Makes sense to me. Software/hardware vulnerabilities are worthless once patched. If this group is tasked with having a way into any system, their main focus is going to be to not-only find exploits, but also to protect those exploits for future use. I have no doubt that such a group exists, and that their collection of exploits is extensive.
Hopefully those exploits are used against our enemies and not against us, but that's probably just a silly hope.
If our guys have the day one exploits, their guys have them too. They (including Iran, China, Russia) have more reason to use cyberwarfare than we do, given the relative size of our military investments. We do it as an afterthought, they do it because we would pound the pemmican out of them in a conventional war.
The problem with a drone is you're introducing a single point of failure that you can't fully protect
does anybody else see the irony here? Isn't a pilot a 'single point of failure'?
This is like space exploration. Everybody wants to go, but robots do SUCH a better job of it. Just like they will doing YOUR job in another few years...
It's also worth pointing out that outside of research, these ultra-high mileage vehicles are rather pointless. MPG is the inverse of fuel consumption, so higher MPG means smaller savings. e.g. Consider a trip of 300 miles in a variety of different cars
The point of comparison metrics is to compare utility of different vehicles. One obvious utility metric of a car is how far it will drive given a tank full of gasoline. If I compare a car that gets 50 MPG with one that gets 250 MPG, I know it will go 5x as far on the same tank of gasoline. That makes the car 5x as efficient, does it not? Since MPG is defined as an efficiency metric, I think it fits that name admirably.
Now, L/100km is another metric used. Say you have three cars, one that uses 5L/100km, one that uses 6L/100km, and one that uses 7L/100km. You know that the one that uses less fuel is better, but how much better? How much farther can you go on a full tank of gas? If the tank size is T, then you can go T/.05 for the 5L/100km, T/.06 for the 6L/100km, etc. Does that help you determine the numeric value of efficiency? Only if you have a calculator handy, right?
I'd say that the formula for the utility (price you would pay) for a car is something like C1 + MPG*C2, where C1 is a dollar amount based on styling, speed, etc, and C2 is a conversion constant. This valuation is done intuitively when looking at cars. The same formula using L/100km would invert MPG, and is thus far less intuitive when valuing a car. So, in my view, the MPG is a better way to measure value, makes more sense from a usability perspective, and is simply more rational.
The obvious advantage to the US scheme is that you can figure out how far you can go on a given amount of fuel without doing division. If you have a car that gets 2.5gp100m (to use your units) and you buy 10 gallons of gas, you go how far? If you instead think your car gets 40mpg, then you obviously can go 400 miles.
Since you buy your fuel in gallons, NOT in miles, the miles/gallon (or km/liter) measure seems much more reasonable.
If you are comparing how far a car can get for a particular cost, it is clear that if you can get twice as far on the same amount of gasoline, the car has twice the utility per dollar spent on gasoline. So, for that reason, it also make sense to compare in miles/gallon.
Calling nuclear power a zero emission source of electricity may be a bit of exaggeration but it's as close to zero as we are going to get.
Zero emission of CO2, not zero emission of radiation. Chernobyl? The near zero probability of a catastrophe per year per plant, multiplied by the number of plants, gives the probability of disaster of some kind around the earth. It is NOT zero. We got lucky in Fukushima. There are lots more potential disasters out there, waiting to happen, including terrorist attacks.
When is the last time you heard of a catastrophe at a solar or wind farm? This doesn't even consider the disposal of waste products. Nuclear sounds good, particularly when we are up against the threat of global ecological disaster, but it causes more problems than it solves, and is far more expensive to implement than solar or wind farms. I have solar on my roof, and it basically pays for my electricity. If new home construction was mandated to be zero carbon footprint, it could be done, easily and cheaply, using passive and active solar construction. With a bit of excess capacity, we could drive to work using our electric cars powered from the solar on our roofs. We need better large storage. We have LOTS of storage in the form of potential energy; just use excess capacity to pump water uphill...
Sadly, we simply don't have the will yet to make this happen. With 1/2 the American people believing crap like the original article here, we simply won't have time to fix the problems before millions of people are displaced.
Most metal does not last long in the presence of oxygen, it corrodes and disappears. Even stone monuments only last 10,000 years or so, due to weathering. The reality is that after a few million years, all of the crap we dug up or built in the last 10,000 years would be fairly evenly distributed over what land mass that had not been subducted under some other continental shelf.
The interesting thing is that if you consider ALL the fossils that have been dug up, our 10,000 year experiment in technology would almost certainly be missing from the record of any future 'intelligent' lifeform.
The main thing we would leave would be a record of environmental catastrophe, another mass extinction event. Oh, that and a few bits of machinery on the moon.
