The calculations show the southern flight path and consequently a water landing. But...how can they be so certain that no one survived? Isn't it possible that the airplane made a controlled glide into a non-powered water landing and that the life rafts deployed and allowed some of the passengers to survive? That has happened before. Admittedly this is very unlikely but can anyone at this point say it is impossible as the Malaysian government is doing?
Because, if what I heard was correct, the life rafts had satellite beacons that would have automatically switched on when the rafts were deployed.
Also, this wasn't the Hudson river, it was the high seas, so a survivable water landing might have involved running headlong into some pretty massive waves.
If it simply ran out of fuel, it should have made controlled water landing and likely floated, with plenty of people exiting the plane with life vests on.
Considering that it wasn't flying even remotely near its proper heading, there's every reason to believe that whoever was guiding the plane simply ran it as far away from land as possible and let gravity take over.
You can also "simply run out of fuel" if the pilot is dead. There was an incident in the USA several years back where something like that happened on a private jet and it flew across half the country on auto-pilot before it ran out of fuel and crashed.
The published text of the PM's speech makes it clear its based on the analysis (what you are calling "statistical probability") not debris or black box.
I don't know why anyone would find that disturbing.
Even if he had debris, for any given family there would still be some "statistical probability" that their loved one survived (infinitely close to zero) involving some sort of miracle, a hidden parachute or a missed connection, etc. Just as we'd discard such false hope, pretending that there is some other place folks ought to be looking or that there is any realistic chance that their family members are safe as hostages in some terrorist base.
It is exceedingly unfortunate that the data analysis was relatively slow (and the data itself was never open sourced); the delay resulted in much lost time and resources by many naval and air groups, and lots of needless gnashing of international teeth.
If there's any lesson here, the satellite data feed(s) should become a bit more formalized, and their release in the event of an accident be as standardized as the black box information. As for the $10/flight for the data, even if the airline doesn't pay for it up front, the data collectors should collect it, and save it until after the flight has landed. If it doesn't land, the airline can pay some much larger fee to get the data ahead of it going public;>
Actually, what I don't understand is why apparently there are not better SAR support mechanisms.
It seems like it would be reasonable to have a set of EPIRB transmitters mounted on the upper surface of the fuselage that would be automatically be ejected by the shock of a sudden (crash) impact. There are EPIRB units on life rafts and similar marine equipment that automatically trigger, after all.
It could have saved several days of confusion.
As far as that goes, the state of the art in micro-electronics means that a similar floating unit containing backup flight recorder information would also be worth ejecting. They needn't be as durable as the main units, but it seems like cheap insurance in the event that the primary equipment ends up 5 miles down in the ocean.
Juniors and newbees to programming will delight in 16 hour days and short delivery schedules. That product that they produce will be as good as any Monday morning product. Full of potential, but also costly to maintain. Bug fixes in the field cost lots of $$$$. The senior, works his day, perhaps after supper another two hours, but those two hours are for quality control. Who has the cleanest bugfree code? Any answers to give?
Once I've gone home for dinner, I'm done for the day. I already know from years of experience that the all you're going to get in the nature of quality creative work per day in a commute-to-work office is about 6 hours and more time in the office will not make any positive difference.
The exception is the stuff that hits me while I'm having "shower" inspirations.
What you get from experience isn't necessarily bug-free code. But code that has been properly thought through, aided by experience, is less likely to be a hack-job design where every bug fix pops out another bug somewhere else.
Is that even a problem? When you download an app from the Play Store, it gives you a list of permissions that the app requests. You give it permission when you download the app. If Play does not list an app if your version of Android or phone does not support the feature, then that's potentially a problem, but an easy one to fix.
Sounbds like "grandfathering". If the permission was available in the older Android by virtue of not having an explicit block, it continues to be available on the newer version even though blocking is now available.
Proper security paranoia says that the opposite should occur. That if a service is now blockable, it should block until the user explicitly agrees otherwise.
On the other hand, recent updates on my tablet have listed privileges that they were newly requesting as part of the update approval process, so I'm not sure how serious this problem really is.
