I didn't mean to imply that a given CEV craft will fly that often--it won't. The entire fleet might be capable of sustained flight rates of 1 or 2 launches per month.
The CEV is not intended to bring a serious reduction in the cost of access to space. It will probably be less expensive to fly than the current Shuttle, and it might be possible to fly it as often as a couple times a month if needed, but it is not a next-generation space access system. CEV is needed, but it is not all that is needed.
7. Employ a keen sense of irony by killing any R&D programs that might lead to affordable, reliable, and frequent access to space before they produce results, using the excuse that the research and development programs have run over-budget. Ignore the fact that the greatest budget over-runs occur in the operational Space Shuttle program. Hope nobody notices that a viable alternative might threaten continued funding of the Shuttle program. See X-33, DC-X, et. al.
They got the Shuttle to last nearly 30 years by flying it dramatically less often than planned, and spending dramatically more than planned to fly it at all. Reliable, frequent, and affordable access to space can only happen by euthanizing the Shuttle program.
It's not a question of hormones. NASA is willing to take risks. NASA management however has a skewed understanding of their incentive, which results in the wrong things for the wrong reasons. We have built a system which costs dramatically more to fly than the nation is willing to spend. It costs so much to fly that we have reduced our expectations and plans over and over and over to fit within the flight budget, even as monies are re-allocated from doing stuff to flying the Shuttle. This silliness must stop.
Every time the Shuttle flies, we fall about six months further behind where we could be. We still have not started to think about replacing it with a system that will deliver reliable, inexpensive and frequent access to space. The capsule replacement on the drawing board won't be inexpensive and it won't fly frequently. It's a stop-gap measure to provide access to the International Space Station, assuming the Shuttle can fly without disaster something like 18 more times to finish the construction. That is definitely not certain. The loss of only one more orbiter -- even in a ground accident as has nearly happened -- will make it all but impossible to finish construction of the ISS.
If you think human and other activity in space is important then you should be in favor of immediate cancellation of the Shuttle program. I don't know what sort of wake-up call that Congress and NASA need to get the hint, but we really need to start working on a next generation system right now.
QoS can be very handy for managing traffic on internal corporate networks. Like many other technologies (e.g. the Evil Petting Zoo), QoS can be applied for good or evil.
" I am all for fighting spam, but given how unreliable spam black-lists are such actions simply damage the internet. "
Assuming the problem referred to in the article summary is that of false positives, I think "unreliable" is really a misleading term to apply to the blacklists. Some of them are relatively reliable at their intended purpose--helping people reduce spam by blocking sources of spam.
The problems with false positives are really an externalized cost, which accrues largely to innocent and not-so-innocent third parties, since sometimes spam originates from IP addresses or domains where other legitimate traffic exits (innocently) but sometimes the owners of those domains are supporting the spam activity directly (not so innocently). Of course, some of the costs of blocked legitimate traffic accrue to the user of the spam list, but those folks are making a trade-off and pretty clearly feel the benefits to be worth the annoyances.
Regarding the central thesis that taking actions like these "damage the internet," may I suggest that in fact the odds of "damage" to anyone are probabaly quite low, assuming that the Registrar does proper due diligence before taking such actions. They should not take the mere presense on a blacklist as gospel, but should check the domains directly themselves.
I'm also amused at the likely effect of the "fee for restoration of service". Ticked-off innocent users will be unfairly charged, and are likely to complain very loudly. Such users will probably receive an apology from a help desk worker, and free restoration of service. Guilty users are financing their operation with stolen identity and credit cards and will probably just pay the fee using ill gotten booty. (Aaaarh, Matey! Make 'em swab the poop deck instead!)
An incident response investigator for the NNSA would be fired for posting something like this to Slashdot. Furthermore, they probably wouldn't take the risk, because they would be smart enough to know that it wouldn't be hard for someone familiar with the group's writings to figure out who you are, if in fact you do work for them. So expect to be fired any day now, in the unlikely event that you were not posting crap.
In most Federal organizations for most employees personnel contact and identity information is not "top secret". For this particular information, perhaps a small number of employees might fall into that category, but the bulk undoubtedly do not.
