But until domestic girls (including his daughters) and underrepresented groups get with the program(ming), the President explained he's pushing tech immigration reform hard and using executive action to help address tech's "urgent need" for global talent.
That reads eerily similar to, "the beatings will continue until morale improves."
Until more people start training for careers of which we have a large supply, we'll keep increasing that supply and making it even less attractive.
The "underrepresented groups" part is even weirder. Until American women start going into tech fields, we'll import more and more foreign men?
Oh, they never specifically reference the professor's own papers (as far as I've seen). But the topics chosen and the expected answers are highly biased by the professor's specific interests. If you are familiar with the writing professor's work and specific interests, you will do better on the exam. Even if the question appears to be asking a general question, the "best" answer is the one that deals with the professor's personal interests.
Note that this discussion is about PhD qualifying exams and not exams in general. Also, I'm not criticizing the whole situation as much as I'm making a general observation. Many students have trouble with this phenomenon.
You've only sidestepped the issues raised and made the most superficial objection to the analogy.
I don't know where you learned to fence, but if this response is indicative of the debate to follow, I'll look for intellectual stimulation elsewhere. I don't mind if you look at my departure as a win; only the tiniest ego would be able to do so.
2. Not sure how that has anything to do with Democracy. We voted for the people that allowed the law, doesn't matter how influenced there were by the IP holders.
No matter what the pretext is, if the laws passed by the government don't generally represent the will of the people then it's not a democracy.
It's not the act of voting itself that makes a democracy. Shouldn't that be obvious? Everyone in North Korea voted for Kim Jong-un, so that's clearly a democracy, right?
That's a pretty defeatist attitude, in addition to being short-sighted.
The process of legalizing/formalizing something completely changes how, and to whom, it is applied. While you may be tracked right now, it doesn't impact your daily life as much, and in nearly as many ways, as it would if it was formalized.
You have the chance of being mugged right now, but you know your life will change if mugging was legalized. It's a bit of a simplistic analogy, but it is still disturbingly accurate.
This is true, but at least in academia you know who's writing the exam questions. The question these sorts of exams seem to be asking is, "Can you read the papers I've published in this particular area and make sense of my results," or, "Assuming you've read my papers, how would I tackle this problem."
That's not to say that they're questions worth asking or not totally self-aggrandizing, but at least they're predictable. Honestly, the professors may actually think that they're good questions. Academia rarely (and only incidentally) selects for people who are good at teaching.
Let's not go overboard, here. A lot of design went into making the product look like what you want, but making products meet consumer expectations when actually being used or handled costs too much.
The more destructive one needs to be to actually get to the product, the less likely disappointed people are to demand a refund.
Note also that the PROPER metric term for 1000 Kg is the Mg. Too bad so few metric worshipers ever use the "mega" prefix....
That's my biggest beef with those who bitch about customary systems like the one used in the US. They invariably turn around and use the customary abominations that are tacked onto SI without seeing the irony.
A good deal of the problem likely comes from broad generalizations and/or moving goalposts. Is there a lack of diversity in "STEM" or in computer programming and engineering?
I'm in science and there is no discernible lack of diversity in my department. Many scientific fields are even predominantly female. Math has a bit of a male bias, but the applied maths are more balanced. I have no idea what careers "Technology" refers to. Engineering and computer programming (technology?) are the fields that are the most biased. Even in them, it's hard to define what these barriers are that you refer to.
1. The effective range of a shotgun (ie the range at which the pellets would cause damage) is about 45 m. I can't find a freely accessible authoritative source for the maximum fallout range for shot, but all of the references to those that I can find say that the maximum travel distance of commonly used shot is about 300 m.
Discharging any firearms in city limits is dangerous and likely illegal, but shooting a shotgun on any sizable plot of land is not likely to cause damage to anyone else. Shotguns are regularly used in rural areas worldwide.
2. I totally agree here. A low powered directional EMP could do the trick. I hear the really high end drones even autogyro down.
I'm not sure if it's that simple. The closest established legal situations are those addressing trespass by livestock and other personal items (kites or balls in the neighbor's lawn). You're not required to ask a drone to leave any more than you'd have to ask a baseball or cow to leave. Even if there's a camera, there's no reasonable assurance that talking to a drone will have any effect (though, it'd probably be a good idea to try it first). If the trespass is deliberate or expected to cause damage to you, your interests would be favored even more.