The chain of trust is broken. This because today a certificate is only authorized by a single source, not by several. In addition to this the model has the flaw that it does not easily allow a point to point scenario where only two parties are involved.
I like your implication. Often there's a legal requirement for multiple witnesses, such as the Hobbit's "10 witnesses signed in red ink", or in real-world cases, things like US treason or Sharia laws. Seems like this should be something that computer trust mechanisms should support as well.
We are assuming that the chain of Trust is reliable, all the way up because most top-level certs are well-known organizations, but we also know that the mechanism can be subverted. Maybe it's time for a "web of trust", instead.
Much of the Internet is founded on democratic/distributed principles. Trust and domains are notable exceptions.
Vim is nice and I actually use it for programming, but jumping between the command mode, insert mode and visual mode still slows me down a lot. Why can't we just be in insert mode constantly and use Ctrl+something for all the commands? Also use Shift+arrows to select text?
Vi was originally designed to run over a very slow modem - say 300 baud over a device with minimal keyboard (no arrow/cursor keys).
Once an editor gains a certain degree of power, you run out of Ctrl+ keys.
My gripe with the vi approach is that it assumes that commands are the rule and text entry is the exception. Most other editors - including the ones I grew up with - are of the opposite point of view.
Consider the source - FTS: "Scott Corley, the Executive Director of immigration-reform group Compete America"
This isn't coming from a CEO, it's coming from a political activist. And of course, he is dead wrong about "The further you get away from your education the less knowledge you have of the new technologies...". Someone just out of school hasn't actually worked with the new technologies as they have trickled into existence as someone who has been in the field for years has.
It's coming from an idiot. Where does he think these temporary workers got their education from?
I wasn't taught the hot platforms of the day in school. I learned them after I left. School was to give me a background so I'd be able to learn them.
Actually, I agree that an RTOS makes more sense for ATMs if only because the less general-purpose functions you provide, the less things there are to exploit. Originally, of course, resources were too valuable and a custom system would have been the rule, but that was before things like the $25 Raspberry Pi Linux board.
The Achilles' Heel of Windows is that each new release is so much fatter than the last one that you have to scrap the old hardware just to move up to the new OS. Linux tends to support some pretty old machinery. I have one system still running on a Pentium 100, although it's not using a modern kernel.
As ineloquently as RabidReindeer may have put it, he's 100% spot on here. I've done security audits for big companies with large teams -- admins insert backdoors al over the place, then their buddies figure out they did it, and instead of being reprimanded they start using it too for convenience. Just because they have a big, publically-traded company doesn't mean the CIO/CISO cares about anything more than compliance on paper.
Actually, in many cases, the backdoors were created on demand from management because doing things securely was too just inconvenient for them. The old "Git 'er Dun!" principle.
Or because the security administrator was in a bad mood the day something idiotic came in and didn't challenge it. I knew a lowly applications programmer who was keeping his own personal files in the product data set because of that.
You don't have to be a Michael Straczynski to know that B5 had a "beginning of the story" and an "end of the story". One of the best decisions that Mr. Straczynski ever made was to allow the story to end (and end grandly I also have to say).
Too many cheap crap-hounds (*cough*couch*abrams*cough*) try to extend a story as long as they are able to squeeze money out of it and are eventually revealed to have no idea what they were doing or where they were going with it. Straczynski told a really great story that ended i a really great way. Live and art have to move on.
I was disappointed, myself. The threat of early termination brought several arcs to a close faster than they should have been, and added at least one that was a bit sloppy. Then again, I thought the whole Vorlon/Shadow conflict thing terminated a bit too abruptly whereas the Centauri thing actually got left dangling over the end.
The one series ending that really did impress me was the final season of Buffy. Mostly the presentation of the final episode, which looked more cinematic than TV-like, but the whole season did a very neat job of tying up years worth of odds and ends.
Small-time admins maybe. If one works as part of a larger team, automation and documentation is king - any such backdoors would get anyone into trouble, quick.
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Worked in Fortune corporations. If I don't stop laughing soon, I'll pass out.
You forgot one category of "untrainables". Those who are simply too lazy to try. They are legion.
