I should think having accurate figures matters, because in the end it's a numbers game.
At the time the US had something thirty strategic bomber wings capable of striking the Soviet Union, We had thousands of advanced B-47 bombers and hundreds of the even more advanced B-52. Each of them could carry thermonuclear bombs with multi-megaton yields. You'd have to count on getting *very* lucky in shooting them down to counterbalance that with only four single warhead ICBMs which were for practical purposes prototypes.
Dang, we used to be such a great country. Now we're just a bunch of ignorant, unimaginative blockheads bickering over the legacy of our better, more creative forbears. Even our cynical government conspiracies look like crap next to theirs.
I might entertain the government having this power to invade my privacy, provided they don't get to do it in privacy themselves.
I think they should get a warrant specifying what they're looking for, and if they don't find what they're looking for they should be required to give you official notification that they've been reading your stuff.
What could you possibly find on a computer that couldn't also be transfered digitally over the internet using encryption?
Traces of such a transfer *after* it occurred and was not intercepted?
Disk blocks with unencrypted data?
Interesting bits in the computers pagefile or swap partition?
Stuff the guy forgot or didn't think to wipe?
Evidence that the computer in question was the other endpoint of a transmission that has been decrypted?
Evidence that the computer in question was one endpoint of a pattern of encrypted transmissions that is shown by independent evidence to be connected with something interesting?
There's lots of stuff that might be interesting, both for legitimate and illegitimate reasons. What is in question is whether looking for that stuff is *reasonable*. That depends on a lot of things, *and differs by context*. If a cop stopped you when you were driving across state lines and searched your bags without a warrant, that would be considered outrageously unconstitutional. Border patrol agents do that all the time when you're crossing the national border. They also impound stuff all the time that might be contraband or (in the case of animals and plants) might cause some kind of problem. That's the flip side of "controlling the border".
I could argue this the other way, but its important to realize that your constitutional protections when you're crossing the border are in practice a lot less robust than they ought to be. I'd argue that in *this* kind of case the US Bill of Rights could be a lot better than it is. For the 1700s it was cutting edge, but if you were writing a Bill of Rights for the twenty-first century, you'd be a lot more sensitive to the potential to the ways governments have discovered over the centuries of abusing the powers it has been given. Clearly the Constitution empowers the government to impound stuff coming across the borders, but it doesn't constrain the purpose, duration and conditions of that impoundment as much as it should. Suspicion is treated as benign under the US Constitution because in the 1700s it wasn't practical to suspect people on the scale technology makes possible. In prior ages this guy would not have come under suspicion entering the border; the ability to transmit suspicion through databases in effect makes it possible for the government to use its normal border powers as a back door for actions it is not permitted in criminal investigations.
Ambitious? It depends. If you're a manufacturing firm that makes flash drives, it might be very easy to make this modification. When you're set up to be able to give a low-ball quote to manufacture something quickly, you're also pretty well set up to make a cheap counterfeit of the same thing, whether or not you actually get the contract.
A few years back there were reports of counterfeit Li-ion cells and batteries when the production was shifted to China from Japan. Even where batteries continue to be made in Japan, there are pretty convincing Chinese made knock-offs. One of the tell-tale signs are Kanji characters (traditional Chinese characters used in Japanese writing) that are replaced with their simplified counterparts used in China today. Clearly these are made by companies in the business of making these kinds of batteries and cells, but the counterfeits may lack many of the redundant safety features that allow you to carry your phone or camera in your pocket without risk.
It would be quite easy for a flash drive manufacturer to make a drive with 128MB that reports as 500G. The looping business may have something to do with how they performed that particular trick (e.g. mapping the same sector multiple times). Then all you need is a friend in the company that produces the Samsung disk enclosures, and you've got a pretty sweet scam. Remember, this is the country that fed its own infants with melamine laced formula. A country with no effective business regulation and a government allergic to bad news is a paradise for a slick operator.
The prevailing assumption today seems to be that mankind is causing every extinction on the planet and,
As a first approximation, mind you, that assumption is correct. Take any given impending extinction and there's a pretty good chance that there is a significant anthropogenic contribution.
as such, we should be working to save every species and variety of endangered animal.
Well, don't you think we should at least *consider* every species for preservation? I'd say the default stance that we should save an endangered species is a sensible one, because that triggers a review when that goal comes into inevitable conflict with other things we want, like development. The default stance that a species should *not* be preserved wouldn't trigger review until the species is much closer to the brink, and could only be preserved by taking extreme measures.
Even ignoring that fact that mankind is part of nature too, extinction is a natural process that was taking place long before we existed.
True, and true, but you're missing an important point. We're a rare part of nature that is self-aware and can think about the future consequences of our actions, even if we don't *like* to. Therefore we bear more responsibility for our choices than, say, a white tailed deer which eats and reproduces but is *unable* to consider the future consequences of its actions.
It seems to me that a world where species DON'T go extinct (thanks to our efforts) would disrupt the natural processes of evolution.
That's a strawman argument, since there is no real possibility that we could stop all anthropogenic extinction, must less ALL extinction. It's a remarkably irrelevant observation, like saying, "perpetual motion machines are impossible, therefore there shouldn't be legal gas mileage standards." The conclusion may or may not be correct, but the argument doesn't lead there.
