Security is complicated. On the one hand, perfect security is impossible. Your servers can be hacked, your data can be stolen, and your users can be phished.
However, there is another perspective that I think is equally important, if not moreso: It's not hopeless. The attackers are not omnipotent. They have 9-5 schedules, bureaucracies, budgets, and deadlines. If your system is protected well enough that your attackers' budget runs out, it will stay safe. From that perspective, security is just a matter of economics. Your security is bought by spending a little money and effort to drastically increase the effort the attackers need to spend.
An attacker embedding a custom chip in server hardware, then processing thousands of phone-home results is expensive for them, and unlikely to get a result. However, replacing your whole data center to use non-Supermicro servers is also expensive. Frankly, the whole thing probably isn't worth anybody's time.
Breaking into an internet-facing server with a default password is easy. There are lots of routers and firewalls out there with default credentials or hidden backdoor accounts. Exploiting one of those is ridiculously cheap for an attacker, and gets them far better results.
The notion of "the attacker is almighty" doesn't help improve overall security, because it silences discussion about how to actually improve security posture. Instead, we should set aside hardware concerns for now, and ask "What's the easiest way we can be attacked, and how can we fix it?", then make the fix, and repeat until your own budget runs out.
My skepticism is not about doubting China's ability. I'm sure China (or any nation or well-funded individual) could get hardware inserted into servers. What I'm skeptical of is whether China (or any nation or well-funded individual) would even bother with the expense and risk when they could send a phishing campaign instead.
Nope, nor have enough details been released that somebody could even start. There's speculation, but Bloomberg hasn't published anything that would let someone verify it on their own.
Or in other words, if you're using Cloudflare, but want to host on Sarten-X's Super-Awesome Web Service (or any of the tons of cheap host providers out there) instead of Azure, you'll have to pay more for bandwidth, and if you're trying to pitch a startup service like an API to clients, they'll want to have that free-bandwidth perk that your competitors offer.
I guess now to be competitive as a cloud provider, I have to go join this "Alliance", which I'm sure will involve a contract of some kind, and some terms... if they'll even talk to a bit player like me.
Thanks, FCC, for killing Net Neutrality! This is exactly the kind of shit that was predicted, and you said it wouldn't happen.
In 2016, I worked with an extremely right-wing company. I'm pretty sure their employees have enough guns to equip a small army.
After the election, a significant percentage were disappointed. In discussions afterward, a few of the die-hard conservatives even confessed they'd voted for HRC, because they worried that Trump would divide the Republican party.
Last I heard, they mostly just want him to shut up and do something that isn't controversial, so the party isn't constantly on defense, and might actually be able to accomplish something before the 2020 election.
Somebody at Google said "hey, we could abuse our power for good!" and management came back saying "it's still abuse, so we're not doing it", and that was the end of it.
Folks did their jobs, nothing bad happened, and everything worked as it should. It's nice to have a story that isn't sky-is-falling panic, but there's literally nothing newsworthy to report here.
"Money laundering" has a very specific definition. It's any effort to hide the source of an illegal income.
Being completely unregulated (by design) makes it extremely easy to simply transfer Bitcoin from a tainted source to a variety of wallets, then back to a clean wallet. With no way to prove ownership of the intermediate wallets (or worse, exchanges that keep centralized wallets without ownership records), there's effectively no way to track where illicit income is going.
Yes, cash has the same issue, which is why cash-heavy industries are the go-to route for money laundering. Cash has an inherent physical limit, though, in that it's simply difficult to transport and handle large quantities of it. Laundering with Bitcoin is essentially unlimited in scale, and the cost to execute the transactions doesn't increase as the scale rises.
Other investment types are regulated, though, for exactly the risks you noted. It isn't the investment itself or its performance that is regulated. It's the behavior of the people working in the trade.
I used to work at a financial company. We carried insurance policies against our own negligence or accidents, and when somebody's account did indeed get hacked, we covered their loss. In our contracts and promotional materials, we made clear that the investments were investments, not a savings account, and there's no guarantee of any return.
The problem is that Bitcoin proponents and exchanges aren't actually complying with such regulations, and like to dance around definitions as it suits them. If you're asking about whether they file SEC* paperwork, then Bitcoin is just like a foreign currency, and isn't really in the SEC's jurisdiction. If you ask about whether its value is counted as taxable income like other currencies, then it's claimed to be an investment that the IRS* doesn't track until it's realized. If you're asking about the economic forecast, then it's going to shoot back up in value any day now, and it will be used for legal transactions and every vendor will accept it, and because it's got built-in scarcity, its value can only go up!
If cryptocurrencies were explicitly called out in regulations, the scammers and risky ventures would be legally culpable for their misleading actions. As it stands, they can just say "well, you should have known it was risky" and walk away.
* Or the SEC and IRS equivalents of your choice. I'm an American, so that's what I know.
