Hey there, consumer, I'm afraid that the ECU firmware is licensed, not sold, and licenses are not transferable. Can I sign you up for a new support agreement?
I suspect that it would be a riskier move, since it would leave a much larger population feeling alienated; but it isn't obviously the case that contemporary cars would be any more immune to software-licensing related bullshit than would other firmware-dependent hardware devices(the ones with OnStar or equivalent can even phone home...)
If information does "leak" out of Facebook their precious company won't be worth the billions and billions they seem to think it is.
I think no more highly of Facebook's adherence to any principles other than their bottom line than you do; but I think that it might not be so clear cut...
Facebook's position of strength lies in having massive network effects, and piles of user data, that draw users back so that their consumery little eyeballs can be monetized until they bleed. What could weaken their position? 1. 'Their' data being trivially available by assorted dodgey-but-easy means without paying them for access to it. 2. People disclosing less because they have heard that Bad Things Can Happen, Oh Noes!
Now, the second item is as likely, or more, to simply elicit cynical displays of 'security' which, after all, are cheaper and easier than the real thing; but the effects of number one could be interesting. Facebook obviously has not the slightest interest in your privacy; but their revenue stream depends on being the gatekeeper to any commercial scale violation of it. The market value of their precious "social graph" goes way down if 95% of it can be swiftly scraped by building a bottom-of-the-barrel malicious app that collects users', users' friends', and friends' of friends, details, or if some combination of spiders and cheap summer interns equipped with attractive stock photos can collect the public stuff.
They obviously have no reason to protect privacy; but it is arguably very much in their interest to have a saleable monopoly position on information disclosures. Particularly if somebody like Phorm or Nebuad shows up and starts snagging Facebook info right off the wire, I'm guessing that Facebook will suddenly start to take SSL a bit more seriously.
I'm not sure that there would be any part of a WWI video game that would be even remotely enjoyable. You'd spend months crouching in the mud behind some barbed wire, losing 1HP per hour to trench foot, occasionally getting insta-gibbed by artillery fire or coughing out your lungs from poison gas, until you were ordered over the top and killed by either machine guns or land mines.
Come to think of it, though, MMORPGs have proven that people are suckers for ghastly, relentless grinding...
It's no noble gas; but N2 is pretty mild mannered. Nitrogen fixation generally requires either really clever enzymes(as with nitrogen fixing bacteria) or fairly abusive temperature and pressure along with a catalyst(as with the Haber Process). It is commonly used as a shield gas for welding of many of the less zesty metals; because it is probably the best-placed material on the cost/inertness curve. Nitrogen, liquid or compressed gas, is dirt cheap compared to any genuinely inert gas, and is inert enough for quite a few applications.
Compounds with a high proportion of nitrogen atoms, on the other hand, are to be considered guilty until someone who loves their fingers less than you do has finished proving them innocent...
Is water still too young to learn about what happens when a (previously stable and happy) diatomic Oxygen structure encounters a couple of barely-legal hydrogen atoms under sufficiently energetic conditions?
Bubbles are, unfortunately, never entirely collateral-damage free. However, compared to the impact of a bubble involving an unholy alliance of the financial services sector and the residential credit/residential construction sector(the first of which has its tentacles in just about everything, the world over, and crazy levels of regulatory capture and the second is strongly coupled to where real people really live, and also has the magic 'homeownership' ticket to favorable legislative treatment) a bubble involving the socialclickfraud.com sector should be comparatively self-contained.
Not zero, basically nothing in an interlinked economy can be, but there is a relatively clean collapse vector, where a few VCs lose their shirts, a bunch of companies learn that 80% of their "value" was in pretend internet money, the ones that offer a service people actually want start charging modest monthly fees, the others go out of business and their coders are reduced to designing IE6 compatible 'enterprise portals'(may god have mercy upon their souls).
Bubbles are always bad; but, as bubbles go, I'd take 'social' over a lot of other things.
I think that, when deciding to make something a compulsory subject, the correlation/causation issue is serious business.
