So I went back to using a dumbphone. It will last much longer than two years, it costs a tenth as much as a smart phone, and it does not pull me in to some sort of Attention Crisis.
It's great that that works for you, but for many people, me included, not having a smartphone means having to carry a whole bunch of other devices as well. A PDA for calendaring and contact management, a GPS receiver for navigation, a camera, an ebook reader, an MP3 player, a portable game console, a fitness tracker, etc. I used to actually carry all of the above (not all the time; I had to pick and choose what to take when and often didn't have the device I wanted), and besides the proliferation of things to carry, most of them didn't do their job as well as my smartphone does. Calendaring and contact management is much better when the data is synced to the cloud. GPS navigation is much better with live traffic and regular (free!) map updates. And so on.
People don't buy smartphones because they think they are better phones. People buy smartphones because they do a whole bunch of things that dumbphones don't.
Please keep in mind that roughly 50% of the American people disagree with you, many of them quite intelligent and thoughtful.
Well, no. If they were intelligent and thoughtful, they could and would see how those things are harmful in literally every way.
This attitude is the primary cause of the election of Donald Trump. Please think about that.
Deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, and excessive military spending are literally how Russia got where it is today. Make America Russian Again? At least when the Russians were the dominant white people in America all they were doing was trapping, and building a couple of forts.
Wrong. Go read some history about how the current Russian oligarchies came about. It wasn't due to deregulation, tax cuts or military spending.
Taxation-based redistribution seems to be the best answer to wealth concentration. However, I should point out that I disagree that wealth concentration, per se, is a problem. The problem is when the people at the bottom don't have enough to live reasonably-good lives, not the disparity between the upper and lower ends.
The solution is simple: give space.com a wide berth, or send them negative feedback about their mishandling of science.
Using imperial units is not "mishandling of science". The numbers are valid regardless of the units chosen, assuming the conversions are done correctly, and with appropriate significant digits. And there's nothing wrong with a web site choosing the units that are most familiar to its primary audience.
You are right. But this is slashdot and the communists will moderate you down to -5 pronto.
It seems more likely that the Trumpian conservatives, who like to fall back on "But Hillary..." whenever Trump does something they can't find a way to defend, will mod me down, not the communists. The communists will agree with me on this one.
I know that Mr. Anonymous Coward (a different anonymous coward than this one) is a Republican, but each and every one of those 'accomplishments' is sheer stupidity.
Please keep in mind that roughly 50% of the American people disagree with you, many of them quite intelligent and thoughtful. You may be right, but it's hardly as cut and dried as you paint it to be, as should be obvious given the large number of people on the other side of each of those questions.
Note that I'm not arguing that you're wrong on the issues (in fact, I agree with you on all three of them, with some caveats and qualifications). I'm arguing that you should exercise some humility. I might also point out that arrogance like yours is a principal cause of Trump's election.
And there is only one person who is less fit for office, and their name is Hillary.
Hillary lost. Get over it. Hillary is irrelevant. "But Hillary..." is in no way a valid or useful argument in support of Trump or in opposition to his detractors.
Think there's a real problem here? Think the President is unfit for office? Then get to work on 25th Amendment proceedings
Keep in mind that the 25th requires Congress to approve removal of the president, with a 2/3 majority of both houses. I think it's reasonable to assume that that would not happen, so the 25th is a dead letter in the current situation.
if not, resign and tell all of this to Congress
Again, you're assuming Congress is of a mind to listen. In reality, the options are "Use the 25th and hope Congress acts, resign and tell the press (then hope Congress acts?), or stage a mini-coup to protect the country." Well, or just hope the voters knew what they were doing and carry out the president's orders, regardless of how insane.
To me, it's really unclear what the most moral path is, given Congress's clear unwillingness to act. A process-focused perspective would argue that you should follow the law, regardless of the consequences. An outcome-focused perspective would argue that you should do what you think is best for the country, even if it requires stretching the law (I don't see any actual breaking of the law here). Conservatives tend to focus on process and liberals on outcome (though there are exceptions). I can see both sides.
Please provide a list of high crimes and misdemeanors that add up to impeachable offenses.
