War is Peace Freedom is Slavery Ignorance is Strength
(I tried to do all caps like in the book but/. wouldn't let me)
One difference, I think between the book and today: As far as I can tell, the constant monitoring (telescreens) were something only used on Party members. I don't think that proles were completely bereft of them, but theirs were public screens designed to display the progress of the war, ration updates, and so forth. Not installed in prole residences.
Proles were victims, just as much as Party members, but they weren't prone to being singled out. Mostly they just happened to be in the wrong places when bombs landed.
If he had just wanted to "inflict maximum damage on his country" he could have just posted all his intelligence data to Wikileaks instead of vetting it through a responsible newspaper.
I seem to recall that what's on WikiLeaks was already vetted, and although different people will have differing opinions on what should and shouldn't have passed vetting, there were a lot of things that didn't pass. Bank account numbers, for one, if memory serves.
If I was in Snowden's situation, I doubt I'd simply sit at home like a lamb awaiting slaughter either. By fleeing, he made sure that the information actually made it to the public. If he'd simply put it out there and it had been intercepted and suppressed, he would have had no second chance.
Also, by remaining on the run, he's kept the issue in the spotlight. He further roiled the waters by taking aid and comfort from Evil Empire nations. You know - the ones we always said we were better than because they wouldn't let people travel without harassment, spied on their citizens, and used torture?
Some of the stuff he has done has admittedly been weird. But then, he comes from a culture where weird is the order of the day. He may be crazy. Or crazy like a fox.
Excessively harsh penalties tend to be counter-productive because they are almost never carried out
Tell that to the people China executed over industrial-scale adulteration of milk with melamine in 2008:
A number of criminal prosecutions occurred, with two people being executed, another given a suspended death penalty, three others receiving life imprisonment, two receiving 15-year jail terms,[6] and seven local government officials, as well as the Director of the Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ) being fired or forced to resign.
Just because the government of our Megacorporate States of America would never dream about enforcing substantial penalties against our industrialist overlords for mass-murdering in the name of profit, doesn't mean China won't.
Sad, isn't it? The people of the Communist People's Republic of China are more likely to get justice than the people of the morally upright USA. It may be a ragged and uneven justice, since with the right friends, offenders will often go scot-free, but occasionally they're going to crucify someone.
In the US, offenders may in extreme cases pay a small (cost of doing business) fine, but they'll never have to worry about accounting for their actions with their lives.
As a naturalized US citizen who actually took a small quiz on this, I am honor-bound to point out that the fine quotation you have provided is actually from the Declaration of Independence, and not the Constitution. While it certainly reflects the aspirations of the founders, and may well represent my or your best hopes, it's not actually the law of the land. The constitution is clearer about its jurisdiction.
Speaking as one born and raised native US, it is my sincerest hope that any member of any branch of the US government who took such a petty legalistic approach to the spirit under which the law of the land was written should be tarred, feathered, and hanged. I'd throw in drawn and quartered just to get the point across but that little amusement was one we didn't carry over from the Mother Country.
Actually, there are already a number of candidates, as far as I'm concerned. The president from whom our current leader seems to draw his inspiration has already effectively made it so that the minute you leave US soil, you lose many of the rights and guarantees of a US citizen. Something that apparently the Roman Empire never did. For them if you were a Roman citizen, you were a Roman citizen, no matter where you were or what Roman tributary you were born in.
We used to set the world standard for rectitude and morality. Now we're daily doing things I was told were only done in the Evil Empire of the Freedom-hating Satanistic Atheistic Commie Russkies or the oppressive dictatorship of the Third Reich. Except that you usually were allowed to keep your shoes on when you travelled over there.
Many many Mission critical applications REQUIRE 6 and have yet to be updated by their vendors...
Xsan admin (needs java6)
FinalCut Server (client will not work with java 7)
I'm hearing a lot of noise about this, and I find it very hard to believe. Java was designed from the very beginning to avoid breakage between releases. It's one of its primary differences from the Microsoft toolchain, where they not only don't support deprecation, they don't even try.
There were only 2 cases that I know of where Java changed radically enough to even worry about breakage: somewhere around 1.02 and the infamous 1.3 (which Oracle was complicit in keeping from its grave, even though their buyout of Sun was years in the future).
By setting the compile and code version flags on the compiler, you are supposed to be able to target any major past release of Java you want, and that has always worked for me. The only thing I ever needed to worry about was minor-release specific bugs, and I don't code to exploit compiler bugs, so it was always more of switching to a different minor release if the primary up-to-date minor release had issues.
