jsmthrowaway

The rotor would have to be enormous and fast, and the helicopter incredibly light with very little payload. One or both of those constraints are probably beyond our materials knowledge, particularly a controllable rotor that would work.

Passenger jets are fine up there because they haul ass, often north of Mach 0.7-0.8, and push as much of the thin air as possible over the wing. (One of the cool things about commercial air travel is that most people don’t realize they’re flying at transonic speeds, but you’ll occasionally see evidence of it in flight.) It doesn’t take much slowing down for a passenger jet to start descending, and ultimately stall, at cruising altitude. The flight envelope at Everest altitude is much smaller than you’d expect.

For a helicopter, you’d need to replicate that set of circumstances, but with wings rotating above you instead. One has to worry about other conditions, too: in the '70s, when Boulet set the helicopter altitude record above 40,000, the engine flamed out on account of how cold it was and wouldn’t restart. High altitude helicopters are a very difficult design problem, and there isn’t much economic demand to solve it.

> I don't know how often hostage scenarios as extreme as you describe actually occur in the USA

Often. Mostly domestic violence barricading scenarios, which are usually handled by front-line officers with sidearms and negotiation. SWAT deployment is usually discretionary at such a scene, predicated on an active shooter, and anticipates forced entry. In an active shooter scenario, front-line officers will typically defer to SWAT to force entry, given the risk.

But yes, it does happen. A lot of domestic violence ends badly.

Talking to police is the first step. Not sure if he mentioned this in the article, but Brian Krebs himself has done it, since he was getting swatted with some frequency on account of his reporting.

There’s also bib gourmand ratings in the same guide for exactly that, which is something like half a star. Less prestigious, but still an accomplishment. If he were starred and then started serving similar quality at the lower price point, I don’t see why they wouldn’t give him one, unless they consider the PR we are reading now a disqualifier for further consideration.

Hardware wallets come with a passphrase mnemonic that completely restores them. Write it down, put it in a safe deposit box, you're done. You can then take an acetylene torch to your hardware wallet, buy a new one, restore from the passphrase, and have everything back. Hardware wallets are far easier to back up offsite than key management on a computer, though a SmartCard-HSM comes close. (Hardware wallets are the same principle as an HSM.)

Since you're probably wondering, the passphrase mnemonic on my Ledger is a group of 24 words that represent a translation of the primary secret key. All accounts on my Ledger are derived from it. I've tested wiping and restoring, and the passphrase now lives in my bank deposit box.

By the nature of cryptocurrency, if you had all the public keys from your hardware wallet you could use it as a bank by dropping the wallet itself in a safe deposit box. You don't need it in your physical possession to receive, only send. I'm considering buying a second for exactly this purpose, though at that point, a paper wallet would be just as functional.

Both work just fine, when compared to DIY. Playing favorites is not how to advocate to people not in the know; I happen to have a Ledger, so it's what I typed.

Or, just buy a Ledger Nano S, which handles all of that for you. For serious crypto one uses hardware keys, and cryptocurrency is no different.

With balanced ternary, setting aside a bit for signed words goes away. We'd stop having to think about signed versus unsigned, and we'd get the full word width if it were based on trits, regardless of the sign. It makes a lot of sense. It also has dramatic implications for floating point, I understand, though I grok that aspect a bit less. If you go unbalanced (I think is the term?) and let each trit express one of three trinary digits from 0 to 2 in an integer, then a 64-trit word can make it 11 significant digits further (3^64-1), and this is a pain point in game engines trying to express astronomical distances such as Star Citizen. You'd open up a number of cool primitive data types; I could see a balanced integer being "signed" and an unbalanced integer being "unsigned/long" for example, and relative pointers could go backwards without having to do a ssize_t-style dance, etc., etc. Tri-states give a native word a lot of possibilities.

There's a lot of people thinking in ternary already, and not realizing it. bool? is ternary: true, false, or null. Think about the implications on error handling of such a primitive at the logic level. I'm positive that's true, I'm positive that's false, I'm not sure. It's a pretty powerful way of computing, and has a lot of implications up the stack.

If you step back and look at the gymnastics we do around boolean logic and arithmetic in typical, day-to-day programming, being able to express a third state at the logic level is something you never knew you wanted. New logic based on unknown values could be expressed -- think about a tritmask, for example, and what you could express with a number of "don't care" trits. I certainly see the value in ternary, with the caveat that I know nothing about IOTA nor how it uses it.

I've seen discussion about "why don't we build 128-bit computers?" and I think it's a similar thought exercise to "why don't we build 63-trit computers?" with the added complexity of three-level logic compared to plain word extension. I gather that a lot of benefits of ternary overlap with what's going to happen in quantum computing, too, though approaching ternary from a traditional computing mindset makes it a lot easier to understand for me.

