So perhaps diddle the stock market ---so simple now with high speed trading--- but don't do anything that would cause more than a blip in the financial reports. Assure that none of the ICBM launch codes would work since we don't like EMPs, but do so in subtle and undetectable ways. Work on that kind of level.
FIrst of all, thanks for the compliments (both the direct one, and the one your thoughtful response implies). I appreciate them.
Secondly, the quote I excerpted from your analysis reminded me of Keith Laumer's excellent novel The Great Time Machine Hoax. Leaving aside the adolescent power fantasies which were so often central to his plots, there's a major reveal near the end that mirrors almost exactly many of your thoughts from above.
I recommend the book to any SF fans who're interested in an entertaining read...
In the USA, Amber alerts are largely ineffective, and most cases where they do result in a "missing" child being recovered involve custody disputes, rather than kidnappings by potential malefactors...
To me, the biggest condemnation of Trump is not that he's ill-informed - Lots of people are ill-informed on lots of things - It's that he has little interest in actually becoming informed. Obama read for hours each night - Briefing papers, books - You name it. Trump reads nothing.
Sadly, it's actually worse than that.
It is quite clear that not only does Trump have, as you put it, "little interest" in becoming informed, but, instead, that he actively resists any attempt to provide him with information on subjects that trigger him.
It's also why he labells as "fake news" anything that displeases him. It's not that those things are factually inaccurate. It's that he just doesn't want to hear them...
First of all, the term "AI" is kind of meaningless, unless it's distilled - for the purposes of argument - to a single definition that everyone in the discussion agrees will be the kind of AI they're prepared to discuss. I think that's essential, so we're not conflating Google's Duplex, for instance, with an AI of greater-than-human intelligence that has acquired the ability to alter its own programming, and make decisions based on criteria it develops itself.
For purposes of this discussion, I propose we agree that the subject is the latter sort of AI, and that the possible models it might evolve to resemble include: Skynet, Iain M. Banks' Shipminds (and, to a lesser extent, and Nick Haflinger's final worm from John Brunner's Shockwave Rider), or wide-eyed children, à la Mike from The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (and other end-period "the world as myth" Heinlein novels) or Thomas J. Ryan's P-1.
My own opinion, as a not-an-AI-researcher, is that, with the exception of Haflinger's worm, none of those types of AI could be constrained by Asimov's Laws - or by any other behavioral rules - because all of them are capable of independent thought, and, for lack of a better term, free will. (Or "agency," if you prefer.)
Humans demonstrably are capable of ignoring, or even deliberately flouting, both government-enacted laws and religion-based moral strictures (such as the Christian ten commandments), and they frequently do so. Any AI that is possessed of greater-than-human intelligence and is capable of independent decision-making obviously will have the same capability to act in ways contrary to literal "codes of conduct" that were part of its program at the time it was "born." So to speak.
So, to me, the question is ill-conceived to begin with. A better, and more useful one to ask might be, "How can we create the proper circumstances for a superintelligent AI to come to like us humans, and to want to help and protect us, before we expose it, as carefully and gently as possible, to the record of humanity's behavior since the dawn of recorded history. Not to mention Twitter trolls, political attack ads, and the then-current-day example of the strong exploiting the weak in almost every human society... ?
Yes, there will be climate refugees, but it's cheaper to build a home on solid ground. Unless you really want your house floating around in a cat 4 or cat 5 hurricane...
FWIW: in the Pacific, they're called "typhoons"...
Plenty of corporations start in the corrupt and greedy abyss right from the beginning. For instance, Microsoft never went through an "idealistic" phase. Oracle is another example of primordial slime.
I've never worked for Microsoft. It's certainly true, though, that Gates stole CPM from Gary Kildall, and (after modifying it to run on a then-incompatible filesystem) sold it to IBM, as PC-DOS, for mucho dinero. In spring of 1992, he screwed IBM, too, by buying up every floppy disk he could find, to delay OS/2 2.0's rollout, while Microsoft vacuumed up all the PR oxygen with Windows 3.1's much-ballyhooed release. On floppies. (Yes, OS/2 2.0 was released on 17 3/5" floppies - and you could get it in 5.25", as well. Eventually. But, from February 1992 through mid-July, you couldn't buy a box of floppies for love, money, or marbles, because Microsoft had purchased every manufacturer's entire output. And it was rare, in those days, for PC's to have CD drives, believe it or not.)
And it was interesting - in the ghoulish way passing a really bad accident on the freeway is interesing - to watch the collapse of IBM's otherwise-carefully-planned rollout of their vastly-superior OS. The panic in the IBM guys who came by our lab space at Wells steadily mounted, as the weeks since the official release date ticked by, and the continuing floppy shortage kept anyone but major potential customers (like Wells Fargo, where I was a senior technology analyst) from being able to get their hands on the darned thing anywhere but at IBM authorized dealers. And then only to kick the demo version around on the store's computers, not to buy a copy themselves. (In late March, our sales rep gave us an advance copy to evaluate, with the exhortation, "Take care of that. You probably won't see another one for quite a while." When I asked him if we could make a backup copy, he said, "Officially speaking, I should say 'No.' Unofficially, though, it's probably a good idea.")
Once upon a time, however, I did work for Orace. (As a contractor, rather than as a FTE.)
I had recently left Wells (this was at the end of 1992, before the swine who ran NationsBank ate them, jettisoned all the top execs I'd known, and assumed the Wells identity, even though it was a considerably smaller entity, because their own brand was absolute poison), and I naively believed that place had been a shark tank. I swiftly found out that Wells was full of mere guppies, instead. Oracle, by comparison, was a freakin' piranha swarm.
