The real danger is that the techniques and insight involved could be used to make a wide variety of weaponizable viruses, in which case one might face a wave of dangerous viruses each of which is not covered by the previous's virusweapon's vaccine. These waves would sweep faster than vaccines could be isolated and produced (which for influenza is about 9 months to a year---for this you have to count proven manufacturing not some future hope of how something might work). How fast can Dr Evil produce new sequences? A bunch faster.
If the description of the research is accurate, this is like publishing a paper on how to manufacture, and mass-produce thermonuclear weaponry with the tech available in a typical university lab, without using any expensive fissile nuclear materials or isotopic separation. What a wonderful world.
I can see the parasites move from finance into pharma... create a nasty virus mutation... and then sell the vaccine... create a mutation... and sell the vaccine... way better than creating fake capital.
Marx was continuing Adam Smith's line of thinking. You don't have to "be a Marxist" to recognize that certain elements of Marx's analysis were on target.
I think what's become clear is that we have to have mechanisms to keep that basic driver -- greed -- in check... because greed, combined with that other great human tendency -- moral laziness -- produces some pretty awful progeny, especially when smart people get drawn up in it. Enron. Mortgage Backed Securities. etc.
The "entrepreneur" field is also littered with greedy, clever twits. I've lost count of the number of "business plans" and "strategies" I've seen that were based on bullshit, and premised on "someone will buy me out."
The actual opinion is published at http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2011/03/30/09-10139.pdf . Pretty calm and sensible, actually.
Search of laptops falls under border doctrine. Issue was whether border doctrine extended to a place 170 miles away, and over a period of time.
The reason they shipped the laptop to a forensic facility was because they had a known sex offender with portions of his hard drive encrypted. Unlike a suitcase, which can easily be searched at the Port of Entry, an encrypted laptop cannot be.
Pedophilic images are evidence of a crime against children. Where there are pictures of children being abused, there's a child who's been abused. Seeking and trading such images create demand for someone to abuse a child. The pedophile sought to have the evidence on his laptop suppressed. The Ninth District said No.
From the opinion:
"Today we examine a question of first impression in the
Ninth Circuit: whether the search of a laptop computer that
begins at the border and ends two days later in a Government
forensic computer laboratory almost 170 miles away can still
fall within the border search doctrine. The district court considered
the issue to be a simple matter of time and space. It
concluded that the search of property seized at an international
border and moved 170 miles from that border for further
search cannot be justified by the border search doctrine.
We disagree.
We find no basis under the law to distinguish the border
search power merely because logic and practicality may
require some property presented for entry—and not yet admitted
or released from the sovereign’s control—to be transported
to a secondary site for adequate inspection. The border
search doctrine is not so rigid as to require the United States
to equip every entry point—no matter how desolate or infrequently
traveled—with inspectors and sophisticated forensic
equipment capable of searching whatever property an individual
may wish to bring within our borders or be otherwise precluded
from exercising its right to protect our nation absent
some heightened suspicion.
Still, the line we draw stops far short of “anything goes” at
the border. The Government cannot simply seize property
under its border search power and hold it for weeks, months,
or years on a whim. Rather, we continue to scrutinize searches
and seizures effectuated under the longstanding border search
power on a case-by-case basis to determine whether the manner
of the search and seizure was so egregious as to render it
unreasonable."
As a gadet geek, I upgraded hardware in that period... but simply transferred everything from one machine to another. And yes, I have upgraded the OS... but that was not anything near a Windows re-install experience.
In the past 5 years, I've "retired" 3 windows machines at home, so I'm well aware of the comparative effort associated with their normal use and maintenance. The Apple experience just lets me do the work I get paid to do.
I bow in your general direction. You clearly have the skill to do all this yourself, and the general understanding to avoid trouble and be resilient when it does strike.
But you did probably spend considerable time researching which components to put together, installing the operating systems, applying the patches, making the snapshots, etc. I took my machine out of the pretty box, turned it on, and started working. So we just spent our money/time differently .
For the average user, it's not just "infections" that drive a reinstall... it's also registry corruptions and god-knows-what... my corporate brick, for example, just seized up the other day, puking on all the security and encryption shite that's been loaded on to it (by our corporate guys). Blue screen of death.
As opposed to what? Wintel fan-boys, who have Stockholm syndrome from decades of abuse from crappy hardware and software? In 5 years of running a MacBook Pro, I have reinstalled my operating system exactly: ZERO times. That's worth several hundred bucks in saved time and aggravation each year.
