But then you're talking about somebody planning over a long term, and not just breaking things in a rage after being fired.
First, you don't have good backups if you're not testing them once in a while. A test should make it evident whether the right stuff is being backed up, and whether it's being backed up properly. With that in place it's hard to hiddenly screw something up.
Second, it's still monumentally stupid. It's a dangerous trick to pull off. Things can easily go wrong (what if the admin gets asked to restore a file that is intentionally being damaged or not backed up?), and even if the whole thing works, whose responsibility are the backups? The admin's. You can bet that the successor will be tasked with recovering what they can, and if in the process they notice traces of any malicous intent, the former admin's ass is grass.
Don't worry about your infrastructure so much. Having been in this position, I noticed that companies seem to worry quite a lot of it.
But it seems to me that it's an unlikely situation. Let's suppose there's an admin really pissed off at you for some reason. What could they do to your photo collection?
Delete it
Corrupt the photos
Post a torrent
Timebombs, sabotage, etc
All those options are pointless and ultimately suicidal for the admin involved. All you need to do is to have readonly off-site backups (which you should have anyway, what if the building gets flooded or burns down?). If properly done the rogue admin can't screw that up, and while the things above might hurt, they'll be perfectly survivable. Even the torrent isn't a big deal. A serious publication isn't going to touch an illegal collection with a 10 foot pole. As a public organization they're an easy and profitable target.
However, those things are terribly stupid and suicidal for the rogue admin. Who will be the first suspect in line when any of the above happens? The recently fired angry admin. Law enforcement treats such things harshly, and word of mouth gets around and it's unlikely they'll get another job after that.
All the admins I've seen leave (and I took note and did it myself when leaving a job) tried to leave in an as non-threatening way as possible. For instance on my last day on one job I discussed with a coworker what I had been doing, where the files were, what was unfinished, the lists of passwords and access control methods to be changed, etc. I did everything I could to make sure that nothing in my departure could be interpreted in a "screw you" of any kind, and to make sure my successor could take over.
Now, what should you be worried about? The legal ways an ex-employee can screw you over. For instance, the BSA. It's easy to report to them. From what I hear they're most eager to show up, offer rewards to the reporter, and it's very hard to deny them entry. And I hear that their visits can be very expensive. So make extra sure you're in perfect licensing compliance (which is pretty hard), or switch to Free Software.
Government money is tax money, paid by all the residents of the country. If everybody paid for it, then everybody should own it. Therefore anything financed with public money should be in the public domain, no exceptions.
Me too. I like the rule against dilution as well, actually.
Picking the nice and fluffy bits out of the Bible makes it all sound much better than it is when you pay attention to the entire thing.
Atheists should definitely welcome it. Lots of people lose their belief when they read the Bible from cover to cover and find out that there's quite a bit of nasty stuff in there.
I think Wicca for instance is just as much bullshit as Christianity, but so far they don't seem to be trying to force anything on me, so I haven't had a reason to protest against them.
I'm perfectly fine with people having private irrational beliefs and staging elaborate ceremonies with scented candles (or whatever the Wicccans do on a regular basis). Now when people start trying to impose their religion on the rest of society, that's when I start having a very big problem with it.
Take a line that reads 4 bytes that determine the length of a section. Is the field proper big or little endian, or the application has to be compatible with both? Is it supposed to be signed or unsigned? If signed, what does a negative size mean? Can it be 0 and if so how is that handled? Are there any special values that aren't a literal length but indicate something else? Like 0xffff being used to indicate it's a section with a size >4GB and the real size is somewhere else.
Sure, you might think you know the answer, it's "int length" so it's signed, and so on. But that only tells you what the code thinks it is. There may be a file it fails to handle correctly, and without a spec you don't know if it's a badly made file, or badly written file reading code.
Wouldn't see the harm from that, or the benefit really.
I've read scripts before. They're generally dreadfully boring to read and in no way a replacement for watching the movie, with a few exceptions. In the exceptional cases they're interesting but only after watching the movie.
For the contracts and audio recording, who gives a damn? And the film will definitely get torrented one way or another.
