I would hope to hell that my doctors have an understanding of what's actually happening! That's what med school and years of experience are for.
I have some very bad news for you, then...
Since this is Slashdot, a car analogy may be best. If you take your precious high-performance sports car to a mechanic to find out why it's not getting the power that it should, he can look at the engine, perform tests and measurements, and tell you that your engine needs a fuel with a higher octane rating. He may not know precisely what an octane rating means chemically, or what chemical processes are taking place during combustion that affect the engine's performance, but he knows the cause of and solution for the symptoms presented.
Similarly, a physician does not usually need to know all of the biological processes that a particular drug affects. Knowledge of common interactions and side effects is necessary, but not the rare effects or anything easily treatable. Basically, if the treatment isn't going to be worse than the disease, they don't need to waste their time or memory thinking about the minimal chance of a mild adverse reaction.
This is not to disparage the medical professionals in any way, but only to clarify what the scope of their job requires. A programmer doesn't need to understand the particle physics that make semiconductors work, a carpenter doesn't need to know how to grow the wood he uses, and a doctor doesn't need to know every side effect for the 10,000 FDA-approved drugs he can prescribe today. Such knowledge just isn't necessary to be an expert in the field.
Making FDA decisions advisory, rather than mandatory would preserve its essential testing function...
...but completely undermine the incentive to actually perform that testing thoroughly and ethically. After an effective marketing campaign, there's no difference between "submitted for FDA approval" and "approved by the FDA", even if the former really means the manufacturer submitted only a brief description of the drug and it was rejected immediately. If, even without approval, the drug can still be marketed and promoted and prescribed, then it's more cost-effective for the manufacturer to run damage-control PR spin after a bad reaction than to actually ensure their products are safe in the first place.
And on the FDA site, I see databases of approvals and lists of rejections, but no details on rejections. We should have as much detail on rejections as we have for approvals. The reason we're not seeing that information is that...
...such information is rapidly out of date, and doesn't matter because doctors can't prescribe those drugs, anyway. The only purpose it serves is to terrorize the public with bad news about a drug that might eventually be considered safe, which in turn just makes it more difficult to convince patients that they should follow their prescribed treatment.
If you want to follow what's going on, I'd recommend some industry publications, which usually strike a nice balance between the technical details and the ultimate impact.
I'm not too terribly familiar with init's requirements, but isn't a "working and viable init.c" basically something like execl("/sbin/getty", "tty0");? It runs, it provides a login shell to the user... what more do you want?
Oh, you want preconfigured settings? Real Linux Users set that stuff by hand when they log in, but fine. We'll add that to the init daemon.
Multiple terminals, too? Fine, a bit of magic with getty, and you're good.
Oh, you want it to start vital services like networking? You could do that with ifconfig, but whatever... Sure, let's give it some network support.
Wait, and now you want to be able to configure all that without compiling? This is getting absurd, but if you insist, we can make a hundred little hundred-line shell scripts, and just run them.
...in different ways? You're really going to ask to run your shiny new server with completely different sets of services at different times, and you're just so spoiled that you can just reconfigure it as needed? Why the hell did we make the damned thing so configurable anyway, if you're not going to use it? Fine... Since you're asking so nicely, we'll throw in a bunch of folders... just link the scripts you want, and names the links so everything's in the right order.
Another request? What do you want from me now? You can't even keep a network operating reliably, and you want your init daemon to do the work for you? Alright, but this is the last straw. Now your configuration scripts can run in parallel, have dependencies, and they will run other scripts to see if they can run your services yet.
...
One of these steps apparently crosses a line, though, and causes enough discomfort that folks derail discussions.
Perhaps I should clarify that statement by saying that the reports are available, but I don't care enough about this particular case to go find this particular report, just to satisfy what I see as a mob that complains about things they don't bother to understand.
So in short, because someone asked why an incentive program isn't useful, you want a witch-hunt to kill off anything you don't like, without any consideration for context.
It just seems so obvious that running a bulldozer through an in-place operational government is the best way to improve efficiency and integrity.
The FDA does give a full report with their rejections, but I don't have a copy of this particular one readily available. My best source is that I used to work in the pharmaceutical industry, in the process for getting new drugs to market. In short, it's a mess even without any accusations of corruption.
I don't think I've ever heard of a modern drug getting approved on its first try (though that's also not where my experience focused). The most common reasons for retesting were things like imprecise side effect rates (two patients in the trial had a headache, so the whole trial needs to be 10x larger to reduce the margin of error) or a lack of documentation (you computed this incidence rate using the standard formula, but exactly what is that formula?).
The problem with a user-centric approach is that you start having public health decisions being made by people with no understanding of what's actually happening. Physicians usually focus on diagnosis and treatment monitoring, not understanding the biochemical interactions of the drugs they recommend. Pharmacists understand the chemistry and interactions, but patient risk analysis and diagnosis is outside of their job. Add a layer of traditional American marketing on top of that, and you have a perfect market for snake-oil salesmen to promote insufficiently-tested medicines to doctors and patients who have no way of knowing how unsafe the medicine is. Doctors can be conned, too.
