Not at all. I'm assuming a rational process with irrational actors. In other words, science.
Data is never perfect, of course. What's more imperfect data gets attacked by people with equally imperfect motives. This is why science doesn't instantaneously converge on a stable, evidence-based view of things. It's a long road to get there, but if you never start because the actors aren't perfect and totally unbiased, you end up with something else: religion.
It doesn't matter. We need data. Everyone has opinions. But as long as their data collection methods are open to examination, you can contest those opinions.
Well, as near as I can make out, they are describing a phenomenon that is analogous to a standing wave in a river.
Watch water in a swift river cascade over a ledge. It will form a standing wave behind the ledge which does not move, even though all the matter in it is moving downstream. This is the opposite of a traveling wave in the ocean where the mater doesn't move but the structure does.
Now so much for analogies. Again as far as I can make out, they coaxed super-cooled sodium atoms into a crystal-like structure which is stable, but allows the constituent atoms move freely within the structure. Again, I suspect this is an analogy too, but I'm at the limit of my understanding of modern physics.
Well, according to TFA the "active defenses" consist of "consisting of accessing without authorization the computer of the attacker to the victim’ own network to gather information in order to establish attribution of criminal activity."
So it sounds innocuous, but I do see a problem: it's a bit like pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, isn't it? You get permission to poke around on the attacker's network... to prove he's the attacker. It's not hard to dream up a lot of squirrely corner cases for that.
Also "active defense" of this sort provides the perfect cover... for hacking. You infect a competitor's computer network to launch an ineffective attack on your own, and then you invade his network with legal impunity.
It's not impossible to do a law like this right, but what are the chances?
Well, part of the "problem" here is that your chance of being murdered by firearm is already very low; you're about 3x as likely to die in a car accident in any given year as to be shot to death.
This doesn't mean that these are not problems; it's a matter of knowing where to get the next marginal increment of safety. If there were some new widget you could bolt on to cars (e.g., like a seatbelt) you could do a straightforward cost benefit analysis. But gun violence is both rarer than automobile deaths, and more complex because auto deaths are accidents and murders are intentional. If you take away one way of dying in a car people won't go and find another way of doing it.
Something like Sandy Hook is particularly tough, because it wasn't the failure of anything we have direct control over. It was an irresponsible gun owner who didn't restrict her disturbed son from access to her firearms. You can't outlaw carelessness. But that shouldn't stop us from seeing events like Sandy Hook as a problem, or at very least a catastrophe.
I expect that faster charging might be a bigger deal for electric cars than greater capacity. The best electric cars have perfectly acceptable ranges, but if you plug them in it takes an hour to add back another 50 miles of range. If you could triple that figure, you'd really have something. Even a cross-continental trip would be feasible. You'd end up spending something like half as much time charging as driving, rather than the other way around.
what if she's a lying sack of shit and none of the stories she tells were true?
Simple, Then everyone involved ends up in the shit hole.
Nobody will believe Uber, because most people have concluded by now they're bastards anyway and their childish CEO doesn't help. But then anybody who actually needs to know whether they can trust her (e.g., future employers) wouldn't be quite sure about her after all the conflicting stories come out.
And they'd have to. Given the sheer magnitude of the culture of dickishness she describes (sexism is one of the many forms of dickishness she describes) if it were all a fabrication people would be standing up saying it's not like that at all. I'm surprised it hasn't happened anyway, given the number of them who must have stock as part of their compensation.
So it boils down to this: does she seem like the kind of person willing to blow up her own future in order to get some dirt on them.
It's usually a safe bet that any change will make the rich richer, provided the change is not catastrophic.
The reason is that adapting to change, for a prudent rich person, is trivially easy. It's a matter of portfolio management; you could reduce it to an algorithm if you like. The main reasons fortunes are lost is investing for ego, rather than a high but sustainable reward/risk.
But you ought to keep an eyeball on that "not catastrophic" proviso.
Since the mid 80s in the United States the median household has seen its purchasing power increase by 14%, as opposed to 150% for the top percentile. That might not seem like a bad deal all around, but the median household's purchasing power is inflated by a drop in the price of things like consumer electronics -- basically all the stuff we buy from China. If you look at the cost of the things we buy from America, the price has gone up precipitously: child care, education, medical services, energy. Many of these things are difficult or impossible to economize on.
Consequently if you look at accumulated weath, the wealth of the median household has actually dropped 30% since 1985. The bottom quartile of households have seen their accumulated wealth drop by 80% since '84.
This has become a very close to a crisis situation -- witness the 2016 election, which was driven by feelings of economic insecurity. The widespread adoption of robotic replacements for low-skilled labor would tip the balance into catastrophe. The collapse of incomes in the bottom quartile would destabilize the country.
