Reporter interviewed some investigators who mentioned that the terrorists had been using encryption, and published the story including that fact. The investigators then realized that the terrorists associates might later read the article and realize that their encryption methods might now be compromised and abandon them -- so the investigators asked the newspaper to bury the article, in the hopes that the terrorists would continue using their (perhaps now compromised) encryption methods a bit longer and thereby expose themselves to capture.
I know it doesn't exactly feed the obligatory Slashdot "government is evil and wants to hack your computer" line, but it seems equally likely to me.
Bitcoin mining, of course -- it may not be as fast as a similarly-priced GPU farm, but the coins it creates will be of the highest possible quality and workmanship.
No disrespect intended, but when "they" come for *your* shit (stuff *previously* not "taxed"), you will be one of those squealing like a pig. Good luck with that. Just saying.
I'm sure there is some theoretical point my tax burden could be raised to that would be enough to make me complain, but I already pay quite a bit in taxes and it doesn't bother me much. It's the price I pay for living in a nice area of a well-cared-for state in a first-world country, and I'm happy to pay it.
I wonder about the logistics behind any such system, would you have to tie a checking account to your Apple ID? Would people be willing to do that?
Plenty of people have already set up iTunes and/or Apple Pay and tied either a credit card or a bank account to their phone for that; if Apple is clever they will leverage that somehow, so that their new feature doesn't require any additional signup above what Apple Pay or iTunes purchases already require.
Anyhow, within a day of her first getting her Mac she had managed to install something called Mackeeper (I think?). It took some digging to find out that it was not some sort of malware protection but actually was the malware.
It probably got installed due to the fact that the MacKeeper people plaster ads for MacKeeper all over the place (presumably only if your web browser's user-agent indicates you're on a Mac, though). These ads strongly suggest that installing MacKeeper will make your Mac more better in every possible way and that you should do download and install it right now because reasons.
Complete bunk, of course, but it can work on the right type of impressionable mind (i.e. "the computer said I should do this, so I'd better do it" -- not making the distinction between what the OS is recommending and what a third-party ad is recommending). I get a phone call from my mom every 6 months or so asking me if she should install MacKeeper or not -- I'm grateful that she knows to ask about it and not just blindly install it.
Upon Submission, Devs send Apple their XCode Projects, and APPLE does the "For Publication" Build with THEIR (likely non-tainted) copy of XCode. Done!
I'm pretty sure the lawyers at my company (and most closed-source software companies) would say that sending the entire source code to a third party is a non-starter. This could work for open-source software, though.
If they can combine the phishing email with a known browser exploit, then just getting the victim to click the link can be enough -- no entering of credentials is necessary.
Most people I know would MUCH rather not work even if it is good for them.
I think it would be more accurate to say that most people would much rather not work at shitty, tedious, mind-numbing, soul-destroying, low-paying jobs that they hate.
I suspect that most people would happily work at a job that fit their interests, and that they found psychologically rewarding; the problem, of course, is that most jobs (and especially the kinds of jobs that are available to untrained/uneducated people) are of the tedious and mind-numbing variety.
On the optimistic side, computers and automation provide us with the opportunity to let machines to the tedious necessary work, freeing up people to find jobs that are more compatible with their own tastes. Of course, it's likely that many of the jobs that people would choose for themselves would not be particularly economically productive -- in a previous era, they would be referred to as "hobbies" -- but that is not a problem in a society where machines provide a surplus of wealth so that humans no longer need to be dragooned into service on threat of starvation.
If nothing else, being able to quit a job you hate without fear of starvation and/or homelessness frees people up to look for a different kind of employment that they would like better, and it frees people to get the education necessary to do that job competently. The endgame is a society with more people doing jobs they want to do rather than jobs that they are forced to do, and therefore a society where more people are enthusiastic and therefore good at their jobs.
Because there are lots and lots of bits of work that people do, that do not involve taking collective resources.
