Make no mistake, I don't mean my subject as anti-science - From my point of view, I'd gladly give one of these to every university in the world before I'd pay for one more bullet fired from one more drone to kill one more Arab in a desert far away.
But in planning for a future desired collision energy, they really should have some actual goal in mind to justify that design. Do they hope to find dark matter? Black holes? Do they actually think they can make the Higgs break down into something else at that energy? So... Why?
Unlike Healthcare.gov, our site doesn't connect to the IRS, DHS, and various state exchanges and authorities. Furthermore, we're using the government's data, so our site is only possible because of the hard work that the Healthcare.gov team has done.
Translation: "We accomplished something in a few weeks that the wastes of flesh in charge of this boondoggle couldn't do in two years and with vastly better access to internal information".
Fire CGI Federal with prejudice (no more government contracts, ever, and no pay for their failures so far). Imprison their CEO for fraud against the American people. And give the 100+ million to these three guys. Give 'em the resources they need to finish their version of the project, and a year to repair this whole massive clusterfuck.
You want a good portal design, hire hungry young geeks, not old-guard defense contractors who still consider ADA an edgy new language.
The problem extends beyond even that basic fact of statistics. In a large company with 10% average annual turnover, if they could selectively get rid of the bottom 10% and replace them with randomly-performing people, ranked performance would actually work pretty well.
The problem here comes comes from the sample size per manager for consideration of these rankings. Let's say you have a department with three top-level managers, each having a team of 10 subordinates. You should ideally end up ranking three of them as the bottom 10% and three of them as the top 10% - And you will! Except, each of those managers will pick a top-1 and a bottom-1, rather than picking from the pool consisting of the entire department.
As a result, even if team-A consists of all stellar performers and team C consists of all wastes of flesh, team A will have one member unfairly fired, and team C will have one member unfairly rewarded more than the average for team A.
Now, under natural conditions, that distinction between team A and C probably wouldn't exist to any notable degree - Until you extend a policy like this across the entire company. Instead of losing the bottom 10% and promoting the top 10%, you end up actively selecting for a corporate culture that favors pooling into over- and under-performing teams exactly like A and C. The high performers, by definition, will pick teams that actually get things done; while the low performers will pick teams where they feel "safe" from flawed performance reviews.
Yet another stunning win for Ms. "paid maternity leave for me, fuck the rest of you" Meyer.
I simply don't trust myself to make a 100% secure server
Funny, neither do I - So why would I use your code (for some non-literal value of "you") instead of my own?:)
Only half kidding here. Yes, I understand why we should generally avoid rolling our own unless necessary. But don't assume that just because someone else has written it already - Possibly someone far, far less experienced and less knowledgeable about security best practices - That you'll end up with a better result with something off the shelf than DIY.
Why go through all the trouble and risk when a free alternate solution already exists?
Well, because as the entire point of TFA, the "free alternate solution" that already exists requires signing up for a service that quite a few of us actively do not want.
In the case of using Google or Facebook or Twitter or the like to handle your auth, you can probably ignore my concern from above about quality. But then we get into concerns about deliberate weaknesses for the purpose of collecting data about us for their marketing departments.
Turns out i am a computer. Couldn't have figured it out myself!
This. Even with the answers, I can't recognize the features those descriptions supposedly refer to... "Little birdies facing eachother on the bottom and little bees flying away from eachother on top"??? WTF? Does anyone actually see the birds and bees the captions keep referring to?
Dear security researchers - Any clever scheme that humans have trouble dealing with, will fail, no matter how "secure" you consider it. I can remember "correct horse battery staple" (with 1 through 9 tacked on at the end to get around annoying domain password history restrictions, of course - Case in point!). ln TFA's case, I'd probably need to keep a goddamned picture of my password in my wallet to compare against each time I log in.
It has nothing to do with size. AT&T and Microsoft were engaged in specific, targetted actions against their competitors, while Goldman Sachs and Fannie Mae were not. You should have taken the fact that you had to introduce arbitrary-looking exceptions to your hypothesis as a warning that because your hypothesis was wrong.
You've missed a prerequisite here.
The things that AT&T and Microsoft got busted for, while specific and targeted, don't break the law when done by a "not too big" company.
