Terrorism existed before the internet. If you take away a free internet, you will still have terrorism; you just won't have the freedoms essential for a functioning democracy anymore. You would, in essence, be handing a victory to the terrorists.
I sell art online, and without search engines indexing my copyrighted material, would find it very difficult to make a living as an artist. A blanket prohibition on linking to copyrighted content would effectively "disappear" a lot of emerging and professional artists from the internet. The internet - and its ability to reach millions of people - has made it possible for countless artists to make a living who would otherwise be unknown. Without it, we'd go back to handing control over art back to the local, physical galleries and the "starving artist" model.
But what if I find flat-earth conspiracy videos HILARIOUS!? Does it even occur to the censors-that-be that some people find conspiracy theories entertaining? As in, enjoying people making an ass of themselves, like the white collar equivalent of stupid redneck videos?
There's an important, unspoken assumption here: that people who watch videos agree with the content. This is a very dangerous assumption to make, because the fact that people will assume you hold a set of positions based on what you watch has the effect of shutting down discourse. The American experiment was an experiment in determining if differing peoples - diverse cultures, ethnicities, etc... could come together and form a country united by a common creed - the Constitution. If we have to shelter people from unfamiliar or uncomfortable ideas, we've essentially admitted that the American experiment has failed; that multiculturalism and diversity are a sham and unworkable. In such a case, tribalism is justified, and ethnic nationalism required, if only for the survival of "your" kind.
What Youtube should be doing is encouraging people to seek out the different, the bizarre, the intransigent evangelists and propaganda to further prepare themselves to interact with the ever increasing diversity of America. What they are doing is quite the opposite; by sheltering people from extreme views, even moderate disagreement - the par for civil discourse in ages past, an inevitable part of making compromises for the public good - is now seen as hatred, and labelled as such (witness the Covington Catholic junior who was called a racist for having smiled at a minority person).[https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/19/us/teens-mock-native-elder-trnd/index.html]
It took just 4 minutes for someone to notice something was wrong, and less than an hour to begin remediation.
In a closed-source organization, it sometimes takes months for them to figure out they've been compromised, and even longer to fix it; I once bought a Toshiba laptop that shipped with a virus, and didn't get the real fix for a few months afterward.
So here's a different perspective, which I hope you'll consider, rather than lumping all older workers into the same stereotype. I would like you to consider an alternative viewpoint to the points you raised:
Younger workers cost the company more, because even though they demand less in salary, they learn the lessons of experience on the company dime. Blowing deadlines costs the company more than just the staff time of the worker; it damages goodwill with the customer, and - in some cases I've observed - cost the company millions of dollars in penalties. A younger worker who makes a mistake in judgment ("Yeah, but that would never happen...") can cost the company a lifetime of salary.
Most people can relate to the saying, "You get what you pay for." With older workers, this is especially true. You aren't paying just for their productivity, you're paying for their expertise. The company doesn't care if you can code 10 times faster than the older worker, if the older worker knows how to do it with 100 times less code. A real world example of this: at one company, a team of younger workers proposed a code solution which would have cost the company 300k in salary, to which the older, more experienced worker replied, "Yes, but you can do that with a registry change."
An older worker can recognize when a project is in trouble before the younger workers, and can correct the situation early enough to mitigate disaster. I've never known an inexperienced engineer who recognized project failure before it happened, much less how to correct it.
Younger workers have to put in 40+ hour work weeks because they don't know what they're doing, or they aren't using their time effectively, etc...
Older workers know that time spent learning the language fad du jour is wasted time if the company doesn't actually commit to using it. Once you've learned a few languages, you understand that picking up a new language doesn't take much time at all; but more, you realize that the largest factors influencing the organization's ability to deliver often center not around the technology used, but inadequate processes, bad design, etc...
Younger workers represent a much greater hiring risk because they don't have a proven track record. It is much harder to assess the value of a younger worker because they just don't have the experience which demonstrates their ability to handle new and unknown challenges.
Experience demonstrates an older worker's ability to keep their skills current and maintain a positive contribution in the face of changing technology. An employer wants to know that when the technological winds shift, their workforce will keep up, and someone who knows just one language, or has little experience hasn't demonstrated this.
So, I'm not going to defend the points one by one, but thought you should know how such statements are perceived by those with more experience. It is these people - with more experience - who will be evaluating whether you would be a good fit for their company.
Just FYI, 2040 is when the oil companies estimate the world will run out of oil. So, yes, this really is a symbolic ban, because by that time, the only oil extracted will be so expensive that it will be used only for plastics and other materials manufacturing, not as a fuel.
