Nothing to do with other items in orbit, I can believe. The ability to launch a little outside the window and still make it, though, should be valid unless they are running on a lot less margin than I expect. I know the first stage, at least, has *some* margin, or it wouldn't be able to do the deceleration and landing burns.

You're remembering wrong. Most ISS launches have windows a few seconds wide, at most. There's a lot of stuff in LEO, all moving very fast, If you want a course that will hit the ISS at exactly the right speed, and not come too close to anything else, you've got a narrow window to do it in. You *can* launch outside that window (space is a big place), but it eats into your fuel and safety margins and usually there's no reason to do that.

Looks pretty good. LG should have just licensed/bought that from you. They'd probably have made it a service that starts (with elevation) automatically, but eh, much better than what they actually did!

You're aware that Windows 1-3.x, Windows 9x, and Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista/7/8.x/10 are each very different systems, right? No, of course you're not, you're a loudmouth who has no idea what he's talking about. Windows NT (which is to say, every version of Windows for PCs or servers since XP) was very much designed with isolation between *all* users, including between Administrators and non-Administrators, as a central feature. Windows NT is not, and never has been, a single-user operating system.

The last version of Windows that was designed as "A SINGLE USER operating system" was Windows ME. Why the fuck would you want to run as though you're running Windows ME? That's bloody idiotic!

Windows NT 3.1 (the initial release, came out in 1993) was very much multi-user, although it wasn't terribly good at timesharing (it wasn't until Windows 2000 that Microsoft added the ability for multiple interactive logins at the same time).

As for why you shouldn't use your OS as a single-user system, there's a number of reasons. One of them is because you, personally, obviously aren't competent to use a computer securely, and probably shouldn't be trusted with anything you have more control over than an iPad (which is, by the way, very multi-user although the earliest versions of iPhone OS, before it could run third-party apps at all, ran everything as root). Another is because sometimes other people run stuff on your computer (via exploits or Trojans or just by walking up to it while you're taking a piss) and you probably don't want them to be able to change everything they feel like changing (you had an impressively stupid rant above about how even an installer shouldn't be able to change UAC settings, which was funny).

As a point of random curiosity, are you aware that there's malware that installs into your hard drive controller and/or your motherboard firmware? Reformatting won't help you there. Also, have you heard of cryptolocker (and friends)? If you reformat, you lose just as much data as if the malware has its way with your machine.

Wow, I've rarely seen so much idiocy written in one post! I honestly can't tell if you're trolling just a little too subtly, or are sincerely that clueless. People are modding you up though, which is really unfortunate. Here, let me see if I can correct even a little of that...

If you run as a full Admin, nobody cares what you consider yourself; people who know anything about security (on *any* OS) are going to consider you an idiot. The fact that you think you know anything is just extra pathetic. People who actually understand security turn UAC up (to make it require your password, like the equivalent mechanism does on non-Windows OSes), or don't run as a member of Administrators at all (in which case UAC requires an Admin's password).

Windows simply wasn't built from the ground up to insulate the user space from the root space.

Welcome to... 1993? Windows NT was very much built from the ground up to do (among other things) exactly that. It was a core design goal and generally successful; while local EoP exploits have been found (and fixed) much like they are on every multi-user OS, I challenge you to get from my normal account to Admin on either my work or personal boxes. Fortunately, on a properly-used machine - even one being used by a security engineer, which I am - UAC prompts are very rare.

The fact some program that can change the UAC settings is pretty huge example of why Windows has issues separating userspace from root space.

You're aware that the installer for this thing runs as Administrator (like most installers), right? How exactly do you propose separating Admin (the installer) from Admin (the privileges needed to change the way UAC works), and what the fuck does that have to do with separating user from Admin? Oh, by the way, "userspace" or "user mode" is the opposite of "kernel mode" or "supervisor mode". Everything in kernel runs as root, but not everything in root is in the kernel. Most processes running under root (or Administrator, or even SYSTEM) are user mode.

Who's [SIC] brilliant idea at Microsoft was it to provide any sort of API that can let any program (besides the control panel widget that lets you adjust UAC settings) adjust UAC settings?