If you wrote your own OS today, and bundled your own browser with it, specifically and targetedly intending to undercut Microsoft's sales - You have done absolutely nothing wrong. You could even brag about your attempts in your SEC filings, and comfortably remain on the legal side of the fence.
Microsoft's actions only crossed into antitrust territory because they exceed a magic (and completely arbitrary) threshold for size.
Really, is it a crime to be better than your competitors?
In the EU, for an American company - Yes. Google. Microsoft. Amazon.
In the EU, for a European company, they actively promote that. Airbus. RBS. BP.
In the US, for an American company - Only if they reach some completely arbitrary threshold of "too big", which at least since Standard Oil has apparently applies solely to technology companies, while the banking industry can snort blow off the asses of underage Filipino prostitutes with impunity. AT&T and Microsoft, vs Goldman Sachs and Fannie.
For symmetry I would mention "In the US, for a European company", but see no point in dealing with purely hypothetical situations.;)
yeah, because saying it will make it a reality, right?
"We'll pay you $1500/year and give you a free "car tunnel" to park in and/or keep the snow off your driveway".
You gonna say no, assuming they don't insult you with something so hideous that your neighbor in the purple house with orange trim would run screaming from the offer?
Posts like this [...] are the proof slashdot has gone down the drain.
Agreed. Slashdot needs to ban ACs, no doubt about it.
Why do modern military planes even have a canopy anymore? The vast majority of interesting visual information gets presented to the pilot via HUD anyway. The actual physical scenery amounts to nothing more than a distraction. Ditch the canopy, stick the pilot deeper inside the plane, and present everything as a video feed.
Or, better yet, just ditch the entire pilot and give the job to a twitch gamer flying the plane from deep inside Cheyenne. Aside from "boots on the ground", today's military amounts to nothing but expensive portable explosion delivery machines. Those machines can do their jobs better, cheaper, and (for some seriously fucked up definition of the word) safer without the overhead of needing to carry an easily-broken bag of meat inside.
I find that any number (of people who enjoy the exploitation of children) higher than 0 to be too high.
Oh, come now - Someone has to thread those bobbins, the crawl-space doesn't fit an adult, and midgets have become increasingly scarce thanks to modern medical science.
Interesting how you cited the one criteria (out of seven listed) that amounts to little more than feelgood fluff. Also interesting how the rest of those criteria make a single, clear point, while #4 has two distinct, completely unrelated parts to it.
I feel good about myself for solidly meeting the rest of those criteria. If the second half of #4 counts as the make-or-break test for the word - You can have it. I love what I do, but when I do it for someone else, I do it to get paid. Simple as that.
/ "All true Scotsmen, in addition to coming from Scotland, must actively enjoy holding hands and singing Kumba-ya".
I took that to mean they just cancelled the satellite project after casting and polishing the mirror but before silvering it.
Alternatively, the intended use may have involved some classified exotic coating that serves some special purpose and they needed to strip the coating before selling the mirror at auction.
If you are a professional that doesn't want the entire city to fall off the grid, if you actually care about the customers, if you don't want the company to go broke, if you don't WANT the damn thing to burn in fire, then that's a pretty shitty plan, now isn't it?
No one (with the possible exception of healthcare workers) actually "cares" about the customers. The most customer-focused CEO on the planet wouldn't piss on a customer dying of thirst in the Sahara if they didn't get paid to pretend they care.
By extension, once a company stops paying me, "professionalism" doesn't count as a magic buzzword that translates into "I'll keep working for you for free". If we parted ways on good terms, it means I'll take a few 30-second phone calls over the next several weeks to help the new guy out, and if they need more extensive help, I'll only charge my normal contracting rate rather than the "fuck you" extortionate one. If, however, they "downsized" me and later discover they really really needed me? Hand me my fiddle and let's go watch Rome burn, preferably with as much looting as possible first.
The Childs case pretty much cinches this - Although we can debate whether or not he legally did the right thing, and whether or not he counted as a BofH in general, he technically did the right thing. You don't give out core router passwords in an open phone-call to an unknown audience, period. And how did they reward him for behaving in a professional manner? TFA makes that much clear.
Your employer owns their hardware, including the "keys" to get into it.
