I don't get it, wouldn't lower oil prices reduce demand for renewable energy, thus reducing investment?
Very little power is generated using oil. The exceptions are places like the Bahamas, where coal isn't really accessible and it's easier to get oil on the island...but in those cases, there's really no effect from lower oil prices anyways because oil/diesel are incredibly expensive when compared to pretty much every other kind of generation. Also, oil only just recently dropped in price; planned projects related to the study here would have been planned out two years earlier (at the earliest) and capitalized a year before when budgets were worked out. It's odd, because the report talks about "industry concerns" related to this...but I work in the power industry, and nobody there even notices that the cost of oil has been low. So I don't understand who these analysts are speaking to, or how much knowledge they really have of the power sector.
What's behind this is another thing that the analysts totally don't see...the challenges of managing generation from renewables, and the fact that power companies have been able to make strides towards this. Generation and load (sink) have to be in balance...otherwise you get variations in both voltage and frequency. This has been a hard enough challenge to manage when the utilities had solid control over generation (they have very little control over load, and what control they do have is caused by "load shedding," whereby they cause a small, localized blackout). But when you add renewables, they lose control over some of their generation output as well...the wind picks up/dies down, clouds cover (or uncover) solar panels, etc. This was further validated as power companies started solar and wind projects, and saw the impact that came from them. The problem can be managed, but it requires more analytic systems (Transmission Management Systems, Distribution Management Systems, and Advanced Distribution Mangement Systems), AMI meters, and a host of other things that are referred to as "WAMPAC," or "Wide Area Monitoring, Protection and Control". These technologies have been developing over the years, and they all take a lot of time and money to implement. That said, power companies have been busily rolling them out, and now a lot of them are far better-prepared to absorb the fluctuations incurred by renewable energy sources.
So, in short: -Renewable projects fired up some years ago -They made it harder to manage the grid, as is -Power companies, now having solid hard information as to how renewables impact their own piece of the grid, set about dealing with the problem with new tech -Now they're better-prepared to roll out more renewable generation capacity
Maybe because of the lack of rifle able to aim from a mile afar and, at the same time, broadcasting it live to the Internet.
No, because they had to enter the building in order to see their targets. They forced one of the employees to surrender her pass-code in order to enter the offices.
Um, no.
They chose to enter the building in order to attack their targets. Because when you're using automatic weapons against multiple unarmed, unarmored targets (one person was armed, but all you have to do is shoot him as early on in the process and the dynamic stays the same) you want to have them in an enclosed area so that you can keep them corralled while you slaughter them. Simple truth, dark as it may be. But they had an option. In fact, they exercised an alternate option in the case of the first person they encountered...whom they ambushed in the open when she went about her daily routine, so that she could be coerced into granting them access to the building in the first place.
But if your tactical options change...instead of an en masse shooting at close range using relatively inaccurate weapons, you can shoot at a distance...then you can change your tactics. The goal here is to incur fear (hence, "terror"ism) in a larger population. I live in DC, and remember what it was like when Malvo (that piece of shit) was shooting people at random. It would be way, way worse if there was video of it, and it would be even worse for their intended fear-target (the media) if they demonstrated that such death could come from out of the blue, anywhere. And if they don't start shooting everyone on the same day, then you get a strange challenge: Do I not go to work? If so, isn't that capitulation? For how long do I not go to work? If I don't go out at all, how can I do my job...but how do you protect me and my staff from snipers who can hit us from range in an urban setting? It sounds like a really awful, terrifying way to live...and with every subsequent shooting, the news cycle reboots and it gets on the front page.
Live-streaming of a rifle-scope? That sounds like death-porn. Who's the audience?
And what's next? Cameras installed in the bullets?
Despite the chill this technology gives me, I can see military applications (e.g., real-time mission-monitoring) but its use by consumers makes no sense to me.
That's what I was thinking...but with a chilling difference. Imagine if the shooters in the Paris attack had something like this, and chose to shoot their targets at distance, while producing videos they could later put up on YouTube? Not good...
How is this not, basically, wiretapping (for which a warrant would ordinarily be necessary)?
It's not wiretapping. The FBI says so. Apparently, the FBI is saying that any private citizen can just set up their own "stingrays" to intercept phone calls as long as they're in public places, and the FBI won't prosecute (at least, not with wiretapping laws). This makes sense.
