I never heard about that program. How do you know about it? Did you work on that program or something?
If they haven't been adding public phone book data to their databases then they'd have to be awfully incompetent - that data is commercially available and (relatively) cheap to purchase.
... after it has been found, that the cause for a crash of an Embraer 195 in Africa has been linked directly to the captain being alone on the flight deck, putting the engines to idle and descend rapidly...
Airplanes already have the technology that lets the aircraft fly better than a human in normal conditions, but pilots don't want to give up complete control and want to be able to override the computer in exceptional conditions - taking over in conditions that the designers didn't plan for is why we still have pilots in the cockpit. There could be a good reason why the pilot wants to override the aircraft and put the engines in idle, so even if the plane tried to take over, a captain that wanted to do something stupid (either because he wants to crash the plane, or he's more confused than the plane about what the right thing to do is), he'd just hit the override button.
One can only hope. But another thing that would be great would be if it was adaptive to traffic in front. If the studies regarding traffic jams are correct then adaptive cruise control could be the thing that makes them disappear. Even if only a fraction of the drivers uses it a dampening effect on the oscillations human drivers causes would help a great deal.
If every car uses the same algorithm, some traffic conditions might cause resonance across all cars that makes traffic even worse.
Let's integrate the cruise control and ABS logic into the robot driver!
Some might call that an architecturally flawed design, but those people have been proven to be fucking morons in similar technical discussions.
What an interesting idea... It seems like I've heard it before:
"Down the road, connected-vehicle and cloud-based data will build on these predictive developments--as will those autonomous vehicles you hear so much about."
"They did not show their true hand," one person briefed on the deal said of the NSA, asserting that government officials did not let on that they knew how to break the encryption."
Right, the NSA, known to be codebreakers, paid them $10M to include their "special" algorithm, and no one had any idea that it could be compromised. Right. Why else would they pay them to use it?
But we will never know for sure unless we continue.
They should use the TSA's mantra: "Well yeah, we haven't really directly stopped any serious attacks, but we've undoubtedly deterred many attacks because the terrorists know they can't get past our security defenses (unless of course, they exploit one of the many weaknesses in airport security that aren't solved by groping children)"
The NSA can say the same "Well, by knowing that we're out there, many terrorists have just given up their plans and went to work at homeless shelters"
When the US rejects Chinese food products, it's usually due to high levels of heavy metals and real poisons. When China rejects US food products, it's due to pseudo-scientific fear of "frankenfoods" which have zero evidence of human health risks. It's not the same thing. Only one is "tainted".
If you place an order for a million red gummi bears, and you find out that when you receive the order that 10% of them are blue gummi bears, it's still correct to say that the blue ones are "tainting" the order, even if they are generally equivalent and perfectly safe to eat.
China is not anti-GMO, but they have an approved list of GMO crops they will accept. If the USA supplier can't do a simple thing like keep track of which GMO variants they are supplying, what other quality control problems do they have?
Thought that was exploitive and slave like to use unpaid interns.
States have caught on to this (though probably not fully altruistically since they lose out on taxes from these unpaid workers), but it's nice to see that the federal government doesn't mind exploiting workers for no pay. Why should they pay when the workers will do it for free - besides, this work benefits everyone. Seems like a good move for government - don't pay workers, but give them all of the essentials that they need to live. They could even use a catchy slogan "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need".
I think if things were working as they should, the unapproved corn wouldn't have made it all the way to China before it was rejected. China makes headlines for sending tainted food to the USA, so the USA should make headlines for sending tainted food to China.
My point wasn't how does Azure suddenly make this possible. My point was how does cloud computing in general make this happen?
Anything you do on the "cloud", i can do in my basement.
The cloud can make some things much more economical. If you need 1000 servers spun up within an hour and only need them for 24 hours, you're going to spend a lot more doing that in your basement than you'd spend at a cloud provider.
So I've got one person replying to me saying FSF is too "fundamentalist", and I've got you saying they're too lax and are letting too much slip through.
I'm not saying they are too lax - I know there are no open source hard drive firmwares (though there is some progress on Open SSD firmware). I'm saying that they are being unclear on what they are delivering, they are saying "No proprietary firmware" when they know that portions of the computer do have
The general theme is that some people will look for even the smallest error just to avoid acknowledging good work.
