It is not necessary to understand the 'inner workings' of something to know how to operate it. It's been a long time since many manuals came with schematics. I don't need to understand Ohm's Law to use a computer, regardless of how many resistors are inside it. However, if you don't bother to read a manual for something (RTFM is a common acronym for a reason, and pride isn't an excuse), you get what's coming to you when the thing you think you're operating is doing something you wouldn't want if you knew better.
Ethically it's about intent. There is no way for an external actor to know if you intended something to be open or not. It is and should be assumed that open APs are open deliberately, because if you assumed open APs were all open accidentally and treated any access thereof as unauthorized use, then nobody could run open APs intended for anybody to use. And before you say nobody does that, in the first place, I do, in the second place, so do A TON of businesses, mostly coffee shops, but there are others. I know many public libraries and similar institutions do as well.
It is unreasonable to assume that something is open accidentally when so many others are open purposefully, and the only excuse offered is 'duh, I'm just too dumb and/or lazy to read the manual that would tell me exactly how I could run the hardware the way I want.' Fuck that.
Don't mess with those johnnies-come-lately that those others have mentioned above, wigle.net is the oldest and largest open database of access points, and they too have an Android app as well as many other clients.
Over 22 MILLION access points and counting, biatch.
You're not putting these pieces together rationally... clearly he is a pit viper that has somehow learned to use a keyboard... or worse, a mad scientist has created a neural interface for pit vipers to post on Slashdot... and he taught it English! Who knows what a pit viper that can read and write English on the internet is capable of!
I hate to agree with drinkypoo... ever... but I concur. Every time somebody drags out the 'but they didn't know what they were doing!' excuse it makes me want to deck somebody. If you have a car and wear the brakes down to nothing to the point where they don't work, you can't then say 'I didn't know that's how brakes worked!' and get out of jail free when you roll over somebody.
Stupidity is not a defense, ignorance is not an excuse. If you don't know how to operate something, don't operate it, because the liability is and should always be the operator's.
Hey, this may be news to you, but companies are made up of *gasp* individual people! All you need is a few people who want some extra cash, get them to work in concert abusing the access that naturally proceeds from their position in the organization, and *boom* malware in the distribution channels.
Yes, a conspiracy should be considered when there is a motive to ship 'bad' parts. Somebody wanted these things distributed, a factor not held in common with mere accidental defects that are missed now and then.
The issue probably was the procedure. Is it really a coincidence that these boards missed QA? I doubt it. If even one of the boards were caught before distribution, wouldn't there have been an investigation that would have stopped the rest? These boards were probably deliberately injected at intervals designed to pass through known gaps in the QA intervals, assuming the QA people weren't somehow complicit themselves.
I guess it just shows how effective the Chinese government propaganda machine is. Hopefully the Chinese themselves aren't as stupid as all the/.ers who are buying it.
The only thing that has ended is automatic redirects, but that doesn't do anything for the Google haters, so they will say that Google has completely caved without bothering to find out what's really going on. Here's a hint haters: Xinhua is the LAST PLACE you ever want to look to find out what's really going on.
Absolutely correct, no doubt the GP will ignore you. His 'relevant' analogy is the real strawman, as a person's house does not contain timestamped records of a person's every activity therein. A search warrant can only reveal the house as it is at the time of search, with a few possible educated extrapolations back in time for rough estimates of previous activity, but nothing like a timestamped log.
It would if the power involved wouldn't instantly cause any suspended water molecules to careen off to some other place than that occupied by the laser. When you're dealing with things that are powerful enough to bring down aircraft and missiles, some water vapor isn't a big problem. It's not the same as the headlights on your car.
The difference is that in the US, accusations like that have to backed up with something. In China it is done on false testimony and hearsay in show trials that, ironically, are frequently closed to the public, not to mention the charges are vague to begin with. (And damn near everything the PRC/CCP does is classified as a 'state secret'. The 'state secret' Shi Tao revealed was nothing more than a warning to the Chinese press not to make mention of the Tiananmen Square Massacre on its anniversary.)
Zeng Jinyan 'harmed state security' by documenting her life on a blog while searching her husband, Hu Jia, who had been 'disappeared' by Chinese authorities for AIDS and and environmental activism.
