If I were Google, I'd worry less about privacy legislation (even in the curiously-disposed-to-regard-consumers-as-human EU, the privacy regulators are badly outgunned, and it's downhill from there) and more about the (surprisingly incompetent; but persistent) attempts by ISPs to take financial advantage of being the ultimate Man in the Middle...
"If you're a Snapchat aficionado, it's worth your while to check out some of the app's enhancements, for they include a brand-new "Replay" feature that now allows you to re-view one of your previously viewed Snapchats a second time. Perhaps you didn't have your Snapchat screenshotting app ready to go the first time (or, worse, your physical camera).
Snapchat does build in a few caveats with the Replay feature. For starters, it doesn't appear as if you can close the app down and reopen it to view a previously viewed Snapchat. Any replay action you do has to be in one, singular instance — which eliminates our "load your screenshot app up" example from above. Additionally, you only get one Replay each day. Make it good.
Interestingly enough, Snapchat doesn't notify the party that sent you the original Snapchat that you've elected to view it a second time. That might be useful information for a sender to know, for no particular reason whatsoever (wink). "
Well, well. you mean to say that those magic disappearing 'snaps' don't actually magically disappear, it's just a couple of permission bits getting twiddled on the server and the client doing a (generally sloppy) job of deleting the local copy? Wow, you'll tell me that 'streaming a video' is actually the same as 'downloading it in ordered chunks and starting to watch the first ones while you wait for the rest' and not something magically different...
If anything, to be able to enable this 'feature' after the fact, snapchat is clearly storing much, much, more than their service would theoretically require (the 'snap' would have to live server-side until delivery; but could be purged immediately thereafter. It isn't.) They may be tapping into a desire for ephemeral communication that somebody like Google doesn't; but it's a facade, a deliberate deception to encourage people to put more sensitive information into the same giant pool of ever cheaper storage with some dubious path to 'monetization'.
On the plus side, they'll be able to earn $13,456 a month writing from home, and there are 6 singles nearby who want to message them, so they'll be OK.
My understanding is that (even when we don't necessarily want to) agreeing to not execute can be a requirement for getting extraditions from most of the EU, probably some other places as well.
(And, of course, even our shoddier execution protocols are arguably more humane than some of the fun that awaits you even in standard prisons. A life term with the finest occupational sadists who aren't officially on our payroll... to be avoided.)
Phones, unfortunately, have really upped the game in terms of creepy surveillance and exfiltration.
When dealing with normal computers, you always have the easy option of just installing wireshark.
If that's too disruptive, or you want to monitor multiple systems, or you don't trust the system you want to inspect, you just tap the last link before the ISP's probably-not-trustworthy gear and examine that. Wireless doesn't change the game much, as long as you know the key (passive tapping becomes easier; but there's a greater risk that your monitoring system will miss some packets in the noise, and driver support for things like promiscuous mode tends to be a lot spottier).
Cellular connections, though? The entire network is Ma Bell's black-box, so even RF sniffing won't get you much (unless you can coax it down to A5/1 or A5/2 and have some time on your hands), and doing the packet capture on-device is markedly harder than on a PC. At best, with a very well behaved android you should be able to use the same tools that you would on normal linux, against whatever peculiar device name is assigned to the cell connection. It's all downhill from there, though creative abuse of VPNs should work against any application not trying to hide from you, even on devices you can't root/jailbreak.
It isn't impossible, with the right device; but you can certainly make things a great deal more difficult if your application waits until it is on a cellular connection before phoning home.
Given the current state of internet-focused writing, with the brutal drive to churn out as much clickbait 'content' as possible as fast as possible, with a side of SEO fuckery, I suspect that adding analytics capabilities to books will... perhaps not... be the most helpful development in literature.
Oh, with the exception of dedicated GPU compute setups, definitely, that's why the servers in use are configured as they are. My point was not that servers should have more GPU power; but that (if a change in software made doing so a good idea) the existing hardware wouldn't provide too much 'inertia' to stop or slow adoption.
There doesn't seem to be too much interest, on the whole; but if one were interested they could change the composition of their servers in fairly short order; and a broader shift could happen comparatively quickly (again, given suitable software).
