Perdition

>A part of me welcomes this. I am sick of the noise. Browsing the Amazon (Kindle) bookstore, I wish that 90% of the junk didn't even appear in my search results.

>Rather read works by people who are creating for the sake of art, and not money.

What does that have to do with the low quality of many self-published works? There is tons of fiction out there written entirely for 'art' and it is nearly all complete trash.

There is so much trash on Amazon because they are killing publishers who traditionally filtered out most of the trash. For every crappy bestseller they published the publishers weeded out tens of thousands of other crappy works.

Crappy authors will still write, even if only for public praise (some people do like rubbish).

But is there any actual evidence that the long shifts in residency actually improves future performance under those conditions?

It seems to me that it is mostly based on tradition and gut feeling.

Most of the issues with non-resident doctors working when tired could be fixed by increasing the number of doctors and physicians assistants. Of course physicians organizations fight against that as it would lead to lowering their income.

I'm fine with that. I just think people are throwing out the baby with the bathwater by declaring mechanical ignition switches to be the problem (when they have worked fine for decades in every other brand).

>Can you think of any reason why the car should not have operational power steering when it is in motion[1]?

You can't have an electrical cut-out that doesn't cut-out certain components. The reason you need a complete electrical cut-out is for safety reasons (eg fuel leaks into engine bay). If the ignition switch is not used for that purpose they would need to put a big red button on the dash like GP said.

The ignition switch cutting all power has worked without incident in every other brand for many decades. The issue here is GM's incompetence, and I'm not inclined to the idea that they would have competently implemented another system.

If anything I think this is an argument that power steering should be limited so that average drivers don't lose control of their vehicles if it fails (I've lost power steering in motion due to an engine stall, it is very scary).

The point is key switches as cut offs work fine when the component doesn't have major faults.

Any other electrical control system could cause just as many issues if designed poorly. Imagine if GM was just as sloppy with a push-to-start electronically controlled system that could shutdown due to EMF.

And there have actually been issues with push-to-start systems. One model I can remember required the user to hold down the button to shut off power in an emergency, when the most common user reaction was to rapidly jab the button.

> for lots of corporations, spending a fortune on hardware (capex) is easier then spending anything on services (opex)

Really? I have only encountered the opposite. CAPEX is normally okay when it fits within normal budget allocations, but any large CAPEX that requires extra budget is a hard sell. OPEX is much preferred because it makes budgeting much more predictable ("$XXXXX per quarter" vs "We might need to spend $XXXXXX some years from now").

That is part of the reason for the cloud craze.

>the problem seems to be that their muscles cannot support weight or balance.

It does? Newborns can support their own weight when hanging. Most toddlers can support their own weight standing long before they develop the coordination required to walk. Babies lack fine motor control.

Our ancestors, with less complex brains, would have been able to walk shortly after birth, hence the walking reflex.

I suspect the issue is that the complexity of modern human brains delays the formation of the neural circuits required for walking because a whole bunch of complex features are developing at the same time.

They were demolished for building code violations according to the article. A process that took many months and many meetings with a tribunal.

The question is whether you believe this guy was a victim of political corruption, where city officials targeted a competitor. Or believe the government side that he was a slumlord. Both seem equally likely given the evidence in the article.

Which lends no credence to Dragos' story at all. Ultrasonic networking isn't a new idea, and malware in firmware has been around as long as rewritable firmware.

The main issue always was Dragos' inability to isolate any suspicious artifacts besides "I can't burn CDs!".

Basically his story required there to not only be firmware malware that could infect a wide variety of devices, but for said malware to somehow exist in a part of the firmware/BIOS chip which couldn't be dumped for examination. Even if such a thing existed he still could have tapped a logic analyzer onto a USB cable, plugged in some fresh hardware, and captured what the malware did.

Are you really going to replace a lawyer with 20 years of experience in their field with a fresh graduate?

If the NSA are targeting your systems they will use a backdoor'd version of Coreboot.

And in this case the malware is lurking in the RAID cards expansion ROM, so you wouldn't even notice a change at boot anyway.

Those aren't blank checks though. The problem with the US system is that the government is backing loans with no regulation of what the universities charge, with the result that tuition costs have increased to the point where most middle-class people couldn't afford to send their kids to school if it wasn't for loans.

Government paying education costs and regulating the price can work. Government paying education costs and not regulating the price is just corporate welfare.

Sure, but market signalling in a profession which takes years of education and training can lead to the same issues.

And this article shows that market signalling is largely not working in this case (because people do not approach education on a rational market basis).

The government already does tell you what you can and can't do for a living in regards to classical professions. You can't just hang up a shingle and call yourself a lawyer, an engineer, or a doctor (or other healthcare professional).

The only difference with the Danish example is that the government refuses to write a blank check (student loans) to law schools who want to take advantage of the naivete of students.

The US system would be vastly improved if the government stopped subsidizing the education industry's market distortions, or if the government actually regulated the education market. Right now it is the worst of both worlds with the government helping the education industry to fleece students and other tax payers.

Pretty much everyone who buys things on the Internet has a Paypal account.

You may as well say that the inconvenience of opening a bank account is too much baggage for people to use Paypal, except pretty much everyone who wants to use Paypal already has a bank account.