My experience with very smart, very motivated people is that they almost always have one or more cool hobbies at which they are pretty good. Sometimes ones that you would expect based on their primary subject area, sometimes rather surprising ones. If you take one of those hobbies and make it a compulsory class, though, the question of whether it will improve the outcomes of the selection of students thrown into it is far from clear(especially since the new class is necessarily trading off against some other use of the time and teachers, it isn't good enough to be better than nothing, you have to be better than whatever you would have been doing instead).
Given that getting hacked is practically an Industry Standard Best Practice(tm) by now, I'm pretty sure that some random subsidiary of a utility company that most of its customers think of as "the power bill" will be largely immune to embarrassment, even in financial terms. If you then narrow the list of suspects down, the odds are higher than you would like of getting some slammer time in exchange for basically nothing.
Unless pen-testing them is your job, I would say that you should either stay the hell out of turbine SCADA systems, or go in with a clever plan to have them shake themselves apart. Anything in between, though, is just a risky waste of time.
Working at AOL(not that I do), is like having a Social Security account that works in reverse: Instead of paying for the retirements of increasingly helpless confused old people, increasingly helpless confused old people pay you, a tidy sum a month, for a service they are no longer using; but do not understand.
Gnawing out your own soul is fairly painful during the first week or two; but after that it starts to get easier.
At least the internet ad-clicking business should be able to implode relatively neatly into a pile of its own worthlessness, rather than blowing up outward and taking a nontrivial chunk of the real economy with it, like our last adventure in letting smart people produce nonsense for money. Plus, Facebook doesn't quite enjoy Goldman-Sachs levels of regulatory capture, so we might even avoid paying the people who fucked it up. Progress!
Here's a drinking game that will(briefly, before it kills you) make you feel better about the state of the software/business method patent system:
1. When you see a bullshit 'on the internet' or 'in the cloud' patent, ask yourself "Could I have done exactly the same thing over a leased line somewhere between 1970 and 1985, if I'd had a checkbook big enough for IBM?".
I haven't been able to dig up anything terribly concrete. Refugees are annoyingly fuzzy and somewhat tricky to count anyway(since they tend to be the ones who didn't get very far, and are living in vast squalid crowds in assorted 3rd-world warzones, or the ones who ran like hell for somewhere else, and are busy hiding out from somewhere else's equivalent of the INS, or the hard-to-count 'moved from the depressed hinterland to the teeming slums of local postmodern megacity' internal migrants) and, as you note, deciding exactly who is a 'refugee' and which ones of those are 'environmental' doesn't make the situation easier.
How bad does a nonviolent agricultural collapse have to be before 'economic migrants' become 'environmental refugees'? How sincere do people who are probably fighting over resources have to be that they are really fighting about whose god is better before the 'environmental refugees' become basic 'refugees'?
Arguably, "Identity" is the wrong target(or, if you think that it is the right target, I consider your motives suspect) for many applications:
"Identity" is a polite euphemism for a lot of personal information. For most purposes, it is utter overkill to achieve legitimate ends. Say that I'm buying some booze online. You don't actually need to know my name, age, appearance, etc, etc. You simply need to know that my age > legal age and that my payment is valid. To log into an email account, you don't need to know who I am, you just need to know that I have the key for the account.
There are, in fact, relatively few situations where the entire bundle of information that falls under "Identity" is relevant. Unfortunately, there are virtually no situations where the person you are transacting with wouldn't be happy to have the entire thing, if only for marketing purposes(or worse).
This scheme had better include some interesting zero-knowledge proof related stuff, or it is little more than a privacy giveaway to a number of private sector actors(and, no doubt, the members of the 'intelligence community' with whom they are oh so cooperative).
I know that "in the cloud" is the hip thing these days; but I'm a bit fuzzy on how this differs in any patentable way from versioning file systems that go back at least as far as VMS, and almost any network backup product that provides differential backups(which is virtually all of them).
Even more specifically, precisely this sort of 'network-accessed version/time view' of documents is what pretty much any IDE does when you point it at a supported revision control system. Complete history of your project, all in 'app', delivered locally or over the network, or clustered, or what have you. Similar, albeit expensive and somewhat niche, stuff can be had for word processing among legal types.
Now, from a user experience perspective, more power to Apple if they can bring the benefits of a revision control model to other applications in a way intuitive enough for people who wouldn't know a revision control system if it bit them. That is the sort of thing that they are good at, and the sort of thing that they can charge a premium for.