Forrest Mims wrote about lightwave transceivers in "Getting Started in Electronics" more than 30 years ago. You could build your own lightwave communications for a few dollars in electronics parts.
Nice to see someone has finally noticed. Also nice is the fact that you can communicate point-to-point without having to worry about licensing and rf interference issues. With lightwave, I don't have to worry about signal crowding simply because of my proximity to other users.
So, if I understand it right, they've just reinvented the MVFS system pioneered by ClearCase decades ago?
The whole point of git was to have a decentralized repository, so that the repository could be rebuilt from anyone's local repository in the case of failure.
But the larger problem is that if your dependencies aren't properly managed, you end up downloading the whole repository when you build anyway, so the only thing they've accomplished is delaying the build step rather than the clone step.
A large part of the fact that I've managed to avoid accidents for so long is the fact that, as a human, I understand how other humans are likely to act and react.
The problem with AI drivers is that humans only loosely follow the rules of the road; their actions are driven multiple influences, and understanding what another human is likely to do in any given situation requires being a human being. For example, consider the following:
Who, but an AI, would actually drive the speed limit in the hammer lane?
In the case of a driver ahead slowing down because of the presence of children, would the AI know to slow down gradually, so as not to create a risk of collision to the cars behind?
Would an AI know how to modulate its breaking in an emergency stop so that it neither struck the vehicle ahead, nor was struck by the vehicle behind? Would it understand that in such a situation, even if it could stop completely, that a better course of action might be to pull to the shoulder so that an impending collision behind it could be avoided?
Would an AI know that a driver is likely to stop for the geese crossing the road? (which, btw, is required by law).
I'm sure there are dozens of other similar cases, but you get the point. AI might understand, in the nominal sense, how to drive a car. What it can't understand is what other drivers are likely to do.
So the issue now becomes a question of how ransomware authors write ransomware in something like Flash or Chrome, which the average user would always enable. It seems like they haven't fixed the fundamental, underlying problem of users running untrusted code, but only moved the goalposts.
The underlying issue here is that security holes of this type are enabled by Windows:
Users don't know, and can't reasonably be expected to know, the difference between executable code and data because the OS blurs the distinction. How many times have we heard Windows users say, "I saved it in Word", or "I saved it in Chrome"?
Windows obscures the internals from the users, which makes it even more difficult for users to understand which programs are running. A user has no way of saying to Windows, "These are the programs I might run - don't start any executable I haven't given permission." By default, the bash shell won't execute any executable except those in special directories (i.e., the PATH), and marked as executable. By default, Windows will execute any executable it can find on the filesystem. This simple step would stop a lot of ransomware.
The fundamental problem of allowing untrusted code execution by default is that it has spawned an entire class of web software which requires script execution to function correctly. Yes, you and I might be aghast at this, but for the Windows world, running untrusted software is part and parcel of the web experience. Windows has taught them to think there's something "wrong" with their computer if JavaScript is disabled.
The irony of this is that the NTFS filesystem has had fine-grained permissions for 2 decades, but Windows never exploited it until now, and even this move - while better than nothing - is questionable. Why does Microsoft always get the usage model wrong?
Security is a question of trade-offs and risk analysis, not blindly following "best practices".
A network must be engineered.
A silver bullet solution means the vendor takes your silver and you take the bullet.
You have to treat your employees well to have a well-run shop.
While there are a lot of problems with the way IT is done in companies today, my experience has been that the companies who pay the least for IT (as in smallest IT staff to general staff ratio) are those companies that encourage honesty, thoughtfulness, and long-term planning. I've worked for a few - at one place, a handful of staff supported 4,000 workers and had time to blab at the watercooler. But they could do this because the company was remarkably consistent about resisting IT fads, and instead looked at IT purchases from the standpoint of, "Yes, but what am I going to get out of it?!" They paid their employees, the vendors, not so much.
Those companies which view IT as a cost center, in my observation:
pay far more than they need for what they get
follow the latest fads in IT
are continually under the gun to cut costs
constantly overwork their employees,
deliver much worse service overall,
and suffer from seemingly constant IT failures of one sort or another.
For some reason, those companies which view IT as a cost center rather than a strategic asset always seem to be falling short of their goals.
Many years ago, when I was working for a large company dominant in the mobile business, I was discussing my ideas for a new mobile device with a potential venture capitalist. I explained that I could handle the design just fine, I just needed someone to go sell it to the large consumer electronics distributors. His reply floored me:
"Yes, but I don't know any telecom guys..."
