I intended to be snarky here, but the more I thought about it, it really is Dice's website. They post stuff, and we keep coming back and reading it, even though we're not paid to. What part of that do you consider "not OK"?
I know C++. To me, anyone who knows python but not C++ is half useless. If you only know Java, you're 25% useless. And if you know only Visual Basic, you're 125% useless.
For those of you not reading Slashdot on Windows 8, you may not realize that local advertising support was built directly into Windows 8, and ads appear in certain Metro-style apps, exactly like iAds on iOS.
Of course since the research paper was written in 2009, this still shouldn't come as much of a surprise, as you've all had six years of warning.
Keep reading the report, and you'll see that they doubled back and covered their other tracks several times. Scheduling the malware activity levels to coincide with Israel's work week would be in keeping with the other forms of camouflage and diversion that were employed by Duqu 2.0's operators, and prove almost nothing at all.
Various leaks after the fact strongly implicated Israel was responsible for Stuxnet (including a YouTube video of an IDF general being congratulated on his team's creation of the malware at his retirement party), but Duqu? The only confirmed relationship to Stuxnet is that both were found in Iran's nuclear facilities. And several nations have as much interest in Iran's nuclear program as Israel, including the US, China, and Russia.
Have Kapersky considered running their business off of bootable CDs?
Read further down in the Fine Report, and you'll see why that strategy probably wouldn't have helped much. After the initial installation, the Command and Control network ran almost exclusively in RAM on Kaspersky's servers; the executable files were deleted to leave as few detectable traces as possible. Of course that meant the malware would be lost during a server reboot, so it depended on the actions of the other nearby servers that would eventually detect the rebooted server was uninfected, and would then re-infect it. And just in case Kaspersky's admins rebooted all servers simultaneously, wiping out the entire C&C system, they left a back door open in the form of a few unimportant PCs infected with persistent malware that would simply launch reverse tunneling proxies at startup. The attackers would have been able to reenter the network without needing to phish them again.
Do you think Y2K would have gone so quietly had the entire IT industry simply ignored the problems created during the prior four decades of programming? Do you think the ebola outbreak would have been stopped so quickly had the world's health care organizations simply ignored the problem?
So yes, it was Y2K all over again. Some people noticed a huge looming threat, they brought it to the attention of the world, the world eventually responded with enough resources to solve the problem.
Complex systems have a lot of variables; that doesn't make them poor candidates for modeling. On the contrary, you simply have to rerun the model as you learn more and better data.
The prediction of "a million victims" was made in the earlier stages of the outbreak and grabbed the attention of the world, so we more clearly remember it as it was on that day. But just because we remember what the media said in October of 2014 doesn't mean they weren't continually working on it. After the model started reversing course the headlines stopped being so alarmist, and so the general public barely remembers the much less dramatic follow-on news "Ebola trending downwards", "revised estimates", etc.
Was this a deliberate attempt by the people generating the model to drum up public support? Was this simply the media grabbing on to the worst case scenario because it made the best headlines? Was it an honest mistake in reporting? Perhaps the "garbage in -- headlines out" came from a source other than the model's data.
Certainly not all the input was inaccurate. There could have been incorrect accounting for the effectiveness of education or news efforts. The medical personnel may have improved faster than predicted. Mobility limitations might have reduced the spread to a manageable rate. Or it could simply be the outcome was a 1:20 chance that beat the predicted odds. There are way too many variables to even know which was the least accurate, but I wouldn't claim any were as bad as "garbage".
If management sets up incentives to game the system they have no one to blame but themselves. Of course employees will do what the system is setup to reward. Duh.
And that's my point. A non-engineer manager won't know what their engineering employees do, so they won't incentivize the right behaviors.
Business lobbyists in the US would have candidates sell this to voters as an example of "onerous, unasked-for Big Government interference!" They'd threaten voters with nonsense like "You have to throw away your dad's old wrenches because it will be illegal to use inch sized bolts!" or "It's a big-tool-company plot to force us all to buy new wrenches!" This would spark irrational debates around pointless-topics, and won't do anything but make candidates look even stupider than they are.
Never mind that most shade-tree mechanics already have toolboxes full of both.
Not always. For example, the Senior VPs at Verizon can discuss the bits and bytes of the GSM protocol with you. They understand how 3G can be subverted, how A5 is weak, signal strength, all that.
And have you ever looked at a hospital's administration board? Notice how many of those people have the word Doctor in their title? If a hospital doesn't promote doctors into executive positions, they make bad decisions and patients suffer and die.
If a company makes an effort to promote engineers to lead up the engineering teams, or whatever kind of specialists to leadership, they will have much better results.
