Except unprecedented is much stronger, it very explicitly means that it's never, ever happened before. If you can point to even a single previous instance, then it's by definition wrong to use it. And since Microsoft recently did release a patch for an EOL product, using it now is plain wrong. Nice by Microsoft, but still wrong. It also makes me wonder how well a "ten more years of security patches" upgrade for Win7 would sell...
adjective 1. without previous instance; never before known or experienced; unexampled or unparalleled:
Careful though, in many languages signed overflow is undefined. C/C++ is like that, for example. In practice it will probably roll to 0x80000000 but it is entirely architecture and compiler dependent if that happens and what 0x80000000 is interpreted as.
Nothing like a nitpicker being wrong, 0x7FFFFFFF + 1 might be undefined but 0x80000000 = INT_MIN = -2147483648 is very well defined as long as you approach it from the negative side.
There's a lot of interpretation of this one. Some people say that it means that Mosaic law is still in effect, others don't. Since Jesus and his disciples arguably ignored certain parts of Mosaic law, the latter interpretation is generally held to be more accurate, but it still causes problems.
Well, it certainly can be argued whether the OT punishments apply or if it's more "And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive them that trespass against us." after Jesus. But there's very little to indicate that his coming rewrote the book on what sin is, he didn't kick the ten commandments to the curb. He didn't say party like it's Sodom and Gomorrah, I'm your get out of hell free card. Even after Jesus, salvation is for the few:
Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
If you turn to the dark side, you die:
All his righteous deeds which he has done will not be remembered for his treachery which he has committed and his sin which he has committed; for them he will die.
If you turn to the light side, you live:
But if the wicked do penance for all his sins which he hath committed, and keep all my commandments, and do judgment, and justice, living he shall live, and shall not die.
There's no major disagreement between the OT and NT on this, it's more a good cop-bad cop thing. Or carrot and stick, if you prefer. The OT pretty much says do as I say, or I will punish you (Garden of Eden, Tower of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, Noah's Ark etc.) while the NT pretty much says do as I ask, and I will reward you with the Kingdom of Heaven and life eternal in Paradise. But what's good and evil, who's sinners and saints? Pretty much the same.
Which of course throws a monkey wrench in all those "but it's invalid because it's OT" arguments. But that's been the core strength of Christianity, morphing into whatever the believers want it to be.
As I understand it, the validation of transactions becomes increasingly more expensive with the number of transactions previously validated.
Not previously validated, that would be silly. But there's issues with the number of concurrent transactions, the blockchain processes those with the greatest fee and you can only push through so many at a time. With the dollar value increasing the BTC values get smaller and the number of transactions bigger, but they don't manage to serve the "long tail". So the fee is kept high, maybe also from some self-serving interest but also to keep the number of transactions down to a manageable level. There are solutions proposed to increase the throughput, but they have to get almost everyone on board so there's no split in the blockchain.
This also makes me think a bit on why developers, even newbies, would have access to the production servers. If something broke between the transition between the development system and production then they'd want it fixed right away. This would be easier to do if the developers had access to the production servers.
Yes, 99.9% of the time that's what happens. Then there's the 0.1% where our most senior "I know what I'm doing" developer was just updating a status (not through a stored procedure, because why add another layer of indirection) and forgot the WHERE clause. To the global log table that every process is required to use. Or the house consultant (he had more system experience than better skills than most our hires so wasn't that) that was going to scratch a database on the test server and rebuild it from a script, who didn't check what server the query window was connected to. Of course these are totally hypothetical examples that never happened *cough*.
Did they not remove the ex-admin's credentials, or what?
They should... but if you're sitting with the keys to the kingdom you might have the domain administrator account password, root passwords, various service accounts set up for particular purposes including but not limited to integration with external access... Yes, all could be done with the proper procedures in place. But very often the responsible for such IT procedures is the admin and the admin is the one keeping tabs on what everyone else has access to. Plus you often have the rights to create undocumented loopholes that you might reasonably excuse as being a test account and an oversight if discovered. Not to mention the setting you'd bring this up, either you're basically questioning the loyalty of one of the most trusted men in the system or it looks like you're setting him up to be fired.
Exactly. Signal is as secure as WhatsApp, meaning "who knows"? Signals servers are run by a single corporation. They go on about how "federated messaging" is stuck in the 90s, but that is complete bullshit.
Bullshit. Message transport has nothing to do with security, doesn't matter if you send a PGP message over SMTP (decentralized) or Facebook (centralized) as long as the cryptography is sound. And the clients are open source, the cryptography is vetted and all that. And if you don't want their servers recording any metadata the server code is open source too, with minor modifications you have your own Signal protocol network. Federation is mainly just a messy hybrid of client to server and server to server communication, either go full P2P and deal with all those routing/discovery/web-of-trust/revocation/denial-of-service/spam complications or just run one central server.