In fact, personnel contact and identity data is normally considered to be "sensitive but unclassified", which is only one notch above "display it on a public web site" and its security receives very little attention and is not taken seriously by most managers. This might be only my opinion, but it is an opinion backed up by a fair bit of unfortunate circumstantial information in the past few weeks, as well as a history of trying to get customers to take it more seriously.
Ask not why some poor little schmuck lost his job for hiring idiots and building a culture of cover-up and deceit in his organization. Ask why some other bigger schmuck did not.
What I don't understand is why we don't hold people accountable more often. It clearly is a tradition that has fallen on hard times in the U.S. In Europe it seems to be more common for government heads to be "held accountable" for the organization they run.
Some states have recently stopped using the SSN as the Driver's License number. Montana, for example. People 'round here have refused to let the state use their SSN number on the Driver's License, forcing the state to come up with a way to generate and handle another type of number. The State finally either got a clue, or gave up, either way, it was an improvement.
Bruce Schnier wrote about this in the most recent Crypto-Gram. The reason is that there is tremendous lobbying pressure being applied to Congress to water down this legislation, and trump the more effective state laws in the process.
Some companies like to have the SSN to use for collections and skip-tracing. Other companies just do it from inertia. Customers need to write to management of companies like Blockbuster and demand that they stop requesting this information.
Dr Michael Hfuhruhurr Notice that in the comments someone says, "I saw this on Slashdot a while ago". And that name? Clearly a reference to a thread-ending historical figure. QED
"I won't go as far as the grandparent, but close. I've never been -harmfully- afflicted by being hacked, rooted, or infected with a virus or spyware. I've almost never run into any of those at all - but once every couple of years something crops up."
Well, so far as you know. One of my clients used to think that, too, and reapeated it as a mantra for years, until I showed them clear evidence that about 200 of their systems were under the direct control of a remote cracker during a worm outbreak. Hard drives and shared filesystems were scanned. Files were uploaded to remote servers under cracker control.
Most organizations (and most people) just don't want to believe exactly how bad it really is when a PC gets infected with malware these days. They don't want to know because if they remain in the dark about it they don't have to do anything to fix it.
I don't know much about the art form, but it seems to me that the reason we don't see this is because it's not necessary. Getting the heat out of the 2D CPU can be done at a pace sufficient to keep the chip from melting, which is good enough.
The problem really has to do with creating too much heat in the first place (e.g. chewing through the storage capacity of your laptop battery), and what the heck you do with the heat once it's off the chip and on the heat sink. Apple's PowerBook / MacBook case is pretty clearly a response to that issue (the aluminum case effectively makes the case and your testicles beneath it an extension of the heat sink) and a fractal heat sink woven through the 2D chip design wouldn't really help your chances of avoiding temporary (or worse?) heat induced infertility.
Due to the heat issues you describe, 3D designs probably won't be common for chips until we stop using electrons and switch to photons for computing. At that point, design complexity trade-offs (perhaps a net reduction in circuit paths or increased storage density needs) will probably drive at least some limited 3D structures.
However, one possible solution to the problem you pose would be to design the chips with lots of little holes and pumping fluid through it. A design could be based on a fractal 3D shape (or perhaps simpler designs might work). It really isn't clear what the advantage of this approach would be right now, though, because the limits of the available area on a 2D chip surface are not really the limiting factor.
Skynet will probably know what a fairly efficient design would be.
"I've not heard comments like that with regard to microeconomics before."
It would seem I'm a font of original ideas.:-)
Seriously, though, don't read too much into it. My comment about microeconomics is not intended as a rebuke of the tools of the field, but rather a caution regarding their application. I obviously think the tools are useful and interesting, or I wouldn't have studied economics. Personally, I think that the schism in economics between macro and micro is somewhat artificial anyway. It's sorta like the schism betwixt general relativity and quantum mechanics. In order to understand the universe we live in, we need them both, there appears to be a bit of a disconnect between them, and our intuition says they could be merged into a grand unified theory, but we haven't a clue how to do it. In economics the schism isn't quite that severe.
Krugman has something interesting to say about macro, and he's a more credible source than am I.
He also has interesting things to say about the general practice of economics. I particularly like the bit about "silly assumptions" of economic models.
