The Acme Corporation would like to remind you that although Mr. Coyote is one of our best customers, he merely assembles our devices—often incorrectly—and has no part in their design.
The sag between half-cycles of the 60 Hz signal results in 120 flashes per second. The duration of the inrush is just a period in which the light is not as bright, which means your flicker-fusion threshold is at a higher frequency... but still not as high as 120 Hz, I wouldn't think.
No, this is not really how things are supposed to work. Congress is supposed to be relatively slow to action so that the judiciary has time to check and balance. Congress was never intended to be a nearly full-time job....
Yes, dividing responsibility partially mitigates the problem. That said, it does not fully mitigate it. In situations like this, the potential attacker would almost certainly spend time figuring out which coworkers are on their side, feeling them out and grooming them for their jobs as your helpers long before mentioning the idea of inserting a Trojan app.
The only thing that significantly reduces the attack surface involves chain-of-command vetting, but this requires a sufficient number of people up your chain of command who understand the process enough to make the right decisions. This is not always a given.
A sysadmin almost always needs to be able to install internal software specific to the company/department, which would be signed by an internal development team. Therefore, any OS that makes it impossible for the admins to add additional authorized signing certs to the system would be a non-starter for almost any real-world use.
About the only things that might work in the real world are requiring multiple admins to sign off on such a change (which would only partially mitigate the problem by requiring a conspiracy of n people to commit such an act) or requiring every individual user to understand certs and how to add trust in a signing cert (which unfortunately creates near-infinite opportunity for social engineering attacks unless you are a small team where everyone knows all of the admins by name).
Such separation of access is fundamentally impossible. You either trust the admin or you don't. Anyone who says otherwise is simply kidding him/herself.
The admin is responsible for installing software. In a matter of minutes, I can patch any app to silently write a copy of each file that the user accesses in a shared location or upload it to a server somewhere. If I'm the admin and can therefore cause those other people to run my Trojan version of the app, then their data is compromised.
Well, you can ask someone who installs them. They'll probably have a positive bias....they install them. They're faster and easier to put in....and aren't likely to leak for several years, meaning that he's either 1) not experienced, 2)has seen it and minimizes it, 3) has seen it, knows its bad, but gets a kick back or other incentive from the company or his employer, 4) or they actually are good walls.... Regardless, will I get an honest opinion? Probably only if I am related to the person in someway.
This is why you take multiple bids and ask each one to explain why they took the approach that they did before making the final decision.
While you're at it, seek out a retired construction worker (who has no financial motive one way or the other), and ask that person, "If this were your house, would you do this?" If his or her answer is "no", then your answer should also be "no".
Of course, the very fact that the journalist calls it an "online identity" makes it clear that the journalist doesn't understand a lick of what he is writing.
Oh, no. That choice of words was almost certainly deliberate, and provided by the government. By using the words "online identity", they can charge him with identity theft, and they'll have more of a chance of getting extradition from Russia. Why? Because "identity theft" sounds a lot more criminal than "read the guy's password off the Post-it on the underside of his keyboard."
Your eyes are quite unusual. Most people can't see 120 flashes per second (two flashes per 60 Hz cycle).... It must drive you absolutely nuts watching TV.:-)
In all seriousness, it probably isn't the flickering, but rather vibration of the filament. Is this near a heating duct, perhaps?
Then you have defective lights. The specification for U.S. mains voltage is 120 +/- 5% VAC, which means the voltage on the grid is allowed to swing between 114 VAC and 126 VAC. Any hardware that cannot tolerate at least that much swing without seriously misbehaving is unsuitable for real-world use.
Conversely throwing money at solar and wind energy when it's not economically viable just distorts the market and leads to wasted resources (a pessimistic view, yes, but accurate to the progress thus far).
Incredibly pessimistic, but not entirely unjustified. As far as I can tell, the primary reason that solar and wind power is so expensive is that the economies of scale are not on its side. Building one experimental solar tower is expensive because your design costs are distributed across a single production unit. However, assuming it works, it is relatively cheap to build a hundred more just like it. Thus, throwing money at solar and wind energy is the only thing that will ever make it financially viable. That said, what we need, at this point, is to throw lots of money at the production side, not the research side.