We're still waiting for the details, but it seems quite likely that there is solid evidence of obstruction of justice (his recent tweet regarding the prosecution of Hunter and Collins was a big mistake, since it demonstrates Trump's commitment to partisan politics and personal benefit over the rule of law, helping to demonstrate motive for the other ways he's obstructed justice) and possibly violation of campaign finance law and/or conspiracy to violate campaign finance law. Note that obstruction and conspiracy are crimes in and of themselves. If Trump didn't actually violate campaign finance law, but merely conspired to, that's a crime. Even if he neither violated it nor conspired to violate it, attempting to obstruct the investigation is a crime.
In addition, Trump has made use of his office to enrich himself, in many ways. If any of the enrichment came from foreign governments -- even something so minor as a foreign government official paying to play at one of his golf courses in order to curry favor -- that's a violation of the emoluments clause of the constitution. There are really, really good reasons why previous presidents have chosen to move their assets into a blind trust and divest any that provide an obvious connection to themselves. Trump's decision not to do those things has left him wide open there, though the GOP-controlled Congress is choosing to look the other way and Mueller's mandate doesn't authorize him to look into emoluments.
But since Congress hasn’t demonstrated the presence of even a nascent backbone, these insiders might figure this is the only way left they can truly serve the country... which is what they’re sworn to do
They're sworn to uphold the constitution, not to serve the country. Normally those two things are the same, but maybe not in this case.
I'm actually undecided on whether the path the anonymous author and his colleagues have chosen is the most moral option. But if you want to look specifically at what they swore to do... they should use the 25th to remove him since that's the constitutional approach. There's nothing in the constitution that authorizes members of the executive branch to defy their boss if they don't like his decisions.
What makes me undecided is that I'm not sure the 25th would work. If the president and his VP and cabinet disagree on his ability to lead, the 25th leaves it to Congress to decide, and requires a 2/3 majority of both houses to permanently oust the president. What, do you think, is the probability that you could get a 2/3 majority of both houses to oust Trump? I think the most likely outcome of an attempt to use the 25th is that Trump would remain president and all of the cabinet officials who supported his removal would be replaced with others who are willing to do what they're told.
In contrast, impeachment requires only a simple majority of the House, plus a 2/3 majority in the Senate to convict and remove. And it seems likely that Mueller's investigation will provide a strong basis for impeachment and conviction, at least with respect to obstruction of justice, and perhaps violation of campaign finance laws (which is what the "collusion" with Russia would really be).
That being the case, it seems to me that there's a conflict here between upholding the constitution and serving the country, which is why I'm not certain that the anonymous official and his colleagues haven't taken the higher moral path, focusing on protecting the country until Mueller gathers enough evidence to successfully remove Trump. Or until the voters change the balance of power in Congress, or remove Trump in 2020.
OTOH, voters could choose to retain Trump, even after having seen his incompetence. In that case, I guess his senior officials should bow to their will and carry out his directives, regardless of their impact.
I'm still waiting for the left to figure out that you can have mass immigration or you can have nice things like universal health care but you certainly can't have both.
I'm not a leftist, but this is obviously wrong. Just provide the nice things only to citizens, while taxing immigrants and citizens alike. Then make the path to citizenship sufficiently difficult to keep the system in balance. There will be the small issue of the fact that children of immigrants are citizens, but history shows that the children of immigrants are more economically productive than the children of citizens so this is a non-problem; they'll pull their own weight.
This leaves open the question of whether you can afford the nice things even for all citizens, but it's trivial to separate that question from the question of immigration.
Investments don't create wealth - they capture it. Wealth is generated by the person on the factory floor making something someone will buy, or the person providing a service that someone will buy. Everything else is just a question of how that wealth gets distributed,.
Only partially true.
It's certainly true that real value is only created through production and sales of real products, but it's not true that investors have nothing to do with it. If you want to understand the difference, you need only look at the economic output of any centrally-planned economy. Why is central planning so bad? Because no central committee can ever be smart enough and ruthless enough to efficiently allocate available resources to productive activities. Economic planning needs to allocate capital to organizations that can most efficiently and effectively use it, without regard to politics, and taking into account what consumers want and need.
This is why capitalistic economies are dramatically more productive, dynamic and healthier than centrally-planned ones: The price-driven decisions made by the ostensibly "useless" class of investors, bankers, wealth managers, etc. Those people serve an extremely important purpose. They reward enterprises that make what consumers want and do it efficiently and punish enterprises that make unnecessary stuff or do it inefficiently. They do this by controlling access to capital. Effective enterprises can easily get the cash[*] they need to expand their operations, ineffective ones get starved and die.
