I do listen to the news, so prove to me that it was the NSA rather than some bored college student looking to inject some mayhem?
And why would I seek to prove something to you that it says right in the damned article that nobody knows who did it, or why, or how? I certainly never claimed it was the NSA, and even TFS suggest that, while it could have been the NSA, they don't know.
There is direct proof someone tried to insert a back door, but as far as who did it, nobody fucking knows, and TFS even says that.
Given what the NSA is doing lately, they're a plausible guess, but, there is no proof to suggest what entity did that... NSA, bored college student, the Chinese, aliens, your mom. It says right in the summary they don't know, and unless someone admits to it, they never will -- but nonetheless, code did magically end up in the code repository they couldn't account for and which they caught. So someone did attempt to insert a back door, that much is fact -- the rest of it is speculation, and that's pretty much evident that it is speculation.
You're asking for proof of something that people are only suggesting as a possibility, not claiming as fact. Which means you're not even debating the article, you're debating something the article didn't say but you're acting as if it did.
What experiments should we run to determine whether that speculative instant communication is possible?
You don't. You study what you can know, and try to work out the details about it, and see if you can figure out something you didn't already know.
If you set out to solve a problem you don't have an inkling about how to solve (or any reason to believe it is solvable), you likely don't know where to begin and will just try random stuff.
We must consider the ramifications of such speculation, find a testable observation, then try it.
Well, you can enumerate a nearly infinite list of implausible speculations for which there's no evidence to suggest it's real. And you can design endless experiments which will tell you either your speculation is wrong, or that it's impossible to know (likely the latter in most cases).
See, unless you have something based on observations that says "hey, if I exploit this I can achieve something cool", you have a goal you'd like to end up with, and no idea of how to get there.
That's not science, it's wishful thinking.
So, if I say the universe is actually a hemorhroid on a giant space baboon's ass... well, that's just wild speculation with no evidence to support it. And there is zero we can do experimentally to test it. Which makes is scientifically meaningless since it can neither be proven nor disproven.
Similarly, if I want FTL travel, instant communication or anything like that... I need to have some evidence the laws of physics might actually allow for it. Barring any evidence to suggest it, it's not science.
Science doesn't make up an unsubstantiated theory and then test it. Science find evidence for something/observes something, develops a hypothesis, and tests it. You're skipping step 1 where you have something to suggest what you're looking for is real.
So, no, we don't always need to consider the ramifications of unfounded speculation as having scientific merit. That's essentially Intelligent Design.
That doesn't mean someone can't come along and change the rules about how we see things -- certainly Einstein did that. And that can radically change what you can do with what you know. But you don't start with an outcome you'd like to see and start trying to test it, especially when that outcome defies all known understandings of physics.
If there is a way to do instant communication over astronomically vast differences, or go faster than the speed of light -- we'd need to discover something else first, which would lead to the application.
Or did they bypass the normal submission means and somehow just sneak it into an about to be built code block?
Well, did you even read the entire summary? Where it says that pretty much everything was bypassed?
But some people didn't like BitKeeper, so a second copy of the source code was kept in CVS. On November 5, 2003, Larry McAvoy noticed that there was a code change in the CVS copy that did not have a pointer to a record of approval. Investigation showed that the change had never been approved and, stranger yet, that this change did not appear in the primary BitKeeper repository at all. Further investigation determined that someone had apparently broken in electronically to the CVS server and inserted a small change
Getting code into a versioning system without a record of it means you bypassed the whole thing, or the versioning system was crap.
Unless somebody has proof that somebody was trying to create a back door then stop with all of the "X-Files" shit. It could have been a hacker trying to put that code in.
Which is pretty much the same thing, isn't it?
'Somebody' or 'a hacker' or 'an unnamed government agency'.. somehow, code got inserted into a repository with no audit trail and no record.
That the NSA has been motivated to do stuff like this is readily apparent unless you've not listened to any news in the last several months. Whether they did it or someone else did, who knows.
