When I got my new smartphone (not a Samsung model), I turned on the voice recognition feature thinking it would be cool to order my phone to get me information via voice only. It was cool, but the phone quickly started picking up on phrases that were not even close to my activation phrase. I'd be talking when suddenly my phone would beep indicating that it had heard some command it thought I had given and had tried to obey. This became too annoying so I disabled the feature.
If Samsung TVs are similar to my phone, they could capture what they think is your activation phrase when it's really nothing even close. Then, they could send voice recordings (non-encrypted) that you never wanted them to capture.
Actually travelling faster than light isn't really forbidden. What's impossible is accelerating to or past light speed. (Your mass will increase infinitely as you accelerate requiring an infinite amount of fuel.) However, you could theoretically start faster than light. The equations lead to an imaginary number which leads to some debate as to what that means. Interestingly, if you were going faster than light, you'd encounter the same effects (divided by the square root of -1) slowing down to light speed that we encounter speeding up to light speed. However, you could reduce those effects by travelling even faster.
We haven't detected anything travelling faster than light, but that could just be a limitation of our detection capabilities rather than a limitation of the Universe.
When I needed a new laptop, I heard good things about Lenovo and they had a good deal so I ordered one. It initially said it would ship in 2 weeks. One week later, that ship date turned into 8 weeks. When I called asking why, I was told "we need some parts" (they wouldn't specify what parts). They also said that it *could* ship earlier but they couldn't guarantee when it would ship. When I tried to cancel, I was told I couldn't but that I could submit a form requesting cancellation which, if approved, might go through before my laptop shipped but might not. In the end, I managed to cancel the order and get all my money back. I ordered from another vendor (Toshiba) and got my laptop in two weeks.
One of my recent pet peeves are the "similar article" links that 1) actually go to other sites, 2) don't seem to be tied to the article I'm reading, and 3) straddle the NSFW line. Specifically, I might be at work looking at an article about some technology-related issue and one of the "similar articles" at the end suddenly has a thumbnail image that I wouldn't want my boss to see if he suddenly appeared behind me. Nothing X-rated, mind you, but nothing I'd purposefully look at at work. I'd love to just block these outright and not have to worry about them coming up.
This is kind of what I figured. There should be some strict limitations on this behavior. Using it for one year to hone your patent application? Fine. Using it for over a decade to make sure your patent applies to technology developed after your initial patent filing? Not good at all. Perhaps there should be a hard limit of one year between priority date and filing date.
The BlueTooth 2.0 specification was released in 2004.
The patent trolls' patents were filed in 2009 and 2011. Both patents have a "priority date" of December 5th, 1997 which apparently means that even though they were filed AFTER BlueTooth 2.0 was released, only prior art from before 12/5/1997 can be considered. How is it that prior art can only be considered if it takes place 12 - 14 years before the patent in question was filed?
I am sick and tired of Luddites that claim robots will steal all the jobs.
In the Luddites' defense, technology often "takes away" specific jobs that some people might have been doing their whole lives. If you were working in a profession for 30 years and that was all you knew, an invention that rendered it moot would be scary. All of a sudden, you'd be out of a job - possibly for good as few companies would be willing to completely retrain you when they could get someone new for cheaper (and who might know the new technology).
Of course, the Luddites miss the long term view. They look at that those people left behind the technological curve and say "technology steals all of our jobs" while ignoring all of the new jobs being opened up. I definitely feel for those whose line of work is suddenly made irrelevant by technology, but that's not a reason to hold technology back.
The pill is 99.9% effective when taken properly. Unfortunately, it can be all too easy to take it too late or forget to take it one day and wind up pregnant. In my opinion, IUD is a more effective birth control mechanism since you don't need to think about it for about five years (at which time it needs to be swapped out). No forgetting to take the pill one day and winding up pregnant.
The number of responses here along the lines of "women always trick men into marriage by getting pregnant" or "birth control is a woman's responsibility" make me sad for my gender. I can't be the only man on Slashdot who 1) respects women (my wife and I both manage our portions of birth control together - I would never suggest that's HER job and not for me to be bothered with), 2) sees fatherhood as a positive outcome - not something that is only entered into via trickery, and 3) would like to see new birth control methods available on the market (whether or not this one would work for my wife and I aside, the more options the better). Can I?
Good luck expecting even 15 years of operation from a washing machine. Today, appliances are designed for a 10 year lifespan. Anything over 10 years is essentially borrowed time waiting for it to break so you can replace it. No company wants to make a washing machine that lasts 30 years which would cost much more than the competitors models. After all, they can sell you a cheaper model that lasts 10 years and then sell you another one every 10 years after that.
