Shouldn't you be saying that the gap gets wider, if you think there really isn't a middle class?
Shouldn't you be focusing on the points being made instead of tripping over the metaphor used?
one of the least popular groups in American politics - who actually have the correct solution for that.
Well there's a bait and switch if I've ever seen it. Let's back up the fail train. The original topic was Why isn't there more public outrage? It's not a popularity contest.
As I once saw it put, it would be a lot better if American elites preached what they practiced
If they started preaching it, then people would realize that what the power elite are proposing and supporting, is structurally more similar to fascism than any other ideology. Which is why they don't. And it would be a lot better if they stopped practicing whatever they're doing... to hell with what they're saying. They could run around saying two plus two is purple for all I care.
among the upper middle class, children are not born out of wedlock and divorces almost never occur once children are born until they're all grown. Making a lasting partnership matters, and it grants enormous advantages to your children.
Besides this statement begging a "Citation needed" sticker on it, how, exactly, does this even loosely, remotely, theoretically, tie back into our discussion about surveillance society and possible solutions to its crippling effects? Because I'm completely lost as to how we went from that topic to your pro-family rant complete with stock footage of storm clouds.
Sorry, I disagree; Firstly, the only time an argument using the word "always" is right is with the statement "Using the word always always makes the statement wrong." Black and white thinking is such a cliche, yet it crops up everywhere. Now, the rebuttal: Those who have the gold, make the rules. Politics and economics are dance partners. My personal opinion is that economics leads most of the time, but sometimes politics leads economics as well. But there's no causal link between the two. They influence each other, but they are separate entities.
As for why this country got to this point regarding wealth inequity, and why our government is so inept, it's not what anyone thinks. It's not the fault of the democrats, or the republicans. It's actually the structure of our government itself. We've been fucked by our own Constitution! But this is not so obvious to anyone...
You see, it very often is the case that one party controls the house, and another the senate. And this results in frequent stalemates because the majorities for each were elected by the voters. They can both legitimately claim to be representing voter interests by not yielding. Now in most other representational democracies, the controlling party can't be blocked or stalemated like this; If such a stalemate does arise, a new vote is forced and a new plurality is elected into office.
Corporations and wealthy individuals don't get stalemated; They can't be jammed up or delayed. They can bring the full measure of their wealth down and will always move faster and more effectively than government control can, simply because the next stalemate is never more than a few months away. Our wealth inequity problem is tied to the Constitution itself. Is it possible for us to fix this? Yes. Has any country with such a problem ever managed to? No.
But I challenge your assertion that this wealth inequity problem is growing worldwide. It happens to be the case that our corporations have so much wealth that they can co-opt smaller governments, but the problem started here -- if those corporations and their process is moving out into other countries now, they're bringing our problems to them. It's not a problem that's happening concurrently across the globe.. it's spreading like an infection with the origination point here. And it can only get a foothold in certain markets, certain places, and in certain situations. And when those corporations are found and weeded out, the problem will slowly cure itself in the affected areas because in most countries, the problem is not structural.
Wealth inequity can occur as a byproduct of the boom/bust cycle of capitalism; but it doesn't become an unregulated positive feedback loop anywhere else but here, because nowhere else are you going to find a combination of an investment-based economy, a culture of debit amongst the general population, a government incapable of responding effectively to changes in economic circumstances, and an almost total absence of inheritance tax due to the pre-emption of governments worldwide that are being used to shelter large amounts of wealth in exchange for a pittance and their sovereignty to protect the wealthy citizen from his/her own government's attempt to return a portion of that wealth back into circulation.
It's a perfect storm, economically speaking -- and I can describe the entire problem using economics. There is no need to step outside into the sphere of politics. It happens to be that economics and politics are in bed with each other about as often as a Republican is caught in the men's room insisting he's not gay... but that doesn't mean they're the same thing, or that one always leads and the other follows.
We don't really repeat mistakes, as there's always been a large contingent that will protect wealth at all possible costs-- and defend their methods of creating it. I don't deny anyone a reasonable profit, but what's reasonable depends on which side of have's/have-nots you might rest on.
Small problem; wealth inequity in this country has never been this bad, not by a long shot. We've had a middle class since the post-industrial labor reforms of the 1930s. Prior to that, it was a clusterfuck as we moved from an agricultural to industrial society, which is to be expected. However, we don't have one anymore; we have the poor, and the super rich. The line separating those two is getting thinner every year.
So no, it is no longer a question of which "side" you're on. If you think this is still about politics, you haven't been keeping up. And to bring this home; This is the reason why nobody gives a fuck about the NSA.
They're too damn busy trying to stay alive to care about something as esoteric as civil liberties. When you're starving, you don't care about freedom -- you care about bread. And anyone who has some is your friend. Make the people starve, and they'll tolerate any amount of tyranny... so long as the tyrant keeps giving out bread crumbs.
This is old news. These methods have been around at least as long as C has. It only works in isolated situations and doesn't make you a good programmer. Or person.
A lot of that list is pretty damn arrogant, or at least naive. Let's start with just the ones the submitter quoted;
Don't bother with a testing/staging server but instead have secret logins and backdoor URLs to test new features
If you're so well known you can dictate terms to your employer, then maybe you can get away with this... for awhile anyway. But most of us, who code for a living, have to do the best with the tools we're given. We can ask for a testing server, but whether we get one is another matter entirely.
As for 'secret logins' and 'backdoor URLs'... every login is supposed to be secret. If you can get a list of userIDs via any external method, that's a security risk. And as for 'backdoor URLs'... Not everything should be accessible to the google crawler.
and mix test data with real data in your database.
There's any number of failure modes in complex code in which shoving random inputs into it will cause it to break in unexpected ways that don't become apparent until properly-formatted data is submitted after. I think what the author was trying to say was not to put invalid data into a production environment on purpose; It might make the app shit a brick. Unless of course that's the only environment you have to test. See also: That 'routine backup' of the EBT system that caused 13 states' food stamp programs to die in place.
Don't bother with a well-understood framework, write everything from scratch instead.
Again, pure arrogance on the part of the author; Well understood frameworks tend not to be highly optimized. If you are dealing with something where performance is absolutely critical, writing it 'from scratch' will probably get you better performance than taking one of those 'well-understood frameworks' out for a drive. Because as most experienced programmers know -- well-understood frameworks also have a lot of extra features and bloat they don't need. See also:.NET
Add dependencies to specific versions of libraries and resources, but don't protect or document those dependencies.