Granted, if I did run into problems, there are alternative Java systems, both from IBM and from open-source, but the only time I've ever felt compelled to go that route was a case involving WebSphere, where IBM was exploiting their own JVM.
So I'm not worried myself about losing Java 6. It's not like a Microsoft compiler where you have to have the identical compiler. I've been running a mix of the 2 systems for some time now and haven't even paid attention to what compiler is on which machine, since the bulk of my code is actually only interested in features no more recent than Java 5.
You hand-translate it to machine code to create the first binary. Then you apply it to itself. It's a time-proven technique.
Yeah, you could do that.
On the other hand, the early Unix compilers were actually translators that converted C to assembler. You could simply check the assembly code to ensure no surprises, then scan the object code to make sure it matched the assembly source. I spent enough time reading core dumps in my misspent youth that I could disassemble object modules in my head.
More recent compilers generate a generic assembler which they then reduce, optimize and generate code from, but the same tactics can be used.
Having spent a certain amount of time twiddling the innards of gcc, however, I can say that the theoretical Evil Compiler isn't likely to go unnoticed for very long in the world. Proprietary compilers may be able to hide malfeasance, but when you've compiled the toolchain from scratch and are running a debug process on it, the number of ways that you can do things that the malware-hiding gremlins didn't anticipate is pretty large.
You might be able to get away with it in a "Mission Impossible" scenario, but not as a general open-to-the-public situation.
I understand your point, but you seem to fail to grasp mine. IT as a whole is indeed a savings center, but those savings materialize elsewhere, the IT department as such is a cost center. It may save more for other departments than its own costs, making a net profit, but that is only a "virtual" profit, not a "real" one, because unless your company is a tech company, IT itself generates no revenue, and as such, no profit. The real profit comes from the revenue of marketeers (or Sales, as someone pointed out, quite rightly), which is augmented by the savings IT makes for everyone, but themselves.
So in the end, IT itself is a sink, whose costs materialize as savings elsewhere (multipliers may vary by department).
Look, dumbfuck, profit is a simple equation: (sales $ in) - (expenses) = (profit)
Manipulating either of the two variables before the equals will affect the profit.
Money is fungible, and both variables on that equation are fungible. Manipulating either one, or heck, both so they both go up will increase profits.
As usual, you sales weasels are distorting things (i.e. LIES) to promote your view. The thing is, all you are doing is making yourself look stupid in the process. SUCCESS AGAIN! for the sales department!
Be nice, now.
All I wanted to do was make the point that the traditional practice of dividing corporate units along a binary line of "profit center/cost center" is not only inaccurate, but potentially harmful.
To bean counters, anything that cannot be quantified into a tangible bean does not exist.
Sales people always think that they are the sole profit generators. Management knows that it's really Management. Being delusional is a necessary trait for either position, however, and they shouldn't take themselves too seriously.
Also let's not forget that sysadmins themselves, or most of the IT staff (in a non-technological company, at least), are not making money - they are spending it and drawing it.
Yeah, that old fallacy. Why is it, do you suppose that we buy all this expensive equipment and hire expensive trained operators if all they do is "spend money"? Why not go back to the Good Old Days like Scrooge and Marley and have desks of underpaid workers scrivening with quill pens?
Maybe it's because IT isn't a cost Center, it's a savings Center.
If you think that all IT does is suck money without making a profit, I encourage you to set up a company based on traditional methods and see how long you survive against your money-wasting peers.
The illness of the age is that too many people think that the only meaningful numbers are the ones actually visible in the books and the the cost of something is what you lay down at the cash register.
I'm not sure that argument makes sense, using Java + Spring isn't going to leave your code any less vulnerable to maintenance and and scope issues anymore than using C# and the core.NET framework would.
In fact, using a 3rd party framework like Spring will greatly improve maintainability because it provides methods that make far more sense than some of the standard Java library ones for common tasks, so you can right much more maintainable code, and you don't have to go out of scope writing fairly common things that aren't in the Java standard library, but are in Spring and similar.
Actually, I dropped the Microsoft native platform years ago because they were making radical API changes on almost a weekly basis, swapping in and out entire API sets.
Functional completeness is important, but having a set of stable functions is even more important.
On the subject of Spring, one of the major advantage of that particular system is that it's based on Inversion of Control. Instead of components reaching out to each other, the components are (ideally) Plain Old Java Objects, and the inter-dependencies are handled by Spring's external wiring mechanism. Done well, this allows both free swapin/swapout of components (as long as their external interfaces are compatible) and components that are easier to re-use in other systems. With a side bonus of typically being easier to test as isolated units.
