I used to work at TEEX (which has some good free cybersecurity courses, btw) and they enforce a policy of alpha testing followed by beta testing. Even minor changes to already-released courses require an appropriate degree of testing. All changes must be approved by a separate department, a curriculum department which is independent of the departments which run the various types of courses.
> they want to be productive and make personal goals
"Working" as a scribe, copying books with pen and ink, isn't really being productive when the printer on the shelf can produce much better copies, much faster.
Scrubbing clothes against a washboard, pretending the washing machine doesn't exist, isn't being productive, it's wasting your time.
Sitting at a desk all day adding up columns of numbers is a wssting your time, given that a computer can get the job done a billion times faster, and with far fewer errors.
It is not productive to spend your time doing something a machine can do better and faster.
Productive work includes writing something interesting that will be printed out on the printer, or finding ways to save trees by reducing the need print and mail things (such as inventing the internet).
In my last couple weeks at my last employer I worked hard to get them ready for my departure - documenting things, walking people through tasks that had been my responsibility, helping review resumes for my replacement, etc. I also stressed repeatedly that it seemed likely they would occasionally come across some code or configuration I had done and it would be helpful to ask me about it - so please ask! I told them if I could save them two or hours trying to figure something out, by me taking five minutes to answer a question, I wanted to do that for them.
18 months later I still stay in touch with my old boss occasionally, and she's said if I ever want to come back they'll make room for me. So I wouldn't say I burned any bridges there. I made the best choice for my family, just as I'd expect them to make the best choice for the organization, and I did what I could to ease the transition for them.
I mentioned doing what's best for the organization. At one company I own, I once fired myself. I founded the company and led it for fifteen years. After fifteen years, I was burned out and wasn't being very productive. So I fired the unproductive employee (myself) and put other people in charge. That put me unemployed, so I went and got a different job (the job mentioned above, my employer prior to my current employment).
So actually not only would I understand if someone let me go, I've actually fired myself. It worked out fine - I enjoyed new challenges in the job, and the old company (which I still own, but don't work for) kept going without me working there.
> Where do you work? would you be ok with your employer coming up to you and for no reason telling you to clean out your desk and get out? would you be ok with not getting any compensation at all, just told to GTFO? > they are not special
I wouldn't really complain if they did, just as I could quit for any reason or no reason. I quit my last job, simply because I got a much better offer. My last employer was good to me, yet I "fired" them when something better came along. My wife decided to quit her job last week, just because she wanted to. (But then she got a promotion an hour before she planned to resign.) It's perfectly fair that on the other side my employer can also end the employment for whatever reason. BUT we don't live in Ontario. Ontario has laws about what the employer has to do. Since Blackberry hired people in Ontario, they need to follow the employment laws in Ontario.
> I mean, I'm sure I'm a terrible person, but surely everyone else can't be as bad as all that, right?:)
I'm naturally a bit of an asshole, so I work hard on being pleasant.
> that people will go along with it because it makes sense and he's asking nicely... And I particularly try to be nice to my bosses, my wife, and one or two other people who can easily affect my life. So the two aren't mutually exclusive - perhaps he's asking nicely, amd CEOs know it's a good idea to be nice to him.:)
Perhaps he's not going to force the issue, but if you're AT&T or Samsung and you're presented with an easy way to get on the FCC chairman's good side, you do it.
A more forceful way of saying the same thing would be:
I may not have the authority to force you to turn on the FM chip, but I do have the authority to kick you in the balls re spectrum allocation and a thousand other things you really care about.
Not that I'm saying he's making a statement quite that forceful. He's expressed an easy way for companies to get on his good side. If you are a peon in the IT department of your company, and the director of manufacturing mentions that your cubicle sure is a mess, you probably tidy it up - even though he's not in your direct chain of command and won't officially order you to tidy up.
The quote at bottom of Slashdot earlier today was: How many teamsters does it take to change a lightbulb? 17, you got a problem with that?
The chairman has told the companies "I (who can royally fuck you over at my leisure) think you should enable the FM chip. I'm not going to waste my time with the whole bureaucratic rule making process for just this one thing right now, but I think it would be a good idea for you to enable it before I start on the next round of rules I put on you."
Mabu, I see that you are writing. Using proper English, even, capitalizing most of the proper names you use.
I assume you didn't come out of the womb writing Slashdot posts, you learned how to write. That proves to me that you are capable of learning new things. You can probably make a guess about something, then when you find out differently, you've learned. Your first guess was incorrect, you learn something, cool. You're smarter afterwards.