Most servers do not have powerful GPUs, and that is where heavy production databases are run.
Servers turn over comparatively quickly, though (sure, every shop has ol' reliable trucking away on the 13GB SCSI drive that was pretty cool when it left the factory, doing something obscure but vital; but the population as a whole churns faster than that), and servers with nice chunks of PCIe (typically intended for your zippy network cards or fancy storage HBAs; but they are perfectly normal PCIe slots) aren't at all difficult to find. Nor has (Nvidia in particular, AMD trailing a touch) Team Graphics been shy about pushing server-suitable GPU compute parts.
It is true that servers today mostly have little to no GPU power; but if the case were made, that would change rather quickly.
Oh, the PPro is worse in basically every conceivable way, with 32-bit address spaces being just one of its sins compared to later designs; my point was that (barring possible niche applications, like the next few years when phones people care about still have less than 4GB of RAM/memory mapped peripherals, or Very Large workloads that break down nicely and are large enough that the RAM savings actually pays for enough programmers to make up for the hassle and still leave some extra cash) taking a perfectly good AMD64/EMT64 connected to a huge chunk of cheap RAM and voluntarily pretending that it's 1995 and you can't afford one of them fancy RISC workstations just seems a little sick.
I do recognize that there are specific areas that could benefit (though apparently not enough to show much life on the kernel development side); but for virtually everything, people choose to throw a bit of extra silicon rather than more expensive humans at the problem almost every time.
I don't have access to TFA; but it strikes me that it might be slightly more complex than the 'deviance can signal status if there are norms from which to deviate' thesis provided by TFS.
There are 'norms' for basically every situation a human might find itself in. You might no know them (which can be awkward), and the 'norm' may be along the lines of 'maximize the probability that you won't be dressed even slightly like anybody else, or naked+LEDs'; but they are there.
I'd (purely off the cuff, of course, this is the comments section), be inclined to hypothesize that norm-compliance (while many extremely competent people also do it, either because they approve of the norm or just don't much care and are in the habit, or recognize the value of being perceived in a certain way) would be most valuable to relatively mediocre people, both in-organization(if I'm not overtly worth firing; but definitely replaceable, do I really want to upset the boss over office dress code?) and when interacting with people outside of it (you wouldn't recognize me personally; but you can tell that I 'look professional' or 'professorial' or whatever).
If, on the other hand, you are just a total fucking rockstar, your ability to buck even theoretically binding institutional conventions is maximized (see also: 'what would it take to get the school's star quarterback expelled?') and your need to obtain validation by identifying yourself with a uniform and institution(either an actual, issued, uniform as with a cop, soldier, etc. or a given profession/status' normally expected attire) is weaker because you have greater access to validation on your own.
Obviously, this doesn't exclude people who are fucking rockstars; but still dress absolutely as would be expected of the unpromising-junior-guy in their position, either out of habit, because they don't have some overriding preference, or because they positively identify with what they are dressing as, nor does it exclude unimpressive candidates who affect rockstardom (nonconformity, itself, is a fairly well developed role. There are even specialist retailers to assist you with all your nonconformist lifestyle requirements!) and either through luck, through successful mimicry, or just because nobody cares nearly as much as expected about the dress code, if it even exists.
It's a recognized problem (though, for the reasons you note, people prefer to ignore it whenever possible because college students will do any dumb survey you throw at them for peanuts), enough so that it has its own spiteful acronym.
They call such research subjects 'WEIRD': Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. (Now, given the student debt numbers and all that neat stuff they didn't tell you about in civics class concerning how governments work, some scare quotes may be in order; but the general "asserting universal truths about human psychology based on American college students is only a few steps ahead of just introspecting and assuming that everyone thinks as you do" point is important...)
If I wanted to divide my nice big memory space into 32-bit address spaces, I'd dig my totally bitchin' PAE-enabled Pentium Pro rig out of the basement, assuming the rats haven't eaten it...
Hey guys, have you ever wanted to buy a workstation with half as many sockets and half as many DIMM slots as the prior generation? What if I remove all the capacity for internal expansion cards so that you can enjoy buying external cardcages? Still not sold? I've come up with the least rackable shape in the history of computing, you'll love it!
