As a Sys Admin, and therefore your consumer, I couldn't care less if you fail hard or try to recover. But LOG THE GOD DAMN ERROR FOR WHAT IT IS FIRST! There is nothing more mind bogglingly useless then some dip-shit programmer who things "Duh, the user should just keep trying until it works. I don't need to prompt them with anything more then 'ERROR: An Error Has Occurred'". Or even worse is the crowd of useless knuckle draggers who think that catching an exception and doing absolutely nothing in the interest of 'keeping things running' is the right course of action everytime. I don't need to see your code, I already know it sucks. Otherwise it would have been too expensive for my employers to want to purchase. But at least tell us where it is failing.
Um, wut? https://developer.android.com/... Java as a language isn't dead. I'm positive that if Google thought their move of disabling Java plug-ins would have killed off interest in the language, they would be moving their SDK away from it. And before you say it, no, NaCl is NOT an adequate replacement.
but sadly, the password change is the best approximation most places have to functioning procedures.
No it isn't. The solution is quite simply to put IT on the same aliases that HR uses to communicate terminations with accounting and their internal staff along with every alias that management uses to communicate terminations with HR. This way IT finds out about Jim John getting canned along with everyone else. There's no "privacy issue" either since any properly setup IT department can access anyones company Email as needed anyway.
Dont see prides of lions killing the pride next door...
Yes you do you idiot; male Lions are the de jure example of a territorial animal. Go ahead and climb into a cage and cuddle up to one of them if you don't believe me.
Here's a thought, why do you think it is that there is only ever one male Lion in a zoo pen at any given time?
On one hand, we have this SJW BS flaring up all over the place, attacking people online and making their lives marginally more difficult. On the other we have this dogmatic crusade against cyber-bullying picking up speed and momentum at a rather interesting pace. Both sides are making the same types of ad passiones arguments and neither side seeing the inevitable conflict.
As an impartial observer and someone who views both sides as a bunch of crackpots and assholes with too much time on their hands, I can not wait to see these two trains collide.
I think more places that teach free classes is a good thing... maybe it will force colleges to go to more sane levels in pricing
What are you yammering about? A college is a brand; the rules about competing products don't apply the same way. A degree from a well respected school isn't even in the same market as a degree from I_Sat_On_My_Ass_At_Home_And_Learned_Stuff. MOOC's are perfect for what they are meant for, people like me who don't like the idea of certain knowledge going to rust.
If you don't believe me then pull up the course material for your local community college and compare it to something like MIT, then compare the price tags. Why would anyone in their right mind choose MIT over the other? And if you're one of those idiots who thinks that they will get more help at the expensive school then please let me know so that I can laugh at you.
It certainly won't happen until we get better tech, but never say "never". But TFA is about some 93 year old retired Chinese geezer "mulling" the idea. He is speaking only for himself, and has no budget whatsoever. There is no "news" here.
Putting solar panels on high altitude kites or balloons may make a more sense. They would be above most clouds, and could be tilted to always directly face the sun.
Agreed, this is an interesting discussion topi, but it is not news.
However on the topic of whether or not this will ever happen I'm pretty sure that we can say it won't, at least not in China. The Gobi dessert is largely under developed and it's not getting any smaller. The US has already shown the utility of putting solar panels in areas like this with the power production projects that are going on in Nevada and Arizona. If China really wants to get above cloud cover then they can put them up on the Altai mountains. Personally I have no idea how active that fault line is, but I'm sure it would more economical then putting solar power collectors in space.
This isn't completely unexpected after seeing the title. "Security Researchers" often take liberties with the idea that a tool chains are comprised of individual components, so there is less of a need to offer a complete solution.
well considering that minimum wage for yearly is something around $22,283 then yeah 28k is a bit expensive. let's say that the employer costs are double what the employee gets.