Okay, that's just plain sloppy. Well, 1 out of 5.
For the icing of the cake, use the coolest mix of cutting-edge programming languages.
The choice of programming languages matters very little, except to those who lack the Tao of programming. For those who are not One with the code, who do not grok the larger patterns that permeate the spaces between that which only the machine understands, and that which only the human understands, the language choice is the difference between life and death. For those who have transcended languages... it is the patterns they seek to understand. The language will take care of itself. It's like saying "Love" in French, German, Russian, or English. It's the same damn thing, and it's possible to understand someone who loves you, even if you don't understand a bloody word they say.
Bottom line here is that this 'list' is just the logical conclusion of a career of mediocrity spent shifting blame around instead of working the problem. Real programmers can use anything; And frankly... they usually do. -_- I've seen some completely hair-brained solutions that are coded in Perl, cgi-bin, bash, PHP, and little chunks of C here and there that work flawlessly and at great speed because the programmer took the best of each of those languages and leveraged them in the solution. Of course, for every good programmer who does this, there's ten more who tried the same thing and wound up with a pile of half-working shit, sooo.... YMMV.
Shouldn't be too hard to write steganography software that hid its messages in the pseudo-random changes to the text for filter evasion.
That's the easy part. The harder part is that you have to either setup, infiltrate, or silently replace, a spam distributor. It's just like money laundering; you need a "legitimate" business to front for it. Which makes this a relatively expensive proposition for the limited bandwidth and one-way communication afforded.
Terrorists, unlike governments, don't have a straw stuck to your wallet. They operate on limited budgets, and with limited manpower available. And the limited manpower they do have tends to be untrained and often uneducated. Engineers are highly sought after by the criminal underground -- terrorists, drug cartels, everyone. They have a glut of mules and people willing to strap bombs to their chest, but far fewer people who can manufacturer the drugs, or make the bombs. They often resort to kidnapping such individuals due to the exceptionally limited supply.
In the face of that, a stenographic technique is very expensive for the service it provides. Why not use conventional stenographic techniques like just visiting tourist hot spots, taking pictures, and uploading them to various blogs? As original images, they wouldn't have a bitwise match anywhere else, thus a differential analysis wouldn't reveal the insertion of stenographic data.
I don't know why engineers over-think problems like this; While yes, a terrorist could do this (or anyone else), the presence of competing solutions offering similar or greater functionality at a lower price means this likely will never happen. The people hauling drugs and strapping bombs to their chest may not be beacons of rational thought, but the people higher up are; You can't organize people without having an organized mind yourself.
And besides, stenography is something most often employed in industrial espionage, or in the high stakes 'spy game'. Or put another way: It's employed by people who have a lot to lose. You aren't going to see garden variety terrorists doing it because they're cheap. And expendable. That's one of the few 'fringe benefits' of being an organization of fantatics -- they don't worry about their 401K plan.
Hypothetical: The police need a warrant to search your house, but it's OK to have 24/7 surveillance of the inside of your house because you purchased a Kinect, and Microsoft decided to send the stream to the authorities. Why would anyone be upset over that?
How did you miss the point here? This isn't about technology, this is about due process, it's about human rights, it's about the balance of power between the government and its citizens, and it is most importantly about answering whether a democracy can survive with this level of intrusion into people's personal lives by the government.
It is said that you defend democracy with four boxes; The soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the ammo box. You are to use them in that order. The soap box I think we can say has safely failed. The ballot box has become useless -- every candidate you can choose is going to support this as a pre-condition to his political career. This is the jury box now.
This isn't a technology problem. This is a social problem. And it's one that's rapidly running out of peaceful solutions.:( Is this case going to trigger a civil war? No. But the large number of cases like it paint a pattern -- and it's that pattern that everyone is worried about.
Things that nobody is worried about: The three guys who actually bought the new XBone.
don't see why people keep making a fuss about this part,
They're making a fuss about it because companies don't give a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut about your civil rights, or anyone else's. They're only too happy to cooperate with the government, or anyone else with money. These records contain more personal information than would often be obtained if I ransacked your house. And having a phone, internet, etc., is essential for surviving in today's society. It isn't optional if you want a job, friends, or anything other than living in the woods. Corporations track everything about you; Bank records, cell phone records, medical records -- everything you do has a record of it kept by a corporation, somewhere.
It's an attempt to deprive someone of their rights against unreasonable search and seizure by simply asking somebody else to do it. And by attempt, I mean they already did it. And by already did it, I mean they've been doing this since the 1960s; but improvements in technology now mean they can do this globally, against everyone, for next to nothing. It's like the argument about how sharing music, etc., was legal... until advances in technology made it trivially easy, and suddenly, we had to throw people in jail for decades at a go and fine them hundreds of millions of dollars for doing the exact same thing, except they were doing it faster, and better, now.
Now personally, I don't care that the government wants to collect 'all the things', but they need probable cause to search all the things. In other words, collect everyone's cell phone records if you want, but you need a reason to look at them that passes constitutional muster. Because if we allow this to stand, then everyone will be a criminal in some fashion, and the government can, via selective enforcement, get rid of anyone they want.
The fact is, the laws are so complex that even our own government can't keep track of them all. If you let them gather evidence on everyone in bulk, you've created a system of efficiently removing political adversaries under the guise of the justice system. It all but destroys the democratic process.
THAT, is why people keep making a fuss; They can't create eloquent arguments to explain this, but it doesn't mean their fears are any less justified!
The DI-524 is, what, 8 years old? The firmware for it hasn't been updated since 2006. How, then is it listed as vulnerable?
This is some guy on a blog. It's a mixture of fact and wild speculation. This isn't an official security notification on something like Bugtraq or CERT, etc. He tested the DI-100 firmware, v1.13. The FTP link he provided lists the timestamp for the file as "02/19/2013 11:09AM", not 2006.
He doesn't even have a DI-100, he just downloaded it at random. He thinks, based on "the source code of the HTML pages and some Shodan search results", that the devices listed are affected. There was no actual testing, it's just rampant speculation based on Sir Bloggy McBlogs google-fu. Now, that said, I have been doing some additional research and the company Revell is based out of Germany -- which is also where D-Link's software development team is. Revell's website indicates the model went on sale about the same time as the movie release -- May 2013. The timestamp is February. It's not enough to bust my theory that 04882 is a reference to the model... it's just possible the website is wrong, or he got one early from a friend who works at said company. It does happen; Maybe they handed them out at special screenings.
