>Child pornography is quite obvious without further investigation
Not really.
* Female parent takes a photo of her child naked in the bath as some kind of happy memory, which she then uses to embarass him in front of his first girlfriend or whatever when looking at a family album (heck, who doesn't have parents like that?) * Drawings classify in the UK (which is something I don't agree with), which bans a lot of Japanese stuff (I can have sex with a 16-year-old girl, but can't have a drawing of a 17-year-old anime character naked) * 16-year-old takes a photo of his 16-year-old girlfriend naked
Real child abuse is abhorrant, but might not be easily recongizable either.
Say, if a six-year-old got punched in the face by another six-year-old to the point where it left a bruise. I'm sure you'd have people whispering that his father did it or something.
Your point about intent and effect is entirely valid...except that the question here is not about how you would define "child porn," but how the law does. And under the law, all of the examples you describe are classified as child porn. This is a problem, yes, but it's not relevant to the current argument. Google must adhere to the law, and they do.
There's a site called "The Customer is Not Always Right," (it's hilarious by the way, but I digress) which talks about customers doing all sorts of insane things. Well, they have numerous situations that took place in game stores, simply around kids being bought copies of "Grand Theft Auto" (multiple versions) by their parents. Heck, if you search for "Grand Theft Auto" on their site, then you see almost exclusively that.
Panicked, or thought the cop was going somewhere and tried to let them by?
You're confusing the way they reacted with the perception of what they were reacting to. I can't guess whether they thought the cop was passing through or pulling them over, but it was never a smooth, safe transition into the intersection. A couple of times, it very nearly caused an accident, with crossing traffic having to brake hard and/or swerve to avoid collision. So what they thought the cop was doing is kind of irrelevant at that point.
I'd be willing to bet that 90%+ of these texters while stationary also do it while moving.
Then it'd be just as straightforward to catch them while moving, as it should be. And a lot easier for them to pull over under those circumstances, as well. I've seen people get lit up by a cop while stopped at a red light...who then panicked and pulled forward into the intersection to almost cause an accident.
Burning Man is not like being at the NTC. For one, it's a social event rather than simulated warfare where you're trying to stay "alive" and not get "killed" while trying to "kill" others.
That seems a rather ironic thing to say, since you're posting it in response to a guide for how to make it easier for people to attend, in direct contravention to some of the pretension that the OP calls out.
i did it twice while in the US Army. two trips to the national training center in the california desert. i hated it. both were pre internet
it takes like 15 minutes to read the day's newspaper and after that, nothing to do the radio stations played the same 10 songs every day, all day
WTF is so awesome about dumping technology and living like a caveman for a few days? try it for a month.
i came back and first thing i did was drink, watch TV and listen to music i hadn't listened to for weeks
Burning Man is not like being at the NTC. For one, it's a social event rather than simulated warfare where you're trying to stay "alive" and not get "killed" while trying to "kill" others. (Quotes because, for those of you who aren't familiar, the NTC is a large area where our military does extremely realistic military training using laser-triggered sensors on otherwise extremely real weaponry. Think of it like military hardware configured to fire blanks, with laser tag attachments on them.) Following this logic, pretty much any situation would be boring...going to a shopping mall wouldn't be fun, because instead of shopping or seeing a movie, you'd be just practicing MOUT inside the mall with no ability to do any of the fun things that would otherwise be available to you.
I get why you'd be bored if you had nothing to do. But at Burning Man, there's a ton to do...starting off with simple socialization. There are tons of people there, each with their own things to talk about. Yes, some of them are total raisincakes...but that can be entertaining too. (I will gloss over the profoundly commonplace nudity, as the entertainment value of that fades after a while.) And in the meanwhile, the absence of contact with the outside world, for the most part, means that you are instead more motivated to look at the immediate community around you. There's art, there's interesting debate, there's a blending of people from many walks of life...and what makes it really neat is that at Burning Man, they have largely shed a lot of the things that would clue you into what they were like in normal life. (Which one of the people with the body paint is the dot-com success who holds several patents, and which is the guy who works at a surf shop?)
