It's not just that. Certain companies (Infosys, Tata, I'm looking at you) have been very heavily abusing the H-1B visa as part of a consulting deal, where they will bid to take a contract (that replaces former native employees), and then staff that contract with H-1Bs. The net effect is that people are getting replaced, but they're doing it in a way to make it not seem that way on paper.
Thankfully, they're getting investigated for it because they've gotten blatant enough that Senators from both parties got pissed off enough about.
Keep in mind that India, which is nearly as populous as China, is a predominantly English speaking country. If sheer number of speakers is a key, the future will probably turn out to be something like Firefly, with a mishmash of Chinese and English.
Korean sentence structure and grammar is pretty similar to Japanese. I had very little trouble picking up Korean after learning Japanese, because all the concepts were the same (topic/subject/object markers, use of counters, etc), it was just different words. A lot of the Sino-Korean words were also very similar to their Sino-Japanese counterparts, too. It's not surprising, since they're both from the same linguistic family and root, and both share a ton of Chinese influence.
If anything, the biggest trouble I had was keeping the two separate, since using the wrong one is a rather bad faux pas...
Different characters can have the same phonetic representation in Japanese, which is one of the tricky parts of the language. English has homonyms too, though they're usually easier to differentiate based on context. Kanji puns from this are definitely a big deal in Japanese humor, as you might expect.
Also, fun fact, prior to the Tokugawa era where Tokyo became the capital, it was called Edo.
To a degree, yes, because the symbols themselves are the same. Note however that some of the original Chinese characters have been altered in use (simplified) by the PRC in the 50s and 60s, but those are only used in mainland China (and I think Singapore maybe?), but not Taiwan or Japan. Aside from that though, the characters for something like 'University' would still be a combination of the character for 'large' and the character for 'school'. It might be pronounced totally differently, but could be read and understood by all.
Fun fact: The proper reading of the characters for the country of "Japan" in Japanese is actually "Nihon" or "Nippon." However, in certain Chinese dialects, the characters that comprise it are pronounced more like "Zep-pen" or "Japan."
What's also fascinating to consider is that Korean is the same way, but that in modern usage you hardly ever see the Chinese characters (Hanja) used, even though I think they're still taught in some schools. Almost everything I saw when I was in Korea was in Hangul, the Korean native alphabetic script.
The NSA has two sides, and two primary missions. One of those is signals intelligence, the other is communications security/information assurance. These are in separate directorates within NSA, so it's not the same people working on them, even if they both ultimately work for the same senior executives when you go far enough up the chain. The Comsec/IA folks are responsible for making sure the communications/networks/etc of the U.S. government/military are secure.
The problem is that these two things are in conflict, even moreso now that the entire world is on the same platform/architecture as opposed to the old days, when everyone had their own crypto machines (like the Germans using ENIGMA in WW2, etc). You find a vulnerability - do you patch it to protect yourself, or exploit it? I have no insight into how they make that decision, or who does, but if I had to guess, in the post 9/11 world the intelligence side probably has had the upper hand.
Anyway, it's important to remember that there IS a 'benign' side of NSA that does stuff like this, SELinux, etc. The fact that it's open source means you can look at the code yourself and review it. Could they hide something in there? Possibly. Would they? Not likely, especially if this is something they expect other government agencies to use.
The notion of having a 'perfect plaintiff' is entirely well established in legal theory. Part of the reason is precedent - if you lose a case, especially the sort of case that goes all the way to the Supreme Court, getting a resounding judgment against your side is a pretty big blow, because it means future attempts will have a much harder time getting past the established doctrine.
So, you want a client who's squeaky clean, that doesn't have any character flaws or potentially shady past that the opposition can point to. You want someone that is more likely to evoke sympathy, because even though it shouldn't matter in the eyes of the law, judges (and juries) are human, and prone to human inclination of liking or disliking someone.
To be fair, 60-70k in most parts Canada probably goes as far or farther than 100k in the Silicon Valley area (Vancouver with its insane real estate market might be an exception). That's assuming a roughly equivalent exchange rate of course (I know it's fallen off a little in the past year or so, but as recently as 2 years ago it was roughly on par with $1CA to $1US).
Sounds plausible to me. Of course, I'd love to see some actual results from an unbiased study, but I don't doubt that by cutting out all the obnoxious and unnecessary ad traffic you'd reduce your network usage significantly.
And that's even aside from the benefits of blocking a malicious vector.
Keep in mind, too, that some employers require them. When I was working as a contractor for a Federal agency, there were a list of certs that you HAD to have. A lot of it was just about setting minimum standards, and some bureaucratic butt-covering, but that's what things are like when you scale beyond a certain size of organization.
