"Camp 1" could make things even more secure by never plugging in any of the computer equipment. If nobody can use it, neither can the hackers. That's about as secure as it gets!
Yes, a ridiculous example, but there's a point here. If perfect security is your only goal (which is sure what it looks like from your message), then that's exactly where you are headed. Assuming you don't do that, then there's actually a balance you are striking between a convenient system that helps people get their job done as efficiently as modern science allows, and security. So the question to ask here is not how to have the best security humanly possible, but where your balance is. How much "insecurity" are you prepared to tolerate, at the expense of productivity? I can't say you are wrong with the balance you chose, but you can't really say anyone else is either.
What somebody needs to do is turn in identical resumes and send two people in, one young and one old, and have them give as close to identical answers as possible and see what happens.
Given that their interview process includes solving a semi-randomly selected coding problem, that would be exceedingly difficult to do, without the active help of Google in the experiment.
My wifi is near unusable at the extremes of my own house. When I go outside, I can't usefully hitch to it more than a few feet from the house. Any drone that wants to inject something would have fly really close.
From what I can dig up, where I live in the US I own the air over my house up to at least 80 feet from the ground (possibly as much as 500). So I'd be well within my rights to shoot down any drone that could come close enough to hook to my wifi. Unless of course they have a subpenoa, but those have to be served, at which point I already know so the drone is kinda pointless.
I'm wondering how tough it would be to develop anti-drone devices that are smart enough to not kill birds and bats.
In fact, you'd think a better and cheaper idea would be to just send someone with said injection device in their pocket to the person's front door posing as a magazine salesman or Jehova's Witness or something. Or better yet, just mail the injection device to the victim. If its small enough to put in a drone, you can probably find a way to slip it into a piece of cardboard or in the packing material for a package or something.
Sure, there could be some optimizations for reducing damage in an imminent crash scenario. That's just fine tuning. Google's real goal is to get a machine driving a little bit better than the average human. It's looking like, at least in known, well mapped cities, they have achieved that.
Pretty conclusively, I'd say. 11 accidents probably isn't a statistically definitive data set, but 0 for 14 is pretty telling.
I'd still like to see what they get with, sadly, more crashes. For instance, with enough data you could figure out if drivers are more likely to wreck into a Google piloted car than into a human-driven one. Even if the wrecks aren't the car's *fault*, it could still be that it is driving the car differently enough from a human that it is violating other driver's expectations, leading to more incidents.
If Google's self-driving car was able to track the car that rear-ended it, I wonder if there are ways to mitigate this kind of "predictable" crash. Maybe letting off the brakes a tad to lessen the impact, or (out of left field idea) deploy air bags on the bumpers?
Seems like if the real issue is "everyone else" in driving you would think Google could come up with ways to reduce the impact level of inevitable crashes.
What I've done in the past is left extra following distance (and try like hell to change lanes) when I have an inattentive driver behind me. For instance the guy who was trying to read an old paper map, stretched out on his lap, in bumper to bumper traffic, and got a shocked look on his face whenever he noticed that I had stopped in front of him. Your rear-view mirror is your friend. Use it!. That way, even if you can't get out of the way, at least you don't hurt your own insurance due to your own car getting thrown forward into another car, and you can brace for impact a bit.
It ought to be possible to program a car to do the same (facial expression recognition, etc.), but I doubt Goggle's car is that sophisticated (yet).
If you hit a car that suiddenly slows down, than one of two things happen.
1) You were tailgating.
2) You weren't paying attention and hit the brake too slow.
3) The car in front of you hit something, which made them stop much more abruptly than would have been possible through use of their own brakes.
4) The car that was in front of you changed lanes to avoid the stopped car, which that you couldn't see due to that first car being in the way, and you had no way to get out of the lane like he did due to cars next to you.
3 and 4 weren't what happened in this case (according to the video), but about once or twice a decade I have 4 happen to me. I haven't hit the stopped car yet, but that's probably only about 80% skill (after the first time it happened, I try to watch for it) and 20% luck. Given enough driving, your luck will run out eventually.