With regard to trespass by non-people, you're generally allowed to capture and keep the object or livestock until the court has remedied the situation. There could be liability for damage to the captured property, though. Capture of a flying drone without damaging it would be difficult, but you may get some leeway if the trespass is deliberate and continued and your objection is clear (eg, pointing a shotgun at it and yelling).
Even the act of damaging trespassing property isn't always actionable. If your dog eats the baseball that the neighbor kid threw onto your lawn, you're not liable for the damage. If you're shooting skeet and someone throws a frisbee onto your land (imagine a scenario that doesn't involve reckless endangerment), you're not liable for damage to the frisbee.
I agree about the UI, and I think your guess about their intentions probably falls close to the truth. Once you get used to the quirks, it's not really much better/worse overall than any other UI I've used.
UIs in general seem to suck and seem to be trending worse. Configurability in general is pretty bad across the board. I console myself with the fact that Mac's options are twiddlable through the plists and that they are all in easy to find places.
I can't think of a UI that I've really loved over the years. Those that are nicely configurable seem to be more buggy and unstable, so I grudgingly understand the desire for simplicity.
If you think that OS X constrains you in ways that Unity (ick) on Ubuntu doesn't then it's just because you haven't yet realized that OS X has a terminal, too. OS X is just a fairly standard BSD with a pretty UI. If you were afraid of using the terminal on Linux, like you are on OS X, you'd feel like you were wearing mittens there, too.
I agree with you about Windows, though. The only way to get anything done there is to repeatedly bang your head against it. The Metro tiles are an improvement in that regard!
Good security includes such layers (but doesn't rely only on them). It's entirely effective against non-targeted automated attacks, which comprise well over 99% of the attacks your network will face. (Of course, a good password or key based auth is just as effective. A good password or key and no root login is more effective.) Allowing root login adds another attack opportunity with predictable parameters. It's all about minimizing the surface open to attack.
Since >99% of all ssh attacks on the internet are automated and target root, you can drop (or tarpit or whatever) all of those attempts without affecting legitimate users. This leaves your attention free to address the attacks that are actually dangerous (and leaves your logs less cluttered or easily filtered).
Look at it another way... what do you gain, security wise, from allowing a superuser to login directly from the network? Especially when most of the attacks you see are trying to log in directly as that superuser.
[As an aside, "security by obscurity" gets a bad rap and the term is often bandied about as a self-evident truth like "correlation is not causation". "Security by obscurity" refers to keeping the design of an implementation secret, not to using secrets in your implementation (is having a password security by obscurity?).
Depending only on obscurity is poor security, but using obscurity as a layer (where it's effective) in a larger security process can be extremely effective. Schneier has a good essay on this subject.]
But you have to brute force a username as well as a password. These attacks aren't in any way targeted and "root" is present everywhere. I've never seen anyone try to ssh into my machines as the user geantvert or chihowa. Have you?
Wha??? Email is plaintext because it's an old protocol and security was an afterthought with most of the original protocols. Email predates the commercialization of the internet by decades.
Email in exchange for being spied on was a Google innovation in the mid-2000's. If that's what you consider the "early days of the internet", I guess...
The first personal email services were offered for pay by ISPs or gratis as Hotmail/Rocketmail/etc. They may have been spied on, but it wasn't part of the agreement and it wasn't for advertising purposes. This is well before the "Big Data" era.
Since railgun slugs are intended to damage by kinetic energy instead of carried explosive...
I just realized that this is where everybody is getting hung up. Current railguns are limited by materials technology and are thus barely capable (at great expense and prep time) of moving a small mass to a high velocity, but there's nothing inherent in railgun physics to only using small masses. Further research, which this guy is asking for, would allow us to make railguns that could fire larger projectiles slower (or small projectiles even faster). Making a railgun that behaved identically to a conventional naval gun, but only required electricity and shells, would be a huge boon to the Navy.
(I assume... I wouldn't want to put an explosive in a rail launcher)
That's probably what the guy standing next to the person who first put an explosive shell in a conventional gun said. Making it work is just a matter of engineering.
I am talking about the railgun the US navy has and the guns they have, not a hypothetical replacement of traditional propellants with magnets.
