Another "must-escape" technology
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This reminded me of the _Calvin and Hobbes_ strip: "Calvin's Pitcher of Plague: $5.00 not to have any." Please, what will I have to pay to get a non-Gadgetized shirt?
Indianapolis. And yes, I carry a key when I take the trash out and when I do yard work. If I don't make distinctions then I never find that I've gone away and left the door unlocked. Probably your memory is better than mine.
Indeed, you'd think that *someone* would notice that Windows has had scheduled task support in all versions since 1995 or so. Why on earth does every product need its own timer gadget? (Answer: they don't; these guys are all working too hard because they're too lazy to learn how the system works.)
Since static discharges due to scrubbing across the seat cushions *are* observed frequently and *are* thought to be responsible for fires at filling stations, wouldn't it be better for the auto manufacturers to fix their upholstery first and then see if we have any more fires? Just eliminating the nuisance of the occasional jolt would be worth a few bucks more, and if it turns out to be a safety issue then so much the better.
Nah, the networks they depend on are mostly made of gear from outfits like Siemens, Ericsson, and Alcatel. cisco's biggest box is pretty small stuff compared to what it takes to run the wires that the Internet rides on. And IP is even worse for carrying a decent TV signal than it is for voice.
Do remember that in the longer run that cost differential tends to erode. The low-priced workers eat into it from below as they become accustomed to a higher standard of living, and the high-priced ones moderate their demands in order to hang onto their jobs.
There's a song, "Japanese Man", which speaks to this. Anybody remember the artist?
Maybe it was that perception that engineers and scientists would just be swallowed by the Military-Industrial Complex to build better bombs.
Or it could just be the bias I've seen strengthening over the years, which says that it's way cool to be ignorant and useless. When I'm feeling particularly paranoid I'm tempted to believe that some outfit like the KGB was working to undermine our competitiveness at the source, like the story with the aliens who tried to program the next human generation for defeat by distributing a video game in which you score points by losing the war.
If *all* jobs are filled by machines, then mankind can go play all day. Sounds good to me. We'll do the jobs we like because they're fun and let the robots have the rest, a la _Voyage from Yesteryear_. I can spend my days writing code that pleases me instead of beating my head against a wall trying to figure out how to make someone else's code do what we need.
I'd say the other reason that people aren't afraid that *everyone* will be replaced by a machine is that there is so much human activity left which we still don't understand to any significant degree. Show me the "master architect algorithm" or a function which correctly models customer satisfaction, or a machine that can win souls for $DEITY. You can't emulate it if you don't know how it works. I believe that that day will come, but we are not positioned to see it, even if it arrives tomorrow.
OMG, those dirty foreigners are stealing all of our yucky gruntwork jobs!
Think about it. There's no way to outsource some tech jobs to another continent. There is no affordable way to replace the guy who runs around replacing busted mice with someone sitting in Rawalpindi. Some jobs require physical presence. We'll still have those.
Some jobs are so specialized that it'll be hard to save any money by shopping more widely. The top-end jobs are probably fairly safe. Only so many artists are born to any generation, and nobody can make more of them. India gets its fair share of artists, of course, but they won't be cheap either, and outsourcing is all about cheap.
What gets lost is the unfun jobs that don't require presence. Churning out endless revisions of the payroll report program is steady work and pays okay, but is it really interesting?
Finally, turnabout's fair play. Find some IT work in another country that you can do for less and "steal" one of *their* jobs. If they can do it, you can do it.
I tend to agree with the notion that innovative thinking from a diverse set of viewpoints will stand us in good stead, but then he goes and trips over narrow thinking himself.
When a good techie stops being promoted, it may not be because he has no ambition (that is, isn't interested in abandoning the field which he embraced, on which he spent much money and many years of his life, to become a manager) but because he is achieving his ambition right where he is. Some of us prefer to have others work for us as CEO, etc. so we can get on with the interesting work and leave the counting of paperclips and silly political posturing to somebody who cares about such matters.
Well, as has been pointed out, pink noise just masks the sounds, and a machine might not have the same limitations as a man. That's why we build machines.
But turning on the sounds of randomly generated keystrokes all the time that the password prompt is displayed, that might inject enough garbage into the data stream to make it worthless.
Of course it'll all be moot once we get the neural couplers.:-)
Or they could have looked out the front windows of the airplane. The WTC was the hardest thing in NYC to avoid seeing, especially from the air. Why do you need coord.s for something that is sticking up out of the clutter and shouting, "yoo hoo! over here!"