Curate the information you present, much like a resume. Make sure it lists skills and technologies you'd like to use again, because those are what recruiters are searching on. Put in employment-relevant information about yourself like location and employment history.
The biggest difference between LinkedIn and a resume, from a curation perspective, is the amount of information that LinkedIn can reasonably organize. Where a resume is mostly limited in length, LinkedIn is only limited by your desire for privacy. Online, you can (and probably should) list every skill you hold expertise in, rather than keeping a carefully-pruned list of eye-catching skills. A resume is written to pass a human HR drone's quick review, but LinkedIn searches don't care how irrelevant skills they have to parse to include you as a match.
See, that's precisely the myth to which I refer. Simply being a publicly-traded corporation, even one formed for-profit, is not actually a legal obligation to maximize profits. The executives have a lot of freedom in their decisions, as long as they are compliant with the actual legal documents. The most important document is still the corporate charter, and shareholder agreements or contracts may stipulate certain performance goals, but without an explicit agreement dictating the executives' behavior, the shareholders have no basis for their lawsuit.
In this case, it's also important to note that even "shareholder value" and "shareholder profit" are different things. By raising prices, this CEO may have increased profit, but he has also done irreparable harm to Nostrum Laboratories' competitive posture, actually decreasing the company's overall value as a for-profit venture. If Nostrum's charter requires any value maximization or long-term goals, this PR debacle could itself provide grounds for a lawsuit.
It is a recurring myth that corporations are somehow absolutely required by law to seek profit. It seems now is a good time to mention that this is absolutely not true. Corporations are only required to do what their charter says, which usually includes some notes about profit, but also more importantly defines the role the company will take (like improving healthcare).
This CEO is avoiding the legal implication by claiming it's a "moral" requirement. Of course, that means there's no written guideline to which we can refer that will identify this as blatant greed, so it becomes a matter of personal judgement. I hope that's remembered in the future whenever the CEO tries to claim he's always acting in the public interest.
TempleOS is a fascinating project. It is completely different from everything we currently have, and in some interesting ways.
Notably, the UI, shell, document format, organization structure, and IDE are all one and the same. Your shell is a text editor where you can embed drawings and link them to other documents, and your documents can be compiled and run with a built-in JIT compiler that also provides its own debug environment.
It's the opposite paradigm to the Unix "everything is a string" philosophy, and also antithetical to Windows' notion of "everything is a GUI". It's more "everything is connected".
The trade-off is that by removing a camera, they can drastically reduce the number of landing/takeoff cycles, which means less downtime and fewer crashes. It also opens the (perhaps future) possibility of having fully-mobile drone support: A drone overhead for days as a convoy moves through unprotected space, without needing to be near a friendly runway.
I don't have any good links, but it's not too complicated...
The radio beacon travels at (roughly) the speed of light. That's about 300 million meters per second, so there's a 1ms delay after the signal gets to be 300 km away.
From a technical perspective, all communications (including Internet-based systems) are bound by that same speed, and trying to break that cosmic limit has proven to be extremely difficult, so engineers have done what engineers do best: they cheat.
The "fancy" algorithm is really pretty simple, conceptually: Instead of just accepting a time beacon, the NTP client measures how long it takes to ask for a time, and assumes that the time it receives was accurate halfway through the round-trip time. For example, if it takes 14ms to get a message saying it's exactly noon, that message was probably received very close to 7 ms after noon, so NTPd will set the local clock accordingly. It's not perfect, because the round-trip time might not be symmetrical, but it's close enough for most practical purposes. Using WiFi might add a bit of delay, but as long as the delay is symmetric, it won't be a problem.
The key for NTP is that it's a client-server protocol, so the client knows approximately how long the message was in transit. A one-way radio beacon like WWV doesn't have that, but that also means WWV doesn't need to receive transmissions from clients to function.
GPS is even fancier. A GPS satellite transmits not just a time beacon, but also a message with the satellite's location when the beacon was sent. Once a receiver has learned the locations and delays for at least four satellites, it can start to determine its own location. First, it will compare the satellites' locations and delays relative to other satellites to figure out where the receiver could possibly be on Earth. Then it can use that location to determine the exact delay for each satellite's signal, which is then used (just like in NTP) to compute the actual time.
GPS is superior to both NTP and WWV, because it is still a one-way communication system, but also isn't subject to any network traffic or assumptions about symmetry. With no prior knowledge, a GPS receiver can accurately compute both its location and time.
When economists talk about "distribution", then mean the distribution and allocation of goods and services. Economists don't care what logo is on the truck making shipments. They care about how many trucks are going to what places.
Capitalists see subsidies as Lemon Socialism. Liberals see subsides as a form of capitalism. The capitalists have a better claim: The TARP bank bailout, and the auto industry bailout were both passed by Democrats, and opposed by Republicans.
