In fairness to the GP, the CIA and some of these agencies have completely ignored their orders and done as they've pleased. Many of us aren't convinced that who holds the oval office has a damned thing to do with what the TLAs are actually doing.
The CIA has spied on Congress, and blatantly broken domestic spying laws.
You think they give a fuck about what they're told to do? Or do you think they just go ahead and do it anyway?
The DHS and every other one of these agencies isn't above lying and breaking the law if it suits their needs. And that has nothing to do with who runs the executive branch any more.
What they have now is a bunch of agencies who don't really much care what the law is, or what the people overseeing them tell them to do. They're protecting their own interests and their own budgets and their own asses as much as anything.
Isn't backdoor supposed to be something you did on purpose?
If there is such a thing, someone did it on purpose.
But it may well not have been Cisco.
Juniper found out it had backdoors they say they didn't put in. If you make a product which holds the keys to a lot of the internet, people are motivated to latch onto that.
You don't actually know that any of your assertions is true, only that you are free to claim anything you want.
Bullshit.
Do you know what the title of the linked PDF is:
U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Unmanned Aircraft System Program Does Not Achieve Intended Results or Recognize All Costs of Operations
I may be paraphrasing, but I'm sticking with inept clowns, failing to achieve desired outcomes, and failing to account for the program as they are expected to.
The Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) Circular A-126 Revised, Improving the Management and Use of Government Aircraft, requires all Federal agencies with aircraft programs to accumulate all costs associated with the programs, including the cost of crew, maintenance, fuel and other fluids, leasing, landing fees, operations and administrative overhead, accident repairs, and acquisition costs. Agencies need to understand the full cost of a program to accurately determine cost effectiveness and to conduct cost comparisons when choosing aircraft.
Sorry, but not doing accounting as required of them, under-reporting what they're spending, and being utterly unable to demonstrate how they're achieving any goals... that pretty much screams either incompetent or dishonest.
Their own auditor is pretty hard on them. My assertions are a far less polite version of what the auditor said. How they do depreciation isn't up for debate, because it's been defined by another agency.
The report boiled down to: overpriced, improperly accounted for, and failing to demonstrate value for money spent.
Pretty much what we've come to expect from the DHS who seem to have an absolutely limitless capacity to spend shitloads of money for no tangible outcomes.
The short version is they've lied, mismanaged funds, and taken steps to cover it up.
You're trying to come up with a sensible solution, which is utterly pointless when discussing a huge government agency spending like drunken monkeys and getting very little value for all that money.
The takeaway here is DHS get given huge sums of money on the claims they're making us safer... when the reality is they are apparently incompetent, dishonest, and utterly failing to do their basic mission except by sheer accident.
That they're doing accounting tricks to hide this says they know damned well they're a bunch of clowns who are mis-spending money.
Given the distinction described, programmers being just implementation and 'developers' actually understanding the needs and wider context, programmers really should be on the decline, and there shouldn't be room for a 'software developer' to need 'programmers' as time goes on.
I have never seen anybody who is this mythical 'programmer' who is some flunky who people hand complete specs to.
Well, that's not true... at one point my company had outsourced some coding to India. They got shit code, delivered late, badly written, and not conforming with any of the specs. Someone spent so much time micromanaging them and getting them to fix defects it was a full time job.
Pretty much everyone I've ever met, regardless of title, was involved in the full complexity of designing and building solutions based on vague and over broad things which were more like "works kind like this but we're not sure".
Do people really have positions who are the bottom of the rung people who do little more than type it in and compile it? Because I've never met any.
Fair enough. Someone made the point a few posts up that this isn't subject to HIPAA and while I'm no lawyer they're probably right.
Well, think about it... HIPAA covers medical professionals and hospitals with an expectation of confidentiality.
If you sign up for a private web site which ends up more or less saying you have HIV, then you chose to give that to a private entity. And then what happens to the data they have is entirely legally different. The same way that governments can demand from corporations what they're not allowed to collect from you. So, no warrant when a company can be forced to hand over data which is now considered "their" property.
There are no protections in place against corporations, and they have no liability.