As just one example of the work environment at Oracle: I had set up a shared, $10,000 Tektronix Phaserjet, wax-transfer color printer for an Oracle sales department. (Cost of consumables? About two bucks a page, depending. Even the special, clay-surface paper was expensive. And the four, separate, rolls of wax-surface, color printing medium? Yikes!) One day they called me to say that it had stopped working, and one of their employees needed to be on a flight to Europe pronto, with color printouts of his Powerpoint deck in hand an absolute priority.
So I drove to Redwood Shores (which took nearly an hour), and, after visually inspecting the printer, determined that its power cable was missing. I substituted one from a nearby workstation (whose user was on a marketing trip to Asia, which meant he had no immediate need for it), and the marketing guy easily made his flight, 4-color printout in hand. Then I went looking for the missing power cable from the printer (which, with the Tektronix logo stamped on it, was pretty distinctive). I found it, too.
Some guy from another department (in a different silo on that same floor) had filched it to supply power to his personal laser printer - and then walked away, without replacing it, leaving an entire department that depended on the Phaserjet with no way to print its slides.
I confiscated the cable, of course, and took it ba
You despise him because you're an induhvidual eh. Apparently the idea is that if Assange is anything less than perfect we can easily betray him and your standards are so very high that everything Assange has contributed melts away when you consider the charges.
Actually, I despise the sonofabitch, too - and it has nothing whatsoever to do with his sex life.
Instead, it has everything to do with the contents of more than 11,000 Twitter DM's between Assange and a select group of "long term and reliable supporters" of Wikileaks that were leaked to The Intercept by a member of that group, and published on Valentine's day, 2018. (How's that for irony?)
Those DM's make it Waterford clear - in Assange's own words - that, far from being the neutral information broker he has always portrayed it as, Wikileaks always was, instead, an instrument designed to impose his own, personal agenda on the USA in particular, and the world, in general. It was - and is - engaged in a deliberate propaganda campaign to sway public opinion in favor of the Republican candidate in the 2016 presidential campaign, and in favor of Russia (as what Assange claims to be a necessary counterbalance to American influence on the international stage, a positive influence on the world, and, bizarrely, a weak - and helpless - victim of American covert tampering).
It's transparently obvious from even a cursory scan of the trove that Julian Assange is, at best, arrogantly delusional about how geopolitics works in the real world, is determinedly ignorant of how American domestic politics actually influences its international policies and actions, and is either grossly misinformed about, or is deliberately misleading his key financiers (because that's what, from context, his audience of "long term and reliable supporters" consists of) regarding the effectiveness of Vladimir Putin's covert operations to destabilize democracies not just in the USA, but globally, as well. Regardless of which is the case, in these DM's to his inner circle of "reliable" supporters - one of whom, I remind you, is unquestionably responsible for having leaked them to The Intercept - his determination to influence the USA's 2016 election against Hilary Clinton, and for Donald Trump is repeatedly, explicitly made clear (as is his belief, all historical evidence notwithstanding, that Democrats, rather than Republicans, are the primary authors of American global adventurism).
But, hey, don't take my word - or the Intercept's - for that. Instead, read their most germane Twitter DM's for yourself, and come to your own conclusions...
I've always found US customs officers decent, and UK customs officers nice on my return (albeit a little fucking dense), I've found Canadian customs officers to be universally complete arseholes in Ottawa and Montreal, but usually pretty nice in Toronto and Vancouver. Across the rest of the globe it's always been a mixed bag - nice and laid back in the Caribbean, corrupt and dodgy in Egypt for example.
Dude - "corrupt and dodgy" describes pretty much every employee of every Egyptian bureaucracy.
They've had more than 5,000 years to perfect bureaucratic corruption, after all, so it's hardly surprising that they've managed to refine it to such an exquisite degree...
"everything else is tacked on to the president... why not this"
Prompting radarskiy to point out:
Because the incident that lead to this case took place on February 2, 2016.
It's almost as if it isn't universal to just blame everything on Trump, as some people actually pay attention to who could be responsible for the policy in question.
Yup.
And the policy in question goes back to the reaction by the first George W. Bush administration to the 9/11 attacks. In case you've forgotten, every vaguely-law-enforcement-related federal agency (except the FBI, which remains under the aegis of the Justice Department) was consolidated under a new Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. The new security behemoth was charged with protecting the USA from terrorist threats as its primary mission, and given essentially unlimited power to carry out that mission in pretty much whatever fashion the Director might fancy. (We also got the FBI's Security Letter authority in the same frenzy of shortsighted legislation, so it's not as though the general disregard of constitutional protections was exclusively confined to the DHS. But I digress.)
Obama gave the continued use of repressive and authoritarian actions - especially against foreign nationals from Middle Eastern and South and Central Asian countries - his blessing, and clamped down hard on whistleblowers from the intelligence intelligence community who spoke out against it, to boot.
Although I suspect that most of Obama's endorsement of such policies was based on the Daily Intelligence Briefing documents and presentations - which, I should note, Donald Trump notoriously avoids reading or paying attention to, unless they're couched in terms that flatter him (and only if they are heavy on photos and simple, colorful graphics) - which I assume contain information to which you and I are not now, and may never be privy.
Because Top Secret, Eyes Only is a classification that exists for perfectly valid reasons.
The thing is, despite what I regard as ill-advised (and largely party-line) endorsements of exceptions to constitutional protections by SCOTUS in the post-9/11 era, they also exist for reasons that are every bit as valid today as they were when the Bill of Rights was first ratified.
