What I don't understand about telco behavior is their simultaneous enthusiasm for dragging their feet as hard as possible on infrastructure buildouts/enhancements and service pricing and for pushing dubiously mature 4GLTE!!!zOMG 433453Gigabits! based handsets that get approximately 45 seconds of battery life, which would be just enough time to run through an 'unlimited' data plan were it not horribly throttled by congested backhaul...
Given the, um, impressive state of competition, sandbagging on service upgrades, sometimes even going backward on pricing, is pragmatic enough; but why are they accompanying that with a push toward devices that are vastly overqualified for the infrastructure, cost more, and deliver lousier user experience?
The trouble, for us, is that the quality and availability of those are likely to increase, the cost and complexity to decrease. The greater the area of ocean where somebody could take a crack at you, just like that, and the longer the list of suspects, the less force projection you get to use your carriers for. As long as the rules are just "don't piss off russia", it's the same old game. If you have to start biting your nails about every last slightly-odd-looking building or tractor trailer within 100km of the coast, you'll really be set up to have a bad day.
Whatever I think of military appropriations, I hope for the sailor's sake that the eventual move from carriers is gradual and voluntary(if embarrassing), rather than a sudden, dramatic, and involuntary conversion of the US fleet to the world's largest unmanned submarine navy...
Given that their epistemological gold standard is "I read in a book that a dude said god told him...", it isn't a huge surprise that media literacy might not be among their strengths.
Probably big fans. It's pretty hard to have a proper Jihad against the infidel Crusaders if they don't arrive at a battlefield within convenient commuting distance of your favorite rugged hideout and start acting unsympathetically enough that you can keep up the PR campaign.
While the supine American media in general have done a pretty good job of supporting exactly that, Fox has really gone out of their way to emphasize nationalist bellicosity with a sharp Christian edge. Far better foils then some centrist waffler would be.
"It is a demonstration of how far the insurgents' attitude towards technology has changed."
Other than some tactical intimidating-cell-operators-into-shutting-down-at-certain-times, based on the (plausible) theory that NATO was having a merry old time eavesdropping, I don't remember the Taliban being terribly anti-technology... Not particularly big enthusiasts(in public) of internet pornography or applied empiricism; but perfectly happy to use technological artifacts where available.
I do look forward to seeing what the/b/tards discover when they engage Mr. Mujahid in a game of "Haram or Halal?"...
Dirty not-so-secret is that the American 'manufacturers' already went straight to a factory in Asia to get their hardware built. The markup, box art, and possibly the software are the parts done stateside. This is about the cloud people cutting out the middleman.
It isn't exactly a huge secret that the network guys(as with the PC guys and others) do a lot of leaning on their OEMs and ODMs, especially for their less specialized lower margin gear. That being the case, it isn't obvious why a major buyer would pay Cisco or somebody just to order the hardware from the subcontractor, slap a sticker on it, and get somebody to churn out an English-language manual.
This would be news if the existing 'manufacturers' hadn't already done much of the work of hollowing them selves out into the marketing and branding arms of the contractors who make the hardware. That VAR stuff is exactly what a large-scale customer wouldn't care much about.
There is a phrase, charming in its expressive brevity and loathsome in its application, that was popularized in American financial services fraud circles during their most recent heyday:
"I'll be gone."
As you say, real engineers are on the hook for their designs. However, the engineer in TFA died in 1986(and quite possibly retired before then). Had he done the wrong thing, he would have avoided inconvenience then and been worm food before it turned out to be a problem.
More broadly, of course, there is the problem that, if one engineer won't sign off on something, HQ has a certain incentive to find one who will. If anything, the fact that the engineer takes the heat for signing off on a bad design increases that incentive. Go engineer shopping until you find somebody optimistic enough to tell you that the project is Just Dandy, or at least is unlikely to fail before you and he are safely out of the business...
I strongly suspect that this laser is intended as a replacement for existing point-defense systems(Phalanx). For longer ranges the navy also has a railgun scheme going, along with existing missiles and aircraft.
It isn't entirely clear that the lasers will work(the demo with the lower powered unit burning an outboard motor took a pitifully long time and that was just a normal outboard motor. No attempt at optical countermeasures, no ablative coatings, no tricks at all); but it should be possible to keep photons on target where it wouldn't be possible for an autocannon to deliver bullets. Also, the navy is in the position where they are pretty much forced to operate on the assumption that something must work and lasers are among the more plausible contenders...
Basically, we have the world's largest investment in aircraft carriers, and stuff for them to carry, and they've been the navy's force-projecting pride and joy since approximately the point in WWII where it became clear that battleships were overpriced floating coffins against even fairly paltry aircraft. Now, if anti-ship missiles and the like cannot be intercepted by some sort of point defense system, it is the aircraft carrier's turn to go the way of the battleship. That would be 10s of billions of dollars worth of awkward(best case, HQ submits to the inevitable in time, the carriers are reduced to a mixture of rotting at the docks and punching defenseless little countries. Worst case, HQ doesn't submit to the inevitable, some scruffy band of militants with a budget so small that an American defense contractor wouldn't bother to steal it sinks something expensive and most of its crew).