Dr. Wang Bingzhang's 'espionage and terrorism' were nothing more than he had founded political parties in opposition to the CCP. For this he was sentenced to life in prison.
Gao Zhisheng was 'disturbing public order' by being a successful human rights lawyer. In the US a charge like that would mean you were involved in a drunken brawl. In China it means you're defending peoples' human rights. Yeah, the US and China are so similar.
You are further ignoring their treatment. Bao Tong served his full sentence for his role in the events leading up to the Tiananmen Square Massacre, but then was forced into house arrest without trial or charges for any additional crime. To this day all his communications are monitored, his visitors screened, and he is followed by agents at all times. When his friend and fellow reform advocate Zhao Ziyang died, he was not only barred from the funeral, but also both he and his wife were beaten by agents for even trying to attend. His wife was hospitalized for three months as consequence. He was refused access to medical care because he refused to remove a flower from his clothes that symbolized his mourning for his friend.
Once you can find me cases like that in the US sometime in the last fifty years, come back and let me know.
I suppose you think the Russians have been perfect angels? No NEO/LEO operations by any nation have been particularly conservative in terms of debris, but your desire to be negative about US actions motivates you and makes you just as subjective as the paranoid bigots who jump on everything the Chinese do and magnify it just because they are Chinese.
Honey bee stings are actually some of the meekest out there, so the 'more harm to the attacker' is bunk. Asian giant hornets are so powerful that they kill more people than all other wildlife in Japan combined. European hornets are superior to European honey bees by a factor of a thousand. Honey bees are a result of natural selection, they are 'good enough' for their environment, but they are not superior, and other results of natural or artificial selection can and have overcome them.
"Burrying our heads in the sand" is, for better or worse, not only almost certainly succesfull approach in whatever catastrophe we might face, but also the only thing we could realistically accomplish. And for millions.
ROI is not high enough, it is not multipurpose. Off-world colonies can accomplish more than simple survival and redundancy, things which cannot be done here (or at least cannot be done with the same economies of scale). (See the Interplanetary Commerce section of Zubrin's Case for Mars.)
Caring is unimportant. Unfortunately people have started to deify the biosphere, and worse, have taken the view that it is static and should be static, regardless of what it takes to fight the agents of change (which are presently ourselves). Biospheres are not static. One may be better for one form of life and worse for another, and that is why life adapts. If anything should be pseudo-worshiped it is not the biosphere but adaptability. Prior to the oxygen catastrophe of the Siderian period the biosphere would not support any animal life as we know it. It took a previously small divergent segment of life to radically alter the atmosphere (sound familiar?) in order to change the biosphere such that previously impossible forms of life could be made possible. People today have such a poverty of imagination combined with a subjective bias for the familiar that they cannot imagine a biosphere without species X, and they cannot imagine a biosphere with the inclusion previously non-extant species Y. All biospheres, all species, are transitional states. Fighting change is futile and more artificial than anything mankind ever did with a factory.
Beware the argument from natural selection, it is not inherently superior. Natural selection produces things that work well enough, not things that work best. Natural selection produces life forms that can't feed themselves, such as the adult gypsy moth, others that die immediately after reproduction, such as the salmon, and lifeforms that die simply because their "design" sucks compared to others (honey bees' vs. hornets' stingers). Reproduction is the primary focus of natural selection, which is why some species are semelparitous.
As humans, we are capable of seeing beyond the 'good enough' mechanisms of natural selection. So yes, maybe you 'still are' that way, but I prefer to look ahead, and I don't think I'm the only one either. One of the causes of our recent economic problems has been the 'fiscal quarter' mentality, whereby only things that are expected in the next three months are important, and things years away are brushed aside. When 'years away' finally arrives, there is no longer enough time to do anything, the probability cone has narrowed and the potential actors are trapped in the disaster scenario they ignored until it was too late. Now I'm not big on the eco-cult, but the fundamental ideas of sustainable development are sound, and based on long term planning, not short term.
That sort of defeatism is not what brought our species out of the trees in the first place. Further, it is patently false.
Consider the immense and largely unexplored ecosystem in a square metre of soil outside your door.
Actually, if I were to bother with such mundanity, I would find that a) all life forms in that space are already named and cataloged; the life cycles observed, recorded and analyzed; their interrelationships studied, etc. b) all substances in that space would similarly be named and categorized; the processes which lead to their presence, ratios, and distribution studied, documented and analyzed and c) all of this would be tied together with larger volumes of knowledge and study about effects exterior to that space.