I think what Moryath was suggesting -- in a very oblique manner -- was "get someone to proof-read your resume and cover letters."
As a non-HR person who has in the past (not "passed") hired (not "highered") people, I can tell you that when weeding through the pile of resumes, glaring spelling and grammatical errors immediately drive the resume to the "no thanks" pile. It's brutal, but true. And yes, I might be missing someone who has a lot of talent. But more importantly, if you aren't taking care of these details, you're not doing yourself any favors. Your employer, by encouraging education, obviously sees value in you, and wants to help further develop your talent. And a university degree is about much more than simply building knowledge about "stuff."
Most of the jobs I've hired for have involved writing, and have called for attention to detail. The bottom line is that managers don't have time to proof-read your work.
Let's see:
* Goldman gets its transaction fee on the $450 million. Win!
* if Goldman holds any shares and sells them for a profit... it wins!
* if Goldman holds enough shares and loses their shirts when a Facebook competitor obliterates Facebook... and cumulatively they've made a lot of unfortunate decisions like this... then the US government will bail them out. It wins!
Why would they give a flying f$%k whether Facebook is worth $50 Billion?
It's good to be Goldman.
1. This piece of "reporting" comes from a trashy Rupert Murdoch rag (the Rupert Murdoch claim might have to be fact-checked), the most valuable journalistic contribution of which is always on this page: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/virals/superbabes/
2. Why opine about freedom of speech on something we clearly don't have the facts on? Who knows what sort of threats he made in the email.
3. No pooftahs!
4. Spam!
"And here's the thing: when you get down to it, the shareholders invested in a company that was behaving unethically. It's the shareholder's investment that allows BP to function this way. When CEOs act unethically, they do it in the name of serving the shareholders. Don't the shareholders bear some responsibility? Isn't part of the problem that the "owners" of the company failed to ensure that their company was "doing the right thing?" I'm not sure that we should be seeking to punish shareholders, but I also don't see why they should take a pass. "
I don't think it's clear that they behaved unethically. Our culture talks a lot about risk assessment and risk analysis, but we're actually not very good at exercising it. See this NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/magazine/06fob-wwln-t.html?ref=magazine . In short, somehow the message of the "on the ground" engineers who may have been warning about issues probably got sufficiently murky by the time they reached the decision-makers that the decision they made probably seemed like a reasonable risk to take. See the second paragraph of this week's Rolling Stone article on McChrystal (2nd para on http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236?RS_show_page=4)? , and think through it in reverse. We're crappy communicators, too.
I agree, however, with your assessment that there's a systemic problem. Part of that problem is that the stock market is a "next quarter forecast" beast, and we -- yes, we -- demand "performance" from our investments. Then there's our petroleum-sucking culture, in which the true cost of oil (figure in the cost of wars, the costs of political oppression, the costs of environmental damage) are allowed to be passed to future generations.
I hear your BTW re my gratuitous expression of frustration, and apologize for the expression and distraction.
However, I would argue -- and there is a disturbing example in the case of the recently declassified Project Gunman, in which the US discovered that the Soviets had compromised IBM Selectric typewriters in the US Embassy in Moscow -- that suggests "the only kind of security that has ever worked" doesn't really exist. The trend seems to be that the gap between the sophistication of attacks and the sophistication of defense is growing. Security by isolation gives the people who have to work in that environment a range of unreasonable hurdles to overcome in doing their work; being human, they start to take shortcuts because the processes piss them off.
We need a different way of thinking about this problem. I don't have the answer. I do know that what we're doing now is not quite a waste of time, but almost so (if someone is really determined to mess with us).
Here's the problem with the "solution" of having government write its own code.
1. Insiders are an arguably pre-eminent cause (arguably, because insider problems are often not reported because of embarrassment) of so-called "penetrations"
2. Just because an insider is trustworthy and stable on the day they were hired, does not mean that they are trustworthy and stable on every day thereafter.
3. Software code runs on hardware. The corollary of having the government write its own code is to have the government design and manufacture every component that goes into hardware.
4. See points 1 and 2.
I could go on, but gawd am I ever bored of pony-tailed security consultants telling us to isolate ourselves to be secure.
Slashdot Mirror
The real danger is that the techniques and insight involved could be used to make a wide variety of weaponizable viruses, in which case one might face a wave of dangerous viruses each of which is not covered by the previous's virusweapon's vaccine. These waves would sweep faster than vaccines could be isolated and produced (which for influenza is about 9 months to a year---for this you have to count proven manufacturing not some future hope of how something might work). How fast can Dr Evil produce new sequences? A bunch faster.
