Note going to work, there's always going to be another psychopath willing to take up where the last one left off.
On the contrary. Drug running is a business, and right now it's a competitive one. The cartels mostly build their military capabilities because it increases their ability to get product to market. If having big fangs and teeth was a disadvantage --- i.e., it increased their costs or threatened their existence --- then they'd be outcompeted by less violent cartels.
As an example, over the past decade the NYC police have revised their cocaine enforcement to target street dealing, but mostly leave non-violent apartment dealing alone. The result has been a huge drop in violence, since the dealers can make more money by keeping a low profile. This stuff really works.
I'm not sure if prohibition is a good solution. Maybe some good, some bad. But since it's clearly not on the political table right this second we at least need to target the real problem before it gets beyond our control.
That's just a slippery slope argument. Who says that the US wouldn't be much more effective at eliminating cartels that cross the border than the Mexican police is?
We're not that effective at eliminating organized drug gangs right now, and that's the scenario I'm concerned about. A huge increase in kidnapping for ransom, municipal gov't corruption, the works.
You can transfer tiny fractions of a bitcoin, so the number of bitcoins in existance isn't that important for liquidity. It's not like a stock.
There is a lower bound to the number of BTC you can transact. More importantly, the number of coins in existence is very important --- the value of 1 BTC is going to be determined, at least to some extent, by the number of BTC in existence. The worry is that people will hoard coins in the expectation that supply won't keep up with demand.
This throttles the market because (a) the value of BTC is now based on speculation, and (b) huge sums could be dumped at any moment, leading to currency instability.
I said this in another comment but I'll say it here too: BTC should have an expiration date, and be rolled back into the market when they're not used. Alternatively the limits on coin creation should be adjusted.
One potential problem is that there are huge stores of Bitcoin floating around, and nobody knows who owns them. Some were created "back in the day" when the network was small and computation was easy. Others were probably picked up by curiosity seekers, who then lost interest.
Either way there are potentially plenty of Bitcoin that could come back on the market at any point, depressing the price and leading to a currency crash.
What the Bitcoin economy needs is an expiration date. Coins must see some transaction once every two years or they become invalid. Alternatively they could be rolled back to the community via through some new mechanism.
At very least, we need to target these cartels based on their level of violence and threat to government control. Pick the nastiest one with the most weapons and devote all of our resources to destroying it. Then move on to the next one on the list, and so on and so forth.
Yes, this means we'll have to take resources away from some of the lesser cartels, but the point is to reduce violence not drug shipments. It needs to be made clear that being the biggest, baddest, most threatening organization is a death sentence for a cartel. Right now these organizations are building jerry-rigged military weapons, but it's only a matter of time before they're doing more, and before they spread over the US border and become entrenched.
The current US & Mexican policy is terrible, bordering on suicidal.
The fundamental problem with software patents is that companies patent simple ideas. The Amazon one-click purchase patent is a prime example. These kinds of ideas should be considered "obvious".
That's correct. Also, there's the fact that old software concepts can be re-patented simply by applying them to a new business area: so, the first person to patent shoe-tying in the context of an e-commerce application gets a monopoly on the idea for twenty years.
I would note that this doesn't seem to occur in the field of/mechanical/ inventions, where the patent office appears to have its head screwed on straight. For example, a few years ago my father tried to patent a simple device designed to unclog garbage disposals. The patent examiner came back with prior art from the late 1800s --- a device with a very similar schematic but a radically different purpose. It was designed to unspool barbed wire for fences. I think the sensitivity level was a little high on that one, but at least there was somebody awake at the switch.
There are good patents, that's the tricky thing. Still, there are a variety of things Congress could do to ameliorate the problem, even without tackling it head on. For one, it could provide more funding to the USPTO examiners. For another it could provide a more cost-effective path to getting patents into re-exam. Even better would be to change the standard for finding a patent invalid. It would be a huge help even if these ideas were limited to patents filed during the 1990s, when the.com boom was in full swing and the USPTO had reduced its examiner qualifications to "does not (routinely) eat human brains".