You see, it isn't that simple. A lot of drivers don't realize that monitoring space between you and the next car isn't sufficient. You have to try to get a good idea of the scene in front of the car in front of you. You have to see if he is (or is likely to be) tailgaiting the person in front of him. Your stopping space needs to account for the cars in front of the car in front of you too (including ones you might not be able to see). You have to try to get into the heads of people around you and adjust yourself if they are being aggressive, or too timid, or inattentive, or just plain nuts.
And yes, in my 35 years of experience driving, most people just aren't capable of that. These days, you're lucky if they aren't on the phone.
That goal might be a technically sound one, but I don't think it's politically viable. Telling people they are not allowed to drive their car anymore is likely to be even less popular than telling Americans they can't own a gun anymore.
I don't think those situations are analogous at all. We already have examples of this in action with our elderly, who are indeed very resistant to having their licenses taken away as their driving abilities wane. But what they really resent is the loss of the freedom of not being able to hop in their own car and go where and when they want. If the alternative was having the computer do the mechanics of driving for them, most elderly folks would be all over that. From my experience with them, towards the end they get very fearful of traffic, and start restricting their travels to less traveled times and places. Taking this out of their hands would be a huge relief, and actually give them more freedom.
Not only that, but you'd also be giving the ability to get around to a lot of people who today cannot drive. For example, the blind, people under 16, etc. Just thinking of having all that time back from those years when I spent all week playing chauffeur for 3 kids with different soccer practices on different sides of town simultaneously... I'd pay $10's of thousands for that. Shut up and take my money now.
So what you'd do is what they did with the drinking laws back in the '80's. "Grandfather" in everyone who has a license now, but for new licenses just start making them slowly more and more restrictive. Not unattainable, but hard enough that the rest of us on the road don't have to worry too much about the drop in public safety inherent in letting you take the wheel.
So basically, nothing you can't have in perl today, with a relational database, and a table or two...
MUMPS was an ancient joke of a language back in the '70's when I started programming (40 years ago). But now you've managed to sell me on its benefits.
In the Star Wars universe, Droids like Artoo and Threepio and, presumably, millions of others, are self-aware and intelligent. They appear to feel physical pain and have emotions like happiness, fear and sadness.
Yet as near as I can see in the canon, droids have no rights whatsoever.
There are at least two storylines that I know of in the SWTOR MMO that involve droids revolting against their biological oppressors. One's a quest area on Nar Shada (Hutt planet), and the other is a Flashpoint instance.
Jar Jar's speech sounds a lot like Jamaican patois to me. Whether that is racist or not is another story, but Jar Jar's general behavior; stupid, lazy, and addled, do conjure up the way blacks were portrayed
I don't believe Jar-Jar was ever portrayed as lazy. Clumsy yes, but not lazy.
The worst negative stereotype in American cinema is the villains all having English accents.
I noticed from the trailer release this weekend that the actress playing the main heroine in the next flick has an English accent. I don't know if she'll be putting on an American accent for her character though.
Of course as an American I'd kind of grown fond of that nit of the Star Wars universe, so I'm not sure I'd like to see it go. It was an easy way to clue the audience in ahead of time on a character's alignment. Kind of like how you could tell bad guys instantly in old black-and-white silent cowboy movies by whether they had a black or white hat on.
It does make me wonder how they handle that on non-English dubs. Do they find the local imperialist accent for that country and use it for imperials, or do they just skip that nuance?
The entitlement out of these people is pretty fucking revolting. I mean, they think they earned something. They got elected - sure... people voted for them - sure... but if you get elected to do X and then do Y...
This kind of thinking right here is what's causing the problem. Congress' job is to pass the legislation needed to keep the government running properly. That of course includes any changes the government requires (one of which might be your "X"), but it also includes a lot of mundane crap. So you need to be voting for people whose judgment you trust to represent you in making these decisions and in keeping the government running smoothly.
Legislators aren't sent to Congress to vote on one bill and then go home and let the people vote on another schmuck to vote their way on tomorrow's bill. But people are voting that way (where "X" typically is "repeal Obamacare"), which means we have a Congress full of people who just vote to repeal Obamacare 55 times (none of which succeed), and otherwise don't care if the country burns down around their ears. After all, doing anything other than "what they were sent to Congress to do" will just get them fired in two years and replaced with someone who will only participate in votes to repeal Obamacare.
