I'm 47. I'm at a point in my career though were most engineers I work with are older than me. I mostly work with American companies. Salaries are $150K/year to $250K/year and the job offers are plentiful.
DNS entries are ASCII. Punycode is a way to put unicode in ASCII in a way that is sort of mostly human readable. For an English speaker (AKA ASCII character users) always set your browser to display the raw punycode and not the unicode points. For the less technical but still English speaking you should be fine as long as you only visit sites with HTTPS. No reputable CA should be signing EV certs with punycode that looks like English words. Ones that do will quickly be removed from the browsers.
For the non-English, you're f#@ked. Seriously. This was a good awful idea. We are going to return to an English only internet because everything else will be untrustable.
The technology doesn't routinely make judgement calls that are inaccurate in a specific direction. It is however much less accurate but lack of accuracy does not mean bias.
Second, it is the policies around how it is used that negatively affect non-white people. This is a policy problem not a technology problem. I'm really not keen on being tracked and scanned by facial recognition or any of the other ways organizations track me but please don't exaggerate and play the racism card just to get clicks. In the end it numbs us to real abuse.
IBM does have a great piece of technology that could streamline a very complicated and expensive part of health care. Unfortunately health care has a huge amount of regulation that I suspect is in many places self contradicting. Watson should be profitable and at the same time it should also bring down my healthcare costs. Unfortunately Watson will require a large company with deep pockets to handle all the regulations and also a company competent at handling complex computer systems. IBM can't do large complex systems and hasn't been able to for 30 years. They don't have the organizational physiology and if even if that changed they don't attracted the types of employees who have that skill set. Amazon could probably do it, maybe Walmart (Walmart an incredible logistics company that happens to have retail stores) but after that I can't think of anyone else (kaiser permanente or one of their competent competitors???)
It might be that this other person sat in meetings with him and it could be seen as an colluding to force an agenda. Or the other person might report to a manager that reports to Krzanich and this manager would then feel as if they are being watched or undermined by the relationship. There are other reasons than sexual misconduct to ban some relationships in a company.
Facebook provides a free service to people like Sabados and Krupalija while they sell advertising. She paid them nothing, I don't understand why anyone expects facebook to do anything other than what is in their own interest. Responding to this request is a huge pain for Facebook with no upside. I can see why they might not want to help. If someone dies and you have a deep connection with their facebook profile then download it and store it yourself!
I don't think my grandma can maintain solar panels on her roof. I don't think she wants to maintain batteries so that she has enough power stored up over the summer to last her the winter. Heck just in the spring she would need a large set of batteries to even out her personal usage. Maybe she could get together with a couple of neighbours and share a battery, maybe one neighbour could put up a windmill so they have an alternative. Wait, even better they could get together with even more neighbours and maybe dam a river and then add hydro to their mix, or put the solar panels in a field or on a tall building. Even better is if this group of neighbours got together with another group hundreds of km away where the weather was a bit different and the solar and wind production between all of them might be more even.
Solar, batteries and everything else will always be better and easier to manage if we create a large grid. I can manage batteries and solar panels but guess what my time is worth so much more doing other things that it is worth it to me to pay someone else (say an electric utility) to manage them.
It is something that society grants the creator of a work but there is an expectation that the work enters the public domain after the copyright expires.
Any entity that loses the ability to distribute the work in a meaningful way should immediately lose the copyright. So the BBC should no longer have copyright on the Doctor Who episodes they lost. Any game made for a now obsolete system that wasn't ported to a newer system should now be public domain. And copyright should be for 5 to 10 years. That is all the time that should be needed to motivate people to create content. Anything longer than that is just hording.
There are many ways that UDP packets can traverse NAT (see UDP hole punching for example). There are lots of applications, especially in games, where UDP makes more sense than TCP. If I know the public IP address of a Steam user, with a bit of guess work and a sending a lot of packets to their router I could impersonate a legitimate UDP sender and get their router to forward the UDP packets to their machine. So yes, this exploit is bad.
