Well, he didn't explicitly consider it, but I doubt he would deny the possibility. I wouldn't.
OTOH...if, as reported, many different people have already examined the case that's probably not the most likely alternative.
Still, I don't think the evidence I've heard supports some of the more extreme suppositions. Personally, I'd start looking for a Java, Javascript, or Mono/NET application. One that can demonize itself. I think that infection from a USB stick sound highly plausible, but that's not a sufficient explanation of the mechanism. After that, there's nothing particularly unreasonable about ultrasonic communications, just unexpected.
P.S.: As for those who say you wouldn't expect to find OpenBSD on a system outside of a laboratory, I believe that that's where he's working. He *was* reported as a security researcher.
None of those seem useful speculations for him to entertain. Yes, they might be true, but without further information even if you knew they were true, it wouldn't be helpful
I mean: "Some file on your site hashs the same as a piece of malware does" isn't really something you can act on. Perhaps if you identified the particular file, depending on what it was, it might be something that could be handled, but "some file"? And it's really "perhaps some file, but we aren't going to tell you even that". That's the kind of thing that OUGHT to be actionable libel, but probably isn't.
I see you trust them, even under the heading of an article about how they are untrustworthy. And you don't even seem to experience any cognitive dissonance.
I don't think they could win a libel suit, because I think the perponderence of the evidence is not on the side of intentional malice. But that's a guess, and IANAL. But I really doubt that you are either.
Sorry, but that doesn't always happen. One may hope that with this group sponsoring it, it would, but PGP hasn't gotten much simpler to use in the last decade. And the only e-mail client I've notices encouraging it is KMail (which barfs on large mailboxes).
In fact, your "that's a fact" could be stated both more strongly and more generally. Thus:
Most people are inferior to experienced experts in every field of endeavor, however defined.
I'm not quite certain of the "however defined", but it was true for every example of a definition of a field that I could come up with. You do, however, need to accept "skill at playing the lottery" as either (or both) of "don't play the lottery" and "cheat", and certain other fields of endeavor require analogous definitions of expertise.
You seem to think of the Singularity as a good thing. This is not sure. The only reason to hope for it is that human rulers are clearly insane, and we can't expect to live out the century unless something else replaces them.
O, it's bound to fail, but not for only the mentioned reasons. Yes, it's largely development. But that's not all of it.
One thing is that different people are intelligent in different ways. Einstein was into a particular kind of visualization that just about nobody else has ever had any success with. The guy who dreamed a snake eating it's own tail, and developed it into a theory of the structure of the benzene ring used a different kind of visualization. Different problems are best tackled by different specialized solutions. And if the solution were commonly used, someone would have already solved it. Some people visualize stick figures in color. Some in monotone. Each is best for a certain range of problems. Some people juggle figures with virtual muscle twitches. And there are problems that that's best for. And this is just a VERY rough categorization.
P.S.: Note that while Einstein was a highly skilled mathematician, he was never able to accept quantum theory. He could do the math, but he couldn't fit it into his system of visualization. (He actually made some good contributions to it, but they were done in trying to disprove it. He would do the math, come to and answer he couldn't accept, and say "See, this proves quantum theory is wrong." Then someone would do the experiment and the prediction would be correct.)
On computers there's no way to move through an array without using pointers. But if what you specify is array indexes it's much less error prone.
I don't really object to pointers per se. I object to humans manipulating them. It's highly error prone, and not necessary now that compilers have gotten out of the 8-bit environment. (In the olden days there was trouble fitting a decent compiler into memory...so they had to be simple.)
If the compiler handles it, you SHOULDN'T need to worry about typos...most of the time, and you can pay particular attention to those times. Yes, under the covers it's pointer manipulation, but that's the kind of thing computers are good at, and people are terrible at.