How is minimum wage relevant in this topic? Generally when you are guarding international borders you don't pay your people so little that they actively seek out bribes. 28K an arrest in the infancy of a program like this is astoundingly cheap and keep in mind that this should include the cost of the manpower behind it so they're washing in some of the already existing overhead to hype up the story. Even if this was 10 years from now after they have had time to discover and implement new inefficiencies in the process and after the cost of the drones has settled then $28,000 per arrest would still be an adequate price tag. Look up what it costs on average to arrest a local drug pusher sometime. Law enforcement is expensive.
One could only hope that if we were to invade an inhabited planet that we would have your military genius and tactical insight at the forefront. What's that over there? A one in a billion planet that has a climate which is accommodating to our species? Oh, I know! Instead of invading it, let's bomb it from space and send enough dust and debris into the atmosphere to kick off a thousand year long nuclear winter so as to make it completely inhospitable it either race! Don't forget to ensure the obliteration of every component of infrastructure that the native species had already built. Because there's nothing like rebuilding civilization again from the stone age to let you know that you've made the right decision.
Call me stupid, but is the bird incineration thing an actual concern holding back solar thermal energy? Or is just classic/. sarcasm? The former scenario sounds just impossibly stupid enough to be real
Why not just make a "suicide" drone, i.e. a drone with an EMP mounted on board. It fries itself, but also fries everything in front of it. Focusing would be significantly less of an issue from 10 ft away...
Maybe because Xzibit isn't the one in charge of R&D for the US military?
Ah, so you are exalting the fluidity of transiatism. Sorry for missing that. It doesn't actually impugn* upon the issue of a localized labor shortage, which is the point that I was trying to extrapolate on. You seem to be suggesting that the upper middle class would fall into hopeless desperation upon the exit of your (constituents?**/cohorts). I want to remind you that every political party have been gunning for our necks for more then a couple of centuries and that we have neither staggered nor fallen in our pursuit.
*: Literal Ancillary Comment: Parlez vous le francais. I'm from Buffalo, Give me a freaking break here!!!
When no one who lives there is willing to work at starbucks because it doesnt pay enough, they will either start paying better or the cost of living will fall to normal levels.
Are you even from America? Neither one of those scenarios is what happens in the situation you propose to engineer here. What happens is that the cities form economic enclaves for the lower class that are "separated" from the rest of the city by some subtle landmark such as a city park, commercial\industrial district, railroad track or other non-residential zone. These areas are called Municipal Housing Projects and the properties are ubiquitously subsidized with rent assistance programs such as Section 8 to make the prospect of living there attractive to the point where some people think it's their only viable option. I'm not sure where you got these romanticized ideas of collective bargaining for the unskilled labor market, or why you think that you can win at this game by not playing but you need to drop them while you're ostensibly still young. Now I have nothing against Bohemianism if that's your choice, but remember that literally any other life style is going to require some actual effort on your part
How is a "household" defined? If you put five kids making minimum wage into a house, that's a household with income above $100,000, but everyone in that house is still in poverty.
That's only if you interpret the poverty line in terms of individual discretionary income as opposed to a standard of living. A large part of the cost of living is fixed costs such as rent and utilities which would be split among the occupants. In addition, the potentially variable costs of necessities such as food, scale pretty well in this country where whole sale markets are adjacent to pretty much every major city. I'll grant you that things like health care and auto insurance would still be a problem, but that's because they're still broken.
On behalf of Systems Administrators everywhere; I will personally bitch slap the first user that tries to tell me that their preferred emacs interpreter is Minecraft.
Given that, what would you say is a more efficient naturally occuring carbon sequestration strategy?
Algae for one. They also happen to live in an area of the planet that we don't, and I for one am pretty confident in our ability to suppress fire in their natural habitat.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against trees so plant as many as you'd like. But don't put all of my eggs in one basket and tell me that it's the only way to get things done.
"Hey, let's fire a few IT guys. Just in case we need to bring up some capeable, disgruntled ex-employees as scapegoats if we ever get hacked."
It looks like somebody needs to look up the terms liable, slanderous and more then likely falsifying and suppressing evidence. The correct thing to do for anyone caught in the scenario you are describing is... nothing. Just sit back and let them dig a hole so deep that you can comfortably retire.
If they come to the US, the US can tax their income. If they work remotely, their home country gets all the income tax.