"Sure, its a bit more effort, but how much effort is worth keeping your hard earned money from the IRS as much as possible?"
Presumably the same number of dollars/hour that would be worth it for any other way of obtaining money by wading through accounting paperwork(or doing some other approximately equivalent work).
Oh, I'd certainly suspect that NASA knows much more about astronautology than I do; but given that the world demand for astronauts is, what, a couple dozen at any one time, with relatively low death rates? It seemed within the bounds of reason to wonder about the question.
Were we to try venturing further afield, I'd imagine that (much as some people would hate it) the biological aspect of choosing the right human for the job would grow in importance. If you fancied a hop to mars, say, the differences in metabolic requirements among people of various sizes and builds would become a much bigger deal.
Arguably, if celebrity weren't something that a depraved subset of the population actively seeks out, I'd classify it as cruel and unusual punishment. It often doesn't do the people who find it much good, either(though, at least they can afford their raging drug habits, unlike some people).
I'm a trifle surprised that a former CIA director apparently doesn't know how 'empiricism' works: "I would argue that what effectiveness we have seen to date is totally irrelevant to how effective it might be in the future"...
Yeah, there's somebody you'd give a job related to intelligence gathering to...
Given the costs of a permanent state of war, and the ghastly security apparatus that will happily metastasize in such an environment, why wait for 'a plan to reduce these threats forever' before backing the hell away as fast as we can? If we wait for the plan (and assume that the plan won't involve "build a giant orwellian database and use it to direct our killbots"), we'll be waiting a long time.
Terrorism just isn't that serious a threat (outside of a few rather ghastly neighborhoods where things classified as 'terrorism' are routine, mostly because there is a low to medium intensity war going on and they are part of that), and our fancy panopticon seems notably inept at, say, stopping a couple of nobodies with approximately zero resources from just bombing a major sporting event, or anybody who feels like it from grabbing their AR-15 and heading to school.
Why wait for a plan that will never arrive? Just say 'Fuck it.' and walk away.
I see that they've left at least one of the people with a chip on their shoulder on earth. It was a perfectly serious question: it's not as though the world is burning through astronauts at a terrifying rate, so you can presumably afford to be fairly picky. Why not send them up in batches well, um, suited, to be able to share any piece of expensive, finicky, hardware that might need a spare pulled out at the last minute?
I couldn't find any flow-rate figures, so I don't know how much of a pain this would be; but the the tether would have to include delivery and return for oxygen (fewer tubes if you just let the used air vent into space; but resupply missions aren't cheap so you'd probably have to send it back to the mothership), delivery and return for the thermal regulation fluid (since the astronaut has neither convection nor conduction to work with, he'll mostly need cooling; but may need additional heat at some point), and then electrical and communications lines.
That probably ends up being a fair-size chunk of cable, especially if you want to send somebody to the further reaches of the ISS, with a bunch of pumps and regulators and things presenting the same reliability issues, just fixed inside the cabin.
It's always an, um, excellent, sign when the company's own spokesweasels are asking you to accept the 'we were incompetent, really!' excuse.
"we have never entered into any contract or engaged in any project with the intention of weakening RSA's products, or introducing potential 'backdoors' into our products for anyone's use."
Their 'categorical denial' of the story is not a denial that they did enter a contract or engage in a project that did weaken RSA's product and introduce a backdoor into their products for somebody's use; but merely the assertion that they never did so intentionally. Slightly different things there...
They should have built simpler, more reliable suits.
I wonder if it would be cheaper to retool the suits, or to select crews of suitably similar size and body type?
I don't doubt that the current hardware has some legacy decisions that NASA would like to rethink, or at least replace with current iterations that are smaller and more reliable; but it's not as though they added complexity for the fun of it the first time around. Keeping things within safe, never mind comfortable, parameters in a vacuum isn't trivial.
Slashdot Mirror
If I were Google, I'd worry less about privacy legislation (even in the curiously-disposed-to-regard-consumers-as-human EU, the privacy regulators are badly outgunned, and it's downhill from there) and more about the (surprisingly incompetent; but persistent) attempts by ISPs to take financial advantage of being the ultimate Man in the Middle...