1) Most of the plastic in the oceans is from China, India and third world countries where rivers are often used for garbage disposal. Our concern for the environment is completely alien to some cultures.*
2) Straws can't be washed so they have to be disposable
3) Straws are small, there mass is negligible, same with plastic grocery bags. As a percentage of your yearly waste I doubt they make 0.5%
4) Be very suspicious of anyone pushing these bans. They are likely virtue signalling and care more about appearing to be doing something than actually doing it.
*To be fair though do to our significantly higher wealth and consumption means our damage to the environment is many times more.
This isn't a problem. The scum is biological. Further it is slowing the rate of change by 50%. The oceans and the atmosphere will still reach the same equilibrium given time. Also we don't want more CO2 in the oceans. It causes acidification and messes with all kinds of ocean life. You could debate where it does more harm, atmosphere or ocean, but ideally we don't want more in either place.
Quantum computers can solve two problems that can affect modern encryption. They force us to double the length of a hash for the same security and they can solve the period of a function. The first application obviously affects hash functions, the second eventually leads to breaking RSA, discrete log type asymmetric functions and many elliptic curve primitives. However they don't make any of this instantaneous. SHA-256 is still safe and the amount of work to massage RSA, Diffie-Hellman and other current schemes into something that a quantum computer can solve is still difficult. So even if your quantum computer were instant, the classical computing is going to take time.
Bitcoin is also safe. You need a public key before you can let loose your quantum computer to try and find a wallets private key but the public keys in bitcoin are only stored as hashes until money is spent the first time from a wallet. So you can only start attacking a wallet once its transaction is broadcast into the network. You would then have to find the private key before the valid transaction was included in the block chain.
Your communications today however are not safe. Someone recording the initial hand shake of a TLS session would in the future be able to figure out what AES key was agreed upon and then be able to read your communication. Anything you digitally sign today will have to be resigned by you before the 10 years expire if you still want to be able to prove you signed it.
A vacuum has no temperature since temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of the particles. In deep space we consider the temperature to be the equilibrium temperature an object will eventually reach, which is the temperature of the cosmic background temperature.
Anyway, one ten billionth of a degree over absolute zero is not 10 billions times colder than the average temperature of the vacuum of space. We really need journalists to have at least passed grade 9 science before writing about science.
Earlier this year I discovered I only knew one other Canadian born and Canadian university educated engineer still working as an engineer in Canada. Excluding that one person all my class mates are either in the USA, immigrated to Canada as kids or are no longer doing engineering. All but one of my coworkers at my last 4 jobs is foreign born. When I worked in the Bay area I had lots of Canadian born co-workers and friends. I've been asked at engineering pickup soccer games in Ottawa, Canada where my accent is from.
I don't even work for any Canadian companies, I do contract work for American companies. The pay isn't even close. I probably get 70% more pay working remote for an American company than I would for a local one.
Before someone asks, no, the rotation about a point doesn't work in 2D since in rotating about the first point your second point will end up in the same place as an existing point and so will many of the other points in the graph. Where as I can always rotate the required distance in 3D and not end up on an existing point.
Imagine the 2D solution is 5. I then likely have a graph with 5 colours where two points not adjacent must be the same colour. Take this graph, copy it and then rotate it slightly out of the plane about one of those two points until the other point is the line distance away from it. Now those points are connected and then must be of opposite colors so I have a graph that now requires 6 colors. Also this new graph likely has 2 points that must be the same color. I copy and rotate again creating something that now requires 7...
In 3D the number most likely jumps to infinity. This is like the how many colours does it take to colour a map so that no adjacent countries have the same colour. 1D is trivally 2, 2D is four but the proof sucks, 3D is clearly infinity.