It's also been demonstrated that when a company promotes a personnel or finance manager to the top of an engineering organization, disaster ensues. Unless the board can rectify the error, the company will implode. Witness the painful demise of HP at the hands of Carly Fiorina, who had zero qualifications to run an engineering company - she had an MBA and degrees in philosophy and history, nothing in engineering. She came out of it smelling like a successful politician, while HP came out of it with a reputation as the place to buy badly supported, DRM-encrusted PCs and peripherals.
It's not just management to blame. Every mid-level peon who is attempting to play the game instead of focusing on delivering value for their customer is subverting the goals. When Manager Mike asks Joe Lineworker for a specific result that's conducive to his politics, Joe can say "sure, I'll scratch your back, just don't forget I did this for you." It's corrosive in both directions.
What happens in this case is the outcome is as the manager inflates his project, the organization is wasting money on a project that isn't of as much value as the executives wanted. And if the wrong projects are inflated, the bad numbers coming out of it corrupt all other projects.
Do you know how many doctors they have in America? How about in Liberia?
According to the CIA World Factbook, in 2008 the U.S. had 2.4 doctors per every 1000 people. In Liberia, they had 0.01 per 1000, but that was before ebola killed 40 of their 120 physicians. Volunteer doctors have helped a little, but not too many want to risk their own lives in such a hot zone. The need is almost beyond comprehension.
Oh, and of those 80 remaining doctors, how many do you think specialize in surgery, and have hours in their day to operate on you? How many specialize in the kind of surgery you may need at that moment?
You can't 'just ship the actual doctor' any more than you can send them a stack of gold bars. There aren't enough who have time or the inclination to go.
Oh, and if it's a time-critical disaster scenario, the patient is still better off with a remote surgeon than with no doctor at all. If the surgeon physically cannot get to the field hospital in the next two hours, and your choices are limited to:
A) bleed to death from a punctured lung because there's nobody here to sew you up, or B) take your chances with Comcast delivering enough bytes for a doctor two states away to sew you up,
You solve this by running the remote surgery in a hospital that still has local doctors and nurses. One general doctor can be in house and prepped for surgery, on call for one or more operating theatres. The patients will still need local nurses to prep the patients, physically administer the anesthesia (in the case of a remote anesthetist), and handle all kinds of tasks. The remote surgeon makes the cuts, does the work, then closes up behind himself as he leaves. The whole time the local nurse(s) is(are) monitoring vitals, and watching for problems. If anything comes up that can't be remotely managed, the nurse signals for the on-call doctor to come in and handle the situation. All the local doctor really needs are the skills required to close up and remove the machine from the patient - they don't have to complete the delicate surgery if it's beyond their capabilities.
Don't fret. Congress is staffed almost entirely by lawyers, and there is zero chance they'll let their bread-and-butter be outsourced or replaced by machines. They already won't even pass laws to simplify laws, in order to keep their jobs as clever interpreters of the cracks between the laws.
They'll damn everyone else to a subcontracted devil running an outsourced version of hell, but they've proven they're going to protect their jobs forever.
I read the article, thinking this was an incorrect claim in the summary. Nope, the article insists in several places that it was "undetectable" by the surgeons. Now, anyone who's played any online FPS knows that 50ms ping times are not only detectable, but are approaching unplayable because some punk kid that's only 10ms away from the server is always taking the head shots before you can even see him.
So I figured there has to be something else. The best hypothesis I could come up with is the current robotic surgery tools introduce their own lag such that the surgeons were unable to distinguish normal device response times from network latency. That, and the goals of a surgeon are completely different from an FPS shooter. A surgeon isn't trying to race anything or anyone - they don't have to shoot first. In a live operating theatre, they are methodical and cautious. It's not like there are sudden surprises that leap out at them that they have to instantly react to. Even a burst blood vessel takes a few moments to assess and plan a recovery from. So maybe if they're used to very slow approach, the latency doesn't impact them as much.
But you could make a whole lot of money if you could develop a "tin-foil accelerometer blocker". Every starship a hundred years from now is going to need inertial dampeners!
I'm glad they do 'real work' with their money, but don't underestimate the value of a successful lobbying campaign. If the resources of the government can be brought to bear, they have the capability to make much bigger changes, even if they seem hobbled by compromises and special interests.
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Well, back in my day there were only three episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus, which we quoted every day at lunch, and we liked it that way.
I intended to be snarky here, but the more I thought about it, it really is Dice's website. They post stuff, and we keep coming back and reading it, even though we're not paid to. What part of that do you consider "not OK"?
If you know Idle (Eric, not the IDE), you get the job automatically. If you can get me tickets to Spamalot.