And you follow that up with "if Florida became unhabitable" (sic). People would stop moving in (or more likely they would restore the habitability of Florida, but let's ignore technology as we've done so far).
Yes, but that would exclude cheapness, wouldn't it? If you're moving because you're about to end up underwater, only a complete moron would be stupid to buy your house. So several million people will buy a second home and abandon their first one, probably helped by a lot of tax money from your pocket. That sounds cheap and easy to you?
Same for tech. Sure, technology is awesome. But I can't see engineering on this scale becoming cheap any time soon.
No, the point is that if Florida ever became "uninhabitable" due to sea level rise, it wouldn't be "now", but much later. And we already have a mechanism for moving people out of Florida in a cheap and effective manner over those time scales.
Well, that's a big problem. In modern times, we just fail at things like that.
Both companies and governments live in "real time", with very little ability to do long term planning. That's why for instance a mission to Mars is unlikely to succeed, or to even get started, because it couldn't be done during the term of a single president. And whoever comes next will almost certainly cancel it.
"Much later" in politics means "will not happen during my term, so it's not my problem". I'm pretty sure that even if he was entirely convinced that in 50 years NY will be underwater, Obama or his successor wouldn't start anything right now. Why do it? His term will be over long before anything goes wrong. Heck, he'll probably be dead before then. And if he did, it'd be undone by his successor because it's a waste of money.
The only way I see anything getting started is with another situation like New Orleans. Once a few cities get flooded, THEN there will be overwhelming public demand to do something. But by then it'll be far too late for any cheap and effective solution that relies on long timescales.
If the oceans warm, then more carbon dioxide is forced out of the oceans than is absorbed, so how can the oceans be acidifying because of carbon dioxide? (insert bullshit pseudoscientific answer right here).
And thinking like that is what causes a mess like New Orleans. I mean, that one huge storm is coming when, next century? Can skimp on maintenance meanwhile.
You do realize that people in the US move on average once every six years
You're telling me that people in the US buy 6 homes in their lifetime on average, and happily abandon the previous ones?
I'm thinking they probably sell them, and use that money to offset for the most part the purchase of a new one. But who's going to pay you for a house underwater or about to be there?
And of course, the fact that Florida still exists and is well populated indicates that even if people move away from it, other people move in.
Shuffling people around is cheap and easy, now if Florida became unhabitable it'd be something else entirely.
Sure, it didn't disintegrate because you were happily living elsewhere. I suspect that if you lived there at the time you'd have a different opinion. Still, it cost you quite a bit:
"Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu (D) is presently asking the Congress for $250 BILLION to rebuild New Orleans." as compared to the estimated $704 billion spent on Iraq as of Feb 2010.
There are places in Europe below sea level. Dams and dikes are a practical solution. Building them around our coasts would create jobs. I never understood this whole "OMG we'll flood the coasts" screaming. If this is an issue then start lobbying Washington for funds to build dams.
That worked really awesomely in New Orleans.
And of course it's an entirely free proposition, that's dirt cheap, doesn't require reengineering ports, closing beaches with the resulting loss of tourism or anything like that. The US fortunately has a smoothly running system as shown by the exemplary mantenance records of the New Orleans levees.
And BTW, we did not have a problem resettling all the people from New Orleans on very short notice. Resettling the coasts would take years and is entirely doable on that time scale. The main questions are whether we expect sea levels to continue rising, the time scale and the cheapest way to deal with it.
Yeah, less snow to shovel will totally offset the slight inconveniences like having to find room for all the population of Florida and other coastal places:
Stats from wikipedia: - Highest point Britton Hill[4] 345 ft (105 m) - Mean 98 ft (30 m) - Lowest point Atlantic Ocean[4] 0 ft (0 m)
Population Ranked 4th in the US - Total (2010) 18,801,310[3]
The exercise of doing this for the rest of of the coast is left to the reader.
Thank you sir for pointing out these points. People don't realize that the Earth is been around for millions of years and just because we see a changing in a cycle doesn't mean we are causing it.
Conversely, just because things have been going on for millions of years, doesn't mean we can't screw things up much faster. Our ability to do so became much larger in modern times.