How did this arrest go down? This is clearly a more interesting development then yet another Sony hack. Hopefully there will be more information forthcoming.
Via the same mechanism every other arrest in this area goes down: traditional investigative work. I.e., he bragged, someone ratted.
What we need is a Federal law with two components:
1. Establish that it's perfectly legal to film the police doing their job in a public place. 2. Make it a crime, punishable with serious jail time, for a police officer to intimidate a photographer, confiscate their camera, or return the camera without the images.
This law should have no exception for "accidents" like phones being smashed or evidence being lost --- any more than we tolerate "accidents" involving children being lost or killed. Police should know that the minute they confiscate a private individual's camera they are putting their careers and their freedom in the balance should anything go wrong.
Of course none of this would be workable; if Congress actually passed any kind of law it would almost certainly protect the police and not the citizenry; and half of Slashdot would probably object to this being a Federal law rather than a state law or would propose that we adopt a technological/market solution instead.
Prisons spend so much money and provide items such as health care, exercise facilities and food because those people are forced to be there.
Prisons provide healthcare and food for free because prisoners are forced to be in prison, thus preventing them from earning their own money to pay for those items. Similarly, school is a full-time requirement for those under 18 (or 16, anyone know what the law is in Michigan?) and also prevents you from holding a full time job (let's put child labor laws aside). So it's actually a much fairer comparison than you think it is --- daytime wage-earning hours are much more valuable than sleeping time.
The reason we don't provide students with healthcare or meals is because it's assumed that their parents will provide for them. If students routinely had to pay for those items themselves you'd see a huge backlash against mandatory schooldays --- or else the government would provide meals and healthcare just as it does for prisoners.
In other words, I think your counterargument is a lot less reasonable than you think it is.
By that metric, they are spending 22% MORE per student on an hourly basis than they are on a prisoner.
And I think the point is that in terms of the value to society, basic education should probably be worth a lot more than 22% more than imprisonment, your somewhat arbitrary calculations aside.
Yes, they should have been using macs. They don't get viruses.
But in all seriousness, the question I would ask is: how many known USB drive infection and privilege escalation vulnerabilities can you download for a 1-year-unpatched* Mac right now. How many can you download for the same Windows machine? In each category many have already been weaponized? How many of these can be tied together with widespread malware vectors that will get them near the machine to be infected?
Of course many of the same vulnerabilities exist for the Mac and for Linux. The difference is that they haven't been discovered, widely publicized and weaponized. You could do all of these things given the resources --- e..g, if you were a nation state.
But if you're not a nation state, then the availability of cheap exploits is what makes Windows machines such a terrifyingly weak link in the security chain, and something you can attack remotely on a relative shoestring. The fact that it's not being done is simply an illustration that the people who know how to do this stuff are not the same people who want to kill Americans. Right now.
* A generous description of many of these air-gapped SCADA machines.
Stuxnet doesn't "target" anything other than Windows SCADA systems (which should cause concern when you see those three words together...), notably those from Seimens. Anywhere you've got one of those SCADA systems, you've got a possibility of Stuxnet. It's just that Iran was using them for their process control systems for the enrichment plant.
Stuxnet targets a Siemens centrifuge controller that's programmed by an (air-gapped) Windows machine. Unfortunately this same basic pattern repeats itself all over the place.
For any given SCADA system --- regardless of manufacturer --- you're extremely likely to see it connected to a modern PC, typically a windows machine. Even if the Windows machine is just running a terminal program, it's connected.
What Stuxnet showed us is that these Windows boxes are a critical vulnerability, even if they're just an ingredient in the programming chain, even if the box is separated by an air gap. I'm sure Israel/US would have found a way to those centrifuge controllers, but without the Windows infection vector it would have been a whole hell of a lot more difficult.
