" Eventually you get to the point where the software was originally designed to do something so totally different to what it's doing now that it may make more sense to rewrite it than to keep adding hacks."
Adding new features to a system does not mean adding hacks. Every system grows in features over time. It takes a lot to make rewriting from scratch to be the best solution. For example how old is Linux?
"Cobol is in attrition as far as most of the world is concerned." Old working code has a huge advantage over a rewrite... It works. You may be shocked how much effort people will make to keep old software running. http://www.comwaretech.com/PDP... http://www.dbit.com/
This is really very funny but the sad thing is that somewhere on the internet people are going to talk about this as a serious subject... I really hope that you are intending this to be a joke.
Acts that prevent things from happening can never be 100% proven. The classic example is taking the keys away from a drunk. You can not prove that you prevented an accident. A prevented war can never be proven because it didn't happen.
"which really means nothing because we measure reality"
Okay fine using your logic. The unrestricted arms race was perfectly safe since they were never used. The current state of surveillance in the US and Britain is also just fine and dandy since nothing bad has happened
I mostly agree. The question I have where the accidents that the car was in control over easily avoidable by a human but not by a program. The end result may be more fender benders but fewer lives lost. Still a good trade off. In the end the sample is too small to jump for joy or shriek in horror.
Had the Cuban missile crisis gotten out of hand it could have caused a full on nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR. Yea that would have beat the Nazis. It is my mistake in not limiting this to the area of ComInt/SigInt/PhotoInt which what the discussion is all about. The whole turn in the odd guy the street thing is a far different kind of "spying". Frankly one that is really looked down on by the Intelligence community at large.
" Russians to be sent to Gulags, countless Jews to be sent to concentration camps, countless people from the DPRK to be killed because they disagreed with the "dear leader". In fact go back further in history and see how many lives spying cost throughout history." The Jews did not really involve spying or communication intercepts. And I counter with D-Day, Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Yom Kippur war.
Actually you can prove that he did. "The agents were not difficult to spot - a task made still easier by the cracking of the German's Enigma encryption. "
sure he was. Any "spy" in the UK that transmitted anything would be intercepted and decrypted... In fact. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
"The agents were not difficult to spot - a task made still easier by the cracking of the German's Enigma encryption. " So yes they did spy on British citizens. I will also bet you really good money that anybody in the UK sending a telegram to Germany in 1938 had that telegram stored at Mi5
" the entire world needs to be watched" It is perfectly legal to spy on the entire world outside of the US as far as the US is concerned. Do you think the US is going take Russia or China to court for using SIGINT systems?
But you do have conversion losses at each stage. The big benefit is that electric cars use less power over all because they have no idle along with charging over night when you are using surplus power.
No the you will just have tin foil hat/hipsters beating the daylights out of you for having a camera... See every discussion of GoogleGlass on Slashdot for proof.
The biggest help is Nuclear power. But the Greens are fighting it. Germany is a prime example. Sure they have built out a lot of Solar and Wind but they are replacing Nuclear with COAL! The say in 20 or so years ago they can replace coal with "renewables" which is just pushing it off and pumping out carbon. Solar will not work because of storage. And no Tesla has not solved that problem. Vermont Yankee which was a small nuclear plant produced on average 4703 GWh per year. It would take 1,287,612 Tesla power walls to provide a 24 hour reserve. The cost would be 4,506,642,000 and that is just for a 24 hour storage system. In the winter you could have many areas where solar output is close to zero for more than a day but if you want cut that in half and put it at 12 hours. And that is JUST the battery costs. Add in solar and wind turbines to match the 4703 GWhs and the math gets super ugly very quickly. And Vermont Yankee was a small plant. BTW it is has been replaced with carbon producing fracked natural gas... Yea... Yell the greens! BTW the Saint Lucie Nuclear power plant in Florida which is far from the largest produces just under 3 times as much power. So figure about 3 million power walls.
"Ah, the old "the system will never be perfect, so we might as well not try to improve it" argument." Sure but this is not an improvement. I am all for increasing taxes for school and frankly even for more federal aid for areas that have low incomes but a centralized system for all funds will have a negative impact and is unworkable.
"As opposed to London, Paris, and Tokyo, which were designed and built during the last 50 years, and thus are more efficient." Paris and London are both very old and they were not "leveled" during WWII.
I find people so amusing. Why would anyone have any doubt that the NSA is using the best tech available? The majority of people seem to be happy with what is going on. Frankly if you voted for President Obama you voted for mass surveillance. He knows all about, he authorises it, and he supports it. Frankly I am all for people pushing for better laws and regulations but the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth over it when they voted for it is just over the top. Grow up people. Every nation will spy on every other nation to the best of it's ability. Only laws can restrict them from local surveillance and only your spies can protect you from the other nations spies.