Here was someone who, because I worked for a telecom, could not grasp that I could work in any other field. He had a degree in MIS, and had hired consultants, yet couldn't get it out of his head that I could/would work in any field other than the one I was currently employed. I had even done mobile device development for other companies, I just wasn't doing it now.
I then realized that this is part of the reason why large companies ossify and die. The venture capitalists and business types honestly cannot even conceive of doing business in any way differently than they do today. For them, Microsoft will always be a PC company, and as the PC market goes, so goes Microsoft. It's a rule, XBOX notwithstanding.
Even should the executives at Microsoft come up with a revolutionary new idea, the best they'll get from the finance guys is a blank stare when they try to get funding for it. Since they've been so successful with PC operating systems and office, why would they invest in anything else?
More to the point, if I visit your house, and you record me without my consent, you've broken the law. However, if I visit your house, and Microsoft records me without my consent, Microsoft has broken the law. Microsoft may have obtained recording consent from you through the EULA/TOS, but they haven't obtained it from me.
In Illinois, and perhaps other states, it is illegal to record someone in a private residence without their consent.
Just because you agreed to the TOS and EULA doesn't mean that I've agreed to it. So, if Cortana records me in your house, it is very possible that Microsoft has broken the law. I never agreed to the EULA or the TOS, nor did I give you or Microsoft permission to record me.
This is what I call a Perfect Failure - an incident, which in spite of being considered a failure by all parties involved, still leaves the party responsible better off than they were before.
From the perspective of the CEO, the "failure" was purely cosmetic. If only I could collect $90 million when I made a mistake..
I've got an HTC one that's several years old, and I can get a 50% charge in 30 minutes with a regular USB cable. I try to keep quiet around iPhone users, though, lest I disturb their superior ego. Now that will really make a mess.
I grew up reading Time in the 80's, so I'm well aware of their pro-drug bias.
Perhaps someone on the Right can explain to me why putting someone in jail for years, and ruining their employment prospects when they get out is preferable to them having a drug habit.
I can explain it: forgiveness . Perhaps you live in Leftist utopia where everything is permissable, but nothing is forgiven, but the rest of the world doesn't think that way. If you wouldn't judge someone for mistakes in their past, and I understand (and the Right understands) that people make mistakes, who is there left to judge someone for their past mistakes? However, I can understand your sentiment - you've surely seen how the Left doesn't forgive racists - and you extrapolate that to a criminal record. You might be right in this regard, but at least you could still work for a conservative.
I imagine most Leftists wouldn't care about past drug use, and should you find yourself interviewed by a Conservative, you can always refer to Romans 3:23: "for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God..." So, from this perspective, the deterrent of prison time helps keep people from picking up the habit in the first place, and gives them reason to seek treatment should it happen to them. When this is combined with the Conservative preference for small government, you end up with a system where the role of police is not to lock everyone up for minor drug crimes, but rather, "to keep an honest man honest".
all drugs are bad no matter what, especially if people might also use them for fun
No, the problem with drugs is that they aren't any fun after addiction and tolerance set in. The Christian Right doesn't care that cocaine can be prescribed by a physician - they're more concerned that it's addictive properties will be used to exploit the weak and suffering. Which is why it can be legally prescribed by a physician, but not the corner drugstore sales associate.
Perhaps someone on the Left can answer this for me, but why is it that the Left objects so strongly to the exploitation of the weak by corporations, but considers exploitation by drug dealers to be a positive social good?
Slashdot Mirror
Terrorism existed before the internet. If you take away a free internet, you will still have terrorism; you just won't have the freedoms essential for a functioning democracy anymore. You would, in essence, be handing a victory to the terrorists.
I sell art online, and without search engines indexing my copyrighted material, would find it very difficult to make a living as an artist. A blanket prohibition on linking to copyrighted content would effectively "disappear" a lot of emerging and professional artists from the internet. The internet - and its ability to reach millions of people - has made it possible for countless artists to make a living who would otherwise be unknown. Without it, we'd go back to handing control over art back to the local, physical galleries and the "starving artist" model.
But what if I find flat-earth conspiracy videos HILARIOUS!? Does it even occur to the censors-that-be that some people find conspiracy theories entertaining? As in, enjoying people making an ass of themselves, like the white collar equivalent of stupid redneck videos?
