cheeseprocedure

Sorry, I don't understand the underlying principles enough to answer that question. How would journalling interfere with the behaviour of a tool like Eraser?

(I do know that SSDs change the nature of the problem dramatically, as their internal storage allocation techniques tend to be opaque to the operating system. One cannot guarantee that an instruction to overwrite block X will be interpreted in the desired manner.)

This application fits your needs on the Windows platform:

"Eraser is an advanced security tool for Windows which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns. Eraser is currently supported under Windows XP (with Service Pack 3), Windows Server 2003 (with Service Pack 2), Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2."

http://eraser.heidi.ie

I wish I was blessed with your mental filters for blocking out distractions. Open office plans drive me absolutely bonkers.

Imagine a "Half-Life" film composed of one continuous shot from the first-person perspective.

I've been unable to reproduce this on systems equipped with the controller in question. I'd love to see "ethtool -e ethX" output for a NIC confirmed to be vulnerable.

/edit Ah, I spoke to soon; the author has updated his page here with diffs between affected and unaffected EEPROMs:

http://www.kriskinc.com/intel-pod

> (Separately, OS X's stub resolver has some neat tricks. e.g., using /etc/resolver/<domain_name> to route DNS requests for a particular domain to a specific name server.)

I was about to give up and install dnsmasq locally to get around a VPN-related issue. Thanks for the tip!

HTTP headers agree:

  $ curl -I http://whytheluckystiff.net
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Server: GitHub.com
  Date: Sun, 06 Jan 2013 04:37:51 GMT
  Content-Type: text/html
  Content-Length: 109
  Last-Modified: Wed, 19 Dec 2012 00:31:03 GMT
  Connection: keep-alive
  Expires: Mon, 07 Jan 2013 04:37:51 GMT
  Cache-Control: max-age=86400
  Accept-Ranges: bytes

> Our food boom has helped create the population boom.

Impoverished populations tend to have a high birthrate, which frequently begets more poverty. I'd like to think we can work to reduce overpopulation through reducing poverty (which includes improving food security) instead of simply relying on Malthus to sort everything out. Call me an optimist.

> Meanwhile, the system accumulates hidden risk. Once food supplies are created, we become dependent on their persistence. If anything unforeseen and catastrophic happened that lopped a percentage off world food production, we would be ill placed to bear the shock.

Again, this seems like a policy problem. Having a robust selection of lower-input/higher-output cultivars would help shield us from the failure of single crops.

First, I completely agree that there are plenty of very complex pieces to the food security puzzle, and I hope I'm not painting GMOs as a magic bullet.

> The problem is that in some parts of the world people are too poor to farm. GMO seed - produced by a company who will lock in farmers to that seed and prevent them from growing on from the crop - is not going to help that.

Not every GMO is a product of pure corporate interest. There are non-profit projects with massive potential (the BioCassava Plus, for example[1][2]).

I agree that the ethical track record of many agricorps is appalling, and I think we need more funding of GMO science that keeps valuable IP in public and charitable hands.

> We heard how agro-chemicals were going to feed the world. They don't.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. It's estimated that a third of humanity is sustained by the Haber-Bosch process [3]; should we count that technology as a failure because hunger still exists?

[1] http://tyglobalist.org/in-the-magazine/features/genetically-...

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21526968

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

Apologies if I'm off base, but can you correct my logic?

If GMOs[1] can enable the growth of more productive and nutritious food crops, it follows that they can enable more efficient agriculture. Lower inputs of resources (including time) and higher output (meaning, hopefully, less hunger and lower food prices) would seem to translate to the higher availability of resources to allocate to other ventures.

If communities are freed from the pressure of scraping together their next meal, doesn't that fundamentally change their health and economic prospects?

[1] Or any specialized cultivar, for that matter.

I take it you didn't actually read his paper.

"What you don’t have the right to do is to stand in the way of others who hope and strive for ways of doing things differently, and hopefully better. Farmers who understand the pressures of a growing population and a warming world. Who understand that yields per hectare are the most important environmental metric. And who understand that technology never stops developing, and that even the fridge and the humble potato were new and scary once."

http://www.ofc.org.uk/files/ofc/papers/mark-lynas-lecture-ox...

> Current techniques may be more risky, but generally speaking it should be hard for plants to produce a horrid mutation based on natural interbreeding mechanisms.

What about the (widespread) practice of mutation breeding? [1] Blasting seeds with X-rays and gamma rays in an attempt to generate new cultivars is a genetic wrecking ball compared to performing genetic engineering.

