Yes, there's that. The grading that is. I don't think its as difficult that we often make it out to be, but since engineering studies require a lot from the students, the notion that "we have to make sure that no-one can get away with coasting or cheating" seems quite spread (in the west at least, which is the only academic culture I can speak of).
So since collaboration invites questions about who did what, and that could lead to "cheating", we're institutionally weary of it.
If I had a dollar for every time I heard "the nation's largest tech companies are demanding these skills" (group work, collaboration, well-rounded, etc.) I could retire and start my own school.
Well, being a university professor I've hear the same things, and you know, the companies are absolutely right. I think you're a bit too cynical. The reason they say these things ("we need engineers who can write and present and work well i groups") is that they do feel a real need, and also feel current graduates lacking in these respects.
However, that's always been the case. It's a pretty stable criticism. So then you have to figure out why. And the answer is very simple and I always point it out when I meet industry representatives who lament the current state of teaching: "We could do that. We could turn out engineers who are much, much better at writing, speaking and what have you. But if we do, we have to cut something else. And we already have trouble cramming the vital subject matter into the education as it is. We've already, during my lifetime added a whole year to the master's engineering degree (from four to five), and you still have to spend too much effort to train them until they can become really productive. So do you really want us to spend more time on writing/presentation, at the cost of less time teaching programming and whatnot?"
The answer is always, "Well, not not really..." and "Well, when you put it that way..."
So, if you ask people what they want, its always always something else than what they would actually spend money on, and pay for. Schools as a general rule don't understand this (an affliction they share with many others in the public sector), the opt for asking and delivering that, instead of realising that wishing and actually putting your money where your mouth is, are two very different things.
I've worked a plant with 50 turret lathes that date from around WWII - still going strong today. No CNC machine is going to drive them out any time soon for economic reasons if nothing else because CNC is expensive.
Yes, but in a sense they're worse for employment than CNC are. With a turret lathe you'll get an even lower cost per item than with a CNC machine, if you have the steady, large scale, and stable-over-time, demand to keep them running.
The demand scale is still: If you need a couple, do them manually. If you need more, CNC. If you need even more than that, build (or adapt) a specialised solution (aka turret lathe).
I remember when I was at SKF, the production engineers could tell me to the cent how large a run of what part made the most sense to produce with what tools available. (Of course I was at the research laboratory where we had exactly one really skilled machinist, with two or three manual machines, as we only did one-offs and not enough of them to keep more than one guy busy.
Back in the day though, you didn't have CNC, so either you used manual, or a turret lathe. The majority of machinist were busy doing the production work "in the middle" that CNC now has dominated. That's where all the jobs went, and that's why CNC was the killer it was/is. Not that we still don't people of all skills. (Even though they're getting harder to find.)
I don't follow European news, but I doubt that very much. The UK is ~14% of the total GDP of the EU (second largest in the EU): it dropping out without replacing the existing trade deals would be a massive economic blow to the EU. The EU may want to punish the UK for leaving, but I doubt they'd do it at the risk of collapsing the EU economy.
No, the message has been pretty consistent, pretty much from the brexit referendum. EU: "First invoke article 50, and then we'll talk". So, its not so much "leave already and then we'll talk", but "say you'll leave, and then we'll talk".
On the subject of EU having to be "soft" on the UK, yes there are economic consequences, but there are also other, far reaching, consequences of being "soft" on the UK. It wouldn't set a good example for the rest of the bunch. So, economic consequences be damned, if they're let off too softly, there won't be enough incentive for the rest to stay in. So, the consequences to the economy probably have to take a back seat. And that's also what we've heard from the EU: "Don't think you can eat the cake and have it to" (paraphrase).
(You lot did after all started a civil war because of someone wanting to leave, economy be damned, so there's historical precedent.)
There's also the issue that the UK's GDP being so high because of their EU membership, so they want to stay "in" as much as possible. That's exactly what they said, then the EU answered: "Don't think so..." It would set a bad precedent.
Fun fact, the inventor of direct trans-cranial stimulation was in the same cybernetics club as Alan Turing at Cambridge.
Reportedly the first applications were only by devotees as it hurt like a... and one hapless subject (also a researcher) fainted! The experimenters were dismayed as when the subject fell over he threatened to pull the lab apparatus with him, and that could have broken it as it was experimental, i.e. a hodgepodge of thrown together bits; not "patient proof". They went for the gear to stop it from hitting the floor, letting their friend take the fall instead! (Us fellow geeks could surely relate...)
