It's not like the constitution of Palestine specifies that every Jew should be killed. It is *NOT* the case that Palestinians execute people for the crime of choosing their own religion (or atheism), it is *NOT* the case that they cruelly execute women by stoning for "crimes" that men are simply forgiven for. It is *NOT* the case that Palestinians are publicly proud of the fact that they nearly exclusively target civilians... hanging up posters in their city halls glorifying people who achieved the great military victory of killing a defenseless family, including 3 babies.
And please, anyone who claims Palestinian "brutality" (bestiality might be a better word) is quite a bit worse than even the worst accusations of what Israel did, is obviously a racist.
When will slashdot start supporting the philosoraptor in replies?
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And IT is just about the only sector that is supposed to be adding jobs to the economy. It will not go down smoothly once this starts happening.
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Lots of people are going to lose their jobs, because only the better ones will be retained. Managing systems manually is a skill that will go the way of car building skills. That's a lot of people.
An IDS is worthless. There's 2 classes of IDS systems : 1) those that detect threats you already know about This is the class all commercial IDS'es fall into. They can do one thing, and one thing only : they can give you an idea where your clueless attackers are. They are less than worthless against a serious threat, because they convince people they're safe, and they give off tons of alarms for attacks that have zero chance of success, which can effectively DoS the security team. They're also hugely expensive, money that could be spent on developing actual decent security. 2) those that attempt to detect what happens after a breach I've yet to see the first IDS system that falls into this category. There may be some value in this, presuming that you've got good internal firewalls, as they can alert you to a subsystem being infected. It *is* too late, of course, and probably too late to prevent the attacker from trying all known easy escalation measures. But at least you know you're fucked, and you know before the press tells you.
I do agree with the basic premise that implementing a bit of obscurity can help you. This is what things like custom tripwires depend on, and you really should have one of those. It can be as simple as having a mysql install, and replace the mysql binary on production systems with one that sends out a single udp syslog packet, then completely shuts down without warning (ie. alt-sysrq-o), because no-one should locally use that binary.
He was put on the list at least 14 months before that happened, all of which time he could have surrendered. And as I said, he could have surrendered at an American embassy when he read about this order, and it would never get executed. A presidential order does not override a constitutional amendment, and the US sure as hell would not have blown up it's own embassy.
And please... this guy willingly took "death from allah's servant" as a name. Please don't pretend he was a good guy.
I don't see how this changes anything about my post. At some point during police operations, the decision is made to use force against someone. This decision is no different from putting a SWAT team outside a mobster's house, other than the press it's received.
Even those guys get due process - you can't just send out a swat team with 50-cals and have them shoot up his house - they have to make some effort at an arrest (and hold them pending trial). The only thing we really know about this incident is the guy was running away in his truck and an unmanned drone blow him up from above and behind.
Except if they're surrounded by lots of guys carrying arms, putting him out of reach of a normal arrest. Lots of mob bosses and leaders were executed in a manner similar to this, right inside America. Even today, snipers are used in raids on organized crime locations. This is not unacceptable : it's merely the least bad option.
All we "really know" about a number of police "victims" is that they were negotiating with armed guards guarding the entrance, with lots of testimonies pointing that guy as, say, a cocaine gang leader, an extortionist or the guy doling out commands at a shooting. That is, if you want to be equally pedantic about organized crime raids.
I mean, I fully understand that what you're saying would be an ideal situation. But we cannot bring everyone before a court of law, simply because there are limits to the cost that can reasonably be incurred to do that. You cannot demand 10 people, enlisted in the armed forces or police, die just to bring 100 guys before a court. That's not an acceptable cost.
I personally think this sort of action is justified against someone if 1) (s)he is actively involved in attacking the lives of innocents (doesn't have to be the guy who "usually" pulls the trigger, any commander or leader is as guilty as anyone he directs) 2) he cannot easily be reached by normal means
I am in full agreement with you, of course : I hope that the "normal means" available to law enforcement advance to the point that these people can be arrested wherever they are. But letting them go free because we have no better option is bad, very very bad.
The issue is simple : this guy is organizing military attacks on civilians, guns blazing. That makes him as valid a target as a mobster executing a drive-by-shooting. As valid as a lunatic firing a mexican import ak-47 in a mall.
