Yeah, that and the companies who don't want to do "military applications" can just do pure research. Pure, ivory-tower research... which the DoD can just pay someone else to integrate into an actual weapon system. It's not like a machine learning algorithm knows or cares to what use it's put, once it is out there.

Dumb posturing; I also wonder if these people have considered what a world dominated by Chinese and Russian military AI will look like, and what effect it would have... I am not sure it would be the best of all possible worlds, exactly.

I doubt this has been lost on the DefCon organizers. Presumably they think that they'd lose more attendance by moving to Europe than by having people who can't safely travel to the US just not come, or attend/present via videoconference or something. And I suspect that's probably true -- very few people (in my experience) go to DefCon or similar conferences on their own dime; you go on your employer's money. And getting your employer to comp you a few hundred bucks for a flight to Vegas and a shitty hotel room (Vegas hotel rooms are notoriously cheap) is a heck of a lot easier than getting a company to cough up for a transatlantic ticket, hotel in Europe, etc. As long as the majority of the attendees are in the US, this is where the conferences are going to be.

But coming here if you're involved in cybercrime is probably, uh, not a very smart idea. That Hutchins came at all suggests to me that he didn't know that the FBI was onto his alleged previous (pre-Wannacry) activities; the alternative is that he's dumb, and he doesn't seem dumb. (Though a fair number of very smart people are also arrogant and don't give other people credit for being able to figure things out, so that's also an option, I suppose.)

There is a legitimate question as to whether there should be some sort of cyber amnesty program, though, given the number of mostly-legitimate "security researchers" who have shady backgrounds but seem to have moved on from them. I've got some mixed feelings on that. On one hand, getting blackhats and their knowledge out into the open so vulns can be remediated and the network in general made more robust is a Good Thing. But I don't know if it outweighs the message it would send, which is that you can basically play Computer Mafioso when you're young and then retire to a nice, secure, respectable position as "security researcher" without the threat of your prior activities coming back to bite you. That's not really how things work in the non-IT world; if you spend your 20s working for the Mob, and then retire to a respectable profession, that respectability is unlikely to protect you from getting a knock on your door sometime later, depending on the statue of limitations, for stuff you did earlier. Might make a judge or jury go easier on you, but it's not an ironclad defense.

I think it's more like "one good deed today doesn't get you off the hook for the bad deed you did last week".

In other words, if you're a blackhat who happens to take down another blackhat, that doesn't buy you a get-out-of-jail-free card that you can play when other things you may have done in the past surface.

Or at least, not to an extent that stops you from getting indicted. It might play pretty well in court if the whole thing actually goes to trial, I'd imagine. Can't hurt anyway.

That doesn't make any sense and has no basis in fact.

There are enough legitimate issues with the FBI / CIA and their handling of cybersecurity issues that creating conspiracy-theory narratives is both unnecessary and counterproductive. Frankly it just muddies the waters on the real issues.

Imagine someone who walks with a cane trying to get out of the window seat in an emergency. Or even get in and out of it at all. Or what happens when the window seat person has to go to the bathroom?

I think this might be a good seating plan for getting more troops into less space in a military transport aircraft. But for civilian airliners? I just can't imagine that it would work.

And my axe. Get off it also.

We won't have a truck manager on every truck. We'll have truck managers responsible for a region of maybe a couple hours' drive. When a truck gets sick, the local truck manager drives out to where it is and fixes it. So we're replacing a couple million jobs with a couple thousand.

Team driving is a big thing. Some trucking companies - notably Covenant - have moved to an all-team format for company drivers. Owner-operators can do what they want, but solo drivers are likely to be outcompeted by team drivers.

The issue is that in recent years, driver duty regulations have been much more strictly enforced, so you truly cannot have your truck moving for more than 11 hours a day as a solo driver. If you have two drivers on board, you can keep the load moving all the time except for rest breaks.

Several vendors make dedicated EFB devices. They're a lot more expensive, though, and their UI is generally awful.

It's no great mystery.

Uber has been working with state legislatures to try to get all the bans and regulatory uncertainty to go away. The legislation reads like a list of things Uber already does, except for the required markings, which is something Uber surely wants but can't force on its drivers - "it's not our fault, it's the law now in Massachusetts, so pick - Uber or Lyft - you can't have both."