Our guilt complex could create a very unnatural world.
I agree, *guilt* is not a sensible way of approaching this problem. I don't feel particularly guilty about the extinction of the passenger pigeon. Just sad. Once the passenger pigeon was a favorite hunting target.T he environment supported huge flocks of them, and had the resource been managed responsibly, people would still be hunting and enjoying them in abundance today. You can take a lot out of a population like that without disturbing it equilibrium, but not an unlimited amount. Conservationists tried to save the species, but they were ahead of the curve.
The passenger pigeon didn't go extinct because people were *bad*. It went extinct because people were *ignorant*. Most people just didn't know that a resource like that could be tipped into extinction. Today we're less ignorant about these things.
The summary posted here at Slashdot invites us to infer more than the memo in TFA says. It seems to imply that Google employees won't get any annual bonus unless the "+1 Button" feature is a success. What the memo says is is that 1/4 of the bonus will be tied to Google's success in its social media efforts *as a whole*.
You get paid for doing your job. Bonuses are something different. I have doubts about the effectiveness of bonuses, particularly for engineers, but if they do have a function it is to get you thinking, not just about the task at hand, but how it might be tweaked to contribute to the overall success of the company. In a company like Google where engineers have considerable scope for creativity, a bonus policy like this might have some positive effect.
As for "social media" being crap, this attitude is *precisely* why managers contemplate steps like this. Just because you have good, even unassailable reasons to believe social media is crap doesn't mean it's an unimportant business. It doesn't matter what *you* think or how justified you are when your customers think differently. Google has to consider Facebook as a key competitor. Facebook has moved into product niches that are important to Google. There's advertising, for one. Everyone one uses Google search, but nobody spends the kind of time many people do on Facebook. Facebook is well positioned to move into other areas such as email and cloud services.
What is really a mystery is why Google chose to pull the plug on Wave. It was poorly marketed, that is true, but it was an unique take on social media: actually using it for *doing* things. The one thing Facebook is *not* positioned to do is launch services that people can readily see require *trust*.
Oh, c'mon. The issues to be decided here aren't any more abstruse than in any other kind of engineering case. Nor are the *vast* majority software developers any more competent to make technical judgments than the judge would be after a few days prep time. Sure, developers more apt to have some idea of what a virtual machine is beforehand, but that idea is to vague to be of much use. How many could explain the difference between a stack machine and a register machine? Or give any kind of explanation of how a compiler optimizer does what it is supposed to? Not many. If you narrowed the pool of "judges" down to people who understood the technology involved to make *technical* judgments in this case, the pool would be tiny and probably consist of people who had a stake in the outcome of the case.
Fortunately, that's not what we need the judge to do. He doesn't have to make decisions about the applications of technology; he has to make decisions about the application of *law*. And it's way better this way. You get the software experts up to make their arguments, and see if they can convince somebody who doesn't have a pre-formed opinion. If one side doesn't have a leg to stand on, it'll show. If both sides have arguments that would sound reasonable to another expert, you want the judge to apply the law without ruling on which side of the dubious question is right. An expert in virtual machine technology couldn't do that impartially. If we followed *your* suggestion, we'd have courts making engineering decisions. What the court should do is rely upon engineering consensus where it exists, and not interfere with the development of that consensus where it doesn't yet.
The drawback of this system is that it depends on having a judge who is good at grasping the essentials of what is at stake. But software developers are ordinary mortals, and a little humility would do us a lot of good. True, not everyone can *do* what we do, but unlike particle physicists or poets we make our living doing things that don't take uncommon intellectual talent to grasp.
Of course, judges *do* often get things horribly wrong, but not more often than software developers get things horribly wrong. It's just the nature of the law that its failures have a wider impact. When you fail as a software developer, somebody who decided to rely upon you is disappointed. When you fail as a judge, people who had no involvement or choice at all are swept into that failure. I think where we've seen horribly misguided legal rulings on technical matters, its because the judge latched onto the kind of specious analogy that politicians often deal with when they talk technology. Even when a politician's intentions are good and the results of using the analogy positive ("information superhighway"), that's not a precise enough understanding to make legal rulings. This guy is doing the right thing and going to school, not exaggerating his prior understanding.
Well, I think the reasons for looking at nuclear aircraft maybe weren't all so silly as having the biggest, baddest stick on the block, although no doubt that was part of the attraction. A nuclear powered aircraft could take off at the first hint of an emergency, and remain aloft indefinitely, randomly cruising the vast airspace of North America virtually untrackable by the Soviets until the order came to attack. Then they'd be able to strike any point on the globe from just about any other point on the globe.
In other words they'd play the role we finally assigned to submarines.
When I came to grad school, I was suddenly thrown into very advanced mathematics...
Oh, that's the combination of intellectual machismo and lousy organization. The reason so many people find themselves going overnight from "you don't need to know that yet," to "you haven't learned that yet?" is because nobody bothered to figure out when a certain piece of math needed to be taught, and nobody much relishes making things easier for people who follow them, even if its the sensible thing to do.
