if your car has to choose between a maneuver that kills you and one that kills other people, which one should it be programmed to do?
How about you tell us what should a HUMAN driver choose in a similar situation first, before you ask what should a computer do?
^ THIS.
Cory's article completely misses the point. Or rather, he brings up the Trolley Problem and then moves on to his own point. The reason it's an ethical dilemma is because it brings up ethical issues. That dilemma doesn't change just because a computer is involved, it just shifts the burden to the system. An obvious solution that would probably occur for the first 10-15 years is "Transfer control back to the human in the event of an emergency", which of course just puts right back where we started.
My biggest concern is that we'll get a bunch of hot shot programmers who don't have the training to UNDERSTAND that they're encoding ethical decisions into their code, or don't understand the weight of them, before they do so. "Solutionism" on the part of Bay Area techies who've never taken a philosophy or ethics class in their life but are convinced science can solve all the problems in the world is how we'll get into messes like anomalous cars, systemd, and sex-changing velociraptors.
"No one will knowingly buy a machine that has code in it specifically designed to kill them."
FTFY. Prove that there isn't code in all Japanese made vehicles sold in America designed to kill their passengers on a certain day at a certain time.
That would be a Herculean task if the source was Open. With closed source firmware and "Trusted Computing" implemented (i.e. You can trust that the code you are running is the code they want you to run, but not necessarily the code you want to run; it says nothing about trustworthiness of the actual code), it is impossible.
Calling BS on this one. No one has time, and few would have the ability, to meaningfully audit all the code in systems affecting their lives. Thus, "auditing" is only as good as the chain of trust it represents... Open source gets you nothing except better post-mortems (no pun intended).
Given that trade-off, I'd actually prefer trusting that *manufacturer-intended* code is indeed running than trusting that OSS/many-eyes auditing has caught fundamental errors. I can sue a manufacturer and there's process for dealing with privacy implications that are present in local code. IOW, "Trusted Computing" at the hardware level tells me that this is actually running MS code and hasn't been hacked. That's valuable knowledge.
I don't think you should judge people who drive modern cars more than you judge people relying on other tools.
I do not judge them. People may choose to do as they wish. I find it all very hard to understand, that's all.
With all due respect, the poster here has what I'd consider to be a modern form of OCD. Maybe we can call it FSF-OCD.
In theory, any given doorknob can be infected with MRSA and something that will make you seriously ill that could be prevented from transmission if you rigorously cleaned it each time before touching. Also, in theory, a device with a microcontroller in it may have an unknown safety-critical bug in it others missed that you might find if you audited the code.**
In practice, a "normal" person would calculate the risk/reward of that behavior and do something else. You're choosing otherwise. That's fine, and it's your call, but don't try to pretend that others are the abnormal ones here.
**Note that this is a different issue than auditing for *spying* and tracking software, or loss of privacy generally. Use of open source software is not in and of itself a solution for solving tracking and privacy issues, especially at the nation-state level.
This appropriateness of this code is based around an interpretation of the novel that the creator doesn't share:
“Useless,” Bradbury says. “They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full.” He bristles when others tell him what his stories mean, and once walked out of a class at UCLA where students insisted his book was about government censorship. He’s now bucking the widespread conventional wisdom with a video clip on his Web site (http://www.raybradbury.com/at_home_clips.html), titled “Bradbury on censorship/television.
I don't know... Maybe I'm coming at this from a different perspective, but as a HAM radio operator, my base station address (and home address) is public information, and is easily searchable by call sign. If you want to use a public resource, whether airwaves or airspace, you need to be traceable. That's, in fact, the entire point.
Put another way, the privacy implications of having untraceable drones outweigh the privacy implications of being able to track down who's controlling them.
Because "binging" on everything is essentially the same as unlimited data, and as we have already seen, every carrier who has ever advertised unlimited data has eventually weaseled out of it.
T-Mobile's BingeOn is nothing more than another bullshit advertising gimmick.