Multiple people have pointed out to you that your first guess was wrong. All the major "bad" tech laws, DMCA, CDA, COPA, etc were all originally sponsored by and/or signed into law by Democrats. (There *is* a reason the criticism of Dems is "big government Democrats). You are capable of learning something from these people, of ending today smarter than you were yesterday. Or you can put your fingers in your ears, whine "neh neh neh I can't hear you". The latter is called "willful ignorance", intentionally working to avoid learning anything new. Your choice, my friend.
I've worked at companies with 2,000 employees or less that have someone designated as being in charge of security. Many companies don't, that doesn't mean they can't or shouldn't.
> the CFO is often an external accountant and not a real CFO; they're auditing and doing tax work, and providing guidance
A similar model can be used for security. Companies like Alert Logic provide the backing of thousands of security experts in a 24/7 Security Operations Center at a cost starting at dozens of dollars per month. One company (which is a one-person conpany) pays me $100/month, which buys them a couple hours of my time every two or three months when they (he) make changes I should consult on or review. For $100/month he gets a career security professional with 20 years of experience who knows the company's systems inside and out at this point.
There's no excuse to not have anyone designated as being in charge of security.
Security is the responsibility of the CSO. Don't have a CSO? Well *there's* your problem. The board and the other Cs should have made sure there was a CSO.
Obviously, if the board and president blow off the CSO's warnings, override his decisions, and don't provide the needed budget, that's on them. It is the responsibility of thr CSO to document those facts.
If I could quickly and easily switch users on my phone, I'd immediately set up three profiles to keep things separate:
Ray@work Ray@play RaysKid
No more accidentally triggering auto-complete of a personal URL while at work. I can let the kid play a game on the phone while I'm driving, knowing the toddler won't be clicking on important work or personal stuff.
I should have said AT LEAST 88 of them are in the low orbit. The rest of them probably are as well. So no real problem of creating space junk here. They'll be gone in about five years.
88 of the satellites are in an orbit less than 500KM altitude. Due to drag from the thermosphere, they'll gradually slow down and fall to a lower altitude. They'll break up and burn up at about 80KM three to five years from now.
Absolutely of you're programming a device that connects to the internet, you should understand a bit about security and have a security mindset. If your device won't get regular updates, this is even more true.
Where does C fit in? It's unnecessary, if you just want to learn basic security best practices.
If you want to really understand how exploits work, and some advanced protections, you need to understand how your program and your data are arranged in memory, what actually happens in the hardware to when your asynchronous timer goes off, etc. For that, C is the language to learn. Java programmers know how to use Java. C programmers know how Java works, internally. The bad guys writing exploits are (typically) C programmers, they can defeat your PHP or Python program because they know how PHP and Python work internally.
You've always used languages with automatic garbage collection, so you mostly don't have to worry about freeing memory after you use it? Great. You don't know how and when memory is freed, and what happens when a hacker exploits a "use after free" to execute code that he's put into the variable you think no longer exists.
To be clear, I'm not saying that people need to *use* C to write secure software. I'm saying that if you *learn* C, you'll learn a lot that applies to advanced security knowledge in any language. Higher level languages are most commonly written in C; if you know how things are done in C you'll understand what your high-level language is doing behind the scenes. You'll understand your Ruby software much better if you understand how the same program works in C.
> Dogs cannot generalize at all. They do not know if another animal is a dog, cat, zebra, see-saw, ball or anything else. To a dog, every dog, cat, human, car, squirrel is different.
It could theoretically be possible that dogs don't put other creatures in categories, that each individual is wholly distinct, not part of a group.
> which is why so many people think their dog is "racist". A dog raised by a black man will tend to bark at more white people than black people and vice versa.
This could also be possible, that dogs DO think in terms of categories, such as "black people" and "white people", rather than treating each individual as wholly distinct.
Either of your statements are possible, and they are direct opposites. If one is true, the other is completely false.
A ceiling fan moves about ten times as much air as a hair dryer. The hair dryer is far louder because smaller is louder, for the same airflow (or even 90% less airlfow).
Because of the physics of propellers, quads are workable in small scale (toys) but the efficiency is horrendous in large scale. Experimental helicopters have been built with two and four propellers for many, many years, but never commercially because they are horribly inefficient.
The thrust of a prop is proportional to SQUARE of blade length. In other words, it's proportional to the swept disk area. A 10 foot prop makes over ten times as much thrust as a 3 foot prop, so having four props of 3 feet each is very inefficient compared to a single 10 foot prop.
