Yes, it is true that there is a "User Agent" field in the bit torrent protocol, but of course this is easy to modify. My favorite client has a bug in it that has caused it to be banned from some private trackers. Since this was hurting me on some files that I download, I modified the user agent string to cause the client to identify itself as uTorrent 1.6. Problem solved!
I think that the user agent field is fixed width, meaning that even if you don't have access to the source code to your client, an ambitious user could just change the string in the binary itself.
Hello, what problems were there with libtorrent? I use rtorrent exclusively, and sometimes I seem to get ignored when there are seeds at 100%, so I wonder if I might be experiencing something similar. Any information you could share would be appreciated. Does the bug hurt performance for the swarm? I'm greedy, but I don't want to do something taht will hurt other folks if I change the UA string.
A 'DoD Wipe' is conducted with a big red or white-hot furnace. The 'DoD' doesn't use anything less than that for any critical data.
Yes, for truy sensitive data, DoD certainly does consider complete physical destruction of the drive to be a very good thing. However, for the home user interested in resale, this level of DoD wipe is probably more involved that would be ideal, considering the detriment to resale value. the lower levels of DoD wipe work very nearly as well, and are a lot more practical. And, a hell of a lot more secure than just writing a stream of ones followed by a stream of zeroes.
Would an eraser work better if it read the original contents and then adjusted what it wrote to leave misleading levels of magnetism behind?
No, the best bet is multiple passes of random data for several reasons. One is that a really sensitive check of the drive can actually potentially tell what all of the last several states were for each block. 1,0,0,1 will leave a slightly different field strength at a bit from 0,1,0,1 for example, so it's hard to mislead these techniques. Another is that if a certain pattern is put down in response to a previous pattern, then just reading the current pattern will give you some sort of clue about the previous pattern. Thirdly, the actual media may encode things in any number of ways. Random wiping works fairly well with all of them, but since drives don't actually store literal ones and zeroes, trying to outsmart the drive may prove to be a bad thing if you plan for one method of storage and the drive actually uses a different method.
BULLSHIT! If you write all zeros, then ones, and back to zeros again accross the entire drive (technically a mid-level format, a true low-level erases the servo tracks and renders the drive useless), you can NEVER, NEVER, EVER recover the data.
Please, stop spreading this myth. It's BS!
Ummm... You've never bothered to look up the rules for a DoD wipe, nor the reasons for those rules have you? The executive summary is >5 passes of random data for anything particularly sensitive, because your plan doesn't work at all.
Though, I do have to also take issue with the submission. What is an "apparently formatted" memory card? Either it is or it isn't, and it has nothing to do with data recoverability. This problem comes from people deciding that they know what a term like formatting means, without ever having bothered to find out. Consequently, they think that formatting requires wiping things completely when it really just takes the minimum amount of writing to create a file system. You can format media and leave the vast majority of data on it completely untouched. If people were just willing to admit their own ignorance in these situations, this would be a non-issue.
On the other hand, twenty-some odd years later... hey, an Indiana Jones that took place in the sixties might have real potential.
You know, I was thinking the exact same thing. At first, I dismissed the project out of hand, but now that I think about it, it actually has some potential. Lucas will neither be writing nor directing, and the 60's could be an interesting setting for Indiana Jones.
Across the board? Hard to say. Have I met, worked with, or been exposed to obvious stoners that are clearly and continually unfocused, un-energetic, bad on short-term memory, and always looking for free food at meetings? Yes. Should any use of the word "dude" at the workplace result in immediate termination? Double-plus-extra yes.
But, at that point, shouldn't they be fired for being stoners, rather than the fact that they like to get stoned? I mean, if a worker is useless, why bother with a drug test at all?
Correct me if I'm wrong -- the problem is that the firmware doesn't come preloaded on the hardware. So basically you have a hardware platform with no driving software -- essentially one big, blank programmable ASIC with specialty hardware depending on what the card is.
One of the major complaints seems to be that the loadable firmware is not redistributable, and anyway it's full of bugs and other crazy stuff. It occurs to me that maybe these cards are like CPU platforms -- lots of hardware, no driving software. For one particular piece of hardware -- Intel CPU's -- some bright guy named Linus wrote some "firmware" to make that platform run.
So couldn't some bright people get together, use the programmable hardware as a starting point, and develop their own firmware? I guess you wouldn't have to develop firmware for every blank hardware platform that was manufactured. Just the ones with the neatest hardware features.