The main reason to use it over PGP is that Signal gives you backwards secrecy, the algorithm is constantly upgrading the keys meaning even if you record messages and compromise a device later you can't decrypt anything other than the most recent ones. If you manage to get a private PGP key, you can decrypt every message sent to that key from the dawn of time. It doesn't do 90% of what PGP tries to do, but it does the last 10% much, much better. And most of all, simpler. Most people don't check Signal's MITM protection and doesn't care when they're notified of key changes, but the same people are not likely to use PGP at all. But since a few will check doing bulk surveillance would be discovered, while everyone intentionally or unintentionally in the middle can wiretap plaintext email all day long.
And the people most likely to profit financially from it don't know the 1st thing about science but everything about profiting from your loss.
True, but they do know a bit about risk management and they do have incentive to create something useful and then use that to profit big. No results means no income, it's a gamble. You could of course hire some public scientists, but it's very hard to say who is doing anything productive. What I've come to realize more and more about the public sector is that without competition you pass everything straight through to the end user. If McDonald's is losing money and is threatened by Burger King, they'll being doing some real soul searching about their concept, products, processes and all that. Hard decisions will be made on every level and excess fat trimmed.
In the public sector, shit flows straight downhill. If they cut the funding to the planning office, building permits take longer. If they get more money, they can hire more people and do the same job faster. But at no point is there any real pressure to change the way building permits are issued. There's no competing office covering the same area that'll do it faster or simpler. You can't have competition on everything, it's hard to see how you could have competing police, military, courts, IRS, DMV, CPS and many other things. But very few of those are known for their cost efficiency and user friendliness. You can kill medical patents, fund a public behemoth of a research institute instead. But I'm not sure it'd be better.
Remember in the early days of PGP? To download and install the software you had to "certify" you were an American on American soil? And of course anyone on American soil or with a VPN could do all that, or download it in the US and burn it to a CD and send it off to whoever, as many did. You just can't "ban" something that is already out in the wild, it doesn't work that way.
That's a terrible analogy, because those export control laws were null and void outside the US. Just because you can smoke pot in Amsterdam doesn't make it trivial to import and use somewhere else. Encryption is not steganography, most cryptographic protocols are like waving a red flag. If that will get you into trouble on its own, there will be trouble. If the vast majority of the population is willing to go along and not protest as the minority is rounded up and fined/jailed, you lose. It's not even hard, you just create some kind of "digital ASBO" and demand that people use communication methods with approved government backdoors/logging. It all depends on how much the public is willing to play along, but given the reactions on Snowden.... they will.
So multiplication of 16 bit matrices is AI? Wow. amazing stuff. OP is right: there is no "AI". Just algorithms. Just because you call them "neural nets" doesn't change a damn thing.
This is flawed deconstructionist logic, humans are an intelligent carbon-based life form. A lump of coal is neither alive nor intelligent, but still made of carbon. Whatever intelligence is, I doubt it is any magic that can't be implemented in silicon, even though the building blocks are equally unintelligent.
Most billionaires probably have garbage advice, once you separate out the survivor bias. That said, this tidbit makes more sense than most.
Well, if you can work you day job and run your own side business successfully and still have time for friends, family, love interests, hobbies etc. because it's still 24 hours a day. I mean it's great if you can kick start it that way without making a leap of faith, but I think a lot of successful college dropouts would say the dedication was necessary. It's hard to say in retrospect that it wasn't, it's easy to say in retrospect that you just built brick upon brick for the few who manage to do it that way.
It's always easy to automate most of a problem, but edge cases tend to be really hard to solve. Yes, the autopilot can fly the plane 99.9% of the time, but the pilots are there for the 0.1% when it can't.
Well, from what I understand they hand over full control to the pilots given sufficient failure because they're there and supposed to be experts, but in many cases it could have continued and in many cases pulled through. Or the damage is so extensive the pilots can't control the plane or don't understand the situation themselves. Or the pilots don't know what to do in these error conditions and don't know how to fly either. For example Air France 447.
According to the final report, the accident resulted from the following succession of major events:
temporary inconsistency between the measured
speeds, likely as a result of the obstruction of the pitot tubes by ice crystals, causing autopilot disconnection and reconfiguration to alternate law;
the crew made inappropriate control inputs that destabilized the flight path;
the crew failed to follow appropriate procedure for loss of displayed airspeed information;
the crew were late in identifying and correcting the deviation from the flight path;
the crew lacked understanding of the approach to stall;
the crew failed to recognize that the aircraft had stalled and consequently did not make inputs that would have made it possible to recover from the stall.
