There is no doubt that in a situation of species-threatening emergency that mankind has, today, the technology to construct a quite large object in earth orbit and give it enough engine power to move through the solar system (Orion drive or whatever). The problem is that we do not have the technology to get stuff out of the Earth's gravity well with anything greater than 0.1% efficiency, and in the process of building that Enterprise-sized object we would destroy the Earth's atmosphere and ecosystem. So until a 10,000x better surface-to-orbit launch technology comes along this ain't gonna happen.
- - - - you need to think about this from the standpoint of you being the boss, [...] When it comes to the people who are leading a division or organization, this becomes even more important. What kind of shady deals would these people be willing to make, what kind of precarious situations would they be willing to put the company in? - - - -
A boss whose company is being acquired is often given a bribe ("retention bonus") to lie to his employees about what he knows and what is going to happen for a long period of time (6-12 months is not uncommon). This is particularly common for director-level bosses and those who lead divisions or organizations. Not sure how that fits into your theory.
= = = Indeed. I'm beginning to suspect these claims of widespread fraud have more to do with some pretty bizarre metrics on the part of those making the claim. It makes great headlines, but I think there's something rather fishy about it. = = =
Lot of pushback on the so-called "fraud epidemic" on the academic science blogs. The emerging concensus is that the campaign is part of a softening-up process for anti-climate science actions.
I don't disagree with you, but the economic pressures are relentless. As late as the mid-1990s a manufacturer could count on there being an ecosystem and trained programmers available for the various high-security, high-reliability architectures on the market (or at least people willing to take jobs being trained as programmers, designers, etc for such systems). By 2000 those ecosystems and finally the architectures themselves had vanished under the avalanche of Wintel systems (bought a new PDP-11 lately? Or even a Tandem Nonstop?). And the cost differential in favor of Wintel went from 1/3x to 1/1000x. It is extremely hard to convince a product development board that your product needs 1000x more funding than the team building what is fundamentally very similar consumer- or commercial-grade system.
And the demand from customers drives things too. Right now every operating manager I work with wants to be able to monitor his plant from home on his iPhone. Customers are putting enormous pressure on their vendors to replace expensive proprietary (but secure) wireless interfaces with much cheaper iPhones. Security gets paid lip service in the spec but doesn't control the decision.
= = = Which is why you need to heed warnings about deadlines well in advance - these SCADA issues wouldn't have been a problem if planning had started two years ago rather than now.
It can take five to ten years (or in some cases I have seen, 20 years) to replace an embedded SCADA system.
Which is a good argument for not using Windows(tm) in any form for industrial control, but that argument was apparently lost in the late 1990s.
= = = Funny how the word egotistical is thrown around by both "sides" here (even though there shouldn't be sides; Apple dropped the ball with an exploit in Java that was patched by Sun months ago, but because Apple owns their own version of Java, porting it from Oracle, they didn't get to it in a timely manner). = = =
Sun has been a division of Oracle for ~2 years now.
There are the neocons in general, including the group that founding PNAC, but here I'm speaking specifically of the end-times/Revelations-type people. They were a feature of W's Administration; in fairness I don't think GHWB would have had truck with them.
= = = While that scenario sounds very plausible and rational, you failed to take into account one major aspect in all this. Iran's leadership is being driven with radical religious convictions. Or so we're lead to believe. The upper echelon espouses the 12th Imam (2nd coming of Christ) and them providing the instruments by which to make that happen. = = =
You are aware that people with very similar beliefs held positions of power throughout George W. Bush's administration, right? How do you think that appeared to citizens of other nations?
I'm with your story, except: the APS debacle. I'll agree that it would have been difficult for Kodak to productize and market the digital technology it already had in-house much earlier than anyone else. But with that digital technology already in-house, as noted, why on earth did they think it was a good idea to embark on developing a new generation of film cameras incompatible with the 200,000,000 million units already in use? That money could have been used to buy Minolta (which was certainly on the market by that time), bring out a line of 35mm compacts that loaded existing 35mm film automatically, and start developing some usable digital technology.