Quite honestly, knowing the details of how SSL works isn't a major portion of my job. My job involves (to vastly simplify it) using server side scripting to pull data from databases and arrange that data using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS into an easy to view format. I know HTML, JavaScript, and CSS inside and out but couldn't tell you the code behind how the browser translates "font-weight: bold" into bolded text or how the text in the TITLE tag gets put into the browser's title area.
Similarly, I can generate a CSR from the webserver, use it to obtain a certificate file, and apply that file (a well as properly configure the server) to make sure that the website is SSL secured. I can even set up my server side scripts to enforce SSL (redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS). However, if you asked me to tell you the technical details behind SSL, I couldn't.
Quite frankly, knowing the technical details behind SSL isn't a part of my job and there are a lot of other things I need to learn which are more applicable. As a web developer, I always need to keep learning. The problem is that there is too much in the computer industry for any one developer to ever know it all. So I prioritize and learn topics that will come into play in my development, not details that - while it would be nice to know - won't help me become a better developer.
A lot of these education "reforms" want to reduce teachers from unionized professionals with a lifetime commitment, to replaceable less-skilled contingent workers who follow standardized workbooks, and are basically computer tenders.
I fear Bill Gates, even when he is bearing gifts. Up to now, he and his lobbyists have been trying to "disrupt" education, by forcing schools to adopt standardized testing, written by Pearson educational publishers, that have never been validated by any of the standard validation methods that every science-based psychologist uses. Teachers are being fired based on tests that literally have no more validity than random numbers. He's taking the MBA methods used by employers to evaluate assembly line workers and marketing managers, and applying them to teachers, as if you could judge the value of teachers by their success in the free market of test results.
A thousand times this. My kids go to school in New York and our governor has basically declared war on public schools. He wants to open more private-business owned charter schools and close public schools who fail the tests. Tests, mind you, that are designed for kids to fail so that Pearson can sell more to the state to bring up test scores and so the politicians can point more fingers at teachers. My kids refuse the tests. Not without some push back, mind you, but it is a growing movement as parents and educators see that these tests have no point other than to funnel money to private businesses and hurt kids/teachers.
I've seen the results of Bill Gate's intrusion into education. His organizations are pushing high stakes standardized tests designed to show the students and teachers are failing so they can sell more resources to bring up the former's test scores and so they can replace the latter. Teachers are being forced to stick to a script and teach to the test because every second not spent on test preparation is a second that might cost them their jobs. (Standardized test scores are being tied to the teachers' jobs. If your kids don't score well enough, you can be let go. So you'd better devote all of your efforts to making sure your kids do well on the tests - whether or not they actually learn anything is irrelevant.)
I try to guide my children to make the right choices, but as a parent sometimes you need to force your child to do the right thing. This isn't a matter of me "owning" my children. It's a matter of me and my wife being the adults responsible for their well-being. Left to their own devices, my oldest would likely sit on the couch all day snacking, watching TV, and playing video games. He would save his homework for the last possible moment and would attempt to stay up all hours of the night.
My oldest is 11 and thinks he's all grown up. He complains when we force him to do his homework before watching TV because it's so hard. (He has to answer some math problems and write a few sentances about a book he's reading.) He has no clue about the work ahead of him in high school and college, but the good habits we enforce now will serve him well into the future.
Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. All it takes is one big loss for humans to disappear.
Even if the loss isn't a "wipe out all humans" scale loss, there are making kinds of losing. When the Library of Alexandria was lost, humanity lost out on a lot of knowledge. We might have gotten some of it back and might have survived without it, but we might be much further along technologically had its contents been available for more generations.
That's because a dog has a complex digestive system capable of handling non-food items being ingested. Simpler organisms don't have this complex a system. It's just "pull in food item", "digest", "expel remains" - with the remains assumed to be of a certain size or smaller. If the remains happen to be larger (e.g. because they are a non-digestible plastic), then it gets stuck in the organism. You might ask why the creature doesn't account for this and the answer would be Evolution. The creature would need to evolve a digestive system that could either break down plastics or could expel their larger sizes as waste. The problem with this is we've only been dumping plastics in the ocean for about 50 years or so. Before this, the creatures found their digestive process worked just fine. They certainly weren't going to evolve a more complex system (at a greater energy cost) for non-existant-at-the-time plastics and we haven't been dumping plastics in the ocean long enough for them to evolve a response to it.