But I'm not referring to untrainable people, I'm talking about the unwillingness of companies to train trainable assets, expecting to profit off someone else's labor and expense.
It didn't used to be like that.
If it's really true that the ratio of work needing top-notch talent to the supply is that out of balance, I have doubts that higher education stepping in will help. Since without anything else changing, running more people through the educational system might increase the number of stars, but it's also going to increase the number of deadheads.
Using the infamous Statistical Sample of 1, however, I'm simply doubtful that we're that badly off. My specialty is in the rarefied aspects of the profession and I've never had enough grunt-level help to keep me from the need to do a lot of stuff that requires lesser levels of skill. While only 10% of us may live up there, very few projects have more than 10% of the work that requires the skill and knowledge of that level.
If anything, I'd say less, since the mode de jour is to mashup existing works in favor of creating actual new products. With apologies for my non-existent French.
I've taught off and on for 30 years now, and over the entire time one thing has remained pretty constant: About 10% of the students completing the programs are really good; they will be star programmers and eventually software architects. Another 40% are competent - they would be able to carry out plans created by others, but should never carry any larger responsibility. Good, solid programmers. The remaining 50% manage to graduate, but frankly should never work directly in the field. Maybe they can be testers or write documentation, but never let them write a line of code in a real project.
Unfortunately, it's not always obvious what kind of person you are hiring. Add to this mix the people who are self-taught, who are coming from some other field, and may have wildly inappropriate ideas. Just as an example, I am currently working with a company whose star programmer (and he really is very good) comes from process control - and has zero clue about testing or quality control. He writes code and assumes that it works, and his company is so glad to have him (at a grunt-level salary) that they refuse to insult him by testing his code - so they deliver his work untested straight to clients - you can imagine how well this works.
tl;dr: There is no shortage of bodies in STEM fields. However, there is a shortage of good people who also have a solid education in and understand of their field. This is true in computer science, and almost certainly in every other STEM field out there.
Sturgeon's Law all over again. Which itself was a somewhat embittered re-observation of what had already been seen in the Pareto Principle (ratios may vary somewhat).
The saving grace of that is you don't need 100% of your staff to be rock stars. There's room for the stars, the supporting cast, and even a few janitors, and that actually makes a lot more economic sense, since those of us with star talents are neither being efficiently used when we have to do the grunt work nor likely to be very happy to so so.
What it more telling is that companies these days typically don't attempt to take their existing assets and train them to become worth more, they want to hire in new people who can "hit the ground running" - trained at someone else's expense, and if the existing people cannot be found a place, they're summarily discarded. Along with their accumulated knowledge of how the business works and how to efficiently support the business.
The developer stole nothing, one element necessary for theft is intentionally depriving the owner of their property and the owner was never deprived of their property. This is conversion
In an interesting sense, you are technically correct because the owner is not being deprived of anything. The owner, Microsoft, still has the code and is thus deprived of nothing. This fits better under industrial espionage law. Unfortunately, case law precedent makes it possible to prosecute the actor under theft statutes.
Theft of secrets. Yes, the original blueprints, code, whatever, remains with the original owner. What has been stolen, however, was the exclusivity of the trade secrets. And trade secrets are only protected as long as they are secret.
This being Windows, 8, probably the most applicable route to prosecution is Illegal Disposal of Toxic Waste, but nevertheless...
Because torture is illegal. While this new drug can just be labeled as something else. And if as side effect this causes pain, discomfort, and madness, well that is unfortunate but these are criminals after all.
Just call it "enhanced interrogation" or something. And hint that if you don't do it, we'll be overrun with criminals. No problems.
I question the ethics of actual jail time. Putting someone in prison is worse than killing an old person: the earlier parts of your life are critical. What happens when a 25 year old goes to prison for 4 years? They may lose their major opportunities to develop a career, settle into a good relationship, raise a family, etc. Their career skills are out of date, they have criminal records, their dating pools in age range shrink and they need to aim at old cougars or flighty college girls who are just looking for older men to hook up with.
The problem is, many people in prison only got there because they worked really hard at it. They were undisciplined in school, abusive towards others, didn't work towards developing a career, and so forth. A lot of unsolved crimes get punished because the criminal later got lengthy sentences for other crimes also committed.
