Because this story fits so well with the facts we've already heard. There is the video of the Israeli general's retirement party where he acknowledged they were celebrating his victory with Stuxnet. There are the claims that the U.S. had the leftover Libyan centrifuges, that they couldn't get them to work so they shared some with the U.K., and when they didn't get them working either so they gave them to Israel who figured out how to both make them work and how to sabotage them. There are the estimates by Langner who posited that the complexity of Stuxnet meant a very well-funded, extremely talented group of developers. There is the evidence of the two Chinese frequency controller factories, both of whom had their private keys stolen, presumably by physical break-ins to the plants by spies.
And there are the facts of the worm's behavior. Its first incarnation was only to perform reconnaissance. It wasn't weaponized until the components found themselves in precisely the configuration of the Natanz centrifuges. It would cause no damage to any kind of facility other than Natanz (or Busheshr). It was precisely stealthy. All these suggest great expense in creating a very specifically targeted weapon, as opposed to a randomly opportunistic criminal or vandal.
Now, if someone were to look at all these other facts and wanted to spin a tale that weaved in threads of Obama and the U.S., then this story would be an almost perfect fit. But any other explanation right now would strain credulity. This story looks far more more like corroborating evidence than an attempt to divert attention away from any other players that have been mentioned before, such as China, the mob, Estonian hackers, or even from Iran staging an attack trying to gain international sympathy.
When are the IOC going to sue them for trademark infringement like they do everyone else..?
Maybe it was the IOC that outed them. By monitoring every computer on the planet for use of the phrase "Olympic games", perhaps they caught the details of the plan, then leaked it to the press.
Actually, I think this could work out to our great advantage. It's perfectly legal here to report the news. If the news includes the trademarked and protected all-rights-revered IP of the IOC, Inc., well that's just too bad for them.
It also is a strategically brilliant name. You can't google for "Olympic Games" and hope to find anything but millions of hits on torches and athletes and lawsuits.
I'm still trying to work out if Google is not being American evil, not being Chinese evil, being completely evil, or not being evil at all in all of this.
As I'm not an audio engineer, I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to properly mix them down. I know there are levels to be set, times to be synchronized, lefts and rights to be balanced, and probably a dozen other things that a trained ear would do that I wouldn't know to do, wouldn't know how to do, and as an amateur wouldn't do well. Even if I were to spend a few hours to get audio output from all these sources somehow mangled into the same pot, it would sound like crap.
At this point I can only sit back and wait for a professional to handle that not-inconsiderable task. So the files themselves aren't worthless, but in this state they're all-but-worthless to me.
So I'm a species bigot. Guess what? That's the advantage of being at the top, and owning the classification system. Until another superior life form comes around and classifies us as vermin, we aren't.
That's not to say we don't have responsibilities to other species. Of course we do. Right now, the responsibility to other species regarding roaches should be "human activity brought non-native roaches across the oceans to become invasive species where they don't belong, so our responsibility is to the native species that are harmed by the roaches. That means we should make every attempt to eradicate roaches."
However, if you really think that humans and roaches should have equal rights, be aware that your only real opportunity is to go join with the roaches, and hope the rest of us don't choke you in a cloud of pesticides. Or you could quit trying to defend really stupid arguments on the interwebz and go volunteer in the community instead, and make a difference to actual suffering humans who need your help.
"intellectual property" is a fundamentally misleading term.
Assuming that phrase truly is misleading, that pretty much guarantees it will continue to be used. "Misleading" means that someone is benefitting from the improper usage, and they will not willingly give up this tool.
And we know which industry groups love to use this phrase.
There's a quantitative and qualitative difference between roaches and mammals. Roaches are disease carrying pests that indiscriminately destroy resources needed by higher species to survive. There are billions of roaches, with billions more waiting to hatch every day, making eradication impossible. I suspect most roaches die due to competition with other roaches for the limited food they have available. Next, there's always a lifespan issue: everything living dies eventually. Even if you wanted to keep a particular roach alive for five years as a pet, it's not going to make it. So if, in its inevitable death, the cockroach can inspire or teach someone, rather than die under a boot heel, or from a chemical fog, or from another predator, or starvation, or a disease, or of dehydration after being stuck on a glue trap, is that not somehow a "better" death in that it serves a higher purpose?