You are suggesting that it is immoral to burn fuel. Or, rather, to burn fuel for a purpose that you (or somebody?) doesn't approve of, or doesn't deem important enough.
It isn't. You're free to disapprove of it, and you're free to tell yourself that Google's founders are going to murder the planet because they flew to Tahiti, but that's got nothing to do with morality.
There's a large and increasing body evidence that burning large amounts of fossil fuel is warming the planet, which in turn will cause oceans to rise, flooding farmland and causing massive population displacement and death. If the science is correct, or if you honestly believe it to be true, then yes --- burning massive amount of excess fuel for a pleasure cruise is immoral. It's immoral in the purest sense of the word.
Most respectable publishers for the CS field have a "self archiving" policy that lets people put their papers on their web site. When they do, all you have to do is give the students the link and tell them to read the paper. No infringement involved.
It's totally unclear. I've published a number of papers in conferences and journals and along the way I've signed a bunch of copyright forms. Every one is different. Some of the forms include very strong language about reproduction, some have personal reproduction rights, some say nothing.
Now you are right that some of these sources probably maintain a policy that allows self-archiving, but it's not totally clear which ones, and whether this represents a permanent license grant or just a policy that can be revoked at any time. I post my papers (in various forms) anyway, and nobody's ever said anything about it. But that's because there's no money to be made off of me --- the adoption of a rule like the one discussed in this article would change that.
Furthermore, although I try to avoid it, I do occasionally host copies of helpful research materials for my class in the event that the original sources go dark. Usually this is because the material just isn't being maintained and nobody minds at all, but technically it's a big copyright violation.
Are things different in other fields? Are there areas where classes are taught primarily from copied materials? If so, why is this done, instead of just picking a selection of books? Is it that there are no adequate books? If so, then why don't people write them?
I teach a graduate-level cryptography course with no assigned textbook --- the reading assignments are almost entirely based on research papers. These are mostly available on line "for free", but this is only because academic publishers haven't aggressively pursued their copyright claims and locked this material down.*
I think the textbook model breaks down as you get into more advanced classes that cover research material.
Incidentally, if this policy was adopted by my university (not GA tech) I would freely violate copyright law and I would encourage my students to do so as well.
* Incidentally, academic publishers play almost no role in the production or even the typesetting of this material. Even book layout is handled by unpaid volunteers. However, to publish in the top conferences and journals you have to sign your life away. It's ridiculous.
Two wars that continue to occupy 150,000 troops and tie up a quarter of our defense budget; a bloated homeland-security apparatus that has at times pushed the bounds of civil liberty; soaring oil prices partially attributable to the global war on bin Laden's terrorist network; and a chunk of our mounting national debt.
In other words, fantastic business for well-connected defense contractors. What, you thought they were going to sit back and make less money just because we defeated the only other global superpower?
In all seriousness, a couple of years ago I attended a meeting with a military organization that was created specifically to deal with the threat to US soldiers created by Improvised Explosive Devices. The purpose of the meeting? To sell them their own computer network.
A computer network in Iraq, or Afghanistan, where the IEDs tend to accumulate? Nope. Just another big installation in Washington DC, costing a fortune to the taxpayer, so an office full of remote staff can have their own redundant equipment and IT staff while the real work gets done overseas.
Yes, in all seriousness --- come up with a device that can instantly diagnose a bacterial or viral infection (specifically: is this swine flu, bird flu, or a cold) and you'll save a hell of a lot of lives when a pandemic comes round.
Even if it only works with a tiny number of pre-determined pathogens, that would be huge.
Other example: Apple introduced random playlists on iPods years ago. Now people noticed that some songs got played more than once before all others were played. Can't be random! There's a bug! Well, no. Still, Apple had to modify their software to make the choice actually LESS random (by have no song being played twice) to make it appear "really" random to the users.
What you are describing is a (pseudo-)random permutation of a playlist. It's still random, just chosen from a different distribution.
And in the case you describe it's arguably a much better choice in terms of what users want. The users weren't being unreasonable, Apple just screwed up.