To date, we basically have 2 approaches: The rehab approach, which hasn't been all that successful up to now, or the punishment approach, which hasn't been successful either. The ultimate penalty: death, resolves the problem by getting rid of the problem-maker, but that's no more a solution that the one employed on the Gordian Knot. Jail time has the advantage of keeping criminals out of circulation, but only works as long as the criminal is incarcerated.
A 13 foot long, quarter ton chicken would NOT be the kind of animal I'd want to get angry. Or be anywhere near when it's hungry. Even though this article says they were "ecological generalists that fed upon vegetation, small animals, and perhaps eggs." I wouldn't want to be the one to test whether this bird/dinosaur would decide to add people to its diet.
For a sufficiently large bird, people are small animals!
It's all related to the most profitable configuration for the company.
The problem is, "profitable" usually actually means "what will get me (high-level exec) the most profit in the least time?" Often followed by "before I bail the ship I just helped sink."
Shore that up with bean-counter metrics, projections that fail to properly account for costs (especially intangible ones) and you can easily justify "saving" money by preferring the inexperienced. The only reason why anything has any quality anymore is that advanced manufacturing techniques and materials allows relatively incompetent and de-motivated employees to turn out items that exceed what was possible 50 years ago when low price and cheap junk were more obviously related. Software, however, isn't something that benefits much from microprocessor-controlled fabrication equipment, which is why cheap software is still cheap junk.
The old-time model of a corporation was based on the idea of a more or less permanent core population of differing levels of skill and experience. Since the 1980s the model has changed to the conceit that everyone is an interchangeable cog purchased at commodity prices, used up, and then discarded at will. Except senior management (who are obviously unique, indispensable and irreplaceable, thus mandating extreme compensation).
Seems like the NSA and CIA might be by nature beyond oversight. Their job includes assuming that the worst scenarios are possible, which then justifies any action to thwart them, including lying to their overseers in order to keep doing illegal things they think is necessary to prevent those worst possible scenarios. It's bureaucratic paranoia resulting in functional schizophrenia that makes sense within the hive mind but not within the greater public mind that employs them to keep us safe.
I tend to doubt that. First, because we do have enough latitude under the law for investigation, infiltration, and other counter-measures. The issue at hand is that the limits of the law have been exceeded by the wrong people at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons. If you want monitoring of domestic communications, that's the FBI's job, for example. If you must spy on every trivial communication of every citizen, you need to provide probable cause as to why that should be essential.
Secondly, because the action-movie scenarios are mostly fictional, and many action movies even admit to that, because they're predicated on a loose-cannon hero taking on the bad guys in defiance of the people who are already assigned to handle the situation.
Thirdly, because in actual practice, the really bad stuff has not happened because of lack of intelligence via authorized channels, but because the intelligence wasn't acted on. The exception to that is that there is relatively little foreknowledge of the domestic berserker attacks, but there's no indication that tapping everyone's phone would help there anyway. Those people tend to keep to themselves. In fact, that's often one of the biggest warning signals.
In the mean time, we have what amounts to an old-time invasion of the Crimea and we blew the moral superiority we could have used to counter Russia by invading Iraq. And the intelligence experts apparently had no suggestions on how to head off the crisis despite all their unrestrained actions.
But I can't help but feel that the very nature of our Government has morphed. Institutions like the NSA aren't bothered by public perception -- they have grown into their own. They are beholden only to their own agenda and will do whatever it takes (lying to congress, fabricating effectiveness) to maintain and expand their power. Obama will do some hand-wringing on TV but in the end nothing will change.
To be fair, public perception shouldn't count. Public action, on the other hand...
And if the American public doesn't take some serious action, they'll have only themselves to blame when people laugh at their assertions of being the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
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The calculations show the southern flight path and consequently a water landing. But...how can they be so certain that no one survived? Isn't it possible that the airplane made a controlled glide into a non-powered water landing and that the life rafts deployed and allowed some of the passengers to survive? That has happened before. Admittedly this is very unlikely but can anyone at this point say it is impossible as the Malaysian government is doing?
