This is the kind of retaliation that seems to fit the North Korean mold. It doesn't matter if they did it themselves or had someone else do it for them.
There seem to be two general styles of politically motivated hacking. One is the NSA/CIA style: the goal is to get as much information as quietly as possible. One of the things that the Snowden/Manning leaks revealed is how extensively the NSA was able to do this.
The other style is the highly visible attack. This is the kind of thing that the Syrian Electronic Army engages in. Much of what they do is intended to be high profile whether they claim responsibility or not.
Despotic leaders like Assad and Kim Jong-il want to see damage and humiliation inflicted on their enemies. It's fundamental to their political strategy. They do this internally to victims of their regimes and externally to their foes.
Rationally it doesn't make much sense for North Korea to waste this kind of capability on a single company. That kind of activity would be better used on a strategic target, say a western defense company or infrastructure in South Korea. (There have been attacks on South Korean banks that fit this description.) But Kim Jong-il is not a rational leader. Atacking Sony because of a perceived personal insult seem just like the kind of thing he would do.
There are plenty of examples of "bad behavior" on Slashdot. I've been accused of this myself, for not being "polite". So it seems obvious that it's only a matter of time until someone in London figures out that collectively Slashdot is a "bad influence" and it gets banned.
Which side won the Cold War again? Oh yeah, "Ignorance is Strength". That side.
The predominant native US movements using terrorist tactics are all right wing. Assassinating doctors at medical clinics providing abortion services. The truck bomb attack in Oklahoma City against a federal office building. The threats against BLM officials in Nevada and Utah. Militia movements./a> Posse Comitatus threatening violence to government officials.
Left wing violence is a thing of the past. You're flogging a dead horse. Environmental extremism is nowhere near the levels it was in the 70's through the mid 80's. When Greenpeace goes out and makes trouble it's not in the US, it's going against Japanese whaling ships. They may get funding from the US, but not doing much to get arrested here.
There are no radioactive scorpions with commie mind control venom lurking under your house. Maybe if you were taking the right meds the paranoia would abate and you would not live in such a distorted and fearful universe. It might even be simpler then taking prescription drugs. For a first step, try leaving your parents basement and watch something else besides Fox News. At least it would be a change...
People in southern California need help to stop fracking in earthquake prone areas, which is pretty much the entire southern end of the state. The oil companies have a lot of money to spend on local politicians to get fracking approved, so maybe it's time to get some help from a guy who really cares about the well-being of people around the world, Vlad (The Impaler) Putin.
Clearly oil companies don't give a rat's ass about the effects of oil extraction (can you say DeepWater Horizon?), so it just makes sense to find allies wherever you can. Given the Supreme Court ruling on non-disclosure of unlimited political contributions, it should be a snap to get Russian money into US politics. It's not like big business in the US has any national affiliation (Apple/Google paying no taxes), so why not get foreign funding? It's not that big a step from what corporations are doing already.
You've got it completely backwards. Sony has lost a vast amount of credibility and trust, and it will take a long long time to get it back.
As you yourself said, "their connections, the power they have to move the industry" carry a lot of weight. A lot of people inside and outside Sony could have their reputations ruined by these leaks. The film industry is full of gossip and jealousy, and people often say things in private that can be incendiary if they get loose. If someone with big clout is offended, a lot of current and future deals could go out the window. Grudges are real, and can last a lifetime.
And even non-bigwigs can be wrecked. Suppose someone takes time off, or has other issues from stress and uses prescription medication as a result. This could easily end up in personal records. This gets out, and that person could find themselves unemployable anywhere. Not even able to get a minimum wage job in retail or fast food, much less the entertainment industry. Remember, there are a lot of show hires and workers are transient, so there are a lot of ex-employees with records at Sony.
Sony could be on the hook for a huge class actions suit, particularly if you consider ex-employees. No matter how long ago it was, if you name shows up online as a result of this breach you have a valid reason to sue.
And Sony is not a well regarded company in Hollywood. They are known for squeezing the life out of people and then giving them the boot. They routinely have layoffs while they are advertising for new hires. (Everyone in Hollywood does this, but Sony is a prime example.)
They keep a few people around but nobody lasts because it's cheaper, and transient workers are no threat to bad upper (or middle) management. Bad practice can be hidden if there is no one around to complain or remind anyone of previous mistakes. (Just ask anyone who has been cycled through Disney about this.)