Regulation isn't the answer, no - you can't get rid of them that way any more than you can get rid of weapons. The ones that we've been successful at banning are the ones nobody really saw as being effective or necessary anyway (Chemical weapons, and some countries have gotten rid of land mines - but not the ones with heavily fortified armed borders).
That said, it's an imperfect analogy. I can't make myself and everyone else immune to a 5.56mm round from a rifle simply by knowing about its existence, what it does, and writing up some code to block it. "Cyberweapons" (pardon the use of such a ridiculous term) only work against two types of targets, those who don't know about the vulnerability being attacked, and those who haven't sufficiently patched it (for a variety of reasons).
Part of the core problem is that the same governments who should be working to protect us from these attacks are instead hoarding the knowledge of those vulnerabilities to use them in an offensive manner. This leaves us more vulnerable than we ought to be, both against criminals, and government attackers (including our own).
Yep, that's definitely part of how it works. "Cost saving measures" is usually the stated rationale though, going on the theory that it will be cheaper to hire contractors to do some of the work that was once done by the agencies/military, and have different companies place bids for it. Sometimes it's nothing more than a staffing bid, with a major defense contractor serving as a glorified temp agency placing "full time equivalent" workers on the site, providing additional staff that can be hired (and fired) more easily than an actual GS/etc.
And don't get me wrong, I've seen examples where it actually made objective and fiscal sense. Having a food service contractor come in to run the dining halls on a basic training post, instead of using trainees on weekly rotations to run them, makes sense in all kinds of ways, for instance. I've seen a lot of others that weren't though, especially when we start getting into the high dollar ones.
Snark aside, my general impression from having worked in and with both federal and non federal agencies, as well as power companies, and seeing contracting in general, the problem of budget pressures and cost cutting isn't unique to either private or public sector, contracting or not. Granted, I'm speaking mainly from an IT Security viewpoint, but everything I've seen and heard indicates it's hardly unique to IT in the energy sector. See the 2009 Gulf Spill, or this article about how TEPCO recognized the risk at Fukushima in 2009, but wound up doing nothing: http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0...
And yes, contractors are certainly a poster child for cost-cutting, but let's remember that there's a reason WHY companies/government agencies hire them in the first place, which is (ostensibly) to cut costs.
Oh, no, of course not. In military contracting, we waste money to save money. It's sort of like having to destroy the village in order to save. See any number of "cost saving" measures that ended up costing us all kinds of money (not to mention lives) down the line.
The Surveillance Court (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the one that does the FISA stuff) is supposed to be one of the checks on the various agencies, and perform relevant oversight/provide rulings. Assuming that we believe that the current system has failed to properly restrain those agencies from doing things they shouldn't, it really should come as no surprise that the Court continues to rubberstamp the same stuff they approved before.
One other interesting note - all the judges on the FISC are solely appointed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, without any confirmation or oversight by Congress required. I don't know if all of the current judges were picked by John Roberts or not, but considering that every Chief Justice since the act of Congress that created it in 1978 has been a conservative (Republican), that may tell you something about the mindset of the FISC. It's certainly not a place to find diverse opinions.
There's a lot of room between "give them complete and absolute sovereignty over the islands" and "screw them, they don't matter, run roughshod over them." Look, there was a lot of horrible shit done throughout human history, and we've got a long list of it that the USA (including some of my ancestors) did. I didn't do it, but that doesn't mean I didn't indirectly benefit in a lot of ways from what they did. So what do we do?
We certainly can't ignore it and go "alright, no more discrimination but you guys have to forget all that past stuff." At the same time we can't just say "Okay, we're just going to give you everything." Yes, the native Hawaiians probably deserve a lot of financial assistance, set asides, and consideration for culturally important sites. At the same time, as members of a pluralistic society now, there's a lot of people it would be horribly unfair to give them absolute control of the islands again.
A lot of the same principles apply with Americans of African/former slave/etc descent, or Native American tribes, etc. We should be working to make things better for them, but at the same time we have to do so within the context of the democratic society we have (even if that means we have to figure out a way to outvote certain racist segments of the population to do so).
On top of that, the native Hawaiians, and even those of mixed ancestry, constitute a small minority of the state population (5.9% according to the 2010 census). Interestingly, the largest ethnic block is Asian at about a third of the population, and Euro/White at around a quarter, and multiracial at a quarter.
Do they deserve considerations because their ancestors got screwed over? Yes, absolutely. But that doesn't mean absolute veto over everything. At some point they need to compromise with the rest of the population.
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It's not just that. Certain companies (Infosys, Tata, I'm looking at you) have been very heavily abusing the H-1B visa as part of a consulting deal, where they will bid to take a contract (that replaces former native employees), and then staff that contract with H-1Bs. The net effect is that people are getting replaced, but they're doing it in a way to make it not seem that way on paper.
