I think the victim should be punished severely too, or else these attacks will keep happening. The victim decided to be a victim, to make himself open to this attack, and this affects the lives of many people at this hospital.
The victim, in this case, is whatever manager or managers decided to have crappy IT security.
IT managers need to start going to prison when these things happen. (Or, if they can show that it was the CEO who prevented them from implementing proper security, the CEO should go to prison.)
Ransomware attacks like this are due to nothing more than sheer negligence. The negligent party should be identified and strongly punished.
The other problem with this "never blame the victim" mentality is that it seems to assume that bad humans shouldn't exist.
For a different example than the car theft in a bad neighborhood one, how about if you park your car under a really big, old tree as a giant storm is blowing in, and the tree falls over and smashes your car? (Let's suppose that you live here and you should know full well that this tree is really old and could fall over.) No other humans were involved here, just you and your dumb parking job. Is it wrong to assign some of the blame to you for parking next to the old tree? Most people would probably say no, you do deserve some blame, depending on how much you could be expected to know about the state of the tree.
So why should you be absolved of all blame when you park in a bad neighborhood and your car gets broken into?
Bad human behavior exists whether you want it to or not, so you can either refuse to accept it and become a victim, or you can try to minimize your risk by avoiding situations where you're more likely to be a victim. It's only sensible to do the latter.
From what I've seen, management is not a great way to get ahead in engineering companies. Lower-level managers are not paid any more than engineers, and they usually have more work to do, such as spending a bunch of time in meetings. If you're good at the political stuff, you can work your way up to higher-level management, where you really do get paid more.
The problem with management is that the skills aren't very transferrable. If you're a good programmer, you can get a job lots of places, because the skills are transferrable. So if one company doesn't work out, or lays you off, oh well, just go apply to a dozen more. You want more money? No problem, just apply to more jobs; you get a big raise by changing companies.
Managers can't do that. Companies like to promote from within, so if you're a middle manager at some big company, other companies are not going to be very keen on hiring you, because they want someone who understands their company, not some other company. So if you get laid off, you'll be starting all over again as a first-line manager, getting paid the same as the engineers but with more work to do. And with the way companies lay people off in droves these days, this is very likely to happen.
I disagree (though not if you limit things to "soon" as you said). Eventually, we'll have the technology to make artificial femmebot cyborgs, that look and feel entirely human, are capable of reproduction with humans, yet have artificially intelligent minds.
Though honestly, it seems like it'd be a lot simpler to just genetically engineer women to think more like men. There's actually women out there like that, they're just a small (and probably highly sought-after) minority. We need to concentrate some of our biotech effort on figuring out what genes select for women who are basically geeky, rational men in a woman's body, and then figure out how to produce lots more of them.
We finally have proof of what this company really stands for!
This is great; I'm going to be using this every time someone tries to claim Microsoft is a decent company. A direct quote from Microsoft that "Hitler did nothing wrong" can't be argued with.
I used to live near NYC, and I disagree about the diversity of industries there. As a software engineer (with a focus on embedded work), the only stuff I saw there was financial, and web development. I did interview at NYSE (mainly just so I could say that I did), but after seeing what it was like had no interest in working there. Some recruiters tried to get me to interview at Bloomberg LP too, but there was no way I'd work in that environment. Outside of finance, I did NOT see much software engineering work, and certainly not much involving embedded systems and low-level programming.
What I *did* see a lot was some seriously deluded thinking on the part of NYCers about how their city was really competitive with the Bay Area, or the West Coast in general. No, it's not. Not even close.
AFAICT, the reason there's a huge surplus of single women in NYC is because the fashion industry is located there, and probably also there's a bunch of legal work, plus marketing of all kinds, careers that have far more women in them. The Bay Area is all tech, so of course there aren't many women there.
As for LA, the last article I read about which cities had surplus males vs females (with data from 2008) said LA had a surplus of males, but not that much (and given its huge size, it's probably not that high a concentration overall). All the west coast cities were male-surplus, while all the northeast cities were female-surplus, except Boston which is equal. There's also a bunch of cities in the South with surplus females, like Memphis.
As for your "disproof", a single anecdote is not proof of anything, nor does it disprove a general statement, it's just an exception. Of course you dated a bunch of engineers, you're one of the very few female engineers so you hang with that crowd, and aren't likely to have a bias against them. My first two girlfriends (both in college) were also engineers, and one of those was from India, and the other was the daughter of immigrants from eastern Europe, so again, not typical American women. Being born outside the States and raised by immigrant parents also gives you a very different worldview than your standard "all-American" girl. Second-generation kids are always a mix of two cultures.