If the description of the research is accurate, this is like publishing a paper on how to manufacture, and mass-produce thermonuclear weaponry with the tech available in a typical university lab, without using any expensive fissile nuclear materials or isotopic separation. What a wonderful world.
I can see the parasites move from finance into pharma... create a nasty virus mutation... and then sell the vaccine... create a mutation... and sell the vaccine... way better than creating fake capital.
Perhaps this indicates that I'm a fatalist, but can they just take me straight to the blue screen of death?
Marx was continuing Adam Smith's line of thinking. You don't have to "be a Marxist" to recognize that certain elements of Marx's analysis were on target. I think what's become clear is that we have to have mechanisms to keep that basic driver -- greed -- in check... because greed, combined with that other great human tendency -- moral laziness -- produces some pretty awful progeny, especially when smart people get drawn up in it. Enron. Mortgage Backed Securities. etc. The "entrepreneur" field is also littered with greedy, clever twits. I've lost count of the number of "business plans" and "strategies" I've seen that were based on bullshit, and premised on "someone will buy me out."
Yep, there's no reason they can't be more specific and just cover the area that's going to be subjected to mayhem. Dunderheads.
Gentlemen, get out your tinfoil hats.
The actual opinion is published at http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2011/03/30/09-10139.pdf . Pretty calm and sensible, actually. Search of laptops falls under border doctrine. Issue was whether border doctrine extended to a place 170 miles away, and over a period of time. The reason they shipped the laptop to a forensic facility was because they had a known sex offender with portions of his hard drive encrypted. Unlike a suitcase, which can easily be searched at the Port of Entry, an encrypted laptop cannot be. Pedophilic images are evidence of a crime against children. Where there are pictures of children being abused, there's a child who's been abused. Seeking and trading such images create demand for someone to abuse a child. The pedophile sought to have the evidence on his laptop suppressed. The Ninth District said No. From the opinion: "Today we examine a question of first impression in the Ninth Circuit: whether the search of a laptop computer that begins at the border and ends two days later in a Government forensic computer laboratory almost 170 miles away can still fall within the border search doctrine. The district court considered the issue to be a simple matter of time and space. It concluded that the search of property seized at an international border and moved 170 miles from that border for further search cannot be justified by the border search doctrine. We disagree. We find no basis under the law to distinguish the border search power merely because logic and practicality may require some property presented for entry—and not yet admitted or released from the sovereign’s control—to be transported to a secondary site for adequate inspection. The border search doctrine is not so rigid as to require the United States to equip every entry point—no matter how desolate or infrequently traveled—with inspectors and sophisticated forensic equipment capable of searching whatever property an individual may wish to bring within our borders or be otherwise precluded from exercising its right to protect our nation absent some heightened suspicion. Still, the line we draw stops far short of “anything goes” at the border. The Government cannot simply seize property under its border search power and hold it for weeks, months, or years on a whim. Rather, we continue to scrutinize searches and seizures effectuated under the longstanding border search power on a case-by-case basis to determine whether the manner of the search and seizure was so egregious as to render it unreasonable."
Twatter.
As a gadet geek, I upgraded hardware in that period... but simply transferred everything from one machine to another. And yes, I have upgraded the OS... but that was not anything near a Windows re-install experience. In the past 5 years, I've "retired" 3 windows machines at home, so I'm well aware of the comparative effort associated with their normal use and maintenance. The Apple experience just lets me do the work I get paid to do.
I bow in your general direction. You clearly have the skill to do all this yourself, and the general understanding to avoid trouble and be resilient when it does strike. But you did probably spend considerable time researching which components to put together, installing the operating systems, applying the patches, making the snapshots, etc. I took my machine out of the pretty box, turned it on, and started working. So we just spent our money/time differently . For the average user, it's not just "infections" that drive a reinstall... it's also registry corruptions and god-knows-what... my corporate brick, for example, just seized up the other day, puking on all the security and encryption shite that's been loaded on to it (by our corporate guys). Blue screen of death.
As opposed to what? Wintel fan-boys, who have Stockholm syndrome from decades of abuse from crappy hardware and software? In 5 years of running a MacBook Pro, I have reinstalled my operating system exactly: ZERO times. That's worth several hundred bucks in saved time and aggravation each year.
Bachman, Turner, Overdrive. 4 Men, One Ton, On Stage.