I personally don't think too highly of plucking the legs off a bug to make them dance for my own amusement, and certainly won't be doing so myself. But I also view cockroaches realistically as harmful pests that ruin (not enhance) ecosystems. I won't be losing any sleep over the deaths of a few extra roaches, no matter how they die.
Create an adblock filter for http://science.slashdot.org./ But if you really intended to block this, you already knew this answer.
A different way would be to create a slashdot account, then go into options, and on the exclusions tab select the Science category. Click save. You won't see them, yet you can get to them when you want. Or maybe you just want to exclude stories from roblimo. Check his box, too.
But much better would be to use your brain. If you don't think a story is interesting, STOP READING IT. Nobody made you come in to this discussion and post about it.
I have a pair of Bose QC-3 and highly recommend them. They create an anti-personnel shield around me on the train during my commute, they can serve as a reminder to my cube neighbor ("Oh, John's put his headphones on, I think we're being too loud"), and with the microphone cable they serve me comfortably on day-long conference bridges, much better than a WECO handset.
I also recommend carrying a spare battery. It seems that every time my battery goes flat on the train, that's the day of the crying and screeching children, the awful yelling parents, the screeching brakes, or the born-again assholes proselytizing to the captive audience (until the train driver throws them off.)
I agree. The better solution however is offices with doors. The BS management philosophy that cubes or bullpens are helpful is so obviously wrong that I could never understand how it has come to be so prevalent.
Simple. Cost. Offices with doors cost at least 4 to 5 times as much per employee as do cubicles. They take much more space per person, they take extra heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and lighting costs, and are not flexible when you have to reorg (which every big company seems to do every few years.)
Remember, they've done a study and found that employees are their eleventh-most-valuable asset: somewhere between toner cartridges and copier paper. I suppose that explains why they keep the toner cartridges in a walled closet with a locking door as opposed to stacked in a cubicle.
I'd have to qualify that with "ambient music I know well". Yesterday when the links to the wonderful kickstarted version of the Goldberg Variations was released, I found myself closing my eyes and just absorbing the music. I opened them about 15 minutes later, completely relaxed, and having accomplished exactly *nothing* in that time!
High energy repetitive ambient house or electronica, with no more than a few meaningless lyrics, stuff I've heard before, those I can work to. Beautifully performed classical music, not so much. Metal would have me reaching for earplugs. Jazz seems specifically designed to break my concentration. Rap makes me flee. And country music actually makes me angry.
I believe that everyone who reads this will have their own very specific, very personal opinions about what is good music to "improve concentration". A poll or study only reveal common traits that indicate what percentages of each genre you should stock in a jukebox, but do not a useful, personalized recommendation make.
The problem isn't attribution as much as it is cross referencing. Say I want to refer to Y. Wang's paper on network theory. I wouldn't use his signature in my paper (signatures are not searchable.)
No, we're constantly running out of account numbers. It's such a common problem that several stop-gap solutions have become commonplace, which is why you never noticed.
So Alice helps Betty form Betty, LLC and take Ed to bid against Alice. Ka-CHING! Lucrative government contracts for both of them!
Exactly. And now there are two women owned firms, whereas before there was only one. After the lucrative contracts, both women will be heads of successful companies. From the point of these laws, which is to encourage the growth of women (and minority) owned businesses, these would be success stories, driving the intended behavior via regulations and economic incentives.
From the points of view of the economy, of fair trade, of fair competition, and of pure capitalism, it may not be seen as a good thing, but the law was not written to further encourage those behaviors, as they're already plenty successful. The law would be working as designed.
Yes, I'm much more interested in the story of how his dad taught him so well and effectively than I am in the solution itself.
