I agree with you entirely from the point of view of a person attempting to break in to rob the place. This isn't a big deal for that.

My concern is two fold. Given police tactics for extracting incriminating evidence, even from innocent individuals (Here's a great video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...), and the courts in our country largely siding with the State and Federal governments in 4th amendment disputes, how long would it be before your Nest data is used in a court of law, or in the planning of a no-knock raid, or in a warrantless fishing exercise to find people meeting a profile?

Is sacrificing your privacy worth the benefit to society? For example, if I know exactly when everyone opens/closes a door and turns on/off lights, I could identify the point in time that individuals arrive home. Now if I know a murder occurred at 1:00am, and that most murders occur within 5 miles of the perpetrator's residence I could look through all of the arrivals at homes within 5 miles between 1:00am and 2:00am and have a nice little batch of suspects to contact. Never mind that Jimmy was at the bar and Nancy works 2nd shift, they're going to get picked up, taken down town, and interrogated by an officer skilled in getting them to admit to things.

-Rick

"Nest Will Now Work With Your Door Locks, Light Bulbs and More"

So anyone who can access your Nest network can now determine your living habits and unlock doors on demand?

I'm not typically a paranoid libertarian, but really, there are some things I'm 100% fine with handling on a closed network or with my own two hands.

-Rick

"iTunes on Windows has also gone downhill over the last few years, and they've completely abandoned Safari on Windows."

Which is to say that it has fallen from the top of the turd pile to somewhere close to the bottom.

-Rick

99.9% of the time, no.

The purpose of the compiler is to identify and optimize the code structures in higher level languages. There are many, many tools, and generations of compilers that have been dedicated to just that. For the vast majority of cases, the compiler will do a better job and leave you with the much easier task of maintaining a high level language codebase.

That said, there are specific operations, most frequently mathematical in nature, that are so explicitly well defined and unchanging, that writing them in ASM may actually allow the author to take procedural liberties that the compiler is unknowledgeable of or exist in such a way that the compiler is unaware of.

The end result of such code is typically virtually unreadable. The syntax masks the math, and the math obfuscates the syntax. But the outcome is a thing of pure beauty.

-Rick

I would take a quick glance at the author/proprietor's wiki page: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/A...

It may shed some light as to why that specific site isn't exactly treated as though it has any scientific credence.

-Rick

From the looks of things, this vulnerability only allows the would-be exploiter to circumvent UAC.

They still need valid credentials for a user with Admin rights to do anything significant (the demo just attempts to launch Calculator).

Which, given your post would imply that you are logged into your Windows 8.1 PC as a user with Admin rights. And if you are perusing Slashdot while logged in as an Admin, you are doing something far worse than Google disclosing the vulnerability :P

-Rick

Information Technology Services Management.

It's what your boss does.

-Rick

Are you sure you're thinking of the Surface Pro? There is no track pad or keyboard (other than the software keyboard). I'll admit, I strongly prefer the Android keyboard/autocomplete to the Microsoft Windows 8.1 digital keyboard.

I'm surprised you note the Surface's battery life, that's one of the weaker aspects in my opinion. My old iPad could pull a full day of active work off the charger. Not sure if I'd trust the SP2 after 4 hours off charger.

Also not sure on your dislike for the charger itself. I strongly prefer the 4-pin magnetic connector over micro USB or that god awful proprietary crap connector that Apple uses on the 4th gen iPads. With the SP2 the plug is reversible, so I don't even have to guess which side is up, and since it's magnetic I don't have to deal with trying to line it up, just get it close and it pops into place.

-Rick

Exactly my point.

When I'm at home, the SP2 is effectively docked, I have a keyboard, a mouse, I'm even thinking about getting a larger monitor for it.

When I'm out running an event, I might bring a keyboard along to enter in player registration, but from there on it's just walking around with it using the touch interface like a tablet.

When I bring it along to a meeting, most of the time it's just for reference, being able to pull up documents, do a quick Google search, take some notes, email a picture of the white board, etc... So typing is limited.

-Rick

"Finally, my hopes include having remote access being more of using Citrix or RDP and having the remote machine be more of a dumb terminal, as opposed to an active VPN, making the remote machine a part of the corporate network."