On the other hand, no warrant, no privacy-violating surveillance. They can still watch/listen to you when you are in public
I don't think that's enough.
It was fine in the past because it simply wasn't feasible for government to surveil everyone all of the time. It was too costly. As technology reduces the cost, we may get to a point where it is perfectly feasible for everyone to be watched all of the time except when they're in their homes with blinds drawn -- and given enough data collected on your movements and actions in public, they can probably deduce most of what you do at home as well.
I think we're eventually going to have to either start imposing limits on data collected in public, or else just give up on the idea of privacy. I know which approach I prefer.
I know which idea is more likely to be practical, which is why I'm more inclined to say "fine, as long as EVERYONE can see it".
Every few years, the various states of the USA conduct aerial surveys of the entire state. This data is public information, often available for only the price of copying. I can state this with total confidence, because I once worked on a project where we acquired our state's imagery and it was something like $30 plus shipping them a hard drive for them to load the data into. This, by the way, is the exact same data that Google maps incorporates.
Typically, this data has a resolution of 1 meter or less, which doesn't admit to much privacy. Less, when you consider that it can often be cross-matched to Google Street View images. And that, incidentally, is one of the reasons metadata is dangerous. You can combine multiple sources and draw conclusions. Which may or may not be correct.
So yes, even if you live off in the wild backwoods, you're still living in a fishbowl. The only visual privacy you have is what may be afforded by walls, roofs, or trees. And that's before law enforcement agencies get out the advanced technology. Allowing for the fact that even the airplane-based photography used to be considered "advanced".
Where do we draw the line? In practical terms, probably about treetop level. Everything higher has been compromised already.
And that's just the aerial component. We also are awash in cameras and other monitoring systems. Because the cameras mounted on major roadways in the city I live in are part of a public network, I can view traffic conditions from my desktop. I can even view traffic conditions in other cities from my desktop. And then there are the various public webcams.
Then why shouldn't the government have complete access to your data? Honestly, we use Google, Facebook, ect... they all have detailed records of our activities and identities that they aggregate and sell for profit. Yet no one protests, as they enjoy the bread and circuses of free Facebook or YouTube. If people started to take their privacy seriously, to attribute a value to their individuality, then maybe we'd get somewhere. The internet is a cesspool, assume everyone is watching. If you don't want your secrets known, protect yourself. We are still in the stoneages of Internet development, imagine what it will be like in 20 years! Wake up people! Take responsibility! If the NSA doesn't get you, Chinese/Iranian/Russian/ect... hackers will.
Actually, in some ways, the most offensive thing about the whole NSA thing is that it's a one-way street. Most of us are resigned to life in a fishbowl at this stage, but they want to be outside the bowl. What's good for us ought to be good for them, within reason. Especially for a nation founded on the concept that ideas and information should flow freely. In large part because the previous government wasn't always so accommodating.
I don't really agree that "teh terrists" knowing how they can be monitored will make them more effective. If anything, I think the more ways they know they can be scrutinized, the more effort they would have to apply to avoidance instead of doing what we're all afraid of them doing, just as the software and media suppliers who obsess on DRM tend to provide lower-quality products. It isn't like we're proposing publishing a monthly "Terrorist's Guide to Avoiding Surveillance", anyway.
Then again, the whole NSA/Big Brother concept is just their version of the Cathedral. A Microsoft of Intelligence-gathering, if you will. In actuality, it appears far more plots are foiled by the Bazaar, where people on the street see something and do something. So the more information you hide from the people on the street, the more dependent they become on centralized protection. But in the Cathedral, they're using statistical methods because a relatively few people must handle a large amount of data. Anything can fail, but the more leveraged something is, the more probability that it will fail catastrophically.
If it ain't broke, then why does it need software maintenance? If it needs software maintenance, then by definitionsomething is broke.
No. A lot of software maintenance is required by external changes, not because the bits wore out one day. Self-contained systems like the ones under discussion are fairly immune to that, but more mundane stuff is a complex mix of social requirements, government regulations, changes in connected technology (including, but vastly exceeding injected network malware), OS upgrades, feature requests, etc., etc., etc., etc.
"If it ain't broke" is false economy when it comes to computers. In most systems, it's not a case of will it break, but when. You can consider an app to be "unbroken" if it is unchanging, but important people will disagree strongly if the world that the software is part of changes and the app (or hardware, or OS, etc.) doesn't change to match.
its not so much what its capable of doing. its what its capable of surviving.
these systems are extremely robust and reliable. its like when people wonder why aircraft avionics tend to be so big and expensive when an arduino could probably handle those tasks too (and yes ive heard that too)...same thing. vibration, rough landings, random mechanics using a hammer to get the screws to line up, or overwrenched a cannonplug.
