The problem is that the tools we use make it easier to do the wrong thing than to do the right thing. Take SQL injection, for example:
When I started using SQL (late 80s / early 90s), parameterized SQL was pretty much the only way to go. I did actually figure out how to execute an arbitrary string of SQL and capture the resulting columns, whose names and data types couldn't be known until runtime. But it was a royal pain, and I doubt most people would have been that persistent - if at all possible, they'd have stuck with the easy way, which involved using SQL parameters.
Fast-forward through a few decades of "advancement" in tools, and now it's trivial to execute a string of arbitrary SQL (just begging for SQL injection), and SQL parameters are this strange thing that people may have heard of, but they're hard to use and they seem like more trouble than they're worth. So far too many people just do it the easy (i.e. INSECURE) way!
I'd like to hear more about these ways of proving that the machines weren't hacked.
Oh, and by the way, none of that high-falutin' "crypto-whatever" nonsense that only a PHD can understand. Those are the same propeller-heads that can't seem to go a week without some major website getting hacked.
If it's going to convince the common man (and perhaps especially the uncommonly-stupid man), it's got to be very simple and straightforward. If your plan is too complex for a simpleton to understand it in 10 minutes, then it's ALREADY failed at the task of maintaining confidence in the system - no matter how technically correct it might be.
See, this is why electronic vote counting is such an abysmal idea. It's not just that the vote totals can theoretically be hacked (though that's bad enough), it's that there's simply NO WAY to prove the totals WEREN'T hacked. If a group of people decides that the election was hacked, there's no real evidence one way or the other. This undermines faith in the system REGARDLESS of whether the election was or was not hacked!
So we're putting the foundations of our system of consensual government at risk just to save 1 sheet of paper every 4 years? Look, I'm all for saving the environment, but is this really the best way to do it? Maybe the newspapers can agree to sell ONE LESS PAGE of advertising on ONE DAY out of every 1,461 days instead? Or maybe we can all agree to buy one less book in our lifetimes? Or maybe we just agree that this is one situation that really IS worth "killing trees" for!
But however we justify it to ourselves, can we PLEASE go back to paper ballots?
You can set it to call your psychiatrist, or a massage therapist to make an appointment, on a long squeeze.
That way when you're upset and gripping your phone tightly it will know what to do.
I'm afraid they're not very good at math: 4,000 people at $17K - $24K per year for 3 years is anywhere from $204M to $288M. So it's going to cost roughly 5X the $50M they claim. And is there any chance at all that they're going to be able to stop the program 3 years from now???
The "supermoon" may look slightly larger than the moon normally looks when it's close to the earth (i.e. every two weeks), but not significantly. In particular, it pales in comparison to the psychological effect of viewing the moon low in the sky (when it looks larger, even though it's actually further away) vs high in the sky (when it looks smaller, even though it's actually closer).
But there's still no reason it should be in the news: regular people wouldn't even notice if it wasn't pointed out to them, and astronomers know it's just a cyclical thing that doesn't mean anything. Imagine if, every spring, the news was full of breathless reports of the upcoming "supersun" which would be much brighter than the "winter sun" and which would stay in the sky for hours longer than the winter sun. That's pretty much the level of amazement we're talking about.
...and in other news, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead and water is still wet.
I agree - it seems like every other month or so there's "gee whiz" story about a "supermoon" or "supermars" or some "celestial alignment" or something. But at best it's probably no more than a fraction of a percent bigger than normal, and it doesn't actually mean anything. If they didn't make a big deal out of it, no one would notice or care.
It actually could mean something: if there used to be an older 2-gallon-per-flush valve, then the 1-gallon valves save 1 gallon - and the 1 pint valves saves 1.87 gallons (compared to the 2-gallon valves), which is 87% more than the 1-gallon valves did. But I seriously doubt that's what they mean, and even if they did, do they actually expect people to do that math while they're peeing?
There's one I see regularly that baffles (and disappoints) me: on the top of the flush valve for public urinals (sorry, I'm a compulsive reader) it says "This 1-pint-per-flush valve saves 87% more than standard 1-gallon valves". What the hell does "saves 87% more" mean? Uses 87% less, fine - but saves 87% more??? WTF???
They had the same problem prior to the year 2000, so why wasn't this lesson already learned?
No, it was a totally different problem.