What this produces is PhDs who've managed to academically survive the ordeal of being unprepared in mathematics, but without necessarily gaining much understanding of the math they use every day.
Well, speaking of what's in Microsoft's "DNA", it is traditionally a company that sells to people who select technology that other people will use. That's where Microsoft is successful. The places where they succeed with consumers are where consumer choices are constrained by other things. People buy Office because they have to exchange documents with people who can only use Office formats. They buy Windows because that's what the IT department lets them buy.
MS actually did pretty well in the smartphone arena because Windows Mobile was very friendly to hardware companies who were eager to cripple their products to suit the carriers' attempts to milk revenue out of bogus services. You can take pictures, but the only way to get them off is with our special Picture EMail Service. You can play music you buy though *our* music store. Apple put an end to that BS because they had the clout to give AT&T a Hobson's Choice: take it or leave it. Of course Apple had it's own version of the walled garden, but at least they didn't nickel and dime you to death by tarting up simple uses of bandwidth as some kind of special "service".
Even the XBox is a consumer device where consumer choices are driven by game titles. The games are technically impressive, so I suppose they do a good job supporting developers, but the the hardware and end-user support is pathetic.
A lot of the contempt for Microsoft's products come from our experiences as users, but making users happy just isn't what Microsoft does. They don't have a history of success through making users happy with which they could build that kind of organizational culture.
It isn't just that.. You miss out on having colleagues. A job should have people you look forward to working with; people who make you better than you are as a lone wolf.
I've been in the full time telecommute situation. It sucked just as bad as the hour and a half each way commute it replaced,and I'm not the most sociable of people. . I'd say 50-50 to 80-20 commute to telecommute would be an ideal ratio.
Carter was better than you remember. He just got blamed for the nasty medicine needed to stop hyperinflation. Once the Fed loosened up the money supply, we got the "Reagan Boom", but if you look at the economic growth figures the boom started in the waning months of the Carter administration and was in full swing in the first year of Reagan, well before any Reagan policies could take effect.
Politically hapless.... Ill grant you. Carter was a modern Adams.
It'd be interesting to hear the number of launches they need to make a profit at that price. I'm assuming the price is based on an average price, which in turn is calculated by assuming the fixed costs of development can be spread over some minimum number of launches.
If the number of paying launches were, say, *1*, I doubt very much they'd be able to make money at that price.
Are the media writing too many articles about how they're writing too many articles about facebook?
That's logically impossible. The market produces exactly the correct number of anything, because that is how market economics *defines* the right number of anything.
Journalism is expensive and unprofitable. Aggregation and opinion thinly disguised as journalism is much more financially efficient, and therefore the market has determined that the right ratio of journalism to fluff is zero, to within thee or more significant digits at least.
Err... The video piece described by the article starts off discussing the American Civil War. What does *that* have to do with Afghanistan?
The answer is "nothing." It wasn't intended to say anything about Afghanistan, because Afghanistan is not what the article is about. The article is about how robotics is the next phase in the mechanization of warfare. The Civil War was the high water mark of pre-mechanized warfare, the last great ware fought with muscle and fodder. The reporter might have mentioned the Battle of Hampton Roads, which everyone knows was the first battle of *ironclads*, but perhaps more significantly it was a battle of steam driven warships, a naval tactics game changer well under way before the start of the war.
Afghanistan is a significant milestone in the ongoing mechanization of warfare, so I think TFA gets that right. The X-47B is a step towards a robotic weapon capable of performing, not just a single task, but an entire mission autonomously. That *policy* requires a human to actually pull the trigger doesn't change the significance of that milestone. That the X-47B is only a mock-up doesn't change that either. It has a 2000 kg weapons bay, so it's clear where the designers are going with this. So I'd say TFA got that right too.
While CNN may not understand the basics of the US military, this article is not evidence supporting that position.
Still doesn't matter. The future payments were part of the deal, no matter how unfavorable the structuring of those payments are. It's not like the employees are playing a fast one here, it was all down in black and white for anyone who bothered to look ahead into the future.
You couldn't walk away from a business deal where you agreed to pay 800K$ up front and later annual payments over some indefinite period by saying, "Yeah, but I didn't do the math properly and I'm paying more than I thought I would," or more realistically, "Now that I actually have to pay out, I wish I'd structured the deal differently." Those are not excuses.
The point of a pension is to encourage employees to join an organization and *stay* with it, which is why your payout goes up as you stay longer and your salary goes up. Once somebody has done everything you asked them to on your end of the deal, you can't say you've changed your mind and all things considered you'd rather hold on to your money, because you can't give them those years back to seek a better deal than you wished you had struck way back wen. Even if the deal you made was profoundly stupid, it's *your* responsibility to stick to it if you possibly can. You could declare bankruptcy, but that's only for the case where you literally can't raise the cash, not where raising the cash would be painful because it's detrimental to your future plans.
This is why I say the best time to tighten your belt is in the good times. You can't retroactively tighten your belt when the bad times hit.
But wasn't SunOS pre-Solaris a BSD varoamt? The screen cap clearly shows "ps -ef" being piped to grep; that's East Coast style (SysV). Back in the day when we were two coasts divided by a common operating system, the hippie Bezerkley hackers would have typed "ps axu". So I guess that "SolarOS" is just the movie world's version of Solaris.