The longer I work in business the more I see morality thrown out the window for better or for worse. I feel bad for these people but it's true, buyer beware.
It's sad, but it's true.
Honestly, I go straight to assuming all corporations are ran by greedy, incompetent douchebags who don't give a crap about you... and that all of them are probably vastly insecure and not to be trusted with your data. It's a cynical world view, but it saves a lot of time.
The sheer number of security stories we see every year says it's better to assume companies are inept, and withhold your data, than it is to think "gee, these nice people seem trustworthy with my personal information". As long as people will hand over their private information to any old website, and as long as corporations have no legal liability, this will keep happening.
If you don't give this shit out to these companies, they don't have it to betray your trust. You might miss out on a shiny bauble, but the company can't get hacked and release your information.
But, nobody wants to listen to that kind of stuff. They want free things on the interwebs, and don't know or don't care about the consequences.
Withhold your data, or give it away... but don't be surprised that when you give it out it might be accessed by someone you didn't intend to, or used for things it wasn't supposed to.
Because at the end of the day it's about greedy assholes maximizing profits, minimizing costs, and not giving a crap about you except for how it makes them money.
The company and therefore the CEO are responsible for their customers' very sensitive information.
Show me the case law which says that.
Time and time again companies are utterly inept at security, get hacked, and basically say "gee, we'd like to say we're sorry but we're not really, and since we're not liable we don't care".
CEOs are, in my opinion, largely responsible for being greedy assholes doing PR and sales... and they don't think they have any such responsibility as protecting your data. At the small company level, a CEO is a self appointed title by some schmuck who thinks he's got a winning business idea. My guess is this is more of the same.
Make companies and CEOs actually responsible for such stuff, and something might happen. Right now corporations can be utterly incompetent, and they have no liability at all.
If your'e expecting some kind of 'moral' responsibility, good luck with that.
So, some guy has an idea for a website, does a shitty job of building and securing it, and gets hacked. Do you really think the CEO is losing any sleep?
Was it just they couldn't be bothered to remove them?
Ding ding ding. You can have anything you want as long as you're willing to pay for it.
The shit release management practices used by Oracle are already the user's problem.
The FTC has decided you can't claim to have a tool which says it removes older, insecure versions and then only delete some of those older, insecure versions.
5. The way the DMCA is written it doesn't matter how pathetic or useless the lock is, merely that someone tried to digitally protect it.
So, don't forget that defeating this flimsy javascript, is (according to a law bought and paid for by the copyright cartel) just the same as defeating crypto or breaking a physical lock.
And those people don't recognize any of your points like how this incompatible with the intertubes. They bought a law which doesn't give a crap about any of that. Just because you can defeat it won't protect you from copyright claims.
When they bought Lucasfilm for 4 billion I thought they'd be hard pressed to make that money back.
Really? You're surprised by this?
When Disney bought Pixar, the licensing revenue from Cars alone was something ridiculous like over $1 billion annually.
The Marvel properties have generated massive amounts of box-office and licensing revenue as well. Again, billions of dollars in box-office and merchandise.
A full-court press by the Disney marketing folks for Star Wars? I fully expected them to be able to milk that purchase for unbelievable sums of money. Disney have pretty much mastered the process of cross licensing and promotion, and the acquisitions they've made over the last bunch of years have all proven to be massive cash cows.
Literally everything these days is Star Wars. I'm not surprised in the least that, far from being hard pressed to recoup that investment, Disney is rolling around in huge piles of money.
Of course, I'm sure somewhere on paper they'll be claiming to have lost money on Star Wars. It's a complete lie, but that seems to be how these things get accounted for these days.
Well, the law was written by the people who wanted to have the law, which means it allows them to say that it's up to $250K per theoretical infringement... usually leading to them making claims on the order of losing eleventy seven trillion dollars for which they need reparations because 1 billion people could have watched it.
PJ used to cover this shit so well.
The law doesn't actually work.
Essentially I think the law allows them to claim they lost more on Expendables 3 than the GDP of the free world, because piracy. When the reality is they didn't a 3rd installation of a cheesy film and not that many people cared.