This makes as much sense as waterboarding without consent not being a crime.
Oh, thank goodness it works that way...the entity that is subject to oversight can state that no oversight is needed. Cool!
Dear FBI: I don't need a permit to have a grenade launcher!
No, but the Natural Laws upon which Western political thought is based do give you the intrinsic right to self preservation, right up to terminating the threat.
But not in this context. If someone shoots you today, you can't go after them with a gun tomorrow after you get out of the hospital. These actions are not self-preservation at all, just retaliatory in nature. And that is clearly defined in both the explicit statutes and case law as a no-no.
Everyone's missing a significant point here: the airlines severely penalize anyone who travels in this fashion. Yes, there are insanities about their pricing models that make it possible to actually save money this way. But the first time you do it, you will get a nastygram from the airline...and if you continue to do it, they will actually ban you. Furthermore, if you're doing this on the first half of your trip, you'll find that your return flights have all been canceled; even worse, the airline will NOT be sympathetic to your plight when you call them up to try and get back home.
I wish I could remember the industry term for this practice, but suffice it to say that a database of flight options that allow you to do this is essentially useless anyways. Google it...type in "skipping the last leg of a flight" and see what you find.
On the other hand, being misunderstood does nothing to contribute to improving the education and awareness of those who misunderstand.
With a succinct message, Tyson started a discussion that spread to thousands of people. Some people misunderstood, and despite the elegance and artistic quality of his written words, that misunderstanding tarnishes his reputation in their minds, and that extends to everything he supports - most notably science and an appreciation of the beauty of the observable world without religious connection. By explaining his meaning clearly, and expressing no wish to offend, some of those people will see the mistake for themselves, and open their minds again to science.
It's not about winning or losing, or of being the stalwart champion of misdirection. It's a matter of graceful interaction with other humans.
Based on that perspective, Sarah Palin would be a marvel of helping human knowledge and understanding progress.
It's no more his job to explain things to me than it is for some guy to just barge into my home and begin telling me how I should redecorate. I didn't ask him to, I didn't hire him to, I didn't indicate any desire on my part for him to do so.
What his role is, however, is much closer to someone you meet at a social gathering who has views on things. He has no particular obligation to conform to guidelines given to him...but at the same time, it's not exactly wrong to push back on what he has to say either. He wasn't hired, he wasn't even invited, and so it's not like asking someone for their views and then whining when you get them. We're allowed to find fault with the man.
Kim Jong Un is exactly the type who would accept undeserved credit for a cyberattack. "What, who me? I did what? Uh... oh really? Oh! OK, yeah everybody, I did it!"
Except that historically, he's always denied responsibility for attacks that were clearly accredited to NK. It's kind of like Putin's behavior in the Ukraine, only even a bit more bizarre.
I never have understood the world's fetish with the US dollar. Every nation has a currency. The US economy is just as prone to stagnation, deficit, over, and under valuing as any other currency.
I'd like nothing better than to see the Rothschild's hold on international markets broken. If it takes China to do that, then all power to China in the endeavour.
Oil...no matter where you buy it on the planet, or from whom...is priced in dollars. In no market is the price of a barrel of crude listed in euros, pounds sterling, or any other currency for that matter.
Why does this matter in this case? Because Russia is basically an entire economy propped up solely on oil revenues. If the ruble devalues against the dollar, then essentially they are subjected to a brutal form of arbitrage where oil is cheaper from Russia than other places. So they get less money than the other oil producers do. If they boost production, it drives the cost of oil down even further. If they restrict production, they get less money that way too. Either way, they're fucked.
Sure. But software shouldn't be able to make hardware damage itself.
Also, designing something like a steelworks without some kind of hardware-level override is so stupid it borders on criminal.
This is like saying "Sure, but car's shouldn't have anything that propels them forward...that's how car crashes happen."
The sole and entire point of control systems (aka SCADA, DCS, or ICS) is to make it possible for software to control hardware. And it's impossible to make *anything* that can't be broken or cause damage if it's abused. When you factor in things like blast furnaces, substations, or other real-time applications that involve massive amounts of energy (kinetic, electrical, thermal or otherwise), you're harnessing one hell of a big thing, and that means careful balances and lots of risk. You can't have a situation where there's thousands of degrees of heat and gigantic crucibles of molten steel and yet have it impossible for something to be done wrong.