Do you have any fucking clue how an operating system works? I mean, even at the basic, general level? Here's a hint: when that Control Panel widget adjusts UAC settings, it is flipping some bits in some configuration store somewhere (*nix mostly uses text files for these stores, Windows mostly uses the registry; in this case the relevant bits are, indeed, in the registry). *ANYTHING* with arbitrary privileges on the system (like an installer running as root) can flip those bits; that's just a basic function of the way OS security works.

I think

No, you actually don't. It's really kind of pathetic.

No program should be permitted, regardless of it's permissions, to touch things like UAC settings.

And how, exactly, do you propose to stop a program that has (worst case) the required permissions to load a driver that can touch physical memory directly from doing anything at all, including changing an OS setting? I sincerely ask you, please, tell me your brilliant idea for revolutionizing the entire field of computer security more than anything since Multics development started 50 years ago.

What do you mean, Admin isn't "allowed" to terminate SYSTEM processes? Administrator (the user), or members of the Administrators group (after UAC) have exactly the same level of access as SYSTEM; SYSTEM is just a machine/service account, rather than a user account.

There are certain processes on Windows that the OS will prevent you from trying to terminate, but that's because they're critical OS processes, not because they run under SYSTEM. You can run Calc.exe under SYSTEM with a little effort, but killing it through (elevated) Task Manager is trivial.

Uh, no offense, but you don't know much about Linux, I take it?

There's a bunch of options, ranging from "mark everything setuid and owned by root" (the least efficient, but you could do it in a few lines of shell script) to simply making each user be UID 0 (which is a trivial edit to /etc/users).

Frankly, you kin of sound like you're mouthing off without knowing anything of what you're talking about (Windows or Linux. Windows NT (which everything since XP has been, in kernel and core components) was very much designed from the beginning with security options in mind. The fact that everybody then ran as Admin instead of running as a normal user unless a program needed admin is unfortunate, and is partially Microsoft's fault, but only somebody utterly ignorant would think that Windows security is an afterthought.

To be the kind of person who would be utterly ignorant and then open your damn fool mouth is... well, I'm sorry. Nobody wants to be that person. You do deserve to be modded down, but what you say is not true at all. I have mod points, as it happens, but chose to reply instead. Maybe somebody else will take care of you and your unfortunate attitude...

For what it's worth, here's some more info: It's true that mandatory integrity control (MIC), which has security impacts, is relatively new (Vista) to Windows, but at least Windows uses it at least slightly; a typical Linux distro doesn't use it at all (though it is available). Speaking of afterthoughts, though, Windows (NT family) has supported ACLs since its initial release, while Linux only supported basic Unix permissions (which are a small subset of the control that ACLs give you unless your group count balloons absurdly) until 2002.

If using cat/type/gc/Get-Content and a pipe is too much for you (yes, it's a few extra characters) you can always install bash or zsh or whatever you prefer.

Seriously, though, you're really stretching if that's what you consider to be broken about Windows. I could easily be similarly nit-picky about Linux, for example, the default file system on many Linux distros has neither transparent encryption nor transparent compression, while Windows (NT family) has had both for the last 15 years.

What phone do you have that doesn't have a Minecraft version? It was ported to WP8 near-instantly upon acquisition. http://www.windowsphone.com/en...

If you're still running WP7, well, um... sucks to be you? Considering that there are sub-$100 (full price, no carrier subsidy) WP8 devices, there's no excuse for running a two-years-since-last-release OS. Even carrier contracts bought at exactly the wrong time would let you upgrade by now.

Vista's base requirement (on the box) was 512MB, actually, although you needed 1GB for Aero. It would technically boot on 384MB, but it ran like shit even compared to normal! Running on 1280MB (stupid laptops that only have one replaceable module...) was viable, though not great, if you used a high-end (for the time) 2GB SD card for ReadyBoost (basically, a disk cache that made it a lot faster to pull stuff into RAM, which was handy when you didn't have enough RAM to keep anything but the smallest possible working set live), it worked all right. I gamed on that box (DotA, Eve Online, some TF2). My next box also ran Vista but had 2GB of RAM. It was a pretty solid gaming box, though (once I installed a beta NVidia driver; the official one "worked" but many features were missing and it ran at about 40% the framerate).