How exactly is it a "bullshit advertising gimmick?" It seems: a) completely transparent b) rational (content gets cached; people stream vids and not just data) c) non-monopolistic d) an actual thing (not "bullshit")
And by the way, I'm not sure how I feel about the USA solution as well, where they claim full separation of church and state but allow clerics to issue official marriages, with the excuse that anyone can issue marriages. It feels like a cop out and it is frequently used to weaken the separation of church and state.
It varies state-by-state. In California, a third party must "solemnize" the marriage, and there must be two witnesses to it (typically the Maid of Honor and the Best Man in a "traditional" wedding), but it's the County Recorder who actually issues the marriage certificate. This third party can be a judge, but typically is a religious leader. I know it's strange for other folks to understand, but America is still a culturally religious country, even if it's nominal in some cases. Solemnization in this manner doesn't really strike anyone as odd except for a few hard-core folks on the coasts. (It only became a larger issue recently due to the "definition of marriage" debates with SSM.)
In San Diego, if you have a specific person you'd like to solemnize a marriage (for example, an older, long-time friend of both parties, or perhaps a professor or teacher they both respected), the County will temporarily deputize someone for a few days to perform a civil marriage service for that purpose. It's at the County Recorder's discretion, though, so that the process doesn't get abused.
While parody of free speech is just more free speech, parody of religion is not itself a religion. Unless you're a dipshit, which many self-proclaimed FSM adherents seem to be.
Ironically enough this season, "Jedi" as a religion probably actually has more legitimacy than "Pastafarian" does. If you're the type of person who puts Jedi on a census form or attempts to speak the Klingon language to another person, you're probably the (nerdy enough) type of person who attempts to adopt that as a bona-fide moral philosophy, or who puts in the effort to use a defined grammar to attempt to convey an idea. Although they started as fictional concepts, they are both legitimate examples of what they'd purport to be.
On the other hand, FSM adherents don't *actually* believe in a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Could they say so under oath? No, you couldn't. Sad they can't distinguish between ironic parody and real life, they're just being assholes trying to (as someone put it earlier) "sit in a clown suit next to people that don't think they're wearing something ridiculous".
Yes, you might have a right to wear Google Glass with a prescription lenses generally, but suing establishments to try to force them to allow you into a movie theater or other sensitive place on those grounds just makes you a complete douchebag.
I don't mind they used it on that day; where there's a real threat with a possible follow-up. My problem is what they do with tools like this the other 364 days a year. If anyone believes that this sits in a hangar waiting to be available during an emergency, I have a bridge for sale in Brooklyn.
Well, that's the point. Ensure there are proper safeguards. Five directors, and a Deputy Assistant at the FBI or something. Hell, require five keys or the President to sign off.
We have nuclear weapons and have managed to not fire them off even though the power is there. A secure system can be built ensure it only happens when authorized by those who bear political responsibility for their use.
Searching to see if there are more terrorists engaged in a coordinated attack? Seems like a reasonable and responsible thing to do.
Yeah, the notion that this is a bad thing to do *during* an emergency is a bit hard to swallow. Exigent circumstances are when we want these dragnets used.
We can talk about pre-scanning metadata and background spying etc all we want, but in an active emergency I want those tools available If something wasn't justified. Feel free to sue after the fact.
Sysadmins need to be part coder these days to do their job properly with automation and flexibility; devs need to be part sysadmin so they can factor performance and stability within sane budgets into their designs.
The thing is, a (good) Sysadmin has *always* needed to be part coder. If you weren't comfortable shell scripting, you weren't being a good Sysadmin. And once you're shell scripting, and maybe doing some perl or python, it's really just a matter of syntax and project scope to go from there.
In short, it's easy to take someone with solid Sysadmin skills and experience and teach them more coding. It's a lot harder to take someone with lots of programming skills and teach them systems administration skills that don't involve programmatically burning and regenerating the machine.
1. You fired all your operations people and gave developers pagers.
--OR-- 1. You fired all your developers and gave your operations people compilers.
Bingo. Devops means talking to each other and walking in each others shoes a little. It does NOT mean that either side is dispensable, and it's certainly not a replacement for advanced skill-sets and knowledge in either domain.