But it's hardly a wacky assertion that it could have been the NSA. It also could have been me, but I'm not telling.;-)
So, if the DNA doesn't match the royalty... Maybe they're not REALLY Royalty?!
Nobody is 'really' royalty... a family conquers and sets themselves up as a dynasty by asserting themselves to be kings and queens.
To some of us, anybody who professes to be royalty is an in-bred idiot with a sense of entitlement who should STFU and go away.
To quote Monty Python... Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
But new research released today calls into question the identities of both the blood and the head, arguing that the DNA in those samples does not match the DNA in living relatives of these kings.
Maybe that just means the descendants of kings have been screwing around just like kings did.
Oblig: However, by 2620, scientists finally got tired of that "stupid joke", so they renamed Uranus to Urectum, believing the revised name to be much less funny.
Do these people have any concept of jurisdiction and courts of law?
So a police force in London demands a registrar in Toronto take down a site based in Singapore?
Me, if I got a request like that from a foreign police force, my response would be "fuck you, show me some paperwork from a court in my jurisdiction, until then, you don't matter".
This is no different than any piss pot country from trying to control the internet. It doesn't work like that.
If it isn't a.co.uk domain, the police force of the City of London have no standing.
I see ifs, maybes, what ifs, a few 'could bes', and wouldn't it be awesome if... and nothing at all to suggest any of it is real or relates to our universe as we see and experience it.
Science is all about figuring out the rules of our universe.
Yes, yes it is.
It isn't about saying "gee, if our universe wasn't really a universe, then all of these things could be true and I could have a pony".
What you're describing is at best speculative fiction, and at worst just making shit up. Anything but science.
I'm not aware there's any credible evidence to suggest we are in a simulation which means everything after your first 'if' is pretty meaningless.
Science only deals in what we can see and observe, and that's not what you're describing. In fact, I'd say it's pretty much the opposite.
Sounds like they are arbitrarily defining computing as a simulation of the universe, therefore the actual universe cannot compute.
Or that they're saying the universe doesn't need to do calculations to determine where a falling object is going -- it just falls according to the laws of physics and doesn't need to be calculated.
I think this unnecessarily limiting people's imagination.
Does 'imagination' in this context actually tell us anything? We know that we need to do calculations for this stuff, but how does the assertion that the universe isn't doing the calculations limit our imagination? Stuff happens according to physical laws, the behavior is inherent to reality. Nobody has to do the math, it just happens.
Besides, from the inside of a simulation its all real to you.
Very meta, and equally meaningless. Yes, if we were in a simulation, we'd likely never know.
But given that we have no evidence to suggest we are, any assumptions around the notion that we are (or may be) are pretty much useless to us unless we can figure out the gaps in the simulation.
To me the suggestion we're living in a simulation serves no other purpose that throwing out something wacky to stump people at parties, but otherwise doesn't seem to have any application to understanding our universe.
Producing stuff is quickly becoming unprofitable. Service economies are our only hope.
Except countries have already decided that knowledge workers will be the magic cure-all.
So making stuff is right out. Service economy jobs are shitty paying in general and there's only so many. If knowledge workers are going to go through the same thing, it's just a long term gutting of the economy in favor of providing corporations with 'efficiencies' -- at the expense of everyone else.
The logical conclusion of globalization is "fuck you, I can get this poor bastard to do it for a nickle". Funny how it's never the management jobs which get cut or off-shored.
it is very clearly a race to an ever descending race to the bottom
That's pretty much how I expect it to play out.
If the purpose of the economy is to enrich corporations and shareholders and leave everyone else to fend for themselves, it looks like it will be a resounding success.
I just don't see that as being a good thing for anyone but the corporations and shareholders, because we'll all live as serfs under the corporations. Which should get us the unrest he's talking about pretty quickly.
Isn't "decline in the overall number of people required to do a job" precisely what assembly lines effect, even if some job categories as a result require fewer humans? We recently posted a contrary analysis arguing that the Luddites are wrong.