Thankfully, they're getting investigated for it because they've gotten blatant enough that Senators from both parties got pissed off enough about.
Keep in mind that India, which is nearly as populous as China, is a predominantly English speaking country. If sheer number of speakers is a key, the future will probably turn out to be something like Firefly, with a mishmash of Chinese and English.
Korean sentence structure and grammar is pretty similar to Japanese. I had very little trouble picking up Korean after learning Japanese, because all the concepts were the same (topic/subject/object markers, use of counters, etc), it was just different words. A lot of the Sino-Korean words were also very similar to their Sino-Japanese counterparts, too. It's not surprising, since they're both from the same linguistic family and root, and both share a ton of Chinese influence.
If anything, the biggest trouble I had was keeping the two separate, since using the wrong one is a rather bad faux pas...
No, it's a different character for 'To'.
Different characters can have the same phonetic representation in Japanese, which is one of the tricky parts of the language. English has homonyms too, though they're usually easier to differentiate based on context. Kanji puns from this are definitely a big deal in Japanese humor, as you might expect.
Also, fun fact, prior to the Tokugawa era where Tokyo became the capital, it was called Edo.
To a degree, yes, because the symbols themselves are the same. Note however that some of the original Chinese characters have been altered in use (simplified) by the PRC in the 50s and 60s, but those are only used in mainland China (and I think Singapore maybe?), but not Taiwan or Japan. Aside from that though, the characters for something like 'University' would still be a combination of the character for 'large' and the character for 'school'. It might be pronounced totally differently, but could be read and understood by all. Fun fact: The proper reading of the characters for the country of "Japan" in Japanese is actually "Nihon" or "Nippon." However, in certain Chinese dialects, the characters that comprise it are pronounced more like "Zep-pen" or "Japan." What's also fascinating to consider is that Korean is the same way, but that in modern usage you hardly ever see the Chinese characters (Hanja) used, even though I think they're still taught in some schools. Almost everything I saw when I was in Korea was in Hangul, the Korean native alphabetic script.
"It's Tesla One... they've gone Plaid!"
Even if it's only, say, 90% bacon-ish, that's still pretty awesome.
Commuting certainly would be more interesting if you had the Doof Wagon driving alongside you, even on the 405.
The NSA has two sides, and two primary missions. One of those is signals intelligence, the other is communications security/information assurance. These are in separate directorates within NSA, so it's not the same people working on them, even if they both ultimately work for the same senior executives when you go far enough up the chain. The Comsec/IA folks are responsible for making sure the communications/networks/etc of the U.S. government/military are secure.
The problem is that these two things are in conflict, even moreso now that the entire world is on the same platform/architecture as opposed to the old days, when everyone had their own crypto machines (like the Germans using ENIGMA in WW2, etc). You find a vulnerability - do you patch it to protect yourself, or exploit it? I have no insight into how they make that decision, or who does, but if I had to guess, in the post 9/11 world the intelligence side probably has had the upper hand.
Anyway, it's important to remember that there IS a 'benign' side of NSA that does stuff like this, SELinux, etc. The fact that it's open source means you can look at the code yourself and review it. Could they hide something in there? Possibly. Would they? Not likely, especially if this is something they expect other government agencies to use.
5mb down/1 mb from Google instead of Commercial ISP: $62
Not having to deal with Comcast/TWC/Verizon/AT&T: Priceless.
I did say "economical" for a reason. :)
It's "the next 30 years" as in "economical Fusion power will happen in 30 years /is 30 years away."
The notion of having a 'perfect plaintiff' is entirely well established in legal theory. Part of the reason is precedent - if you lose a case, especially the sort of case that goes all the way to the Supreme Court, getting a resounding judgment against your side is a pretty big blow, because it means future attempts will have a much harder time getting past the established doctrine.
So, you want a client who's squeaky clean, that doesn't have any character flaws or potentially shady past that the opposition can point to. You want someone that is more likely to evoke sympathy, because even though it shouldn't matter in the eyes of the law, judges (and juries) are human, and prone to human inclination of liking or disliking someone.
To be fair, 60-70k in most parts Canada probably goes as far or farther than 100k in the Silicon Valley area (Vancouver with its insane real estate market might be an exception). That's assuming a roughly equivalent exchange rate of course (I know it's fallen off a little in the past year or so, but as recently as 2 years ago it was roughly on par with $1CA to $1US).
Sounds plausible to me. Of course, I'd love to see some actual results from an unbiased study, but I don't doubt that by cutting out all the obnoxious and unnecessary ad traffic you'd reduce your network usage significantly.
And that's even aside from the benefits of blocking a malicious vector.
Keep in mind, too, that some employers require them. When I was working as a contractor for a Federal agency, there were a list of certs that you HAD to have. A lot of it was just about setting minimum standards, and some bureaucratic butt-covering, but that's what things are like when you scale beyond a certain size of organization.