Restriction of privileges is exactly what we already do in the Real World. You cannot just stroll into a military base and demand to be let into the armory or the files of the CO's planning staff without causing yourself a whole lotta trouble. You can't expect to walk into the control room of a power plant without a badge. It's awfully hard to get onto the workroom floor of *any* manufacturing business if nobody recognizes you.
This is exactly the network security model. Assuming that the bad guys have useful knowledge, make it hard for them to gain the access necessary to use it. Locking up a network by hiding information has been derided, not because of some ivory-tower theory, but because it's a deviation from what's known to work well in the physical world. We've known all along that secrets are fleeting, and that active measures have the best chance of foiling a determined attacker.
"It's worse than that. Instead of users with system accounts, democratic countries have this:
# useradd -g root terrorist"
Oh, really. Try walking into SAC headquarters without a security clearance. Wasn't there a big flap the other day about someone who only asked for a map of the service tunnels under his school?
We hire a handful of stewards to hold the root passwords for us.
Yeah, that's a scene I've thought of a lot in the last few years. Some guy stands up and says, "I have a weapon...." He goes down immediately under a dozen hands. Someone says, "open a door."
"As you said before, we had no idea that terrorists would send their operatives to flight school so that they could crash planes into buildings. Well, until they did it."
Probably because it was taking an insane risk. If you don't care about takeoff, landing, or survival, and you're willing to wait until you can see the city you're aiming at before taking the controls, you can learn everything you need to know about flying from a book in about ten minutes. Some days I can't help thinking that these guys *wanted* to be caught.
Water companies test their output all the time, precisely because they could be wiped out by half a million wrongful-death lawsuits in one swell foop if they don't.
Really, if you and a buddy put on orange vests and hard hats, and spent your days peering through survey instruments and jotting notes, how many weeks would you have to do this before anyone bothered to speak to you at all? Okay, you'd be nabbed quickly if you surveyed the Pentagon or ORNL, but there are *supposed* to be people checking over those thousands of bridges and dams and whatnot -- who would stop you?
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This reminded me of the _Calvin and Hobbes_ strip: "Calvin's Pitcher of Plague: $5.00 not to have any." Please, what will I have to pay to get a non-Gadgetized shirt?
Indianapolis. And yes, I carry a key when I take the trash out and when I do yard work. If I don't make distinctions then I never find that I've gone away and left the door unlocked. Probably your memory is better than mine.
If it's an exterior door, then yes, I do lock it every single time.
Indeed, you'd think that *someone* would notice that Windows has had scheduled task support in all versions since 1995 or so. Why on earth does every product need its own timer gadget? (Answer: they don't; these guys are all working too hard because they're too lazy to learn how the system works.)
Apparently Gator does that everywhere, not just Soviet Russia. :-(
Have your family decided that doors are too hard to use if you have to unlock them, and moved to a house with no locks?
We already had an answer. There are lots of keyservers out there.
Since static discharges due to scrubbing across the seat cushions *are* observed frequently and *are* thought to be responsible for fires at filling stations, wouldn't it be better for the auto manufacturers to fix their upholstery first and then see if we have any more fires? Just eliminating the nuisance of the occasional jolt would be worth a few bucks more, and if it turns out to be a safety issue then so much the better.
The Linux 2.6.0 source tarball is about 40MB.
Nah, the networks they depend on are mostly made of gear from outfits like Siemens, Ericsson, and Alcatel. cisco's biggest box is pretty small stuff compared to what it takes to run the wires that the Internet rides on. And IP is even worse for carrying a decent TV signal than it is for voice.
Yeah, my first thought was, "where do I find an under-$100 ATX motherboard that'll take one of those?"
An interesting point. Thanks. But at least I'm misusing it in the same way that everybody else does. :-)
Lots of quotes get misused universally. "Separation of church and state" and "my country, right or wrong" are a couple of good examples.
Do remember that in the longer run that cost differential tends to erode. The low-priced workers eat into it from below as they become accustomed to a higher standard of living, and the high-priced ones moderate their demands in order to hang onto their jobs.
There's a song, "Japanese Man", which speaks to this. Anybody remember the artist?
Maybe it was that perception that engineers and scientists would just be swallowed by the Military-Industrial Complex to build better bombs.
Or it could just be the bias I've seen strengthening over the years, which says that it's way cool to be ignorant and useless. When I'm feeling particularly paranoid I'm tempted to believe that some outfit like the KGB was working to undermine our competitiveness at the source, like the story with the aliens who tried to program the next human generation for defeat by distributing a video game in which you score points by losing the war.