Conventional breeding has given us plenty of Oopses. The modern kiwifruit, whose progenitor (the smaller and less tasty Chinese gooseberry) may have been safely snacked upon by many folks who would today suffer a lethal allergic reaction after eating a kiwi. In the 1980s, a mutant variety of zucchini began producing enough cucurbitacin toxin to hospitalize a number of people. [2]

> If such transfers have occurred in nature for a long, long time, then it's safe to say that nature has created pathways that are safe. Our pathways are new.

We're still playing by nature's fundamental biological rules, and nature has had hundreds of millions of years to develop resiliency inside that same framework. One example: bacterial mechanisms to mitigate the damage from undesirable horizontal gene transfers by recognizing and deactivating to foreign genetic material: [3]

> I'm making a Talebian argument here. Nature is a VERY complex system. When we mess with it, we make incremental visible gains, and run the risk of large, invisible losses.

I think "incremental" is a bit of an understatement if we can, for example, feed tens of millions of humans in parts of the world where conventional crops cannot (yet?) provide reliable and sufficient nutrition, a critical step in reducing poverty.

Having said all this, I think crop monoculture is a serious problem, but I think it's an issue that needs to be solved through sound policy, not just through science.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_breeding

[2] http://books.google.ca/books?id=Jcq1wTe_93UC&lpg=PP1&...

[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17575047

The registration costs would need to be non-trivial to discourage abuse, which would harm legitimate small-scale innovators. Also, who decides (or validates) the "worth" of a patent? We would be replacing one regulatory nightmare with another.

I'm not sure that comparison is in the same ballpark. (I'm also not supporting his stance.)

I had a chance to speak to one of the lead developers at Palantir a couple years back, and asked him about this apparent conflict of political ideals.

His answer: by enabling agencies to properly apply the data they already have, Palantir's products reduce the pressure to further erode civil liberties in the pursuit of more data.

I wonder if we'll be able to submit pull requests.

We[1] need to begin tearing down the stigma of mental illness before better care can really have an impact.

[1] Canada/the US, at least; I'm not familiar enough with other cultures.

How about the millions of children who have been educated for 13+ years in the public school systems and go on to lead fulfilling adult lives?

FreeBSD has a simple and consistent upgrade path between major releases, excellent stability, excellent hardware support (on the server side, at least; that's where it matters to me personally), a magnificent packaging and ports system, excellent documentation, an excellent firewall stack (pf), a proper ZFS implementation, a powerful and easy-to-manage jails system, and is used in plenty of corporations, large and small, both as a conventional server platform and as a base for commercial products.

It is a well-curated shop, while GNU/Linux is a street bazaar.

It is a pleasure to administer.

You might want to take a closer look.

...Or, in the case of rootkits:

> "Oh, this will never happen to me!" -everyone, long after they were hacked

> (100 bytes per TB are expected to go bad every year)

That's unsettling. Source?

Er... it doesn't work reliably, and by definition, cannot work reliably. If market inefficiencies exist to be exploited, then someone is ultimately getting the short end of every stick.

On the subject of actual newsroom expenses: Pew Research Center for Excellence in Journalism has an interesting piece on the budgets of major cable news networks. [1]

These charts (from [1] and [2]) are particularly interesting:

http://www.stateofthemedia.org/files/2011/01/31_Cable_Revenu...

http://stateofthemedia.org/files/2011/03/20_Cable_Cable-Chan...

http://www.stateofthemedia.org/files/2011/01/5_Cable_CNN-Lea...

http://www.stateofthemedia.org/files/2011/01/21_Cable_CNN-Re...

http://www.stateofthemedia.org/files/2011/01/22_Cable_The-Sa...

In short, when compared to CNN: despite operating few domestic and foreign bureaus, Fox News pulled in more revenue and had nearly as large an audience (as measured by viewers tuning in for 60 minutes or more monthly). Fox also allocates over 70% of its budget to "program expenses" (including salaries for its hosts), whereas CNN's program expenses are about 44%. The difference in staffing figures are also drastic: ~4000 for CNN, 1272 for Fox.

[1] http://stateofthemedia.org/2011/cable-essay/

[2] http://stateofthemedia.org/2011/cable-essay/data-page-2/

It would be very interesting to see some data on the impact of government-funded blue-sky research (in other words, science that didn't have an obvious short-term commercial application).

Intuitively, it seems like such spending would open up new commercial frontiers for the private sector, but I'm not personally aware of specific examples of net payoff.

Wow. When was the last time Apple officially recommend another company's product as a workaround?

Even worse, he had a relatively rare form of pancreatic cancer that is easier to treat.

http://www.webmd.com/cancer/pancreatic-cancer/news/20110825/...

Be extremely cautious when using WD Green drives in a RAID configuration.

They may be quiet/inexpensive, but they also don't ship with Time-Limited Error Recovery enabled (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery). This makes it much more likely they'll drop out of an array. Some models can have this option flipped on; some cannot.

Love the product shot covered in greasy fingerprints.