It's also not an excuse for not dealing with best practices on both sides. The fact that it compiles and you've successfully shipped a black box Docker that seems to pass the tests doesn't mean the internals have been properly designed and engineered, which means you've made fixing problems and dealing with fires (traditionally the domain of the SysAdmin/SysEng, but they'll wake up a Dev if they have to) much more difficult. Frontloading complexity into your automation framework doesn't make anyone's life easier except the person doing the most rote of tasks. The equivalent is making a nice, shiny, impossible-to-repair car that's nothing but code spaghetti and mush underneath the hood because you didn't have a human sanity-checking what you put out.
you need to stop confusing systemd (the binary) and systemd (the project) - it certainly was intentional to call them both the same name and has caused tons of confusion...
FTFY.
I'd love to give the benefit of the doubt, but no one who's been involved in any sort of technological, engineering, or business project in a larger ecosystem could possibly fail to recognize the "embrace and extend", vendor lock-in pattern that happened there.
The systemd of today would have been rejected had it been (fully) proposed as a unified whole in Fedora 14. Leaving the true agenda unstated, or implying that there'd be no pressure to adopt the rest of the systemd "platform" was exactly what you'd do if you wanted to get your foot in the door. To assume that wasn't intentional is to assume that Poettering is an idiot and doesn't understand how the Linux community works. After his previous software contributions, I fail to see how that could be the case.
It's great that we're able to appreciate old, reliable (or "reliable enough"), working designs that persist in physical space. It's too bad upstarts (no pun intended) don't take this lesson and apply it to other types of technology engineering too.
I care how fast my compiler compiles (as long as it's not insane) about as much as I care how fast my system boots (as long as it's not insane).
Seriously. Whatever planet you weird devs came from, can you return to it? (And take Lennart with you?)... Spend your free time re-optimizing your cut-and-paste chef recipes or something, and leave the engineering to the rest of us?
... Honestly, a lot of the push for a Utopian, fully-autonomous car mindset comes from three major groups: 1) People living in New York City, where basically no one has a car and many can't drive 2) People living in the Bay Area or Silicon Valley where driving is a pain because of poor freeway design and everyone's a 22-y/o new developer who thinks they can devops a technological solution to change people, 3) People still in college or a college area who've not had the opportunity to drive because of cost/benefit
Everyone not living solely in a dorm or mega-dorm-like environment should really get out and talk to more people. Everyone living in the urbanized East Coast should take a trip out West for a while. It's very, very, very different.
I've always been fond of Apple's ADB. It seemed like the closest thing to USB as far as I know of, at least compared to IBM's PS/2. ADB seemed more versatile than PS/2, which was easy to mistake the PS/2 mouse port with the PS/2 keyboard port. The only other versatile port I can think was SCSI with it's ability to chain devices.
Yeah, this. Surprised more people haven't mentioned this. ADB was pretty far ahead of its time, considering it debuted with.. what, the Mac SE? Apple IIGS? I forget which of those came out first, but certainly way back in the day.
More to the point... All this discussion about USB adoption without really mentioning what made it actually take off. The Original iMac. Only someone like Steve Jobs could get the company to agree to drop essentially ALL legacy support at once and force people into this newfangled thing. Apple missed the boat on CD-RW's for a few years, but the iMac really ignited widespread USB adoption on both sides of the divide.
Not one post on any board has cited an actual problem they have encountered and how it damaged their infrastructure or workflow. I am not for or against systemd but, with the general consensus of the posters, there seems to be few real world problems with it and instead, a lot whining about how systemd breaks "their" precious Linux world view.
I just had the latest (of many) systemd issues with a RHEL update to 7.2 hosing boot. Seems simple enough to fix, right? Downgrade to the previous kernel and figure things out. That hung too, though. Couldn't get systemd to boot into rescue more, or even emergency mode. It would simply "hang" for no reason. Booted from ISO and chroot'd in and things seemed fine enough. No logs of course, so nothing useful to diagnose with.
Three hours later, after my umpteenth boot attempt, I find that on some random virtual console I couldn't get to until I manually tweaked the grub line, systemd was deciding that that a selinux policy file was corrupt and halting... but it only displayed that after you WAIT 600 SECONDS for some other startup function to timeout. No log entry, no diagnosis until then.