A cinematic flop... a $90 million third installation in a campy series in which, yes, we really are going to see a bunch of aging action hero actors being cast as... wait for it... a bunch of aging action heroes... with a bunch more aging action hero stereotypes trying to cash in on that campy payday action with each sequel.
And the movie studio is going to try to claim to have lost an impossible amount of money for a movie so bad even the core demographic didn't give a damn.
No, I'm not completely tone deaf... but in doing some testing, I found there was a point at which I could no longer discriminate the difference. There was no more better to be had to my ear, and certainly nothing to justify spending more for it,
Everything beyond a certain point was just sorta, "yeah, that's good too, but not really any different". Those of is who aren't musicians or otherwise blessed with great hearing, we mostly can't tell/don't care about the difference. It doesn't register unless it's terrible.
Hell, sit me on a patio with a beer in my hand, and my rechargeable iHome speakers sound pretty fine to me.
I actually went with the Bose because at the same price point I thought it felt more solid, and whatever my non-musician ears heard from whatever CDs I used to audition themsaid it actually sounded better than what I was comparing it to... and because I liked their center channel's size and price point compared to other choices.
I was buying home-theater first, and music second, because that's how they get used.
Trust me, by the time it's 5.1 DTS, it's as loud as I need it to be, and I don't find myself thinking "wow, no highs or lows must be Bose"; I'm thinking "pow smash boom".
But, really, after 15 years with them, unless they suddenly catch fire or something, it has never occurred to me that I need different speakers.
Right, meanwhile the warmer and more purple sound coming through the Monster cables makes the music taste more like bananas and less like bat poop.
The reality is the vast majority of people simply cannot hear the stuff that audiophiles claim to be able to hear. An oscilloscope can't either, apparently.
Which means in a blind listen I'd bet most people will never be able to tell highs/lows/Bose thing.
If you're someplace where you want noise cancelling headphones, you're probably not overly worried about perfect fidelity, you're worried about not hearing that mewling brat which prompted you to get out your noise cancelling headphones in the first place.
For everybody on the planet who never uses "warmer" or "sweeter" or "minty fresh" to describe speakers, it mostly sounds like someone talking out of their ass.
Of course there are other ways you could fuck with them. Feed FiFi the dog some ex-lax. Explosive diarrhea will result. You could also experiment with narcoleptics and benzos too. Maybe even some Prozac for the pooch.
All of which stands a pretty decent chance of you having the police show up at your door.
Pretty sure if you go around poisoning your neighbor's dog you'll find that is frowned upon.
Yeah, methinks the studio knew it would be a turd and released it so they could try to make money by suing people.
I mean, it's Expendables 3 for crying out loud... who the hell even knew there was a 3?
According to IMDB, it cost $90 mil to make and grossed $38 mil which means nobody gave a damn. Which makes it even more shocking that there's apparently going to be a number 4.
You can't sue for damages if you can't prove people would have seen the movie. And I'm not so sure of that.
Not when you really think about what this is testing for.
This is scanning the sky, looking for stars which exhibit a periodic dimming which could be accounted for by an orbiting body blocking some of the light. You cannot look directly for the orbiting body, so you are looking for an unusual behavior in the light of the star.. a cyclic dimming. The star did dim, and was added as a candidate to check to see if it has an exoplanet. In this case, it turned out that it was something they hadn't even considered... a giant storm on a brown dwarf, but which nonetheless caused the star to dim in a cyclic manner.
But, see, the light did dim with a periodicity which suggested something might be interesting to look at. This is what they were looking for. That is the search, because this is not a direct search for exoplanets.. it's a search for the possibility of an exoplanet based on what we see of the light from the star.
When you find what you were looking for... a star whose light dims in a recurring pattern... that is not a damned false positive. That's a hit with an unexpected reason.
In this case, a true false positive would be looking closely at the star, and finding no evidence the light from the star ever goes through a periodic dimming, and wondering why the machine went 'ping'.
They literally found something which matched the criteria. It just so happens that in the case of binary stars and giant storms of brown dwarf stars... you stumble on something you didn't know you might find.
What they didn't do is devise a test to look for exoplanets. They devised a test to look for stars which exhibit a certain kind of behavior so it could be flagged as interesting for further examination to see if there might be exoplanets.