It fell by the wayside as magnetic stimulation was invented, so it's interesting to see it come to the fore again.
For the attack to be successful, all of the following must hold...
And yet, the old NSA saying that "attacks only get better, they never get worse", is an apt reminder. While it may not be practical today, it was just made more practical. Whatever happens next, the attack will not get worse. Expect people to work at all the listed limitations, and who knows...
So, even if there isn't reason to suspect a full blown jump-out-of-the-windows fire just yet, there's a definite smell of smoke in the air.
Syringes are just as easy to use with 5 minutes of training.
Having had to use two Epipens in anger, and another two in training (live with Epinephrin) I beg to differ.
In my case its complicated by the fact that the user was afraid of needles (really, really afraid), but could be coaxed into learning to use, and then use the Epipen. So call me sceptical. I'll take the autoinjector every time, and all the time.
The main problem is that you let yourselves be gouged on price. The Swedish pharmaceutical purchasing agency buy the exact same Epipen here in Sweden for $50. It cost me something like $45, to buy, before insurance, and since children were involved it's actually free on the states dime.
How on earth you can accept a system that charges several times that price, when the company is clearly willing to sell it for a lot less to a much, much smaller player, is completely beyond me.
You don't need syringes, you need a different system. Badly.
No. If that was the point they wouldn't even have published the rest of the tape. If they were like old media then it would just be the slanted reporting that furthered their story and that's all.
But they didn't. The released all of it. Both a shortened commented version and the whole shebang, so that people could make up their own mind about the incident. That's exactly what this is about.
No that's (of course!) not how it works here in loser pays-land. For exactly the reasons you mention. Instead, the winner can only claim reasonable fees, so burying the loser in lawyer's hours wont work. There are set scales and standards so you can actually pretty well know in advance what it'll cost you.
And also, if you win, but are awarded less than half of what you sought, that counts as "losing" from the perspective of fees. There's also middle ground where you're ordered to pay part (say 20%) of fees, depending on "how much" you lost. And no punitive damages. If the company needs to learn their lessen, they're fined.
But of course a system like this wouldn't work for the kinds of legal problems where ordinary people would actually see a court. So there are special courts for workplace/employment issues, a special renter's court, etc. where it is cheap (free) and easy to have your case heard. We also have a system of "ombudsman" where there are special government prosecutors that will act on your behalf. e.g. when it comes to consumer issues, or discrimination.
This means that the average Swede never sees the inside of a court, and doesn't even typically know anybody who has. Civil suits are almost unheard of. E.g. traffic accidents are handled by insurance companies, without any court involvement. And if you're unhappy with the insurance company, again, there's a special court for that.
And again you're focusing on the wrong part of the video. I already said exactly what you said, i.e. it was a fluid and difficult to judge situation and shit happens. And again that's not what we're talking about.
What we're talking about is the van!. Once the firing has stopped they follow a wounded man on the ground crawling along the curb. They make comments along the lines of "Just pick up a gun budy so I can shoot you!" (paraphrase). (Gloating, but that's not the point). This demonstrates that they're well aware of the rules of engagement that prohibits the attacking of wounded and unarmed on the battle field.
Then the van comes around the corner. The father in the van immediately stops, goes out and renders aid. The helicopter crew is heard lying to their chain of command as they ask for permission to fire on the van telling their commander that they are "gathering weapons and bodies" (not exact quote). While the then current rules of engagement permitted attacking those that tried to remove weapons and the bodies of the fallen, they did of course not permit attacking someone who was giving aid to the unarmed wounded.
Given the wrong information of course their commander gives them permission to fire, and they do so, with disastrous results. (Again with the gloating, clear lack of professionalism there...).
That was beyond the pale, and a clear violation of not only international law, but also their own rules of engagement
. Since they were safe in a helicopter several thousand meters away, they don't get cut any slack from being in mortal peril themselves, and they also had a bit of time, and other options available, so no excuse there either.
Yeaaah, well, given the source I'd take that with a huge bucket of salt. Even the US wouldn't do such a thing in the west, and especially not Scandinavia. The political fall out would be huge, much larger than any temporary gain that could be had from kidnapping Assange. Actually, paradoxically, the "honey trap" theory is actually much more believable, than that.
So, I can't say I'm convinced. In fact if he were ever prosecuted in Sweden, my money is on a boring he-said-she-said trial, of no real consequence. (And even as a honey trap, the damage has already been done, so there wouldn't be any need for more, and those who prefer could have that theory intact).
Uh? They didn't edit that out. The every last detail of the van is there from beginning to end. The whole film is also much longer than what is commonly shown, if that's the "edit" you're talking about.
