Exactly this. TSA rules are dumb. This particular agent may, or may not, have done something bad. If she did she should be punished, but guilty until proven innocent isn't any more fair for her than anyone else.
I've been patted down by the TSA. It was nothing like this. I'm not saying this woman is lying. Perhaps this particular agent was incompetent, anal retentive about being "sure", or really was a perv; I don't know. I do know that if the pat down is done right, it's annoying at worst. I'm not saying the situation is right in the first place, but I am saying that either the TSA employee was violating procedure or this woman is incredibly over sensitive. What she says happened should be impossible if the pat down was done properly.
Lots do, but only recently have SOHO class scanners included this. Our scanner at my last job bound to AD and sent your scans directly to your desk, it was incredibly easy to use. It even had a real keyboard. Load up the document in the hopper, tap the "scan to email" button and select the address (or address, and you could also manually type in outside addresses if you needed) you wanted to send to. It scanned quickly and at a high resolution too. It was in every way superior to a fax machine (though it could fax too, in a pinch). All in all the best system I've personally ever worked with. It also cost us a couple grand.
By contrast, the brand new wireless printer/scanner/fax I just bought for home can also scan to an e-mail address, but the controls are pretty clumsy. It's easier just to use the software on the computer. Typing an e-mail address of any length using a tiny on screen keyboard with "up/down/select" controls takes to damned long. Even if there was a real touch screen with a virtual keyboard it would be fine (and some SOHO models have this now).
You just very awesomely described my experience at Boeing, but to be fair not all DoD contractors are like that. Look around at the smaller ones. Many (not all, but many) are far more agile and willing to use the skills and abilities of their staff. Since you're already cleared you'd be on the short list for hiring almost by default. I'm not saying that even the smaller contractors are free wheeling good times companies, but they are much better. The problem with the big boys is most of them got their start in aviation and rocketry. Fields where very small errors can cause very large problems. They approach everything like they're building an airplane.
If you're near Huntsville, or Colorado Springs check out Colsa Corp. I left there on very good terms just recently and would be happy to work for them again. If they had offices in MA I'd probably still be with them
I'm in roughly the same spot. A bit younger, 5 years or so, but very experienced sys admin and I get lots of hits when I look. I turned down a job with a 30% raise last year when my then company offered me a 17% raise as a counter (the new job was in DC and I was in Alabama, so the math worked out fine), then just recently took a job here in Boston that got me another 8% (and allowed me to rejoin my wife who'd been forced to move up here for work). Linux system administration is hot right now. My advice (to both of us) is don't rest on your laurels. We're hot right now, and that's great. It's a surprisingly uncommon skill set, but more and more companies want it. That won't last forever. Keep your eyes on where the industry may go next. Also look for opportunities to move into management or architecture whichever floats your boat more. It seems a little more future proof.
Microsoft and Intel have thrown some legendary parties at Supercomputing. In 2006, they rented an entire Mall in Tampa. Free food and drink (Pretty much anything you wanted, They wouldn't hand out 20 year old scotch I'm sure, but I specifically remember having a Bombay Sapphire martini), live music, probably more than a thousand people. It was an amazing time, but I'm told that it paled in comparison to some previous years. There's no doubt Redmond knows how to throw a party.
Technically you can use LDAP to store information. Being an an auth/user database is only part of what LDAP does. It's more like a lightweight non-relational database than anything (I realize that isn't quite right, but it's a reasonable comparison). One of the things that nearly any LDAP tutorial has you do is create a shared address book for instance. Indeed, if you look at the most popular LDAP system currently available (Microsoft's Active Directory) you'll see that it can store all sorts of potentially valuable information about users. From their contact info to there access levels.
At least according to what I've read, they make money on that division. Not great margins (5% or so), but they made money and in volume it adds up. Sure it's a crappy business to be in, and getting out it might seem like a good idea; but dropping a profit center, no matter how annoying it is or thin the margins, to bet the farm on an unproven idea seems a bit crazy.