Will anyone ever give Mylan’s ($MYL) blockbuster epinephrine injection, EpiPen, a run for its money?
That’s the question now that another potential competitor is out of the running. The FDA stiff-armed Adamis' ($ADMP) prefilled epinephrine syringe, asking for more data. Regulators want the San Diego-based company to expand a patient usability study and product stress testing studies included in the original application.
The way Evercore ISI analyst Umer Raffat sees it, Adamis’ product wouldn’t have been “a large competitor” for EpiPen, given the difference between its prefilled syringe and Mylan’s more convenient injection pen device. But “Adamis could have added to managed care pressures,” through its stated strategy of acting as a discounted product.
Instead, Mylan is home free--a status it must be getting used to, given the failures that have repeatedly befallen its competitors. Back in November, Sanofi's ($SNY) Auvi-Q hit a wall, when an injector fault triggered a hefty recall. Ultimately, the pharma giant yanked Auvi-Q from the market, and then bailed on its marketing partnership with developer PDL BioPharma ($PDLI), putting the med’s future up in the air. It was EpiPen's first real challenger in years.
More recently, the FDA handed generics giant Teva ($TEVA) a rejection for its generic version of EpiPen, flagging “certain major deficiencies” in its letter to the Israeli pharma. With serious issues to work through, Teva said earlier this year that it expects its product to be "significantly delayed"--meaning it doesn’t expect a rollout before 2017.
The FDA wouldn't have anything to do with the recall, and a request for more information isn't really a particularly effective use of corrupt power. Requests for more data happen all the time, so they're usually turned around pretty quickly. My money's on a perfect storm of chance events, and Mylan's taking the opportunity to capitalize on it.
Yeah... I get the distinct impression that this is mob justice at its finest.
As I understand the story, the other major competitor was unable to show test results that their autoinjector worked reliably, and as such lost their FDA approval. If I'm to believe that descriptions mean anything, the product would certainly fit the "non-innovator multiple source" category.
So let me get this straight... First the enemy uses a high-power L-band radar to find every speck of reflective dust. Then they use "much more powerful" S-band radar to somehow identify things the S-band radar can't even see. Meanwhile, the "much more powerful" S-Band and the L-band radar are both bright shining beacons to any SEAD flights, who are equipped with surveillance gear that can tell the difference between an actual radar and a decoy.
The only way the radar helps is to feed targeting information to anti-aircraft weapons like SAM launchers. Unfortunately for the radar operators, the L-band radar will still be susceptible to the countermeasure techniques used against it last time, like chaff and ECM, and the S-band radar won't have enough response to determine where the aircraft is. It can guess, but the odds of a hit are low.
That really boils down the nature of warfare. You do everything you can to improve your odds. Stealth does not guarantee success; the enemy could fire blindly at every blip on an antique radar system, and might hit something. However, the odds of a successful mission are better using a stealthy F-35 than using a nonstealthy B52H, as your earlier comment proposed. Since the running cost of a F-35 is about four times that of a B52, the question becomes a matter of whether it's worth paying four times as much to improve the odds of getting your crew back alive. That in turn requires understanding just how effective stealth is. According to the first reference I found, the stealthy aircraft reflects about 1/10000th as much radiation in the S-band, which is still what would be used for targeting, even if your giant L-band array can tell the SAM to launch. Those look like pretty good odds to me.
The original comment from the AC was that cruise missile range is relatively short, which in turn makes guidance easier. You then said that guidance isn't necessary, and now you're saying that all cruise missiles have guidance. It seems you're unfamiliar with cruise missiles in general.
Almost all cruise missiles have the ability to control their own flight. Some have the ability to be controlled by radio from an operator, but that's an "extra feature" thing that is really only for ease of deployment, and usually plays no tactical role whatsoever. The idea is that a missile can be launched early, and it doesn't need to be given a confirmed target until it's halfway there. No, there is not usually someone sitting there with a joystick actually flying the missile to its target. Such capabilities are typically only used in the climax of a Hollywood blockbuster.
Any distinction today between "guided" and "unguided" cruise missiles is more a distinction on the level of control the missile's avionics has. At one extreme is a purely ballistic missile, effectively fired from a rocket launcher and landing wherever gravity makes it run into the ground. At the other extreme, an advanced cruise missile can not just control its flight, but perform positive identification of the target before the strike.
The distinction is important when considering the technological capability of an enemy. Scavenger fighters like ISIS or rebel groups won't be able to afford an arsenal of modern missiles, but they might be able to stick an microcontroller on a rocket and make it land somewhat close to a target. This has a tactical impact, because the accuracy of weapons determines the radius of hazard around a target. If the enemy missiles are only accurate to within a 1-mile radius, it can be politically important to keep military installations 2 miles from civilian areas, to prevent any accusations of bringing the conflict closer to civilians. Conversely, if the enemy has the weaponry to make surgical strikes, locating a base near a city can improve supply logistics, and any civilian collateral damage can be be used to vilify the enemy... if they could do better, why didn't they?
good enough to make it past the USPTO (which is harder than people think)
Which in itself is part of the problem, though Slashdotters would rather just whine about the Big Bad Gubmint.