Why do I say "probably" in my previous post? Because you and I don't know what the firmware in our microwaves do. It's probably fine. There haven't been any big microwave firmware scandals that I'm aware of. (And if I didn't say "probably", you'd say "How can you know?!")
Why do you keep comparing hard drive firmware with microwave firmware? My microwave doesn't see every bit of data I store on my hard drive, nor does it have full access to the physical RAM of my computer.
You keep saying "probably" because you really don't know what the hard drive firmware is doing. Which is fine, but don't dismiss it with "Well no one knows what it's doing and besides you can't do anything about it, so just ignore it".
Regarding FSF's statement, they said "no proprietary firmware options". Options. Whatever firmware could be removed has been removed.
Ahh, so there's no proprietary firmware except for the parts that use proprietary firmware. Well that's crystal clear and not misleading at all.
Is the HDD firmware a problem? I don't know. I don't know personally, and I don't know what FSF's take on it is.
If you feel that proprietary software infringes on your rights, how could closed source HDD firmware not be a problem?
But even if you did find some flaw, the right thing to do is say "Well, FSF is definitely 95%, and well done to them for their effort, but I'd like some discussion on this other 5%".
I might be willing to give them more credit if it was clear why they are promoting a computer that has open source software and open source BIOS, but the CPU and peripherals have proprietary embedded software and no one really knows what it does. How could I even give them 95% credit when I don't even know what the goal is or how what they've done so far meets the goal - how would that 95% be measured? If the system can't function without a hard drive and the hard drive runs proprietary software, are they really 95% close to a free and open solution?
In reality, it doesn't matter since few people will want to purchase a 7 year old laptop just because it is "open" - but it doesn't really help the FSF much when they endorse an "open" product that's really not open.
> Is the harddrive running open-source firmware too?
A disingenuous double attack.
First: "Since I can't be perfect, why should I make any effort at all?"
The article says:
The free software operating system preloaded on the refurbished X60 is Trisquel GNU/Linux, the Ubuntu derivative backed by the FSF that ships without any proprietary software or firmware options.
So tell me again who is being disingenous?
Second: "FSF is has compromised! that makes them insincere"
The answer is that no, the hd firmware isn't open. Like the firmware of a microwave or common wristwatch, it's probably impossible to put new firmware on it, and it's probably not a problem.
A line has to be drawn somewhere, so FSF's line is: if the software (including firmware) can be updated, it must be free. The philosophy is that if it's complex or important, then the vendor will create a way to update the firmware. If the firmware can't be updated, then the code is probably sufficiently mundane as to be ignored, just as circuits are ignored.
Why say it has "no proprietary firmware" when it clearly does?
Firmware is available for many (most?) hard drives. I'm not sure why that makes it difference -- if that particular laptop didn't allow BIOS updates, would it be ok to advertise it as not having proprietary firmware? Is it somehow better that not only is the firmware no accessible in the hard drive, but the entire API is secret so you have no idea what it's doing? Maybe it scans the hard drive at night looking for your secret data and it uses its DMA access to poke that data into operating system TCP buffers. Any device with DMA access can be a security threat.
And why do you keep saying probably? If there's a chance that proprietary firmware could be a problem, then shouldn't they tell me that?
My point wasn't how does Azure suddenly make this possible. My point was how does cloud computing in general make this happen?
Anything you do on the "cloud", i can do in my basement.
The cloud can make some things much more economical. If you need 1000 servers spun up within an hour and only need them for 24 hours, you're going to spend a lot more doing that in your basement than you'd spend at a cloud provider.
"Motti: Any attack made by the Rebels against this station would be a useless gesture, no matter what technical data they've obtained. This station is now the ultimate power in the universe! I suggest we use it.
Vader: Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force."
Sometimes it's more about resisting than conquest.
Plus, if I were them, I'd be worried that the USA would insert a backdoor in the avionics that allows the plane to be remote controlled by the USA.
If they are procuring them with the hope of surviving any sort of even brief conflict with the US, they will be sadly disappointed no matter who they buy their jets from. A more troubling backdoor would be a listening post on each jet that scoops up data on to a drive in a secret compartment, which can then be downloaded by a CIA/NSA agent pretending to be a Boeing service tech.
I wouldn't expect them to get into a direct conflict with the USA, but if they were in a conflict that the USA didn't want them to be in, or if they were interfering in a covert USA operation, the USA could ground their jets or enforce a "no fly" zone purely in software.