Incidentally, Snapchat is actually a terrible example of 'eraseable internet' (though it sure doesn't go out of its way to tell you that...)
They recently rolled out a fun new feature:
"If you're a Snapchat aficionado, it's worth your while to check out some of the app's enhancements, for they include a brand-new "Replay" feature that now allows you to re-view one of your previously viewed Snapchats a second time. Perhaps you didn't have your Snapchat screenshotting app ready to go the first time (or, worse, your physical camera).
Snapchat does build in a few caveats with the Replay feature. For starters, it doesn't appear as if you can close the app down and reopen it to view a previously viewed Snapchat. Any replay action you do has to be in one, singular instance — which eliminates our "load your screenshot app up" example from above. Additionally, you only get one Replay each day. Make it good.
Interestingly enough, Snapchat doesn't notify the party that sent you the original Snapchat that you've elected to view it a second time. That might be useful information for a sender to know, for no particular reason whatsoever (wink). "
Well, well. you mean to say that those magic disappearing 'snaps' don't actually magically disappear, it's just a couple of permission bits getting twiddled on the server and the client doing a (generally sloppy) job of deleting the local copy? Wow, you'll tell me that 'streaming a video' is actually the same as 'downloading it in ordered chunks and starting to watch the first ones while you wait for the rest' and not something magically different...
If anything, to be able to enable this 'feature' after the fact, snapchat is clearly storing much, much, more than their service would theoretically require (the 'snap' would have to live server-side until delivery; but could be purged immediately thereafter. It isn't.) They may be tapping into a desire for ephemeral communication that somebody like Google doesn't; but it's a facade, a deliberate deception to encourage people to put more sensitive information into the same giant pool of ever cheaper storage with some dubious path to 'monetization'.
On the plus side, they'll be able to earn $13,456 a month writing from home, and there are 6 singles nearby who want to message them, so they'll be OK.
My understanding is that (even when we don't necessarily want to) agreeing to not execute can be a requirement for getting extraditions from most of the EU, probably some other places as well.
(And, of course, even our shoddier execution protocols are arguably more humane than some of the fun that awaits you even in standard prisons. A life term with the finest occupational sadists who aren't officially on our payroll... to be avoided.)
Phones, unfortunately, have really upped the game in terms of creepy surveillance and exfiltration.
When dealing with normal computers, you always have the easy option of just installing wireshark.
If that's too disruptive, or you want to monitor multiple systems, or you don't trust the system you want to inspect, you just tap the last link before the ISP's probably-not-trustworthy gear and examine that. Wireless doesn't change the game much, as long as you know the key (passive tapping becomes easier; but there's a greater risk that your monitoring system will miss some packets in the noise, and driver support for things like promiscuous mode tends to be a lot spottier).
Cellular connections, though? The entire network is Ma Bell's black-box, so even RF sniffing won't get you much (unless you can coax it down to A5/1 or A5/2 and have some time on your hands), and doing the packet capture on-device is markedly harder than on a PC. At best, with a very well behaved android you should be able to use the same tools that you would on normal linux, against whatever peculiar device name is assigned to the cell connection. It's all downhill from there, though creative abuse of VPNs should work against any application not trying to hide from you, even on devices you can't root/jailbreak.
It isn't impossible, with the right device; but you can certainly make things a great deal more difficult if your application waits until it is on a cellular connection before phoning home.
Given the current state of internet-focused writing, with the brutal drive to churn out as much clickbait 'content' as possible as fast as possible, with a side of SEO fuckery, I suspect that adding analytics capabilities to books will... perhaps not... be the most helpful development in literature.
Oh, with the exception of dedicated GPU compute setups, definitely, that's why the servers in use are configured as they are. My point was not that servers should have more GPU power; but that (if a change in software made doing so a good idea) the existing hardware wouldn't provide too much 'inertia' to stop or slow adoption.
There doesn't seem to be too much interest, on the whole; but if one were interested they could change the composition of their servers in fairly short order; and a broader shift could happen comparatively quickly (again, given suitable software).
Most servers do not have powerful GPUs, and that is where heavy production databases are run.
