...correspondents who themselves presumably were trained in maintaining the integrity of secret communications -- ie, some kind of self-awareness of who the recipient of the email is and whether the address is considered to be secure?
If I'm Petraeus, wouldn't I have had second thoughts when replying to an email address of "hillary@hillaryisawesome-votehillary2016.com"?
Or did he just blindly go ahead -- "Dear Mrs. Clinton (I *think* this is your address), here is a list of all the special forces guys in the field as of right now. Just FYI, we're super busy right now so if something urgent happens in Libya, we probably won't get to it until next week. Also, I'm helping this woman named Paula Broadwell on a book about me so I cc'd her on this. We're into it "real deep" (LOL) but don't tell me wife anything about it, I kind of want it to be a surprise."
I think that's it right there. Technology development on its own largely depends on profit/loss market forces to shape its direction and development. As just one example, pharmaceutical research is biased towards therapies that are profitable, not necessarily ideal therapies or even cures, since cured people don't buy medicine.
A major space exploration program focuses technology development on its utility, first and its economics later. And it's not always the technologies the space program has developed, it's the practical research done developing them that's often the enduring value.
If I buy a car that turns out to be stolen, it doesn't matter. The cops will take it away from me and I won't get a refund.
I'm not sure that the fungible nature of money necessarily changes this.
It may also be that if the receiver believes the transaction to be fraudulent or suspicious (he buys your house for more than market value) then he may hand you the title back and ask for the money.
Regarding payback, often times they do go after money, but they can't take what has been already spent and there often isn't as much to get as one would like.
You bet they can take back what was spent. It's called a clawback. Here in Minnesota, our local version of Bernie Madoff Tom Petters stole "only" 3.6 billion in a ponzi scheme and the court-appointed receiver had the authority take back money from a lot of people.
Basically he had the authority to say "this documentation says Tom Petters gave you $x, give it back or we'll take it from you." They did this with charities, even. It didn't matter if you had already spent it -- that only made your repayment obligation more complicated.
I've thought for years that this would be a good strategy and wondered why it never happened.
I would go a step further and warn banks, hosting companies, and other otherwise legitimate businesses who provide the "air supply" that they are facilitating criminal enterprises and that they should stop. Those that get found repeatedly doing business with them should face RICO prosecutions.
At the end of the day,though, I sometimes wonder if there's this attitude that any business that involves mostly upper class people and doesn't involve drugs or violence is somehow OK, no matter how much fraud it perpetuates.
I mean, how can you explain telemarketing scams? They've been around forever, since the days of telephone technology so basic you could almost trace the calls with a multimeter.
It must be comforting to think that everyone is wondering why you quit Facebook and spending their time wishing you'd come back and share your quips and insights on daily trivia.
Unfortunately, it's not true. They're not wondering. They're not even talking about you.
Some recidivism may be due to an inherent "criminal nature", but it sure seems like a good chunk of it is due to getting put back out on the street with a record that makes it impossible to get any kind of a decent job or stable housing, which in turn often forces offenders back into the same environment they came from, surrounded by the same people and situations that contributed (not caused) to their criminal activity to begin with.
I don't know if it's true or not, but isn't murder one of those crimes that's mostly a one-time crime of passion? Ie, most murderers aren't serial killers.
And then there's the question about what "crimes" they are committing -- I'd like to see recidivism statistics that completely throw out all drug crimes (possession, dealing, all of it).
About the only group I'd kind of suspect to have a high inherent rate of recidivism would be burglary/larceny. I think there's a lot of property thieves who basically turn it into a job and it probably represents some kind of inherent disregard for others which contributes to repeat offenses. But I wouldn't disregard the notion that being essentially unemployable due to a criminal record contributing to going back to stealing. They may be *prone* to theft generally, but without a chance to get a job or a stable lifestyle it's not hard to see how stealing is an easy fallback position.
I want an FBI-intensive investigation that finds out who knew what and when, and then the HUMAN BEINGS responsible for it punished.