Because, if what I heard was correct, the life rafts had satellite beacons that would have automatically switched on when the rafts were deployed.
Also, this wasn't the Hudson river, it was the high seas, so a survivable water landing might have involved running headlong into some pretty massive waves.
If it simply ran out of fuel, it should have made controlled water landing and likely floated, with plenty of people exiting the plane with life vests on.
Considering that it wasn't flying even remotely near its proper heading, there's every reason to believe that whoever was guiding the plane simply ran it as far away from land as possible and let gravity take over.
You can also "simply run out of fuel" if the pilot is dead. There was an incident in the USA several years back where something like that happened on a private jet and it flew across half the country on auto-pilot before it ran out of fuel and crashed.
The published text of the PM's speech makes it clear its based on the analysis (what you are calling "statistical probability") not debris or black box.
I don't know why anyone would find that disturbing.
Even if he had debris, for any given family there would still be some "statistical probability" that their loved one survived (infinitely close to zero) involving some sort of miracle, a hidden parachute or a missed connection, etc. Just as we'd discard such false hope, pretending that there is some other place folks ought to be looking or that there is any realistic chance that their family members are safe as hostages in some terrorist base.
It is exceedingly unfortunate that the data analysis was relatively slow (and the data itself was never open sourced); the delay resulted in much lost time and resources by many naval and air groups, and lots of needless gnashing of international teeth.
If there's any lesson here, the satellite data feed(s) should become a bit more formalized, and their release in the event of an accident be as standardized as the black box information. As for the $10/flight for the data, even if the airline doesn't pay for it up front, the data collectors should collect it, and save it until after the flight has landed. If it doesn't land, the airline can pay some much larger fee to get the data ahead of it going public ;>
Actually, what I don't understand is why apparently there are not better SAR support mechanisms.
It seems like it would be reasonable to have a set of EPIRB transmitters mounted on the upper surface of the fuselage that would be automatically be ejected by the shock of a sudden (crash) impact. There are EPIRB units on life rafts and similar marine equipment that automatically trigger, after all.
It could have saved several days of confusion.
As far as that goes, the state of the art in micro-electronics means that a similar floating unit containing backup flight recorder information would also be worth ejecting. They needn't be as durable as the main units, but it seems like cheap insurance in the event that the primary equipment ends up 5 miles down in the ocean.
Juniors and newbees to programming will delight in 16 hour days and short delivery schedules. That product that they produce will be as good as any Monday morning product. Full of potential, but also costly to maintain. Bug fixes in the field cost lots of $$$$.
The senior, works his day, perhaps after supper another two hours, but those two hours are for quality control. Who has the cleanest bugfree code? Any answers to give?
Once I've gone home for dinner, I'm done for the day. I already know from years of experience that the all you're going to get in the nature of quality creative work per day in a commute-to-work office is about 6 hours and more time in the office will not make any positive difference.
The exception is the stuff that hits me while I'm having "shower" inspirations.
What you get from experience isn't necessarily bug-free code. But code that has been properly thought through, aided by experience, is less likely to be a hack-job design where every bug fix pops out another bug somewhere else.
Is that even a problem? When you download an app from the Play Store, it gives you a list of permissions that the app requests. You give it permission when you download the app. If Play does not list an app if your version of Android or phone does not support the feature, then that's potentially a problem, but an easy one to fix.
Sounbds like "grandfathering". If the permission was available in the older Android by virtue of not having an explicit block, it continues to be available on the newer version even though blocking is now available.
Proper security paranoia says that the opposite should occur. That if a service is now blockable, it should block until the user explicitly agrees otherwise.
On the other hand, recent updates on my tablet have listed privileges that they were newly requesting as part of the update approval process, so I'm not sure how serious this problem really is.
The chain of trust is broken. This because today a certificate is only authorized by a single source, not by several. In addition to this the model has the flaw that it does not easily allow a point to point scenario where only two parties are involved.
I like your implication. Often there's a legal requirement for multiple witnesses, such as the Hobbit's "10 witnesses signed in red ink", or in real-world cases, things like US treason or Sharia laws. Seems like this should be something that computer trust mechanisms should support as well.