If they'd just let the computer carry on from a best guess air speed based on thrust, altitude and angle of attack, they'd have been fine:
At 02:10:34, after displaying incorrectly for half a minute, the left-side instruments recorded a sharp rise in airspeed to 223 knots (413 km/h; 257 mph), as did the Integrated Standby Instrument System (ISIS) 33 seconds later(the right-side instruments are not recorded by the recorder). The icing event had lasted for just over a minute.
Every time shit like this happens, we improve the safety systems. And so every time the pilots become less and less accustomed to actually handling anything other than normal mode. Which is when we don't need them.
I wouldn't be surprised that if the share of unreliable renewable energy, smart meters and electric vehicles goes up you can "donate" storage capacity to the power company in exchange for free charging. Say you charge your Tesla to say 50% minimum for your short daily commute, but if and only if it's free it'll go up to 90% automatically. Or on request, of course. Even if it's only a few kWh each multiplied by thousands of cars it's many megawatts. You might also see a slight increase in demand as people take make opportunistic use of their "free" miles.
I'm sure there's other opportunities too like dynamic air conditioning, space heating, hot water boiling etc. that could work in a range of temperatures and consume peaks leading to less consumption in the following hours. Or "nice to haves" like say a heated driveway that you don't normally use unless it's free. In short, I think the fear of excess power generation is highly overrated. It's having enough reliable power for minimum power generation that is the challenge.
Unbelievably high values for something that doesn't actually have any intrinsic value are generally followed by crashes. This is obviously a conspiracy theory, and I have no evidence, but the shady origin of Bitcoin (nobody really knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is) could mean that it was engineered by a national actor to crash national economies. It is, after all, a caricature of fiat currency.
The fantastical is rarely true when a much less more mundane explanation would suffice. It would be extremely hard for one man to bootstrap a crypto-currency, it's like printing your own monopoly money and asking other people to believe it's worth something. My guess is that he's a fiction created by a cabal of the first bitcoin miners who pretended the strange creator came and left, now it's an egalitarian free-for-all so join the mining you too. I also wouldn't be surprised if many of the first trades were in fact fictional, with dollars also changing hands under the table to try creating the impression it had trade value. Once they sold the narrative and mining went viral they could sit almost at the top of the rocket, while pretending to just be one of the lucky few that heard of it early. I think you give Bitcoin way too much credit, it was almost certainly started to make money from thin air. And it looks like a success at that.
You don't know what you'll find out if you don't look. You may as well discount all of astronomy because we're not likely to end up visiting any but perhaps the closest of stars.
Well, you can try wielding that as a shield but we also have a huge history of recording things that serve very little purpose other than entertainment and trivia. Some are essentially pack rats for knowledge, collecting it for no particular end other than knowing what 16th century English cuisine was like or the mating habits of the spotted hummingbird. If we were compiling a treatise of useful information for a post-apocalyptic society I'd gladly let 90%+ be STEM and give most other subjects a cursory summary. And no, Elvis and Mozart would not make the cut. The rest you could put in a vault with a sign saying "for when you've got society working again and happen to be curious about what the past was like".
That's been standard process for many decades, but it's actually less likely now because it's harder to implement than these technological solutions, even though it's more likely to actually catch the party involved (because even if they take every precaution listed so far here, they'd still be caught simply by the wording used.)
These technical solutions only matter if you see the copy somehow, the changing text is for when it is referenced by news media, in reports by foreign agencies and such. IIRC from a previous article usually the base document is the same, but there are summaries that subtly swap words. They're also "juicy" hoping that you'll end up with direct quotes, since actual scans are usually rare because of the reasons above. Unlike say a movie OCR to get a plaintext file is pretty destructive to all other clues.
Additionally, for my exams, I tried to focus on applying concepts we've learned in class, yet many of them had noticeable difficulty doing anything that wasn't directly regurgitated from class.
Well, analogies seem much easier when you know the answer. For example, take a basic feedback loop. I can understand what it means in an electric circuit, or in social economics (wages drives costs drives prices drives wages), nuclear physics (one fission reaction becomes two become BOOM), learned behavior (have a doggy treat) and geopolitics (we provoke, they counter provoke, actually it's just BOOM too) but if you haven't really tried to see the parallels it's pretty hard. A lot of students feel overwhelmed by just knowing all the tools and applying the right one.