Partisanship somehow changes the merits of an argument? That's an... interesting... approach to debate. Politics aside, it's worth noting that the auto bailout ended up costing the US government about $14 billion, while TARP as a whole (including the auto bailout) actually ended up turning a $86 billion profit overall. All together, the program seems to have done exactly what it was intended to do: reduce the shock of the financial crisis, stabilizing the economy to protect against further snowball effects.
Your partisan analysis of subsidies also doesn't mesh with a socialist perspective. To a socialist, subsidies are a governmental decision that something risky is of such benefit to society that the risk (financial or otherwise) should be offset. In a totalitarian state like the USSR or DPRK, the state-run company in that area would just go order work on that project... and open the door to corruption because the state will ensure the project's success, no matter how poorly it's managed or how wasteful it may be. With private industry, however, the subsidies have to be financial offsets, either ensuring a minimum income or covering some expenses outright.
What's offensive to a socialist is the use of subsidies and financial incentives to support projects that aren't directly in the public interest. For example, I know of a particular company that promised to upgrade their factory in a small town, but only if they got a nice tax cut for a few decades (similar to a more-publicized event). While that made for nice headlines about "creating jobs", it hurt the town in the long run. Since the company's normal taxes were a significant percentage of the town's budget, local projects actually lost funding in order to keep the town's budget balanced. Sure, some folks got a new shiny office building, but the high school roof started collapsing.
Unfortunately, that's been a recurring theme with American government policies lately. A notable example is the coal industry, which is subsidized by about $850 million annually, yet only employs about 77,000 people. That's about an $11,000 cost per person per year, ostensibly to keep those 77,000 jobs. The question is, of course, whether we need those jobs as a society. To a socialist, that $11,000 would likely be better spent funding career education and training to support other industries (or even bringing new skills to the coal industry), with the key benefit being that even if the coal industry collapsed, the society would still have a larger wealth of skills to continue progress.
Again, it's a matter of philosophy. The socialists want societal improvement to be the primary goal of government, with industries benefiting indirectly. Who actually owns the company is relatively insignificant at this point.
That's an oversimplified description. Socialism isn't just that the government owns the means of production, but also that it is responsible for the distribution of the produced goods and services. Since that's also the much larger and more difficult part of the philosophy, it's also the part that should be discussed most thoroughly.
In essence, any government that collects taxes already has a government-owned means of production. The government produces tax income. How it then uses those taxes is the subject of endless debate, and those of us who want a bit more socialism want to see distributions that focus on the socialist philosophies. We want to see less focus on propping up private industry, and more focus on community projects. We want less subsidies for corporate expansion, and more grants for anyone to claim.
In short, the socialist influence the young people look for is for government to aim to improve life outside of work, rather than dumping resources into privately-managed companies that have primarily just increased inequality over the past few decades.
Eh.... I'm very curious as to precisely how the poll was conducted. This is one of those things where the precise wording is important, and the subject is vulnerable to a lot of bias.
As an example, I will use my own views. I'm well aware of how poorly socialism has fared historically, but I'm also aware of how the implementation of socialist ideals has always been hindered by human corruption and greed, just as those same vices have caused inequality and suffering in capitalist societies. If I were asked whether I'd want to live under a socialist government, my response would be a resounding "no".
However, if asked whether I would be in favor of socialism as a legislative doctrine, I would have to answer "yes". I have seen significant evidence that governmental structure can actually run social services decently, if the human corruption can be adequately checked in the system design. Philosophically, I believe that we as a society should work to support the whole society, rather than seeking personal hegemony.
To borrow a phrase, capitalism is the worst system, except for everything else we've tried. There are certainly some good ideas in socialist systems, but they rely on an awful lot of trust. Capitalism assumes no trust, but brings its own collection of faults. I think an ideal system would draw on both ideologies (and others), with careful thought toward how the system can be exploited in the future.
One way that balance can be acheived is by using technology to monitor and control governmental services, filling the role that bureaucracy does today. It is much easier to design a "fair" computer than it is to ask a human to be "fair", because it's relatively straightforward to have computers explicitly ignore certain input.
That means we need to educate our children not just on civics, but on security, philosophy, history, and technology, as well.... We're doomed.
Germany was quite peaceful in 1939, thanks to its strong military and authoritarian government. It was all those other, weaker countries that had that nasty war, mostly because they weren't strong enough to repel invaders.
Trump is a big fan of that German ideology, so it makes perfect sense he'd want to replicate their history here.
The "efficiency" to which I refer is the coefficient of performance, which is more accurately the efficiency of just a part of the larger thermodynamic system. To physicists who only work in closed systems, it's an infuriating misuse of terms. To an engineer who understands that open and closed systems are different and are measured differently, it's perfectly fine. That's also why it's only an "apparent" violation of thermodynamics... looking at a system large enough to be closed, the whole thing is still increasing entropy, keeping the universe happy.
Nuclear reactors don't have a heat pump, what would be the purpose?