I think it's more of a matter that A, when things are mission-critical, you become conservative and don't swap stuff out every month and B, a large, standardized object is easier to swap out than one of an incompatible collection of newer odd-sized smaller things. Some people could also say C, repairability, but there are limits to what's repairable in-flight anyway, and there are fewer things that need repair when everything's on a single chip that's so small that you could pack 3 primary and 2 spare units into the same-sized space as the older discrete or TTL circuitry with plenty of spare room for shock padding and radiation/pulse shields.
Even the Shuttle gradually migrated to electronic controls. Long after the astronauts' watches packed more computing power. But a whole different dynamic applies to stuff like that. Some things can muddle by for a long time without the latest and greatest.
The trouble with supercomputers is that only governments buy them.
Actually, not so. For about 15 minutes, I once owned a supercomputer myself, believe it or not.
It wasn't a major supercomputer, but it was classified as a true supercomputer and I was acting as an intermediary for an oil industry company who had offended the seller, so the seller wouldn't sell directly to them.
Governments are definitely big consumers of supercomputers, but universities also do a lot of computationally-intensive work, not all of which is necessarily government-funded. I've already mentioned oil companies. I'm sure there are other cases.
So that's why I come across obvious errors in books where I thought that if it stands out like a sore thumb at a non-native speaker, why the fuck did the proof-readers miss it?
Actually, one or two books I've bought have either had major-disruptive goofs (pages out of place, repeated paragraphs, etc.) in them or actual "black holes" where the reader software locks up.
So far I've resisted the temptation to decrypt and repair them, but...
There would be no need to reverse engineer a pristine copy of the work. Simply proofreading a single copy and correcting some of the existing errors, while at the same time, introducing a few new errors of the same type
I didn't read the article because I had seen it earlier in another news source, so I don't if this is mentioned in the one mentioned here, but proofreading may not do it in this case. The source I read mentioned two specific types of change that do not introduce any typos (I'm choosing the exampled myself):
- One of them was reordering of nouns when the order does not matter, e.g. "Peter and John went for lunch" vs "John and Peter went for lunch";
- The other was playing with negatives: e.g. "something is unclear" vs "something is not clear"
Since there are no actual typos, it's hard to spot the identifying bits. You'd have to change the text substantially, in order to have a good chance of being free from discovery. Adding your own typos may not serve any purpose, since the company selling can focus just on the changes they made, not looking for other changes introduced after.
Of course, if there is a concerted effort to release documents, all pirates would need to do would be buying a few copies and diffing the documents. You may not get the original back, but if the changes are randomly put in a specific set of words, you certainly can end up with something close to the original than any of the sold copies and still free from pirate identification.
The ebooks I buy are encrypted using credentials that are unique to my account with the vendor. If I was to implement a watermarking scheme, I'd likely use these same credentials to power the watermarking process. In theory, that would make a pirated copy more traceable, and make gimmicked copies more obviously evidence of a deliberate attempt at piracy.
There's also the fact that the current generation of at least some readers hide the book files in an area that is apparently physically inaccessible even to people who root the devices, so "accidental" leakage cannot be claimed. Although, for the record, next reader I but WILL have the books out in the open or I won't buy it. Not because I'm intending to pirate, but because I don't want my library evaporating if the bookstore does a "Borders" and turns off its support servers. Or because I changed booksellers.
Or - and this is perhaps the most immediate concern - that I offend the Gods of Amazon in some way, such as letting my credit card expire on a non-book purchase and they shut my library down along with ever other service they offer. Which allegedly has been done to someone recently.
Slashdot Mirror
No there aren't. http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html
And even if there were, the actual Twinkie recipe probably says something like "Take 500 lbs of refined flour and dump it in a cement mixer...".
They don't make them suckers up in home-kitchen sized batches.
and by "still good" you mean you have eaten parts without getting sick?
They're Twinkies. If you didn't get sick, they wouldn't be "still good".
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
(I tried to do all caps like in the book but /. wouldn't let me)
One difference, I think between the book and today: As far as I can tell, the constant monitoring (telescreens) were something only used on Party members. I don't think that proles were completely bereft of them, but theirs were public screens designed to display the progress of the war, ration updates, and so forth. Not installed in prole residences.
Proles were victims, just as much as Party members, but they weren't prone to being singled out. Mostly they just happened to be in the wrong places when bombs landed.