Except that's mostly not what happens. Sure, there's a few assholes out there who take advantage, there always are. Most of these people are simply reporting things like "I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure Ali down the street is planting all those bombs that are killing your soldiers and my neighbors indiscriminately." You see, mostly US soldiers aren't out to randomly and indiscriminately arrest and torture people. Yes, yes, bad shit happened, people abused their positions, it was all over the news and I'm not defending it. There's no excuse for the scum bags that use a war as an excuse for thrill murders, or treat prisoners like dogs. Unhappily they exist, happily they aren't nearly as common as you seem to think.
I spent a year in Iraq. We dealt with these informers regularly. We verified and double checked everything they told us, because that's our responsibility. We caught some people trying to to settle scores or cause trouble. We also caught people with the information we were given. People that did some truly horrifying things. Not just to our guys, to their neighbors and countrymen. At the time I was over there, the bombs killed civilians as often or even more often than they killed soldiers. These days the balance has shifted even farther. The majority of casualties for these types of attacks are civilians.
Except Apple didn't decide to simultaneously stop making iPods and Macs. They kept their profit centers moving while branching out into a new area. If the iPhone had been a debacle (always a possibility, albeit a small one given the hype Apple was getting), it would nopt have meant the end of Apple. They would still have had profitable products.
I don't have that problem with regular earbuds too often, but I can't wear the ones with a microphone that come with phones. Those cause great hilarity since they can partially control the phone, so when they get shorts from sweat you get all kinds of skips, pauses, and other weird stuff.
I was thinking the same thing. Also, for hiking, you can power your GPS device with the walking movement you're already making to perform the hike. I rarely run far enough to actually run out of juice on my phone (which is also my MP3 player and GPS), but I've cut it close a few times when the thing was already low when I started. (For those that wonder, we don't use GPS to figure out where we're running, at least I don't and I doubt many people do, it's just a nice way to keep accurate track of distance.)
Somewhat immaterial. Unless you are taking a walk specifically to charge your devices (possible I suppose, but probably unlikely), most of us spend at least several hours a day moving around via a foot power. The energy created by our our regular controlled impacts with the ground is normally simply lost; this would allow the capture of at least some of it. In the third world environments they're targeting, people walk even more. I can also see this being great for hiking, camping, and all sorts of outdoor activities that can leave you far away from power sources.
It's not besides the point, it's the practical side of the point. This doesn't mean we should ignore questions of morality, how much power is too much, how much monitoring is appropriate, etc... It just mean that while these philosophical questions are both interesting and relevant you don't really need to worried about the practical implications day by day. Practically, the government *can't* watch you all the time, or really at all, unless you are the subject of some investigation worth those resources (or someone is doing something they shouldn't be). That doesn't mean we shouldn't seek to limit and control then from a legal and regulatory perspective, but it does mean you probably don't need to worry about spies in your attic.
This is generally something I have a hard time convincing people of. I've worked for spooky organizations. Not at the highest levels or on the most secret projects, but in the general vicinity. The government is not monitoring you. Not because they lack the legal capability (though they do, and that is mostly, but not always, respected), but because they lack the technical ability. There are only so many analysts, only so much computer time, only so much storage. Except in cases of explicit corruption or misuse of resource, those analysts, that computer time, and that storage is not being wasted on monitoring Joe and Jane average.
I'm not going to say that there aren't abuses by the people who have access to some of this stuff; they are human and weak like the rest of us and are often tempted to take advantage of their situation I'm sure. In general however, unless you've done something that got a warrant issued for your information, the government doesn't care. They just don't have the resources to be big brother, even if they want to be.
Could you imagine if Nintendo teamed up with Apple in a full partnership to make something like this? Then they released a bunch of old 16 and 32 bit games for it ported to run natively on the phone? With good advertising, a big name like Nintendo (and their game library) behind it, and a small but lucrative side business licensing the tech to third party developers... that could be a license to print money. I'd certainly be willing to pay $50 or $60 bucks for the controller, and maybe $10 for the games. It's more than phone games usually cost, but with real controllers you could do a lot more.
Re:It'll never make it through FDA trials
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
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· Score: 1
Now, of course, "cure for cancer" is a worthless phrase as well, since cancer is a type of disease, and not a single disease, and therefore, it's extremely unlikely that one cure will work for more than one cancer let alone all of them.