Sometimes when I see certain errors like that (where it's made into words that sound much like how it's pronounced as you pointed out), I kinda wonder if the writer isn't using some speech-to-text software...
No, actually they don't. You don't see commercial airliners (or military planes for that matter), ships, cars (including EVs), appliances ("durable goods"), semiconductors, mobile phones, or really almost any kind of manufacturing in Israel, except a couple of firearms makers maybe. They do do a lot with IP however; several semiconductor companies have design centers there.
It's true, Israel does have some impressive and unique technologies developed there, compared to its size and its state of security. A lot of their technology is military-oriented, for obvious reasons. They've done an impressive job of building a 1st-world nation (economically speaking) in a small place which used to be nothing special less than a century ago. But "the latest in technology"? No, sorry. They are not self-sufficient in any sense. They can't even make many of the weapons systems that defend them; they buy them from the US (e.g. fighter jets).
And conversely, I keep $120 per year in my pocket by not paying to listen to stuff that I already own, or wasting time listening to "new releases" because they're all crap anyway.
No, a good driver can't shift that fast, at least not as fast as a DSG. Those shift in milliseconds. Humans can't move that fast. There's a reason race cars moved to those.
As for counting on the driver in an automatic to do the right thing, it's a lot easier there because they don't need to change gears, they let the car do it automatically. There are some things they can do to eke out more economy (or waste fuel conversely), but it's a lot less than with a stick.
For EVs, no. Having a transmission in an EV is nonsensical; just look at Teslas. Transmissions rob power, so the only reason they're used is because ICE engines have narrow powerbands and make peak torque at high speeds. Electric motors make peak torque at stall and have wider powerbands and can be sized for the speed range of a car so they don't need a transmission at all, though they probably do need a reduction gear (as the Tesla has).
Ok, so what's preventing the company from just firing his ass when he doesn't do what the CEO wants and hiring some lackey that does? This sounds a lot like "self regulation".
You've somehow managed to go on a long rant and tell me I'm "both right and wrong" but neglected to provide any kind of specifics or supporting evidence.
If it takes an expert driver who's driven around the Nurburgring many times to get equivalent fuel economy in a manual, then in the real world, it's not equivalent, because almost no one is an expert driver. I have driven modern manuals, both 5 and 6-speed, and I've driven 18-wheelers (in a parking lot). 18-wheelers aren't remotely comparable; they're far heavier than any car, and they're powered by large diesel engines because of the torque needed for that kind of load and performance. The first 6 speeds in an 18-speed truck aren't even used most of the time, they're a special low range. Anyway, what works in a 3000-pound gasoline-powered car isn't going to apply to a 80,000 pound diesel-powered truck.
It's really not that complicated: when you combine lower overall gear ratios and fewer forward speeds (usually 6 in any decent car now), to higher overall gear ratios and as many or more forward speeds (6-8), the latter is going to have better fuel economy, particularly on the highway due to the taller gearing.
Yeah, it may be new. But the beeping on my 2015 Mazda3 is from a beeper under the hood (the same beeper that tells you the car is unlocking or locking). You'll hear it after you close the door, even with the stereo blasting.
First off, automatics DO engine brake downhill. My Mazda does. It sounds like you haven't driven an automatic in over a decade.
But your biggest flaw is assuming that automatics and manuals have identical mechanics, and identical gear ratios. If you were comparing a manual transmission to an automated manual transmission (and I don't mean a DSG, because the mechanics are different, I mean a real manual transmission with the shifter and clutch operated by solenoids instead of a human), you might be correct, IF you were using an expert driver as the human.
But this is not the case. Automatics are very different from manuals. The biggest difference is that the gear ratios are entirely different. Manuals have shorter gears, automatics have taller gears. This makes a huge difference in highway fuel economy, because the automatic can drive around at almost lugging rpms, while the manual is buzzing at 1000rpm or more higher at all times. The automatic can get away with higher overdrive gears because it takes milliseconds to downshift when necessary, whereas a manual car can't count on the driver to do the right thing and manual drivers tend to hold gears a lot because shifting takes a lot of time and is extra effort. Also, manual drivers these days seem to only care about performance, not fuel economy, so carmakers have set the gear ratios accordingly.
Being able to choose a gear proactively doesn't make enough of a difference to make up for all this.
In addition, in many cars, automatics simply have more gears available to choose from. I've never heard of an 8-speed manual in a car, but 8-speed automatics are getting to be common.
I suspect that most others on the right also cringe at these remarks.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, are you kidding? Everyone on the right believes what that guy said. It's not just some small portion of the American population that believes in climate change denialism, it's probably about half, maybe more.