Your girlfriend was selected in an unfair lottery. It wouldn't be right to let all that stand.
It's really not a zero-sum game, just a simulation of one. The US can afford to admit all of the 22,000 accidental winners and hold a second lottery for the full 100,000 quota.
This was a monumental fuckup that cost people significant amounts of time and money. Hopefully it was a one time fuckup. Given that the US already hands out a relatively low number of green cards, we can afford to eat an extra 22,000 this one time.
Your version of justice would probably have Solomon's men cutting the baby in half.
1. Does your system use software? 2. Is it connected to a network, or does it have any kind of outward-facing attack surface? 3. Is it an embedded system? 4. Is it based on Windows? 5. Is it based on another commercial OS? 6. Does it use a significant number of standard libraries? 7. Is it proprietary, or has it/not/ been subject to significant public attack/repair/analysis. 8. Does it handle any kind of sensitive data, have a microphone that could overhear things, or is it connected to a network that has other kinds of sensitive data on it.
If you answered 'yes' to question 8 and any one of the previous questions, then your system has a critical vulnerability that could lead to a total compromise. Finding that vulnerability will require varying degrees of effort, from 'almost none' to 'a year of with a fuzzing framework and IDA'.
If you answered yes to 3, 4 and 5, possibly 6, definitely 7, then it'll be closer to the easier side than the hard side.
I work in the security industry, so I perhaps I'm just a bit jaded. But I have to say that the novelty of these stories has worn off for me --- we could probably save everyone a lot of trouble by setting up a cron job that generates 'random system of the day has vulnerability' new stories.
(And yes, I realize that it's important to keep vendors on their toes, etc. But this will be handled like every other story: a few holes will be patched, the vendor will brush off the concerns, and it'll be business as usual.)
This whole discussion is predicated on the notion that Skype is better than a standard VoIP/videoconferencing network (with centralized call setup and some routing) due to its low cost of operation. But Skype, for $8.5bn, is not low cost.
I am willing to bet an inflation-adjusted $100 that MS never makes up the difference.
Even if they do re-construct everything, it has patents. It's not that easy.
When you're talking about a budget number with 9 zeros in it it, it really is that easy. Throw in a $500 million/year court-enforced judgement (which I imagine is more than Skype makes or MS could possibly charge) and you'd still be in the black for 14 years.
But in reality it would never come to that. Microsoft has one of the largest patent portfolios in the industry. I have to imagine that they could easily countersue for any number of things. It would get ugly, but it would still be cheaper than what MS just paid.
Insofar as Microsoft has reasons --- I'm sure they do. They had a number of reasons to start their currently-unprofitable businesses and to invest in a number of the.com dogs they now own. But those were bad reasons, and the stockholders should be very worried when they see this kind of money getting tossed around without a clear plan.
I do believe MS is not trying to get Skype per-se, but their architecture. The common mortal wouldn't know, but Skype has proprietary encryption that still has not been beaten (Russia even wanted to ban Skype), distributed supernodes that make their network really cheap to run (compared to other kinds of architectures) while still working flawlessly over cascading NAT's, for example and a really good VoiP codec (revolutionary, really, it was the first real contender for a PC phone).
If you can't reconstruct Skype's architecture for less than $1bn, then you shouldn't be in the business.
The most relevant point here is that Skype is a p2p client. That means most of their network config and encryption logic is right there in the client waiting for someone who knows how to use IDAPro to reverse it. So you can start the task with a full design schematic, then spend the rest of your time implementing and improving.
While you're at it you can run a decent national marketing campaign (incl. Superbowl ads) for no more than another $300-400 million. That leaves you with a cool $7bn to defray operating costs, while you offer the service as a free feature built into Windows 8 and Windows Phone --- thus killing off Skype and any other competition.
(Yes, I know this was probably a stock+cash deal, so it's not 'real' money. But stock has value too. I'm sure MS has lots of good arguments for this decision, but none of them will ever lead to anyone turning a profit.)
