*Setting ALL traffic lights EVERYWHERE continuously to GREEN - Is this fear mongering? EVERYWHERE? really? 99% of traffic lights are not connected to any grid. Maybe they have local transponders that Ambulances can request green, but it would be negligent to allow a situation that could bypass the interlocks that prevent all-ways green. There is only so much that software hacking can defeat. The professional engineer that would ever allow that situation would be put in prison.
*ATM's across the nation spewing out wads of cash (riot ensues) - ATMs and banking in general do not rely on the internet for core operations. You may find some stupid private ATMs to be vulnerable, but that is their problem. Web banking for customer-access of course is an exposure, but a genuine effort is applied to closing holes in those systems.
*Cutting electricity at night (riot ensues) - Have you ever experienced a blackout? I have. People survive. We are not animals. But, this one is interesting because there are documented cases where power plants have some malware present. However, I am slightly skeptical that PCs would control machinery in a way that a hacker could exploit directly. It would require a program that could specifically interfere with the development and deployment of code into PLCs and other real-time systems that causes damage. Not impossible, but way up there in the 1% of possible things that could happen. Most likely any corruption of information systems could be over-ridden by engineers or resolved by backup systems. There is a much more likely chance of physical sabotage (actually has happened in US.)
This is still the most credible threat, but the fact that it isn't an everyday occurrence like identity theft says that there is either insufficient motive, or other mitigating factors. If it was as easy as some news reports claim, then bored hackers everywhere would be doing it. To the original point, the solution isn't retaliatory strikes on other nations, it is regulatory fines on the idiots who don't understand how or why to firewall critical infrastructure.
*Resetting GPS coordinates ala Die Hard (2 I think) so sea level is revised - I'll leave that to a person who actually understands how that system works. My Spidy-sense says that is just Hollywood.
*DDOS facebook (riot ensues) - LOL probably true.
*Resetting/rebooting medical hardware - Possible, I'll blame the PHBs who allowed that equipment to be connected to public networks. Otherwise, they will continue normally if on private/inaccessible networks.
*Disabling cooling systems at nuclear reactors - Not really substantiated. Explain why the NRC allows the control systems to be web-enabled,
*Robovacuums commanded to "suck up the cat" - You got me there. I don't own one.
*Trains accelerated to maximum speed, brakes disabled - Same reasons as traffic lights and nuclear reactors.
Further examples:
*Hackers lift info from my computer and blackmail me. Why? because free market doesn't understand how to enforce better quality in OS's, and consumers have no power over this.
*My credit card numbers compromised for the 10th time. Why? because free market doesn't care and consumers are not well enough educated/powerless to demand chip-and-pin systems.
*Website goes down and I can't pay my bills. I pay my bills tomorrow when situation resolved.
*Movie studio leaks/hacked/whatever latest movie. Kinda their problem to instill loyalty on insiders and have secure systems.
*Some DIY'er puts his whole home automation online and hackers have fun spying on bedroom / unlocking front door / ordering endless supply of water filter supplies. - Sorry dude, you should have known.
*Car entertainment systems blasts Pron at 100 dB while children in car. - probably will happen soon. I don't trust all car companies to put quality and security first.
Totally agree. I've worked with a few physicists along the way. They won't admit it, but they are basically electrical engineers only missing a semester or two. They make fine engineers, willing to read a datasheet and have great attention to detail.
Aspiring managers absolutely should be attending meetings, volunteer efforts, etc. on their own time to develop leadership skills.
Surgeons and police officers are well-trained, but it is not usually considered creative work. On the job training is designed into the curriculum. In some cases, a surgeon may be innovative and develop new surgical techniques. In those cases, yes, they are basically operating on their own time. It is either pro-bono work or a teaching hospital, and the patient is willing to take a chance on a non-standard treatment.
Programming is creative work. Every problem is a new experience requiring a unique solution by a combination of past experience and knowledge, while incorporating fundamentals of science and math. Building this base is not necessarily well covered in school. Unfortunately, many curricula are eliminating internships and apprenticeships.
True. Systems that actually matter use leased-lines (or the digital equivalent.) Anything is possible, but the hackability is way less likely compared to the internet.