To get you back on topic, the Navy is asking for a replacement for their conventional guns. They're aware of the railgun technology they have now and want it to be improved. Being able to shoot small mass projectiles at extremely high velocity is a cool feature of railguns, but they are not theoretically limited to that specific design.
Again, I'll refer you to the summary that motivated this entire discussion:
Speaking before nearly 3,000 attendees at the Naval Future Force Science and Technology EXPO in Washington, D.C., Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert charged his audience to reduce reliance on gunpowder in a wide-ranging speech on the future technological needs of the Navy. "Number one, you've got to get us off gunpowder," said Greenert, noting that Office of Naval Research-supported weapon programs like Laser Weapon System (LaWS) and the electromagnetic railgun are vital to the future force. “Probably the biggest vulnerability of a ship is its magazine—because that’s where all the explosives are." Weapons like LaWS have a virtually unlimited magazine, only constrained by power and cooling capabilities aboard the vessel carrying them. In addition, Greenert noted the added safety for Sailors and Marines that will come from reducing dependency on gunpowder-based munitions.
and I think there was another one built in the middle east somewhere but it escapes me.
I think you're referring to the Project Babylon gun. As an extension of the HARP research, it was aimed at being able to shoot projectiles into orbit. Cool stuff.
If your going to shoot the railgun the same way you shoot conventional guns what's the point?
The point, as stated repeatedly in the summary, is to eliminate the need to carry explosives on ships. Modern ships at sea will rarely have the opportunity to fire straight at any target. Being able to fire straight at a target means that you're close to it and that's dangerous. Ships are mobile heavy artillery platforms.
It's funny that you should mention that. Werner Koch still uses a 1024D key for email. In fact, nearly everyone at g10code.com either has no key listed or uses 1024D. Most of the people involved in the development of GnuPG use ancient 1042D keys.
It's not just GnuPG, though. Phil Zimmermann only uses 1024D.
Pretty safe to assume that most people who were capable of reading the first clause of that sentence could also read the second clause and understood the point he was making.
...it means your target audience is sophisticated enough that you don't need to write using a breathless, made for reality TV, annoyingly *excited* tone.
If we're comparing vinyl to CDs, it's worth noting that mass produced CDs don't use dyes. They use a metal film with the pits physically pressed into it.
I know you said "blank media", but apples to apples. There are plenty of other places to cheap out in the production of a CD (or vinyl album), though.
Slashdot Mirror
But until domestic girls (including his daughters) and underrepresented groups get with the program(ming), the President explained he's pushing tech immigration reform hard and using executive action to help address tech's "urgent need" for global talent.
That reads eerily similar to, "the beatings will continue until morale improves."
Until more people start training for careers of which we have a large supply, we'll keep increasing that supply and making it even less attractive.
The "underrepresented groups" part is even weirder. Until American women start going into tech fields, we'll import more and more foreign men?
Oh, they never specifically reference the professor's own papers (as far as I've seen). But the topics chosen and the expected answers are highly biased by the professor's specific interests. If you are familiar with the writing professor's work and specific interests, you will do better on the exam. Even if the question appears to be asking a general question, the "best" answer is the one that deals with the professor's personal interests.
Note that this discussion is about PhD qualifying exams and not exams in general. Also, I'm not criticizing the whole situation as much as I'm making a general observation. Many students have trouble with this phenomenon.
You've only sidestepped the issues raised and made the most superficial objection to the analogy.
I don't know where you learned to fence, but if this response is indicative of the debate to follow, I'll look for intellectual stimulation elsewhere. I don't mind if you look at my departure as a win; only the tiniest ego would be able to do so.
2. Not sure how that has anything to do with Democracy. We voted for the people that allowed the law, doesn't matter how influenced there were by the IP holders.
No matter what the pretext is, if the laws passed by the government don't generally represent the will of the people then it's not a democracy.
It's not the act of voting itself that makes a democracy. Shouldn't that be obvious? Everyone in North Korea voted for Kim Jong-un, so that's clearly a democracy, right?
That's a pretty defeatist attitude, in addition to being short-sighted.
The process of legalizing/formalizing something completely changes how, and to whom, it is applied. While you may be tracked right now, it doesn't impact your daily life as much, and in nearly as many ways, as it would if it was formalized.