Yes, we renditioned the Egyptians, and there was a huge stink, with a clear change in policy afterwards. Much more would have been made of it, but as the foreign secretary was murdered shortly after, and the prime minister stepped down due to losing the election for other reasons, there wasn't the political pressure. Even though we were asked to rendition more, not a single one was. To think that you could do the same to Julian Assange with no-one batting an eyelid is naive in the extreme.
And there has been no admittance of any such thing, or even close to that. You'd need a credible source. The one you cite can't even get crucial details on the Egyptian case right, so why would their ramblings on Assange have any bearing on the truth?
For example when US helicopters kill some journalists in Iraq they will remove the early parts of the video showing these journalists traveling down the street with a group of armed militants only blocks from where US ground forces are engaged in combat.
And whether that's true or not isn't even the point. It's not the journalists we care about in that encounter. Shit happens in war, and it's difficult to tell from the photos. No, it's the helicopter crew lying to their chain of command to receive permission to fire on the van, in clear violation of both international law and the US own rules of engagement at the time that we think is beyond the pale.
Nah, just see the headlines when TSA gropes grandmas and small kids today. Many of these false alarms will be in the same categories, so I'm betting the system will take the fall.
And that's the beauty of it. The rest of us don't have to care about your perception of it. You're free to despise it to your hearts content, though your feelings about it are not shared by the entire community.
Never said they were shared. Never even said I particularly hated it either. Why would I expend that kind of emotional energy on them, over a thing like this. Now, that there's someone somwhere that will use it, I have no doubt about. I'm likewise convinced that we'll be able to count them without resorting to using our toes... It's going to be a miniscule thing, and MS will no doubt dump it, or let it languish. (POSIX subsystem style)
And it wasn't me that chose the issue, as much as you. You did after all point it out as a major advancement over the state of the art. To me it's a small step. In a not particularly important direction. We've tried it in the Unix community and it didn't catch on. So apparently it didn't hamper learning in any significant way.
But if it floats your boat, go right ahead. Just don't expect to gather many proselytes on the way, and get used to talking to yourself. I doubt you'll find many others to exchange your experiences with...:-)
Well, it's Ericsson we're talking about here. Still running plenty of thirty year old code. So "we" know a thing or two about that particular problem.
It's was my experience when I was there for seven years, and six major releases of successively larger and more feature-full products, that maintainability was higher than could be expected. And that's even when we had code from another team (100+) in another country basically just dumped in our basement. (The other site was closed down).
And like I said in another comment, when it came time to interop tests, we were the one that changed our behaviour to work around bugs in other manufacturers equipment. We were much more nimble than they were. Much of the credit goes to the programming environment there as well.
Due to the base rate fallacy, systems like this don't work, and never will.
There just aren't enough terrorists to make this worthwhile. Let's assume that one person in a million is a terrorist (probably a high number), and let's furthermore assume that the system get's it right every time it actually sees a terrorist. Let's also assume that it only get it wrong once in a thousand when it sees a non-terrorist, i.e. once in a thousand the system will say "terrorist" when it's not.
With these figures, you will have one thousand false alarms for every one terrorist you catch! I.e. a completely unusable system, that will drown their users in false alarms.
Note that these figures are also completely unrealistically good. Real facial recognition systems that work with willing subjects, are in the high nineties when it comes to true positives, and in the single digit (or low double digit) percent when it comes to false positives. Not 1/1000 that we assumed above.
Now, in relative terms of course a system like this helps. We've increased our certainty from 1 per million to 1 per thousand. That's a thousand fold increase. But in absolute terms it's still unusably bad.
And this is incidentally why we don't screen for most/many diseases in the population. Even with a good test we'll drown in false positives. And the math works the same way for many other situations as well.
I've got IPv6 Dual stack here and it works fine with Netflix. The netflix traffic is using IPv6.
Yes. With native IPv6 Netflix works well and prefers that. It's only that many of us can't get native IPv6 and have to resort to tunnelling. That has worked well for years. However, since Netflix now bans VPNs they also ban IPv6 tunnelling, even though my tunnel ends in the same country I'm located in (and is registered in my name).
I had to switch it off. All of a sudden Netflix decided that my registered tunnel with my own IPv6 subnet was an indication of me not being in the place I was supposed to. So netflix just stopped working. (I'd cut them off by that point, but the rest of the family didn't see it that way...)
So the final and workable fix was to switch off IPv6 on my internal network. Now it's only my gateway that is v6 routable.