This has the capability to be effective, if not for every cancer, at least for a wide swath of them. Just change the signature that the hunter-killer cells are well, hunting, and presto. It's way to early to even call this a "cure" for leukemia, but if the theory proves sound and it doesn't kill more people than it saves in testing, this could be the key to curing just about every cancer. It's like anything else, you have to prototype out the theory before you attempt the general case.
One could, with a bit of twisting and turning, make an argument that such a thing might be evidence for *a* benevolent God; but I fail to see how it could be evidence for your particular belief system. Nearly every religion on Earth postulates the existence of a benevolent God, how is this evidence that your particular theory is correct rather than one of the others?
Re:Could the title and summary be more exaggerated
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
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· Score: 2
Actually, if you read the article, it's pretty clear that while this particular experiment was leukemia based the theory should work on nearly any cancer. Basically, they used a modified HIV virus as a carrier to modify the DNA of some of the patients white blood cells (outside of the body). The modified cells are made to specifically target the cancer in question (and replicate, a lot). If trials continue to be successful, there is no reason to think that the "signature" of any cancer couldn't be substituted for the leukemia.
Re:Modified, Harmless HIV Used
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I am not an expert on this, by any means, but from reading the article and a bit of deduction I *think* the answers are straightforward:
1) The use of the modified HIV strain is outside of the body. It's used to "train" the white blood cells that have already been removed, so it's not likely to have much, if any, capability to harm the patient.
2) The new "specialized" white blood cells are just that. Once their "target" is gone, they will likely die off. There's nothing for them to fight.
3) Even if the treatment has a similar mortality rate to flu, that would be a huge and unimaginable improvement over the mortality rate for most types of aggressive cancer. The mortality rate for flu, especially if the patient is already in the hospital and everyone is prepared for it, is extremely low. The mortality rate for some of the more aggressive cancers is well over 50% even with treatment.
Honestly, there exist several forms of highly aggressive, highly lethal cancers that people would look at a 20% base mortality rate for the cure and consider it a good deal. Not that this seems to be a problem in this case.
Again, missing the point. No one is saying we're going to wake up tomorrow and all the PCs will be gone. For most people, and many application, PCs are becoming redundant (especially if you don't classify laptops as PCs, which is somewhat a matter of semantics). Current generations of phones and tablets are not quite up to the tasks that many of us perform on PCs, and there will always be a market for larger machines (simply becasue no matter how much you miniaturize, you will always be able to get more power/storage into a larger space), but those larger machines are on the way to becoming specialist devices that only certain types of people need or want.
Desktop/laptop class computers have, for about the last 5 years, been about as powerful as a "normal" person will ever need them to be. They run the OS and pretty much all the software people need, and can do it all at once without really trying to hard. Games, server software, modeling and simulation software.. that kind of thing will continue to push to boundaries and want every cycle you can give it, but for standard home/office use computers are powerful enough. So in five years, when tablets are as powerful as PCs were 5 years ago, why does a "normal" person need a PC? Just make a tablet that can dock with a keyboard/mouse/monitor, and make the UI smart enough to adjust itself based on whether it's in tablet (Touch UI) mode or docked (KVM UI) mode.
Will there still be people who need more? Who need a full PC for games, or coding, or whatever? Yeah sure. Will there there be a need for a PC in every home? Probably not. In 20 years "PCs" as we know them today will likely be specialist devices owned by a few people with a specific need. Of course we'll still have devices that do most of what PCs do. They just won't be big rectangular boxes with wires hooked to control and display devices.
1) Put phone on airplane mode 2) Once a day, drive to the middle of the desert to check e-mail/voice mail/text messages. 3) Put phone back on airplane mode. 4) Hope some enterprising asshole hasn't put up some crap in the middle of the desert.
Probably a little over paranoid, but not much. In reality I'd probably be a bit less paranoid than that, but I'd definitely move a few hotels down to do anything more serious than checking text messages.
It probably will have no affect what-so-ever. Why? Well you probably don't remember, but when the story about using smartphones for soldier to soldier communication came out, I said that the final version would no doubt use a portable military infrastructure for radios and towers. I got a rash of shit from people who a) thought I was right and were convinced the military would be wasting money, or b) thought I was wrong. The general argument went: "every nation on Earth has a cellular infrastructure in place, why not just use that?"