I think that Feynman, while he has a nice point, is really far too optimistic in saying that we 'refuse to learn'. There are, certainly, examples of engineering fuckups caused by genuine failures of understanding or lack of information; but there is also the common instance where the 'we' making the decision knows full well that they won't be the people who get injured or killed(or even subjected to civil or criminal liability) and so make the perfectly value-rational decision to go ahead and do it.
There are ignorance problems and there are malice problems(and, hovering somewhere between the two, there are the gamblers who take on risks that turn out to go badly)...
We at TEPCO are proud to retroactively congratulate any and all peons whose thankless personal sacrifices turned out to have been in our best interest. We would like to take a moment to encourage future sacrifices by employees on behalf of TEPCO.
While not everyone will have the honor of insisting on sound engineering at vulnerable nuclear facilities, we are sure that all of you can find a way to squeeze in some unpaid overtime or not seek reimbursement of job related expenses.
They could certainly stand to be rather more featurefull(given that computational power has gotten slightly cheaper since they were introduced; but SIMs aren't just a little slab of ROM.
They implement a full processor on board, to do some sort of challenge/response cryptographic ID for verification purposes(considerably more robust than your usual password. It turns out that carriers can get their thumbs out of their asses if there's a potential for billing problems not in their favor...)
They also provide some writeable storage space for contacts information. Frequently not enough, and only a few of the fields are robustly supported across all handsets.
Given the increasingly low cost of storage and computational power, it is arguably time for an overhaul, at least of the movable data storage part; but they definitely have their uses.
Tme for all the hypocrites to come out against apple who is offering a free, perpetual license for the relevant patents, in favor of those who won't do the same, only because they have an irrational hatred of apple. Just look at the first post.
The are offering a 'free' license only to anyone who licenses their patents under the same conditions. That's not really 'free' that's 'Apple is tired of getting charged license fees by people who've been doing phone R&D rather longer than they have'...
The widgets with this chip are all designed as TV-receiver USB widgets. I'm sure that there are some $11 electronics out there that are... um... totally FCC part 15 compliant; but no intentional radiating is going on.
Engineers are overrepresented among terrorists. Perhaps you can convince one that he'll get 70 especially attractive virgins if he repairs your sarcasm meter and then achieves martyrdom.
It is certainly arguable; but my thinking is that WinMo(while pretty terrible) really represents the first major incursion of the PC guys into the mobile space on the theory that just throwing more silicon at the problem can allow the PC guys' software edge to pull ahead of the specialization of the mobile guys.
It was rather premature(some of the early WinMo devices were pretty tragicomedic in terms of things like battery life and RAM), and MS fucked it up by trying a too-literal translation of desktop UI to a teeny screen(Hey, hands up everyone who wants to use I-can't-believe-it's-not-Windows-95 with a stylus! Anybody?); but it was the debut of the theory that familiarity and brute force would be making their way to mobile.
Given how poorly MS executed, RIM certainly shouldn't have panicked(and, indeed, Windows Mobile ended up not being the competitor that caused them any serious trouble, nor did any others emerge for a few years); but they ought to have started considering what Blackberry would look like once "Delivers email" became a basic feature, not a killer app.
Instead, RIM more or less stood still, delivering extremely incremental upgrades of their existing capabilities. Really, it is both high praise and deep blame to look at how similar Blackberry units have been over the years. They started out so far ahead it was hardly fair. Then they didn't move.
Microsoft actually ended up doing much the same thing: win32 survived as the favored userland of NT derivative OSes; but they had to give up on the "bolt more shit onto DOS" strategy and hire some DEC guys to build them a more or less completely new OS. Apple had to do something roughly similar when they finally gave up on classic Mac OS and bought NeXT to get a real operating system, to which they bolted some of the userland from the old OS.
It's also a bit irrelevant in online transactions, unmanned POS terminals, etc. so anybody relying on ID checking to stop anything more sophisticated than utter morons buying a pack of cigs at 7-11 after a mugging is fooling themselves.
Luckily, nobody would be stupid enough to build a money transfer system where the user ID and the authentication secret are identical, so this breach should be no big deal.
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What I don't understand about telco behavior is their simultaneous enthusiasm for dragging their feet as hard as possible on infrastructure buildouts/enhancements and service pricing and for pushing dubiously mature 4GLTE!!!zOMG 433453Gigabits! based handsets that get approximately 45 seconds of battery life, which would be just enough time to run through an 'unlimited' data plan were it not horribly throttled by congested backhaul...