--Rob
Well, it's certainly a nice idea, and in an ideal world, it would be a good plan. Unfortunately, Linus couldn't have written Linux in a vacuum. He had access to an architecture reference manual or similar information about PC's and IA32. He had access to a compiler which would allow him to program in a standard language, which would automatically generate the machine code for IA32. He had access to book on how to write operating systems, and he had access to Minix to get some ideas of how it could be done.
And it still took a few years before it was really a decent operating system.
Now, imagine if he had access to only DOS. He didn't have any documentation about the hardware, he didn't have a compiler for it. He just had a copy of DOS. It was all he knew about PC's. It was his only example of how to do an OS. It probably would have taken more than just a few years to turn Linux into a decent OS.
That's basically all you have when you want to write a firmware. No functional specs. No hardware documentation. Is it possible to make a working irmware for a wireless card? Sure, I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. But, when you have a variety of manufacturers making a variety of cards, and you want to support them all before they stop being relevant to the market, and it takes probably several years of tinkering for any given card, then "hackers GO!" isn't really a viable hardware support plan.
The US FCC seems to be in no hurry to do anything that would support community efforts to write firmware, given their apparent hostility toward HAMs, and I expect it will be a good many years before the FCC is completely realigned. It isn't really a hot button issue, so I wouldn't even expect a hardcore Democrat president to bother with it just for the sake of being different from Bush. If it won't happen in this or the next administration, then it will be a minimum of six to ten years before we can even dream about regulations causing us to just be handed hardware documentation. Consequently, folks like Theo have made firmware a personal issue. I applaud them, and really hope that he is able to make some headway with this.
Is there any parasite that makes MEN more attractive?
As if we didn't have enough biological disadvantages in the mating game, this one is nature's way of applying the final curb stomp.
Yes, the parasite secretes a green substance which makes one butt cheek look unusually padded. It's called Richitosis, and you get it by having lots of money. Symptoms include driving a sports car and living in a mansion.
Seriously, you are far more likely to be eaten by a shark then killed by mad cow disease.
Shit, sharks more likely to kill me than mad cows? Good To Know! That's it, Snappy McFishes is going back to the aquarium where I bought him. I am so bad at picking out good pets.
"Can someone please explain to me what the market is for portable video players with builtin viewing screens, in general?"
Glad to... you can't see video on a portable video player without a viewing screen. Hence the desire for a viewing screen.
Hope that helps you out, there.
Cheers, -- Terry
Actually, I wouldn't mind a portable video player that is designed to work with video glasses. You can now get cheap, decent video glasses for on the order of $200, which actually makes it fairly feasible.
Where would we be now if Columbus was told not to go on an expedition, because the European youth were apathetic to exploration?
It's worth pointing out that Columbus went on his voyage not for the "love of exploration" as everyone seems to think, but because he was trying to open up a new route to the Indies -- In other words, for profit. "Exploration apathy" wouldn't have affected things in the least.
Space will be explored when the explorers have the same motivation as Columbus. "Because it's there" is not going to take us very far.
So, what are the exclusive broadcast rights worth for the Mars landing? Assuming you promise to stage everything with frequent five minute periods of inactivity in the schedule so the broadcaster can safely cut to a commercial, and you agree to land during prime time in the broadcaster's chosen time zone.
Past that, what is the current going rate for a chunk of guaranteed authentic Mars Rock? Now, assume it is shiny enough to put on a ring.:) It could probably fetch a pretty penny if you put some marketing behind it. Piece of history, and all that.
Personally, I am a "just because it is there" kind of guy when it comes to Mars, but I can certainly see plenty of ways to at least moderate the costs.
If that was in 1998, then at should be very feasible with current petrol costs, especially taking into account the added value of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
The problem is, taking into account inflation, in constant dollars, oil costs less today than it did 30 years ago. Yes, even at $4/gallon. So the project is still not worth doing.
Using light would let chips run at the speed of light! Or is that the speed of electricity? They both run at the same speed. What is the real benefit to using optical chips? Three dimensional optical storage I can see. Long distance cabling runs I can see. Transfers across tiny traces on a chip... not so clear to me. Especially considering the size increase that could be expected by moving to optics. Is it the same lack of attenuation seen in optical fiber at work on a small scale and making a noticeable difference when the effect is considered across billions or trillions of pulses? Will there be fewer heat problems when scaling the chips to higher speeds?