Ever heard of C4? Try using an accelerometer connected to a detonator. Using FPV technology you can fly an RC plane into a politician for about $1000. You could even cut the motor at 300m and dive it in quietly. Nobody would see it coming. If you wanted to keep the plane, there are circuits to drop the bomb using RC controls.
The C4 would cost extra, of course...
This is one of the WORST things that could happen for me, personally, since I like to fly RC aircraft, and drones in particular. It will now be a 'big deal' to fly drones and RC aircraft. Thankfully, it'll probably take a few months before the patriot act is extended to prohibit RC aircraft and drones. "To protect us from the evil-doers!".
Actually, the Ptolemaic system was much more accurate than the Copernican system, and was based on observation. It explained the observation that there was no parallax when observing the fixed stars. Only better technology, and truly mind-bending conceptions of the size of the universe could correct that flawed observation and change everybody's mind about it. The system also explained the fact that the earth did not appear to be moving. That was a huge hurtle for the ancient, since they believed Aristotle's view that for something to keep moving, something had to keep pushing it.
The Ptolemaic system was used for 1500 years to predict events in the heavens. It may not have been 'right', but nobody cared. That is similar to the quantum dynamics, where nobody really knows why it works, but can use it to make accurate predictions about things like quantum tunneling.
However, the ideas of relativity are of a different kind. They are much deeper, in the sense that science thinks they know what is going on, at least at some level. Relativity provides an explanation, as opposed to just a way to compute the result.
Also, relativity already allows FTL, in a sense; if you take a spaceship, and accelerate it at 1g continually towards the Andromeda galaxy, the space between you and Andromeda will contract, and your clocks will slow. You still won't be able to measure your speed relative to the galaxy (or anything else) as anything faster than the speed of light, but you'll get there in your lifetime.
However, if you decide to turn around and return to tell your friends about it, you'll come back to where the earth was, but millions of years in earth's future. That will happen due to the fact that your clock (and the atoms in your body) will be slowed by the accelerations, effectively taking a shortcut through spacetime.
Although I believe that the national security apparatus in a democracy must be watched, and some of the revelations to be disquieting in light of what has been going on at the IRS, I don't find this a hard choice.
Apparently, the IRS was also using keyword searches to help with their workload, using keywords such as 'progressive', 'israel', 'occupy', etc. They weren't only looking for conservative groups, they were just using common sense in trying to get through the massive influx of applications that "citizen's united" created. So, you don't even have to be worried about the IRS!
I know that cisco has facilities for wiretapping built into their routers; I used to work at cisco, on IOS. There were bits of the code that were there to allow law enforcement to control and wiretap flows without the knowledge of root level users (ie, sysadmins). It is documented in the cisco user manuals as 'lawful intercept'. Feel free to look at the user docs.
Unfortunately, knowing how to get the flows doesn't help when the ends are encrypted, unless you have access to the one time pads, or the bad guys are silly enough to depend on NP hard encryption.
The problem isn't the professors. It is the moronic, half baked programmers who pick up a methodology without really understanding it, misuse it, and then whine about it afterwards in an attempt to deflect blame.
Object oriented programming is a case in point. Everybody said it was great. However, unless you were quite dedicated at designing and factoring things before you started, the end result was invariably a hideous mass of scar tissue, oozing blood and puss. So, some shops now are culturally antagonistic towards oo design (cough cisco) precisely because they were burned by being stupid and arrogant. C++ was actually excluded from IOS (the original IOS, which is currently running most of the routers in the world) until about 5 years ago. It was only outside forces that changed things, acquisitions that had to be merged, that forced the issue. It is still frowned upon, except in these sorts of cases.
They already have millions of reviewers looking at the crap all the time. Just put a 'is it copied?' button next to the video, and after 100 clicks have somebody look at it.
Because biographies are obviously highly objective sources of information. No thanks I'll stick to getting my knowledge on the topic from more objective historical references thank you very much.
Sigh. You are talking about they guy who wrote the Einstein, Franklin, and Kissinger bios. You know nothing, and you are also unwilling to learn. Good for you, keep that anti-apple bias as pure as you can. Don't let it be corrupted by facts. We all know how annoying and inconvenient they can be.
I don't think your opinion in your final paragraph makes you a groupie because suddenly you're agreeing with my original point - that Jobs' skill was in running a company and marketing. I do however think all the bollocks giving Jobs credit for things that weren't his idea makes you a groupie though.
My argument all along (aside from the divergence towards your suggestion Jobs was responsible for ideas that weren't his) has simply been that Jobs strengths weren't technical, hence calling him a "technical genius" is fucking stupid, that's all.