Immense and largely unexplored my ass. I might add further that the bulk of the useful information about terrestrial ecosystems has been gathered in the last two centuries, with information density and relative utility only increasing with time. In other words, it is demonstrable that as humanity advances it understands more things more quickly. Extraterrestrial environments could be understood in a fraction of the time, not only because of the nature of science and human understanding, but because such systems are doubtless more simple without innumerable teemings of life complicating things everywhere.
Betting on rarity really works well when it comes to levees and hurricanes, building design parameters and earthquakes, etc. I mean, sure, lots of people have died when the really rare events eventually happened, but I'm sure that means that going forward rare things won't actually happen anymore.~
While I think that humanity could survive another event on the level of the Chicxulub impact, I don't think that a larger event is survivable. There are also problems unique to humanity as an increasingly capable technological civilization, including problems that may not even be foreseen. Aside from potential anthropogenic biological and technological threats, there are also hypothetical threats from the outside, with the nasty possible combination of RKVs with the Prisoner's Dilemma.
No, scratch that, excavation is fucking expensive.
Go look up the costs of major transportation tunnel projects. Billions. Imagine the cost of putting habitable structures of any size down there... especially when you can just build up with no excavation cost. (The excavation cost is on top of the cost of all the structure itself. Even after you get all the dirt and rock out, you still need walls and support structure, just like any other building, not to mention all the finishings.)
Creating an independent extraterrestrial colony is a mammoth task, but it would be resilient to all possible extinction events below a level affecting more than one planet of the solar system. Any single planet solution is ultimately vulnerable to anything up to and including planetary events. When the entire species is at stake, cost-benefit analysis needs to be a bit broader in scope to match.
By all means, let us keep all our eggs in one basket and just wait patiently for some extinction event. That worked out well for the other 99% of life on earth over geologic time.
Rational adults compromise in terms of mutual consent, not tyranny, whether of the majority or otherwise. Ironic you should should trot out 'stealing' when you no doubt support the very thing, so long as you think it's done in some romanticized 'Robin Hood' fashion. As Cullen Hightower once said,
There's always somebody who is paid too much, and taxed too little - and it's always somebody else.
Slashdot Mirror
At a $35 price point, I would posit that any touchscreen could be categorized as 'shitty' although there is a chance that it will be 'sucktastic'.
I'll drink to that!
Ted Nugent bought them all.
It is not necessary to understand the 'inner workings' of something to know how to operate it. It's been a long time since many manuals came with schematics. I don't need to understand Ohm's Law to use a computer, regardless of how many resistors are inside it. However, if you don't bother to read a manual for something (RTFM is a common acronym for a reason, and pride isn't an excuse), you get what's coming to you when the thing you think you're operating is doing something you wouldn't want if you knew better.
Ethically it's about intent. There is no way for an external actor to know if you intended something to be open or not. It is and should be assumed that open APs are open deliberately, because if you assumed open APs were all open accidentally and treated any access thereof as unauthorized use, then nobody could run open APs intended for anybody to use. And before you say nobody does that, in the first place, I do, in the second place, so do A TON of businesses, mostly coffee shops, but there are others. I know many public libraries and similar institutions do as well.
It is unreasonable to assume that something is open accidentally when so many others are open purposefully, and the only excuse offered is 'duh, I'm just too dumb and/or lazy to read the manual that would tell me exactly how I could run the hardware the way I want.' Fuck that.
Don't mess with those johnnies-come-lately that those others have mentioned above, wigle.net is the oldest and largest open database of access points, and they too have an Android app as well as many other clients.
Over 22 MILLION access points and counting, biatch.
And remember kids, almost anything that blocks visible light blocks IR too.
You're not putting these pieces together rationally... clearly he is a pit viper that has somehow learned to use a keyboard... or worse, a mad scientist has created a neural interface for pit vipers to post on Slashdot... and he taught it English! Who knows what a pit viper that can read and write English on the internet is capable of!