Either way there are concerns. With Citrix (assuming Citrix Web, since you specifically call out no VPN), you wind up with the exact same issue as what happened here. As soon as someone's username/password is compromised, the would be hacker has full access to what ever is publicly exposed. So any applications or desktops available to the user in Citrix are fair game. You are now counting on the internal security of each of your applications...

For RDP, I am unaware of an RDP clients that are trusted for use NOT coming in over a VPN. The thought of a non-VPN RDP solution on an enterprise network is somewhat frightening to me. Do you have a client in mind? I'd like to read more about it.

As for VPNs, if done well, there is limited risk. For example, the laptop I have with my current employer has a built in software firewall and enterprise class virus prevention solution. I also do not have administrative access (only a small handful of people in the entire agency do and it is not on their standard domain accounts). Additionally, to connect to our VPN, you need not just the VPN software/configuration, and a username/password, but that user account must also be configured to allow for VPN access (again, limited to a subset of employees) on a specific machine (not sure if they use MAC or some other hardware ID tag), and when you connect you are prompted for a rotating security code that you get by checking an RSA dongle that has been issued to you.

So yeah, VPNs can be cracked, especially if they aren't designed to be secure, but when done properly, they can be significantly more secure than just exposing a Citrix/RDP web solution.

-Rick

I am not in the market for a car >right nowin a city I find work in.

This means over the last 10+ years my shortest commute has been just ~25 minutes, and my longest has been ~55 minutes with an average of ~45 minutes. Twice a day for 250 days a year (give or take) over 10+ years.

That's almost 2000 hours of my life I've spent focused on driving a car.

2000 hours not writing code. 2000 hours not reading. 2000 not speaking with my family. 2000 hours not listening intently to pod casts, in depth analysis, or educational programming. It's almost a full year's worth of labor.

So, throw together some IFs here: IF the self driving car can last for 10 years, and IF my job allows me to work while commuting (or I find other means of revenue generation while commuting), and IF my commute remains consistent at 45 minutes, and IF my commute is fully automated, and IF I were to have an hourly of ~$50, the car could cost up to $100,000 MORE than my desired vehicle and still break even.

That's a whole lot of IFs. Now, if you're rocking out Mechanical Turks at an amazing pace while commuting, you can top out at probably $10/hr, so you're looking at a $20,000 premium over 10 years. If you're a new-ish car only kind of person, Turking only gets you a $10,000 premium over 5 years.

So from the consumer side, the premium of the self drive has to get weighed against the value of time. To me, my time is incredibly valuable, I would gladly cough up a nice chunk of change to get a self-drive feature on a car (a $10-20k premium would still be in my price range without resorting to Mechanical Turk on the drive). So I'll wait for prices to come down to that.

From the commercial side though, it could be way better. Imagine being a taxi fleet operator with 2 dozen cars and only 3 drivers that only need to be active in case of vehicular failure or by specific request. Or a freight hauling company that can run trucks 24x7, even when the "driver" is sleeping. Even transit busses and shuttles could be largely driverless.

So you are right, not every consumer is going to buy one, especially not now when supply is short and prices are extremely high. But over the next decade as prices drop, technology improves, and availability increases, we'll see more commercial adoption and a growing consumer market.

-Rick

I have a (don't judge me!) Surface Pro 2. After my last PC got struck by lightning almost 9 months ago, I haven't bothered building a new one.

The Surface Pro has (just) enough processing power to handle most of what I need it to do. All my standard office stuff (word, excel, visio) and as long as I'm not doing anything too crazy, it handles my personal dev projects (VS2013 and some assorted web and .Net apps) including debugging (although I'm not running a local database on it for development).

Yeah, it can do Netflix, hulu, and prime, but it also runs an Android emulator (hurray for Andyroid!) fairly well for apps I need that aren't available on Windows and for my own cross platform development testing.

It's not a gaming rig though. I'm not going to jump in a 40-person WoW raid with the graphics cranked up, nor am I going to jump into a FPS and count on head shots. I still need an actual rig for that fun.

But as far as having a super handy tablet that I can effectively doc to have a solid work machine (I'm in management now, so I don't need to compile that million lines of code assembly), it does quite well.