No, there aren't. Because every adult in the country has benefitted (and continues to benefit) from the services that are automatically provided to every resident: military and police protection, fire prevention and suppression, the legal system, public schools and universities, roadways, bridges, airports, curbs on pollution, water and sewage systems, enforcement of property rights, regulations and inspections that keep the food supply safe and affordable, building codes, communications infrastructure, air traffic control, automotive safety regulations, public libraries, the Internet, etc etc etc. All of those things require collective resources to implement and maintain. It's just that they work so well that many people have forgotten that without taxes they would not exist, and now take them for granted because they can't imagine life without them. Hence the emergence of entitled libertarians whining about the government "stealing" their work because they are too comfortable to notice all the benefits that they are receiving in return.
At some point, those that are doing a disproportionately greater amount of work than the rest will say "to hell with this" and stop producing
At some point, those doing the work will all be machines. If they go on strike, we'll have bigger problems.:)
There has to be incentive to work.
Fear of homelessness or starvation is not the best incentive to work. It's only enough to keep someone showing up; it's not going to produce much inspired output. At some point mankind needs to advance beyond the slave "he who does not work does not eat" mentality and find more meaningful reasons for working.
Things that are given without being earned have no value.
I'm sure you'll keep that truism in mind if you're ever starving and someone offers you some food.
So, according to you, if the majority decides that slavery should be legal, we should just "have to accept that"?
Fortunately we live in a Constitutional democracy, that won't happen. The Constitution overrides the will of the majority, and the 13th Amendment abolished slavery.
The Constitution does not say that taxes are unconstitutional -- quite the opposite in fact, it explicitly grants the government the right to levy taxes.
That's the way fasicst think; it reveals a lot about you.
Your ad homeinem attacks and lack of basic knowledge about how the government works reveal a fair bit about you as well.
What I'd like is not to have to carry around an extra device at all -- my cell phone is already in my pocket just about all the time, and these days it's got enough power to work a basic desktop computer, the only drawback is that its small size makes its user interactions less efficient than what a full desktop can provide.
So the ideal usage pattern would be: I walk over to a keyboard/mouse/monitor that is sitting somewhere, sit down in front of it, and my cell phone (still in my pocket) connects to the keyboard/mouse/monitor wirelessly and presents me with a login screen. I do my work as I would at any computer, and then when I'm done, I get up and leave, and the pairing dissolves and the screen goes dark. All my data and computing state stays in my pocket with me. Same thing happens wherever I go.
Of course there are security concerns that would need to be ironed out, so it probably wouldn't be quite that seamless, but that's the ideal.
These machines aren't meant to be the Boeing 747 of fusion power. They're more like the Wright Flyer -- which was not even close to being a commercially viable flying machine, but did demonstrate that heavier-than-air flight was possible, and provided the engineers with experience that helped them engineer the next generation of aircraft.
My bad programming habit is #3 -- putting too much code on one line.
The problem I have is that the there's no standard terminal width anymore. Back in ancient days, it was simple to say "just try to keep lines less than 80 characters long so that the fit nicely on the VT100 terminal everybody uses", but now that most developers have monstrous 30" LCD screens running a 4K resolution, etc, an 80-character line-length limit is a ridiculous underutilization -- like formatting a newspaper so that it can be easily read through a periscope, even though nobody ever uses periscopes for that purpose.
So the next thought would be, choose a line-limit greater than 80 characters long. But what? 160 characters? 320? Whatever number of characters fits across the width of a "typical" window? What constitutes "typical"? And at what font size? Fixed-space font or proportional?
At that point the Asperger's-compliant section of my brain says "ah, screw it, it's all subjective anyway", and I just end up ignoring display-width issues and just putting as much on the line as will logically go onto the line. vi (the only editor worth considering;)) handles line-wrapping just fine, so it's not a problem for me. It does irritate my co-workers who are using non-line-wrapping IDEs though, since they have to do a lot of scrolling back and forth. (Of course that has the benefit of training them to leave my code alone if possible, which shouldn't be overlooked)
I think you'll be able to find cases where humans react better and cases where computers work better.
