But that won't stop an attorney hell-bent on suing him into oblivion from bringing it up in court negatively as well: "The defendant literally told people how to use his device to get away with murder! This is further evidence that he was being malicious towards the plaintiff in his disclosure, which is why you must find in favor of my client."
In this case he took it upon himself to decide that "there is no possible fix therefore responsible disclosure won't help." But we don't know for sure that the company can't fix the problem with some kind of software update - that's simply his claim. If there is a way to update the EEPROM, any way at all, then a software update could have fixed the problem. Sure, it would be a breaking change to the existing card key systems, but it might not entail a hardware fix to millions of hotel room doors. This guy never gave them that chance.
Notification would have enabled the company to create an update plan, to order a million new circuit boards, to redesign the protocols, to schedule repair crews, to do whatever it took to fix the problem, and to have all that stuff prepared before his disclosure. No matter who they are and how badly they want to fix the problem, this is a year long process at least. Now, during that entire year, bad guys with Arduinos will have full access to unoccupied hotel rooms.
And he's going to get sued into the next millennium. Not only are the plaintiffs going to use arguments like the above, but they're also going to drag his business dealings into it. They're going to make claims like "he's disgruntled because his business venture failed, and he did this out of spiteful retaliation." They're going to throw so much trash at him that I'm not sure even Johnny Cochran would have been able to get him out of trouble.
Their presentations may or may not get suppressed, but this approach pretty much ensures he will get sued.
Worse, in his paper he uses an example of framing a hotel employee for murder! While dramatizing the vulnerability is not uncommon amongst hackers looking to draw media attention to the seriousness of their claims, suggesting a plan for murder is a really, really poor choice. The consequences of this could be even higher than the civil penalties of a lawsuit.
It can certainly output the quantity of shows needed to fill the TV schedule. As far as quality, everything it emits has already been proven in the marketplace. With the right amount of recursion, it could carry a show from season to episode to act to scene, even offering some of the heroic quips and villainous monologues.
It's been rumored that TV Tropes was actually no more than this tool leaked from the BBC Programme Planning department.
You can't make a robot that can do the job of a plumber.
Today I can make a plumber more efficient. I can tell him to run PEX instead of copper pipe, which means he can plumb a house in about half the time (and without the risk of having the copper stolen from the jobsite.) Half the time means loss of half the jobs.
And tomorrow, I don't have to replace the plumber with a robot if I can make the job of plumber completely obsolete. It won't be long before housing goes modular and home builders are buying pre-finished factory made sections, like interior walls, wet walls, exterior walls, kitchen walls, floors, ceilings, and roofs, each with snap-together electric, plumbing, and HVAC.
So your $40/hr plumbing, electrical, HVAC, drywall, painting, roofing, flooring, and carpentry jobs all just went to a $9/hr laborer who spent about an hour per room assembling them, a crane operator (assuming it isn't automatically run by the assembler) and a few jobs to whoever is left to maintain the robots in the housing factories.
And don't think it isn't coming. Today we are already building pre-finished and fully furnished hotel rooms and cruise ship staterooms in factories, and dropping them into hotels or boat hulls with a crane. The hotel assembler tightens the connectors on the hot, cold, waste, and vent pipes. He plugs in the electric buss. The ventilation ducts are probably slip-fit. There is no reason general housing can't go the same way, and lots of reasons for it to do so.
The unions were correct back in the 1960s, when they said that automation was going to take their jobs. They just got the date wrong, that's all.
I had a small Tupperware container of applesauce that was buried beneath some papers for about six months. I went to the restroom to rinse it out, and when I opened it instead of the expected rotten food smell, the smell of delicious apple cider came out!
I still dumped it down the drain without tasting it. But it probably would have been really good.
So there you go. Put in a Tupperware container of applesauce. Or maybe skip all that risk and just bury a bottle of 25 year old Scotch, which you know will be good in another 25 years..
My old original RAZR was great but for a fatal design flaw - the external volume adjust buttons would silence the ring volume even when the phone was closed. I missed a lot of calls because of that stupidity.
The music player app was sadly useless too. It took forever to load, and would crash often. It was no iPod.
On the plus side, it ran any J2ME apps, had a standard mini USB for charging and data, a large enough screen, a replaceable battery, and a lot of other pluses.