How I work (Krugman) What seems terribly hard for many economists to accept is that all our models involve silly assumptions. Given what we know about cognitive psychology, utility maximization is a ludicrous concept; equilibrium pretty foolish outside of financial markets; perfect competition a howler for most industries. The reason for making these assumptions is not that they are reasonable but that they seem to help us produce models that are helpful metaphors for things that we think happen in the real world.
What he doesn't say, because the point of his essay is different and carries him a different direction, is that politicians completely fail to grasp the silliness of the assumpions, and the resulting limitations of the models, in part because economists often fail to remember that they started, decades ago, with a model that has silly assumptions.
I disagree that most economists would view efficiency as something determined by a value judgement. Whether a market is efficient or not has to do with whether goods are allocated to those with the highest willingness to pay for them, and allowing price to function properly as a signal of the value a good or service has. In this way, resources will flow to where they will be most productive. I'm not sure where value judgments or any normative statements/analysis enter the picture.
Interesting link, dieoff.org. Where did you study economics?
It may be true that most economists wouldn't consider the inherent value judgments in various efficiency models, but that would be because they haven't been taught to think out of the box (which makes it like any other field, right?). Some of them are aware of it, though. You would be most likely to find overt discussions of this in the subfield of developmental economics.
The very fact that several different models of efficiency exist is a pretty big hint that something interesting is going on with the term "efficiency". The central issue is that the criteria by which you determine what is efficient are inherently value laden.
Alternative efficiency models could be constructed which are based on different assumptions -- perhaps everyone born should be guaranteed a certain minimum quality of life, with respect to food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and education. The resulting efficiency might be described as an index of human misery, factoring in things like starvation, life expectancy and likelihood of death from warfare.
I studied economics at the University of Nebraska where I see several of my professors remain. They most certainly are not to be blamed for my statements, conjecture, hyperbole, devils-advocate games, misrepresentations, misunderstandings, inaccuracies, and other opinions. I didn't pursue an advanced degree, so I wasn't fully brainwashed, uh, indoctrinated, uh, educated.:-)
He never said you shouldn't trust that their anti-virus software works, which is the straw man your reply addresses.
You missed. I neither said nor implied any such thing.
I agree that it's wise to be aware of people's incentives and motivations, including one's own -- it's not a smokescreen, rather it's a deeper understanding. Profit motivated people and organizations do all manner of good and trustworthy things. I'm only pointing out that profit motivation, by itself, is not sufficient as the basis for the argument in the parent post.
You do get a point for making me (and probably others) laugh with your opening sentence, however. Nicely done.
Hmm... I'm sympathetic to your position, but not your reasoning. Except for the occasional trust funder, just about everyone here is selling their services in exchange for cash. If you leave one job for another, higher paying job, are you profit motivated, and thus no longer to be trusted?
I suspect that rather than their motivation to make a profit, it is really the years of strangely incongruous (for a security company) and untrustworthy behavior like pioneering the pop-up browser advertisements and so forth that have caused you to trust not McAfee.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't mean to imply that a given CEV craft will fly that often--it won't. The entire fleet might be capable of sustained flight rates of 1 or 2 launches per month.
The CEV is not intended to bring a serious reduction in the cost of access to space. It will probably be less expensive to fly than the current Shuttle, and it might be possible to fly it as often as a couple times a month if needed, but it is not a next-generation space access system. CEV is needed, but it is not all that is needed.
7. Employ a keen sense of irony by killing any R&D programs that might lead to affordable, reliable, and frequent access to space before they produce results, using the excuse that the research and development programs have run over-budget. Ignore the fact that the greatest budget over-runs occur in the operational Space Shuttle program. Hope nobody notices that a viable alternative might threaten continued funding of the Shuttle program. See X-33, DC-X, et. al.
They got the Shuttle to last nearly 30 years by flying it dramatically less often than planned, and spending dramatically more than planned to fly it at all. Reliable, frequent, and affordable access to space can only happen by euthanizing the Shuttle program.
It's not a question of hormones. NASA is willing to take risks. NASA management however has a skewed understanding of their incentive, which results in the wrong things for the wrong reasons. We have built a system which costs dramatically more to fly than the nation is willing to spend. It costs so much to fly that we have reduced our expectations and plans over and over and over to fit within the flight budget, even as monies are re-allocated from doing stuff to flying the Shuttle. This silliness must stop.