This is true, for now... but consider what happens over time: every time a computer does something sufficiently poorly (i.e. badly enough to cause an accident), there will be a full black-box recording and log of the conditions and operations that led up to the accident. The car company's programmers will go over the situation with a fine-toothed comb to understand what happened, and update the software to handle that situation better in the future.
Rinse and repeat for a decade or two, and the number of scenarios where the car is still worse than a human will start to become quite small.
(Meanwhile, human beings will continue to drive at more or less their present skill level, since they don't learn much from each others' mistakes)
I guess what I'm asking is, what problem are we trying to solve here?
We've got a lot of people out there who really like to eat meat, and aren't likely to give it up anytime soon. To meet their demand, we've got a meat industry that is inefficient, unhygienic, environmentally harmful, and cruel to animals.
If (and it's a big if) someone can come up with a meat substitute that is sufficiently similar to the real thing, and cheaper to produce and to buy, then the problematic meat industry will likely shrink down into a much-less-problematic niche/specialty market for foodies.
Are people who are concerned about what they eat going to embrace a chemical s**t storm just because it's meatless?
Probably not.
However, the companies described in the article are not developing a "chemical s**tstorm". Rather, they are developing food preparation processes that make plant materials taste more like meat.
Slashdot Mirror
This begs the question of where our intelligence agencies are focusing their efforts.
I'd imagine that US security agencies are concentrating their efforts on... the US.
How about this, instead:
Reporter interviewed some investigators who mentioned that the terrorists had been using encryption, and published the story including that fact. The investigators then realized that the terrorists associates might later read the article and realize that their encryption methods might now be compromised and abandon them -- so the investigators asked the newspaper to bury the article, in the hopes that the terrorists would continue using their (perhaps now compromised) encryption methods a bit longer and thereby expose themselves to capture.
I know it doesn't exactly feed the obligatory Slashdot "government is evil and wants to hack your computer" line, but it seems equally likely to me.
Bitcoin mining, of course -- it may not be as fast as a similarly-priced GPU farm, but the coins it creates will be of the highest possible quality and workmanship.
I'm pretty sure that Anonymous Coward's response was itself propagating some other kind of meme, but I'm not motivated enough to look it up.
Anyway, the thing is to take inappropriately over-the-top invective with a grain of salt, since it was probably intended to be tongue-in-cheek.
Except armed people stop killings and other violence all the time.
Can you back that up with some evidence? Sounds truthy to me.
No disrespect intended, but when "they" come for *your* shit (stuff *previously* not "taxed"), you will be one of those squealing like a pig. Good luck with that. Just saying.
I'm sure there is some theoretical point my tax burden could be raised to that would be enough to make me complain, but I already pay quite a bit in taxes and it doesn't bother me much. It's the price I pay for living in a nice area of a well-cared-for state in a first-world country, and I'm happy to pay it.
Now they can steal your phone AND the rest of your money.
Only if they also steal your access PIN, or one of your fingers...
I wonder about the logistics behind any such system, would you have to tie a checking account to your Apple ID? Would people be willing to do that?
Plenty of people have already set up iTunes and/or Apple Pay and tied either a credit card or a bank account to their phone for that; if Apple is clever they will leverage that somehow, so that their new feature doesn't require any additional signup above what Apple Pay or iTunes purchases already require.
TimeMachine is a push backup on the same computer. Thus vulnerable to being encrypted too.
Only if the malware gains root access -- not that that couldn't happen, of course.
You want a pull backup from a second system ( maybe with TimeMachine on that secondary computer).
Another option would be to have two external TimeMachine drives, and only keep one of them connected at any time, and swap them every so often.
Anyhow, within a day of her first getting her Mac she had managed to install something called Mackeeper (I think?). It took some digging to find out that it was not some sort of malware protection but actually was the malware.