And people claim serious cinema is *inaccessible*.
Yeah, but this way you get really cool jungle built-submarines. Too bad this one was so... utilitarian. Given the price, they could easily afford to throw in a little polished brass, mahogany (they *are* building it in the jungle), and red leather and be friggin' steampunk Captain Nemo.
Never said it was like DRM. The point is: they lost the secret, and the *system* is irretrievably compromised. It doesn't matter where the secret was stored, it was still baked in.
Y'know, one of the first things experts tell you when you're trying to educate yourself about crypto is not to rely too much on secrets that are baked into a product or system. This situation is a vindication of that principle. The whole house of cards has fallen down in an irreparable way because of a single security breach.
This is going to cost RSA a lot more than sales of its SecureID product. People buy this product, not because they have analyzed the system and decided it is architecturally secure; they bought it because they trusted RSA. RSA was founded by the most illustrious minds in the field. I was looking at some RSA job postings recently, and they don't appear to hire anybody who doesn't have a PhD. RSA is supposed to be the company that knows how to do things right. That means they knowingly produced a system that violated stuff you learn in Chapter 1 of a basic crypto text, and then induced customers to rely on that system for security.
RSA reputation, meet porcelain bowl.
I want to be clear I'm not criticizing RSA for the security breach. I'm criticizing them for inducing customers to rely on a system that becomes irreparably untrustworthy after a single event that was bound to happen sooner or later.
Actually, I did read something the other day about the the issue of the historical wave-heights. The reactors *were* built to that standard, however (a) the exact heights of historical tsunamis are estimates, which were subsequently revised upward and (b) seismic models suggested (correctly) that a much larger tsunami than any historically recorded was a serious possibility. (Prays to Google for a reference.... Ah here we are: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11087/1135345-82.stm ).
So, *yes* it is absolutely true that the engineers designed the plan to withstand this historical maximum tsunami. But no, that does not mean the company took adequate steps given new knowledge that came to light.
What we're seeing in Fukushima is a remarkable mixture of triumph and failure of human foresight. I think we're getting to the point where it's possible to make some reasonable conjectures about the differences between the two. Before you can build a plant like this, you've got to go to extraordinary lengths to build "defense in depth" features into the design. Those measures are thoroughly vindicated by their usefulness in the Fukushima crisis. On the other hand, foresight *specific to this installation* was not nearly so rigorous. Yes, they built levees, but *no* they didn't think through what would happen if those failed. They took the vanilla design and plopped a safety fix around it, whereas it is now clear they should have made provisions for cooling the reactor even if the building were flooded.
The later we get in the process, the less impressive the foresight becomes. The basic reactor design is very well thought out; the site specific installation less so, the reaction to new develops positively bad. When in 2002 they're informed that their tsunami barriers are likely far too low, their response is practically nil, the kind of thing you'd do after a quick meeting. "What should we do about the possibility of a tsunami topping the barriers?" "Well," one guy says, "we should raise some of the pumps." The order goes out to raise some of the pumps and one pump gets jacked up eight inches. Had they, in response to this news, actually staged a drill with people alert to spotting potential problems, they might have taken measures like elevating the emergency pump and generation equipment. That probably would have seemed expensive at the time, but it would have been the right thing to do, and in the end a bargain.
This model of increasingly sloppy thinking later in a project is plausible because it fits with what everyone knows about how organizations work. Management did its homework because it *had* to do it in order to get the plant built. Now that it had what it wanted, nothing was forcing management to think in that self-critical way about disaster planning. And engineers... well *I'm* an engineer and I know how we think. Constraints that are a stimulating intellectual challenge in the early design phase become a pain in the neck the later they're introduced, especially after things are up and running. We tend to look at those things when introduced later as less reasonable, even less *plausible*, because they're less practical to address. Recently I interviewed at a company that provides web based apps. Things went well until the designer showed me the source code. In about five minutes I discovered at least three if not more very serious security concerns. "We don'.t have that problem," the guy says. My thought is, "how do you know?" The thing is, he'd have been delighted to entertain the notion of a security problem at the design phase. Up and running with customers depending on the product that's news he doesn't want to hear.
Note the big, big difference between the kind of thought that went into early *design* of the reactors and the thought that went into adapting to news of a similar nature about the *siting* and *installation* of those designs. When the basic design was being hashed out, nobody ever said anything like, "Well, that's never actually happened before."
Well, that's the point, isn't it? You don't have to build an application with so many bells and whistles, but if you *do*, then OSGI is a pretty neat solution to managing them. If you're going to need something like plug-ins, then OSGI is an alternative to rolling your own, but it comes at a cost of having to learn to think in OSGI. It's conceptually heavyweight, but not necessarily more so than whatever you manage to come up with.
Whether that's over-engineering depends on the problem. OSGI is a big win in an IDE like Eclipse or Netbeans, or an application server like Glassfish or JBoss.
Slashdot Mirror
I should think having accurate figures matters, because in the end it's a numbers game.