Holy crap, of course there are experiments that demonstrate evolutionary theory. FFS just buy in some fruitflies or mice... After a few generations observe the results.
Yep, and the ID folks know this. If you point to this fantastically amazing, observable phenomenon, they simply move the goalposts so that 'evolution' is defined as something you can't easily demonstrate in a lab. Speciation, for example, or the development of the eyeball in a complex species.
Even if you somehow figure out how to demonstrate those things, they'll find a way to re-define it into something even harder: like "demonstrate that modern humans can be produced from single-cell bacteria".
Point is, you can't argue with these folks, and you can't expect intellectual honesty out of a school of thought which posits the fundamental existence of some Intelligent Designer but then fails to express the slightest curiosity about who they are or how they operate.
This has actually damaged public discourse. My father recently took a guided tour of a major national park. The ranger pointed our a species of small lizard, and told the group how this species had observably changed its colors and foodsource over the past few decades, in response to some changing environmental condition. One of the group innocently used the term 'evolution' to ask a question about this, and the ranger immediately stopped him and pointed out that this is an example of 'adaptation', not evolution. His correction had an 'I'm only correcting you to cover my ass' wink to it, but it's a shame that we live in a country where Federal employees have to be so careful and explicit.
It suggests that MIT has established itself as the top engineering school in the world, and consequently gets the best engineering applicants in the world. I hear it's also a decent education.
Slashdot Mirror
Note going to work, there's always going to be another psychopath willing to take up where the last one left off.
On the contrary. Drug running is a business, and right now it's a competitive one. The cartels mostly build their military capabilities because it increases their ability to get product to market. If having big fangs and teeth was a disadvantage --- i.e., it increased their costs or threatened their existence --- then they'd be outcompeted by less violent cartels.
As an example, over the past decade the NYC police have revised their cocaine enforcement to target street dealing, but mostly leave non-violent apartment dealing alone. The result has been a huge drop in violence, since the dealers can make more money by keeping a low profile. This stuff really works.
I'm not sure if prohibition is a good solution. Maybe some good, some bad. But since it's clearly not on the political table right this second we at least need to target the real problem before it gets beyond our control.
We're not that effective at eliminating organized drug gangs right now, and that's the scenario I'm concerned about. A huge increase in kidnapping for ransom, municipal gov't corruption, the works.
There is a lower bound to the number of BTC you can transact. More importantly, the number of coins in existence is very important --- the value of 1 BTC is going to be determined, at least to some extent, by the number of BTC in existence. The worry is that people will hoard coins in the expectation that supply won't keep up with demand.
This throttles the market because (a) the value of BTC is now based on speculation, and (b) huge sums could be dumped at any moment, leading to currency instability.
I said this in another comment but I'll say it here too: BTC should have an expiration date, and be rolled back into the market when they're not used. Alternatively the limits on coin creation should be adjusted.
One potential problem is that there are huge stores of Bitcoin floating around, and nobody knows who owns them. Some were created "back in the day" when the network was small and computation was easy. Others were probably picked up by curiosity seekers, who then lost interest.
Either way there are potentially plenty of Bitcoin that could come back on the market at any point, depressing the price and leading to a currency crash.
What the Bitcoin economy needs is an expiration date. Coins must see some transaction once every two years or they become invalid. Alternatively they could be rolled back to the community via through some new mechanism.
At very least, we need to target these cartels based on their level of violence and threat to government control. Pick the nastiest one with the most weapons and devote all of our resources to destroying it. Then move on to the next one on the list, and so on and so forth.
Yes, this means we'll have to take resources away from some of the lesser cartels, but the point is to reduce violence not drug shipments. It needs to be made clear that being the biggest, baddest, most threatening organization is a death sentence for a cartel. Right now these organizations are building jerry-rigged military weapons, but it's only a matter of time before they're doing more, and before they spread over the US border and become entrenched.
The current US & Mexican policy is terrible, bordering on suicidal.