Given the combination of ill will and a lot of ex-workers, don't be surprised when the civil actions start. Sony doesn't have a leg to stand on, particularly on personal records. They had no partitioned networks/systems, no encryption, and didn't detect the breach until they were screwed. It's going to be just like drug lawsuits: there will be multiple late night commercials fishing for anyone who worked at Sony to join in.
Hollywood is a schadenfreude kind of town. There will be a lot of movie industry types who will derive a lot of satisfaction from watching Sony suffer mightily because of this.
In the most recent election, there were 10 or so elected judge positions. Each had 3 or 4 candidates. Of the total candidates, over 50% listed their occupation as "Gang prosecutor", or a similar phrase. Because the only thing judges ever do is hear cases about gangs, or so one might think. No traffic court, no civil litigation, no other criminal cases. Only gangs.
It's simple: quantity over quality. And because they can. Beyond that, if they can get funding, they (NSA/BND/etc) will do it, because spying is what they do. They need no other reason.
Of course the practical result is that they spend so many resources spying on the masses that they are incapable of doing anything else well. For example, they have the meta data on a large percentage of all the phone calls in the world, but they were caught flat footed by the rise of ISIS in Syria. If they spent 1/100 of the time and money wasted on tapping everyone's phone on doing the hard human intelligence in places like Syria, the world would be a better place.
So ultimately we are all demonstrably less safe because of the huge time and attention sinkhole of mass surveillance. Not to mention the cost and threat to democracy. All you need is know the history of the FBI to realize that illegal spying on civilians will inevitability lead to abuse of that information. We'll find out about the current abuses in 20-30 years, after the bad actors have retired or died, and it's too late to do anything for the victims. For example, the full text of the letter from the FBI to MLK trying to get him to commit suicide was just released a month or so ago.
Every time I post under this title I get modded down to -1,000,000. So what? I'm right, and tearing out a book page, or voting down reality is just a form of political masturbation. I'm going to continue saying this every time I see Republicans choosing to be stupid. Not opposing vile behavior is giving up.
Researchers from Stanford demonstrated in 2005 how to generate an image of a scene from the point of view of the light source instead of the camera. It's called dual photography, and has some similarities to the single pixel technique.
We present a novel photographic technique called dual photography, which exploits Helmholtz reciprocity to interchange the lights and cameras in a scene. With a video projector providing structured illumination, reciprocity permits us to generate pictures from the viewpoint of the projector, even though no camera was present at that location. The technique is completely image-based, requiring no knowledge of scene geometry or surface properties, and by its nature automatically includes all transport paths, including shadows, interreflections and caustics. In its simplest form, the technique can be used to take photographs without a camera; we demonstrate this by capturing a photograph using a projector and a photo-resistor. If the photo-resistor is replaced by a camera, we can produce a 4D dataset that allows for relighting with 2D incident illumination.
It exploits Helmholtz reciprocity to swap the camera view with the light view. If light is modeled as rays/photons, the path between the light source and a camera pixel is the same going from the light to the pixel, or the pixel to the light. Hence reciprocity.
Yes, Mr. ShashDot Pundit. You're absolutely right.
You are so smart and they are so dumb. it's guaranteed that they spent no time doing any calculations about this. Every engineer they have has never even seen the ocean, only designed stuff on paper/computers in nice clean rooms. They've never run any simulations, or done any physical testing at all, because all engineers just know that complex new things always work perfectly the first time.
So just call them and talk to the receptionist, or send them an email and tell them about your brilliant insight. I'm sure that once they hear your detailed criticism it will bring their foolish scheme to a screeching halt. At the very least they will give up, or see the light and appoint you the head honcho. Only your fantastically sharp mind can save them.
H.R. 1422, which passed 229-191, would shake up the EPA’s Scientific Advisory Board, placing restrictions on those pesky scientists and creating room for experts with overt financial ties to the industries affected by EPA regulations.
The bill is being framed as a play for transparency: Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, argued that the board’s current structure is problematic because it “excludes industry experts, but not officials for environmental advocacy groups.” The inclusion of industry experts, he said, would right this injustice.
But the White House, which threatened to veto the bill, said it would “negatively affect the appointment of experts and would weaken the scientific independence and integrity of the SAB.”
In what might be the most ridiculous aspect of the whole thing, the bill forbids scientific experts from participating in “advisory activities” that either directly or indirectly involve their own work. In case that wasn’t clear: experts would be forbidden from sharing their expertise in their own research — the bizarre assumption, apparently, being that having conducted peer-reviewed studies on a topic would constitute a conflict of interest. “In other words,” wrote Union of Concerned Scientists director Andrew A. Rosenberg in an editorial for RollCall, “academic scientists who know the most about a subject can’t weigh in, but experts paid by corporations who want to block regulations can.”
