I think what you're stumbling upon is called "The Interview Illusion" - a Social Psychology term - that goes something like this: People have a mistaken belief in their ability to predict, based on a brief conversation with someone, how they will evaluate this person in the future. (Reference: Kunda and Nisbett, 1986).
Interviews are generally a poor measure for gaining personal knowledge about someone. While they often serve well in proving someone a bad candidate (interviewee is completely unprepared or totally inconsistant), they hardly ever help in determining whether or not someone will be a *good* candidate - that is, people overestimate trait consistency, when really, responses are mostly pre-determined by expectency and prior-knowledge.
If someone were to ask, "Hey, you were a black-hat in the past, have you changed?", the very fact that the black-hat is applying for a security job signifies change, but his *answer* is going to be stock: it expects a "Yes".
I'm not a big fan of interviews. I'm a big fan of putting someone to task, briefly, and seeing how they perform. Unless you're extremely charismatic, interviews often tell little about a candidate.
That's positively absurd logic. That's like saying the people who design home security systems for a living should have been criminals at some point in their lives. Or that people who design buildings should have experienced structural collapse, just so they know what it feels like and they don't screw it up.
See, in humans, we've got this thing called language, which can be used to symbolically represent situations. We've also got this new concept called "imagination".
I don't know, but I think you'd have a pretty hard time convincing a prison psychologist or preacher that to counsel inmates properly, she'd have definately needed to do hard time, because hey, how else could she relate?
I think you're adopting a point of view like this: trait consistency is better explored through interview and business conversations than it is through similar situations in the past.
I think that point of view is wrong.
Personally, I'd be looking for honest and repuutable in a Software Engineer to protect my business, and an interview might not tell me that. Background checks are little more than a formality these days - there's very little one can do about making sure someone hasn't falsified an employment record.
When placed in a similar situation with sensitive data and equipment, did the person react badly in the past? If he was a black-hat hacker for any period of time, I say, "Yes". Being a security professional is as much about being a trustworthy person as it is being a good programmer. Think about what you're saying: "To reduce security, we're going to hire someone that has contributed to crime in the area we're hiring him for." The chance of a "social" hack increases astronomically - just as when people hire stupid employees with easy to guess passwords, employers should be careful not to hire people who have password-circumvention access and will abuse it.
I'm not saying that one black-hat job should stain one's reputation. I'm just saying that this type of thing should be a grave warning sign to an employer with extremely sensitive data to protect.
Cancer cells would be identified by certain characteristics of the cell - surface proteins, agressive transport, etc.
I'd like to put in my two cents that it's about as likely for a genetically engineered virus to mutate and cause a brain-eating disease as it is for a regular one to do so - and probably less likely, since "successful" mutation requires a variety of hosts and a "useful" survival function.
I'd also like to point out a few things you missed:
1) The people who are gifted enough to leave the "cave" first poorly adjust - see Neo in new environment. The people who return, in order to "liberate" the caged are laughed at, and told that the true light has blinded them, as they are unable to identify the objects on the wall.
2) The "Philosophers", the ones who see the true light, are reluctant but feel obligated to return to the cave in order to free them, much like the characters in the matrix, who face countless obstacles but still persist.
The Cave Allegory is quite well played out in the Matrix. Don't be so quick to bash his comment.
Re:This would make learning a little more fun...
on
Origami and Math
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· Score: 1
And all of that together eventually turned me into a Information Systems/Business major, because it didn't require math.
Sorry for the jab, but...
As a Business Major, of course you don't need math! If things don't add up right (taxes, extra losses you don't want people to see, bonuses for the heck of it, etc.) you can always use the origami paper shredder, ala Enron.:)
"The animals lived 140 days -- we took the brains out at that point and found no tumors there," Lang said in a telephone interview. Normally, mice injected with human brain tumor cells die within 20 days."
They checked at 140 days for tumor tissue and didn't find any. Their normal lifespan might be longer, but it's significantly less if you kill them. =P
I hate it when people compare AI and human chess players and say the following three things:
a) The computer cheats because it can evaluate more moves b) The computer cheats because it has "traps" and "100% win situations" programmed in c) The computer cheats because it has access to previous human games and can "guess" a player's strategy
This might be true, but most grandmaster chess players have played thousands upon thousands of hours of chess. They can immediately rule out half the moves on the board as "stupid" or "unhelpful", and they themselves come with the special knowledge of having seen many, many board situations and having worked out their solutions.