You have the chance of being mugged right now, but you know your life will change if mugging was legalized. It's a bit of a simplistic analogy, but it is still disturbingly accurate.
This is true, but at least in academia you know who's writing the exam questions. The question these sorts of exams seem to be asking is, "Can you read the papers I've published in this particular area and make sense of my results," or, "Assuming you've read my papers, how would I tackle this problem."
That's not to say that they're questions worth asking or not totally self-aggrandizing, but at least they're predictable. Honestly, the professors may actually think that they're good questions. Academia rarely (and only incidentally) selects for people who are good at teaching.
Let's not go overboard, here. A lot of design went into making the product look like what you want, but making products meet consumer expectations when actually being used or handled costs too much.
The more destructive one needs to be to actually get to the product, the less likely disappointed people are to demand a refund.
Note also that the PROPER metric term for 1000 Kg is the Mg. Too bad so few metric worshipers ever use the "mega" prefix....
That's my biggest beef with those who bitch about customary systems like the one used in the US. They invariably turn around and use the customary abominations that are tacked onto SI without seeing the irony.
A good deal of the problem likely comes from broad generalizations and/or moving goalposts. Is there a lack of diversity in "STEM" or in computer programming and engineering?
I'm in science and there is no discernible lack of diversity in my department. Many scientific fields are even predominantly female. Math has a bit of a male bias, but the applied maths are more balanced. I have no idea what careers "Technology" refers to. Engineering and computer programming (technology?) are the fields that are the most biased. Even in them, it's hard to define what these barriers are that you refer to.
I think you're thinking of thalidomide. It was given to pregnant women to treat nausea and morning sickness.
It still has some very valid medical uses, but not at all in the context of pregnancy.
1. The effective range of a shotgun (ie the range at which the pellets would cause damage) is about 45 m. I can't find a freely accessible authoritative source for the maximum fallout range for shot, but all of the references to those that I can find say that the maximum travel distance of commonly used shot is about 300 m.
Discharging any firearms in city limits is dangerous and likely illegal, but shooting a shotgun on any sizable plot of land is not likely to cause damage to anyone else. Shotguns are regularly used in rural areas worldwide.
2. I totally agree here. A low powered directional EMP could do the trick. I hear the really high end drones even autogyro down.
I'm not sure if it's that simple. The closest established legal situations are those addressing trespass by livestock and other personal items (kites or balls in the neighbor's lawn). You're not required to ask a drone to leave any more than you'd have to ask a baseball or cow to leave. Even if there's a camera, there's no reasonable assurance that talking to a drone will have any effect (though, it'd probably be a good idea to try it first). If the trespass is deliberate or expected to cause damage to you, your interests would be favored even more.
With regard to trespass by non-people, you're generally allowed to capture and keep the object or livestock until the court has remedied the situation. There could be liability for damage to the captured property, though. Capture of a flying drone without damaging it would be difficult, but you may get some leeway if the trespass is deliberate and continued and your objection is clear (eg, pointing a shotgun at it and yelling).
Even the act of damaging trespassing property isn't always actionable. If your dog eats the baseball that the neighbor kid threw onto your lawn, you're not liable for the damage. If you're shooting skeet and someone throws a frisbee onto your land (imagine a scenario that doesn't involve reckless endangerment), you're not liable for damage to the frisbee.
I agree about the UI, and I think your guess about their intentions probably falls close to the truth. Once you get used to the quirks, it's not really much better/worse overall than any other UI I've used.
UIs in general seem to suck and seem to be trending worse. Configurability in general is pretty bad across the board. I console myself with the fact that Mac's options are twiddlable through the plists and that they are all in easy to find places.
I can't think of a UI that I've really loved over the years. Those that are nicely configurable seem to be more buggy and unstable, so I grudgingly understand the desire for simplicity.
Exactly!
If you think that OS X constrains you in ways that Unity (ick) on Ubuntu doesn't then it's just because you haven't yet realized that OS X has a terminal, too. OS X is just a fairly standard BSD with a pretty UI. If you were afraid of using the terminal on Linux, like you are on OS X, you'd feel like you were wearing mittens there, too.
I agree with you about Windows, though. The only way to get anything done there is to repeatedly bang your head against it. The Metro tiles are an improvement in that regard!