The local climate is South Florida. So what you want to do is restrict people from being active in their community and improving their community. I guess things like Beach Cleanups should also not be allowed since only rich people can spend the time cleaning a beach?..... Yeah Sorry but what you are proposing is a totalitarian system where the central government mandates everything. The funding would never be "equal" because you would not have unlimited resources so those areas that lean one way or the other would be starved for funds and swing areas would get more resources. So school in Utah where it is both very hot and very cold that needs AC upgraded would have to wait while a School in Ohio would get a new football stadium. It can not work and is a terrible idea.
You left out 1. Wireless will never have the bandwidth of fiber. 2. They will be limited to very close to line of sight. Sucks to have national park, state park or even a large farm in the way.
"IF traffic were spread evenly across the network, there wouldn't be a problem, but it's not. So you kind of need a backbone of some sort." In theory caching would work but that would have issues with syncing.
"The difference between WW2 codebreakers and today's NSA and what have you being, of course, that WW2 codebreakers were used against to crack the communications of a defined enemy. So yes, it's perfectly reasonable to object to a practice that considers literally everybody, civilian or not, foreigner or not, to be an enemy." Actually the spying was on all nations. It was only after the US started Lend-Lease that the spying was restricted by the US. The USSR spied on the US all through the war even when they where our "friend". Frankly that action is why the spying on "friendly" countries became common. For example during the Yom Kippur war the US spied on Israel to and made them live up the the cease fire. The US was spying on Germany and German companies long before 12/7/41. They spying on Japan also predates the war. Sure work to put laws into place and make them good ones to protect US citizens but also understand that every nation will spy to the best of it's abilities. If you thin Nations in Asia, the EU, South America, or Africa are any different than you are simply fooling yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
" Eventually you get to the point where the software was originally designed to do something so totally different to what it's doing now that it may make more sense to rewrite it than to keep adding hacks."
Adding new features to a system does not mean adding hacks. Every system grows in features over time. It takes a lot to make rewriting from scratch to be the best solution.
For example how old is Linux?
"Cobol is in attrition as far as most of the world is concerned."
Old working code has a huge advantage over a rewrite... It works.
You may be shocked how much effort people will make to keep old software running.
http://www.comwaretech.com/PDP...
http://www.dbit.com/
Once you have X amount of software written in a language the language will never die.
Fortran, Cobol, c, c++ will probably never die.
This is really very funny but the sad thing is that somewhere on the internet people are going to talk about this as a serious subject...
I really hope that you are intending this to be a joke.
Acts that prevent things from happening can never be 100% proven.
The classic example is taking the keys away from a drunk. You can not prove that you prevented an accident.
A prevented war can never be proven because it didn't happen.
"which really means nothing because we measure reality"
Okay fine using your logic.
The unrestricted arms race was perfectly safe since they were never used.
The current state of surveillance in the US and Britain is also just fine and dandy since nothing bad has happened
It got modded up because the readers on Slashdot do not want to hear that porn and or video games have any downside.
Of course they forget that free access to addictive substances has been shown in study after study to cause problems.
I mostly agree. The question I have where the accidents that the car was in control over easily avoidable by a human but not by a program. The end result may be more fender benders but fewer lives lost. Still a good trade off.
In the end the sample is too small to jump for joy or shriek in horror.
that is pretty much what I said.
Had the Cuban missile crisis gotten out of hand it could have caused a full on nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR.
Yea that would have beat the Nazis.
It is my mistake in not limiting this to the area of ComInt/SigInt/PhotoInt which what the discussion is all about.
The whole turn in the odd guy the street thing is a far different kind of "spying". Frankly one that is really looked down on by the Intelligence community at large.
" Russians to be sent to Gulags, countless Jews to be sent to concentration camps, countless people from the DPRK to be killed because they disagreed with the "dear leader". In fact go back further in history and see how many lives spying cost throughout history."
The Jews did not really involve spying or communication intercepts.
And I counter with D-Day, Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Yom Kippur war.
Actually you can prove that he did.
"The agents were not difficult to spot - a task made still easier by the cracking of the German's Enigma encryption. "
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
sure he was. Any "spy" in the UK that transmitted anything would be intercepted and decrypted...