It always makes me crazy when assholes (yes, that's my word for a novice who pontificates about the "incompetence" of actual professionals without citing anything concrete or meaningful) who don't have any experience whatsoever with control systems put forth their idolized version of reality that somehow means that everything can be simple and as safe as a Fisher-Price toy, despite the fact that these environments have never been foolproof in all of human history. Trains crash, pressure vessels explode, chemicals leak, boilers beer-can, transformers flash...it's always been that way, and always will be. Control systems make them less likely to do so for accidental reasons, but also allow an attacker to force it to happen for deliberate ones. That's the trade-off, and to this day it's still a trade-off that's had a positive outcome. It makes no more sense to back out these systems than it did for banking to go back to using adding machines, just because there were cyber security incidents early on in the financial sector. The next step forward is better security for these environments, which is in the process of happening as we speak.
Funny, because the science that I learned about in college was ALL ABOUT being constantly questioned.
Only when appropriate. Questioning the discovery of the Higgs-Boson, if you know what you're talking about? Valid. Questioning gravity as a way of holding up your science teacher and keeping him from teaching anything important because you're forcing him to repeat the already well-validated science to prove that gravity is indeed real? Bullshit.
At some point, you have to accept that something is proven, and move on, unless you have something compelling to introduce real doubt. At the end of the day there has to be some agreement, to quote Lewis Black, as to "what the fuck reality is."
Um...Sony is headquartered in Japan. And there's no way that a decision with this level of financial impact was made without permission from management back hom.
What's so IT-specific about this maxim, that it warrants being on Slashdot? A slow news day?
Probably the fact that tons of us have tried to tell people this in our jobs in the past, but few have been able to put it as clearly and as succinctly as this, while still stating all the factors that play into it.
Well, you can not force a company to hire more people, nor blame it for optimizing their warehouse. It they're really not firing people, that's a good thing. I guess their business is growing, too, so to compensate the reduction in manual labor.
Well put. On the other side of it, I don't see how it should in any way be a surprise to anyone who knows Amazon at all (like their warehouse employees) that this kind of thing would be on its way. There is a certain reality to the fact that people must grow and evolve their skills to maintain their own employability no matter what their career path.
A more cynical, if not entirely inaccurate, way to describe the other side of that equation is this.
The company who can solve the issue of demotion without loss of face is going to go far.
How about demoting the incompetent boss and the fuckwit who promoted them that one step too far together? Root cause analysis, after all, is crucial when resolving a process failure...
If you look at AWS's actual announcement, they say nothing about Oracle. They say that Aurora is compatible with MySQL, which happens to be owned by Oracle, but it is not what most people think of as "Oracle"!
What's my migration path from Oracle to Aurora? Does it support PL/SQL, XML, APEX, Java, etc. stored procedures? Does it support Oracle syntax, index types, etc? How sophisticated is its data dictionary?
From AWS's announcement, it looks like Aurora is meant to be mostly a drop-in replacement for MySQL, but with much higher scalability and durability and more advanced backup features. If I had to call it something, I'd call Aurora "MySQL RAC", because Aurora seems to buy you more RAC-like features but with MySQL syntax/features.
It absolutely does NOT appear to be an easy migration from an existing Oracle application to the Aurora database. Maybe Aurora will attract some new applications, but if you're a big Oracle customer, don't salivate on that 90% cost savings so quickly, because it ain't there!
I think you don't understand how competitors get displaced in the IT market.
Nobody is going to state that their product is a drop-in replacement when it comes to applications. It's not possible, it's never been true, and nobody would believe it even if it were. But Oracle has a huge number of extremely unhappy customers (direct and OEM) who hate their licensing cost and behavior (see the comment a bit of a scroll above about Oracle being "audit-happy"), and want another option. Oracle sells not just databases but full-on applications as well; they're a competitor to SAP in the ERM space for example, and against PeopleSoft in the HR space. But there are ways to roadmap away from them, so that instead of just dumping Oracle tomorrow and replacing the database, you plan to replace them. One extreme case is ArcSight, which used to OEM Oracle for all of their products. They wrote their own DB engine to get rid of Oracle, and their pricing has become much more sane as a result. And, since their DB is purpose-built for the single purpose it serves, it's actually better at what it does than Oracle was. It was a major effort, and other parts of ArcSight were rewritten to facilitate it, but the end result is pretty badass.