Servers turn over comparatively quickly, though (sure, every shop has ol' reliable trucking away on the 13GB SCSI drive that was pretty cool when it left the factory, doing something obscure but vital; but the population as a whole churns faster than that), and servers with nice chunks of PCIe (typically intended for your zippy network cards or fancy storage HBAs; but they are perfectly normal PCIe slots) aren't at all difficult to find. Nor has (Nvidia in particular, AMD trailing a touch) Team Graphics been shy about pushing server-suitable GPU compute parts.
It is true that servers today mostly have little to no GPU power; but if the case were made, that would change rather quickly.
Oh, the PPro is worse in basically every conceivable way, with 32-bit address spaces being just one of its sins compared to later designs; my point was that (barring possible niche applications, like the next few years when phones people care about still have less than 4GB of RAM/memory mapped peripherals, or Very Large workloads that break down nicely and are large enough that the RAM savings actually pays for enough programmers to make up for the hassle and still leave some extra cash) taking a perfectly good AMD64/EMT64 connected to a huge chunk of cheap RAM and voluntarily pretending that it's 1995 and you can't afford one of them fancy RISC workstations just seems a little sick.
I do recognize that there are specific areas that could benefit (though apparently not enough to show much life on the kernel development side); but for virtually everything, people choose to throw a bit of extra silicon rather than more expensive humans at the problem almost every time.
I don't have access to TFA; but it strikes me that it might be slightly more complex than the 'deviance can signal status if there are norms from which to deviate' thesis provided by TFS.
There are 'norms' for basically every situation a human might find itself in. You might no know them (which can be awkward), and the 'norm' may be along the lines of 'maximize the probability that you won't be dressed even slightly like anybody else, or naked+LEDs'; but they are there.
I'd (purely off the cuff, of course, this is the comments section), be inclined to hypothesize that norm-compliance (while many extremely competent people also do it, either because they approve of the norm or just don't much care and are in the habit, or recognize the value of being perceived in a certain way) would be most valuable to relatively mediocre people, both in-organization(if I'm not overtly worth firing; but definitely replaceable, do I really want to upset the boss over office dress code?) and when interacting with people outside of it (you wouldn't recognize me personally; but you can tell that I 'look professional' or 'professorial' or whatever).
If, on the other hand, you are just a total fucking rockstar, your ability to buck even theoretically binding institutional conventions is maximized (see also: 'what would it take to get the school's star quarterback expelled?') and your need to obtain validation by identifying yourself with a uniform and institution(either an actual, issued, uniform as with a cop, soldier, etc. or a given profession/status' normally expected attire) is weaker because you have greater access to validation on your own.
Obviously, this doesn't exclude people who are fucking rockstars; but still dress absolutely as would be expected of the unpromising-junior-guy in their position, either out of habit, because they don't have some overriding preference, or because they positively identify with what they are dressing as, nor does it exclude unimpressive candidates who affect rockstardom (nonconformity, itself, is a fairly well developed role. There are even specialist retailers to assist you with all your nonconformist lifestyle requirements!) and either through luck, through successful mimicry, or just because nobody cares nearly as much as expected about the dress code, if it even exists.
It's a recognized problem (though, for the reasons you note, people prefer to ignore it whenever possible because college students will do any dumb survey you throw at them for peanuts), enough so that it has its own spiteful acronym.
They call such research subjects 'WEIRD': Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. (Now, given the student debt numbers and all that neat stuff they didn't tell you about in civics class concerning how governments work, some scare quotes may be in order; but the general "asserting universal truths about human psychology based on American college students is only a few steps ahead of just introspecting and assuming that everyone thinks as you do" point is important...)
If I wanted to divide my nice big memory space into 32-bit address spaces, I'd dig my totally bitchin' PAE-enabled Pentium Pro rig out of the basement, assuming the rats haven't eaten it...
Hey guys, have you ever wanted to buy a workstation with half as many sockets and half as many DIMM slots as the prior generation? What if I remove all the capacity for internal expansion cards so that you can enjoy buying external cardcages? Still not sold? I've come up with the least rackable shape in the history of computing, you'll love it!
Your jurisdiction may vary; but getting rid of an unwanted tweet is probably substantially harder than getting rid of an unwanted fetus....