The earth will be here weather we on it or not. Life will live on just as it did without us.
The earth, or life in a general sense continuing to exist is pretty much a given unless we manage to blow it up into space dust, DBZ style. But nobody is worrying about that, AFAIK.
What worries me is that I want myself, my children if I ever have any, familiy, friends, their decendants and so on to be able to live and do so reasonably comfortably. Yeah, humanity in general can adapt and survive events like the flooding of all coastal cities even. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be a big deal. No, it'd be a huge horrible mess with world-wide consequences, so I really hope we don't have to see it happen.
In both cases of the second study there's a way to stop, since even without the button giving up was a possibility. I'm not sure what the button changes. Perhaps it's that without the button, they think they'll have a hard time getting the test stopped early, and don't want to risk waiting until it gets unbearable before trying to talk their way out of it.
But in space, there's no stop button and no way out. No amount of arguing, threatening, beating people up, promising vast riches or the most horrible torment, killing, or anything else will change the fact that you're stuck in a capsule between Earth and Mars, and that no matter what, you're not getting out of it alive unless it successfully lands on Mars, then successfully returns home. Your only options are putting up with whatever problems you have and completing the mission, or directly or indirectly committing suicide.
I don't think there's a way of setting up a study with that kind of situation since ethical concerns would prevent it from happening, so I think the best study cases would be people who got into similar situations in the military, arctic research bases, and such.
Since they can walk out at any time, aborting is easy, and the mission can fail due to quite minor disagreements. Nobody needs to put up with anything, they just can go "screw it" and leave. That it's been working so far seems to mean it's working amazingly well.
On the other hand, if you're in space, and don't like it, what are you going to do? Throw a gigantic tantrum and beat people up? Things like that will bite you in the ass sooner or later, and are likely to result in your death. I think one's self-preservation instinct should provide some motivation.
Maybe somebody who's been in the military or similar positions can comment: What's it like to be in a life and death situation with a team member you really hate? Do people put aside the personal conflicts until the task gets done?
For one, we're most likely on different contients. For best security you'd want to hand it over in person.
Also sticks aren't that big. It's fine for email, but not a whole lot if you want to send DVD images.
You also need a separate OTP for every 2 people that talk to each other. One file for Alice to Bob, another for Alice to Carol, another for Bob to Carol, and so on. That gets annoying pretty fast, and to make all those OTPs in the first place you'll need one nice RNG. It's going to take quite a while getting 16GB of random data from/dev/random.
If you encrypt a one time pad with anything else, it's only as strong as whatever you encrypted it with. So the one time pad is superfluous.
If you encrypt a one time pad with another, then that second one must have at least the same length as the first. So to transfer 1GB of data, you need 1GB of OTP, for which you need 1GB of another OTP, which is quite pointless.
It all comes to that OTPs are huge and exchanging them is a huge problem that's not practical for the vast majority of people.
You'll just be swapping one indoctrination for another.
I'd like to remove it completely rather than create a new kind
I doubt religion will die as long as humans are alive. If you believe animals (except for humans and their more recent ancestors) don't have religion, then clearly religion emerged in humans, outcompeted the default of "no religion" and has even thrived in the past thousands of years.
Why? Past religions have died. Try to find some believers in Zeus. No reason why current ones can't die as well.
Yes there are a small minority of atheists, but most atheists don't appear to have much of an indoctrination, education and conversion plan (and so far such plans from atheists have been rather evil and negative in comparison to more benign religions). So how will the ratios increase?
Several:
1. Ensure church/state separation. Religion mustn't be mandatory. 2. Decouple religion and morality. Remove the association between "religion" and "good person". This seems to be making progress as of lately. 3. Improve science education 4. Offer alternatives for the social functions of religion.
I think the goal shouldn't be about indoctrination. It's not about forcing people to believe something else, it's about removing the point in bothering to believe in the first place.
Once religion isn't required, doesn't provide morality and doesn't explain anything it just gets reduced to something very vague and pointless.
Actually that's been noticed for quite a while now.
Hence the recent atheist campaigns aimed at people who stopped believing but don't admit it in public, and the interest in building some sort of community around atheism. There's quite a large amount of people in churches that aren't there for the religion, but for the social aspects.