Saying "why can't a sponge do X when a dog can" doesn't make sense. Why can't you stay underwater for hours when a fish can? Different animals have different capabilities.
I'm not sure if this was a web developer position you were interviewing for, but your statement of "these developers are building sites that need to be secure" makes me think it is. Let me speak as a web developer who's been at this for over twenty years.
I've never once in my position needed to know public/private key encryption to secure files for my job. If you asked me right now how to do this, I'd have no clue. If my manager were to walk over to me now and tell me to do this, I'd need some time to familiarize myself with the process. This would mean using Google to find articles on the subject. Possibly with an addition of purchasing books on the topic or going for training, but mostly Google. I pride myself on my Google-Fu. It can be an invaluable skill to a developer.
How do I secure my websites without knowledge of public/private key encryption then? I know how to set up SSL certificates and send traffic via HTTPS. (Yes, this is a form of public/private key encryption, but I don't know the intricacies of it. I just know how to set it up.) I also know to sanitize my inputs so a user entering "LastName=Jones' 1=1; Delete From Users" in the URL won't delete all of our records. I know not to take user input and just spit it out on my webpage. I know to look for the edge cases where security could fail and protect against them. When I'm building websites/apps, I think "how would I break this if I were malicious" and then I protect against these attacks. Is my security 100% effective? I'm sure not. Nobody's is, but I take pride in securing my sites as much as I possibly can.
All without being able to recite Public/Private Key Encryption details on command. Unless the job directly requires this knowledge, I'd inquire as to why this was such a deal-breaking question and why you've come to the conclusion that so many developers are bad at what they do because they can't immediately recite the details of every technology you toss their way.
If enough states had drivers license apps, maybe we could pressure device manufacturers to make a "license mode." So you get pulled over and need to show your driver's license. You unlock your phone just enough that the drivers license can be displayed but not so much that other applications can launch (or photos/texts/etc can be rifled through).
That shift means that to wall street guys, companies with solid business but no growth are effectively worthless.
Not only that, but if you have too little growth, you're seen as not a good investment. Your company consistently grew 5% every year? Sorry, that's not good enough. Fire 10% of your workforce and slash the quality of your products so you can eke out a 25% growth this quarter. Then I'll sell my stock at a great profit. Oh, now your company is tanking because of stockholders pressuring you to put short-term profits ahead of long-term growth? Too bad, we're on to the next big thing now.
Slashdot Mirror
And the final irony? If Ronald Reagan ran for President today, he would be kicked out of the GOP today for being too liberal.
When I got my new smartphone (not a Samsung model), I turned on the voice recognition feature thinking it would be cool to order my phone to get me information via voice only. It was cool, but the phone quickly started picking up on phrases that were not even close to my activation phrase. I'd be talking when suddenly my phone would beep indicating that it had heard some command it thought I had given and had tried to obey. This became too annoying so I disabled the feature.
If Samsung TVs are similar to my phone, they could capture what they think is your activation phrase when it's really nothing even close. Then, they could send voice recordings (non-encrypted) that you never wanted them to capture.
Actually travelling faster than light isn't really forbidden. What's impossible is accelerating to or past light speed. (Your mass will increase infinitely as you accelerate requiring an infinite amount of fuel.) However, you could theoretically start faster than light. The equations lead to an imaginary number which leads to some debate as to what that means. Interestingly, if you were going faster than light, you'd encounter the same effects (divided by the square root of -1) slowing down to light speed that we encounter speeding up to light speed. However, you could reduce those effects by travelling even faster.
We haven't detected anything travelling faster than light, but that could just be a limitation of our detection capabilities rather than a limitation of the Universe.
When I needed a new laptop, I heard good things about Lenovo and they had a good deal so I ordered one. It initially said it would ship in 2 weeks. One week later, that ship date turned into 8 weeks. When I called asking why, I was told "we need some parts" (they wouldn't specify what parts). They also said that it *could* ship earlier but they couldn't guarantee when it would ship. When I tried to cancel, I was told I couldn't but that I could submit a form requesting cancellation which, if approved, might go through before my laptop shipped but might not. In the end, I managed to cancel the order and get all my money back. I ordered from another vendor (Toshiba) and got my laptop in two weeks.
One of my recent pet peeves are the "similar article" links that 1) actually go to other sites, 2) don't seem to be tied to the article I'm reading, and 3) straddle the NSFW line. Specifically, I might be at work looking at an article about some technology-related issue and one of the "similar articles" at the end suddenly has a thumbnail image that I wouldn't want my boss to see if he suddenly appeared behind me. Nothing X-rated, mind you, but nothing I'd purposefully look at at work. I'd love to just block these outright and not have to worry about them coming up.