If you want someone whose sole concern is a single issue, and won't participate or cooperate on anything else, you aren't voting for a legislator; you are voting for a talking head.
will eventually sub-contract databases to someone else (good chance a foreign company like everything else). And that database sitting on a server in China, India, or wherever
In this science fiction scenario of yours, I'd be more worried about said country instructing its workers to munge the data to let certain designated people get clearances.
Some science fiction comes to pass of course, but I'd like to think anyone with access to that particular database is required to have a COMSEC clearance (which are prohibited to "foreign persons").
Most compilers, after code generation (and often after code analysis, while the code is in some machine-independent tree state that sounds much like their invented language here) perform their optimization runs.
This just sounds like its doing that. Sure, its source-language independent. But so is gcc's backend. Basically its taking a "done" excecutable, reconstructing a form similar to the intermediate tree form the GCC backend uses, and then doing another optimization pass like GCC's backend does. What's new and unique here?
Until about a year ago, I had a security clearance. So I'm one of the 22 million. I've already been contacted by our site clearance officer. They gave me this link from the OPM about the breach, which has more information than the links in the article.
For those who haven't gone through it, during a background search they send actual human beings around to your friend and family, and then to second-order contacts they know who know you, to ask questions about you. So the OPM, and now the hackers, literally know stuff about me that I don't know.
My wife once called me up and told me we'd gotten one of those, just like the 200 million we had received before, but this time she clicked it because "it was from *our* bank this time". "Our bank", btw is one of those big multistate banks. Probably about the first one a phisher would guess.
(*head to desk*)
On the bright side, at least she had the acuity to call me about it immediately. I had her *call* the bank with the phone # from our paper statement and change all our contact info immediately. No noticeable harm done.
Any bicyclist can tell you the bullying attitude they get from a certain percentage of pickup-truck drivers. Texas is practically the home of the jacked-up pickup.
I guarantee you that if there weren't actual people in those google cars in Texas, they would be getting run off the road (and perhaps run over) with regularity.
I've been reading Fivethirtyeight.com since back when it was an expert blog on statistical analysis of polls. I guess that's not what it is any more, but I still read it.
I still read CodingHorror, although Jeff's output has gone way down since StackOverflow took off (or since he starting having kids. I'm not sure which was the real driver).
But I think for the most part youtube series have replaced a lot of my blog reading.
From someone who saw what is now known as "A New Hope" in theaters 4 times in the 70's (not really a brag, that just means I was alive then. The lines were literally around the theaters every showing), this is a frigging great idea. I don't know why it took so long to come up with it, but I'm grateful it didn't happen until after Lucas.
On a side note, whoever's idea it was to make the "department" on this post a quote from Kosh on Babylon-5, 50 points to your house. (Hufflepuff I'm guessing). And may the odds be forever in your favor. Always.
This has nothing to do specifically with guns, 3D or otherwise.
This appears to be a change to ITAR to define making files available for download as part of the law. This has long been a work-around that multiple people in my company at least have pointed out was stupid during ITAR training: If I install software on my laptop I have to go through ITAR with it, but if I leave it on a server at work and access it remotely from Europe, not ITAR. There are still laws, mind you, but they are different laws. Fixing this, while annoying to some, at least makes the law make a bit more sense.
So where do guns come into this? As near as I can tell, only because this story is on Fox news, and they can't get their 80-to-dead audience excited about "Obummer" by griping about internet files.
Yes, if memory serves, it was passed in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve.
Really something to be proud of...
Your memory is pretty good. The only thing missing is that this was the Republican strategy from the get-go: Delay everything, even bills they supported, so that the ACA could not be gotten to by the Christmas recess. So the credit for the passage goes to the Democrats, while the "credit" for it being in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve goes to the Republicans.
I suppose which part is worthy of being proud of is a matter of perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
"Camp 1" could make things even more secure by never plugging in any of the computer equipment. If nobody can use it, neither can the hackers. That's about as secure as it gets!
Yes, a ridiculous example, but there's a point here. If perfect security is your only goal (which is sure what it looks like from your message), then that's exactly where you are headed. Assuming you don't do that, then there's actually a balance you are striking between a convenient system that helps people get their job done as efficiently as modern science allows, and security. So the question to ask here is not how to have the best security humanly possible, but where your balance is. How much "insecurity" are you prepared to tolerate, at the expense of productivity? I can't say you are wrong with the balance you chose, but you can't really say anyone else is either.
