I'm at a university and we do this all the time. IBM gave us 'millions' in software, that was a burned CD with some stuff on it (not my research group so I'm not really sure what exactly, but something related to distributed computing).
My group got a '4 million dollar' donation which was all of the source code for a project a small company had worked on for 10 years with 5 major versions.
Whatever that MSRP headline number was is what they could claim as a tax break. Didn't matter if it was absurdly unrelated to the actual value or not.
The whole of large-scale funding of science and engineering came out of WW-II -- the Manhatten Project and microwave radar.
No, it's been around for a lot longer than that. The french even in the 18th century had a national science policy that was essentially what we're talking about here - things that directly benefit the country. The British had a more laissez faire approach to the whole thing with the Royal Society, and never really congealed a cohesive plan. Since the two regularly stole from each other for a couple of centuries it worked out OK. The british did a lot of fundamental science, the french did a lot of practical stuff, and they just copied each other where it was relevant.
Since the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536 there have been various efforts at funding science in the way we think of it through universities, I suppose arguably you could even go back to the 11th or 12th century in Italy for something similar, though that was much more limited in scope.
Government funding is a sort of odd concept. If you expect rich lords to subsidize the children of other rich lords (who sit in the house of lords) being educated at a government school is that government funding? Not exactly, but it's not really different either. The world has had had government support for industry and research for centuries, but different funding models are well, different. Tax breaks, making members of the government pay for it, making 'The Church' pay for etc. have all been going on for ages.
Microsoft needs someone at the top who uses their products the way someone who isn't surrounded by microsofties every day does. So they can get their shit together on design. Windows 8 is an example of doing a great job executing a terrible idea. That has to stop. Now.
It also needs someone who recognizes there is a market beyond himself and can support that (this is where Steve jobs always struggled) - car guys get that. This car might not be for me, but there is a market for it.
It also needs someone with an internal employee evaluation system that is going to actually make supportive of co-workers and that rewards everyone doing great work when they do.
Ideally microsoft needs someone who can decide what direction to take the company - an open services and software company that supports a large collection of partners, or a device and services company that has no friends. And to decide which of those is best for shareholders they need someone from outside the microsoft bubble.
Mulally isn't necessarily the best pick - but of the list of known candidates from outside MS he's got a decent track record.
We had a grad student get charged 3000 dollars in tuition (money she didn't have) because she submitted the final corrected version of her thesis wrong in the computer system (she created it as a new thesis rather than as an update to the existing submission), She didn't realize this problem for a full 40 minutes, and by that point it was 00:30 hours. She fought for a couple of weeks with the administration until finally the dean overheard her arguing with someone, asked for an explanation, shook his head, and magically the 3000 dollar fee disappeared. But she wasn't going to get her PhD until she paid the money otherwise.
A lady I started my Masters with had a supervisor who retired and moved to australia. She was told about 10 months in advance this was going to happen. But her project didn't get done, so... she had to start over with a new supervisor on a new project. (There is and was a whole lot of the university screwing her on that one).
The big difference I found is that in business, your first priority is business. If you're on a project and you get moved to something else because of an emergency no one expects you to have completely the first project at the same time. In academia, not so much, well, not as a grad student anyway.
Most of us are aware of better coding practices, but getting things done on academic schedules tends to result in whatever can be done before reading week or before tuition is due or the like.
We don't mind sometimes, but when you are asked to work 8-10 hours a day then raise a family there isn't a whole lot of time for dealing with people who think we should get rid of the Internet, or that gold is the only real money.
The (linked) Aandtech article on battery life pretty much answers its own question.
Surface pro and surface pro 2 completely destroy everything else in the benchmark ratings. It means haswell doesn't manage lower power scenarios nearly as well as ARM, but Intel never has.
For a comparison to iOS they'd need to well, actually have on on their chart. I can certainly see the argument that Windows is worse at power management than other OS's on the same hardware - but without hard numbers in a chart that's a tough case to make, since you're comparing different review sites to each other. Comparing different hardware is missing out on a lot - for most computing needs they're benchmarking Haswell is massive overkill - which might just be it, it literally cannot slow itself down enough (with either MS or intel drivers being the culprit) to save even more power.
Or windows is doing background stuff that other OS's aren't. Whether those provide any value to justify reduced battery life or not is debatable, but the answer seems to be 'probably not'.