You must realize that there are lines that if you cross them, lethal force can (and should) be applied to stop you, to protect others. Do you really think it is unacceptable for a police sniper to take out a gun-swinging lunatic in a school ? If possible, you should be brought to trial, yes, absolutely, but that doesn't mean we have to let hundreds of people die just to save the bastard's life. I am absolutely sure that the guy would be perfectly (physically) safe had he turned himself in to the local American embassy, or if he got arrested on a plane flight or something. It was publicly declared that he was a target, so he can't complain that he didn't know. He was actively organizing killings of civilians, and surrounded by armed guards/lunatics. He's like a mob boss as far as I'm concerned.
All international treaties say that if you are involved in covert military operations, like all terrorists are, you are fair game. Read them. Any foreign soldier, actively involved in military operations that is not wearing a clearly identifiable uniform does not have *any* form of protection under the Geneva convention. He can be killed for any reason, by any means (except targeting his family, which by the way is the modus operandi of this guy) at any time at any place.
In case you're wondering, who gets to decide if someone is a non-uniformed combatant ? Whoever is the ranking commander on the ground. That means if there's 5 soldiers, and one of them is a drill-instructor, it's the drill-instructor. This decision is final and cannot be attacked (though of course, the integrity of the person giving the order can be attacked. But for a conviction you need to prove this person gave that order out of malice, before a military tribunal, simple mistake does not suffice (although mistake can of course suffice for a demotion, or even dishonorable discharge, but not for criminal procedings)).
Needless to say, the 5th amendment is similar here : if there is a good reason to suspect people are in direct physical danger from this guy, it doesn't apply (aside, of course, from the fact that this didn't happen on American soil, which is the only place where amendments apply). The 5th amendment would have legally protected him had he peacefully surrendered on American soil, like at an embassy, or an airport terminal. And as I said before, you can't complain he didn't get a warning beforehand.
Had he surrendered, the American justice system would have given him a public forum to shout out any and all grievances he had to anyone who cared to listen before handing down a sentence, just like the 5th amendment requires. Most terrorists use this forum to publicly scream about how allah damands muslims kill all americans (happened 3 times already). If he wanted to make a public stand, that would be the way to go.
None of this requires war to be declared. You don't declare war against anything except a recognized nation-state. Strictly speaking that means that the US only needs to declare war to countries where it has an embassy. Any other form of organization the US wishes to attack, whether it's a mob, a band of lunatics, a crime gang, a smuggling ring, a company, an enterprise, or a terrorist madhouse... And even declarations of war only mean that the initial order to attack should be public, which they always are since they always take place as a formal request from the president's office to congress. Usually, as in the case of the attack on Iraq, these orders are then delivered all diplomats, both of the relevant country, and any other, and to the press, but that is a mere courtesy and not required at all. After this initial piece of paper, the actual initiation of hostilities usually takes a few weeks or a few months, because there is a strict limit to how much pr
The big issue is lots of people are being replaced
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By scripts.
Add to that that devOps is much, much harder than system engineering. A DevOps engineer needs to know enough about multiple programming languages *and* algorithmics *and* data and telecom infrastructure to tweak the programs that are really controlling the network. There aren't many people like this at the moment (so if you want to move as a programmer to a $200k/year job, understanding the packet datapath and it's controlling plane is where it's at, provided you're good at optimizing algorithms. The first company to make a real control plane that merges control of the application inside the host and control of the network above the host, controllable by an api is going to make a bundle).
Most sysadmins and netadmins these days know a bit of scripting, and have lots of knowledge over specific details of the OS/switches/routers/firewalls, like the access subsystems or networks and firewalls. But almost none of them could tell you exactly what happens, in code, when ssh refuses or accepts a connection, and what access that implies for all parties involved. I've yet to meet the first sysadmin that can tell me how to optimize a non-trivial problem. An example devOps issue that is requested is to increase that access (e.g. we control the firewall, and we would like it to log ssh connections. Can you tweak the ssh daemon with as little interference on the client side as possible. And then use that to log all access to production systems, in other words : execute a man-in-the-middle attack on the firewall to get full accountability of the production network).