I don't see why RICO provisions don't apply here. This is an organized conspiracy to violate pollution laws and commit fraud. Fraud at this scale is a felony easily, and while I don't doubt the pollution laws are civil, not criminal violations, the felony is the the organized conspiracy to evade them.
Punishment SHOULD include jail time for those responsible for green lighting this scheme and probably financial penalties that claw back all monies made during the period of fraud -- not just what was left in the bank, but every dollar earned no matter where it ended up, including investment gains made with this money.
And personal financial culpability -- no corporate paybacks, executive insurance compensation. Let the cops auction off your personal property if necessary to pay the fines.
It's pretty much dark across the continental US for at least 8-10 hours per day, isn't it?
The wind may blow, but is it continuous at night everywhere it's dark? Is the wind speed high enough/predictable enough to totally offset the loss of 100% of solar capacity in aggregate?
In these places you have MORE wind at night, can you reliably transmit power to places that might have less wind at night, or at least that night?
A lot of the content people want isn't the web site's original work, it's the contributions of the thousands of users of the web site. Like Slashdot -- I'm really not here for TFA, I'm here for the discussion that occurs about the TFA.
Why should I pay the web site owner for content they didn't generate? Nobody would visit the site if it wasn't for the unpaid contributors.
I get that sites cost money to run, but making the people who make your web site valuable through their contributions of content pay with ads and tracking is kind of obnoxious.
Maybe people who contribute more often could get less or no ads.
Isn't it just a matter of time? Pandemics have swept through humanity fairly regularly. Modern countries seem to have escaped them for the most part recently, partly because they've got stuff like fresh water and septic systems, partly because medical science inoculates against some of them, and partly because self-awareness has enabled us to minimize others (AIDS).
But it seems like eventually something will come along that none of those things does much for, at least in the short term.
I'd be curious just to see how long they would last in real world (neither extremely brutal nor extremely mild) SAN/RAID applications. Like a shelf of 24 in a RAID-6 config with a couple of hot spares.
What would the actual failure rate be? Would the relatively low cost of say a Samsung 850 Pro be worth a higher failure rate when you consider what the cost vs. performance of a shelf of 24 SSDs would be? Would $2k a year on replacement disks be worth a storage subsystem capable of that kind of performance?
Or would it just overwhelm the SSDs and make the failure rate unsustainable?
I tend to think that it's not a question of their unreliability but the inherent complexity of providing high availability and scale that works 100% of the time.
As a consultant, I love AWS/Azure/O365 outages. They bring most customers back to reality with regard to the infalliability of "the cloud" and to the exponential increase in complexity required when chasing the "never goes down" dream.
If those guys, with unlimited money and unlimited talent, can't make their systems not have outages, then some random cheap company who has read a vendor HA product marketing sheet and thinks it will buy them uptime forever should know there are no guarantees.
I wonder if NASA has actually thought of what kind of drugs they might need to give astronauts to keep them from going bonkers.
Some kind of low-grade hypnotic that wouldn't too badly hamper cognitive ability but allow astronauts to go into a kind of hypnotic trance for hours at a time.
A cow-orker this morning just described a situation that drove his old company nuts for months until they finally tracked it down.
Periodically (with no discernible pattern), network performance would get really bad for an hour or two and then go back to normal. It took them weeks to figure out that someone would, from time to time, plug in a managed Ethernet switch with a spanning tree configuration that named it as the root switch, which caused spanning tree throughout the network to reconfigure itself with horrible path choices.
I don't know what the state of the art in spanning tree is these days, but while I would guess there are ways to make this a lot less likely to happen I would bet that many networks don't do whatever that something is and would be very vulnerable to an attack on spanning tree. It could be malicious (wreak havoc with traffic) or even devious, designed to force path selection so that traffic got pushed through vulnerable links that could be tapped.
It works fine, but without any of the support for the new hardware features or the new OS features that are supposed to work with the new hardware features.