Chess is an interesting game because it is on the scale of infiniately complex.
Computers also have a serious disadvantage: the players they play against are not computers, and therefore do not evaluate moves with the same algorithms. For instance, when Deep X makes his check he says, "I'm going to do this... and then... Kasparov might do that... and I might do this... and Kasparov might do that..." - all the while substituting in what he believes are probable moves for Kasparov based on his own algorithm. This may be disadvantageous because Kasparov may analyze a situation from a different perspective - and while this is a factor in EVERY chess game (human vs. computer or human vs. human) - it is important to note that the computer does not have the priviledge of analyzing the situation from these distinctly human perspectives.
Re:When you think about it...
on
Searching Sound
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· Score: 1
Their names? Sensative information about them? Suspected locations?
Isn't part of the point of email that it might want to be anonymous? Do you really want the government having records of each and every email you've sent so that they can collect taxes on it?
Re:When you think about it...
on
Searching Sound
·
· Score: 1
Its not clear how this sort of thing would be useful for the military.
Well, you could tap thousands of phone lines and search for phonemes that indicate the high level military commanders, etc. After you "found" one, you could immediately jump in and listen on it, or if the communication is laden enough, hit that phone-system. With the recent military advances and precision weapons, this isn't *that* hard to imagine.
I mean, with a powerful enough system, you could filter thousands of hours of data at once, ignoring all but the useful stuff. It'd be like audio spy satelites.
When you think about it...
on
Searching Sound
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
When you think about it, though, government and military agencies must have had this for quite some time.
Tapping and bugging really does no good unless you've got someone listening all the time - and that's both expensive and impossible. While I realize that someone only has to be listening every time someone makes a phone call with the tapping situation, the outcome is lots more hours of audio then are feasible to search and use.
If we couldn't have searched audio on a wide scale before, then I find it hard to believe we'd ever be catching anyone by specific phone intercepts. Instead, we'd just be using that sort of thing as evidence.
I mean, I realize this is a great technology, I just doubt it's as "new" as it seems...
Re:These sorts of questions apply to all devices..
on
Looking at Longhorn
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· Score: 1
And you don't think anyone's ever crashed his car while paying attention to another, more glitzy car on the road instead of the stuff ahead of him?
These sorts of questions apply to all devices...
on
Looking at Longhorn
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· Score: 1, Insightful
These sorts of questions apply to all devices, in the end.
Take a look at your car. Do you really think it's design makes it much more aerodynamic, or do you think it's just the same eye-candy?
What about the paint? Paint jobs are pretty silly things, by your logic. They cost money and all they do is act as eye-candy.
What about the hubcaps, the flashing lights on the interior that never serve any real purpose, the leather, the...
The RIAA has said things like 'Digital Copies of Music made from Illegal Copies are Illegal' - i.e., if I own a metallica CD but download the songs online, I'm still breaking the law.
Technically, I own the rights to that song, since I've already purchased it. But the RIAA has said that fair use does not extend to making digital copies.
If fair use doesn't extend to making digital copies, then they can't copy songs to check, regardless of whether or not they have Metallica's permission.
The basis for the RIAA case against Verizon, as pointed out in the article, is that Verizon must release contact info for customers because the RIAA has no way to contact these customers without Verizon's help.
The Verizon lawyer just said: "Wait a minute. You just contacted millions of people."
Also, about "the messaging": it appears that the RIAA is "logging on" to popular file sharing services and using simple scripting to message users through the system. Kazaa provides this functionality.
See, the thing I don't understand, is that to do this sort of thing *legitimately* - that is, prove the user who they're messaging IS distributing copywrited content - the RIAA must log on, search, download, and play a potentially infringing file. Then, the RIAA has to send out the message.
No matter what the speed of the RIAA connection, something tells me that it's going to be very difficult for them to download millions of songs, check them by hand, and then send out messages - since it simply isn't possible. Perhaps they could hash files, sure, but they're STILL downloading thousands of songs. In other words, this is what this says: "I just used this file sharing service to illegally copy a song - and if I want to, I can sue you for it." In previous suits, the RIAA has said things to the tune of: "Since you didn't own copyright to this and my computer made a copy, regardless of whether or not I own copyright, the file isn't legally mine." Or, translation: "I committed a crime to prove your guilt."