So, in the end, a database does not need to support PL/SQL or Oracle syntax to displace Oracle. It just needs to do what Oracle does, with the understanding that the interfaces to it have to change to some degree...which isn't really the end of the world anyways. Things like service-oriented architecture being in place already make this kind of change a lot easier, as well. But there's no need to act just like the product you want to replace, any more than Dell servers needed to be able to use Compaq power supplies and hard drives when Dell first entered the server market. Customers simply switched, and switched their inventory accordingly along with it.
So, look at this through the eyes of the defender, in the context of breaches of other sites. Put aside ethics, right/wrong, law, etc.; what this comes down to is a security breach when viewed from the defender's perspective, right?
Okay, so when you look at past breaches, what do you find...breakdowns in basic security. Sony wasn't patching, Home Depot wasn't watching their security monitoring, etc. While many vendors and researchers are trying to come up with novel security products and solutions to solve exotic problems in unique ways, what's actually happening is entities aren't following Security 101.
There are signs that this has happened with Tor as well. Silk Road 2.0, for example, was registered using "Blake@Benthall.net," which is about as NON-anonymous as you can possibly get. It's not only giving up the name, it's the name as it's tied to a very specific "Blake Benthall," so that law enforcement wouldn't even have to set about figuring out which Blake Benthall it was. A quick warrant request, a fax to the hosting provider behind "Benthall.net," and the guy is toast. This is not very fucking good security, at a fundamental level. And even worse, it was what got Ulbricht, the original operator of Silk Road, caught.
The argument could be made that only some domains were hit because others were out of reach due to where they were hosted; I don't buy this. In the past, it's been possible to get significant disruption of even the most unreachable systems through a number of means. This is why the RBL "broke up" and went to ground; even being out of the reach of law enforcement didn't mean their IP space couldn't get blackholed by ICANN, for example, or domains ignored by upstream TLD resolvers in the DNS hierarchy. I do believe that this "out of reach" potential was why hundreds of domains were shut down, but only 17 people were arrested. But if there were a fundamental issue with TOR itself, I don't see why they couldn't (and wouldn't) take down all of the sites they would want to hit at one blow. But now three of the top six drug-sale sites are still up, including the one that was second-largest, Agora.
So this looks more to me like the variability of operational security among the operators of the different domains, and poor security by those that got hit.
Newer Airbuses limit rudder range at speed. The A300 could lose its tail if the pilot did something stupid, as happened with American Airlines 587. People seem to be happy enough to deal with the interlock.
And thank goodness that there's been a meaningful poll asking all of the passengers how happy they are with the interlock, not to mention informing them of it...otherwise you'd not have been able to make this assertion!
From my experience, the boneheads were almost exclusively in the HR agencies. And that's a light term for fucking-unbelievable-idiots. I have tons of incompetence-filled horror stories. Techies (anything from coders to any branch of engineering), IMHO, should only be recruited by their peers. Period.
Almost exclusively, yes...but not entirely. And we blacklist recruiting firms as well...at least I do. I have only 6 blacklist entries in the spam management settings for my personal domain, and 4 of them are to keep me from getting contacted by companies like KForce...companies whose recruiters' behavior is so egregious that I consider contact from them to be a threat to my career.
But then, on the other side, I've interviewed (as a hiring decision maker at my company) people who are so unfuckingbelievably full of shit that I documented it in detail and sent it back to the recruiting firm with an admonishment for not doing a better pre-screen. I would neither be surprised nor bothered if such people were then blacklisted by that recruiter. If a resume is a little bit exaggerated, that's expected. But don't go in for a crucial position with a ton of responsibility that requires a lot of technical expertise if you don't have the slightest goddamned idea how any of it works.
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I don't get it, wouldn't lower oil prices reduce demand for renewable energy, thus reducing investment?
Very little power is generated using oil. The exceptions are places like the Bahamas, where coal isn't really accessible and it's easier to get oil on the island...but in those cases, there's really no effect from lower oil prices anyways because oil/diesel are incredibly expensive when compared to pretty much every other kind of generation. Also, oil only just recently dropped in price; planned projects related to the study here would have been planned out two years earlier (at the earliest) and capitalized a year before when budgets were worked out. It's odd, because the report talks about "industry concerns" related to this...but I work in the power industry, and nobody there even notices that the cost of oil has been low. So I don't understand who these analysts are speaking to, or how much knowledge they really have of the power sector.