There's music to hear, art to look at, performances to watch...it goes on and on. Not at all like being at the NTC. And it's only for a few days, as you pointed out...if it went on all month, yeah, that'd be a bit much. So what? The same is true of almost anything else. You can't say that something is pointless because it'd be awful if it (insert unrealistic and non-reality-based condition here).
Let me see if I understand this correctly: the social contract that *did* exist failed with regard to privacy because private and public entities alike found it was in their best interests to break it, so the solution is to create a brand new one. There are multibillion dollar industries around large-scale analytics for commercial purposes, surveillance for military, intelligence and other purposes, and lots of money to be made by continuing to violate the contract. And for the most part, the overwhelming majority of corporations where this comes into play are all doing it and competing more efficiently as a result...so it's not like market forces have much of an option to go anywhere else. For that matter, a smaller competitor that started up with the goal of respecting the social contract would be at a significant competitive disadvantage. But we should just ignore all that, and just create a new one, instead of moving over to contracts of a more binding nature (like legislation around privacy, perhaps?)
For the AP that was probably true (that the Internet was a deadly competitor). The AP represents one of the major things that is wrong with the newspaper business.
You look at a print version of some newspapers and it's filled with cusinarted AP articles. They've been butchered to fill empty column space. The newspaper that I actually read cover to cover has zero (0) AP articles in it.
I wouldn't know. I worked at AP Broadcast, which had nothing to do with newspapers:)
I've worked at a major newspaper. Reporters HATE technical people. That's one of the reasons tech reporting so bad... they won't even TALK to a tech person in most cases.
That culture hates (and can be very denigrating) to all people that are not reporters. Just getting an online presence itself very controversial at first.
The fact that most newspapers faltered is not a surprise and is based on their culture. They are going to have to actually embrace people of other skill sets if they can compete at all, and that's a cultural changing going right down to how journalism is taught at journalism schools.
I can vouch for this in the overall news world, and not just in newspapers. Long, long ago during the early days of the Web, before the dot-com boom, I worked at the Associated Press. The head of the entire AP had, as canon, a prohibition on embracing the Internet because he didn't want to do anything that supported it. He saw it not as an alternative source of distribution but as a competitor, and considered even looking into engaging on it as a way of fomenting competition against the AP's core business. His views were not exactly radical among the business of journalism at large, either; trade magazines either categorized it as a problem (if they were ironically visionary) or ignored it altogether.
It's like if someone asked about the ideal gamer's smartphone and you complained that all the people are talking about games, although there are so many other things you can do with your smartphone.
Yeah, I understood that part. I'm a hobbyist myself; I've been playing around with Arduino in various forms (Nano and Teensy primarily), and the like. But a smartphone isn't just something you swap out...you have to commit to it for the most part, or you won't get the value from it. They aren't cheap if they're any good, and it's no fun to either carry around two phones for no particular reason, or to have to deal with the added cost of an extra phone each month as well as the question of which phone number to give whom. Oh, and since non-scriptable apps are out of the running, you exclude nearly the entire ecosystem of existing apps which are available today to do even the most crucial and basic things (like read email). You won't get many apps written for it which comply with the requirement, because it's a hobbyist phone...and hobbyists are few and far between, so there's no promise of a critical mass to get large companies to back proactive development so that there'll be a good selection to start out with.
Writing code is not something a smartphone excels at as a platform; gaming, on the other hand, and many other non-scripting activities are. So it'd be a situation where I'd pay $10 extra a month, plus have to carry two phones, all just so that I could have some scriptable applications on one of the two phones, but not the phone that I would rely upon for most things because there would be almost no apps for it in the first place? I don't get it. I love to tinker, code, and play around with electronics, but this doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. And that's my point.
I get the desire to script, on many levels...but to have the ability to write scripts supersede ALL other considerations for an app? I'm sorry, but when I'm playing solitaire on my phone to kill a few minutes, I don't see any particular need to be able to run scripts. This seems idiotic to me. I would hasten to point out the numerous advertisements for everything from web browsers to phones (of different types) to tablets that used "Angry Birds" as an example of what you could do. A phone that can't play games (because let's face it, scripting is not needed in most games) is going to fail horribly.