I don't give that kind of interview, I mostly ask leading questions. But it very quickly became clear this guy I was interviewing for a team lead position had an encyclopedic knowledge of the GoF patterns book. You could stick a pin in the index and he could sketch the pattern from memory. And he knew a whole bunch of other stuff. He could discuss the latest developments in the field easily and fluently. So I thought, the team will probably enjoy working with this guy. He's pretty interesting.
When they started fail to meet deadlines I looked at the code they were producing and I was shocked. Superficially the code had all the right bits, but if you dove in you quickly realized that functionality was scattered hither and yon. It was lava flow behind a facade of design. I might as well have given the team a book as a leader because this guy had no actual understanding of how any of that stuff worked. And yet if you asked he could deliver a cogent, but canned explanation that was utterly convincing... until you asked him to show how the stuff he actually produced corresponded with the theory.
It was the most perfect facsimile of knowledge I have ever encountered. I had no idea that anyone could keep so much in his head that was, in effect, gibberish to him.
Now it so happens this guy was Indian. In my experience Indian programmers are neither better nor worse talent-wise than American ones. The best are outstanding and the worst are terrible. But this guy was bad in a particular way that could only have come out of an educational system that puts a high premium on rote memorization and facile regurgitation of what the teacher says. And that took this guy far, as far as a master's degree at an American university, although in retrospect that's pretty disturbing.
I wouldn't call it super-insecure. It was introduced in 1993, and it took 24 years for someone to demonstrate the first contrived hash collision. Twenty-four years is not a bad run. MD5 didn't fare nearly so well.
Anyhow, we've known for years this is coming and SHA-2 has been available for ages. Not exactly much of a plot, in my opinion.
You are talking about David Hahn, and while he had enough stuff to contaminate his mother's garden shed, he didn't have anything he could make a bomb with.
He was attempting to implement the thorium fuel cycle in which neutron bombardment of thorium-232 produces uranium-233. He scavenged small amounts of thorium from gas lantern mantles; however to obtain enough U-233 to build a bomb he'd have had to obtain 1.6 metric tons of pure metalic thorium-232.
So far, so good, but one of the advantages of the thorium fuel cycle is reduced potential for proliferation. The U-233 produced is contaminated with other uranium isotopes and if made into a bomb will produce a fizzle. U-233's tendency to fizzle is why it's never been used by itself in a weapon, but always in conjunction with U-235 or Pu-239.
But Hahn never had the tons of pure metallic thorium he'd need to obtain a critical mass of U-233. He had the thorium oxide from a couple hundred lantern mantles -- maybe a few hundred milligrams. He'd have needed to scale his operation up by over a million times.
Well, my point is that specifics matter. I don't think we should issue blanket condemnations of the NSA, nor blanket pats on the back.
What they do is important, but also full of temptations for abuse. They're a lot like police in that respect. The police play a critical role in our society, but that doesn't make them beyond criticism, in fact quite the opposite. People on either "side" (the very notion of "side" is broken) can't seem to grasp the necessity for standards that are both tough AND fair.
Well, an agency like the NSA does do more than one thing, you know.
This is called the selective attention fallacy. We all know that the NSA does many legitimate and non-controversial things. We just act like everyone there is involved in the controversial ones.
A working Hiroshima style fission bomb isn't that hard to build, which is why the Little Boy bomb had that particular design. But getting the 64 kg of fissile materials you need to build one is a bitch. Unlike as depicted in many bad post-apocalyptic novels, you can't produce bomb grade nuclear fuel in a basement or a small cave. It requires massive industrial facilities and leaves evidence which is impossible to hide. That's why non-state actors have never been able to produce a nuclear weapon, despite the fact that such as weapon is highly desirable and some of them are well-funded. And there's getting the uranium in the first place; you need a theoretical minimum of about nine tons of purified but unenriched uranium to start, and in practice quite a bit more if you don't have forever to do it.
For a private actor, obtaining a nuclear weapon is extremely unlikely, barring some breakthrough in physics or chemistry.
Dropping a big space rock, on the other hand, is limited not by physics, as you suggest, but by economics. At present it's economically impossible, but if there were private space activities such as near Earth asteroid mining, everything you'd need to do it would be there, so the only missing piece would be intent. As for using lunar materials, the same applies, it's just farther off because the cost of getting stuff out of the Moon's gravity well means lunar mining is only attractive for materials destined for space use.