It's traditionally been, and remains to be, difficult to get a patent. As a result, patent law is structured such that once a patent is approved, it's almost certainly some kind of groundbreaking new technology. Then if someone else end up with the same technology, they must certainly have copied the patent, and it's effectively the burden of the defendant to show that their design process excluded the duplicated patent, effectively requiring proving a negative and undermining the public good for which the patent system was created. In essence, the patent system is assumed to be infallible, so its failures have a significant impact.
I've put some consideration into a system in which the first step in any patent lawsuit is a mandatory reevaluation of the patent claims, paid for by the USPTO (and amortized into filing fees), and waivable if the reevaluation was done recently enough to remain relevant to current societal standards. Part of that evaluation would weigh whether the patent is really a specific application, or a new technology that will have wide use. In essence, once a patent is granted, it's only partially valuable until it's been tested in court, and its value as a commodity (especially for trade between NPEs) depends significantly on the likelihood of the patent to stand up to a fresh examination. On the other hand, a novel patent with specific demonstrable products would be more likely to survive a trial, so it would be more valuable to investors interested in creating products.
You ought to try reading TFA. The long-wave radar might be able to detect that something's there, but it's the modern computation power that might possibly be able to identify the particular signature of a new plane, rather than raising alerts for every bird or chaff that happens to be in the vicinity.
That means it's not going to be a part of the old weapons systems. Only major powers like Russia or China would likely be able to use the technology on a battlefield, and they're unlikely to enter a direct open conflict with America or its allies. It certainly won't be readily available to insurgents like we're fighting now in the Middle East, and it won't be the old scrap left behind if a modern base is abandoned. Even if the technology is used in battle, it is pretty easily identified, and destroyed as part of an initial campaign for air superiority.
...That's a guided cruise missile, then. In modern parlance, an "unguided" cruise missile is something like the old German V-1, which would travel a certain distance in a certain direction, then fall and blow up where it landed, but had no practical ability to correct its course during flight beyond basic stabilization.
In the political arena, Ukraine is not really an ally with any binding need for the US to react. The whole affair was between two sovereign nations with no American involvement.
even one cruise nuke on Russian soil would have sent the message
I'm not sure what message you intend to send, but the one that's received is "America broke treaties first", and that opens the morality floodgates. Any other nuclear-armed military can then feel free to launch their nukes, in defense of their Russian ally against the suspected ally of the evil USA.
An unguided cruise missile is a tactical disaster in a modern war. They are only useful against civilian or very large military targets, because they can be blown off course by wind or other interference, and lack the course-correction a guidance system would provide. If you're a belligerent like Germany in WWII, you can happily point them at your British enemy and watch the civilian casualty count rise as their morale falls. Unfortunately, if you're at least pretending to follow the rules of ware (as almost all nations do today), that risk to civilians acts against your best interests.
Modern warfare tactics also include the use of aerial refueling, effectively extending the F-35 range to 600 miles beyond where you or an ally have air superiority. That drastically changes the effective use of the aircraft.
If the enemy has Soviet radar and SAM equipment from the 70s and 80s, which is now available readily and cheaply to anyone with a grudge against the USA, a B52H can deliver approximately 0 times the bomb load of any modern stealthy aircraft, with a 55% higher cost per flight hour before disintegration.
That's why the LRS-B program started, to build the upcoming B-21.
That's not how it works... that's not how any of it works.
If you want to be a non-criminal hacker, but can't get permission from someone who doesn't care about security, you don't hack them. Period. You don't get to attack someone without invitation and keep your shiny clean reputation. This guy is getting screwed because he allegedly broke the law.
I've worked with red teams. If you're going to ignore their findings, you're better off not hiring them in the first place. See, red teams keep records. Those records can be subpoenaed, and if it turns out that you were told about a vulnerability and chose to ignore it, it's your ass on the line. Insurance companies won't pay for damages, approvals get revoked, and SLAs start invoking their failure clauses. It's a huge price tag that's almost always bigger that the price to fix the findings.
There is also the absurd notion that any success stories of internal reporting would also be kept internal. The NSA isn't particularly likely to say "Hey everybody, we did some stuff we can't tell you about, but it was unethical, so now we are doing it differently."
"We're naming Bob as the analyst of the month for his report on how the HOT GRITS project invaded the personal privacy of Natalie Portman. Remember to ask the Petrification Ethics Review Board for approval before coating any actresses."
To my knowledge, the folks who actually understand such things do not say actually say that about Hillary Clinton's email server. In her case, the facts are much less clear. The key words in section 798 are "knowingly and willfully". Where Snowden knew he was leaking classified information and was a willing participant, Hillary did at least try to keep some basic (if ultimately inadequate) security on the server contents.
There is also an argument to be made that Clinton did not herself "knowingly and willfully" send any classified emails. As I understand, the only publicly released information does not mention who sent what. Rather, the classified emails may have only been sent to Hillary, making her an unwilling participant.