=== Here in the United States of America only people 21 years of age or older may legally purchase and consume alcohol. We call them adults in the colloquial sense. ===
Which is an utterly bizarre exception to the general rule. An 18 year old citizen can vote, sign binding legal contracts including those for real estate, end all association with the local public school district, get married, join the army, renounced his citizenship... anything except buy a beer. He/she is an adult in every sense of the term. Whether or not he/she will exercise those rights wisely is another question, but they are there.
=== I think it's teaching people to be oversensitive. "Wow! He expressed an opinion that I don't like! He must be censored, punished, and ostracized!" ===
Because when members of the dominant culture expressed opinions that minority cultures didn't like all the way up through the 1980s (and often followed those words up with beatings, house burnings, job losses, killings, etc) they were "censored, punished, and ostracized" by their society and contritely agreed never to do it again.
Oops, wait, no they weren't and no they didn't. I grew up on the abuse-heaping side of that cultural divide and saw it go on for years - decades - unchecked, brutal, and destructive. So now that the overall culture is changing to make such behavior unacceptable it is "oversensitivity"? Can't agree with your police work there.
"Political correctness" = I can no longer get away with openly hurling vicious insults at groups of people I dislike, and my fee fees are hurt because I am now publicly called out for being vicious; I want to go back to the days when I could bully with impunity.
=== For me, the real question is fundamental. Why, in the modern "free" world does being outed as a homosexual cause one to prefer suicide rather than live with the shame? As a society, would it not be better to address such a fundamental social problem than to simply treat the symptoms? ===
You are aware that Rick Santorum has a significant chance of being nominated for President by a major political party in the United States, and thus given the affect of random events such as blips in the economy or oil prices has a significant chance of being elected President of the United States (and de facto leader of his political party)? Are you aware of Mr. Santorum's views on homosexuality and how homosexuals should be treated in our society? And that apparently his position is not a fringe belief but one which could see him installed in the Oval Office?
=== In the UK, nuclear weapon convoys are unmistakable, and they are incredibly heavily guarded. The weapons are carried in armoured articulated lorries, but they are accompanied by escorts from the police, the nuclear constabulary, the regular army, the marines, decoy trucks, recovery tow vehicles, fire tenders...
Regional roads are closed entirely for them while they pass by, patrolled by police on foot. Nothing is allowed to block their way. They don't stop. ===
While you are observing all that, the actual nuclear warhead is being moved in a regular looking lorry marked TESCO.
> You're lucky. I work in an IT-related position on a network that controls infrastructure. > If it goes down, downtown might not have water...
Which is why regulated utilities were (and those that still exist, still are) required to file staffing analysis and plans with their regulators - because it has been known since at least the days of the construction of the Pyramids that it is not possible for human beings to work 8000 hours per year no matter how vital their contribution is, and it is the responsibility of the service provider to have reasonable staffing/coverage plans in place.
=== Being on salary, which in most cases also means being "exempt", explicitly means you are NOT on the clock. It explicitly means that they are not required to pay you overtime.===
If we are speaking of the United States, that is true up to an undefined point revolving around the word "reasonable". An agreement to take an exempt position is not an agreement to perform work for the employer for 8,760 hours per year; employers have found themselves on the wrong end of a Dept of Labor lawsuit for believing that it is.
>> It is an utterly appalling invasion of privacy with immense potential for >> manipulation and privacy theft that requires immediate federal intervention.'"
Why would the Federal Gov't intervene? Seems like a capability tailor-made for use in surveillance by three-letter agencies.
And I think the answer to that will be, it was the carriers that decided what functions to enable. And the carriers were exempted from all electronic spying restrictions by the FISA extension of 2008 (aka absolve AT&T bill).
=== If you have rushed, underqualified people do the maintenance, then sure, it decreases reliability. If you have careful, non-rushed and competent people doing it, I doubt very much that the same is true. ===
Go read some of the original references on Reliability Centered Maintenance, particularly the Nowlan & Heap report referenced upthread by multiple posters. Your basic assumption has been shown to be very often incorrect in practice.
