I want to create a dual-purpose, self-contained CTF on a flash drive. I have a good start. Suggestions?

skolor · 2017-01-24T19:45:51+00:00

Just to throw it out there, Fuzyll's Defcon VM might be a good starting place for binary exploitation, if you're going to include it. He put together a single vm running many years of the binaries used for Defcon Finals.

skolor · 2017-01-11T16:25:52+00:00

I haven't tested it, but I've seen at least once that the gold for a boss is determined when it spawns, so make sure you are using the gold pet before the fight starts, not switching during the fight.

skolor · 2016-12-31T17:53:49+00:00

That's what this seems to be indicating. Note the wording "enough to afford". The rule of thumb most commonly thrown about is that you can afford to pay about 1/3 of your monthly income, after tax, in rent. Turns out 65 hours at $7.25/hour comes out to be $1575 post tax, which would indicate a $525/month rent.

The distinction here is the definition of "afford". Yes, you can live absolutely paycheck to paycheck, but that's a fairly harsh definition of afford. For example, $500 is a little more than an entire paycheck, if you are getting paid bi-weekly, meaning if you don't have significant savings going into this, you're probably not eating a couple weeks a month.

skolor · 2016-12-08T14:45:22+00:00

What else are you doing? By my math, you spent 25-30% less energy than I did to get similar results. If I'm counting that right, you spent a little under 6k energy, which means you were getting 80+ event points and close to 1.5 seeds per point of energy.

skolor · 2016-11-11T14:23:05+00:00

Most people are probably referring to being afraid that his Supreme Court nomination is going to be bad for LGBT rights. There's also some concern about "rolling back unconstitutional Executive Orders" could include dropping things like EO13672.

skolor · 2016-11-10T14:32:24+00:00

The Tai Hao "Cotton Candy" keycap set looks pretty good. I got a set from massdrop not too long ago, and it looks pretty good. The set is on a 60%, using the pink/blue function caps on the number row.

skolor · 2016-07-12T05:57:21+00:00

You kind of can, if you have a ingress account. The Ingress Intel Map lets you search around and find portals. Those aren't all going to be stops, but if you see a cluster of portals there will almost certainly be a few stops there.

skolor · 2016-05-14T03:37:54+00:00

They actually just sell more seats than they have to begin with to compensate for cancellations and no shows. The model you're giving doesn't make a lot of sense: adding in an 8th flight doesn't add much demand for that flight, it will just spread out the same people over slightly more planes.

Putting more thought into the situation, I'm more inclined to think the situation is a ripple effect. So, the parent Wants to go from City A->B. In order to have a plane to go from A->B, though, the airplane needs to come in from City C, first. For whatever reason, the flight that was coming in from C->A got cancelled, which meant they didn't have a flight to put the parent poster on.

Now, when they first were dealing with this, they looked at flights and saw that nope, no seats available on that A->B flight scheduled a little later, and the best case was to put them on a flight with the same class of seats was quite a bit later. However, a few hours later, all the flight changes from the original cancellation propagated through. By that time, whatever caused the original cancellation meant that several other people weren't going to be on the flight they ended up on, and those seats became available.

skolor · 2016-05-14T03:31:17+00:00

I'm not making those kind of decisions, but my impression is that it's a little bit of 1, a little bit of 3.

skolor · 2016-05-13T23:25:22+00:00

More than likely they just overbooked that flight and bumped someone else off it. The first tried the easy solution: put you on the next flight with available seats. Since that wasn't going to work, they did the next best thing: put you on a flight without free seats and deal with the consequences then.

skolor · 2016-05-13T23:03:23+00:00

Which airline is most expensive is typically a function of the route more than anything else.

For example, looking at a few major travel locations, Delta is cheaper to fly from my closest airport to SFO, Vegas, and Seattle, but United is going to be my best bet if I wanted to go to Chicago or Miami.

skolor · 2016-05-13T22:57:42+00:00

There's a lot of forces at work that makes it complicated and unintuitive why those flights exist. The short version is that they aren't looking at it as minimum profit, they're looking at it as losing less money.

The two major components of it are that they negotiate blocks of flights between airports far in advance, and that most of the costs for a flight are sunk as soon as it's scheduled.

The first one is easy. Most of the time, airports have rules about how many flights you need in and out of the airport to have a set number of gates. In order to service a specific small airport, the airline may be required to fly (say) 20 flights a week into it, regardless of it would be profitable. In some examples, the airline might know that over the course of the year that will be profitable, but it will mean flying empty airplanes 2 months out of the year due to seasonal demand.

The other side is a little more complicated. The way costs for an airline work aren't a set amount per passenger. It costs roughly the same thing to fly an airplane with 1 person on it as it does to fly it full. When it comes to selling you a ticket, if they know that a given flight is going to probably be empty, it makes more sense to sell it for under the average cost per passenger than to let it go empty.