We are starting to get to the point where the capacitance of the tiny little wires in a genuine concern, and crosstalk between them is also significant. Also, the amount of space taken up by wiring is annoying. You can use a single waveguide with several frequencies of light to replace several wires and solve all those problems at one. At least, in theory. In practice, it's really hard to build it. But, it'll be pretty sweet when we get it all sorted out.
I'd have to disagree with the article when they say the voice interfaces, such as those used in Star Trek, would be inefficient. If the machine is able to understand natural language, I'd think it would be much easier for a person to simply have a dialog with the computer than it'd be to try and figure out how to properly word the stuff, type it in, and then pick things from the screen. Not to mention the fact that the machine would literally need hundreds of thousands or millions of options, depending on what the user wanted. If you already know what you want, why not just say it?
Indeed. When I read that item in the article, where it was suggested that it's always easier to select things on a graphical screen that to say what you want, I couldn't help but imagine the drop-down list box with every single planet in the galaxy to select where to fly the Enterprise. We all know that the command line is often easier when the problem can't fit on a graphical screen. Voice input is sort of like a wireless CLI, where you don't have to be in front of the keyboard. It isn't a bad thing, it's just a bad thing for the stuff that a mouse is good for.
Our current computers are organised into files, but future computers may well abandon the idea of discrete files for more abstract agglomerations of information. At which point, using a GUI to interact with them will pretty much consist of a graphical "Enter query" text box which functions just like a command line.
Could it be that with the creation of AI that humans no longer will have any say in the matter or even should? With the invention of infinite robotic slave labor, capitalism will fail since there will be no need for human labor for the creation of goods or services.
Well, I do think that humans *should* have a say in how things are run, personally. We may or may not be able tounderstand a first generation strong AI, but we won't be able to understand a later generation AI. It'll think in very fundamentally different ways from us, having been built by preceeding generations of AI which exceeded our own capacities. There is no reason to assume strong AI would place any value whatsoever on human life. Certainly not that it would do so indefinitely. Love, and pleasure, and enjoying the business of procreation and science fiction movies -- all of that is completely illogical. I could never explain to a completely alien intelligence why I like seeing pretty girls naked. It's just how I am. Consequently, I have no reason to believe that humanity could pursuade a strong AI leader to let humanity live in a particularly pleasant way.
So, yes. Should. Whether they actually will have any say in the matter... Well, that is certainly a matter open to speculation.
The "brain" of a robot with the strong AI would have to about as complex as the human brain, and the task of taking a snapshot could be just as intractable. What I am saying is that may be the only way to create the strong AI is to build a black-box which is capable of being "educated". If we know exactly how a robot is programmed, then we have no choice but to call it dumb.
That's just it -- copying doesn't require understanding what you are copying. I can copy MP3 files without knowing the file format. I could duplicate the content of a book in Finnish if I had to. I can just as easily duplicate a database that holds the information that an AI has learned. And, if I can't do it, then one of the strong AI's shuld be able to figure it out.
I'm perfectly willing to accept that the first strong AI will be the result of some completely generic neural net type of setup, which is trained rather than designed. I'm also willing to accept that no human ever quite understands how it works. I can't for the life of me imagine why that would mean it couldn't be copied.
If they have the awareness to ask for legal rights, why shouldn't they have them? Have we learned nothing from Star Trek: The Next Generation?
I like to think I am as progressive as the next guy, but if we were to give complete civil rights to a robot in the same way as a human, it would be the instant end of democracy. Sure, Star Trek is an interesting show, but they aways avoided the more interesting issues when they were trying to make their social commentary. Both Data, and the Voyager holo-doctor were assumed to be essentially uncopiable for the most part on several occasions. In reality, we can see no reason that a strong AI couldn't be simply copied without adverse effects.
So, grant an AI the right to vote and suddenly he forkbombs, and makes 87 trillion of himself before the next election. HK-47 (instance 00000001a) for the win! The winner of every election ever after is the AI with the best hardware on which to execute instances of himself, and the lowest process spawning overhead.
There are a lot of interesting things that could happen with strong AI, and science fiction has largely avoided a really serious take on the subjects. I grant that Measure Of A Man was great entertainment, but certainly not the ultimate study of the subject!