At the time the US had something thirty strategic bomber wings capable of striking the Soviet Union, We had thousands of advanced B-47 bombers and hundreds of the even more advanced B-52. Each of them could carry thermonuclear bombs with multi-megaton yields. You'd have to count on getting *very* lucky in shooting them down to counterbalance that with only four single warhead ICBMs which were for practical purposes prototypes.
Dang, we used to be such a great country. Now we're just a bunch of ignorant, unimaginative blockheads bickering over the legacy of our better, more creative forbears. Even our cynical government conspiracies look like crap next to theirs.
I might entertain the government having this power to invade my privacy, provided they don't get to do it in privacy themselves.
I think they should get a warrant specifying what they're looking for, and if they don't find what they're looking for they should be required to give you official notification that they've been reading your stuff.
What could you possibly find on a computer that couldn't also be transfered digitally over the internet using encryption?
Traces of such a transfer *after* it occurred and was not intercepted?
Disk blocks with unencrypted data?
Interesting bits in the computers pagefile or swap partition?
Stuff the guy forgot or didn't think to wipe?
Evidence that the computer in question was the other endpoint of a transmission that has been decrypted?
Evidence that the computer in question was one endpoint of a pattern of encrypted transmissions that is shown by independent evidence to be connected with something interesting?
There's lots of stuff that might be interesting, both for legitimate and illegitimate reasons. What is in question is whether looking for that stuff is *reasonable*. That depends on a lot of things, *and differs by context*. If a cop stopped you when you were driving across state lines and searched your bags without a warrant, that would be considered outrageously unconstitutional. Border patrol agents do that all the time when you're crossing the national border. They also impound stuff all the time that might be contraband or (in the case of animals and plants) might cause some kind of problem. That's the flip side of "controlling the border".
I could argue this the other way, but its important to realize that your constitutional protections when you're crossing the border are in practice a lot less robust than they ought to be. I'd argue that in *this* kind of case the US Bill of Rights could be a lot better than it is. For the 1700s it was cutting edge, but if you were writing a Bill of Rights for the twenty-first century, you'd be a lot more sensitive to the potential to the ways governments have discovered over the centuries of abusing the powers it has been given. Clearly the Constitution empowers the government to impound stuff coming across the borders, but it doesn't constrain the purpose, duration and conditions of that impoundment as much as it should. Suspicion is treated as benign under the US Constitution because in the 1700s it wasn't practical to suspect people on the scale technology makes possible. In prior ages this guy would not have come under suspicion entering the border; the ability to transmit suspicion through databases in effect makes it possible for the government to use its normal border powers as a back door for actions it is not permitted in criminal investigations.
Ambitious? It depends. If you're a manufacturing firm that makes flash drives, it might be very easy to make this modification. When you're set up to be able to give a low-ball quote to manufacture something quickly, you're also pretty well set up to make a cheap counterfeit of the same thing, whether or not you actually get the contract.
A few years back there were reports of counterfeit Li-ion cells and batteries when the production was shifted to China from Japan. Even where batteries continue to be made in Japan, there are pretty convincing Chinese made knock-offs. One of the tell-tale signs are Kanji characters (traditional Chinese characters used in Japanese writing) that are replaced with their simplified counterparts used in China today. Clearly these are made by companies in the business of making these kinds of batteries and cells, but the counterfeits may lack many of the redundant safety features that allow you to carry your phone or camera in your pocket without risk.
It would be quite easy for a flash drive manufacturer to make a drive with 128MB that reports as 500G. The looping business may have something to do with how they performed that particular trick (e.g. mapping the same sector multiple times). Then all you need is a friend in the company that produces the Samsung disk enclosures, and you've got a pretty sweet scam. Remember, this is the country that fed its own infants with melamine laced formula. A country with no effective business regulation and a government allergic to bad news is a paradise for a slick operator.
The prevailing assumption today seems to be that mankind is causing every extinction on the planet and,
As a first approximation, mind you, that assumption is correct. Take any given impending extinction and there's a pretty good chance that there is a significant anthropogenic contribution.
as such, we should be working to save every species and variety of endangered animal.
Well, don't you think we should at least *consider* every species for preservation? I'd say the default stance that we should save an endangered species is a sensible one, because that triggers a review when that goal comes into inevitable conflict with other things we want, like development. The default stance that a species should *not* be preserved wouldn't trigger review until the species is much closer to the brink, and could only be preserved by taking extreme measures.
Even ignoring that fact that mankind is part of nature too, extinction is a natural process that was taking place long before we existed.
True, and true, but you're missing an important point. We're a rare part of nature that is self-aware and can think about the future consequences of our actions, even if we don't *like* to. Therefore we bear more responsibility for our choices than, say, a white tailed deer which eats and reproduces but is *unable* to consider the future consequences of its actions.
It seems to me that a world where species DON'T go extinct (thanks to our efforts) would disrupt the natural processes of evolution.
That's a strawman argument, since there is no real possibility that we could stop all anthropogenic extinction, must less ALL extinction. It's a remarkably irrelevant observation, like saying, "perpetual motion machines are impossible, therefore there shouldn't be legal gas mileage standards." The conclusion may or may not be correct, but the argument doesn't lead there.
Our guilt complex could create a very unnatural world.
