I think most examples of people claiming to be offended are really either examples of them trolling or covert attacks on the 'offender', whose views they dislike. Unfortunately it's impossible to tell whether the person is really offended, but assuming 50/50 responsibility between the offender and offendee seems reasonable. Even the most 'offensive' act or statement won't offend everyone, hence the offendee always has a role in, hence responsibility for the offense, however small.
People will use all kinds of reasons to justify their behaviour. I imagine this name would make all kinds of people want to try out the software as well. Do you think the main purpose of the open source community is to provide tools for megacorporations?
I thought they were there to run software on as part of your appraisal as to whether to buy one or not. If you are an artist it makes sense to run software relating to your art. I don't know whether he has any plans to upgrade his existing Apple setup or not, but going into the shop to have a play is the point isn't it? They don't make you sign anything relating to what you can and can't run, and it doesn't seem as though anything improper was done here - no fraud, impersonation, malicious code designed to do harm. If the people going into the shop didn't realise computer watches you in America as well as Soviet Russia, then they learnt something. No crime I can see.
Same flaw in argument as the original article. Starting from the computer does not identify the user. Even if you made the person submit DNA every time they logged in some would go around collecting people's DNA and keeping it in the fridge for when they needed to anon.
I was thinking the same, I'm sure I read they had already built one. Why don't they just run off a copy if they need another? OK, give it a misleading TLD if you have to for marketing purposes.
Were these guys asleep in the last couple months? Seems to me that we have all been publicly reminded that computer networks aren't secure, and that some are very not secure because their owners are asleep at the wheel. So what to do about that? Of course! Pretend the problem is people pretending to be whom they are not, and carry on pretending that you can secure a network against that. Give a load of taxpayers money to some buddies to build a new 'secure' network, instead of legislating and regulating the owners of the current network components and asking them why they didn't secure their shit better. Can they not understand that there is no way for a server to tell which person it is communicating with, especially if that person deliberately lies? Only human beings can fairly reliably recognise other human beings. You can't make computers that can do it, they are much less clever than people.
It sounds as though the author blames the problem on too small a transaction scope, in other words they are carrying out a commit on every single Like response from a site visitor. They could queue such non-essential transactions in the middleware and commit en bloc using a queue that commits chunks at a time, or commit them to an unindexed shard that then propagates to the other shards. He says too many resources are being used in one part of the process (data integrity) and too little in another (queries). Index much? Rebalance hardware towards the instances supporting queries? These things do seem soluble by some effort in system design and engineering. I get that the rollout is tricky to test under load and all that, but if your database grows you need to expect to engineer it, there is no such thing as scalability, different designs are optimal at different scales. All this is independent of DBMS. Is a message of the article just that Facebook had no idea they were going to grow so big so didn't design their middleware and backend with that in mind? Of course that happened. As for the book, another DBMS? We have some thanks.
Tell that to lichen, a whole family of bacterial-fungal symbionts which are large enough that they might stick to a surface, with the individuals in direct contact dying but the rest of the organism proliferating, or go talk to Streptomyces coelicolor; it forms large colony-like sticky clusters under phosphate limitation in the switch to seconday metabolism. I don't see why those clumps wouldn't stick to a surface, killing the individuals in direct contact, but providing an environment for the rest of the clump that is free from competition, hence ripe for exploitation. Also, you say that there is no reasonable way to avoid getting killed but see Comment Subject. How do 20,000 individuals out of every million avoid being killed? There are the fittest and do survive, and will mutate.
I don't think people will really fall for it. It will take a huge amount of free holidays and Harry Potter DVDs to get people to buy the 'New Sun, Same Scum'.
Biggest readership newspaper in the UK. It might not be your culture personally nor mine but if there is such a thing as a national culture there's a strong case to be made that News of the World was one of its major organs for the last 100 years.
I've been thinking this too. It seems quite likely they are doing this in other markets. I guess it's all down to rumbling the PIs at the business end though, and getting hold of their records as happened in the UK.
I'm inclined to agree with this analysis. This is a vicious counterattack on both the employees and on those expressing disgust at the corporation's actions. It sounds like 'You want to fuck with our brand? well fuck you we are big enough to make a new one, and screw your national newspaper, it is just a vehicle for us to make money. You do not own your own national culture so get used to it.' I do think that they will contaminate the Sun brand with this though. They have made their move, it will be interesting to see what anon's response will be.
If the kill rate is less than 100% then it seems the bacteria can resist/avoid.
Perhaps evolution won't use the first strategy that came off the top of my head, but that doesn't imply 'not possible'. History says otherwise. Perhaps the bacteria will piggy-back on a fungus which develops defenses, or form agglomerations where the individuals which attach directly are killed but their sisters stick to their cold dead bodies and are cushioned. I think we are both speculating and we still can't really call 'impossible' even after a few millions of generations of bacteria have been all over it and the kill rate is still over 98%. If the kill rate is less than 100% then my argument holds - the slightest genetic advantage in terms of survivability/avoidability will be amplified by the weapon, and such advantages will accumulate over time.
