It isn't. Ignoring the fact that you're a chimera and a mosaic, which means you can have multiple combinations of those, we know from genetic genealogy that 111 markers will be sufficient to uniquely identify the group that comprises every relative up to three steps away (so third cousins, great grandparents, etc).
You'd need far, far more markers to uniquely identify you. And that's useless as your DNA will last up to a million years. Cross-contamination means that unless you can identify how old the DNA is, having the DNA tells you nothing.
(You CAN actually obtain that information, but the standard consumer systems aren't nearly high enough resolution. You'd need full genome sequences from multiple collection spots across the body, plus sequencing of the sample, for that. At roughly $10,000 a pop, plus borrowing a computer powerful enough to determine the point of intercept from the nearest sample, you're looking at more than most police departments have in budget even for coffee and doughnuts. Most crime labs just aren't clean enough or well equipt enough to do such work, they're low-budget hack jobs designed to make a quick buck.)
And then all you'd have is a sample that matches you. Remember, the sample just has an anonymous ID. There's nothing in the testing system's database that links that ID up to your name.
Can the police use it? No, the markers consumer-grade labs collect are not compatible with any police database markers. They look for different things at different points on the genome. Zero overlap and there's nothing they could do to fix it because of the way microarrays work.
If you have an education system with N parameters, with each parameter weighted according to its contribution to how well educated a child will become, then optimize according to those weights, you will produce a better output than if you deoptimize along those same N parameters. That would seem to be the definition of optimize. The question is, what are the parameters and what are the weights? You can't weight everything 100%, your total weight comes to 100%.
Answer that and you (a) answer your question, (b) produce far better results in schools, and (c) achieve whirled peas.
We know that farming is highly inefficient on resources. An estimated 95% of people died from starvation or injury in the transition from the mesolithic to the neolithic, due to the fact that you have to work a lot harder with a much higher risk of getting nothing. That is why larger communities developed. Even though individuals and families had a low probability of surviving, a village had much better odds. It required a leader and distribution of what was produced, but it worked.
After the advent of cooking 1.8 million years ago, most hominids spent a lot of time not hunting or gathering. That is how culture, technology and language arose.
As noted in my previous post, that does depend. There are companies that offer flexitime and there are cultures that are highly successful outside the UK/US paradigm. Flexible hours and a good work culture improves competitiveness and some countries are cashing in on that.
Now, if you want to stay in the US, you have to live by US rules. Same with the UK. And most companies are rigid and, well, I wouldn't call it medieval as some Japanese and European corporations have operated successfully from 900 AD until the present. Clearly there were attitudes from back then obviously worked on competitiveness. Nonetheless, there is a certain feudal aspect to it, and indeed that's where most clock development came from - feudal organizations wanting to manage the time of others as much as possible.
If you live in such a world, you have to play by those rules, however inefficient they are. And they are inefficient.
If you want to play by different rules, you've got to find a country that plays by them, a job that is economic to hold there, and a way to be accepted.
Yes, that is how the world works. Problem is, it's inefficient. Which means that whichever company stops working like that first will out-compete those who don't. I work to the real world's schedule, but it's the schedule set by nations with a failing economy that can't keep up with those who work differently. I don't demand that the real world accommodate me, unlike the grandparent post, but I do keep my eye on those who have adapted and evolved. If I can find a way to fit in with THEM, then I'll move. I owe no country and no culture loyalty. It works or it doesn't.
In the first place, then none of this would have been an issue. It's no bloody wonder Microsoft no longer sells software, only licenses, because they'd get sued under the lemon laws. This is grossly incompetent on their part.
Can you write an OS, cleanly, that is secure against CPU bugs? Yes, yes you can. You design the code properly and then you do this thing that is quite remarkable. You write a full set of tests.
But what if you don't know about the specific bug? Why should you have to? A bug, by definition, involves behaviour that falls outside the specification of behaviour. If your specification says that if you perform the task x, the information y is not visible at point z, and you find it is visible, you have a bug.
But we know from the antitrust case that Microsoft has no specification, no documented API, no set behaviours and minimal testing. And this is why their software failed on the bug, and this is why their patch failed on the bug. (In case people have forgotten, back in the old days standard policy was to NEVER install odd-numbered service packs because they had too many bugs.)
Linux also messed up on these kernel bugs. This is because there's inadequate documentation and inadequate testing outside of actual use. This means that Linux has very very few bugs along active pathways. It averages 1/10th the defect density of commercial software, impressive by any count. Since active pathways are actively and thoroughly tested, the defect density along those will be far far lower still. The bugs will be off the regular beaten path and that's why Linux fell foul.