This is Slashdot. You only get abuse.
I know C++. To me, anyone who knows python but not C++ is half useless. If you only know Java, you're 25% useless. And if you know only Visual Basic, you're 125% useless.
Too late. It's been touched.
For those of you not reading Slashdot on Windows 8, you may not realize that local advertising support was built directly into Windows 8, and ads appear in certain Metro-style apps, exactly like iAds on iOS.
Of course since the research paper was written in 2009, this still shouldn't come as much of a surprise, as you've all had six years of warning.
Keep reading the report, and you'll see that they doubled back and covered their other tracks several times. Scheduling the malware activity levels to coincide with Israel's work week would be in keeping with the other forms of camouflage and diversion that were employed by Duqu 2.0's operators, and prove almost nothing at all.
Various leaks after the fact strongly implicated Israel was responsible for Stuxnet (including a YouTube video of an IDF general being congratulated on his team's creation of the malware at his retirement party), but Duqu? The only confirmed relationship to Stuxnet is that both were found in Iran's nuclear facilities. And several nations have as much interest in Iran's nuclear program as Israel, including the US, China, and Russia.
Have Kapersky considered running their business off of bootable CDs?
Read further down in the Fine Report, and you'll see why that strategy probably wouldn't have helped much. After the initial installation, the Command and Control network ran almost exclusively in RAM on Kaspersky's servers; the executable files were deleted to leave as few detectable traces as possible. Of course that meant the malware would be lost during a server reboot, so it depended on the actions of the other nearby servers that would eventually detect the rebooted server was uninfected, and would then re-infect it. And just in case Kaspersky's admins rebooted all servers simultaneously, wiping out the entire C&C system, they left a back door open in the form of a few unimportant PCs infected with persistent malware that would simply launch reverse tunneling proxies at startup. The attackers would have been able to reenter the network without needing to phish them again.
Do you think Y2K would have gone so quietly had the entire IT industry simply ignored the problems created during the prior four decades of programming? Do you think the ebola outbreak would have been stopped so quickly had the world's health care organizations simply ignored the problem?
So yes, it was Y2K all over again. Some people noticed a huge looming threat, they brought it to the attention of the world, the world eventually responded with enough resources to solve the problem.
Complex systems have a lot of variables; that doesn't make them poor candidates for modeling. On the contrary, you simply have to rerun the model as you learn more and better data.
The prediction of "a million victims" was made in the earlier stages of the outbreak and grabbed the attention of the world, so we more clearly remember it as it was on that day. But just because we remember what the media said in October of 2014 doesn't mean they weren't continually working on it. After the model started reversing course the headlines stopped being so alarmist, and so the general public barely remembers the much less dramatic follow-on news "Ebola trending downwards", "revised estimates", etc.
Was this a deliberate attempt by the people generating the model to drum up public support? Was this simply the media grabbing on to the worst case scenario because it made the best headlines? Was it an honest mistake in reporting? Perhaps the "garbage in -- headlines out" came from a source other than the model's data.
Certainly not all the input was inaccurate. There could have been incorrect accounting for the effectiveness of education or news efforts. The medical personnel may have improved faster than predicted. Mobility limitations might have reduced the spread to a manageable rate. Or it could simply be the outcome was a 1:20 chance that beat the predicted odds. There are way too many variables to even know which was the least accurate, but I wouldn't claim any were as bad as "garbage".
If management sets up incentives to game the system they have no one to blame but themselves. Of course employees will do what the system is setup to reward. Duh.
And that's my point. A non-engineer manager won't know what their engineering employees do, so they won't incentivize the right behaviors.
Business lobbyists in the US would have candidates sell this to voters as an example of "onerous, unasked-for Big Government interference!" They'd threaten voters with nonsense like "You have to throw away your dad's old wrenches because it will be illegal to use inch sized bolts!" or "It's a big-tool-company plot to force us all to buy new wrenches!" This would spark irrational debates around pointless-topics, and won't do anything but make candidates look even stupider than they are.
Never mind that most shade-tree mechanics already have toolboxes full of both.
Not always. For example, the Senior VPs at Verizon can discuss the bits and bytes of the GSM protocol with you. They understand how 3G can be subverted, how A5 is weak, signal strength, all that.
And have you ever looked at a hospital's administration board? Notice how many of those people have the word Doctor in their title? If a hospital doesn't promote doctors into executive positions, they make bad decisions and patients suffer and die.
If a company makes an effort to promote engineers to lead up the engineering teams, or whatever kind of specialists to leadership, they will have much better results.