Given the, um, impressive state of competition, sandbagging on service upgrades, sometimes even going backward on pricing, is pragmatic enough; but why are they accompanying that with a push toward devices that are vastly overqualified for the infrastructure, cost more, and deliver lousier user experience?
The trouble, for us, is that the quality and availability of those are likely to increase, the cost and complexity to decrease. The greater the area of ocean where somebody could take a crack at you, just like that, and the longer the list of suspects, the less force projection you get to use your carriers for. As long as the rules are just "don't piss off russia", it's the same old game. If you have to start biting your nails about every last slightly-odd-looking building or tractor trailer within 100km of the coast, you'll really be set up to have a bad day. Whatever I think of military appropriations, I hope for the sailor's sake that the eventual move from carriers is gradual and voluntary(if embarrassing), rather than a sudden, dramatic, and involuntary conversion of the US fleet to the world's largest unmanned submarine navy...
Given that their epistemological gold standard is "I read in a book that a dude said god told him...", it isn't a huge surprise that media literacy might not be among their strengths.
I am curious of what they think about Fox news ?
Probably big fans. It's pretty hard to have a proper Jihad against the infidel Crusaders if they don't arrive at a battlefield within convenient commuting distance of your favorite rugged hideout and start acting unsympathetically enough that you can keep up the PR campaign.
While the supine American media in general have done a pretty good job of supporting exactly that, Fox has really gone out of their way to emphasize nationalist bellicosity with a sharp Christian edge. Far better foils then some centrist waffler would be.
I'm guessing that this would put you on Sarkozy's naughty list, for sure...
"It is a demonstration of how far the insurgents' attitude towards technology has changed."
/b/tards discover when they engage Mr. Mujahid in a game of "Haram or Halal?"...
Other than some tactical intimidating-cell-operators-into-shutting-down-at-certain-times, based on the (plausible) theory that NATO was having a merry old time eavesdropping, I don't remember the Taliban being terribly anti-technology... Not particularly big enthusiasts(in public) of internet pornography or applied empiricism; but perfectly happy to use technological artifacts where available.
I do look forward to seeing what the
Dirty not-so-secret is that the American 'manufacturers' already went straight to a factory in Asia to get their hardware built. The markup, box art, and possibly the software are the parts done stateside. This is about the cloud people cutting out the middleman.
It isn't exactly a huge secret that the network guys(as with the PC guys and others) do a lot of leaning on their OEMs and ODMs, especially for their less specialized lower margin gear. That being the case, it isn't obvious why a major buyer would pay Cisco or somebody just to order the hardware from the subcontractor, slap a sticker on it, and get somebody to churn out an English-language manual.
This would be news if the existing 'manufacturers' hadn't already done much of the work of hollowing them selves out into the marketing and branding arms of the contractors who make the hardware. That VAR stuff is exactly what a large-scale customer wouldn't care much about.
There is a phrase, charming in its expressive brevity and loathsome in its application, that was popularized in American financial services fraud circles during their most recent heyday:
"I'll be gone."
As you say, real engineers are on the hook for their designs. However, the engineer in TFA died in 1986(and quite possibly retired before then). Had he done the wrong thing, he would have avoided inconvenience then and been worm food before it turned out to be a problem.
More broadly, of course, there is the problem that, if one engineer won't sign off on something, HQ has a certain incentive to find one who will. If anything, the fact that the engineer takes the heat for signing off on a bad design increases that incentive. Go engineer shopping until you find somebody optimistic enough to tell you that the project is Just Dandy, or at least is unlikely to fail before you and he are safely out of the business...
I strongly suspect that this laser is intended as a replacement for existing point-defense systems(Phalanx). For longer ranges the navy also has a railgun scheme going, along with existing missiles and aircraft.
It isn't entirely clear that the lasers will work(the demo with the lower powered unit burning an outboard motor took a pitifully long time and that was just a normal outboard motor. No attempt at optical countermeasures, no ablative coatings, no tricks at all); but it should be possible to keep photons on target where it wouldn't be possible for an autocannon to deliver bullets. Also, the navy is in the position where they are pretty much forced to operate on the assumption that something must work and lasers are among the more plausible contenders...
Basically, we have the world's largest investment in aircraft carriers, and stuff for them to carry, and they've been the navy's force-projecting pride and joy since approximately the point in WWII where it became clear that battleships were overpriced floating coffins against even fairly paltry aircraft. Now, if anti-ship missiles and the like cannot be intercepted by some sort of point defense system, it is the aircraft carrier's turn to go the way of the battleship. That would be 10s of billions of dollars worth of awkward(best case, HQ submits to the inevitable in time, the carriers are reduced to a mixture of rotting at the docks and punching defenseless little countries. Worst case, HQ doesn't submit to the inevitable, some scruffy band of militants with a budget so small that an American defense contractor wouldn't bother to steal it sinks something expensive and most of its crew).