I can't figure out why AOL doesn't stop developing new useless content and start developing email filters that really work. They have the largest collection of junk-mail EVER to run statistical analysis on. If all they can come up with is "block mail from X server", they suck. =P
More and more, people are realizing that E-Mail and 'The Internet' are not services offered by AOL. They're realizing that AOL does not "own" the internet, and they're realizing that most companies don't pay AOL to host their content.
It's tough to explain to people what the internet is. AOL was a great simplification tool, in the "early days" of public access - you connect, and everything's set up for you.
Now, millions who use the internet do so from work, with their work providing the connection and their work providing their email address. What's going to happen when AOL customers get told that they can't communicate with the "outside" anymore? Easy - they shut off their AOL subscription, because it becomes meaningless. Instead of simplifying their lives, it starts hampering them.
I find it funny that AOL has adopted this policy, only because their market share has so dramatically decreaesd in the last few years. Sure, lots of people use AOL instant messenger, but if AOL starts charging for that, people will switch - I guarrentee it.
These millions of people using Kazaa, etc.? They all realize that AOL isn't providing that content. Blocking (whitelisting) email makes the fact that AOL doesn't provide the internet *extremely salient* to AOL customers: Which is, imho, a horrible, horrible business move.
America Online: So easy to overlook, no wonder it's gone bankrupt.
Right - and it's so random that it has no ultimate purpose. All programs have a purpose, DNA doesn't. Long-term changes in DNA happen because of changes in the immense system that DNA is a part of.
For instance, cheetahs didn't get faster in able to catch prey - one day, a faster cheetah was born who had the potential to survive longer, and he mated more, and spread his "fastness" through DNA - these individuals had greater potential than the rest of the individuals in the population, and the DNA changed in the long term. But at the outset, the faster invdividual wasn't biased-to-win, he was a fluke of nature, a mutation.
That's how DNA ultimately changes - mutation. Fluke things that end for better or for worse.
Here's a quote which, at the heart, sums up *why the programmer analogy is wrong*:
Natural selection cannot play God, because it is a blind process with no goal in mind and no means to get to a predetermined endpoint. -John Alcock, Animal Behavior, 7th ed.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to keep arguing, I call it "discussion". =P
I think what you're stumbling upon is called "The Interview Illusion" - a Social Psychology term - that goes something like this: People have a mistaken belief in their ability to predict, based on a brief conversation with someone, how they will evaluate this person in the future. (Reference: Kunda and Nisbett, 1986).
Interviews are generally a poor measure for gaining personal knowledge about someone. While they often serve well in proving someone a bad candidate (interviewee is completely unprepared or totally inconsistant), they hardly ever help in determining whether or not someone will be a *good* candidate - that is, people overestimate trait consistency, when really, responses are mostly pre-determined by expectency and prior-knowledge.
If someone were to ask, "Hey, you were a black-hat in the past, have you changed?", the very fact that the black-hat is applying for a security job signifies change, but his *answer* is going to be stock: it expects a "Yes".
I'm not a big fan of interviews. I'm a big fan of putting someone to task, briefly, and seeing how they perform. Unless you're extremely charismatic, interviews often tell little about a candidate.
That's positively absurd logic. That's like saying the people who design home security systems for a living should have been criminals at some point in their lives. Or that people who design buildings should have experienced structural collapse, just so they know what it feels like and they don't screw it up.
See, in humans, we've got this thing called language, which can be used to symbolically represent situations. We've also got this new concept called "imagination".
I don't know, but I think you'd have a pretty hard time convincing a prison psychologist or preacher that to counsel inmates properly, she'd have definately needed to do hard time, because hey, how else could she relate?
I'm not sure I agree with you.
I think you're adopting a point of view like this: trait consistency is better explored through interview and business conversations than it is through similar situations in the past.
I think that point of view is wrong.
Personally, I'd be looking for honest and repuutable in a Software Engineer to protect my business, and an interview might not tell me that. Background checks are little more than a formality these days - there's very little one can do about making sure someone hasn't falsified an employment record.
When placed in a similar situation with sensitive data and equipment, did the person react badly in the past? If he was a black-hat hacker for any period of time, I say, "Yes". Being a security professional is as much about being a trustworthy person as it is being a good programmer. Think about what you're saying: "To reduce security, we're going to hire someone that has contributed to crime in the area we're hiring him for." The chance of a "social" hack increases astronomically - just as when people hire stupid employees with easy to guess passwords, employers should be careful not to hire people who have password-circumvention access and will abuse it.