It still isn't 'microsofts hardware', it's hardware from some 3rd party vendor they soldered together in a case and put their own sticker on it. Yes, it's up to MS to try and ride the cases of Intel and whomever is supplying their displays and SSD's to find ways to save power, but it's ultimately up to the 3rd party guys (who also sell parts to the rest of us) to actually make the drivers for their hardware.
And Fuzzing sucks, because you're making assumptions about how much to add still. And your assumptions can easily turn out to be wrong.
Real data isn't necessarily random - that was the example I gave you for a reason. Systematic biases introduced into real use you can't simulate for. Random usage patterns you can *try* and fuzz, but you can easily screw that up, depends on the system.
again, this isn't new.
No it definitely isn't. This sort of stuff has been around hundreds of years, and if you think 'fuzzing' will deal with systematic biases in your data you should probably come back to school, we'll sort you out when you get to second year.
Computers are fast.
But finite. That you can do with 10 computers what took 100 before doesn't change the problems caused by having half (or 1/4) the number of computers that you actually needed.
The moment you cannot fit the entire problem on one box with room to spare you are into all of the problems of running out of capacity, which are not new.
Isn't true, at all. Watch 1000 volunteers all try and test your system, and then try and simulate that behaviour to model however many you think you'll have - and you still get surprised.
Yes, definitely you should have testing for all the cases of what a user can do. But you don't know how people are really going to use a system until they're using it for real. As it turns out real use is different than testing, and an early tester sample are not really a good sample.
Let me give you an example of how synthetic tests will go badly. You get some fake numbers from your partners so they all have either completely random prices, or they all have exactly the same price. So when you're testing users click around, and no problem right, they can select the one they want etc.
Then you get real data, in the real world - and one company posts a price 3% lower than the other guy but it's for a slightly different product. So before, where users clicked the same thing once, now a bunch of them are clicking back and forth loading the page multiple times doing so, they're sending them to their friends to compare etc.
It then takes your assumption about 100 000 users per box to maybe 70, 80 or 90 or some number not quite enough when you scale up to 5 million.
Ivy bridge was a bad best option. Haswell is basically the same performance for 40% less power consumption but didn't exist back when they made surface pro 1.
Microsoft isn't a chip maker - there was literally no good option for a CPU for the surface pro that would be x86 - AMD processors were all as hot or had bad performance.
ARM, sure, they had choices, but go build yourself a PC and try and find an x86 cpu that isn't from Intel or AMD and is reasonably priced and works worth a damn.
While that's certainly true, designing a system for 5 million users versus 10 million users is not radically different - but if 10 million users all try and hit your server designed for 5 million you're going to have problems.
There's no way healthcare.gov was done as a 'hobby' type site - they guessed wrong on the load they were going to have and there seem to be some issues with how the insurance companies hook up to the system - neither of which is encouraging but it's not like they intended 100 users and got a million.
Although it would be interesting to know if some of this is largely a 'first day' sort of problem, where the first few weeks just has way too many users and by mid november it will be more or less settled. And then all the people who didn't sign up will panic and need to over christmas and there will be problems again.
And there's no data like real world data for load. At some point you sit down in a room and guess how people are going to use your software. You put it out there, and find out you were wrong.
That is after all, why they did this with a couple of months to spare.
Are there going to be 10 million people over christmas all trying to buy health insurance? Probably, and that's going to cause no end of grief, but there isn't some mystical open source fairy that can tell you how to correctly predict load for a system like this and make all the infrastructure work the way you want it to. Particularly with health care and open source you'd have to deal with thousands of tea party programmers trying to fuck it up too.
Those wouldn't be starting salaries unless you have a graduate degree or experience and are jumping into a senior position.
Last I checked (which was a couple of years ago) a fresh PhD starting at google was in the 130-140 range, and a fresh undergrad was usually in the 80 range - at least that's what my students get.
That's same with any big city/small town setup - you buy a house in the city (or suburbs of the city anyway), when it comes time to retire you sell your house and move to a small town half an hour a way, buy a comparable house for half the price, and the other half becomes most of your retirement nestegg.
Yes, because we have Bush light as Prime minister. But he's wrong about trying to climb further in bed with 'murica. And that's my point - just because he's wrong about it doesn't mean he's going to change. The people who have power and sensible policies are as much going along with NSA spying as people with bad policy. So the options are to find fringe crazy people who are only right about NSA spying and wrong on everything else. And on the scale of things NSA spying is a far less serious problem than a lot of other things.