I agree, *guilt* is not a sensible way of approaching this problem. I don't feel particularly guilty about the extinction of the passenger pigeon. Just sad. Once the passenger pigeon was a favorite hunting target.T he environment supported huge flocks of them, and had the resource been managed responsibly, people would still be hunting and enjoying them in abundance today. You can take a lot out of a population like that without disturbing it equilibrium, but not an unlimited amount. Conservationists tried to save the species, but they were ahead of the curve.
The passenger pigeon didn't go extinct because people were *bad*. It went extinct because people were *ignorant*. Most people just didn't know that a resource like that could be tipped into extinction. Today we're less ignorant about these things.
Well, *most* of us are, anyway.
The summary posted here at Slashdot invites us to infer more than the memo in TFA says. It seems to imply that Google employees won't get any annual bonus unless the "+1 Button" feature is a success. What the memo says is is that 1/4 of the bonus will be tied to Google's success in its social media efforts *as a whole*.
You get paid for doing your job. Bonuses are something different. I have doubts about the effectiveness of bonuses, particularly for engineers, but if they do have a function it is to get you thinking, not just about the task at hand, but how it might be tweaked to contribute to the overall success of the company. In a company like Google where engineers have considerable scope for creativity, a bonus policy like this might have some positive effect.
As for "social media" being crap, this attitude is *precisely* why managers contemplate steps like this. Just because you have good, even unassailable reasons to believe social media is crap doesn't mean it's an unimportant business. It doesn't matter what *you* think or how justified you are when your customers think differently. Google has to consider Facebook as a key competitor. Facebook has moved into product niches that are important to Google. There's advertising, for one. Everyone one uses Google search, but nobody spends the kind of time many people do on Facebook. Facebook is well positioned to move into other areas such as email and cloud services.
What is really a mystery is why Google chose to pull the plug on Wave. It was poorly marketed, that is true, but it was an unique take on social media: actually using it for *doing* things. The one thing Facebook is *not* positioned to do is launch services that people can readily see require *trust*.
Oh, c'mon. The issues to be decided here aren't any more abstruse than in any other kind of engineering case. Nor are the *vast* majority software developers any more competent to make technical judgments than the judge would be after a few days prep time. Sure, developers more apt to have some idea of what a virtual machine is beforehand, but that idea is to vague to be of much use. How many could explain the difference between a stack machine and a register machine? Or give any kind of explanation of how a compiler optimizer does what it is supposed to? Not many. If you narrowed the pool of "judges" down to people who understood the technology involved to make *technical* judgments in this case, the pool would be tiny and probably consist of people who had a stake in the outcome of the case.
Fortunately, that's not what we need the judge to do. He doesn't have to make decisions about the applications of technology; he has to make decisions about the application of *law*. And it's way better this way. You get the software experts up to make their arguments, and see if they can convince somebody who doesn't have a pre-formed opinion. If one side doesn't have a leg to stand on, it'll show. If both sides have arguments that would sound reasonable to another expert, you want the judge to apply the law without ruling on which side of the dubious question is right. An expert in virtual machine technology couldn't do that impartially. If we followed *your* suggestion, we'd have courts making engineering decisions. What the court should do is rely upon engineering consensus where it exists, and not interfere with the development of that consensus where it doesn't yet.
The drawback of this system is that it depends on having a judge who is good at grasping the essentials of what is at stake. But software developers are ordinary mortals, and a little humility would do us a lot of good. True, not everyone can *do* what we do, but unlike particle physicists or poets we make our living doing things that don't take uncommon intellectual talent to grasp.
Of course, judges *do* often get things horribly wrong, but not more often than software developers get things horribly wrong. It's just the nature of the law that its failures have a wider impact. When you fail as a software developer, somebody who decided to rely upon you is disappointed. When you fail as a judge, people who had no involvement or choice at all are swept into that failure. I think where we've seen horribly misguided legal rulings on technical matters, its because the judge latched onto the kind of specious analogy that politicians often deal with when they talk technology. Even when a politician's intentions are good and the results of using the analogy positive ("information superhighway"), that's not a precise enough understanding to make legal rulings. This guy is doing the right thing and going to school, not exaggerating his prior understanding.
Well, I think the reasons for looking at nuclear aircraft maybe weren't all so silly as having the biggest, baddest stick on the block, although no doubt that was part of the attraction. A nuclear powered aircraft could take off at the first hint of an emergency, and remain aloft indefinitely, randomly cruising the vast airspace of North America virtually untrackable by the Soviets until the order came to attack. Then they'd be able to strike any point on the globe from just about any other point on the globe.
In other words they'd play the role we finally assigned to submarines.
When I came to grad school, I was suddenly thrown into very advanced mathematics...
Oh, that's the combination of intellectual machismo and lousy organization. The reason so many people find themselves going overnight from "you don't need to know that yet," to "you haven't learned that yet?" is because nobody bothered to figure out when a certain piece of math needed to be taught, and nobody much relishes making things easier for people who follow them, even if its the sensible thing to do.
What this produces is PhDs who've managed to academically survive the ordeal of being unprepared in mathematics, but without necessarily gaining much understanding of the math they use every day.