Talk about "giant leap for mankind" backwards. Thanks Netflix. (Or rather "MPAA" I guess.)
Expert: I mean, look at it - it's a bunch of nails and duct tape around a low explosive core which doesn't have nearly the proper confinement for even 50% of the maximum shock wave capable, much less the ability to transition to detonation. And this wiring - that's just disgraceful - the solder didn't even flow properly here, and this is entirely unsheilded - anything could set this off accidentally, even a cell phone. If you were in my training program, you're fail miserably.
You'd be right they'd fail the course and be booted out! And for good reason. I can assure you that you have special operations soldiers in the US who can and do use IEDs (for black flag, or deniable operations if nothing else) and you can be likewise sure that they will look like cobbled together crap (in case they're detected before they go off) but will not actually be crap. They'll go boom every time, because there's nothing worse than having a meticulously, planned and executed operation, months in the making, go south at the very last moment because the bloody bomb doesn't go off when it should! When that happens heads will roll. Even literally.
If there is e.g. soldering to be done, you can bet your sweet arse that it'll be done by someone who knows how to do that, or has been properly trained. Why do you think that it cost the US millions to train such as soldier, while AlQueda or ISIS makes changes out the $100 or so they spend? Sure large bureaucracies are inefficient at times, but they're not that bad. That money goes into things like this.
So. It's the bloody NSA we're talking about here. The most highly funded intelligence organisation in the world. The people behind stuxnet etc. I expect nothing short of perfection from them, and meticulous attention to the details that matter. Born from long experience of what not to do, and analysis of how to do it better, faster, cheaper. The same way I don't expect the USAF to fly aircraft with bits falling off them mid flight. For the same reasons.
That the NSA doesn't have their shit together is quite noteworthy, given what you'd expect. What it means is another question altogether, and not that easy to speculate on.
You can pick at powershell for many things, but it's help implementation soundly thrashes "man". It's not even a contest.
Sure, you may have a point on that particular issue. You are after all talking about a system that was made up from whole cloth by one entity recently, not an older system that grew organically over time at many places, with input from many people.
And the perceived lack of consistency of manual pages was indeed identified by the GNU crowd, and hence their trying to introduce the "info" subsystem (that addresses most/many of your issues).
And "info" didn't really take off. Why? Because man pages are just "good enough". They're certainly not so bad that it would motivate someone to change platforms to windows (not even "info" it turns out). Having tried to build serious systems on both windows and Unix, the amount of documentation doesn't really help, when so much of what Microsoft tells you is just flat out wrong as in "will not work as advertised," even in the technical documentation.
So is e.g. bash flawed? Sure, the semantics are alright, but the syntax is pretty horrible (hence Plan 9 and "rc" that I ran for many years, which is much improved and a joy in that respect). But, at least it works as advertised. (Note that "csh" that doesn't work as advertised, was pretty much dropped by the wayside a long time ago).
And that's why we do not care one iota that MS moves powershell to Unix. And why we likewise don't care much about arguments about its superiority. We've been burned hard enough in the past to have learnt our lesson. And "bling" like slightly better on-line manuals (esp. in the age of Google) doesn't sway us one bit. Not even a little one. So feel free to keep powershells superior documentation. It comes with much too much baggage to be worth it.
Agreed, but that wasn't really my point. In order to get more subtle points across in writing you have to be literary above and beyond merely literate. And that's a much higher standard in today's "get it done now" business climate where shortness (of breath?) dominates.
This wasn't exactly very impressive to read, either...
No, but what a feat of engineering if they had actually done it! Pay-off time must be long on such an installation, but you'd have to admire the guts to bring such a project to fruition, all the same.:-)
I can Get-Help -examples to skip directly to syntax examples, and I'm moved on to the next step before I've gotten half-way through a man.
OK, so you get an email from your boss saying "Widget X doesn't work, could you take a look at it".
Imagine even a short voice message read in many different possible tones ranging from the apologetic, via the matter-of-fact to the seething with rage, and I think you'll agree that you could get valuable information that would affect your handling of the matter outside of the literal meaning? And that's even ignoring things like; is the stress on "could", "you", or "look"?
So while I wouldn't want to wish voicemail on my worst enemy, to say that even short off-line voice messages don't add anything to the communication, and that you could only use that to solve issues in an "emotional" way, is a long stretch.