It worked, they found something interesting, albeit unexpected. But in terms of identifying a star whose light dims and brightens and is therefore worthy of a closer look... this is not by any stretch of the imagination a "false positive".
That's the criteria they were looking for. It just so happens the universe has more cool things that we plan for in advance.
So, if you mistakenly think this is a direct test to find an exoplanet, you will think this is a false positive. But they were looking for the exoplanets based on some indirect evidence, which is turns out also finds you more than you expected.
If you build a mammal detector, and find a squirrel instead of a human, that's not a false positive. If you build a detector for stars whose light dims and then brightens, and find one of those... that's not a false positive
But you must understand what the test is actually testing for.
Yes, except in this case, the star actually dimmed, was identified as a candidate for dimming due to orbital transit of another body. On closer inspection, they found it dimmed not due to transit, but due to a storm.
That's not a false positive. That's an actual match of the criteria which yielded a completely unexpected situation... the same as happened with the binary stars.
Finding that star is NOT a false positive, not by a long shot. The test result wasn't wrong, it just identified something nobody had even contemplated.
but only when the extension has had the intent of harmonizing the term to that of another major developed market
Which of course the US state department has been dutifully trying to do at the request of the copyright lobby so it can be extended domestically.
You can bet your ass that people are working diligently to ensure that the needs of the copyright lobby are served, because US foreign policy has been so thoroughly polluted with serving corporate interests there's no other option.
Uncle Sam is on the take, and now mostly represents the real constituents... multinational corporations.
I'm sure the TPP has been designed to further this goal.
False positives doesn't meant what you think it means. Finding a body which matches the criteria and then turns out to be either a pair of stars or a brown dwarf with a storm is NOT a false positive.
It means something was detected, and it turned out to be something else we hadn't planned for, but according to the parameters got looked at.
False positives is if you look at candidates and say "we have no idea why this is even on the list". This is actually finding stuff to look at, and then we realize it's something we'd not yet considered.
In my lifetime the hunt for exoplanets has gone from "maybe we could find something if we did this" to "holy crap look at all this stuff" to "my god, it's full of storms".
To all of the folks doing this stuff... please, keep up the awesome.
Slashdot Mirror
In fairness to the GP, the CIA and some of these agencies have completely ignored their orders and done as they've pleased. Many of us aren't convinced that who holds the oval office has a damned thing to do with what the TLAs are actually doing.
The CIA has spied on Congress, and blatantly broken domestic spying laws.
You think they give a fuck about what they're told to do? Or do you think they just go ahead and do it anyway?
The DHS and every other one of these agencies isn't above lying and breaking the law if it suits their needs. And that has nothing to do with who runs the executive branch any more.
What they have now is a bunch of agencies who don't really much care what the law is, or what the people overseeing them tell them to do. They're protecting their own interests and their own budgets and their own asses as much as anything.
If there is such a thing, someone did it on purpose.
But it may well not have been Cisco.
Juniper found out it had backdoors they say they didn't put in. If you make a product which holds the keys to a lot of the internet, people are motivated to latch onto that.
Bullshit.
Do you know what the title of the linked PDF is:
I may be paraphrasing, but I'm sticking with inept clowns, failing to achieve desired outcomes, and failing to account for the program as they are expected to.
Sorry, but not doing accounting as required of them, under-reporting what they're spending, and being utterly unable to demonstrate how they're achieving any goals ... that pretty much screams either incompetent or dishonest.
Their own auditor is pretty hard on them. My assertions are a far less polite version of what the auditor said. How they do depreciation isn't up for debate, because it's been defined by another agency.
The report boiled down to: overpriced, improperly accounted for, and failing to demonstrate value for money spent.
Pretty much what we've come to expect from the DHS who seem to have an absolutely limitless capacity to spend shitloads of money for no tangible outcomes.
The short version is they've lied, mismanaged funds, and taken steps to cover it up.
You're trying to come up with a sensible solution, which is utterly pointless when discussing a huge government agency spending like drunken monkeys and getting very little value for all that money.