For instance, on Crunchyroll more than half the anime isn't available in Europe. The ones that they do let me watch have japanese audio and english subtitles.
"This song/movie/video isn't available in your region due to licensing restrictions"
This is amazingly common in Europe. Which is very stupid, because if I can't buy it legally, the most logical thing to do is to pirate it. If I can't pay even when I want to, the logical conclusion is that they just don't want my money.
Slashdot Mirror
But then you're talking about somebody planning over a long term, and not just breaking things in a rage after being fired.
First, you don't have good backups if you're not testing them once in a while. A test should make it evident whether the right stuff is being backed up, and whether it's being backed up properly. With that in place it's hard to hiddenly screw something up.
Second, it's still monumentally stupid. It's a dangerous trick to pull off. Things can easily go wrong (what if the admin gets asked to restore a file that is intentionally being damaged or not backed up?), and even if the whole thing works, whose responsibility are the backups? The admin's. You can bet that the successor will be tasked with recovering what they can, and if in the process they notice traces of any malicous intent, the former admin's ass is grass.
No, I don't need a human face or to be greeted by somebody who's been sitting in a cramped booth and mechanically greeting people for months. Ew.
It's a frickin' bridge, not a hotel.
Don't worry about your infrastructure so much. Having been in this position, I noticed that companies seem to worry quite a lot of it.
But it seems to me that it's an unlikely situation. Let's suppose there's an admin really pissed off at you for some reason. What could they do to your photo collection?
All those options are pointless and ultimately suicidal for the admin involved. All you need to do is to have readonly off-site backups (which you should have anyway, what if the building gets flooded or burns down?). If properly done the rogue admin can't screw that up, and while the things above might hurt, they'll be perfectly survivable. Even the torrent isn't a big deal. A serious publication isn't going to touch an illegal collection with a 10 foot pole. As a public organization they're an easy and profitable target.
However, those things are terribly stupid and suicidal for the rogue admin. Who will be the first suspect in line when any of the above happens? The recently fired angry admin. Law enforcement treats such things harshly, and word of mouth gets around and it's unlikely they'll get another job after that.
All the admins I've seen leave (and I took note and did it myself when leaving a job) tried to leave in an as non-threatening way as possible. For instance on my last day on one job I discussed with a coworker what I had been doing, where the files were, what was unfinished, the lists of passwords and access control methods to be changed, etc. I did everything I could to make sure that nothing in my departure could be interpreted in a "screw you" of any kind, and to make sure my successor could take over.
Now, what should you be worried about? The legal ways an ex-employee can screw you over. For instance, the BSA. It's easy to report to them. From what I hear they're most eager to show up, offer rewards to the reporter, and it's very hard to deny them entry. And I hear that their visits can be very expensive. So make extra sure you're in perfect licensing compliance (which is pretty hard), or switch to Free Software.
Government money is tax money, paid by all the residents of the country. If everybody paid for it, then everybody should own it. Therefore anything financed with public money should be in the public domain, no exceptions.
Me too. I like the rule against dilution as well, actually.
Picking the nice and fluffy bits out of the Bible makes it all sound much better than it is when you pay attention to the entire thing.
Atheists should definitely welcome it. Lots of people lose their belief when they read the Bible from cover to cover and find out that there's quite a bit of nasty stuff in there.
I think Wicca for instance is just as much bullshit as Christianity, but so far they don't seem to be trying to force anything on me, so I haven't had a reason to protest against them.
I'm perfectly fine with people having private irrational beliefs and staging elaborate ceremonies with scented candles (or whatever the Wicccans do on a regular basis). Now when people start trying to impose their religion on the rest of society, that's when I start having a very big problem with it.
Source code makes for a crappy specification.
Take a line that reads 4 bytes that determine the length of a section. Is the field proper big or little endian, or the application has to be compatible with both? Is it supposed to be signed or unsigned? If signed, what does a negative size mean? Can it be 0 and if so how is that handled? Are there any special values that aren't a literal length but indicate something else? Like 0xffff being used to indicate it's a section with a size >4GB and the real size is somewhere else.