So, skilled jobs require fewer people, manufacturing and unskilled jobs get off-shored.
The end result is a big gaping hole in employment, and unless new industries come along, there's nothing else for these people to do.
We're already seeing this, and if there is no new employment sectors, all that's left in your economy is part time jobs and other shit jobs. Unemployment numbers go down more because people give up looking than because jobs are getting created to offset those who get 'right sized'.
Is this the direction you want your country to go in? Because this is where we're heading -- the shareholders are happy (for a while), but you no longer have anybody to buy your product (and then your sales slump and the shareholders are unhappy).
Welcome to the future, where short-term shareholder value will destroy your economy in the long run.
All this article tells me is that the judges were idiots and Colorado alcoholic rednecks start pretty young.
Right. And I'm sure that NASA didn't consider any of these things before they decided it would be sent up on a payload, and the The National Center for Earth and Space Science Education haven't considered any of these issues. Nosiree. Just a bunch of idiots who lack your brilliant insight.
Or, alternatively, it's an experiment which has merit, which is why it was selected.
Noting that beer is safer than contaminated water, Bodzianowski note that beer could be useful âoein future civilization as an emergency backup hydration and medical source.
Wasn't this pretty much the key to Europe's success for several hundred years, and why the monks were always boozing it up?
Contaminated water wasn't safe to drink, but turn it into alcoholic beverages and it's safer.
Brilliant; beer, making civilization better for thousands of years. That's awesome.
Of course, I'm also forced to ask, did an 11 year old make beer for a science experiment? "No mom, I'm just verifying my test results, it's OK." Very ingenious solution to an age old problem.;-)
Frustrating the analysis and repair are 'incomplete information about the design of the electrical system' and the fact that "regular quality controls in design and construction were bypassed in an effort to fast track the Utah project."
This sounds like someone was in such a great hurry to get their shiny new toy that they bypassed a lot of the steps they should have followed.
And, somehow I doubt there's a lot of sympathy for the NSA here on Slashdot.
Well, judging by the fact that my cable company routinely scales stuff down to 720p (or worse in some cases) and calls it high-def, I'm sure some marketing idiots will just come up with their own definition for UHD and claim they're delivering it.
To be honest, I figure 4k and 8k TV is many years away from widespread adoption. My current TV is only about 2 years old, and I have no interest in replacing my stuff because the movie companies think they can get even more money out of me.
I'd be more interested in higher resolutions for my computer monitor than my TV.
Do you support any Enterprise Software? And does anybody you know stand to be affected if an organization goes from running this stuff in-house to a service provided by Google?
But, most importantly, it's nice to see businesses moving away from the great evil which is the Notes suite.:-P I've never known a single person who liked it, but I've known people who were stuck with it.
inBloom execs maintain their service has been unfairly maligned, saying it is entirely up to school districts or states to decide which details about students to store in the system and with whom to share them
And do the parents and students have any say?
Because quite frankly it's not really up to the school boards to share private information about children with a corporation.
This definitely sounds like from pretty creepy level of tracking -- and the 'permanent record' we used to joke about as kids might become real. By the time a kid is out of highschool, companies are going to know every detail about them and have that information to use for their own purposes.
Sure this is front page news... But why on slashdot?
My honest (and exceedingly cynical) answer: because the government will latch onto any event like this to further curtail what the rest of us are allowed to do under the guise of security, and it will have a run-on effect in other areas.
My best guess, they'll push back the secure area around the White House, and even more of DC (or anything even close to a government building) will be under lock down more often, and they'll give themselves heightened powers to stop things like this.
Give it a little while, and there will be new secret regulations saying they can stop and detain anybody in a car to question them to be sure they don't plan on trying something like this.
It sounds very tinfoil hat, but I've started to conclude that the most paranoid/cynical interpretation tends to come true over time.
And Microsoft will now unleash the flying monkeys to try to refute any claims about lower TCO.
I'm sure there will be studies trotted out, and all sorts of attempts to discredit this.