If *all* jobs are filled by machines, then mankind can go play all day. Sounds good to me. We'll do the jobs we like because they're fun and let the robots have the rest, a la _Voyage from Yesteryear_. I can spend my days writing code that pleases me instead of beating my head against a wall trying to figure out how to make someone else's code do what we need.
I'd say the other reason that people aren't afraid that *everyone* will be replaced by a machine is that there is so much human activity left which we still don't understand to any significant degree. Show me the "master architect algorithm" or a function which correctly models customer satisfaction, or a machine that can win souls for $DEITY. You can't emulate it if you don't know how it works. I believe that that day will come, but we are not positioned to see it, even if it arrives tomorrow.
OMG, those dirty foreigners are stealing all of our yucky gruntwork jobs!
Think about it. There's no way to outsource some tech jobs to another continent. There is no affordable way to replace the guy who runs around replacing busted mice with someone sitting in Rawalpindi. Some jobs require physical presence. We'll still have those.
Some jobs are so specialized that it'll be hard to save any money by shopping more widely. The top-end jobs are probably fairly safe. Only so many artists are born to any generation, and nobody can make more of them. India gets its fair share of artists, of course, but they won't be cheap either, and outsourcing is all about cheap.
What gets lost is the unfun jobs that don't require presence. Churning out endless revisions of the payroll report program is steady work and pays okay, but is it really interesting?
Finally, turnabout's fair play. Find some IT work in another country that you can do for less and "steal" one of *their* jobs. If they can do it, you can do it.
I tend to agree with the notion that innovative thinking from a diverse set of viewpoints will stand us in good stead, but then he goes and trips over narrow thinking himself.
When a good techie stops being promoted, it may not be because he has no ambition (that is, isn't interested in abandoning the field which he embraced, on which he spent much money and many years of his life, to become a manager) but because he is achieving his ambition right where he is. Some of us prefer to have others work for us as CEO, etc. so we can get on with the interesting work and leave the counting of paperclips and silly political posturing to somebody who cares about such matters.
Well, as has been pointed out, pink noise just masks the sounds, and a machine might not have the same limitations as a man. That's why we build machines.
:-)
But turning on the sounds of randomly generated keystrokes all the time that the password prompt is displayed, that might inject enough garbage into the data stream to make it worthless.
Of course it'll all be moot once we get the neural couplers.
Or they could have looked out the front windows of the airplane. The WTC was the hardest thing in NYC to avoid seeing, especially from the air. Why do you need coord.s for something that is sticking up out of the clutter and shouting, "yoo hoo! over here!"
Restriction of privileges is exactly what we already do in the Real World. You cannot just stroll into a military base and demand to be let into the armory or the files of the CO's planning staff without causing yourself a whole lotta trouble. You can't expect to walk into the control room of a power plant without a badge. It's awfully hard to get onto the workroom floor of *any* manufacturing business if nobody recognizes you.
This is exactly the network security model. Assuming that the bad guys have useful knowledge, make it hard for them to gain the access necessary to use it. Locking up a network by hiding information has been derided, not because of some ivory-tower theory, but because it's a deviation from what's known to work well in the physical world. We've known all along that secrets are fleeting, and that active measures have the best chance of foiling a determined attacker.
"It's worse than that. Instead of users with system accounts, democratic countries have this:
# useradd -g root terrorist"
Oh, really. Try walking into SAC headquarters without a security clearance. Wasn't there a big flap the other day about someone who only asked for a map of the service tunnels under his school?
We hire a handful of stewards to hold the root passwords for us.
Yeah, that's a scene I've thought of a lot in the last few years. Some guy stands up and says, "I have a weapon...." He goes down immediately under a dozen hands. Someone says, "open a door."
"As you said before, we had no idea that terrorists would send their operatives to flight school so that they could crash planes into buildings. Well, until they did it."
Probably because it was taking an insane risk. If you don't care about takeoff, landing, or survival, and you're willing to wait until you can see the city you're aiming at before taking the controls, you can learn everything you need to know about flying from a book in about ten minutes. Some days I can't help thinking that these guys *wanted* to be caught.
Water companies test their output all the time, precisely because they could be wiped out by half a million wrongful-death lawsuits in one swell foop if they don't.
Really, if you and a buddy put on orange vests and hard hats, and spent your days peering through survey instruments and jotting notes, how many weeks would you have to do this before anyone bothered to speak to you at all? Okay, you'd be nabbed quickly if you surveyed the Pentagon or ORNL, but there are *supposed* to be people checking over those thousands of bridges and dams and whatnot -- who would stop you?