It is also important to understand how easy it is to accidentally include classified information in a collaborative medium like email. Let us suppose, hypothetically, that it would be outright classified to say "the President's favorite dessert is vanilla cake with chocolate frosting". It may be unclassified to say "the President prefers vanilla cake" and also unclassified to say "the President prefers chocolate frosting", but putting both together becomes a classified discussion. In the context of an email chain, especially when a participant may not read the entire chain thoroughly, it is very easy to imagine a discussion first mentioning the preference for vanilla cake, then a later reply separately adding the frosting preference. Nobody knowingly released classified information, but the classified information is there.
However, a wider-reaching law is section 793, which covers removal from the "proper place of custody". Walking into a secure environment and carrying out classified information without proper authorization would violate this law, and there are a number of cases that have been prosecuted under this section. Again, though, there's little evidence that Clinton personally mishandled classified information that was later found on her server. There is a clause in the law covering "gross negligence", but that dishonor would likely fall to whoever was in charge of securing the server, rather than the person who asked for it.
In short, Comey's assessment is pretty succinct. Hillary Clinton was careless and probably should have known better than to run a personal server, but there's not enough evidence to make a decent case against her.
18 U.S.C. 798. Note how that law has no mention of malicious intent. It doesn't matter whether Snowden had noble intentions when he broke the law; it is still a violation. This is in contrast to other laws he may have broken (like 18 U.S.C 2381) which require making the case that Snowden's goal was to aid the enemies of the United States.
That distinction is important when Snowden claims that he won't get a "fair trial". In a trial, the question is whether the defendant broke the law. A fair trial means the defendant has a fair chance to defend himself. Regarding section 798, Snowden could argue that he wasn't really the one who leaked the information, or could claim that he was misled to believe that Glenn Greenwald was authorized to receive the information, or he could argue that the whole affair is an elaborate conspiracy to frame him. Unfortunately, he's already quite publicly stated that he took classified material about communications intelligence and made it available to the public. He still can get a fair trial just as soon as he sets foot on American soil, but "fair" and "likely to win" are two very different things.
Snowden's motives can then be used during sentencing to argue for a lighter sentence, and that would probably be fairly successful, since the NSA has directly and indirectly admitted some wrongdoing on their own behalf. On the other hand, despite Snowden's claims, there's very little (unclassified) evidence that he actually tried to pursue any legal alternatives, and there's a growing amount of evidence that Snowden's leak benefited foreign parties. That part of the trial will be far more difficult to predict.
Maybe that's why he keeps emphasizing how much he'll get done in the first few months of his 1461-day term... Perhaps he's concerned that he won't survive long enough to take things slowly.
From the description given (especially considering the lack of information about the "squealing noise"), you wouldn't have any evidence indicating whether the failure is a jammed fan, POST failure, PSU failure, bad electrical supply, or a rodent living inside. Some of those can be repaired, and some can not. Some are a threat to the computer's continued operation, and some are easily mitigated.
Mastering a subject means you know what's reasonable. I wouldn't expect to see a bad electrical supply in the United States. On the other hand, it also means you know what's possible... on aircraft and military systems, 400Hz is not uncommon, and can cause some PSUs to fail in exciting ways. If you are claiming to be an expert in computer repair, you should follow up his description with several questions to ascertain precisely what symptoms are presented, rather than jumping to a conclusion to appear helpful. Unless this "someone" can provide the level of detail necessary for an accurate diagnosis, a direct evaluation is absolutely necessary.
The "source" is whoever passed the information on to someone else. With respect to the editorial power they hold, anyone along the way may choose to manipulate their targets.
Let's suppose for sake of discussion that Russia hired a third-party hacker to get the DNC emails. In that case, the hacker has an incentive and opportunity to select the most damaging emails to provide to his client, under the reasonable assumption that providing juicy gossip would be considered a good job, and likely to lead to more jobs in the future. The emails wouldn't need to be fabricated, but may be carefully selected to avoid internal rebuttals, for example.
Once Russia has the emails, they again have an editorial opportunity. They are the sole means by which those emails will reach the rest of the world, and they can also pick and choose which parts get released. Since Trump has promised to be a much more Russia-friendly candidate, there is again a motive to select the most damaging emails for release.
Finally the emails reach WikiLeaks, where Assange has apparently publicly stated he will try to attack Clinton's campaign. Again, being the first route for the emails to reach the masses, they hold power over the narrative. If the emails' previous custodians already used their power to manipulate the emails, there are already fewer directions the discussion can take, but they could still be reduced further.
If you want to not be manipulated, you have to consider everyone who has the opportunity to manipulate what you see, and consider their motivations. They are your sources.
Slashdot Mirror
I would hope to hell that my doctors have an understanding of what's actually happening! That's what med school and years of experience are for.
I have some very bad news for you, then...