Good security includes such layers (but doesn't rely only on them). It's entirely effective against non-targeted automated attacks, which comprise well over 99% of the attacks your network will face. (Of course, a good password or key based auth is just as effective. A good password or key and no root login is more effective.) Allowing root login adds another attack opportunity with predictable parameters. It's all about minimizing the surface open to attack.
Since >99% of all ssh attacks on the internet are automated and target root, you can drop (or tarpit or whatever) all of those attempts without affecting legitimate users. This leaves your attention free to address the attacks that are actually dangerous (and leaves your logs less cluttered or easily filtered).
Look at it another way... what do you gain, security wise, from allowing a superuser to login directly from the network? Especially when most of the attacks you see are trying to log in directly as that superuser.
[As an aside, "security by obscurity" gets a bad rap and the term is often bandied about as a self-evident truth like "correlation is not causation". "Security by obscurity" refers to keeping the design of an implementation secret, not to using secrets in your implementation (is having a password security by obscurity?).
Depending only on obscurity is poor security, but using obscurity as a layer (where it's effective) in a larger security process can be extremely effective. Schneier has a good essay on this subject.]
But you have to brute force a username as well as a password. These attacks aren't in any way targeted and "root" is present everywhere. I've never seen anyone try to ssh into my machines as the user geantvert or chihowa. Have you?
Wha??? Email is plaintext because it's an old protocol and security was an afterthought with most of the original protocols. Email predates the commercialization of the internet by decades.
Email in exchange for being spied on was a Google innovation in the mid-2000's. If that's what you consider the "early days of the internet", I guess...
The first personal email services were offered for pay by ISPs or gratis as Hotmail/Rocketmail/etc. They may have been spied on, but it wasn't part of the agreement and it wasn't for advertising purposes. This is well before the "Big Data" era.
Since railgun slugs are intended to damage by kinetic energy instead of carried explosive...
I just realized that this is where everybody is getting hung up. Current railguns are limited by materials technology and are thus barely capable (at great expense and prep time) of moving a small mass to a high velocity, but there's nothing inherent in railgun physics to only using small masses. Further research, which this guy is asking for, would allow us to make railguns that could fire larger projectiles slower (or small projectiles even faster). Making a railgun that behaved identically to a conventional naval gun, but only required electricity and shells, would be a huge boon to the Navy.
(I assume... I wouldn't want to put an explosive in a rail launcher)
That's probably what the guy standing next to the person who first put an explosive shell in a conventional gun said. Making it work is just a matter of engineering.
I am talking about the railgun the US navy has and the guns they have, not a hypothetical replacement of traditional propellants with magnets.
To get you back on topic, the Navy is asking for a replacement for their conventional guns. They're aware of the railgun technology they have now and want it to be improved. Being able to shoot small mass projectiles at extremely high velocity is a cool feature of railguns, but they are not theoretically limited to that specific design.
Again, I'll refer you to the summary that motivated this entire discussion:
and I think there was another one built in the middle east somewhere but it escapes me.
I think you're referring to the Project Babylon gun. As an extension of the HARP research, it was aimed at being able to shoot projectiles into orbit. Cool stuff.
If your going to shoot the railgun the same way you shoot conventional guns what's the point?
The point, as stated repeatedly in the summary, is to eliminate the need to carry explosives on ships. Modern ships at sea will rarely have the opportunity to fire straight at any target. Being able to fire straight at a target means that you're close to it and that's dangerous. Ships are mobile heavy artillery platforms.
It's funny that you should mention that. Werner Koch still uses a 1024D key for email. In fact, nearly everyone at g10code.com either has no key listed or uses 1024D. Most of the people involved in the development of GnuPG use ancient 1042D keys.
It's not just GnuPG, though. Phil Zimmermann only uses 1024D.
Perhaps there's something we're missing?
Pretty safe to assume that most people who were capable of reading the first clause of that sentence could also read the second clause and understood the point he was making.
...it means your target audience is sophisticated enough that you don't need to write using a breathless, made for reality TV, annoyingly *excited* tone.
If we're comparing vinyl to CDs, it's worth noting that mass produced CDs don't use dyes. They use a metal film with the pits physically pressed into it.
I know you said "blank media", but apples to apples. There are plenty of other places to cheap out in the production of a CD (or vinyl album), though.