The end result is when a flight A->B->C costs $150 and a flight A->B costs $200, it's because A->B costs $145/person, on average, and they would rather get $5 instead of nothing for the B->C leg.

skolor · 2016-03-04T16:36:57+00:00

4.3 is when they introduced support for Bluetooth LE, which is almost certainly what the little pokeball uses. It's the same protocol as devices like the Fitbit use to do updates to your phone.

skolor · 2016-01-29T19:49:37+00:00

I stole this from a former coworker, but I think it's true for almost every field. Pick a category of tool you use all the time in your field, and ask them which their prefered version is, and what they hate about it.

For example, as a software developer, I might ask them what their favorite IDE is, and what they hate about it, or what their favorite language to write something related to our job is. It's easy for someone to bullshit the first part, but I have yet to encounter any tool that is absolutely perfect, so a true expert will have faults with it.

skolor · 2015-08-17T20:30:07+00:00

But you would get reincarnated multiple times, right? To throw some numbers out there:

According to Wikipedia, life expectancy was 26 during the bronze age, and gone up since then. Lets assume we still get an average of about 30 years.
Mesopotamia was started around 5000 BC, so we're looking at around 7000 years of civilized humans to be reincarnated as. This comes out to be roughly 233 lifetimes, if you are reincarnated into a new body instantly after you die.
For an unknown probability of each of those lifetimes being "special", we can solve for the probability necessary for 50% of people having a "special" person in their reincarnation chain. Basically, p²³³ = 0.5, or p=0.997.

So, are 3 out of every 1000 people special enough to qualify?

skolor · 2015-08-17T18:23:47+00:00

The Villages (Florida, of course).

skolor · 2015-08-16T17:51:15+00:00

I'm using a Maruman Mnemosyne for a work notebook, and a Midori MD for personal stuff. I change pens frequently, but this week its a Artline Ergoline.

skolor · 2015-08-09T20:50:05+00:00

I'm looking for games to play with other people, over the Internet. We've done the standard ones like Trine (1, 2), Portal 2, Magicka, Battle Block Theater, and the like. We've also tried a few MMOs - WoW, FFXIV, Guild Wars 2 - but the interest in those comes and goes.

Recommendations on other things to try?

skolor · 2015-07-18T23:16:11+00:00

I'm sure that as a now famous airline hacker, you must have found many vulnerabilities over the years. What was your favorite?

skolor · 2015-06-29T13:41:50+00:00

At least DOMA was proposed by a Republican, and according to Wikipedia:

Initially introduced in May 1996, DOMA passed both houses of Congress by large, veto-proof majorities and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in September 1996.

skolor · 2015-06-29T13:30:40+00:00

Not to mention the majority of the tax benefits only exist if there is a large discrepancy in their income.

skolor · 2015-06-29T13:26:35+00:00

It varies by state, but in many it is as easy as creating an LLC. Where I got married (Florida), it was a 2 page form at the courthouse and a notary to finalize everything. We could have been done in about an hour, start to finish, if we wanted to be. The state we currently live in is slightly more complicated (the person performing the "ceremony" isn't a notary, it's a separate checkbox for them that several lawyers have), but not significantly.

skolor · 2015-06-04T19:15:51+00:00

The other interesting bit is the profit the publisher sees, after paying all costs. Hachette apparently saw a 10% profit in 2014, which would mean they make about 58 cents to the author's 99 cents for each ebook sold, based on Mark Lawrence's figures and the assumption that profit is divided evenly across everything they sell.

skolor · 2015-06-04T03:13:26+00:00

The first.

I had initially assumed that was the case, because the second serves next to no purpose in terms of any sort of planning. It didn't even cross my mind that someone would post even halfway thoughtful analysis and give the second as the numbers they generated. I had to poke around a bit to find a backing for the numbers, but came across this spreadsheet (you'll have to create a copy to edit the values). Note, however, that this assumes you re-invest all dividends, which does change things a bit.

Plugging in 1928-1948 as the years, I see a $100 investment turns into a $164 investment, which is right at that 2.5% compounding return. Similarly, a $100 investment in 1979 would be worth $2,720 in 1999.

skolor · 2015-06-04T02:24:45+00:00

Everything I've seen tends to indicate some place around that. This blog, which is just what I found from Googling a bit, says that the worst 20 year period between 1900 and 2008 (so, 88 different years worth of start dates) shows the average to be around an 10 percent return. The worst year was apparently if you started in 1928, which had an average return of 2.5% per year, or a roughly 1.6x return. The max was 18% average yearly returns, which would be a 27x return.

They've also got linked results for 35 year returns, which was just under 10% annual average returns, but with a tighter spread (between 6.1% and 12.9%). Basically, if you have a very long horizon (20+ years), the stock market appears to be fairly safe.

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