The difference is that ageism does affect many Slashdot readers. Sexist and racism apparently not so much.
I heard a rumor there's even a word for that phenomenon. But only "SJW"s use it, so clearly this whole line of thinking should be ignored.
What somebody needs to do is turn in identical resumes and send two people in, one young and one old, and have them give as close to identical answers as possible and see what happens.
Given that their interview process includes solving a semi-randomly selected coding problem, that would be exceedingly difficult to do, without the active help of Google in the experiment.
The FAA still regulates drones as unmanned aerial vehicles, per their rules it's just like shooting at a manned vehicle.
Hmm. Yes, that does appear to be the case.
The last thing a military contractor want to hear is about cheaper alternatives to their expensive toys.
"The first rule of government spending: Why build one when you can build two at twice the price?"
My favorite line from Contact
My wifi is near unusable at the extremes of my own house. When I go outside, I can't usefully hitch to it more than a few feet from the house. Any drone that wants to inject something would have fly really close.
From what I can dig up, where I live in the US I own the air over my house up to at least 80 feet from the ground (possibly as much as 500). So I'd be well within my rights to shoot down any drone that could come close enough to hook to my wifi. Unless of course they have a subpenoa, but those have to be served, at which point I already know so the drone is kinda pointless.
I'm wondering how tough it would be to develop anti-drone devices that are smart enough to not kill birds and bats.
In fact, you'd think a better and cheaper idea would be to just send someone with said injection device in their pocket to the person's front door posing as a magazine salesman or Jehova's Witness or something. Or better yet, just mail the injection device to the victim. If its small enough to put in a drone, you can probably find a way to slip it into a piece of cardboard or in the packing material for a package or something.
Sure, there could be some optimizations for reducing damage in an imminent crash scenario. That's just fine tuning. Google's real goal is to get a machine driving a little bit better than the average human. It's looking like, at least in known, well mapped cities, they have achieved that.
Pretty conclusively, I'd say. 11 accidents probably isn't a statistically definitive data set, but 0 for 14 is pretty telling.
I'd still like to see what they get with, sadly, more crashes. For instance, with enough data you could figure out if drivers are more likely to wreck into a Google piloted car than into a human-driven one. Even if the wrecks aren't the car's *fault*, it could still be that it is driving the car differently enough from a human that it is violating other driver's expectations, leading to more incidents.
If Google's self-driving car was able to track the car that rear-ended it, I wonder if there are ways to mitigate this kind of "predictable" crash. Maybe letting off the brakes a tad to lessen the impact, or (out of left field idea) deploy air bags on the bumpers? Seems like if the real issue is "everyone else" in driving you would think Google could come up with ways to reduce the impact level of inevitable crashes.
What I've done in the past is left extra following distance (and try like hell to change lanes) when I have an inattentive driver behind me. For instance the guy who was trying to read an old paper map, stretched out on his lap, in bumper to bumper traffic, and got a shocked look on his face whenever he noticed that I had stopped in front of him. Your rear-view mirror is your friend. Use it!. That way, even if you can't get out of the way, at least you don't hurt your own insurance due to your own car getting thrown forward into another car, and you can brace for impact a bit.
It ought to be possible to program a car to do the same (facial expression recognition, etc.), but I doubt Goggle's car is that sophisticated (yet).
If you hit a car that suiddenly slows down, than one of two things happen.
1) You were tailgating.
2) You weren't paying attention and hit the brake too slow.
3) The car in front of you hit something, which made them stop much more abruptly than would have been possible through use of their own brakes.
4) The car that was in front of you changed lanes to avoid the stopped car, which that you couldn't see due to that first car being in the way, and you had no way to get out of the lane like he did due to cars next to you.
3 and 4 weren't what happened in this case (according to the video), but about once or twice a decade I have 4 happen to me. I haven't hit the stopped car yet, but that's probably only about 80% skill (after the first time it happened, I try to watch for it) and 20% luck. Given enough driving, your luck will run out eventually.