You've got it backwards. For the most part those with serious schizophrenia (and other mental disorders) are not so much of a threat because they are so mentally disorganized.
The people who are the real problems are "normal", but use religion as an excuse for their bad behavior, or those who follow religion so blindly that they do bad things because of group pressure.
England should immediately ban people from communicating with one another in any way, shape, manor or form. No talking, no writing, no sign language, no winks, nods, frowns or smiles.
No facial expression allowed, because the terrorists might win!!!
They need mandatory unisex berkas with built in sound proofing. That's how to protect western values of freedom, by wrapping everyone up in a shroud and making them shut the fuck up. That will show those radical scum they can't push England around. Freedom!
In more detail, let me modify one of your key sentences: "what's good for the corrupt oligarchs may not be the same as what's good for the country." Fixed that for you.
Impoverishing US workers will not "juice the success of domestic tech companies which, in the long run, may actually be better for the U.S. as a whole". One that happens it will be hard as hell to bootstrap back to an overall high standard of living in the US. Just how stupid are you to even think that?
And then there is the issue that tech workers are just the latest group to be thrown under the bus in the name of short term greed.
Here's an example of how it's done. At one point construction and industrial jobs like meat packing were all unionized. Then the unions were broken and the jobs were filled by immigrant labor. That's why there are now large numbers of Spanish speaking non-documented workers in the Midwest, for example. It's not that native US workers are not good workers, it's that the employers don't want them because they want semi-slaves. They want workers who will put up with anything, including having their wages stolen or being maimed on the job and not being able to do anything about it.
For tech workers the plan is slightly more complex. First, offshore as many jobs as possible. Second, import as many non-citizen workers as possible. Third, flood the market with a bunch of severely under-trained "coders", like Zuckerberg and his co-conspirators are attempting with code.org. Having a vast army of unemployed makes anyone with a job completely fearful and willing to settle for crumbs.
So the US middle class is destroyed? Do you think that any of the rich care? Remember what Romney said during the election. He thinks that half of Americans are scum. As far as he and his ilk are concerned, if you don't do well it's all your fault. The reality is that he and his type profit from eliminating jobs in the US. They do well by making the rest of us do poorly, and they then have the gall to blame us for not being good enough.
I guess you think that you're immune, or perhaps you want to be a serf. You sure don't seem like someone who want to work and prosper in their own country. What's wrong with you?
Event though the Slashdot Pundits are clueless about the utility of such a simulation, it has real significance.
There is nothing like having the experience of another persons problems to make you more thoughtful and sympathetic. Even if someone like Tyra Banks shallowly exploits homelessness for a day, the principle still holds.
For a real world example of how vicious someone can be about a disease like Parkinson's, just look at what Rush Limbaugh did to Michael J. Fox:
In October 2006 Limbaugh said Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, had exaggerated the effects of his affliction in political TV ad advocating for funding of stem cell research. Limbaugh said that Fox in the ad had been "shameless" in "moving all around and shaking", and Fox had not taken "his medication or he's acting, one of the two". Fox said "the irony of it is I was too medicated", adding that there was no way to predict how his symptoms would manifest. Limbaugh said he would apologize to Fox "bigley and hugely...if I am wrong in characterizing his behavior on this commercial as an act". In 2012, Fox said Limbaugh in 2006 had acted on "bullying instincts" when "he said I faked it. I didn't fake it", and said Limbaugh's goal was to have him marginalized and shut down for his stem cell stance.
I would bet that anyone who had the simulated experience would never make that kind of odious claim against someone else. For example if kids in school were exposed to the effect they would be a lot less inclined to make fun of people with tremors.
This is an example of how technology can change perceptions in positive ways.
The article is shallow and dumb. It does not even mention the inventor of APL, Ken Iverson, even though two of the languages in the article are based on APL.
APL was not invented by IBM to be terse. It was invented by Iverson as a notation to describe array operations, and he published a book about it before he went to IBM.
This is just lazy journalism. The guy who wrote it got a stupiod idea, spent insufficient time doing research, wrote something trivial in even less time and screwed up his facts.
In the "news" (not in fact), there was a claimed missile gap between the US and the USSR. This blew up (pun intended) just before the Kennedy/Nixon presidential election, and helped Kennedy get elected. Kennedy blamed Nixon, who was Vice President during the previous Eisenhower administration, of being responsible for this failure.