NSAUSA, on the other hand, watches everybody.
If he had just wanted to "inflict maximum damage on his country" he could have just posted all his intelligence data to Wikileaks instead of vetting it through a responsible newspaper.
I seem to recall that what's on WikiLeaks was already vetted, and although different people will have differing opinions on what should and shouldn't have passed vetting, there were a lot of things that didn't pass. Bank account numbers, for one, if memory serves.
If I was in Snowden's situation, I doubt I'd simply sit at home like a lamb awaiting slaughter either. By fleeing, he made sure that the information actually made it to the public. If he'd simply put it out there and it had been intercepted and suppressed, he would have had no second chance.
Also, by remaining on the run, he's kept the issue in the spotlight. He further roiled the waters by taking aid and comfort from Evil Empire nations. You know - the ones we always said we were better than because they wouldn't let people travel without harassment, spied on their citizens, and used torture?
Some of the stuff he has done has admittedly been weird. But then, he comes from a culture where weird is the order of the day. He may be crazy. Or crazy like a fox.
anyhow, if he had been a dude with nothing to lose, he would seem more like an eeeeeviiiiil communist spy.
I thought we called them "Wal-Mart Purchasing Agents" these days.
They're only eeeeeviiiiil when they don't offer us Always the Low Price[TM].
You do realize that the government pressured lawyers not to file for compensation for the victims of the milk scandal? That's the justice you want?
It may be a ragged and uneven justice, since with the right friends, offenders will often go scot-free,
No, I don't want that sort of justice, but poor justice is better than no justice.
now to make it back pack sized!
Out of Legos!
Excessively harsh penalties tend to be counter-productive because they are almost never carried out
Tell that to the people China executed over industrial-scale adulteration of milk with melamine in 2008:
A number of criminal prosecutions occurred, with two people being executed, another given a suspended death penalty, three others receiving life imprisonment, two receiving 15-year jail terms,[6] and seven local government officials, as well as the Director of the Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ) being fired or forced to resign.
(from Wikipedia)
Just because the government of our Megacorporate States of America would never dream about enforcing substantial penalties against our industrialist overlords for mass-murdering in the name of profit, doesn't mean China won't.
Sad, isn't it? The people of the Communist People's Republic of China are more likely to get justice than the people of the morally upright USA. It may be a ragged and uneven justice, since with the right friends, offenders will often go scot-free, but occasionally they're going to crucify someone.
In the US, offenders may in extreme cases pay a small (cost of doing business) fine, but they'll never have to worry about accounting for their actions with their lives.
As a naturalized US citizen who actually took a small quiz on this, I am honor-bound to point out that the fine quotation you have provided is actually from the Declaration of Independence, and not the Constitution. While it certainly reflects the aspirations of the founders, and may well represent my or your best hopes, it's not actually the law of the land. The constitution is clearer about its jurisdiction.
Speaking as one born and raised native US, it is my sincerest hope that any member of any branch of the US government who took such a petty legalistic approach to the spirit under which the law of the land was written should be tarred, feathered, and hanged. I'd throw in drawn and quartered just to get the point across but that little amusement was one we didn't carry over from the Mother Country.
Actually, there are already a number of candidates, as far as I'm concerned. The president from whom our current leader seems to draw his inspiration has already effectively made it so that the minute you leave US soil, you lose many of the rights and guarantees of a US citizen. Something that apparently the Roman Empire never did. For them if you were a Roman citizen, you were a Roman citizen, no matter where you were or what Roman tributary you were born in.
We used to set the world standard for rectitude and morality. Now we're daily doing things I was told were only done in the Evil Empire of the Freedom-hating Satanistic Atheistic Commie Russkies or the oppressive dictatorship of the Third Reich. Except that you usually were allowed to keep your shoes on when you travelled over there.
As noble as that might seem, you will be undermining national security and wasting your own tax money.
And we employ professionals to do both of those. We call them "Legislators".
It's like Facebook, for cats!
You, sir, are infringing on my patent. Facebook. For Cats. With a Computer. On the Internet!
Many many Mission critical applications REQUIRE 6 and have yet to be updated by their vendors...
Xsan admin (needs java6)
FinalCut Server (client will not work with java 7)
I'm hearing a lot of noise about this, and I find it very hard to believe. Java was designed from the very beginning to avoid breakage between releases. It's one of its primary differences from the Microsoft toolchain, where they not only don't support deprecation, they don't even try.