Well, speaking of what's in Microsoft's "DNA", it is traditionally a company that sells to people who select technology that other people will use. That's where Microsoft is successful. The places where they succeed with consumers are where consumer choices are constrained by other things. People buy Office because they have to exchange documents with people who can only use Office formats. They buy Windows because that's what the IT department lets them buy.
MS actually did pretty well in the smartphone arena because Windows Mobile was very friendly to hardware companies who were eager to cripple their products to suit the carriers' attempts to milk revenue out of bogus services. You can take pictures, but the only way to get them off is with our special Picture EMail Service. You can play music you buy though *our* music store. Apple put an end to that BS because they had the clout to give AT&T a Hobson's Choice: take it or leave it. Of course Apple had it's own version of the walled garden, but at least they didn't nickel and dime you to death by tarting up simple uses of bandwidth as some kind of special "service".
Even the XBox is a consumer device where consumer choices are driven by game titles. The games are technically impressive, so I suppose they do a good job supporting developers, but the the hardware and end-user support is pathetic.
A lot of the contempt for Microsoft's products come from our experiences as users, but making users happy just isn't what Microsoft does. They don't have a history of success through making users happy with which they could build that kind of organizational culture.
It isn't just that.. You miss out on having colleagues. A job should have people you look forward to working with; people who make you better than you are as a lone wolf.
I've been in the full time telecommute situation. It sucked just as bad as the hour and a half each way commute it replaced,and I'm not the most sociable of people. . I'd say 50-50 to 80-20 commute to telecommute would be an ideal ratio.
Carter was better than you remember. He just got blamed for the nasty medicine needed to stop hyperinflation. Once the Fed loosened up the money supply, we got the "Reagan Boom", but if you look at the economic growth figures the boom started in the waning months of the Carter administration and was in full swing in the first year of Reagan, well before any Reagan policies could take effect.
Politically hapless .... Ill grant you. Carter was a modern Adams.
It'd be interesting to hear the number of launches they need to make a profit at that price. I'm assuming the price is based on an average price, which in turn is calculated by assuming the fixed costs of development can be spread over some minimum number of launches.
If the number of paying launches were, say, *1*, I doubt very much they'd be able to make money at that price.
Are the media writing too many articles about how they're writing too many articles about facebook?
That's logically impossible. The market produces exactly the correct number of anything, because that is how market economics *defines* the right number of anything.
Journalism is expensive and unprofitable. Aggregation and opinion thinly disguised as journalism is much more financially efficient, and therefore the market has determined that the right ratio of journalism to fluff is zero, to within thee or more significant digits at least.
Err... The video piece described by the article starts off discussing the American Civil War. What does *that* have to do with Afghanistan?
The answer is "nothing." It wasn't intended to say anything about Afghanistan, because Afghanistan is not what the article is about. The article is about how robotics is the next phase in the mechanization of warfare. The Civil War was the high water mark of pre-mechanized warfare, the last great ware fought with muscle and fodder. The reporter might have mentioned the Battle of Hampton Roads, which everyone knows was the first battle of *ironclads*, but perhaps more significantly it was a battle of steam driven warships, a naval tactics game changer well under way before the start of the war.
Afghanistan is a significant milestone in the ongoing mechanization of warfare, so I think TFA gets that right. The X-47B is a step towards a robotic weapon capable of performing, not just a single task, but an entire mission autonomously. That *policy* requires a human to actually pull the trigger doesn't change the significance of that milestone. That the X-47B is only a mock-up doesn't change that either. It has a 2000 kg weapons bay, so it's clear where the designers are going with this. So I'd say TFA got that right too.
While CNN may not understand the basics of the US military, this article is not evidence supporting that position.
But those people are nobodies...
Still doesn't matter. The future payments were part of the deal, no matter how unfavorable the structuring of those payments are. It's not like the employees are playing a fast one here, it was all down in black and white for anyone who bothered to look ahead into the future.
You couldn't walk away from a business deal where you agreed to pay 800K$ up front and later annual payments over some indefinite period by saying, "Yeah, but I didn't do the math properly and I'm paying more than I thought I would," or more realistically, "Now that I actually have to pay out, I wish I'd structured the deal differently." Those are not excuses.
The point of a pension is to encourage employees to join an organization and *stay* with it, which is why your payout goes up as you stay longer and your salary goes up. Once somebody has done everything you asked them to on your end of the deal, you can't say you've changed your mind and all things considered you'd rather hold on to your money, because you can't give them those years back to seek a better deal than you wished you had struck way back wen. Even if the deal you made was profoundly stupid, it's *your* responsibility to stick to it if you possibly can. You could declare bankruptcy, but that's only for the case where you literally can't raise the cash, not where raising the cash would be painful because it's detrimental to your future plans.
This is why I say the best time to tighten your belt is in the good times. You can't retroactively tighten your belt when the bad times hit.
But wasn't SunOS pre-Solaris a BSD varoamt? The screen cap clearly shows "ps -ef" being piped to grep; that's East Coast style (SysV). Back in the day when we were two coasts divided by a common operating system, the hippie Bezerkley hackers would have typed "ps axu". So I guess that "SolarOS" is just the movie world's version of Solaris.