And note that even if obtaining a nuclear weapon were considerably easier than it is today, you still couldn't rule out an opportunistic space attack. It could be the guy running the mining scow, or even hacking an automated vehicle's software. That's something well within the capability of a wealthy individual, not to mention state actors.
At some point we're going to have to deal seriously with the space rock attack scenario. But that's decades off. When someone starts a project to move dense masses in space on the order of a metric ton or so, that's the time that governments need to step in with oversight. Right now it's still in the realm of sci fi.
Well, they're supposed to post nutrition information, and you should generally go by that. If the sandwich patty is supposed to be 50% soy, and it say the plain sandwich has so many grams of carbs, that should be that.
However, if the test results don't match what the company expects, some franchisee may be off the reservation.
No, he's saying that corporate programming managers are too timid to take risks.
It's hard to understand what's been lost if don't remember radio from when most radio stations were independently owned, and of course manually operated by an on-site engineer and broadcaster.
Yes in a major city there might be a handful of top-40 "hits" stations, a handful of talk or sports radio stations too, but aside from that almost every station on the dial had an unique and reflected some personal perspective. Often they were labors of love, with owners or DJs promoting genres of music they enjoyed personally, like classical or jazz, or towards the end, hip-hop.
This wasn't a case of being destroyed by a disruptive technology, like newspapers. This was a case of a deliberate rules change which allowed corporations to own a large fraction of radio stations in a market, combined with the ability to automate radio stations across the country so that they are in fact exactly the same no matter where you go, with allowances for slight regional differences like the preponderance of Christian radio across the South.
The troubling thing in these situations is always the possibility of the sour grapes/personal vendetta scenario you describe. That said, the very doubt this automatically raises means that a prudent person doesn't take such an accusation lightly.
As I say to my kids, with seven billion people on the planet you can find examples of virtually any kind of behavior you can imagine. It doesn't make that behavior normal or representative of anything.
So you can't jump to any conclusions one way or the other. You can try to gauge how credible this person sounds, but what other people might have done has no bearing on that.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, without looking, how many ml is 1 gill, 15 dram?
Not at all. I'm assuming a rational process with irrational actors. In other words, science.
Data is never perfect, of course. What's more imperfect data gets attacked by people with equally imperfect motives. This is why science doesn't instantaneously converge on a stable, evidence-based view of things. It's a long road to get there, but if you never start because the actors aren't perfect and totally unbiased, you end up with something else: religion.
It doesn't matter. We need data. Everyone has opinions. But as long as their data collection methods are open to examination, you can contest those opinions.
Opinions without data are just bullshit.
It doesn't matter. You still need data.
Look, science doesn't work because scientists are impartial. It's the adversarial process of science itself that is impartial.
Yep. Where I live we have reversing falls -- rapids that run in opposite directions on the outgoing and incoming tide. They look very much like that.
Well, as near as I can make out, they are describing a phenomenon that is analogous to a standing wave in a river.
Watch water in a swift river cascade over a ledge. It will form a standing wave behind the ledge which does not move, even though all the matter in it is moving downstream. This is the opposite of a traveling wave in the ocean where the mater doesn't move but the structure does.
Now so much for analogies. Again as far as I can make out, they coaxed super-cooled sodium atoms into a crystal-like structure which is stable, but allows the constituent atoms move freely within the structure. Again, I suspect this is an analogy too, but I'm at the limit of my understanding of modern physics.
Well, according to TFA the "active defenses" consist of "consisting of accessing without authorization the computer of the attacker to the victim’ own network to gather information in order to establish attribution of criminal activity."
So it sounds innocuous, but I do see a problem: it's a bit like pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, isn't it? You get permission to poke around on the attacker's network... to prove he's the attacker. It's not hard to dream up a lot of squirrely corner cases for that.
Also "active defense" of this sort provides the perfect cover... for hacking. You infect a competitor's computer network to launch an ineffective attack on your own, and then you invade his network with legal impunity.
It's not impossible to do a law like this right, but what are the chances?
No, Pence. And Pruitt too.
Well, part of the "problem" here is that your chance of being murdered by firearm is already very low; you're about 3x as likely to die in a car accident in any given year as to be shot to death.
This doesn't mean that these are not problems; it's a matter of knowing where to get the next marginal increment of safety. If there were some new widget you could bolt on to cars (e.g., like a seatbelt) you could do a straightforward cost benefit analysis. But gun violence is both rarer than automobile deaths, and more complex because auto deaths are accidents and murders are intentional. If you take away one way of dying in a car people won't go and find another way of doing it.
Something like Sandy Hook is particularly tough, because it wasn't the failure of anything we have direct control over. It was an irresponsible gun owner who didn't restrict her disturbed son from access to her firearms. You can't outlaw carelessness. But that shouldn't stop us from seeing events like Sandy Hook as a problem, or at very least a catastrophe.