It's not the language it's the CPU instruction pipeline. On your old 8 bit computer it would take 4 ticks to fetch the instruction, fetch the arguments, do the calculation, store the result. Then we got a pipeline where each tick you would do all 4 things, fetch instruction 4, get the arguments for instruction 3, do the calculation for instruction 2 and store the result of the instruction 1. Over the years pipelines got longer and more complex. An inefficiency in pipelines occurs when you do a branch, then have to wait for the pipeline to fill. The solution to this is to fetch both instructions and speculatively do both until you know which way the branch went. Unfortunately there were two security problems with this. Intel wasn't checking if you had permission to gather the arguments until after they were fetched and second some effects of following the branch that wasn't taken could be seen by the branch that was. So the trick was to get the speculative branch, the one your code won't take in the end, to fetch something you shouldn't have access to and then in the other branch look at that data.
It is actually very easy to exploit Meltdown and Spectre in assembly and C and much harder in JavaScript. However, my web browser doesn't regularly download and run binary files, it does regularly load JavaScript and automatically run it.
CPUs have always had flaws and as a developer there was always an errata sheet you had to read and understand. The problem today is cloud computing and to some extent javascript. People are now running untrusted code on the same systems as their trusted programs. It was assumed that as long as your sandbox for these programs was secure and well defined that this was safe. Spectre and Meltdown proved this wasn't true.
A lot of these devices don't seem finished when you compare them to general consumer devices. I might forgive no security but often they handle error conditions incorrectly and don't even give an indication of a problem. For example radiation counters that say no radiation when their sensor becomes saturated. Or devices that will after a power interruption join the first network that they find and just wait for commands (802.15.4 medical monitors joining ZigBee meter networks). I've also seen devices that as far as I can tell where never tested in the real world before being used (pager based patient room transfer systems - besides no security and broadcasting your private information, pager uses a detect n and correct m error correcting algorithm where n=m, so if the bit error exceeds n then you get the wrong message with no indication)
I do contract work for many companies and my work is core to what they do. I set my own hours, use almost all my own equipment, work in my own office, subcontract out some QA and repairs, I even bill in 15 minute intervals - I don't see how I'm different from an Uber driver. The existing test of control made perfect sense.
Question - will I now have to be an employee of the American companies I'm currently doing contract work for? or just companies in California?
Actually the problem in Japan was the rods melted. If they had been just dumped in the ocean it would have been fine. The radiation around those rods is only dangerous if you are within a few centimeters of them. You eventually have to retrieve the rods but you could safely wait a hundred years till they aren't as radio active.
[I'm Canadian] When I was in university we held a protest asking for more funding for universities. We had 3 politicians come to speak to us. The first two were very sympathetic and said that funding for university was a priority for their parties and if elected they would spend enough to keep tuition the same or lower. The third politician was the former head of my university's student council and a member of the ruling federal party. The protest was in one of the engineering lecture halls where he had been a student years before. He very directly and truthfully explained that we were the most privileged sector of the Canadian population and that for those of us taking degrees that would lead to well paying jobs the cost of tuition could be higher almost all of us would still pay. He then called us selfish and self-entitled and that if he had extra money in the budget to spend there were lots of other groups where the money would make a bigger difference. The room was silent, the protests ended. I think everyone felt like they were 10 years old and had just been caught doing something wrong.
We may not need all the fields in the WHOIS record but there are many that are currently needed for the internet to function. I find it bizarre that the EU's data protection advisory group doesn't understand this and wouldn't create some sort of temporary provision to allow ICANN time to adjust. Their response seemed very arrogant.
The dating sites aren't working for women either. In my area, Ottawa, Canada, the median age of an active POF profile of slim or athletic woman between 30 and 40 is 300 days. (You can sort the profiles by newest first, find the oldest profile that was on in the last 30 days and then message the women halfway between and ask them when they created their profiles)
Create a crappy woman's profile, see how many messages it gets bombarded with. Now imagine trying to get this woman's attention and keep it. It's almost impossible to do it with out sounding needy and desperate. Also every woman is remembering the best men she chatted with, the funny ones, the handsome ones, rich ones... It doesn't matter that all these are all guys ultimately didn't choose her, they inflated her sense of self worth, they raised her minimum standard of what she will date.