Since this is Slashdot, a car analogy may be best. If you take your precious high-performance sports car to a mechanic to find out why it's not getting the power that it should, he can look at the engine, perform tests and measurements, and tell you that your engine needs a fuel with a higher octane rating. He may not know precisely what an octane rating means chemically, or what chemical processes are taking place during combustion that affect the engine's performance, but he knows the cause of and solution for the symptoms presented.
Similarly, a physician does not usually need to know all of the biological processes that a particular drug affects. Knowledge of common interactions and side effects is necessary, but not the rare effects or anything easily treatable. Basically, if the treatment isn't going to be worse than the disease, they don't need to waste their time or memory thinking about the minimal chance of a mild adverse reaction.
This is not to disparage the medical professionals in any way, but only to clarify what the scope of their job requires. A programmer doesn't need to understand the particle physics that make semiconductors work, a carpenter doesn't need to know how to grow the wood he uses, and a doctor doesn't need to know every side effect for the 10,000 FDA-approved drugs he can prescribe today. Such knowledge just isn't necessary to be an expert in the field.
Making FDA decisions advisory, rather than mandatory would preserve its essential testing function...
...but completely undermine the incentive to actually perform that testing thoroughly and ethically. After an effective marketing campaign, there's no difference between "submitted for FDA approval" and "approved by the FDA", even if the former really means the manufacturer submitted only a brief description of the drug and it was rejected immediately. If, even without approval, the drug can still be marketed and promoted and prescribed, then it's more cost-effective for the manufacturer to run damage-control PR spin after a bad reaction than to actually ensure their products are safe in the first place.
And on the FDA site, I see databases of approvals and lists of rejections, but no details on rejections. We should have as much detail on rejections as we have for approvals. The reason we're not seeing that information is that...
...such information is rapidly out of date, and doesn't matter because doctors can't prescribe those drugs, anyway. The only purpose it serves is to terrorize the public with bad news about a drug that might eventually be considered safe, which in turn just makes it more difficult to convince patients that they should follow their prescribed treatment.
If you want to follow what's going on, I'd recommend some industry publications, which usually strike a nice balance between the technical details and the ultimate impact.
I'm not too terribly familiar with init's requirements, but isn't a "working and viable init.c" basically something like execl("/sbin/getty", "tty0");? It runs, it provides a login shell to the user... what more do you want?
Oh, you want preconfigured settings? Real Linux Users set that stuff by hand when they log in, but fine. We'll add that to the init daemon.
Multiple terminals, too? Fine, a bit of magic with getty, and you're good.
Oh, you want it to start vital services like networking? You could do that with ifconfig, but whatever... Sure, let's give it some network support.
Wait, and now you want to be able to configure all that without compiling? This is getting absurd, but if you insist, we can make a hundred little hundred-line shell scripts, and just run them.
...in different ways? You're really going to ask to run your shiny new server with completely different sets of services at different times, and you're just so spoiled that you can just reconfigure it as needed? Why the hell did we make the damned thing so configurable anyway, if you're not going to use it? Fine... Since you're asking so nicely, we'll throw in a bunch of folders... just link the scripts you want, and names the links so everything's in the right order.
Another request? What do you want from me now? You can't even keep a network operating reliably, and you want your init daemon to do the work for you? Alright, but this is the last straw. Now your configuration scripts can run in parallel, have dependencies, and they will run other scripts to see if they can run your services yet.
...
One of these steps apparently crosses a line, though, and causes enough discomfort that folks derail discussions.
Perhaps I should clarify that statement by saying that the reports are available, but I don't care enough about this particular case to go find this particular report, just to satisfy what I see as a mob that complains about things they don't bother to understand.
So in short, because someone asked why an incentive program isn't useful, you want a witch-hunt to kill off anything you don't like, without any consideration for context.
It just seems so obvious that running a bulldozer through an in-place operational government is the best way to improve efficiency and integrity.
The FDA does give a full report with their rejections, but I don't have a copy of this particular one readily available. My best source is that I used to work in the pharmaceutical industry, in the process for getting new drugs to market. In short, it's a mess even without any accusations of corruption.
I don't think I've ever heard of a modern drug getting approved on its first try (though that's also not where my experience focused). The most common reasons for retesting were things like imprecise side effect rates (two patients in the trial had a headache, so the whole trial needs to be 10x larger to reduce the margin of error) or a lack of documentation (you computed this incidence rate using the standard formula, but exactly what is that formula?).
The problem with a user-centric approach is that you start having public health decisions being made by people with no understanding of what's actually happening. Physicians usually focus on diagnosis and treatment monitoring, not understanding the biochemical interactions of the drugs they recommend. Pharmacists understand the chemistry and interactions, but patient risk analysis and diagnosis is outside of their job. Add a layer of traditional American marketing on top of that, and you have a perfect market for snake-oil salesmen to promote insufficiently-tested medicines to doctors and patients who have no way of knowing how unsafe the medicine is. Doctors can be conned, too.
Or, it could be not malice, but mere stupidity.
It seems there's been a series of unfortunate events affecting Mylan's competitors:
Will anyone ever give Mylan’s ($MYL) blockbuster epinephrine injection, EpiPen, a run for its money?