It probably got installed due to the fact that the MacKeeper people plaster ads for MacKeeper all over the place (presumably only if your web browser's user-agent indicates you're on a Mac, though). These ads strongly suggest that installing MacKeeper will make your Mac more better in every possible way and that you should do download and install it right now because reasons.
Complete bunk, of course, but it can work on the right type of impressionable mind (i.e. "the computer said I should do this, so I'd better do it" -- not making the distinction between what the OS is recommending and what a third-party ad is recommending). I get a phone call from my mom every 6 months or so asking me if she should install MacKeeper or not -- I'm grateful that she knows to ask about it and not just blindly install it.
Upon Submission, Devs send Apple their XCode Projects, and APPLE does the "For Publication" Build with THEIR (likely non-tainted) copy of XCode. Done!
I'm pretty sure the lawyers at my company (and most closed-source software companies) would say that sending the entire source code to a third party is a non-starter. This could work for open-source software, though.
If they can combine the phishing email with a known browser exploit, then just getting the victim to click the link can be enough -- no entering of credentials is necessary.
Most people I know would MUCH rather not work even if it is good for them.
I think it would be more accurate to say that most people would much rather not work at shitty, tedious, mind-numbing, soul-destroying, low-paying jobs that they hate.
I suspect that most people would happily work at a job that fit their interests, and that they found psychologically rewarding; the problem, of course, is that most jobs (and especially the kinds of jobs that are available to untrained/uneducated people) are of the tedious and mind-numbing variety.
On the optimistic side, computers and automation provide us with the opportunity to let machines to the tedious necessary work, freeing up people to find jobs that are more compatible with their own tastes. Of course, it's likely that many of the jobs that people would choose for themselves would not be particularly economically productive -- in a previous era, they would be referred to as "hobbies" -- but that is not a problem in a society where machines provide a surplus of wealth so that humans no longer need to be dragooned into service on threat of starvation.
If nothing else, being able to quit a job you hate without fear of starvation and/or homelessness frees people up to look for a different kind of employment that they would like better, and it frees people to get the education necessary to do that job competently. The endgame is a society with more people doing jobs they want to do rather than jobs that they are forced to do, and therefore a society where more people are enthusiastic and therefore good at their jobs.
Because there are lots and lots of bits of work that people do, that do not involve taking collective resources.
No, there aren't. Because every adult in the country has benefitted (and continues to benefit) from the services that are automatically provided to every resident: military and police protection, fire prevention and suppression, the legal system, public schools and universities, roadways, bridges, airports, curbs on pollution, water and sewage systems, enforcement of property rights, regulations and inspections that keep the food supply safe and affordable, building codes, communications infrastructure, air traffic control, automotive safety regulations, public libraries, the Internet, etc etc etc. All of those things require collective resources to implement and maintain. It's just that they work so well that many people have forgotten that without taxes they would not exist, and now take them for granted because they can't imagine life without them. Hence the emergence of entitled libertarians whining about the government "stealing" their work because they are too comfortable to notice all the benefits that they are receiving in return.
At some point, those that are doing a disproportionately greater amount of work than the rest will say "to hell with this" and stop producing
At some point, those doing the work will all be machines. If they go on strike, we'll have bigger problems. :)
There has to be incentive to work.
Fear of homelessness or starvation is not the best incentive to work. It's only enough to keep someone showing up; it's not going to produce much inspired output. At some point mankind needs to advance beyond the slave "he who does not work does not eat" mentality and find more meaningful reasons for working.
Things that are given without being earned have no value.
I'm sure you'll keep that truism in mind if you're ever starving and someone offers you some food.
So, according to you, if the majority decides that slavery should be legal, we should just "have to accept that"?
Fortunately we live in a Constitutional democracy, that won't happen. The Constitution overrides the will of the majority, and the 13th Amendment abolished slavery.
The Constitution does not say that taxes are unconstitutional -- quite the opposite in fact, it explicitly grants the government the right to levy taxes.
That's the way fasicst think; it reveals a lot about you.
Your ad homeinem attacks and lack of basic knowledge about how the government works reveal a fair bit about you as well.
