IANAGP/C... ...BUUUT, the 8th element by atomic number just ain't that rare in the cosmos.The general asshattery of the DeBeers family and corp aside, the fact that we've known about one of its molecular allotropes for most of our written history SHOULD tell us that allotrope ain't that rare on Earth, either. Yeah, you need special conditions to press a 2-d lattice into a 3-d lattice, but we're doing that in labs with, literally, waste gasses from sewage. The fact that uur pressure-cooker of a planet's interior does the same thing should come as a surprise to small children and the illiterate..

So, in order to facilitate micro-trades, we're going to allow them to trade in terms of less than a second... which is disturbing all by itself when you think that even very fast internet destinations in the U.S. have latency on the order or 100ms or so. Even very slight congestion means that the financial exchanges have to simply trust the timestamps issued by the traders to get the prices and volume correct and cannot depend on the receive sequence.

There's no room for malicious action there at all, and as we all know, the U.S. has absolutely no outside actors interested in manipulating events inside the country for their own ends.

So ultimately, we're going to depend on some sort of time service run by Google and Nasdaq to validate those signatures. The problem there is that both those organizations have and will be aggressively targeted by bad apples the world over. TFA is a little light on the technical aspects of how, exactly, Google and/or Nasdaq is going to ensure that there's no forgery of timestamps. That service goes down... and Google and Nasdaq do have network problems from time to time... and suddenly all transactions are suspect? Heaven forfend that whatever algorithm used to synchronize and sign the transactions down to the nanosecond level is ever cracked. There's going to be a huge economic impetus for even very powerful countries to work on this. Imagine Chinese supercomputers manipulating American stock exchanges for their own benefit. I don't think that's too far fetched.

And we're not just depending on Google or Nasdaq, but on everyone who takes part in issuing and signing these timestamps. Wow, that's a huge amount of attack surface.

The open beta has been out for about a month prior to the mirrors starting their seed yesterday. It's had some fairly serious issues, mostly related to video. I've personally had some hardware lockups while watching videos on an integrated Intel adapter with VLC (and have submitted bug reports). I've also seen other bug reports and feature requests go simply ignored... Not even addressed as 'will fix' or 'won't fix'.

I love me some Mint, but I personally feel that I'm going to have to treat this as a 'wait for the .1 release' before I personally consider it stable.

Firefox was ditched for the same set of reasons that Netscape was ditched:

- Both Firefox and Netscape had become or were perceived as slow and bloated compared to the competition. I vividly remember my eye twitching back in the late 90s during my phone tech support days when I heard a fellow phone jockey recommend Internet Explorer 3 to a customer over Netscape because it was 'so much faster'. This was back in the 28.8/56k dial-up era, so take that into account. Chrome is widely perceived to be faster and more powerful at running webapps than Firefox... and regardless of the reality, this perception goes top to bottom. Developers frequently choose to develop against Chrome and then test against Firefox... if they bother to test against Firefox.

- Privacy, browser configuration, and Internet safety are widely perceived to be 'too difficult'. This was as true in the 90s as it is today. People are intimidated by the reality of what it takes to be safe and private on the Internet and/or far too lazy to learn to configure their browser. Netscape and Mozilla have never quite made it as easy to 'click click click dubya dubya dubya' as their competition. Microsoft and Google both are much better at hand-holding... and leading their 'customers' down the garden path. Installing ad or script blockers *seems* more intimidating on Firefox than similar plugins for Chrome because Google has successfully 'App-Store-Ized' their plugin ecosystem.

- Netscape and Firefox have never been 'The Internet'. Microsoft did its damndest to make sure that Windows users all directly equated that blue 'e' icon with 'The Internet'. Google is its own damn verb. Both companies' marketing divisions have made very good pushes to make themselves synonymous with 'The Internet'.

- Netscape and Mozilla have never had a strong pre-install base. Every Windows Install since 95 has come with IE. Every Android device comes with Chrome. Most folks simply can't be assed to install another browser. Sad but true. If Firefox ever wants to become really relevant, it's going to have to get some kind of mainstream pre-install base going. We're not talking Linux distros here. They're going to have to pull off the Firefox equivalent of an 'Android OS' or 'Chromebook'. It's doable, but Mozilla is not strongly steered the way Microsoft was or Google is. Moz has a long history of dropping the soap far too often.

Ahem.

*Cough*
< Ron Swanson >
Do you want 'Wargames' with Matthew Broderick? Because this is how you get 'Wargames' with Matthew Broderick.
< /Ron Swanson >

Even think about installing from sources I don't really trust? This was one of my big joys when I was finally able to ditch Windows. I didn't have to install *anything* I didn't trust any more.