There were only 2 cases that I know of where Java changed radically enough to even worry about breakage: somewhere around 1.02 and the infamous 1.3 (which Oracle was complicit in keeping from its grave, even though their buyout of Sun was years in the future).
By setting the compile and code version flags on the compiler, you are supposed to be able to target any major past release of Java you want, and that has always worked for me. The only thing I ever needed to worry about was minor-release specific bugs, and I don't code to exploit compiler bugs, so it was always more of switching to a different minor release if the primary up-to-date minor release had issues.
Granted, if I did run into problems, there are alternative Java systems, both from IBM and from open-source, but the only time I've ever felt compelled to go that route was a case involving WebSphere, where IBM was exploiting their own JVM.
So I'm not worried myself about losing Java 6. It's not like a Microsoft compiler where you have to have the identical compiler. I've been running a mix of the 2 systems for some time now and haven't even paid attention to what compiler is on which machine, since the bulk of my code is actually only interested in features no more recent than Java 5.
Who compiles the compiler?
You hand-translate it to machine code to create the first binary. Then you apply it to itself. It's a time-proven technique.
Yeah, you could do that.
On the other hand, the early Unix compilers were actually translators that converted C to assembler. You could simply check the assembly code to ensure no surprises, then scan the object code to make sure it matched the assembly source. I spent enough time reading core dumps in my misspent youth that I could disassemble object modules in my head.
More recent compilers generate a generic assembler which they then reduce, optimize and generate code from, but the same tactics can be used.
Having spent a certain amount of time twiddling the innards of gcc, however, I can say that the theoretical Evil Compiler isn't likely to go unnoticed for very long in the world. Proprietary compilers may be able to hide malfeasance, but when you've compiled the toolchain from scratch and are running a debug process on it, the number of ways that you can do things that the malware-hiding gremlins didn't anticipate is pretty large.
You might be able to get away with it in a "Mission Impossible" scenario, but not as a general open-to-the-public situation.
Tell me that again when you're lying in bed in agony because the morphine just isn't doing it any more.
And 9 women can gestate a baby in 1 month?
I understand your point, but you seem to fail to grasp mine. IT as a whole is indeed a savings center, but those savings materialize elsewhere, the IT department as such is a cost center. It may save more for other departments than its own costs, making a net profit, but that is only a "virtual" profit, not a "real" one, because unless your company is a tech company, IT itself generates no revenue, and as such, no profit. The real profit comes from the revenue of marketeers (or Sales, as someone pointed out, quite rightly), which is augmented by the savings IT makes for everyone, but themselves.
So in the end, IT itself is a sink, whose costs materialize as savings elsewhere (multipliers may vary by department).
Look, dumbfuck, profit is a simple equation: (sales $ in) - (expenses) = (profit)
Manipulating either of the two variables before the equals will affect the profit.
Money is fungible, and both variables on that equation are fungible. Manipulating either one, or heck, both so they both go up will increase profits.
As usual, you sales weasels are distorting things (i.e. LIES) to promote your view. The thing is, all you are doing is making yourself look stupid in the process. SUCCESS AGAIN! for the sales department!
Be nice, now.
All I wanted to do was make the point that the traditional practice of dividing corporate units along a binary line of "profit center/cost center" is not only inaccurate, but potentially harmful.
To bean counters, anything that cannot be quantified into a tangible bean does not exist.
Sales people always think that they are the sole profit generators. Management knows that it's really Management. Being delusional is a necessary trait for either position, however, and they shouldn't take themselves too seriously.
Also let's not forget that sysadmins themselves, or most of the IT staff (in a non-technological company, at least), are not making money - they are spending it and drawing it.
Yeah, that old fallacy. Why is it, do you suppose that we buy all this expensive equipment and hire expensive trained operators if all they do is "spend money"? Why not go back to the Good Old Days like Scrooge and Marley and have desks of underpaid workers scrivening with quill pens?
Maybe it's because IT isn't a cost Center, it's a savings Center.
If you think that all IT does is suck money without making a profit, I encourage you to set up a company based on traditional methods and see how long you survive against your money-wasting peers.
The illness of the age is that too many people think that the only meaningful numbers are the ones actually visible in the books and the the cost of something is what you lay down at the cash register.
I'm not sure that argument makes sense, using Java + Spring isn't going to leave your code any less vulnerable to maintenance and and scope issues anymore than using C# and the core .NET framework would.
In fact, using a 3rd party framework like Spring will greatly improve maintainability because it provides methods that make far more sense than some of the standard Java library ones for common tasks, so you can right much more maintainable code, and you don't have to go out of scope writing fairly common things that aren't in the Java standard library, but are in Spring and similar.