Every time the Shuttle flies, we fall about six months further behind where we could be. We still have not started to think about replacing it with a system that will deliver reliable, inexpensive and frequent access to space. The capsule replacement on the drawing board won't be inexpensive and it won't fly frequently. It's a stop-gap measure to provide access to the International Space Station, assuming the Shuttle can fly without disaster something like 18 more times to finish the construction. That is definitely not certain. The loss of only one more orbiter -- even in a ground accident as has nearly happened -- will make it all but impossible to finish construction of the ISS.
If you think human and other activity in space is important then you should be in favor of immediate cancellation of the Shuttle program. I don't know what sort of wake-up call that Congress and NASA need to get the hint, but we really need to start working on a next generation system right now.
QoS can be very handy for managing traffic on internal corporate networks. Like many other technologies (e.g. the Evil Petting Zoo), QoS can be applied for good or evil.
Well, to be fair, Enron isn't a typical American company. Their hubris vastly exceeded their ability to cover their tracks, which got them caught!
: )
The problems with false positives are really an externalized cost, which accrues largely to innocent and not-so-innocent third parties, since sometimes spam originates from IP addresses or domains where other legitimate traffic exits (innocently) but sometimes the owners of those domains are supporting the spam activity directly (not so innocently). Of course, some of the costs of blocked legitimate traffic accrue to the user of the spam list, but those folks are making a trade-off and pretty clearly feel the benefits to be worth the annoyances.
Regarding the central thesis that taking actions like these "damage the internet," may I suggest that in fact the odds of "damage" to anyone are probabaly quite low, assuming that the Registrar does proper due diligence before taking such actions. They should not take the mere presense on a blacklist as gospel, but should check the domains directly themselves.
I'm also amused at the likely effect of the "fee for restoration of service". Ticked-off innocent users will be unfairly charged, and are likely to complain very loudly. Such users will probably receive an apology from a help desk worker, and free restoration of service. Guilty users are financing their operation with stolen identity and credit cards and will probably just pay the fee using ill gotten booty. (Aaaarh, Matey! Make 'em swab the poop deck instead!)
Bullshit.
An incident response investigator for the NNSA would be fired for posting something like this to Slashdot. Furthermore, they probably wouldn't take the risk, because they would be smart enough to know that it wouldn't be hard for someone familiar with the group's writings to figure out who you are, if in fact you do work for them. So expect to be fired any day now, in the unlikely event that you were not posting crap.
In most Federal organizations for most employees personnel contact and identity information is not "top secret". For this particular information, perhaps a small number of employees might fall into that category, but the bulk undoubtedly do not.
In fact, personnel contact and identity data is normally considered to be "sensitive but unclassified", which is only one notch above "display it on a public web site" and its security receives very little attention and is not taken seriously by most managers. This might be only my opinion, but it is an opinion backed up by a fair bit of unfortunate circumstantial information in the past few weeks, as well as a history of trying to get customers to take it more seriously.
Ask not why some poor little schmuck lost his job for hiring idiots and building a culture of cover-up and deceit in his organization. Ask why some other bigger schmuck did not.
What I don't understand is why we don't hold people accountable more often. It clearly is a tradition that has fallen on hard times in the U.S. In Europe it seems to be more common for government heads to be "held accountable" for the organization they run.
Some states have recently stopped using the SSN as the Driver's License number. Montana, for example. People 'round here have refused to let the state use their SSN number on the Driver's License, forcing the state to come up with a way to generate and handle another type of number. The State finally either got a clue, or gave up, either way, it was an improvement.
The most likely or immediate threat would be to the personal security of the employees and contractors.
Bruce Schnier wrote about this in the most recent Crypto-Gram. The reason is that there is tremendous lobbying pressure being applied to Congress to water down this legislation, and trump the more effective state laws in the process.
Write your Senators and Congresspersons.
Some companies like to have the SSN to use for collections and skip-tracing. Other companies just do it from inertia. Customers need to write to management of companies like Blockbuster and demand that they stop requesting this information.
Dr Michael Hfuhruhurr Notice that in the comments someone says, "I saw this on Slashdot a while ago". And that name? Clearly a reference to a thread-ending historical figure. QED
Most organizations (and most people) just don't want to believe exactly how bad it really is when a PC gets infected with malware these days. They don't want to know because if they remain in the dark about it they don't have to do anything to fix it.