Snaps abstract too much away, IMHO. You don't know what runtime a given snap is going to require unless you dig. There's *another* place for insecure code to run if everything is not perfectly vetted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

That's some Grade 'A' Marketing Bullshit right there:

That's MBA-ese for 'We be laying some bitches off!'

Somewhere there is an exasperated coder trying to get his resume in order.

...and the companies involved will always be ethical and judicious in what they do with the massive amount of biometric data such a system would collect.

I mean, seriously, Ticketmaster. They're above reproach, right up there with luminaries like Monsanto, Haliburton, and Comcast. There's no way we could ever regret this move.

Tim, Mark, this is not a pissing match in a schoolyard. This is about the breach of the trust of an entire country's populace in a grievous way. Neither Apple nor Facebook has treated its customers or others well in the past. Rather than two little kids crying, 'We're better than...' or 'We told them so...', we need two adults saying 'This is the situation. These are our faults. This is why we're vulnerable. This is what we're going to do.'

Apple and Facebook are both soulless corporations with real, breathing people behind, inside, and in front of them, and everyone of them are being hurt in a myriad of ways. Neither one has great records of behavior. Facebook's sins are simply more recent and raw. I don't need to go into details.

BOTH have a huge responsibility to the public that go beyond excuses, stock prices, or personal ego. Denying that responsibility is why we're in this mess. Live up to that responsibility, huh?

Too much to ask, I'm certain. This is why I ditched MS and EA products a long time ago and have never personally paid for Apple or Facebook products with either cash nor my personal data.

Apropos captcha: syndrome

http://www.discovery.com/tv-sh...

Basically, they tried to build a boat with 'pykrete' in the arctic and found that it fell apart PDQ.

They had a little more success building a boat with a mix of ice and sheets of newspaper, but it still didn't last an hour before coming apart.

NFW an aircraft carrier would ever manage to finish construction, let alone... y'know... launch aircraft.

City of Heroes is an interesting example because there's a fairly significant developer presence on the 'City of Titans' project, which aims to be a 'spiritual successor' to CoH/CoV.

https://cityoftitans.com/

Currently, those folks are developing in a 'Clean Room' state, building what will hopefully be a great game.

Imagine, however, if an 'abandonware' exemption is passed. Would it ONLY give rights to non-profits like MADE, or would it give rights to individuals like myself who are damn pissed their favorite MMO got canned and/or folks like the CoT crew who are seeking to replace said MMO with a new model. If there was suddenly no penalty for examining reverse-engineered or decompiled code, would it help them or would it hinder them in their efforts. Some would argue that the latter might be true. It's better to make a clean break from old client/server limitations and build something new. I personally take the middle ground. Yes, you do want to erase any limitations you can, but you'd be foolish not to try to learn from the past if that past is available to you.

Personally, I doubt the DMCA is going to budge much in the current political climate. I'd love to see an 'abandoned code' exemption of some kind put in regardless.

than a Micro$oft proprietary language running on a machine that can't be debugged in real time at unimaginable speeds, and you know it'll be connected to AI shortly afterwards somehow.

Really, that was all you needed right there. The 'tying yourselves to Google and MS' rant is simply preaching to the choir at this point.

Srsly, those of us who can get off MS (and Google) products do so when we can. (I've been MS Clear for a while now.) Steam and Minecraft both run on Linux, and pretty much every new PC game does as well with the exceptions of a few big studios. GOG's DRM-free catalog contains almost every PC game worth having. (And WINE runs a f-ton of games these days. Oh, and Photoshop CS2. The one that Adobe allows you to download for free 'because it's out of date'. Duckduckgo isn't *quite* as powerful a searcher as Google, but it's still damn nice, and if you're keeping business on Google's servers that you don't want the world to know about, well, that's a problem on your end.

Knowledge will set ye free. Don't rant. Educate. When a family member or friend complains that their Windows install is crapping out on them again, offer to install Mint. Extoll Duckduckgo. 'But I want to play Warcraft'. Wow runs fine under the latest version of WINE.

IMO, Facebook and Twitter are far worse demons to personal liberty and privacy than MS ever was.

The phone belonged to a Ms. Wu, who recently renewed her phone contract and purchased a 64GB rose gold iPhone 8 Plus

Impressive, seeing as the 8 doesn't come in Rose Gold.

Not in this case. Rust (and similar programming approaches) prevent accidental interference between threads (of the same application) at the code execution layer - i.e. they prevent bugs due to programming errors. This attack is happening at the hardware level - the threads in question could be completely different applications and could be written in any language.