One of the big problems I see with liberals (and I say this as someone who generally agrees with most liberal ideas) is that they frequently refuse to see and believe just how prevalent certain beliefs are among certain populations. They have an almost religious belief that most people are good, peaceful people who are interested in the welfare of all, and they tend to ignore humanity's darker sides, and not see how many people really aren't good or peaceful and who are entirely selfish, sociopathic, or intent on doing harm.
The problem is, if the technical types stand up and say "This is a terrible idea", they're going to just get overruled, and fired if they don't follow their orders. That's the nature of any private company: the people at the top make the decisions, and the technical types have to do what they're told or they can find a new job.
How exactly do you propose to fix this? Telling people to risk their careers and livelihoods is silly, it's not going to stop the managers from making bad decisions anyway, and it's not going to help anything. People might be willing to risk their careers when the stakes are very high (human lives), but if it's just some stupid over-budget corporate ERP system, who cares? If the company is poorly managed and blows millions of dollars on a horribly-managed software project that doesn't involve people getting killed, why would you risk your job trying to do "the right thing"? You're not going to save anyone's life, in fact if you succeed you're only going to help the corporation make more money. That may be good for your paycheck if you succeed, but the risk is very high and the price of failure is pretty high (your job), whereas sitting back and letting the managers screw it up isn't going to cause any major problems for you or anyone: the company will waste a bunch of money, you'll keep your job, and that's it.
What I want to know is, why is it the whistleblower heroes are listed by name, but we never see the names printed of any of these managers (at Thiokol or NASA) who *murdered* the Challenger crew. All we ever hear about these people is the names "bureaucrat" or "manager". Somehow these people have completely escaped all culpability, including having their names aired in public for their misdeeds.
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I think the victim should be punished severely too, or else these attacks will keep happening. The victim decided to be a victim, to make himself open to this attack, and this affects the lives of many people at this hospital.
The victim, in this case, is whatever manager or managers decided to have crappy IT security.
IT managers need to start going to prison when these things happen. (Or, if they can show that it was the CEO who prevented them from implementing proper security, the CEO should go to prison.)
Ransomware attacks like this are due to nothing more than sheer negligence. The negligent party should be identified and strongly punished.
The other problem with this "never blame the victim" mentality is that it seems to assume that bad humans shouldn't exist.
For a different example than the car theft in a bad neighborhood one, how about if you park your car under a really big, old tree as a giant storm is blowing in, and the tree falls over and smashes your car? (Let's suppose that you live here and you should know full well that this tree is really old and could fall over.) No other humans were involved here, just you and your dumb parking job. Is it wrong to assign some of the blame to you for parking next to the old tree? Most people would probably say no, you do deserve some blame, depending on how much you could be expected to know about the state of the tree.
So why should you be absolved of all blame when you park in a bad neighborhood and your car gets broken into?
Bad human behavior exists whether you want it to or not, so you can either refuse to accept it and become a victim, or you can try to minimize your risk by avoiding situations where you're more likely to be a victim. It's only sensible to do the latter.
From what I've seen, management is not a great way to get ahead in engineering companies. Lower-level managers are not paid any more than engineers, and they usually have more work to do, such as spending a bunch of time in meetings. If you're good at the political stuff, you can work your way up to higher-level management, where you really do get paid more.
The problem with management is that the skills aren't very transferrable. If you're a good programmer, you can get a job lots of places, because the skills are transferrable. So if one company doesn't work out, or lays you off, oh well, just go apply to a dozen more. You want more money? No problem, just apply to more jobs; you get a big raise by changing companies.
Managers can't do that. Companies like to promote from within, so if you're a middle manager at some big company, other companies are not going to be very keen on hiring you, because they want someone who understands their company, not some other company. So if you get laid off, you'll be starting all over again as a first-line manager, getting paid the same as the engineers but with more work to do. And with the way companies lay people off in droves these days, this is very likely to happen.
I disagree (though not if you limit things to "soon" as you said). Eventually, we'll have the technology to make artificial femmebot cyborgs, that look and feel entirely human, are capable of reproduction with humans, yet have artificially intelligent minds.
Though honestly, it seems like it'd be a lot simpler to just genetically engineer women to think more like men. There's actually women out there like that, they're just a small (and probably highly sought-after) minority. We need to concentrate some of our biotech effort on figuring out what genes select for women who are basically geeky, rational men in a woman's body, and then figure out how to produce lots more of them.
We finally have proof of what this company really stands for!