But there is the PHB factor trying to avoid that cost, or just wants to be able to log-in from home.
Exactly. I just don't get it, why does the media and actual government agencies equate 'cyber warfare' to actual weapons? It isn't remotely the same thing. Even the most organized state-sponsored cyber attack is basically just targeting design flaws in information systems. Real weapons target people and property that are actually difficult to protect from physical damage. It costs hundreds of billions of dollars per year to design, build, and staff military equipment. Actual warfare is absolute appalling hell, a cyber attack at its worst would be a degradation of some business systems that operate over the public internet. Any critical systems like military, banking, power grid, industrial networks, etc. essentially operate out-of-band. And if they don't, then they should be held to a higher standard. Yes, it would cost money, but not nearly military-level cost. So maybe some retail commerce would be inconvenienced, but what specifically would be damaged by a cyber attack?
I don't usually respond to AC's, but get a grip. Jeez.
Yes, I'm approaching middle age; own my house; have wife, kid, etc.
My career doesn't revolve around commodity computing hardware, I actually do work with a lot of discrete components for actual embedded electronic products.
You are never too old for toys. You can always learn something by playing. This nostalgia _is_ important, because it served me well. I hope future generations have something equally good even if it happens to be new and different. I'm not sure smartphones, social media, and inexpensive gaming rigs are that thing.
Being a skeptic is good, but a denialist is a different thing; removed from reality.
Yes, the 'science is settled' camp about climate change is definitely deserving of criticism. Real science is always open to _honest_ review with provable data, not just contrarian opinions. But my point is this article didn't demonstrate any significant science publications that contradict the majority of PHD's who are publishing about climate change.
Yes, 100% agree. I just wonder if people were saying the same thing 50, or 100 years ago. Is this history repeating itself, or something unique to the technological revolution of the 20th century?
Yes, taxes absolutely are a socialistic method of distributing costs that seem important to other people. I'm not willing to live in a third-world existence surrounded by people who can't afford to individually bear the costs of school at the time their kids are of school age. If you want your kid to go to private school, that is your choice. But the taxes you pay are not for your kid, it is for everyone regardless of how many kids you have.
And yes you do have the right to elect people making these rules, have a smaller taxable property, or move to a different town.
That seems to be the dilemma at a lot of places these days, even the front-runners like Best Buy, Target, etc. Newsflash to CEOs: if I go to your store's website to do research on your products then you need to make it easy and obvious what you have locally _today_. Ship to store is just a waste of everybody's time - I'm going elsewhere online at that point. If I'm in the store physically, you need to have the selection of products people want.
Very true. As a kid in the '80s, I really enjoyed Radio Shack. It was more than just a store. It was a culture. They had the battery club, the cheesy comic book, store catalog, toys, science kits, DIY audio parts for your car or home, anything radio, various loose parts for electronics projects. We were fighting the Soviets and science education was a priority. There was no internet to turn to. If you were patient, you could mail order the part you needed or rummage through a local surplus store. But Radio Shack had it on the shelf for $0.99 - even if that happened to be 500% markup. It was worth it.
Yeah exactly, his cynicism is off the charts (and misplaced)
Science did not tell us to avoid natural fats in our diet, it was the: USDA, FDA, AMA, etc. etc. It was government and industry associations, sensational journalists who won't or can't deal with basic stats, not scientists. On the contrary, there is a body of scientific works that are basically saying 'told you so.'
The jump to connecting this to climate change had zero supporting evidence in this article. If there was a pattern of provable deceit by a majority of scientists, then show it...
I agree, this seems to be a fine art that has been lost no matter what language was used. Putty is the only significant program that I know of that doesn't require a huge install. Heck, even MinGW got complicated along the way somewhere. You can't even install a printer driver under 100 MB anymore.
Exactly. This is not an apology. I read TFA. Somehow, they want to put the horse back in the barn. There was a time that they had a mission to develop technology that was useful to US government agencies, industry, banking interests, etc. I truly respect people who were doing honest work at securing US interests. But there is just no going back, all that work is forever tainted.