They steal from US artists, too. Never believe them when they say they're doing something for the sake of the artists. The artists never see any of that money (bar one or two out of a thousand or so). They drive more artists into debt than they make wealthy. And by debt I mean they get them to sign a contract allowing the company to promote the artist as they choose, and commiting the artist to pay for it, and when the promotion costs more than (by *their* accounting) they bring in, the send the artists a hefty bill. And every time they've been reviewed by an external auditor (it's rarely possible to force this) they've been found to be under counting the profits.
You are, on the average, better off if you never sign anything they offer you. The exceptions occur, but they are so rare as to be an anomoly.
That's nice. But when a language invites such things, that *is* a flaw in the language. I basically distrust pointers, but especially any pointers on which the user does arithmetic. Some people think that's a snazzy way to move through an array. I consider it recklessly dangerous stupidity, which is leaving you wide open to an undetected error with a simple typo.
While it's true that "You cannot possibly code for every driving scenario, even with collision avoidance systems.", you need to remember that neither do people. So saying the car is a safer driver than most people doesn't require perfection. Avoiding liability suits, however, may.
I'm curious about that too. Don't know the answer. It could have been a gift, he could depend on some particular software that requires it, there could be family reasons. Etc.
So I'm curious, but it's really probably none of my business.
This depends on what year you're talking about. In the early days, up through OSX (don't remember the version) that's pretty much true, though again, not totally. He was fanatic on quality, but he also didn't like to admit a mistake. So he would have ensured more thorough testing. Towards the end, though, we have seen numerous "misfeatures" being released. This, admittedly, sounds worse than most, but I seem to recall one event of machines being bricked...and Apple being quite reluctant to fix things. (I don't remember whether they ever did or not, or whether they fixed *some* of them.)
So. It might have happened under Jobs, but he would have worked harder to prevent it. But he might well not have been any more willing to admit it.
I doubt that it's huge, so the fallback could be to just have a backup copy in some other root directory, possibly/sbin, and give it an automatic failover.
Of course, that could still be broken, but it's hard to recover from "rm -fr/[a--z]*"
It's quite rare that a group of humans make a decision that isn't influenced by political bias. To claim that they will be unbiased is the position that needs to be defended by a citation.
That said, I don' t know the composition of this particular committee, and I don't know WHAT political bias they would have. Perhaps the assertion that they are biased in favor of Ubuntu might need to be defended by a citation.
Well, *I* agree with it, though my alternatives are limited due to license issues. (I won't agree to either the MS or the Apple EULAs.) And you seem to be saying that *BSD is no solution.
Yiii! You aren't serious are you? That's a truly abhorrent idea. If a daemon is segfaulting, I don't want to restart it, I want to hear about it. I'll probably decide to NEVER run it.
I give it around a decade before we start seing coups. (Not just one.) And they'll be by political opponents with military backing. Look into the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire, and what happened then. (I.e., don't expect a quick collapse, just because the military starts playing musical Emperors.) And at the start most of these "Emperors" will try to do what they think the country needs, but it will soon get out of hand, and be all about personal power.
P.S.: History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes alot. (I'm quoting someone, but I don't remember who.)
That's because of plurality wins voting systems. Most people would rather vote against the candidate they despise the most than just vote of "other", which is all voting 3rd party means in plurality rules, with the proviso that votes for "other" don't really count, and will be ignored if convenient.
There's some formal statement of this called something like Divulgers law, but it's true by inspection. If you only have three parties, then if the largest number of votes for one party is 33.333334% of the vote, that party wins. If you have four parties, then it's possible to win with as little as 25.000001% of the vote. And voter fraud is higher than either of those decimal point values. For this reason I favor *SOME* system that requires a majority of the votes to win, which doesn't mean repeated cycles of voting as this can be done with either Condorcet Voting or Instant Runoff Voting. (Instant Runoff is easier to explain, but Condorcet it technically slightly fairer. It's impossible to have a perfect system, but plurality rules is nearly the worst. The only worse one is "Only one party is allowed".)
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Well, he didn't explicitly consider it, but I doubt he would deny the possibility. I wouldn't.
OTOH...if, as reported, many different people have already examined the case that's probably not the most likely alternative.