And while I'm sorry you had such a crappy experience in public school, you might be heartened to know that not all public schools are equally horseshit as the ones you were unfortunate enough to attend. We have some absolutely stellar schools around us here, with teachers that actually care, and they try hard to challenge the kids to reach above their "expected potential". Not every school, mind you, but many of the ones in our district are excellent. I think it helps to have schools large enough to have multiple classes per grade level, which means they can offer a whole class or two of remedial addition to the kids who need that, several classes of algebra and trig to the majority of students, and a class of calc 1 and calc 2 to the kids who want that challenge.
Sadly, I know that your story is far too common. I have a friend who grew up in California public schools, then due to family circumstances had to take his senior year of high school in a Kentucky school. He went from an 11th grade pre-calc class to basic math in 12th grade, complete with scarily stupid students and teachers. (I don't know where in Kentucky he was.) With no challenges in school, (and suddenly being dropped into a foster family situation,) he found himself in the classic teenage rebellion scenario, and discovered plenty of ways to get into trouble. It was fortunate for him that he had only one year to suffer through the bad school before he got into a college, which certainly helped him get his life back on track.
Private schools aren't always the answer either, by the way. There are some well known parochial schools around here that deliver some pretty mediocre educations.
So my advice is don't judge all public schools based solely on your own experience. Like most other things in life there are good ones and bad ones out there, and any responsible parent needs to be very selective where their kids go.
I have evidence to the contrary. As I posted above, I had a dog that would watch me throw a ball onto a sloped roof, where it left her sight. It then rolled along the slope of the roof in an arc and returned to sight a few seconds later, further down the roofline. She became quite good at positioning herself under the spot where the ball would eventually reemerge and drop to her.
It obviously doesn't mean she understood the calculus or formal proofs. It does demonstrate that mammalian brains are capable of taking in some facts of movement and making predictions based on them. It's not all that surprising in a dog. They are descended from animals that hunt cooperatively in packs, where they learn that some of the pack will drive prey out, and others know to run ahead to where the prey will likely flee to, even though they aren't always following them with their eyes.
Exactly. As a kid, I had a dog that understood when I threw a ball up on the roof of our garage, which caused it to disappear from her sight, that it would roll along the slope of the roof and and reappear further down the roofline. She actually got fairly good at predicting where the ball would reappear, repositioning herself along its path over time so she would meet it at its eventual drop point. Does that mean my dog understood calculus, or solved Newton's problem? Well, she recognized a pattern and was able to apply a repeatable solution.
That tells me that the brain is capable of recognizing complex patterns around us, and is actually already very capable of deriving and applying practical solutions. ("So easy a dog could do it.") Applying abstract mathematical models to them, however, is not so easy.
What I'd be most interested in in this whole saga is "what methods did his father use to teach him math?" Obviously they were highly effective.
You're perfectly free to select what you ingest. You can grow your own Bt-free corn, feed it to your own rBGH-free cow, eat it on the 4th of July, and I'll applaud you for it. You can even be a vegan and just live off the veggies you grow yourself.
But maybe you live in the city, and can't raise your own food. No problem. Farmers are growing it today and labeling it Organic. There's a documentation regimen they go through to ensure you're not getting "non-natural" food. As a part of this they have to mechanically remove weeds, and apply manure instead of spraying fertilizers. Since it costs a lot more money to operate a certified organic farm, it's going to cost you more in the grocery store.
So why isn't that good enough? You can buy exactly what you're asking for today. You may pay a premium, but that's the price for being selective. That's capitalism in action right there.
Since it's all about trust anyway, a Dropbox client would be the last place I'd put my trust before storing data in their cloud. If their client knows my key, how do I know they aren't sending it up to the mothership as well?
Integrated security simply means a larger attack surface and more parts in which you have to invest 100% trust. It's much safer to trust a single tool that only does security (encryption) than to trust their entire ecosystem.
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Very good point that I completely missed, thank you.