Regulation isn't the answer, no - you can't get rid of them that way any more than you can get rid of weapons. The ones that we've been successful at banning are the ones nobody really saw as being effective or necessary anyway (Chemical weapons, and some countries have gotten rid of land mines - but not the ones with heavily fortified armed borders).
That said, it's an imperfect analogy. I can't make myself and everyone else immune to a 5.56mm round from a rifle simply by knowing about its existence, what it does, and writing up some code to block it. "Cyberweapons" (pardon the use of such a ridiculous term) only work against two types of targets, those who don't know about the vulnerability being attacked, and those who haven't sufficiently patched it (for a variety of reasons).
Part of the core problem is that the same governments who should be working to protect us from these attacks are instead hoarding the knowledge of those vulnerabilities to use them in an offensive manner. This leaves us more vulnerable than we ought to be, both against criminals, and government attackers (including our own).
Yep, that's definitely part of how it works. "Cost saving measures" is usually the stated rationale though, going on the theory that it will be cheaper to hire contractors to do some of the work that was once done by the agencies/military, and have different companies place bids for it. Sometimes it's nothing more than a staffing bid, with a major defense contractor serving as a glorified temp agency placing "full time equivalent" workers on the site, providing additional staff that can be hired (and fired) more easily than an actual GS/etc.
And don't get me wrong, I've seen examples where it actually made objective and fiscal sense. Having a food service contractor come in to run the dining halls on a basic training post, instead of using trainees on weekly rotations to run them, makes sense in all kinds of ways, for instance. I've seen a lot of others that weren't though, especially when we start getting into the high dollar ones.
Snark aside, my general impression from having worked in and with both federal and non federal agencies, as well as power companies, and seeing contracting in general, the problem of budget pressures and cost cutting isn't unique to either private or public sector, contracting or not. Granted, I'm speaking mainly from an IT Security viewpoint, but everything I've seen and heard indicates it's hardly unique to IT in the energy sector. See the 2009 Gulf Spill, or this article about how TEPCO recognized the risk at Fukushima in 2009, but wound up doing nothing: http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0...
And yes, contractors are certainly a poster child for cost-cutting, but let's remember that there's a reason WHY companies/government agencies hire them in the first place, which is (ostensibly) to cut costs.
Oh, no, of course not. In military contracting, we waste money to save money. It's sort of like having to destroy the village in order to save. See any number of "cost saving" measures that ended up costing us all kinds of money (not to mention lives) down the line.
He thinks it's just private contractors that cut corners to save money?
That's adorable.
The Surveillance Court (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the one that does the FISA stuff) is supposed to be one of the checks on the various agencies, and perform relevant oversight/provide rulings. Assuming that we believe that the current system has failed to properly restrain those agencies from doing things they shouldn't, it really should come as no surprise that the Court continues to rubberstamp the same stuff they approved before.
One other interesting note - all the judges on the FISC are solely appointed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, without any confirmation or oversight by Congress required. I don't know if all of the current judges were picked by John Roberts or not, but considering that every Chief Justice since the act of Congress that created it in 1978 has been a conservative (Republican), that may tell you something about the mindset of the FISC. It's certainly not a place to find diverse opinions.
There's a lot of room between "give them complete and absolute sovereignty over the islands" and "screw them, they don't matter, run roughshod over them." Look, there was a lot of horrible shit done throughout human history, and we've got a long list of it that the USA (including some of my ancestors) did. I didn't do it, but that doesn't mean I didn't indirectly benefit in a lot of ways from what they did. So what do we do?
We certainly can't ignore it and go "alright, no more discrimination but you guys have to forget all that past stuff." At the same time we can't just say "Okay, we're just going to give you everything." Yes, the native Hawaiians probably deserve a lot of financial assistance, set asides, and consideration for culturally important sites. At the same time, as members of a pluralistic society now, there's a lot of people it would be horribly unfair to give them absolute control of the islands again.
A lot of the same principles apply with Americans of African/former slave/etc descent, or Native American tribes, etc. We should be working to make things better for them, but at the same time we have to do so within the context of the democratic society we have (even if that means we have to figure out a way to outvote certain racist segments of the population to do so).
So, does that make them better or worse than Time Warner Cable? Seems like a frying pan or fire choice.
On top of that, the native Hawaiians, and even those of mixed ancestry, constitute a small minority of the state population (5.9% according to the 2010 census). Interestingly, the largest ethnic block is Asian at about a third of the population, and Euro/White at around a quarter, and multiracial at a quarter. Do they deserve considerations because their ancestors got screwed over? Yes, absolutely. But that doesn't mean absolute veto over everything. At some point they need to compromise with the rest of the population.