Y2K was about an optimization made early in the history of software development, when every bit and byte was precious, and it was expected that the software would be replaced long before it became a problem. Well, not all of it got replaced before then - but everyone knew the problem was there, and exactly when it would bite us, so a lot of people worked hard patching system so that there were no major problems. And before you sneer at the short-sightedness of early developers, let me ask you this: how many of YOUR programs are Y10K compatible? Or Y2037 compatible? Or Y65536 compatible?
This is about security flaws (some due to criminally-negligent designs, some due to inevitable software bugs made even by skilled developers) that are NOT known about in advance, and that CANNOT be patched when they suddenly become a problem.
Or in the case of the situations and environments I work, your statement should read: "Move the applications to where they are not accessible when you have no internet connection while you need to do your work".
The definition of a networked system is "one you can't use because some computer you never heard of is down".
The cloud is highly shared and redundant clustering that is automated and agnostic. It can be public or private.
Wait, so I can save carbon by having a private cloud in my basement? I mean sure, that saves the lag and whatnot from the always-problematic last mile, but how does the movie get to my private cloud? I'm not seeing the carbon savings!
so unless Jackson thinks HP should hire unqualified people just because
they are black or latino, he should probably focus his efforts earlier
in the pipeline
I doubt that's what he thinks - he doesn't actually care about black or latino people. He just wants the publicity, and some sort of "fund for underprivileged nerds" to be set up, which he can then "administer" in a way that benefits him and his friends. Shakedown, plain and simple.
Technically the device might last 30 years, but come on - it's electronics! If electronic gadgets last a decade before they get replaced by newer versions, they're doing pretty good How many electronic gadgets do you have from 1984 that are still in use?
But they could also turn up missing in due to any number of other causes! Only a tiny fraction of missing bodies are due to mid-ocean plane crashes - I still haven't heard why finding the corpses of a couple dozen such people per year is so much more important than finding the corpses of the thousands of other people that could be found by spending that same billion dollars more intelligently.
Just for the record, I'm not suggesting that the 4 cent (or 9 cent) cost makes it worthwhile - I just got tired of reading wild speculation about the costs, and decided to do a little math and come up with a better answer. You're right about the 2 segments per day - short-haul flights do more, but when those crash it's over land, so they tend to be found pretty quickly. Only those flying over water would benefit from this system.
And I do think it's fair (and helpful) to bring it down to a per-passenger level. Sure, the airlines operate at a large scale, so any fleet-wide investment will cost zillions, and any fleet-wide savings will save zillions. But that's compared to overall costs in the mega-zillions, so the numbers are almost meaningless to most people. Suppose someone wanted to eliminate the padding on the seats, and just have you sit on bare metal, and quoted a large dollar figure savings - the first thing I'd do is estimate the per-passenger savings: if it's $50-$100 per pax, then it could make a big difference in ticket prices (PLEASE let's not go off on a tangent about how the greedy bastards at the airline would just keep the difference!)... if it's $0.05 per pax, then no, even the meager comfort of the standard seat cushion is worth a nickle to me (besides, your metal seat couldn't be used as a flotation device)
Worldwide, thousands (probably millions) of people turn up missing every year - it's sad, but true. The number of people who would be found significantly sooner by this device probably averages around a couple dozen per year. What makes those people worth spending billions of dollars on?
It's more likely you could use that same money to find a lot more than a couple dozen people by spending it more intelligently. The only thing that makes these people special is that they were rich enough to afford trans-pacific plane tickets, and they're in the news. If you think that makes them more important than other people, then YOU are the one barely attached to human reality.
A few hundred people per day per plane... what?... this will pay for itself in a few days and then the airline will keep the extra fees and add it to its bottom line. Win for the airline. Win for the government involved. And fuck the consumer. Gotta love Capitalism - and crony capitalism as it is practiced in most of the World - fuck the people!
Wow - another poster claimed that NOT installing the boxes was proof of how capitalism sucks, and you're claiming that installing them (the exact opposite!) would prove that capitalism sucks.
I think you left-wingers have a stock answer ("capitalism sucks") and you're always on the lookout for a question to attach it to.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that the tools we use make it easier to do the wrong thing than to do the right thing. Take SQL injection, for example:
When I started using SQL (late 80s / early 90s), parameterized SQL was pretty much the only way to go. I did actually figure out how to execute an arbitrary string of SQL and capture the resulting columns, whose names and data types couldn't be known until runtime. But it was a royal pain, and I doubt most people would have been that persistent - if at all possible, they'd have stuck with the easy way, which involved using SQL parameters.