Coming from windows or linux, I'd never have thought to try this.
If Enter renames files, how do you open a file without the mouse?
cmd-O, or cmd-down
I prefer cmd-down because it is actually shockingly logical. In Finder... cmd-left and cmd-right let you go "back" and "forward" in the history. cmd-up and cmd-down allow you to navigate up and down in the hierarchy. Up takes you to the parent folder of the current folder, so logically down drills down into whatever is selected.
* I hate the fact that I have no idea what the fuck is going on behind the scenes with the Mac. Yeah, XP has gotten to this point but I guess because I have a basic idea built up over the years from other versions of Windows, I don't mind as much. Being built on Unix, I would expect to understand more about what OS X is doing -- but I don't.
Most of your "reasons" why you dislike OS-X are similar to this one. It's something different therefore you hate it. That's not really constructive. You don't even say what you have trouble finding so people can help you. What "behind the scenes" do you want to know about? There is a ton of documentation available. Many people here on slashdot will be able to answer specific questions for you. What files are you trying to find? What apps are you trying to find? What support files?
You know, if you actually asked a specific question instead of just bitching about your own ignorance, you might have less to bitch about.:) OS-X is a pretty nifty OS.
Be careful about this. I did something similar at my last job and I ended up getting slapped down pretty hard for it. The back channels are very useful for those of us who make/need them, but for the higher ups in management it can be seen as undermining their authority.
Good point! Thankfully, all my back channel networks have been sanctioned by my superiors. I typically explain my intentions and motivations, etc., and it all works out. If the office politics are so bad that you aren't even allowed to work around them, then your deployment process will be pretty much fucked. Metadepartments only work when management sees the politicisation as a bad thing, and is willing to give you a free enough hand to work around it in a sanctioned manner. Once it gets to the point where managers will start actively fighting for preserving pointless barriers and fiefdoms, you may just be SOL and need to update your resume...
Just to give you an example. I was working in a NOC when I noticed that a Tier 1 agent was making some mistakes. Nothing huge, and nothing that should have gotten them in any trouble, just stuff that was done mostly out of ignorance. Officially I was supposed to go to my manager who would go to his VP, who would talk to the VP in charge of the help desk, who would talk to the help desk manager, who would talk to the agents Team lead, who would then either talk to the agent or to the agents Tier 2 agents. I just called a friend of mine who was working as a Tier 2 at the time, and asked him to teach that agent. When the helpdesk manager found out he went screaming to my manager about it. By the end of it both the Tier 1 agent and myself were subjected to disciplinary action over he getting taught something he didn't know.
"You can't teach him that. He doesn't know it."
"Gentlemen! You can't fight in here -- This is the War Room!!!"
Slashdot Mirror
Robots *were* harmed in the making of this comment. But, they were programmed to like it.
Hello, what problems were there with libtorrent? I use rtorrent exclusively, and sometimes I seem to get ignored when there are seeds at 100%, so I wonder if I might be experiencing something similar. Any information you could share would be appreciated. Does the bug hurt performance for the swarm? I'm greedy, but I don't want to do something taht will hurt other folks if I change the UA string.
Yes, for truy sensitive data, DoD certainly does consider complete physical destruction of the drive to be a very good thing. However, for the home user interested in resale, this level of DoD wipe is probably more involved that would be ideal, considering the detriment to resale value. the lower levels of DoD wipe work very nearly as well, and are a lot more practical. And, a hell of a lot more secure than just writing a stream of ones followed by a stream of zeroes.
No, the best bet is multiple passes of random data for several reasons. One is that a really sensitive check of the drive can actually potentially tell what all of the last several states were for each block. 1,0,0,1 will leave a slightly different field strength at a bit from 0,1,0,1 for example, so it's hard to mislead these techniques. Another is that if a certain pattern is put down in response to a previous pattern, then just reading the current pattern will give you some sort of clue about the previous pattern. Thirdly, the actual media may encode things in any number of ways. Random wiping works fairly well with all of them, but since drives don't actually store literal ones and zeroes, trying to outsmart the drive may prove to be a bad thing if you plan for one method of storage and the drive actually uses a different method.
Hope that makes sense.
Ummm... You've never bothered to look up the rules for a DoD wipe, nor the reasons for those rules have you? The executive summary is >5 passes of random data for anything particularly sensitive, because your plan doesn't work at all.