Yes, you could get many of the same points across in email, but people as a rule don't because, a) it involves too much typing, thought, and b) most to too polite to write the things they have less problem saying. And that carries over even to voice communication, i.e. outside of face-to-face IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, there's that. The grading that is. I don't think its as difficult that we often make it out to be, but since engineering studies require a lot from the students, the notion that "we have to make sure that no-one can get away with coasting or cheating" seems quite spread (in the west at least, which is the only academic culture I can speak of).
So since collaboration invites questions about who did what, and that could lead to "cheating", we're institutionally weary of it.
If I had a dollar for every time I heard "the nation's largest tech companies are demanding these skills" (group work, collaboration, well-rounded, etc.) I could retire and start my own school.
Well, being a university professor I've hear the same things, and you know, the companies are absolutely right. I think you're a bit too cynical. The reason they say these things ("we need engineers who can write and present and work well i groups") is that they do feel a real need, and also feel current graduates lacking in these respects.
However, that's always been the case. It's a pretty stable criticism. So then you have to figure out why. And the answer is very simple and I always point it out when I meet industry representatives who lament the current state of teaching: "We could do that. We could turn out engineers who are much, much better at writing, speaking and what have you. But if we do, we have to cut something else. And we already have trouble cramming the vital subject matter into the education as it is. We've already, during my lifetime added a whole year to the master's engineering degree (from four to five), and you still have to spend too much effort to train them until they can become really productive. So do you really want us to spend more time on writing/presentation, at the cost of less time teaching programming and whatnot?"
The answer is always, "Well, not not really..." and "Well, when you put it that way..."
So, if you ask people what they want, its always always something else than what they would actually spend money on, and pay for. Schools as a general rule don't understand this (an affliction they share with many others in the public sector), the opt for asking and delivering that, instead of realising that wishing and actually putting your money where your mouth is, are two very different things.
I've worked a plant with 50 turret lathes that date from around WWII - still going strong today. No CNC machine is going to drive them out any time soon for economic reasons if nothing else because CNC is expensive.
Yes, but in a sense they're worse for employment than CNC are. With a turret lathe you'll get an even lower cost per item than with a CNC machine, if you have the steady, large scale, and stable-over-time, demand to keep them running.
The demand scale is still: If you need a couple, do them manually. If you need more, CNC. If you need even more than that, build (or adapt) a specialised solution (aka turret lathe).
I remember when I was at SKF, the production engineers could tell me to the cent how large a run of what part made the most sense to produce with what tools available. (Of course I was at the research laboratory where we had exactly one really skilled machinist, with two or three manual machines, as we only did one-offs and not enough of them to keep more than one guy busy.
Back in the day though, you didn't have CNC, so either you used manual, or a turret lathe. The majority of machinist were busy doing the production work "in the middle" that CNC now has dominated. That's where all the jobs went, and that's why CNC was the killer it was/is. Not that we still don't people of all skills. (Even though they're getting harder to find.)
I don't follow European news, but I doubt that very much. The UK is ~14% of the total GDP of the EU (second largest in the EU): it dropping out without replacing the existing trade deals would be a massive economic blow to the EU. The EU may want to punish the UK for leaving, but I doubt they'd do it at the risk of collapsing the EU economy.
No, the message has been pretty consistent, pretty much from the brexit referendum. EU: "First invoke article 50, and then we'll talk". So, its not so much "leave already and then we'll talk", but "say you'll leave, and then we'll talk".
On the subject of EU having to be "soft" on the UK, yes there are economic consequences, but there are also other, far reaching, consequences of being "soft" on the UK. It wouldn't set a good example for the rest of the bunch. So, economic consequences be damned, if they're let off too softly, there won't be enough incentive for the rest to stay in. So, the consequences to the economy probably have to take a back seat. And that's also what we've heard from the EU: "Don't think you can eat the cake and have it to" (paraphrase).
(You lot did after all started a civil war because of someone wanting to leave, economy be damned, so there's historical precedent.)
There's also the issue that the UK's GDP being so high because of their EU membership, so they want to stay "in" as much as possible. That's exactly what they said, then the EU answered: "Don't think so..." It would set a bad precedent.
Fun fact, the inventor of direct trans-cranial stimulation was in the same cybernetics club as Alan Turing at Cambridge.
Reportedly the first applications were only by devotees as it hurt like a ... and one hapless subject (also a researcher) fainted! The experimenters were dismayed as when the subject fell over he threatened to pull the lab apparatus with him, and that could have broken it as it was experimental, i.e. a hodgepodge of thrown together bits; not "patient proof". They went for the gear to stop it from hitting the floor, letting their friend take the fall instead! (Us fellow geeks could surely relate...)
It fell by the wayside as magnetic stimulation was invented, so it's interesting to see it come to the fore again.