John Q. Private is currently at mile marker 23 on highway 2, proceeding at 65 mph in an easterly direction, with 100 miles of range remaining.
Say I am John Q. Private. Can you give me a scenario where I might care that someone has this information?
When the speed limit is 55.
Alternatively, when someone correlates driving patterns with murders and determines that you were parked in the parking lots of restaurants that were within walking distance of three unsolved murders. Can you prove you were eating? The whole time?
Yes, I can think of a lot of scenarios where you might care.
The problem is the type of science that Republicans tend to fund. If it has a benefit to the military or the defense industry, it gets funding. If it doesn't, no money for you. This is something of an exaggeration, I know, but that seems to be the main focus for science funding when they're in office.
The Democrats, by contrast, might give less money in total, but they tend to give that money in areas that benefit all of humanity—solar and wind energy research, for example.
Or at least that's my perception. Feel free to present evidence to the contrary.
GSM is not infrastructure. GSM is architecture. Whenever companies create shell organizations to do the actual buildout, it is almost invariably a colossal failure because:
None of the companies want to pay the money to maintain the infrastructure.
All of the companies find ways to oversell the infrastructure.
The shell company is never structured in a way that allows them to charge those companies for the services.
The extra hassle of that additional company means that the companies then try to find ways to avoid working with that company when they build out their next generation infrastructure to replace it.
The result is a tragedy of the commons, and the infrastructure ends up being no better than when individual private companies build it themselves, and often worse because those private companies now have an external entity to blame when people complain.
Roughly a day after 9/11, Bush screwed up and blamed Iraq in a press conference. IIRC, he quickly corrected himself, but it was obvious even then that he would be using 9/11 as an excuse to invade Iraq.
One thought that occurs to me is that men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better. By 2014, electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button.
Not a total miss. If you haven't seen these, they you haven't been in the right office buildings. Okay, so they're mostly backed by either fluorescent lights or LEDs, and the panels themselves don't glow, per se, but the basic idea is valid. It also reminds me of the LED panels that are sometimes used in newer TV setups.
Jets of compressed air will also lift land vehicles off the highways, which, among other things, will minimize paving problems. Smooth earth or level lawns will do as well as pavements. Bridges will also be of less importance, since cars will be capable of crossing water on their jets, though local ordinances will discourage the practice.
Yeah, that's a miss. It never made it out of military use to the civilian world, and it already existed in the military world at the time of this prediction.
For short-range travel, moving sidewalks (with benches on either side, standing room in the center) will be making their appearance in downtown sections. They will be raised above the traffic.
s/downtown/airport/. And non-moving elevated sidewalks (pedestrian bridges) are actually becoming pretty common these days. So not entirely a miss. The real miss is the assumption that anyone would still care about the downtown anymore.
Traffic will continue (on several levels in some places) only because all parking will be off-street and because at least 80 per cent of truck deliveries will be to certain fixed centers at the city's rim.
The last part... only in Venice.... That said, AFAIK, most parking in major cities is off-street, statistically.
Compressed air tubes will carry goods and materials over local stretches, and the switching devices that will place specific shipments in specific destinations will be one of the city's marvels.
That's a miss. Turns out trucks are cheaper than redundant infrastructure.
As for television, wall screens will have replaced the ordinary set; but transparent cubes will be making their appearance in which three-dimensional viewing will be possible. In fact, one popular exhibit at the 2014 World's Fair will be such a 3-D TV, built life-size, in which ballet performances will be seen. The cube will slowly revolve for viewing from all angles.
Let's call that one half right. 3D TV is starting to become available in households, though the viewing angle is limited, and it still requires you to wear glasses. Flat panels have largely replaced CRTs, though only a small percentage of them are actually mounted on walls.
There will, therefore, be a worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth control by rational and humane methods and, by 2014, it will undoubtedly have taken serious effect. The rate of increase of population will have slackened*but, I suspect, not sufficiently.
Have you looked at birth rates in developed nations? He pretty much nailed this one, notwithstanding the lack of a formal propaganda drive....
Long answer: Lack of competition in service providers, compounded by the expense of building infrastructure covering all that "flyover" territory where you've got 0.2 people per square mile, if you're lucky.