I hate to agree with drinkypoo... ever... but I concur. Every time somebody drags out the 'but they didn't know what they were doing!' excuse it makes me want to deck somebody. If you have a car and wear the brakes down to nothing to the point where they don't work, you can't then say 'I didn't know that's how brakes worked!' and get out of jail free when you roll over somebody.
Stupidity is not a defense, ignorance is not an excuse. If you don't know how to operate something, don't operate it, because the liability is and should always be the operator's.
Hey, this may be news to you, but companies are made up of *gasp* individual people! All you need is a few people who want some extra cash, get them to work in concert abusing the access that naturally proceeds from their position in the organization, and *boom* malware in the distribution channels.
In other industries this happens all the time.
Yes, a conspiracy should be considered when there is a motive to ship 'bad' parts. Somebody wanted these things distributed, a factor not held in common with mere accidental defects that are missed now and then.
The issue probably was the procedure. Is it really a coincidence that these boards missed QA? I doubt it. If even one of the boards were caught before distribution, wouldn't there have been an investigation that would have stopped the rest? These boards were probably deliberately injected at intervals designed to pass through known gaps in the QA intervals, assuming the QA people weren't somehow complicit themselves.
I guess it just shows how effective the Chinese government propaganda machine is. Hopefully the Chinese themselves aren't as stupid as all the /.ers who are buying it.
The only thing that has ended is automatic redirects, but that doesn't do anything for the Google haters, so they will say that Google has completely caved without bothering to find out what's really going on. Here's a hint haters: Xinhua is the LAST PLACE you ever want to look to find out what's really going on.
Absolutely correct, no doubt the GP will ignore you. His 'relevant' analogy is the real strawman, as a person's house does not contain timestamped records of a person's every activity therein. A search warrant can only reveal the house as it is at the time of search, with a few possible educated extrapolations back in time for rough estimates of previous activity, but nothing like a timestamped log.
It would if the power involved wouldn't instantly cause any suspended water molecules to careen off to some other place than that occupied by the laser. When you're dealing with things that are powerful enough to bring down aircraft and missiles, some water vapor isn't a big problem. It's not the same as the headlights on your car.
The difference is that in the US, accusations like that have to backed up with something. In China it is done on false testimony and hearsay in show trials that, ironically, are frequently closed to the public, not to mention the charges are vague to begin with. (And damn near everything the PRC/CCP does is classified as a 'state secret'. The 'state secret' Shi Tao revealed was nothing more than a warning to the Chinese press not to make mention of the Tiananmen Square Massacre on its anniversary.)
Zeng Jinyan 'harmed state security' by documenting her life on a blog while searching her husband, Hu Jia, who had been 'disappeared' by Chinese authorities for AIDS and and environmental activism.
Dr. Wang Bingzhang's 'espionage and terrorism' were nothing more than he had founded political parties in opposition to the CCP. For this he was sentenced to life in prison.
Gao Zhisheng was 'disturbing public order' by being a successful human rights lawyer. In the US a charge like that would mean you were involved in a drunken brawl. In China it means you're defending peoples' human rights. Yeah, the US and China are so similar.
You are further ignoring their treatment. Bao Tong served his full sentence for his role in the events leading up to the Tiananmen Square Massacre, but then was forced into house arrest without trial or charges for any additional crime. To this day all his communications are monitored, his visitors screened, and he is followed by agents at all times. When his friend and fellow reform advocate Zhao Ziyang died, he was not only barred from the funeral, but also both he and his wife were beaten by agents for even trying to attend. His wife was hospitalized for three months as consequence. He was refused access to medical care because he refused to remove a flower from his clothes that symbolized his mourning for his friend.
Once you can find me cases like that in the US sometime in the last fifty years, come back and let me know.
I suppose you think the Russians have been perfect angels? No NEO/LEO operations by any nation have been particularly conservative in terms of debris, but your desire to be negative about US actions motivates you and makes you just as subjective as the paranoid bigots who jump on everything the Chinese do and magnify it just because they are Chinese.
"Burrying our heads in the sand" is, for better or worse, not only almost certainly succesfull approach in whatever catastrophe we might face, but also the only thing we could realistically accomplish. And for millions.
ROI is not high enough, it is not multipurpose. Off-world colonies can accomplish more than simple survival and redundancy, things which cannot be done here (or at least cannot be done with the same economies of scale). (See the Interplanetary Commerce section of Zubrin's Case for Mars.)
