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oroup

Diplomacy works _because_ you have the means to defend yourself. If they can fight and you can’t, why will they bother talking to you?
Re:Would von Braun's Mars Landers Have Worked? on Wednesday February 21, 2024 @04:13AM (#39451689)
More recent versions of the plan contemplate electrolyzing water in the ground to obtain the required oxygen
I’ll take the under
Re:A Minimum Viable Computer, or Linux for $15 on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @11:41AM (#30087757)
A display mounted on a flat surface between your hands seems like a ready path to neck trauma.
Soylent
Adding significant BOM cost, growing physical volume, reducing battery life, creating lots of complexity to get certain apps to run on one CPU or the other and the associated cache coherency issues? So that iOS developers can test their apps on a native CPU (But still plenty of differences like screen size, no cell radio, no GPS, accelerometers, etc) Seems dubious.
Also it makes scraping much harder.
Re:Managed Kubernetes Price Comparison on Saturday March 07, 2020 @01:25PM (#22513094)
At the low end it’s worth considering Fargate distinct from EKS. You don’t need to provision a whole cluster (generally 3 machines minimum) and can just run as little as a single Pod.
Re:A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools on Saturday February 29, 2020 @09:09AM (#22450612)
My joke is that the unrealistic thing about Star Trek is not the faster than light travel or the matter transmitters it’s that their videoconferencing always works.
Re:WeWork chases new financing as cash crunch looms on Friday October 11, 2019 @11:35AM (#21225367)
Before we sold, we had WeWork offices in Denver and NY and used a similar competitor in Austin. They worked great and we were happy with them. But they were also a commodity and we chose based on price and lack of lock-in.
Reminds me of Zapata the fish oil company launching zap.com an internet portal and then spinning out and IPOing the subsidiary. [0]

[0] https://mobile.nytimes.com/1999/04/14/business/company-news-...

Re:Electromagnetic Water Cloak Eliminates Drag and Wake on Thursday December 14, 2017 @09:57AM (#15922689)
Great answer, thanks!
Re:Electromagnetic Water Cloak Eliminates Drag and Wake on Thursday December 14, 2017 @03:41AM (#15920805)
I'm fascinated by how this ended up with the same name as the fictional stealthy propulsion technology from the Hunt For Red October. They're both called "magneto hydrodynamic" propulsion.

The book was published in 1984. Was this widely theorized? Did Clancy speak to someone with non public information? Were the researchers at Duke fans of the book / movie? Did they just copy the name of his technology or did the fictional description of how it worked actually inspire their research?

Given that the ME has full access to the NIC, outbound traffic could be concealed onboard traffic that is already outbound. If the adversary has also compromised network routers, the traffic could be observed and decoded without explicitly being sent anywhere.

Similarly inbound control signals could be delivered by modifying inbound traffic that the ME observed and decided.

Depending on your throughput needs the signal could be delivered subtly by for example modifying the timing between packets in a way that would be very hard to identify as a signal.

I’m hoping the ME firmware Now gets dumped and studied closely. I’m betting there are some surprises in there

Give me a break. The same three letter agency that convinced Intel to do this will convince Apple to do the same. I'm guessing you're basing your faith in Apple based on their refusal to cooperate in the San Bernadino case[1] and the so-called "cop button" in iOS 11[2]. (And some generic "we value privacy" rhetoric that I won't bother linking.)

That stuff is great but doesn't mean much. Just because they're blocking border agents from trivially imaging phones at the border doesn't mean that they won't cooperate at a higher level with some undocumented baseband features.

Just as Defense in Depth is a concept in security, we've already seen a corollary "Offense in Depth" from the intelligence community. Is the best attack in the random number generator[3] or undocumented silicon[4] or intercepting your boxes on the way to your data center[5] or tapping your fiber[6] or stealing your certs[7] or paying your employees to go rogue[8]? Why choose when you can just do them all.

Apple hardware is vertically integrated and utterly undocumented. The AMT chip has been present on motherboards since 2006[9]. The Snowden Introspection Engine found that the Wifi Chipset remains powered up even when Wifi is turned off.[10] I find it hard to believe that the same government who went to all these lengths to compromise our infrastructure would really let Apple get away with refusing. How did that turn out for Joseph Nacchio?[11]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-wa...