Sure, you might think you know the answer, it's "int length" so it's signed, and so on. But that only tells you what the code thinks it is. There may be a file it fails to handle correctly, and without a spec you don't know if it's a badly made file, or badly written file reading code.
What's his ego got to do with the movie? One's huge ego doesn't automatically result in a movie getting made, you know.
If it does, I'm still waiting for mine!
Wouldn't see the harm from that, or the benefit really.
I've read scripts before. They're generally dreadfully boring to read and in no way a replacement for watching the movie, with a few exceptions. In the exceptional cases they're interesting but only after watching the movie.
For the contracts and audio recording, who gives a damn? And the film will definitely get torrented one way or another.
Yes, but that would exclude cheapness, wouldn't it? If you're moving because you're about to end up underwater, only a complete moron would be stupid to buy your house. So several million people will buy a second home and abandon their first one, probably helped by a lot of tax money from your pocket. That sounds cheap and easy to you?
Same for tech. Sure, technology is awesome. But I can't see engineering on this scale becoming cheap any time soon.
Well, that's a big problem. In modern times, we just fail at things like that.
Both companies and governments live in "real time", with very little ability to do long term planning. That's why for instance a mission to Mars is unlikely to succeed, or to even get started, because it couldn't be done during the term of a single president. And whoever comes next will almost certainly cancel it.
"Much later" in politics means "will not happen during my term, so it's not my problem". I'm pretty sure that even if he was entirely convinced that in 50 years NY will be underwater, Obama or his successor wouldn't start anything right now. Why do it? His term will be over long before anything goes wrong. Heck, he'll probably be dead before then. And if he did, it'd be undone by his successor because it's a waste of money.
The only way I see anything getting started is with another situation like New Orleans. Once a few cities get flooded, THEN there will be overwhelming public demand to do something. But by then it'll be far too late for any cheap and effective solution that relies on long timescales.
How do you reach that conclusion?
Water's capacity to absorb CO2 increases with temperature.
It generally works that way. You can trivially test that you can dissolve more sugar in hot than in cold water.
And thinking like that is what causes a mess like New Orleans. I mean, that one huge storm is coming when, next century? Can skimp on maintenance meanwhile.
You're telling me that people in the US buy 6 homes in their lifetime on average, and happily abandon the previous ones?
I'm thinking they probably sell them, and use that money to offset for the most part the purchase of a new one. But who's going to pay you for a house underwater or about to be there?
And of course, the fact that Florida still exists and is well populated indicates that even if people move away from it, other people move in.
Shuffling people around is cheap and easy, now if Florida became unhabitable it'd be something else entirely.
Sure, it didn't disintegrate because you were happily living elsewhere. I suspect that if you lived there at the time you'd have a different opinion. Still, it cost you quite a bit:
"Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu (D) is presently asking the Congress for $250 BILLION to rebuild New Orleans." as compared to the estimated $704 billion spent on Iraq as of Feb 2010.
That worked really awesomely in New Orleans.
And of course it's an entirely free proposition, that's dirt cheap, doesn't require reengineering ports, closing beaches with the resulting loss of tourism or anything like that. The US fortunately has a smoothly running system as shown by the exemplary mantenance records of the New Orleans levees.
Yes, indeed. Things went very smoothly.
It's very funny that you use the very thing I'd use to explain why it'd be a monumental mess to try to argue everything would be fine.
Yeah, less snow to shovel will totally offset the slight inconveniences like having to find room for all the population of Florida and other coastal places:
Stats from wikipedia:
- Highest point Britton Hill[4] 345 ft (105 m)
- Mean 98 ft (30 m)
- Lowest point Atlantic Ocean[4] 0 ft (0 m)
Population Ranked 4th in the US
- Total (2010) 18,801,310[3]
The exercise of doing this for the rest of of the coast is left to the reader.
Conversely, just because things have been going on for millions of years, doesn't mean we can't screw things up much faster. Our ability to do so became much larger in modern times.
The earth, or life in a general sense continuing to exist is pretty much a given unless we manage to blow it up into space dust, DBZ style. But nobody is worrying about that, AFAIK.