The takeaway here is DHS get given huge sums of money on the claims they're making us safer ... when the reality is they are apparently incompetent, dishonest, and utterly failing to do their basic mission except by sheer accident.
That they're doing accounting tricks to hide this says they know damned well they're a bunch of clowns who are mis-spending money.
Why is nobody being charged with fraud?
I have never seen anybody who is this mythical 'programmer' who is some flunky who people hand complete specs to.
Well, that's not true ... at one point my company had outsourced some coding to India. They got shit code, delivered late, badly written, and not conforming with any of the specs. Someone spent so much time micromanaging them and getting them to fix defects it was a full time job.
Pretty much everyone I've ever met, regardless of title, was involved in the full complexity of designing and building solutions based on vague and over broad things which were more like "works kind like this but we're not sure".
Do people really have positions who are the bottom of the rung people who do little more than type it in and compile it? Because I've never met any.
Long term, get the hell out of tech, and stop giving your employers any loyalty ... because they'll drop you like a hot turd the moment they can.
But, then, we've pretty much all known this teaching all kids to code was a self-serving thing to get them more cheap labor.
Got kids you want to be gainfully employed? Get them into a trade like an electrician, welder, or plumber.
Tech is being gutted to the lowest bidder. So all of these years of saying tech jobs were the way of the future ... well, so long, suckers.
Well, think about it ... HIPAA covers medical professionals and hospitals with an expectation of confidentiality.
If you sign up for a private web site which ends up more or less saying you have HIV, then you chose to give that to a private entity. And then what happens to the data they have is entirely legally different. The same way that governments can demand from corporations what they're not allowed to collect from you. So, no warrant when a company can be forced to hand over data which is now considered "their" property.
There are no protections in place against corporations, and they have no liability.
It's sad, but it's true.
Honestly, I go straight to assuming all corporations are ran by greedy, incompetent douchebags who don't give a crap about you ... and that all of them are probably vastly insecure and not to be trusted with your data. It's a cynical world view, but it saves a lot of time.
The sheer number of security stories we see every year says it's better to assume companies are inept, and withhold your data, than it is to think "gee, these nice people seem trustworthy with my personal information". As long as people will hand over their private information to any old website, and as long as corporations have no legal liability, this will keep happening.
If you don't give this shit out to these companies, they don't have it to betray your trust. You might miss out on a shiny bauble, but the company can't get hacked and release your information.
But, nobody wants to listen to that kind of stuff. They want free things on the interwebs, and don't know or don't care about the consequences.
Withhold your data, or give it away ... but don't be surprised that when you give it out it might be accessed by someone you didn't intend to, or used for things it wasn't supposed to.
Because at the end of the day it's about greedy assholes maximizing profits, minimizing costs, and not giving a crap about you except for how it makes them money.
Show me the case law which says that.
Time and time again companies are utterly inept at security, get hacked, and basically say "gee, we'd like to say we're sorry but we're not really, and since we're not liable we don't care".
CEOs are, in my opinion, largely responsible for being greedy assholes doing PR and sales ... and they don't think they have any such responsibility as protecting your data. At the small company level, a CEO is a self appointed title by some schmuck who thinks he's got a winning business idea. My guess is this is more of the same.
Make companies and CEOs actually responsible for such stuff, and something might happen. Right now corporations can be utterly incompetent, and they have no liability at all.
If your'e expecting some kind of 'moral' responsibility, good luck with that.
So, some guy has an idea for a website, does a shitty job of building and securing it, and gets hacked. Do you really think the CEO is losing any sleep?
Ding ding ding. You can have anything you want as long as you're willing to pay for it.
The shit release management practices used by Oracle are already the user's problem.
The FTC has decided you can't claim to have a tool which says it removes older, insecure versions and then only delete some of those older, insecure versions.
Somehow, I doubt it.
Apparently that doesn't seem to be problematic for someone to sneak in adware to boost their own bottom line.
Oracle probably threatened them with a license audit and they'd need to pay eleventy eleven trillion dollars.
Oh, and don't forget:
5. The way the DMCA is written it doesn't matter how pathetic or useless the lock is, merely that someone tried to digitally protect it.