But in that case, what's the advantage of implanting it? I mean, other than thieves now wanting to cut out my spleen instead of just taking my wallet.

There are a number of Youtube videos of people flying hobby drones well above 10,000 feet. Above 10,000, several safety measures go out of effect - airline passengers can remove their seat belts, airliners can exceed 250 knots, etc - so a hobby drone at 10,001 feet is much more dangerous than a drone at 9,999. Above 18,000, all flights must be conducted under IFR and pilots are no longer required to see and avoid - so they stop looking out the window and get busy with other tasks. So a hobby drone at 18,001 feet is yet more dangerous still, as well as being a whole new level of illegal.

You can bet your bottom dollar that hobby drone operators know none of this.

The FAA, for very good common-sense safety reasons, wants like hell to put a stop to this. However, Congress legislated away the FAA's power to actually regulate or provide standards for hobby drones. The FAA can't say "don't fly them above 10,000 feet" because they are now prohibited by the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 from *any* rulemaking regarding model aircraft. And according to the Act, the model aircraft can be *up to 55 pounds* - and it seems like FAA concepts like "controlled airspace" don't apply. The only requirement is that if you are going to fly within 5 miles of an airport, the operator has to provide prior notice - *not ask permission* - from the airport's air traffic control.

During the period 1958-2012, the FAA was solely responsible for aviation safety and airspace regulation, and maintained a profoundly excellent safety record. From 2012, there are now two agencies responsible for air safety - the FAA for manned aircraft, and vaguely-defined "community-based set of safety guidelines" for recreational drones in the same airspace. Common sense says that this can't, and won't, work - so basically, Congress has decided that we will wait until a drone takes down an airliner, then over-react and probably outlaw all hobby drones everywhere. And probably blame the FAA.

This is what passes for policy-making in the US today. It's really very sad.

Yeah I'd like some more meat to the story as well. Amazon Glacier achieves its pricing by using low-RPM consumer drives plugged into some sort of high-density backplanes; supposedly they are so densely packed that you can only spin up a few drives at once due to power and heat issues. Hence the delay.

I assume Google is doing something similar, maybe with somewhat better power or cooling since they're offering faster retrieval times which implies that perhaps they can spin up a higher percentage of drives at a time.

Well, I was programming in the 1970s, so this is recollection for me, not history. And you've got it wrong in either case.

The famous port of the Unix kernel to C was in 1972/73, not 1970, and at that time, C was still a private language within Bell Labs. The K&R book "The C Programming Language" was published in 1978, but C didn't gain much traction outside Bell Labs until Microsoft and Borland released compilers for it in the mid 1980s.

In the period from 1965-1970, computer science was taught using ALGOL, and between 1970 and 1980, it was taught using PASCAL - mostly the UCSD p-System. The Christmas shopping season of 1977 was the first time you could buy a computer and take it to your house, and these machines were programmed using interpreted BASIC and hand-coded assembler - nobody in microcomputers had ever heard of C. The first compiled language for microcomputers that had any widespread success was Turbo Pascal, released in 1983 for CP/M and DOS. C did not make any serious inroads into microcomputer popularity until the mid to late 1980s.

This wasn't just some random thing - there were good reasons for it. Many of the microcomputers of that era didn't have curly brace keys, so there was a version of C where you could type (* and *) instead of { and }. But more to the point, compiling Pascal is incredibly faster and easier than compiling C. Pascal does not have a preprocessor, header files or multiple passes - the syntax of the language lends itself to being fast and cheap to use on extremely minimal hardware architectures.

Some of the features of Turbo Pascal - like the "with" statement and the set operator - have never been duplicated in any other language. Trying to paint Pascal as an also-ran to C is both historically and technically incorrect.

> Why do we need yet another language, that has no particularly useful features?

You do understand that Pascal was first released in 1970, right? Many Pascal programmers in the 1970s asked the same question - why do we need C, with its dangerous string handling and obtuse preprocessor, if it doesn't solve any new problems?

> I used Pascal in some college courses, and felt that my productivity went down by about 50% compared to C

I felt the same when I switched from Pascal to C. I had to spend half my life squinting at curly braces and trying to track down what the origin of some multi-level-#defined thing was. It is normal to feel a reduction in productivity when changing languages, but that doesn't mean the new language is worse.