That’s the question now that another potential competitor is out of the running. The FDA stiff-armed Adamis' ($ADMP) prefilled epinephrine syringe, asking for more data. Regulators want the San Diego-based company to expand a patient usability study and product stress testing studies included in the original application.
The way Evercore ISI analyst Umer Raffat sees it, Adamis’ product wouldn’t have been “a large competitor” for EpiPen, given the difference between its prefilled syringe and Mylan’s more convenient injection pen device. But “Adamis could have added to managed care pressures,” through its stated strategy of acting as a discounted product.
Instead, Mylan is home free--a status it must be getting used to, given the failures that have repeatedly befallen its competitors. Back in November, Sanofi's ($SNY) Auvi-Q hit a wall, when an injector fault triggered a hefty recall. Ultimately, the pharma giant yanked Auvi-Q from the market, and then bailed on its marketing partnership with developer PDL BioPharma ($PDLI), putting the med’s future up in the air. It was EpiPen's first real challenger in years.
More recently, the FDA handed generics giant Teva ($TEVA) a rejection for its generic version of EpiPen, flagging “certain major deficiencies” in its letter to the Israeli pharma. With serious issues to work through, Teva said earlier this year that it expects its product to be "significantly delayed"--meaning it doesn’t expect a rollout before 2017.
The FDA wouldn't have anything to do with the recall, and a request for more information isn't really a particularly effective use of corrupt power. Requests for more data happen all the time, so they're usually turned around pretty quickly. My money's on a perfect storm of chance events, and Mylan's taking the opportunity to capitalize on it.
Yeah... I get the distinct impression that this is mob justice at its finest.
As I understand the story, the other major competitor was unable to show test results that their autoinjector worked reliably, and as such lost their FDA approval. If I'm to believe that descriptions mean anything, the product would certainly fit the "non-innovator multiple source" category.
too expensive to stand by their client
He wasn't their (paying) client. He is a benefit to the infosec society, and was provided pro bono service in appreciation of and to assist his work.
This attack probably cost Akamai a significant amount of money, so it's reasonable that they'd cut it off for a while.
So let me get this straight... First the enemy uses a high-power L-band radar to find every speck of reflective dust. Then they use "much more powerful" S-band radar to somehow identify things the S-band radar can't even see. Meanwhile, the "much more powerful" S-Band and the L-band radar are both bright shining beacons to any SEAD flights, who are equipped with surveillance gear that can tell the difference between an actual radar and a decoy.
The only way the radar helps is to feed targeting information to anti-aircraft weapons like SAM launchers. Unfortunately for the radar operators, the L-band radar will still be susceptible to the countermeasure techniques used against it last time, like chaff and ECM, and the S-band radar won't have enough response to determine where the aircraft is. It can guess, but the odds of a hit are low.
That really boils down the nature of warfare. You do everything you can to improve your odds. Stealth does not guarantee success; the enemy could fire blindly at every blip on an antique radar system, and might hit something. However, the odds of a successful mission are better using a stealthy F-35 than using a nonstealthy B52H, as your earlier comment proposed. Since the running cost of a F-35 is about four times that of a B52, the question becomes a matter of whether it's worth paying four times as much to improve the odds of getting your crew back alive. That in turn requires understanding just how effective stealth is. According to the first reference I found, the stealthy aircraft reflects about 1/10000th as much radiation in the S-band, which is still what would be used for targeting, even if your giant L-band array can tell the SAM to launch. Those look like pretty good odds to me.
The original comment from the AC was that cruise missile range is relatively short, which in turn makes guidance easier. You then said that guidance isn't necessary, and now you're saying that all cruise missiles have guidance. It seems you're unfamiliar with cruise missiles in general.
Almost all cruise missiles have the ability to control their own flight. Some have the ability to be controlled by radio from an operator, but that's an "extra feature" thing that is really only for ease of deployment, and usually plays no tactical role whatsoever. The idea is that a missile can be launched early, and it doesn't need to be given a confirmed target until it's halfway there. No, there is not usually someone sitting there with a joystick actually flying the missile to its target. Such capabilities are typically only used in the climax of a Hollywood blockbuster.
Any distinction today between "guided" and "unguided" cruise missiles is more a distinction on the level of control the missile's avionics has. At one extreme is a purely ballistic missile, effectively fired from a rocket launcher and landing wherever gravity makes it run into the ground. At the other extreme, an advanced cruise missile can not just control its flight, but perform positive identification of the target before the strike.
The distinction is important when considering the technological capability of an enemy. Scavenger fighters like ISIS or rebel groups won't be able to afford an arsenal of modern missiles, but they might be able to stick an microcontroller on a rocket and make it land somewhat close to a target. This has a tactical impact, because the accuracy of weapons determines the radius of hazard around a target. If the enemy missiles are only accurate to within a 1-mile radius, it can be politically important to keep military installations 2 miles from civilian areas, to prevent any accusations of bringing the conflict closer to civilians. Conversely, if the enemy has the weaponry to make surgical strikes, locating a base near a city can improve supply logistics, and any civilian collateral damage can be be used to vilify the enemy... if they could do better, why didn't they?
good enough to make it past the USPTO (which is harder than people think)
Which in itself is part of the problem, though Slashdotters would rather just whine about the Big Bad Gubmint.