Childs screwed up by withholding entirely the wrong sort of information. You don't pitch a fit and refuse to give them the passwords - You give them exactly what they've asked for and then watch in glee as they realize they don't have the faintest clue of what to do with those passwords.
Picture a fairly simple small-scale corporate WAN. Three separate subnets. Nothing massive in scale.
Now imagine they "no longer need your services" after three years of uninterrupted service.
Now imagine that you haven't persisted the router configs and they lose power.
Now imagine a non-technical city manager trying to figure out why he can't get to facebook, and demanding passwords from you.
When you stop laughing...
Yes, you can still thoroughly document your infrastructure for your successor, for the (most likely) scenario where you peacefully move on and want to help the poor bastard out. But if you suddenly find yourself "redundant", well, "here you go, all the passwords. Good luck, and I charge $1500/hr as my standard consulting rate".
At one-seventh the density of air, helium produces less drag on the moving components of a drive - the spinning disk platters and actuator arms -- which translates into less friction and lower operating temperatures.
Or even better, a vacuum of 0.147psi has one-one-hundredth the density of air. Both a vacuum and filling it with helium require making the drive air tight; and at least with 3.5" drives, they have an impressively strong frame that could certainly withstand a modest vacuum. Or better yet, do both! Fill it with low pressure helium, saving helium and getting even more reduction in friction.
All that aside, though, I don't quite get the capacity boost - Drive capacity results from the number of platters and the areal density of bits on a platter. Friction has nothing to do with either of those constraints.
Still, not complaining - About time I upgraded the drive size in my home file server. Funny how that works - Every year or so I add another drive, and then every five years or so I replace the whole array with two new drives having more total capacity than what I replaced.
How many solar panels would be required to 'pave over death valley'?
For large-scale installations, we have better, simpler, old-school tech than installing actual solar panels. My point more addressed the will, not the specifics.
TFA claims that we can't meet the world's power needs with renewables. I call BS, we just don't have the will to move off of the sweet, sweet teat of oil, for which we already have massive infrastructure in place to support its use. Do you have any idea how many gas stations the US has? How many miles of oil and natural gas pipelines exist? How much effort and expense goes into maintaining those?
To directly answer your question, though, it would take almost exactly six billion panels to literally pave Death Valley. We wouldn't actually need that many, however, since the entire annual US electric budget only comes in at 4,138TWh - Which a mere 5.2B (cheap consumer-grade) panels would satisfy. But as I mentioned above, we wouldn't really use 5.2 cheap consumer-grade billion panels - We'd use either an array of more traditional solar thermal plants (aka lots of cheap mirrors heat something up), or at the very least, use newer, more efficient and multi-sun panels with their own array of mirrors. Current cells exist that can take 70k suns - Lowering the number of actual panels needed (as opposed to cheap mirrors) to a manageable 74 thousand.
Please don't handwave "logistics" as if it's triviality. Logistics is a significant issue, IMO bigger than generating the power to begin with.
Fair point, but "hard" still beats "we don't currently know how to even do it".
I think, though, that I probably took the wrong approach with following the GP's lead about death vallet to Manhattan. A properly distributed grid doesn't require any such massive-scale superconducting long haul transmission lines - It simply requires average population density over an area to match its (very literal) shadow. Manhattan can't possibly make enough solar power to meet demand - But in a 50 mile radius of Manhattan, you have vast tracts of former farming wasteland, an ocean, a "long" island with high steady winds perfect for a turbine farm...
I don't mean to sound overly flippant here, but the problem largely amounts to one of will, not practicality.
Slashdot Mirror
Make no mistake, I don't mean my subject as anti-science - From my point of view, I'd gladly give one of these to every university in the world before I'd pay for one more bullet fired from one more drone to kill one more Arab in a desert far away.
But in planning for a future desired collision energy, they really should have some actual goal in mind to justify that design. Do they hope to find dark matter? Black holes? Do they actually think they can make the Higgs break down into something else at that energy? So... Why?
Unlike Healthcare.gov, our site doesn't connect to the IRS, DHS, and various state exchanges and authorities. Furthermore, we're using the government's data, so our site is only possible because of the hard work that the Healthcare.gov team has done.
Translation: "We accomplished something in a few weeks that the wastes of flesh in charge of this boondoggle couldn't do in two years and with vastly better access to internal information".