I never said anything like what you apparently misread in my post. I never said Jobs was a 'technical genius'. (What I know of Jobs is that he was a mediocre engineer. He was never gifted with the ability to design a system, or to build new tech from scratch. That all came from the Isaacson Biography, by the way.) Your animosity towards anything related to Jobs or Apple seems to have blinded you. Go read my post again, I have been saying the same thing all along. You owe me an apology, and you owe yourself a remedial reading class.
Sorry but a lot of this is just patently false. Especially so the latter ones - my Nokia 7650 from 5 years before the iPhone came out had a camera, apps, ran ports of games like Doom, had a web browser and so on - the idea of a phone as a computer was determined many many years before Apple even considered seriously entering the market. HP's iPaq range was even closer in this regard when they turned them from PDAs into phones.
Sigh. There were also lots of MP3 players before the ipod made them mainstream. I was not asserting that Steve Jobs invented the telephone. I was saying that before the iphone, folks didn't consider giving up their laptops. The app store built a wonderful framework for building and monetizing real world applications for phones. Before that, you were living on the leavings of the guys porting Doom to a proprietary Nokia OS.
Music downloads were also possible way before iTunes, both legal and illegal.
Actually, they weren't. Illegal downloads were possible. Legal downloads were very hard, simply because the owners of the media weren't willing to play. Jobs made that possible.
"I haven't a clue how he did it, but he changed things around us. There is really no way to deny that. "
This is only true if you live an Apple centric world and only consumed things via Apple - e.g. if you didn't download any music until iTunes came about.
Wrongo, moosebreath. Apple made it possible to GET the media. ITunes worked on windows too. Nobody would have trusted the clowns at napster to sell their music.
"You could make the argument that he made Microsoft as well; without windows, and the mac version of word and excel, what would microsoft be today? Can you say 'digital research'?"
This seems especially silly given that Apple would've gone under without Microsoft's bailout.
Look up the history. That Microsoft bailout happened years later, after Microsoft was in control of the software industry, after Jobs came back to Apple in 96. Think back to the windows 3 days. They stole the underlying ideas for windows 3 (and the APIs) from the Mac OS code they had access to for Word and Excel development.
The biggest problem with your comment is most of those ideas didn't even come from Jobs, they came from Apple staff,
Again, nobody said Steve Jobs invented anything. He recognized things that were totally cool, and made them better by being a total compulsive asshole about them. He DID do this. Read the Isaacson biography. Much of the technology you use every day, INCLUDING linux and windows, owes a huge debt to Steve Jobs and his hideous obsessive compulsive disorder.
sure Steve recognised them as worthwhile to go ahead with, but Jobs was not the visionary behind any of them.
I think if anything your distorted view of what he as a person chose and did highlights just how good he was of marketing, not just Apple and it's products but himself. He made himself a messiah who from your comments you would believe was the mind behind every innovation at Apple - he wasn't, he was just the guy who picked the good ideas and signed off on them then drove them forward to popularity with excellent marketing. Given this I think you are a Jobs groupie - you're attributing ideas to him that weren't his.
Again, sigh... Marketing is much more important than technology. You can have the best tech, and yet still fail in the marketplace because your ADs suck. Also, as I said before, Apple was useless without Steve Jobs. I was there, I know. All they cared about was monetizing the Macintosh, coming out with new versions that worked in a 'business environment'. It drove their market share from 15% to 7% in 5 years. Jobs didn't invent anything. Nobody says he invented technology. He saw things that nobody else saw and ran with them. If he hadn't done that, we wouldn't have the cool toys we have now. If you think that opinion makes me a groupie, you don't know what a groupie is.
I'm no jobs groupie. However, he was the first to recognize the commercial possibilities of personal computers. That alone should give him a higher standing than what you allow. He was also the first to recognize the commercial possibilities of a graphical user interface, the first to really buy into the idea that computer generated animated films were viable, and the first to really recognize the idea that your phone would be your computer instead of just your phone. He was the guy who made music downloads possible.
I worked for apple during the years between Jobs, from 1988 to 1993. Nothing new came out then, even when exciting things were happening in the company internally. Nobody would take a risk on anything new. We were basically waiting for Steve Jobs to return (most of us didn't know it at the time). His ability as a leader, as an alpha-geek, made him able to take those risks, to drive folks to do things they normally wouldn't do. Who believed that killing the clones made sense? Who believed that dressing up 10 year old computers in translucent cases would make sense? Who believed that switching to a *nix kernel, or switching to using intel chips, or having a computer company go into first music, and then telephones made sense? Only Jobs. I haven't a clue how he did it, but he changed things around us. There is really no way to deny that.
You could make the argument that he made Microsoft as well; without windows, and the mac version of word and excel, what would microsoft be today? Can you say 'digital research'?