But this is child's play compared to what the devOps guys really want. They want an API they can use for problems like "we have a network with nodes N, links L(n1, n2, capacity, cost function), peering links P, and data transmission requests from the applications R(app1, app2, dataSize, profit, constraints). Configure the applications and network so that cost is minimized, profit is maximized and all specified constraints are followed (e.g. "maximum latency for video : 2s, max latency for voip 50msec,...). Oh and do tell us which improvements to the network would bring the most benefit in terms of $ per increase in maximum bandwidth transmitted."
If you have a company whose profit is mostly determined by the capacity of it's network, any advantage you have in this is going to pay out hugely. For a netflix, amazon, bing, microsoft's online office and other apps, google, yahoo, any online advertising company, any online voip company,... having a functioning algorithm like this means a vast advantage over competitors.
The big issue is that it's much easier for a capable programmer to become a devOps engineer than it is for operational people to become devOps engineers. Not that we have any kind of surplus of capable programmers at all, but I doubt that even if they have no choice many sysadmins will become good programmers.
So the issue is, this is about automating network/system operations the way ford automated car production : if you work in operations, one of 3 things is going to happen: 1) you move to development/engineering, and spend most of your time writing and debugging programs 2) you become a robot, a call center employee, the interface between a computer system and external parties, in other words, your job is reduced to "you want fries with that ?" level 3) you're fired (which it will be for a lot of people)
For the vast majority of people in operations it will mean a gradual move to option 2, and after a few years option 3 if you didn't manage to get recruited for engineering... Of course this does mean that if you do succeed it will mean an increase in salary, potentially a big one. But most people won't succeed (which is of course the reason for the salary increase in the first place).
And that is of course the big issue. The IT workforce is going to drop massively if these guys succeed, and consist entirely of call-center employee
Yes, all of which are designed to ensure competence, not to assign blame. If an executive hires an incompetent, the fault for any future problems lies with that executive. Who is more the fool: the fool... or the man who hires him?
That depends on the division of costs versus rewards. In nearly all organizations I've worked for, it goes somewhat like this :
Hiring a competent developer, who will be hard to find, but won't screw up : 1) costs : go to the executive, since he's responsible for hiring 2) rewards : go to the middle manager, since the hiring guy is never the manager with final responsibility for the product (and costs for hiring competent people have gone up a *lot*)
Hiring the first fool that passes basic checks, who is easy to find, but screws up a lot : 1) costs : go to the middle manager with final responsibility for the product (ie. someone else) 2) rewards : go to the hiring executive (look ! quarterly quota filled in a week's time)
So who's the greater fool ? By large, it's the executive that tries to find competent employees. And this is ignoring the fact that in languages like java, vb (and more and more) C#, competent employees are a liability. Especially for a consulting business, competent employees are a liability. Once you have one or two really competent guys, you want to hire lots of fools.
Everything the US did there was agreed upon by the allied powers, and the real orders for censorship came from European powers, who couldn't be bothered to have their own soldiers enforce them. So the US did. That does not mean the US liked those impositions on Germany by the allied powers, only that it thought it could prevent matters getting out of hand -again- by having a large force stationed there observing and enforcing international treaties. It worked -thank God-.
Or that's what I was taught in school anyway. Granted that was Belgium. Although, given what happened in Belgium right after the war, I must admit I am in full agreement with that assessment : had it been up to Belgian soldiers, Germans -normal Germans- would have had the choice : executions based on flimsy evidence, everything they own disappearing and humliation, or another war, which was the fate that awaited many in Belgium for real or imagined collaboration.
Similar things happened in other countries, most notably in the Netherlands, but it happened everywhere from Portugal to Poland and Iceland to Greece.
So frankly, what you should blame the US for is for not standing up enough for those poor ex-Nazi's. That might also put things in perspective.
Where does everybody get the ridiculous idea that when things really hit the fan, people (not soldiers) will still care about the difference between civilians and armed forces ? That conflicts play out between armed forces exclusively is an illusion shared only by those living 15000 km away from the nearest small-scale civil unrest.
Why ? Are you seriously under the illusion that even 50% of the human race even wants free speech ?
I'm asking this question, not because I truly do not see the value of free speech, but because that's the question that's being asked in the "united nations" GA. There is general agreement that free speech and western imperialism are synonyms.