Never going to work while the security of home PC's is Swiss cheese.
Not to worry. Palladium, er, I mean the 'Next Generation Secure Computing Base', er... umm... the 'Trusted Computing Group' will save us from that(and the evils of piracy and software that isn't signed by Verisign!)
Remember how we were just talking about the nasty, gaping, holes in the practice of using CAs to verify SSL certs? How the CAs were largely rent-seeking incompetents with strong market incentives to do inadequate verification while simultaneously trumpeting their security? How there were just too many of them, and a compromise at any served to threaten the security of all SSLed connections?
Well, yeah, that kind of sucks because this plan looks very similar: Some kind of public/private key system, with multiple totally trustworthy(tm) private sector vendors, subject to the twin incentives of trying to establish themselves as one of the 'trusted' trusted identity trustees, so that they get the user fees and user data; but also likely to start getting sloppy on the verification side; because everybody hates a cost center...
Mathematically, most of the hard work has already been done, and the engineering required to put some sort of secure hardware widget, while not something to be left to the naive, isn't exactly terra incognita(smart card ICs, and/or the integrated USB+smartcard chip+optional definitely-not-keylogged-keypad are a well established product category some generations old at this point); but the organizational/economic incentives side of this is pretty much certain to be totally, utterly fucked.
In that vein, it should be noted that (outside of highly unlikely corner cases of 1 meter rises in sea level causing a boat full of people going 'Dude, where's my island?' to wash up on your shores), it can be a bit tricky to identify the root cause of somebody's refugee status.
A reasonable percentage of Africa's ghastly little bush wars, for instance, are proximately about some goofy ethnic struggle or an ego clash between two psychotic strongmen; but the punchline generally boils down to the fact that the local subsistence agriculture/pastoralism hasn't actually been providing subsistence of late, which really stirs people up.
The assorted uprisings that a number of arab states are currently seeing are in the same boat. It isn't as though the populace just noticed that their leaders are brutal kleptocrats. A spike in food prices, though, has pushed them from feeling poor and downtrodden to feeling desperate and downtrodden.
Even if one wishes to leave macro-level climate out of the picture entirely, it isn't at all difficult to identify regions where high-intensity agriculture, and often shoddy practices, are converting farmland to desert or marginal scrub at a fair clip.
I've got news for you: trying to start a class war in America is indeed stupid, because one started years ago and is just entering the 'mop up' phase...
Ironically for Jackson, consumer electronics are one of the things that have gotten cheaper faster than Joe Sixpack has gotten poorer, and thus are a lousy thing to try to get people worked up about.
Actually, if anybody is interested, I have a large supply of dehydrated Water Ready to Drink(WRD) packets available. These things are the perfect complement to MREs, and great in all sorts of emergency situations.
Ah, a classic case of attacking the irrelevant symptoms and ignoring the relevant causes.
Has the supply of US jobs that aren't either burger flipping or financial services scamming been gutted like a landed fish? Oh fuck yeah. Is that the iPad's fault? How can you even seriously consider such a foolish idea?
With more respect than I can usually muster for Mr. Jackson, the numbers don't lie: American workers have been treading water or worse since the 70's. The economy as a whole has been doing OK, and productivity per worker has actually never been better; but fuck all of that has gone to the bottom 90-odd percent. The comparatively low-skill, low-capital populations that Jackson is probably most interested in appealing to have done particularly badly. The idea, though, that the destruction of a fairly modest number of low-skill, low-pay service sector jobs by technology is the root(or even a reasonably sized branch) of the problem would be hilarious were it not taken seriously. Low-skill, low-pay service sector jobs are the paltry rewards of the post-industrial economy, where people flip burgers for one another. If you are reduced to quibbling over those, you have already lost.
How handy. I think that it was just this week that the DoD was looking for research aimed at assisting them in blowing up slightly fewer noncombatants based on lousy aerial footage...
Slashdot Mirror
Hey there, consumer, I'm afraid that the ECU firmware is licensed, not sold, and licenses are not transferable. Can I sign you up for a new support agreement?