AFAICT, the new hardware basically requires a pretty significant OS revision. To be sure, a lot of the changes (like the "task manager" view which now shows a less convenient overlapping page view of existing open apps) seem purely for cosmetics.
I think it was probably pretty cutting edge offering porn in 1972!
I mean, this was pre-VHS/Betamax and depending on how you want to date it, almost pre-Deep Throat and the brief mainstream fascination with X rated movies as more-or-less acceptable entertainment of the 1970s. I think it was an era where some local vice squads would still raid a place *showing* a porno film.
My general understanding was that general public interest in porn spike with Deep Throat and there was a brief window where it was seen as kind of avant garde to go to an X rated movie.
The development of VHS in the mid-late 70s allowed people to watch porn in the privacy of their own homes and skip the dirty movie theater.
Hiding in plain sight seems to be a pretty good technique in the physical world and in the computer world it would seem to be a terrific to combine with encryption to make the encrypted data hard to identify.
Especially in today's world where people are constantly sharing images, videos, etc.
I'm also curious about using steganography in transport protocols -- steganographic data or parameters in HTTP/S requests and responses that would otherwise decode as meaningful, but contain hidden encrypted information.
There was a New Yorker article about Paul Ekman (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/08/05/the-naked-face) that made the claim that reading facial expressions could provide a very difficult to beat method of detecting dishonesty. The full article is paywalled, but if I remember he had a technique he claimed was teachable and had a very high rate of success.
Ekman spent years creating an entire taxonomy of human faces and apparently there have been studies involving people who score off the charts in detecting lies when watching video statements.
he reason I had that interest at all was because my life has been strongly effected again and again by people who think it's OK to just fabricate things to hurt people they don't like for one reason or another.
You may just be impacted by some of the psychopathic personalities that exist out in the wild. These people have an inability to experience empathy and will quite often act out cruelly to others to get what they want.
If stockholders held any actual power in a company, I'd be fine with making fines punitive for stockholders.
But we live in a world where senior management in collusion with the board have essentially stripped shareholders of any power. Most shareholder initiated proxies are non-binding, when they're allowed at all. Boards routinely rubber stamp management decisions-- mostly because they are so often comprised of managers from other companies (boards have more recursion than CompSci 3104).
The idea that officers don't know what might be happening seems a practical truth, but it flies in the face of stratospheric executive salaries justified with the general logic that CEOs and senior management are geniuses, singularly responsible for the success and advancement of their organizations. If they want to get paid as if that was true, they should face the concomitant assignment of responsibility.
Saying "they didn't know" seems to be a failure of management (the verb) -- failure to setup adequate reporting and oversight processes.
Further, in this specific case it seems unlikely that a rogue employee or even rogue engineering group would have been unlikely to be solely responsible. The scale of risk, cost remediation and fixing the problem (emissions) correctly seems to have been something that would have naturally bubbled up through management.
Why not personal financial culpability for the officers of the company? The fine is their personal responsibility to be paid from their own assets, up to and including all their personal property being auctioned off and the balance paid through onerous payments that guarantee a net income of no more than $40k per year until the fine is settled.
Bar any third party payments from insurance, corporate repayment or any other third sources. Garnish any cash payments to them from friends or family. Require home visits and auditing to make sure their lifestyle doesn't exceed the income minus payments they have to make after having their assets liquidated.
And claw back any monies earned as a result of the fineable behavior and paid out to others, up to and including raiding pensions, trusts and other sheltered accounts. Remember how OJ had some huge pension that couldn't be touched after he lost the wrongful death lawsuit?
Slashdot Mirror
...correspondents who themselves presumably were trained in maintaining the integrity of secret communications -- ie, some kind of self-awareness of who the recipient of the email is and whether the address is considered to be secure?
If I'm Petraeus, wouldn't I have had second thoughts when replying to an email address of "hillary@hillaryisawesome-votehillary2016.com"?