Add some really heavy-duty math to that with "Mathematical Aspects of Reliability-Centered Maintenance" by H. L. Resnikoff ! Way over my head. But the basic idea is simple. In a reasonably well-designed system with reasonably reliable components, you have the least information about that which interests you the most: failure rates. Making standard probability-distribution failure analysis virtually impossible (even if one discards the questionable "everything has a bathtub failure distribution" assumption).
=== Back in the early 90s, I inherited from a friend a fear of rebooting, turning off, or performing maintenance on a computer. Half the time he opened the case, the computer would become unbootable or never turn back on. ===
Neither you nor your friend are alone in thinking that:
AD-A066579, RELIABILITY-CENTERED MAINTENANCE, Nowlan & Heap, (DEC 1978) [this used to be available for download from the US Dept of Commerce web site; now appears to be behind a US government paywall (!)]
Slashdot Mirror
There is no doubt that in a situation of species-threatening emergency that mankind has, today, the technology to construct a quite large object in earth orbit and give it enough engine power to move through the solar system (Orion drive or whatever). The problem is that we do not have the technology to get stuff out of the Earth's gravity well with anything greater than 0.1% efficiency, and in the process of building that Enterprise-sized object we would destroy the Earth's atmosphere and ecosystem. So until a 10,000x better surface-to-orbit launch technology comes along this ain't gonna happen.
sPh
A boss whose company is being acquired is often given a bribe ("retention bonus") to lie to his employees about what he knows and what is going to happen for a long period of time (6-12 months is not uncommon). This is particularly common for director-level bosses and those who lead divisions or organizations. Not sure how that fits into your theory.
sPh
Lot of pushback on the so-called "fraud epidemic" on the academic science blogs. The emerging concensus is that the campaign is part of a softening-up process for anti-climate science actions.
sPh
I don't disagree with you, but the economic pressures are relentless. As late as the mid-1990s a manufacturer could count on there being an ecosystem and trained programmers available for the various high-security, high-reliability architectures on the market (or at least people willing to take jobs being trained as programmers, designers, etc for such systems). By 2000 those ecosystems and finally the architectures themselves had vanished under the avalanche of Wintel systems (bought a new PDP-11 lately? Or even a Tandem Nonstop?). And the cost differential in favor of Wintel went from 1/3x to 1/1000x. It is extremely hard to convince a product development board that your product needs 1000x more funding than the team building what is fundamentally very similar consumer- or commercial-grade system.
And the demand from customers drives things too. Right now every operating manager I work with wants to be able to monitor his plant from home on his iPhone. Customers are putting enormous pressure on their vendors to replace expensive proprietary (but secure) wireless interfaces with much cheaper iPhones. Security gets paid lip service in the spec but doesn't control the decision.
sPh
It can take five to ten years (or in some cases I have seen, 20 years) to replace an embedded SCADA system.
Which is a good argument for not using Windows(tm) in any form for industrial control, but that argument was apparently lost in the late 1990s.
sPh
Sun has been a division of Oracle for ~2 years now.
sPh
There are the neocons in general, including the group that founding PNAC, but here I'm speaking specifically of the end-times/Revelations-type people. They were a feature of W's Administration; in fairness I don't think GHWB would have had truck with them.
sPh
You are aware that people with very similar beliefs held positions of power throughout George W. Bush's administration, right? How do you think that appeared to citizens of other nations?
sPh
I'm with your story, except: the APS debacle. I'll agree that it would have been difficult for Kodak to productize and market the digital technology it already had in-house much earlier than anyone else. But with that digital technology already in-house, as noted, why on earth did they think it was a good idea to embark on developing a new generation of film cameras incompatible with the 200,000,000 million units already in use? That money could have been used to buy Minolta (which was certainly on the market by that time), bring out a line of 35mm compacts that loaded existing 35mm film automatically, and start developing some usable digital technology.
sPh
Which is an utterly bizarre exception to the general rule. An 18 year old citizen can vote, sign binding legal contracts including those for real estate, end all association with the local public school district, get married, join the army, renounced his citizenship... anything except buy a beer. He/she is an adult in every sense of the term. Whether or not he/she will exercise those rights wisely is another question, but they are there.
sPh
Because when members of the dominant culture expressed opinions that minority cultures didn't like all the way up through the 1980s (and often followed those words up with beatings, house burnings, job losses, killings, etc) they were "censored, punished, and ostracized" by their society and contritely agreed never to do it again.