There's no way in hell they'll take this lying down, or without trying to get the government to intervene on their behalf -- perhaps as a trade issue and claim they're being unfairly excluded.
What useful function can the 98th percentile accomplish from this association? What does Mensa actually do?
At the end of the day, it's essentially a social club like the Rotary Club or the Knights of Columbus. It's just a self-selected group based on a specific set of criteria.
To the best of my knowledge, Mensa hasn't collectively gotten together to 'do' anything like solving specific problems.
More like get together for cocktails, and discuss the semantic differences between a canape and an hors d'ouevre, and other such fascinating trivia.
If they were children, there would be a club house and a sign saying "no X allowed". Other than that, I'm sure people will tell you how awesome it is and all the good they do -- and those people will likely be members.
Slashdot Mirror
And why would I seek to prove something to you that it says right in the damned article that nobody knows who did it, or why, or how? I certainly never claimed it was the NSA, and even TFS suggest that, while it could have been the NSA, they don't know.
There is direct proof someone tried to insert a back door, but as far as who did it, nobody fucking knows, and TFS even says that.
Given what the NSA is doing lately, they're a plausible guess, but, there is no proof to suggest what entity did that ... NSA, bored college student, the Chinese, aliens, your mom. It says right in the summary they don't know, and unless someone admits to it, they never will -- but nonetheless, code did magically end up in the code repository they couldn't account for and which they caught. So someone did attempt to insert a back door, that much is fact -- the rest of it is speculation, and that's pretty much evident that it is speculation.
You're asking for proof of something that people are only suggesting as a possibility, not claiming as fact. Which means you're not even debating the article, you're debating something the article didn't say but you're acting as if it did.
You're tilting at windmills there dude.
You don't. You study what you can know, and try to work out the details about it, and see if you can figure out something you didn't already know.
If you set out to solve a problem you don't have an inkling about how to solve (or any reason to believe it is solvable), you likely don't know where to begin and will just try random stuff.
Well, you can enumerate a nearly infinite list of implausible speculations for which there's no evidence to suggest it's real. And you can design endless experiments which will tell you either your speculation is wrong, or that it's impossible to know (likely the latter in most cases).
See, unless you have something based on observations that says "hey, if I exploit this I can achieve something cool", you have a goal you'd like to end up with, and no idea of how to get there.
That's not science, it's wishful thinking.
So, if I say the universe is actually a hemorhroid on a giant space baboon's ass ... well, that's just wild speculation with no evidence to support it. And there is zero we can do experimentally to test it. Which makes is scientifically meaningless since it can neither be proven nor disproven.
Similarly, if I want FTL travel, instant communication or anything like that ... I need to have some evidence the laws of physics might actually allow for it. Barring any evidence to suggest it, it's not science.
Science doesn't make up an unsubstantiated theory and then test it. Science find evidence for something/observes something, develops a hypothesis, and tests it. You're skipping step 1 where you have something to suggest what you're looking for is real.
So, no, we don't always need to consider the ramifications of unfounded speculation as having scientific merit. That's essentially Intelligent Design.
That doesn't mean someone can't come along and change the rules about how we see things -- certainly Einstein did that. And that can radically change what you can do with what you know. But you don't start with an outcome you'd like to see and start trying to test it, especially when that outcome defies all known understandings of physics.
If there is a way to do instant communication over astronomically vast differences, or go faster than the speed of light -- we'd need to discover something else first, which would lead to the application.
Well, did you even read the entire summary? Where it says that pretty much everything was bypassed?
Getting code into a versioning system without a record of it means you bypassed the whole thing, or the versioning system was crap.
Which is pretty much the same thing, isn't it?
'Somebody' or 'a hacker' or 'an unnamed government agency' .. somehow, code got inserted into a repository with no audit trail and no record.
That the NSA has been motivated to do stuff like this is readily apparent unless you've not listened to any news in the last several months. Whether they did it or someone else did, who knows.