Yet some people can't even bring themselves to go that far. And paranoid denial is a problem, because if you want to make progress on a problem, you need to have data, which we aren't allowed got collect.
If you don't want simplistic solutions to problems, you need evidence. There's no substitute.
I expect that faster charging might be a bigger deal for electric cars than greater capacity. The best electric cars have perfectly acceptable ranges, but if you plug them in it takes an hour to add back another 50 miles of range. If you could triple that figure, you'd really have something. Even a cross-continental trip would be feasible. You'd end up spending something like half as much time charging as driving, rather than the other way around.
what if she's a lying sack of shit and none of the stories she tells were true?
Simple, Then everyone involved ends up in the shit hole.
Nobody will believe Uber, because most people have concluded by now they're bastards anyway and their childish CEO doesn't help. But then anybody who actually needs to know whether they can trust her (e.g., future employers) wouldn't be quite sure about her after all the conflicting stories come out.
And they'd have to. Given the sheer magnitude of the culture of dickishness she describes (sexism is one of the many forms of dickishness she describes) if it were all a fabrication people would be standing up saying it's not like that at all. I'm surprised it hasn't happened anyway, given the number of them who must have stock as part of their compensation.
So it boils down to this: does she seem like the kind of person willing to blow up her own future in order to get some dirt on them.
Lucky for you, then.
It's usually a safe bet that any change will make the rich richer, provided the change is not catastrophic.
The reason is that adapting to change, for a prudent rich person, is trivially easy. It's a matter of portfolio management; you could reduce it to an algorithm if you like. The main reasons fortunes are lost is investing for ego, rather than a high but sustainable reward/risk.
But you ought to keep an eyeball on that "not catastrophic" proviso.
Since the mid 80s in the United States the median household has seen its purchasing power increase by 14%, as opposed to 150% for the top percentile. That might not seem like a bad deal all around, but the median household's purchasing power is inflated by a drop in the price of things like consumer electronics -- basically all the stuff we buy from China. If you look at the cost of the things we buy from America, the price has gone up precipitously: child care, education, medical services, energy. Many of these things are difficult or impossible to economize on.
Consequently if you look at accumulated weath, the wealth of the median household has actually dropped 30% since 1985. The bottom quartile of households have seen their accumulated wealth drop by 80% since '84.
This has become a very close to a crisis situation -- witness the 2016 election, which was driven by feelings of economic insecurity. The widespread adoption of robotic replacements for low-skilled labor would tip the balance into catastrophe. The collapse of incomes in the bottom quartile would destabilize the country.
Worst hire I ever made.
I don't give that kind of interview, I mostly ask leading questions. But it very quickly became clear this guy I was interviewing for a team lead position had an encyclopedic knowledge of the GoF patterns book. You could stick a pin in the index and he could sketch the pattern from memory. And he knew a whole bunch of other stuff. He could discuss the latest developments in the field easily and fluently. So I thought, the team will probably enjoy working with this guy. He's pretty interesting.
When they started fail to meet deadlines I looked at the code they were producing and I was shocked. Superficially the code had all the right bits, but if you dove in you quickly realized that functionality was scattered hither and yon. It was lava flow behind a facade of design. I might as well have given the team a book as a leader because this guy had no actual understanding of how any of that stuff worked. And yet if you asked he could deliver a cogent, but canned explanation that was utterly convincing... until you asked him to show how the stuff he actually produced corresponded with the theory.
It was the most perfect facsimile of knowledge I have ever encountered. I had no idea that anyone could keep so much in his head that was, in effect, gibberish to him.
Now it so happens this guy was Indian. In my experience Indian programmers are neither better nor worse talent-wise than American ones. The best are outstanding and the worst are terrible. But this guy was bad in a particular way that could only have come out of an educational system that puts a high premium on rote memorization and facile regurgitation of what the teacher says. And that took this guy far, as far as a master's degree at an American university, although in retrospect that's pretty disturbing.
I wouldn't call it super-insecure. It was introduced in 1993, and it took 24 years for someone to demonstrate the first contrived hash collision. Twenty-four years is not a bad run. MD5 didn't fare nearly so well.
Anyhow, we've known for years this is coming and SHA-2 has been available for ages. Not exactly much of a plot, in my opinion.
You are talking about David Hahn, and while he had enough stuff to contaminate his mother's garden shed, he didn't have anything he could make a bomb with.