What worries me is that I want myself, my children if I ever have any, familiy, friends, their decendants and so on to be able to live and do so reasonably comfortably. Yeah, humanity in general can adapt and survive events like the flooding of all coastal cities even. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be a big deal. No, it'd be a huge horrible mess with world-wide consequences, so I really hope we don't have to see it happen.
I'm not really convinced.
In both cases of the second study there's a way to stop, since even without the button giving up was a possibility. I'm not sure what the button changes. Perhaps it's that without the button, they think they'll have a hard time getting the test stopped early, and don't want to risk waiting until it gets unbearable before trying to talk their way out of it.
But in space, there's no stop button and no way out. No amount of arguing, threatening, beating people up, promising vast riches or the most horrible torment, killing, or anything else will change the fact that you're stuck in a capsule between Earth and Mars, and that no matter what, you're not getting out of it alive unless it successfully lands on Mars, then successfully returns home. Your only options are putting up with whatever problems you have and completing the mission, or directly or indirectly committing suicide.
I don't think there's a way of setting up a study with that kind of situation since ethical concerns would prevent it from happening, so I think the best study cases would be people who got into similar situations in the military, arctic research bases, and such.
I think it's the reverse, really.
Since they can walk out at any time, aborting is easy, and the mission can fail due to quite minor disagreements. Nobody needs to put up with anything, they just can go "screw it" and leave. That it's been working so far seems to mean it's working amazingly well.
On the other hand, if you're in space, and don't like it, what are you going to do? Throw a gigantic tantrum and beat people up? Things like that will bite you in the ass sooner or later, and are likely to result in your death. I think one's self-preservation instinct should provide some motivation.
Maybe somebody who's been in the military or similar positions can comment: What's it like to be in a life and death situation with a team member you really hate? Do people put aside the personal conflicts until the task gets done?
Very.
For one, we're most likely on different contients. For best security you'd want to hand it over in person.
Also sticks aren't that big. It's fine for email, but not a whole lot if you want to send DVD images.
You also need a separate OTP for every 2 people that talk to each other. One file for Alice to Bob, another for Alice to Carol, another for Bob to Carol, and so on. That gets annoying pretty fast, and to make all those OTPs in the first place you'll need one nice RNG. It's going to take quite a while getting 16GB of random data from /dev/random.
Wow, such a devastating argument!
I'll go quietly cry in a corner now.
If you encrypt a one time pad with anything else, it's only as strong as whatever you encrypted it with. So the one time pad is superfluous.
If you encrypt a one time pad with another, then that second one must have at least the same length as the first. So to transfer 1GB of data, you need 1GB of OTP, for which you need 1GB of another OTP, which is quite pointless.
It all comes to that OTPs are huge and exchanging them is a huge problem that's not practical for the vast majority of people.
I'd like to remove it completely rather than create a new kind
Why? Past religions have died. Try to find some believers in Zeus. No reason why current ones can't die as well.
Several:
1. Ensure church/state separation. Religion mustn't be mandatory.
2. Decouple religion and morality. Remove the association between "religion" and "good person". This seems to be making progress as of lately.
3. Improve science education
4. Offer alternatives for the social functions of religion.
I think the goal shouldn't be about indoctrination. It's not about forcing people to believe something else, it's about removing the point in bothering to believe in the first place.
Once religion isn't required, doesn't provide morality and doesn't explain anything it just gets reduced to something very vague and pointless.
Actually that's been noticed for quite a while now.
Hence the recent atheist campaigns aimed at people who stopped believing but don't admit it in public, and the interest in building some sort of community around atheism. There's quite a large amount of people in churches that aren't there for the religion, but for the social aspects.
No, not even that.
For instance, on Crunchyroll more than half the anime isn't available in Europe. The ones that they do let me watch have japanese audio and english subtitles.
They're a huge pain.
"This song/movie/video isn't available in your region due to licensing restrictions"
This is amazingly common in Europe. Which is very stupid, because if I can't buy it legally, the most logical thing to do is to pirate it. If I can't pay even when I want to, the logical conclusion is that they just don't want my money.