There's an important, unspoken assumption here: that people who watch videos agree with the content. This is a very dangerous assumption to make, because the fact that people will assume you hold a set of positions based on what you watch has the effect of shutting down discourse. The American experiment was an experiment in determining if differing peoples - diverse cultures, ethnicities, etc... could come together and form a country united by a common creed - the Constitution. If we have to shelter people from unfamiliar or uncomfortable ideas, we've essentially admitted that the American experiment has failed; that multiculturalism and diversity are a sham and unworkable. In such a case, tribalism is justified, and ethnic nationalism required, if only for the survival of "your" kind.
What Youtube should be doing is encouraging people to seek out the different, the bizarre, the intransigent evangelists and propaganda to further prepare themselves to interact with the ever increasing diversity of America. What they are doing is quite the opposite; by sheltering people from extreme views, even moderate disagreement - the par for civil discourse in ages past, an inevitable part of making compromises for the public good - is now seen as hatred, and labelled as such (witness the Covington Catholic junior who was called a racist for having smiled at a minority person).[https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/19/us/teens-mock-native-elder-trnd/index.html]
It took just 4 minutes for someone to notice something was wrong, and less than an hour to begin remediation.
In a closed-source organization, it sometimes takes months for them to figure out they've been compromised, and even longer to fix it; I once bought a Toshiba laptop that shipped with a virus, and didn't get the real fix for a few months afterward.
What happens when criminals build their own facial recognition software to identify the police?
I even made this my email sig:
"Password update for user gillbates failed; password '12345' already used by user 'Administrator'; change the password and try again."
So here's a different perspective, which I hope you'll consider, rather than lumping all older workers into the same stereotype. I would like you to consider an alternative viewpoint to the points you raised:
So, I'm not going to defend the points one by one, but thought you should know how such statements are perceived by those with more experience. It is these people - with more experience - who will be evaluating whether you would be a good fit for their company.
Just FYI, 2040 is when the oil companies estimate the world will run out of oil. So, yes, this really is a symbolic ban, because by that time, the only oil extracted will be so expensive that it will be used only for plastics and other materials manufacturing, not as a fuel.
Forrest Mims wrote about lightwave transceivers in "Getting Started in Electronics" more than 30 years ago. You could build your own lightwave communications for a few dollars in electronics parts.
Nice to see someone has finally noticed. Also nice is the fact that you can communicate point-to-point without having to worry about licensing and rf interference issues. With lightwave, I don't have to worry about signal crowding simply because of my proximity to other users.
So, if I understand it right, they've just reinvented the MVFS system pioneered by ClearCase decades ago?
The whole point of git was to have a decentralized repository, so that the repository could be rebuilt from anyone's local repository in the case of failure.
But the larger problem is that if your dependencies aren't properly managed, you end up downloading the whole repository when you build anyway, so the only thing they've accomplished is delaying the build step rather than the clone step.
A large part of the fact that I've managed to avoid accidents for so long is the fact that, as a human, I understand how other humans are likely to act and react.
The problem with AI drivers is that humans only loosely follow the rules of the road; their actions are driven multiple influences, and understanding what another human is likely to do in any given situation requires being a human being. For example, consider the following:
I'm sure there are dozens of other similar cases, but you get the point. AI might understand, in the nominal sense, how to drive a car. What it can't understand is what other drivers are likely to do.
So the issue now becomes a question of how ransomware authors write ransomware in something like Flash or Chrome, which the average user would always enable. It seems like they haven't fixed the fundamental, underlying problem of users running untrusted code, but only moved the goalposts.
The underlying issue here is that security holes of this type are enabled by Windows:
The irony of this is that the NTFS filesystem has had fine-grained permissions for 2 decades, but Windows never exploited it until now, and even this move - while better than nothing - is questionable. Why does Microsoft always get the usage model wrong?
Isn't this just like having a home directory where others aren't allowed write access to your files?
I can't help but wonder why it took Windows 2 decades to correct the default umask on user files.
While there are a lot of problems with the way IT is done in companies today, my experience has been that the companies who pay the least for IT (as in smallest IT staff to general staff ratio) are those companies that encourage honesty, thoughtfulness, and long-term planning. I've worked for a few - at one place, a handful of staff supported 4,000 workers and had time to blab at the watercooler. But they could do this because the company was remarkably consistent about resisting IT fads, and instead looked at IT purchases from the standpoint of, "Yes, but what am I going to get out of it?!" They paid their employees, the vendors, not so much.
Those companies which view IT as a cost center, in my observation:
pay far more than they need for what they get
follow the latest fads in IT
are continually under the gun to cut costs
constantly overwork their employees,
deliver much worse service overall,
and suffer from seemingly constant IT failures of one sort or another.