Being able to figure out the underlying concept so they can apply the tool in what they see as a novel situation is mastering the tool. It's certainly what you'd look for in top grades or advanced classes, but most classes should test them on the level they've been taught not whether they've already started to grasp the next level. Of course they should be able to deal with some variation on the textbook case without going blank, but it's easy to overdo it because it seems obvious to you.
While some companies might do that, I really doubt Microsoft is doing country-level blocks in Win10 as quite a lot of people would notice that. Where the server is located is no excuse for Microsoft to screw up the update process, it's just the same clients have experienced that their privacy and default application settings were "mysteriously" reset to the default.
This is basically true for every decade. Nostalgia is the only reason people remember things fondly.
And you can remember the bad things in a good way, without really rose coloring it. Like most people can look at a photo of themselves from 20 years and go "OMG we look so ridiculous" and laugh at it not "OMG we look so lame" and be embarrassed. I can reminisce about the BBS days and how slow the modems were isn't rose tinted, it's perhaps even exaggerated. A lot of these "memorably bad" moments are like that, you hold on to a few emotions and as the details fade you only remember that you were horribly, horribly cold or really, really embarrassed or whatever. And yet with enough distance it becomes a story to laugh at.
If you do not, no amount of "magic" management and tracking will help. If you keep them low, however, you do not need a lot of tracking, every bug will be unique enough to be memorable or fixed fast enough to not need tracking. Of course that means you need to have really good architects, designers and coders. Hard to get but worth the price they will ask.
As well as clear requirements, plenty manpower, no deadlines and a free pony? In any case, straight bug fixes aren't usually the problem it's more vague issues that either aren't important enough or too rooted in the current design to just fix but ideally you'd gather up, make coherent and implement the next time you redo an interface, module or something like that. On the one side we don't want to simply reject it and forget about it, on the other it's no good if it essentially goes in the garbage bin because nobody will look at it again. And when you get a similar request quickly recognize that you already have it, identify if it's a duplicate or an extension or different angle to the same and merge them. All non-trivial mushy processes.
Look at that Ander Breivik guy. Killed nearly 100 people, most of the children. Very well planned attacked. Basically radicalized himself, with some help from other extremists on the internet who convinced him that Europe was at war.
More like under a silent invasion by Islam, that an Illuminati-like cabal is creating Muslim refugees, blocking their entry to other Islamic nations and funneling them into Europe and that they will eventually try to take over through civil war and bring Europe to Islamic rule. In his mind he was the savior trying to stop it and I believe he still thinks history will prove him right. I don't believe in the conspiracy, I abhor his methods but he's hardly the only one concerned about the future of Europe...
As for his choice of targets the primary target was the bomb at government headquarters, it mostly failed because of a parking garage and a flaw in the bomb's construction but it should have brought the whole building down killing hundreds. His secondary target was a former prime minister speaking at the youth convention whom he considered the grand traitor. The youths were only a tertiary target, a way to salt the earth. His goal was to eradicate as much of a political party as possible, but it drowned in the atrocity.
I'd rather win at something I can do myself, than watch other people win at a level I can't play at.
I think couch potatoes and people who can't stand passive entertainment are both missing out on something. Personally, playing a video game can be fun. Sitting down for two hours to watch a movie can also be fun. I'm not a huge my team vs your team fan but occasionally during world championships and the Olympics I'll see if "our" athletes win, it can be fun to cheer for somebody. And occasionally watching skilled people do impressive feats is fun, even when it's not a competition as such. But if that doesn't bring out the wow-factor in you, then whatever floats your boat bro. Just be careful that it doesn't turn into general narcissism, if it's not about me it's not important.
Not that hard.. the current crop of terrorists are all 2nd-3rd generation immigrants that have never shown any desire to adopt western values.
Some. But there are also some that initially have been very western/liberal, had some sort of religious awakening and looking back on their past life they see it as very decadent and sinful. Those are often the leg men, who feel they owe Allah so much back taxes their only way to paradise is jihad. These people are often radicalized quite quickly in a matter of weeks or months while these feelings are new and intense and is often why it shocks the neighbors.
I'm impressed with this device you have that can predict the future.
I'm sure the CDC would marvel at my crystal ball if: 1. We have good domestic apples 2. We import foreign apples from disease-ridden areas 3. The same bad apples show up domestically
The difference is we have no problem with offending non-infected foreign apples by denying them entry, we do this all the time with produce, animal products etc. even though it's probably 99% harmless. The problem is that even just a small handful of terrorists can keep your country hostage, France entered a state of national emergency on November 2015 and it is still not lifted. When you're in a state of emergency where the normal rule of law is suspended for years then that is the new normal. So what are they going to say, that in six months the threat of terror is gone? One year? Two years? Three years? Europe has infected itself with a virtually everlasting case of Islamic terror. Nobody knows who the next terrorist will be, but we damn well know what we've done these last couple decades to make it so.