That's correct. Also, there's the fact that old software concepts can be re-patented simply by applying them to a new business area: so, the first person to patent shoe-tying in the context of an e-commerce application gets a monopoly on the idea for twenty years.
I would note that this doesn't seem to occur in the field of /mechanical/ inventions, where the patent office appears to have its head screwed on straight. For example, a few years ago my father tried to patent a simple device designed to unclog garbage disposals. The patent examiner came back with prior art from the late 1800s --- a device with a very similar schematic but a radically different purpose. It was designed to unspool barbed wire for fences. I think the sensitivity level was a little high on that one, but at least there was somebody awake at the switch.
There are good patents, that's the tricky thing. Still, there are a variety of things Congress could do to ameliorate the problem, even without tackling it head on. For one, it could provide more funding to the USPTO examiners. For another it could provide a more cost-effective path to getting patents into re-exam. Even better would be to change the standard for finding a patent invalid. It would be a huge help even if these ideas were limited to patents filed during the 1990s, when the .com boom was in full swing and the USPTO had reduced its examiner qualifications to "does not (routinely) eat human brains".
That this statement even has to be written down represents a miracle of political branding and propaganda.
Via the same mechanism every other arrest in this area goes down: traditional investigative work. I.e., he bragged, someone ratted.
What we need is a Federal law with two components:
1. Establish that it's perfectly legal to film the police doing their job in a public place.
2. Make it a crime, punishable with serious jail time, for a police officer to intimidate a photographer, confiscate their camera, or return the camera without the images.
This law should have no exception for "accidents" like phones being smashed or evidence being lost --- any more than we tolerate "accidents" involving children being lost or killed. Police should know that the minute they confiscate a private individual's camera they are putting their careers and their freedom in the balance should anything go wrong.
Of course none of this would be workable; if Congress actually passed any kind of law it would almost certainly protect the police and not the citizenry; and half of Slashdot would probably object to this being a Federal law rather than a state law or would propose that we adopt a technological/market solution instead.
Prisons provide healthcare and food for free because prisoners are forced to be in prison, thus preventing them from earning their own money to pay for those items. Similarly, school is a full-time requirement for those under 18 (or 16, anyone know what the law is in Michigan?) and also prevents you from holding a full time job (let's put child labor laws aside). So it's actually a much fairer comparison than you think it is --- daytime wage-earning hours are much more valuable than sleeping time.
The reason we don't provide students with healthcare or meals is because it's assumed that their parents will provide for them. If students routinely had to pay for those items themselves you'd see a huge backlash against mandatory schooldays --- or else the government would provide meals and healthcare just as it does for prisoners.
In other words, I think your counterargument is a lot less reasonable than you think it is.
And I think the point is that in terms of the value to society, basic education should probably be worth a lot more than 22% more than imprisonment, your somewhat arbitrary calculations aside.
But in all seriousness, the question I would ask is: how many known USB drive infection and privilege escalation vulnerabilities can you download for a 1-year-unpatched* Mac right now. How many can you download for the same Windows machine? In each category many have already been weaponized? How many of these can be tied together with widespread malware vectors that will get them near the machine to be infected?
Of course many of the same vulnerabilities exist for the Mac and for Linux. The difference is that they haven't been discovered, widely publicized and weaponized. You could do all of these things given the resources --- e..g, if you were a nation state.
But if you're not a nation state, then the availability of cheap exploits is what makes Windows machines such a terrifyingly weak link in the security chain, and something you can attack remotely on a relative shoestring. The fact that it's not being done is simply an illustration that the people who know how to do this stuff are not the same people who want to kill Americans. Right now.
* A generous description of many of these air-gapped SCADA machines.
Stuxnet targets a Siemens centrifuge controller that's programmed by an (air-gapped) Windows machine. Unfortunately this same basic pattern repeats itself all over the place.