This is great; I'm going to be using this every time someone tries to claim Microsoft is a decent company. A direct quote from Microsoft that "Hitler did nothing wrong" can't be argued with.
They listed a bunch in there. Two I know of offhand are the Ford Focus and the Mazda3.
No, DSGs do not use more fuel. Citation needed. You're just making things up to fit your bias.
I used to live near NYC, and I disagree about the diversity of industries there. As a software engineer (with a focus on embedded work), the only stuff I saw there was financial, and web development. I did interview at NYSE (mainly just so I could say that I did), but after seeing what it was like had no interest in working there. Some recruiters tried to get me to interview at Bloomberg LP too, but there was no way I'd work in that environment. Outside of finance, I did NOT see much software engineering work, and certainly not much involving embedded systems and low-level programming.
What I *did* see a lot was some seriously deluded thinking on the part of NYCers about how their city was really competitive with the Bay Area, or the West Coast in general. No, it's not. Not even close.
AFAICT, the reason there's a huge surplus of single women in NYC is because the fashion industry is located there, and probably also there's a bunch of legal work, plus marketing of all kinds, careers that have far more women in them. The Bay Area is all tech, so of course there aren't many women there.
As for LA, the last article I read about which cities had surplus males vs females (with data from 2008) said LA had a surplus of males, but not that much (and given its huge size, it's probably not that high a concentration overall). All the west coast cities were male-surplus, while all the northeast cities were female-surplus, except Boston which is equal. There's also a bunch of cities in the South with surplus females, like Memphis.
As for your "disproof", a single anecdote is not proof of anything, nor does it disprove a general statement, it's just an exception. Of course you dated a bunch of engineers, you're one of the very few female engineers so you hang with that crowd, and aren't likely to have a bias against them. My first two girlfriends (both in college) were also engineers, and one of those was from India, and the other was the daughter of immigrants from eastern Europe, so again, not typical American women. Being born outside the States and raised by immigrant parents also gives you a very different worldview than your standard "all-American" girl. Second-generation kids are always a mix of two cultures.
Sometimes when I see certain errors like that (where it's made into words that sound much like how it's pronounced as you pointed out), I kinda wonder if the writer isn't using some speech-to-text software...
What's really bad is that that particular grammatical error is one that only a native English speak from America, probably the South, would make.
No, actually they don't. You don't see commercial airliners (or military planes for that matter), ships, cars (including EVs), appliances ("durable goods"), semiconductors, mobile phones, or really almost any kind of manufacturing in Israel, except a couple of firearms makers maybe. They do do a lot with IP however; several semiconductor companies have design centers there.
It's true, Israel does have some impressive and unique technologies developed there, compared to its size and its state of security. A lot of their technology is military-oriented, for obvious reasons. They've done an impressive job of building a 1st-world nation (economically speaking) in a small place which used to be nothing special less than a century ago. But "the latest in technology"? No, sorry. They are not self-sufficient in any sense. They can't even make many of the weapons systems that defend them; they buy them from the US (e.g. fighter jets).
And conversely, I keep $120 per year in my pocket by not paying to listen to stuff that I already own, or wasting time listening to "new releases" because they're all crap anyway.
That's because you aren't looking.
http://www.autoblog.com/2010/0...
http://www.edmunds.com/fuel-ec...
http://www.cartalk.com/blogs/t...
Incorrect. We know who was negligent in Katrina: President George W Bush, his dumb lackey "Brownie", and the governor of Louisiana at the time.
No, a good driver can't shift that fast, at least not as fast as a DSG. Those shift in milliseconds. Humans can't move that fast. There's a reason race cars moved to those.
As for counting on the driver in an automatic to do the right thing, it's a lot easier there because they don't need to change gears, they let the car do it automatically. There are some things they can do to eke out more economy (or waste fuel conversely), but it's a lot less than with a stick.
For EVs, no. Having a transmission in an EV is nonsensical; just look at Teslas. Transmissions rob power, so the only reason they're used is because ICE engines have narrow powerbands and make peak torque at high speeds. Electric motors make peak torque at stall and have wider powerbands and can be sized for the speed range of a car so they don't need a transmission at all, though they probably do need a reduction gear (as the Tesla has).
Ok, so what's preventing the company from just firing his ass when he doesn't do what the CEO wants and hiring some lackey that does? This sounds a lot like "self regulation".
You've somehow managed to go on a long rant and tell me I'm "both right and wrong" but neglected to provide any kind of specifics or supporting evidence.