Note that I'm not claiming that markets are perfect, or that the moneymen don't make plenty of mistakes.
Such claims are obviously ludicrous and anyone can point to counterexamples (e.g. Enron, banking bailouts, etc.). But what is unquestionable is that this system works better than any other system yet devised.
[*] Note that although we use cash to allocate resources, this doesn't mean that "money" is what's actually being allocated, or that economics is about money. Economics has nothing to do with money. Money facilitates exchanges of what the economy is really about, goods and services, by being a universal stand-in for any good or service. So what investors are really doing when they decide where to put their money is to decide where the system should allocate its real goods and services, including labor.
And why do they have record profits? Because their labor costs are shrinking.
And why are their labor costs shrinking? A small percentage of the reduction is due to wage stagnation, but the major cause -- and this is especially true at the tech-driven giants like Amazon -- is automation. Recognition of this fact highlights a serious risk to low-wage workers: If government arbitrarily boosts labor costs, then corporations will accelerate their development and deployment of automation.
Granted that Amazon is already pushing the pace on automation, and it's unlikely that this bill would materially increase their efforts. But the same isn't true across the board. It's certain that automation will eventually destroy all of these low-skilled jobs, and dealing with this tech-pocalypse is going to be a serious challenge. How fast it happens will determine the severity of that challenge, though... which means that increasing the minimum wage or billing corporations for the social services used by their employees are dangerous. These approaches will accelerate the pace of automation -- and will do nothing to address automation-driven unemployment.
IMO, a better approach is to begin replacing our social safety net with a Universal Basic Income, funded by progressive tax increases. This is politically harder, much harder, but stands a chance of slowing automation-driven unemployment rather than accelerating it, and it provides an actual solution to the problem of what to do when those low-skilled jobs just disappear.
There's a parable/joke that goes around, about a new employee who screwed up in a way that cost the company ten thousand dollars. After sheepishly admitting the error to his boss, the employee begins packing up his desk. The boss comes by and says "What are you doing?" The employee replies that he's packing because he's going to be fired. The boss replies "Why in the world would I fire you? I just spent $10,000 training you!"
Related, when I first joined Google, on the Billing Team, which builds the systems that collect and disburse all of the money that flows into and out of Google, I was told that I wouldn't be a Real Billing Engineer until I'd made a mistake that cost the company a million dollars, and then designed and implemented a change to the system that made my mistake impossible. The point was well made, and well taken: This was a culture in which mistakes were to be learned from, not punished.
It is almost impossible to find new slide rules now: Only a few manufacturers are left, and even fewer manufacture them to the same standards as the best older slide rules. I still have one, which I keep as an heirloom.
I bought a new one on ThinkGeek a few years ago... but it doesn't look like they carry them any more. And the one I bought was pretty low quality -- loose-fitting plastic with fairly fat lines. I inherited a couple of old ones from my father in law, and they're so much better. Metal with ultra-fine lines on them and tightly-fitted enough that you need to lubricate them from time to time.
An elegant tool of a more civilized age. Or something. I do like my slide rules, though I'm pretty slow at using them.
According to TFA, they segmented the network in response to the hack.
Okay.
And yes, VLAN isn't perfect. That's why you want belt AND suspenders, not belt OR suspenders.
Except that VLANs are more like wearing suspenders made of a few, thin threads. It's almost nothing. Proper cryptographic security is the right solution here, and once you have that, a VLAN provides nothing -- other than traffic management, which is what it's really good for. VLANs were never intended to be used as a security measure, and shouldn't be applied with any expectation that they're adding significant security.
I'll get modded to oblivion for saying that, but the reality is that an armed uprising against the government is impossible these days.
Given the long-demonstrated success of lightly-armed guerrilla insurgencies against modern military forces, that might not be true even if the military stayed united, obeyed the government and were willing to fire on its fellow citizens. But it's very likely that in the event of an armed uprising a substantial portion of the military would join it and an even larger portion would simply refuse to fight. Plus, it's obvious that a first goal of an insurgency would be to use their civilian arms to obtain military arms, whether by liberating arms from the US military (with, undoubtedly, some assistance from members of the military) or just by lasting long enough to convince enemies of the US to supply them.
Bottom line, tens of millions of US citizens armed with hundreds of millions of civilian arms have a reasonable chance of success of overthrowing the government if they have competent organization, leadership and communications.