I wouldn't say that they have agreed to a plan. A plan is something with details and some notion of how, in this case, they are going to effectively assert and trust that all weapons and precursors have been handed over (when most of it all is mobile, so that they can be moved around and hidden more easily). It would have details about how you either secure everything in place...in the middle of a war zone...or how you safely move them (again, through a war zone) to be destroyed elsewhere. It bears pointing out that the destruction of chemical weapon stockpiles at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal was a horrifically difficult and lengthy undertaking, and that was in the midst of a safe, secure and highly industrialized nation. There is no way anyone has come up with an acceptable plan in so short a timeframe as this; I've read that there has been some planning around how to seize and secure (with armed forces) some of the chemical warfare assets should the need and opportunity arise, but that's a very different animal than what is being discussed here, as that is predicated by a general cessation of the civil war currently under way.
What Syria has agreed to is a concept, not a plan. And even then they may only be banking on the idea that coming up with a true plan to accomplish the stated objectives will be next to impossible, just to buy themselves more time and perhaps even get the notion of military strikes to die out altogether.
It's interesting that they're willing to sell bitcoins...but not buy them.
Know how I can tell you didn't read the article?
(emulating snarky tone)
Know how I can tell you don't know investing or economics?
I think you're forgetting the concepts of short and long investing, or thinking they are somehow the same. People who think a certain instrument...be it houses, a precious metal, or tulips...will take short positions on it, buying some based on short-term fluctuations and then selling. They will buy *very* little, and only in ways that they control...which would not be the case if they took cash at these machines. If they do that, then all of a sudden, they can become an outlet for dumping that would occur in the event of a crash in the value of bitcoins. This is something you don't allow, if you're convinced that a crash will come. But in the short term, there *is* money to be made, as long as you're willing to limit your position (and risk). And the irony of this way of doing business is that unless you grow (and thus invalidate your own safeguards), you actually become more liquid as you go, thus further improving your safety.
It's interesting that they're willing to sell bitcoins...but not buy them. Sounds to me like they think that bitcoins will lose their value in due course. One could argue that they're only worried about the security implications of an ATM that gives cash in exchange for a digital currency, but if that were the case, then they'd have at least as much to worry about with just handing out bitcoins anyways (which aren't free).
Yeah, they did a great job with that historically right?
Mortgage crisis mean anything to you?
Exactly...and when it comes to leveraged debt and securities, there actually aren't people trying to make them all fail. It's nothing like security, it's far, far simpler. And yet...look what happened even so, when the quants were set loose?
And that is the crux of the matter. Risk must be quantified in the units that business decisions are made - dollars. Beyond that, risk needs to accurately assessed to the point of what is the likelihood and not what is possible. Once we know the likelihood and the cost, decision makers will be able to make their decisions.
Ah, but here's the problem: It can't be done.
Explain to me how you will take risk and quantify it in dollars, when the attacks, the attackers and the vulnerabilities are changing over time. Explain to me how you will take the complexity of an environment with multiple critical paths...which will have changed by the time you're done mapping all of them, by the way...and map the vulnerabilities (all of them...you'll need to know this, obviously, and good luck with that) against those, in combination with a full on threat assessment of all the threat actors who may be interested in the organization as a target. Explain to me how you'll actually come up with a probability of compromise for every threat and vulnerability, and a cost for each possible kind of breach. Oh, and since capital planning will be determined using this, you need to predict, with a fair degree of accuracy, how all of this will change over the next 36 months (including guessing correctly about which capital budgets for other business functions will be approved).
This has been tried; it does not work. It costs an insane amount of money to do it, and this is why none of the security frameworks (CMMI, ITIL's security subset, COBIT, NIST SP800-53, etc.) try to do it. That's why you have to instead look at where you are weak overall, and work on improvement in general terms. There's no way to get to discrete numbers when it comes to this form of risk, because there are actual people on the other end of the equation, trying to change the numbers. It's not like most other forms of risk, where the outside cause is non-sentient and fairly quantifiable with actuarial means.
IT would love to, but upper management doesn't want to hear it.