The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) 11-10-57, issued in December 1957, predicted that the Soviets would "probably have a first operational capability with up to 10 prototype ICBMs" at "some time during the period from mid-1958 to mid-1959." After Nikita Khrushchev claimed to be producing them "like sausages", the numbers started to inflate. A similar report gathered only a few months later, NIE 11-5-58 released in August 1958, concluded that the USSR had "the technical and industrial capability... to have an operational capability with 100 ICBMs" some time in 1960, and perhaps 500 ICBMs "some time in 1961, or at the latest in 1962."
In a widely syndicated article in 1959, Joseph Alsop even went so far as to describe "classified intelligence" as placing the Soviet missile count as high as 1,500 by 1963, while the US would have only 130 at that time.
It is known today that even the CIA's estimate was too high; the actual number of ICBMs, even including interim-use prototypes, was 4.
So they were claiming over a hundred in two years, while the real number at the time was four.
In Kubricks's film Dr. Strangelove, this was parodied as a
mineshaft gap
Dr. Strangelove recommends that the President gather several hundred thousand people, with a high female-to-male ratio (10 to 1), to live in deep mineshafts where the radiation would not penetrate, and to then institute a breeding program to repopulate the Earth when the radiation has subsided. Turgidson warns that the Soviets will likely do the same, and worries about a "mineshaft gap". In the middle of this discussion, Dr. Strangelove miraculously rises from his wheelchair, takes a few small steps, and shouts, "Mein Führer! I can walk!".
So in a time of shrinking budgets, when a Pentagon general gets up on a podium and screams "were falling behind, we need more money NOW!!!", maybe you should examine his claims very carefully. The Pentagon is not exactly a disinterested party. There is a lot of recent history suggesting he might not be right.
General Jack D. Ripper is a character in Stanly Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove, a black comedy about nuclear holocaust. The character was played by Sterling Hayden.
Ripper gets WW III rolling:
United States Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) is commander of Burpelson Air Force Base, which houses the SAC 843rd Bomb Wing equipped with B-52 bombers. The 843rd is currently on airborne alert, in flight just hours from the Soviet border.
General Ripper orders his executive officer, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake of the UK Royal Air Force, to put the base on alert. Ripper also issues 'Wing Attack Plan R' to the patrolling aircraft, one of which is commanded by Major T. J. "King" Kong (Slim Pickens). All of the aircraft commence an attack flight on Russia, and set their radios to allow communications only through the CRM 114 discriminator, which is programmed to transmit only communications preceded by a secret three-letter code known only to General Ripper.
Mandrake discovers that no order for war has been issued by the Pentagon, and tries to stop Ripper, who locks them both in his office. Ripper tells Mandrake that he believes the Soviets have been using fluoridation of United States' water supplies to pollute the "precious bodily fluids" of Americans. Mandrake realizes that General Ripper is insane.
The crucial factor in the size and shape of the Shuttle orbiter was the requirement that it be able to accommodate the largest planned commercial and military satellites, and have over 1,000 mile cross-range recovery range to meet the requirement for classified USAF missions for a once-around abort from a launch to a polar orbit. The militarily specified 1,085 nm cross range requirement was one of the primary reasons for the Shuttle's large wings, compared to modern commercial designs with very minimal control surfaces and glide capability. Factors involved in opting for solid rockets and an expendable fuel tank included the desire of the Pentagon to obtain a high-capacity payload vehicle for satellite deployment, and the desire of the Nixon administration to reduce the costs of space exploration by developing a spacecraft with reusable components.
Of course the USAF then backed out on their commitment, and went with non-reusable launchers. From their point of view this had two very desirable characteristics: first, it kept the flow of funding/pork to the big existing aerospace companies (Boeing, Lockheed) and it also allowed Air Force personal to retire and go directly to work for those same companies. Between the self-serving political pork based decisions in Congress, and the self-serving revolving door in the military-industrial complex, the Space Shuttle didn't have a chance.
This left NASA with an intrinsically flawed design. With a reduced fleet size there were no economies of scale, and the platform never evolved. That's why it was never cost effective and took so long to refurbish between flights. Also, the screwed up design was the direct cause of both shuttle disasters. The SRBs and big wings with an external tank were the features that caused the accidents.
If NASA had not been forced to accommodate the Air Force requirements on a budget that was too small, they would have come up with a safe and cost-effective solution. They know how to do it right when there is not too much external interference. Almost every time there is a big screw up at NASA it's because decisions are imposed on them by politics.