I suspect that it would be a riskier move, since it would leave a much larger population feeling alienated; but it isn't obviously the case that contemporary cars would be any more immune to software-licensing related bullshit than would other firmware-dependent hardware devices(the ones with OnStar or equivalent can even phone home...)
If information does "leak" out of Facebook their precious company won't be worth the billions and billions they seem to think it is.
I think no more highly of Facebook's adherence to any principles other than their bottom line than you do; but I think that it might not be so clear cut...
Facebook's position of strength lies in having massive network effects, and piles of user data, that draw users back so that their consumery little eyeballs can be monetized until they bleed. What could weaken their position? 1. 'Their' data being trivially available by assorted dodgey-but-easy means without paying them for access to it. 2. People disclosing less because they have heard that Bad Things Can Happen, Oh Noes!
Now, the second item is as likely, or more, to simply elicit cynical displays of 'security' which, after all, are cheaper and easier than the real thing; but the effects of number one could be interesting. Facebook obviously has not the slightest interest in your privacy; but their revenue stream depends on being the gatekeeper to any commercial scale violation of it. The market value of their precious "social graph" goes way down if 95% of it can be swiftly scraped by building a bottom-of-the-barrel malicious app that collects users', users' friends', and friends' of friends, details, or if some combination of spiders and cheap summer interns equipped with attractive stock photos can collect the public stuff.
They obviously have no reason to protect privacy; but it is arguably very much in their interest to have a saleable monopoly position on information disclosures. Particularly if somebody like Phorm or Nebuad shows up and starts snagging Facebook info right off the wire, I'm guessing that Facebook will suddenly start to take SSL a bit more seriously.
I'm not sure that there would be any part of a WWI video game that would be even remotely enjoyable. You'd spend months crouching in the mud behind some barbed wire, losing 1HP per hour to trench foot, occasionally getting insta-gibbed by artillery fire or coughing out your lungs from poison gas, until you were ordered over the top and killed by either machine guns or land mines.
Come to think of it, though, MMORPGs have proven that people are suckers for ghastly, relentless grinding...
It's no noble gas; but N2 is pretty mild mannered. Nitrogen fixation generally requires either really clever enzymes(as with nitrogen fixing bacteria) or fairly abusive temperature and pressure along with a catalyst(as with the Haber Process). It is commonly used as a shield gas for welding of many of the less zesty metals; because it is probably the best-placed material on the cost/inertness curve. Nitrogen, liquid or compressed gas, is dirt cheap compared to any genuinely inert gas, and is inert enough for quite a few applications.
Compounds with a high proportion of nitrogen atoms, on the other hand, are to be considered guilty until someone who loves their fingers less than you do has finished proving them innocent...
Is water still too young to learn about what happens when a (previously stable and happy) diatomic Oxygen structure encounters a couple of barely-legal hydrogen atoms under sufficiently energetic conditions?
Well, that and prepare for unforeseen consequences...
Bubbles are, unfortunately, never entirely collateral-damage free. However, compared to the impact of a bubble involving an unholy alliance of the financial services sector and the residential credit/residential construction sector(the first of which has its tentacles in just about everything, the world over, and crazy levels of regulatory capture and the second is strongly coupled to where real people really live, and also has the magic 'homeownership' ticket to favorable legislative treatment) a bubble involving the socialclickfraud.com sector should be comparatively self-contained.
Not zero, basically nothing in an interlinked economy can be, but there is a relatively clean collapse vector, where a few VCs lose their shirts, a bunch of companies learn that 80% of their "value" was in pretend internet money, the ones that offer a service people actually want start charging modest monthly fees, the others go out of business and their coders are reduced to designing IE6 compatible 'enterprise portals'(may god have mercy upon their souls).
Bubbles are always bad; but, as bubbles go, I'd take 'social' over a lot of other things.
That was the example that I had in mind.
I think that, when deciding to make something a compulsory subject, the correlation/causation issue is serious business.
My experience with very smart, very motivated people is that they almost always have one or more cool hobbies at which they are pretty good. Sometimes ones that you would expect based on their primary subject area, sometimes rather surprising ones. If you take one of those hobbies and make it a compulsory class, though, the question of whether it will improve the outcomes of the selection of students thrown into it is far from clear(especially since the new class is necessarily trading off against some other use of the time and teachers, it isn't good enough to be better than nothing, you have to be better than whatever you would have been doing instead).