Well the perps were allegedly outsiders and the NSA's job was to spy on outsiders.
So was the CIA, and they dropped the ball too.
No intelligence agencies had much success at trying to infiltrate Al Qaeda, and most of them were only making a half assed effort to do so at best anyway. Hence the need for more resources.
That doesn't mean a massive data centre in utah is the right resource - but in addition to spying on China and Russia and India and China and France and the UK etc. the US now needs to contend with another player in the field.
So they are violating the law and the constitution, and just because we've thought it's been going on for a long time, now that we have proof we should just let it go?
So, aside from the obvious, that constitutions are stupid and they are chartered by law to do what they are doing - my point wasn't that what they're doing is good. It's that it isn't surprising.
It's hard to work up outrage over a program that has been going on for over 20 years, that everyone with any influence has known is going on for 20 years. That doesn't mean being in favour of it.
Slavery was not legal in the UK from 1772 on - but it was legal in the colonies until 1833 (although the slave trade was abolished in 1807). That's a long time for something obviously abhorrent to be going on. But you can't be out protesting every day for 60 years about something you disagree with. Until someone comes along that looks like they're actually going to do something about it you aren't going to change the law and keep your job and your family fed at the same time. I'm not against ideological crusaders jumping up and down about things - that's how you get change. But if the choice of whom to support is Ron Paul (or his idiot boy son) then the US is better off being spied on than that lunatic being in charge of anything.
The people in charge in basically all of the NATO countries, Australia and New Zealand are all in favour of the program, so... I might not be in favour of it, but I'm also far more worried about whether or not government policy is going to actually do something about the economy, healthcare etc. So given the choice, and the lack of political will to do anything about it, I'm not going to be out protesting all the time. My country, Canada, should already be walling itself off from the US (both literally and figuratively), NSA spying is only a sideshow to that as a broader political problem. If you're in the US, healthcare is far more important than NSA spying. You can't worry about being spied on if you're dead, and if you're bankrupt due to getting cancer you have bigger problems than whether or not the government can collect you e-mail contact list.
Every one of the 9/11 terrorists fit a profile that should have sounded alarm bells at the border.
I hate to break it to you, but half the male muslims in the world meet the same profile. And the vast majority of them don't try and crash airplanes into buildings.
But that's beside the point - I didn't any of it was a good idea. Only that it's not surprising.
Russian operatives were far more successful, some escaping detection for multiple decades.
Yes, but spies are professionals.
And enough Al Qaeda operatives have escaped detection to cause quite a lot of trouble (including incidentally in Russia, which unlike the US, has internal border controls as well).
Which again, isn't really a shock - they were always allowed to look for spies, but after Al Qaeda showed everyone how infiltration can really be done, you'd pretty much expect them to be looking at everyone to figure out if they are an 'agent a foreign power'.
That's kind of it. We've known about secret closets in AT&T offices for ages, and we have known about NSA- microsoft cooperation for a long time. We've know since what, the 1990 that they were one of the biggest buyers of supercomputing tech etc.
The only thing snowden has really meaningfully (meaningful to the public anyway) revealed is who exactly is in on it, and you could reasonably figure that out with the minimum of brain power before.
Besides that, what does anyone think all this money going to agencies is for if not for spying? Particularly the NSA as a sigint organization, electronic eavesdropping is their whole reason d'etre. You may not like what they're doing, but for the amount of money they're getting I'd expect them to be trying to build the tools to wiretap everything. You may think they shouldn't be doing that - and fair enough, they probably shouldn't, but at least 10 billion dollars a year is a lot of money for an organization that specializes in spying on electronic communications and doesn't run its own submarines or human intelligence.
Slashdot Mirror
mediahint, Hola, anything that lets you free VPN into services that you aren't really supposed to be able to access.
Yep.
I'm at a university and we do this all the time. IBM gave us 'millions' in software, that was a burned CD with some stuff on it (not my research group so I'm not really sure what exactly, but something related to distributed computing).
My group got a '4 million dollar' donation which was all of the source code for a project a small company had worked on for 10 years with 5 major versions.