Sleep (at least on laptops) worked steadily for me since Windows 2000 until Win7 actually. On one of my Vista machines, hibernate was broken due to an NVidia driver bug (that was never fixed before that video card became unsupported), but on a Vista machine with an ATi card, it worked fine. On Win7, a (new) laptop with a different NVidia card couldn't enter sleep, but could do hibernate. Don't blame Microsoft for shitty graphics drivers that fail to switch power states (you can see it recorded in the Event Viewer).

I stopped buying NVidia graphics cards after that; their drivers used to be good, but ever since the switch to WDDM they've been shit. They've even managed to cause BSODs (happened to my roommate a couple months ago, then-brand-new card with fully updated drivers) by crashing, and then crashing *again* within a few seconds of being brought back online (pre-WDDM, any video driver crash meant BSOD, but ever since Vista the drivers run in user-space and don't automatically bring the system down when they crash, provided they can be started again).

secure key-stream, like is done in modern stream ciphers.

RC4 biases paper (PDF) would like to hear more about your secure key streams...

Yes, XOR can be used as a component of perfectly secure cipher (and is, indeed, used in one part or another of many real-world ciphers) but in practice the most popular stream cipher in the world is broken.

Your first line is wrong, wrong, very wrong. XOR is unbreakable if used with a proper one-time pad, but no output of a key stretching algorithm is going to meet that bar. The absolutely essential characteristic of a one-time pad is that every value it could contain is equally likely.

What you're trying to describe is more like how stream ciphers, such as RC4 work: you supply a key, and the cipher stretches that key into a bitstream of whatever length you require. XOR that bitstream with the plaintext to get ciphertext, or with the ciphertext to get plaintext. RC4 is simple, it's fast, it's been used for decades in real-world cryptography, and it is *broken*. It's not even a matter of being *theoretically* breakable; people have actually been able to decrypt stretches of RC4-encrypted text without knowing (or brute-forcing, that being completely impractical) the 128-bit key.

The problem is that not every bit of the keystream is equally likely to be 0 or 1. There are biases in the cipher, such that no matter the key, you can predict the likelihood that each bit of the ciphertext was flipped. Combine enough ciphertexts of the same plaintext (this would be impractical-bordering-impossible for a human, but is easy for a computer) and you (or rather, your software) can look at all the ciphertexts, notice certain bits are slightly more likely to be 0 or 1 (this would never happen with a proper one-time pad), and based on your knowledge of the cipher's biases, determine whether those bits were originally 0 or 1. Finding those biases is expensive initially, but they are now known for enough bytes that it's usually possible (assuming enough samples of identical plaintexts with different keys*) to get things like somebody's HTTPS-protected cookies.

* A relatively easy way to get all those samples is to inject a script into somebody's HTTP response - say, for http://slashdot.org/ - which constantly does nothing but request the same HTTPS URL (such as https://mail.google.com/ and does nothing with the response. Collect the requests (not the responses, since those might vary) and eventually you can figure out the plaintext (including the user's session token) with a high degree of likelihood.

I'm sorry to hear you are still single and have no idea what living in an actual household is like, but maybe you failed to notice (despite quoting it...) the part where he said "My wife and I made a Nissan Leaf our second vehicle"? As in, they were going to get a second car *anyhow*, like most multiple-driver households do? Sure sounds like the electric car is doing just fine in this niche.

Of course, there's a huge logical fallacy in your argument anyhow. The way you "think", every household would need to have a massive pickup truck just in case they needed to haul seven tons of stuff some day. I mean, you could buy a compact car that gets 4x the fuel economy and can park in "compact" spaces, but the way you can't even stuff a sofa in one of those you would

really wind up needing two vehicles.

Who wants to spend the money on that, just for a car that is better for 95% of the driving you actually do? Seriously, the vast majority of the US practically never drives outside their metropolitan area, which means ranges that a Leaf can handle easily and that a Tesla utterly laughs at. If they do need to drive further than that and absolutely can't stand to wait while the car charges (in a Tesla, this wait is 30-45 minutes every four-ish hours, which is a pretty reasonable time to take for a meal), rentals aren't nearly as expensive as buying an ICE car that you only need a few times a year (if that).