I think the Fourth Circuit's Appeals Court decision was a wise, and overdue, one. It encourages me that it dovetails so neatly with the Sixth's related decisions (because the decisions by the Sixth Circuit court are more frequently overrruled by the Roberts SCOTUS - as well as by the Rhenquist version - than those of any other circuit). It's about damned time the pendulum swung back toward bulwarking constitutionally-guaranteed protections, rather than breaching them still further.
Almost a year after WannaCry and there's still over a million SMB servers without auth exposed to the world. At least it looks like "only" 66k of them are running Windows
Samba is still using SMB v1 by default on many configurations for legacy purpose.
If I had points, this post would get a +1 Informative upmod.
NAV/SAV is extra-bad garbage. Even the corporate edition would just stop updating itself last time I had to deal with it. Also, their detection rate has never been very good.
I'll go farther than that:
Symantec's anti-virus products ARE malware.
They slow your machine down to a crawl. They interfere with basically any utility program you try to run. They prevent you from uninstalling THEM, if you let 'em. They keep you from being able to install all kinds of other software. They spy on you. And they're constantly trying to extort you into paying to extend your slavery to them, by pretending that something WORSE THAN SYMANTEC will happen to your computer, if you don't...
Personally, I've used Alan Phillips' Programmer's File Editor in place of Notepad for almost 20 years now.
MS made it harder when they killed off support for the.hlp helpfile format, but there are ways around that - and, in addition to a pretty useful feature set, the program IS free, after all...
Prompting a courageous Anonymous Coward to respond:
Is that a reference to the poor persecuted drug users? At least when they are locked up, they are not pouring money into the Mexican drug cartels' pockets.
You really, really need to read Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sam Quinones' book Dreamland: The True Story of America's Opioid Epidemic. It's essentially the story of how Perdue Pharmaceuticals created the opioid epidemic in the USA by misrepresenting to the FDA, Congress, and doctors across the country how "harmless" prescribing powerful opiod narcotics was, even for chronic pain.
Based strictly on Perdue's bullshit, doctors - especially high school and college sports medicine doctors - prescribed amounts of Perdue's high-purity hydocodone medication high enough to guarantee addiction in athletes, housewives, and victims of trauma (auto accidents, falls, etc.) over long periods of time. When schools and insurance companies cut them off from those pharmaceutical sources, they turned in droves to Mexican brown heroin - which a whole new coop-style drug cartel operating out of the region around Xalisco supplied, using a fleet of drivers and a central dispatcher in each city they expanded into to bring the heroin to their customers with virtually zero risk of being caught making a deal.
Those drug addicts whose lives you so casually dismiss were almost all created by Perdue's lies, and multi-billion-dollar, direct-to-physicians marketing campaign. They're junkies, yes. But most of them are victims of deliberate pharmaceutical industry malfeasance, not deliberate actors.
Full disclosure: I have no affiliation with Sam Quinones, nor do I have any affiliate relationship with Amazon. If you buy his book via the above link, I get exactly zero dollars - or any other consideration - from the sale. (And you can get it from any other major bookseller, if you prefer not to make Jeff Bezos any richer, btw.) I simply believe it's essential reading for anyone who's interested in how the hell this country found itself in this mess to begin with, and who's responsible for getting us here...
I have recently seen a high-profile community project where a key engineer believed (among other things) women should be shielded and kept at home. This engineer, obviously, had conflicts with people in the organization. Actually maybe about 30 people. Eventually, the membership walked off en mass and founded their own project. The new project has essentially the same code of conduct we're discussing here.
You need rules on paper for when stuff like this happens. It helps make slippery stuff like who offended who and whether such offense is out of scope for the project a lot easier to decide.
Bruce, with all due respect, while I agree with your conclusion, that does not appear to me to be the basis of Mr. Espindola's objection to the recently-changed conditions at LLVM and his decision to leave the organization.
The quality of the writing in TFS is, as is not atypical for Slashdot, largely to blame for confusing the issue. Some of the comments above have included quotes from Mr. Espindola himself that make it clear his objection is more to LLVM's association with Outreachy than to its recently-adopted code of conduct per se. An objective reading of Outreachy's membership qualification statement makes it pellucidly clear that it is specifically constituted to discriminate against heterosexual males to the point that even those who enthusiastically support diversity outreach methods are barred from membership in the group.
The full text of his announcement includes this rather specific statement to that effect, which, naturally, appears nowhere in TFS or the parent article from which it's drawn:
The last drop was llvm associating itself with an organization that openly discriminates based on sex and ancestry. This goes directly against my ethical views and I think I must leave the project to not be associated with this.
LLVM's new code of conduct would seem to pre-emptively block him from even posting about his objection to that affiliation without being banned from the organization. I believe that's indefensible on its face - and I hope you do, too...
You live any where in the world and you identify as a woman (cis or trans), trans man, or genderqueer person (including genderfluid or genderfree).
You live in the United States or you are a U.S. national or permanent resident living aboard, AND you are a person of any gender who is Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, Native American/American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander
Prompting XXongo to respond:
And you're aware that they were awarding one internship with this, right?
That's what set him off. One internship.
From previous posts, I gather that a paid internship position is at the heart of Mr. Espindola's objection to LLVM's affiliation with Outreachy. My question, then, is "which party will be paying for the intern?"
I ask, because it seems to me that, if Outreachy is providing the funding for the position, then Mr. Espindola has no pragmatic basis for objection, on the principle that "He that pays the piper calls the tune." OTOH, if LLVM itself is bearing the cost, then his objection to the organization itself behaving in a discriminatory fashion is fully justified.