Actually, I dropped the Microsoft native platform years ago because they were making radical API changes on almost a weekly basis, swapping in and out entire API sets.
Functional completeness is important, but having a set of stable functions is even more important.
On the subject of Spring, one of the major advantage of that particular system is that it's based on Inversion of Control. Instead of components reaching out to each other, the components are (ideally) Plain Old Java Objects, and the inter-dependencies are handled by Spring's external wiring mechanism. Done well, this allows both free swapin/swapout of components (as long as their external interfaces are compatible) and components that are easier to re-use in other systems. With a side bonus of typically being easier to test as isolated units.
On the other hand, no warrant, no privacy-violating surveillance. They can still watch/listen to you when you are in public
I don't think that's enough.
It was fine in the past because it simply wasn't feasible for government to surveil everyone all of the time. It was too costly. As technology reduces the cost, we may get to a point where it is perfectly feasible for everyone to be watched all of the time except when they're in their homes with blinds drawn -- and given enough data collected on your movements and actions in public, they can probably deduce most of what you do at home as well.
I think we're eventually going to have to either start imposing limits on data collected in public, or else just give up on the idea of privacy. I know which approach I prefer.
I know which idea is more likely to be practical, which is why I'm more inclined to say "fine, as long as EVERYONE can see it".
Every few years, the various states of the USA conduct aerial surveys of the entire state. This data is public information, often available for only the price of copying. I can state this with total confidence, because I once worked on a project where we acquired our state's imagery and it was something like $30 plus shipping them a hard drive for them to load the data into. This, by the way, is the exact same data that Google maps incorporates.
Typically, this data has a resolution of 1 meter or less, which doesn't admit to much privacy. Less, when you consider that it can often be cross-matched to Google Street View images. And that, incidentally, is one of the reasons metadata is dangerous. You can combine multiple sources and draw conclusions. Which may or may not be correct.
So yes, even if you live off in the wild backwoods, you're still living in a fishbowl. The only visual privacy you have is what may be afforded by walls, roofs, or trees. And that's before law enforcement agencies get out the advanced technology. Allowing for the fact that even the airplane-based photography used to be considered "advanced".
Where do we draw the line? In practical terms, probably about treetop level. Everything higher has been compromised already.
And that's just the aerial component. We also are awash in cameras and other monitoring systems. Because the cameras mounted on major roadways in the city I live in are part of a public network, I can view traffic conditions from my desktop. I can even view traffic conditions in other cities from my desktop. And then there are the various public webcams.
So smile. And pass the TetraMin.
What is applying to Google is not a law, and is secret.
Actually, the point of the whole discussion was that the NSA says otherwise.
Then why shouldn't the government have complete access to your data? Honestly, we use Google, Facebook, ect... they all have detailed records of our activities and identities that they aggregate and sell for profit. Yet no one protests, as they enjoy the bread and circuses of free Facebook or YouTube. If people started to take their privacy seriously, to attribute a value to their individuality, then maybe we'd get somewhere. The internet is a cesspool, assume everyone is watching. If you don't want your secrets known, protect yourself. We are still in the stoneages of Internet development, imagine what it will be like in 20 years! Wake up people! Take responsibility! If the NSA doesn't get you, Chinese/Iranian/Russian/ect... hackers will.
Actually, in some ways, the most offensive thing about the whole NSA thing is that it's a one-way street. Most of us are resigned to life in a fishbowl at this stage, but they want to be outside the bowl. What's good for us ought to be good for them, within reason. Especially for a nation founded on the concept that ideas and information should flow freely. In large part because the previous government wasn't always so accommodating.
I don't really agree that "teh terrists" knowing how they can be monitored will make them more effective. If anything, I think the more ways they know they can be scrutinized, the more effort they would have to apply to avoidance instead of doing what we're all afraid of them doing, just as the software and media suppliers who obsess on DRM tend to provide lower-quality products. It isn't like we're proposing publishing a monthly "Terrorist's Guide to Avoiding Surveillance", anyway.
Then again, the whole NSA/Big Brother concept is just their version of the Cathedral. A Microsoft of Intelligence-gathering, if you will. In actuality, it appears far more plots are foiled by the Bazaar, where people on the street see something and do something. So the more information you hide from the people on the street, the more dependent they become on centralized protection. But in the Cathedral, they're using statistical methods because a relatively few people must handle a large amount of data. Anything can fail, but the more leveraged something is, the more probability that it will fail catastrophically.