You see, it isn't that simple. A lot of drivers don't realize that monitoring space between you and the next car isn't sufficient. You have to try to get a good idea of the scene in front of the car in front of you. You have to see if he is (or is likely to be) tailgaiting the person in front of him. Your stopping space needs to account for the cars in front of the car in front of you too (including ones you might not be able to see). You have to try to get into the heads of people around you and adjust yourself if they are being aggressive, or too timid, or inattentive, or just plain nuts.
And yes, in my 35 years of experience driving, most people just aren't capable of that. These days, you're lucky if they aren't on the phone.
That goal might be a technically sound one, but I don't think it's politically viable. Telling people they are not allowed to drive their car anymore is likely to be even less popular than telling Americans they can't own a gun anymore.
I don't think those situations are analogous at all. We already have examples of this in action with our elderly, who are indeed very resistant to having their licenses taken away as their driving abilities wane. But what they really resent is the loss of the freedom of not being able to hop in their own car and go where and when they want. If the alternative was having the computer do the mechanics of driving for them, most elderly folks would be all over that. From my experience with them, towards the end they get very fearful of traffic, and start restricting their travels to less traveled times and places. Taking this out of their hands would be a huge relief, and actually give them more freedom.
Not only that, but you'd also be giving the ability to get around to a lot of people who today cannot drive. For example, the blind, people under 16, etc. Just thinking of having all that time back from those years when I spent all week playing chauffeur for 3 kids with different soccer practices on different sides of town simultaneously ... I'd pay $10's of thousands for that. Shut up and take my money now.
So what you'd do is what they did with the drinking laws back in the '80's. "Grandfather" in everyone who has a license now, but for new licenses just start making them slowly more and more restrictive. Not unattainable, but hard enough that the rest of us on the road don't have to worry too much about the drop in public safety inherent in letting you take the wheel.
So basically, nothing you can't have in perl today, with a relational database, and a table or two ...
MUMPS was an ancient joke of a language back in the '70's when I started programming (40 years ago). But now you've managed to sell me on its benefits.
In the Star Wars universe, Droids like Artoo and Threepio and, presumably, millions of others, are self-aware and intelligent. They appear to feel physical pain and have emotions like happiness, fear and sadness.
Yet as near as I can see in the canon, droids have no rights whatsoever.
There are at least two storylines that I know of in the SWTOR MMO that involve droids revolting against their biological oppressors. One's a quest area on Nar Shada (Hutt planet), and the other is a Flashpoint instance.
Jar Jar's speech sounds a lot like Jamaican patois to me. Whether that is racist or not is another story, but Jar Jar's general behavior; stupid, lazy, and addled, do conjure up the way blacks were portrayed
I don't believe Jar-Jar was ever portrayed as lazy. Clumsy yes, but not lazy.
The worst negative stereotype in American cinema is the villains all having English accents.
I noticed from the trailer release this weekend that the actress playing the main heroine in the next flick has an English accent. I don't know if she'll be putting on an American accent for her character though.
Of course as an American I'd kind of grown fond of that nit of the Star Wars universe, so I'm not sure I'd like to see it go. It was an easy way to clue the audience in ahead of time on a character's alignment. Kind of like how you could tell bad guys instantly in old black-and-white silent cowboy movies by whether they had a black or white hat on.
It does make me wonder how they handle that on non-English dubs. Do they find the local imperialist accent for that country and use it for imperials, or do they just skip that nuance?
The entitlement out of these people is pretty fucking revolting. I mean, they think they earned something. They got elected - sure... people voted for them - sure... but if you get elected to do X and then do Y...
This kind of thinking right here is what's causing the problem. Congress' job is to pass the legislation needed to keep the government running properly. That of course includes any changes the government requires (one of which might be your "X"), but it also includes a lot of mundane crap. So you need to be voting for people whose judgment you trust to represent you in making these decisions and in keeping the government running smoothly.
Legislators aren't sent to Congress to vote on one bill and then go home and let the people vote on another schmuck to vote their way on tomorrow's bill. But people are voting that way (where "X" typically is "repeal Obamacare"), which means we have a Congress full of people who just vote to repeal Obamacare 55 times (none of which succeed), and otherwise don't care if the country burns down around their ears. After all, doing anything other than "what they were sent to Congress to do" will just get them fired in two years and replaced with someone who will only participate in votes to repeal Obamacare.