The steam loop in a nuclear power plant essentially forms a heat pump system, transferring heat from the primary coolant or reactor itself to the turbines and cooling towers (and then the water/air around the facility). The only notable difference between the power plant's cycle and a home A/C system is that the power plant uses a turbine to extract energy from the working fluid, rather than just dissipating the energy through a radiator.
In relation to the power a plant produces: zero.
Which would mean their CoP is infinitely large, which is substantially more than the "2 to 6" I normally consider.
An interesting fact is that heat pumps (like home air conditioners, refrigerators, or nuclear power plants) are actually in the range of 200% to 600% efficient, apparently violating that wonderful law. For a given amount of energy expended, they can actually move 2 to 6 times* that amount of energy across the pump.
Now, this is still not a closed system, so it's perfectly fine to have small-scale violations. The total entropy in the closed system (including both sides of the pump, and the energy supply for the pump) still increases as the pump itself isn't 100% efficient in moving the working fluid.
* I recall the "2 to 6 times" figure as a rule of thumb... but I don't actually know how it compares to the heat pump system in a nuclear reactor, whose scale is far larger than a home A/C system. I would love to know the power consumption of a nuclear facility's coolant pumps.
The problem is that the water is chilled... but it's chilled by running it through colder water, usually pulled from a lake or a stream. Usually this isn't a problem, because the waste heat doesn't disrupt the ecosystem too much.
Right now, however, the environment is so warm that adding the waste heat would push temperatures above acceptable levels, killing the local ecosystem. Instead, the reactors are shut down to minimize the amount of heat they have to dissipate.
Sure, that VPN provider says it's in $COUNTRY, and your exit IP address might be from that location... but what about their billing servers, company headquarters, or any other records they feel like keeping on you? If they break their own privacy policy, in whose jurisdiction can you file a lawsuit?
Using a VPN for "privacy" is just giving your data to someone else instead of your local ISP. Do you really trust that provider more, enough to hand them control of your network traffic?
There are a few reasonable uses for a VPN (besides remote network access, as the technology was made for). It's critical for activists in locations where they are directly targeted. It's a vital tool for testing access and routing issues. I'll even say that avoiding region limits is a reasonable (if not always legal) use... but it's not really an effective privacy tool in any way, and certainly not necessary for day-to-day browsing by the vast majority of average users.
As a user who chooses neither Outlook or Thunderbird, here's my list of "killer features" in Outlook:
Full Exchange support
Calendar/Skype/address list integration
GPO-configurable options
Smoother handling of large mailboxes
Similarly, here's my list for Thunderbird:
Open standards, open source, etc.
Better support for IMAP/POP3
Older interface style (less UI learning curve)
Fully-client-side filtering
Personally, I use GMail, which comes with a whole separate list of pros and cons, which basically boils down to "integrates well, but only with Google products", but it works for me.
If you're in a corporate Exchange environment, Outlook is the best integration you'll get. If you run your own non-Exchange mail server, Thunderbird is pretty darned good. If you're lazy and don't care to ever think about email, GMail is probably all you need.
No, I meant that quite literally. We had interns write the init scripts for our product (a multi-million-dollar system of embedded Linux-based components), because the "real developers" were writing "real software".
In our product, the exact capabilities of each component depend on what other components are available. Through a "interesting" architecture, that discovery happens at startup, with a command-line constructed in the init scripts which were, as noted, written by interns with all of the real-world experience you'd expect from interns.
If a component didn't boot in the right order, it effectively doesn't exist. If the external network is down, you may as well not have one. If you reboot a component after a failed startup, that component will expect behavior in other components that won't actually be provided. If a service or a component crashes, other components will simply hang.
Usually, the recommended solution for any problem is "try rebooting everything again, and pay close attention to the 3-page startup procedure".
Now, I'm not suggesting that systemd will solve these architecture problems on its own, but the few components that have been upgraded are much easier to trace and manage dependencies on.
BGP was designed on a pair of napkins. SMTP is a pile of hacks on top of workarounds laid over a protocol that was never supposed to handle important messages. HTTP has evolved to become the de facto face of the Internet... and a large portion of its traffic is just a wrapper around JSON data because JavaScript doesn't get raw socket access. It's taken three tries to get hostname resolution to its current state, and even that's rife with problems.
I love the Internet as much as the next guy, but frankly, it only works because a lot of people have made a lot of band-aid patches to accommodate the last four decades of problems. Payment processing is one thing I'm quite happy to keep in an ivory tower, knowing that if someone screws it up, there's a whole army of lawyers coming to make their life awful.
Now, this isn't to say there aren't any problems in the traditional payment-processing systems... quite the contrary. There are a lot of issues with those systems, but the folks running those systems usually have a greater financial interest in keeping those systems running smoothly than they have in exploiting the problems for immediate profit.
Slashdot Mirror
The public deserves the truth.
Security is complicated. On the one hand, perfect security is impossible. Your servers can be hacked, your data can be stolen, and your users can be phished.