Sheesh I thought the guy was a business man. On what planet was nuclear ever an economically viable proposition if you don't subsidise it by the nuclear weapons business as a sideline? The cost of cleanup is astronomical, unless the proposal is never to clean up and just keep moving the reactors to a new town when the old one gets too dirty/old to use. Nuclear was never about generating affordable energy. Do you think Iran's nuclear programme is about generating affordable energy for them?
They wouldn't necessarily have to evolve a new kingdom of life. Perhaps they might just evolve a mechanism to exude something very sticky that gums up the nano surface. There's more than one way to survive a weapon.
As for the deer, they might not learn bullet resistance but they would almost certainly develop camouflage, faster wound healing, faster running, or other hunter survival strategies. The point is the slow easy to kill ones are the ones to die first. The weapon automatically selects for the survival of the ones best place to avoid the weapon, creating a harder to kill population overall, and any subsequent mutation which increases the ability to avoid the weapon spreads like wildfire through the population. The better the weapon at killing, the stronger the selection pressure to evolve immunity. If the kill rate is less than 100% the critters get better and better at not being killed over time through mutation.
I guess the conversion back to sugars would be expensive, so it wouldn't necessarily include this in its regular metabolism, only do it as a temporary defence mechanism to cope with attack. If it could exude enough enzymes, it might be able to render its very near environment survivable by surrounding itself in an enzymey sugary sticky blob that can beat the wipe. Ingestion by a human would neatly strip off the sugar coating. Just speculating tho.
This says it all. So out of every million bacteria up to 20,000 individuals can survive the attack. The article doesn't indicate what proportion of this 20,000 go on to successfully reproduce, but if it's >0 then voila, instant selection pressure for resistant microbes,
Given microbes can survive high temperature thermal vents, concentrated heavy metals in mining waste ponds, high pressures a mile underground, low pressures and cosmic rays in space, etc, I would say it's probably only a matter of time.
I've tried this and it works well as a deodorant but I worried about the Alzheimer's risks from absorbing the Al through my skin. Do you think it's safe?
I don't see any theoretical reason why a microbe couldn't evolve a mechanism to metabolise alcohol into something like, say, a sugar. Most organic enzymatic reactions seem to be reversible.
Slashdot Mirror
I think most examples of people claiming to be offended are really either examples of them trolling or covert attacks on the 'offender', whose views they dislike. Unfortunately it's impossible to tell whether the person is really offended, but assuming 50/50 responsibility between the offender and offendee seems reasonable. Even the most 'offensive' act or statement won't offend everyone, hence the offendee always has a role in, hence responsibility for the offense, however small.
Agreed. Also offense is a phenomenon requiring two participants, and the offended person is also (equally I would argue) responsible for the offense.
People will use all kinds of reasons to justify their behaviour. I imagine this name would make all kinds of people want to try out the software as well. Do you think the main purpose of the open source community is to provide tools for megacorporations?
Are newspapers the only ones or does this extend into other media? (TV news I am looking at you).
I thought they were there to run software on as part of your appraisal as to whether to buy one or not. If you are an artist it makes sense to run software relating to your art. I don't know whether he has any plans to upgrade his existing Apple setup or not, but going into the shop to have a play is the point isn't it? They don't make you sign anything relating to what you can and can't run, and it doesn't seem as though anything improper was done here - no fraud, impersonation, malicious code designed to do harm. If the people going into the shop didn't realise computer watches you in America as well as Soviet Russia, then they learnt something. No crime I can see.
Same flaw in argument as the original article. Starting from the computer does not identify the user. Even if you made the person submit DNA every time they logged in some would go around collecting people's DNA and keeping it in the fridge for when they needed to anon.
I was thinking the same, I'm sure I read they had already built one. Why don't they just run off a copy if they need another? OK, give it a misleading TLD if you have to for marketing purposes.
Were these guys asleep in the last couple months? Seems to me that we have all been publicly reminded that computer networks aren't secure, and that some are very not secure because their owners are asleep at the wheel. So what to do about that? Of course! Pretend the problem is people pretending to be whom they are not, and carry on pretending that you can secure a network against that. Give a load of taxpayers money to some buddies to build a new 'secure' network, instead of legislating and regulating the owners of the current network components and asking them why they didn't secure their shit better. Can they not understand that there is no way for a server to tell which person it is communicating with, especially if that person deliberately lies? Only human beings can fairly reliably recognise other human beings. You can't make computers that can do it, they are much less clever than people.