Given that getting hacked is practically an Industry Standard Best Practice(tm) by now, I'm pretty sure that some random subsidiary of a utility company that most of its customers think of as "the power bill" will be largely immune to embarrassment, even in financial terms. If you then narrow the list of suspects down, the odds are higher than you would like of getting some slammer time in exchange for basically nothing.
Unless pen-testing them is your job, I would say that you should either stay the hell out of turbine SCADA systems, or go in with a clever plan to have them shake themselves apart. Anything in between, though, is just a risky waste of time.
Hey, be nice.
Working at AOL(not that I do), is like having a Social Security account that works in reverse: Instead of paying for the retirements of increasingly helpless confused old people, increasingly helpless confused old people pay you, a tidy sum a month, for a service they are no longer using; but do not understand.
Gnawing out your own soul is fairly painful during the first week or two; but after that it starts to get easier.
At least the internet ad-clicking business should be able to implode relatively neatly into a pile of its own worthlessness, rather than blowing up outward and taking a nontrivial chunk of the real economy with it, like our last adventure in letting smart people produce nonsense for money. Plus, Facebook doesn't quite enjoy Goldman-Sachs levels of regulatory capture, so we might even avoid paying the people who fucked it up. Progress!
Here's a drinking game that will(briefly, before it kills you) make you feel better about the state of the software/business method patent system:
1. When you see a bullshit 'on the internet' or 'in the cloud' patent, ask yourself "Could I have done exactly the same thing over a leased line somewhere between 1970 and 1985, if I'd had a checkbook big enough for IBM?".
2. If yes, take a shot.
I haven't been able to dig up anything terribly concrete. Refugees are annoyingly fuzzy and somewhat tricky to count anyway(since they tend to be the ones who didn't get very far, and are living in vast squalid crowds in assorted 3rd-world warzones, or the ones who ran like hell for somewhere else, and are busy hiding out from somewhere else's equivalent of the INS, or the hard-to-count 'moved from the depressed hinterland to the teeming slums of local postmodern megacity' internal migrants) and, as you note, deciding exactly who is a 'refugee' and which ones of those are 'environmental' doesn't make the situation easier.
How bad does a nonviolent agricultural collapse have to be before 'economic migrants' become 'environmental refugees'? How sincere do people who are probably fighting over resources have to be that they are really fighting about whose god is better before the 'environmental refugees' become basic 'refugees'?
Arguably, "Identity" is the wrong target(or, if you think that it is the right target, I consider your motives suspect) for many applications:
"Identity" is a polite euphemism for a lot of personal information. For most purposes, it is utter overkill to achieve legitimate ends. Say that I'm buying some booze online. You don't actually need to know my name, age, appearance, etc, etc. You simply need to know that my age > legal age and that my payment is valid. To log into an email account, you don't need to know who I am, you just need to know that I have the key for the account.
There are, in fact, relatively few situations where the entire bundle of information that falls under "Identity" is relevant. Unfortunately, there are virtually no situations where the person you are transacting with wouldn't be happy to have the entire thing, if only for marketing purposes(or worse).
This scheme had better include some interesting zero-knowledge proof related stuff, or it is little more than a privacy giveaway to a number of private sector actors(and, no doubt, the members of the 'intelligence community' with whom they are oh so cooperative).
I know that "in the cloud" is the hip thing these days; but I'm a bit fuzzy on how this differs in any patentable way from versioning file systems that go back at least as far as VMS, and almost any network backup product that provides differential backups(which is virtually all of them).
Even more specifically, precisely this sort of 'network-accessed version/time view' of documents is what pretty much any IDE does when you point it at a supported revision control system. Complete history of your project, all in 'app', delivered locally or over the network, or clustered, or what have you. Similar, albeit expensive and somewhat niche, stuff can be had for word processing among legal types.
Now, from a user experience perspective, more power to Apple if they can bring the benefits of a revision control model to other applications in a way intuitive enough for people who wouldn't know a revision control system if it bit them. That is the sort of thing that they are good at, and the sort of thing that they can charge a premium for.