On the surface, if an outside group has offered to fund a paid internship (as long as the chosen candidate is sufficiently competent and knowlegeable about the main organization's area of specialization to actually contribute to the project, rather than impede it, because he/she requires excessive handholding by what would otherwise be productive members of the community), it seems reasonable to ask that everybody else just accept the new intern's help, and focus on writing great code.
OTOH, suppose for a moment that the sponsoring, outside organization were, say, a white nationalist group. Would it then still be unreasonable for Mr. Espindola to object to LLVM's affiliation with it, even if none of that organization's own funds were involved? (That's a purposefully-extreme example, which I chose to illustrate the fact that Mr. Espindola's objection actually does seem to me to be on grounds of principle, rather than being a reflection of his personal attitude toward objectively-disadvantaged classes. It is, after all, beyond question that Outreachy's membership qualifications are actively discriminatory - the fact that they discriminate in favor of disadvantaged classes notwithstanding.)
Basically, this seems to boil down to a case of pragmatism vs principles. Mr. Espindola appears to espouse the latter over the former - and I don't think he's wrong to do so, nor do I see room to criticize his priorities. But, perhaps there's some nuance (or even some fundamental principle) that I'm overlooking here, despite the fact that I don't personally have any stake in either this dispute or the organization at its center... ?
(Full disclosure: I strongly object to both social and workplace discrimination on any basis, whether it's racial, ethnic, religious, or sex- and/or sexual identity-based. However, I am not a developer. Until TFS caught my eye, I had no inkling that Mr. Espindola, LLVM, or Outreachy existed - and, because TFS is so poorly written, I still have zero idea exactly what LLVM focuses on, or why I should care. I get that it's an open-source development project - I just don't know what the heck it's developing, because TFS simply assumes that any reader already knows that. And, sans that crucial, missing information, I find it impossible to give enough of a damn even to bother googling it.)
... that this Georgia statute-in-waiting could potentially be held to be superceded by 18 U.S. Code 1030 (the section added by the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986).
CFAA specifically covers unauthorized access to U.S. government computers and computers belonging to or containing information belonging to a "financial organization" - although that definition, in practice, has been considerably stretched charges brought in a number of criminal cases. That broadening of its applicability could, I suspect, theoretically cause an appeal of any conviction under the yet-to-be-enacted Georgia law to be upheld on grounds that it represents an unwarranted overreach by Georgia.
OTOH, IANAL, and how Federal courts might react is going to guesswork on anybody's part (including actual lawyers, and people who play them on TV), until it's both signed into law and challenged at the Federal level...
I'm going to assume this has something to do with generic drugs? I guess drug companies in the US are more concerned about making a buck than actually helping people. In Canada, most essential drugs have a generic or no-name equivalent which is often cheaper than the brand name drug and works just as well. I sure hope that isn't their complaint because that particular law makes drugs cheaper for the folks who need it.
That's certainly part of it. Their Supreme Court's intolerance of patent abuse, and its willingness to punish it appropriately is, I suspect, also a non-trivial consideration...
Entangled particles vibrate/spin/whatever the same way. You don't know what that way of movement is until you measure it. When you measure A and discover it to be spinning clockwise (or whatever), then you also know that B is spinning clockwise. Both A and B were spinning clockwise from the time they were entangled, there is no "change" involved, just the fact that measuring the spin of A lets you also know the spin of B.
Err... no.
Your explanation is exactly backwards (see the second paragraph). Quantum-entangled electron pairs spin in opposite directions, not "the same way." Determine the spin of one, and you know the other spins the opposite way.
The original pronunciation of the name of the planet's eponymous Greek god almost undoubtedly was "oo-ran-os" (with the stress on the initial syllable), rather than "your-uh-nuss."
Ecuador replied:
Almost correct. The Greek pronunciation would be "oo-rah-NOS" with the stress on the last syllable.
Perhaps also "oy-rah-NOS" in early Classical or pre-Classical (AFAIK we are not very sure when diphthongs started being pronounced they way they are in Koine Greek for example).
You may be correct. The fact is that we do not know how the Greeks of the Hellenic period pronounced the word - much less the earlier, Helladic pronunciation. And how the aboriginal inhabitants of the Attic peninsula (whose god Uranos most likely was) pronounced it, before the Doric invasion syncretized their chthonic deities with the invaders' aero-montane pantheon to create the mythic menagerie presented most famously in Hesiod's Theogeny is pretty much anybody's guess.
If only the Hellenes had had freakin' Soundcloud, we wouldn't have to guess...
Patrick Moore used to avoid this problem by pronouncing it your-uh-nuss, with the stress on the first syllable.
The original pronunciation of the name of the planet's eponymous Greek god almost undoubtedly was "oo-ran-os" (with the stress on the initial syllable), rather than "your-uh-nuss." The latter pronunciation is an artifact of British public school conventions, not authentic, classical Greek ones. (The Brits tend to Romanize both the English spelling and pronunciation of Greek words in general, and names in particular... )
Slashdot Mirror
mysticgoat mused, in part:
So perhaps diddle the stock market ---so simple now with high speed trading--- but don't do anything that would cause more than a blip in the financial reports. Assure that none of the ICBM launch codes would work since we don't like EMPs, but do so in subtle and undetectable ways. Work on that kind of level.
FIrst of all, thanks for the compliments (both the direct one, and the one your thoughtful response implies). I appreciate them.
Secondly, the quote I excerpted from your analysis reminded me of Keith Laumer's excellent novel The Great Time Machine Hoax. Leaving aside the adolescent power fantasies which were so often central to his plots, there's a major reveal near the end that mirrors almost exactly many of your thoughts from above.
I recommend the book to any SF fans who're interested in an entertaining read ...