> Don't accuse others of astroturfing or shillage. This always degrades discussion and rarely hits the mark. Email us instead and we'll look into it.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

If you find yourself impacted by these changes in your home lab (and chances are you will; taking ballooning out of Free is nothing but petty), keep in mind that you can follow the lead of the major hosting companies and jump ship to KVM via oVirt or some homebrew. KVM is better in a number of ways anyway, one of them being a lack of control by Citrix, not to mention when Linode switched they got ~30% more perf out of Linodes.

Xen has been dying for a while. EC2 is heading off it, and they've held out the longest. This change is evidence that Citrix would like to accelerate that trend by killing off the home lab users that stuck it out (read: me). Looks like I have a new Christmas project.

https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/01/7-ways-we-harde...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/07/aws_writes_new_kvm_...

https://blog.linode.com/2015/06/16/linode-turns-12-heres-som...

https://www.digitalocean.com/help/technical/general/ (Cmd+F KVM)

Seniors can still go to the college campus and see it. These ads are completely not shown by the system. Not a perfect comparison.

> Also, telegram isn't encrypted as far as I know.

Sure it is. There are (optional) E2E one-on-one secret chats. Doing E2E for a group is obviously a bit harder, as that's broadcast or multicast encryption -- think the DirecTV problem -- but the protocol itself is encrypted nonetheless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(messaging_service)#E...

Since Apache License v2.0 and GPLv2 are incompatible, I'd be curious to understand the implications of this license selection for a few scenarios in both directions. Say osquery wanted to include a GPLv2 library. Could it? How about an Apache License v2.0 library? ASF and FSF differ on the interpretation of the details, which would come into play here. Does the GPLv2's requirement that it apply to the whole work[0] matter?

A more interesting thought: say I wanted to fork osquery. Do I select one of the licenses as part of my forking operation, since I, the user, am exercising my rights under one of the licenses (at my option) to derive the work? Would that mean I could fork osquery to Apache License v2.0, GPLv2, or both at my discretion? Given the requirements of GPLv2, am I even permitted to do that?

An even more interesting thought: osquery seems to derive GPLv2 code from the Netfilter project by patching it:

https://github.com/facebook/osquery/blob/master/tools/provis...

https://github.com/facebook/osquery/blob/master/tools/provis...

Can the resulting product then be distributed Apache License v2.0, given the viral nature of GPLv2? I'm not clear how that dependency is used, but is Facebook even able to license this work as Apache License v2.0 at all?

This is a very confusing dual-license scenario, and something I'd never thought about with choices like Apache/MIT. I feel it important to point out that I'm not attempting to introduce FUD or criticize Facebook; I'm genuinely curious.

[0]: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1364

Then that bigger issue applies to Memphis and Los Angeles, too, both of which had a larger backlog than Detroit. Safer to say that bias and resources are primary causes, since the subtext of what you're saying is that something is "going on" in Detroit.

http://www.endthebacklog.org/backlog/where-backlog-exists-an...

I'm not sure being called out for claiming that Detroit was once the largest city in the United States is "nitpicking." That's just a factually wrong statement, and as a Detroit native, sets up a narrative (unintentionally, I'm guessing) that we fell from grace even harder than we did. "Detroit was once larger than New York City" is an implied claim that would unjustly amplify the collapse of Detroit to an audience that doesn't know better, particularly internationally. We fell, but not that hard.

I understood your underlying point, but I don't think the correction is attempting to nitpick you, just striving for accuracy.

> git reset --hard <commit>

Unless part of your surgery involves files that do not yet live in the history, or you're working on a detached HEAD in a mid-merge state, or... git reset --hard is a very dangerous operation unless you're 100% sure of the entire state of the repository. That is a very rapid way to lose work if you're not perfectly diligent.

And sure, you shouldn't have to back up .git or your workspace, but sometimes, it's a hell of a lot easier to ripcord out and say "screw it" if you have a complete workspace from before you decided to launch down the rebase hole or whatever.

> force pushing to the branch to take into account criticism on commits can be helpful

Hm? Criticism on commits should be additive. The commit was made, response was made, and a new commit addresses the response. Rewriting history breaks a lot of things and removes context. Another approach:

1) Add commit addressing criticism.

2) Squash when merging feature in to master, which is one of the only cases where I think rewriting history is OK.

Much cleaner master history, no rewriting history (which you should never do once another checkout sees your branch, including GitHub), and a number of other benefits. If you're routinely force pushing feature branches, something is broken in your workflow, IMO.