Patent worthy, though? Srsly?
Never going to work while the security of home PC's is Swiss cheese.
Not to worry. Palladium, er, I mean the 'Next Generation Secure Computing Base', er... umm... the 'Trusted Computing Group' will save us from that(and the evils of piracy and software that isn't signed by Verisign!)
Remember how we were just talking about the nasty, gaping, holes in the practice of using CAs to verify SSL certs? How the CAs were largely rent-seeking incompetents with strong market incentives to do inadequate verification while simultaneously trumpeting their security? How there were just too many of them, and a compromise at any served to threaten the security of all SSLed connections?
Well, yeah, that kind of sucks because this plan looks very similar: Some kind of public/private key system, with multiple totally trustworthy(tm) private sector vendors, subject to the twin incentives of trying to establish themselves as one of the 'trusted' trusted identity trustees, so that they get the user fees and user data; but also likely to start getting sloppy on the verification side; because everybody hates a cost center...
Mathematically, most of the hard work has already been done, and the engineering required to put some sort of secure hardware widget, while not something to be left to the naive, isn't exactly terra incognita(smart card ICs, and/or the integrated USB+smartcard chip+optional definitely-not-keylogged-keypad are a well established product category some generations old at this point); but the organizational/economic incentives side of this is pretty much certain to be totally, utterly fucked.
In that vein, it should be noted that (outside of highly unlikely corner cases of 1 meter rises in sea level causing a boat full of people going 'Dude, where's my island?' to wash up on your shores), it can be a bit tricky to identify the root cause of somebody's refugee status.
A reasonable percentage of Africa's ghastly little bush wars, for instance, are proximately about some goofy ethnic struggle or an ego clash between two psychotic strongmen; but the punchline generally boils down to the fact that the local subsistence agriculture/pastoralism hasn't actually been providing subsistence of late, which really stirs people up.
The assorted uprisings that a number of arab states are currently seeing are in the same boat. It isn't as though the populace just noticed that their leaders are brutal kleptocrats. A spike in food prices, though, has pushed them from feeling poor and downtrodden to feeling desperate and downtrodden.
Even if one wishes to leave macro-level climate out of the picture entirely, it isn't at all difficult to identify regions where high-intensity agriculture, and often shoddy practices, are converting farmland to desert or marginal scrub at a fair clip.
I've got news for you: trying to start a class war in America is indeed stupid, because one started years ago and is just entering the 'mop up' phase...
Ironically for Jackson, consumer electronics are one of the things that have gotten cheaper faster than Joe Sixpack has gotten poorer, and thus are a lousy thing to try to get people worked up about.
Actually, if anybody is interested, I have a large supply of dehydrated Water Ready to Drink(WRD) packets available. These things are the perfect complement to MREs, and great in all sorts of emergency situations.
Ah, a classic case of attacking the irrelevant symptoms and ignoring the relevant causes.
Has the supply of US jobs that aren't either burger flipping or financial services scamming been gutted like a landed fish? Oh fuck yeah. Is that the iPad's fault? How can you even seriously consider such a foolish idea?
With more respect than I can usually muster for Mr. Jackson, the numbers don't lie: American workers have been treading water or worse since the 70's. The economy as a whole has been doing OK, and productivity per worker has actually never been better; but fuck all of that has gone to the bottom 90-odd percent. The comparatively low-skill, low-capital populations that Jackson is probably most interested in appealing to have done particularly badly. The idea, though, that the destruction of a fairly modest number of low-skill, low-pay service sector jobs by technology is the root(or even a reasonably sized branch) of the problem would be hilarious were it not taken seriously. Low-skill, low-pay service sector jobs are the paltry rewards of the post-industrial economy, where people flip burgers for one another. If you are reduced to quibbling over those, you have already lost.
How handy. I think that it was just this week that the DoD was looking for research aimed at assisting them in blowing up slightly fewer noncombatants based on lousy aerial footage...
I can' t argue with your correctness(or my error). I can suggest that you really should study for that Turing test a bit...
Depending on the flavor of porn preferred in that location, that arguably qualifies as an 'intrusion detection and visualization system', of a sort...