We are assuming that the chain of Trust is reliable, all the way up because most top-level certs are well-known organizations, but we also know that the mechanism can be subverted. Maybe it's time for a "web of trust", instead.
Much of the Internet is founded on democratic/distributed principles. Trust and domains are notable exceptions.
Vim is nice and I actually use it for programming, but jumping between the command mode, insert mode and visual mode still slows me down a lot. Why can't we just be in insert mode constantly and use Ctrl+something for all the commands? Also use Shift+arrows to select text?
Vi was originally designed to run over a very slow modem - say 300 baud over a device with minimal keyboard (no arrow/cursor keys).
Once an editor gains a certain degree of power, you run out of Ctrl+ keys.
My gripe with the vi approach is that it assumes that commands are the rule and text entry is the exception. Most other editors - including the ones I grew up with - are of the opposite point of view.
Consider the source - FTS: "Scott Corley, the Executive Director of immigration-reform group Compete America"
This isn't coming from a CEO, it's coming from a political activist. And of course, he is dead wrong about "The further you get away from your education the less knowledge you have of the new technologies...". Someone just out of school hasn't actually worked with the new technologies as they have trickled into existence as someone who has been in the field for years has.
It's coming from an idiot. Where does he think these temporary workers got their education from?
I wasn't taught the hot platforms of the day in school. I learned them after I left. School was to give me a background so I'd be able to learn them.
Actually, I agree that an RTOS makes more sense for ATMs if only because the less general-purpose functions you provide, the less things there are to exploit. Originally, of course, resources were too valuable and a custom system would have been the rule, but that was before things like the $25 Raspberry Pi Linux board.
The Achilles' Heel of Windows is that each new release is so much fatter than the last one that you have to scrap the old hardware just to move up to the new OS. Linux tends to support some pretty old machinery. I have one system still running on a Pentium 100, although it's not using a modern kernel.
As ineloquently as RabidReindeer may have put it, he's 100% spot on here. I've done security audits for big companies with large teams -- admins insert backdoors al over the place, then their buddies figure out they did it, and instead of being reprimanded they start using it too for convenience. Just because they have a big, publically-traded company doesn't mean the CIO/CISO cares about anything more than compliance on paper.
Actually, in many cases, the backdoors were created on demand from management because doing things securely was too just inconvenient for them. The old "Git 'er Dun!" principle.
Or because the security administrator was in a bad mood the day something idiotic came in and didn't challenge it. I knew a lowly applications programmer who was keeping his own personal files in the product data set because of that.
You don't have to be a Michael Straczynski to know that B5 had a "beginning of the story" and an "end of the story". One of the best decisions that Mr. Straczynski ever made was to allow the story to end (and end grandly I also have to say).
Too many cheap crap-hounds (*cough*couch*abrams*cough*) try to extend a story as long as they are able to squeeze money out of it and are eventually revealed to have no idea what they were doing or where they were going with it. Straczynski told a really great story that ended i a really great way. Live and art have to move on.
I was disappointed, myself. The threat of early termination brought several arcs to a close faster than they should have been, and added at least one that was a bit sloppy. Then again, I thought the whole Vorlon/Shadow conflict thing terminated a bit too abruptly whereas the Centauri thing actually got left dangling over the end.
The one series ending that really did impress me was the final season of Buffy. Mostly the presentation of the final episode, which looked more cinematic than TV-like, but the whole season did a very neat job of tying up years worth of odds and ends.
Small-time admins maybe. If one works as part of a larger team, automation and documentation is king - any such backdoors would get anyone into trouble, quick.
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Worked in Fortune corporations. If I don't stop laughing soon, I'll pass out.
You forgot one category of "untrainables". Those who are simply too lazy to try. They are legion.
But I'm not referring to untrainable people, I'm talking about the unwillingness of companies to train trainable assets, expecting to profit off someone else's labor and expense.
It didn't used to be like that.
If it's really true that the ratio of work needing top-notch talent to the supply is that out of balance, I have doubts that higher education stepping in will help. Since without anything else changing, running more people through the educational system might increase the number of stars, but it's also going to increase the number of deadheads.