However, there is another perspective that I think is equally important, if not moreso: It's not hopeless. The attackers are not omnipotent. They have 9-5 schedules, bureaucracies, budgets, and deadlines. If your system is protected well enough that your attackers' budget runs out, it will stay safe. From that perspective, security is just a matter of economics. Your security is bought by spending a little money and effort to drastically increase the effort the attackers need to spend.
An attacker embedding a custom chip in server hardware, then processing thousands of phone-home results is expensive for them, and unlikely to get a result. However, replacing your whole data center to use non-Supermicro servers is also expensive. Frankly, the whole thing probably isn't worth anybody's time.
Breaking into an internet-facing server with a default password is easy. There are lots of routers and firewalls out there with default credentials or hidden backdoor accounts. Exploiting one of those is ridiculously cheap for an attacker, and gets them far better results.
The notion of "the attacker is almighty" doesn't help improve overall security, because it silences discussion about how to actually improve security posture. Instead, we should set aside hardware concerns for now, and ask "What's the easiest way we can be attacked, and how can we fix it?", then make the fix, and repeat until your own budget runs out.
My skepticism is not about doubting China's ability. I'm sure China (or any nation or well-funded individual) could get hardware inserted into servers. What I'm skeptical of is whether China (or any nation or well-funded individual) would even bother with the expense and risk when they could send a phishing campaign instead.
Nope, nor have enough details been released that somebody could even start. There's speculation, but Bloomberg hasn't published anything that would let someone verify it on their own.
Or in other words, if you're using Cloudflare, but want to host on Sarten-X's Super-Awesome Web Service (or any of the tons of cheap host providers out there) instead of Azure, you'll have to pay more for bandwidth, and if you're trying to pitch a startup service like an API to clients, they'll want to have that free-bandwidth perk that your competitors offer.
I guess now to be competitive as a cloud provider, I have to go join this "Alliance", which I'm sure will involve a contract of some kind, and some terms... if they'll even talk to a bit player like me.
Thanks, FCC, for killing Net Neutrality! This is exactly the kind of shit that was predicted, and you said it wouldn't happen.
In 2016, I worked with an extremely right-wing company. I'm pretty sure their employees have enough guns to equip a small army.
After the election, a significant percentage were disappointed. In discussions afterward, a few of the die-hard conservatives even confessed they'd voted for HRC, because they worried that Trump would divide the Republican party.
Last I heard, they mostly just want him to shut up and do something that isn't controversial, so the party isn't constantly on defense, and might actually be able to accomplish something before the 2020 election.
So let me try to summarize this:
Somebody at Google said "hey, we could abuse our power for good!" and management came back saying "it's still abuse, so we're not doing it", and that was the end of it.
Folks did their jobs, nothing bad happened, and everything worked as it should. It's nice to have a story that isn't sky-is-falling panic, but there's literally nothing newsworthy to report here.
"Money laundering" has a very specific definition. It's any effort to hide the source of an illegal income.
Being completely unregulated (by design) makes it extremely easy to simply transfer Bitcoin from a tainted source to a variety of wallets, then back to a clean wallet. With no way to prove ownership of the intermediate wallets (or worse, exchanges that keep centralized wallets without ownership records), there's effectively no way to track where illicit income is going.
Yes, cash has the same issue, which is why cash-heavy industries are the go-to route for money laundering. Cash has an inherent physical limit, though, in that it's simply difficult to transport and handle large quantities of it. Laundering with Bitcoin is essentially unlimited in scale, and the cost to execute the transactions doesn't increase as the scale rises.
Other investment types are regulated, though, for exactly the risks you noted. It isn't the investment itself or its performance that is regulated. It's the behavior of the people working in the trade.
I used to work at a financial company. We carried insurance policies against our own negligence or accidents, and when somebody's account did indeed get hacked, we covered their loss. In our contracts and promotional materials, we made clear that the investments were investments, not a savings account, and there's no guarantee of any return.
The problem is that Bitcoin proponents and exchanges aren't actually complying with such regulations, and like to dance around definitions as it suits them. If you're asking about whether they file SEC* paperwork, then Bitcoin is just like a foreign currency, and isn't really in the SEC's jurisdiction. If you ask about whether its value is counted as taxable income like other currencies, then it's claimed to be an investment that the IRS* doesn't track until it's realized. If you're asking about the economic forecast, then it's going to shoot back up in value any day now, and it will be used for legal transactions and every vendor will accept it, and because it's got built-in scarcity, its value can only go up!
If cryptocurrencies were explicitly called out in regulations, the scammers and risky ventures would be legally culpable for their misleading actions. As it stands, they can just say "well, you should have known it was risky" and walk away.
* Or the SEC and IRS equivalents of your choice. I'm an American, so that's what I know.
Curate the information you present, much like a resume. Make sure it lists skills and technologies you'd like to use again, because those are what recruiters are searching on. Put in employment-relevant information about yourself like location and employment history.