[2] https://www.cultofmac.com/498052/ios-11-lets-quickly-disable...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_number_generator_attack...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_backdoor#Examples

[5] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/173721-the-nsa-regular...

[6] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/new-docs-show-ns...

[7] https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/12/09/serious-security...

[8] http://www.ocweekly.com/news/fbi-used-best-buys-geek-squad-t...

[9] https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel

[10] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2996800-AgainstTheLa...

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio

If you don't mind de-cloaking, do you mind sending me an email?
The system works best over the long term if IPO shares are a little bit underpriced. Bankers have no trouble moving them and earning their fees, buyers are happy to take them because they get some pop and the company feels like they captured most of the value from the shares they sold.

A big pop says the shares were underpriced and the company left money on the table. A decline means the shares were overpriced and the buyers may become reluctant in the future.

For a company that only IPOs once, they don't really care if buyers become reluctant next time but they do care if a narrative develops that they have a loser stock.

Re:My Next Mac Mini on Saturday January 28, 2017 @01:28PM (#13507879)
Awesome
No my theory is that they may have already done a reverse split to wash out small stakeholders. If there is an IPO in their future they will have to do a split as well. The former small stakeholders would not get their shares back.

Obviously I know nothing about this but if I were the poster I would ask to hear the story.

$1300 is really an unusually high strike price. While in theory there is no difference between 200 options at $1300 per share and 20k options at $13 per share, the former is very unusual and I'd at least want to know the story. If the company is to IPO there will almost certainly be a stock split.

One way to force small stakeholders off your cap table is to do a reverse stock split because fractional shares are typically paid out in cash. If that were the case here, I'd call it sketchy behavior and steer clear.

I believe this should be an "unoccupancy" tax instead, where owners are taxed if the home is unoccupied:

* increases the supply of available housing

* includes all the properties that have already been purchased for speculation and hits every year

* substitutes an occupancy check (using data like utility utilization or direct observation) rather than a test of foreignness which is too easy to game.

* doesn't dissuade foreign investors but facilitates the creation of safe rental infrastructure serving them.

Re:FBI Cannot Make Apple Rewrite Its OS on Friday March 18, 2016 @01:48PM (#11313514)
I don't think this is quite an accurate analogy. A shredder removes the ability of anyone (including the owner) to read what was on the documents before shredding. A locked phone retains the ability for the owner to unlock it so it's not quite the same thing.

(Not that its relevant, but I support Apple in this fight.)

Re:Fixing the Inequity of Startup Equity on Monday February 29, 2016 @09:50PM (#11200485)
How about this - the company agrees to purchase And give to the employee any options that are vested and un-exercised for two years and agrees to cooperate w a declared set of known secondary buyers. Employees are on their own for the taxes and can always decline.

* It extends the retention effect of equity since it starts kicking in at year 3 and extends smoothly forward.

* It has no cash impact on the company since its buying the shares from itself.

* In the early years the tax impact should be minimal. In later years there should be secondary buyers who can give employees enough cash to cover the tax liability at the cost of offering a discount.

* It discourages the pure lottery players since it requires the employee to either cover the tax burden or engage a secondary firm and deal w the discount they require.

* The downside for the company (aside from increased dilution vs the status quo) is that it establishes a clear market price for common equity which can be disadvantageous.

Re:How Soylent and Oculus Could Fix the Prison System on Saturday January 30, 2016 @11:00AM (#11002301)
I'd say this qualifies as a dangerous idea. Horrifying at first blush but it sticks in the brain. That the comments are almost universally negative tells you something.
The closest I've seen to this in real life is where an investor will purchase common shares meaning they are on equal footing to investors. It's rare, but it does happen.[0]

[0] http://www.wsj.com/articles/snapchat-discloses-650-million-p...

Seems like a prime opportunity for a class action lawsuit. Juniper was selling a class of products that categorically did not do what it claimed. What would be interesting is their method of defense. As was pointed out to me in an earlier thread, companies have legal immunity when assuring the intelligence community with their work.[1] But Juniper already claims that they do not assist third parties to compromise their products. So they would either need to change their statements or be ineligible for this defense.

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