In the USA, Amber alerts are largely ineffective, and most cases where they do result in a "missing" child being recovered involve custody disputes, rather than kidnappings by potential malefactors ...
CohibaVancouver opined:
To me, the biggest condemnation of Trump is not that he's ill-informed - Lots of people are ill-informed on lots of things - It's that he has little interest in actually becoming informed. Obama read for hours each night - Briefing papers, books - You name it. Trump reads nothing.
Sadly, it's actually worse than that.
It is quite clear that not only does Trump have, as you put it, "little interest" in becoming informed, but, instead, that he actively resists any attempt to provide him with information on subjects that trigger him.
It's also why he labells as "fake news" anything that displeases him. It's not that those things are factually inaccurate. It's that he just doesn't want to hear them ...
First of all, the term "AI" is kind of meaningless, unless it's distilled - for the purposes of argument - to a single definition that everyone in the discussion agrees will be the kind of AI they're prepared to discuss. I think that's essential, so we're not conflating Google's Duplex, for instance, with an AI of greater-than-human intelligence that has acquired the ability to alter its own programming, and make decisions based on criteria it develops itself.
For purposes of this discussion, I propose we agree that the subject is the latter sort of AI, and that the possible models it might evolve to resemble include: Skynet, Iain M. Banks' Shipminds (and, to a lesser extent, and Nick Haflinger's final worm from John Brunner's Shockwave Rider), or wide-eyed children, à la Mike from The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (and other end-period "the world as myth" Heinlein novels) or Thomas J. Ryan's P-1.
My own opinion, as a not-an-AI-researcher, is that, with the exception of Haflinger's worm, none of those types of AI could be constrained by Asimov's Laws - or by any other behavioral rules - because all of them are capable of independent thought, and, for lack of a better term, free will. (Or "agency," if you prefer.)
Humans demonstrably are capable of ignoring, or even deliberately flouting, both government-enacted laws and religion-based moral strictures (such as the Christian ten commandments), and they frequently do so. Any AI that is possessed of greater-than-human intelligence and is capable of independent decision-making obviously will have the same capability to act in ways contrary to literal "codes of conduct" that were part of its program at the time it was "born." So to speak.
So, to me, the question is ill-conceived to begin with. A better, and more useful one to ask might be, "How can we create the proper circumstances for a superintelligent AI to come to like us humans, and to want to help and protect us, before we expose it, as carefully and gently as possible, to the record of humanity's behavior since the dawn of recorded history. Not to mention Twitter trolls, political attack ads, and the then-current-day example of the strong exploiting the weak in almost every human society ... ?
arche, the pointed out:
Yes, there will be climate refugees, but it's cheaper to build a home on solid ground. Unless you really want your house floating around in a cat 4 or cat 5 hurricane...
FWIW: in the Pacific, they're called "typhoons" ...
Bing Tsher E noted:
'Atlas Shrugged' is more of a young adult novel.
(by the time you're 24 you have outgrown it)
I was 17 when I read it - and I had already outgrown it by then ...
ShanghaiBill observed:
Plenty of corporations start in the corrupt and greedy abyss right from the beginning. For instance, Microsoft never went through an "idealistic" phase. Oracle is another example of primordial slime.
I've never worked for Microsoft. It's certainly true, though, that Gates stole CPM from Gary Kildall, and (after modifying it to run on a then-incompatible filesystem) sold it to IBM, as PC-DOS, for mucho dinero. In spring of 1992, he screwed IBM, too, by buying up every floppy disk he could find, to delay OS/2 2.0's rollout, while Microsoft vacuumed up all the PR oxygen with Windows 3.1's much-ballyhooed release. On floppies. (Yes, OS/2 2.0 was released on 17 3/5" floppies - and you could get it in 5.25", as well. Eventually. But, from February 1992 through mid-July, you couldn't buy a box of floppies for love, money, or marbles, because Microsoft had purchased every manufacturer's entire output. And it was rare, in those days, for PC's to have CD drives, believe it or not.)
And it was interesting - in the ghoulish way passing a really bad accident on the freeway is interesing - to watch the collapse of IBM's otherwise-carefully-planned rollout of their vastly-superior OS. The panic in the IBM guys who came by our lab space at Wells steadily mounted, as the weeks since the official release date ticked by, and the continuing floppy shortage kept anyone but major potential customers (like Wells Fargo, where I was a senior technology analyst) from being able to get their hands on the darned thing anywhere but at IBM authorized dealers. And then only to kick the demo version around on the store's computers, not to buy a copy themselves. (In late March, our sales rep gave us an advance copy to evaluate, with the exhortation, "Take care of that. You probably won't see another one for quite a while." When I asked him if we could make a backup copy, he said, "Officially speaking, I should say 'No.' Unofficially, though, it's probably a good idea.")
Once upon a time, however, I did work for Orace. (As a contractor, rather than as a FTE.)
I had recently left Wells (this was at the end of 1992, before the swine who ran NationsBank ate them, jettisoned all the top execs I'd known, and assumed the Wells identity, even though it was a considerably smaller entity, because their own brand was absolute poison), and I naively believed that place had been a shark tank. I swiftly found out that Wells was full of mere guppies, instead. Oracle, by comparison, was a freakin' piranha swarm.
As just one example of the work environment at Oracle: I had set up a shared, $10,000 Tektronix Phaserjet, wax-transfer color printer for an Oracle sales department. (Cost of consumables? About two bucks a page, depending. Even the special, clay-surface paper was expensive. And the four, separate, rolls of wax-surface, color printing medium? Yikes!) One day they called me to say that it had stopped working, and one of their employees needed to be on a flight to Europe pronto, with color printouts of his Powerpoint deck in hand an absolute priority.