Partially true, but not universally so. The problem is more that technical staff speaks in terms of technical risks, while upper management thinks in terms of business risk, and the two are not obviously aligned. It's like a patient who wants to know "how bad it is," and the doctor answers in terms of probability of due to . The key is to be more proactive about it, and to qualify where a business/organization is strong or weak in terms of security, while providing a plan to improve things down the road. It's impossible to tell someone what the odds are of X being compromised due to Y risk, resulting in Z cost; the best you can do is look for weaknesses and then come up with a plan to prioritize and fix them. Upper management understands the need to be secure, but they need to be given something they can understand and act on or approve. They won't make decisions based on things they don't understand (if they're smart).
Of course, if compliance comes into the picture, then the risk definition changes. It no longer becomes about risk of compromise, but risk of fines due to noncompliance. This makes it very easy to categorize the risk and communicate it...and as a result, compliance-based security spending is very high compared to security-based security spending.
But on the other hand, you caught that you missed the joke...thus not only catching the joke in the end but also honestly stating that you had missed it for a bit. Uber-win, sir, uber-win:)
I feel these manufactures are moving backwards. I don't want a small tablet, I would much prefer something more usable with a 15" or 17" screen. These things are just too small to really be useful.
Yeah, exactly...I would love a 17" tablet. Also, I would like it to have a better keyboard, and more ports. And a hard drive. A bigger battery would be nice. How about both a touchpad and a touchscreen? Maybe a little nub in the middle of the keyboard, for those who don't like touchpads, come to think of it, would be a good idea too. Oh, more RAM. And if it could run full Windows or OS X instead of RT, that would be handy too...
What are they missing? You said it yourself, inpatient care is expensive, and this treatment's out of reach of the poor. It's a classic example of a doctor choosing to specialise in diseases of the rich.
Apparently, I forgot one more thing that the online patients could do in the course of their treatment:
This looks to me like the perfect business opportunity. Inpatient care is terribly expensive, putting this out of the reach of people who can't afford it because they've lost their jobs due to their addiction and no longer have benefits. Why not offer it online?
I can think of many therapeutic activities that would help towards curing the impulse to spend all of one's time online:
-Troll debating -Handling requests from the clients of graphics artists and webmasters -Collecting free iPads, iPhones and other electronics from all those sites that just give them away for free -Resolving arguments in online gaming chat sessions
I can think of many more as well...the options are nearly endless! And this could all be done from the comfort of their own home...
High Voltage DC will transmit power over huge distances with very little loss. It's already in use all over Europe.
Europe isn't even close to having the distances that are a concern in the US. There are several power companies...FirstEnergy, Xcel, Iberdrola (ironic because it's a power company in the US which is a subsidiary of a European company), Sempra all come to mind...which all have larger operating regions than any state in Europe outside of Russia. Germany, the most industrialized state in Europe, is significantly smaller. The distance between the most ideal wind-farm site that would serve Los Angeles and Los Angeles itself is longer than Germany is wide, and far longer than the distance between any feeder line in all of Europe.
Delivering electricity at constant voltage and frequency is already hard.
Delivering electricity at constant voltage and frequency in a grid where a few wandering clouds and a gust of wind create production spikes is definitly hard.
You missed two other factors...
Delivering electricity at constant voltage and frequency in a grid where a few wandering clouds and a gust of wind create *unpredictable* production spikes and drops, and where the source of some of the generation assets is hundreds of miles from the distribution points it needs to get to, is hard.
Lots of people like to talk about how much sun the US gets, and how much space there is to put up wind farms. But they don't realize a few things. One, the best places for PV farms and wind farms are far, far from population centers...and that means that utilities have to figure out how to manage VARS over those distances which is still not a problem that's entirely been solved. T. Boone Pickens had to bail on his whole wind farm venture in the Southeast because of this. And two, while the cost of PV panels (as would be put on the roof of a home of business) has dropped significantly, the majority of the cost of an on-premise solar installation is the anti-islanding gear that ensures the safety of any linemen who show up to deal with a power outage, assuming that only the end of the break in a line that leads back to the rest of the larger grid is live. And the cost of that gear has not changed much at all.
Slashdot Mirror
>Child pornography is quite obvious without further investigation
Not really.