It sounds as though the author blames the problem on too small a transaction scope, in other words they are carrying out a commit on every single Like response from a site visitor. They could queue such non-essential transactions in the middleware and commit en bloc using a queue that commits chunks at a time, or commit them to an unindexed shard that then propagates to the other shards. He says too many resources are being used in one part of the process (data integrity) and too little in another (queries). Index much? Rebalance hardware towards the instances supporting queries? These things do seem soluble by some effort in system design and engineering. I get that the rollout is tricky to test under load and all that, but if your database grows you need to expect to engineer it, there is no such thing as scalability, different designs are optimal at different scales. All this is independent of DBMS. Is a message of the article just that Facebook had no idea they were going to grow so big so didn't design their middleware and backend with that in mind? Of course that happened. As for the book, another DBMS? We have some thanks.
Tell that to lichen, a whole family of bacterial-fungal symbionts which are large enough that they might stick to a surface, with the individuals in direct contact dying but the rest of the organism proliferating, or go talk to Streptomyces coelicolor; it forms large colony-like sticky clusters under phosphate limitation in the switch to seconday metabolism. I don't see why those clumps wouldn't stick to a surface, killing the individuals in direct contact, but providing an environment for the rest of the clump that is free from competition, hence ripe for exploitation. Also, you say that there is no reasonable way to avoid getting killed but see Comment Subject. How do 20,000 individuals out of every million avoid being killed? There are the fittest and do survive, and will mutate.
I don't think people will really fall for it. It will take a huge amount of free holidays and Harry Potter DVDs to get people to buy the 'New Sun, Same Scum'.
Biggest readership newspaper in the UK. It might not be your culture personally nor mine but if there is such a thing as a national culture there's a strong case to be made that News of the World was one of its major organs for the last 100 years.
He did find out the mobile numbers of large numbers of people quite quickly it seems. I wonder how that step was accomplished.
I've been thinking this too. It seems quite likely they are doing this in other markets. I guess it's all down to rumbling the PIs at the business end though, and getting hold of their records as happened in the UK.
I'm inclined to agree with this analysis. This is a vicious counterattack on both the employees and on those expressing disgust at the corporation's actions. It sounds like 'You want to fuck with our brand? well fuck you we are big enough to make a new one, and screw your national newspaper, it is just a vehicle for us to make money. You do not own your own national culture so get used to it.' I do think that they will contaminate the Sun brand with this though. They have made their move, it will be interesting to see what anon's response will be.
If the kill rate is less than 100% then it seems the bacteria can resist/avoid.
Perhaps evolution won't use the first strategy that came off the top of my head, but that doesn't imply 'not possible'. History says otherwise. Perhaps the bacteria will piggy-back on a fungus which develops defenses, or form agglomerations where the individuals which attach directly are killed but their sisters stick to their cold dead bodies and are cushioned. I think we are both speculating and we still can't really call 'impossible' even after a few millions of generations of bacteria have been all over it and the kill rate is still over 98%. If the kill rate is less than 100% then my argument holds - the slightest genetic advantage in terms of survivability/avoidability will be amplified by the weapon, and such advantages will accumulate over time.
Sheesh I thought the guy was a business man. On what planet was nuclear ever an economically viable proposition if you don't subsidise it by the nuclear weapons business as a sideline? The cost of cleanup is astronomical, unless the proposal is never to clean up and just keep moving the reactors to a new town when the old one gets too dirty/old to use. Nuclear was never about generating affordable energy. Do you think Iran's nuclear programme is about generating affordable energy for them?
As for the deer, they might not learn bullet resistance but they would almost certainly develop camouflage, faster wound healing, faster running, or other hunter survival strategies. The point is the slow easy to kill ones are the ones to die first. The weapon automatically selects for the survival of the ones best place to avoid the weapon, creating a harder to kill population overall, and any subsequent mutation which increases the ability to avoid the weapon spreads like wildfire through the population. The better the weapon at killing, the stronger the selection pressure to evolve immunity. If the kill rate is less than 100% the critters get better and better at not being killed over time through mutation.
Putting alum on your armpits every day
I guess the conversion back to sugars would be expensive, so it wouldn't necessarily include this in its regular metabolism, only do it as a temporary defence mechanism to cope with attack. If it could exude enough enzymes, it might be able to render its very near environment survivable by surrounding itself in an enzymey sugary sticky blob that can beat the wipe. Ingestion by a human would neatly strip off the sugar coating. Just speculating tho.
Given microbes can survive high temperature thermal vents, concentrated heavy metals in mining waste ponds, high pressures a mile underground, low pressures and cosmic rays in space, etc, I would say it's probably only a matter of time.
I've tried this and it works well as a deodorant but I worried about the Alzheimer's risks from absorbing the Al through my skin. Do you think it's safe?
I don't see any theoretical reason why a microbe couldn't evolve a mechanism to metabolise alcohol into something like, say, a sugar. Most organic enzymatic reactions seem to be reversible.
Does this corporation employ similar newsgathering methods in its other markets? Australia? USA?
I refer the honourable gentlemen to a previous point of order: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2288852&cid=36643866