The biggest difference between LinkedIn and a resume, from a curation perspective, is the amount of information that LinkedIn can reasonably organize. Where a resume is mostly limited in length, LinkedIn is only limited by your desire for privacy. Online, you can (and probably should) list every skill you hold expertise in, rather than keeping a carefully-pruned list of eye-catching skills. A resume is written to pass a human HR drone's quick review, but LinkedIn searches don't care how irrelevant skills they have to parse to include you as a match.
A lawsuit on what grounds, exactly?
See, that's precisely the myth to which I refer. Simply being a publicly-traded corporation, even one formed for-profit, is not actually a legal obligation to maximize profits. The executives have a lot of freedom in their decisions, as long as they are compliant with the actual legal documents. The most important document is still the corporate charter, and shareholder agreements or contracts may stipulate certain performance goals, but without an explicit agreement dictating the executives' behavior, the shareholders have no basis for their lawsuit.
In this case, it's also important to note that even "shareholder value" and "shareholder profit" are different things. By raising prices, this CEO may have increased profit, but he has also done irreparable harm to Nostrum Laboratories' competitive posture, actually decreasing the company's overall value as a for-profit venture. If Nostrum's charter requires any value maximization or long-term goals, this PR debacle could itself provide grounds for a lawsuit.
It is a recurring myth that corporations are somehow absolutely required by law to seek profit. It seems now is a good time to mention that this is absolutely not true. Corporations are only required to do what their charter says, which usually includes some notes about profit, but also more importantly defines the role the company will take (like improving healthcare).
This CEO is avoiding the legal implication by claiming it's a "moral" requirement. Of course, that means there's no written guideline to which we can refer that will identify this as blatant greed, so it becomes a matter of personal judgement. I hope that's remembered in the future whenever the CEO tries to claim he's always acting in the public interest.
TempleOS is a fascinating project. It is completely different from everything we currently have, and in some interesting ways.
Notably, the UI, shell, document format, organization structure, and IDE are all one and the same. Your shell is a text editor where you can embed drawings and link them to other documents, and your documents can be compiled and run with a built-in JIT compiler that also provides its own debug environment.
It's the opposite paradigm to the Unix "everything is a string" philosophy, and also antithetical to Windows' notion of "everything is a GUI". It's more "everything is connected".
The trade-off is that by removing a camera, they can drastically reduce the number of landing/takeoff cycles, which means less downtime and fewer crashes. It also opens the (perhaps future) possibility of having fully-mobile drone support: A drone overhead for days as a convoy moves through unprotected space, without needing to be near a friendly runway.
I was interested in the story until I read those little details.
An endocrinologist is consulting for a testing lab? Stunning!
A highly-specialized expert with extremely-good credentials got paid $34K/year average for a job? Scandalous!
Hell, I was recently offered more than that for an engineering consultancy that should barely require a four-year degree.
I don't have any good links, but it's not too complicated...
The radio beacon travels at (roughly) the speed of light. That's about 300 million meters per second, so there's a 1ms delay after the signal gets to be 300 km away.
From a technical perspective, all communications (including Internet-based systems) are bound by that same speed, and trying to break that cosmic limit has proven to be extremely difficult, so engineers have done what engineers do best: they cheat.
The "fancy" algorithm is really pretty simple, conceptually: Instead of just accepting a time beacon, the NTP client measures how long it takes to ask for a time, and assumes that the time it receives was accurate halfway through the round-trip time. For example, if it takes 14ms to get a message saying it's exactly noon, that message was probably received very close to 7 ms after noon, so NTPd will set the local clock accordingly. It's not perfect, because the round-trip time might not be symmetrical, but it's close enough for most practical purposes. Using WiFi might add a bit of delay, but as long as the delay is symmetric, it won't be a problem.
The key for NTP is that it's a client-server protocol, so the client knows approximately how long the message was in transit. A one-way radio beacon like WWV doesn't have that, but that also means WWV doesn't need to receive transmissions from clients to function.
GPS is even fancier. A GPS satellite transmits not just a time beacon, but also a message with the satellite's location when the beacon was sent. Once a receiver has learned the locations and delays for at least four satellites, it can start to determine its own location. First, it will compare the satellites' locations and delays relative to other satellites to figure out where the receiver could possibly be on Earth. Then it can use that location to determine the exact delay for each satellite's signal, which is then used (just like in NTP) to compute the actual time.
GPS is superior to both NTP and WWV, because it is still a one-way communication system, but also isn't subject to any network traffic or assumptions about symmetry. With no prior knowledge, a GPS receiver can accurately compute both its location and time.
Distribution is a service.
When economists talk about "distribution", then mean the distribution and allocation of goods and services. Economists don't care what logo is on the truck making shipments. They care about how many trucks are going to what places.