Such is the nature of speculating on these things; it's interesting, but it's nearly impossible to get positive verification of a theory.
Regardless of how strong the evidence may be, uniquely identifying someone on the internet is dangerous and may even expose you to a slander/libel/defamation case. You may recall not long ago the witch hunt on reddit for the Boston Bomber. Over a dozen 'suspects' were named and shamed on the forums, none of whom turned out to be the actual person. Those people's lives crumbled into dust after, and police had to devote valuable resources at the time to protecting those individuals from vigilantes. Don't go the extra step of naming someone -- no matter how confident you are, the odds are very high that you're wrong. I know you think you're being edgy, smart, whatever and showing off your google-fu here, but you've actually rather accomplished the reverse -- you've demonstrated a reckless abandon and an inability to consider the consequences of your actions, or at least favoring momentary glory and recognition at the expense of another. Neither scores high marks in internet ethics.
On the internet, a loaded finger is a bigger threat than a loaded gun.
In other news, this incident is excellent fodder for security researchers to use as a case in point for how knowledge of a person's habits and hobbies can provide valuable insight into potential password selections, and also that the password selection is so strongly correlated with these things, that knowing the password alone can be sufficient to uniquely identify the user!
How about a Prison Sentence. These ego maniacs are putting people's bank account at risk. It is no different from writing a virus. In fact it is worse.
Sorry man, but this isn't an ego maniac. It's worse than that. 04882 is an oblique reference to the product ID used by Revell. Revell produces hobby scale models of various things. In this case... of the USS Enterprise, as seen in the worst trek movie ever -- Star Trek: Into Darkness. Which means, we're not dealing with an ego maniac: We're dealing with a guy who is utterly devoid of ego. This particular model probably sits on his desk in his cube, providing both inspiration to one 'Joel' in D-Link's software development team for a password, and simultaniously functioning as the strongest prophylactic known to man.
The good news though is that firmware released by D-Link prior to May of 2013 shouldn't be affected, unlike Joel's employment situation.
One of the news articles mentioned that merchants were supposed to record transactions manually and allow purchases up to $50
Due to the government shutdown, I cannot provide primary source data such as would be normally available from the USDA, etc. In lieu of that, the links provided represent the best non-authoritative sources available at this time.
The average household size is 2.48. Source. The average person spends about $70 a week on food Source 76% of people on food stamps are disabled, elderly, or children. Source Around 44 million Americans are on food stamps now*
* [Couldn't find credible source; Estimated from multiple sources]
This would mean that the average weekly trip to the grocery store, for an average household, would be $173.60. If your number is correct, then the government has opted to allow vendors to 28% of a family's food to be processed. Also according to the article, this outage may last up to three days.
Now here's the thing; A lot of those families live 'paycheck to paycheck'. Even if it is welfare; They don't have a fully stocked pantry. If they don't buy food today, a lot of them don't eat. And most people go shopping on the weekend. Your quoted $50 means the average family runs out of food in just under two days. I was unable to find any citation to back your assertion that they were allowing purchases as long as they were under $50 as well, so I have my doubts as to its validity. Anecdotally, two of my friends who have food stamps in the midwestern area reported being unable to purchase any food or remove any amount of cash benefits from their accounts.
So either the situation is 'rather bad' -- 1 in 8 Americans will be going hungry for at least one day this week on average. Or it's 'very bad', in that 1 in 8 Americans will be going hungry for three days. And possibly longer -- many of those people use public transportation or arranged rides to get to the grocery store every week. Especially the elderly and disabled. These rides are picked out weeks ahead of time. For them, they could be looking at not eating for a week or more.
So I return to my original point: Why is it that credit card companies, who offer a convenience, do this, but our government, which provides something that in a very literal sense is life or death to some people, does not? There is no answer to that question that I come away with that makes this look like anything other than criminal neglect of a vulnerable population.
People in Ohio, Michigan and 15 other states found themselves temporarily unable to use their food stamp debit-style cards on Saturday,
Why is it that a convenience -- our credit cards, are able to weather a failure like this by simply allowing all purchases, but our food stamp cards simply stop working? Credit card systems are, at every level, designed to cope with a failure by simply authorizing the purchase. Only a very small number of transactions would have been failed anyway for insufficient funds, etc., and these are reconciled when that part of the system is restored to service... meaning there's very little loss to the provider for this.
For that matter, if they've decided to design the system in this fashion, where were the redundancies? If a routine backup can result in failure on this scale, then it begs the question of where and how the backup of the actual systems, not just the data, got overlooked.
So the guy who pretty much sparked off the patent arms race with his "one click" patent non-sense is now building a shrine to his climb up the ladder of success, which largely consisted of him stomping on the fingers of everyone he climbed over. And it's in Seattle no less, pretty much the city that bathes itself in Irony showers daily.
So see it this way then: you conflate bias and variance, which is a big no-no in experimentation:
Er, no. My comment was about a person's perceptions. This has nothing to do with reality; People's perceptions are highly skewed based on expectation and personal biases. One of the first things they try and teach you in any art class is overcoming this; You have to throw away your ideas about what something should look like, or you'll never get past stick figures. Instead, you draw as though you are seeing this thing for the first time. We intentionally take everyday objects in class and hang them upside down, or throw it in with a pile of junk, and the sole reason for doing this is to break this need for the rational mind to enforce its expectations on even the simplest of perceptions.
A person cannot, without training and significant self-awareness, overcome these biases, these expectations, these preconceptions. And while you might think art and science are on opposite ends of a spectrum, they are very much alike -- science is about accurate observation. Curiously, so is art.
I've looked at the data regarding popular sources of news and the biases they have at the institutional level; The author of Freakonomics did a TV interview about it. While admittedly it was not a robust and extensive study, it was certainly a lot more effort than anyone here has put into it -- and he found that Fox News and the New York Times were about as equally biased relative to average (zero point).
Now I've been modbombed into oblivion for daring to go against the rabid hipster crowd here on Slashdot that wants to make Snowden a hero and suggesting that The Guardian is a biased source of news... but I will continue to say so no matter how many times someone goes through my comment history and blows all their mod points on me.
People despise having a mirror held up to them -- everyone. Every. Single. Person. On this website considers themselves above average, intelligent, thoughtful, and blah blah blah. And when they come across evidence that goes against this, they get very vindictive. To me, nothing confirms the veracity of my statements like this reaction does. Even you managed a strawman here, and you seem at least somewhat more thoughtful than the other guys imagine themselves to be.