But it's hardly a wacky assertion that it could have been the NSA. It also could have been me, but I'm not telling. ;-)
Nobody is 'really' royalty ... a family conquers and sets themselves up as a dynasty by asserting themselves to be kings and queens.
To some of us, anybody who professes to be royalty is an in-bred idiot with a sense of entitlement who should STFU and go away.
To quote Monty Python ... Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Maybe that just means the descendants of kings have been screwing around just like kings did.
Just sayin'.
That either the editor is lousy at Morse code, or that discovering that the Slashdot editors are lazy doesn't make you any wiser.
Possibly both.
Oblig: However, by 2620, scientists finally got tired of that "stupid joke", so they renamed Uranus to Urectum, believing the revised name to be much less funny.
Do these people have any concept of jurisdiction and courts of law?
So a police force in London demands a registrar in Toronto take down a site based in Singapore?
Me, if I got a request like that from a foreign police force, my response would be "fuck you, show me some paperwork from a court in my jurisdiction, until then, you don't matter".
This is no different than any piss pot country from trying to control the internet. It doesn't work like that.
If it isn't a .co.uk domain, the police force of the City of London have no standing.
Idiots.
I see ifs, maybes, what ifs, a few 'could bes', and wouldn't it be awesome if ... and nothing at all to suggest any of it is real or relates to our universe as we see and experience it.
Yes, yes it is.
It isn't about saying "gee, if our universe wasn't really a universe, then all of these things could be true and I could have a pony".
What you're describing is at best speculative fiction, and at worst just making shit up. Anything but science.
I'm not aware there's any credible evidence to suggest we are in a simulation which means everything after your first 'if' is pretty meaningless.
Science only deals in what we can see and observe, and that's not what you're describing. In fact, I'd say it's pretty much the opposite.
Yeah, because social media badges are so meaningful and indicative of 'success' in anything.
Or that they're saying the universe doesn't need to do calculations to determine where a falling object is going -- it just falls according to the laws of physics and doesn't need to be calculated.
Does 'imagination' in this context actually tell us anything? We know that we need to do calculations for this stuff, but how does the assertion that the universe isn't doing the calculations limit our imagination? Stuff happens according to physical laws, the behavior is inherent to reality. Nobody has to do the math, it just happens.
Very meta, and equally meaningless. Yes, if we were in a simulation, we'd likely never know.
But given that we have no evidence to suggest we are, any assumptions around the notion that we are (or may be) are pretty much useless to us unless we can figure out the gaps in the simulation.
To me the suggestion we're living in a simulation serves no other purpose that throwing out something wacky to stump people at parties, but otherwise doesn't seem to have any application to understanding our universe.
Except countries have already decided that knowledge workers will be the magic cure-all.
So making stuff is right out. Service economy jobs are shitty paying in general and there's only so many. If knowledge workers are going to go through the same thing, it's just a long term gutting of the economy in favor of providing corporations with 'efficiencies' -- at the expense of everyone else.
The logical conclusion of globalization is "fuck you, I can get this poor bastard to do it for a nickle". Funny how it's never the management jobs which get cut or off-shored.
That's pretty much how I expect it to play out.
If the purpose of the economy is to enrich corporations and shareholders and leave everyone else to fend for themselves, it looks like it will be a resounding success.
I just don't see that as being a good thing for anyone but the corporations and shareholders, because we'll all live as serfs under the corporations. Which should get us the unrest he's talking about pretty quickly.
So, skilled jobs require fewer people, manufacturing and unskilled jobs get off-shored.
The end result is a big gaping hole in employment, and unless new industries come along, there's nothing else for these people to do.
We're already seeing this, and if there is no new employment sectors, all that's left in your economy is part time jobs and other shit jobs. Unemployment numbers go down more because people give up looking than because jobs are getting created to offset those who get 'right sized'.
Is this the direction you want your country to go in? Because this is where we're heading -- the shareholders are happy (for a while), but you no longer have anybody to buy your product (and then your sales slump and the shareholders are unhappy).