That's the real issue with multiple cultures. You best be prepared for the realization that there's exactly 1 culture that values free speech. All other cultures want big exceptions to that : Europe wants laws that forbid saying things that would be hurtful to the more sensitive politicians (e.g. "what exactly is the political history of barosso ?", "how exactly does the dutch monarchy use it's power ?"), or would be hurtful for large groups of people (e.g. "wasn't the prophet of islam a slave driver, child rapist, warmonger, thief and worse ? Are you teaching kids this sort of thing is okay, as long as victims are 'infidels' ?", even if you quote the evidence straight from "holy" texts), and of course everything that would threaten one of the very large unions. India wants any hint about the "ethnic" (in reality : religious) tensions in India erased from the internet, including anything about Pakistan (oh, and vice-versa). China... well the list is *very* long there (e.g. "what exactly is happening in Tibet" ? and make no mistake, Chinese people do NOT want this attitude to change, especially not on the Tibet issue). And that's ignoring what the many dictators in the UN GA want, although their demands are quite tame compared to the above.
Even otherwise progressive nations like switzerland want their police force to have permission to do whatever it takes (and I really do mean "whatever" here) to take any violation of banker's secrecy offline. Specifically they would like to take a hell of a lot of opinions about the financial meltdown offline, because they give the impression private information is shared (e.g. an ex-banker saying he knows that "the management of X" did Y. That's a HUGE no-no in Switzerland)
Yes the US has free speech issues, I am in full agreement there. However, we should try to see the difference between the splinter and the board.
If the UN has it's way, free speech will be reduced to the lowest-common-denominator of all free speech laws. You don't want that.
In other words, a 3rd party has CONCERNS that MPEG-LA may be able to swipe the sweat right off of the developer's brows due to accidental similarities.
Have you looked at the math behind it ? Accidental similarities is not a very good defense if they're 90% identical, with including at least 3 operations that were, as far as I can tell, invented (from zero) for h264 (and thus effectively owned by MPEG-LA). There is *no* original step in VP8, as far as I can tell. The things they didn't copy from h264 they copied from apple, although the actual path would more likely be apple -> academic papers -> vp8.
Oh and one of the steps VP8 added was actually suggested by MPEG-LA in the standard, in the "avenues for further research" section, with a link to a paper describing exactly what they did.
Let's not pretend this is anywhere near a doubtful case : it's not. MPEG-LA did >90% of the development work that was needed to bring VP8 into the world. Which is probably why VP8 was developed by 6 people where the MPEG-LA needed hundreds.
Finally, the problem of patents appears to be rearing its ugly head again. VP8 is simply way too similar to H.264: a pithy, if slightly inaccurate, description of VP8 would be “H.264 Baseline Profile with a better entropy coder”. Even VC-1 differed more from H.264 than VP8 does, and even VC-1 didn’t manage to escape the clutches of software patents. It’s quite possible that VP8 has no patent issues, but until we get some hard evidence that VP8 is safe, I would be cautious. Since Google is not indemnifying users of VP8 from patent lawsuits, this is even more of a potential problem. Most importantly, Google has not released any justifications for why the various parts of VP8 do not violate patents, as Sun did with their OMS standard: such information would certainly cut down on speculation and make it more clear what their position actually is.
Read the article (there's about a page's worth of text in there about patents, including specific processes. It convincingly tears the notion that VP8 is independant from h264 to shreds), this guy's done a lot of research into this :
Then please explain why you know better than 40 years of psychological research. You disagree with long accepted theories, without any explanation, and without doing any research of your own (and despite agreeing that "there is an effect" whatever you mean by that). Books, comics do not, in general, cause any negative psychological effects, as far as is known. I don't know why you keep bringing them into the discussion, since that's entirely beside the point.
Significance is simply a mathematical property of 2 series of numbers as far as I'm concerned. It is generally considered to be whatever amount of difference is required to ensure 95% chance that one series is bigger than another, assuming both follow a normal distribution. Given the law of large numbers, this may not be perfectly accurate in the short term, but it's pretty fucking accurate in the long term even if you screw up the distribution.