Personal biases are incredibly hard to see, and even more difficult to overcome. They are cognitive shortcuts that very often serve us well in everyday life -- but these shortcuts are overused and eventually move into the subconscious, where until they are dragged kicking and screaming back to conscious thought, they will sit, quietly distorting every perception that person has. There are monks living up the sides of mountains that spend their entire lives trying to transcend this glitch in the human mind. There's a reason racism, sexism, religion, etc., are all so prevalent -- this is not easy. If it were, I wouldn't ever need to post anything on Slashdot ever again; We'd all be reasonable and unbiased people... and there'd only ever be a couple of comments in each story. -_-
But we aren't reasonable, and we're biased as hell. All of us. Me, you, the person reading this. It's human nature to have them, just as it's human nature to hate people who point it out.
Don't worry. All you need to do is unwrap the entire roll of aluminum foil and cover your whole body. You'll be safe then.
First, nice snark. But, it's worth mentioning that tinfoil only blocks EMR and beta radiation. Nuclear fusion emits more than those; You'd be wrapping yourself up in tin foil only to find it has been used for its intended purpose.
I suppose you can be mad at Microsoft for not constantly scanning their customers, but "Bing ads" is still misleading in the usual headline sensationalism way...
Actually, you can't. A standard tactic is to serve regular, unmodified ads, to IP address blocks known to have businesses that to this. For example, the google crawler -- many websites will show different pages if you simply sub the user agent string in as Google; Bypassing compulsory registration, not displaying navigation... adding piles of SEO words to the bottom of the page, and the list goes on.
Microsoft can't be expected to protect against stuff like this; Every website that allows javascript to be injected from a 3rd party website is equally vulnerable. And that's most of them; Including Slashdot; It has script links to rpxnow.com and fsdn.com. Hundreds of websites link into Google's ajax and analytics pages. A great many websites simply break if you disable 3rd party javascript.
So blame Microsoft if you want, but really, the people you want work at ORACLE.
Stop putting together these multipart stories and then having a new thread to discuss it in. We hashed most of these points in the last thread. Now you're barfing it up onto the main page again... so we can have the same arguments a second time? Either wait until all the parts are there and post it as a whole, or join the threads together so we don't wind up rehashing things. It's wasteful and obnoxious.
You don't have to be a post-modernist to agree that all media (hell, everyon) is biased. However, I don't think it is fair to compare the bias of the Guardian with the bias of Fox News. There are degrees.
I happen to disagree. About the only way they could be more biased is if they had a love van in the back lot and were handing out fliers on Marxism. But let's be objective about this; Do you consider them to be more, less, or about as biased, as the New York Times?
If you answered the same or more, I have some bad news for you.
You simply cannot see your own biases. It's what I said originally. They're called cognitive blind spots for a reason. And this is one of yours. I'm sorry, but they're biased. They're about as biased as Fox News. You just think Fox News seems more biased because your own bias puts you left of center, which makes Fox News seem comparatively farther away than the NYT or the Guardian.
People seem vehemently determined to believe that the entire country is not run by a select few.
I would very much like to meet such a person, who probably also rides a unicorn into work every day. The only people who believe that are our children, who aren't yet experienced enough to know that civics class is based largely on fiction.
While this is more true in Appalachia, correlation does not equal causation.
Citation needed. Also, the internet has a phrase for this; "It's a Trap!" This suggests the need is still very much alive.. at least if the species wishes to continue reproducing.
some bugs will always (always) slip through, no matter if
You're using the Nirvana Fallacy. Just because some bugs will slip through is not an excuse not to take due diligence in preventing them. And what Google is doing is not due diligence.
Untrained ones, who will probably catch one-thousandth the bugs your primary testers do
Which just goes to my original point: Giving financial support to the developers and maintainers of the product would be both (a) an actual contribution towards creating a reliable product, and (b) be significantly more effective.
this new program is Google paying people who add security features to existing FOSS projects.
You're confused. Bug fixing is not the same as adding security features. However, on the off chance you are serious... citation needed. And... still off topic.
The story is that Google is giving people money to make the Internet as a whole more secure...
Recent stories about Google cooperating with the NSA to spy in citizens all over the world is a strong mark against your assertion. And a few dollars spent on bug fixing and adding security features (if that's even a real story) does not compensate the massive security failings this company has, and continues to, engage in.
So? You can be biased and still do good journalism.
That is the third-most stupid thing I have read on slashdot this week; And this week has been particularly harsh on my brain meats. While the literal definition of journalism, "the activity or profession of writing for newspapers or magazines or of broadcasting news on radio or television," does not include mention of the ethics of journalism, I expect people to have a grasp on it. As you do not, I shall now dispense a brief explanation of why it's so important.
Democracy can only function well with an educated populace. You simply can't vote the most capable candidate into office unless you know the issues, and that means knowing facts. Not interpretation of them. Not skewed versions of them. Not partial lists of them. You need to know everything about it, or you're not making an informed decision, you're making a decision based on propaganda and lies. When your audience is millions of Americans, your voice carries a lot of power. With great power comes great responsibility. And anyone who passes off their own biases as fact is not a supporter of Democracy and I do not want them on my team.
In fact, I'd say it's impossible not to be biased. Everyone is biased, it's human nature. Organizations can go some way to mitigating that bias but you'll never remove it entirely.
Your argument is that because we can't be perfect at something, we shouldn't even try. This is such a classic mistake we've given it a formal name: The Nirvana Fallacy. And yes martha, there is a wikipedia on it.
Organizations can go some way to mitigating that bias but you'll never remove it entirely.
The institution of science does a pretty good job of limiting the effects of bias. Oh yes, you can point out the problems. Oh yes, they're very real. But compared to say... Fox News, they're doing a pretty good job. There's a reason scientists have been alternately revered and burned a the stake throughout history -- it's because of their stubborn devotion to the truth regardless of religious or political preference. And that stubborn devotion has catapulted forward all of humanity from banging rocks together to make fire and foraging for food, and sleeping in caves, to all the modern conveniences you have before you.
So I see your nilhism and perfectionism and raise you... rationality. Your move, Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
However, we don't have one anymore; we have the poor, and the super rich. The line separating those two is getting thinner every year.
What on earth does that even mean?
This.
Shouldn't you be saying that the gap gets wider, if you think there really isn't a middle class?
Shouldn't you be focusing on the points being made instead of tripping over the metaphor used?
one of the least popular groups in American politics - who actually have the correct solution for that.
Well there's a bait and switch if I've ever seen it. Let's back up the fail train. The original topic was Why isn't there more public outrage? It's not a popularity contest.