Rifles are dangerous to classrooms of 25 first graders, college students, other unarmed folks. That is why people are afraid of them; the astonishingly low probability that their children will be killed by a madman, and the empathy they feel for victims of said violence.
However, the fact is that the NRA is a terrorist organization, and should be put down. Wayne LaPierre has indirectly killed far more Americans than Bin Laden ever did. Hand guns are the real culprit here, and should be made completely and totally illegal. I don't give a shit if the Mythbusters shoot dummies with rifles, or you go out and kill animals for the fun of killing defenseless creatures, and I'm not really worried about crazies shooting people, because it happens so infrequently. I'm worried about the 13 year old living 15 minutes from my door that carjacked and killed a person because they wanted to drive their car around for a few hours. I'm worried about the hundreds of thousands of handguns in Oakland (15 minutes away from my house) that leak into my quiet suburban neighborhood and kill kids and adults due to acts of unbelievable stupidity. I'm worried about some angry driver I inadvertently cut off on the freeway pulling out a gun and shooting at me because he has a gun under his seat "just in case".
People get angry, and they lash out. If they don't have handguns, they almost never kill other people; it is unbelievably hard to kill somebody with a knife or a club. Not so hard with a gun. Look at the statistics. Murder rates in the US and other places that allow handguns are high; murder rates in places where handguns are illegal are low. (Look at Canada again. Folks can own rifles, but handgun ownership is much more difficult. Almost no one kills others with a rifle.)
The rest are happily installing crap on your system with your blessings.
It really PISSES ME OFF that nobody can figure out how to fix this. Fucking malware guys should be stripped, dipped in glue, and rolled in fire ants. For the first offense. What a bunch of assholes.
You offer lots of assertions, but no actual evidence. Show me three examples of million line systems written in FORTH. Compare that to the thousands of huge systems running on your typical linux system, written in python, perl, C, lisp, or java. FORTH has been around since the 70s. Seems like folks would have used it more if it were truly as nice as you say.
When I was playing with FORTH in the 80s, it was marginally interesting. It made a good executive on mips, where I used it as a way to bring up new hardware. I wrote a lisp system in FORTH for the mac (using MacFORTH) But big systems? You need to point them out to me.
Sorry, my experience is very different than yours. Doing simple data structures is hellish (comma operator?). You need to build the entire structure of your program up from scratch, because the language doesn't offer ANYTHING except its elegant, minimal syntax, memory peek and poke, and a few other primitives. My view is that programming in FORTH is like programming in assembler, except that you need to use reverse polish notation. There have actually been systems built to run FORTH directly, encoding the primitive words into microcode. As such, it really IS assembler. (I guess you could say the same thing about lisp and C, though).
Also, you'll need to back up those claims of speed. You could also say that, statement for statement, assembler is far faster than C. Try comparing it to python based on functionality. I'm guessing that a moderately complex one-liner in python, perhaps involving a big list comprehension, will take hundreds of words of FORTH to replicate. Also, the FORTH will be slower, because the python has been optimized to hell, but the FORTH has been hand coded by somebody who just wants to get to the next problem. The FORTH will require you to remember the 17 parameters on the stack, and to ensure that they get pushed popped, swapped, and duped in exactly the right order. If you mess up, you'll be debugging for hours.
FORTH is a p-code assembler, where you specify what patterns get laid down by hand. There is some cleverness in the way the words link together, and in the process model, but it is basically an interpreted system. A good compiler will run rings around it. Hell, python will run rings around it unless you are very careful about how you organize things. Life is too short to start every project from scratch.
If true, it would mean that nearly 1/1000 of the total energy use in the US is currently devoted to bitcoin mining. That is preposterous. According to wikipedia, the total usage in the US is 3,886,400,000 MW-h/yr. The stated value for mining is 358,000MW-h/yr. The ratio between them is 9.23e-4. That energy usage figure includes all industrial activity, all computers running in the US, all street lights, all TVs, all electric stoves, etc. Everything. So, I simply don't believe the figure given.
The figure probably originates from http://blockchain.info/stats. I'm guessing it is either made up, or using bogus energy figures.
I suppose doctors and airline pilots also whine about the 'process' of using checklists. The results speak for themselves, though.
Nobody likes to be told what to do, but remembering what worked, and making that happen again is what has made our culture possible. That is what process is supposed to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Makes sense to me. Software/hardware vulnerabilities are worthless once patched. If this group is tasked with having a way into any system, their main focus is going to be to not-only find exploits, but also to protect those exploits for future use. I have no doubt that such a group exists, and that their collection of exploits is extensive.