I keep wondering whether if I were to ship my 1100 page copy of Inside Macintosh VI (a.k.a "The System 7 Book") back to Apple anyone there might accidentally read it and stop screwing up iOS.
I've never understood the appeal of Quake-style drop-downs. The last thing I need is quick command at chat speed, and, as a server sysadmin there's usually nothing interesting on my laptop/desktop to begin with -- I'm administering servers that are out there doing stuff.
For Windows (and OS X, finally), I've gotten accustomed to SecureCRT's interface and tend to find it the most comfortable. SecureFX is a little less reliable on the Mac (I prefer CyberDuck or another more Mac-like client), but its integration with CRT's keystore makes it super convenient.
I sometimes wonder what the world would look like if developers were financially liable for software security failures.
It'd look like the cost analysis of the current US healthcare industry. The fear of a malpractice lawsuit is rampant, which leads to ass-covering every which way imaginable, and fees and insurance costs that match.
I'm not saying malpractice lawsuits are bad, but that level of scrutiny is what we're all paying for out of our pockets.
Would you trust someone with a double margarita if this was the first time they've ever drinked?
The best predictor for responsible use of credit given today is whether you've responsibly used credit in the past. Not using credit is not "responsible use of credit" any more than being 10 years sober is "responsible use of alcohol".... it's non-use of alcohol, and, in fact, is a pretty clear hint that maybe you *shouldn't* trust that person with alcohol.
Yes, it sucks if you're being super cautious about any possibility of taking on any debt and you're otherwise a reasonable person, but Catch-22's are hardly limited to credit scoring.
It is amazing to me that asking people to act like functional adults and not social misfits in a public forum is a possible death knell for ANY community.
Yes, because the people who managed to design, build, operate, maintain, and improve upon computers, the internet, and software in general for the last 60 years couldn't possibly have been adult. Thank goodness we have this guy to lead us from the darkness and save us from ourselves.
The devil is always in the details, so if they apply the ban hammer TOO harshly, it'll run people off, sure, but it's a little early to assume that, don't you think?
To be fair, there's not much incredibly unique about solar weather like this that wouldn't apply to a general electrical catastrophe from an intentional EMP. There's a chance of getting some notice notice, but the practical effects of that will be slim other than telling anyone with a Faraday Cage to close and everyone else to attempt to power everything down first.
Whether it's a rogue state exploding a few nukes in space over the US (no targetting needed, just fire it up from a shipping container at set it to explode about 100mi high), or the Sun taking it out, the end is the same... pretty complete collapse of infrastructure everywhere at once. Think Katrina, but simultaneously across the county. What infrastructure remains working probably won't stay functioning for long with all of the other issues going on...
The logistics of rebuilding will be immense and measured in years, and that's assuming we have enough working equipment after that to "reboot civilization", as it were, and some other -- better equipped -- country with a few working jets doesn't decide to take advantage of things. The military will have properly shielded equipment in many cases, but it's an open question how long and in what way a chain of command can survive when disconnection is universal and recovery is years away.
The rural areas will be survivable; the coastal cities and anywhere where survival depends on electricity and food transportation logistics will not be.
The book One Second After is a decent look at what it might be like, although I have faith that there will be more HAMs than he seems to think who might be able to help with long distance communication in the aftermath. Or you could just watch reruns of Revolution and ignore the mystical nanite techno-babble and focus on the sociology of the collapse.
Anyone who thinks this is beyond the pale has obviously never piloted a plain before. I don't care if built the aviation device yourself by hand with spare Christmas decoration parts, if you're in the air you need to do your registration, paperwork, and file a flight plan. "Model airplanes" hadn't necessarily required licensing (so long as you stay below a certain height), but other aspects of it (like radio-telemetry) do.
So long as we're getting to a point where someone's "drone" is enough of a hazard to the conduct of real air operations, it makes perfect sense to nip this problem in the bud.