It's also been demonstrated that when a company promotes a personnel or finance manager to the top of an engineering organization, disaster ensues. Unless the board can rectify the error, the company will implode. Witness the painful demise of HP at the hands of Carly Fiorina, who had zero qualifications to run an engineering company - she had an MBA and degrees in philosophy and history, nothing in engineering. She came out of it smelling like a successful politician, while HP came out of it with a reputation as the place to buy badly supported, DRM-encrusted PCs and peripherals.
It's not just management to blame. Every mid-level peon who is attempting to play the game instead of focusing on delivering value for their customer is subverting the goals. When Manager Mike asks Joe Lineworker for a specific result that's conducive to his politics, Joe can say "sure, I'll scratch your back, just don't forget I did this for you." It's corrosive in both directions.
What happens in this case is the outcome is as the manager inflates his project, the organization is wasting money on a project that isn't of as much value as the executives wanted. And if the wrong projects are inflated, the bad numbers coming out of it corrupt all other projects.
just ship the actual doctor.
Do you know how many doctors they have in America? How about in Liberia?
According to the CIA World Factbook, in 2008 the U.S. had 2.4 doctors per every 1000 people. In Liberia, they had 0.01 per 1000, but that was before ebola killed 40 of their 120 physicians. Volunteer doctors have helped a little, but not too many want to risk their own lives in such a hot zone. The need is almost beyond comprehension.
Oh, and of those 80 remaining doctors, how many do you think specialize in surgery, and have hours in their day to operate on you? How many specialize in the kind of surgery you may need at that moment?
You can't 'just ship the actual doctor' any more than you can send them a stack of gold bars. There aren't enough who have time or the inclination to go.
Oh, and if it's a time-critical disaster scenario, the patient is still better off with a remote surgeon than with no doctor at all. If the surgeon physically cannot get to the field hospital in the next two hours, and your choices are limited to:
A) bleed to death from a punctured lung because there's nobody here to sew you up, or
B) take your chances with Comcast delivering enough bytes for a doctor two states away to sew you up,
most people will opt for B.
You solve this by running the remote surgery in a hospital that still has local doctors and nurses. One general doctor can be in house and prepped for surgery, on call for one or more operating theatres. The patients will still need local nurses to prep the patients, physically administer the anesthesia (in the case of a remote anesthetist), and handle all kinds of tasks. The remote surgeon makes the cuts, does the work, then closes up behind himself as he leaves. The whole time the local nurse(s) is(are) monitoring vitals, and watching for problems. If anything comes up that can't be remotely managed, the nurse signals for the on-call doctor to come in and handle the situation. All the local doctor really needs are the skills required to close up and remove the machine from the patient - they don't have to complete the delicate surgery if it's beyond their capabilities.
Next is holograms lawyers in courtrooms!!!
Don't fret. Congress is staffed almost entirely by lawyers, and there is zero chance they'll let their bread-and-butter be outsourced or replaced by machines. They already won't even pass laws to simplify laws, in order to keep their jobs as clever interpreters of the cracks between the laws.
They'll damn everyone else to a subcontracted devil running an outsourced version of hell, but they've proven they're going to protect their jobs forever.
I read the article, thinking this was an incorrect claim in the summary. Nope, the article insists in several places that it was "undetectable" by the surgeons. Now, anyone who's played any online FPS knows that 50ms ping times are not only detectable, but are approaching unplayable because some punk kid that's only 10ms away from the server is always taking the head shots before you can even see him.
So I figured there has to be something else. The best hypothesis I could come up with is the current robotic surgery tools introduce their own lag such that the surgeons were unable to distinguish normal device response times from network latency. That, and the goals of a surgeon are completely different from an FPS shooter. A surgeon isn't trying to race anything or anyone - they don't have to shoot first. In a live operating theatre, they are methodical and cautious. It's not like there are sudden surprises that leap out at them that they have to instantly react to. Even a burst blood vessel takes a few moments to assess and plan a recovery from. So maybe if they're used to very slow approach, the latency doesn't impact them as much.
Is that duck-typing or duck-stereotyping? /ducks.
Mind you I would have thought that on a train you could triangulate with mobile repeaters and such much more easily,
Not underground, where cell service is blocked by a hundred feet of rock and dirt.
But you could make a whole lot of money if you could develop a "tin-foil accelerometer blocker". Every starship a hundred years from now is going to need inertial dampeners!
And the bacteria are fighting the effects of the fungus. Go reread the summary.
I'm glad they do 'real work' with their money, but don't underestimate the value of a successful lobbying campaign. If the resources of the government can be brought to bear, they have the capability to make much bigger changes, even if they seem hobbled by compromises and special interests.