What's behind this is another thing that the analysts totally don't see...the challenges of managing generation from renewables, and the fact that power companies have been able to make strides towards this. Generation and load (sink) have to be in balance...otherwise you get variations in both voltage and frequency. This has been a hard enough challenge to manage when the utilities had solid control over generation (they have very little control over load, and what control they do have is caused by "load shedding," whereby they cause a small, localized blackout). But when you add renewables, they lose control over some of their generation output as well...the wind picks up/dies down, clouds cover (or uncover) solar panels, etc. This was further validated as power companies started solar and wind projects, and saw the impact that came from them. The problem can be managed, but it requires more analytic systems (Transmission Management Systems, Distribution Management Systems, and Advanced Distribution Mangement Systems), AMI meters, and a host of other things that are referred to as "WAMPAC," or "Wide Area Monitoring, Protection and Control". These technologies have been developing over the years, and they all take a lot of time and money to implement. That said, power companies have been busily rolling them out, and now a lot of them are far better-prepared to absorb the fluctuations incurred by renewable energy sources.
So, in short:
-Renewable projects fired up some years ago
-They made it harder to manage the grid, as is
-Power companies, now having solid hard information as to how renewables impact their own piece of the grid, set about dealing with the problem with new tech
-Now they're better-prepared to roll out more renewable generation capacity
Maybe because of the lack of rifle able to aim from a mile afar and, at the same time, broadcasting it live to the Internet.
No, because they had to enter the building in order to see their targets. They forced one of the employees to surrender her pass-code in order to enter the offices.
Um, no.
They chose to enter the building in order to attack their targets. Because when you're using automatic weapons against multiple unarmed, unarmored targets (one person was armed, but all you have to do is shoot him as early on in the process and the dynamic stays the same) you want to have them in an enclosed area so that you can keep them corralled while you slaughter them. Simple truth, dark as it may be. But they had an option. In fact, they exercised an alternate option in the case of the first person they encountered...whom they ambushed in the open when she went about her daily routine, so that she could be coerced into granting them access to the building in the first place.
But if your tactical options change...instead of an en masse shooting at close range using relatively inaccurate weapons, you can shoot at a distance...then you can change your tactics. The goal here is to incur fear (hence, "terror"ism) in a larger population. I live in DC, and remember what it was like when Malvo (that piece of shit) was shooting people at random. It would be way, way worse if there was video of it, and it would be even worse for their intended fear-target (the media) if they demonstrated that such death could come from out of the blue, anywhere. And if they don't start shooting everyone on the same day, then you get a strange challenge: Do I not go to work? If so, isn't that capitulation? For how long do I not go to work? If I don't go out at all, how can I do my job...but how do you protect me and my staff from snipers who can hit us from range in an urban setting? It sounds like a really awful, terrifying way to live...and with every subsequent shooting, the news cycle reboots and it gets on the front page.
Live-streaming of a rifle-scope? That sounds like death-porn. Who's the audience?
And what's next? Cameras installed in the bullets?
Despite the chill this technology gives me, I can see military applications (e.g., real-time mission-monitoring) but its use by consumers makes no sense to me.
That's what I was thinking...but with a chilling difference. Imagine if the shooters in the Paris attack had something like this, and chose to shoot their targets at distance, while producing videos they could later put up on YouTube? Not good...
How is this not, basically, wiretapping (for which a warrant would ordinarily be necessary)?
It's not wiretapping. The FBI says so. Apparently, the FBI is saying that any private citizen can just set up their own "stingrays" to intercept phone calls as long as they're in public places, and the FBI won't prosecute (at least, not with wiretapping laws). This makes sense.
This makes as much sense as waterboarding without consent not being a crime.
Oh, thank goodness it works that way...the entity that is subject to oversight can state that no oversight is needed. Cool!
Dear FBI: I don't need a permit to have a grenade launcher!
What, you mean TorrentFreak isn't a valid source of journalism that checks sources and facts before reporting something?
HOLY SHIT THAT'S SO SURPRISING :)
No, but the Natural Laws upon which Western political thought is based do give you the intrinsic right to self preservation, right up to terminating the threat.