In fact.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
"The agents were not difficult to spot - a task made still easier by the cracking of the German's Enigma encryption. "
So yes they did spy on British citizens. I will also bet you really good money that anybody in the UK sending a telegram to Germany in 1938 had that telegram stored at Mi5
" the entire world needs to be watched"
It is perfectly legal to spy on the entire world outside of the US as far as the US is concerned.
Do you think the US is going take Russia or China to court for using SIGINT systems?
But you do have conversion losses at each stage.
The big benefit is that electric cars use less power over all because they have no idle along with charging over night when you are using surplus power.
You left out nuclear. A good bit of US power still comes from Nuclear which is low carbon "No power source including Solar is carbon free".
No the you will just have tin foil hat/hipsters beating the daylights out of you for having a camera...
See every discussion of GoogleGlass on Slashdot for proof.
The biggest help is Nuclear power. But the Greens are fighting it.
Germany is a prime example. Sure they have built out a lot of Solar and Wind but they are replacing Nuclear with COAL!
The say in 20 or so years ago they can replace coal with "renewables" which is just pushing it off and pumping out carbon.
Solar will not work because of storage.
And no Tesla has not solved that problem. Vermont Yankee which was a small nuclear plant produced on average 4703 GWh per year. It would take 1,287,612 Tesla power walls to provide a 24 hour reserve. The cost would be 4,506,642,000 and that is just for a 24 hour storage system. In the winter you could have many areas where solar output is close to zero for more than a day but if you want cut that in half and put it at 12 hours. And that is JUST the battery costs. Add in solar and wind turbines to match the 4703 GWhs and the math gets super ugly very quickly.
And Vermont Yankee was a small plant. BTW it is has been replaced with carbon producing fracked natural gas... Yea... Yell the greens!
BTW the Saint Lucie Nuclear power plant in Florida which is far from the largest produces just under 3 times as much power. So figure about 3 million power walls.
"Ah, the old "the system will never be perfect, so we might as well not try to improve it" argument."
Sure but this is not an improvement. I am all for increasing taxes for school and frankly even for more federal aid for areas that have low incomes but a centralized system for all funds will have a negative impact and is unworkable.
But for all practical purposes Tokyo is about 70 years old.
"As opposed to London, Paris, and Tokyo, which were designed and built during the last 50 years, and thus are more efficient."
Paris and London are both very old and they were not "leveled" during WWII.
I find people so amusing.
Why would anyone have any doubt that the NSA is using the best tech available? The majority of people seem to be happy with what is going on. Frankly if you voted for President Obama you voted for mass surveillance. He knows all about, he authorises it, and he supports it.
Frankly I am all for people pushing for better laws and regulations but the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth over it when they voted for it is just over the top.
Grow up people. Every nation will spy on every other nation to the best of it's ability. Only laws can restrict them from local surveillance and only your spies can protect you from the other nations spies.
The local climate is South Florida.
So what you want to do is restrict people from being active in their community and improving their community. I guess things like Beach Cleanups should also not be allowed since only rich people can spend the time cleaning a beach?.....
Yeah Sorry but what you are proposing is a totalitarian system where the central government mandates everything. The funding would never be "equal" because you would not have unlimited resources so those areas that lean one way or the other would be starved for funds and swing areas would get more resources. So school in Utah where it is both very hot and very cold that needs AC upgraded would have to wait while a School in Ohio would get a new football stadium.
It can not work and is a terrible idea.
You left out
1. Wireless will never have the bandwidth of fiber.
2. They will be limited to very close to line of sight. Sucks to have national park, state park or even a large farm in the way.
"IF traffic were spread evenly across the network, there wouldn't be a problem, but it's not. So you kind of need a backbone of some sort."
In theory caching would work but that would have issues with syncing.
"The difference between WW2 codebreakers and today's NSA and what have you being, of course, that WW2 codebreakers were used against to crack the communications of a defined enemy. So yes, it's perfectly reasonable to object to a practice that considers literally everybody, civilian or not, foreigner or not, to be an enemy."
Actually the spying was on all nations. It was only after the US started Lend-Lease that the spying was restricted by the US. The USSR spied on the US all through the war even when they where our "friend". Frankly that action is why the spying on "friendly" countries became common. For example during the Yom Kippur war the US spied on Israel to and made them live up the the cease fire.
The US was spying on Germany and German companies long before 12/7/41. They spying on Japan also predates the war.
Sure work to put laws into place and make them good ones to protect US citizens but also understand that every nation will spy to the best of it's abilities. If you thin Nations in Asia, the EU, South America, or Africa are any different than you are simply fooling yourself.
Citation?
Cuban Missile Crisis