On a toy sized example, you can live with the inefficiency to get lower mechanical complexity due to another issue with scaling. Basically, for each dimenaion to scale linearly, weight is cubed. Consider a boom that is 1cm X 1cm x 10cm on the small craft. We want to scale it by a factor of ten. It becomes ten times as long, 10cm X 10cm x 100cm. Not only is is ten times as long, it's also ten times as thick and ten times as wide - a thousand times as much total mass, a thousand times as heavy.
Because of that cube calculation as you scale up and down, very small (toy size) craft can have phenomenal power-to-weight ratios and get away with stuff that's not possible in full-sized craft. For a full-sized craft, power-to-weight is a very significant issue. You can't have tiny, inefficient props on a full-size craft, you need a long prop which cubes the thrust.
Don't be too shocked that according to Google's lawyers, Google is right. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't, but what's quoted is Google's argument. The other side may very well reply "Wtf? Did you forget to read the entire first half of the patent?":)
Most of the time when a patent story shows up on Slashdot I read the patent to see what it actually claims. I haven't done the research on these. So I'm taking no position on who might be right or wrong. I'm only pointing that it's a bit silly to take a position on a patent without knowing what the patent says, or anything more than the very general field the patent is related to, but that's common around here.
-- mere recitation of a generic computer cannot transform a *patent-ineligible* idea into a patent-eligible invention --
In other words, if you have something that's not patentable in the first place, adding the words "with a computer" doesn't magically make it patentable. It's either patentable or not, saying "with a computer" doesn't change that, the court ruled.
By the same reasoning, if you start with something that *is* patentable, having a computer involved doesn't make it magically unpatentable.
One can make a machine out of transistors which compresses sound in a new and useful way, and if it's new and useful it's patentable. We'll call this machine "Machine A". If you invented Machine A and I sold copies without your permission, I would be in violation of your patent. That's true even if the copies I'm selling are "some assemby required". If assembling it according to the instructions I provide results in violating your patent, you could sue me.
An electronic machine like Machine A can be built by hand, or with tools. I can instruct another machine called a "pick and place" machine to build "Machine A" by picking up transistors and putting them on a circuit board. Either way I end up with Machine A, whether I build it by hand or use a pick and place machine to build it. If I'm building your machine without a license, I violate your patent whether I build it by hand or I use a pick-and-place to build it. I end up with your patented Machine A.
I can also build Machine A by starting with a huge grid of transistors and REMOVING the ones I don't want. I'll still end up with the same Machine A. That's called a PGA - it's building electronic devices by carving, destroying the parts I don't want. That's another method of building Machine A and violating your patent. To build Machine A from a PGA, I type up a precise specification of what Machine A to be, then the PGA machine builds me a copy of machine A by disconnecting all the transistors that aren't needed for Machine A. An ASIC is similar - it builds electronic machines from a set of instructions.
Here's the interesting bit - to specify what ASIC or PGA I want built, I can use a language called C. Basically, I build Machine A in C, then my PGA "printer" makes a hardcopy, with transistors. That's the same C language that we use to build the Linux kernel, and most system software. The same machine, specified using the same language, can be "printed out" as a physical manifestation, or run internally to the computer. Either way, it's still Machine A, your invention. If your invention is patentable and patented, it's patented whether I build it by hand, with a pick-and-place, with an ASIC, or with a compiler.
Yeah I agree the problem is lying about it. He's the incoming national security advisor. He should have said "yeah, I talked to the Russian ambassador, and I'm preparing my recommendations and report for the President based on those discussions". Just blow it off as doing his job, albeit prematurely, before the inauguration.
In theory he might have violated the Logan Act, but in 200 years nobody has ever been prosecuted under the Logan Act (one person has been indicted). As a member of the incoming administration's foreign policy team, it's not *that* weird that he would talk to diplomats from other nations and start getting to them and their positions.
Not that I'm saying it was hunky-dory to have those conversations at that time, but he certainly could have made it seem like no big deal, if he didn't lie about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to work at TEEX (which has some good free cybersecurity courses, btw) and they enforce a policy of alpha testing followed by beta testing. Even minor changes to already-released courses require an appropriate degree of testing. All changes must be approved by a separate department, a curriculum department which is independent of the departments which run the various types of courses.
> they want to be productive and make personal goals
"Working" as a scribe, copying books with pen and ink, isn't really being productive when the printer on the shelf can produce much better copies, much faster.