So why do we still not have anything faster than 6 Mbps DSL in lots of places right smack in the middle of the Silicon Valley? It has nothing to do with density and everything to do with for-profit companies having no real incentive to improve their infrastructure while they can keep milking the existing infrastructure for all it's worth.
I know it's sacrilege in the U.S. to suggest that some things really should be handled by the government but infrastructure really should be.
You're half right. Infrastructure should be initially built by the government, but immediately spun off as a nonprofit corporation, a la TVA. This has the advantage of taking the profit motive out of the equation, while at least reducing the specter of government control, censorship, spying, etc.
The UC system is a freaking train wreck. I'm deliberately ignoring UC and a handful of other ostensibly high-prestige school systems.
To give a counterexample, the university where I did my undergrad degree keeps combining programs and making administrators go back to teaching, because then they can cut out the adjunct instructors that would otherwise have been needed to cover the administrators' reduced course load.
You're right that the people at the top are getting paid too much in many cases. In large part, this is caused by poor decision-making by the people who choose them. Instead of hiring from within, some universities try to poach their presidents and chancellors from other universities or companies, resulting in an ever-escalating pay scale and ever-decreasing levels of loyalty to the institution. Worse, it leads to ever-decreasing levels of competence; they know they're just using the school as a stepping stone to a bigger school, so they don't have to care about the fallout from their poor decisions.
If you want to choose a good university that isn't overcharging you, ask them where they got their chancellor. If he or she is a former professor at that university, go to that school. This is true for many reasons, but the biggest reason is that they have loyalty to the university and pride in it. They're not doing it for the money, but because they really want the university to be the best it can be. Thus, those folks invariably do a much better job than outside candidates. Having seen many, many chancellors come and go, IMO, the strength of that correlation couldn't be clearer.
And when you find out that they've hired somebody like Janet Napolitano... you know they've gone completely off the deep end, and the school's leadership will be an utter train wreck. Go somewhere else. Just saying.
They're higher than professor salaries, but not by enough to be relevant. We're talking maybe half again more, and again, barely keeping up with inflation. There are exceptions (the presidents of many large colleges, for example), but they're the exception, not the rule.
The demand isn't, precisely speaking, fixed, but the demand is not changing that much. As a percentage of the population, it has slowly crept from about 45% to about 70% of the population over the course of 60 years, which is more than enough time for the market to readily meet that demand without triggering significant inflation. And, of course, the population has gone up, but IMO that really doesn't count.
The point I was trying to make is that demand isn't based on the cost; it is based on the knowledge that without a college education, you can't get a job doing anything interesting or a job that pays well. Therefore, the demand isn't tied to the cost except insofar as the lack of availability of low-cost colleges could defer the spending for a period of time, but pent-up demand is still demand. Thus, effectively, demand is pretty much fixed.
The supply is fixed in that in order to recruit more teachers in the fields that actually drive people to go to college—high tech, for example—you have to be able to outpay industry, or at least be moderately competitive. This turns out to be harder than it sounds. Also, in order to have a functioning university, you have to have a certain number of students just to be able to afford enough teachers to cover the required curriculum to become/remain accredited. And until you're accredited, your degree isn't worth anything, which makes it remarkably difficult to get enough students to start a new college or university. It's a really hard chicken-and-egg problem. For this reason, new universities (that are not branches of other universities) appear fairly infrequently.
Slashdot Mirror
The Acme Corporation would like to remind you that although Mr. Coyote is one of our best customers, he merely assembles our devices—often incorrectly—and has no part in their design.
Sincerely,
The Acme Corporation
The sag between half-cycles of the 60 Hz signal results in 120 flashes per second. The duration of the inrush is just a period in which the light is not as bright, which means your flicker-fusion threshold is at a higher frequency... but still not as high as 120 Hz, I wouldn't think.
No, this is not really how things are supposed to work. Congress is supposed to be relatively slow to action so that the judiciary has time to check and balance. Congress was never intended to be a nearly full-time job....
Yes, dividing responsibility partially mitigates the problem. That said, it does not fully mitigate it. In situations like this, the potential attacker would almost certainly spend time figuring out which coworkers are on their side, feeling them out and grooming them for their jobs as your helpers long before mentioning the idea of inserting a Trojan app.