If there's an unmarked drone flying around, filming people, and doing God-knows-what-else, I want do be able to file a complaint with the FAA about it.
Slashdot Mirror
if your car has to choose between a maneuver that kills you and one that kills other people, which one should it be programmed to do?
How about you tell us what should a HUMAN driver choose in a similar situation first, before you ask what should a computer do?
^ THIS.
Cory's article completely misses the point. Or rather, he brings up the Trolley Problem and then moves on to his own point. The reason it's an ethical dilemma is because it brings up ethical issues. That dilemma doesn't change just because a computer is involved, it just shifts the burden to the system. An obvious solution that would probably occur for the first 10-15 years is "Transfer control back to the human in the event of an emergency", which of course just puts right back where we started.
My biggest concern is that we'll get a bunch of hot shot programmers who don't have the training to UNDERSTAND that they're encoding ethical decisions into their code, or don't understand the weight of them, before they do so. "Solutionism" on the part of Bay Area techies who've never taken a philosophy or ethics class in their life but are convinced science can solve all the problems in the world is how we'll get into messes like anomalous cars, systemd, and sex-changing velociraptors.
FTFY. Prove that there isn't code in all Japanese made vehicles sold in America designed to kill their passengers on a certain day at a certain time.
That would be a Herculean task if the source was Open. With closed source firmware and "Trusted Computing" implemented (i.e. You can trust that the code you are running is the code they want you to run, but not necessarily the code you want to run; it says nothing about trustworthiness of the actual code), it is impossible.
Calling BS on this one. No one has time, and few would have the ability, to meaningfully audit all the code in systems affecting their lives. Thus, "auditing" is only as good as the chain of trust it represents... Open source gets you nothing except better post-mortems (no pun intended).
Given that trade-off, I'd actually prefer trusting that *manufacturer-intended* code is indeed running than trusting that OSS/many-eyes auditing has caught fundamental errors. I can sue a manufacturer and there's process for dealing with privacy implications that are present in local code. IOW, "Trusted Computing" at the hardware level tells me that this is actually running MS code and hasn't been hacked. That's valuable knowledge.
*snip*
I don't think you should judge people who drive modern cars more than you judge people relying on other tools.
I do not judge them. People may choose to do as they wish. I find it all very hard to understand, that's all.
With all due respect, the poster here has what I'd consider to be a modern form of OCD. Maybe we can call it FSF-OCD.
In theory, any given doorknob can be infected with MRSA and something that will make you seriously ill that could be prevented from transmission if you rigorously cleaned it each time before touching. Also, in theory, a device with a microcontroller in it may have an unknown safety-critical bug in it others missed that you might find if you audited the code.**
In practice, a "normal" person would calculate the risk/reward of that behavior and do something else. You're choosing otherwise. That's fine, and it's your call, but don't try to pretend that others are the abnormal ones here.
**Note that this is a different issue than auditing for *spying* and tracking software, or loss of privacy generally. Use of open source software is not in and of itself a solution for solving tracking and privacy issues, especially at the nation-state level.
This appropriateness of this code is based around an interpretation of the novel that the creator doesn't share:
http://www.laweekly.com/news/r...
I don't know... Maybe I'm coming at this from a different perspective, but as a HAM radio operator, my base station address (and home address) is public information, and is easily searchable by call sign. If you want to use a public resource, whether airwaves or airspace, you need to be traceable. That's, in fact, the entire point.
Put another way, the privacy implications of having untraceable drones outweigh the privacy implications of being able to track down who's controlling them.
Because "binging" on everything is essentially the same as unlimited data, and as we have already seen, every carrier who has ever advertised unlimited data has eventually weaseled out of it.
T-Mobile's BingeOn is nothing more than another bullshit advertising gimmick.
How exactly is it a "bullshit advertising gimmick?" It seems:
a) completely transparent
b) rational (content gets cached; people stream vids and not just data)
c) non-monopolistic
d) an actual thing (not "bullshit")
And by the way, I'm not sure how I feel about the USA solution as well, where they claim full separation of church and state but allow clerics to issue official marriages, with the excuse that anyone can issue marriages. It feels like a cop out and it is frequently used to weaken the separation of church and state.