Slashdot Mirror
I read 'unprecedented' as 'unusual
Except unprecedented is much stronger, it very explicitly means that it's never, ever happened before. If you can point to even a single previous instance, then it's by definition wrong to use it. And since Microsoft recently did release a patch for an EOL product, using it now is plain wrong. Nice by Microsoft, but still wrong. It also makes me wonder how well a "ten more years of security patches" upgrade for Win7 would sell...
adjective
1. without previous instance; never before known or experienced; unexampled or unparalleled:
Careful though, in many languages signed overflow is undefined. C/C++ is like that, for example. In practice it will probably roll to 0x80000000 but it is entirely architecture and compiler dependent if that happens and what 0x80000000 is interpreted as.
Nothing like a nitpicker being wrong, 0x7FFFFFFF + 1 might be undefined but 0x80000000 = INT_MIN = -2147483648 is very well defined as long as you approach it from the negative side.
There's a lot of interpretation of this one. Some people say that it means that Mosaic law is still in effect, others don't. Since Jesus and his disciples arguably ignored certain parts of Mosaic law, the latter interpretation is generally held to be more accurate, but it still causes problems.
Well, it certainly can be argued whether the OT punishments apply or if it's more "And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive them that trespass against us." after Jesus. But there's very little to indicate that his coming rewrote the book on what sin is, he didn't kick the ten commandments to the curb. He didn't say party like it's Sodom and Gomorrah, I'm your get out of hell free card. Even after Jesus, salvation is for the few:
Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
If you turn to the dark side, you die:
All his righteous deeds which he has done will not be remembered for his treachery which he has committed and his sin which he has committed; for them he will die.
If you turn to the light side, you live:
But if the wicked do penance for all his sins which he hath committed, and keep all my commandments, and do judgment, and justice, living he shall live, and shall not die.
There's no major disagreement between the OT and NT on this, it's more a good cop-bad cop thing. Or carrot and stick, if you prefer. The OT pretty much says do as I say, or I will punish you (Garden of Eden, Tower of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, Noah's Ark etc.) while the NT pretty much says do as I ask, and I will reward you with the Kingdom of Heaven and life eternal in Paradise. But what's good and evil, who's sinners and saints? Pretty much the same.
Which of course throws a monkey wrench in all those "but it's invalid because it's OT" arguments. But that's been the core strength of Christianity, morphing into whatever the believers want it to be.
As I understand it, the validation of transactions becomes increasingly more expensive with the number of transactions previously validated.
Not previously validated, that would be silly. But there's issues with the number of concurrent transactions, the blockchain processes those with the greatest fee and you can only push through so many at a time. With the dollar value increasing the BTC values get smaller and the number of transactions bigger, but they don't manage to serve the "long tail". So the fee is kept high, maybe also from some self-serving interest but also to keep the number of transactions down to a manageable level. There are solutions proposed to increase the throughput, but they have to get almost everyone on board so there's no split in the blockchain.
This also makes me think a bit on why developers, even newbies, would have access to the production servers. If something broke between the transition between the development system and production then they'd want it fixed right away. This would be easier to do if the developers had access to the production servers.
Yes, 99.9% of the time that's what happens. Then there's the 0.1% where our most senior "I know what I'm doing" developer was just updating a status (not through a stored procedure, because why add another layer of indirection) and forgot the WHERE clause. To the global log table that every process is required to use. Or the house consultant (he had more system experience than better skills than most our hires so wasn't that) that was going to scratch a database on the test server and rebuild it from a script, who didn't check what server the query window was connected to. Of course these are totally hypothetical examples that never happened *cough*.
Did they not remove the ex-admin's credentials, or what?
They should... but if you're sitting with the keys to the kingdom you might have the domain administrator account password, root passwords, various service accounts set up for particular purposes including but not limited to integration with external access... Yes, all could be done with the proper procedures in place. But very often the responsible for such IT procedures is the admin and the admin is the one keeping tabs on what everyone else has access to. Plus you often have the rights to create undocumented loopholes that you might reasonably excuse as being a test account and an oversight if discovered. Not to mention the setting you'd bring this up, either you're basically questioning the loyalty of one of the most trusted men in the system or it looks like you're setting him up to be fired.
Having production databases that can be reached from developers workstations is always a bad idea.
Welcome to DevOps ;)
Exactly. Signal is as secure as WhatsApp, meaning "who knows"? Signals servers are run by a single corporation. They go on about how "federated messaging" is stuck in the 90s, but that is complete bullshit.