Doesn't work anymore. In the 20th century the 'wise men' (educated) were the first to be marched off... Then the 'undesirables', etc. They already were identified by the time the situation arose. Not sure what the 21st century holds for us. But considering how much information is recorded about all of us going back who knows how long, it is probably too late already.
You will have to do more than just keep quiet, you will have to be 'useful' as well.
Silly rabbit!:) We were certain of our liberties as codified in law (mistakenly.) Now, we are not sure of anything. It is no longer paranoia, now there is precedence.
Even in case #1, there is sometimes things that can be done. For example, speculative execution. If you can boil down to a small number of choices as a result of the first operation, then it may make sense to compute both outcomes. Or there may be some other intermediate value that might be needed in only some outcomes. But this requires application-specific knowledge usually to know exactly what is allowable and what the payoff would be. You wouldn't want to create a situation where executing both cases affects a global resource. So you would need a language expressive enough to hint this information to the compiler.
Telecommuting: I work for a company that is fairly traditional. I have co-workers in Germany, Japan, the other side of the USA, 3 co-workers working out of their homes in different cities. I work with them on a daily basis. The only reason I work in an office is because we work on physical hardware and need to share some resources. The irony is that talking with co-workers over phone, email, or shared screen is often more efficient than with the person in the same office.
Translation: translate.google.com works as well as anything. The only real limitation is that technical jargon in German doesn't pass through to an equivalent US English expression. But that is the same thing that happens when German people speak English. They have very good grammar and accent in English, but they are not taught our technical words or colloquialisms. So technical documents have a lot of instances of "Module", "Technology", etc. referring to different things using the same words when there were more specific words that meant something in German.
Cryptocurrency: true, I think that is a lot of work to do there. But not the least of which will be institutional barriers deliberately intended to regulate the flow of currency over borders.
I'd be happy calling December 25th "Santa Claus Day." Christians still refer to Christmas and go to midnight mass on the 24th and such.
The "Christmas" tree, lights, Santa, gift giving to each other, ham or turkey dinner, having the day off are definitely the norm in this country, and they are not spelled out in the bible as far as I know.
Happy Holidays offends _me_ only because it is so damn generic and politically correct. It is equivalent to say "Happy Holidays" on any holiday such as the 4th of July because we don't want to be exclusive of other nations' dates of independence.
So I think I will just go with "Have a merry Santa Claus Day and a happy new year" (Unless we don't want to offend people following other calender new years.) Then maybe "Have a merry Santa Claus Day and a happy rollover of the Gregorian calendar"
Kodak diversified into many areas. The problem is that they were always expecting the high profit margins in every product line. And they needed that due to the large R&D, worker benefits, big management, and quality control process that they tried to apply everywhere. Secondarily, they were always chasing the razor-blade model and that just doesn't work everywhere. I agree that led to some wasteful ventures like batteries and such. But in general, they preferred to sell off a company for one-time cash rather than try to operate it. For example: Carestream, Eastman chemical, Exelis, etc.
Many of these companies are able to expand in new directions. Formerly, they were constrained under the vertically-integrated structure within Kodak because they only focused on photographic products.
The good news is that many of the industries Kodak spun off are still employing people and operating in the same physical plant that Kodak built. In fact, many new food-processing operations have moved into former film-handling facilities due to the superb climate-controlled buildings that Kodak built up.
People here in Rochester have a lot of resentment that Kodak didn't pursue digital cameras sooner. But the plain fact is that there just isn't as much market to monetize even if they did beat out Sony, et al. for the camera market. Nevermind that even digital cameras have lost market to smartphones. Electronics are low-margin, especially if produced in the USA. Film was very high-margin and high-volume. If you are over 30 years old, you probably remember that using a few rolls of film a year was a big deal due to the cost. Now picture-taking is virtually free; only rarely do I pay money to print out a photo.
Slashdot Mirror
Too much imagination with no real think-through:
*Setting ALL traffic lights EVERYWHERE continuously to GREEN - Is this fear mongering? EVERYWHERE? really? 99% of traffic lights are not connected to any grid. Maybe they have local transponders that Ambulances can request green, but it would be negligent to allow a situation that could bypass the interlocks that prevent all-ways green. There is only so much that software hacking can defeat. The professional engineer that would ever allow that situation would be put in prison.