But then, who cares about people working on solving some of the most cutting edge AI problems encountered in board gaming.
If they can't figure out how to work around a name collision on a search engine, they must not be very good AI programmers.
What I'd like is not to have to carry around an extra device at all -- my cell phone is already in my pocket just about all the time, and these days it's got enough power to work a basic desktop computer, the only drawback is that its small size makes its user interactions less efficient than what a full desktop can provide.
So the ideal usage pattern would be: I walk over to a keyboard/mouse/monitor that is sitting somewhere, sit down in front of it, and my cell phone (still in my pocket) connects to the keyboard/mouse/monitor wirelessly and presents me with a login screen. I do my work as I would at any computer, and then when I'm done, I get up and leave, and the pairing dissolves and the screen goes dark. All my data and computing state stays in my pocket with me. Same thing happens wherever I go.
Of course there are security concerns that would need to be ironed out, so it probably wouldn't be quite that seamless, but that's the ideal.
These machines aren't meant to be the Boeing 747 of fusion power. They're more like the Wright Flyer -- which was not even close to being a commercially viable flying machine, but did demonstrate that heavier-than-air flight was possible, and provided the engineers with experience that helped them engineer the next generation of aircraft.
How long until we can just 3D print one of these things? :)
My bad programming habit is #3 -- putting too much code on one line.
The problem I have is that the there's no standard terminal width anymore. Back in ancient days, it was simple to say "just try to keep lines less than 80 characters long so that the fit nicely on the VT100 terminal everybody uses", but now that most developers have monstrous 30" LCD screens running a 4K resolution, etc, an 80-character line-length limit is a ridiculous underutilization -- like formatting a newspaper so that it can be easily read through a periscope, even though nobody ever uses periscopes for that purpose.
So the next thought would be, choose a line-limit greater than 80 characters long. But what? 160 characters? 320? Whatever number of characters fits across the width of a "typical" window? What constitutes "typical"? And at what font size? Fixed-space font or proportional?
At that point the Asperger's-compliant section of my brain says "ah, screw it, it's all subjective anyway", and I just end up ignoring display-width issues and just putting as much on the line as will logically go onto the line. vi (the only editor worth considering ;)) handles line-wrapping just fine, so it's not a problem for me. It does irritate my co-workers who are using non-line-wrapping IDEs though, since they have to do a lot of scrolling back and forth. (Of course that has the benefit of training them to leave my code alone if possible, which shouldn't be overlooked)
I think you'll be able to find cases where humans react better and cases where computers work better.
This is true, for now... but consider what happens over time: every time a computer does something sufficiently poorly (i.e. badly enough to cause an accident), there will be a full black-box recording and log of the conditions and operations that led up to the accident. The car company's programmers will go over the situation with a fine-toothed comb to understand what happened, and update the software to handle that situation better in the future.
Rinse and repeat for a decade or two, and the number of scenarios where the car is still worse than a human will start to become quite small.
(Meanwhile, human beings will continue to drive at more or less their present skill level, since they don't learn much from each others' mistakes)
It seems like those people are just impossible to please. Yes, your dinner doesn't taste like meat. That's what you signed on for there, buddy!
Of course, the point of the article is that several companies are well on their way to making it possible to please those people. Science!
I guess what I'm asking is, what problem are we trying to solve here?
We've got a lot of people out there who really like to eat meat, and aren't likely to give it up anytime soon. To meet their demand, we've got a meat industry that is inefficient, unhygienic, environmentally harmful, and cruel to animals.
If (and it's a big if) someone can come up with a meat substitute that is sufficiently similar to the real thing, and cheaper to produce and to buy, then the problematic meat industry will likely shrink down into a much-less-problematic niche/specialty market for foodies.
Are people who are concerned about what they eat going to embrace a chemical s**t storm just because it's meatless?
Probably not.
However, the companies described in the article are not developing a "chemical s**tstorm". Rather, they are developing food preparation processes that make plant materials taste more like meat.