I'm not saying that one black-hat job should stain one's reputation. I'm just saying that this type of thing should be a grave warning sign to an employer with extremely sensitive data to protect.
Cancer cells would be identified by certain characteristics of the cell - surface proteins, agressive transport, etc.
I'd like to put in my two cents that it's about as likely for a genetically engineered virus to mutate and cause a brain-eating disease as it is for a regular one to do so - and probably less likely, since "successful" mutation requires a variety of hosts and a "useful" survival function.
I'd also like to point out a few things you missed:
1) The people who are gifted enough to leave the "cave" first poorly adjust - see Neo in new environment. The people who return, in order to "liberate" the caged are laughed at, and told that the true light has blinded them, as they are unable to identify the objects on the wall.
2) The "Philosophers", the ones who see the true light, are reluctant but feel obligated to return to the cave in order to free them, much like the characters in the matrix, who face countless obstacles but still persist.
The Cave Allegory is quite well played out in the Matrix. Don't be so quick to bash his comment.
And all of that together eventually turned me into a Information Systems/Business major, because it didn't require math.
:)
Sorry for the jab, but...
As a Business Major, of course you don't need math! If things don't add up right (taxes, extra losses you don't want people to see, bonuses for the heck of it, etc.) you can always use the origami paper shredder, ala Enron.
"The animals lived 140 days -- we took the brains out at that point and found no tumors there," Lang said in a telephone interview. Normally, mice injected with human brain tumor cells die within 20 days."
They checked at 140 days for tumor tissue and didn't find any. Their normal lifespan might be longer, but it's significantly less if you kill them. =P
I hate it when people compare AI and human chess players and say the following three things:
a) The computer cheats because it can evaluate more moves
b) The computer cheats because it has "traps" and "100% win situations" programmed in
c) The computer cheats because it has access to previous human games and can "guess" a player's strategy
This might be true, but most grandmaster chess players have played thousands upon thousands of hours of chess. They can immediately rule out half the moves on the board as "stupid" or "unhelpful", and they themselves come with the special knowledge of having seen many, many board situations and having worked out their solutions.
Chess is an interesting game because it is on the scale of infiniately complex.
Computers also have a serious disadvantage: the players they play against are not computers, and therefore do not evaluate moves with the same algorithms. For instance, when Deep X makes his check he says, "I'm going to do this... and then... Kasparov might do that... and I might do this... and Kasparov might do that..." - all the while substituting in what he believes are probable moves for Kasparov based on his own algorithm. This may be disadvantageous because Kasparov may analyze a situation from a different perspective - and while this is a factor in EVERY chess game (human vs. computer or human vs. human) - it is important to note that the computer does not have the priviledge of analyzing the situation from these distinctly human perspectives.
Their names? Sensative information about them? Suspected locations?
Isn't part of the point of email that it might want to be anonymous? Do you really want the government having records of each and every email you've sent so that they can collect taxes on it?
Its not clear how this sort of thing would be useful for the military.
Well, you could tap thousands of phone lines and search for phonemes that indicate the high level military commanders, etc. After you "found" one, you could immediately jump in and listen on it, or if the communication is laden enough, hit that phone-system. With the recent military advances and precision weapons, this isn't *that* hard to imagine.
I mean, with a powerful enough system, you could filter thousands of hours of data at once, ignoring all but the useful stuff. It'd be like audio spy satelites.
When you think about it, though, government and military agencies must have had this for quite some time.
Tapping and bugging really does no good unless you've got someone listening all the time - and that's both expensive and impossible. While I realize that someone only has to be listening every time someone makes a phone call with the tapping situation, the outcome is lots more hours of audio then are feasible to search and use.
If we couldn't have searched audio on a wide scale before, then I find it hard to believe we'd ever be catching anyone by specific phone intercepts. Instead, we'd just be using that sort of thing as evidence.
I mean, I realize this is a great technology, I just doubt it's as "new" as it seems...
And you don't think anyone's ever crashed his car while paying attention to another, more glitzy car on the road instead of the stuff ahead of him?
These sorts of questions apply to all devices, in the end.
Take a look at your car. Do you really think it's design makes it much more aerodynamic, or do you think it's just the same eye-candy?