If it ain't broke, then why does it need software maintenance? If it needs software maintenance, then by definition something is broke.
No. A lot of software maintenance is required by external changes, not because the bits wore out one day. Self-contained systems like the ones under discussion are fairly immune to that, but more mundane stuff is a complex mix of social requirements, government regulations, changes in connected technology (including, but vastly exceeding injected network malware), OS upgrades, feature requests, etc., etc., etc., etc.
"If it ain't broke" is false economy when it comes to computers. In most systems, it's not a case of will it break, but when. You can consider an app to be "unbroken" if it is unchanging, but important people will disagree strongly if the world that the software is part of changes and the app (or hardware, or OS, etc.) doesn't change to match.
its not so much what its capable of doing.
its what its capable of surviving.
these systems are extremely robust and reliable. its like when people wonder why aircraft avionics tend to be so big and expensive when an arduino could probably handle those tasks too (and yes ive heard that too)...same thing. vibration, rough landings, random mechanics using a hammer to get the screws to line up, or overwrenched a cannonplug.
I think it's more of a matter that A, when things are mission-critical, you become conservative and don't swap stuff out every month and B, a large, standardized object is easier to swap out than one of an incompatible collection of newer odd-sized smaller things. Some people could also say C, repairability, but there are limits to what's repairable in-flight anyway, and there are fewer things that need repair when everything's on a single chip that's so small that you could pack 3 primary and 2 spare units into the same-sized space as the older discrete or TTL circuitry with plenty of spare room for shock padding and radiation/pulse shields.
Even the Shuttle gradually migrated to electronic controls. Long after the astronauts' watches packed more computing power. But a whole different dynamic applies to stuff like that. Some things can muddle by for a long time without the latest and greatest.
The trouble with supercomputers is that only governments buy them.
Actually, not so. For about 15 minutes, I once owned a supercomputer myself, believe it or not.
It wasn't a major supercomputer, but it was classified as a true supercomputer and I was acting as an intermediary for an oil industry company who had offended the seller, so the seller wouldn't sell directly to them.
Governments are definitely big consumers of supercomputers, but universities also do a lot of computationally-intensive work, not all of which is necessarily government-funded. I've already mentioned oil companies. I'm sure there are other cases.
So that's why I come across obvious errors in books where I thought that if it stands out like a sore thumb at a non-native speaker, why the fuck did the proof-readers miss it?
Actually, one or two books I've bought have either had major-disruptive goofs (pages out of place, repeated paragraphs, etc.) in them or actual "black holes" where the reader software locks up.
So far I've resisted the temptation to decrypt and repair them, but...
There would be no need to reverse engineer a pristine copy of the work. Simply proofreading a single copy and correcting some of the existing errors, while at the same time, introducing a few new errors of the same type
I didn't read the article because I had seen it earlier in another news source, so I don't if this is mentioned in the one mentioned here, but proofreading may not do it in this case. The source I read mentioned two specific types of change that do not introduce any typos (I'm choosing the exampled myself):
- One of them was reordering of nouns when the order does not matter, e.g. "Peter and John went for lunch" vs "John and Peter went for lunch";
- The other was playing with negatives: e.g. "something is unclear" vs "something is not clear"
Since there are no actual typos, it's hard to spot the identifying bits. You'd have to change the text substantially, in order to have a good chance of being free from discovery. Adding your own typos may not serve any purpose, since the company selling can focus just on the changes they made, not looking for other changes introduced after.
Of course, if there is a concerted effort to release documents, all pirates would need to do would be buying a few copies and diffing the documents. You may not get the original back, but if the changes are randomly put in a specific set of words, you certainly can end up with something close to the original than any of the sold copies and still free from pirate identification.
The ebooks I buy are encrypted using credentials that are unique to my account with the vendor. If I was to implement a watermarking scheme, I'd likely use these same credentials to power the watermarking process. In theory, that would make a pirated copy more traceable, and make gimmicked copies more obviously evidence of a deliberate attempt at piracy.
There's also the fact that the current generation of at least some readers hide the book files in an area that is apparently physically inaccessible even to people who root the devices, so "accidental" leakage cannot be claimed. Although, for the record, next reader I but WILL have the books out in the open or I won't buy it. Not because I'm intending to pirate, but because I don't want my library evaporating if the bookstore does a "Borders" and turns off its support servers. Or because I changed booksellers.
Or - and this is perhaps the most immediate concern - that I offend the Gods of Amazon in some way, such as letting my credit card expire on a non-book purchase and they shut my library down along with ever other service they offer. Which allegedly has been done to someone recently.