And people claim serious cinema is *inaccessible*.
Yeah, but this way you get really cool jungle built-submarines. Too bad this one was so ... utilitarian. Given the price, they could easily afford to throw in a little polished brass, mahogany (they *are* building it in the jungle), and red leather and be friggin' steampunk Captain Nemo.
Never said it was like DRM. The point is: they lost the secret, and the *system* is irretrievably compromised. It doesn't matter where the secret was stored, it was still baked in.
Y'know, one of the first things experts tell you when you're trying to educate yourself about crypto is not to rely too much on secrets that are baked into a product or system. This situation is a vindication of that principle. The whole house of cards has fallen down in an irreparable way because of a single security breach.
This is going to cost RSA a lot more than sales of its SecureID product. People buy this product, not because they have analyzed the system and decided it is architecturally secure; they bought it because they trusted RSA. RSA was founded by the most illustrious minds in the field. I was looking at some RSA job postings recently, and they don't appear to hire anybody who doesn't have a PhD. RSA is supposed to be the company that knows how to do things right. That means they knowingly produced a system that violated stuff you learn in Chapter 1 of a basic crypto text, and then induced customers to rely on that system for security.
RSA reputation, meet porcelain bowl.
I want to be clear I'm not criticizing RSA for the security breach. I'm criticizing them for inducing customers to rely on a system that becomes irreparably untrustworthy after a single event that was bound to happen sooner or later.
Sad part is trying to live without Flush [sic] and MS, is darned near impossible.
100 million iPhone users and 20 million iPad users disagree.
** Lightbulb Illuminates ***
Great Scott! They're all zombies! It's a giant army of undead customers animated with Steve Jobs' unholy juju! Aaargh!
Actually, I did read something the other day about the the issue of the historical wave-heights. The reactors *were* built to that standard, however (a) the exact heights of historical tsunamis are estimates, which were subsequently revised upward and (b) seismic models suggested (correctly) that a much larger tsunami than any historically recorded was a serious possibility. (Prays to Google for a reference.... Ah here we are: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11087/1135345-82.stm ).
So, *yes* it is absolutely true that the engineers designed the plan to withstand this historical maximum tsunami. But no, that does not mean the company took adequate steps given new knowledge that came to light.
What we're seeing in Fukushima is a remarkable mixture of triumph and failure of human foresight. I think we're getting to the point where it's possible to make some reasonable conjectures about the differences between the two. Before you can build a plant like this, you've got to go to extraordinary lengths to build "defense in depth" features into the design. Those measures are thoroughly vindicated by their usefulness in the Fukushima crisis. On the other hand, foresight *specific to this installation* was not nearly so rigorous. Yes, they built levees, but *no* they didn't think through what would happen if those failed. They took the vanilla design and plopped a safety fix around it, whereas it is now clear they should have made provisions for cooling the reactor even if the building were flooded.
The later we get in the process, the less impressive the foresight becomes. The basic reactor design is very well thought out; the site specific installation less so, the reaction to new develops positively bad. When in 2002 they're informed that their tsunami barriers are likely far too low, their response is practically nil, the kind of thing you'd do after a quick meeting. "What should we do about the possibility of a tsunami topping the barriers?" "Well," one guy says, "we should raise some of the pumps." The order goes out to raise some of the pumps and one pump gets jacked up eight inches. Had they, in response to this news, actually staged a drill with people alert to spotting potential problems, they might have taken measures like elevating the emergency pump and generation equipment. That probably would have seemed expensive at the time, but it would have been the right thing to do, and in the end a bargain.
This model of increasingly sloppy thinking later in a project is plausible because it fits with what everyone knows about how organizations work. Management did its homework because it *had* to do it in order to get the plant built. Now that it had what it wanted, nothing was forcing management to think in that self-critical way about disaster planning. And engineers ... well *I'm* an engineer and I know how we think. Constraints that are a stimulating intellectual challenge in the early design phase become a pain in the neck the later they're introduced, especially after things are up and running. We tend to look at those things when introduced later as less reasonable, even less *plausible*, because they're less practical to address. Recently I interviewed at a company that provides web based apps. Things went well until the designer showed me the source code. In about five minutes I discovered at least three if not more very serious security concerns. "We don'.t have that problem," the guy says. My thought is, "how do you know?" The thing is, he'd have been delighted to entertain the notion of a security problem at the design phase. Up and running with customers depending on the product that's news he doesn't want to hear.
Note the big, big difference between the kind of thought that went into early *design* of the reactors and the thought that went into adapting to news of a similar nature about the *siting* and *installation* of those designs. When the basic design was being hashed out, nobody ever said anything like, "Well, that's never actually happened before."
Well, that's the point, isn't it? You don't have to build an application with so many bells and whistles, but if you *do*, then OSGI is a pretty neat solution to managing them. If you're going to need something like plug-ins, then OSGI is an alternative to rolling your own, but it comes at a cost of having to learn to think in OSGI. It's conceptually heavyweight, but not necessarily more so than whatever you manage to come up with.
Whether that's over-engineering depends on the problem. OSGI is a big win in an IDE like Eclipse or Netbeans, or an application server like Glassfish or JBoss.