As I once saw it put, it would be a lot better if American elites preached what they practiced
If they started preaching it, then people would realize that what the power elite are proposing and supporting, is structurally more similar to fascism than any other ideology. Which is why they don't. And it would be a lot better if they stopped practicing whatever they're doing... to hell with what they're saying. They could run around saying two plus two is purple for all I care.
among the upper middle class, children are not born out of wedlock and divorces almost never occur once children are born until they're all grown. Making a lasting partnership matters, and it grants enormous advantages to your children.
Besides this statement begging a "Citation needed" sticker on it, how, exactly, does this even loosely, remotely, theoretically, tie back into our discussion about surveillance society and possible solutions to its crippling effects? Because I'm completely lost as to how we went from that topic to your pro-family rant complete with stock footage of storm clouds.
t is always about politics because
Sorry, I disagree; Firstly, the only time an argument using the word "always" is right is with the statement "Using the word always always makes the statement wrong." Black and white thinking is such a cliche, yet it crops up everywhere. Now, the rebuttal: Those who have the gold, make the rules. Politics and economics are dance partners. My personal opinion is that economics leads most of the time, but sometimes politics leads economics as well. But there's no causal link between the two. They influence each other, but they are separate entities.
As for why this country got to this point regarding wealth inequity, and why our government is so inept, it's not what anyone thinks. It's not the fault of the democrats, or the republicans. It's actually the structure of our government itself. We've been fucked by our own Constitution! But this is not so obvious to anyone...
You see, it very often is the case that one party controls the house, and another the senate. And this results in frequent stalemates because the majorities for each were elected by the voters. They can both legitimately claim to be representing voter interests by not yielding. Now in most other representational democracies, the controlling party can't be blocked or stalemated like this; If such a stalemate does arise, a new vote is forced and a new plurality is elected into office.
Corporations and wealthy individuals don't get stalemated; They can't be jammed up or delayed. They can bring the full measure of their wealth down and will always move faster and more effectively than government control can, simply because the next stalemate is never more than a few months away. Our wealth inequity problem is tied to the Constitution itself. Is it possible for us to fix this? Yes. Has any country with such a problem ever managed to? No.
But I challenge your assertion that this wealth inequity problem is growing worldwide. It happens to be the case that our corporations have so much wealth that they can co-opt smaller governments, but the problem started here -- if those corporations and their process is moving out into other countries now, they're bringing our problems to them. It's not a problem that's happening concurrently across the globe.. it's spreading like an infection with the origination point here. And it can only get a foothold in certain markets, certain places, and in certain situations. And when those corporations are found and weeded out, the problem will slowly cure itself in the affected areas because in most countries, the problem is not structural.
Wealth inequity can occur as a byproduct of the boom/bust cycle of capitalism; but it doesn't become an unregulated positive feedback loop anywhere else but here, because nowhere else are you going to find a combination of an investment-based economy, a culture of debit amongst the general population, a government incapable of responding effectively to changes in economic circumstances, and an almost total absence of inheritance tax due to the pre-emption of governments worldwide that are being used to shelter large amounts of wealth in exchange for a pittance and their sovereignty to protect the wealthy citizen from his/her own government's attempt to return a portion of that wealth back into circulation.
It's a perfect storm, economically speaking -- and I can describe the entire problem using economics. There is no need to step outside into the sphere of politics. It happens to be that economics and politics are in bed with each other about as often as a Republican is caught in the men's room insisting he's not gay... but that doesn't mean they're the same thing, or that one always leads and the other follows.
We don't really repeat mistakes, as there's always been a large contingent that will protect wealth at all possible costs-- and defend their methods of creating it. I don't deny anyone a reasonable profit, but what's reasonable depends on which side of have's/have-nots you might rest on.
Small problem; wealth inequity in this country has never been this bad, not by a long shot. We've had a middle class since the post-industrial labor reforms of the 1930s. Prior to that, it was a clusterfuck as we moved from an agricultural to industrial society, which is to be expected. However, we don't have one anymore; we have the poor, and the super rich. The line separating those two is getting thinner every year.
So no, it is no longer a question of which "side" you're on. If you think this is still about politics, you haven't been keeping up. And to bring this home; This is the reason why nobody gives a fuck about the NSA.
They're too damn busy trying to stay alive to care about something as esoteric as civil liberties. When you're starving, you don't care about freedom -- you care about bread. And anyone who has some is your friend. Make the people starve, and they'll tolerate any amount of tyranny... so long as the tyrant keeps giving out bread crumbs.
This is old news. These methods have been around at least as long as C has. It only works in isolated situations and doesn't make you a good programmer. Or person.
A lot of that list is pretty damn arrogant, or at least naive. Let's start with just the ones the submitter quoted;
Don't bother with a testing/staging server but instead have secret logins and backdoor URLs to test new features
If you're so well known you can dictate terms to your employer, then maybe you can get away with this... for awhile anyway. But most of us, who code for a living, have to do the best with the tools we're given. We can ask for a testing server, but whether we get one is another matter entirely.
As for 'secret logins' and 'backdoor URLs'... every login is supposed to be secret. If you can get a list of userIDs via any external method, that's a security risk. And as for 'backdoor URLs'... Not everything should be accessible to the google crawler.
and mix test data with real data in your database.
There's any number of failure modes in complex code in which shoving random inputs into it will cause it to break in unexpected ways that don't become apparent until properly-formatted data is submitted after. I think what the author was trying to say was not to put invalid data into a production environment on purpose; It might make the app shit a brick. Unless of course that's the only environment you have to test. See also: That 'routine backup' of the EBT system that caused 13 states' food stamp programs to die in place.
Don't bother with a well-understood framework, write everything from scratch instead.
Again, pure arrogance on the part of the author; Well understood frameworks tend not to be highly optimized. If you are dealing with something where performance is absolutely critical, writing it 'from scratch' will probably get you better performance than taking one of those 'well-understood frameworks' out for a drive. Because as most experienced programmers know -- well-understood frameworks also have a lot of extra features and bloat they don't need. See also: .NET
Add dependencies to specific versions of libraries and resources, but don't protect or document those dependencies.
Okay, that's just plain sloppy. Well, 1 out of 5.
For the icing of the cake, use the coolest mix of cutting-edge programming languages.