That sounds suspiciously like Santorum's argument in favor of stopping the NOAA from providing weather forecasts to the public, which was clearly pushed strictly to favor of his donor's firm, Accuweather. Since I am paying for a government forecaster to produce forecasts, then I want those forecasts. The NOAA didn't build their site as commercial competition, they built their site to permit public access to government information. Big Difference.
The real question is: should the NOAA exist? That's a completely different question. But since they obviously do exist today, and their mandate is to provide weather for federal and defense reasons (Coast Guard and Civil Defense, IIRC), then their products should be made available to any citizen at a nominal cost. And in today's world, that means a publicly accessible web site and web services.
Accuweather created themselves as competition to the NOAA, back when the NOAA had a harder time distributing information. But like so many other businesses based on the old model of "distributing data is hard", the internet has changed that, and their distinction is no longer relevant.
If Accuweather doesn't like the idea of online competition, they have three choices: produce measurably better forecasts than are otherwise available, change their model and start selling galoshes online, or fade quietly into oblivion.
Mansfield went on to state that Apple would use only genuine Congalese tantalum, African conflict diamonds, rainforest teak, and Iranian oil based lubricants; and furthermore the iOS developers would smoke only Tibetan opium. "No one else in our industry can afford to make those claims, bitches!" he cackled.
At press time, the reporters were too mellow from the complimentary Afghan bud to harsh his groove. Steve Jobs could not be reached for comment.
what's wrong with shorter, cascading keys using different algorithms?
The complexity that results adds a lot of risky unknowns. There are many tales of protocols being broken due to people looking at the various pieces in unexpected ways. Take DES, for example. Ordinary DES takes 56 bits of key material and offers 56 (OK, 55) bits of security. When DES was starting to appear fragile to brute force attacks, people looked for ways to strengthen it without replacing it. They thought of running two instances of DES, each with its own key, one after the other. How much security should this offer? The answer everyone expected was 112 bits. But someone discovered that the piecemeal approach created a meet-in-the-middle attack using storage as a trade off for computation, and it effectively only doubled the security to 57 (OK 56) bits. That's why 3DES was created. It uses three instances of DES, and when used with three unique keys provides the needed 112 bits of security. It's still not the 168 bits of key material, but it's thought to be effective against brute force attacks for the foreseeable future.
Nobody knows in advance all the complex interactions that makes these novel attacks possible; at least not until they have a reason to look for them.
It probably won't be satellite based, because the problem with satellites is delivering enough energy up to space (there are no gas stations up there.) It will probably be vehicle based, where you just drive a truck to the highest peak on the battlefield.
The straightness of the line might matter a little bit for coarse initial acquisition of the drone, but not in continual precision mode. Not being mathematically "straight" doesn't matter because the system almost certainly employs feedback from the target UAV. If the laser is hitting the drone to the left of the target's dead center, its response will cause the laser to recenter to the right. Doesn't matter how straight it is, as long as the energy finds its way into the drone's batteries. Did you ever build a sunlight follower, where you had a vertical shade separating two photocells, and the difference between them measured by an LM738 that drove the tracking motor? (Popular Electronics had plans back in the 1970s.) Maintaining aim on a fast-moving distant target uses the same principles, only with digital electronics, RF messaging, lasers, and really high speed, high precision deflectors.
And if you want to know how to drive a laser beam really, really fast, faster than even a galvanic mirror in a Laser Floyd light show, (got to keep up with the Droneses, after all,) a KTN deflector can operate up to 10 degrees at speeds of up to 100kHz, and is available to handle wavelengths from visible to infrared. Wow.
In the last year there was a test of a real world tracking system aimed at an aircraft. I don't remember the date, but it was published on a NOTAM keeping pilots 100km away from a test area because they were shining a laser on a target aircraft. It certainly could be related to this test.
I suspect the laser will be vehicle mounted, as it will need a lot more power than a soldier can carry. There's no technical reasons to limit one vehicle to carry only one laser, and also no reason one laser couldn't maintain several drones.
The nice thing about maintaining LOS to an aircraft is that they can simply fly up to solve most problems with ground clutter. Park your laser on any hilltop in your control, and get your shine on. Don't have any nearby hilltops? Well, they're the Army, they can just take one. It's what they do, and they're very good at it.