What about the paint? Paint jobs are pretty silly things, by your logic. They cost money and all they do is act as eye-candy.
What about the hubcaps, the flashing lights on the interior that never serve any real purpose, the leather, the...
The point is: People like things that glitz.
What's going to happen, a trekkie is going to lose his virginity?
Mozilla Javascript Filtering!
The RIAA has said things like 'Digital Copies of Music made from Illegal Copies are Illegal' - i.e., if I own a metallica CD but download the songs online, I'm still breaking the law.
Technically, I own the rights to that song, since I've already purchased it. But the RIAA has said that fair use does not extend to making digital copies.
If fair use doesn't extend to making digital copies, then they can't copy songs to check, regardless of whether or not they have Metallica's permission.
Yeah, but how do they do that without first using the service?
Yeah, but they can easily look at IP addresses, which as far as I know, are still traceable.
The basis for the RIAA case against Verizon, as pointed out in the article, is that Verizon must release contact info for customers because the RIAA has no way to contact these customers without Verizon's help.
The Verizon lawyer just said: "Wait a minute. You just contacted millions of people."
Also, about "the messaging": it appears that the RIAA is "logging on" to popular file sharing services and using simple scripting to message users through the system. Kazaa provides this functionality.
See, the thing I don't understand, is that to do this sort of thing *legitimately* - that is, prove the user who they're messaging IS distributing copywrited content - the RIAA must log on, search, download, and play a potentially infringing file. Then, the RIAA has to send out the message.
No matter what the speed of the RIAA connection, something tells me that it's going to be very difficult for them to download millions of songs, check them by hand, and then send out messages - since it simply isn't possible. Perhaps they could hash files, sure, but they're STILL downloading thousands of songs. In other words, this is what this says: "I just used this file sharing service to illegally copy a song - and if I want to, I can sue you for it." In previous suits, the RIAA has said things to the tune of: "Since you didn't own copyright to this and my computer made a copy, regardless of whether or not I own copyright, the file isn't legally mine." Or, translation: "I committed a crime to prove your guilt."
I'm pretty sure that isn't legal.
I can't figure out why AOL doesn't stop developing new useless content and start developing email filters that really work. They have the largest collection of junk-mail EVER to run statistical analysis on. If all they can come up with is "block mail from X server", they suck. =P
More and more, people are realizing that E-Mail and 'The Internet' are not services offered by AOL. They're realizing that AOL does not "own" the internet, and they're realizing that most companies don't pay AOL to host their content.
It's tough to explain to people what the internet is. AOL was a great simplification tool, in the "early days" of public access - you connect, and everything's set up for you.
Now, millions who use the internet do so from work, with their work providing the connection and their work providing their email address. What's going to happen when AOL customers get told that they can't communicate with the "outside" anymore? Easy - they shut off their AOL subscription, because it becomes meaningless. Instead of simplifying their lives, it starts hampering them.
I find it funny that AOL has adopted this policy, only because their market share has so dramatically decreaesd in the last few years. Sure, lots of people use AOL instant messenger, but if AOL starts charging for that, people will switch - I guarrentee it.
These millions of people using Kazaa, etc.? They all realize that AOL isn't providing that content. Blocking (whitelisting) email makes the fact that AOL doesn't provide the internet *extremely salient* to AOL customers: Which is, imho, a horrible, horrible business move.
America Online: So easy to overlook, no wonder it's gone bankrupt.
Right - and it's so random that it has no ultimate purpose. All programs have a purpose, DNA doesn't. Long-term changes in DNA happen because of changes in the immense system that DNA is a part of.
For instance, cheetahs didn't get faster in able to catch prey - one day, a faster cheetah was born who had the potential to survive longer, and he mated more, and spread his "fastness" through DNA - these individuals had greater potential than the rest of the individuals in the population, and the DNA changed in the long term. But at the outset, the faster invdividual wasn't biased-to-win, he was a fluke of nature, a mutation.
That's how DNA ultimately changes - mutation. Fluke things that end for better or for worse.
Here's a quote which, at the heart, sums up *why the programmer analogy is wrong*:
Natural selection cannot play God, because it is a blind process with no goal in mind and no means to get to a predetermined endpoint.
-John Alcock, Animal Behavior, 7th ed.
Programs are tools for a purpose. DNA is not.
I was just pointing out that it's a common mistake. The Slashdot article is a lot stronger in endorsing it than the science article is.