Note that I think civil war is the worst possible way to replace bad government, not least because with rare exceptions revolutionaries are very bad at devising a good government to replace the bad one. But I think it's important that we retain the option as a last resort.
That's exactly why for the sake of belt and suspenders you should at least use a vlan to isolate the security traffic if not a physically separated network.
The Google network is heavily segmented, though Google has shifted to consider that more of a management feature than a security feature. Google relies primarily on the BeyondCorp zero trust model to provide security, because network segmentation really doesn't. Segmentation isn't useless, but it provides no protection against adversaries who get access to the wires.
I'm sure the badge readers were on a separate VLAN. But Google doesn't trust network segmentation and obviously chose to investigate potential vulnerabilities. Which is a good thing, for Google, for its users and customers, and for other Software House customers (and, almost certainly, customers of Software House's competitors, because I'd be very surprised if the whole door access industry weren't at least this bad).
How some other company operates and sells their products can't really represent Google's own development practices.
No, but it shows that they use and rely on 3rd party unverified and ill designed programs
So does every company. So does yours. But how many others do this sort of investigation? Software House has thousands of clients, but it was Google that found the problem -- and published it.
Surely Google should know we speak English exclusively? So what's the point?
It's unlikely that it perceived what it heard as another language. This new bilingual feature only works if you set it up, and only with the second language that you choose. More likely, it just heard some phonemes that triggered the "Ok Google" detection, and then couldn't figure out what followed.
This presumably helps with code-switching, which bilingual people tend to do all-the-freaking-time. They'll start a sentence in one language, forget how to say something in that language (or don't like how it sounds in that one), then switch to another, sometimes for only a few words before switching back.
No, it isn't that clever yet. I just tried it with a few sentences of mixed English and Spanish, and every time it assumed that the entire sentence was in one language, correctly understanding the part that was in that language and finding something phonetically close (ish) for the rest.
I think what it's doing is submitting your words in parallel to all three systems: LangID and the two systems for the languages you have selected. LangID returns its best guess at the language you used, then Assistant gives you the results from the corresponding system.
Slashdot Mirror
So I went back to using a dumbphone. It will last much longer than two years, it costs a tenth as much as a smart phone, and it does not pull me in to some sort of Attention Crisis.
It's great that that works for you, but for many people, me included, not having a smartphone means having to carry a whole bunch of other devices as well. A PDA for calendaring and contact management, a GPS receiver for navigation, a camera, an ebook reader, an MP3 player, a portable game console, a fitness tracker, etc. I used to actually carry all of the above (not all the time; I had to pick and choose what to take when and often didn't have the device I wanted), and besides the proliferation of things to carry, most of them didn't do their job as well as my smartphone does. Calendaring and contact management is much better when the data is synced to the cloud. GPS navigation is much better with live traffic and regular (free!) map updates. And so on.
People don't buy smartphones because they think they are better phones. People buy smartphones because they do a whole bunch of things that dumbphones don't.
Please keep in mind that roughly 50% of the American people disagree with you, many of them quite intelligent and thoughtful.
Well, no. If they were intelligent and thoughtful, they could and would see how those things are harmful in literally every way.
This attitude is the primary cause of the election of Donald Trump. Please think about that.
Deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, and excessive military spending are literally how Russia got where it is today. Make America Russian Again? At least when the Russians were the dominant white people in America all they were doing was trapping, and building a couple of forts.
Wrong. Go read some history about how the current Russian oligarchies came about. It wasn't due to deregulation, tax cuts or military spending.
Taxation-based redistribution seems to be the best answer to wealth concentration. However, I should point out that I disagree that wealth concentration, per se, is a problem. The problem is when the people at the bottom don't have enough to live reasonably-good lives, not the disparity between the upper and lower ends.
The solution is simple: give space.com a wide berth, or send them negative feedback about their mishandling of science.
Using imperial units is not "mishandling of science". The numbers are valid regardless of the units chosen, assuming the conversions are done correctly, and with appropriate significant digits. And there's nothing wrong with a web site choosing the units that are most familiar to its primary audience.
You are right. But this is slashdot and the communists will moderate you down to -5 pronto.
It seems more likely that the Trumpian conservatives, who like to fall back on "But Hillary..." whenever Trump does something they can't find a way to defend, will mod me down, not the communists. The communists will agree with me on this one.
I know that Mr. Anonymous Coward (a different anonymous coward than this one) is a Republican, but each and every one of those 'accomplishments' is sheer stupidity.