Scrubbing clothes against a washboard, pretending the washing machine doesn't exist, isn't being productive, it's wasting your time.
Sitting at a desk all day adding up columns of numbers is a wssting your time, given that a computer can get the job done a billion times faster, and with far fewer errors.
It is not productive to spend your time doing something a machine can do better and faster.
Productive work includes writing something interesting that will be printed out on the printer, or finding ways to save trees by reducing the need print and mail things (such as inventing the internet).
Can it block repetitive, spammy ads posted on Slashdot by APK?
Mentioning your software once in response to this story is acceptable, if the post is short and tries to be informative.
Posting about it twice per story is annoying.
Six or seven long posts full of bold text is spam. I may need to dig out my old APK spam blocker again.
In my last couple weeks at my last employer I worked hard to get them ready for my departure - documenting things, walking people through tasks that had been my responsibility, helping review resumes for my replacement, etc. I also stressed repeatedly that it seemed likely they would occasionally come across some code or configuration I had done and it would be helpful to ask me about it - so please ask! I told them if I could save them two or hours trying to figure something out, by me taking five minutes to answer a question, I wanted to do that for them.
18 months later I still stay in touch with my old boss occasionally, and she's said if I ever want to come back they'll make room for me. So I wouldn't say I burned any bridges there. I made the best choice for my family, just as I'd expect them to make the best choice for the organization, and I did what I could to ease the transition for them.
I mentioned doing what's best for the organization. At one company I own, I once fired myself. I founded the company and led it for fifteen years. After fifteen years, I was burned out and wasn't being very productive. So I fired the unproductive employee (myself) and put other people in charge. That put me unemployed, so I went and got a different job (the job mentioned above, my employer prior to my current employment).
So actually not only would I understand if someone let me go, I've actually fired myself. It worked out fine - I enjoyed new challenges in the job, and the old company (which I still own, but don't work for) kept going without me working there.
> Where do you work? would you be ok with your employer coming up to you and for no reason telling you to clean out your desk and get out? would you be ok with not getting any compensation at all, just told to GTFO?
> they are not special
I wouldn't really complain if they did, just as I could quit for any reason or no reason. I quit my last job, simply because I got a much better offer. My last employer was good to me, yet I "fired" them when something better came along. My wife decided to quit her job last week, just because she wanted to. (But then she got a promotion an hour before she planned to resign.) It's perfectly fair that on the other side my employer can also end the employment for whatever reason. BUT we don't live in Ontario. Ontario has laws about what the employer has to do. Since Blackberry hired people in Ontario, they need to follow the employment laws in Ontario.
Let me try being slightly less subtle. Let's fill in the missing letters:
Muscle collagen is produced by _uscl_ _ell_ .
So if you have muscle cells growing, they'll probably produce _olla_en.
What produces these "non-cellular proteins" which wouldn't exist in a mass a muscle cells?
You may well be 100% right.
> I mean, I'm sure I'm a terrible person, but surely everyone else can't be as bad as all that, right? :)
I'm naturally a bit of an asshole, so I work hard on being pleasant.
> that people will go along with it because it makes sense and he's asking nicely ... And I particularly try to be nice to my bosses, my wife, and one or two other people who can easily affect my life. So the two aren't mutually exclusive - perhaps he's asking nicely, amd CEOs know it's a good idea to be nice to him. :)
Perhaps he's not going to force the issue, but if you're AT&T or Samsung and you're presented with an easy way to get on the FCC chairman's good side, you do it.
A more forceful way of saying the same thing would be:
I may not have the authority to force you to turn on the FM chip, but I do have the authority to kick you in the balls re spectrum allocation and a thousand other things you really care about.
Not that I'm saying he's making a statement quite that forceful. He's expressed an easy way for companies to get on his good side. If you are a peon in the IT department of your company, and the director of manufacturing mentions that your cubicle sure is a mess, you probably tidy it up - even though he's not in your direct chain of command and won't officially order you to tidy up.
The quote at bottom of Slashdot earlier today was:
How many teamsters does it take to change a lightbulb?
17, you got a problem with that?
The chairman has told the companies "I (who can royally fuck you over at my leisure) think you should enable the FM chip. I'm not going to waste my time with the whole bureaucratic rule making process for just this one thing right now, but I think it would be a good idea for you to enable it before I start on the next round of rules I put on you."
Mabu, I see that you are writing. Using proper English, even, capitalizing most of the proper names you use.