Or did he just blindly go ahead -- "Dear Mrs. Clinton (I *think* this is your address), here is a list of all the special forces guys in the field as of right now. Just FYI, we're super busy right now so if something urgent happens in Libya, we probably won't get to it until next week. Also, I'm helping this woman named Paula Broadwell on a book about me so I cc'd her on this. We're into it "real deep" (LOL) but don't tell me wife anything about it, I kind of want it to be a surprise."
But they give technology development a focus.
I think that's it right there. Technology development on its own largely depends on profit/loss market forces to shape its direction and development. As just one example, pharmaceutical research is biased towards therapies that are profitable, not necessarily ideal therapies or even cures, since cured people don't buy medicine.
A major space exploration program focuses technology development on its utility, first and its economics later. And it's not always the technologies the space program has developed, it's the practical research done developing them that's often the enduring value.
If I buy a car that turns out to be stolen, it doesn't matter. The cops will take it away from me and I won't get a refund.
I'm not sure that the fungible nature of money necessarily changes this.
It may also be that if the receiver believes the transaction to be fraudulent or suspicious (he buys your house for more than market value) then he may hand you the title back and ask for the money.
Regarding payback, often times they do go after money, but they can't take what has been already spent and there often isn't as much to get as one would like.
You bet they can take back what was spent. It's called a clawback. Here in Minnesota, our local version of Bernie Madoff Tom Petters stole "only" 3.6 billion in a ponzi scheme and the court-appointed receiver had the authority take back money from a lot of people.
Basically he had the authority to say "this documentation says Tom Petters gave you $x, give it back or we'll take it from you." They did this with charities, even. It didn't matter if you had already spent it -- that only made your repayment obligation more complicated.
I've thought for years that this would be a good strategy and wondered why it never happened.
I would go a step further and warn banks, hosting companies, and other otherwise legitimate businesses who provide the "air supply" that they are facilitating criminal enterprises and that they should stop. Those that get found repeatedly doing business with them should face RICO prosecutions.
At the end of the day,though, I sometimes wonder if there's this attitude that any business that involves mostly upper class people and doesn't involve drugs or violence is somehow OK, no matter how much fraud it perpetuates.
I mean, how can you explain telemarketing scams? They've been around forever, since the days of telephone technology so basic you could almost trace the calls with a multimeter.
It must be comforting to think that everyone is wondering why you quit Facebook and spending their time wishing you'd come back and share your quips and insights on daily trivia.
Unfortunately, it's not true. They're not wondering. They're not even talking about you.
Some recidivism may be due to an inherent "criminal nature", but it sure seems like a good chunk of it is due to getting put back out on the street with a record that makes it impossible to get any kind of a decent job or stable housing, which in turn often forces offenders back into the same environment they came from, surrounded by the same people and situations that contributed (not caused) to their criminal activity to begin with.
I don't know if it's true or not, but isn't murder one of those crimes that's mostly a one-time crime of passion? Ie, most murderers aren't serial killers.
And then there's the question about what "crimes" they are committing -- I'd like to see recidivism statistics that completely throw out all drug crimes (possession, dealing, all of it).
About the only group I'd kind of suspect to have a high inherent rate of recidivism would be burglary/larceny. I think there's a lot of property thieves who basically turn it into a job and it probably represents some kind of inherent disregard for others which contributes to repeat offenses. But I wouldn't disregard the notion that being essentially unemployable due to a criminal record contributing to going back to stealing. They may be *prone* to theft generally, but without a chance to get a job or a stable lifestyle it's not hard to see how stealing is an easy fallback position.
I want an FBI-intensive investigation that finds out who knew what and when, and then the HUMAN BEINGS responsible for it punished.
I don't see why RICO provisions don't apply here. This is an organized conspiracy to violate pollution laws and commit fraud. Fraud at this scale is a felony easily, and while I don't doubt the pollution laws are civil, not criminal violations, the felony is the the organized conspiracy to evade them.