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Exactly this. TSA rules are dumb. This particular agent may, or may not, have done something bad. If she did she should be punished, but guilty until proven innocent isn't any more fair for her than anyone else.
I've been patted down by the TSA. It was nothing like this. I'm not saying this woman is lying. Perhaps this particular agent was incompetent, anal retentive about being "sure", or really was a perv; I don't know. I do know that if the pat down is done right, it's annoying at worst. I'm not saying the situation is right in the first place, but I am saying that either the TSA employee was violating procedure or this woman is incredibly over sensitive. What she says happened should be impossible if the pat down was done properly.
Lots do, but only recently have SOHO class scanners included this. Our scanner at my last job bound to AD and sent your scans directly to your desk, it was incredibly easy to use. It even had a real keyboard. Load up the document in the hopper, tap the "scan to email" button and select the address (or address, and you could also manually type in outside addresses if you needed) you wanted to send to. It scanned quickly and at a high resolution too. It was in every way superior to a fax machine (though it could fax too, in a pinch). All in all the best system I've personally ever worked with. It also cost us a couple grand.
By contrast, the brand new wireless printer/scanner/fax I just bought for home can also scan to an e-mail address, but the controls are pretty clumsy. It's easier just to use the software on the computer. Typing an e-mail address of any length using a tiny on screen keyboard with "up/down/select" controls takes to damned long. Even if there was a real touch screen with a virtual keyboard it would be fine (and some SOHO models have this now).
You just very awesomely described my experience at Boeing, but to be fair not all DoD contractors are like that. Look around at the smaller ones. Many (not all, but many) are far more agile and willing to use the skills and abilities of their staff. Since you're already cleared you'd be on the short list for hiring almost by default. I'm not saying that even the smaller contractors are free wheeling good times companies, but they are much better. The problem with the big boys is most of them got their start in aviation and rocketry. Fields where very small errors can cause very large problems. They approach everything like they're building an airplane.
If you're near Huntsville, or Colorado Springs check out Colsa Corp. I left there on very good terms just recently and would be happy to work for them again. If they had offices in MA I'd probably still be with them
I'm in roughly the same spot. A bit younger, 5 years or so, but very experienced sys admin and I get lots of hits when I look. I turned down a job with a 30% raise last year when my then company offered me a 17% raise as a counter (the new job was in DC and I was in Alabama, so the math worked out fine), then just recently took a job here in Boston that got me another 8% (and allowed me to rejoin my wife who'd been forced to move up here for work). Linux system administration is hot right now. My advice (to both of us) is don't rest on your laurels. We're hot right now, and that's great. It's a surprisingly uncommon skill set, but more and more companies want it. That won't last forever. Keep your eyes on where the industry may go next. Also look for opportunities to move into management or architecture whichever floats your boat more. It seems a little more future proof.
Microsoft and Intel have thrown some legendary parties at Supercomputing. In 2006, they rented an entire Mall in Tampa. Free food and drink (Pretty much anything you wanted, They wouldn't hand out 20 year old scotch I'm sure, but I specifically remember having a Bombay Sapphire martini), live music, probably more than a thousand people. It was an amazing time, but I'm told that it paled in comparison to some previous years. There's no doubt Redmond knows how to throw a party.
Technically you can use LDAP to store information. Being an an auth/user database is only part of what LDAP does. It's more like a lightweight non-relational database than anything (I realize that isn't quite right, but it's a reasonable comparison). One of the things that nearly any LDAP tutorial has you do is create a shared address book for instance. Indeed, if you look at the most popular LDAP system currently available (Microsoft's Active Directory) you'll see that it can store all sorts of potentially valuable information about users. From their contact info to there access levels.
At least according to what I've read, they make money on that division. Not great margins (5% or so), but they made money and in volume it adds up. Sure it's a crappy business to be in, and getting out it might seem like a good idea; but dropping a profit center, no matter how annoying it is or thin the margins, to bet the farm on an unproven idea seems a bit crazy.