* Female parent takes a photo of her child naked in the bath as some kind of happy memory, which she then uses to embarass him in front of his first girlfriend or whatever when looking at a family album (heck, who doesn't have parents like that?)
* Drawings classify in the UK (which is something I don't agree with), which bans a lot of Japanese stuff (I can have sex with a 16-year-old girl, but can't have a drawing of a 17-year-old anime character naked)
* 16-year-old takes a photo of his 16-year-old girlfriend naked
Real child abuse is abhorrant, but might not be easily recongizable either.
Say, if a six-year-old got punched in the face by another six-year-old to the point where it left a bruise. I'm sure you'd have people whispering that his father did it or something.
Your point about intent and effect is entirely valid...except that the question here is not about how you would define "child porn," but how the law does. And under the law, all of the examples you describe are classified as child porn. This is a problem, yes, but it's not relevant to the current argument. Google must adhere to the law, and they do.
There's a site called "The Customer is Not Always Right," (it's hilarious by the way, but I digress) which talks about customers doing all sorts of insane things. Well, they have numerous situations that took place in game stores, simply around kids being bought copies of "Grand Theft Auto" (multiple versions) by their parents. Heck, if you search for "Grand Theft Auto" on their site, then you see almost exclusively that.
Panicked, or thought the cop was going somewhere and tried to let them by?
You're confusing the way they reacted with the perception of what they were reacting to. I can't guess whether they thought the cop was passing through or pulling them over, but it was never a smooth, safe transition into the intersection. A couple of times, it very nearly caused an accident, with crossing traffic having to brake hard and/or swerve to avoid collision. So what they thought the cop was doing is kind of irrelevant at that point.
Just following orders? Where have I heard that before?
Yeah, but it sounds so much better with a Georgia accent, while wearing mirrored sunglasses :)
I'd be willing to bet that 90%+ of these texters while stationary also do it while moving.
Then it'd be just as straightforward to catch them while moving, as it should be. And a lot easier for them to pull over under those circumstances, as well. I've seen people get lit up by a cop while stopped at a red light...who then panicked and pulled forward into the intersection to almost cause an accident.
Well, except for Thunderdome, of course.
Touche :)
Don't go to "Burning Man".
"Burning Man" is for pretentious douchebags.
That seems a rather ironic thing to say, since you're posting it in response to a guide for how to make it easier for people to attend, in direct contravention to some of the pretension that the OP calls out.
i did it twice while in the US Army. two trips to the national training center in the california desert. i hated it. both were pre internet
it takes like 15 minutes to read the day's newspaper and after that, nothing to do
the radio stations played the same 10 songs every day, all day
WTF is so awesome about dumping technology and living like a caveman for a few days? try it for a month.
i came back and first thing i did was drink, watch TV and listen to music i hadn't listened to for weeks
Burning Man is not like being at the NTC. For one, it's a social event rather than simulated warfare where you're trying to stay "alive" and not get "killed" while trying to "kill" others. (Quotes because, for those of you who aren't familiar, the NTC is a large area where our military does extremely realistic military training using laser-triggered sensors on otherwise extremely real weaponry. Think of it like military hardware configured to fire blanks, with laser tag attachments on them.) Following this logic, pretty much any situation would be boring...going to a shopping mall wouldn't be fun, because instead of shopping or seeing a movie, you'd be just practicing MOUT inside the mall with no ability to do any of the fun things that would otherwise be available to you.
I get why you'd be bored if you had nothing to do. But at Burning Man, there's a ton to do...starting off with simple socialization. There are tons of people there, each with their own things to talk about. Yes, some of them are total raisincakes...but that can be entertaining too. (I will gloss over the profoundly commonplace nudity, as the entertainment value of that fades after a while.) And in the meanwhile, the absence of contact with the outside world, for the most part, means that you are instead more motivated to look at the immediate community around you. There's art, there's interesting debate, there's a blending of people from many walks of life...and what makes it really neat is that at Burning Man, they have largely shed a lot of the things that would clue you into what they were like in normal life. (Which one of the people with the body paint is the dot-com success who holds several patents, and which is the guy who works at a surf shop?)