Because this story fits so well with the facts we've already heard. There is the video of the Israeli general's retirement party where he acknowledged they were celebrating his victory with Stuxnet. There are the claims that the U.S. had the leftover Libyan centrifuges, that they couldn't get them to work so they shared some with the U.K., and when they didn't get them working either so they gave them to Israel who figured out how to both make them work and how to sabotage them. There are the estimates by Langner who posited that the complexity of Stuxnet meant a very well-funded, extremely talented group of developers. There is the evidence of the two Chinese frequency controller factories, both of whom had their private keys stolen, presumably by physical break-ins to the plants by spies.
And there are the facts of the worm's behavior. Its first incarnation was only to perform reconnaissance. It wasn't weaponized until the components found themselves in precisely the configuration of the Natanz centrifuges. It would cause no damage to any kind of facility other than Natanz (or Busheshr). It was precisely stealthy. All these suggest great expense in creating a very specifically targeted weapon, as opposed to a randomly opportunistic criminal or vandal.
Now, if someone were to look at all these other facts and wanted to spin a tale that weaved in threads of Obama and the U.S., then this story would be an almost perfect fit. But any other explanation right now would strain credulity. This story looks far more more like corroborating evidence than an attempt to divert attention away from any other players that have been mentioned before, such as China, the mob, Estonian hackers, or even from Iran staging an attack trying to gain international sympathy.
I think the time for nay-saying is over.
When are the IOC going to sue them for trademark infringement like they do everyone else..?
Maybe it was the IOC that outed them. By monitoring every computer on the planet for use of the phrase "Olympic games", perhaps they caught the details of the plan, then leaked it to the press.
Actually, I think this could work out to our great advantage. It's perfectly legal here to report the news. If the news includes the trademarked and protected all-rights-revered IP of the IOC, Inc., well that's just too bad for them.
It also is a strategically brilliant name. You can't google for "Olympic Games" and hope to find anything but millions of hits on torches and athletes and lawsuits.
I'm still trying to work out if Google is not being American evil, not being Chinese evil, being completely evil, or not being evil at all in all of this.
As I'm not an audio engineer, I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to properly mix them down. I know there are levels to be set, times to be synchronized, lefts and rights to be balanced, and probably a dozen other things that a trained ear would do that I wouldn't know to do, wouldn't know how to do, and as an amateur wouldn't do well. Even if I were to spend a few hours to get audio output from all these sources somehow mangled into the same pot, it would sound like crap.
At this point I can only sit back and wait for a professional to handle that not-inconsiderable task. So the files themselves aren't worthless, but in this state they're all-but-worthless to me.
So I'm a species bigot. Guess what? That's the advantage of being at the top, and owning the classification system. Until another superior life form comes around and classifies us as vermin, we aren't.
That's not to say we don't have responsibilities to other species. Of course we do. Right now, the responsibility to other species regarding roaches should be "human activity brought non-native roaches across the oceans to become invasive species where they don't belong, so our responsibility is to the native species that are harmed by the roaches. That means we should make every attempt to eradicate roaches."
However, if you really think that humans and roaches should have equal rights, be aware that your only real opportunity is to go join with the roaches, and hope the rest of us don't choke you in a cloud of pesticides. Or you could quit trying to defend really stupid arguments on the interwebz and go volunteer in the community instead, and make a difference to actual suffering humans who need your help.
"intellectual property" is a fundamentally misleading term.
Assuming that phrase truly is misleading, that pretty much guarantees it will continue to be used. "Misleading" means that someone is benefitting from the improper usage, and they will not willingly give up this tool.
And we know which industry groups love to use this phrase.
There's a quantitative and qualitative difference between roaches and mammals. Roaches are disease carrying pests that indiscriminately destroy resources needed by higher species to survive. There are billions of roaches, with billions more waiting to hatch every day, making eradication impossible. I suspect most roaches die due to competition with other roaches for the limited food they have available. Next, there's always a lifespan issue: everything living dies eventually. Even if you wanted to keep a particular roach alive for five years as a pet, it's not going to make it. So if, in its inevitable death, the cockroach can inspire or teach someone, rather than die under a boot heel, or from a chemical fog, or from another predator, or starvation, or a disease, or of dehydration after being stuck on a glue trap, is that not somehow a "better" death in that it serves a higher purpose?