Except that's mostly not what happens. Sure, there's a few assholes out there who take advantage, there always are. Most of these people are simply reporting things like "I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure Ali down the street is planting all those bombs that are killing your soldiers and my neighbors indiscriminately." You see, mostly US soldiers aren't out to randomly and indiscriminately arrest and torture people. Yes, yes, bad shit happened, people abused their positions, it was all over the news and I'm not defending it. There's no excuse for the scum bags that use a war as an excuse for thrill murders, or treat prisoners like dogs. Unhappily they exist, happily they aren't nearly as common as you seem to think.
I spent a year in Iraq. We dealt with these informers regularly. We verified and double checked everything they told us, because that's our responsibility. We caught some people trying to to settle scores or cause trouble. We also caught people with the information we were given. People that did some truly horrifying things. Not just to our guys, to their neighbors and countrymen. At the time I was over there, the bombs killed civilians as often or even more often than they killed soldiers. These days the balance has shifted even farther. The majority of casualties for these types of attacks are civilians.
Except Apple didn't decide to simultaneously stop making iPods and Macs. They kept their profit centers moving while branching out into a new area. If the iPhone had been a debacle (always a possibility, albeit a small one given the hype Apple was getting), it would nopt have meant the end of Apple. They would still have had profitable products.
I don't have that problem with regular earbuds too often, but I can't wear the ones with a microphone that come with phones. Those cause great hilarity since they can partially control the phone, so when they get shorts from sweat you get all kinds of skips, pauses, and other weird stuff.
I was thinking the same thing. Also, for hiking, you can power your GPS device with the walking movement you're already making to perform the hike. I rarely run far enough to actually run out of juice on my phone (which is also my MP3 player and GPS), but I've cut it close a few times when the thing was already low when I started. (For those that wonder, we don't use GPS to figure out where we're running, at least I don't and I doubt many people do, it's just a nice way to keep accurate track of distance.)
Somewhat immaterial. Unless you are taking a walk specifically to charge your devices (possible I suppose, but probably unlikely), most of us spend at least several hours a day moving around via a foot power. The energy created by our our regular controlled impacts with the ground is normally simply lost; this would allow the capture of at least some of it. In the third world environments they're targeting, people walk even more. I can also see this being great for hiking, camping, and all sorts of outdoor activities that can leave you far away from power sources.
It's not besides the point, it's the practical side of the point. This doesn't mean we should ignore questions of morality, how much power is too much, how much monitoring is appropriate, etc... It just mean that while these philosophical questions are both interesting and relevant you don't really need to worried about the practical implications day by day. Practically, the government *can't* watch you all the time, or really at all, unless you are the subject of some investigation worth those resources (or someone is doing something they shouldn't be). That doesn't mean we shouldn't seek to limit and control then from a legal and regulatory perspective, but it does mean you probably don't need to worry about spies in your attic.
This is generally something I have a hard time convincing people of. I've worked for spooky organizations. Not at the highest levels or on the most secret projects, but in the general vicinity. The government is not monitoring you. Not because they lack the legal capability (though they do, and that is mostly, but not always, respected), but because they lack the technical ability. There are only so many analysts, only so much computer time, only so much storage. Except in cases of explicit corruption or misuse of resource, those analysts, that computer time, and that storage is not being wasted on monitoring Joe and Jane average.
I'm not going to say that there aren't abuses by the people who have access to some of this stuff; they are human and weak like the rest of us and are often tempted to take advantage of their situation I'm sure. In general however, unless you've done something that got a warrant issued for your information, the government doesn't care. They just don't have the resources to be big brother, even if they want to be.
6... 6 digits. The number keys, they are not my friend today.
Look on the bright side, at 5 digits I'm stuck with my wife (just kidding honey).
Could you imagine if Nintendo teamed up with Apple in a full partnership to make something like this? Then they released a bunch of old 16 and 32 bit games for it ported to run natively on the phone? With good advertising, a big name like Nintendo (and their game library) behind it, and a small but lucrative side business licensing the tech to third party developers... that could be a license to print money. I'd certainly be willing to pay $50 or $60 bucks for the controller, and maybe $10 for the games. It's more than phone games usually cost, but with real controllers you could do a lot more.
Now, of course, "cure for cancer" is a worthless phrase as well, since cancer is a type of disease, and not a single disease, and therefore, it's extremely unlikely that one cure will work for more than one cancer let alone all of them.