Hopefully those exploits are used against our enemies and not against us, but that's probably just a silly hope.
If our guys have the day one exploits, their guys have them too. They (including Iran, China, Russia) have more reason to use cyberwarfare than we do, given the relative size of our military investments. We do it as an afterthought, they do it because we would pound the pemmican out of them in a conventional war.
The pilot is a single point of failure per plane.
Drones introduce a single point of failure shared by the whole squadron or even a significant portion of the the air force.
You mean they fly drones without redundant links? That would be surprising if true.
The problem with a drone is you're introducing a single point of failure that you can't fully protect
does anybody else see the irony here? Isn't a pilot a 'single point of failure'?
This is like space exploration. Everybody wants to go, but robots do SUCH a better job of it. Just like they will doing YOUR job in another few years...
It's also worth pointing out that outside of research, these ultra-high mileage vehicles are rather pointless. MPG is the inverse of fuel consumption, so higher MPG means smaller savings. e.g. Consider a trip of 300 miles in a variety of different cars
The point of comparison metrics is to compare utility of different vehicles. One obvious utility metric of a car is how far it will drive given a tank full of gasoline. If I compare a car that gets 50 MPG with one that gets 250 MPG, I know it will go 5x as far on the same tank of gasoline. That makes the car 5x as efficient, does it not? Since MPG is defined as an efficiency metric, I think it fits that name admirably.
Now, L/100km is another metric used. Say you have three cars, one that uses 5L/100km, one that uses 6L/100km, and one that uses 7L/100km. You know that the one that uses less fuel is better, but how much better? How much farther can you go on a full tank of gas? If the tank size is T, then you can go T/.05 for the 5L/100km, T/.06 for the 6L/100km, etc. Does that help you determine the numeric value of efficiency? Only if you have a calculator handy, right?
I'd say that the formula for the utility (price you would pay) for a car is something like C1 + MPG*C2, where C1 is a dollar amount based on styling, speed, etc, and C2 is a conversion constant. This valuation is done intuitively when looking at cars. The same formula using L/100km would invert MPG, and is thus far less intuitive when valuing a car. So, in my view, the MPG is a better way to measure value, makes more sense from a usability perspective, and is simply more rational.
The obvious advantage to the US scheme is that you can figure out how far you can go on a given amount of fuel without doing division. If you have a car that gets 2.5gp100m (to use your units) and you buy 10 gallons of gas, you go how far? If you instead think your car gets 40mpg, then you obviously can go 400 miles.
Since you buy your fuel in gallons, NOT in miles, the miles/gallon (or km/liter) measure seems much more reasonable.
If you are comparing how far a car can get for a particular cost, it is clear that if you can get twice as far on the same amount of gasoline, the car has twice the utility per dollar spent on gasoline. So, for that reason, it also make sense to compare in miles/gallon.
Regarding nuclear power:
Calling nuclear power a zero emission source of electricity may be a bit of exaggeration but it's as close to zero as we are going to get.
Zero emission of CO2, not zero emission of radiation. Chernobyl? The near zero probability of a catastrophe per year per plant, multiplied by the number of plants, gives the probability of disaster of some kind around the earth. It is NOT zero. We got lucky in Fukushima. There are lots more potential disasters out there, waiting to happen, including terrorist attacks.
When is the last time you heard of a catastrophe at a solar or wind farm? This doesn't even consider the disposal of waste products. Nuclear sounds good, particularly when we are up against the threat of global ecological disaster, but it causes more problems than it solves, and is far more expensive to implement than solar or wind farms. I have solar on my roof, and it basically pays for my electricity. If new home construction was mandated to be zero carbon footprint, it could be done, easily and cheaply, using passive and active solar construction. With a bit of excess capacity, we could drive to work using our electric cars powered from the solar on our roofs. We need better large storage. We have LOTS of storage in the form of potential energy; just use excess capacity to pump water uphill...
Sadly, we simply don't have the will yet to make this happen. With 1/2 the American people believing crap like the original article here, we simply won't have time to fix the problems before millions of people are displaced.
Most metal does not last long in the presence of oxygen, it corrodes and disappears. Even stone monuments only last 10,000 years or so, due to weathering. The reality is that after a few million years, all of the crap we dug up or built in the last 10,000 years would be fairly evenly distributed over what land mass that had not been subducted under some other continental shelf.
The interesting thing is that if you consider ALL the fossils that have been dug up, our 10,000 year experiment in technology would almost certainly be missing from the record of any future 'intelligent' lifeform.
The main thing we would leave would be a record of environmental catastrophe, another mass extinction event. Oh, that and a few bits of machinery on the moon.