It varies state-by-state. In California, a third party must "solemnize" the marriage, and there must be two witnesses to it (typically the Maid of Honor and the Best Man in a "traditional" wedding), but it's the County Recorder who actually issues the marriage certificate. This third party can be a judge, but typically is a religious leader. I know it's strange for other folks to understand, but America is still a culturally religious country, even if it's nominal in some cases. Solemnization in this manner doesn't really strike anyone as odd except for a few hard-core folks on the coasts. (It only became a larger issue recently due to the "definition of marriage" debates with SSM.)
In San Diego, if you have a specific person you'd like to solemnize a marriage (for example, an older, long-time friend of both parties, or perhaps a professor or teacher they both respected), the County will temporarily deputize someone for a few days to perform a civil marriage service for that purpose. It's at the County Recorder's discretion, though, so that the process doesn't get abused.
While parody of free speech is just more free speech, parody of religion is not itself a religion. Unless you're a dipshit, which many self-proclaimed FSM adherents seem to be.
Ironically enough this season, "Jedi" as a religion probably actually has more legitimacy than "Pastafarian" does. If you're the type of person who puts Jedi on a census form or attempts to speak the Klingon language to another person, you're probably the (nerdy enough) type of person who attempts to adopt that as a bona-fide moral philosophy, or who puts in the effort to use a defined grammar to attempt to convey an idea. Although they started as fictional concepts, they are both legitimate examples of what they'd purport to be.
On the other hand, FSM adherents don't *actually* believe in a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Could they say so under oath? No, you couldn't. Sad they can't distinguish between ironic parody and real life, they're just being assholes trying to (as someone put it earlier) "sit in a clown suit next to people that don't think they're wearing something ridiculous".
Yes, you might have a right to wear Google Glass with a prescription lenses generally, but suing establishments to try to force them to allow you into a movie theater or other sensitive place on those grounds just makes you a complete douchebag.
I don't mind they used it on that day; where there's a real threat with a possible follow-up. My problem is what they do with tools like this the other 364 days a year. If anyone believes that this sits in a hangar waiting to be available during an emergency, I have a bridge for sale in Brooklyn.
Well, that's the point. Ensure there are proper safeguards. Five directors, and a Deputy Assistant at the FBI or something. Hell, require five keys or the President to sign off.
We have nuclear weapons and have managed to not fire them off even though the power is there. A secure system can be built ensure it only happens when authorized by those who bear political responsibility for their use.
Searching to see if there are more terrorists engaged in a coordinated attack? Seems like a reasonable and responsible thing to do.
Yeah, the notion that this is a bad thing to do *during* an emergency is a bit hard to swallow. Exigent circumstances are when we want these dragnets used.
We can talk about pre-scanning metadata and background spying etc all we want, but in an active emergency I want those tools available If something wasn't justified. Feel free to sue after the fact.
Sysadmins need to be part coder these days to do their job properly with automation and flexibility; devs need to be part sysadmin so they can factor performance and stability within sane budgets into their designs.
The thing is, a (good) Sysadmin has *always* needed to be part coder. If you weren't comfortable shell scripting, you weren't being a good Sysadmin. And once you're shell scripting, and maybe doing some perl or python, it's really just a matter of syntax and project scope to go from there.
In short, it's easy to take someone with solid Sysadmin skills and experience and teach them more coding. It's a lot harder to take someone with lots of programming skills and teach them systems administration skills that don't involve programmatically burning and regenerating the machine.
1. You fired all your operations people and gave developers pagers.
--OR--
1. You fired all your developers and gave your operations people compilers.
Bingo. Devops means talking to each other and walking in each others shoes a little. It does NOT mean that either side is dispensable, and it's certainly not a replacement for advanced skill-sets and knowledge in either domain.