Punishment SHOULD include jail time for those responsible for green lighting this scheme and probably financial penalties that claw back all monies made during the period of fraud -- not just what was left in the bank, but every dollar earned no matter where it ended up, including investment gains made with this money.
And personal financial culpability -- no corporate paybacks, executive insurance compensation. Let the cops auction off your personal property if necessary to pay the fines.
It's pretty much dark across the continental US for at least 8-10 hours per day, isn't it?
The wind may blow, but is it continuous at night everywhere it's dark? Is the wind speed high enough/predictable enough to totally offset the loss of 100% of solar capacity in aggregate?
In these places you have MORE wind at night, can you reliably transmit power to places that might have less wind at night, or at least that night?
A method's accuracy is less important than the persuasiveness of its arguments about why it was inaccurate.
A lot of the content people want isn't the web site's original work, it's the contributions of the thousands of users of the web site. Like Slashdot -- I'm really not here for TFA, I'm here for the discussion that occurs about the TFA.
Why should I pay the web site owner for content they didn't generate? Nobody would visit the site if it wasn't for the unpaid contributors.
I get that sites cost money to run, but making the people who make your web site valuable through their contributions of content pay with ads and tracking is kind of obnoxious.
Maybe people who contribute more often could get less or no ads.
Isn't it just a matter of time? Pandemics have swept through humanity fairly regularly. Modern countries seem to have escaped them for the most part recently, partly because they've got stuff like fresh water and septic systems, partly because medical science inoculates against some of them, and partly because self-awareness has enabled us to minimize others (AIDS).
But it seems like eventually something will come along that none of those things does much for, at least in the short term.
Question is, can they afford to buy cheap expendable SSD drives now to boost performance
After reading about the SSD write endurance test:
http://techreport.com/review/2...
I'd be curious just to see how long they would last in real world (neither extremely brutal nor extremely mild) SAN/RAID applications. Like a shelf of 24 in a RAID-6 config with a couple of hot spares.
What would the actual failure rate be? Would the relatively low cost of say a Samsung 850 Pro be worth a higher failure rate when you consider what the cost vs. performance of a shelf of 24 SSDs would be? Would $2k a year on replacement disks be worth a storage subsystem capable of that kind of performance?
Or would it just overwhelm the SSDs and make the failure rate unsustainable?
I tend to think that it's not a question of their unreliability but the inherent complexity of providing high availability and scale that works 100% of the time.
As a consultant, I love AWS/Azure/O365 outages. They bring most customers back to reality with regard to the infalliability of "the cloud" and to the exponential increase in complexity required when chasing the "never goes down" dream.
If those guys, with unlimited money and unlimited talent, can't make their systems not have outages, then some random cheap company who has read a vendor HA product marketing sheet and thinks it will buy them uptime forever should know there are no guarantees.
That was supposed to be consumer cheap and datacenter fast and durable?
I don't know what market this thing is for, maybe the host caching or db stuff.
I wonder if NASA has actually thought of what kind of drugs they might need to give astronauts to keep them from going bonkers.
Some kind of low-grade hypnotic that wouldn't too badly hamper cognitive ability but allow astronauts to go into a kind of hypnotic trance for hours at a time.
A cow-orker this morning just described a situation that drove his old company nuts for months until they finally tracked it down.
Periodically (with no discernible pattern), network performance would get really bad for an hour or two and then go back to normal. It took them weeks to figure out that someone would, from time to time, plug in a managed Ethernet switch with a spanning tree configuration that named it as the root switch, which caused spanning tree throughout the network to reconfigure itself with horrible path choices.
I don't know what the state of the art in spanning tree is these days, but while I would guess there are ways to make this a lot less likely to happen I would bet that many networks don't do whatever that something is and would be very vulnerable to an attack on spanning tree. It could be malicious (wreak havoc with traffic) or even devious, designed to force path selection so that traffic got pushed through vulnerable links that could be tapped.