I think what Moryath was suggesting -- in a very oblique manner -- was "get someone to proof-read your resume and cover letters." As a non-HR person who has in the past (not "passed") hired (not "highered") people, I can tell you that when weeding through the pile of resumes, glaring spelling and grammatical errors immediately drive the resume to the "no thanks" pile. It's brutal, but true. And yes, I might be missing someone who has a lot of talent. But more importantly, if you aren't taking care of these details, you're not doing yourself any favors. Your employer, by encouraging education, obviously sees value in you, and wants to help further develop your talent. And a university degree is about much more than simply building knowledge about "stuff." Most of the jobs I've hired for have involved writing, and have called for attention to detail. The bottom line is that managers don't have time to proof-read your work.
First they came for the Home Button, and no one spoke up...
Let's see: * Goldman gets its transaction fee on the $450 million. Win! * if Goldman holds any shares and sells them for a profit... it wins! * if Goldman holds enough shares and loses their shirts when a Facebook competitor obliterates Facebook... and cumulatively they've made a lot of unfortunate decisions like this... then the US government will bail them out. It wins! Why would they give a flying f$%k whether Facebook is worth $50 Billion? It's good to be Goldman.
Sarah Palin is an alien. Her last name rhymes with alien. Therefore she is.
Yeah... that penguin might be from another planet him or herself. Golly, that would be confusing.
1. This piece of "reporting" comes from a trashy Rupert Murdoch rag (the Rupert Murdoch claim might have to be fact-checked), the most valuable journalistic contribution of which is always on this page: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/virals/superbabes/ 2. Why opine about freedom of speech on something we clearly don't have the facts on? Who knows what sort of threats he made in the email. 3. No pooftahs! 4. Spam!
If your wife were a Microsoft product, and you called the Help Desk for support, they'd suggest you stop using the feature.
"And here's the thing: when you get down to it, the shareholders invested in a company that was behaving unethically. It's the shareholder's investment that allows BP to function this way. When CEOs act unethically, they do it in the name of serving the shareholders. Don't the shareholders bear some responsibility? Isn't part of the problem that the "owners" of the company failed to ensure that their company was "doing the right thing?" I'm not sure that we should be seeking to punish shareholders, but I also don't see why they should take a pass. " I don't think it's clear that they behaved unethically. Our culture talks a lot about risk assessment and risk analysis, but we're actually not very good at exercising it. See this NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/magazine/06fob-wwln-t.html?ref=magazine . In short, somehow the message of the "on the ground" engineers who may have been warning about issues probably got sufficiently murky by the time they reached the decision-makers that the decision they made probably seemed like a reasonable risk to take. See the second paragraph of this week's Rolling Stone article on McChrystal (2nd para on http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236?RS_show_page=4)? , and think through it in reverse. We're crappy communicators, too. I agree, however, with your assessment that there's a systemic problem. Part of that problem is that the stock market is a "next quarter forecast" beast, and we -- yes, we -- demand "performance" from our investments. Then there's our petroleum-sucking culture, in which the true cost of oil (figure in the cost of wars, the costs of political oppression, the costs of environmental damage) are allowed to be passed to future generations.
Yeah, I think McDonalds would be far better suited. They know how to handle oil.
This robot must appear in front of a Congressional Hearing to be b%tch-slapped and ritually humiliated in a proper farcical manner.
I hear your BTW re my gratuitous expression of frustration, and apologize for the expression and distraction. However, I would argue -- and there is a disturbing example in the case of the recently declassified Project Gunman, in which the US discovered that the Soviets had compromised IBM Selectric typewriters in the US Embassy in Moscow -- that suggests "the only kind of security that has ever worked" doesn't really exist. The trend seems to be that the gap between the sophistication of attacks and the sophistication of defense is growing. Security by isolation gives the people who have to work in that environment a range of unreasonable hurdles to overcome in doing their work; being human, they start to take shortcuts because the processes piss them off. We need a different way of thinking about this problem. I don't have the answer. I do know that what we're doing now is not quite a waste of time, but almost so (if someone is really determined to mess with us).
Here's the problem with the "solution" of having government write its own code. 1. Insiders are an arguably pre-eminent cause (arguably, because insider problems are often not reported because of embarrassment) of so-called "penetrations" 2. Just because an insider is trustworthy and stable on the day they were hired, does not mean that they are trustworthy and stable on every day thereafter. 3. Software code runs on hardware. The corollary of having the government write its own code is to have the government design and manufacture every component that goes into hardware. 4. See points 1 and 2. I could go on, but gawd am I ever bored of pony-tailed security consultants telling us to isolate ourselves to be secure.