It's traditionally been, and remains to be, difficult to get a patent. As a result, patent law is structured such that once a patent is approved, it's almost certainly some kind of groundbreaking new technology. Then if someone else end up with the same technology, they must certainly have copied the patent, and it's effectively the burden of the defendant to show that their design process excluded the duplicated patent, effectively requiring proving a negative and undermining the public good for which the patent system was created. In essence, the patent system is assumed to be infallible, so its failures have a significant impact.
I've put some consideration into a system in which the first step in any patent lawsuit is a mandatory reevaluation of the patent claims, paid for by the USPTO (and amortized into filing fees), and waivable if the reevaluation was done recently enough to remain relevant to current societal standards. Part of that evaluation would weigh whether the patent is really a specific application, or a new technology that will have wide use. In essence, once a patent is granted, it's only partially valuable until it's been tested in court, and its value as a commodity (especially for trade between NPEs) depends significantly on the likelihood of the patent to stand up to a fresh examination. On the other hand, a novel patent with specific demonstrable products would be more likely to survive a trial, so it would be more valuable to investors interested in creating products.
You ought to try reading TFA. The long-wave radar might be able to detect that something's there, but it's the modern computation power that might possibly be able to identify the particular signature of a new plane, rather than raising alerts for every bird or chaff that happens to be in the vicinity.
That means it's not going to be a part of the old weapons systems. Only major powers like Russia or China would likely be able to use the technology on a battlefield, and they're unlikely to enter a direct open conflict with America or its allies. It certainly won't be readily available to insurgents like we're fighting now in the Middle East, and it won't be the old scrap left behind if a modern base is abandoned. Even if the technology is used in battle, it is pretty easily identified, and destroyed as part of an initial campaign for air superiority.
...That's a guided cruise missile, then. In modern parlance, an "unguided" cruise missile is something like the old German V-1, which would travel a certain distance in a certain direction, then fall and blow up where it landed, but had no practical ability to correct its course during flight beyond basic stabilization.
[As] it is, the US failed to back up an ally.
In the political arena, Ukraine is not really an ally with any binding need for the US to react. The whole affair was between two sovereign nations with no American involvement.
even one cruise nuke on Russian soil would have sent the message
I'm not sure what message you intend to send, but the one that's received is "America broke treaties first", and that opens the morality floodgates. Any other nuclear-armed military can then feel free to launch their nukes, in defense of their Russian ally against the suspected ally of the evil USA.
An unguided cruise missile is a tactical disaster in a modern war. They are only useful against civilian or very large military targets, because they can be blown off course by wind or other interference, and lack the course-correction a guidance system would provide. If you're a belligerent like Germany in WWII, you can happily point them at your British enemy and watch the civilian casualty count rise as their morale falls. Unfortunately, if you're at least pretending to follow the rules of ware (as almost all nations do today), that risk to civilians acts against your best interests.
Modern warfare tactics also include the use of aerial refueling, effectively extending the F-35 range to 600 miles beyond where you or an ally have air superiority. That drastically changes the effective use of the aircraft.
If the enemy has Soviet radar and SAM equipment from the 70s and 80s, which is now available readily and cheaply to anyone with a grudge against the USA, a B52H can deliver approximately 0 times the bomb load of any modern stealthy aircraft, with a 55% higher cost per flight hour before disintegration.
That's why the LRS-B program started, to build the upcoming B-21.
When Bob, Bob's peer, and their manager all sign off on the pentest plan, it's a lot more difficult to claim ignorance.
That's not how it works... that's not how any of it works.
If you want to be a non-criminal hacker, but can't get permission from someone who doesn't care about security, you don't hack them. Period. You don't get to attack someone without invitation and keep your shiny clean reputation. This guy is getting screwed because he allegedly broke the law.
I've worked with red teams. If you're going to ignore their findings, you're better off not hiring them in the first place. See, red teams keep records. Those records can be subpoenaed, and if it turns out that you were told about a vulnerability and chose to ignore it, it's your ass on the line. Insurance companies won't pay for damages, approvals get revoked, and SLAs start invoking their failure clauses. It's a huge price tag that's almost always bigger that the price to fix the findings.
There is also the absurd notion that any success stories of internal reporting would also be kept internal. The NSA isn't particularly likely to say "Hey everybody, we did some stuff we can't tell you about, but it was unethical, so now we are doing it differently."
"We're naming Bob as the analyst of the month for his report on how the HOT GRITS project invaded the personal privacy of Natalie Portman. Remember to ask the Petrification Ethics Review Board for approval before coating any actresses."
To my knowledge, the folks who actually understand such things do not say actually say that about Hillary Clinton's email server. In her case, the facts are much less clear. The key words in section 798 are "knowingly and willfully". Where Snowden knew he was leaking classified information and was a willing participant, Hillary did at least try to keep some basic (if ultimately inadequate) security on the server contents.