I meant gasoline engines, not diesel.
The person I know with two gasoline powered VWs complained about oil consumption, up to about a quart per month.
They saw service in Viet Nam including shooting down Mig-17s.
It works fine, but without any of the support for the new hardware features or the new OS features that are supposed to work with the new hardware features.
AFAICT, the new hardware basically requires a pretty significant OS revision. To be sure, a lot of the changes (like the "task manager" view which now shows a less convenient overlapping page view of existing open apps) seem purely for cosmetics.
I think it was probably pretty cutting edge offering porn in 1972!
I mean, this was pre-VHS/Betamax and depending on how you want to date it, almost pre-Deep Throat and the brief mainstream fascination with X rated movies as more-or-less acceptable entertainment of the 1970s. I think it was an era where some local vice squads would still raid a place *showing* a porno film.
My general understanding was that general public interest in porn spike with Deep Throat and there was a brief window where it was seen as kind of avant garde to go to an X rated movie.
The development of VHS in the mid-late 70s allowed people to watch porn in the privacy of their own homes and skip the dirty movie theater.
What is the state of steganography these days?
Hiding in plain sight seems to be a pretty good technique in the physical world and in the computer world it would seem to be a terrific to combine with encryption to make the encrypted data hard to identify.
Especially in today's world where people are constantly sharing images, videos, etc.
I'm also curious about using steganography in transport protocols -- steganographic data or parameters in HTTP/S requests and responses that would otherwise decode as meaningful, but contain hidden encrypted information.
It might be facial expression analysis.
There was a New Yorker article about Paul Ekman (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/08/05/the-naked-face) that made the claim that reading facial expressions could provide a very difficult to beat method of detecting dishonesty. The full article is paywalled, but if I remember he had a technique he claimed was teachable and had a very high rate of success.
Ekman spent years creating an entire taxonomy of human faces and apparently there have been studies involving people who score off the charts in detecting lies when watching video statements.
he reason I had that interest at all was because my life has been strongly effected again and again by people who think it's OK to just fabricate things to hurt people they don't like for one reason or another.
You may just be impacted by some of the psychopathic personalities that exist out in the wild. These people have an inability to experience empathy and will quite often act out cruelly to others to get what they want.
If stockholders held any actual power in a company, I'd be fine with making fines punitive for stockholders.
But we live in a world where senior management in collusion with the board have essentially stripped shareholders of any power. Most shareholder initiated proxies are non-binding, when they're allowed at all. Boards routinely rubber stamp management decisions-- mostly because they are so often comprised of managers from other companies (boards have more recursion than CompSci 3104).
The idea that officers don't know what might be happening seems a practical truth, but it flies in the face of stratospheric executive salaries justified with the general logic that CEOs and senior management are geniuses, singularly responsible for the success and advancement of their organizations. If they want to get paid as if that was true, they should face the concomitant assignment of responsibility.
Saying "they didn't know" seems to be a failure of management (the verb) -- failure to setup adequate reporting and oversight processes.
Further, in this specific case it seems unlikely that a rogue employee or even rogue engineering group would have been unlikely to be solely responsible. The scale of risk, cost remediation and fixing the problem (emissions) correctly seems to have been something that would have naturally bubbled up through management.
Why not personal financial culpability for the officers of the company? The fine is their personal responsibility to be paid from their own assets, up to and including all their personal property being auctioned off and the balance paid through onerous payments that guarantee a net income of no more than $40k per year until the fine is settled.
Bar any third party payments from insurance, corporate repayment or any other third sources. Garnish any cash payments to them from friends or family. Require home visits and auditing to make sure their lifestyle doesn't exceed the income minus payments they have to make after having their assets liquidated.
And claw back any monies earned as a result of the fineable behavior and paid out to others, up to and including raiding pensions, trusts and other sheltered accounts. Remember how OJ had some huge pension that couldn't be touched after he lost the wrongful death lawsuit?
Or, just throw them in jail for 10 years.