So I drove to Redwood Shores (which took nearly an hour), and, after visually inspecting the printer, determined that its power cable was missing. I substituted one from a nearby workstation (whose user was on a marketing trip to Asia, which meant he had no immediate need for it), and the marketing guy easily made his flight, 4-color printout in hand. Then I went looking for the missing power cable from the printer (which, with the Tektronix logo stamped on it, was pretty distinctive). I found it, too.
Some guy from another department (in a different silo on that same floor) had filched it to supply power to his personal laser printer - and then walked away, without replacing it, leaving an entire department that depended on the Phaserjet with no way to print its slides.
I confiscated the cable, of course, and took it ba
tinkerton sneered:
You despise him because you're an induhvidual eh. Apparently the idea is that if Assange is anything less than perfect we can easily betray him and your standards are so very high that everything Assange has contributed melts away when you consider the charges.
Actually, I despise the sonofabitch, too - and it has nothing whatsoever to do with his sex life.
Instead, it has everything to do with the contents of more than 11,000 Twitter DM's between Assange and a select group of "long term and reliable supporters" of Wikileaks that were leaked to The Intercept by a member of that group, and published on Valentine's day, 2018. (How's that for irony?)
Those DM's make it Waterford clear - in Assange's own words - that, far from being the neutral information broker he has always portrayed it as, Wikileaks always was, instead, an instrument designed to impose his own, personal agenda on the USA in particular, and the world, in general. It was - and is - engaged in a deliberate propaganda campaign to sway public opinion in favor of the Republican candidate in the 2016 presidential campaign, and in favor of Russia (as what Assange claims to be a necessary counterbalance to American influence on the international stage, a positive influence on the world, and, bizarrely, a weak - and helpless - victim of American covert tampering).
It's transparently obvious from even a cursory scan of the trove that Julian Assange is, at best, arrogantly delusional about how geopolitics works in the real world, is determinedly ignorant of how American domestic politics actually influences its international policies and actions, and is either grossly misinformed about, or is deliberately misleading his key financiers (because that's what, from context, his audience of "long term and reliable supporters" consists of) regarding the effectiveness of Vladimir Putin's covert operations to destabilize democracies not just in the USA, but globally, as well. Regardless of which is the case, in these DM's to his inner circle of "reliable" supporters - one of whom, I remind you, is unquestionably responsible for having leaked them to The Intercept - his determination to influence the USA's 2016 election against Hilary Clinton, and for Donald Trump is repeatedly, explicitly made clear (as is his belief, all historical evidence notwithstanding, that Democrats, rather than Republicans, are the primary authors of American global adventurism).
But, hey, don't take my word - or the Intercept's - for that. Instead, read their most germane Twitter DM's for yourself, and come to your own conclusions ...
Xest observed:
I've always found US customs officers decent, and UK customs officers nice on my return (albeit a little fucking dense), I've found Canadian customs officers to be universally complete arseholes in Ottawa and Montreal, but usually pretty nice in Toronto and Vancouver. Across the rest of the globe it's always been a mixed bag - nice and laid back in the Caribbean, corrupt and dodgy in Egypt for example.
Dude - "corrupt and dodgy" describes pretty much every employee of every Egyptian bureaucracy.
They've had more than 5,000 years to perfect bureaucratic corruption, after all, so it's hardly surprising that they've managed to refine it to such an exquisite degree ...
sabbede explained:
Drinking at a small bar on Long Island.
Where it's policy that they don't get to run a tab ...
dcollins117 confided:
Jesus exists. He's the Mexican fellow that mows my lawn.
Man. I wish I had mod points ...
Okian Warrior complained:
"everything else is tacked on to the president... why not this"
Prompting radarskiy to point out:
Because the incident that lead to this case took place on February 2, 2016.
It's almost as if it isn't universal to just blame everything on Trump, as some people actually pay attention to who could be responsible for the policy in question.
Yup.
And the policy in question goes back to the reaction by the first George W. Bush administration to the 9/11 attacks. In case you've forgotten, every vaguely-law-enforcement-related federal agency (except the FBI, which remains under the aegis of the Justice Department) was consolidated under a new Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. The new security behemoth was charged with protecting the USA from terrorist threats as its primary mission, and given essentially unlimited power to carry out that mission in pretty much whatever fashion the Director might fancy. (We also got the FBI's Security Letter authority in the same frenzy of shortsighted legislation, so it's not as though the general disregard of constitutional protections was exclusively confined to the DHS. But I digress.)
Obama gave the continued use of repressive and authoritarian actions - especially against foreign nationals from Middle Eastern and South and Central Asian countries - his blessing, and clamped down hard on whistleblowers from the intelligence intelligence community who spoke out against it, to boot.
Although I suspect that most of Obama's endorsement of such policies was based on the Daily Intelligence Briefing documents and presentations - which, I should note, Donald Trump notoriously avoids reading or paying attention to, unless they're couched in terms that flatter him (and only if they are heavy on photos and simple, colorful graphics) - which I assume contain information to which you and I are not now, and may never be privy.
Because Top Secret, Eyes Only is a classification that exists for perfectly valid reasons.
The thing is, despite what I regard as ill-advised (and largely party-line) endorsements of exceptions to constitutional protections by SCOTUS in the post-9/11 era, they also exist for reasons that are every bit as valid today as they were when the Bill of Rights was first ratified.
I think the Fourth Circuit's Appeals Court decision was a wise, and overdue, one. It encourages me that it dovetails so neatly with the Sixth's related decisions (because the decisions by the Sixth Circuit court are more frequently overrruled by the Roberts SCOTUS - as well as by the Rhenquist version - than those of any other circuit). It's about damned time the pendulum swung back toward bulwarking constitutionally-guaranteed protections, rather than breaching them still further.