Ever heard of C4? Try using an accelerometer connected to a detonator. Using FPV technology you can fly an RC plane into a politician for about $1000. You could even cut the motor at 300m and dive it in quietly. Nobody would see it coming. If you wanted to keep the plane, there are circuits to drop the bomb using RC controls.
The C4 would cost extra, of course...
This is one of the WORST things that could happen for me, personally, since I like to fly RC aircraft, and drones in particular. It will now be a 'big deal' to fly drones and RC aircraft. Thankfully, it'll probably take a few months before the patriot act is extended to prohibit RC aircraft and drones. "To protect us from the evil-doers!".
Actually, the Ptolemaic system was much more accurate than the Copernican system, and was based on observation. It explained the observation that there was no parallax when observing the fixed stars. Only better technology, and truly mind-bending conceptions of the size of the universe could correct that flawed observation and change everybody's mind about it. The system also explained the fact that the earth did not appear to be moving. That was a huge hurtle for the ancient, since they believed Aristotle's view that for something to keep moving, something had to keep pushing it.
The Ptolemaic system was used for 1500 years to predict events in the heavens. It may not have been 'right', but nobody cared. That is similar to the quantum dynamics, where nobody really knows why it works, but can use it to make accurate predictions about things like quantum tunneling.
However, the ideas of relativity are of a different kind. They are much deeper, in the sense that science thinks they know what is going on, at least at some level. Relativity provides an explanation, as opposed to just a way to compute the result.
Also, relativity already allows FTL, in a sense; if you take a spaceship, and accelerate it at 1g continually towards the Andromeda galaxy, the space between you and Andromeda will contract, and your clocks will slow. You still won't be able to measure your speed relative to the galaxy (or anything else) as anything faster than the speed of light, but you'll get there in your lifetime.
However, if you decide to turn around and return to tell your friends about it, you'll come back to where the earth was, but millions of years in earth's future. That will happen due to the fact that your clock (and the atoms in your body) will be slowed by the accelerations, effectively taking a shortcut through spacetime.
People have thought of ways to use this 'hack' to move faster than light. Here is a fluff piece on some work in that direction.
Dickens had it pegged in Bleak House
Although I believe that the national security apparatus in a democracy must be watched, and some of the revelations to be disquieting in light of what has been going on at the IRS, I don't find this a hard choice.
Apparently, the IRS was also using keyword searches to help with their workload, using keywords such as 'progressive', 'israel', 'occupy', etc. They weren't only looking for conservative groups, they were just using common sense in trying to get through the massive influx of applications that "citizen's united" created. So, you don't even have to be worried about the IRS!
link to story about trojan compiler
I know that cisco has facilities for wiretapping built into their routers; I used to work at cisco, on IOS. There were bits of the code that were there to allow law enforcement to control and wiretap flows without the knowledge of root level users (ie, sysadmins). It is documented in the cisco user manuals as 'lawful intercept'. Feel free to look at the user docs.
Unfortunately, knowing how to get the flows doesn't help when the ends are encrypted, unless you have access to the one time pads, or the bad guys are silly enough to depend on NP hard encryption.
The problem isn't the professors. It is the moronic, half baked programmers who pick up a methodology without really understanding it, misuse it, and then whine about it afterwards in an attempt to deflect blame.
Object oriented programming is a case in point. Everybody said it was great. However, unless you were quite dedicated at designing and factoring things before you started, the end result was invariably a hideous mass of scar tissue, oozing blood and puss. So, some shops now are culturally antagonistic towards oo design (cough cisco) precisely because they were burned by being stupid and arrogant. C++ was actually excluded from IOS (the original IOS, which is currently running most of the routers in the world) until about 5 years ago. It was only outside forces that changed things, acquisitions that had to be merged, that forced the issue. It is still frowned upon, except in these sorts of cases.
They already have millions of reviewers looking at the crap all the time. Just put a 'is it copied?' button next to the video, and after 100 clicks have somebody look at it.
"He DID do this. Read the Isaacson biography."
Because biographies are obviously highly objective sources of information. No thanks I'll stick to getting my knowledge on the topic from more objective historical references thank you very much.
Sigh. You are talking about they guy who wrote the Einstein, Franklin, and Kissinger bios. You know nothing, and you are also unwilling to learn. Good for you, keep that anti-apple bias as pure as you can. Don't let it be corrupted by facts. We all know how annoying and inconvenient they can be.
I don't think your opinion in your final paragraph makes you a groupie because suddenly you're agreeing with my original point - that Jobs' skill was in running a company and marketing. I do however think all the bollocks giving Jobs credit for things that weren't his idea makes you a groupie though.
My argument all along (aside from the divergence towards your suggestion Jobs was responsible for ideas that weren't his) has simply been that Jobs strengths weren't technical, hence calling him a "technical genius" is fucking stupid, that's all.