If it takes an expert driver who's driven around the Nurburgring many times to get equivalent fuel economy in a manual, then in the real world, it's not equivalent, because almost no one is an expert driver. I have driven modern manuals, both 5 and 6-speed, and I've driven 18-wheelers (in a parking lot). 18-wheelers aren't remotely comparable; they're far heavier than any car, and they're powered by large diesel engines because of the torque needed for that kind of load and performance. The first 6 speeds in an 18-speed truck aren't even used most of the time, they're a special low range. Anyway, what works in a 3000-pound gasoline-powered car isn't going to apply to a 80,000 pound diesel-powered truck.
It's really not that complicated: when you combine lower overall gear ratios and fewer forward speeds (usually 6 in any decent car now), to higher overall gear ratios and as many or more forward speeds (6-8), the latter is going to have better fuel economy, particularly on the highway due to the taller gearing.
These days, a lot of new cars have stop-start technology (they automatically shut down at stoplights, and restart when you step on the gas).
Well for this to work, you wouldn't be able to publicize the existence of the system.
On a more serious note though, I wonder if it'd be possible to detect the explosives remotely through air sensors or something.
You think murderers should just go free and just have to live with their consciences? Great, let's just let everyone out of prison now!
Yeah, it may be new. But the beeping on my 2015 Mazda3 is from a beeper under the hood (the same beeper that tells you the car is unlocking or locking). You'll hear it after you close the door, even with the stereo blasting.
Completely wrong.
First off, automatics DO engine brake downhill. My Mazda does. It sounds like you haven't driven an automatic in over a decade.
But your biggest flaw is assuming that automatics and manuals have identical mechanics, and identical gear ratios. If you were comparing a manual transmission to an automated manual transmission (and I don't mean a DSG, because the mechanics are different, I mean a real manual transmission with the shifter and clutch operated by solenoids instead of a human), you might be correct, IF you were using an expert driver as the human.
But this is not the case. Automatics are very different from manuals. The biggest difference is that the gear ratios are entirely different. Manuals have shorter gears, automatics have taller gears. This makes a huge difference in highway fuel economy, because the automatic can drive around at almost lugging rpms, while the manual is buzzing at 1000rpm or more higher at all times. The automatic can get away with higher overdrive gears because it takes milliseconds to downshift when necessary, whereas a manual car can't count on the driver to do the right thing and manual drivers tend to hold gears a lot because shifting takes a lot of time and is extra effort. Also, manual drivers these days seem to only care about performance, not fuel economy, so carmakers have set the gear ratios accordingly.
Being able to choose a gear proactively doesn't make enough of a difference to make up for all this.
In addition, in many cars, automatics simply have more gears available to choose from. I've never heard of an 8-speed manual in a car, but 8-speed automatics are getting to be common.
I suspect that most others on the right also cringe at these remarks.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, are you kidding? Everyone on the right believes what that guy said. It's not just some small portion of the American population that believes in climate change denialism, it's probably about half, maybe more.
One of the big problems I see with liberals (and I say this as someone who generally agrees with most liberal ideas) is that they frequently refuse to see and believe just how prevalent certain beliefs are among certain populations. They have an almost religious belief that most people are good, peaceful people who are interested in the welfare of all, and they tend to ignore humanity's darker sides, and not see how many people really aren't good or peaceful and who are entirely selfish, sociopathic, or intent on doing harm.
Yep, the classic no-win scenario. The only way to win is not to play. (Or to change the rules of the game like Captain Kirk did.)
The problem is, if the technical types stand up and say "This is a terrible idea", they're going to just get overruled, and fired if they don't follow their orders. That's the nature of any private company: the people at the top make the decisions, and the technical types have to do what they're told or they can find a new job.
How exactly do you propose to fix this? Telling people to risk their careers and livelihoods is silly, it's not going to stop the managers from making bad decisions anyway, and it's not going to help anything. People might be willing to risk their careers when the stakes are very high (human lives), but if it's just some stupid over-budget corporate ERP system, who cares? If the company is poorly managed and blows millions of dollars on a horribly-managed software project that doesn't involve people getting killed, why would you risk your job trying to do "the right thing"? You're not going to save anyone's life, in fact if you succeed you're only going to help the corporation make more money. That may be good for your paycheck if you succeed, but the risk is very high and the price of failure is pretty high (your job), whereas sitting back and letting the managers screw it up isn't going to cause any major problems for you or anyone: the company will waste a bunch of money, you'll keep your job, and that's it.
What I want to know is, why is it the whistleblower heroes are listed by name, but we never see the names printed of any of these managers (at Thiokol or NASA) who *murdered* the Challenger crew. All we ever hear about these people is the names "bureaucrat" or "manager". Somehow these people have completely escaped all culpability, including having their names aired in public for their misdeeds.