I don't know why people think tracking an aircraft can't be done. "Oh, no, the target is unstable and the air is dirty, it'll never work!" Just because it's a problem seems hard does not automatically make it impossible for someone dedicated to the task. Anyway, they appear to be too busy overcoming the problems to realize it's impossible.
They "only" got 48 hours because by that time the test had proved all of their objectives and there was no point in continuing it, according to TFA.
Unfortunately with all the details lacking in TFA, there's no way to know if the laser was fired intermittently, or if it was continually charging the UAV.
Did you RTFA? It said nothing about the test conditions inside the wind tunnel, only that “This test is one of the final steps...The next step in proving the reality of this technology is to demonstrate it outdoors in an extended flight of the Stalker.”
They could have used a low powered laser to simulate range. They could have introduced dust, smoke and fog into the tunnel to simulate weather. And they don't need to prove the tracking platform works if they already have a tracking platform that works, and such tracking platforms were demonstrated last year on test aircraft at distances of 20km or more. And none of that info made the blurb, which as I said looked designed to stimulate investment.
earth is curved, lasers are straight, how many seconds can you actually do this in the field before you loose the tiny target... not counting in wind, drift, clouds, rain, or some dipshit playing with his watch?
Stabilized aiming platforms better not be a challenge for the military. Hell, there are kids making segway-clones and auto-aim-paintgun-bots out of web cams, Arduinos, and old inkjet printer stepper motors. You think a funded organization with a military product can't simply place an order with www.mobileweaponsplatforms-R-us.com and have one delivered tomorrow?
From the article, "At the conclusion of the flight test, held in a wind tunnel,"
So they've pointed a laser at a photocell indoors, this is so far from doing it over hostile territory as to be laughable.
This is what research looks like. You don't start out testing a ready-to-deploy espionage platform. You take an idea, enhance it a bit, test it to see if your change works, enhance it more, see if your changes improved it, etc. Nobody's laughing at this stage, but I bet they were cheering.
Leaking the test results is also what 'marketing to investors' looks like. "Hey, Vulture Capitalists Inc., we've got a shiny laser powered spy drone for you to invest in, and we have proof of some ongoing tests... the military is interested... you'll get rich... give us $20 million... please?"
I just saw a blog of some home heating and cooling specialists who were decrying the new Nest thermostat because it comes with a screwdriver and homeowner-oriented installation instructions. "Nest shouldn't encourage people to install their own thermostats. They should tell people to hire heating specialists who have the experience and the tools and the knowledge and the [blah blah blah]" All I could see was a tremendous amount of whining and fear-driven self-preservationism, with absolutely no actual facts presented to support their position. They don't care what percentage of the homeowner's installations of Nest thermostats are completely successful and wouldn't have required a heating expert, only that Nest is deliberately cutting into their service calls. The bastards.
So from the viewpoint of someone reading a rant from a writer who is despairing the fall of grammar, your point also seems a bit self-serving. "You need good writers because, well, I'm a writer!" The heating guys completely failed to do it, but I think you need to prepare your value case. At least you are much better equipped to do so than they are.
Is the value of good grammar strictly aesthetic? Art for art's sake is certainly a valid reason, and pays the bills as long as you have patrons for support and a gallery to display your works in, but you better have thick skin to deal with being called a pretentious snob. The other problem with art is that popular art likes to break the rules, and so it continually evolves in the eyes of its beholders. I'm not saying "TH3 L33T WURKS UV B1LLY $H@KESF33R'S LOLCAT" are ever going to be revered by future generations, nor would anyone mistake B1FF!!1!! for a writer, only that an artist has to understand that there are an infinite number of forms the craft will appear to take. Even though 99.9% of them will suck.
Is there value in the extra precision that you are able to deliver in your writing? Does your writing carry its meaning so clearly that nobody ever has to pause to question your words? That has great practical value, especially when compared against people whose writing frequently falls short; but it's hardly satisfying to be "the guy who writes perfectly at a 5th grade reading level."
So go ahead. Try to preserve some form of the formal rules of the language. Please. Just be prepared for disappointment.
This Samsung commercial in which they mock a bunch of hipsters standing on line for nine hours to buy the next iPhone is probably where that remark came from.
"I could never get a Samsung. I'm creative." "Dude, you're a barrista."