In the end we end up with most men sounding desperate and undesirable and we created a situation where most people would rather be single than date the bottom 80% of the opposite sex.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm 47. I'm at a point in my career though were most engineers I work with are older than me. I mostly work with American companies. Salaries are $150K/year to $250K/year and the job offers are plentiful.
DNS entries are ASCII. Punycode is a way to put unicode in ASCII in a way that is sort of mostly human readable. For an English speaker (AKA ASCII character users) always set your browser to display the raw punycode and not the unicode points. For the less technical but still English speaking you should be fine as long as you only visit sites with HTTPS. No reputable CA should be signing EV certs with punycode that looks like English words. Ones that do will quickly be removed from the browsers.
For the non-English, you're f#@ked. Seriously. This was a good awful idea. We are going to return to an English only internet because everything else will be untrustable.
The technology doesn't routinely make judgement calls that are inaccurate in a specific direction. It is however much less accurate but lack of accuracy does not mean bias.
Second, it is the policies around how it is used that negatively affect non-white people. This is a policy problem not a technology problem. I'm really not keen on being tracked and scanned by facial recognition or any of the other ways organizations track me but please don't exaggerate and play the racism card just to get clicks. In the end it numbs us to real abuse.
IBM does have a great piece of technology that could streamline a very complicated and expensive part of health care. Unfortunately health care has a huge amount of regulation that I suspect is in many places self contradicting. Watson should be profitable and at the same time it should also bring down my healthcare costs. Unfortunately Watson will require a large company with deep pockets to handle all the regulations and also a company competent at handling complex computer systems. IBM can't do large complex systems and hasn't been able to for 30 years. They don't have the organizational physiology and if even if that changed they don't attracted the types of employees who have that skill set. Amazon could probably do it, maybe Walmart (Walmart an incredible logistics company that happens to have retail stores) but after that I can't think of anyone else (kaiser permanente or one of their competent competitors???)
It might be that this other person sat in meetings with him and it could be seen as an colluding to force an agenda. Or the other person might report to a manager that reports to Krzanich and this manager would then feel as if they are being watched or undermined by the relationship. There are other reasons than sexual misconduct to ban some relationships in a company.
Facebook provides a free service to people like Sabados and Krupalija while they sell advertising. She paid them nothing, I don't understand why anyone expects facebook to do anything other than what is in their own interest. Responding to this request is a huge pain for Facebook with no upside. I can see why they might not want to help. If someone dies and you have a deep connection with their facebook profile then download it and store it yourself!
I don't think my grandma can maintain solar panels on her roof. I don't think she wants to maintain batteries so that she has enough power stored up over the summer to last her the winter. Heck just in the spring she would need a large set of batteries to even out her personal usage. Maybe she could get together with a couple of neighbours and share a battery, maybe one neighbour could put up a windmill so they have an alternative. Wait, even better they could get together with even more neighbours and maybe dam a river and then add hydro to their mix, or put the solar panels in a field or on a tall building. Even better is if this group of neighbours got together with another group hundreds of km away where the weather was a bit different and the solar and wind production between all of them might be more even.
Solar, batteries and everything else will always be better and easier to manage if we create a large grid. I can manage batteries and solar panels but guess what my time is worth so much more doing other things that it is worth it to me to pay someone else (say an electric utility) to manage them.
It is something that society grants the creator of a work but there is an expectation that the work enters the public domain after the copyright expires.
Any entity that loses the ability to distribute the work in a meaningful way should immediately lose the copyright. So the BBC should no longer have copyright on the Doctor Who episodes they lost. Any game made for a now obsolete system that wasn't ported to a newer system should now be public domain. And copyright should be for 5 to 10 years. That is all the time that should be needed to motivate people to create content. Anything longer than that is just hording.
There are many ways that UDP packets can traverse NAT (see UDP hole punching for example). There are lots of applications, especially in games, where UDP makes more sense than TCP. If I know the public IP address of a Steam user, with a bit of guess work and a sending a lot of packets to their router I could impersonate a legitimate UDP sender and get their router to forward the UDP packets to their machine. So yes, this exploit is bad.