I assume you didn't come out of the womb writing Slashdot posts, you learned how to write. That proves to me that you are capable of learning new things. You can probably make a guess about something, then when you find out differently, you've learned. Your first guess was incorrect, you learn something, cool. You're smarter afterwards.
Multiple people have pointed out to you that your first guess was wrong. All the major "bad" tech laws, DMCA, CDA, COPA, etc were all originally sponsored by and/or signed into law by Democrats. (There *is* a reason the criticism of Dems is "big government Democrats). You are capable of learning something from these people, of ending today smarter than you were yesterday. Or you can put your fingers in your ears, whine "neh neh neh I can't hear you". The latter is called "willful ignorance", intentionally working to avoid learning anything new. Your choice, my friend.
Before posting some idea that came from your ass, look it up.
DMCA: Clinton
CDA: Clinton
COPA: Clinton
DRM (criminalize breaking it): Clinton
IDIOT: globaljustin
I've worked at companies with 2,000 employees or less that have someone designated as being in charge of security. Many companies don't, that doesn't mean they can't or shouldn't.
> the CFO is often an external accountant and not a real CFO; they're auditing and doing tax work, and providing guidance
A similar model can be used for security. Companies like Alert Logic provide the backing of thousands of security experts in a 24/7 Security Operations Center at a cost starting at dozens of dollars per month. One company (which is a one-person conpany) pays me $100/month, which buys them a couple hours of my time every two or three months when they (he) make changes I should consult on or review. For $100/month he gets a career security professional with 20 years of experience who knows the company's systems inside and out at this point.
There's no excuse to not have anyone designated as being in charge of security.
Security is the responsibility of the CSO.
Don't have a CSO? Well *there's* your problem. The board and the other Cs should have made sure there was a CSO.
Obviously, if the board and president blow off the CSO's warnings, override his decisions, and don't provide the needed budget, that's on them. It is the responsibility of thr CSO to document those facts.
If I could quickly and easily switch users on my phone, I'd immediately set up three profiles to keep things separate:
Ray@work
Ray@play
RaysKid
No more accidentally triggering auto-complete of a personal URL while at work. I can let the kid play a game on the phone while I'm driving, knowing the toddler won't be clicking on important work or personal stuff.
I should have said AT LEAST 88 of them are in the low orbit. The rest of them probably are as well. So no real problem of creating space junk here. They'll be gone in about five years.
88 of the satellites are in an orbit less than 500KM altitude. Due to drag from the thermosphere, they'll gradually slow down and fall to a lower altitude. They'll break up and burn up at about 80KM three to five years from now.
Career network security programmer here.
Absolutely of you're programming a device that connects to the internet, you should understand a bit about security and have a security mindset. If your device won't get regular updates, this is even more true.
Where does C fit in? It's unnecessary, if you just want to learn basic security best practices.
If you want to really understand how exploits work, and some advanced protections, you need to understand how your program and your data are arranged in memory, what actually happens in the hardware to when your asynchronous timer goes off, etc. For that, C is the language to learn. Java programmers know how to use Java. C programmers know how Java works, internally. The bad guys writing exploits are (typically) C programmers, they can defeat your PHP or Python program because they know how PHP and Python work internally.
You've always used languages with automatic garbage collection, so you mostly don't have to worry about freeing memory after you use it? Great. You don't know how and when memory is freed, and what happens when a hacker exploits a "use after free" to execute code that he's put into the variable you think no longer exists.
To be clear, I'm not saying that people need to *use* C to write secure software. I'm saying that if you *learn* C, you'll learn a lot that applies to advanced security knowledge in any language. Higher level languages are most commonly written in C; if you know how things are done in C you'll understand what your high-level language is doing behind the scenes. You'll understand your Ruby software much better if you understand how the same program works in C.
> Dogs cannot generalize at all. They do not know if another animal is a dog, cat, zebra, see-saw, ball or anything else. To a dog, every dog, cat, human, car, squirrel is different.
It could theoretically be possible that dogs don't put other creatures in categories, that each individual is wholly distinct, not part of a group.
> which is why so many people think their dog is "racist". A dog raised by a black man will tend to bark at more white people than black people and vice versa.
This could also be possible, that dogs DO think in terms of categories, such as "black people" and "white people", rather than treating each individual as wholly distinct.
Either of your statements are possible, and they are direct opposites. If one is true, the other is completely false.
About noise:
A ceiling fan moves about ten times as much air as a hair dryer. The hair dryer is far louder because smaller is louder, for the same airflow (or even 90% less airlfow).