It should not have fallen foul, since the solution is pretty much the solution people have been using to secure against all kinds of direct access attacks for at least 20 years now.
However, there's also a difference. Because of the Linux development model, the most you could do is hire testers and technical writers. Some vendors already do. The defect density can be reduced further but you have diminishing returns.
With closed-source cathedral software like Microsoft's Windows, defects are a choice for the bulk of it. Turing's Halting Problem applies to certain types of programming, not to all types. You can place all the unprovable software into a single non-critical component. And, yes, a lack of security is a defect. Windows is defective by design, by choice, because it's more profitable to sell crap to you repeatedly than to get it right. There's no consequences for getting it wrong.
OpenBSD complained that the disclosure was done stupidly. Maybe so, I want to know why anything exploitable was laid out in a highly exploitable way. That doesn't sound terribly secure. Why should there be anything positionally-dependent anywhere, given that we've always known CPUs are improperly tested - one of the first things most of us learned in CS was not to trust the CPU would get it right and also to validate the results by looking at them rather than looking at the code generating them.
Would this push the cost up? Yes. It would mean instead of a mountain of e-waste and smart devices nobody wants to be smart, you'd have rather fewer devices that WORKED.
Facebook has servers in Europe. So does Microsoft. So do a lot of companies. That data is subject to the DPA. Being an American company is irrelevant, we had this out with the US tax people wanting Microsoft's data. Do try and keep up.
Then you've (a) never used a DNA service, (b) never bothered to look up what the police DNA database uses (clue - it's incompatible), (c) don't understand DNA.
You cannot de-anonymize the results, don't give me that crap.
The fact that you can find a criminal pretending to offer a service (and apparently those are the circles you work in) does not make any difference to the status of legitimate services.
DNA cannot be abused.
I probably know more about the last two decades than you do. I certainly know more about what is being done and what can be done.
Yes, I know that's satire, but there are a few things that people might worry about.
Only partially for hair colour. I'm something like 75% brown-haired, 20% red-haired, 5% black-haired. What's law enforcement going to do with that? "Someone who may or may not have hair, which may or may not be absolutely anything at all" is not much of a fit. Epigenetics and diet can alter the ratios. Similar problems exist for eye colour.
Race is falsified by DNA. You carry mutations from just about every human (and several non-human) races.
Height and weight, hmmm, if the diet is good then you can determine both from DNA, which rules out everyone in America and Britain.
Birth date is probably the one trait in the list that could potentially be derived unambiguously from DNA, but it would require a fair amount of DNA and it would require the most expensive tests possible.
The DNA evidence they get constitutes 12 markers that aren't included in ANY of the DNA tests provided off the shelf. It's also so thoroughly discredited, because too few markers are used, that it has virtually no legal value any more.
The only way Microsoft could reorganize properly is if they split vertically. The only way they could improve is by a total rewrite using decent coding standards and published APIs. None of which is likely under any administration.
They don't have to. The multiple layers of anonymizing means nobody can provide anything useful. Besides which, there's nothing in there the government can use.
Paranoia is a psychiatric disorders, not a political stance.
Well, annoying Britain means a likely complaint to the data protection people in Europe, which means a potential billion dollar fine from the EU or a permanent ban across the entire continent. The EU takes data protection seriously (unlike America) but won't generally take action unless a nation state complains. Until Britain leaves, it's a nation state the EU would take seriously.
And that's pretty much the thought process that drove my design. An uber-dumb packet forwarder can't be hacked and has the lowest possible latency. You can plug an ultra-dumb firewall in front and have a router module that sits sideways on that figures out how packets are to be forwarded. By being sideways, it isn't directly addressed by anything. If it falls over, oh well, it takes out nothing and delays nothing as it reboots. One module, one function, independent of all other modules. Everything is nice, everything is simple, I can add new modules as I think of new things and not a single one of those new modules will add complexity to anything that's there.
The design uses Linux where Linux is appropriate, SEL4 where Linux is too complex. I considered using BareMetal OS, because I don't need levels of reliability in anything I just want minimum latency, but decided learning one new API at my advanced age was enough.
The chief problem is that everyone wants an all-in-one router, no modules, no mess, that has a single CPU that does absolutely everything and that allows admins to log in from any port. I've built routers that are a lot more secure than that, but I'm not convinced there's a market for them.
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It isn't. Ignoring the fact that you're a chimera and a mosaic, which means you can have multiple combinations of those, we know from genetic genealogy that 111 markers will be sufficient to uniquely identify the group that comprises every relative up to three steps away (so third cousins, great grandparents, etc).
You'd need far, far more markers to uniquely identify you. And that's useless as your DNA will last up to a million years. Cross-contamination means that unless you can identify how old the DNA is, having the DNA tells you nothing.