Bullshit. Message transport has nothing to do with security, doesn't matter if you send a PGP message over SMTP (decentralized) or Facebook (centralized) as long as the cryptography is sound. And the clients are open source, the cryptography is vetted and all that. And if you don't want their servers recording any metadata the server code is open source too, with minor modifications you have your own Signal protocol network. Federation is mainly just a messy hybrid of client to server and server to server communication, either go full P2P and deal with all those routing/discovery/web-of-trust/revocation/denial-of-service/spam complications or just run one central server.
The main reason to use it over PGP is that Signal gives you backwards secrecy, the algorithm is constantly upgrading the keys meaning even if you record messages and compromise a device later you can't decrypt anything other than the most recent ones. If you manage to get a private PGP key, you can decrypt every message sent to that key from the dawn of time. It doesn't do 90% of what PGP tries to do, but it does the last 10% much, much better. And most of all, simpler. Most people don't check Signal's MITM protection and doesn't care when they're notified of key changes, but the same people are not likely to use PGP at all. But since a few will check doing bulk surveillance would be discovered, while everyone intentionally or unintentionally in the middle can wiretap plaintext email all day long.
And the people most likely to profit financially from it don't know the 1st thing about science but everything about profiting from your loss.
True, but they do know a bit about risk management and they do have incentive to create something useful and then use that to profit big. No results means no income, it's a gamble. You could of course hire some public scientists, but it's very hard to say who is doing anything productive. What I've come to realize more and more about the public sector is that without competition you pass everything straight through to the end user. If McDonald's is losing money and is threatened by Burger King, they'll being doing some real soul searching about their concept, products, processes and all that. Hard decisions will be made on every level and excess fat trimmed.
In the public sector, shit flows straight downhill. If they cut the funding to the planning office, building permits take longer. If they get more money, they can hire more people and do the same job faster. But at no point is there any real pressure to change the way building permits are issued. There's no competing office covering the same area that'll do it faster or simpler. You can't have competition on everything, it's hard to see how you could have competing police, military, courts, IRS, DMV, CPS and many other things. But very few of those are known for their cost efficiency and user friendliness. You can kill medical patents, fund a public behemoth of a research institute instead. But I'm not sure it'd be better.
Remember in the early days of PGP? To download and install the software you had to "certify" you were an American on American soil? And of course anyone on American soil or with a VPN could do all that, or download it in the US and burn it to a CD and send it off to whoever, as many did. You just can't "ban" something that is already out in the wild, it doesn't work that way.
That's a terrible analogy, because those export control laws were null and void outside the US. Just because you can smoke pot in Amsterdam doesn't make it trivial to import and use somewhere else. Encryption is not steganography, most cryptographic protocols are like waving a red flag. If that will get you into trouble on its own, there will be trouble. If the vast majority of the population is willing to go along and not protest as the minority is rounded up and fined/jailed, you lose. It's not even hard, you just create some kind of "digital ASBO" and demand that people use communication methods with approved government backdoors/logging. It all depends on how much the public is willing to play along, but given the reactions on Snowden.... they will.
So multiplication of 16 bit matrices is AI? Wow. amazing stuff. OP is right: there is no "AI". Just algorithms. Just because you call them "neural nets" doesn't change a damn thing.
This is flawed deconstructionist logic, humans are an intelligent carbon-based life form. A lump of coal is neither alive nor intelligent, but still made of carbon. Whatever intelligence is, I doubt it is any magic that can't be implemented in silicon, even though the building blocks are equally unintelligent.
Most billionaires probably have garbage advice, once you separate out the survivor bias. That said, this tidbit makes more sense than most.
Well, if you can work you day job and run your own side business successfully and still have time for friends, family, love interests, hobbies etc. because it's still 24 hours a day. I mean it's great if you can kick start it that way without making a leap of faith, but I think a lot of successful college dropouts would say the dedication was necessary. It's hard to say in retrospect that it wasn't, it's easy to say in retrospect that you just built brick upon brick for the few who manage to do it that way.
It's always easy to automate most of a problem, but edge cases tend to be really hard to solve. Yes, the autopilot can fly the plane 99.9% of the time, but the pilots are there for the 0.1% when it can't.
Well, from what I understand they hand over full control to the pilots given sufficient failure because they're there and supposed to be experts, but in many cases it could have continued and in many cases pulled through. Or the damage is so extensive the pilots can't control the plane or don't understand the situation themselves. Or the pilots don't know what to do in these error conditions and don't know how to fly either. For example Air France 447.