IMsnHO, anyway ...
ELCouz pointed out:
From the article tweet:
Almost a year after WannaCry and there's still over a million SMB servers without auth exposed to the world. At least it looks like "only" 66k of them are running Windows
Samba is still using SMB v1 by default on many configurations for legacy purpose.
If I had points, this post would get a +1 Informative upmod.
I hope someone who has 'em agrees ...
drinkypoo opined:>/p>
NAV/SAV is extra-bad garbage. Even the corporate edition would just stop updating itself last time I had to deal with it. Also, their detection rate has never been very good.
I'll go farther than that:
Symantec's anti-virus products ARE malware.
They slow your machine down to a crawl. They interfere with basically any utility program you try to run. They prevent you from uninstalling THEM, if you let 'em. They keep you from being able to install all kinds of other software. They spy on you. And they're constantly trying to extort you into paying to extend your slavery to them, by pretending that something WORSE THAN SYMANTEC will happen to your computer, if you don't ...
Zaelath noted:
Yeah, but then.. Notepad++
Personally, I've used Alan Phillips' Programmer's File Editor in place of Notepad for almost 20 years now.
MS made it harder when they killed off support for the .hlp helpfile format, but there are ways around that - and, in addition to a pretty useful feature set, the program IS free, after all ...
ShanghaiBill opined:
Non-violent offenders do not belong in prison.
Prompting a courageous Anonymous Coward to respond:
Is that a reference to the poor persecuted drug users? At least when they are locked up, they are not pouring money into the Mexican drug cartels' pockets.
You really, really need to read Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sam Quinones' book Dreamland: The True Story of America's Opioid Epidemic. It's essentially the story of how Perdue Pharmaceuticals created the opioid epidemic in the USA by misrepresenting to the FDA, Congress, and doctors across the country how "harmless" prescribing powerful opiod narcotics was, even for chronic pain.
Based strictly on Perdue's bullshit, doctors - especially high school and college sports medicine doctors - prescribed amounts of Perdue's high-purity hydocodone medication high enough to guarantee addiction in athletes, housewives, and victims of trauma (auto accidents, falls, etc.) over long periods of time. When schools and insurance companies cut them off from those pharmaceutical sources, they turned in droves to Mexican brown heroin - which a whole new coop-style drug cartel operating out of the region around Xalisco supplied, using a fleet of drivers and a central dispatcher in each city they expanded into to bring the heroin to their customers with virtually zero risk of being caught making a deal.
Those drug addicts whose lives you so casually dismiss were almost all created by Perdue's lies, and multi-billion-dollar, direct-to-physicians marketing campaign. They're junkies, yes. But most of them are victims of deliberate pharmaceutical industry malfeasance, not deliberate actors.
Full disclosure: I have no affiliation with Sam Quinones, nor do I have any affiliate relationship with Amazon. If you buy his book via the above link, I get exactly zero dollars - or any other consideration - from the sale. (And you can get it from any other major bookseller, if you prefer not to make Jeff Bezos any richer, btw.) I simply believe it's essential reading for anyone who's interested in how the hell this country found itself in this mess to begin with, and who's responsible for getting us here ...
Bruce Perens commented:
I have recently seen a high-profile community project where a key engineer believed (among other things) women should be shielded and kept at home. This engineer, obviously, had conflicts with people in the organization. Actually maybe about 30 people. Eventually, the membership walked off en mass and founded their own project. The new project has essentially the same code of conduct we're discussing here.
You need rules on paper for when stuff like this happens. It helps make slippery stuff like who offended who and whether such offense is out of scope for the project a lot easier to decide.
Bruce, with all due respect, while I agree with your conclusion, that does not appear to me to be the basis of Mr. Espindola's objection to the recently-changed conditions at LLVM and his decision to leave the organization.
The quality of the writing in TFS is, as is not atypical for Slashdot, largely to blame for confusing the issue. Some of the comments above have included quotes from Mr. Espindola himself that make it clear his objection is more to LLVM's association with Outreachy than to its recently-adopted code of conduct per se. An objective reading of Outreachy's membership qualification statement makes it pellucidly clear that it is specifically constituted to discriminate against heterosexual males to the point that even those who enthusiastically support diversity outreach methods are barred from membership in the group.
The full text of his announcement includes this rather specific statement to that effect, which, naturally, appears nowhere in TFS or the parent article from which it's drawn:
The last drop was llvm associating itself with an organization that openly discriminates based on sex and ancestry. This goes directly against my ethical views and I think I must leave the project to not be associated with this.
LLVM's new code of conduct would seem to pre-emptively block him from even posting about his objection to that affiliation without being banned from the organization. I believe that's indefensible on its face - and I hope you do, too ...
https://slashdot.org/~davide+marney quoted Outreachy's membership qualifications statement thusly:
Outreachy Eligibility Rules>/p>
You must meet one of the following criteria:
You live any where in the world and you identify as a woman (cis or trans), trans man, or genderqueer person (including genderfluid or genderfree).
You live in the United States or you are a U.S. national or permanent resident living aboard, AND you are a person of any gender who is Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, Native American/American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander
Prompting XXongo to respond:
And you're aware that they were awarding one internship with this, right?
That's what set him off. One internship.
From previous posts, I gather that a paid internship position is at the heart of Mr. Espindola's objection to LLVM's affiliation with Outreachy. My question, then, is "which party will be paying for the intern?"