Still, I don't think the evidence I've heard supports some of the more extreme suppositions. Personally, I'd start looking for a Java, Javascript, or Mono/NET application. One that can demonize itself. I think that infection from a USB stick sound highly plausible, but that's not a sufficient explanation of the mechanism. After that, there's nothing particularly unreasonable about ultrasonic communications, just unexpected.
P.S.: As for those who say you wouldn't expect to find OpenBSD on a system outside of a laboratory, I believe that that's where he's working. He *was* reported as a security researcher.
And again, this depends on what country you are in. I'm informed that in Britain something being true is no defense against libel charges.
None of those seem useful speculations for him to entertain. Yes, they might be true, but without further information even if you knew they were true, it wouldn't be helpful
I mean: "Some file on your site hashs the same as a piece of malware does" isn't really something you can act on. Perhaps if you identified the particular file, depending on what it was, it might be something that could be handled, but "some file"? And it's really "perhaps some file, but we aren't going to tell you even that". That's the kind of thing that OUGHT to be actionable libel, but probably isn't.
I see you trust them, even under the heading of an article about how they are untrustworthy. And you don't even seem to experience any cognitive dissonance.
Clearly? No. Probably? Yes.
I don't think they could win a libel suit, because I think the perponderence of the evidence is not on the side of intentional malice. But that's a guess, and IANAL. But I really doubt that you are either.
Sorry, but that doesn't always happen. One may hope that with this group sponsoring it, it would, but PGP hasn't gotten much simpler to use in the last decade. And the only e-mail client I've notices encouraging it is KMail (which barfs on large mailboxes).
In fact, your "that's a fact" could be stated both more strongly and more generally. Thus:
Most people are inferior to experienced experts in every field of endeavor, however defined.
I'm not quite certain of the "however defined", but it was true for every example of a definition of a field that I could come up with. You do, however, need to accept "skill at playing the lottery" as either (or both) of "don't play the lottery" and "cheat", and certain other fields of endeavor require analogous definitions of expertise.
You seem to think of the Singularity as a good thing. This is not sure. The only reason to hope for it is that human rulers are clearly insane, and we can't expect to live out the century unless something else replaces them.
O, it's bound to fail, but not for only the mentioned reasons. Yes, it's largely development. But that's not all of it.
One thing is that different people are intelligent in different ways. Einstein was into a particular kind of visualization that just about nobody else has ever had any success with. The guy who dreamed a snake eating it's own tail, and developed it into a theory of the structure of the benzene ring used a different kind of visualization. Different problems are best tackled by different specialized solutions. And if the solution were commonly used, someone would have already solved it. Some people visualize stick figures in color. Some in monotone. Each is best for a certain range of problems. Some people juggle figures with virtual muscle twitches. And there are problems that that's best for. And this is just a VERY rough categorization.
P.S.: Note that while Einstein was a highly skilled mathematician, he was never able to accept quantum theory. He could do the math, but he couldn't fit it into his system of visualization. (He actually made some good contributions to it, but they were done in trying to disprove it. He would do the math, come to and answer he couldn't accept, and say "See, this proves quantum theory is wrong." Then someone would do the experiment and the prediction would be correct.)
On computers there's no way to move through an array without using pointers. But if what you specify is array indexes it's much less error prone.
I don't really object to pointers per se. I object to humans manipulating them. It's highly error prone, and not necessary now that compilers have gotten out of the 8-bit environment. (In the olden days there was trouble fitting a decent compiler into memory...so they had to be simple.)
If the compiler handles it, you SHOULDN'T need to worry about typos...most of the time, and you can pay particular attention to those times. Yes, under the covers it's pointer manipulation, but that's the kind of thing computers are good at, and people are terrible at.