"Sure, its a bit more effort, but how much effort is worth keeping your hard earned money from the IRS as much as possible?"
Presumably the same number of dollars/hour that would be worth it for any other way of obtaining money by wading through accounting paperwork(or doing some other approximately equivalent work).
Was there ever some kind of doubt that this was about watching somebody fuck up and then get hounded mercilessly? Anybody?
People get off on blood sports and mob violence, this is the mostly-legal and really easy flavor.
Oh, I'd certainly suspect that NASA knows much more about astronautology than I do; but given that the world demand for astronauts is, what, a couple dozen at any one time, with relatively low death rates? It seemed within the bounds of reason to wonder about the question.
Were we to try venturing further afield, I'd imagine that (much as some people would hate it) the biological aspect of choosing the right human for the job would grow in importance. If you fancied a hop to mars, say, the differences in metabolic requirements among people of various sizes and builds would become a much bigger deal.
Arguably, if celebrity weren't something that a depraved subset of the population actively seeks out, I'd classify it as cruel and unusual punishment. It often doesn't do the people who find it much good, either(though, at least they can afford their raging drug habits, unlike some people).
Well, he did study economics... I'd say that even Rumsfeld's smokescreening about known and unknown unknowns shows greater epistemic acuity, though.
I'm a trifle surprised that a former CIA director apparently doesn't know how 'empiricism' works: "I would argue that what effectiveness we have seen to date is totally irrelevant to how effective it might be in the future"...
Yeah, there's somebody you'd give a job related to intelligence gathering to...
Given the costs of a permanent state of war, and the ghastly security apparatus that will happily metastasize in such an environment, why wait for 'a plan to reduce these threats forever' before backing the hell away as fast as we can? If we wait for the plan (and assume that the plan won't involve "build a giant orwellian database and use it to direct our killbots"), we'll be waiting a long time.
Terrorism just isn't that serious a threat (outside of a few rather ghastly neighborhoods where things classified as 'terrorism' are routine, mostly because there is a low to medium intensity war going on and they are part of that), and our fancy panopticon seems notably inept at, say, stopping a couple of nobodies with approximately zero resources from just bombing a major sporting event, or anybody who feels like it from grabbing their AR-15 and heading to school.
Why wait for a plan that will never arrive? Just say 'Fuck it.' and walk away.
I see that they've left at least one of the people with a chip on their shoulder on earth. It was a perfectly serious question: it's not as though the world is burning through astronauts at a terrifying rate, so you can presumably afford to be fairly picky. Why not send them up in batches well, um, suited, to be able to share any piece of expensive, finicky, hardware that might need a spare pulled out at the last minute?
I couldn't find any flow-rate figures, so I don't know how much of a pain this would be; but the the tether would have to include delivery and return for oxygen (fewer tubes if you just let the used air vent into space; but resupply missions aren't cheap so you'd probably have to send it back to the mothership), delivery and return for the thermal regulation fluid (since the astronaut has neither convection nor conduction to work with, he'll mostly need cooling; but may need additional heat at some point), and then electrical and communications lines.
That probably ends up being a fair-size chunk of cable, especially if you want to send somebody to the further reaches of the ISS, with a bunch of pumps and regulators and things presenting the same reliability issues, just fixed inside the cabin.
It's always an, um, excellent, sign when the company's own spokesweasels are asking you to accept the 'we were incompetent, really!' excuse.
"we have never entered into any contract or engaged in any project with the intention of weakening RSA's products, or introducing potential 'backdoors' into our products for anyone's use."
Their 'categorical denial' of the story is not a denial that they did enter a contract or engage in a project that did weaken RSA's product and introduce a backdoor into their products for somebody's use; but merely the assertion that they never did so intentionally. Slightly different things there...
They should have built simpler, more reliable suits.
I wonder if it would be cheaper to retool the suits, or to select crews of suitably similar size and body type?
I don't doubt that the current hardware has some legacy decisions that NASA would like to rethink, or at least replace with current iterations that are smaller and more reliable; but it's not as though they added complexity for the fun of it the first time around. Keeping things within safe, never mind comfortable, parameters in a vacuum isn't trivial.