The choice of programming languages matters very little, except to those who lack the Tao of programming. For those who are not One with the code, who do not grok the larger patterns that permeate the spaces between that which only the machine understands, and that which only the human understands, the language choice is the difference between life and death. For those who have transcended languages... it is the patterns they seek to understand. The language will take care of itself. It's like saying "Love" in French, German, Russian, or English. It's the same damn thing, and it's possible to understand someone who loves you, even if you don't understand a bloody word they say.
Bottom line here is that this 'list' is just the logical conclusion of a career of mediocrity spent shifting blame around instead of working the problem. Real programmers can use anything; And frankly... they usually do. -_- I've seen some completely hair-brained solutions that are coded in Perl, cgi-bin, bash, PHP, and little chunks of C here and there that work flawlessly and at great speed because the programmer took the best of each of those languages and leveraged them in the solution. Of course, for every good programmer who does this, there's ten more who tried the same thing and wound up with a pile of half-working shit, sooo.... YMMV.
Shouldn't be too hard to write steganography software that hid its messages in the pseudo-random changes to the text for filter evasion.
That's the easy part. The harder part is that you have to either setup, infiltrate, or silently replace, a spam distributor. It's just like money laundering; you need a "legitimate" business to front for it. Which makes this a relatively expensive proposition for the limited bandwidth and one-way communication afforded.
Terrorists, unlike governments, don't have a straw stuck to your wallet. They operate on limited budgets, and with limited manpower available. And the limited manpower they do have tends to be untrained and often uneducated. Engineers are highly sought after by the criminal underground -- terrorists, drug cartels, everyone. They have a glut of mules and people willing to strap bombs to their chest, but far fewer people who can manufacturer the drugs, or make the bombs. They often resort to kidnapping such individuals due to the exceptionally limited supply.
In the face of that, a stenographic technique is very expensive for the service it provides. Why not use conventional stenographic techniques like just visiting tourist hot spots, taking pictures, and uploading them to various blogs? As original images, they wouldn't have a bitwise match anywhere else, thus a differential analysis wouldn't reveal the insertion of stenographic data.
I don't know why engineers over-think problems like this; While yes, a terrorist could do this (or anyone else), the presence of competing solutions offering similar or greater functionality at a lower price means this likely will never happen. The people hauling drugs and strapping bombs to their chest may not be beacons of rational thought, but the people higher up are; You can't organize people without having an organized mind yourself.
And besides, stenography is something most often employed in industrial espionage, or in the high stakes 'spy game'. Or put another way: It's employed by people who have a lot to lose. You aren't going to see garden variety terrorists doing it because they're cheap. And expendable. That's one of the few 'fringe benefits' of being an organization of fantatics -- they don't worry about their 401K plan.
Hypothetical: The police need a warrant to search your house, but it's OK to have 24/7 surveillance of the inside of your house because you purchased a Kinect, and Microsoft decided to send the stream to the authorities. Why would anyone be upset over that?
How did you miss the point here? This isn't about technology, this is about due process, it's about human rights, it's about the balance of power between the government and its citizens, and it is most importantly about answering whether a democracy can survive with this level of intrusion into people's personal lives by the government.
It is said that you defend democracy with four boxes; The soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the ammo box. You are to use them in that order. The soap box I think we can say has safely failed. The ballot box has become useless -- every candidate you can choose is going to support this as a pre-condition to his political career. This is the jury box now.
This isn't a technology problem. This is a social problem. And it's one that's rapidly running out of peaceful solutions. :( Is this case going to trigger a civil war? No. But the large number of cases like it paint a pattern -- and it's that pattern that everyone is worried about.
Things that nobody is worried about: The three guys who actually bought the new XBone.
don't see why people keep making a fuss about this part,
They're making a fuss about it because companies don't give a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut about your civil rights, or anyone else's. They're only too happy to cooperate with the government, or anyone else with money. These records contain more personal information than would often be obtained if I ransacked your house. And having a phone, internet, etc., is essential for surviving in today's society. It isn't optional if you want a job, friends, or anything other than living in the woods. Corporations track everything about you; Bank records, cell phone records, medical records -- everything you do has a record of it kept by a corporation, somewhere.
It's an attempt to deprive someone of their rights against unreasonable search and seizure by simply asking somebody else to do it. And by attempt, I mean they already did it. And by already did it, I mean they've been doing this since the 1960s; but improvements in technology now mean they can do this globally, against everyone, for next to nothing. It's like the argument about how sharing music, etc., was legal... until advances in technology made it trivially easy, and suddenly, we had to throw people in jail for decades at a go and fine them hundreds of millions of dollars for doing the exact same thing, except they were doing it faster, and better, now.
Now personally, I don't care that the government wants to collect 'all the things', but they need probable cause to search all the things. In other words, collect everyone's cell phone records if you want, but you need a reason to look at them that passes constitutional muster. Because if we allow this to stand, then everyone will be a criminal in some fashion, and the government can, via selective enforcement, get rid of anyone they want.
The fact is, the laws are so complex that even our own government can't keep track of them all. If you let them gather evidence on everyone in bulk, you've created a system of efficiently removing political adversaries under the guise of the justice system. It all but destroys the democratic process.
THAT, is why people keep making a fuss; They can't create eloquent arguments to explain this, but it doesn't mean their fears are any less justified!
The DI-524 is, what, 8 years old? The firmware for it hasn't been updated since 2006. How, then is it listed as vulnerable?
This is some guy on a blog. It's a mixture of fact and wild speculation. This isn't an official security notification on something like Bugtraq or CERT, etc. He tested the DI-100 firmware, v1.13. The FTP link he provided lists the timestamp for the file as "02/19/2013 11:09AM", not 2006.
He doesn't even have a DI-100, he just downloaded it at random. He thinks, based on "the source code of the HTML pages and some Shodan search results", that the devices listed are affected. There was no actual testing, it's just rampant speculation based on Sir Bloggy McBlogs google-fu. Now, that said, I have been doing some additional research and the company Revell is based out of Germany -- which is also where D-Link's software development team is. Revell's website indicates the model went on sale about the same time as the movie release -- May 2013. The timestamp is February. It's not enough to bust my theory that 04882 is a reference to the model... it's just possible the website is wrong, or he got one early from a friend who works at said company. It does happen; Maybe they handed them out at special screenings.
Such is the nature of speculating on these things; it's interesting, but it's nearly impossible to get positive verification of a theory.
s this the guy behind it? http://www.joesdata.com/executive/Joel_Liu_421313008.html Assuming good will, it seems like debugging code left in the final firmware release.