Fast-forward through a few decades of "advancement" in tools, and now it's trivial to execute a string of arbitrary SQL (just begging for SQL injection), and SQL parameters are this strange thing that people may have heard of, but they're hard to use and they seem like more trouble than they're worth. So far too many people just do it the easy (i.e. INSECURE) way!
I'd like to hear more about these ways of proving that the machines weren't hacked.
Oh, and by the way, none of that high-falutin' "crypto-whatever" nonsense that only a PHD can understand. Those are the same propeller-heads that can't seem to go a week without some major website getting hacked.
If it's going to convince the common man (and perhaps especially the uncommonly-stupid man), it's got to be very simple and straightforward. If your plan is too complex for a simpleton to understand it in 10 minutes, then it's ALREADY failed at the task of maintaining confidence in the system - no matter how technically correct it might be.
See, this is why electronic vote counting is such an abysmal idea. It's not just that the vote totals can theoretically be hacked (though that's bad enough), it's that there's simply NO WAY to prove the totals WEREN'T hacked. If a group of people decides that the election was hacked, there's no real evidence one way or the other. This undermines faith in the system REGARDLESS of whether the election was or was not hacked!
So we're putting the foundations of our system of consensual government at risk just to save 1 sheet of paper every 4 years? Look, I'm all for saving the environment, but is this really the best way to do it? Maybe the newspapers can agree to sell ONE LESS PAGE of advertising on ONE DAY out of every 1,461 days instead? Or maybe we can all agree to buy one less book in our lifetimes? Or maybe we just agree that this is one situation that really IS worth "killing trees" for!
But however we justify it to ourselves, can we PLEASE go back to paper ballots?
You can set it to call your psychiatrist, or a massage therapist to make an appointment, on a long squeeze. That way when you're upset and gripping your phone tightly it will know what to do.
Where are my moderator points when I need them???
So... every time I pull the phone out of my pocket, it's going to activate some feature? No thanks. P.S. Frist!
I'm afraid they're not very good at math: 4,000 people at $17K - $24K per year for 3 years is anywhere from $204M to $288M. So it's going to cost roughly 5X the $50M they claim. And is there any chance at all that they're going to be able to stop the program 3 years from now???
I just like the name "Offline Streaming". Streaming is, by definition, online.
"theoretical ways to deal with the waste products" = "no actual ways to deal with the waste products"
As opposed to coal and other fossil fuels, where we have a very effective way of dealing with the waste products: just let them go up the smokestack!
P.S. You do know that coal mining releases more radiation into the air, and kills more people, than nuclear power - right?
No. It's actually the same size. Just closer. ;)
Where are my humor mod points when I need them?
The "supermoon" may look slightly larger than the moon normally looks when it's close to the earth (i.e. every two weeks), but not significantly. In particular, it pales in comparison to the psychological effect of viewing the moon low in the sky (when it looks larger, even though it's actually further away) vs high in the sky (when it looks smaller, even though it's actually closer).
...and in other news, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead and water is still wet.
But there's still no reason it should be in the news: regular people wouldn't even notice if it wasn't pointed out to them, and astronomers know it's just a cyclical thing that doesn't mean anything. Imagine if, every spring, the news was full of breathless reports of the upcoming "supersun" which would be much brighter than the "winter sun" and which would stay in the sky for hours longer than the winter sun. That's pretty much the level of amazement we're talking about.
I agree - it seems like every other month or so there's "gee whiz" story about a "supermoon" or "supermars" or some "celestial alignment" or something. But at best it's probably no more than a fraction of a percent bigger than normal, and it doesn't actually mean anything. If they didn't make a big deal out of it, no one would notice or care.
It actually could mean something: if there used to be an older 2-gallon-per-flush valve, then the 1-gallon valves save 1 gallon - and the 1 pint valves saves 1.87 gallons (compared to the 2-gallon valves), which is 87% more than the 1-gallon valves did. But I seriously doubt that's what they mean, and even if they did, do they actually expect people to do that math while they're peeing?
There's one I see regularly that baffles (and disappoints) me: on the top of the flush valve for public urinals (sorry, I'm a compulsive reader) it says "This 1-pint-per-flush valve saves 87% more than standard 1-gallon valves". What the hell does "saves 87% more" mean? Uses 87% less, fine - but saves 87% more??? WTF???
They had the same problem prior to the year 2000, so why wasn't this lesson already learned?
No, it was a totally different problem.