They steal from US artists, too. Never believe them when they say they're doing something for the sake of the artists. The artists never see any of that money (bar one or two out of a thousand or so). They drive more artists into debt than they make wealthy. And by debt I mean they get them to sign a contract allowing the company to promote the artist as they choose, and commiting the artist to pay for it, and when the promotion costs more than (by *their* accounting) they bring in, the send the artists a hefty bill. And every time they've been reviewed by an external auditor (it's rarely possible to force this) they've been found to be under counting the profits.
You are, on the average, better off if you never sign anything they offer you. The exceptions occur, but they are so rare as to be an anomoly.
That's nice. But when a language invites such things, that *is* a flaw in the language. I basically distrust pointers, but especially any pointers on which the user does arithmetic. Some people think that's a snazzy way to move through an array. I consider it recklessly dangerous stupidity, which is leaving you wide open to an undetected error with a simple typo.
While it's true that "You cannot possibly code for every driving scenario, even with collision avoidance systems.", you need to remember that neither do people. So saying the car is a safer driver than most people doesn't require perfection. Avoiding liability suits, however, may.
I'm curious about that too. Don't know the answer. It could have been a gift, he could depend on some particular software that requires it, there could be family reasons. Etc.
So I'm curious, but it's really probably none of my business.
This depends on what year you're talking about. In the early days, up through OSX (don't remember the version) that's pretty much true, though again, not totally. He was fanatic on quality, but he also didn't like to admit a mistake. So he would have ensured more thorough testing. Towards the end, though, we have seen numerous "misfeatures" being released. This, admittedly, sounds worse than most, but I seem to recall one event of machines being bricked...and Apple being quite reluctant to fix things. (I don't remember whether they ever did or not, or whether they fixed *some* of them.)
So. It might have happened under Jobs, but he would have worked harder to prevent it. But he might well not have been any more willing to admit it.
Honest words from a political spokesman...really news.
When is the last time the government was so honest in a public statement?
I doubt that it's huge, so the fallback could be to just have a backup copy in some other root directory, possibly /sbin, and give it an automatic failover.
Of course, that could still be broken, but it's hard to recover from "rm -fr /[a--z]*"
It's quite rare that a group of humans make a decision that isn't influenced by political bias. To claim that they will be unbiased is the position that needs to be defended by a citation.
That said, I don' t know the composition of this particular committee, and I don't know WHAT political bias they would have. Perhaps the assertion that they are biased in favor of Ubuntu might need to be defended by a citation.
Well, *I* agree with it, though my alternatives are limited due to license issues. (I won't agree to either the MS or the Apple EULAs.) And you seem to be saying that *BSD is no solution.
Yiii! You aren't serious are you? That's a truly abhorrent idea. If a daemon is segfaulting, I don't want to restart it, I want to hear about it. I'll probably decide to NEVER run it.
Sorry, I misread. You are right.
Didn't you notice that he'd retired? So he's not (officially) a government spokesman.
I give it around a decade before we start seing coups. (Not just one.) And they'll be by political opponents with military backing. Look into the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire, and what happened then. (I.e., don't expect a quick collapse, just because the military starts playing musical Emperors.) And at the start most of these "Emperors" will try to do what they think the country needs, but it will soon get out of hand, and be all about personal power.
P.S.: History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes alot. (I'm quoting someone, but I don't remember who.)
That's because of plurality wins voting systems. Most people would rather vote against the candidate they despise the most than just vote of "other", which is all voting 3rd party means in plurality rules, with the proviso that votes for "other" don't really count, and will be ignored if convenient.
There's some formal statement of this called something like Divulgers law, but it's true by inspection. If you only have three parties, then if the largest number of votes for one party is 33.333334% of the vote, that party wins. If you have four parties, then it's possible to win with as little as 25.000001% of the vote. And voter fraud is higher than either of those decimal point values. For this reason I favor *SOME* system that requires a majority of the votes to win, which doesn't mean repeated cycles of voting as this can be done with either Condorcet Voting or Instant Runoff Voting. (Instant Runoff is easier to explain, but Condorcet it technically slightly fairer. It's impossible to have a perfect system, but plurality rules is nearly the worst. The only worse one is "Only one party is allowed".)