*ATM's across the nation spewing out wads of cash (riot ensues) - ATMs and banking in general do not rely on the internet for core operations. You may find some stupid private ATMs to be vulnerable, but that is their problem. Web banking for customer-access of course is an exposure, but a genuine effort is applied to closing holes in those systems.
*Cutting electricity at night (riot ensues) - Have you ever experienced a blackout? I have. People survive. We are not animals. But, this one is interesting because there are documented cases where power plants have some malware present. However, I am slightly skeptical that PCs would control machinery in a way that a hacker could exploit directly. It would require a program that could specifically interfere with the development and deployment of code into PLCs and other real-time systems that causes damage. Not impossible, but way up there in the 1% of possible things that could happen. Most likely any corruption of information systems could be over-ridden by engineers or resolved by backup systems. There is a much more likely chance of physical sabotage (actually has happened in US.)
This is still the most credible threat, but the fact that it isn't an everyday occurrence like identity theft says that there is either insufficient motive, or other mitigating factors. If it was as easy as some news reports claim, then bored hackers everywhere would be doing it. To the original point, the solution isn't retaliatory strikes on other nations, it is regulatory fines on the idiots who don't understand how or why to firewall critical infrastructure.
*Resetting GPS coordinates ala Die Hard (2 I think) so sea level is revised - I'll leave that to a person who actually understands how that system works. My Spidy-sense says that is just Hollywood.
*DDOS facebook (riot ensues) - LOL probably true.
*Resetting/rebooting medical hardware - Possible, I'll blame the PHBs who allowed that equipment to be connected to public networks. Otherwise, they will continue normally if on private/inaccessible networks.
*Disabling cooling systems at nuclear reactors - Not really substantiated. Explain why the NRC allows the control systems to be web-enabled,
*Robovacuums commanded to "suck up the cat" - You got me there. I don't own one.
*Trains accelerated to maximum speed, brakes disabled - Same reasons as traffic lights and nuclear reactors.
Further examples:
*Hackers lift info from my computer and blackmail me. Why? because free market doesn't understand how to enforce better quality in OS's, and consumers have no power over this.
*My credit card numbers compromised for the 10th time. Why? because free market doesn't care and consumers are not well enough educated/powerless to demand chip-and-pin systems.
*Website goes down and I can't pay my bills. I pay my bills tomorrow when situation resolved.
*Movie studio leaks/hacked/whatever latest movie. Kinda their problem to instill loyalty on insiders and have secure systems.
*Some DIY'er puts his whole home automation online and hackers have fun spying on bedroom / unlocking front door / ordering endless supply of water filter supplies. - Sorry dude, you should have known.
*Car entertainment systems blasts Pron at 100 dB while children in car. - probably will happen soon. I don't trust all car companies to put quality and security first.
Interesting. Maybe this is a cultural difference.
In the northeast US where I am:
Office == status/universal desire/privacy
Salary == taboo discussion.
Good advice. A little recon can do you much good.
Totally agree. I've worked with a few physicists along the way. They won't admit it, but they are basically electrical engineers only missing a semester or two. They make fine engineers, willing to read a datasheet and have great attention to detail.
If they gave you an office, then everyone else will ask for one. It is a lot easier to keep individual salaries secret.
Aspiring managers absolutely should be attending meetings, volunteer efforts, etc. on their own time to develop leadership skills.
Surgeons and police officers are well-trained, but it is not usually considered creative work. On the job training is designed into the curriculum. In some cases, a surgeon may be innovative and develop new surgical techniques. In those cases, yes, they are basically operating on their own time. It is either pro-bono work or a teaching hospital, and the patient is willing to take a chance on a non-standard treatment.
Programming is creative work. Every problem is a new experience requiring a unique solution by a combination of past experience and knowledge, while incorporating fundamentals of science and math. Building this base is not necessarily well covered in school. Unfortunately, many curricula are eliminating internships and apprenticeships.