According to the final report, the accident resulted from the following succession of major events:
If they'd just let the computer carry on from a best guess air speed based on thrust, altitude and angle of attack, they'd have been fine:
At 02:10:34, after displaying incorrectly for half a minute, the left-side instruments recorded a sharp rise in airspeed to 223 knots (413 km/h; 257 mph), as did the Integrated Standby Instrument System (ISIS) 33 seconds later(the right-side instruments are not recorded by the recorder). The icing event had lasted for just over a minute.
Every time shit like this happens, we improve the safety systems. And so every time the pilots become less and less accustomed to actually handling anything other than normal mode. Which is when we don't need them.
I wouldn't be surprised that if the share of unreliable renewable energy, smart meters and electric vehicles goes up you can "donate" storage capacity to the power company in exchange for free charging. Say you charge your Tesla to say 50% minimum for your short daily commute, but if and only if it's free it'll go up to 90% automatically. Or on request, of course. Even if it's only a few kWh each multiplied by thousands of cars it's many megawatts. You might also see a slight increase in demand as people take make opportunistic use of their "free" miles.
I'm sure there's other opportunities too like dynamic air conditioning, space heating, hot water boiling etc. that could work in a range of temperatures and consume peaks leading to less consumption in the following hours. Or "nice to haves" like say a heated driveway that you don't normally use unless it's free. In short, I think the fear of excess power generation is highly overrated. It's having enough reliable power for minimum power generation that is the challenge.
Unbelievably high values for something that doesn't actually have any intrinsic value are generally followed by crashes. This is obviously a conspiracy theory, and I have no evidence, but the shady origin of Bitcoin (nobody really knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is) could mean that it was engineered by a national actor to crash national economies. It is, after all, a caricature of fiat currency.
The fantastical is rarely true when a much less more mundane explanation would suffice. It would be extremely hard for one man to bootstrap a crypto-currency, it's like printing your own monopoly money and asking other people to believe it's worth something. My guess is that he's a fiction created by a cabal of the first bitcoin miners who pretended the strange creator came and left, now it's an egalitarian free-for-all so join the mining you too. I also wouldn't be surprised if many of the first trades were in fact fictional, with dollars also changing hands under the table to try creating the impression it had trade value. Once they sold the narrative and mining went viral they could sit almost at the top of the rocket, while pretending to just be one of the lucky few that heard of it early. I think you give Bitcoin way too much credit, it was almost certainly started to make money from thin air. And it looks like a success at that.
You don't know what you'll find out if you don't look. You may as well discount all of astronomy because we're not likely to end up visiting any but perhaps the closest of stars.
Well, you can try wielding that as a shield but we also have a huge history of recording things that serve very little purpose other than entertainment and trivia. Some are essentially pack rats for knowledge, collecting it for no particular end other than knowing what 16th century English cuisine was like or the mating habits of the spotted hummingbird. If we were compiling a treatise of useful information for a post-apocalyptic society I'd gladly let 90%+ be STEM and give most other subjects a cursory summary. And no, Elvis and Mozart would not make the cut. The rest you could put in a vault with a sign saying "for when you've got society working again and happen to be curious about what the past was like".
That's been standard process for many decades, but it's actually less likely now because it's harder to implement than these technological solutions, even though it's more likely to actually catch the party involved (because even if they take every precaution listed so far here, they'd still be caught simply by the wording used.)
These technical solutions only matter if you see the copy somehow, the changing text is for when it is referenced by news media, in reports by foreign agencies and such. IIRC from a previous article usually the base document is the same, but there are summaries that subtly swap words. They're also "juicy" hoping that you'll end up with direct quotes, since actual scans are usually rare because of the reasons above. Unlike say a movie OCR to get a plaintext file is pretty destructive to all other clues.
Additionally, for my exams, I tried to focus on applying concepts we've learned in class, yet many of them had noticeable difficulty doing anything that wasn't directly regurgitated from class.
Well, analogies seem much easier when you know the answer. For example, take a basic feedback loop. I can understand what it means in an electric circuit, or in social economics (wages drives costs drives prices drives wages), nuclear physics (one fission reaction becomes two become BOOM), learned behavior (have a doggy treat) and geopolitics (we provoke, they counter provoke, actually it's just BOOM too) but if you haven't really tried to see the parallels it's pretty hard. A lot of students feel overwhelmed by just knowing all the tools and applying the right one.
Being able to figure out the underlying concept so they can apply the tool in what they see as a novel situation is mastering the tool. It's certainly what you'd look for in top grades or advanced classes, but most classes should test them on the level they've been taught not whether they've already started to grasp the next level. Of course they should be able to deal with some variation on the textbook case without going blank, but it's easy to overdo it because it seems obvious to you.