Perhaps you are looking at this from an engineer's point of view instead of a manager's? The manager is paying his or her employees to communicate effectively, not perfectly. If your memos and those produced by your less-literate co-workers' all trigger the correct actions, the true value to the business is "whichever cost the least to produce."
There are other far more important attributes of effective communication: meaning, clarity, brevity (a personal battle for me), completeness, and no doubt others. Syntactical correctness doesn't contribute to cost savings unless it enhances these other qualities. And it may cost me opportunities as an employer, as I need someone who can do the job. Unless that job is writing English well, I may be unnecessarily reducing my pool of applicants.
As I'm an engineer, though, I completely agree with you. I just wanted to point out that there is an alternative viewpoint.
Maybe this is a worst case scenario. Now, Apple can threaten Samsung for every improvement that makes it "cooler", because they might make it "cool enough". "Dang, that's a cool font; better not use it on your tablet or we'll sue you!"
Actually, I don't agree with you that the rule is fine. The judge didn't legally define cool, but he used it as the basis of his ruling. Read another way, he said "you must be |<---this cool--->| to be infringing." But how cool is that? Is the scale linear, does it have steps from "rad" to "lame", or is it Boolean? Is it a series of comparisons, like hot or not? Who assigns them? Judges? Voters? MPs? MTV text-in-polls? What is cool measured in? microjamesdeans? jasonstathams? decamileycyruses? anti-BTUs? milliiPads?
Because that ruling really is for teh lulz. This quote is likely to become an internet meme all on its own, with thousands of pictures of cats sitting on Samsung tablets and half-witted captions about "keepn warrm on mah galaxy bcuz itz not cool"
How do you see trust being handled in these systems? It would seem to beat the core of everything - anti-spoofing, error detection and correction, and possibly authorized receivers.
Slashdot Mirror
Very good point!
But that won't stop an attorney hell-bent on suing him into oblivion from bringing it up in court negatively as well: "The defendant literally told people how to use his device to get away with murder! This is further evidence that he was being malicious towards the plaintiff in his disclosure, which is why you must find in favor of my client."
In this case he took it upon himself to decide that "there is no possible fix therefore responsible disclosure won't help." But we don't know for sure that the company can't fix the problem with some kind of software update - that's simply his claim. If there is a way to update the EEPROM, any way at all, then a software update could have fixed the problem. Sure, it would be a breaking change to the existing card key systems, but it might not entail a hardware fix to millions of hotel room doors. This guy never gave them that chance.
Notification would have enabled the company to create an update plan, to order a million new circuit boards, to redesign the protocols, to schedule repair crews, to do whatever it took to fix the problem, and to have all that stuff prepared before his disclosure. No matter who they are and how badly they want to fix the problem, this is a year long process at least. Now, during that entire year, bad guys with Arduinos will have full access to unoccupied hotel rooms.
And he's going to get sued into the next millennium. Not only are the plaintiffs going to use arguments like the above, but they're also going to drag his business dealings into it. They're going to make claims like "he's disgruntled because his business venture failed, and he did this out of spiteful retaliation." They're going to throw so much trash at him that I'm not sure even Johnny Cochran would have been able to get him out of trouble.
Their presentations may or may not get suppressed, but this approach pretty much ensures he will get sued.
Worse, in his paper he uses an example of framing a hotel employee for murder! While dramatizing the vulnerability is not uncommon amongst hackers looking to draw media attention to the seriousness of their claims, suggesting a plan for murder is a really, really poor choice. The consequences of this could be even higher than the civil penalties of a lawsuit.
Eventually, AI will outpace the output and quality of even the most creative person. What then?
May I present to you the TV Tropes Story Generator?
It can certainly output the quantity of shows needed to fill the TV schedule. As far as quality, everything it emits has already been proven in the marketplace. With the right amount of recursion, it could carry a show from season to episode to act to scene, even offering some of the heroic quips and villainous monologues.
It's been rumored that TV Tropes was actually no more than this tool leaked from the BBC Programme Planning department.
You can't make a robot that can do the job of a plumber.
Today I can make a plumber more efficient. I can tell him to run PEX instead of copper pipe, which means he can plumb a house in about half the time (and without the risk of having the copper stolen from the jobsite.) Half the time means loss of half the jobs.