You are correct that trying to get users to put CC details in to pay a "microtransaction" will put people off, but there are plenty of convenient (two - three click) payment processes that already have huge amounts of users.

>Initially, you had to sign up with your credit card, fill out an annoying form and go through a few intimidating screens.

No, you can click on a button and get a redirect to Paypal, where you then enter your Paypal password and hit "confirm".

Paypal's whole business model is based around making transactions like this convenient and easy (for the payer).

She isn't from Saudi Arabia. Apart from having a few nutty leaders Iran is closer to countries like Turkey than it is to Saudi Arabia.

Anyway, academia is generally one of the few "liberal" institutions in Islamic countries. The issue is usually of female graduates finding work outside academia (eg Saudi Arabia graduated its first batch of female law students in 2008 and still hasn't let them practice law).

>If someone makes it through the airport screens and carries the virus into a city, the epidemiology could become overwhelming before we know an outbreak has begun.

Could, but very unlikely to, as Ebola doesn't spread as easily as cold or flu viruses.

Most of the outbreaks in Africa, where numerous dangerous practices such as hospitals reusing needles helped spread the virus, have had only a few hundred cases. The latest outbreak is pushing towards 2000 cases but local practices that don't exist in the West are contributing significantly.

The kind of national agencies that have the capacity to make the hacker "have an accident" develop their own systems in-house. As far as I am aware the market for products like FINFISHER is ordinary LEO and crappy regimes in the middle-east and Asia that don't have the capacity to black-bag a foreign national.

No. There are tactical principles that are taught, and basic tactical approaches, but a "tactical playbook" would be completely unwieldy.

The Soviet military used that system, including algorithms to determine which tactical approach to apply. Western military's have long focused on small unit initiative and rewarding novel tactics. A wartime military is the ultimate meritocracy.

Even in WWI, which is often stereotyped as stupid generals sending men walking into machine gun fire, there was a huge amount of tactical innovation from the lower levels (by 1917 they had developed the small unit tactics we still use today).

The weight and fitness standards would have kept more hackers out of the military than LGBT discrimination.

>It's a creativity-driven field that moves quickly, evolves hourly, and requires intellectual agility.

That does describe what is expected of military members in combat operations, so it isn't like the military shouldn't be able to apply that philosophy to this area.

I would think the issue is that the "cyberwarfare" group is new and so is being run like an ordinary technical unit, which means procedures and process out the ears and limited flexibility. The military could easily free them of that and let the unit run itself like a special operations unit.

In reality that system was not mechanically/electronically automated, it just enabled a team of officers in a bunker to give a general launch order without contact with the leadership. And the launch orders would still need to be manually carried out by the crews of strategic missile assets.

It was a hedge against a decapitation strike and the chaos that would result in the Soviet military due to its officers habitual deference to central authority.

The problem isn't measurement, it is tying rewards to achieving certain measurements. People will do what you reward them for doing, even if that isn't what you actually wanted them to do.

The real issue is that identifying the correct things to measure and reward is really, really hard.

I read once about a factory that was trying to improve output so they started rewarding shifts of workers for reaching production goals. But to achieve those goals workers started cutting corners and quality went down. So the company installed a device to measure the quality of the widgets, which worked for a while but then quality went down again. The workers had figured out they could just keep measuring the same in-spec widget over and over again to make the machine happy. Next the company altered the quality measurement machine so that it would issue an error if it did two identical measurements in a row. Again quality went up for a while until the workers figured out they could just rotate a couple of good parts through the machine to fool it.

The issue is thinking average keys and locks are anything but a mild inconvenience. Spurned lovers/friends/coworkers could easily "borrow" a key and get it copied.

They could also just get a screwdriver and a rubber mallet and remove the lock, or smash a window.

>the way that military whistleblowers are treated

No different to how any other institutional whistleblowers are treated.

>the fallout from military atrocities in Vietnam (invariably blame was heaped upon the soldiers on the ground and not allowed to sully the sleeves of the officers who gave them their orders

Do you live in an alternate reality? The only people court martialed over My Lai for example were officers, including a Colonel and a General (who was demoted).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_W._Koster

A trademark is exactly what it sounds like, a mark that is used in trade. It has to be in specific markets, and you use it or you lose it.

As this guy doesn't run a tech conference he has zero chance of defending that TM.

A guy named Joe Blogs similarly has zero chance of stopping "Joe Blogs(14)" the conference

Experience with reCaptcha.

I can totally understand why those would frustrate non-technical users, but on a site like HN I would expect people to know how reCaptcha works.

That said I think reCaptcha has been getting much harder recently due to the arms race with bots. I now sometimes fail 3-4 times in a row.

Care more about others user-experience and safety (I primarily use ABP and NoScript to block malware attacks) than the fact that if advertising becomes less effective other methods to pay for websites will have to be developed, so I recommend people use ABP.

Also, advertising isn't "free", there is still a cost even if I am not seeing the money directly leave my wallet every time I see an ad. I would rather the ad supported model died out, the only reason it came to dominate is because there wasn't the technology to support other options when newspapers were first developed.

Why would the government migrate to an OS they are making weaker?

If Linux was banned from use in critical systems that might lend credibility to that conspiracy theory, Linux being used in sensitive systems destroys any credibility that theory has.