It's also not an excuse for not dealing with best practices on both sides. The fact that it compiles and you've successfully shipped a black box Docker that seems to pass the tests doesn't mean the internals have been properly designed and engineered, which means you've made fixing problems and dealing with fires (traditionally the domain of the SysAdmin/SysEng, but they'll wake up a Dev if they have to) much more difficult. Frontloading complexity into your automation framework doesn't make anyone's life easier except the person doing the most rote of tasks. The equivalent is making a nice, shiny, impossible-to-repair car that's nothing but code spaghetti and mush underneath the hood because you didn't have a human sanity-checking what you put out.
you need to stop confusing systemd (the binary) and systemd (the project) - it certainly was intentional to call them both the same name and has caused tons of confusion...
FTFY.
I'd love to give the benefit of the doubt, but no one who's been involved in any sort of technological, engineering, or business project in a larger ecosystem could possibly fail to recognize the "embrace and extend", vendor lock-in pattern that happened there.
The systemd of today would have been rejected had it been (fully) proposed as a unified whole in Fedora 14. Leaving the true agenda unstated, or implying that there'd be no pressure to adopt the rest of the systemd "platform" was exactly what you'd do if you wanted to get your foot in the door. To assume that wasn't intentional is to assume that Poettering is an idiot and doesn't understand how the Linux community works. After his previous software contributions, I fail to see how that could be the case.
It's great that we're able to appreciate old, reliable (or "reliable enough"), working designs that persist in physical space. It's too bad upstarts (no pun intended) don't take this lesson and apply it to other types of technology engineering too.
I care how fast my compiler compiles (as long as it's not insane) about as much as I care how fast my system boots (as long as it's not insane).
Seriously. Whatever planet you weird devs came from, can you return to it? (And take Lennart with you?)... Spend your free time re-optimizing your cut-and-paste chef recipes or something, and leave the engineering to the rest of us?
... Honestly, a lot of the push for a Utopian, fully-autonomous car mindset comes from three major groups:
1) People living in New York City, where basically no one has a car and many can't drive
2) People living in the Bay Area or Silicon Valley where driving is a pain because of poor freeway design and everyone's a 22-y/o new developer who thinks they can devops a technological solution to change people,
3) People still in college or a college area who've not had the opportunity to drive because of cost/benefit
Everyone not living solely in a dorm or mega-dorm-like environment should really get out and talk to more people. Everyone living in the urbanized East Coast should take a trip out West for a while. It's very, very, very different.
- A San Diego, CA resident
I've always been fond of Apple's ADB. It seemed like the closest thing to USB as far as I know of, at least compared to IBM's PS/2. ADB seemed more versatile than PS/2, which was easy to mistake the PS/2 mouse port with the PS/2 keyboard port. The only other versatile port I can think was SCSI with it's ability to chain devices.
Yeah, this. Surprised more people haven't mentioned this. ADB was pretty far ahead of its time, considering it debuted with .. what, the Mac SE? Apple IIGS? I forget which of those came out first, but certainly way back in the day.
More to the point... All this discussion about USB adoption without really mentioning what made it actually take off. The Original iMac. Only someone like Steve Jobs could get the company to agree to drop essentially ALL legacy support at once and force people into this newfangled thing. Apple missed the boat on CD-RW's for a few years, but the iMac really ignited widespread USB adoption on both sides of the divide.
Not one post on any board has cited an actual problem they have encountered and how it damaged their infrastructure or workflow. I am not for or against systemd but, with the general consensus of the posters, there seems to be few real world problems with it and instead, a lot whining about how systemd breaks "their" precious Linux world view.
I just had the latest (of many) systemd issues with a RHEL update to 7.2 hosing boot. Seems simple enough to fix, right? Downgrade to the previous kernel and figure things out. That hung too, though. Couldn't get systemd to boot into rescue more, or even emergency mode. It would simply "hang" for no reason. Booted from ISO and chroot'd in and things seemed fine enough. No logs of course, so nothing useful to diagnose with.
Three hours later, after my umpteenth boot attempt, I find that on some random virtual console I couldn't get to until I manually tweaked the grub line, systemd was deciding that that a selinux policy file was corrupt and halting... but it only displayed that after you WAIT 600 SECONDS for some other startup function to timeout. No log entry, no diagnosis until then.
Thanks, guys. Way to improve upon shell scripts.