And tomorrow, I don't have to replace the plumber with a robot if I can make the job of plumber completely obsolete. It won't be long before housing goes modular and home builders are buying pre-finished factory made sections, like interior walls, wet walls, exterior walls, kitchen walls, floors, ceilings, and roofs, each with snap-together electric, plumbing, and HVAC.
So your $40/hr plumbing, electrical, HVAC, drywall, painting, roofing, flooring, and carpentry jobs all just went to a $9/hr laborer who spent about an hour per room assembling them, a crane operator (assuming it isn't automatically run by the assembler) and a few jobs to whoever is left to maintain the robots in the housing factories.
And don't think it isn't coming. Today we are already building pre-finished and fully furnished hotel rooms and cruise ship staterooms in factories, and dropping them into hotels or boat hulls with a crane. The hotel assembler tightens the connectors on the hot, cold, waste, and vent pipes. He plugs in the electric buss. The ventilation ducts are probably slip-fit. There is no reason general housing can't go the same way, and lots of reasons for it to do so.
The unions were correct back in the 1960s, when they said that automation was going to take their jobs. They just got the date wrong, that's all.
Imagine the size and strength of the nets Foxconn will have to install to keep their industrial robots from leaping to the streets!
Too soon?
I had a small Tupperware container of applesauce that was buried beneath some papers for about six months. I went to the restroom to rinse it out, and when I opened it instead of the expected rotten food smell, the smell of delicious apple cider came out!
I still dumped it down the drain without tasting it. But it probably would have been really good.
So there you go. Put in a Tupperware container of applesauce. Or maybe skip all that risk and just bury a bottle of 25 year old Scotch, which you know will be good in another 25 years..
My old original RAZR was great but for a fatal design flaw - the external volume adjust buttons would silence the ring volume even when the phone was closed. I missed a lot of calls because of that stupidity.
The music player app was sadly useless too. It took forever to load, and would crash often. It was no iPod.
On the plus side, it ran any J2ME apps, had a standard mini USB for charging and data, a large enough screen, a replaceable battery, and a lot of other pluses.
HBO, Showtime, et al, are paid for and ad free. But they cost a lot more than the ad sponsored channels.
I'd be interested in an a la carte solution, where I could pay for ad free Comedy Central and Discovery, but skip MTV entirely.
That sounds suspiciously like Santorum's argument in favor of stopping the NOAA from providing weather forecasts to the public, which was clearly pushed strictly to favor of his donor's firm, Accuweather. Since I am paying for a government forecaster to produce forecasts, then I want those forecasts. The NOAA didn't build their site as commercial competition, they built their site to permit public access to government information. Big Difference.
The real question is: should the NOAA exist? That's a completely different question. But since they obviously do exist today, and their mandate is to provide weather for federal and defense reasons (Coast Guard and Civil Defense, IIRC), then their products should be made available to any citizen at a nominal cost. And in today's world, that means a publicly accessible web site and web services.
Accuweather created themselves as competition to the NOAA, back when the NOAA had a harder time distributing information. But like so many other businesses based on the old model of "distributing data is hard", the internet has changed that, and their distinction is no longer relevant.
If Accuweather doesn't like the idea of online competition, they have three choices: produce measurably better forecasts than are otherwise available, change their model and start selling galoshes online, or fade quietly into oblivion.
Mansfield went on to state that Apple would use only genuine Congalese tantalum, African conflict diamonds, rainforest teak, and Iranian oil based lubricants; and furthermore the iOS developers would smoke only Tibetan opium. "No one else in our industry can afford to make those claims, bitches!" he cackled.
At press time, the reporters were too mellow from the complimentary Afghan bud to harsh his groove. Steve Jobs could not be reached for comment.
what's wrong with shorter, cascading keys using different algorithms?
The complexity that results adds a lot of risky unknowns. There are many tales of protocols being broken due to people looking at the various pieces in unexpected ways. Take DES, for example. Ordinary DES takes 56 bits of key material and offers 56 (OK, 55) bits of security. When DES was starting to appear fragile to brute force attacks, people looked for ways to strengthen it without replacing it. They thought of running two instances of DES, each with its own key, one after the other. How much security should this offer? The answer everyone expected was 112 bits. But someone discovered that the piecemeal approach created a meet-in-the-middle attack using storage as a trade off for computation, and it effectively only doubled the security to 57 (OK 56) bits. That's why 3DES was created. It uses three instances of DES, and when used with three unique keys provides the needed 112 bits of security. It's still not the 168 bits of key material, but it's thought to be effective against brute force attacks for the foreseeable future.