While some companies might do that, I really doubt Microsoft is doing country-level blocks in Win10 as quite a lot of people would notice that. Where the server is located is no excuse for Microsoft to screw up the update process, it's just the same clients have experienced that their privacy and default application settings were "mysteriously" reset to the default.
This is basically true for every decade. Nostalgia is the only reason people remember things fondly.
And you can remember the bad things in a good way, without really rose coloring it. Like most people can look at a photo of themselves from 20 years and go "OMG we look so ridiculous" and laugh at it not "OMG we look so lame" and be embarrassed. I can reminisce about the BBS days and how slow the modems were isn't rose tinted, it's perhaps even exaggerated. A lot of these "memorably bad" moments are like that, you hold on to a few emotions and as the details fade you only remember that you were horribly, horribly cold or really, really embarrassed or whatever. And yet with enough distance it becomes a story to laugh at.
If you do not, no amount of "magic" management and tracking will help. If you keep them low, however, you do not need a lot of tracking, every bug will be unique enough to be memorable or fixed fast enough to not need tracking. Of course that means you need to have really good architects, designers and coders. Hard to get but worth the price they will ask.
As well as clear requirements, plenty manpower, no deadlines and a free pony? In any case, straight bug fixes aren't usually the problem it's more vague issues that either aren't important enough or too rooted in the current design to just fix but ideally you'd gather up, make coherent and implement the next time you redo an interface, module or something like that. On the one side we don't want to simply reject it and forget about it, on the other it's no good if it essentially goes in the garbage bin because nobody will look at it again. And when you get a similar request quickly recognize that you already have it, identify if it's a duplicate or an extension or different angle to the same and merge them. All non-trivial mushy processes.
Look at that Ander Breivik guy. Killed nearly 100 people, most of the children. Very well planned attacked. Basically radicalized himself, with some help from other extremists on the internet who convinced him that Europe was at war.
More like under a silent invasion by Islam, that an Illuminati-like cabal is creating Muslim refugees, blocking their entry to other Islamic nations and funneling them into Europe and that they will eventually try to take over through civil war and bring Europe to Islamic rule. In his mind he was the savior trying to stop it and I believe he still thinks history will prove him right. I don't believe in the conspiracy, I abhor his methods but he's hardly the only one concerned about the future of Europe...
As for his choice of targets the primary target was the bomb at government headquarters, it mostly failed because of a parking garage and a flaw in the bomb's construction but it should have brought the whole building down killing hundreds. His secondary target was a former prime minister speaking at the youth convention whom he considered the grand traitor. The youths were only a tertiary target, a way to salt the earth. His goal was to eradicate as much of a political party as possible, but it drowned in the atrocity.
I'd rather win at something I can do myself, than watch other people win at a level I can't play at.
I think couch potatoes and people who can't stand passive entertainment are both missing out on something. Personally, playing a video game can be fun. Sitting down for two hours to watch a movie can also be fun. I'm not a huge my team vs your team fan but occasionally during world championships and the Olympics I'll see if "our" athletes win, it can be fun to cheer for somebody. And occasionally watching skilled people do impressive feats is fun, even when it's not a competition as such. But if that doesn't bring out the wow-factor in you, then whatever floats your boat bro. Just be careful that it doesn't turn into general narcissism, if it's not about me it's not important.
Not that hard.. the current crop of terrorists are all 2nd-3rd generation immigrants that have never shown any desire to adopt western values.
Some. But there are also some that initially have been very western/liberal, had some sort of religious awakening and looking back on their past life they see it as very decadent and sinful. Those are often the leg men, who feel they owe Allah so much back taxes their only way to paradise is jihad. These people are often radicalized quite quickly in a matter of weeks or months while these feelings are new and intense and is often why it shocks the neighbors.
I'm impressed with this device you have that can predict the future.
I'm sure the CDC would marvel at my crystal ball if:
1. We have good domestic apples
2. We import foreign apples from disease-ridden areas
3. The same bad apples show up domestically
The difference is we have no problem with offending non-infected foreign apples by denying them entry, we do this all the time with produce, animal products etc. even though it's probably 99% harmless. The problem is that even just a small handful of terrorists can keep your country hostage, France entered a state of national emergency on November 2015 and it is still not lifted. When you're in a state of emergency where the normal rule of law is suspended for years then that is the new normal. So what are they going to say, that in six months the threat of terror is gone? One year? Two years? Three years? Europe has infected itself with a virtually everlasting case of Islamic terror. Nobody knows who the next terrorist will be, but we damn well know what we've done these last couple decades to make it so.