I personally think everybody is entitled to their own opinions about scientific theories. You are not entitled to your own opinions about facts. If you wish to have this theory, great ! But please explain why the vast majority of studies, including the one this article is about, find significant increases in violent behavior. As to whether this effect is technically "permanent", obviously video games do not exist for longer than a human lifespan yet, which would be the smallest reasonable measure that'd be effectively equal to a permanent change, so that's an open question. The increase in violence effect of playing video games lasts at the very least 10 years, though. Studies to check for effects after 15 years are in progress, but frankly, I seriously doubt you will find them agreeing with your theory.
Also let me ask the obvious question : what would it take for you to change your mind about this ?
Are you really going down this road ? What you're saying is akin to "mathematics has nothing to do with building a computer", with the argument probably being that there are no mathematicians on the factory floor. Same with a codec. In the same way MPEG-LA has a LOT to do with ffmpeg development. You cannot just sit down and develop a better codec.
First you develop a lot of principles you can use, and describe their properties purely theoretically. Then you pay a lot of developers to try to combine those in hundreds of ways until you find a few good ones. This requires actual decent developers with solid theoretical knowledge and years of experience. You know, the kind google complains regularly turn down $200k/year offers. Then you publish the result, various kinds of example code, encoders, good decoders, bad (but fast) decoders... subsequently patenting all this stuff.
No offence, but h264, and the stuff based on it, is pretty close to how the patent system is supposed to work. You do a lot of theoretical work, then publish it for free and for anyone to learn from. But if they want to build stuff with it, that requires they pay you for your work, for a limited time. MPEG-LA seems to me a very good example of the patent system used to accomplish a very worthy goal.
MPEG-LA is not a patent troll. Their patents are not obvious, they're not copies of academics' work, they're not even bought from other parties. They actually worked long and hard on finding all this stuff before they patented it. Why are they not entitled to payment for their work ? Nobody is stopping you from finding and using *other* principles and combinations to implement a codec (which is not what vp8 developers did, so yes MPEG-LA will require payment for users of VP8 as well, which seems perfectly fair to me).
The simple truth is that without MPEG-LA and their investments we would not have video codecs half as good as h264. Nor would be have vp8 or theora codecs. In my book that entitles them to get their investment back and a tidy profit on top of that.
While boats are very efficient, even when heavily loaded, much more so than trucks or trains, it is still a *lot* cheaper (and faster) to move an empty ship around.
1) please look up how valid the FAT patent was in Europe : perfectly valid. For most non-Chinese Asian countries software patents are valid and China is just a matter of time (problem is enforcement, not so much the law) 2) I believe DiVX has a proper license, and to get their implementation you have to agree to their EULA... which requires you, amongst other things, to never use any other player than their own, if you think that's a better deal, go ahead You might have mentioned flash as well, since that's at least a workable solution for websites 3) if that were true every implementation except the win7 and ffmpeg one should be blacklisted (specifically the divx one). Browser makers don't like to have bugs "this video works on win2k, but not on winxp" type bugs which are unavoidable when using the OS's codecs. It also adds complexity to the user's experience because they will need to track down the correct codec for their own system. Google is pretty adamant about avoiding that (and their browser is much better for it)
MPEG-LA did invest kind of a huge amount of money to create h264 in the first place. WebM, is partly based on that work. Work which was shared, but not freely shared. See here for example, note what software is used for WebM decoding : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP8#Encoding.
So what's the big deal here ? MPEG-LA advanced the state of the art in compression codecs, by a lot, and they invested money in that project. How is it unfair of them to expect compensation from people using that work, whether that is through using WebM or h264 ?
Anyway, the point is moot, since anything that needs video codecs still needs h264. Only when that changes (which won't be until blue-ray is forgotten in the dustbin of history) will there be a problem : if you buy a license for your software to decode h264, you're perfectly welcome to use that same license for WebM as far as MPEG-LA is concerned.
In fairness... you might list the full steps from the MPEG-LA's business plans. It goes like this :
1) bring together experts, implementors (on their payroll), testers,..., and negotiate for years with all sorts of different companies and government agencies until you have enough investment to get a quality video compression format 2) publish all the products of step 1 openly, for everyone to read and use. Write books about it (yes, plural, we're talking dozens) 3) profit
Step 3, the "predatory" part, is kind of a necessity for this whole thing to work... And you could just as well argue that people using this product without compensating MPEG-LA is just as predatory. H264 is something that you don't write in an afternoon (or with 100 developers in a year's time, for that matter).