For the attack to be successful, all of the following must hold...
And yet, the old NSA saying that "attacks only get better, they never get worse", is an apt reminder. While it may not be practical today, it was just made more practical. Whatever happens next, the attack will not get worse. Expect people to work at all the listed limitations, and who knows...
So, even if there isn't reason to suspect a full blown jump-out-of-the-windows fire just yet, there's a definite smell of smoke in the air.
Syringes are just as easy to use with 5 minutes of training.
Having had to use two Epipens in anger, and another two in training (live with Epinephrin) I beg to differ.
In my case its complicated by the fact that the user was afraid of needles (really, really afraid), but could be coaxed into learning to use, and then use the Epipen. So call me sceptical. I'll take the autoinjector every time, and all the time.
The main problem is that you let yourselves be gouged on price. The Swedish pharmaceutical purchasing agency buy the exact same Epipen here in Sweden for $50. It cost me something like $45, to buy, before insurance, and since children were involved it's actually free on the states dime.
How on earth you can accept a system that charges several times that price, when the company is clearly willing to sell it for a lot less to a much, much smaller player, is completely beyond me.
You don't need syringes, you need a different system. Badly.
No. If that was the point they wouldn't even have published the rest of the tape. If they were like old media then it would just be the slanted reporting that furthered their story and that's all.
But they didn't. The released all of it. Both a shortened commented version and the whole shebang, so that people could make up their own mind about the incident. That's exactly what this is about.
No that's (of course!) not how it works here in loser pays-land. For exactly the reasons you mention. Instead, the winner can only claim reasonable fees, so burying the loser in lawyer's hours wont work. There are set scales and standards so you can actually pretty well know in advance what it'll cost you.
And also, if you win, but are awarded less than half of what you sought, that counts as "losing" from the perspective of fees. There's also middle ground where you're ordered to pay part (say 20%) of fees, depending on "how much" you lost. And no punitive damages. If the company needs to learn their lessen, they're fined.
But of course a system like this wouldn't work for the kinds of legal problems where ordinary people would actually see a court. So there are special courts for workplace/employment issues, a special renter's court, etc. where it is cheap (free) and easy to have your case heard. We also have a system of "ombudsman" where there are special government prosecutors that will act on your behalf. e.g. when it comes to consumer issues, or discrimination.
This means that the average Swede never sees the inside of a court, and doesn't even typically know anybody who has. Civil suits are almost unheard of. E.g. traffic accidents are handled by insurance companies, without any court involvement. And if you're unhappy with the insurance company, again, there's a special court for that.
They did not lie
And again you're focusing on the wrong part of the video. I already said exactly what you said, i.e. it was a fluid and difficult to judge situation and shit happens. And again that's not what we're talking about.
What we're talking about is the van!. Once the firing has stopped they follow a wounded man on the ground crawling along the curb. They make comments along the lines of "Just pick up a gun budy so I can shoot you!" (paraphrase). (Gloating, but that's not the point). This demonstrates that they're well aware of the rules of engagement that prohibits the attacking of wounded and unarmed on the battle field.
Then the van comes around the corner. The father in the van immediately stops, goes out and renders aid. The helicopter crew is heard lying to their chain of command as they ask for permission to fire on the van telling their commander that they are "gathering weapons and bodies" (not exact quote). While the then current rules of engagement permitted attacking those that tried to remove weapons and the bodies of the fallen, they did of course not permit attacking someone who was giving aid to the unarmed wounded.
Given the wrong information of course their commander gives them permission to fire, and they do so, with disastrous results. (Again with the gloating, clear lack of professionalism there...).
That was beyond the pale, and a clear violation of not only international law, but also their own rules of engagement
. Since they were safe in a helicopter several thousand meters away, they don't get cut any slack from being in mortal peril themselves, and they also had a bit of time, and other options available, so no excuse there either.
Yeaaah, well, given the source I'd take that with a huge bucket of salt. Even the US wouldn't do such a thing in the west, and especially not Scandinavia. The political fall out would be huge, much larger than any temporary gain that could be had from kidnapping Assange. Actually, paradoxically, the "honey trap" theory is actually much more believable, than that.
So, I can't say I'm convinced. In fact if he were ever prosecuted in Sweden, my money is on a boring he-said-she-said trial, of no real consequence. (And even as a honey trap, the damage has already been done, so there wouldn't be any need for more, and those who prefer could have that theory intact).
Uh? They didn't edit that out. The every last detail of the van is there from beginning to end. The whole film is also much longer than what is commonly shown, if that's the "edit" you're talking about.