No, it isn't, if you're playing with surgical tools that disrupt Git history, which was my point. It's a lot easier to revert to before you started than attempt to abort out of a huge rebase/squash/ugly merge conflict hell/rewrite of history. I'm not saying back up before every commit. I'm saying when `git status` is three pages long, you have 14,000 conflicts, and you're on a detached HEAD God knows where, it's your choice to spend the next hour typing the right Git commands to get back where you wanted to be, or just back out and try again. I know which one I'd prefer.

Yep. That is the important tip, right here.

    $ pushd ..
    $ cp -a my-project my-project-before-I-did-git-surgery
    $ popd

Then relax. This is extremely important before playing with nasty Git surgical tools such as huge rebases. Borked it up?

    $ pushd ..
    $ rm -rf my-project
    $ cp -a my-project-before-I-did-git-surgery my-project
    $ popd

Undo is a great thing, and it's also important to triple check the entire state of the repository before you push, because pushing is basically committing to whatever surgery you've done. If you're having to fix stuff with -f, you're going to run into trouble; try to avoid -f ever.

Engines sound deeper when you put them in gear, if he’s driving a muscle car or something, though I’d expect coming home in the evening would do it too in that case.

To be fair, it was 2006, and "everybody's phone has a great camera" was several years off. The article does mention someone may have snagged it on a plain digital camera.

Not taking a side, just pointing that out.

That's right. It's simple to remember once you get the hang of it. 100% grade: every foot forward is one foot of climb, or every meter forward is one meter of rise. 10% grade: ten feet forward, one foot up, or ten meters forward, one meter up. 110% grade: one foot forward, 1.1 feet up, or one meter forward, 1.1 meters up. 6% grades are steep enough to earn warning signs, if you pay attention to signage in the mountains.

Sonora Pass, for example, has sections of 26% grade. That sounds immensely steep (and is, for driving), but it sounds more reasonable when you say "every 50 feet forward, you've climbed 13 feet." Solve the triangle, and that's 14.574°. If you've been over the Sonora Pass, you know that it feels like you're in a rocket climbing vertically at a couple points, and you might be surprised to learn that's only 14.6° of grade.

22nd Street in SF is over 31%, IIRC, and is one of the steepest streets I can think of.

Nor does law enforcement, for that matter. Operating a Stingray-like device to capture cellular user information is very, very illegal in the United States without proper authority to do so. Even capturing open Wi-Fi that you do not control is legally perilous and has divided courts on its legality, which seems counterintuitive on its face given the simple physics of radio, but is a fact.

It’s stupidly simple to run afoul of the CFAA and federal wiretapping laws, not to mention the expectation of privacy standard in California.

The tool panel is pretty much identical in its entirety. Layout, which tools go where, icons, etc.

Edit: Seriously, guys, it is, I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted:

http://otms.wikispaces.com/file/view/PS_tools_Wiley_Media.jp...

They brought in dogs to search the room, then let everybody back in. Pretty safe guess that was a credible bomb threat.

Especially considering 4chan was sending Pai's home a pizza every half hour for a while, if Twitter is to be believed.

They'd have to then avoid anticompetitive attention due to owning ESPN, though.

I do, yes. Disney took incredible heat and a number of shareholders bailed as a result of Miramax releasing Pulp Fiction, and Weinstein had to fight for it, if I recall my film history. Disney also refused to allow Miramax to release Dogma, which is history that is guiding my surprise. That studio is part of the reason they started being more careful, and they finally divested Miramax in 2010.

It’ll be interesting to see how they handle their portfolio going forward.

Wow, Disney didn’t ask them to divest FX, which means they’re knowingly acquiring It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia among other content they’d normally not find palatable. They even call out that they’re bringing in The Americans and Deadpool. That’s kind of strange for Disney, given that historically they’re careful about what they’re associated with. I really hope they leave their new portfolio alone, but that’s not their MO with content that they find controversial.

Well, you might have just hit on it, actually: that assumes our job is to assail an accuser. Maybe that changed.

Yes and no. People spoke up before Fowler; why are we hinging the culture on her? Something I think a lot of people are overlooking is that she was heard on a larger scale than anybody before her, but lionizing her as a result is actually disrespectful to the plethora of examples who came before her and were just unlucky (I guess?). I can think of a number of prominent examples within tech that didn't get any of the attention outside of tech, but I will not rehash them here.

That, to me, indicates that something else shifted culturally to allow the Uber thing to help contribute to that environment. What is that? Was it the scale of Uber? Was it something about Fowler? Was it that the same power dynamics that suppressed revelations about Weinstein were starting to degrade within insular tech? I'm personally curious about it, and I don't think Fowler's blog post was solely responsible and folks should start making conclusions about cultural shifts, is my only point.

Edit to your edit: Careful; you're lightly claiming that accusers before Fowler were unbelievable and easily dismissed.