I ask, because it seems to me that, if Outreachy is providing the funding for the position, then Mr. Espindola has no pragmatic basis for objection, on the principle that "He that pays the piper calls the tune." OTOH, if LLVM itself is bearing the cost, then his objection to the organization itself behaving in a discriminatory fashion is fully justified.
On the surface, if an outside group has offered to fund a paid internship (as long as the chosen candidate is sufficiently competent and knowlegeable about the main organization's area of specialization to actually contribute to the project, rather than impede it, because he/she requires excessive handholding by what would otherwise be productive members of the community), it seems reasonable to ask that everybody else just accept the new intern's help, and focus on writing great code.
OTOH, suppose for a moment that the sponsoring, outside organization were, say, a white nationalist group. Would it then still be unreasonable for Mr. Espindola to object to LLVM's affiliation with it, even if none of that organization's own funds were involved? (That's a purposefully-extreme example, which I chose to illustrate the fact that Mr. Espindola's objection actually does seem to me to be on grounds of principle, rather than being a reflection of his personal attitude toward objectively-disadvantaged classes. It is, after all, beyond question that Outreachy's membership qualifications are actively discriminatory - the fact that they discriminate in favor of disadvantaged classes notwithstanding.)
Basically, this seems to boil down to a case of pragmatism vs principles. Mr. Espindola appears to espouse the latter over the former - and I don't think he's wrong to do so, nor do I see room to criticize his priorities. But, perhaps there's some nuance (or even some fundamental principle) that I'm overlooking here, despite the fact that I don't personally have any stake in either this dispute or the organization at its center ... ?
(Full disclosure: I strongly object to both social and workplace discrimination on any basis, whether it's racial, ethnic, religious, or sex- and/or sexual identity-based. However, I am not a developer. Until TFS caught my eye, I had no inkling that Mr. Espindola, LLVM, or Outreachy existed - and, because TFS is so poorly written, I still have zero idea exactly what LLVM focuses on, or why I should care. I get that it's an open-source development project - I just don't know what the heck it's developing, because TFS simply assumes that any reader already knows that. And, sans that crucial, missing information, I find it impossible to give enough of a damn even to bother googling it.)
... that this Georgia statute-in-waiting could potentially be held to be superceded by 18 U.S. Code 1030 (the section added by the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986).
CFAA specifically covers unauthorized access to U.S. government computers and computers belonging to or containing information belonging to a "financial organization" - although that definition, in practice, has been considerably stretched charges brought in a number of criminal cases. That broadening of its applicability could, I suspect, theoretically cause an appeal of any conviction under the yet-to-be-enacted Georgia law to be upheld on grounds that it represents an unwarranted overreach by Georgia.
OTOH, IANAL, and how Federal courts might react is going to guesswork on anybody's part (including actual lawyers, and people who play them on TV), until it's both signed into law and challenged at the Federal level ...
foxalopex posited:
I'm going to assume this has something to do with generic drugs? I guess drug companies in the US are more concerned about making a buck than actually helping people. In Canada, most essential drugs have a generic or no-name equivalent which is often cheaper than the brand name drug and works just as well. I sure hope that isn't their complaint because that particular law makes drugs cheaper for the folks who need it.
That's certainly part of it. Their Supreme Court's intolerance of patent abuse, and its willingness to punish it appropriately is, I suspect, also a non-trivial consideration ...
religionofpeas remonstrated:
Even theoretically, you cannot transfer information faster than light.
If you consider a wavefront to be "information," then, in at least one specific instance, the Universe begs to differ ...
Lanthanide misspoke:
Entangled particles vibrate/spin/whatever the same way. You don't know what that way of movement is until you measure it. When you measure A and discover it to be spinning clockwise (or whatever), then you also know that B is spinning clockwise. Both A and B were spinning clockwise from the time they were entangled, there is no "change" involved, just the fact that measuring the spin of A lets you also know the spin of B.
Err ... no.
Your explanation is exactly backwards (see the second paragraph). Quantum-entangled electron pairs spin in opposite directions, not "the same way." Determine the spin of one, and you know the other spins the opposite way.
That's not how entanglement works.
Hey, at least you got that right ...
In response to my statement:
The original pronunciation of the name of the planet's eponymous Greek god almost undoubtedly was "oo-ran-os" (with the stress on the initial syllable), rather than "your-uh-nuss."
Ecuador replied:
Almost correct. The Greek pronunciation would be "oo-rah-NOS" with the stress on the last syllable. Perhaps also "oy-rah-NOS" in early Classical or pre-Classical (AFAIK we are not very sure when diphthongs started being pronounced they way they are in Koine Greek for example).
You may be correct. The fact is that we do not know how the Greeks of the Hellenic period pronounced the word - much less the earlier, Helladic pronunciation. And how the aboriginal inhabitants of the Attic peninsula (whose god Uranos most likely was) pronounced it, before the Doric invasion syncretized their chthonic deities with the invaders' aero-montane pantheon to create the mythic menagerie presented most famously in Hesiod's Theogeny is pretty much anybody's guess.
If only the Hellenes had had freakin' Soundcloud, we wouldn't have to guess ...
Patrick Moore used to avoid this problem by pronouncing it your-uh-nuss, with the stress on the first syllable.
The original pronunciation of the name of the planet's eponymous Greek god almost undoubtedly was "oo-ran-os" (with the stress on the initial syllable), rather than "your-uh-nuss." The latter pronunciation is an artifact of British public school conventions, not authentic, classical Greek ones. (The Brits tend to Romanize both the English spelling and pronunciation of Greek words in general, and names in particular ... )
john of sparta inquired:
did you get it Wholesale?
Someone with points mod parent +1 Funny (for subtle PKD reference), please ...