Regardless of how strong the evidence may be, uniquely identifying someone on the internet is dangerous and may even expose you to a slander/libel/defamation case. You may recall not long ago the witch hunt on reddit for the Boston Bomber. Over a dozen 'suspects' were named and shamed on the forums, none of whom turned out to be the actual person. Those people's lives crumbled into dust after, and police had to devote valuable resources at the time to protecting those individuals from vigilantes. Don't go the extra step of naming someone -- no matter how confident you are, the odds are very high that you're wrong. I know you think you're being edgy, smart, whatever and showing off your google-fu here, but you've actually rather accomplished the reverse -- you've demonstrated a reckless abandon and an inability to consider the consequences of your actions, or at least favoring momentary glory and recognition at the expense of another. Neither scores high marks in internet ethics.
On the internet, a loaded finger is a bigger threat than a loaded gun.
In other news, this incident is excellent fodder for security researchers to use as a case in point for how knowledge of a person's habits and hobbies can provide valuable insight into potential password selections, and also that the password selection is so strongly correlated with these things, that knowing the password alone can be sufficient to uniquely identify the user!
How about a Prison Sentence. These ego maniacs are putting people's bank account at risk. It is no different from writing a virus. In fact it is worse.
Sorry man, but this isn't an ego maniac. It's worse than that. 04882 is an oblique reference to the product ID used by Revell. Revell produces hobby scale models of various things. In this case... of the USS Enterprise, as seen in the worst trek movie ever -- Star Trek: Into Darkness. Which means, we're not dealing with an ego maniac: We're dealing with a guy who is utterly devoid of ego. This particular model probably sits on his desk in his cube, providing both inspiration to one 'Joel' in D-Link's software development team for a password, and simultaniously functioning as the strongest prophylactic known to man.
The good news though is that firmware released by D-Link prior to May of 2013 shouldn't be affected, unlike Joel's employment situation.
One of the news articles mentioned that merchants were supposed to record transactions manually and allow purchases up to $50
Due to the government shutdown, I cannot provide primary source data such as would be normally available from the USDA, etc. In lieu of that, the links provided represent the best non-authoritative sources available at this time.
The average household size is 2.48. Source.
The average person spends about $70 a week on food Source
76% of people on food stamps are disabled, elderly, or children. Source
Around 44 million Americans are on food stamps now*
* [Couldn't find credible source; Estimated from multiple sources]
This would mean that the average weekly trip to the grocery store, for an average household, would be $173.60. If your number is correct, then the government has opted to allow vendors to 28% of a family's food to be processed. Also according to the article, this outage may last up to three days.
Now here's the thing; A lot of those families live 'paycheck to paycheck'. Even if it is welfare; They don't have a fully stocked pantry. If they don't buy food today, a lot of them don't eat. And most people go shopping on the weekend. Your quoted $50 means the average family runs out of food in just under two days. I was unable to find any citation to back your assertion that they were allowing purchases as long as they were under $50 as well, so I have my doubts as to its validity. Anecdotally, two of my friends who have food stamps in the midwestern area reported being unable to purchase any food or remove any amount of cash benefits from their accounts.
So either the situation is 'rather bad' -- 1 in 8 Americans will be going hungry for at least one day this week on average. Or it's 'very bad', in that 1 in 8 Americans will be going hungry for three days. And possibly longer -- many of those people use public transportation or arranged rides to get to the grocery store every week. Especially the elderly and disabled. These rides are picked out weeks ahead of time. For them, they could be looking at not eating for a week or more.
So I return to my original point: Why is it that credit card companies, who offer a convenience, do this, but our government, which provides something that in a very literal sense is life or death to some people, does not? There is no answer to that question that I come away with that makes this look like anything other than criminal neglect of a vulnerable population.
People in Ohio, Michigan and 15 other states found themselves temporarily unable to use their food stamp debit-style cards on Saturday,
Why is it that a convenience -- our credit cards, are able to weather a failure like this by simply allowing all purchases, but our food stamp cards simply stop working? Credit card systems are, at every level, designed to cope with a failure by simply authorizing the purchase. Only a very small number of transactions would have been failed anyway for insufficient funds, etc., and these are reconciled when that part of the system is restored to service... meaning there's very little loss to the provider for this.
For that matter, if they've decided to design the system in this fashion, where were the redundancies? If a routine backup can result in failure on this scale, then it begs the question of where and how the backup of the actual systems, not just the data, got overlooked.
So the guy who pretty much sparked off the patent arms race with his "one click" patent non-sense is now building a shrine to his climb up the ladder of success, which largely consisted of him stomping on the fingers of everyone he climbed over. And it's in Seattle no less, pretty much the city that bathes itself in Irony showers daily.
Beautiful symmetry. Brings a tear to my eye.
So see it this way then: you conflate bias and variance, which is a big no-no in experimentation:
Er, no. My comment was about a person's perceptions. This has nothing to do with reality; People's perceptions are highly skewed based on expectation and personal biases. One of the first things they try and teach you in any art class is overcoming this; You have to throw away your ideas about what something should look like, or you'll never get past stick figures. Instead, you draw as though you are seeing this thing for the first time. We intentionally take everyday objects in class and hang them upside down, or throw it in with a pile of junk, and the sole reason for doing this is to break this need for the rational mind to enforce its expectations on even the simplest of perceptions.
A person cannot, without training and significant self-awareness, overcome these biases, these expectations, these preconceptions. And while you might think art and science are on opposite ends of a spectrum, they are very much alike -- science is about accurate observation. Curiously, so is art.
I've looked at the data regarding popular sources of news and the biases they have at the institutional level; The author of Freakonomics did a TV interview about it. While admittedly it was not a robust and extensive study, it was certainly a lot more effort than anyone here has put into it -- and he found that Fox News and the New York Times were about as equally biased relative to average (zero point).
Now I've been modbombed into oblivion for daring to go against the rabid hipster crowd here on Slashdot that wants to make Snowden a hero and suggesting that The Guardian is a biased source of news... but I will continue to say so no matter how many times someone goes through my comment history and blows all their mod points on me.
People despise having a mirror held up to them -- everyone. Every. Single. Person. On this website considers themselves above average, intelligent, thoughtful, and blah blah blah. And when they come across evidence that goes against this, they get very vindictive. To me, nothing confirms the veracity of my statements like this reaction does. Even you managed a strawman here, and you seem at least somewhat more thoughtful than the other guys imagine themselves to be.