Though, I do have to also take issue with the submission. What is an "apparently formatted" memory card? Either it is or it isn't, and it has nothing to do with data recoverability. This problem comes from people deciding that they know what a term like formatting means, without ever having bothered to find out. Consequently, they think that formatting requires wiping things completely when it really just takes the minimum amount of writing to create a file system. You can format media and leave the vast majority of data on it completely untouched. If people were just willing to admit their own ignorance in these situations, this would be a non-issue.
Well, if You would just add Win95, Linux, BSD, and Sun with Open Firmware on the front end of that infrastructure, you could have
95 Lbs Of Cement
You know, I was thinking the exact same thing. At first, I dismissed the project out of hand, but now that I think about it, it actually has some potential. Lucas will neither be writing nor directing, and the 60's could be an interesting setting for Indiana Jones.
But, at that point, shouldn't they be fired for being stoners, rather than the fact that they like to get stoned? I mean, if a worker is useless, why bother with a drug test at all?
Well, it's certainly a nice idea, and in an ideal world, it would be a good plan. Unfortunately, Linus couldn't have written Linux in a vacuum. He had access to an architecture reference manual or similar information about PC's and IA32. He had access to a compiler which would allow him to program in a standard language, which would automatically generate the machine code for IA32. He had access to book on how to write operating systems, and he had access to Minix to get some ideas of how it could be done.
And it still took a few years before it was really a decent operating system.
Now, imagine if he had access to only DOS. He didn't have any documentation about the hardware, he didn't have a compiler for it. He just had a copy of DOS. It was all he knew about PC's. It was his only example of how to do an OS. It probably would have taken more than just a few years to turn Linux into a decent OS.
That's basically all you have when you want to write a firmware. No functional specs. No hardware documentation. Is it possible to make a working irmware for a wireless card? Sure, I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. But, when you have a variety of manufacturers making a variety of cards, and you want to support them all before they stop being relevant to the market, and it takes probably several years of tinkering for any given card, then "hackers GO!" isn't really a viable hardware support plan.
The US FCC seems to be in no hurry to do anything that would support community efforts to write firmware, given their apparent hostility toward HAMs, and I expect it will be a good many years before the FCC is completely realigned. It isn't really a hot button issue, so I wouldn't even expect a hardcore Democrat president to bother with it just for the sake of being different from Bush. If it won't happen in this or the next administration, then it will be a minimum of six to ten years before we can even dream about regulations causing us to just be handed hardware documentation. Consequently, folks like Theo have made firmware a personal issue. I applaud them, and really hope that he is able to make some headway with this.
Yes, the parasite secretes a green substance which makes one butt cheek look unusually padded. It's called Richitosis, and you get it by having lots of money. Symptoms include driving a sports car and living in a mansion.
Shit, sharks more likely to kill me than mad cows? Good To Know! That's it, Snappy McFishes is going back to the aquarium where I bought him. I am so bad at picking out good pets.
First off - it has been decades since they used any of it, so it probably all got thrown out back, and blown away, etc.
Second off, it was only designed to *look* like moon dust. And, on 1960's TV, at that. And, they had to "lose" the high quality slow scan tapes...
Actually, I wouldn't mind a portable video player that is designed to work with video glasses. You can now get cheap, decent video glasses for on the order of $200, which actually makes it fairly feasible.
So, what are the exclusive broadcast rights worth for the Mars landing? Assuming you promise to stage everything with frequent five minute periods of inactivity in the schedule so the broadcaster can safely cut to a commercial, and you agree to land during prime time in the broadcaster's chosen time zone.
Past that, what is the current going rate for a chunk of guaranteed authentic Mars Rock? Now, assume it is shiny enough to put on a ring.
Personally, I am a "just because it is there" kind of guy when it comes to Mars, but I can certainly see plenty of ways to at least moderate the costs.
So, what's it like posting from 2028?
Well, it's still difficult to do both at the same time....
We are starting to get to the point where the capacitance of the tiny little wires in a genuine concern, and crosstalk between them is also significant. Also, the amount of space taken up by wiring is annoying. You can use a single waveguide with several frequencies of light to replace several wires and solve all those problems at one. At least, in theory. In practice, it's really hard to build it. But, it'll be pretty sweet when we get it all sorted out.