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Remember there is no muslim brutality either.
It's not like the constitution of Palestine specifies that every Jew should be killed. It is *NOT* the case that Palestinians execute people for the crime of choosing their own religion (or atheism), it is *NOT* the case that they cruelly execute women by stoning for "crimes" that men are simply forgiven for. It is *NOT* the case that Palestinians are publicly proud of the fact that they nearly exclusively target civilians ... hanging up posters in their city halls glorifying people who achieved the great military victory of killing a defenseless family, including 3 babies.
And please, anyone who claims Palestinian "brutality" (bestiality might be a better word) is quite a bit worse than even the worst accusations of what Israel did, is obviously a racist.
Comprende ?
Hmmm ... star wars ... or prehistoric humans ?
When will slashdot start supporting the philosoraptor in replies?
And IT is just about the only sector that is supposed to be adding jobs to the economy. It will not go down smoothly once this starts happening.
Lots of people are going to lose their jobs, because only the better ones will be retained. Managing systems manually is a skill that will go the way of car building skills. That's a lot of people.
An IDS is worthless. There's 2 classes of IDS systems :
1) those that detect threats you already know about
This is the class all commercial IDS'es fall into. They can do one thing, and one thing only : they can give you an idea where your clueless attackers are. They are less than worthless against a serious threat, because they convince people they're safe, and they give off tons of alarms for attacks that have zero chance of success, which can effectively DoS the security team. They're also hugely expensive, money that could be spent on developing actual decent security.
2) those that attempt to detect what happens after a breach
I've yet to see the first IDS system that falls into this category. There may be some value in this, presuming that you've got good internal firewalls, as they can alert you to a subsystem being infected. It *is* too late, of course, and probably too late to prevent the attacker from trying all known easy escalation measures. But at least you know you're fucked, and you know before the press tells you.
I do agree with the basic premise that implementing a bit of obscurity can help you. This is what things like custom tripwires depend on, and you really should have one of those. It can be as simple as having a mysql install, and replace the mysql binary on production systems with one that sends out a single udp syslog packet, then completely shuts down without warning (ie. alt-sysrq-o), because no-one should locally use that binary.
He was put on the list at least 14 months before that happened, all of which time he could have surrendered. And as I said, he could have surrendered at an American embassy when he read about this order, and it would never get executed. A presidential order does not override a constitutional amendment, and the US sure as hell would not have blown up it's own embassy.
And please ... this guy willingly took "death from allah's servant" as a name. Please don't pretend he was a good guy.
I don't see how this changes anything about my post. At some point during police operations, the decision is made to use force against someone. This decision is no different from putting a SWAT team outside a mobster's house, other than the press it's received.
Even those guys get due process - you can't just send out a swat team with 50-cals and have them shoot up his house - they have to make some effort at an arrest (and hold them pending trial). The only thing we really know about this incident is the guy was running away in his truck and an unmanned drone blow him up from above and behind.
Except if they're surrounded by lots of guys carrying arms, putting him out of reach of a normal arrest. Lots of mob bosses and leaders were executed in a manner similar to this, right inside America. Even today, snipers are used in raids on organized crime locations. This is not unacceptable : it's merely the least bad option.
All we "really know" about a number of police "victims" is that they were negotiating with armed guards guarding the entrance, with lots of testimonies pointing that guy as, say, a cocaine gang leader, an extortionist or the guy doling out commands at a shooting. That is, if you want to be equally pedantic about organized crime raids.
I mean, I fully understand that what you're saying would be an ideal situation. But we cannot bring everyone before a court of law, simply because there are limits to the cost that can reasonably be incurred to do that. You cannot demand 10 people, enlisted in the armed forces or police, die just to bring 100 guys before a court. That's not an acceptable cost.
I personally think this sort of action is justified against someone if
1) (s)he is actively involved in attacking the lives of innocents (doesn't have to be the guy who "usually" pulls the trigger, any commander or leader is as guilty as anyone he directs)
2) he cannot easily be reached by normal means
I am in full agreement with you, of course : I hope that the "normal means" available to law enforcement advance to the point that these people can be arrested wherever they are. But letting them go free because we have no better option is bad, very very bad.