Here's an in depth article specifically addressing this issue: Failure to Launch. It was published in March this year, five months before the Virgin Galactic crash. It painted a pretty grim picture then, so obviously things are even more dire now.
Some quotes.
In the absence of Galactic operations, the only passengers who have lifted off from Spaceport America are the cremated remains of people whose families have paid UP Aerospace to launch their dead loved ones on a final joyride.
Speaking about Richard Branson:
“What you have is one of the poorest states in the country and the taxpayers in this state subsidizing the business of a billionaire for the benefit of multimillionaires,” says Gessing.
The actual hub of commercial US space launch development is the Mohave Air and Space Port.
That facility recently released a promotional video calling itself “The Modern-Day Kitty Hawk,” and it may very well be right. Including Virgin Galactic, there are 17 commercial space companies using 19 rocket launch sites at Mojave. “It is the center of aerospace entrepreneurial development,” says Galactic CEO George Whitesides.
Even for Virgin Galactic, Mojave is where the jobs are.
Galactic job offerings announced via Twitter in the final months of 2013 were for nearly 50 positions to be based in Mojave, ranging from jobs like systems engineering lead to hydraulics systems engineer to propulsion test manager. In that same period only nine jobs to be based at Spaceport America were advertised, and those jobs were not lucrative engineering gigs but decidedly more menial positions like warehouse manager and diesel technician and manager of maintenance.... But for every one job based at the New Mexico spaceport, there are still another five announced for Mojave.
The whole mess sounds a lot like the scam pulled by major league sports franchises: they get cities to build billion dollar stadiums, tax breaks that make it unlikely that the cities will ever directly make money from the team, and then hire a bunch of part time workers to run concessions. Not exactly high paying jobs that will fuel economic growth in the region.
It's another case of the ultra wealthy getting corporate welfare at the expense of people who really can't afford it. It doesn't much look like capitalism, it looks a lot more like a feudal lord starving the peasants to keep the castle in business.
I will tell you how it works from the other side of the fence.
First, find some area with a high cool factor. Cool can be substituted for almost anything else, like management.
Find potential employees who are obsessed with your cool idea/company. There are two equally important characteristics that these people must have: they must be really smart, and they must be ready to do anything to make the cool happen.
Promise them two things: they will help change the world, and any sacrifice they make now will pay off in big bucks when you succeed. Pay them a moderately OK salary, but not anywhere near the high end. If pay ever comes up talk about cool, loyalty and payoffs in the indefinite future.
Work them until blood comes of their ears. If possible cater their meals, so they spend all their time either at work or with their co-workers. This keeps them from realizing that you are stealing their life. It helps if you can find single people, or couples where you hire both people. Social ties to non-employees just cause trouble.
Raise money, get customers, and go into panic mode. Take the people you have hired with no management experience and make them manage stuff. Don't hire professional managers because it is a waste of money and time. Also, if they know that you are making mistakes, they might challenge you and make the staff start wondering if you know what you are doing.
Pay yourself very well, but act humble. If the place is small, take people out to lunch or dinner a lot. It's tax deductible, and it makes them think you give a rat's ass about them.
Be a technical success at the cost of business failure. Over promise and deliver late, but show great technical chops. Make sure that everyone in your market area sees how good your results are, even if they are not economically viable.
Go out of business. Be apologetic to your employees about failing. Tell them they did a great job and it's not their fault. It helps if you have a partner you can blame.
This is all OK, because you got the big salary, so you can buy a house and have a new car, etc. You also have the intangible asset of having a high profile start up with high technical visibility.
Do it again as many times as you can. If you do it right you will have some workers, clients, and even investors who will follow you around and experience the cycle multiple times. Your net worth can go up and you can become respected in your field without ever running a successful business. It's called failing up. It's a very popular career path in both Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
There is no content outside the pay wall that is useful.
What does a 'write-once-erase’ access model mean? For all we know, it means they can only write the data once, not more then once, and erase it without the ability to do any reads. That's one interpretation of those three words in that order.
Is there some way we can retroactively erase this from Slashdot? It's so broken it cannot be fixed.
Everyone leave this now and don't come back. It's the closest we can get to erasing it. That's what I'm doing. Now.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I ment Kim Jong-un, not Kim Jong-il. Wrong mad generation of mad dictator.
There seem to be two general styles of politically motivated hacking. One is the NSA/CIA style: the goal is to get as much information as quietly as possible. One of the things that the Snowden/Manning leaks revealed is how extensively the NSA was able to do this.