Why use someone else's cloud when you can plug your own? That, and the money stays in-house instead of going to a competitor.
Well yeah, I understand why Microsoft uses Azure, but they make it sound like Azure is an important part of why Microsoft can fight off a botnet, when there are plenty of other cloud services out there that have similar capabilities.
"Microsoft is only able to do all this by relying on the company's existing infrastructure, including its Azure cloud service"
Yea sure, the cloud enabled you to do this. Infomercial much?
I was wondering about that too -- how much compute power does it take to combat a Botnet, and why does it require Azure -- couldn't Amazon AWS would just as well?
My HP doesn't have a built in camera. My mics are filled with caulking. When I need either, I plug in external.
But that's only the mics you know about. One of those things that looks like a capacitor on your motherboard is actually a secret NSA microphone. It's wired in with one of the inside-layer traces on the motherboard so no one has detected it yet.
Sticky notes? tape? Slashdot - News for mediocre office workers.
I wrote my Malware with a hook into the operating system that detects when you're reading the camera firmware to see if it's changed, then it feeds you the unaltered firmware. Plus, I only load my firmware when I want to spy on you, the rest of the time I load up the old firmware.
Pretty much every business that can has already left the state of California. We are left with service industry and tourism jobs that don't come anywhere close to a living wage, especially when you consider the real estate costs.
San Francisco is practically a wasteland these days - all of the tech companies that have no fixed assets thus can move easily have already left. You can stand in the middle of 101 at 8:30am and not see a single car for hours. Real estate has never been so low - landlords are offering 6 months free rent to anyone that comes, and multiple landlords are getting into reverse bidding wars to try to win you over with low prices.
Yeah, all of the businesses in California have packed up and left, leaving nothing but wildlife behind - which explains why Coyotes are moving into San Francisco
Slashdot Mirror
I never heard about that program. How do you know about it? Did you work on that program or something?
If they haven't been adding public phone book data to their databases then they'd have to be awfully incompetent - that data is commercially available and (relatively) cheap to purchase.
... after it has been found, that the cause for a crash of an Embraer 195 in Africa has been linked directly to the captain being alone on the flight deck, putting the engines to idle and descend rapidly...
http://www.aeroinside.com/item/3416/lam-e190-over-botswana-namibia-on-nov-29th-2013-captain-intentionally-crashed-aircraft
Airplanes already have the technology that lets the aircraft fly better than a human in normal conditions, but pilots don't want to give up complete control and want to be able to override the computer in exceptional conditions - taking over in conditions that the designers didn't plan for is why we still have pilots in the cockpit. There could be a good reason why the pilot wants to override the aircraft and put the engines in idle, so even if the plane tried to take over, a captain that wanted to do something stupid (either because he wants to crash the plane, or he's more confused than the plane about what the right thing to do is), he'd just hit the override button.
One can only hope. But another thing that would be great would be if it was adaptive to traffic in front.
If the studies regarding traffic jams are correct then adaptive cruise control could be the thing that makes them disappear.
Even if only a fraction of the drivers uses it a dampening effect on the oscillations human drivers causes would help a great deal.
If every car uses the same algorithm, some traffic conditions might cause resonance across all cars that makes traffic even worse.
Let's integrate the cruise control and ABS logic into the robot driver!
Some might call that an architecturally flawed design, but those people have been proven to be fucking morons in similar technical discussions.
What an interesting idea... It seems like I've heard it before:
"Down the road, connected-vehicle and cloud-based data will build on these predictive developments--as will those autonomous vehicles you hear so much about."
"They did not show their true hand," one person briefed on the deal said of the NSA, asserting that government officials did not let on that they knew how to break the encryption."
Right, the NSA, known to be codebreakers, paid them $10M to include their "special" algorithm, and no one had any idea that it could be compromised. Right. Why else would they pay them to use it?
But we will never know for sure unless we continue.
They should use the TSA's mantra: "Well yeah, we haven't really directly stopped any serious attacks, but we've undoubtedly deterred many attacks because the terrorists know they can't get past our security defenses (unless of course, they exploit one of the many weaknesses in airport security that aren't solved by groping children)"
The NSA can say the same "Well, by knowing that we're out there, many terrorists have just given up their plans and went to work at homeless shelters"
When the US rejects Chinese food products, it's usually due to high levels of heavy metals and real poisons. When China rejects US food products, it's due to pseudo-scientific fear of "frankenfoods" which have zero evidence of human health risks. It's not the same thing. Only one is "tainted".