So, don't forget that defeating this flimsy javascript, is (according to a law bought and paid for by the copyright cartel) just the same as defeating crypto or breaking a physical lock.
And those people don't recognize any of your points like how this incompatible with the intertubes. They bought a law which doesn't give a crap about any of that. Just because you can defeat it won't protect you from copyright claims.
Really? You're surprised by this?
When Disney bought Pixar, the licensing revenue from Cars alone was something ridiculous like over $1 billion annually.
The Marvel properties have generated massive amounts of box-office and licensing revenue as well. Again, billions of dollars in box-office and merchandise.
A full-court press by the Disney marketing folks for Star Wars? I fully expected them to be able to milk that purchase for unbelievable sums of money. Disney have pretty much mastered the process of cross licensing and promotion, and the acquisitions they've made over the last bunch of years have all proven to be massive cash cows.
Literally everything these days is Star Wars. I'm not surprised in the least that, far from being hard pressed to recoup that investment, Disney is rolling around in huge piles of money.
Of course, I'm sure somewhere on paper they'll be claiming to have lost money on Star Wars. It's a complete lie, but that seems to be how these things get accounted for these days.
Well, the law was written by the people who wanted to have the law, which means it allows them to say that it's up to $250K per theoretical infringement ... usually leading to them making claims on the order of losing eleventy seven trillion dollars for which they need reparations because 1 billion people could have watched it.
PJ used to cover this shit so well.
The law doesn't actually work.
Essentially I think the law allows them to claim they lost more on Expendables 3 than the GDP of the free world, because piracy. When the reality is they didn't a 3rd installation of a cheesy film and not that many people cared.
A cinematic flop ... a $90 million third installation in a campy series in which, yes, we really are going to see a bunch of aging action hero actors being cast as ... wait for it ... a bunch of aging action heroes ... with a bunch more aging action hero stereotypes trying to cash in on that campy payday action with each sequel.
And the movie studio is going to try to claim to have lost an impossible amount of money for a movie so bad even the core demographic didn't give a damn.
No, I'm not completely tone deaf ... but in doing some testing, I found there was a point at which I could no longer discriminate the difference. There was no more better to be had to my ear, and certainly nothing to justify spending more for it,
Everything beyond a certain point was just sorta, "yeah, that's good too, but not really any different". Those of is who aren't musicians or otherwise blessed with great hearing, we mostly can't tell/don't care about the difference. It doesn't register unless it's terrible.
Hell, sit me on a patio with a beer in my hand, and my rechargeable iHome speakers sound pretty fine to me.
I actually went with the Bose because at the same price point I thought it felt more solid, and whatever my non-musician ears heard from whatever CDs I used to audition themsaid it actually sounded better than what I was comparing it to ... and because I liked their center channel's size and price point compared to other choices.
I was buying home-theater first, and music second, because that's how they get used.
Trust me, by the time it's 5.1 DTS, it's as loud as I need it to be, and I don't find myself thinking "wow, no highs or lows must be Bose"; I'm thinking "pow smash boom".
But, really, after 15 years with them, unless they suddenly catch fire or something, it has never occurred to me that I need different speakers.
LOL .. scary, dangerous, and hostile to life. :-P
But, really, think about it ... even at 3% that's a crap pile of solar systems in our galaxy alone.
I mean, even 3% of "beyond really grasping", is still "beyond really grasping".
To quote Armageddon ...Begging your pardon, sir, but it's a big ass sky.
Right, meanwhile the warmer and more purple sound coming through the Monster cables makes the music taste more like bananas and less like bat poop.
The reality is the vast majority of people simply cannot hear the stuff that audiophiles claim to be able to hear. An oscilloscope can't either, apparently.
Which means in a blind listen I'd bet most people will never be able to tell highs/lows/Bose thing.
If you're someplace where you want noise cancelling headphones, you're probably not overly worried about perfect fidelity, you're worried about not hearing that mewling brat which prompted you to get out your noise cancelling headphones in the first place.
For everybody on the planet who never uses "warmer" or "sweeter" or "minty fresh" to describe speakers, it mostly sounds like someone talking out of their ass.
All of which stands a pretty decent chance of you having the police show up at your door.