This has the capability to be effective, if not for every cancer, at least for a wide swath of them. Just change the signature that the hunter-killer cells are well, hunting, and presto. It's way to early to even call this a "cure" for leukemia, but if the theory proves sound and it doesn't kill more people than it saves in testing, this could be the key to curing just about every cancer. It's like anything else, you have to prototype out the theory before you attempt the general case.
One could, with a bit of twisting and turning, make an argument that such a thing might be evidence for *a* benevolent God; but I fail to see how it could be evidence for your particular belief system. Nearly every religion on Earth postulates the existence of a benevolent God, how is this evidence that your particular theory is correct rather than one of the others?
Actually, if you read the article, it's pretty clear that while this particular experiment was leukemia based the theory should work on nearly any cancer. Basically, they used a modified HIV virus as a carrier to modify the DNA of some of the patients white blood cells (outside of the body). The modified cells are made to specifically target the cancer in question (and replicate, a lot). If trials continue to be successful, there is no reason to think that the "signature" of any cancer couldn't be substituted for the leukemia.
I am not an expert on this, by any means, but from reading the article and a bit of deduction I *think* the answers are straightforward:
1) The use of the modified HIV strain is outside of the body. It's used to "train" the white blood cells that have already been removed, so it's not likely to have much, if any, capability to harm the patient.
2) The new "specialized" white blood cells are just that. Once their "target" is gone, they will likely die off. There's nothing for them to fight.
3) Even if the treatment has a similar mortality rate to flu, that would be a huge and unimaginable improvement over the mortality rate for most types of aggressive cancer. The mortality rate for flu, especially if the patient is already in the hospital and everyone is prepared for it, is extremely low. The mortality rate for some of the more aggressive cancers is well over 50% even with treatment.
Honestly, there exist several forms of highly aggressive, highly lethal cancers that people would look at a 20% base mortality rate for the cure and consider it a good deal. Not that this seems to be a problem in this case.
Again, missing the point. No one is saying we're going to wake up tomorrow and all the PCs will be gone. For most people, and many application, PCs are becoming redundant (especially if you don't classify laptops as PCs, which is somewhat a matter of semantics). Current generations of phones and tablets are not quite up to the tasks that many of us perform on PCs, and there will always be a market for larger machines (simply becasue no matter how much you miniaturize, you will always be able to get more power/storage into a larger space), but those larger machines are on the way to becoming specialist devices that only certain types of people need or want.
Desktop/laptop class computers have, for about the last 5 years, been about as powerful as a "normal" person will ever need them to be. They run the OS and pretty much all the software people need, and can do it all at once without really trying to hard. Games, server software, modeling and simulation software.. that kind of thing will continue to push to boundaries and want every cycle you can give it, but for standard home/office use computers are powerful enough. So in five years, when tablets are as powerful as PCs were 5 years ago, why does a "normal" person need a PC? Just make a tablet that can dock with a keyboard/mouse/monitor, and make the UI smart enough to adjust itself based on whether it's in tablet (Touch UI) mode or docked (KVM UI) mode.
Will there still be people who need more? Who need a full PC for games, or coding, or whatever? Yeah sure. Will there there be a need for a PC in every home? Probably not. In 20 years "PCs" as we know them today will likely be specialist devices owned by a few people with a specific need. Of course we'll still have devices that do most of what PCs do. They just won't be big rectangular boxes with wires hooked to control and display devices.
My technology plan for BlackHat:
1) Put phone on airplane mode
2) Once a day, drive to the middle of the desert to check e-mail/voice mail/text messages.
3) Put phone back on airplane mode.
4) Hope some enterprising asshole hasn't put up some crap in the middle of the desert.
Probably a little over paranoid, but not much. In reality I'd probably be a bit less paranoid than that, but I'd definitely move a few hotels down to do anything more serious than checking text messages.
It probably will have no affect what-so-ever. Why? Well you probably don't remember, but when the story about using smartphones for soldier to soldier communication came out, I said that the final version would no doubt use a portable military infrastructure for radios and towers. I got a rash of shit from people who a) thought I was right and were convinced the military would be wasting money, or b) thought I was wrong. The general argument went: "every nation on Earth has a cellular infrastructure in place, why not just use that?"
This is why.