I never said anything like what you apparently misread in my post. I never said Jobs was a 'technical genius'. (What I know of Jobs is that he was a mediocre engineer. He was never gifted with the ability to design a system, or to build new tech from scratch. That all came from the Isaacson Biography, by the way.) Your animosity towards anything related to Jobs or Apple seems to have blinded you. Go read my post again, I have been saying the same thing all along. You owe me an apology, and you owe yourself a remedial reading class.
Sorry but a lot of this is just patently false. Especially so the latter ones - my Nokia 7650 from 5 years before the iPhone came out had a camera, apps, ran ports of games like Doom, had a web browser and so on - the idea of a phone as a computer was determined many many years before Apple even considered seriously entering the market. HP's iPaq range was even closer in this regard when they turned them from PDAs into phones.
Sigh. There were also lots of MP3 players before the ipod made them mainstream. I was not asserting that Steve Jobs invented the telephone. I was saying that before the iphone, folks didn't consider giving up their laptops. The app store built a wonderful framework for building and monetizing real world applications for phones. Before that, you were living on the leavings of the guys porting Doom to a proprietary Nokia OS.
Music downloads were also possible way before iTunes, both legal and illegal.
Actually, they weren't. Illegal downloads were possible. Legal downloads were very hard, simply because the owners of the media weren't willing to play. Jobs made that possible.
"I haven't a clue how he did it, but he changed things around us. There is really no way to deny that. "
This is only true if you live an Apple centric world and only consumed things via Apple - e.g. if you didn't download any music until iTunes came about.
Wrongo, moosebreath. Apple made it possible to GET the media. ITunes worked on windows too. Nobody would have trusted the clowns at napster to sell their music.
"You could make the argument that he made Microsoft as well; without windows, and the mac version of word and excel, what would microsoft be today? Can you say 'digital research'?"
This seems especially silly given that Apple would've gone under without Microsoft's bailout.
Look up the history. That Microsoft bailout happened years later, after Microsoft was in control of the software industry, after Jobs came back to Apple in 96. Think back to the windows 3 days. They stole the underlying ideas for windows 3 (and the APIs) from the Mac OS code they had access to for Word and Excel development.
The biggest problem with your comment is most of those ideas didn't even come from Jobs, they came from Apple staff,
Again, nobody said Steve Jobs invented anything. He recognized things that were totally cool, and made them better by being a total compulsive asshole about them. He DID do this. Read the Isaacson biography. Much of the technology you use every day, INCLUDING linux and windows, owes a huge debt to Steve Jobs and his hideous obsessive compulsive disorder.
sure Steve recognised them as worthwhile to go ahead with, but Jobs was not the visionary behind any of them.
I think if anything your distorted view of what he as a person chose and did highlights just how good he was of marketing, not just Apple and it's products but himself. He made himself a messiah who from your comments you would believe was the mind behind every innovation at Apple - he wasn't, he was just the guy who picked the good ideas and signed off on them then drove them forward to popularity with excellent marketing. Given this I think you are a Jobs groupie - you're attributing ideas to him that weren't his.
Again, sigh... Marketing is much more important than technology. You can have the best tech, and yet still fail in the marketplace because your ADs suck. Also, as I said before, Apple was useless without Steve Jobs. I was there, I know. All they cared about was monetizing the Macintosh, coming out with new versions that worked in a 'business environment'. It drove their market share from 15% to 7% in 5 years. Jobs didn't invent anything. Nobody says he invented technology. He saw things that nobody else saw and ran with them. If he hadn't done that, we wouldn't have the cool toys we have now. If you think that opinion makes me a groupie, you don't know what a groupie is.
I'm no jobs groupie. However, he was the first to recognize the commercial possibilities of personal computers. That alone should give him a higher standing than what you allow. He was also the first to recognize the commercial possibilities of a graphical user interface, the first to really buy into the idea that computer generated animated films were viable, and the first to really recognize the idea that your phone would be your computer instead of just your phone. He was the guy who made music downloads possible.
I worked for apple during the years between Jobs, from 1988 to 1993. Nothing new came out then, even when exciting things were happening in the company internally. Nobody would take a risk on anything new. We were basically waiting for Steve Jobs to return (most of us didn't know it at the time). His ability as a leader, as an alpha-geek, made him able to take those risks, to drive folks to do things they normally wouldn't do. Who believed that killing the clones made sense? Who believed that dressing up 10 year old computers in translucent cases would make sense? Who believed that switching to a *nix kernel, or switching to using intel chips, or having a computer company go into first music, and then telephones made sense? Only Jobs. I haven't a clue how he did it, but he changed things around us. There is really no way to deny that.