The only thing that significantly reduces the attack surface involves chain-of-command vetting, but this requires a sufficient number of people up your chain of command who understand the process enough to make the right decisions. This is not always a given.
A sysadmin almost always needs to be able to install internal software specific to the company/department, which would be signed by an internal development team. Therefore, any OS that makes it impossible for the admins to add additional authorized signing certs to the system would be a non-starter for almost any real-world use.
About the only things that might work in the real world are requiring multiple admins to sign off on such a change (which would only partially mitigate the problem by requiring a conspiracy of n people to commit such an act) or requiring every individual user to understand certs and how to add trust in a signing cert (which unfortunately creates near-infinite opportunity for social engineering attacks unless you are a small team where everyone knows all of the admins by name).
Such separation of access is fundamentally impossible. You either trust the admin or you don't. Anyone who says otherwise is simply kidding him/herself.
The admin is responsible for installing software. In a matter of minutes, I can patch any app to silently write a copy of each file that the user accesses in a shared location or upload it to a server somewhere. If I'm the admin and can therefore cause those other people to run my Trojan version of the app, then their data is compromised.
This is why you take multiple bids and ask each one to explain why they took the approach that they did before making the final decision.
While you're at it, seek out a retired construction worker (who has no financial motive one way or the other), and ask that person, "If this were your house, would you do this?" If his or her answer is "no", then your answer should also be "no".
Oh, no. That choice of words was almost certainly deliberate, and provided by the government. By using the words "online identity", they can charge him with identity theft, and they'll have more of a chance of getting extradition from Russia. Why? Because "identity theft" sounds a lot more criminal than "read the guy's password off the Post-it on the underside of his keyboard."
Your eyes are quite unusual. Most people can't see 120 flashes per second (two flashes per 60 Hz cycle).... It must drive you absolutely nuts watching TV. :-)
In all seriousness, it probably isn't the flickering, but rather vibration of the filament. Is this near a heating duct, perhaps?
Let me guess. Cheap CFLs?
Then you have defective lights. The specification for U.S. mains voltage is 120 +/- 5% VAC, which means the voltage on the grid is allowed to swing between 114 VAC and 126 VAC. Any hardware that cannot tolerate at least that much swing without seriously misbehaving is unsuitable for real-world use.
What's the phrase? Once is chance, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern.
Incredibly pessimistic, but not entirely unjustified. As far as I can tell, the primary reason that solar and wind power is so expensive is that the economies of scale are not on its side. Building one experimental solar tower is expensive because your design costs are distributed across a single production unit. However, assuming it works, it is relatively cheap to build a hundred more just like it. Thus, throwing money at solar and wind energy is the only thing that will ever make it financially viable. That said, what we need, at this point, is to throw lots of money at the production side, not the research side.
When the speed limit is 55.
Alternatively, when someone correlates driving patterns with murders and determines that you were parked in the parking lots of restaurants that were within walking distance of three unsolved murders. Can you prove you were eating? The whole time?
Yes, I can think of a lot of scenarios where you might care.
The problem is the type of science that Republicans tend to fund. If it has a benefit to the military or the defense industry, it gets funding. If it doesn't, no money for you. This is something of an exaggeration, I know, but that seems to be the main focus for science funding when they're in office.
The Democrats, by contrast, might give less money in total, but they tend to give that money in areas that benefit all of humanity—solar and wind energy research, for example.
Or at least that's my perception. Feel free to present evidence to the contrary.
GSM is not infrastructure. GSM is architecture. Whenever companies create shell organizations to do the actual buildout, it is almost invariably a colossal failure because:
The result is a tragedy of the commons, and the infrastructure ends up being no better than when individual private companies build it themselves, and often worse because those private companies now have an external entity to blame when people complain.
Roughly a day after 9/11, Bush screwed up and blamed Iraq in a press conference. IIRC, he quickly corrected himself, but it was obvious even then that he would be using 9/11 as an excuse to invade Iraq.
Because none of that farming country has fast Internet service, either.
Not a total miss. If you haven't seen these, they you haven't been in the right office buildings. Okay, so they're mostly backed by either fluorescent lights or LEDs, and the panels themselves don't glow, per se, but the basic idea is valid. It also reminds me of the LED panels that are sometimes used in newer TV setups.