That isn't even close, income tax in the US is paid by the employer and credited back to the employee as a tax credit. People not physically present in the US would fail the substantial presence test and so would be taxed as a non-resident alien. This severely limits the deductions that they can take (number of deductions, marriage status etc) but they still pay in at roughly the same rate. I've never had to deal with in myself but from what I understand you would have to be a complete idiot to take up a contract like this since you'd be effectively paying the US government taxes on top of any applicable taxes from your home country.
And it's going to be very hard to convince people to go to work day in and day out when they can have a comfortable life doing whatever they please.
No it won't. Some of us will always want more then what our neighbors have and that right there will be our incentive to work. If everyone around me is supplied with enough money to live comfortably and take one vacation a year, then I would work for two or maybe three vacations a year. Not to mention the boredom factor of being at home all day, social interaction at the workplace, the sense of accomplishment that some of us are lucky enough to get from our jobs. These are all positive reasons to work that people take for granted. While it may be true that you can get most of these from school, there's a certain point where you would want to apply your knowledge instead of just reading about theory. In my experience forcing people to work just makes them miserable, and they are almost universally the worst employees no matter what the job might be.
The biggest problem I see with just handing out a comfortable life style to everyone would be managing crime. Some people just do stupid things when they have nothing better to do with their time. If their quality of living is guaranteed because they don't have to worry about losing a job that they require to survive then consequences like prison are going to mean less to them.
Even if you wanted to argue that the customers deserve more compensation than 50cents per month because of the real estate used by the modem, considering they can easily take up less than a tenth of a square foot, plugging that into the average square-foot rate for real estate in the area where the customer lives would probably only amount to perhaps a only a few additional pennies per month. If you factor in the notion that it would not be reasonable to compensate them for 100% of that, becuase the customer is getting some use out of the modem as well, it probably doesn't even work out to a whole penny.
Wow, it's a good thing that absolutely none of what you mentioned any where in your post has any impact what so ever on what is in effect a real estate agreement between two private entities. Unless Comcast suddenly qualifies for some kind of federal housing allowance that I want to allow them to use, the average square-foot rate for real estate does not come into play any where at any time. If I have no interest in charging a rate that is "competitive" for use of my property then I don't have to, if they do not agree with my rates then they are free to go somewhere else. The law is quite simple in this case, it's "pay up or fuck off" in other words capitalism at its finest.
This isn't about how insignificant the price of electricity might be, or what a fair rate to reimburse customers is or any of that crap. This is the fact that their company wants the ability to use property I own to make a profit. The physical location that I own has a value to them and they have to pay the rate that I charge (which by the way would be a hell of a lot more then 50 cents a month) because without my cooperation they would not be able to offer coverage for this service in the immediate area. Give it a minute, some idiot right now hasn't read to the end of this sentence and is thinking "Well it would be unreasonable for Comcast to negotiate private contracts with each of it's customers blah blah blah...". My preemptive response to this oblivious person is simple, I don't give a damn. I simply don't care about what is or isn't reasonable to expect or economical for Comcast to do, their convenience is absolutely none of my concern. My concern is the use of property I own to make a profit. Can you see the flaw in your retarded excuse of an argument yet?
There's a lot more "mechanics" than "engineers" in the real world.
How many engineers redesign the wheel for each and every problem? Competent engineers know when the tools they have are adequate to address the task at hand.
All right, maybe they aren't Russian, I don't know. But why not try to find these uber-coders that you always hear about to do some pen testing of the Tor code? It's in their best interest to make sure Tor is as secure as possible.
What are you talking about? The only thing Tor does is add layers of indirection between the client and host, the data still needs to eventually be able to find a viable route between A and B. When a large percentage of connections using the TOR protocol end up at the same hand full of places, which is something that you can determine when you have access to a Tier 1 service providers records btw, then it helps narrow down the number of suspects you need to investigate. The only way to remain secure in that world is to remain small.