1) Most of the plastic in the oceans is from China, India and third world countries where rivers are often used for garbage disposal. Our concern for the environment is completely alien to some cultures.*
2) Straws can't be washed so they have to be disposable
3) Straws are small, there mass is negligible, same with plastic grocery bags. As a percentage of your yearly waste I doubt they make 0.5%
4) Be very suspicious of anyone pushing these bans. They are likely virtue signalling and care more about appearing to be doing something than actually doing it.
*To be fair though do to our significantly higher wealth and consumption means our damage to the environment is many times more.
This isn't a problem. The scum is biological. Further it is slowing the rate of change by 50%. The oceans and the atmosphere will still reach the same equilibrium given time. Also we don't want more CO2 in the oceans. It causes acidification and messes with all kinds of ocean life. You could debate where it does more harm, atmosphere or ocean, but ideally we don't want more in either place.
Quantum computers can solve two problems that can affect modern encryption. They force us to double the length of a hash for the same security and they can solve the period of a function. The first application obviously affects hash functions, the second eventually leads to breaking RSA, discrete log type asymmetric functions and many elliptic curve primitives. However they don't make any of this instantaneous. SHA-256 is still safe and the amount of work to massage RSA, Diffie-Hellman and other current schemes into something that a quantum computer can solve is still difficult. So even if your quantum computer were instant, the classical computing is going to take time.
Bitcoin is also safe. You need a public key before you can let loose your quantum computer to try and find a wallets private key but the public keys in bitcoin are only stored as hashes until money is spent the first time from a wallet. So you can only start attacking a wallet once its transaction is broadcast into the network. You would then have to find the private key before the valid transaction was included in the block chain.
Your communications today however are not safe. Someone recording the initial hand shake of a TLS session would in the future be able to figure out what AES key was agreed upon and then be able to read your communication. Anything you digitally sign today will have to be resigned by you before the 10 years expire if you still want to be able to prove you signed it.
A vacuum has no temperature since temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of the particles. In deep space we consider the temperature to be the equilibrium temperature an object will eventually reach, which is the temperature of the cosmic background temperature.
Anyway, one ten billionth of a degree over absolute zero is not 10 billions times colder than the average temperature of the vacuum of space. We really need journalists to have at least passed grade 9 science before writing about science.
Earlier this year I discovered I only knew one other Canadian born and Canadian university educated engineer still working as an engineer in Canada. Excluding that one person all my class mates are either in the USA, immigrated to Canada as kids or are no longer doing engineering. All but one of my coworkers at my last 4 jobs is foreign born. When I worked in the Bay area I had lots of Canadian born co-workers and friends. I've been asked at engineering pickup soccer games in Ottawa, Canada where my accent is from.
I don't even work for any Canadian companies, I do contract work for American companies. The pay isn't even close. I probably get 70% more pay working remote for an American company than I would for a local one.
Before someone asks, no, the rotation about a point doesn't work in 2D since in rotating about the first point your second point will end up in the same place as an existing point and so will many of the other points in the graph. Where as I can always rotate the required distance in 3D and not end up on an existing point.
Imagine the 2D solution is 5. I then likely have a graph with 5 colours where two points not adjacent must be the same colour. Take this graph, copy it and then rotate it slightly out of the plane about one of those two points until the other point is the line distance away from it. Now those points are connected and then must be of opposite colors so I have a graph that now requires 6 colors. Also this new graph likely has 2 points that must be the same color. I copy and rotate again creating something that now requires 7...
In 3D the number most likely jumps to infinity. This is like the how many colours does it take to colour a map so that no adjacent countries have the same colour. 1D is trivally 2, 2D is four but the proof sucks, 3D is clearly infinity.