Caring is unimportant. Unfortunately people have started to deify the biosphere, and worse, have taken the view that it is static and should be static, regardless of what it takes to fight the agents of change (which are presently ourselves). Biospheres are not static. One may be better for one form of life and worse for another, and that is why life adapts. If anything should be pseudo-worshiped it is not the biosphere but adaptability. Prior to the oxygen catastrophe of the Siderian period the biosphere would not support any animal life as we know it. It took a previously small divergent segment of life to radically alter the atmosphere (sound familiar?) in order to change the biosphere such that previously impossible forms of life could be made possible. People today have such a poverty of imagination combined with a subjective bias for the familiar that they cannot imagine a biosphere without species X, and they cannot imagine a biosphere with the inclusion previously non-extant species Y. All biospheres, all species, are transitional states. Fighting change is futile and more artificial than anything mankind ever did with a factory.
Beware the argument from natural selection, it is not inherently superior. Natural selection produces things that work well enough, not things that work best. Natural selection produces life forms that can't feed themselves, such as the adult gypsy moth, others that die immediately after reproduction, such as the salmon, and lifeforms that die simply because their "design" sucks compared to others (honey bees' vs. hornets' stingers). Reproduction is the primary focus of natural selection, which is why some species are semelparitous.
As humans, we are capable of seeing beyond the 'good enough' mechanisms of natural selection. So yes, maybe you 'still are' that way, but I prefer to look ahead, and I don't think I'm the only one either. One of the causes of our recent economic problems has been the 'fiscal quarter' mentality, whereby only things that are expected in the next three months are important, and things years away are brushed aside. When 'years away' finally arrives, there is no longer enough time to do anything, the probability cone has narrowed and the potential actors are trapped in the disaster scenario they ignored until it was too late. Now I'm not big on the eco-cult, but the fundamental ideas of sustainable development are sound, and based on long term planning, not short term.
Consider the immense and largely unexplored ecosystem in a square metre of soil outside your door.
Actually, if I were to bother with such mundanity, I would find that a) all life forms in that space are already named and cataloged; the life cycles observed, recorded and analyzed; their interrelationships studied, etc. b) all substances in that space would similarly be named and categorized; the processes which lead to their presence, ratios, and distribution studied, documented and analyzed and c) all of this would be tied together with larger volumes of knowledge and study about effects exterior to that space.
Immense and largely unexplored my ass. I might add further that the bulk of the useful information about terrestrial ecosystems has been gathered in the last two centuries, with information density and relative utility only increasing with time. In other words, it is demonstrable that as humanity advances it understands more things more quickly. Extraterrestrial environments could be understood in a fraction of the time, not only because of the nature of science and human understanding, but because such systems are doubtless more simple without innumerable teemings of life complicating things everywhere.
Betting on rarity really works well when it comes to levees and hurricanes, building design parameters and earthquakes, etc. I mean, sure, lots of people have died when the really rare events eventually happened, but I'm sure that means that going forward rare things won't actually happen anymore.~
While I think that humanity could survive another event on the level of the Chicxulub impact, I don't think that a larger event is survivable. There are also problems unique to humanity as an increasingly capable technological civilization, including problems that may not even be foreseen. Aside from potential anthropogenic biological and technological threats, there are also hypothetical threats from the outside, with the nasty possible combination of RKVs with the Prisoner's Dilemma.
Excavation is expensive.
No, scratch that, excavation is fucking expensive.
Go look up the costs of major transportation tunnel projects. Billions. Imagine the cost of putting habitable structures of any size down there... especially when you can just build up with no excavation cost. (The excavation cost is on top of the cost of all the structure itself. Even after you get all the dirt and rock out, you still need walls and support structure, just like any other building, not to mention all the finishings.)
Creating an independent extraterrestrial colony is a mammoth task, but it would be resilient to all possible extinction events below a level affecting more than one planet of the solar system. Any single planet solution is ultimately vulnerable to anything up to and including planetary events. When the entire species is at stake, cost-benefit analysis needs to be a bit broader in scope to match.
By all means, let us keep all our eggs in one basket and just wait patiently for some extinction event. That worked out well for the other 99% of life on earth over geologic time.
There's always somebody who is paid too much, and taxed too little - and it's always somebody else.