Welcome to the future, where short-term shareholder value will destroy your economy in the long run.
Right. And I'm sure that NASA didn't consider any of these things before they decided it would be sent up on a payload, and the The National Center for Earth and Space Science Education haven't considered any of these issues. Nosiree. Just a bunch of idiots who lack your brilliant insight.
Or, alternatively, it's an experiment which has merit, which is why it was selected.
My money is on the latter option.
Wasn't this pretty much the key to Europe's success for several hundred years, and why the monks were always boozing it up?
Contaminated water wasn't safe to drink, but turn it into alcoholic beverages and it's safer.
Brilliant; beer, making civilization better for thousands of years. That's awesome.
Of course, I'm also forced to ask, did an 11 year old make beer for a science experiment? "No mom, I'm just verifying my test results, it's OK." Very ingenious solution to an age old problem. ;-)
This sounds like someone was in such a great hurry to get their shiny new toy that they bypassed a lot of the steps they should have followed.
And, somehow I doubt there's a lot of sympathy for the NSA here on Slashdot.
Well, judging by the fact that my cable company routinely scales stuff down to 720p (or worse in some cases) and calls it high-def, I'm sure some marketing idiots will just come up with their own definition for UHD and claim they're delivering it.
To be honest, I figure 4k and 8k TV is many years away from widespread adoption. My current TV is only about 2 years old, and I have no interest in replacing my stuff because the movie companies think they can get even more money out of me.
I'd be more interested in higher resolutions for my computer monitor than my TV.
Am I imagining things, or does it sound like a nuclear plant is being operated by a company without the barest idea of how to do that?
Accidentally flipping off the cooling pumps in a nuclear plant sounds like something which shouldn't even be physically possible.
I believe you, but really? I've never known a single person who didn't hate Notes -- I'm actually surprised to see someone say they liked it.
I've never seen it much myself, but I've heard a lot of people complaining about it over the years. I've just assumed it was universally reviled.
Do you support any Enterprise Software? And does anybody you know stand to be affected if an organization goes from running this stuff in-house to a service provided by Google?
But, most importantly, it's nice to see businesses moving away from the great evil which is the Notes suite. :-P I've never known a single person who liked it, but I've known people who were stuck with it.
And do the parents and students have any say?
Because quite frankly it's not really up to the school boards to share private information about children with a corporation.
This definitely sounds like from pretty creepy level of tracking -- and the 'permanent record' we used to joke about as kids might become real. By the time a kid is out of highschool, companies are going to know every detail about them and have that information to use for their own purposes.
My honest (and exceedingly cynical) answer: because the government will latch onto any event like this to further curtail what the rest of us are allowed to do under the guise of security, and it will have a run-on effect in other areas.
My best guess, they'll push back the secure area around the White House, and even more of DC (or anything even close to a government building) will be under lock down more often, and they'll give themselves heightened powers to stop things like this.
Give it a little while, and there will be new secret regulations saying they can stop and detain anybody in a car to question them to be sure they don't plan on trying something like this.
It sounds very tinfoil hat, but I've started to conclude that the most paranoid/cynical interpretation tends to come true over time.
And Microsoft will now unleash the flying monkeys to try to refute any claims about lower TCO.
I'm sure there will be studies trotted out, and all sorts of attempts to discredit this.
There's no way in hell they'll take this lying down, or without trying to get the government to intervene on their behalf -- perhaps as a trade issue and claim they're being unfairly excluded.
At the end of the day, it's essentially a social club like the Rotary Club or the Knights of Columbus. It's just a self-selected group based on a specific set of criteria.
To the best of my knowledge, Mensa hasn't collectively gotten together to 'do' anything like solving specific problems.
More like get together for cocktails, and discuss the semantic differences between a canape and an hors d'ouevre, and other such fascinating trivia.
If they were children, there would be a club house and a sign saying "no X allowed". Other than that, I'm sure people will tell you how awesome it is and all the good they do -- and those people will likely be members.