It's not the language it's the CPU instruction pipeline. On your old 8 bit computer it would take 4 ticks to fetch the instruction, fetch the arguments, do the calculation, store the result. Then we got a pipeline where each tick you would do all 4 things, fetch instruction 4, get the arguments for instruction 3, do the calculation for instruction 2 and store the result of the instruction 1. Over the years pipelines got longer and more complex. An inefficiency in pipelines occurs when you do a branch, then have to wait for the pipeline to fill. The solution to this is to fetch both instructions and speculatively do both until you know which way the branch went. Unfortunately there were two security problems with this. Intel wasn't checking if you had permission to gather the arguments until after they were fetched and second some effects of following the branch that wasn't taken could be seen by the branch that was. So the trick was to get the speculative branch, the one your code won't take in the end, to fetch something you shouldn't have access to and then in the other branch look at that data.
It is actually very easy to exploit Meltdown and Spectre in assembly and C and much harder in JavaScript. However, my web browser doesn't regularly download and run binary files, it does regularly load JavaScript and automatically run it.
CPUs have always had flaws and as a developer there was always an errata sheet you had to read and understand. The problem today is cloud computing and to some extent javascript. People are now running untrusted code on the same systems as their trusted programs. It was assumed that as long as your sandbox for these programs was secure and well defined that this was safe. Spectre and Meltdown proved this wasn't true.
A lot of these devices don't seem finished when you compare them to general consumer devices. I might forgive no security but often they handle error conditions incorrectly and don't even give an indication of a problem. For example radiation counters that say no radiation when their sensor becomes saturated. Or devices that will after a power interruption join the first network that they find and just wait for commands (802.15.4 medical monitors joining ZigBee meter networks). I've also seen devices that as far as I can tell where never tested in the real world before being used (pager based patient room transfer systems - besides no security and broadcasting your private information, pager uses a detect n and correct m error correcting algorithm where n=m, so if the bit error exceeds n then you get the wrong message with no indication)
I do contract work for many companies and my work is core to what they do. I set my own hours, use almost all my own equipment, work in my own office, subcontract out some QA and repairs, I even bill in 15 minute intervals - I don't see how I'm different from an Uber driver. The existing test of control made perfect sense.
Question - will I now have to be an employee of the American companies I'm currently doing contract work for? or just companies in California?
Actually the problem in Japan was the rods melted. If they had been just dumped in the ocean it would have been fine. The radiation around those rods is only dangerous if you are within a few centimeters of them. You eventually have to retrieve the rods but you could safely wait a hundred years till they aren't as radio active.
[I'm Canadian] When I was in university we held a protest asking for more funding for universities. We had 3 politicians come to speak to us. The first two were very sympathetic and said that funding for university was a priority for their parties and if elected they would spend enough to keep tuition the same or lower. The third politician was the former head of my university's student council and a member of the ruling federal party. The protest was in one of the engineering lecture halls where he had been a student years before. He very directly and truthfully explained that we were the most privileged sector of the Canadian population and that for those of us taking degrees that would lead to well paying jobs the cost of tuition could be higher almost all of us would still pay. He then called us selfish and self-entitled and that if he had extra money in the budget to spend there were lots of other groups where the money would make a bigger difference.
The room was silent, the protests ended. I think everyone felt like they were 10 years old and had just been caught doing something wrong.
We may not need all the fields in the WHOIS record but there are many that are currently needed for the internet to function. I find it bizarre that the EU's data protection advisory group doesn't understand this and wouldn't create some sort of temporary provision to allow ICANN time to adjust. Their response seemed very arrogant.
The dating sites aren't working for women either. In my area, Ottawa, Canada, the median age of an active POF profile of slim or athletic woman between 30 and 40 is 300 days. (You can sort the profiles by newest first, find the oldest profile that was on in the last 30 days and then message the women halfway between and ask them when they created their profiles)
Create a crappy woman's profile, see how many messages it gets bombarded with. Now imagine trying to get this woman's attention and keep it. It's almost impossible to do it with out sounding needy and desperate. Also every woman is remembering the best men she chatted with, the funny ones, the handsome ones, rich ones... It doesn't matter that all these are all guys ultimately didn't choose her, they inflated her sense of self worth, they raised her minimum standard of what she will date.
In the end we end up with most men sounding desperate and undesirable and we created a situation where most people would rather be single than date the bottom 80% of the opposite sex.