The other style is the highly visible attack. This is the kind of thing that the Syrian Electronic Army engages in. Much of what they do is intended to be high profile whether they claim responsibility or not.
Despotic leaders like Assad and Kim Jong-il want to see damage and humiliation inflicted on their enemies. It's fundamental to their political strategy. They do this internally to victims of their regimes and externally to their foes.
Rationally it doesn't make much sense for North Korea to waste this kind of capability on a single company. That kind of activity would be better used on a strategic target, say a western defense company or infrastructure in South Korea. (There have been attacks on South Korean banks that fit this description.) But Kim Jong-il is not a rational leader. Atacking Sony because of a perceived personal insult seem just like the kind of thing he would do.
Which side won the Cold War again? Oh yeah, "Ignorance is Strength". That side.
The predominant native US movements using terrorist tactics are all right wing. Assassinating doctors at medical clinics providing abortion services. The truck bomb attack in Oklahoma City against a federal office building. The threats against BLM officials in Nevada and Utah. Militia movements./a> Posse Comitatus threatening violence to government officials.
Left wing violence is a thing of the past. You're flogging a dead horse. Environmental extremism is nowhere near the levels it was in the 70's through the mid 80's. When Greenpeace goes out and makes trouble it's not in the US, it's going against Japanese whaling ships. They may get funding from the US, but not doing much to get arrested here.
There are no radioactive scorpions with commie mind control venom lurking under your house. Maybe if you were taking the right meds the paranoia would abate and you would not live in such a distorted and fearful universe. It might even be simpler then taking prescription drugs. For a first step, try leaving your parents basement and watch something else besides Fox News. At least it would be a change...
Clearly oil companies don't give a rat's ass about the effects of oil extraction (can you say DeepWater Horizon?), so it just makes sense to find allies wherever you can. Given the Supreme Court ruling on non-disclosure of unlimited political contributions, it should be a snap to get Russian money into US politics. It's not like big business in the US has any national affiliation (Apple/Google paying no taxes), so why not get foreign funding? It's not that big a step from what corporations are doing already.
Cynical much?
As you yourself said, "their connections, the power they have to move the industry" carry a lot of weight. A lot of people inside and outside Sony could have their reputations ruined by these leaks. The film industry is full of gossip and jealousy, and people often say things in private that can be incendiary if they get loose. If someone with big clout is offended, a lot of current and future deals could go out the window. Grudges are real, and can last a lifetime.
And even non-bigwigs can be wrecked. Suppose someone takes time off, or has other issues from stress and uses prescription medication as a result. This could easily end up in personal records. This gets out, and that person could find themselves unemployable anywhere. Not even able to get a minimum wage job in retail or fast food, much less the entertainment industry. Remember, there are a lot of show hires and workers are transient, so there are a lot of ex-employees with records at Sony.
Sony could be on the hook for a huge class actions suit, particularly if you consider ex-employees. No matter how long ago it was, if you name shows up online as a result of this breach you have a valid reason to sue.
And Sony is not a well regarded company in Hollywood. They are known for squeezing the life out of people and then giving them the boot. They routinely have layoffs while they are advertising for new hires. (Everyone in Hollywood does this, but Sony is a prime example.)
They keep a few people around but nobody lasts because it's cheaper, and transient workers are no threat to bad upper (or middle) management. Bad practice can be hidden if there is no one around to complain or remind anyone of previous mistakes. (Just ask anyone who has been cycled through Disney about this.)
Given the combination of ill will and a lot of ex-workers, don't be surprised when the civil actions start. Sony doesn't have a leg to stand on, particularly on personal records. They had no partitioned networks/systems, no encryption, and didn't detect the breach until they were screwed. It's going to be just like drug lawsuits: there will be multiple late night commercials fishing for anyone who worked at Sony to join in.
Hollywood is a schadenfreude kind of town. There will be a lot of movie industry types who will derive a lot of satisfaction from watching Sony suffer mightily because of this.
Way to go 'Merica!!
Of course the practical result is that they spend so many resources spying on the masses that they are incapable of doing anything else well. For example, they have the meta data on a large percentage of all the phone calls in the world, but they were caught flat footed by the rise of ISIS in Syria. If they spent 1/100 of the time and money wasted on tapping everyone's phone on doing the hard human intelligence in places like Syria, the world would be a better place.