Fire CGI Federal with prejudice (no more government contracts, ever, and no pay for their failures so far). Imprison their CEO for fraud against the American people. And give the 100+ million to these three guys. Give 'em the resources they need to finish their version of the project, and a year to repair this whole massive clusterfuck.
You want a good portal design, hire hungry young geeks, not old-guard defense contractors who still consider ADA an edgy new language.
Just don't go chugging it around gaslights. Killer burps.
The problem extends beyond even that basic fact of statistics. In a large company with 10% average annual turnover, if they could selectively get rid of the bottom 10% and replace them with randomly-performing people, ranked performance would actually work pretty well.
The problem here comes comes from the sample size per manager for consideration of these rankings. Let's say you have a department with three top-level managers, each having a team of 10 subordinates. You should ideally end up ranking three of them as the bottom 10% and three of them as the top 10% - And you will! Except, each of those managers will pick a top-1 and a bottom-1, rather than picking from the pool consisting of the entire department.
As a result, even if team-A consists of all stellar performers and team C consists of all wastes of flesh, team A will have one member unfairly fired, and team C will have one member unfairly rewarded more than the average for team A.
Now, under natural conditions, that distinction between team A and C probably wouldn't exist to any notable degree - Until you extend a policy like this across the entire company. Instead of losing the bottom 10% and promoting the top 10%, you end up actively selecting for a corporate culture that favors pooling into over- and under-performing teams exactly like A and C. The high performers, by definition, will pick teams that actually get things done; while the low performers will pick teams where they feel "safe" from flawed performance reviews.
Yet another stunning win for Ms. "paid maternity leave for me, fuck the rest of you" Meyer.
I simply don't trust myself to make a 100% secure server
:)
Funny, neither do I - So why would I use your code (for some non-literal value of "you") instead of my own?
Only half kidding here. Yes, I understand why we should generally avoid rolling our own unless necessary. But don't assume that just because someone else has written it already - Possibly someone far, far less experienced and less knowledgeable about security best practices - That you'll end up with a better result with something off the shelf than DIY.
Why go through all the trouble and risk when a free alternate solution already exists?
Well, because as the entire point of TFA, the "free alternate solution" that already exists requires signing up for a service that quite a few of us actively do not want.
In the case of using Google or Facebook or Twitter or the like to handle your auth, you can probably ignore my concern from above about quality. But then we get into concerns about deliberate weaknesses for the purpose of collecting data about us for their marketing departments.
Turns out i am a computer. Couldn't have figured it out myself!
This. Even with the answers, I can't recognize the features those descriptions supposedly refer to... "Little birdies facing eachother on the bottom and little bees flying away from eachother on top"??? WTF? Does anyone actually see the birds and bees the captions keep referring to?
Dear security researchers - Any clever scheme that humans have trouble dealing with, will fail, no matter how "secure" you consider it. I can remember "correct horse battery staple" (with 1 through 9 tacked on at the end to get around annoying domain password history restrictions, of course - Case in point!). ln TFA's case, I'd probably need to keep a goddamned picture of my password in my wallet to compare against each time I log in.
...And overnight, Chromium replaces 97% of Chrome's market share.
You might want to do a GIS for this guy WITH safesearch on, before trying to find the pictures mentioned in TFA.
Trust me, you do not want to see these pics. Ban them from the internet with fire!
"It has nothing to do with size."
[...]
"because effects scale with the size of the actor"
Oh-kaaay... Should I, um, just leave you to debate yourself on this one?
It has nothing to do with size. AT&T and Microsoft were engaged in specific, targetted actions against their competitors, while Goldman Sachs and Fannie Mae were not. You should have taken the fact that you had to introduce arbitrary-looking exceptions to your hypothesis as a warning that because your hypothesis was wrong.
You've missed a prerequisite here.
The things that AT&T and Microsoft got busted for, while specific and targeted, don't break the law when done by a "not too big" company.
If you wrote your own OS today, and bundled your own browser with it, specifically and targetedly intending to undercut Microsoft's sales - You have done absolutely nothing wrong. You could even brag about your attempts in your SEC filings, and comfortably remain on the legal side of the fence.
