Needing to know the MAC address is just a limitation of the nRF24L01+ chip he was using. Conveniently though, the chip has an undocumented feature (or bug) that lets you trick it into giving the full packet, including the MAC address header. The only brute force scanning he ends up doing is to scan through all the different frequencies.

And the "key" is xored with the plaintext to get the "encrypted" text, and the typed character is in a single byte. So you only actually need a single byte of the MAC address.

And it happens to be the first byte, which for these Microsoft keyboards is always 0xCD. So you don't even need to bother figuring out what the MAC address is.

And if SOCKS isn't enough, you can also do ssh -w 42:42 to link a pair of tun interfaces between the two sides. (Slightly less cool because you have to manually configure networking on both ends for it.)

And then the summary decides to hold compression up as the super amazing feature that nobody has ever heard of...

Because FOSS still doesn't place some arbitrary BS restriction on fixing stuff.

Yes, it's true that a lot of users won't have the knowledge to do it, or won't be competent enough. Heck, even the people who can fix bugs won't have the time to fix every bug they encounter. But at least FOSS doesn't just outright ban you from doing it.

It's not meant for an economy. Bitcoin is intended as a way to move your dollars around, not as a replacement for dollars.

It shouldn't be too surprising that Bitcoin is bad at something it wasn't designed to do, but that's not a good reason to avoid using it for what it was designed to do.

There have always been. Don't make the assumption that this'll always be true.

And there's a problem. People are going to end up unable to participate in the market, because you need money to do that, and you get money from doing jobs, and you can't get a job if there aren't any to get.

This is going to be a problem for us at some point, and we're going to need to deal with it. Which, knowing us, will probably happen way too late.

Jobs are created by people who a) come up with an idea for a new business, and b) need people to do something to make that idea a reality.

If it doesn't need people to do it, then no jobs are created. And the set of things that need people (as opposed to automation/robots/AI) to do them is shrinking pretty darn fast.

So?

The GP's point is still entirely valid.

It's just odd word choices all around. The headline suggests that this is important because it uses an iPhone as its brains (as if a high-speed M&M sorting machine isn't cool by itself), then the body goes on to says that the sorter's creator's blog uses an iPhone as its brains (wait, I thought it was the sorter itself that did that?), and then it strongly implies that other M&M sorting machines can't detect different colors, which makes one wonder how those machines ever managed to sort any M&Ms. Then it implies that this one can't sort M&Ms either, but only "sort" them.

I suspect what it wanted to say was this:

but I guess that would've made things too clear.

I find this to be really irritating when sellers on eBay do it... but Amazon actually fix shipping prices for Marketplace. For instance, shipping on books/CDs/DVDs/games is $3.99. (Full list.) For sellers on Amazon Marketplace, a price of 1c means "we would've sold this to you cheaper, but Amazon won't let us."

What they ought to do is to just merge the shipping price in with the product price. Combined shipping would make that impossible (since the price would depend on what other items you have in your basket), but Amazon don't even allow that, so adding a book to your basket is going to increase the total shipping cost by $3.99. It makes no sense as a separate figure.

Like we had the upper hand in shutting Code Red, Blaster and the like down?

Those worms weren't self-intelligent and they weren't even trying to hide. Imagine an AI that signs itself up for the 12 month free AWS trial and spends that time not bringing any attention to itself. You can't pull the plug if you don't know which plug to pull. Maybe you don't even realize that a plug even needs pulling.

Or maybe the AI spends its time trying to spread over the internet as far as it can. I doubt we'd ever pull off a shutdown of the entire internet, let alone a complete purge of all executable data on every computer system on the planet, which is roughly what we'd need to do to make sure we got rid of it. I don't think you can rely on "we had a kill switch".

Maybe if they'd actually take our suggestions or our code. But no.

Makes it kind of hard to contribute anything back to them.

Or perhaps most of their bug searching is done by subcontractors, so it's not technically the NSA finding any of them.

From what I've heard of systemd, I'm honestly not quite sure whether this was -- as I initially thought -- badly phrased, or if they are in fact planning to roll partitioning into systemd along with everything else.