There's music to hear, art to look at, performances to watch...it goes on and on. Not at all like being at the NTC. And it's only for a few days, as you pointed out...if it went on all month, yeah, that'd be a bit much. So what? The same is true of almost anything else. You can't say that something is pointless because it'd be awful if it (insert unrealistic and non-reality-based condition here).
Let me see if I understand this correctly: the social contract that *did* exist failed with regard to privacy because private and public entities alike found it was in their best interests to break it, so the solution is to create a brand new one. There are multibillion dollar industries around large-scale analytics for commercial purposes, surveillance for military, intelligence and other purposes, and lots of money to be made by continuing to violate the contract. And for the most part, the overwhelming majority of corporations where this comes into play are all doing it and competing more efficiently as a result...so it's not like market forces have much of an option to go anywhere else. For that matter, a smaller competitor that started up with the goal of respecting the social contract would be at a significant competitive disadvantage. But we should just ignore all that, and just create a new one, instead of moving over to contracts of a more binding nature (like legislation around privacy, perhaps?)
Um...what?
For the AP that was probably true (that the Internet was a deadly competitor). The AP represents one of the major things that is wrong with the newspaper business.
You look at a print version of some newspapers and it's filled with cusinarted AP articles. They've been butchered to fill empty column space. The newspaper that I actually read cover to cover has zero (0) AP articles in it.
I wouldn't know. I worked at AP Broadcast, which had nothing to do with newspapers :)
I've worked at a major newspaper. Reporters HATE technical people. That's one of the reasons tech reporting so bad... they won't even TALK to a tech person in most cases.
That culture hates (and can be very denigrating) to all people that are not reporters. Just getting an online presence itself very controversial at first.
The fact that most newspapers faltered is not a surprise and is based on their culture. They are going to have to actually embrace people of other skill sets if they can compete at all, and that's a cultural changing going right down to how journalism is taught at journalism schools.
I can vouch for this in the overall news world, and not just in newspapers. Long, long ago during the early days of the Web, before the dot-com boom, I worked at the Associated Press. The head of the entire AP had, as canon, a prohibition on embracing the Internet because he didn't want to do anything that supported it. He saw it not as an alternative source of distribution but as a competitor, and considered even looking into engaging on it as a way of fomenting competition against the AP's core business. His views were not exactly radical among the business of journalism at large, either; trade magazines either categorized it as a problem (if they were ironically visionary) or ignored it altogether.
This is about a hobbyist smartphone.
It's like if someone asked about the ideal gamer's smartphone and you complained that all the people are talking about games, although there are so many other things you can do with your smartphone.
Yeah, I understood that part. I'm a hobbyist myself; I've been playing around with Arduino in various forms (Nano and Teensy primarily), and the like. But a smartphone isn't just something you swap out...you have to commit to it for the most part, or you won't get the value from it. They aren't cheap if they're any good, and it's no fun to either carry around two phones for no particular reason, or to have to deal with the added cost of an extra phone each month as well as the question of which phone number to give whom. Oh, and since non-scriptable apps are out of the running, you exclude nearly the entire ecosystem of existing apps which are available today to do even the most crucial and basic things (like read email). You won't get many apps written for it which comply with the requirement, because it's a hobbyist phone...and hobbyists are few and far between, so there's no promise of a critical mass to get large companies to back proactive development so that there'll be a good selection to start out with.
Writing code is not something a smartphone excels at as a platform; gaming, on the other hand, and many other non-scripting activities are. So it'd be a situation where I'd pay $10 extra a month, plus have to carry two phones, all just so that I could have some scriptable applications on one of the two phones, but not the phone that I would rely upon for most things because there would be almost no apps for it in the first place? I don't get it. I love to tinker, code, and play around with electronics, but this doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. And that's my point.
I get the desire to script, on many levels...but to have the ability to write scripts supersede ALL other considerations for an app? I'm sorry, but when I'm playing solitaire on my phone to kill a few minutes, I don't see any particular need to be able to run scripts. This seems idiotic to me. I would hasten to point out the numerous advertisements for everything from web browsers to phones (of different types) to tablets that used "Angry Birds" as an example of what you could do. A phone that can't play games (because let's face it, scripting is not needed in most games) is going to fail horribly.