As for upgrading, I got a great deal on the Surface Pro 2 as the Pro 3s had been on the market and the 2s were getting cleared out. If/When the Pro 4s come out, I might make the jump, but for now, I'm good.

-Rick

"(emphasis mine). Can you explain the difference?"

Sure, it's called 'nuance'. You are inferring that I am making a statement about Republicans, because republicans are more likely to hold conservative ideals than non-republicans. But I am not saying that any specific Republican is racist. I am saying that of a random sampling of self-identifying conservatives, you will find more people with racist opinions than in random samplings of non-self-identifying conservatives.

My entire argument apparently boils down to your woefully inadequate reading comprehension ability and failure to recognize nuance.

"That means that if you take a random sampling of people who identify as having conservative ideologies, they will be statistically more likely to also hold racist beliefs...If you would like some actual scientific reading on the association between ideology, intelligence, and race views, might I recommend:"

This is two sentences. The first is a logical argument, one which you still have not put forth any evidence to counter. The second is a recommendation to read some scientific studies on the matter, which you openly dismissed. You then doubled down by reading mass media summaries of the studies which you completely misinterpreted and have also failed to account for.

The only thing I'm going to look like a moron for is spending my time attempting to debate with you. My bad.

-Rick

Absolutely.

Where I work now there are 4 classifications of employees, progressing in pay level, but all assigned to the same software development services efforts.

My jaw hit the floor when my boss told me that anyone at level 4 is expected to perform project management duties.

So now I have a couple of rock solid level-3 developers that are on track to move into a true software architecture style role. I look at these fine developers and think, you know, it would be great if I could put together a training plan for them to really take their design approach to the next level and put goals together around their technical skill set, technical leadership, and continuing education with a prize at the end of the road of a nice shiny new title and pay bump.

But nope. If I want to promote these guys, I have to send them to project management 101. They need to go back and learn a whole new skillset, change over from dealing with code to dealing with people, and take on a whole new style of work.

What sense does that make? It's like someone is running an experiment to see if the Peter Principle is real.

-Rick

"Again, we're talking about a Democrat who said something racist."

Incorrect. Someone made a ridiculous statement: "EVERYONE WHO SAYS ANYTHING RACIST IS A REPUBLICAN."

Which I rebutted. Pointing out that it was not correct.

"about how Republicans are "statistically more likely to be racist." (You're lying about that by the way.)"

And you're creating an argument where there isn't one. I never said "Republicans are statistically more likely to be racist". What you did there was take my statement, out of context, and wrapped it in your own straw man. This would be what we laymen call "lying". Now, you may disagree with me over the statistics, and that's fine. But to call me a liar because you constructed your own argument to take apart is intellectually dishonest.

"One of the biggest pushers of the second idea in the Democratic Party is Al Sharpton"

In the same way that one of the biggest pushers of the 2nd idea in the GOP is Rush Limbaugh.

In either case, the existence of Rush and Al do not refute my statistic. As individuals, they are accounted for in the minority/majority of each quantification.

"You're lying about the contents of the Furugson study. "

Seeing as how I didn't say ANYTHING about the context of the Furugson study, it's kinda hard to imagine how I would be lying about it.

Also, are you sure you read the links you posted? Including these snippets:

"Hodson and Busseri (2012) found in a correlational study that lower intelligence in childhood is predictive of greater racism in adulthood, with this effect being mediated (partially explained) through conservative ideology."

"Taken together, what do these studies suggest? Excessive exposure to news coverage could be toxic as is avoidance of open-minded attitudes and ideals."

" Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found."

The reason I didn't bother linking to specific news articles about these two studies is because they are so contentious. You can find the summaries of them on Huffpo or Breitbart. LiveScience or Christian Monitor. CNN or FOX. Each with significantly different spins as they attempt to describe the studies in ways that either flatters or infuriates their viewers. So yeah, I recommend reading the articles instead of some ad man's rendition of it looking for some eye bleeding headlines to drive his click-bait.

Seriously though, you are calling me a liar though you've offered no proof. You've built straw men that you have excellently destroyed. You have attempted to switch the topic, and I'm actually expecting a goal post maneuver next.

So, if you would like to debate, lets debate. If you want to parrot talking points you learnt from reading Breitbart, I'll be moving along and you can enjoy the echo chamber.

-Rick