Please keep in mind that roughly 50% of the American people disagree with you, many of them quite intelligent and thoughtful. You may be right, but it's hardly as cut and dried as you paint it to be, as should be obvious given the large number of people on the other side of each of those questions.
Note that I'm not arguing that you're wrong on the issues (in fact, I agree with you on all three of them, with some caveats and qualifications). I'm arguing that you should exercise some humility. I might also point out that arrogance like yours is a principal cause of Trump's election.
And there is only one person who is less fit for office, and their name is Hillary.
Hillary lost. Get over it. Hillary is irrelevant. "But Hillary..." is in no way a valid or useful argument in support of Trump or in opposition to his detractors.
Think there's a real problem here? Think the President is unfit for office? Then get to work on 25th Amendment proceedings
Keep in mind that the 25th requires Congress to approve removal of the president, with a 2/3 majority of both houses. I think it's reasonable to assume that that would not happen, so the 25th is a dead letter in the current situation.
if not, resign and tell all of this to Congress
Again, you're assuming Congress is of a mind to listen. In reality, the options are "Use the 25th and hope Congress acts, resign and tell the press (then hope Congress acts?), or stage a mini-coup to protect the country." Well, or just hope the voters knew what they were doing and carry out the president's orders, regardless of how insane.
To me, it's really unclear what the most moral path is, given Congress's clear unwillingness to act. A process-focused perspective would argue that you should follow the law, regardless of the consequences. An outcome-focused perspective would argue that you should do what you think is best for the country, even if it requires stretching the law (I don't see any actual breaking of the law here). Conservatives tend to focus on process and liberals on outcome (though there are exceptions). I can see both sides.
Please provide a list of high crimes and misdemeanors that add up to impeachable offenses.
We're still waiting for the details, but it seems quite likely that there is solid evidence of obstruction of justice (his recent tweet regarding the prosecution of Hunter and Collins was a big mistake, since it demonstrates Trump's commitment to partisan politics and personal benefit over the rule of law, helping to demonstrate motive for the other ways he's obstructed justice) and possibly violation of campaign finance law and/or conspiracy to violate campaign finance law. Note that obstruction and conspiracy are crimes in and of themselves. If Trump didn't actually violate campaign finance law, but merely conspired to, that's a crime. Even if he neither violated it nor conspired to violate it, attempting to obstruct the investigation is a crime.
In addition, Trump has made use of his office to enrich himself, in many ways. If any of the enrichment came from foreign governments -- even something so minor as a foreign government official paying to play at one of his golf courses in order to curry favor -- that's a violation of the emoluments clause of the constitution. There are really, really good reasons why previous presidents have chosen to move their assets into a blind trust and divest any that provide an obvious connection to themselves. Trump's decision not to do those things has left him wide open there, though the GOP-controlled Congress is choosing to look the other way and Mueller's mandate doesn't authorize him to look into emoluments.
But since Congress hasn’t demonstrated the presence of even a nascent backbone, these insiders might figure this is the only way left they can truly serve the country... which is what they’re sworn to do
They're sworn to uphold the constitution, not to serve the country. Normally those two things are the same, but maybe not in this case.
I'm actually undecided on whether the path the anonymous author and his colleagues have chosen is the most moral option. But if you want to look specifically at what they swore to do... they should use the 25th to remove him since that's the constitutional approach. There's nothing in the constitution that authorizes members of the executive branch to defy their boss if they don't like his decisions.
What makes me undecided is that I'm not sure the 25th would work. If the president and his VP and cabinet disagree on his ability to lead, the 25th leaves it to Congress to decide, and requires a 2/3 majority of both houses to permanently oust the president. What, do you think, is the probability that you could get a 2/3 majority of both houses to oust Trump? I think the most likely outcome of an attempt to use the 25th is that Trump would remain president and all of the cabinet officials who supported his removal would be replaced with others who are willing to do what they're told.
In contrast, impeachment requires only a simple majority of the House, plus a 2/3 majority in the Senate to convict and remove. And it seems likely that Mueller's investigation will provide a strong basis for impeachment and conviction, at least with respect to obstruction of justice, and perhaps violation of campaign finance laws (which is what the "collusion" with Russia would really be).
That being the case, it seems to me that there's a conflict here between upholding the constitution and serving the country, which is why I'm not certain that the anonymous official and his colleagues haven't taken the higher moral path, focusing on protecting the country until Mueller gathers enough evidence to successfully remove Trump. Or until the voters change the balance of power in Congress, or remove Trump in 2020.