If you place an order for a million red gummi bears, and you find out that when you receive the order that 10% of them are blue gummi bears, it's still correct to say that the blue ones are "tainting" the order, even if they are generally equivalent and perfectly safe to eat.
China is not anti-GMO, but they have an approved list of GMO crops they will accept. If the USA supplier can't do a simple thing like keep track of which GMO variants they are supplying, what other quality control problems do they have?
Thought that was exploitive and slave like to use unpaid interns.
States have caught on to this (though probably not fully altruistically since they lose out on taxes from these unpaid workers), but it's nice to see that the federal government doesn't mind exploiting workers for no pay. Why should they pay when the workers will do it for free - besides, this work benefits everyone. Seems like a good move for government - don't pay workers, but give them all of the essentials that they need to live. They could even use a catchy slogan "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need".
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html?pagewanted=all
Isn't this just things working as they should?
I think if things were working as they should, the unapproved corn wouldn't have made it all the way to China before it was rejected. China makes headlines for sending tainted food to the USA, so the USA should make headlines for sending tainted food to China.
My point wasn't how does Azure suddenly make this possible. My point was how does cloud computing in general make this happen?
Anything you do on the "cloud", i can do in my basement.
The cloud can make some things much more economical. If you need 1000 servers spun up within an hour and only need them for 24 hours, you're going to spend a lot more doing that in your basement than you'd spend at a cloud provider.
How did this get modded "troll"?
Musk's Hubris? Is that some new cologne?
So I've got one person replying to me saying FSF is too "fundamentalist", and I've got you saying they're too lax and are letting too much slip through.
I'm not saying they are too lax - I know there are no open source hard drive firmwares (though there is some progress on Open SSD firmware). I'm saying that they are being unclear on what they are delivering, they are saying "No proprietary firmware" when they know that portions of the computer do have
The general theme is that some people will look for even the smallest error just to avoid acknowledging good work.
Why do I say "probably" in my previous post? Because you and I don't know what the firmware in our microwaves do. It's probably fine. There haven't been any big microwave firmware scandals that I'm aware of. (And if I didn't say "probably", you'd say "How can you know?!")
Why do you keep comparing hard drive firmware with microwave firmware? My microwave doesn't see every bit of data I store on my hard drive, nor does it have full access to the physical RAM of my computer.
You keep saying "probably" because you really don't know what the hard drive firmware is doing. Which is fine, but don't dismiss it with "Well no one knows what it's doing and besides you can't do anything about it, so just ignore it".
Regarding FSF's statement, they said "no proprietary firmware options". Options. Whatever firmware could be removed has been removed.
Ahh, so there's no proprietary firmware except for the parts that use proprietary firmware. Well that's crystal clear and not misleading at all.
Is the HDD firmware a problem? I don't know. I don't know personally, and I don't know what FSF's take on it is.
If you feel that proprietary software infringes on your rights, how could closed source HDD firmware not be a problem?
But even if you did find some flaw, the right thing to do is say "Well, FSF is definitely 95%, and well done to them for their effort, but I'd like some discussion on this other 5%".
I might be willing to give them more credit if it was clear why they are promoting a computer that has open source software and open source BIOS, but the CPU and peripherals have proprietary embedded software and no one really knows what it does. How could I even give them 95% credit when I don't even know what the goal is or how what they've done so far meets the goal - how would that 95% be measured? If the system can't function without a hard drive and the hard drive runs proprietary software, are they really 95% close to a free and open solution?
In reality, it doesn't matter since few people will want to purchase a 7 year old laptop just because it is "open" - but it doesn't really help the FSF much when they endorse an "open" product that's really not open.
> Is the harddrive running open-source firmware too?
A disingenuous double attack.
First: "Since I can't be perfect, why should I make any effort at all?"
The article says:
The free software operating system preloaded on the refurbished X60 is Trisquel GNU/Linux, the Ubuntu derivative backed by the FSF that ships without any proprietary software or firmware options.
So tell me again who is being disingenous?
Second: "FSF is has compromised! that makes them insincere"
The answer is that no, the hd firmware isn't open. Like the firmware of a microwave or common wristwatch, it's probably impossible to put new firmware on it, and it's probably not a problem.