But not in this context. If someone shoots you today, you can't go after them with a gun tomorrow after you get out of the hospital. These actions are not self-preservation at all, just retaliatory in nature. And that is clearly defined in both the explicit statutes and case law as a no-no.
Everyone's missing a significant point here: the airlines severely penalize anyone who travels in this fashion. Yes, there are insanities about their pricing models that make it possible to actually save money this way. But the first time you do it, you will get a nastygram from the airline...and if you continue to do it, they will actually ban you. Furthermore, if you're doing this on the first half of your trip, you'll find that your return flights have all been canceled; even worse, the airline will NOT be sympathetic to your plight when you call them up to try and get back home.
I wish I could remember the industry term for this practice, but suffice it to say that a database of flight options that allow you to do this is essentially useless anyways. Google it...type in "skipping the last leg of a flight" and see what you find.
On the other hand, being misunderstood does nothing to contribute to improving the education and awareness of those who misunderstand.
With a succinct message, Tyson started a discussion that spread to thousands of people. Some people misunderstood, and despite the elegance and artistic quality of his written words, that misunderstanding tarnishes his reputation in their minds, and that extends to everything he supports - most notably science and an appreciation of the beauty of the observable world without religious connection. By explaining his meaning clearly, and expressing no wish to offend, some of those people will see the mistake for themselves, and open their minds again to science.
It's not about winning or losing, or of being the stalwart champion of misdirection. It's a matter of graceful interaction with other humans.
Based on that perspective, Sarah Palin would be a marvel of helping human knowledge and understanding progress.
Only, she's not :)
Tyson's job is to explain things to the masses.
It's his job.
No, it's not.
It's no more his job to explain things to me than it is for some guy to just barge into my home and begin telling me how I should redecorate. I didn't ask him to, I didn't hire him to, I didn't indicate any desire on my part for him to do so.
What his role is, however, is much closer to someone you meet at a social gathering who has views on things. He has no particular obligation to conform to guidelines given to him...but at the same time, it's not exactly wrong to push back on what he has to say either. He wasn't hired, he wasn't even invited, and so it's not like asking someone for their views and then whining when you get them. We're allowed to find fault with the man.
Kim Jong Un is exactly the type who would accept undeserved credit for a cyberattack. "What, who me? I did what? Uh ... oh really? Oh! OK, yeah everybody, I did it!"
Except that historically, he's always denied responsibility for attacks that were clearly accredited to NK. It's kind of like Putin's behavior in the Ukraine, only even a bit more bizarre.
Would you really want to send your son or daughter to die in North Korea because crackers broke into a company's servers?
The cast of "Duck Dynasty" did North Korea's hacking for them? I didn't know this...
I never have understood the world's fetish with the US dollar. Every nation has a currency. The US economy is just as prone to stagnation, deficit, over, and under valuing as any other currency.
I'd like nothing better than to see the Rothschild's hold on international markets broken. If it takes China to do that, then all power to China in the endeavour.
Oil...no matter where you buy it on the planet, or from whom...is priced in dollars. In no market is the price of a barrel of crude listed in euros, pounds sterling, or any other currency for that matter.
Why does this matter in this case? Because Russia is basically an entire economy propped up solely on oil revenues. If the ruble devalues against the dollar, then essentially they are subjected to a brutal form of arbitrage where oil is cheaper from Russia than other places. So they get less money than the other oil producers do. If they boost production, it drives the cost of oil down even further. If they restrict production, they get less money that way too. Either way, they're fucked.
And you know what? GOOD. Fuck them.
Seems Gollum was right...
Sure. But software shouldn't be able to make hardware damage itself.
Also, designing something like a steelworks without some kind of hardware-level override is so stupid it borders on criminal.
This is like saying "Sure, but car's shouldn't have anything that propels them forward...that's how car crashes happen."
The sole and entire point of control systems (aka SCADA, DCS, or ICS) is to make it possible for software to control hardware. And it's impossible to make *anything* that can't be broken or cause damage if it's abused. When you factor in things like blast furnaces, substations, or other real-time applications that involve massive amounts of energy (kinetic, electrical, thermal or otherwise), you're harnessing one hell of a big thing, and that means careful balances and lots of risk. You can't have a situation where there's thousands of degrees of heat and gigantic crucibles of molten steel and yet have it impossible for something to be done wrong.