Oops, wait, no they weren't and no they didn't. I grew up on the abuse-heaping side of that cultural divide and saw it go on for years - decades - unchecked, brutal, and destructive. So now that the overall culture is changing to make such behavior unacceptable it is "oversensitivity"? Can't agree with your police work there.
sPh
"Political correctness" = I can no longer get away with openly hurling vicious insults at groups of people I dislike, and my fee fees are hurt because I am now publicly called out for being vicious; I want to go back to the days when I could bully with impunity.
You are aware that Rick Santorum has a significant chance of being nominated for President by a major political party in the United States, and thus given the affect of random events such as blips in the economy or oil prices has a significant chance of being elected President of the United States (and de facto leader of his political party)? Are you aware of Mr. Santorum's views on homosexuality and how homosexuals should be treated in our society? And that apparently his position is not a fringe belief but one which could see him installed in the Oval Office?
sPh
While you are observing all that, the actual nuclear warhead is being moved in a regular looking lorry marked TESCO.
sPh
The implication was fairly strong that the plague(s) were the result of the biofood corporations fighting wars against one another.
sPh
I think your browser must not properly render the IRONY tag.
sPh
> You're lucky. I work in an IT-related position on a network that controls infrastructure.
> If it goes down, downtown might not have water...
Which is why regulated utilities were (and those that still exist, still are) required to file staffing analysis and plans with their regulators - because it has been known since at least the days of the construction of the Pyramids that it is not possible for human beings to work 8000 hours per year no matter how vital their contribution is, and it is the responsibility of the service provider to have reasonable staffing/coverage plans in place.
sPh
If we are speaking of the United States, that is true up to an undefined point revolving around the word "reasonable". An agreement to take an exempt position is not an agreement to perform work for the employer for 8,760 hours per year; employers have found themselves on the wrong end of a Dept of Labor lawsuit for believing that it is.
sPh
>> It is an utterly appalling invasion of privacy with immense potential for
>> manipulation and privacy theft that requires immediate federal intervention.'"
Why would the Federal Gov't intervene? Seems like a capability tailor-made for use in surveillance by three-letter agencies.
sPh
And I think the answer to that will be, it was the carriers that decided what functions to enable. And the carriers were exempted from all electronic spying restrictions by the FISA extension of 2008 (aka absolve AT&T bill).
sPh
===
If you have rushed, underqualified people do the maintenance, then sure, it decreases reliability. If you have careful, non-rushed and competent people doing it, I doubt very much that the same is true.
===
Go read some of the original references on Reliability Centered Maintenance, particularly the Nowlan & Heap report referenced upthread by multiple posters. Your basic assumption has been shown to be very often incorrect in practice.
sPh
Add some really heavy-duty math to that with "Mathematical Aspects of Reliability-Centered Maintenance" by H. L. Resnikoff ! Way over my head. But the basic idea is simple. In a reasonably well-designed system with reasonably reliable components, you have the least information about that which interests you the most: failure rates. Making standard probability-distribution failure analysis virtually impossible (even if one discards the questionable "everything has a bathtub failure distribution" assumption).
sPh
Thanks!
sPh
===
Obviously not doing maintenance is much worse than the risk incurred by doing maintenance.
===
That's far from obvious, actually, and is demonstrably wrong for many types of systems and installations.
sPh
===
Back in the early 90s, I inherited from a friend a fear of rebooting, turning off, or performing maintenance on a computer. Half the time he opened the case, the computer would become unbootable or never turn back on.
===
Neither you nor your friend are alone in thinking that:
AD-A066579, RELIABILITY-CENTERED MAINTENANCE, Nowlan & Heap, (DEC 1978) [this used to be available for download from the US Dept of Commerce web site; now appears to be behind a US government paywall (!)]
A more recent summary:
http://reliabilityweb.com/index.php/articles/maintenance_management_a_new_paradigm/
sPh