For any given SCADA system --- regardless of manufacturer --- you're extremely likely to see it connected to a modern PC, typically a windows machine. Even if the Windows machine is just running a terminal program, it's connected.
What Stuxnet showed us is that these Windows boxes are a critical vulnerability, even if they're just an ingredient in the programming chain, even if the box is separated by an air gap. I'm sure Israel/US would have found a way to those centrifuge controllers, but without the Windows infection vector it would have been a whole hell of a lot more difficult.
There's a large and increasing body evidence that burning large amounts of fossil fuel is warming the planet, which in turn will cause oceans to rise, flooding farmland and causing massive population displacement and death. If the science is correct, or if you honestly believe it to be true, then yes --- burning massive amount of excess fuel for a pleasure cruise is immoral. It's immoral in the purest sense of the word.
It's totally unclear. I've published a number of papers in conferences and journals and along the way I've signed a bunch of copyright forms. Every one is different. Some of the forms include very strong language about reproduction, some have personal reproduction rights, some say nothing.
Now you are right that some of these sources probably maintain a policy that allows self-archiving, but it's not totally clear which ones, and whether this represents a permanent license grant or just a policy that can be revoked at any time. I post my papers (in various forms) anyway, and nobody's ever said anything about it. But that's because there's no money to be made off of me --- the adoption of a rule like the one discussed in this article would change that.
Furthermore, although I try to avoid it, I do occasionally host copies of helpful research materials for my class in the event that the original sources go dark. Usually this is because the material just isn't being maintained and nobody minds at all, but technically it's a big copyright violation.
I teach a graduate-level cryptography course with no assigned textbook --- the reading assignments are almost entirely based on research papers. These are mostly available on line "for free", but this is only because academic publishers haven't aggressively pursued their copyright claims and locked this material down.*
I think the textbook model breaks down as you get into more advanced classes that cover research material.
Incidentally, if this policy was adopted by my university (not GA tech) I would freely violate copyright law and I would encourage my students to do so as well.
* Incidentally, academic publishers play almost no role in the production or even the typesetting of this material. Even book layout is handled by unpaid volunteers. However, to publish in the top conferences and journals you have to sign your life away. It's ridiculous.
In other words, fantastic business for well-connected defense contractors. What, you thought they were going to sit back and make less money just because we defeated the only other global superpower?
In all seriousness, a couple of years ago I attended a meeting with a military organization that was created specifically to deal with the threat to US soldiers created by Improvised Explosive Devices. The purpose of the meeting? To sell them their own computer network.
A computer network in Iraq, or Afghanistan, where the IEDs tend to accumulate? Nope. Just another big installation in Washington DC, costing a fortune to the taxpayer, so an office full of remote staff can have their own redundant equipment and IT staff while the real work gets done overseas.
Yes, in all seriousness --- come up with a device that can instantly diagnose a bacterial or viral infection (specifically: is this swine flu, bird flu, or a cold) and you'll save a hell of a lot of lives when a pandemic comes round.
Even if it only works with a tiny number of pre-determined pathogens, that would be huge.
What you are describing is a (pseudo-)random permutation of a playlist. It's still random, just chosen from a different distribution.
And in the case you describe it's arguably a much better choice in terms of what users want. The users weren't being unreasonable, Apple just screwed up.
It's really not a zero-sum game, just a simulation of one. The US can afford to admit all of the 22,000 accidental winners and hold a second lottery for the full 100,000 quota.
This was a monumental fuckup that cost people significant amounts of time and money. Hopefully it was a one time fuckup. Given that the US already hands out a relatively low number of green cards, we can afford to eat an extra 22,000 this one time.
Your version of justice would probably have Solomon's men cutting the baby in half.
1. Does your system use software? /not/ been subject to significant public attack/repair/analysis.
2. Is it connected to a network, or does it have any kind of outward-facing attack surface?
3. Is it an embedded system?
4. Is it based on Windows?
5. Is it based on another commercial OS?
6. Does it use a significant number of standard libraries?
7. Is it proprietary, or has it
8. Does it handle any kind of sensitive data, have a microphone that could overhear things, or is it connected to a network that has other kinds of sensitive data on it.