For some reason, those companies which view IT as a cost center rather than a strategic asset always seem to be falling short of their goals.
So what could possibly go wrong with having the key to unlock dozens of upper-middle class homes in a delivery van whilst the driver grabs lunch?
Many years ago, when I was working for a large company dominant in the mobile business, I was discussing my ideas for a new mobile device with a potential venture capitalist. I explained that I could handle the design just fine, I just needed someone to go sell it to the large consumer electronics distributors. His reply floored me:
"Yes, but I don't know any telecom guys..."
Here was someone who, because I worked for a telecom, could not grasp that I could work in any other field. He had a degree in MIS, and had hired consultants, yet couldn't get it out of his head that I could/would work in any field other than the one I was currently employed. I had even done mobile device development for other companies, I just wasn't doing it now.
I then realized that this is part of the reason why large companies ossify and die. The venture capitalists and business types honestly cannot even conceive of doing business in any way differently than they do today. For them, Microsoft will always be a PC company, and as the PC market goes, so goes Microsoft. It's a rule, XBOX notwithstanding.
Even should the executives at Microsoft come up with a revolutionary new idea, the best they'll get from the finance guys is a blank stare when they try to get funding for it. Since they've been so successful with PC operating systems and office, why would they invest in anything else?
More to the point, if I visit your house, and you record me without my consent, you've broken the law. However, if I visit your house, and Microsoft records me without my consent, Microsoft has broken the law. Microsoft may have obtained recording consent from you through the EULA/TOS, but they haven't obtained it from me.
In Illinois, and perhaps other states, it is illegal to record someone in a private residence without their consent.
Just because you agreed to the TOS and EULA doesn't mean that I've agreed to it. So, if Cortana records me in your house, it is very possible that Microsoft has broken the law. I never agreed to the EULA or the TOS, nor did I give you or Microsoft permission to record me.
This is what I call a Perfect Failure - an incident, which in spite of being considered a failure by all parties involved, still leaves the party responsible better off than they were before.
From the perspective of the CEO, the "failure" was purely cosmetic. If only I could collect $90 million when I made a mistake..
280 characters?! When does it stop?! 300? 512? 1k!? Why, you could almost express a coherent thought with that much text.
Twitter as we know it is dead.
It took Dyson 15 years and 5000+ prototypes to get a vacuum right. Yes, a vacuum.
I can only wonder how many tries it's going to take them to get right something as complex as a car.
I've got an HTC one that's several years old, and I can get a 50% charge in 30 minutes with a regular USB cable. I try to keep quiet around iPhone users, though, lest I disturb their superior ego. Now that will really make a mess.
So I made one mistake, and 580 years later, someone finds a bug in my code. Thanks a lot, Korea!
Perhaps you don't consider Time Leftist, but a lot of people do:
I grew up reading Time in the 80's, so I'm well aware of their pro-drug bias.
Perhaps someone on the Right can explain to me why putting someone in jail for years, and ruining their employment prospects when they get out is preferable to them having a drug habit.
I can explain it: forgiveness . Perhaps you live in Leftist utopia where everything is permissable, but nothing is forgiven, but the rest of the world doesn't think that way. If you wouldn't judge someone for mistakes in their past, and I understand (and the Right understands) that people make mistakes, who is there left to judge someone for their past mistakes? However, I can understand your sentiment - you've surely seen how the Left doesn't forgive racists - and you extrapolate that to a criminal record. You might be right in this regard, but at least you could still work for a conservative.
I imagine most Leftists wouldn't care about past drug use, and should you find yourself interviewed by a Conservative, you can always refer to Romans 3:23: "for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God..." So, from this perspective, the deterrent of prison time helps keep people from picking up the habit in the first place, and gives them reason to seek treatment should it happen to them. When this is combined with the Conservative preference for small government, you end up with a system where the role of police is not to lock everyone up for minor drug crimes, but rather, "to keep an honest man honest".
all drugs are bad no matter what, especially if people might also use them for fun
No, the problem with drugs is that they aren't any fun after addiction and tolerance set in. The Christian Right doesn't care that cocaine can be prescribed by a physician - they're more concerned that it's addictive properties will be used to exploit the weak and suffering. Which is why it can be legally prescribed by a physician, but not the corner drugstore sales associate.
Perhaps someone on the Left can answer this for me, but why is it that the Left objects so strongly to the exploitation of the weak by corporations, but considers exploitation by drug dealers to be a positive social good?