Using the infamous Statistical Sample of 1, however, I'm simply doubtful that we're that badly off. My specialty is in the rarefied aspects of the profession and I've never had enough grunt-level help to keep me from the need to do a lot of stuff that requires lesser levels of skill. While only 10% of us may live up there, very few projects have more than 10% of the work that requires the skill and knowledge of that level.
If anything, I'd say less, since the mode de jour is to mashup existing works in favor of creating actual new products. With apologies for my non-existent French.
I've taught off and on for 30 years now, and over the entire time one thing has remained pretty constant: About 10% of the students completing the programs are really good; they will be star programmers and eventually software architects. Another 40% are competent - they would be able to carry out plans created by others, but should never carry any larger responsibility. Good, solid programmers. The remaining 50% manage to graduate, but frankly should never work directly in the field. Maybe they can be testers or write documentation, but never let them write a line of code in a real project.
Unfortunately, it's not always obvious what kind of person you are hiring. Add to this mix the people who are self-taught, who are coming from some other field, and may have wildly inappropriate ideas. Just as an example, I am currently working with a company whose star programmer (and he really is very good) comes from process control - and has zero clue about testing or quality control. He writes code and assumes that it works, and his company is so glad to have him (at a grunt-level salary) that they refuse to insult him by testing his code - so they deliver his work untested straight to clients - you can imagine how well this works.
tl;dr: There is no shortage of bodies in STEM fields. However, there is a shortage of good people who also have a solid education in and understand of their field. This is true in computer science, and almost certainly in every other STEM field out there.
Sturgeon's Law all over again. Which itself was a somewhat embittered re-observation of what had already been seen in the Pareto Principle (ratios may vary somewhat).
The saving grace of that is you don't need 100% of your staff to be rock stars. There's room for the stars, the supporting cast, and even a few janitors, and that actually makes a lot more economic sense, since those of us with star talents are neither being efficiently used when we have to do the grunt work nor likely to be very happy to so so.
What it more telling is that companies these days typically don't attempt to take their existing assets and train them to become worth more, they want to hire in new people who can "hit the ground running" - trained at someone else's expense, and if the existing people cannot be found a place, they're summarily discarded. Along with their accumulated knowledge of how the business works and how to efficiently support the business.
So not much different than PHP then...
(ducks)
It generates Perl?
The developer stole nothing, one element necessary for theft is intentionally depriving the owner of their property and the owner was never deprived of their property. This is conversion
In an interesting sense, you are technically correct because the owner is not being deprived of anything. The owner, Microsoft, still has the code and is thus deprived of nothing. This fits better under industrial espionage law. Unfortunately, case law precedent makes it possible to prosecute the actor under theft statutes.
Theft of secrets. Yes, the original blueprints, code, whatever, remains with the original owner. What has been stolen, however, was the exclusivity of the trade secrets. And trade secrets are only protected as long as they are secret.
This being Windows, 8, probably the most applicable route to prosecution is Illegal Disposal of Toxic Waste, but nevertheless...
Because torture is illegal. While this new drug can just be labeled as something else. And if as side effect this causes pain, discomfort, and madness, well that is unfortunate but these are criminals after all.
Just call it "enhanced interrogation" or something. And hint that if you don't do it, we'll be overrun with criminals. No problems.
I question the ethics of actual jail time. Putting someone in prison is worse than killing an old person: the earlier parts of your life are critical. What happens when a 25 year old goes to prison for 4 years? They may lose their major opportunities to develop a career, settle into a good relationship, raise a family, etc. Their career skills are out of date, they have criminal records, their dating pools in age range shrink and they need to aim at old cougars or flighty college girls who are just looking for older men to hook up with.
The problem is, many people in prison only got there because they worked really hard at it. They were undisciplined in school, abusive towards others, didn't work towards developing a career, and so forth. A lot of unsolved crimes get punished because the criminal later got lengthy sentences for other crimes also committed.