Microsoft's actions only crossed into antitrust territory because they exceed a magic (and completely arbitrary) threshold for size.
Really, is it a crime to be better than your competitors?
;)
In the EU, for an American company - Yes. Google. Microsoft. Amazon.
In the EU, for a European company, they actively promote that. Airbus. RBS. BP.
In the US, for an American company - Only if they reach some completely arbitrary threshold of "too big", which at least since Standard Oil has apparently applies solely to technology companies, while the banking industry can snort blow off the asses of underage Filipino prostitutes with impunity. AT&T and Microsoft, vs Goldman Sachs and Fannie.
For symmetry I would mention "In the US, for a European company", but see no point in dealing with purely hypothetical situations.
yeah, because saying it will make it a reality, right?
"We'll pay you $1500/year and give you a free "car tunnel" to park in and/or keep the snow off your driveway".
You gonna say no, assuming they don't insult you with something so hideous that your neighbor in the purple house with orange trim would run screaming from the offer?
Posts like this [...] are the proof slashdot has gone down the drain.
Agreed. Slashdot needs to ban ACs, no doubt about it.
Although a good idea in general, one totally not needed.
Turn on permanent private/incognito Browsing mode. Done.
I let sites I visit set whatever obnoxious privacy-stealing cookies they want - Because those cookies cease to exist outside the current tab.
Why do modern military planes even have a canopy anymore? The vast majority of interesting visual information gets presented to the pilot via HUD anyway. The actual physical scenery amounts to nothing more than a distraction. Ditch the canopy, stick the pilot deeper inside the plane, and present everything as a video feed.
Or, better yet, just ditch the entire pilot and give the job to a twitch gamer flying the plane from deep inside Cheyenne. Aside from "boots on the ground", today's military amounts to nothing but expensive portable explosion delivery machines. Those machines can do their jobs better, cheaper, and (for some seriously fucked up definition of the word) safer without the overhead of needing to carry an easily-broken bag of meat inside.
epic fail............
...History fail.
logic fail...........
when the Framers of the Constitution referred to the militia in the text of the document and the ratification debates, they had very definite ideas of what they meant. Their concept of the militia as a legal and political institution was a product of English heritage, as it was modified by the uniqueness of the American experience. It differed radically from our own concept. Specifically, what we think of today as the militia--that is, the National Guard--would have been viewed as a "standing army" by political leaders of the Revolutionary era.
I find that any number (of people who enjoy the exploitation of children) higher than 0 to be too high.
Oh, come now - Someone has to thread those bobbins, the crawl-space doesn't fit an adult, and midgets have become increasingly scarce thanks to modern medical science.
/ Handbasket, please.
Try this on for size:
Interesting how you cited the one criteria (out of seven listed) that amounts to little more than feelgood fluff. Also interesting how the rest of those criteria make a single, clear point, while #4 has two distinct, completely unrelated parts to it.
I feel good about myself for solidly meeting the rest of those criteria. If the second half of #4 counts as the make-or-break test for the word - You can have it. I love what I do, but when I do it for someone else, I do it to get paid. Simple as that.
/ "All true Scotsmen, in addition to coming from Scotland, must actively enjoy holding hands and singing Kumba-ya".
I took that to mean they just cancelled the satellite project after casting and polishing the mirror but before silvering it.
Alternatively, the intended use may have involved some classified exotic coating that serves some special purpose and they needed to strip the coating before selling the mirror at auction.
If you are a professional that doesn't want the entire city to fall off the grid, if you actually care about the customers, if you don't want the company to go broke, if you don't WANT the damn thing to burn in fire, then that's a pretty shitty plan, now isn't it?
No one (with the possible exception of healthcare workers) actually "cares" about the customers. The most customer-focused CEO on the planet wouldn't piss on a customer dying of thirst in the Sahara if they didn't get paid to pretend they care.
By extension, once a company stops paying me, "professionalism" doesn't count as a magic buzzword that translates into "I'll keep working for you for free". If we parted ways on good terms, it means I'll take a few 30-second phone calls over the next several weeks to help the new guy out, and if they need more extensive help, I'll only charge my normal contracting rate rather than the "fuck you" extortionate one. If, however, they "downsized" me and later discover they really really needed me? Hand me my fiddle and let's go watch Rome burn, preferably with as much looting as possible first.