(You CAN actually obtain that information, but the standard consumer systems aren't nearly high enough resolution. You'd need full genome sequences from multiple collection spots across the body, plus sequencing of the sample, for that. At roughly $10,000 a pop, plus borrowing a computer powerful enough to determine the point of intercept from the nearest sample, you're looking at more than most police departments have in budget even for coffee and doughnuts. Most crime labs just aren't clean enough or well equipt enough to do such work, they're low-budget hack jobs designed to make a quick buck.)
And then all you'd have is a sample that matches you. Remember, the sample just has an anonymous ID. There's nothing in the testing system's database that links that ID up to your name.
Can the police use it? No, the markers consumer-grade labs collect are not compatible with any police database markers. They look for different things at different points on the genome. Zero overlap and there's nothing they could do to fix it because of the way microarrays work.
It's more accurate to say that as Americans like to argue, all arguments are US-centric.
If you have an education system with N parameters, with each parameter weighted according to its contribution to how well educated a child will become, then optimize according to those weights, you will produce a better output than if you deoptimize along those same N parameters. That would seem to be the definition of optimize. The question is, what are the parameters and what are the weights? You can't weight everything 100%, your total weight comes to 100%.
Answer that and you (a) answer your question, (b) produce far better results in schools, and (c) achieve whirled peas.
If you survived childhood, then the average lifespan in the Bronze Age was 72.
We know that farming is highly inefficient on resources. An estimated 95% of people died from starvation or injury in the transition from the mesolithic to the neolithic, due to the fact that you have to work a lot harder with a much higher risk of getting nothing. That is why larger communities developed. Even though individuals and families had a low probability of surviving, a village had much better odds. It required a leader and distribution of what was produced, but it worked.
After the advent of cooking 1.8 million years ago, most hominids spent a lot of time not hunting or gathering. That is how culture, technology and language arose.
As noted in my previous post, that does depend. There are companies that offer flexitime and there are cultures that are highly successful outside the UK/US paradigm. Flexible hours and a good work culture improves competitiveness and some countries are cashing in on that.
Now, if you want to stay in the US, you have to live by US rules. Same with the UK. And most companies are rigid and, well, I wouldn't call it medieval as some Japanese and European corporations have operated successfully from 900 AD until the present. Clearly there were attitudes from back then obviously worked on competitiveness. Nonetheless, there is a certain feudal aspect to it, and indeed that's where most clock development came from - feudal organizations wanting to manage the time of others as much as possible.
If you live in such a world, you have to play by those rules, however inefficient they are. And they are inefficient.
If you want to play by different rules, you've got to find a country that plays by them, a job that is economic to hold there, and a way to be accepted.
Yes, that is how the world works. Problem is, it's inefficient. Which means that whichever company stops working like that first will out-compete those who don't. I work to the real world's schedule, but it's the schedule set by nations with a failing economy that can't keep up with those who work differently. I don't demand that the real world accommodate me, unlike the grandparent post, but I do keep my eye on those who have adapted and evolved. If I can find a way to fit in with THEM, then I'll move. I owe no country and no culture loyalty. It works or it doesn't.
External CPUs and GPUs have been around since the mid 1980s. Most were unpopular or unusable.
In the first place, then none of this would have been an issue. It's no bloody wonder Microsoft no longer sells software, only licenses, because they'd get sued under the lemon laws. This is grossly incompetent on their part.
Can you write an OS, cleanly, that is secure against CPU bugs? Yes, yes you can. You design the code properly and then you do this thing that is quite remarkable. You write a full set of tests.
But what if you don't know about the specific bug? Why should you have to? A bug, by definition, involves behaviour that falls outside the specification of behaviour. If your specification says that if you perform the task x, the information y is not visible at point z, and you find it is visible, you have a bug.
But we know from the antitrust case that Microsoft has no specification, no documented API, no set behaviours and minimal testing. And this is why their software failed on the bug, and this is why their patch failed on the bug. (In case people have forgotten, back in the old days standard policy was to NEVER install odd-numbered service packs because they had too many bugs.)
Linux also messed up on these kernel bugs. This is because there's inadequate documentation and inadequate testing outside of actual use. This means that Linux has very very few bugs along active pathways. It averages 1/10th the defect density of commercial software, impressive by any count. Since active pathways are actively and thoroughly tested, the defect density along those will be far far lower still. The bugs will be off the regular beaten path and that's why Linux fell foul.
It should not have fallen foul, since the solution is pretty much the solution people have been using to secure against all kinds of direct access attacks for at least 20 years now.
However, there's also a difference. Because of the Linux development model, the most you could do is hire testers and technical writers. Some vendors already do. The defect density can be reduced further but you have diminishing returns.