So ultimately we are all demonstrably less safe because of the huge time and attention sinkhole of mass surveillance. Not to mention the cost and threat to democracy. All you need is know the history of the FBI to realize that illegal spying on civilians will inevitability lead to abuse of that information. We'll find out about the current abuses in 20-30 years, after the bad actors have retired or died, and it's too late to do anything for the victims. For example, the full text of the letter from the FBI to MLK trying to get him to commit suicide was just released a month or so ago.
The shorter version: fuck Republican stupidity.
It exploits Helmholtz reciprocity to swap the camera view with the light view. If light is modeled as rays/photons, the path between the light source and a camera pixel is the same going from the light to the pixel, or the pixel to the light. Hence reciprocity.
You are so smart and they are so dumb. it's guaranteed that they spent no time doing any calculations about this. Every engineer they have has never even seen the ocean, only designed stuff on paper/computers in nice clean rooms. They've never run any simulations, or done any physical testing at all, because all engineers just know that complex new things always work perfectly the first time.
So just call them and talk to the receptionist, or send them an email and tell them about your brilliant insight. I'm sure that once they hear your detailed criticism it will bring their foolish scheme to a screeching halt. At the very least they will give up, or see the light and appoint you the head honcho. Only your fantastically sharp mind can save them.
Good luck with your new position.
House Republicans pass bill forbidding scientists from advising the EPA on their own research :
The people who are the real problems are "normal", but use religion as an excuse for their bad behavior, or those who follow religion so blindly that they do bad things because of group pressure.
England should immediately ban people from communicating with one another in any way, shape, manor or form. No talking, no writing, no sign language, no winks, nods, frowns or smiles.
No facial expression allowed, because the terrorists might win!!!
They need mandatory unisex berkas with built in sound proofing. That's how to protect western values of freedom, by wrapping everyone up in a shroud and making them shut the fuck up. That will show those radical scum they can't push England around. Freedom!
In more detail, let me modify one of your key sentences: "what's good for the corrupt oligarchs may not be the same as what's good for the country." Fixed that for you.
Impoverishing US workers will not "juice the success of domestic tech companies which, in the long run, may actually be better for the U.S. as a whole". One that happens it will be hard as hell to bootstrap back to an overall high standard of living in the US. Just how stupid are you to even think that?
And then there is the issue that tech workers are just the latest group to be thrown under the bus in the name of short term greed.
Here's an example of how it's done. At one point construction and industrial jobs like meat packing were all unionized. Then the unions were broken and the jobs were filled by immigrant labor. That's why there are now large numbers of Spanish speaking non-documented workers in the Midwest, for example. It's not that native US workers are not good workers, it's that the employers don't want them because they want semi-slaves. They want workers who will put up with anything, including having their wages stolen or being maimed on the job and not being able to do anything about it.
For tech workers the plan is slightly more complex. First, offshore as many jobs as possible. Second, import as many non-citizen workers as possible. Third, flood the market with a bunch of severely under-trained "coders", like Zuckerberg and his co-conspirators are attempting with code.org. Having a vast army of unemployed makes anyone with a job completely fearful and willing to settle for crumbs.
So the US middle class is destroyed? Do you think that any of the rich care? Remember what Romney said during the election. He thinks that half of Americans are scum. As far as he and his ilk are concerned, if you don't do well it's all your fault. The reality is that he and his type profit from eliminating jobs in the US. They do well by making the rest of us do poorly, and they then have the gall to blame us for not being good enough.
I guess you think that you're immune, or perhaps you want to be a serf. You sure don't seem like someone who want to work and prosper in their own country. What's wrong with you?
There is nothing like having the experience of another persons problems to make you more thoughtful and sympathetic. Even if someone like Tyra Banks shallowly exploits homelessness for a day, the principle still holds.
For a real world example of how vicious someone can be about a disease like Parkinson's, just look at what Rush Limbaugh did to Michael J. Fox:
I would bet that anyone who had the simulated experience would never make that kind of odious claim against someone else. For example if kids in school were exposed to the effect they would be a lot less inclined to make fun of people with tremors.
This is an example of how technology can change perceptions in positive ways.
APL was not invented by IBM to be terse. It was invented by Iverson as a notation to describe array operations, and he published a book about it before he went to IBM.
This is just lazy journalism. The guy who wrote it got a stupiod idea, spent insufficient time doing research, wrote something trivial in even less time and screwed up his facts.
He gets an "I" for idiot.
In the "news" (not in fact), there was a claimed missile gap between the US and the USSR. This blew up (pun intended) just before the Kennedy/Nixon presidential election, and helped Kennedy get elected. Kennedy blamed Nixon, who was Vice President during the previous Eisenhower administration, of being responsible for this failure.