Pretty sure if you go around poisoning your neighbor's dog you'll find that is frowned upon.
Yeah, methinks the studio knew it would be a turd and released it so they could try to make money by suing people.
I mean, it's Expendables 3 for crying out loud ... who the hell even knew there was a 3?
According to IMDB, it cost $90 mil to make and grossed $38 mil which means nobody gave a damn. Which makes it even more shocking that there's apparently going to be a number 4.
You can't sue for damages if you can't prove people would have seen the movie. And I'm not so sure of that.
Not when you really think about what this is testing for.
This is scanning the sky, looking for stars which exhibit a periodic dimming which could be accounted for by an orbiting body blocking some of the light. You cannot look directly for the orbiting body, so you are looking for an unusual behavior in the light of the star .. a cyclic dimming. The star did dim, and was added as a candidate to check to see if it has an exoplanet. In this case, it turned out that it was something they hadn't even considered ... a giant storm on a brown dwarf, but which nonetheless caused the star to dim in a cyclic manner.
But, see, the light did dim with a periodicity which suggested something might be interesting to look at. This is what they were looking for. That is the search, because this is not a direct search for exoplanets .. it's a search for the possibility of an exoplanet based on what we see of the light from the star.
When you find what you were looking for ... a star whose light dims in a recurring pattern ... that is not a damned false positive. That's a hit with an unexpected reason.
In this case, a true false positive would be looking closely at the star, and finding no evidence the light from the star ever goes through a periodic dimming, and wondering why the machine went 'ping'.
They literally found something which matched the criteria. It just so happens that in the case of binary stars and giant storms of brown dwarf stars ... you stumble on something you didn't know you might find.
What they didn't do is devise a test to look for exoplanets. They devised a test to look for stars which exhibit a certain kind of behavior so it could be flagged as interesting for further examination to see if there might be exoplanets.
It worked, they found something interesting, albeit unexpected. But in terms of identifying a star whose light dims and brightens and is therefore worthy of a closer look ... this is not by any stretch of the imagination a "false positive".
That's the criteria they were looking for. It just so happens the universe has more cool things that we plan for in advance.
So, if you mistakenly think this is a direct test to find an exoplanet, you will think this is a false positive. But they were looking for the exoplanets based on some indirect evidence, which is turns out also finds you more than you expected.
If you build a mammal detector, and find a squirrel instead of a human, that's not a false positive. If you build a detector for stars whose light dims and then brightens, and find one of those ... that's not a false positive
But you must understand what the test is actually testing for.
Yes, except in this case, the star actually dimmed, was identified as a candidate for dimming due to orbital transit of another body. On closer inspection, they found it dimmed not due to transit, but due to a storm.
That's not a false positive. That's an actual match of the criteria which yielded a completely unexpected situation ... the same as happened with the binary stars.
Finding that star is NOT a false positive, not by a long shot. The test result wasn't wrong, it just identified something nobody had even contemplated.
Which of course the US state department has been dutifully trying to do at the request of the copyright lobby so it can be extended domestically.
You can bet your ass that people are working diligently to ensure that the needs of the copyright lobby are served, because US foreign policy has been so thoroughly polluted with serving corporate interests there's no other option.
Uncle Sam is on the take, and now mostly represents the real constituents ... multinational corporations.
I'm sure the TPP has been designed to further this goal.
Keanu Reeves has an estimated net worth of $350 million ... I'm not sure I'd call him a failed star.
Love him or hate him, pretty much everyone knows who he is.
False positives doesn't meant what you think it means. Finding a body which matches the criteria and then turns out to be either a pair of stars or a brown dwarf with a storm is NOT a false positive.
It means something was detected, and it turned out to be something else we hadn't planned for, but according to the parameters got looked at.
False positives is if you look at candidates and say "we have no idea why this is even on the list". This is actually finding stuff to look at, and then we realize it's something we'd not yet considered.
That's science.
In my lifetime the hunt for exoplanets has gone from "maybe we could find something if we did this" to "holy crap look at all this stuff" to "my god, it's full of storms".
To all of the folks doing this stuff ... please, keep up the awesome.