OTOH, voters could choose to retain Trump, even after having seen his incompetence. In that case, I guess his senior officials should bow to their will and carry out his directives, regardless of their impact.
I'm still waiting for the left to figure out that you can have mass immigration or you can have nice things like universal health care but you certainly can't have both.
I'm not a leftist, but this is obviously wrong. Just provide the nice things only to citizens, while taxing immigrants and citizens alike. Then make the path to citizenship sufficiently difficult to keep the system in balance. There will be the small issue of the fact that children of immigrants are citizens, but history shows that the children of immigrants are more economically productive than the children of citizens so this is a non-problem; they'll pull their own weight.
This leaves open the question of whether you can afford the nice things even for all citizens, but it's trivial to separate that question from the question of immigration.
Median wage would likely be more representative.
That is the median wage: http://www.latimes.com/busines...
Investments don't create wealth - they capture it. Wealth is generated by the person on the factory floor making something someone will buy, or the person providing a service that someone will buy. Everything else is just a question of how that wealth gets distributed,.
Only partially true.
It's certainly true that real value is only created through production and sales of real products, but it's not true that investors have nothing to do with it. If you want to understand the difference, you need only look at the economic output of any centrally-planned economy. Why is central planning so bad? Because no central committee can ever be smart enough and ruthless enough to efficiently allocate available resources to productive activities. Economic planning needs to allocate capital to organizations that can most efficiently and effectively use it, without regard to politics, and taking into account what consumers want and need.
This is why capitalistic economies are dramatically more productive, dynamic and healthier than centrally-planned ones: The price-driven decisions made by the ostensibly "useless" class of investors, bankers, wealth managers, etc. Those people serve an extremely important purpose. They reward enterprises that make what consumers want and do it efficiently and punish enterprises that make unnecessary stuff or do it inefficiently. They do this by controlling access to capital. Effective enterprises can easily get the cash[*] they need to expand their operations, ineffective ones get starved and die.
Note that I'm not claiming that markets are perfect, or that the moneymen don't make plenty of mistakes. Such claims are obviously ludicrous and anyone can point to counterexamples (e.g. Enron, banking bailouts, etc.). But what is unquestionable is that this system works better than any other system yet devised.
[*] Note that although we use cash to allocate resources, this doesn't mean that "money" is what's actually being allocated, or that economics is about money. Economics has nothing to do with money. Money facilitates exchanges of what the economy is really about, goods and services, by being a universal stand-in for any good or service. So what investors are really doing when they decide where to put their money is to decide where the system should allocate its real goods and services, including labor.
And why do they have record profits? Because their labor costs are shrinking.
And why are their labor costs shrinking? A small percentage of the reduction is due to wage stagnation, but the major cause -- and this is especially true at the tech-driven giants like Amazon -- is automation. Recognition of this fact highlights a serious risk to low-wage workers: If government arbitrarily boosts labor costs, then corporations will accelerate their development and deployment of automation.
Granted that Amazon is already pushing the pace on automation, and it's unlikely that this bill would materially increase their efforts. But the same isn't true across the board. It's certain that automation will eventually destroy all of these low-skilled jobs, and dealing with this tech-pocalypse is going to be a serious challenge. How fast it happens will determine the severity of that challenge, though... which means that increasing the minimum wage or billing corporations for the social services used by their employees are dangerous. These approaches will accelerate the pace of automation -- and will do nothing to address automation-driven unemployment.
IMO, a better approach is to begin replacing our social safety net with a Universal Basic Income, funded by progressive tax increases. This is politically harder, much harder, but stands a chance of slowing automation-driven unemployment rather than accelerating it, and it provides an actual solution to the problem of what to do when those low-skilled jobs just disappear.
There's a parable/joke that goes around, about a new employee who screwed up in a way that cost the company ten thousand dollars. After sheepishly admitting the error to his boss, the employee begins packing up his desk. The boss comes by and says "What are you doing?" The employee replies that he's packing because he's going to be fired. The boss replies "Why in the world would I fire you? I just spent $10,000 training you!"
Related, when I first joined Google, on the Billing Team, which builds the systems that collect and disburse all of the money that flows into and out of Google, I was told that I wouldn't be a Real Billing Engineer until I'd made a mistake that cost the company a million dollars, and then designed and implemented a change to the system that made my mistake impossible. The point was well made, and well taken: This was a culture in which mistakes were to be learned from, not punished.