Nobody knows in advance all the complex interactions that makes these novel attacks possible; at least not until they have a reason to look for them.
It probably won't be satellite based, because the problem with satellites is delivering enough energy up to space (there are no gas stations up there.) It will probably be vehicle based, where you just drive a truck to the highest peak on the battlefield.
The straightness of the line might matter a little bit for coarse initial acquisition of the drone, but not in continual precision mode. Not being mathematically "straight" doesn't matter because the system almost certainly employs feedback from the target UAV. If the laser is hitting the drone to the left of the target's dead center, its response will cause the laser to recenter to the right. Doesn't matter how straight it is, as long as the energy finds its way into the drone's batteries. Did you ever build a sunlight follower, where you had a vertical shade separating two photocells, and the difference between them measured by an LM738 that drove the tracking motor? (Popular Electronics had plans back in the 1970s.) Maintaining aim on a fast-moving distant target uses the same principles, only with digital electronics, RF messaging, lasers, and really high speed, high precision deflectors.
And if you want to know how to drive a laser beam really, really fast, faster than even a galvanic mirror in a Laser Floyd light show, (got to keep up with the Droneses, after all,) a KTN deflector can operate up to 10 degrees at speeds of up to 100kHz, and is available to handle wavelengths from visible to infrared. Wow.
In the last year there was a test of a real world tracking system aimed at an aircraft. I don't remember the date, but it was published on a NOTAM keeping pilots 100km away from a test area because they were shining a laser on a target aircraft. It certainly could be related to this test.
I suspect the laser will be vehicle mounted, as it will need a lot more power than a soldier can carry. There's no technical reasons to limit one vehicle to carry only one laser, and also no reason one laser couldn't maintain several drones.
The nice thing about maintaining LOS to an aircraft is that they can simply fly up to solve most problems with ground clutter. Park your laser on any hilltop in your control, and get your shine on. Don't have any nearby hilltops? Well, they're the Army, they can just take one. It's what they do, and they're very good at it.
I don't know why people think tracking an aircraft can't be done. "Oh, no, the target is unstable and the air is dirty, it'll never work!" Just because it's a problem seems hard does not automatically make it impossible for someone dedicated to the task. Anyway, they appear to be too busy overcoming the problems to realize it's impossible.
They "only" got 48 hours because by that time the test had proved all of their objectives and there was no point in continuing it, according to TFA.
Unfortunately with all the details lacking in TFA, there's no way to know if the laser was fired intermittently, or if it was continually charging the UAV.
Did you RTFA? It said nothing about the test conditions inside the wind tunnel, only that “This test is one of the final steps...The next step in proving the reality of this technology is to demonstrate it outdoors in an extended flight of the Stalker.”
They could have used a low powered laser to simulate range. They could have introduced dust, smoke and fog into the tunnel to simulate weather. And they don't need to prove the tracking platform works if they already have a tracking platform that works, and such tracking platforms were demonstrated last year on test aircraft at distances of 20km or more. And none of that info made the blurb, which as I said looked designed to stimulate investment.
earth is curved, lasers are straight, how many seconds can you actually do this in the field before you loose the tiny target ... not counting in wind, drift, clouds, rain, or some dipshit playing with his watch?
Stabilized aiming platforms better not be a challenge for the military. Hell, there are kids making segway-clones and auto-aim-paintgun-bots out of web cams, Arduinos, and old inkjet printer stepper motors. You think a funded organization with a military product can't simply place an order with www.mobileweaponsplatforms-R-us.com and have one delivered tomorrow?
From the article, "At the conclusion of the flight test, held in a wind tunnel,"
So they've pointed a laser at a photocell indoors, this is so far from doing it over hostile territory as to be laughable.
This is what research looks like. You don't start out testing a ready-to-deploy espionage platform. You take an idea, enhance it a bit, test it to see if your change works, enhance it more, see if your changes improved it, etc. Nobody's laughing at this stage, but I bet they were cheering.