If you want someone whose sole concern is a single issue, and won't participate or cooperate on anything else, you aren't voting for a legislator; you are voting for a talking head.
will eventually sub-contract databases to someone else (good chance a foreign company like everything else). And that database sitting on a server in China, India, or wherever
In this science fiction scenario of yours, I'd be more worried about said country instructing its workers to munge the data to let certain designated people get clearances.
Some science fiction comes to pass of course, but I'd like to think anyone with access to that particular database is required to have a COMSEC clearance (which are prohibited to "foreign persons").
Most compilers, after code generation (and often after code analysis, while the code is in some machine-independent tree state that sounds much like their invented language here) perform their optimization runs.
This just sounds like its doing that. Sure, its source-language independent. But so is gcc's backend. Basically its taking a "done" excecutable, reconstructing a form similar to the intermediate tree form the GCC backend uses, and then doing another optimization pass like GCC's backend does. What's new and unique here?
Until about a year ago, I had a security clearance. So I'm one of the 22 million. I've already been contacted by our site clearance officer. They gave me this link from the OPM about the breach, which has more information than the links in the article.
For those who haven't gone through it, during a background search they send actual human beings around to your friend and family, and then to second-order contacts they know who know you, to ask questions about you. So the OPM, and now the hackers, literally know stuff about me that I don't know.
My wife once called me up and told me we'd gotten one of those, just like the 200 million we had received before, but this time she clicked it because "it was from *our* bank this time". "Our bank", btw is one of those big multistate banks. Probably about the first one a phisher would guess.
(*head to desk*)
On the bright side, at least she had the acuity to call me about it immediately. I had her *call* the bank with the phone # from our paper statement and change all our contact info immediately. No noticeable harm done.
Any bicyclist can tell you the bullying attitude they get from a certain percentage of pickup-truck drivers. Texas is practically the home of the jacked-up pickup.
I guarantee you that if there weren't actual people in those google cars in Texas, they would be getting run off the road (and perhaps run over) with regularity.
I've been reading Fivethirtyeight.com since back when it was an expert blog on statistical analysis of polls. I guess that's not what it is any more, but I still read it.
I still read CodingHorror, although Jeff's output has gone way down since StackOverflow took off (or since he starting having kids. I'm not sure which was the real driver).
But I think for the most part youtube series have replaced a lot of my blog reading.
From someone who saw what is now known as "A New Hope" in theaters 4 times in the 70's (not really a brag, that just means I was alive then. The lines were literally around the theaters every showing), this is a frigging great idea. I don't know why it took so long to come up with it, but I'm grateful it didn't happen until after Lucas.
On a side note, whoever's idea it was to make the "department" on this post a quote from Kosh on Babylon-5, 50 points to your house. (Hufflepuff I'm guessing). And may the odds be forever in your favor. Always.
Now perhaps he was a master strategist and saw that all this would happen. Or perhaps he just decided it was time to do the Right Thing.
Or perhaps he favored gay marriage all along, but lied about it to get elected president. Then...
I think this is just a restatement of my second option, but dipped in a huge vat of venom.
This has nothing to do specifically with guns, 3D or otherwise.
This appears to be a change to ITAR to define making files available for download as part of the law. This has long been a work-around that multiple people in my company at least have pointed out was stupid during ITAR training: If I install software on my laptop I have to go through ITAR with it, but if I leave it on a server at work and access it remotely from Europe, not ITAR. There are still laws, mind you, but they are different laws. Fixing this, while annoying to some, at least makes the law make a bit more sense.
So where do guns come into this? As near as I can tell, only because this story is on Fox news, and they can't get their 80-to-dead audience excited about "Obummer" by griping about internet files.
Political clickbait.
Yes, if memory serves, it was passed in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve.
Really something to be proud of...
Your memory is pretty good. The only thing missing is that this was the Republican strategy from the get-go: Delay everything, even bills they supported, so that the ACA could not be gotten to by the Christmas recess. So the credit for the passage goes to the Democrats, while the "credit" for it being in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve goes to the Republicans.
I suppose which part is worthy of being proud of is a matter of perspective.