their workload, at least eventually.

There's no point to building a startup if you end up dead or broken at the end of it. If you see it coming, then you need to act to fix it. If you go with the idea that you work or your startup fails, then when you break down, your startup will fail anyway. That or if you do make a successful startup, but break down because of making it successful, congratulations, you've just defined Pyrrhic victory for the startup scene. You'd probably have been better off as a wage slave at the end of it.

Some people are driven to try and succeed, and the journey can be as rewarding all by itself, even with failure at the end. But if you aren't someone who can enjoy, or at least regard the journey as a rewarding learning experience, you should not be founding a startup.

What I would like to see explained in more detail is the claim that 'wifi sense doesn't reveal your plaintext password' during the sharing process.

My understanding was that(except WPA2 with RADIUS and a suitably chosen EAP) there isn't any provision for authenticating to a password protected AP without knowing the password. The AP itself might be able to destroy the password after it has been set, saving only a hash, as is good practice to keep more important sets of usernames and passwords from being compromised; but the client requesting authentication needs the password. The non 'enterprise' cases were designed to be easy to use, not particularly clever; and MS has limited room to get creative without causing nasty breakage on large numbers of variously dysfunctional legacy APs.

With a proper full WPA2 setup, or with one of the 'no authentication at the AP; but captive portal and/or VPN is the only way to access anything interesting' arrangements, you have more options; but how can you 'share' authentication to a WPA-PSK or WEP network without also sharing the key? Did they actually come up with something really clever, or does the UI just not show you the password, thus 'hiding' it?

Surely this is the logical place to insert "In the public sector, they cut corners to waste money!" and then talk about military contracting for a while.