The Childs case pretty much cinches this - Although we can debate whether or not he legally did the right thing, and whether or not he counted as a BofH in general, he technically did the right thing. You don't give out core router passwords in an open phone-call to an unknown audience, period. And how did they reward him for behaving in a professional manner? TFA makes that much clear.
Your employer owns their hardware, including the "keys" to get into it.
Childs screwed up by withholding entirely the wrong sort of information. You don't pitch a fit and refuse to give them the passwords - You give them exactly what they've asked for and then watch in glee as they realize they don't have the faintest clue of what to do with those passwords.
Picture a fairly simple small-scale corporate WAN. Three separate subnets. Nothing massive in scale.
Now imagine they "no longer need your services" after three years of uninterrupted service.
Now imagine that you haven't persisted the router configs and they lose power.
Now imagine a non-technical city manager trying to figure out why he can't get to facebook, and demanding passwords from you.
When you stop laughing...
Yes, you can still thoroughly document your infrastructure for your successor, for the (most likely) scenario where you peacefully move on and want to help the poor bastard out. But if you suddenly find yourself "redundant", well, "here you go, all the passwords. Good luck, and I charge $1500/hr as my standard consulting rate".
+5 insightful. Thank you!
I'd mention the three magic words that everyone seems to forget, "WELL-REGULATED MILITIA"
Hmm, okay, let's see... I keep my guns in good working order, know how to use them, and do not count as regular military.
Check, well-regulated militia. Anything else you'd like to discuss?
At one-seventh the density of air, helium produces less drag on the moving components of a drive - the spinning disk platters and actuator arms -- which translates into less friction and lower operating temperatures.
Or even better, a vacuum of 0.147psi has one-one-hundredth the density of air. Both a vacuum and filling it with helium require making the drive air tight; and at least with 3.5" drives, they have an impressively strong frame that could certainly withstand a modest vacuum. Or better yet, do both! Fill it with low pressure helium, saving helium and getting even more reduction in friction.
All that aside, though, I don't quite get the capacity boost - Drive capacity results from the number of platters and the areal density of bits on a platter. Friction has nothing to do with either of those constraints.
Still, not complaining - About time I upgraded the drive size in my home file server. Funny how that works - Every year or so I add another drive, and then every five years or so I replace the whole array with two new drives having more total capacity than what I replaced.
How many solar panels would be required to 'pave over death valley'?
For large-scale installations, we have better, simpler, old-school tech than installing actual solar panels. My point more addressed the will, not the specifics.
TFA claims that we can't meet the world's power needs with renewables. I call BS, we just don't have the will to move off of the sweet, sweet teat of oil, for which we already have massive infrastructure in place to support its use. Do you have any idea how many gas stations the US has? How many miles of oil and natural gas pipelines exist? How much effort and expense goes into maintaining those?
To directly answer your question, though, it would take almost exactly six billion panels to literally pave Death Valley. We wouldn't actually need that many, however, since the entire annual US electric budget only comes in at 4,138TWh - Which a mere 5.2B (cheap consumer-grade) panels would satisfy. But as I mentioned above, we wouldn't really use 5.2 cheap consumer-grade billion panels - We'd use either an array of more traditional solar thermal plants (aka lots of cheap mirrors heat something up), or at the very least, use newer, more efficient and multi-sun panels with their own array of mirrors. Current cells exist that can take 70k suns - Lowering the number of actual panels needed (as opposed to cheap mirrors) to a manageable 74 thousand.
Please don't handwave "logistics" as if it's triviality. Logistics is a significant issue, IMO bigger than generating the power to begin with.
Fair point, but "hard" still beats "we don't currently know how to even do it".
I think, though, that I probably took the wrong approach with following the GP's lead about death vallet to Manhattan. A properly distributed grid doesn't require any such massive-scale superconducting long haul transmission lines - It simply requires average population density over an area to match its (very literal) shadow. Manhattan can't possibly make enough solar power to meet demand - But in a 50 mile radius of Manhattan, you have vast tracts of former farming wasteland, an ocean, a "long" island with high steady winds perfect for a turbine farm...
I don't mean to sound overly flippant here, but the problem largely amounts to one of will, not practicality.