I personally don't think too highly of plucking the legs off a bug to make them dance for my own amusement, and certainly won't be doing so myself. But I also view cockroaches realistically as harmful pests that ruin (not enhance) ecosystems. I won't be losing any sleep over the deaths of a few extra roaches, no matter how they die.
How do i block these kind of stories in adblock?
Create an adblock filter for http://science.slashdot.org./ But if you really intended to block this, you already knew this answer.
A different way would be to create a slashdot account, then go into options, and on the exclusions tab select the Science category. Click save. You won't see them, yet you can get to them when you want. Or maybe you just want to exclude stories from roblimo. Check his box, too.
But much better would be to use your brain. If you don't think a story is interesting, STOP READING IT. Nobody made you come in to this discussion and post about it.
Read The Sound Machine by Roald Dahl sometime. Interesting exploration of this idea.
I came here to post "won't somebody think of the cockroaches?", but apparently somebody is.
Or noise cancellation headphones.
I have a pair of Bose QC-3 and highly recommend them. They create an anti-personnel shield around me on the train during my commute, they can serve as a reminder to my cube neighbor ("Oh, John's put his headphones on, I think we're being too loud"), and with the microphone cable they serve me comfortably on day-long conference bridges, much better than a WECO handset.
I also recommend carrying a spare battery. It seems that every time my battery goes flat on the train, that's the day of the crying and screeching children, the awful yelling parents, the screeching brakes, or the born-again assholes proselytizing to the captive audience (until the train driver throws them off.)
I agree. The better solution however is offices with doors. The BS management philosophy that cubes or bullpens are helpful is so obviously wrong that I could never understand how it has come to be so prevalent.
Simple. Cost. Offices with doors cost at least 4 to 5 times as much per employee as do cubicles. They take much more space per person, they take extra heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and lighting costs, and are not flexible when you have to reorg (which every big company seems to do every few years.)
Remember, they've done a study and found that employees are their eleventh-most-valuable asset: somewhere between toner cartridges and copier paper. I suppose that explains why they keep the toner cartridges in a walled closet with a locking door as opposed to stacked in a cubicle.
I'd have to qualify that with "ambient music I know well". Yesterday when the links to the wonderful kickstarted version of the Goldberg Variations was released, I found myself closing my eyes and just absorbing the music. I opened them about 15 minutes later, completely relaxed, and having accomplished exactly *nothing* in that time!
High energy repetitive ambient house or electronica, with no more than a few meaningless lyrics, stuff I've heard before, those I can work to. Beautifully performed classical music, not so much. Metal would have me reaching for earplugs. Jazz seems specifically designed to break my concentration. Rap makes me flee. And country music actually makes me angry.
I believe that everyone who reads this will have their own very specific, very personal opinions about what is good music to "improve concentration". A poll or study only reveal common traits that indicate what percentages of each genre you should stock in a jukebox, but do not a useful, personalized recommendation make.
The problem isn't attribution as much as it is cross referencing. Say I want to refer to Y. Wang's paper on network theory. I wouldn't use his signature in my paper (signatures are not searchable.)
No, we're constantly running out of account numbers. It's such a common problem that several stop-gap solutions have become commonplace, which is why you never noticed.
"GUID, bitte."
So Alice helps Betty form Betty, LLC and take Ed to bid against Alice. Ka-CHING! Lucrative government contracts for both of them!
Exactly. And now there are two women owned firms, whereas before there was only one. After the lucrative contracts, both women will be heads of successful companies. From the point of these laws, which is to encourage the growth of women (and minority) owned businesses, these would be success stories, driving the intended behavior via regulations and economic incentives.
From the points of view of the economy, of fair trade, of fair competition, and of pure capitalism, it may not be seen as a good thing, but the law was not written to further encourage those behaviors, as they're already plenty successful. The law would be working as designed.
Yes, I'm much more interested in the story of how his dad taught him so well and effectively than I am in the solution itself.