True. Systems that actually matter use leased-lines (or the digital equivalent.) Anything is possible, but the hackability is way less likely compared to the internet.
But there is the PHB factor trying to avoid that cost, or just wants to be able to log-in from home.
Exactly. I just don't get it, why does the media and actual government agencies equate 'cyber warfare' to actual weapons? It isn't remotely the same thing. Even the most organized state-sponsored cyber attack is basically just targeting design flaws in information systems. Real weapons target people and property that are actually difficult to protect from physical damage. It costs hundreds of billions of dollars per year to design, build, and staff military equipment. Actual warfare is absolute appalling hell, a cyber attack at its worst would be a degradation of some business systems that operate over the public internet. Any critical systems like military, banking, power grid, industrial networks, etc. essentially operate out-of-band. And if they don't, then they should be held to a higher standard. Yes, it would cost money, but not nearly military-level cost. So maybe some retail commerce would be inconvenienced, but what specifically would be damaged by a cyber attack?
I don't usually respond to AC's, but get a grip. Jeez.
Yes, I'm approaching middle age; own my house; have wife, kid, etc.
My career doesn't revolve around commodity computing hardware, I actually do work with a lot of discrete components for actual embedded electronic products.
You are never too old for toys. You can always learn something by playing. This nostalgia _is_ important, because it served me well. I hope future generations have something equally good even if it happens to be new and different. I'm not sure smartphones, social media, and inexpensive gaming rigs are that thing.
Being a skeptic is good, but a denialist is a different thing; removed from reality.
Yes, the 'science is settled' camp about climate change is definitely deserving of criticism. Real science is always open to _honest_ review with provable data, not just contrarian opinions. But my point is this article didn't demonstrate any significant science publications that contradict the majority of PHD's who are publishing about climate change.
Yes, exactly. I stated 'science' as in the systematic process of testable ideas and critical review of publications. Anything else is just marketing.
Yes, 100% agree. I just wonder if people were saying the same thing 50, or 100 years ago. Is this history repeating itself, or something unique to the technological revolution of the 20th century?
Yes, taxes absolutely are a socialistic method of distributing costs that seem important to other people. I'm not willing to live in a third-world existence surrounded by people who can't afford to individually bear the costs of school at the time their kids are of school age. If you want your kid to go to private school, that is your choice. But the taxes you pay are not for your kid, it is for everyone regardless of how many kids you have.
And yes you do have the right to elect people making these rules, have a smaller taxable property, or move to a different town.
That seems to be the dilemma at a lot of places these days, even the front-runners like Best Buy, Target, etc. Newsflash to CEOs: if I go to your store's website to do research on your products then you need to make it easy and obvious what you have locally _today_. Ship to store is just a waste of everybody's time - I'm going elsewhere online at that point. If I'm in the store physically, you need to have the selection of products people want.
Very true. As a kid in the '80s, I really enjoyed Radio Shack. It was more than just a store. It was a culture. They had the battery club, the cheesy comic book, store catalog, toys, science kits, DIY audio parts for your car or home, anything radio, various loose parts for electronics projects. We were fighting the Soviets and science education was a priority. There was no internet to turn to. If you were patient, you could mail order the part you needed or rummage through a local surplus store. But Radio Shack had it on the shelf for $0.99 - even if that happened to be 500% markup. It was worth it.
Yeah exactly, his cynicism is off the charts (and misplaced)
Science did not tell us to avoid natural fats in our diet, it was the: USDA, FDA, AMA, etc. etc. It was government and industry associations, sensational journalists who won't or can't deal with basic stats, not scientists. On the contrary, there is a body of scientific works that are basically saying 'told you so.'
The jump to connecting this to climate change had zero supporting evidence in this article. If there was a pattern of provable deceit by a majority of scientists, then show it...
I agree, this seems to be a fine art that has been lost no matter what language was used. Putty is the only significant program that I know of that doesn't require a huge install. Heck, even MinGW got complicated along the way somewhere. You can't even install a printer driver under 100 MB anymore.