Slashdot Mirror
As a Sys Admin, and therefore your consumer, I couldn't care less if you fail hard or try to recover. But LOG THE GOD DAMN ERROR FOR WHAT IT IS FIRST! There is nothing more mind bogglingly useless then some dip-shit programmer who things "Duh, the user should just keep trying until it works. I don't need to prompt them with anything more then 'ERROR: An Error Has Occurred'". Or even worse is the crowd of useless knuckle draggers who think that catching an exception and doing absolutely nothing in the interest of 'keeping things running' is the right course of action everytime. I don't need to see your code, I already know it sucks. Otherwise it would have been too expensive for my employers to want to purchase. But at least tell us where it is failing.
Java is dead
Um, wut? https://developer.android.com/... Java as a language isn't dead. I'm positive that if Google thought their move of disabling Java plug-ins would have killed off interest in the language, they would be moving their SDK away from it. And before you say it, no, NaCl is NOT an adequate replacement.
but sadly, the password change is the best approximation most places have to functioning procedures.
No it isn't. The solution is quite simply to put IT on the same aliases that HR uses to communicate terminations with accounting and their internal staff along with every alias that management uses to communicate terminations with HR. This way IT finds out about Jim John getting canned along with everyone else. There's no "privacy issue" either since any properly setup IT department can access anyones company Email as needed anyway.
Dont see prides of lions killing the pride next door...
Yes you do you idiot; male Lions are the de jure example of a territorial animal. Go ahead and climb into a cage and cuddle up to one of them if you don't believe me.
Here's a thought, why do you think it is that there is only ever one male Lion in a zoo pen at any given time?
Hey now, that's no way to talk about the FDIC!
On one hand, we have this SJW BS flaring up all over the place, attacking people online and making their lives marginally more difficult. On the other we have this dogmatic crusade against cyber-bullying picking up speed and momentum at a rather interesting pace. Both sides are making the same types of ad passiones arguments and neither side seeing the inevitable conflict.
As an impartial observer and someone who views both sides as a bunch of crackpots and assholes with too much time on their hands, I can not wait to see these two trains collide.
I think more places that teach free classes is a good thing... maybe it will force colleges to go to more sane levels in pricing
What are you yammering about? A college is a brand; the rules about competing products don't apply the same way. A degree from a well respected school isn't even in the same market as a degree from I_Sat_On_My_Ass_At_Home_And_Learned_Stuff. MOOC's are perfect for what they are meant for, people like me who don't like the idea of certain knowledge going to rust.
If you don't believe me then pull up the course material for your local community college and compare it to something like MIT, then compare the price tags. Why would anyone in their right mind choose MIT over the other? And if you're one of those idiots who thinks that they will get more help at the expensive school then please let me know so that I can laugh at you.
It certainly won't happen until we get better tech, but never say "never". But TFA is about some 93 year old retired Chinese geezer "mulling" the idea. He is speaking only for himself, and has no budget whatsoever. There is no "news" here.
Putting solar panels on high altitude kites or balloons may make a more sense. They would be above most clouds, and could be tilted to always directly face the sun.
Agreed, this is an interesting discussion topi, but it is not news.
However on the topic of whether or not this will ever happen I'm pretty sure that we can say it won't, at least not in China. The Gobi dessert is largely under developed and it's not getting any smaller. The US has already shown the utility of putting solar panels in areas like this with the power production projects that are going on in Nevada and Arizona. If China really wants to get above cloud cover then they can put them up on the Altai mountains. Personally I have no idea how active that fault line is, but I'm sure it would more economical then putting solar power collectors in space.
This isn't completely unexpected after seeing the title. "Security Researchers" often take liberties with the idea that a tool chains are comprised of individual components, so there is less of a need to offer a complete solution.
well considering that minimum wage for yearly is something around $22,283 then yeah 28k is a bit expensive. let's say that the employer costs are double what the employee gets.
How is minimum wage relevant in this topic? Generally when you are guarding international borders you don't pay your people so little that they actively seek out bribes. 28K an arrest in the infancy of a program like this is astoundingly cheap and keep in mind that this should include the cost of the manpower behind it so they're washing in some of the already existing overhead to hype up the story. Even if this was 10 years from now after they have had time to discover and implement new inefficiencies in the process and after the cost of the drones has settled then $28,000 per arrest would still be an adequate price tag. Look up what it costs on average to arrest a local drug pusher sometime. Law enforcement is expensive.