Whatever that MSRP headline number was is what they could claim as a tax break. Didn't matter if it was absurdly unrelated to the actual value or not.
The whole of large-scale funding of science and engineering came out of WW-II -- the Manhatten Project and microwave radar.
No, it's been around for a lot longer than that. The french even in the 18th century had a national science policy that was essentially what we're talking about here - things that directly benefit the country. The British had a more laissez faire approach to the whole thing with the Royal Society, and never really congealed a cohesive plan. Since the two regularly stole from each other for a couple of centuries it worked out OK. The british did a lot of fundamental science, the french did a lot of practical stuff, and they just copied each other where it was relevant.
Since the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536 there have been various efforts at funding science in the way we think of it through universities, I suppose arguably you could even go back to the 11th or 12th century in Italy for something similar, though that was much more limited in scope.
Government funding is a sort of odd concept. If you expect rich lords to subsidize the children of other rich lords (who sit in the house of lords) being educated at a government school is that government funding? Not exactly, but it's not really different either. The world has had had government support for industry and research for centuries, but different funding models are well, different. Tax breaks, making members of the government pay for it, making 'The Church' pay for etc. have all been going on for ages.
Why?
Because he's not a microsoft technology nerd.
Microsoft needs someone at the top who uses their products the way someone who isn't surrounded by microsofties every day does. So they can get their shit together on design. Windows 8 is an example of doing a great job executing a terrible idea. That has to stop. Now.
It also needs someone who recognizes there is a market beyond himself and can support that (this is where Steve jobs always struggled) - car guys get that. This car might not be for me, but there is a market for it.
It also needs someone with an internal employee evaluation system that is going to actually make supportive of co-workers and that rewards everyone doing great work when they do.
Ideally microsoft needs someone who can decide what direction to take the company - an open services and software company that supports a large collection of partners, or a device and services company that has no friends. And to decide which of those is best for shareholders they need someone from outside the microsoft bubble.
Mulally isn't necessarily the best pick - but of the list of known candidates from outside MS he's got a decent track record.
There is a bit.
We had a grad student get charged 3000 dollars in tuition (money she didn't have) because she submitted the final corrected version of her thesis wrong in the computer system (she created it as a new thesis rather than as an update to the existing submission), She didn't realize this problem for a full 40 minutes, and by that point it was 00:30 hours. She fought for a couple of weeks with the administration until finally the dean overheard her arguing with someone, asked for an explanation, shook his head, and magically the 3000 dollar fee disappeared. But she wasn't going to get her PhD until she paid the money otherwise.
A lady I started my Masters with had a supervisor who retired and moved to australia. She was told about 10 months in advance this was going to happen. But her project didn't get done, so... she had to start over with a new supervisor on a new project. (There is and was a whole lot of the university screwing her on that one).
The big difference I found is that in business, your first priority is business. If you're on a project and you get moved to something else because of an emergency no one expects you to have completely the first project at the same time. In academia, not so much, well, not as a grad student anyway.
That's pretty normal for PhD students.
Most of us are aware of better coding practices, but getting things done on academic schedules tends to result in whatever can be done before reading week or before tuition is due or the like.
Indeed, not so much on /. but some of my most correct posts on reddit have been downvoted to oblivion.
Unpopular truths are still truths.
We don't mind sometimes, but when you are asked to work 8-10 hours a day then raise a family there isn't a whole lot of time for dealing with people who think we should get rid of the Internet, or that gold is the only real money.
The (linked) Aandtech article on battery life pretty much answers its own question.
Surface pro and surface pro 2 completely destroy everything else in the benchmark ratings. It means haswell doesn't manage lower power scenarios nearly as well as ARM, but Intel never has.
For a comparison to iOS they'd need to well, actually have on on their chart. I can certainly see the argument that Windows is worse at power management than other OS's on the same hardware - but without hard numbers in a chart that's a tough case to make, since you're comparing different review sites to each other. Comparing different hardware is missing out on a lot - for most computing needs they're benchmarking Haswell is massive overkill - which might just be it, it literally cannot slow itself down enough (with either MS or intel drivers being the culprit) to save even more power.
Or windows is doing background stuff that other OS's aren't. Whether those provide any value to justify reduced battery life or not is debatable, but the answer seems to be 'probably not'.