In fact, the estimates about the number of Soviet ICBMs were grotesquely exaggerated.
So they were claiming over a hundred in two years, while the real number at the time was four.
In Kubricks's film Dr. Strangelove, this was parodied as a mineshaft gap
So in a time of shrinking budgets, when a Pentagon general gets up on a podium and screams "were falling behind, we need more money NOW!!!", maybe you should examine his claims very carefully. The Pentagon is not exactly a disinterested party. There is a lot of recent history suggesting he might not be right.
Ripper gets WW III rolling:
YMMV, but I like top hide under my bed.
Of course the USAF then backed out on their commitment, and went with non-reusable launchers. From their point of view this had two very desirable characteristics: first, it kept the flow of funding/pork to the big existing aerospace companies (Boeing, Lockheed) and it also allowed Air Force personal to retire and go directly to work for those same companies. Between the self-serving political pork based decisions in Congress, and the self-serving revolving door in the military-industrial complex, the Space Shuttle didn't have a chance.
This left NASA with an intrinsically flawed design. With a reduced fleet size there were no economies of scale, and the platform never evolved. That's why it was never cost effective and took so long to refurbish between flights. Also, the screwed up design was the direct cause of both shuttle disasters. The SRBs and big wings with an external tank were the features that caused the accidents.
If NASA had not been forced to accommodate the Air Force requirements on a budget that was too small, they would have come up with a safe and cost-effective solution. They know how to do it right when there is not too much external interference. Almost every time there is a big screw up at NASA it's because decisions are imposed on them by politics.
Some quotes.
Speaking about Richard Branson:
The actual hub of commercial US space launch development is the Mohave Air and Space Port.
Even for Virgin Galactic, Mojave is where the jobs are.
The whole mess sounds a lot like the scam pulled by major league sports franchises: they get cities to build billion dollar stadiums, tax breaks that make it unlikely that the cities will ever directly make money from the team, and then hire a bunch of part time workers to run concessions. Not exactly high paying jobs that will fuel economic growth in the region.
It's another case of the ultra wealthy getting corporate welfare at the expense of people who really can't afford it. It doesn't much look like capitalism, it looks a lot more like a feudal lord starving the peasants to keep the castle in business.
First, find some area with a high cool factor. Cool can be substituted for almost anything else, like management.
Find potential employees who are obsessed with your cool idea/company. There are two equally important characteristics that these people must have: they must be really smart, and they must be ready to do anything to make the cool happen.
Promise them two things: they will help change the world, and any sacrifice they make now will pay off in big bucks when you succeed. Pay them a moderately OK salary, but not anywhere near the high end. If pay ever comes up talk about cool, loyalty and payoffs in the indefinite future.
Work them until blood comes of their ears. If possible cater their meals, so they spend all their time either at work or with their co-workers. This keeps them from realizing that you are stealing their life. It helps if you can find single people, or couples where you hire both people. Social ties to non-employees just cause trouble.
Raise money, get customers, and go into panic mode. Take the people you have hired with no management experience and make them manage stuff. Don't hire professional managers because it is a waste of money and time. Also, if they know that you are making mistakes, they might challenge you and make the staff start wondering if you know what you are doing.
Pay yourself very well, but act humble. If the place is small, take people out to lunch or dinner a lot. It's tax deductible, and it makes them think you give a rat's ass about them.
Be a technical success at the cost of business failure. Over promise and deliver late, but show great technical chops. Make sure that everyone in your market area sees how good your results are, even if they are not economically viable.
Go out of business. Be apologetic to your employees about failing. Tell them they did a great job and it's not their fault. It helps if you have a partner you can blame.
This is all OK, because you got the big salary, so you can buy a house and have a new car, etc. You also have the intangible asset of having a high profile start up with high technical visibility.
Do it again as many times as you can. If you do it right you will have some workers, clients, and even investors who will follow you around and experience the cycle multiple times. Your net worth can go up and you can become respected in your field without ever running a successful business. It's called failing up. It's a very popular career path in both Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
What does a 'write-once-erase’ access model mean? For all we know, it means they can only write the data once, not more then once, and erase it without the ability to do any reads. That's one interpretation of those three words in that order.
Is there some way we can retroactively erase this from Slashdot? It's so broken it cannot be fixed.
Everyone leave this now and don't come back. It's the closest we can get to erasing it. That's what I'm doing. Now.
Otherwise this wouldn't even come up.