Capitalists see subsidies as Lemon Socialism. Liberals see subsides as a form of capitalism. The capitalists have a better claim: The TARP bank bailout, and the auto industry bailout were both passed by Democrats, and opposed by Republicans.
Partisanship somehow changes the merits of an argument? That's an... interesting... approach to debate. Politics aside, it's worth noting that the auto bailout ended up costing the US government about $14 billion, while TARP as a whole (including the auto bailout) actually ended up turning a $86 billion profit overall. All together, the program seems to have done exactly what it was intended to do: reduce the shock of the financial crisis, stabilizing the economy to protect against further snowball effects.
Your partisan analysis of subsidies also doesn't mesh with a socialist perspective. To a socialist, subsidies are a governmental decision that something risky is of such benefit to society that the risk (financial or otherwise) should be offset. In a totalitarian state like the USSR or DPRK, the state-run company in that area would just go order work on that project... and open the door to corruption because the state will ensure the project's success, no matter how poorly it's managed or how wasteful it may be. With private industry, however, the subsidies have to be financial offsets, either ensuring a minimum income or covering some expenses outright.
What's offensive to a socialist is the use of subsidies and financial incentives to support projects that aren't directly in the public interest. For example, I know of a particular company that promised to upgrade their factory in a small town, but only if they got a nice tax cut for a few decades (similar to a more-publicized event). While that made for nice headlines about "creating jobs", it hurt the town in the long run. Since the company's normal taxes were a significant percentage of the town's budget, local projects actually lost funding in order to keep the town's budget balanced. Sure, some folks got a new shiny office building, but the high school roof started collapsing.
Unfortunately, that's been a recurring theme with American government policies lately. A notable example is the coal industry, which is subsidized by about $850 million annually, yet only employs about 77,000 people. That's about an $11,000 cost per person per year, ostensibly to keep those 77,000 jobs. The question is, of course, whether we need those jobs as a society. To a socialist, that $11,000 would likely be better spent funding career education and training to support other industries (or even bringing new skills to the coal industry), with the key benefit being that even if the coal industry collapsed, the society would still have a larger wealth of skills to continue progress.
Again, it's a matter of philosophy. The socialists want societal improvement to be the primary goal of government, with industries benefiting indirectly. Who actually owns the company is relatively insignificant at this point.
That's an oversimplified description. Socialism isn't just that the government owns the means of production, but also that it is responsible for the distribution of the produced goods and services. Since that's also the much larger and more difficult part of the philosophy, it's also the part that should be discussed most thoroughly.
In essence, any government that collects taxes already has a government-owned means of production. The government produces tax income. How it then uses those taxes is the subject of endless debate, and those of us who want a bit more socialism want to see distributions that focus on the socialist philosophies. We want to see less focus on propping up private industry, and more focus on community projects. We want less subsidies for corporate expansion, and more grants for anyone to claim.
In short, the socialist influence the young people look for is for government to aim to improve life outside of work, rather than dumping resources into privately-managed companies that have primarily just increased inequality over the past few decades.
Eh.... I'm very curious as to precisely how the poll was conducted. This is one of those things where the precise wording is important, and the subject is vulnerable to a lot of bias.
As an example, I will use my own views. I'm well aware of how poorly socialism has fared historically, but I'm also aware of how the implementation of socialist ideals has always been hindered by human corruption and greed, just as those same vices have caused inequality and suffering in capitalist societies. If I were asked whether I'd want to live under a socialist government, my response would be a resounding "no".
However, if asked whether I would be in favor of socialism as a legislative doctrine, I would have to answer "yes". I have seen significant evidence that governmental structure can actually run social services decently, if the human corruption can be adequately checked in the system design. Philosophically, I believe that we as a society should work to support the whole society, rather than seeking personal hegemony.
To borrow a phrase, capitalism is the worst system, except for everything else we've tried. There are certainly some good ideas in socialist systems, but they rely on an awful lot of trust. Capitalism assumes no trust, but brings its own collection of faults. I think an ideal system would draw on both ideologies (and others), with careful thought toward how the system can be exploited in the future.
One way that balance can be acheived is by using technology to monitor and control governmental services, filling the role that bureaucracy does today. It is much easier to design a "fair" computer than it is to ask a human to be "fair", because it's relatively straightforward to have computers explicitly ignore certain input.
That means we need to educate our children not just on civics, but on security, philosophy, history, and technology, as well.... We're doomed.
Germany was quite peaceful in 1939, thanks to its strong military and authoritarian government. It was all those other, weaker countries that had that nasty war, mostly because they weren't strong enough to repel invaders.
Trump is a big fan of that German ideology, so it makes perfect sense he'd want to replicate their history here.
You have a strange idea of "efficiency".
The "efficiency" to which I refer is the coefficient of performance, which is more accurately the efficiency of just a part of the larger thermodynamic system. To physicists who only work in closed systems, it's an infuriating misuse of terms. To an engineer who understands that open and closed systems are different and are measured differently, it's perfectly fine. That's also why it's only an "apparent" violation of thermodynamics... looking at a system large enough to be closed, the whole thing is still increasing entropy, keeping the universe happy.