And while I'm sorry you had such a crappy experience in public school, you might be heartened to know that not all public schools are equally horseshit as the ones you were unfortunate enough to attend. We have some absolutely stellar schools around us here, with teachers that actually care, and they try hard to challenge the kids to reach above their "expected potential". Not every school, mind you, but many of the ones in our district are excellent. I think it helps to have schools large enough to have multiple classes per grade level, which means they can offer a whole class or two of remedial addition to the kids who need that, several classes of algebra and trig to the majority of students, and a class of calc 1 and calc 2 to the kids who want that challenge.
Sadly, I know that your story is far too common. I have a friend who grew up in California public schools, then due to family circumstances had to take his senior year of high school in a Kentucky school. He went from an 11th grade pre-calc class to basic math in 12th grade, complete with scarily stupid students and teachers. (I don't know where in Kentucky he was.) With no challenges in school, (and suddenly being dropped into a foster family situation,) he found himself in the classic teenage rebellion scenario, and discovered plenty of ways to get into trouble. It was fortunate for him that he had only one year to suffer through the bad school before he got into a college, which certainly helped him get his life back on track.
Private schools aren't always the answer either, by the way. There are some well known parochial schools around here that deliver some pretty mediocre educations.
So my advice is don't judge all public schools based solely on your own experience. Like most other things in life there are good ones and bad ones out there, and any responsible parent needs to be very selective where their kids go.
I have evidence to the contrary. As I posted above, I had a dog that would watch me throw a ball onto a sloped roof, where it left her sight. It then rolled along the slope of the roof in an arc and returned to sight a few seconds later, further down the roofline. She became quite good at positioning herself under the spot where the ball would eventually reemerge and drop to her.
It obviously doesn't mean she understood the calculus or formal proofs. It does demonstrate that mammalian brains are capable of taking in some facts of movement and making predictions based on them. It's not all that surprising in a dog. They are descended from animals that hunt cooperatively in packs, where they learn that some of the pack will drive prey out, and others know to run ahead to where the prey will likely flee to, even though they aren't always following them with their eyes.
Exactly. As a kid, I had a dog that understood when I threw a ball up on the roof of our garage, which caused it to disappear from her sight, that it would roll along the slope of the roof and and reappear further down the roofline. She actually got fairly good at predicting where the ball would reappear, repositioning herself along its path over time so she would meet it at its eventual drop point. Does that mean my dog understood calculus, or solved Newton's problem? Well, she recognized a pattern and was able to apply a repeatable solution.
That tells me that the brain is capable of recognizing complex patterns around us, and is actually already very capable of deriving and applying practical solutions. ("So easy a dog could do it.") Applying abstract mathematical models to them, however, is not so easy.
What I'd be most interested in in this whole saga is "what methods did his father use to teach him math?" Obviously they were highly effective.
It's a good thing our forebears didn't know it was impossible, or they'd have all starved to death.
Or is this some new use of the word impossible that I'm not familiar with?
You're perfectly free to select what you ingest. You can grow your own Bt-free corn, feed it to your own rBGH-free cow, eat it on the 4th of July, and I'll applaud you for it. You can even be a vegan and just live off the veggies you grow yourself.
But maybe you live in the city, and can't raise your own food. No problem. Farmers are growing it today and labeling it Organic. There's a documentation regimen they go through to ensure you're not getting "non-natural" food. As a part of this they have to mechanically remove weeds, and apply manure instead of spraying fertilizers. Since it costs a lot more money to operate a certified organic farm, it's going to cost you more in the grocery store.
So why isn't that good enough? You can buy exactly what you're asking for today. You may pay a premium, but that's the price for being selective. That's capitalism in action right there.
... but it really isn't! If you can manage to find someone with zero experience, Windows does not magically make sense to them.
We seem to have no problem finding an endless supply of Windows "admins" with zero experience. I don't know why you think that's such a big deal.
Since it's all about trust anyway, a Dropbox client would be the last place I'd put my trust before storing data in their cloud. If their client knows my key, how do I know they aren't sending it up to the mothership as well?
Integrated security simply means a larger attack surface and more parts in which you have to invest 100% trust. It's much safer to trust a single tool that only does security (encryption) than to trust their entire ecosystem.