booly @ booly @sh.itjust.works

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491

Joined

2 yr. ago

To put it bluntly, science costs money, and persuading people who control money to spend that money is itself a skill.

Or, zooming out, science requires resources: physical commodities, equipment, the skilled labor of entire teams. The most effective way to marshal those resources is with money, and management/sales skills are necessary to get those resources working together in concert.

A private equity firm bought them to naked short the stock

You just like throwing around words regardless of meaning?

They owned equity, so they were long, not short. They owned a stake so they weren't naked.

What they did was a simple extraction of value from something they owned, destroying it. It has nothing to do with short selling, and has nothing to do with manipulation of stock trading (after all, they took it private so that it wouldn't be publicly traded, so there were no public traders to manipulate).

Motorola Solutions is a dominant radio manufacturer in the government/first responder space, as well as major infrastructure providers. Yes, that means cops, but it also means firefighters, ambulances, trains, buses, airports, and any fleet of mobile service for mission critical stuff like electric utilities, telecom, and some aviation uses. Back in the day of trunk radio, it used to be common for taxis, too.

Motorola sold its consumer mobile businesses (cell phones) in 2011 in a spinoff as "Motorola Mobility," around the time it was shutting down and selling off pieces of its space/satellite businesses, but kept most of its other businesses. Today's Motorola Solutions is the legal successor to the Motorola that invented the cell phone.

At least 50, but I'd make it larger. Maybe increase from 50 to about 8 billion and make sure all the villagers' needs are met.

I'd say the real world doesn't reward being actually gifted.

More accurately, the real world punishes being below average at any one of like a dozen skillets. You can't min/max your stats because being 99th percentile at something won't make up for being 30th percentile at something else. Better to be 75th percentile at both.

The real world requires cross-disciplinary coordination, which means thriving requires both soft skills and multiple hard skills.

They pronounce it "heera"

If you're going to reach back into the time period before they hired the writers/showrunners to actually develop a script in early 2022, or selling the rights to Amazon in 2020, then you're talking about a project that was far from certain it would actually get made. Hard to say that they "knew" a tv show was coming before 2022.

Given the fact they knew that fallout TV series was coming out, I do find it a bit baffling that they didn’t just make fallout 5

I'm pretty sure the TV show began development in 2022, four years after Starfield was announced in 2018.

Um, nobody is talking about chemically converting the released carbon dioxide back into chemical compounds with stored chemical energy, like hydrocarbons and graphite. They're talking about physically sequestering CO2, or binding the carbon into materials that aren't combustible (like calcium carbonate).

Put another way: if I burned some hydrocarbons in a fireplace and put a balloon over the flue, I'd capture some carbon dioxide (and probably some water) in that balloon, and the carbon in that balloon would've cost me less energy to capture than was released in burning the hydrocarbons to begin with. So long as I could keep the balloon from leaking or deflating.

Unless you can capture 1 ton of carbon using less energy than is extracted by burning 1 ton of carbon, you can not capture carbon.

Is this not already the case that these processes are net negative in carbon released? How much does it currently cost, in energy, to capture carbon at these smokestacks?

GNU's
Not
Unix

not meant to be consistent with the human eye.

Even then, postprocessing is inevitable.

As the white/gold versus blue/black dress debate showed, our perception of color is heavily influenced by context, and is more than just a simple algorithm of which rods and cone cells were activated while viewing an image.

I gotta imagine making the Sahara Desert habitable is a lot easier than making Mars habitable. The Sahara at least has breathable atmosphere, a 24 hour day, solar intensity that our plants are well adapted to using, and is relatively close to resupply from population centers on Earth.

The typical default configuration has the ISP providing DNS services (and even if you use an external DNS provider, the default configuration there is that the DNS traffic itself isn't encrypted from the ISP's ability to analyze).

So even if you visit a site that is hosted on some big service, where the IP address might not reveal what you're looking at (like visiting a site hosted or cached by Cloudflare or AWS), the DNS lookup might at least reveal the domain you're visiting.

Still, the domain itself doesn't reveal the URL that follows the domain.

So if you do a Google search for "weird sexual fetishes," that might cause you to visit the URL:

        https://www.google.com/search?q=weird+sexual+fetishes


  

Your ISP can see that you visited the www.google.com domain, but can't see what search you actually performed.

There are different tricks and tips for keeping certain things private from certain observers, so splitting up the actual ISP from the DNS resolver from the website itself might be helpful and scattering pieces of information, but some of those pieces of information will inevitably have to be shared with someone.

A big chunk of the US military's budget is on very expensive US healthcare. Something like 7% of the military's annual budget is health expenses, and that doesn't even include the Department of Veterans Affairs, which provides health care to veterans.

A lot of NIL money during the off-season is booster money, yes. That's money that basically will only go to athletes signed with a particular school.

But there's also a lot of NIL money for actual big budget TV/print advertising from national corporations for ads produced by major ad agencies. That's money that follows the athlete.

Not all of it will follow the athlete to the pros (and not every athlete goes pro), especially since the WNBA seems to have lower viewership than NCAA women's basketball. But if anyone is gonna be making good money on sponsorships in the WNBA, it'll be Caitlin Clark.

A zero day is an exploit that has been identified by someone but not yet used.

I've always understood that the counting of days comes from the vendor's knowledge. So any exploit from before Google was aware of the vulnerability would be a zero day.

It wouldn't make any sense to refer to the days counted from when an attacker first discovers the vulnerability, because by definition any vulnerability in active exploitation wouldn't be a zero day.

disclosed active exploitation

So, not a fucking zero day.

I'm confused. Isn't an active exploit that hasn't been patched yet, by definition, a zero day? So the release of a new patch that closes an actively exploited vulnerability patches a zero-day?

I agree.

I point out that pretty much everyone in that group experiences it, so even those who aren't in that disadvantaged group should show some empathy towards the experiences of others, that we may never directly encounter ourselves. Part of that empathy, of course, is to provide support and structures for reducing the likelihood that these things happen, and mitigating them when they do happen.

It basically varies from chip to chip, and program to program.

Speculative execution is when a program hits some kind of branch (like an if-then statement) and the CPU just goes ahead and calculates as if it's true, and progresses down that line until it learns "oh wait it was false, just scrub all that work I did so far down this branch." So it really depends on what that specific chip was doing in that moment, for that specific program.

It's a very real performance boost for normal operations, but for cryptographic operations you want every function to perform in exactly the same amount of time, so that something outside that program can't see how long it took and infer secret information.

These timing/side channel attacks generally work like this: imagine you have a program that tests if variable X is a prime number, by testing if every number smaller than X can divide evenly, from 2 on to X. Well, the bigger X is, the longer that particular function will take. So if the function takes a really long time, you've got a pretty good idea of what X is. So if you have a separate program that isn't allowed to read the value of X, but can watch another program operate on X, you might be able to learn bits of information about X.

Patches for these vulnerabilities changes the software to make those programs/function in fixed time, but then you lose all the efficiency gains of being able to finish faster, when you slow the program down to the weakest link, so to speak.