To date, we basically have 2 approaches: The rehab approach, which hasn't been all that successful up to now, or the punishment approach, which hasn't been successful either. The ultimate penalty: death, resolves the problem by getting rid of the problem-maker, but that's no more a solution that the one employed on the Gordian Knot. Jail time has the advantage of keeping criminals out of circulation, but only works as long as the criminal is incarcerated.
A 13 foot long, quarter ton chicken would NOT be the kind of animal I'd want to get angry. Or be anywhere near when it's hungry. Even though this article says they were "ecological generalists that fed upon vegetation, small animals, and perhaps eggs." I wouldn't want to be the one to test whether this bird/dinosaur would decide to add people to its diet.
For a sufficiently large bird, people are small animals!
It's all related to the most profitable configuration for the company.
The problem is, "profitable" usually actually means "what will get me (high-level exec) the most profit in the least time?" Often followed by "before I bail the ship I just helped sink."
Shore that up with bean-counter metrics, projections that fail to properly account for costs (especially intangible ones) and you can easily justify "saving" money by preferring the inexperienced. The only reason why anything has any quality anymore is that advanced manufacturing techniques and materials allows relatively incompetent and de-motivated employees to turn out items that exceed what was possible 50 years ago when low price and cheap junk were more obviously related. Software, however, isn't something that benefits much from microprocessor-controlled fabrication equipment, which is why cheap software is still cheap junk.
The old-time model of a corporation was based on the idea of a more or less permanent core population of differing levels of skill and experience. Since the 1980s the model has changed to the conceit that everyone is an interchangeable cog purchased at commodity prices, used up, and then discarded at will. Except senior management (who are obviously unique, indispensable and irreplaceable, thus mandating extreme compensation).
It's probably more accurate to say that they said nothing unless they had to and then they lied.
The oil that 'spilled' into the gulf in 2010 was a naturally occurring substance, as evidenced by how easily the environment dealt with it.
I think a lot of Gulf folks in the seafood industry would have something to say about "how easily the environment dealt with it".
They're still digging oil out of the beaches in Alaska and the Exxon-Valdez incident was a long time ago now.
We don't dig up fossil fuels out of the ground and eat them.
What do you think saccharin is made of?
Seems like the NSA and CIA might be by nature beyond oversight. Their job includes assuming that the worst scenarios are possible, which then justifies any action to thwart them, including lying to their overseers in order to keep doing illegal things they think is necessary to prevent those worst possible scenarios. It's bureaucratic paranoia resulting in functional schizophrenia that makes sense within the hive mind but not within the greater public mind that employs them to keep us safe.
I tend to doubt that. First, because we do have enough latitude under the law for investigation, infiltration, and other counter-measures. The issue at hand is that the limits of the law have been exceeded by the wrong people at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons. If you want monitoring of domestic communications, that's the FBI's job, for example. If you must spy on every trivial communication of every citizen, you need to provide probable cause as to why that should be essential.
Secondly, because the action-movie scenarios are mostly fictional, and many action movies even admit to that, because they're predicated on a loose-cannon hero taking on the bad guys in defiance of the people who are already assigned to handle the situation.
Thirdly, because in actual practice, the really bad stuff has not happened because of lack of intelligence via authorized channels, but because the intelligence wasn't acted on. The exception to that is that there is relatively little foreknowledge of the domestic berserker attacks, but there's no indication that tapping everyone's phone would help there anyway. Those people tend to keep to themselves. In fact, that's often one of the biggest warning signals.
In the mean time, we have what amounts to an old-time invasion of the Crimea and we blew the moral superiority we could have used to counter Russia by invading Iraq. And the intelligence experts apparently had no suggestions on how to head off the crisis despite all their unrestrained actions.
But I can't help but feel that the very nature of our Government has morphed. Institutions like the NSA aren't bothered by public perception -- they have grown into their own. They are beholden only to their own agenda and will do whatever it takes (lying to congress, fabricating effectiveness) to maintain and expand their power. Obama will do some hand-wringing on TV but in the end nothing will change.
To be fair, public perception shouldn't count. Public action, on the other hand...
And if the American public doesn't take some serious action, they'll have only themselves to blame when people laugh at their assertions of being the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.