It always makes me crazy when assholes (yes, that's my word for a novice who pontificates about the "incompetence" of actual professionals without citing anything concrete or meaningful) who don't have any experience whatsoever with control systems put forth their idolized version of reality that somehow means that everything can be simple and as safe as a Fisher-Price toy, despite the fact that these environments have never been foolproof in all of human history. Trains crash, pressure vessels explode, chemicals leak, boilers beer-can, transformers flash...it's always been that way, and always will be. Control systems make them less likely to do so for accidental reasons, but also allow an attacker to force it to happen for deliberate ones. That's the trade-off, and to this day it's still a trade-off that's had a positive outcome. It makes no more sense to back out these systems than it did for banking to go back to using adding machines, just because there were cyber security incidents early on in the financial sector. The next step forward is better security for these environments, which is in the process of happening as we speak.
Funny, because the science that I learned about in college was ALL ABOUT being constantly questioned.
Only when appropriate. Questioning the discovery of the Higgs-Boson, if you know what you're talking about? Valid. Questioning gravity as a way of holding up your science teacher and keeping him from teaching anything important because you're forcing him to repeat the already well-validated science to prove that gravity is indeed real? Bullshit.
At some point, you have to accept that something is proven, and move on, unless you have something compelling to introduce real doubt. At the end of the day there has to be some agreement, to quote Lewis Black, as to "what the fuck reality is."
Home of the brave.
Um...Sony is headquartered in Japan. And there's no way that a decision with this level of financial impact was made without permission from management back hom.
What's so IT-specific about this maxim, that it warrants being on Slashdot? A slow news day?
Probably the fact that tons of us have tried to tell people this in our jobs in the past, but few have been able to put it as clearly and as succinctly as this, while still stating all the factors that play into it.
Well, you can not force a company to hire more people, nor blame it for optimizing their warehouse. It they're really not firing people, that's a good thing. I guess their business is growing, too, so to compensate the reduction in manual labor.
Well put. On the other side of it, I don't see how it should in any way be a surprise to anyone who knows Amazon at all (like their warehouse employees) that this kind of thing would be on its way. There is a certain reality to the fact that people must grow and evolve their skills to maintain their own employability no matter what their career path.
A more cynical, if not entirely inaccurate, way to describe the other side of that equation is this.
The republican candidate list now includes (at least)
Mitt Romney
Jeb Bush
Scott Walker
Chris Christie
Sarah Palin
Bobby Jindal
And now Carly Fiorina wants in, too? That will be quite a crowd.
Well, I gotta say...the next two years are going to be an absolutely wonderful time for comedians!
This one hundred times.
The company who can solve the issue of demotion without loss of face is going to go far.
How about demoting the incompetent boss and the fuckwit who promoted them that one step too far together? Root cause analysis, after all, is crucial when resolving a process failure...
If you look at AWS's actual announcement, they say nothing about Oracle. They say that Aurora is compatible with MySQL, which happens to be owned by Oracle, but it is not what most people think of as "Oracle"!
What's my migration path from Oracle to Aurora? Does it support PL/SQL, XML, APEX, Java, etc. stored procedures? Does it support Oracle syntax, index types, etc? How sophisticated is its data dictionary?
From AWS's announcement, it looks like Aurora is meant to be mostly a drop-in replacement for MySQL, but with much higher scalability and durability and more advanced backup features. If I had to call it something, I'd call Aurora "MySQL RAC", because Aurora seems to buy you more RAC-like features but with MySQL syntax/features.
It absolutely does NOT appear to be an easy migration from an existing Oracle application to the Aurora database. Maybe Aurora will attract some new applications, but if you're a big Oracle customer, don't salivate on that 90% cost savings so quickly, because it ain't there!
I think you don't understand how competitors get displaced in the IT market.
Nobody is going to state that their product is a drop-in replacement when it comes to applications. It's not possible, it's never been true, and nobody would believe it even if it were. But Oracle has a huge number of extremely unhappy customers (direct and OEM) who hate their licensing cost and behavior (see the comment a bit of a scroll above about Oracle being "audit-happy"), and want another option. Oracle sells not just databases but full-on applications as well; they're a competitor to SAP in the ERM space for example, and against PeopleSoft in the HR space. But there are ways to roadmap away from them, so that instead of just dumping Oracle tomorrow and replacing the database, you plan to replace them. One extreme case is ArcSight, which used to OEM Oracle for all of their products. They wrote their own DB engine to get rid of Oracle, and their pricing has become much more sane as a result. And, since their DB is purpose-built for the single purpose it serves, it's actually better at what it does than Oracle was. It was a major effort, and other parts of ArcSight were rewritten to facilitate it, but the end result is pretty badass.