I wouldn't say that they have agreed to a plan. A plan is something with details and some notion of how, in this case, they are going to effectively assert and trust that all weapons and precursors have been handed over (when most of it all is mobile, so that they can be moved around and hidden more easily). It would have details about how you either secure everything in place...in the middle of a war zone...or how you safely move them (again, through a war zone) to be destroyed elsewhere. It bears pointing out that the destruction of chemical weapon stockpiles at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal was a horrifically difficult and lengthy undertaking, and that was in the midst of a safe, secure and highly industrialized nation. There is no way anyone has come up with an acceptable plan in so short a timeframe as this; I've read that there has been some planning around how to seize and secure (with armed forces) some of the chemical warfare assets should the need and opportunity arise, but that's a very different animal than what is being discussed here, as that is predicated by a general cessation of the civil war currently under way.
What Syria has agreed to is a concept, not a plan. And even then they may only be banking on the idea that coming up with a true plan to accomplish the stated objectives will be next to impossible, just to buy themselves more time and perhaps even get the notion of military strikes to die out altogether.
It's interesting that they're willing to sell bitcoins...but not buy them.
Know how I can tell you didn't read the article?
(emulating snarky tone)
Know how I can tell you don't know investing or economics?
I think you're forgetting the concepts of short and long investing, or thinking they are somehow the same. People who think a certain instrument...be it houses, a precious metal, or tulips...will take short positions on it, buying some based on short-term fluctuations and then selling. They will buy *very* little, and only in ways that they control...which would not be the case if they took cash at these machines. If they do that, then all of a sudden, they can become an outlet for dumping that would occur in the event of a crash in the value of bitcoins. This is something you don't allow, if you're convinced that a crash will come. But in the short term, there *is* money to be made, as long as you're willing to limit your position (and risk). And the irony of this way of doing business is that unless you grow (and thus invalidate your own safeguards), you actually become more liquid as you go, thus further improving your safety.
It's interesting that they're willing to sell bitcoins...but not buy them. Sounds to me like they think that bitcoins will lose their value in due course. One could argue that they're only worried about the security implications of an ATM that gives cash in exchange for a digital currency, but if that were the case, then they'd have at least as much to worry about with just handing out bitcoins anyways (which aren't free).
Yeah, they did a great job with that historically right?
Mortgage crisis mean anything to you?
Exactly...and when it comes to leveraged debt and securities, there actually aren't people trying to make them all fail. It's nothing like security, it's far, far simpler. And yet...look what happened even so, when the quants were set loose?
And that is the crux of the matter. Risk must be quantified in the units that business decisions are made - dollars. Beyond that, risk needs to accurately assessed to the point of what is the likelihood and not what is possible. Once we know the likelihood and the cost, decision makers will be able to make their decisions.
Ah, but here's the problem: It can't be done.
Explain to me how you will take risk and quantify it in dollars, when the attacks, the attackers and the vulnerabilities are changing over time. Explain to me how you will take the complexity of an environment with multiple critical paths...which will have changed by the time you're done mapping all of them, by the way...and map the vulnerabilities (all of them...you'll need to know this, obviously, and good luck with that) against those, in combination with a full on threat assessment of all the threat actors who may be interested in the organization as a target. Explain to me how you'll actually come up with a probability of compromise for every threat and vulnerability, and a cost for each possible kind of breach. Oh, and since capital planning will be determined using this, you need to predict, with a fair degree of accuracy, how all of this will change over the next 36 months (including guessing correctly about which capital budgets for other business functions will be approved).
This has been tried; it does not work. It costs an insane amount of money to do it, and this is why none of the security frameworks (CMMI, ITIL's security subset, COBIT, NIST SP800-53, etc.) try to do it. That's why you have to instead look at where you are weak overall, and work on improvement in general terms. There's no way to get to discrete numbers when it comes to this form of risk, because there are actual people on the other end of the equation, trying to change the numbers. It's not like most other forms of risk, where the outside cause is non-sentient and fairly quantifiable with actuarial means.
IT would love to, but upper management doesn't want to hear it.