It still isn't 'microsofts hardware', it's hardware from some 3rd party vendor they soldered together in a case and put their own sticker on it. Yes, it's up to MS to try and ride the cases of Intel and whomever is supplying their displays and SSD's to find ways to save power, but it's ultimately up to the 3rd party guys (who also sell parts to the rest of us) to actually make the drivers for their hardware.
... it's called fuzzing.
And Fuzzing sucks, because you're making assumptions about how much to add still. And your assumptions can easily turn out to be wrong.
Real data isn't necessarily random - that was the example I gave you for a reason. Systematic biases introduced into real use you can't simulate for. Random usage patterns you can *try* and fuzz, but you can easily screw that up, depends on the system.
again, this isn't new.
No it definitely isn't. This sort of stuff has been around hundreds of years, and if you think 'fuzzing' will deal with systematic biases in your data you should probably come back to school, we'll sort you out when you get to second year.
Computers are fast.
But finite. That you can do with 10 computers what took 100 before doesn't change the problems caused by having half (or 1/4) the number of computers that you actually needed.
The moment you cannot fit the entire problem on one box with room to spare you are into all of the problems of running out of capacity, which are not new.
We keep saying it over and over because:
It's easy.
Isn't true, at all. Watch 1000 volunteers all try and test your system, and then try and simulate that behaviour to model however many you think you'll have - and you still get surprised.
Yes, definitely you should have testing for all the cases of what a user can do. But you don't know how people are really going to use a system until they're using it for real. As it turns out real use is different than testing, and an early tester sample are not really a good sample.
Let me give you an example of how synthetic tests will go badly. You get some fake numbers from your partners so they all have either completely random prices, or they all have exactly the same price. So when you're testing users click around, and no problem right, they can select the one they want etc.
Then you get real data, in the real world - and one company posts a price 3% lower than the other guy but it's for a slightly different product. So before, where users clicked the same thing once, now a bunch of them are clicking back and forth loading the page multiple times doing so, they're sending them to their friends to compare etc.
It then takes your assumption about 100 000 users per box to maybe 70, 80 or 90 or some number not quite enough when you scale up to 5 million.
Ivy bridge was a bad best option. Haswell is basically the same performance for 40% less power consumption but didn't exist back when they made surface pro 1.
Microsoft isn't a chip maker - there was literally no good option for a CPU for the surface pro that would be x86 - AMD processors were all as hot or had bad performance.
ARM, sure, they had choices, but go build yourself a PC and try and find an x86 cpu that isn't from Intel or AMD and is reasonably priced and works worth a damn.
Ya but that was 1998 - tech boom and all that.
Today people pay less to start but there's good money if you have experience.
While that's certainly true, designing a system for 5 million users versus 10 million users is not radically different - but if 10 million users all try and hit your server designed for 5 million you're going to have problems.
There's no way healthcare.gov was done as a 'hobby' type site - they guessed wrong on the load they were going to have and there seem to be some issues with how the insurance companies hook up to the system - neither of which is encouraging but it's not like they intended 100 users and got a million.
Although it would be interesting to know if some of this is largely a 'first day' sort of problem, where the first few weeks just has way too many users and by mid november it will be more or less settled. And then all the people who didn't sign up will panic and need to over christmas and there will be problems again.
And there's no data like real world data for load. At some point you sit down in a room and guess how people are going to use your software. You put it out there, and find out you were wrong.
That is after all, why they did this with a couple of months to spare.
Are there going to be 10 million people over christmas all trying to buy health insurance? Probably, and that's going to cause no end of grief, but there isn't some mystical open source fairy that can tell you how to correctly predict load for a system like this and make all the infrastructure work the way you want it to. Particularly with health care and open source you'd have to deal with thousands of tea party programmers trying to fuck it up too.
The surface pro is fine - other than for having an Ivy bridge, which isn't microsofts fault.
But that's not all that relevant when the problems are with the ARM devices.
Followup to my previous - the actual page
http://www.glassdoor.com/blog/25-highest-paying-companies-software-engineers-2013-glassdoor-report/
has a starting salary link but some of those are not entry level - 3 years experience makes a big difference over 0.
Those wouldn't be starting salaries unless you have a graduate degree or experience and are jumping into a senior position.
Last I checked (which was a couple of years ago) a fresh PhD starting at google was in the 130-140 range, and a fresh undergrad was usually in the 80 range - at least that's what my students get.