He was attempting to implement the thorium fuel cycle in which neutron bombardment of thorium-232 produces uranium-233. He scavenged small amounts of thorium from gas lantern mantles; however to obtain enough U-233 to build a bomb he'd have had to obtain 1.6 metric tons of pure metalic thorium-232.
So far, so good, but one of the advantages of the thorium fuel cycle is reduced potential for proliferation. The U-233 produced is contaminated with other uranium isotopes and if made into a bomb will produce a fizzle. U-233's tendency to fizzle is why it's never been used by itself in a weapon, but always in conjunction with U-235 or Pu-239.
But Hahn never had the tons of pure metallic thorium he'd need to obtain a critical mass of U-233. He had the thorium oxide from a couple hundred lantern mantles -- maybe a few hundred milligrams. He'd have needed to scale his operation up by over a million times.
Well, my point is that specifics matter. I don't think we should issue blanket condemnations of the NSA, nor blanket pats on the back.
What they do is important, but also full of temptations for abuse. They're a lot like police in that respect. The police play a critical role in our society, but that doesn't make them beyond criticism, in fact quite the opposite. People on either "side" (the very notion of "side" is broken) can't seem to grasp the necessity for standards that are both tough AND fair.
That can't be the best you've got. Please try again.
Well, an agency like the NSA does do more than one thing, you know.
This is called the selective attention fallacy. We all know that the NSA does many legitimate and non-controversial things. We just act like everyone there is involved in the controversial ones.
Wow. How is it that ACs all have mind-reading crystal balls?
A working Hiroshima style fission bomb isn't that hard to build, which is why the Little Boy bomb had that particular design. But getting the 64 kg of fissile materials you need to build one is a bitch. Unlike as depicted in many bad post-apocalyptic novels, you can't produce bomb grade nuclear fuel in a basement or a small cave. It requires massive industrial facilities and leaves evidence which is impossible to hide. That's why non-state actors have never been able to produce a nuclear weapon, despite the fact that such as weapon is highly desirable and some of them are well-funded. And there's getting the uranium in the first place; you need a theoretical minimum of about nine tons of purified but unenriched uranium to start, and in practice quite a bit more if you don't have forever to do it.
For a private actor, obtaining a nuclear weapon is extremely unlikely, barring some breakthrough in physics or chemistry.
Dropping a big space rock, on the other hand, is limited not by physics, as you suggest, but by economics. At present it's economically impossible, but if there were private space activities such as near Earth asteroid mining, everything you'd need to do it would be there, so the only missing piece would be intent. As for using lunar materials, the same applies, it's just farther off because the cost of getting stuff out of the Moon's gravity well means lunar mining is only attractive for materials destined for space use.
And note that even if obtaining a nuclear weapon were considerably easier than it is today, you still couldn't rule out an opportunistic space attack. It could be the guy running the mining scow, or even hacking an automated vehicle's software. That's something well within the capability of a wealthy individual, not to mention state actors.
At some point we're going to have to deal seriously with the space rock attack scenario. But that's decades off. When someone starts a project to move dense masses in space on the order of a metric ton or so, that's the time that governments need to step in with oversight. Right now it's still in the realm of sci fi.
It trends moderate.
Well, they're supposed to post nutrition information, and you should generally go by that. If the sandwich patty is supposed to be 50% soy, and it say the plain sandwich has so many grams of carbs, that should be that.
However, if the test results don't match what the company expects, some franchisee may be off the reservation.
No, he's saying that corporate programming managers are too timid to take risks.
It's hard to understand what's been lost if don't remember radio from when most radio stations were independently owned, and of course manually operated by an on-site engineer and broadcaster.
Yes in a major city there might be a handful of top-40 "hits" stations, a handful of talk or sports radio stations too, but aside from that almost every station on the dial had an unique and reflected some personal perspective. Often they were labors of love, with owners or DJs promoting genres of music they enjoyed personally, like classical or jazz, or towards the end, hip-hop.
This wasn't a case of being destroyed by a disruptive technology, like newspapers. This was a case of a deliberate rules change which allowed corporations to own a large fraction of radio stations in a market, combined with the ability to automate radio stations across the country so that they are in fact exactly the same no matter where you go, with allowances for slight regional differences like the preponderance of Christian radio across the South.
The troubling thing in these situations is always the possibility of the sour grapes/personal vendetta scenario you describe. That said, the very doubt this automatically raises means that a prudent person doesn't take such an accusation lightly.
As I say to my kids, with seven billion people on the planet you can find examples of virtually any kind of behavior you can imagine. It doesn't make that behavior normal or representative of anything.
So you can't jump to any conclusions one way or the other. You can try to gauge how credible this person sounds, but what other people might have done has no bearing on that.