Obligatory Oatmeal: How a Web Design Goes Straight To Hell.
This is kind of what I figured. There should be some strict limitations on this behavior. Using it for one year to hone your patent application? Fine. Using it for over a decade to make sure your patent applies to technology developed after your initial patent filing? Not good at all. Perhaps there should be a hard limit of one year between priority date and filing date.
The BlueTooth 2.0 specification was released in 2004.
The patent trolls' patents were filed in 2009 and 2011. Both patents have a "priority date" of December 5th, 1997 which apparently means that even though they were filed AFTER BlueTooth 2.0 was released, only prior art from before 12/5/1997 can be considered. How is it that prior art can only be considered if it takes place 12 - 14 years before the patent in question was filed?
This is completely and totally wrong. I don't agree with this at all.
You smash them when they file lawsuits. Don't wait until they win them or they'll never learn.
In the Luddites' defense, technology often "takes away" specific jobs that some people might have been doing their whole lives. If you were working in a profession for 30 years and that was all you knew, an invention that rendered it moot would be scary. All of a sudden, you'd be out of a job - possibly for good as few companies would be willing to completely retrain you when they could get someone new for cheaper (and who might know the new technology).
Of course, the Luddites miss the long term view. They look at that those people left behind the technological curve and say "technology steals all of our jobs" while ignoring all of the new jobs being opened up. I definitely feel for those whose line of work is suddenly made irrelevant by technology, but that's not a reason to hold technology back.
The pill is 99.9% effective when taken properly. Unfortunately, it can be all too easy to take it too late or forget to take it one day and wind up pregnant. In my opinion, IUD is a more effective birth control mechanism since you don't need to think about it for about five years (at which time it needs to be swapped out). No forgetting to take the pill one day and winding up pregnant.
The number of responses here along the lines of "women always trick men into marriage by getting pregnant" or "birth control is a woman's responsibility" make me sad for my gender. I can't be the only man on Slashdot who 1) respects women (my wife and I both manage our portions of birth control together - I would never suggest that's HER job and not for me to be bothered with), 2) sees fatherhood as a positive outcome - not something that is only entered into via trickery, and 3) would like to see new birth control methods available on the market (whether or not this one would work for my wife and I aside, the more options the better). Can I?
You forgot the addendum to #4:
4a) Lobby the government to ban any technology if it threatens their prominence in the industry.
(See the MPAA/RIAA for a prime example.)
Good luck expecting even 15 years of operation from a washing machine. Today, appliances are designed for a 10 year lifespan. Anything over 10 years is essentially borrowed time waiting for it to break so you can replace it. No company wants to make a washing machine that lasts 30 years which would cost much more than the competitors models. After all, they can sell you a cheaper model that lasts 10 years and then sell you another one every 10 years after that.
18. TV show is cancelled before the plot lines are resolved leading to angry aliens storming the planet demanding to see the ending.
Quite honestly, knowing the details of how SSL works isn't a major portion of my job. My job involves (to vastly simplify it) using server side scripting to pull data from databases and arrange that data using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS into an easy to view format. I know HTML, JavaScript, and CSS inside and out but couldn't tell you the code behind how the browser translates "font-weight: bold" into bolded text or how the text in the TITLE tag gets put into the browser's title area.
Similarly, I can generate a CSR from the webserver, use it to obtain a certificate file, and apply that file (a well as properly configure the server) to make sure that the website is SSL secured. I can even set up my server side scripts to enforce SSL (redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS). However, if you asked me to tell you the technical details behind SSL, I couldn't.
Quite frankly, knowing the technical details behind SSL isn't a part of my job and there are a lot of other things I need to learn which are more applicable. As a web developer, I always need to keep learning. The problem is that there is too much in the computer industry for any one developer to ever know it all. So I prioritize and learn topics that will come into play in my development, not details that - while it would be nice to know - won't help me become a better developer.
A thousand times this. My kids go to school in New York and our governor has basically declared war on public schools. He wants to open more private-business owned charter schools and close public schools who fail the tests. Tests, mind you, that are designed for kids to fail so that Pearson can sell more to the state to bring up test scores and so the politicians can point more fingers at teachers. My kids refuse the tests. Not without some push back, mind you, but it is a growing movement as parents and educators see that these tests have no point other than to funnel money to private businesses and hurt kids/teachers.
