Its quite possible for more than one person involved in the incident to have been in the wrong. All these articles are kind of strange as they try to spin it as "its either completely the cops fault or completely the SWATcaller's fault." It aint so.

They're not kidding when they say "sometimes its impossible". Microcode is NOT general purpose code. There's only so much you can do with microcode, and it often involves just messing with voltage timings and gates that are already part of the silicon. Granted, I'm sure some supply-demand / cost/benefit analysis is going on, but please challenge the assumption that they can just 'fix the bug' with microcode updates.

You largely can't reprogram what the CPU's underlying silicon actually does, using microcode. People keep talking about it like its some complete programming language. It is not.

a better analogy would be that it is similar to a program that is running the system for controlling railroad track switching. You can make the trains do a lot by making them switch tracks and change direction and so forth, but there's only so much you can do - the tracks they go on and the location of the switches are pre-set.

Oh for sure there are, but I'm talking about people who are in the mindset that matches the points above. Showing them evidence has zero effect.

There ARE some real conspiracies (see watergate, bigfoot, etc) which generally involve a small number of individuals, and in general are discovered somewhat quickly (timescale is hours to a couple years), but then you get the "grand" conspiracies which involves the to-the-deathbed collaboration of hundreds or thousands of people and multiple different international government and non-government institutions (some of which aren't our friends).

The problem is that once a person has fallen to "grand" conspiracy belief, they tend to be the kind that believes all others, big and small.

Basically, if you ever find yourself in a debate with someone who believes in a coverup of something that would take many thousands of people their entire lives to cover up from many different nations, you may as well stop debating. A conspiracy of that size unravels in months at most, hours more likely. The biggest such conspiracy to hold together was the landing by the allies during WW2, and that wasn't really a campaign to say something the opposite was happening, just that the landings were happening in a different place at a different time. And it only lasted just long enough to execute.

Once a person has been "caught" in a conspiracy theory is like being caught in a cult. They become evidence immune.
1. All evidence that disproves the conspiracy is planted and thus part of the conspiracy. It must be suppressed.
2. All evidence that can be construed as even remotely supporting the conspiracy is the only true evidence. It must be echoed.
3. All lack of evidence either way is proof of a cover up by the conspiracy. The lack of it proves the conspiracy.
4. Any authority figure that speaks out against the conspiracy is part of the conspiracy. They must be suppressed.
5. Any authority figure that agrees with the conspiracy is part of the enlightened ones and is the only trusted source of truth. They must be echoed.


Once someone has sunk that deep into a conspiracy theory (and I'm sure several readers have) there really isn't any point arguing with them or disagreeing with them or trying to engage with them in any meaningful way, they are lost.

This is sort of a half-fix but what would ultimately mean is that when a city installs a lot of solar/other stuff (for the benefit of their citizens to lower pollution/electricity costs/etc) and thus have excess cheap power to sell back to the grid or use, bitcoin miners would move in and use up all excess while its cheap, leading to the permanent residents of a town getting no cost benefit to doing it. They might even have to fire up the coal plants again to meet demand.

I can totally understand permanent residents of a city working with the council to basically say nope to that. They live there. Its their choice, thats how city governance works.

Otherwise what ends up happening is that the miners move in and starts increasing demand whenever the cost is under a certain amount, which means the cost has a strict floor at the price of bitcoin generation. It can never ever be cheaper than that, because the moment its cheaper than that, miners absorb all the excess, causing the cost of electricity to be tied to the price of bitcoin, something you probably don't want for your city if you live there, especially if you've been investing in infrastructure to reduce energy prices / clean pollution.

It gets worse, too. You might decide 'fine, let the market decide', so you are forced to build more electricity-producing plants to meet this rising demand and keep pushing costs down or face brownouts / blackouts in residential. Its really, really really expensive to build electric generation plants and the infrastructure to support them, and it takes a really long time, and they are expensive to maintain running, even if you 'turn them off'. But the miners move out whenever there's some other better opportunity elsewhere, leaving you with all this infrastructure your permanent residents payed for and are being taxed on...

The electricity company cannot produce infinite electricity at a whim. They have a certain amount of generation capacity, and when demand increases, they can build additional plants - but they are expensive to run and take a long time to build.

So at any given time there is a fixed amount of peak electricity available (you can't really store it) and the cities and companies basically run on estimates on how much is in use / will be needed, thats the allotment.

If a city were to suddenly draw 10x as much power, this is a problem, as it can stress the grid. It can be overcome by building additional production facilities, but that takes years.

DOesn't that mean that there's basically a giant free cache available to anyone who wants to store data out there? And because UDP is spoofable, people could store data in said cache without betraying where it came from?

unsecured Memcached servers could store data - par2'd data chunks, for example, similar to a newsgroup - along with indices / torrent tracker data / etc. And since they will store keys from spoofed UDP packets, there is no good way to figure out who put the data there.

Just saying. Better than ddoses :(

The other thing that I've noticed is that the juniors nowdays do tend to move around a lot. They're much, much much more likely to quit after internship and take a job at a different big corp than YOUR big corp, after thanking you for all the training.

I've noticed that goes even moreso for juniors nowadays. More and more, people work very short stints at any given job, especially in silicon valley type jobs... When people keep taking other jobs, it doesn't make as much sense to spend what amounts to 50k+ of expert time mentoring them just so that they hop to a different place at the end of it.

This job-hopping trait seems to be a trait that is increasing in the younger generations - I won't judge whether its good or bad (in that hey, its up to them what they do with their life) but it does mean that it impacts mentoring decisions and how companies spend their money.

Yeah, this.

Basically, people signing up for 10.99 and then buying a giant exercise machine that costs many times more than the margin on shipping, binge watching everything, then letting the subscription die after one month, to open it again a couple months later when they do the same thing again.

Eventually it just doesn't make sense. Its one thing if its netflix and a human can only consume so much, its another thing when a single person can flood a delivery truck and incur hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of free shipping in one gulp.

From TFA, for those asking instead of reading, April 2018 is when the signature requirement will cease.

Most supermarkets already have some sort of deal where signature is only required on purchases larger than $50 anyway.

They are starting to tighten their grip to the point where systems are starting to slip through their fingers.

Google's new strategy has definitely been walled-garden - for example look at the youtube vs amazon fire tv debacle.
They're starting to use the systems they already inhabit as leverage to wall people in.

Youtube cannot be sideloaded to Fire TVs because they don't include the giant bulk of google's "play store" and "Google services" which for some reason, youtube demands also be installed. KODI does work though.

Pretty much. Given that the app literally already works on the fire devices and works pretty well, the only way they'd pull it is if they actually made an update to the app that checked whether it was on a fire device and specifically refused to work because of that.

I've got KODI installed but yeah, this will hurt a lot. It doesn't make me hate amazon though. it makes me hate google.