There is also an argument to be made that Clinton did not herself "knowingly and willfully" send any classified emails. As I understand, the only publicly released information does not mention who sent what. Rather, the classified emails may have only been sent to Hillary, making her an unwilling participant.
It is also important to understand how easy it is to accidentally include classified information in a collaborative medium like email. Let us suppose, hypothetically, that it would be outright classified to say "the President's favorite dessert is vanilla cake with chocolate frosting". It may be unclassified to say "the President prefers vanilla cake" and also unclassified to say "the President prefers chocolate frosting", but putting both together becomes a classified discussion. In the context of an email chain, especially when a participant may not read the entire chain thoroughly, it is very easy to imagine a discussion first mentioning the preference for vanilla cake, then a later reply separately adding the frosting preference. Nobody knowingly released classified information, but the classified information is there.
However, a wider-reaching law is section 793, which covers removal from the "proper place of custody". Walking into a secure environment and carrying out classified information without proper authorization would violate this law, and there are a number of cases that have been prosecuted under this section. Again, though, there's little evidence that Clinton personally mishandled classified information that was later found on her server. There is a clause in the law covering "gross negligence", but that dishonor would likely fall to whoever was in charge of securing the server, rather than the person who asked for it.
In short, Comey's assessment is pretty succinct. Hillary Clinton was careless and probably should have known better than to run a personal server, but there's not enough evidence to make a decent case against her.
18 U.S.C. 798. Note how that law has no mention of malicious intent. It doesn't matter whether Snowden had noble intentions when he broke the law; it is still a violation. This is in contrast to other laws he may have broken (like 18 U.S.C 2381) which require making the case that Snowden's goal was to aid the enemies of the United States.
That distinction is important when Snowden claims that he won't get a "fair trial". In a trial, the question is whether the defendant broke the law. A fair trial means the defendant has a fair chance to defend himself. Regarding section 798, Snowden could argue that he wasn't really the one who leaked the information, or could claim that he was misled to believe that Glenn Greenwald was authorized to receive the information, or he could argue that the whole affair is an elaborate conspiracy to frame him. Unfortunately, he's already quite publicly stated that he took classified material about communications intelligence and made it available to the public. He still can get a fair trial just as soon as he sets foot on American soil, but "fair" and "likely to win" are two very different things.
Snowden's motives can then be used during sentencing to argue for a lighter sentence, and that would probably be fairly successful, since the NSA has directly and indirectly admitted some wrongdoing on their own behalf. On the other hand, despite Snowden's claims, there's very little (unclassified) evidence that he actually tried to pursue any legal alternatives, and there's a growing amount of evidence that Snowden's leak benefited foreign parties. That part of the trial will be far more difficult to predict.
Maybe that's why he keeps emphasizing how much he'll get done in the first few months of his 1461-day term... Perhaps he's concerned that he won't survive long enough to take things slowly.
That's exactly correct: no merit whatsoever.
From the description given (especially considering the lack of information about the "squealing noise"), you wouldn't have any evidence indicating whether the failure is a jammed fan, POST failure, PSU failure, bad electrical supply, or a rodent living inside. Some of those can be repaired, and some can not. Some are a threat to the computer's continued operation, and some are easily mitigated.
Mastering a subject means you know what's reasonable. I wouldn't expect to see a bad electrical supply in the United States. On the other hand, it also means you know what's possible... on aircraft and military systems, 400Hz is not uncommon, and can cause some PSUs to fail in exciting ways. If you are claiming to be an expert in computer repair, you should follow up his description with several questions to ascertain precisely what symptoms are presented, rather than jumping to a conclusion to appear helpful. Unless this "someone" can provide the level of detail necessary for an accurate diagnosis, a direct evaluation is absolutely necessary.
The "source" is whoever passed the information on to someone else. With respect to the editorial power they hold, anyone along the way may choose to manipulate their targets.
Let's suppose for sake of discussion that Russia hired a third-party hacker to get the DNC emails. In that case, the hacker has an incentive and opportunity to select the most damaging emails to provide to his client, under the reasonable assumption that providing juicy gossip would be considered a good job, and likely to lead to more jobs in the future. The emails wouldn't need to be fabricated, but may be carefully selected to avoid internal rebuttals, for example.
Once Russia has the emails, they again have an editorial opportunity. They are the sole means by which those emails will reach the rest of the world, and they can also pick and choose which parts get released. Since Trump has promised to be a much more Russia-friendly candidate, there is again a motive to select the most damaging emails for release.
Finally the emails reach WikiLeaks, where Assange has apparently publicly stated he will try to attack Clinton's campaign. Again, being the first route for the emails to reach the masses, they hold power over the narrative. If the emails' previous custodians already used their power to manipulate the emails, there are already fewer directions the discussion can take, but they could still be reduced further.
If you want to not be manipulated, you have to consider everyone who has the opportunity to manipulate what you see, and consider their motivations. They are your sources.