Y2K was about an optimization made early in the history of software development, when every bit and byte was precious, and it was expected that the software would be replaced long before it became a problem. Well, not all of it got replaced before then - but everyone knew the problem was there, and exactly when it would bite us, so a lot of people worked hard patching system so that there were no major problems. And before you sneer at the short-sightedness of early developers, let me ask you this: how many of YOUR programs are Y10K compatible? Or Y2037 compatible? Or Y65536 compatible?
This is about security flaws (some due to criminally-negligent designs, some due to inevitable software bugs made even by skilled developers) that are NOT known about in advance, and that CANNOT be patched when they suddenly become a problem.
Or in the case of the situations and environments I work, your statement should read: "Move the applications to where they are not accessible when you have no internet connection while you need to do your work".
The definition of a networked system is "one you can't use because some computer you never heard of is down".
Also, most streaming content doesn't use TCP/IP anyway.
The cloud is highly shared and redundant clustering that is automated and agnostic. It can be public or private.
Wait, so I can save carbon by having a private cloud in my basement? I mean sure, that saves the lag and whatnot from the always-problematic last mile, but how does the movie get to my private cloud? I'm not seeing the carbon savings!
Most people will never learn.
"A distributed system is a system where I can’t get my work done because a computer has failed that I’ve never even heard of."
- Leslie Lamport, 2006 (or earlier)
so unless Jackson thinks HP should hire unqualified people just because they are black or latino, he should probably focus his efforts earlier in the pipeline
I doubt that's what he thinks - he doesn't actually care about black or latino people. He just wants the publicity, and some sort of "fund for underprivileged nerds" to be set up, which he can then "administer" in a way that benefits him and his friends. Shakedown, plain and simple.
Technically the device might last 30 years, but come on - it's electronics! If electronic gadgets last a decade before they get replaced by newer versions, they're doing pretty good How many electronic gadgets do you have from 1984 that are still in use?
But they could also turn up missing in due to any number of other causes! Only a tiny fraction of missing bodies are due to mid-ocean plane crashes - I still haven't heard why finding the corpses of a couple dozen such people per year is so much more important than finding the corpses of the thousands of other people that could be found by spending that same billion dollars more intelligently.
No, I've lived in america all my life. I thought it was a common phrase, like saying you could "wake up dead" tomorrow.
Just for the record, I'm not suggesting that the 4 cent (or 9 cent) cost makes it worthwhile - I just got tired of reading wild speculation about the costs, and decided to do a little math and come up with a better answer. You're right about the 2 segments per day - short-haul flights do more, but when those crash it's over land, so they tend to be found pretty quickly. Only those flying over water would benefit from this system.
... if it's $0.05 per pax, then no, even the meager comfort of the standard seat cushion is worth a nickle to me (besides, your metal seat couldn't be used as a flotation device)
And I do think it's fair (and helpful) to bring it down to a per-passenger level. Sure, the airlines operate at a large scale, so any fleet-wide investment will cost zillions, and any fleet-wide savings will save zillions. But that's compared to overall costs in the mega-zillions, so the numbers are almost meaningless to most people. Suppose someone wanted to eliminate the padding on the seats, and just have you sit on bare metal, and quoted a large dollar figure savings - the first thing I'd do is estimate the per-passenger savings: if it's $50-$100 per pax, then it could make a big difference in ticket prices (PLEASE let's not go off on a tangent about how the greedy bastards at the airline would just keep the difference!)
Worldwide, thousands (probably millions) of people turn up missing every year - it's sad, but true. The number of people who would be found significantly sooner by this device probably averages around a couple dozen per year. What makes those people worth spending billions of dollars on?
It's more likely you could use that same money to find a lot more than a couple dozen people by spending it more intelligently. The only thing that makes these people special is that they were rich enough to afford trans-pacific plane tickets, and they're in the news. If you think that makes them more important than other people, then YOU are the one barely attached to human reality.
A few hundred people per day per plane ... what? ... this will pay for itself in a few days and then the airline will keep the extra fees and add it to its bottom line.
Win for the airline. Win for the government involved. And fuck the consumer.
Gotta love Capitalism - and crony capitalism as it is practiced in most of the World - fuck the people!
Wow - another poster claimed that NOT installing the boxes was proof of how capitalism sucks, and you're claiming that installing them (the exact opposite!) would prove that capitalism sucks.
I think you left-wingers have a stock answer ("capitalism sucks") and you're always on the lookout for a question to attach it to.