Leaking the test results is also what 'marketing to investors' looks like. "Hey, Vulture Capitalists Inc., we've got a shiny laser powered spy drone for you to invest in, and we have proof of some ongoing tests ... the military is interested ... you'll get rich ... give us $20 million ... please?"
I just saw a blog of some home heating and cooling specialists who were decrying the new Nest thermostat because it comes with a screwdriver and homeowner-oriented installation instructions. "Nest shouldn't encourage people to install their own thermostats. They should tell people to hire heating specialists who have the experience and the tools and the knowledge and the [blah blah blah]" All I could see was a tremendous amount of whining and fear-driven self-preservationism, with absolutely no actual facts presented to support their position. They don't care what percentage of the homeowner's installations of Nest thermostats are completely successful and wouldn't have required a heating expert, only that Nest is deliberately cutting into their service calls. The bastards.
So from the viewpoint of someone reading a rant from a writer who is despairing the fall of grammar, your point also seems a bit self-serving. "You need good writers because, well, I'm a writer!" The heating guys completely failed to do it, but I think you need to prepare your value case. At least you are much better equipped to do so than they are.
Is the value of good grammar strictly aesthetic? Art for art's sake is certainly a valid reason, and pays the bills as long as you have patrons for support and a gallery to display your works in, but you better have thick skin to deal with being called a pretentious snob. The other problem with art is that popular art likes to break the rules, and so it continually evolves in the eyes of its beholders. I'm not saying "TH3 L33T WURKS UV B1LLY $H@KESF33R'S LOLCAT" are ever going to be revered by future generations, nor would anyone mistake B1FF!!1!! for a writer, only that an artist has to understand that there are an infinite number of forms the craft will appear to take. Even though 99.9% of them will suck.
Is there value in the extra precision that you are able to deliver in your writing? Does your writing carry its meaning so clearly that nobody ever has to pause to question your words? That has great practical value, especially when compared against people whose writing frequently falls short; but it's hardly satisfying to be "the guy who writes perfectly at a 5th grade reading level."
So go ahead. Try to preserve some form of the formal rules of the language. Please. Just be prepared for disappointment.
WHOOSH!
This Samsung commercial in which they mock a bunch of hipsters standing on line for nine hours to buy the next iPhone is probably where that remark came from.
"I could never get a Samsung. I'm creative."
"Dude, you're a barrista."
Perhaps you are looking at this from an engineer's point of view instead of a manager's? The manager is paying his or her employees to communicate effectively, not perfectly. If your memos and those produced by your less-literate co-workers' all trigger the correct actions, the true value to the business is "whichever cost the least to produce."
There are other far more important attributes of effective communication: meaning, clarity, brevity (a personal battle for me), completeness, and no doubt others. Syntactical correctness doesn't contribute to cost savings unless it enhances these other qualities. And it may cost me opportunities as an employer, as I need someone who can do the job. Unless that job is writing English well, I may be unnecessarily reducing my pool of applicants.
As I'm an engineer, though, I completely agree with you. I just wanted to point out that there is an alternative viewpoint.
Odd, I'm responding on my iPad right now and don't have any readability problems with Slashdot.
Are you sure you're not using a Galaxy instead of an iPad? I hear they're not as cool, maybe that's the problem?
Maybe this is a worst case scenario. Now, Apple can threaten Samsung for every improvement that makes it "cooler", because they might make it "cool enough". "Dang, that's a cool font; better not use it on your tablet or we'll sue you!"
Actually, I don't agree with you that the rule is fine. The judge didn't legally define cool, but he used it as the basis of his ruling. Read another way, he said "you must be |<---this cool--->| to be infringing." But how cool is that? Is the scale linear, does it have steps from "rad" to "lame", or is it Boolean? Is it a series of comparisons, like hot or not? Who assigns them? Judges? Voters? MPs? MTV text-in-polls? What is cool measured in? microjamesdeans? jasonstathams? decamileycyruses? anti-BTUs? milliiPads?
Because that ruling really is for teh lulz. This quote is likely to become an internet meme all on its own, with thousands of pictures of cats sitting on Samsung tablets and half-witted captions about "keepn warrm on mah galaxy bcuz itz not cool"
How do you see trust being handled in these systems? It would seem to beat the core of everything - anti-spoofing, error detection and correction, and possibly authorized receivers.