Exactly. This is not an apology. I read TFA. Somehow, they want to put the horse back in the barn. There was a time that they had a mission to develop technology that was useful to US government agencies, industry, banking interests, etc. I truly respect people who were doing honest work at securing US interests. But there is just no going back, all that work is forever tainted.
Doesn't work anymore. In the 20th century the 'wise men' (educated) were the first to be marched off... Then the 'undesirables', etc. They already were identified by the time the situation arose.
Not sure what the 21st century holds for us. But considering how much information is recorded about all of us going back who knows how long, it is probably too late already.
You will have to do more than just keep quiet, you will have to be 'useful' as well.
Silly rabbit! :)
We were certain of our liberties as codified in law (mistakenly.) Now, we are not sure of anything. It is no longer paranoia, now there is precedence.
Even in case #1, there is sometimes things that can be done. For example, speculative execution. If you can boil down to a small number of choices as a result of the first operation, then it may make sense to compute both outcomes. Or there may be some other intermediate value that might be needed in only some outcomes. But this requires application-specific knowledge usually to know exactly what is allowable and what the payoff would be. You wouldn't want to create a situation where executing both cases affects a global resource. So you would need a language expressive enough to hint this information to the compiler.
Telecommuting: I work for a company that is fairly traditional. I have co-workers in Germany, Japan, the other side of the USA, 3 co-workers working out of their homes in different cities. I work with them on a daily basis. The only reason I work in an office is because we work on physical hardware and need to share some resources. The irony is that talking with co-workers over phone, email, or shared screen is often more efficient than with the person in the same office.
Translation: translate.google.com works as well as anything. The only real limitation is that technical jargon in German doesn't pass through to an equivalent US English expression. But that is the same thing that happens when German people speak English. They have very good grammar and accent in English, but they are not taught our technical words or colloquialisms. So technical documents have a lot of instances of "Module", "Technology", etc. referring to different things using the same words when there were more specific words that meant something in German.
Cryptocurrency: true, I think that is a lot of work to do there. But not the least of which will be institutional barriers deliberately intended to regulate the flow of currency over borders.
I'd be happy calling December 25th "Santa Claus Day." Christians still refer to Christmas and go to midnight mass on the 24th and such.
The "Christmas" tree, lights, Santa, gift giving to each other, ham or turkey dinner, having the day off are definitely the norm in this country, and they are not spelled out in the bible as far as I know.
Happy Holidays offends _me_ only because it is so damn generic and politically correct. It is equivalent to say "Happy Holidays" on any holiday such as the 4th of July because we don't want to be exclusive of other nations' dates of independence.
So I think I will just go with "Have a merry Santa Claus Day and a happy new year" (Unless we don't want to offend people following other calender new years.)
Then maybe "Have a merry Santa Claus Day and a happy rollover of the Gregorian calendar"
Kodak diversified into many areas. The problem is that they were always expecting the high profit margins in every product line. And they needed that due to the large R&D, worker benefits, big management, and quality control process that they tried to apply everywhere. Secondarily, they were always chasing the razor-blade model and that just doesn't work everywhere. I agree that led to some wasteful ventures like batteries and such. But in general, they preferred to sell off a company for one-time cash rather than try to operate it. For example: Carestream, Eastman chemical, Exelis, etc.
Many of these companies are able to expand in new directions. Formerly, they were constrained under the vertically-integrated structure within Kodak because they only focused on photographic products.
The good news is that many of the industries Kodak spun off are still employing people and operating in the same physical plant that Kodak built. In fact, many new food-processing operations have moved into former film-handling facilities due to the superb climate-controlled buildings that Kodak built up.
People here in Rochester have a lot of resentment that Kodak didn't pursue digital cameras sooner. But the plain fact is that there just isn't as much market to monetize even if they did beat out Sony, et al. for the camera market. Nevermind that even digital cameras have lost market to smartphones. Electronics are low-margin, especially if produced in the USA. Film was very high-margin and high-volume. If you are over 30 years old, you probably remember that using a few rolls of film a year was a big deal due to the cost. Now picture-taking is virtually free; only rarely do I pay money to print out a photo.
Does Tyson regularly tweet on the birthday of other significant scientists besides Newton?