* ducks *
I don't know much about the art form, but it seems to me that the reason we don't see this is because it's not necessary. Getting the heat out of the 2D CPU can be done at a pace sufficient to keep the chip from melting, which is good enough.
The problem really has to do with creating too much heat in the first place (e.g. chewing through the storage capacity of your laptop battery), and what the heck you do with the heat once it's off the chip and on the heat sink. Apple's PowerBook / MacBook case is pretty clearly a response to that issue (the aluminum case effectively makes the case and your testicles beneath it an extension of the heat sink) and a fractal heat sink woven through the 2D chip design wouldn't really help your chances of avoiding temporary (or worse?) heat induced infertility.
Due to the heat issues you describe, 3D designs probably won't be common for chips until we stop using electrons and switch to photons for computing. At that point, design complexity trade-offs (perhaps a net reduction in circuit paths or increased storage density needs) will probably drive at least some limited 3D structures.
However, one possible solution to the problem you pose would be to design the chips with lots of little holes and pumping fluid through it. A design could be based on a fractal 3D shape (or perhaps simpler designs might work). It really isn't clear what the advantage of this approach would be right now, though, because the limits of the available area on a 2D chip surface are not really the limiting factor.
Skynet will probably know what a fairly efficient design would be.
I'm guessing the cat is black. Otherwise you would see white cat hair on his black turtleneck sweaters at the keynotes.
Seriously, though, don't read too much into it. My comment about microeconomics is not intended as a rebuke of the tools of the field, but rather a caution regarding their application. I obviously think the tools are useful and interesting, or I wouldn't have studied economics. Personally, I think that the schism in economics between macro and micro is somewhat artificial anyway. It's sorta like the schism betwixt general relativity and quantum mechanics. In order to understand the universe we live in, we need them both, there appears to be a bit of a disconnect between them, and our intuition says they could be merged into a grand unified theory, but we haven't a clue how to do it. In economics the schism isn't quite that severe.
Krugman has something interesting to say about macro, and he's a more credible source than am I.
There's something about macro (Krugman)
The links to his charts are broken, so you can see an explanation of the IS/LM model at wikipedia.
He also has interesting things to say about the general practice of economics. I particularly like the bit about "silly assumptions" of economic models.
What he doesn't say, because the point of his essay is different and carries him a different direction, is that politicians completely fail to grasp the silliness of the assumpions, and the resulting limitations of the models, in part because economists often fail to remember that they started, decades ago, with a model that has silly assumptions.
But don't take my word for it. Read this interesting essay, instead: Efficiency (by Paul Heyne)
The very fact that several different models of efficiency exist is a pretty big hint that something interesting is going on with the term "efficiency". The central issue is that the criteria by which you determine what is efficient are inherently value laden.
Alternative efficiency models could be constructed which are based on different assumptions -- perhaps everyone born should be guaranteed a certain minimum quality of life, with respect to food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and education. The resulting efficiency might be described as an index of human misery, factoring in things like starvation, life expectancy and likelihood of death from warfare.
I studied economics at the University of Nebraska where I see several of my professors remain. They most certainly are not to be blamed for my statements, conjecture, hyperbole, devils-advocate games, misrepresentations, misunderstandings, inaccuracies, and other opinions. I didn't pursue an advanced degree, so I wasn't fully brainwashed, uh, indoctrinated, uh, educated.
I agree that it's wise to be aware of people's incentives and motivations, including one's own -- it's not a smokescreen, rather it's a deeper understanding. Profit motivated people and organizations do all manner of good and trustworthy things. I'm only pointing out that profit motivation, by itself, is not sufficient as the basis for the argument in the parent post.
You do get a point for making me (and probably others) laugh with your opening sentence, however. Nicely done.
Hmm... I'm sympathetic to your position, but not your reasoning. Except for the occasional trust funder, just about everyone here is selling their services in exchange for cash. If you leave one job for another, higher paying job, are you profit motivated, and thus no longer to be trusted?
I suspect that rather than their motivation to make a profit, it is really the years of strangely incongruous (for a security company) and untrustworthy behavior like pioneering the pop-up browser advertisements and so forth that have caused you to trust not McAfee.