Yes, we renditioned the Egyptians, and there was a huge stink, with a clear change in policy afterwards. Much more would have been made of it, but as the foreign secretary was murdered shortly after, and the prime minister stepped down due to losing the election for other reasons, there wasn't the political pressure. Even though we were asked to rendition more, not a single one was. To think that you could do the same to Julian Assange with no-one batting an eyelid is naive in the extreme.
And there has been no admittance of any such thing, or even close to that. You'd need a credible source. The one you cite can't even get crucial details on the Egyptian case right, so why would their ramblings on Assange have any bearing on the truth?
For example when US helicopters kill some journalists in Iraq they will remove the early parts of the video showing these journalists traveling down the street with a group of armed militants only blocks from where US ground forces are engaged in combat.
And whether that's true or not isn't even the point. It's not the journalists we care about in that encounter. Shit happens in war, and it's difficult to tell from the photos. No, it's the helicopter crew lying to their chain of command to receive permission to fire on the van, in clear violation of both international law and the US own rules of engagement at the time that we think is beyond the pale.
Nah, just see the headlines when TSA gropes grandmas and small kids today. Many of these false alarms will be in the same categories, so I'm betting the system will take the fall.
And that's the beauty of it. The rest of us don't have to care about your perception of it. You're free to despise it to your hearts content, though your feelings about it are not shared by the entire community.
Never said they were shared. Never even said I particularly hated it either. Why would I expend that kind of emotional energy on them, over a thing like this. Now, that there's someone somwhere that will use it, I have no doubt about. I'm likewise convinced that we'll be able to count them without resorting to using our toes... It's going to be a miniscule thing, and MS will no doubt dump it, or let it languish. (POSIX subsystem style)
And it wasn't me that chose the issue, as much as you. You did after all point it out as a major advancement over the state of the art. To me it's a small step. In a not particularly important direction. We've tried it in the Unix community and it didn't catch on. So apparently it didn't hamper learning in any significant way.
But if it floats your boat, go right ahead. Just don't expect to gather many proselytes on the way, and get used to talking to yourself. I doubt you'll find many others to exchange your experiences with... :-)
Well, it's Ericsson we're talking about here. Still running plenty of thirty year old code. So "we" know a thing or two about that particular problem.
It's was my experience when I was there for seven years, and six major releases of successively larger and more feature-full products, that maintainability was higher than could be expected. And that's even when we had code from another team (100+) in another country basically just dumped in our basement. (The other site was closed down).
And like I said in another comment, when it came time to interop tests, we were the one that changed our behaviour to work around bugs in other manufacturers equipment. We were much more nimble than they were. Much of the credit goes to the programming environment there as well.
Due to the base rate fallacy, systems like this don't work, and never will.
There just aren't enough terrorists to make this worthwhile. Let's assume that one person in a million is a terrorist (probably a high number), and let's furthermore assume that the system get's it right every time it actually sees a terrorist. Let's also assume that it only get it wrong once in a thousand when it sees a non-terrorist, i.e. once in a thousand the system will say "terrorist" when it's not.
With these figures, you will have one thousand false alarms for every one terrorist you catch! I.e. a completely unusable system, that will drown their users in false alarms.
Note that these figures are also completely unrealistically good. Real facial recognition systems that work with willing subjects, are in the high nineties when it comes to true positives, and in the single digit (or low double digit) percent when it comes to false positives. Not 1/1000 that we assumed above.
Now, in relative terms of course a system like this helps. We've increased our certainty from 1 per million to 1 per thousand. That's a thousand fold increase. But in absolute terms it's still unusably bad.
And this is incidentally why we don't screen for most/many diseases in the population. Even with a good test we'll drown in false positives. And the math works the same way for many other situations as well.
I've got IPv6 Dual stack here and it works fine with Netflix. The netflix traffic is using IPv6.
Yes. With native IPv6 Netflix works well and prefers that. It's only that many of us can't get native IPv6 and have to resort to tunnelling. That has worked well for years. However, since Netflix now bans VPNs they also ban IPv6 tunnelling, even though my tunnel ends in the same country I'm located in (and is registered in my name).
I had to switch it off. All of a sudden Netflix decided that my registered tunnel with my own IPv6 subnet was an indication of me not being in the place I was supposed to. So netflix just stopped working. (I'd cut them off by that point, but the rest of the family didn't see it that way...)
So the final and workable fix was to switch off IPv6 on my internal network. Now it's only my gateway that is v6 routable.