Nuclear reactors don't have a heat pump, what would be the purpose?
The steam loop in a nuclear power plant essentially forms a heat pump system, transferring heat from the primary coolant or reactor itself to the turbines and cooling towers (and then the water/air around the facility). The only notable difference between the power plant's cycle and a home A/C system is that the power plant uses a turbine to extract energy from the working fluid, rather than just dissipating the energy through a radiator.
In relation to the power a plant produces: zero.
Which would mean their CoP is infinitely large, which is substantially more than the "2 to 6" I normally consider.
An interesting fact is that heat pumps (like home air conditioners, refrigerators, or nuclear power plants) are actually in the range of 200% to 600% efficient, apparently violating that wonderful law. For a given amount of energy expended, they can actually move 2 to 6 times* that amount of energy across the pump.
Now, this is still not a closed system, so it's perfectly fine to have small-scale violations. The total entropy in the closed system (including both sides of the pump, and the energy supply for the pump) still increases as the pump itself isn't 100% efficient in moving the working fluid.
* I recall the "2 to 6 times" figure as a rule of thumb... but I don't actually know how it compares to the heat pump system in a nuclear reactor, whose scale is far larger than a home A/C system. I would love to know the power consumption of a nuclear facility's coolant pumps.
It's a terrible summary.
The problem is that the water is chilled... but it's chilled by running it through colder water, usually pulled from a lake or a stream. Usually this isn't a problem, because the waste heat doesn't disrupt the ecosystem too much.
Right now, however, the environment is so warm that adding the waste heat would push temperatures above acceptable levels, killing the local ecosystem. Instead, the reactors are shut down to minimize the amount of heat they have to dissipate.
...and it's just as effective, too.
Sure, that VPN provider says it's in $COUNTRY, and your exit IP address might be from that location... but what about their billing servers, company headquarters, or any other records they feel like keeping on you? If they break their own privacy policy, in whose jurisdiction can you file a lawsuit?
Using a VPN for "privacy" is just giving your data to someone else instead of your local ISP. Do you really trust that provider more, enough to hand them control of your network traffic?
There are a few reasonable uses for a VPN (besides remote network access, as the technology was made for). It's critical for activists in locations where they are directly targeted. It's a vital tool for testing access and routing issues. I'll even say that avoiding region limits is a reasonable (if not always legal) use... but it's not really an effective privacy tool in any way, and certainly not necessary for day-to-day browsing by the vast majority of average users.
As a user who chooses neither Outlook or Thunderbird, here's my list of "killer features" in Outlook:
Similarly, here's my list for Thunderbird:
Personally, I use GMail, which comes with a whole separate list of pros and cons, which basically boils down to "integrates well, but only with Google products", but it works for me.
If you're in a corporate Exchange environment, Outlook is the best integration you'll get. If you run your own non-Exchange mail server, Thunderbird is pretty darned good. If you're lazy and don't care to ever think about email, GMail is probably all you need.
No, I meant that quite literally. We had interns write the init scripts for our product (a multi-million-dollar system of embedded Linux-based components), because the "real developers" were writing "real software".
In our product, the exact capabilities of each component depend on what other components are available. Through a "interesting" architecture, that discovery happens at startup, with a command-line constructed in the init scripts which were, as noted, written by interns with all of the real-world experience you'd expect from interns.
If a component didn't boot in the right order, it effectively doesn't exist. If the external network is down, you may as well not have one. If you reboot a component after a failed startup, that component will expect behavior in other components that won't actually be provided. If a service or a component crashes, other components will simply hang.
Usually, the recommended solution for any problem is "try rebooting everything again, and pay close attention to the 3-page startup procedure".
Now, I'm not suggesting that systemd will solve these architecture problems on its own, but the few components that have been upgraded are much easier to trace and manage dependencies on.
Have you actually seen the Internet protocols?
BGP was designed on a pair of napkins. SMTP is a pile of hacks on top of workarounds laid over a protocol that was never supposed to handle important messages. HTTP has evolved to become the de facto face of the Internet... and a large portion of its traffic is just a wrapper around JSON data because JavaScript doesn't get raw socket access. It's taken three tries to get hostname resolution to its current state, and even that's rife with problems.
I love the Internet as much as the next guy, but frankly, it only works because a lot of people have made a lot of band-aid patches to accommodate the last four decades of problems. Payment processing is one thing I'm quite happy to keep in an ivory tower, knowing that if someone screws it up, there's a whole army of lawyers coming to make their life awful.
Now, this isn't to say there aren't any problems in the traditional payment-processing systems... quite the contrary. There are a lot of issues with those systems, but the folks running those systems usually have a greater financial interest in keeping those systems running smoothly than they have in exploiting the problems for immediate profit.