One could only hope that if we were to invade an inhabited planet that we would have your military genius and tactical insight at the forefront. What's that over there? A one in a billion planet that has a climate which is accommodating to our species? Oh, I know! Instead of invading it, let's bomb it from space and send enough dust and debris into the atmosphere to kick off a thousand year long nuclear winter so as to make it completely inhospitable it either race! Don't forget to ensure the obliteration of every component of infrastructure that the native species had already built. Because there's nothing like rebuilding civilization again from the stone age to let you know that you've made the right decision.
http://www.firstsolar.com/en/about-us/projects/california-flats
Call me stupid, but is the bird incineration thing an actual concern holding back solar thermal energy? Or is just classic /. sarcasm? The former scenario sounds just impossibly stupid enough to be real
You spread the beams out from a larger surface area and have them converge in the distance.
You were close, but that did need a little fixing up.
Why not just make a "suicide" drone, i.e. a drone with an EMP mounted on board. It fries itself, but also fries everything in front of it. Focusing would be significantly less of an issue from 10 ft away...
Maybe because Xzibit isn't the one in charge of R&D for the US military?
Ah, so you are exalting the fluidity of transiatism. Sorry for missing that. It doesn't actually impugn* upon the issue of a localized labor shortage, which is the point that I was trying to extrapolate on. You seem to be suggesting that the upper middle class would fall into hopeless desperation upon the exit of your (constituents?**/cohorts). I want to remind you that every political party have been gunning for our necks for more then a couple of centuries and that we have neither staggered nor fallen in our pursuit.
*: Literal Ancillary Comment: Parlez vous le francais. I'm from Buffalo, Give me a freaking break here!!!
**: Question, not a comment.
When no one who lives there is willing to work at starbucks because it doesnt pay enough, they will either start paying better or the cost of living will fall to normal levels.
Are you even from America? Neither one of those scenarios is what happens in the situation you propose to engineer here. What happens is that the cities form economic enclaves for the lower class that are "separated" from the rest of the city by some subtle landmark such as a city park, commercial\industrial district, railroad track or other non-residential zone. These areas are called Municipal Housing Projects and the properties are ubiquitously subsidized with rent assistance programs such as Section 8 to make the prospect of living there attractive to the point where some people think it's their only viable option. I'm not sure where you got these romanticized ideas of collective bargaining for the unskilled labor market, or why you think that you can win at this game by not playing but you need to drop them while you're ostensibly still young. Now I have nothing against Bohemianism if that's your choice, but remember that literally any other life style is going to require some actual effort on your part
How is a "household" defined? If you put five kids making minimum wage into a house, that's a household with income above $100,000, but everyone in that house is still in poverty.
That's only if you interpret the poverty line in terms of individual discretionary income as opposed to a standard of living. A large part of the cost of living is fixed costs such as rent and utilities which would be split among the occupants. In addition, the potentially variable costs of necessities such as food, scale pretty well in this country where whole sale markets are adjacent to pretty much every major city. I'll grant you that things like health care and auto insurance would still be a problem, but that's because they're still broken.
On behalf of Systems Administrators everywhere; I will personally bitch slap the first user that tries to tell me that their preferred emacs interpreter is Minecraft.
Given that, what would you say is a more efficient naturally occuring carbon sequestration strategy?
Algae for one. They also happen to live in an area of the planet that we don't, and I for one am pretty confident in our ability to suppress fire in their natural habitat.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against trees so plant as many as you'd like. But don't put all of my eggs in one basket and tell me that it's the only way to get things done.
"Hey, let's fire a few IT guys. Just in case we need to bring up some capeable, disgruntled ex-employees as scapegoats if we ever get hacked."
It looks like somebody needs to look up the terms liable, slanderous and more then likely falsifying and suppressing evidence. The correct thing to do for anyone caught in the scenario you are describing is ... nothing. Just sit back and let them dig a hole so deep that you can comfortably retire.