You could make the argument that he made Microsoft as well; without windows, and the mac version of word and excel, what would microsoft be today? Can you say 'digital research'?
Rifles are dangerous to classrooms of 25 first graders, college students, other unarmed folks. That is why people are afraid of them; the astonishingly low probability that their children will be killed by a madman, and the empathy they feel for victims of said violence.
However, the fact is that the NRA is a terrorist organization, and should be put down. Wayne LaPierre has indirectly killed far more Americans than Bin Laden ever did. Hand guns are the real culprit here, and should be made completely and totally illegal. I don't give a shit if the Mythbusters shoot dummies with rifles, or you go out and kill animals for the fun of killing defenseless creatures, and I'm not really worried about crazies shooting people, because it happens so infrequently. I'm worried about the 13 year old living 15 minutes from my door that carjacked and killed a person because they wanted to drive their car around for a few hours. I'm worried about the hundreds of thousands of handguns in Oakland (15 minutes away from my house) that leak into my quiet suburban neighborhood and kill kids and adults due to acts of unbelievable stupidity. I'm worried about some angry driver I inadvertently cut off on the freeway pulling out a gun and shooting at me because he has a gun under his seat "just in case".
People get angry, and they lash out. If they don't have handguns, they almost never kill other people; it is unbelievably hard to kill somebody with a knife or a club. Not so hard with a gun. Look at the statistics. Murder rates in the US and other places that allow handguns are high; murder rates in places where handguns are illegal are low. (Look at Canada again. Folks can own rifles, but handgun ownership is much more difficult. Almost no one kills others with a rifle.)
The rest are happily installing crap on your system with your blessings.
It really PISSES ME OFF that nobody can figure out how to fix this. Fucking malware guys should be stripped, dipped in glue, and rolled in fire ants. For the first offense. What a bunch of assholes.
You offer lots of assertions, but no actual evidence. Show me three examples of million line systems written in FORTH. Compare that to the thousands of huge systems running on your typical linux system, written in python, perl, C, lisp, or java. FORTH has been around since the 70s. Seems like folks would have used it more if it were truly as nice as you say.
When I was playing with FORTH in the 80s, it was marginally interesting. It made a good executive on mips, where I used it as a way to bring up new hardware. I wrote a lisp system in FORTH for the mac (using MacFORTH) But big systems? You need to point them out to me.
Sorry, my experience is very different than yours. Doing simple data structures is hellish (comma operator?). You need to build the entire structure of your program up from scratch, because the language doesn't offer ANYTHING except its elegant, minimal syntax, memory peek and poke, and a few other primitives. My view is that programming in FORTH is like programming in assembler, except that you need to use reverse polish notation. There have actually been systems built to run FORTH directly, encoding the primitive words into microcode. As such, it really IS assembler. (I guess you could say the same thing about lisp and C, though).
Also, you'll need to back up those claims of speed. You could also say that, statement for statement, assembler is far faster than C. Try comparing it to python based on functionality. I'm guessing that a moderately complex one-liner in python, perhaps involving a big list comprehension, will take hundreds of words of FORTH to replicate. Also, the FORTH will be slower, because the python has been optimized to hell, but the FORTH has been hand coded by somebody who just wants to get to the next problem. The FORTH will require you to remember the 17 parameters on the stack, and to ensure that they get pushed popped, swapped, and duped in exactly the right order. If you mess up, you'll be debugging for hours.
FORTH is a p-code assembler, where you specify what patterns get laid down by hand. There is some cleverness in the way the words link together, and in the process model, but it is basically an interpreted system. A good compiler will run rings around it. Hell, python will run rings around it unless you are very careful about how you organize things. Life is too short to start every project from scratch.
If true, it would mean that nearly 1/1000 of the total energy use in the US is currently devoted to bitcoin mining. That is preposterous. According to wikipedia, the total usage in the US is 3,886,400,000 MW-h/yr. The stated value for mining is 358,000MW-h/yr. The ratio between them is 9.23e-4. That energy usage figure includes all industrial activity, all computers running in the US, all street lights, all TVs, all electric stoves, etc. Everything. So, I simply don't believe the figure given.
The figure probably originates from http://blockchain.info/stats. I'm guessing it is either made up, or using bogus energy figures.
FWIW, my vaio has a facility to keep the battery charged only at 50%, or 80%. When I am plugged in for a few weeks, I drop it down to 50%.
I suppose doctors and airline pilots also whine about the 'process' of using checklists. The results speak for themselves, though.
Nobody likes to be told what to do, but remembering what worked, and making that happen again is what has made our culture possible. That is what process is supposed to be.