I keep wondering whether if I were to ship my 1100 page copy of Inside Macintosh VI (a.k.a "The System 7 Book") back to Apple anyone there might accidentally read it and stop screwing up iOS.
I've never understood the appeal of Quake-style drop-downs. The last thing I need is quick command at chat speed, and, as a server sysadmin there's usually nothing interesting on my laptop/desktop to begin with -- I'm administering servers that are out there doing stuff.
For Windows (and OS X, finally), I've gotten accustomed to SecureCRT's interface and tend to find it the most comfortable. SecureFX is a little less reliable on the Mac (I prefer CyberDuck or another more Mac-like client), but its integration with CRT's keystore makes it super convenient.
I sometimes wonder what the world would look like if developers were financially liable for software security failures.
It'd look like the cost analysis of the current US healthcare industry. The fear of a malpractice lawsuit is rampant, which leads to ass-covering every which way imaginable, and fees and insurance costs that match.
I'm not saying malpractice lawsuits are bad, but that level of scrutiny is what we're all paying for out of our pockets.
I have no debt and a hefty savings account
According to lenders this makes me a credit risk.
Would you trust someone with a double margarita if this was the first time they've ever drinked?
The best predictor for responsible use of credit given today is whether you've responsibly used credit in the past. Not using credit is not "responsible use of credit" any more than being 10 years sober is "responsible use of alcohol".... it's non-use of alcohol, and, in fact, is a pretty clear hint that maybe you *shouldn't* trust that person with alcohol.
Yes, it sucks if you're being super cautious about any possibility of taking on any debt and you're otherwise a reasonable person, but Catch-22's are hardly limited to credit scoring.
It is amazing to me that asking people to act like functional adults and not social misfits in a public forum is a possible death knell for ANY community.
Yes, because the people who managed to design, build, operate, maintain, and improve upon computers, the internet, and software in general for the last 60 years couldn't possibly have been adult. Thank goodness we have this guy to lead us from the darkness and save us from ourselves.
The devil is always in the details, so if they apply the ban hammer TOO harshly, it'll run people off, sure, but it's a little early to assume that, don't you think?
No.
To be fair, there's not much incredibly unique about solar weather like this that wouldn't apply to a general electrical catastrophe from an intentional EMP. There's a chance of getting some notice notice, but the practical effects of that will be slim other than telling anyone with a Faraday Cage to close and everyone else to attempt to power everything down first.
Whether it's a rogue state exploding a few nukes in space over the US (no targetting needed, just fire it up from a shipping container at set it to explode about 100mi high), or the Sun taking it out, the end is the same... pretty complete collapse of infrastructure everywhere at once. Think Katrina, but simultaneously across the county. What infrastructure remains working probably won't stay functioning for long with all of the other issues going on...
The logistics of rebuilding will be immense and measured in years, and that's assuming we have enough working equipment after that to "reboot civilization", as it were, and some other -- better equipped -- country with a few working jets doesn't decide to take advantage of things. The military will have properly shielded equipment in many cases, but it's an open question how long and in what way a chain of command can survive when disconnection is universal and recovery is years away.
The rural areas will be survivable; the coastal cities and anywhere where survival depends on electricity and food transportation logistics will not be.
The book One Second After is a decent look at what it might be like, although I have faith that there will be more HAMs than he seems to think who might be able to help with long distance communication in the aftermath. Or you could just watch reruns of Revolution and ignore the mystical nanite techno-babble and focus on the sociology of the collapse.
Anyone who thinks this is beyond the pale has obviously never piloted a plain before. I don't care if built the aviation device yourself by hand with spare Christmas decoration parts, if you're in the air you need to do your registration, paperwork, and file a flight plan. "Model airplanes" hadn't necessarily required licensing (so long as you stay below a certain height), but other aspects of it (like radio-telemetry) do.
So long as we're getting to a point where someone's "drone" is enough of a hazard to the conduct of real air operations, it makes perfect sense to nip this problem in the bud.
If there's an unmarked drone flying around, filming people, and doing God-knows-what-else, I want do be able to file a complaint with the FAA about it.