If they come to the US, the US can tax their income. If they work remotely, their home country gets all the income tax.
That isn't even close, income tax in the US is paid by the employer and credited back to the employee as a tax credit. People not physically present in the US would fail the substantial presence test and so would be taxed as a non-resident alien. This severely limits the deductions that they can take (number of deductions, marriage status etc) but they still pay in at roughly the same rate. I've never had to deal with in myself but from what I understand you would have to be a complete idiot to take up a contract like this since you'd be effectively paying the US government taxes on top of any applicable taxes from your home country.
And it's going to be very hard to convince people to go to work day in and day out when they can have a comfortable life doing whatever they please.
No it won't. Some of us will always want more then what our neighbors have and that right there will be our incentive to work. If everyone around me is supplied with enough money to live comfortably and take one vacation a year, then I would work for two or maybe three vacations a year. Not to mention the boredom factor of being at home all day, social interaction at the workplace, the sense of accomplishment that some of us are lucky enough to get from our jobs. These are all positive reasons to work that people take for granted. While it may be true that you can get most of these from school, there's a certain point where you would want to apply your knowledge instead of just reading about theory. In my experience forcing people to work just makes them miserable, and they are almost universally the worst employees no matter what the job might be.
The biggest problem I see with just handing out a comfortable life style to everyone would be managing crime. Some people just do stupid things when they have nothing better to do with their time. If their quality of living is guaranteed because they don't have to worry about losing a job that they require to survive then consequences like prison are going to mean less to them.
Even if you wanted to argue that the customers deserve more compensation than 50cents per month because of the real estate used by the modem, considering they can easily take up less than a tenth of a square foot, plugging that into the average square-foot rate for real estate in the area where the customer lives would probably only amount to perhaps a only a few additional pennies per month. If you factor in the notion that it would not be reasonable to compensate them for 100% of that, becuase the customer is getting some use out of the modem as well, it probably doesn't even work out to a whole penny.
Wow, it's a good thing that absolutely none of what you mentioned any where in your post has any impact what so ever on what is in effect a real estate agreement between two private entities. Unless Comcast suddenly qualifies for some kind of federal housing allowance that I want to allow them to use, the average square-foot rate for real estate does not come into play any where at any time. If I have no interest in charging a rate that is "competitive" for use of my property then I don't have to, if they do not agree with my rates then they are free to go somewhere else. The law is quite simple in this case, it's "pay up or fuck off" in other words capitalism at its finest.
This isn't about how insignificant the price of electricity might be, or what a fair rate to reimburse customers is or any of that crap. This is the fact that their company wants the ability to use property I own to make a profit. The physical location that I own has a value to them and they have to pay the rate that I charge (which by the way would be a hell of a lot more then 50 cents a month) because without my cooperation they would not be able to offer coverage for this service in the immediate area. Give it a minute, some idiot right now hasn't read to the end of this sentence and is thinking "Well it would be unreasonable for Comcast to negotiate private contracts with each of it's customers blah blah blah...". My preemptive response to this oblivious person is simple, I don't give a damn. I simply don't care about what is or isn't reasonable to expect or economical for Comcast to do, their convenience is absolutely none of my concern. My concern is the use of property I own to make a profit. Can you see the flaw in your retarded excuse of an argument yet?
How many programmers write compilers?
There's a lot more "mechanics" than "engineers" in the real world.
How many engineers redesign the wheel for each and every problem? Competent engineers know when the tools they have are adequate to address the task at hand.
All right, maybe they aren't Russian, I don't know. But why not try to find these uber-coders that you always hear about to do some pen testing of the Tor code? It's in their best interest to make sure Tor is as secure as possible.
What are you talking about? The only thing Tor does is add layers of indirection between the client and host, the data still needs to eventually be able to find a viable route between A and B. When a large percentage of connections using the TOR protocol end up at the same hand full of places, which is something that you can determine when you have access to a Tier 1 service providers records btw, then it helps narrow down the number of suspects you need to investigate. The only way to remain secure in that world is to remain small.