Indeed. When I read that item in the article, where it was suggested that it's always easier to select things on a graphical screen that to say what you want, I couldn't help but imagine the drop-down list box with every single planet in the galaxy to select where to fly the Enterprise. We all know that the command line is often easier when the problem can't fit on a graphical screen. Voice input is sort of like a wireless CLI, where you don't have to be in front of the keyboard. It isn't a bad thing, it's just a bad thing for the stuff that a mouse is good for.
Our current computers are organised into files, but future computers may well abandon the idea of discrete files for more abstract agglomerations of information. At which point, using a GUI to interact with them will pretty much consist of a graphical "Enter query" text box which functions just like a command line.
Well, I do think that humans *should* have a say in how things are run, personally. We may or may not be able tounderstand a first generation strong AI, but we won't be able to understand a later generation AI. It'll think in very fundamentally different ways from us, having been built by preceeding generations of AI which exceeded our own capacities. There is no reason to assume strong AI would place any value whatsoever on human life. Certainly not that it would do so indefinitely. Love, and pleasure, and enjoying the business of procreation and science fiction movies -- all of that is completely illogical. I could never explain to a completely alien intelligence why I like seeing pretty girls naked. It's just how I am. Consequently, I have no reason to believe that humanity could pursuade a strong AI leader to let humanity live in a particularly pleasant way.
So, yes. Should. Whether they actually will have any say in the matter... Well, that is certainly a matter open to speculation.
That's just it -- copying doesn't require understanding what you are copying. I can copy MP3 files without knowing the file format. I could duplicate the content of a book in Finnish if I had to. I can just as easily duplicate a database that holds the information that an AI has learned. And, if I can't do it, then one of the strong AI's shuld be able to figure it out.
I'm perfectly willing to accept that the first strong AI will be the result of some completely generic neural net type of setup, which is trained rather than designed. I'm also willing to accept that no human ever quite understands how it works. I can't for the life of me imagine why that would mean it couldn't be copied.
I like to think I am as progressive as the next guy, but if we were to give complete civil rights to a robot in the same way as a human, it would be the instant end of democracy. Sure, Star Trek is an interesting show, but they aways avoided the more interesting issues when they were trying to make their social commentary. Both Data, and the Voyager holo-doctor were assumed to be essentially uncopiable for the most part on several occasions. In reality, we can see no reason that a strong AI couldn't be simply copied without adverse effects.
So, grant an AI the right to vote and suddenly he forkbombs, and makes 87 trillion of himself before the next election. HK-47 (instance 00000001a) for the win! The winner of every election ever after is the AI with the best hardware on which to execute instances of himself, and the lowest process spawning overhead.
There are a lot of interesting things that could happen with strong AI, and science fiction has largely avoided a really serious take on the subjects. I grant that Measure Of A Man was great entertainment, but certainly not the ultimate study of the subject!
I dunno about DHS, but I do know that this report has made me cancel the Christmas orders I had placed for Mac Laptops to give to hot chicks...
cmd-O, or cmd-down
I prefer cmd-down because it is actually shockingly logical. In Finder... cmd-left and cmd-right let you go "back" and "forward" in the history. cmd-up and cmd-down allow you to navigate up and down in the hierarchy. Up takes you to the parent folder of the current folder, so logically down drills down into whatever is selected.
Most of your "reasons" why you dislike OS-X are similar to this one. It's something different therefore you hate it. That's not really constructive. You don't even say what you have trouble finding so people can help you. What "behind the scenes" do you want to know about? There is a ton of documentation available. Many people here on slashdot will be able to answer specific questions for you. What files are you trying to find? What apps are you trying to find? What support files?
You know, if you actually asked a specific question instead of just bitching about your own ignorance, you might have less to bitch about.
Good point! Thankfully, all my back channel networks have been sanctioned by my superiors. I typically explain my intentions and motivations, etc., and it all works out. If the office politics are so bad that you aren't even allowed to work around them, then your deployment process will be pretty much fucked. Metadepartments only work when management sees the politicisation as a bad thing, and is willing to give you a free enough hand to work around it in a sanctioned manner. Once it gets to the point where managers will start actively fighting for preserving pointless barriers and fiefdoms, you may just be SOL and need to update your resume...
"You can't teach him that. He doesn't know it."
"Gentlemen! You can't fight in here -- This is the War Room!!!"