It is almost impossible to find new slide rules now: Only a few manufacturers are left, and even fewer manufacture them to the same standards as the best older slide rules. I still have one, which I keep as an heirloom.
I bought a new one on ThinkGeek a few years ago... but it doesn't look like they carry them any more. And the one I bought was pretty low quality -- loose-fitting plastic with fairly fat lines. I inherited a couple of old ones from my father in law, and they're so much better. Metal with ultra-fine lines on them and tightly-fitted enough that you need to lubricate them from time to time.
An elegant tool of a more civilized age. Or something. I do like my slide rules, though I'm pretty slow at using them.
It is almost impossible to find new slide rules now
It's almost impossible to find new buggy whips now too.
https://www.drivingessentials....
According to TFA, they segmented the network in response to the hack.
Okay.
And yes, VLAN isn't perfect. That's why you want belt AND suspenders, not belt OR suspenders.
Except that VLANs are more like wearing suspenders made of a few, thin threads. It's almost nothing. Proper cryptographic security is the right solution here, and once you have that, a VLAN provides nothing -- other than traffic management, which is what it's really good for. VLANs were never intended to be used as a security measure, and shouldn't be applied with any expectation that they're adding significant security.
I'll get modded to oblivion for saying that, but the reality is that an armed uprising against the government is impossible these days.
Given the long-demonstrated success of lightly-armed guerrilla insurgencies against modern military forces, that might not be true even if the military stayed united, obeyed the government and were willing to fire on its fellow citizens. But it's very likely that in the event of an armed uprising a substantial portion of the military would join it and an even larger portion would simply refuse to fight. Plus, it's obvious that a first goal of an insurgency would be to use their civilian arms to obtain military arms, whether by liberating arms from the US military (with, undoubtedly, some assistance from members of the military) or just by lasting long enough to convince enemies of the US to supply them.
Bottom line, tens of millions of US citizens armed with hundreds of millions of civilian arms have a reasonable chance of success of overthrowing the government if they have competent organization, leadership and communications.
Note that I think civil war is the worst possible way to replace bad government, not least because with rare exceptions revolutionaries are very bad at devising a good government to replace the bad one. But I think it's important that we retain the option as a last resort.
That's exactly why for the sake of belt and suspenders you should at least use a vlan to isolate the security traffic if not a physically separated network.
The Google network is heavily segmented, though Google has shifted to consider that more of a management feature than a security feature. Google relies primarily on the BeyondCorp zero trust model to provide security, because network segmentation really doesn't. Segmentation isn't useless, but it provides no protection against adversaries who get access to the wires.
I'm sure the badge readers were on a separate VLAN. But Google doesn't trust network segmentation and obviously chose to investigate potential vulnerabilities. Which is a good thing, for Google, for its users and customers, and for other Software House customers (and, almost certainly, customers of Software House's competitors, because I'd be very surprised if the whole door access industry weren't at least this bad).
This guy had access to the network and shouldn't have unless the poking around was blessed.
"The guy" is a member of Google's Red Team, which is the group tasked with finding internal security problems. He was "blessed".
How some other company operates and sells their products can't really represent Google's own development practices.
No, but it shows that they use and rely on 3rd party unverified and ill designed programs
So does every company. So does yours. But how many others do this sort of investigation? Software House has thousands of clients, but it was Google that found the problem -- and published it.
Surely Google should know we speak English exclusively? So what's the point?
It's unlikely that it perceived what it heard as another language. This new bilingual feature only works if you set it up, and only with the second language that you choose. More likely, it just heard some phonemes that triggered the "Ok Google" detection, and then couldn't figure out what followed.
This presumably helps with code-switching, which bilingual people tend to do all-the-freaking-time. They'll start a sentence in one language, forget how to say something in that language (or don't like how it sounds in that one), then switch to another, sometimes for only a few words before switching back.
No, it isn't that clever yet. I just tried it with a few sentences of mixed English and Spanish, and every time it assumed that the entire sentence was in one language, correctly understanding the part that was in that language and finding something phonetically close (ish) for the rest.
I think what it's doing is submitting your words in parallel to all three systems: LangID and the two systems for the languages you have selected. LangID returns its best guess at the language you used, then Assistant gives you the results from the corresponding system.
Also: https://linc.cnil.fr/fr/unders...