Talk about "giant leap for mankind" backwards. Thanks Netflix. (Or rather "MPAA" I guess.)
Expert: I mean, look at it - it's a bunch of nails and duct tape around a low explosive core which doesn't have nearly the proper confinement for even 50% of the maximum shock wave capable, much less the ability to transition to detonation. And this wiring - that's just disgraceful - the solder didn't even flow properly here, and this is entirely unsheilded - anything could set this off accidentally, even a cell phone. If you were in my training program, you're fail miserably.
You'd be right they'd fail the course and be booted out! And for good reason. I can assure you that you have special operations soldiers in the US who can and do use IEDs (for black flag, or deniable operations if nothing else) and you can be likewise sure that they will look like cobbled together crap (in case they're detected before they go off) but will not actually be crap. They'll go boom every time, because there's nothing worse than having a meticulously, planned and executed operation, months in the making, go south at the very last moment because the bloody bomb doesn't go off when it should! When that happens heads will roll. Even literally.
If there is e.g. soldering to be done, you can bet your sweet arse that it'll be done by someone who knows how to do that, or has been properly trained. Why do you think that it cost the US millions to train such as soldier, while AlQueda or ISIS makes changes out the $100 or so they spend? Sure large bureaucracies are inefficient at times, but they're not that bad. That money goes into things like this.
So. It's the bloody NSA we're talking about here. The most highly funded intelligence organisation in the world. The people behind stuxnet etc. I expect nothing short of perfection from them, and meticulous attention to the details that matter. Born from long experience of what not to do, and analysis of how to do it better, faster, cheaper. The same way I don't expect the USAF to fly aircraft with bits falling off them mid flight. For the same reasons.
That the NSA doesn't have their shit together is quite noteworthy, given what you'd expect. What it means is another question altogether, and not that easy to speculate on.
You can pick at powershell for many things, but it's help implementation soundly thrashes "man". It's not even a contest.
Sure, you may have a point on that particular issue. You are after all talking about a system that was made up from whole cloth by one entity recently, not an older system that grew organically over time at many places, with input from many people.
And the perceived lack of consistency of manual pages was indeed identified by the GNU crowd, and hence their trying to introduce the "info" subsystem (that addresses most/many of your issues).
And "info" didn't really take off. Why? Because man pages are just "good enough". They're certainly not so bad that it would motivate someone to change platforms to windows (not even "info" it turns out). Having tried to build serious systems on both windows and Unix, the amount of documentation doesn't really help, when so much of what Microsoft tells you is just flat out wrong as in "will not work as advertised," even in the technical documentation.
So is e.g. bash flawed? Sure, the semantics are alright, but the syntax is pretty horrible (hence Plan 9 and "rc" that I ran for many years, which is much improved and a joy in that respect). But, at least it works as advertised. (Note that "csh" that doesn't work as advertised, was pretty much dropped by the wayside a long time ago).
And that's why we do not care one iota that MS moves powershell to Unix. And why we likewise don't care much about arguments about its superiority. We've been burned hard enough in the past to have learnt our lesson. And "bling" like slightly better on-line manuals (esp. in the age of Google) doesn't sway us one bit. Not even a little one. So feel free to keep powershells superior documentation. It comes with much too much baggage to be worth it.
Agreed, but that wasn't really my point. In order to get more subtle points across in writing you have to be literary above and beyond merely literate. And that's a much higher standard in today's "get it done now" business climate where shortness (of breath?) dominates.
This wasn't exactly very impressive to read, either...
No, but what a feat of engineering if they had actually done it! Pay-off time must be long on such an installation, but you'd have to admire the guts to bring such a project to fruition, all the same. :-)
I can Get-Help -examples to skip directly to syntax examples, and I'm moved on to the next step before I've gotten half-way through a man.
OK, so you get an email from your boss saying "Widget X doesn't work, could you take a look at it".
Imagine even a short voice message read in many different possible tones ranging from the apologetic, via the matter-of-fact to the seething with rage, and I think you'll agree that you could get valuable information that would affect your handling of the matter outside of the literal meaning? And that's even ignoring things like; is the stress on "could", "you", or "look"?
So while I wouldn't want to wish voicemail on my worst enemy, to say that even short off-line voice messages don't add anything to the communication, and that you could only use that to solve issues in an "emotional" way, is a long stretch.
Yes, you could get many of the same points across in email, but people as a rule don't because, a) it involves too much typing, thought, and b) most to too polite to write the things they have less problem saying. And that carries over even to voice communication, i.e. outside of face-to-face IMHO.