I've seen the results of Bill Gate's intrusion into education. His organizations are pushing high stakes standardized tests designed to show the students and teachers are failing so they can sell more resources to bring up the former's test scores and so they can replace the latter. Teachers are being forced to stick to a script and teach to the test because every second not spent on test preparation is a second that might cost them their jobs. (Standardized test scores are being tied to the teachers' jobs. If your kids don't score well enough, you can be let go. So you'd better devote all of your efforts to making sure your kids do well on the tests - whether or not they actually learn anything is irrelevant.)
I try to guide my children to make the right choices, but as a parent sometimes you need to force your child to do the right thing. This isn't a matter of me "owning" my children. It's a matter of me and my wife being the adults responsible for their well-being. Left to their own devices, my oldest would likely sit on the couch all day snacking, watching TV, and playing video games. He would save his homework for the last possible moment and would attempt to stay up all hours of the night.
My oldest is 11 and thinks he's all grown up. He complains when we force him to do his homework before watching TV because it's so hard. (He has to answer some math problems and write a few sentances about a book he's reading.) He has no clue about the work ahead of him in high school and college, but the good habits we enforce now will serve him well into the future.
It's called being a parent.
Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. All it takes is one big loss for humans to disappear.
Even if the loss isn't a "wipe out all humans" scale loss, there are making kinds of losing. When the Library of Alexandria was lost, humanity lost out on a lot of knowledge. We might have gotten some of it back and might have survived without it, but we might be much further along technologically had its contents been available for more generations.
Not sure, but I'm betting humans are going to lose.
That's because a dog has a complex digestive system capable of handling non-food items being ingested. Simpler organisms don't have this complex a system. It's just "pull in food item", "digest", "expel remains" - with the remains assumed to be of a certain size or smaller. If the remains happen to be larger (e.g. because they are a non-digestible plastic), then it gets stuck in the organism. You might ask why the creature doesn't account for this and the answer would be Evolution. The creature would need to evolve a digestive system that could either break down plastics or could expel their larger sizes as waste. The problem with this is we've only been dumping plastics in the ocean for about 50 years or so. Before this, the creatures found their digestive process worked just fine. They certainly weren't going to evolve a more complex system (at a greater energy cost) for non-existant-at-the-time plastics and we haven't been dumping plastics in the ocean long enough for them to evolve a response to it.
Saying "why can't a sponge do X when a dog can" doesn't make sense. Why can't you stay underwater for hours when a fish can? Different animals have different capabilities.
I'm not sure if this was a web developer position you were interviewing for, but your statement of "these developers are building sites that need to be secure" makes me think it is. Let me speak as a web developer who's been at this for over twenty years.
I've never once in my position needed to know public/private key encryption to secure files for my job. If you asked me right now how to do this, I'd have no clue. If my manager were to walk over to me now and tell me to do this, I'd need some time to familiarize myself with the process. This would mean using Google to find articles on the subject. Possibly with an addition of purchasing books on the topic or going for training, but mostly Google. I pride myself on my Google-Fu. It can be an invaluable skill to a developer.
How do I secure my websites without knowledge of public/private key encryption then? I know how to set up SSL certificates and send traffic via HTTPS. (Yes, this is a form of public/private key encryption, but I don't know the intricacies of it. I just know how to set it up.) I also know to sanitize my inputs so a user entering "LastName=Jones' 1=1; Delete From Users" in the URL won't delete all of our records. I know not to take user input and just spit it out on my webpage. I know to look for the edge cases where security could fail and protect against them. When I'm building websites/apps, I think "how would I break this if I were malicious" and then I protect against these attacks. Is my security 100% effective? I'm sure not. Nobody's is, but I take pride in securing my sites as much as I possibly can.
All without being able to recite Public/Private Key Encryption details on command. Unless the job directly requires this knowledge, I'd inquire as to why this was such a deal-breaking question and why you've come to the conclusion that so many developers are bad at what they do because they can't immediately recite the details of every technology you toss their way.
If enough states had drivers license apps, maybe we could pressure device manufacturers to make a "license mode." So you get pulled over and need to show your driver's license. You unlock your phone just enough that the drivers license can be displayed but not so much that other applications can launch (or photos/texts/etc can be rifled through).
Not only that, but if you have too little growth, you're seen as not a good investment. Your company consistently grew 5% every year? Sorry, that's not good enough. Fire 10% of your workforce and slash the quality of your products so you can eke out a 25% growth this quarter. Then I'll sell my stock at a great profit. Oh, now your company is tanking because of stockholders pressuring you to put short-term profits ahead of long-term growth? Too bad, we're on to the next big thing now.