Yeah, that's a miss. It never made it out of military use to the civilian world, and it already existed in the military world at the time of this prediction.
s/downtown/airport/. And non-moving elevated sidewalks (pedestrian bridges) are actually becoming pretty common these days. So not entirely a miss. The real miss is the assumption that anyone would still care about the downtown anymore.
The last part... only in Venice.... That said, AFAIK, most parking in major cities is off-street, statistically.
That's a miss. Turns out trucks are cheaper than redundant infrastructure.
Let's call that one half right. 3D TV is starting to become available in households, though the viewing angle is limited, and it still requires you to wear glasses. Flat panels have largely replaced CRTs, though only a small percentage of them are actually mounted on walls.
Have you looked at birth rates in developed nations? He pretty much nailed this one, notwithstanding the lack of a formal propaganda drive....
So why do we still not have anything faster than 6 Mbps DSL in lots of places right smack in the middle of the Silicon Valley? It has nothing to do with density and everything to do with for-profit companies having no real incentive to improve their infrastructure while they can keep milking the existing infrastructure for all it's worth.
You're half right. Infrastructure should be initially built by the government, but immediately spun off as a nonprofit corporation, a la TVA. This has the advantage of taking the profit motive out of the equation, while at least reducing the specter of government control, censorship, spying, etc.
The UC system is a freaking train wreck. I'm deliberately ignoring UC and a handful of other ostensibly high-prestige school systems.
To give a counterexample, the university where I did my undergrad degree keeps combining programs and making administrators go back to teaching, because then they can cut out the adjunct instructors that would otherwise have been needed to cover the administrators' reduced course load.
You're right that the people at the top are getting paid too much in many cases. In large part, this is caused by poor decision-making by the people who choose them. Instead of hiring from within, some universities try to poach their presidents and chancellors from other universities or companies, resulting in an ever-escalating pay scale and ever-decreasing levels of loyalty to the institution. Worse, it leads to ever-decreasing levels of competence; they know they're just using the school as a stepping stone to a bigger school, so they don't have to care about the fallout from their poor decisions.
If you want to choose a good university that isn't overcharging you, ask them where they got their chancellor. If he or she is a former professor at that university, go to that school. This is true for many reasons, but the biggest reason is that they have loyalty to the university and pride in it. They're not doing it for the money, but because they really want the university to be the best it can be. Thus, those folks invariably do a much better job than outside candidates. Having seen many, many chancellors come and go, IMO, the strength of that correlation couldn't be clearer.
And when you find out that they've hired somebody like Janet Napolitano... you know they've gone completely off the deep end, and the school's leadership will be an utter train wreck. Go somewhere else. Just saying.
They're higher than professor salaries, but not by enough to be relevant. We're talking maybe half again more, and again, barely keeping up with inflation. There are exceptions (the presidents of many large colleges, for example), but they're the exception, not the rule.
The demand isn't, precisely speaking, fixed, but the demand is not changing that much. As a percentage of the population, it has slowly crept from about 45% to about 70% of the population over the course of 60 years, which is more than enough time for the market to readily meet that demand without triggering significant inflation. And, of course, the population has gone up, but IMO that really doesn't count.
The point I was trying to make is that demand isn't based on the cost; it is based on the knowledge that without a college education, you can't get a job doing anything interesting or a job that pays well. Therefore, the demand isn't tied to the cost except insofar as the lack of availability of low-cost colleges could defer the spending for a period of time, but pent-up demand is still demand. Thus, effectively, demand is pretty much fixed.
The supply is fixed in that in order to recruit more teachers in the fields that actually drive people to go to college—high tech, for example—you have to be able to outpay industry, or at least be moderately competitive. This turns out to be harder than it sounds. Also, in order to have a functioning university, you have to have a certain number of students just to be able to afford enough teachers to cover the required curriculum to become/remain accredited. And until you're accredited, your degree isn't worth anything, which makes it remarkably difficult to get enough students to start a new college or university. It's a really hard chicken-and-egg problem. For this reason, new universities (that are not branches of other universities) appear fairly infrequently.
For a moment there, I saw Meg Whitman and thought Carly Fiorina, and wanted some of what you were smoking.
Then I read it again and started thinking about it, and yeah, that sounds like a great idea. She could sell off the various divisions on eBay.