Partially true, but not universally so. The problem is more that technical staff speaks in terms of technical risks, while upper management thinks in terms of business risk, and the two are not obviously aligned. It's like a patient who wants to know "how bad it is," and the doctor answers in terms of probability of due to . The key is to be more proactive about it, and to qualify where a business/organization is strong or weak in terms of security, while providing a plan to improve things down the road. It's impossible to tell someone what the odds are of X being compromised due to Y risk, resulting in Z cost; the best you can do is look for weaknesses and then come up with a plan to prioritize and fix them. Upper management understands the need to be secure, but they need to be given something they can understand and act on or approve. They won't make decisions based on things they don't understand (if they're smart).
Of course, if compliance comes into the picture, then the risk definition changes. It no longer becomes about risk of compromise, but risk of fines due to noncompliance. This makes it very easy to categorize the risk and communicate it...and as a result, compliance-based security spending is very high compared to security-based security spending.
Yes, I missed the joke. Fail.
But on the other hand, you caught that you missed the joke...thus not only catching the joke in the end but also honestly stating that you had missed it for a bit. Uber-win, sir, uber-win :)
I feel these manufactures are moving backwards. I don't want a small tablet, I would much prefer something more usable with a 15" or 17" screen. These things are just too small to really be useful.
Yeah, exactly...I would love a 17" tablet. Also, I would like it to have a better keyboard, and more ports. And a hard drive. A bigger battery would be nice. How about both a touchpad and a touchscreen? Maybe a little nub in the middle of the keyboard, for those who don't like touchpads, come to think of it, would be a good idea too. Oh, more RAM. And if it could run full Windows or OS X instead of RT, that would be handy too...
What are they missing? You said it yourself, inpatient care is expensive, and this treatment's out of reach of the poor. It's a classic example of a doctor choosing to specialise in diseases of the rich.
Apparently, I forgot one more thing that the online patients could do in the course of their treatment:
-Explain humor to ACs on Slashdot.
This looks to me like the perfect business opportunity. Inpatient care is terribly expensive, putting this out of the reach of people who can't afford it because they've lost their jobs due to their addiction and no longer have benefits. Why not offer it online?
I can think of many therapeutic activities that would help towards curing the impulse to spend all of one's time online:
-Troll debating
-Handling requests from the clients of graphics artists and webmasters
-Collecting free iPads, iPhones and other electronics from all those sites that just give them away for free
-Resolving arguments in online gaming chat sessions
I can think of many more as well...the options are nearly endless! And this could all be done from the comfort of their own home...
High Voltage DC will transmit power over huge distances with very little loss. It's already in use all over Europe.
Europe isn't even close to having the distances that are a concern in the US. There are several power companies...FirstEnergy, Xcel, Iberdrola (ironic because it's a power company in the US which is a subsidiary of a European company), Sempra all come to mind...which all have larger operating regions than any state in Europe outside of Russia. Germany, the most industrialized state in Europe, is significantly smaller. The distance between the most ideal wind-farm site that would serve Los Angeles and Los Angeles itself is longer than Germany is wide, and far longer than the distance between any feeder line in all of Europe.
Delivering electricity to a socket isn't hard.
Delivering electricity at constant voltage and frequency is already hard.
Delivering electricity at constant voltage and frequency in a grid where a few wandering clouds and a gust of wind create production spikes is definitly hard.
You missed two other factors...
Delivering electricity at constant voltage and frequency in a grid where a few wandering clouds and a gust of wind create *unpredictable* production spikes and drops, and where the source of some of the generation assets is hundreds of miles from the distribution points it needs to get to, is hard.
Lots of people like to talk about how much sun the US gets, and how much space there is to put up wind farms. But they don't realize a few things. One, the best places for PV farms and wind farms are far, far from population centers...and that means that utilities have to figure out how to manage VARS over those distances which is still not a problem that's entirely been solved. T. Boone Pickens had to bail on his whole wind farm venture in the Southeast because of this. And two, while the cost of PV panels (as would be put on the roof of a home of business) has dropped significantly, the majority of the cost of an on-premise solar installation is the anti-islanding gear that ensures the safety of any linemen who show up to deal with a power outage, assuming that only the end of the break in a line that leads back to the rest of the larger grid is live. And the cost of that gear has not changed much at all.