A line has to be drawn somewhere, so FSF's line is: if the software (including firmware) can be updated, it must be free. The philosophy is that if it's complex or important, then the vendor will create a way to update the firmware. If the firmware can't be updated, then the code is probably sufficiently mundane as to be ignored, just as circuits are ignored.
Why say it has "no proprietary firmware" when it clearly does?
Firmware is available for many (most?) hard drives. I'm not sure why that makes it difference -- if that particular laptop didn't allow BIOS updates, would it be ok to advertise it as not having proprietary firmware? Is it somehow better that not only is the firmware no accessible in the hard drive, but the entire API is secret so you have no idea what it's doing? Maybe it scans the hard drive at night looking for your secret data and it uses its DMA access to poke that data into operating system TCP buffers. Any device with DMA access can be a security threat.
And why do you keep saying probably? If there's a chance that proprietary firmware could be a problem, then shouldn't they tell me that?
Is the harddrive running open-source firmware too? How could I possibly store my data on a device that uses proprietary software?
My point wasn't how does Azure suddenly make this possible. My point was how does cloud computing in general make this happen?
Anything you do on the "cloud", i can do in my basement.
The cloud can make some things much more economical. If you need 1000 servers spun up within an hour and only need them for 24 hours, you're going to spend a lot more doing that in your basement than you'd spend at a cloud provider.
"Motti: Any attack made by the Rebels against this station would be a useless gesture, no matter what technical data they've obtained. This station is now the ultimate power in the universe! I suggest we use it.
Vader: Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force."
Sometimes it's more about resisting than conquest.
And the power of religion?
Plus, if I were them, I'd be worried that the USA would insert a backdoor in the avionics that allows the plane to be remote controlled by the USA.
If they are procuring them with the hope of surviving any sort of even brief conflict with the US, they will be sadly disappointed no matter who they buy their jets from. A more troubling backdoor would be a listening post on each jet that scoops up data on to a drive in a secret compartment, which can then be downloaded by a CIA/NSA agent pretending to be a Boeing service tech.
I wouldn't expect them to get into a direct conflict with the USA, but if they were in a conflict that the USA didn't want them to be in, or if they were interfering in a covert USA operation, the USA could ground their jets or enforce a "no fly" zone purely in software.
Why use someone else's cloud when you can plug your own? That, and the money stays in-house instead of going to a competitor.
Well yeah, I understand why Microsoft uses Azure, but they make it sound like Azure is an important part of why Microsoft can fight off a botnet, when there are plenty of other cloud services out there that have similar capabilities.
Plus, if I were them, I'd be worried that the USA would insert a backdoor in the avionics that allows the plane to be remote controlled by the USA.
"Microsoft is only able to do all this by relying on the company's existing infrastructure, including its Azure cloud service"
Yea sure, the cloud enabled you to do this. Infomercial much?
I was wondering about that too -- how much compute power does it take to combat a Botnet, and why does it require Azure -- couldn't Amazon AWS would just as well?
My HP doesn't have a built in camera. My mics are filled with caulking. When I need either, I plug in external.
But that's only the mics you know about. One of those things that looks like a capacitor on your motherboard is actually a secret NSA microphone. It's wired in with one of the inside-layer traces on the motherboard so no one has detected it yet.
I put a backwards mirror over mine so they thought I was spying on them.
I make sure I'm naked any time I'm within range of the camera -- anyone that makes the mistake of spying on me will not do it again.
I just check if the firmware has changed.
Sticky notes? tape? Slashdot - News for mediocre office workers.
I wrote my Malware with a hook into the operating system that detects when you're reading the camera firmware to see if it's changed, then it feeds you the unaltered firmware. Plus, I only load my firmware when I want to spy on you, the rest of the time I load up the old firmware.
It's pretty simple: if you have a device with a camera, just cover the camera with a little black tape and tada, no more spying
What about the microphone?
Pretty much every business that can has already left the state of California. We are left with service industry and tourism jobs that don't come anywhere close to a living wage, especially when you consider the real estate costs.
San Francisco is practically a wasteland these days - all of the tech companies that have no fixed assets thus can move easily have already left. You can stand in the middle of 101 at 8:30am and not see a single car for hours. Real estate has never been so low - landlords are offering 6 months free rent to anyone that comes, and multiple landlords are getting into reverse bidding wars to try to win you over with low prices.
Yeah, all of the businesses in California have packed up and left, leaving nothing but wildlife behind - which explains why Coyotes are moving into San Francisco