With closed-source cathedral software like Microsoft's Windows, defects are a choice for the bulk of it. Turing's Halting Problem applies to certain types of programming, not to all types. You can place all the unprovable software into a single non-critical component. And, yes, a lack of security is a defect. Windows is defective by design, by choice, because it's more profitable to sell crap to you repeatedly than to get it right. There's no consequences for getting it wrong.
OpenBSD complained that the disclosure was done stupidly. Maybe so, I want to know why anything exploitable was laid out in a highly exploitable way. That doesn't sound terribly secure. Why should there be anything positionally-dependent anywhere, given that we've always known CPUs are improperly tested - one of the first things most of us learned in CS was not to trust the CPU would get it right and also to validate the results by looking at them rather than looking at the code generating them.
Would this push the cost up? Yes. It would mean instead of a mountain of e-waste and smart devices nobody wants to be smart, you'd have rather fewer devices that WORKED.
Facebook has servers in Europe. So does Microsoft. So do a lot of companies. That data is subject to the DPA. Being an American company is irrelevant, we had this out with the US tax people wanting Microsoft's data. Do try and keep up.
Then you've (a) never used a DNA service, (b) never bothered to look up what the police DNA database uses (clue - it's incompatible), (c) don't understand DNA.
You cannot de-anonymize the results, don't give me that crap.
The fact that you can find a criminal pretending to offer a service (and apparently those are the circles you work in) does not make any difference to the status of legitimate services.
DNA cannot be abused.
I probably know more about the last two decades than you do. I certainly know more about what is being done and what can be done.
Yes, I know that's satire, but there are a few things that people might worry about.
Only partially for hair colour. I'm something like 75% brown-haired, 20% red-haired, 5% black-haired. What's law enforcement going to do with that? "Someone who may or may not have hair, which may or may not be absolutely anything at all" is not much of a fit. Epigenetics and diet can alter the ratios. Similar problems exist for eye colour.
Race is falsified by DNA. You carry mutations from just about every human (and several non-human) races.
Height and weight, hmmm, if the diet is good then you can determine both from DNA, which rules out everyone in America and Britain.
Birth date is probably the one trait in the list that could potentially be derived unambiguously from DNA, but it would require a fair amount of DNA and it would require the most expensive tests possible.
The DNA evidence they get constitutes 12 markers that aren't included in ANY of the DNA tests provided off the shelf. It's also so thoroughly discredited, because too few markers are used, that it has virtually no legal value any more.
The only way Microsoft could reorganize properly is if they split vertically. The only way they could improve is by a total rewrite using decent coding standards and published APIs. None of which is likely under any administration.
Understand that the only useful ancestral data are the YDNA and mtdna haplogroups, and that health data is 90% for the researchers.
They don't have to. The multiple layers of anonymizing means nobody can provide anything useful. Besides which, there's nothing in there the government can use.
Paranoia is a psychiatric disorders, not a political stance.
Data Protection Act, both the British and European versions.
Sensible people have wanted the UN to take over the Internet, because countries mess it up all the time.
Well, annoying Britain means a likely complaint to the data protection people in Europe, which means a potential billion dollar fine from the EU or a permanent ban across the entire continent. The EU takes data protection seriously (unlike America) but won't generally take action unless a nation state complains. Until Britain leaves, it's a nation state the EU would take seriously.
And that's pretty much the thought process that drove my design. An uber-dumb packet forwarder can't be hacked and has the lowest possible latency. You can plug an ultra-dumb firewall in front and have a router module that sits sideways on that figures out how packets are to be forwarded. By being sideways, it isn't directly addressed by anything. If it falls over, oh well, it takes out nothing and delays nothing as it reboots. One module, one function, independent of all other modules. Everything is nice, everything is simple, I can add new modules as I think of new things and not a single one of those new modules will add complexity to anything that's there.
The design uses Linux where Linux is appropriate, SEL4 where Linux is too complex. I considered using BareMetal OS, because I don't need levels of reliability in anything I just want minimum latency, but decided learning one new API at my advanced age was enough.
You're anonymous so I won't bother with more than the slight mocking laugh.
The chief problem is that everyone wants an all-in-one router, no modules, no mess, that has a single CPU that does absolutely everything and that allows admins to log in from any port. I've built routers that are a lot more secure than that, but I'm not convinced there's a market for them.
Give me something that doesn't leak memory, drain the CPU of its blood and has a decent footprint.
Because it's safer than walking next to them?
Or maybe because some people really care about good art and cosplay is excellent art.
One LARP group in Britain had to close down because too many members were hired by film studios to work on costuming.