You aren't an Article 3, Section 2, kind of guy?
I think that Feynman, while he has a nice point, is really far too optimistic in saying that we 'refuse to learn'. There are, certainly, examples of engineering fuckups caused by genuine failures of understanding or lack of information; but there is also the common instance where the 'we' making the decision knows full well that they won't be the people who get injured or killed(or even subjected to civil or criminal liability) and so make the perfectly value-rational decision to go ahead and do it.
There are ignorance problems and there are malice problems(and, hovering somewhere between the two, there are the gamblers who take on risks that turn out to go badly)...
We at TEPCO are proud to retroactively congratulate any and all peons whose thankless personal sacrifices turned out to have been in our best interest. We would like to take a moment to encourage future sacrifices by employees on behalf of TEPCO.
While not everyone will have the honor of insisting on sound engineering at vulnerable nuclear facilities, we are sure that all of you can find a way to squeeze in some unpaid overtime or not seek reimbursement of job related expenses.
I'm not sure that's a 'Samurai' thing as much as a 'not a sociopath' thing...
They could certainly stand to be rather more featurefull(given that computational power has gotten slightly cheaper since they were introduced; but SIMs aren't just a little slab of ROM.
They implement a full processor on board, to do some sort of challenge/response cryptographic ID for verification purposes(considerably more robust than your usual password. It turns out that carriers can get their thumbs out of their asses if there's a potential for billing problems not in their favor...)
They also provide some writeable storage space for contacts information. Frequently not enough, and only a few of the fields are robustly supported across all handsets.
Given the increasingly low cost of storage and computational power, it is arguably time for an overhaul, at least of the movable data storage part; but they definitely have their uses.
Tme for all the hypocrites to come out against apple who is offering a free, perpetual license for the relevant patents, in favor of those who won't do the same, only because they have an irrational hatred of apple. Just look at the first post.
The are offering a 'free' license only to anyone who licenses their patents under the same conditions. That's not really 'free' that's 'Apple is tired of getting charged license fees by people who've been doing phone R&D rather longer than they have'...
The widgets with this chip are all designed as TV-receiver USB widgets. I'm sure that there are some $11 electronics out there that are... um... totally FCC part 15 compliant; but no intentional radiating is going on.
Engineers are overrepresented among terrorists. Perhaps you can convince one that he'll get 70 especially attractive virgins if he repairs your sarcasm meter and then achieves martyrdom.
It is certainly arguable; but my thinking is that WinMo(while pretty terrible) really represents the first major incursion of the PC guys into the mobile space on the theory that just throwing more silicon at the problem can allow the PC guys' software edge to pull ahead of the specialization of the mobile guys.
It was rather premature(some of the early WinMo devices were pretty tragicomedic in terms of things like battery life and RAM), and MS fucked it up by trying a too-literal translation of desktop UI to a teeny screen(Hey, hands up everyone who wants to use I-can't-believe-it's-not-Windows-95 with a stylus! Anybody?); but it was the debut of the theory that familiarity and brute force would be making their way to mobile.
Given how poorly MS executed, RIM certainly shouldn't have panicked(and, indeed, Windows Mobile ended up not being the competitor that caused them any serious trouble, nor did any others emerge for a few years); but they ought to have started considering what Blackberry would look like once "Delivers email" became a basic feature, not a killer app.
Instead, RIM more or less stood still, delivering extremely incremental upgrades of their existing capabilities. Really, it is both high praise and deep blame to look at how similar Blackberry units have been over the years. They started out so far ahead it was hardly fair. Then they didn't move.
Microsoft actually ended up doing much the same thing: win32 survived as the favored userland of NT derivative OSes; but they had to give up on the "bolt more shit onto DOS" strategy and hire some DEC guys to build them a more or less completely new OS. Apple had to do something roughly similar when they finally gave up on classic Mac OS and bought NeXT to get a real operating system, to which they bolted some of the userland from the old OS.
Do we even need to be asking such an obvious question? British is the foreign language that Americans are most likely to understand...
It's also a bit irrelevant in online transactions, unmanned POS terminals, etc. so anybody relying on ID checking to stop anything more sophisticated than utter morons buying a pack of cigs at 7-11 after a mugging is fooling themselves.
That we review the controversial word 'controversial'. It is horribly overused and misused.
Mefloquine isn't 'controversial'. It has well-known psychiatric side effects and well-known efficacy as an antimalarial prophylactic.
Luckily, nobody would be stupid enough to build a money transfer system where the user ID and the authentication secret are identical, so this breach should be no big deal.
Oh wait.
Fuck.
How could an artist be awarded a copyright? Only corporations are allowed to own those...