Don't rent buy.
That's same with any big city/small town setup - you buy a house in the city (or suburbs of the city anyway), when it comes time to retire you sell your house and move to a small town half an hour a way, buy a comparable house for half the price, and the other half becomes most of your retirement nestegg.
Yes, because we have Bush light as Prime minister. But he's wrong about trying to climb further in bed with 'murica. And that's my point - just because he's wrong about it doesn't mean he's going to change. The people who have power and sensible policies are as much going along with NSA spying as people with bad policy. So the options are to find fringe crazy people who are only right about NSA spying and wrong on everything else. And on the scale of things NSA spying is a far less serious problem than a lot of other things.
Well the perps were allegedly outsiders and the NSA's job was to spy on outsiders.
So was the CIA, and they dropped the ball too.
No intelligence agencies had much success at trying to infiltrate Al Qaeda, and most of them were only making a half assed effort to do so at best anyway. Hence the need for more resources.
That doesn't mean a massive data centre in utah is the right resource - but in addition to spying on China and Russia and India and China and France and the UK etc. the US now needs to contend with another player in the field.
So they are violating the law and the constitution, and just because we've thought it's been going on for a long time, now that we have proof we should just let it go?
So, aside from the obvious, that constitutions are stupid and they are chartered by law to do what they are doing - my point wasn't that what they're doing is good. It's that it isn't surprising.
It's hard to work up outrage over a program that has been going on for over 20 years, that everyone with any influence has known is going on for 20 years. That doesn't mean being in favour of it.
Slavery was not legal in the UK from 1772 on - but it was legal in the colonies until 1833 (although the slave trade was abolished in 1807). That's a long time for something obviously abhorrent to be going on. But you can't be out protesting every day for 60 years about something you disagree with. Until someone comes along that looks like they're actually going to do something about it you aren't going to change the law and keep your job and your family fed at the same time. I'm not against ideological crusaders jumping up and down about things - that's how you get change. But if the choice of whom to support is Ron Paul (or his idiot boy son) then the US is better off being spied on than that lunatic being in charge of anything.
The people in charge in basically all of the NATO countries, Australia and New Zealand are all in favour of the program, so... I might not be in favour of it, but I'm also far more worried about whether or not government policy is going to actually do something about the economy, healthcare etc. So given the choice, and the lack of political will to do anything about it, I'm not going to be out protesting all the time. My country, Canada, should already be walling itself off from the US (both literally and figuratively), NSA spying is only a sideshow to that as a broader political problem. If you're in the US, healthcare is far more important than NSA spying. You can't worry about being spied on if you're dead, and if you're bankrupt due to getting cancer you have bigger problems than whether or not the government can collect you e-mail contact list.
Every one of the 9/11 terrorists fit a profile that should have sounded alarm bells at the border.
I hate to break it to you, but half the male muslims in the world meet the same profile. And the vast majority of them don't try and crash airplanes into buildings.
But that's beside the point - I didn't any of it was a good idea. Only that it's not surprising.
Russian operatives were far more successful, some escaping detection for multiple decades.
Yes, but spies are professionals.
And enough Al Qaeda operatives have escaped detection to cause quite a lot of trouble (including incidentally in Russia, which unlike the US, has internal border controls as well).
Which again, isn't really a shock - they were always allowed to look for spies, but after Al Qaeda showed everyone how infiltration can really be done, you'd pretty much expect them to be looking at everyone to figure out if they are an 'agent a foreign power'.
That's kind of it. We've known about secret closets in AT&T offices for ages, and we have known about NSA- microsoft cooperation for a long time. We've know since what, the 1990 that they were one of the biggest buyers of supercomputing tech etc.
The only thing snowden has really meaningfully (meaningful to the public anyway) revealed is who exactly is in on it, and you could reasonably figure that out with the minimum of brain power before.
Besides that, what does anyone think all this money going to agencies is for if not for spying? Particularly the NSA as a sigint organization, electronic eavesdropping is their whole reason d'etre. You may not like what they're doing, but for the amount of money they're getting I'd expect them to be trying to build the tools to wiretap everything. You may think they shouldn't be doing that - and fair enough, they probably shouldn't, but at least 10 billion dollars a year is a lot of money for an organization that specializes in spying on electronic communications and doesn't run its own submarines or human intelligence.