Personal biases are incredibly hard to see, and even more difficult to overcome. They are cognitive shortcuts that very often serve us well in everyday life -- but these shortcuts are overused and eventually move into the subconscious, where until they are dragged kicking and screaming back to conscious thought, they will sit, quietly distorting every perception that person has. There are monks living up the sides of mountains that spend their entire lives trying to transcend this glitch in the human mind. There's a reason racism, sexism, religion, etc., are all so prevalent -- this is not easy. If it were, I wouldn't ever need to post anything on Slashdot ever again; We'd all be reasonable and unbiased people... and there'd only ever be a couple of comments in each story. -_-
But we aren't reasonable, and we're biased as hell. All of us. Me, you, the person reading this. It's human nature to have them, just as it's human nature to hate people who point it out.
Don't worry. All you need to do is unwrap the entire roll of aluminum foil and cover your whole body. You'll be safe then.
First, nice snark. But, it's worth mentioning that tinfoil only blocks EMR and beta radiation. Nuclear fusion emits more than those; You'd be wrapping yourself up in tin foil only to find it has been used for its intended purpose.
I suppose you can be mad at Microsoft for not constantly scanning their customers, but "Bing ads" is still misleading in the usual headline sensationalism way...
Actually, you can't. A standard tactic is to serve regular, unmodified ads, to IP address blocks known to have businesses that to this. For example, the google crawler -- many websites will show different pages if you simply sub the user agent string in as Google; Bypassing compulsory registration, not displaying navigation ... adding piles of SEO words to the bottom of the page, and the list goes on.
Microsoft can't be expected to protect against stuff like this; Every website that allows javascript to be injected from a 3rd party website is equally vulnerable. And that's most of them; Including Slashdot; It has script links to rpxnow.com and fsdn.com. Hundreds of websites link into Google's ajax and analytics pages. A great many websites simply break if you disable 3rd party javascript.
So blame Microsoft if you want, but really, the people you want work at ORACLE.
Stop putting together these multipart stories and then having a new thread to discuss it in. We hashed most of these points in the last thread. Now you're barfing it up onto the main page again... so we can have the same arguments a second time? Either wait until all the parts are there and post it as a whole, or join the threads together so we don't wind up rehashing things. It's wasteful and obnoxious.
You don't have to be a post-modernist to agree that all media (hell, everyon) is biased. However, I don't think it is fair to compare the bias of the Guardian with the bias of Fox News. There are degrees.
I happen to disagree. About the only way they could be more biased is if they had a love van in the back lot and were handing out fliers on Marxism. But let's be objective about this; Do you consider them to be more, less, or about as biased, as the New York Times?
If you answered the same or more, I have some bad news for you.
You simply cannot see your own biases. It's what I said originally. They're called cognitive blind spots for a reason. And this is one of yours. I'm sorry, but they're biased. They're about as biased as Fox News. You just think Fox News seems more biased because your own bias puts you left of center, which makes Fox News seem comparatively farther away than the NYT or the Guardian.
Historically, the flying machine has just been a stupid pipe dream. We shouldn't even try building one.
You sir, are awarded the Internet for today. That was a concise and utterly brilliant response. Alas, all I have to offer you are my congratulations.
People seem vehemently determined to believe that the entire country is not run by a select few.
I would very much like to meet such a person, who probably also rides a unicorn into work every day. The only people who believe that are our children, who aren't yet experienced enough to know that civics class is based largely on fiction.
While this is more true in Appalachia, correlation does not equal causation.
Citation needed. Also, the internet has a phrase for this; "It's a Trap!" This suggests the need is still very much alive.. at least if the species wishes to continue reproducing.
Yay! Now I won't have to leave the basement to get my prescription for my social anxiety! Thank you internet!
And your evidence for that is... what, exactly?
The lack of job postings was a clue.
They have a bug bounty program...
Yes, one that's almost painfully cheap.
some bugs will always (always) slip through, no matter if
You're using the Nirvana Fallacy. Just because some bugs will slip through is not an excuse not to take due diligence in preventing them. And what Google is doing is not due diligence.
Untrained ones, who will probably catch one-thousandth the bugs your primary testers do
Which just goes to my original point: Giving financial support to the developers and maintainers of the product would be both (a) an actual contribution towards creating a reliable product, and (b) be significantly more effective.
this new program is Google paying people who add security features to existing FOSS projects.
You're confused. Bug fixing is not the same as adding security features. However, on the off chance you are serious... citation needed. And... still off topic.
The story is that Google is giving people money to make the Internet as a whole more secure...
Recent stories about Google cooperating with the NSA to spy in citizens all over the world is a strong mark against your assertion. And a few dollars spent on bug fixing and adding security features (if that's even a real story) does not compensate the massive security failings this company has, and continues to, engage in.
ObDisclaimer: I happen to like the Guardian.
So? You can be biased and still do good journalism.
That is the third-most stupid thing I have read on slashdot this week; And this week has been particularly harsh on my brain meats. While the literal definition of journalism, "the activity or profession of writing for newspapers or magazines or of broadcasting news on radio or television," does not include mention of the ethics of journalism, I expect people to have a grasp on it. As you do not, I shall now dispense a brief explanation of why it's so important.
Democracy can only function well with an educated populace. You simply can't vote the most capable candidate into office unless you know the issues, and that means knowing facts. Not interpretation of them. Not skewed versions of them. Not partial lists of them. You need to know everything about it, or you're not making an informed decision, you're making a decision based on propaganda and lies. When your audience is millions of Americans, your voice carries a lot of power. With great power comes great responsibility. And anyone who passes off their own biases as fact is not a supporter of Democracy and I do not want them on my team.
In fact, I'd say it's impossible not to be biased. Everyone is biased, it's human nature. Organizations can go some way to mitigating that bias but you'll never remove it entirely.
Your argument is that because we can't be perfect at something, we shouldn't even try. This is such a classic mistake we've given it a formal name: The Nirvana Fallacy. And yes martha, there is a wikipedia on it.
Organizations can go some way to mitigating that bias but you'll never remove it entirely.
The institution of science does a pretty good job of limiting the effects of bias. Oh yes, you can point out the problems. Oh yes, they're very real. But compared to say... Fox News, they're doing a pretty good job. There's a reason scientists have been alternately revered and burned a the stake throughout history -- it's because of their stubborn devotion to the truth regardless of religious or political preference. And that stubborn devotion has catapulted forward all of humanity from banging rocks together to make fire and foraging for food, and sleeping in caves, to all the modern conveniences you have before you.
So I see your nilhism and perfectionism and raise you... rationality. Your move, Internet.