Because of the physics of propellers, quads are workable in small scale (toys) but the efficiency is horrendous in large scale. Experimental helicopters have been built with two and four propellers for many, many years, but never commercially because they are horribly inefficient.
The thrust of a prop is proportional to SQUARE of blade length. In other words, it's proportional to the swept disk area. A 10 foot prop makes over ten times as much thrust as a 3 foot prop, so having four props of 3 feet each is very inefficient compared to a single 10 foot prop.
On a toy sized example, you can live with the inefficiency to get lower mechanical complexity due to another issue with scaling. Basically, for each dimenaion to scale linearly, weight is cubed. Consider a boom that is 1cm X 1cm x 10cm on the small craft. We want to scale it by a factor of ten. It becomes ten times as long, 10cm X 10cm x 100cm. Not only is is ten times as long, it's also ten times as thick and ten times as wide - a thousand times as much total mass, a thousand times as heavy.
Because of that cube calculation as you scale up and down, very small (toy size) craft can have phenomenal power-to-weight ratios and get away with stuff that's not possible in full-sized craft. For a full-sized craft, power-to-weight is a very significant issue. You can't have tiny, inefficient props on a full-size craft, you need a long prop which cubes the thrust.
Thanks for the research. Much appreciated.
> From google's reply: ...
> Its also shocking
Don't be too shocked that according to Google's lawyers, Google is right. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't, but what's quoted is Google's argument. The other side may very well reply "Wtf? Did you forget to read the entire first half of the patent?" :)
Most of the time when a patent story shows up on Slashdot I read the patent to see what it actually claims. I haven't done the research on these. So I'm taking no position on who might be right or wrong. I'm only pointing that it's a bit silly to take a position on a patent without knowing what the patent says, or anything more than the very general field the patent is related to, but that's common around here.
Here's what the court ruled in Alice:
--
mere recitation of a generic computer cannot transform a *patent-ineligible* idea into a patent-eligible invention
--
In other words, if you have something that's not patentable in the first place, adding the words "with a computer" doesn't magically make it patentable. It's either patentable or not, saying "with a computer" doesn't change that, the court ruled.
By the same reasoning, if you start with something that *is* patentable, having a computer involved doesn't make it magically unpatentable.
One can make a machine out of transistors which compresses sound in a new and useful way, and if it's new and useful it's patentable. We'll call this machine "Machine A". If you invented Machine A and I sold copies without your permission, I would be in violation of your patent. That's true even if the copies I'm selling are "some assemby required". If assembling it according to the instructions I provide results in violating your patent, you could sue me.
An electronic machine like Machine A can be built by hand, or with tools. I can instruct another machine called a "pick and place" machine to build "Machine A" by picking up transistors and putting them on a circuit board. Either way I end up with Machine A, whether I build it by hand or use a pick and place machine to build it. If I'm building your machine without a license, I violate your patent whether I build it by hand or I use a pick-and-place to build it. I end up with your patented Machine A.
I can also build Machine A by starting with a huge grid of transistors and REMOVING the ones I don't want. I'll still end up with the same Machine A. That's called a PGA - it's building electronic devices by carving, destroying the parts I don't want. That's another method of building Machine A and violating your patent. To build Machine A from a PGA, I type up a precise specification of what Machine A to be, then the PGA machine builds me a copy of machine A by disconnecting all the transistors that aren't needed for Machine A. An ASIC is similar - it builds electronic machines from a set of instructions.
Here's the interesting bit - to specify what ASIC or PGA I want built, I can use a language called C. Basically, I build Machine A in C, then my PGA "printer" makes a hardcopy, with transistors. That's the same C language that we use to build the Linux kernel, and most system software. The same machine, specified using the same language, can be "printed out" as a physical manifestation, or run internally to the computer. Either way, it's still Machine A, your invention. If your invention is patentable and patented, it's patented whether I build it by hand, with a pick-and-place, with an ASIC, or with a compiler.
Yeah I agree the problem is lying about it. He's the incoming national security advisor. He should have said "yeah, I talked to the Russian ambassador, and I'm preparing my recommendations and report for the President based on those discussions". Just blow it off as doing his job, albeit prematurely, before the inauguration.
In theory he might have violated the Logan Act, but in
200 years nobody has ever been prosecuted under the Logan Act (one person has been indicted). As a member of the incoming administration's foreign policy team, it's not *that* weird that he would talk to diplomats from other nations and start getting to them and their positions.
Not that I'm saying it was hunky-dory to have those conversations at that time, but he certainly could have made it seem like no big deal, if he didn't lie about it.