So, in the end, a database does not need to support PL/SQL or Oracle syntax to displace Oracle. It just needs to do what Oracle does, with the understanding that the interfaces to it have to change to some degree...which isn't really the end of the world anyways. Things like service-oriented architecture being in place already make this kind of change a lot easier, as well. But there's no need to act just like the product you want to replace, any more than Dell servers needed to be able to use Compaq power supplies and hard drives when Dell first entered the server market. Customers simply switched, and switched their inventory accordingly along with it.
So, look at this through the eyes of the defender, in the context of breaches of other sites. Put aside ethics, right/wrong, law, etc.; what this comes down to is a security breach when viewed from the defender's perspective, right?
Okay, so when you look at past breaches, what do you find...breakdowns in basic security. Sony wasn't patching, Home Depot wasn't watching their security monitoring, etc. While many vendors and researchers are trying to come up with novel security products and solutions to solve exotic problems in unique ways, what's actually happening is entities aren't following Security 101.
There are signs that this has happened with Tor as well. Silk Road 2.0, for example, was registered using "Blake@Benthall.net," which is about as NON-anonymous as you can possibly get. It's not only giving up the name, it's the name as it's tied to a very specific "Blake Benthall," so that law enforcement wouldn't even have to set about figuring out which Blake Benthall it was. A quick warrant request, a fax to the hosting provider behind "Benthall.net," and the guy is toast. This is not very fucking good security, at a fundamental level. And even worse, it was what got Ulbricht, the original operator of Silk Road, caught.
The argument could be made that only some domains were hit because others were out of reach due to where they were hosted; I don't buy this. In the past, it's been possible to get significant disruption of even the most unreachable systems through a number of means. This is why the RBL "broke up" and went to ground; even being out of the reach of law enforcement didn't mean their IP space couldn't get blackholed by ICANN, for example, or domains ignored by upstream TLD resolvers in the DNS hierarchy. I do believe that this "out of reach" potential was why hundreds of domains were shut down, but only 17 people were arrested. But if there were a fundamental issue with TOR itself, I don't see why they couldn't (and wouldn't) take down all of the sites they would want to hit at one blow. But now three of the top six drug-sale sites are still up, including the one that was second-largest, Agora.
So this looks more to me like the variability of operational security among the operators of the different domains, and poor security by those that got hit.
Newer Airbuses limit rudder range at speed. The A300 could lose its tail if the pilot did something stupid, as happened with American Airlines 587. People seem to be happy enough to deal with the interlock.
And thank goodness that there's been a meaningful poll asking all of the passengers how happy they are with the interlock, not to mention informing them of it...otherwise you'd not have been able to make this assertion!
From my experience, the boneheads were almost exclusively in the HR agencies. And that's a light term for fucking-unbelievable-idiots. I have tons of incompetence-filled horror stories. Techies (anything from coders to any branch of engineering), IMHO, should only be recruited by their peers. Period.
Almost exclusively, yes...but not entirely. And we blacklist recruiting firms as well...at least I do. I have only 6 blacklist entries in the spam management settings for my personal domain, and 4 of them are to keep me from getting contacted by companies like KForce...companies whose recruiters' behavior is so egregious that I consider contact from them to be a threat to my career.
But then, on the other side, I've interviewed (as a hiring decision maker at my company) people who are so unfuckingbelievably full of shit that I documented it in detail and sent it back to the recruiting firm with an admonishment for not doing a better pre-screen. I would neither be surprised nor bothered if such people were then blacklisted by that recruiter. If a resume is a little bit exaggerated, that's expected. But don't go in for a crucial position with a ton of responsibility that requires a lot of technical expertise if you don't have the slightest goddamned idea how any of it works.
Sure. Remove the Google link to the bad review.
And every other link to the guy. Forever.
No more searches on him, for the entire rest of his performing career.
It's the only way to keep that review from sneaking back into future search results.
Actually, the reviewer's take on it did in fact seem to indicate that we should forget all about this guy...