If you answered 'yes' to question 8 and any one of the previous questions, then your system has a critical vulnerability that could lead to a total compromise. Finding that vulnerability will require varying degrees of effort, from 'almost none' to 'a year of with a fuzzing framework and IDA'.
If you answered yes to 3, 4 and 5, possibly 6, definitely 7, then it'll be closer to the easier side than the hard side.
I work in the security industry, so I perhaps I'm just a bit jaded. But I have to say that the novelty of these stories has worn off for me --- we could probably save everyone a lot of trouble by setting up a cron job that generates 'random system of the day has vulnerability' new stories.
(And yes, I realize that it's important to keep vendors on their toes, etc. But this will be handled like every other story: a few holes will be patched, the vendor will brush off the concerns, and it'll be business as usual.)
Lots of great lessons to learn from skype.
This whole discussion is predicated on the notion that Skype is better than a standard VoIP/videoconferencing network (with centralized call setup and some routing) due to its low cost of operation. But Skype, for $8.5bn, is not low cost.
I am willing to bet an inflation-adjusted $100 that MS never makes up the difference.
When you're talking about a budget number with 9 zeros in it it, it really is that easy. Throw in a $500 million/year court-enforced judgement (which I imagine is more than Skype makes or MS could possibly charge) and you'd still be in the black for 14 years.
But in reality it would never come to that. Microsoft has one of the largest patent portfolios in the industry. I have to imagine that they could easily countersue for any number of things. It would get ugly, but it would still be cheaper than what MS just paid.
Insofar as Microsoft has reasons --- I'm sure they do. They had a number of reasons to start their currently-unprofitable businesses and to invest in a number of the .com dogs they now own. But those were bad reasons, and the stockholders should be very worried when they see this kind of money getting tossed around without a clear plan.
If you can't reconstruct Skype's architecture for less than $1bn, then you shouldn't be in the business.
The most relevant point here is that Skype is a p2p client. That means most of their network config and encryption logic is right there in the client waiting for someone who knows how to use IDAPro to reverse it. So you can start the task with a full design schematic, then spend the rest of your time implementing and improving.
While you're at it you can run a decent national marketing campaign (incl. Superbowl ads) for no more than another $300-400 million. That leaves you with a cool $7bn to defray operating costs, while you offer the service as a free feature built into Windows 8 and Windows Phone --- thus killing off Skype and any other competition.
(Yes, I know this was probably a stock+cash deal, so it's not 'real' money. But stock has value too. I'm sure MS has lots of good arguments for this decision, but none of them will ever lead to anyone turning a profit.)
Yep, and the ID folks know this. If you point to this fantastically amazing, observable phenomenon, they simply move the goalposts so that 'evolution' is defined as something you can't easily demonstrate in a lab. Speciation, for example, or the development of the eyeball in a complex species.
Even if you somehow figure out how to demonstrate those things, they'll find a way to re-define it into something even harder: like "demonstrate that modern humans can be produced from single-cell bacteria".
Point is, you can't argue with these folks, and you can't expect intellectual honesty out of a school of thought which posits the fundamental existence of some Intelligent Designer but then fails to express the slightest curiosity about who they are or how they operate.
This has actually damaged public discourse. My father recently took a guided tour of a major national park. The ranger pointed our a species of small lizard, and told the group how this species had observably changed its colors and foodsource over the past few decades, in response to some changing environmental condition. One of the group innocently used the term 'evolution' to ask a question about this, and the ranger immediately stopped him and pointed out that this is an example of 'adaptation', not evolution. His correction had an 'I'm only correcting you to cover my ass' wink to it, but it's a shame that we live in a country where Federal employees have to be so careful and explicit.
It suggests that MIT has established itself as the top engineering school in the world, and consequently gets the best engineering applicants in the world. I hear it's also a decent education.