The issue is simple : this guy is organizing military attacks on civilians, guns blazing. That makes him as valid a target as a mobster executing a drive-by-shooting. As valid as a lunatic firing a mexican import ak-47 in a mall.
You must realize that there are lines that if you cross them, lethal force can (and should) be applied to stop you, to protect others. Do you really think it is unacceptable for a police sniper to take out a gun-swinging lunatic in a school ? If possible, you should be brought to trial, yes, absolutely, but that doesn't mean we have to let hundreds of people die just to save the bastard's life. I am absolutely sure that the guy would be perfectly (physically) safe had he turned himself in to the local American embassy, or if he got arrested on a plane flight or something. It was publicly declared that he was a target, so he can't complain that he didn't know. He was actively organizing killings of civilians, and surrounded by armed guards/lunatics. He's like a mob boss as far as I'm concerned.
All international treaties say that if you are involved in covert military operations, like all terrorists are, you are fair game. Read them. Any foreign soldier, actively involved in military operations that is not wearing a clearly identifiable uniform does not have *any* form of protection under the Geneva convention. He can be killed for any reason, by any means (except targeting his family, which by the way is the modus operandi of this guy) at any time at any place.
In case you're wondering, who gets to decide if someone is a non-uniformed combatant ? Whoever is the ranking commander on the ground. That means if there's 5 soldiers, and one of them is a drill-instructor, it's the drill-instructor. This decision is final and cannot be attacked (though of course, the integrity of the person giving the order can be attacked. But for a conviction you need to prove this person gave that order out of malice, before a military tribunal, simple mistake does not suffice (although mistake can of course suffice for a demotion, or even dishonorable discharge, but not for criminal procedings)).
Needless to say, the 5th amendment is similar here : if there is a good reason to suspect people are in direct physical danger from this guy, it doesn't apply (aside, of course, from the fact that this didn't happen on American soil, which is the only place where amendments apply). The 5th amendment would have legally protected him had he peacefully surrendered on American soil, like at an embassy, or an airport terminal. And as I said before, you can't complain he didn't get a warning beforehand.
Had he surrendered, the American justice system would have given him a public forum to shout out any and all grievances he had to anyone who cared to listen before handing down a sentence, just like the 5th amendment requires. Most terrorists use this forum to publicly scream about how allah damands muslims kill all americans (happened 3 times already). If he wanted to make a public stand, that would be the way to go.
None of this requires war to be declared. You don't declare war against anything except a recognized nation-state. Strictly speaking that means that the US only needs to declare war to countries where it has an embassy. Any other form of organization the US wishes to attack, whether it's a mob, a band of lunatics, a crime gang, a smuggling ring, a company, an enterprise, or a terrorist madhouse ... And even declarations of war only mean that the initial order to attack should be public, which they always are since they always take place as a formal request from the president's office to congress. Usually, as in the case of the attack on Iraq, these orders are then delivered all diplomats, both of the relevant country, and any other, and to the press, but that is a mere courtesy and not required at all. After this initial piece of paper, the actual initiation of hostilities usually takes a few weeks or a few months, because there is a strict limit to how much pr
By scripts.
Add to that that devOps is much, much harder than system engineering. A DevOps engineer needs to know enough about multiple programming languages *and* algorithmics *and* data and telecom infrastructure to tweak the programs that are really controlling the network. There aren't many people like this at the moment (so if you want to move as a programmer to a $200k/year job, understanding the packet datapath and it's controlling plane is where it's at, provided you're good at optimizing algorithms. The first company to make a real control plane that merges control of the application inside the host and control of the network above the host, controllable by an api is going to make a bundle).
Most sysadmins and netadmins these days know a bit of scripting, and have lots of knowledge over specific details of the OS/switches/routers/firewalls, like the access subsystems or networks and firewalls. But almost none of them could tell you exactly what happens, in code, when ssh refuses or accepts a connection, and what access that implies for all parties involved. I've yet to meet the first sysadmin that can tell me how to optimize a non-trivial problem. An example devOps issue that is requested is to increase that access (e.g. we control the firewall, and we would like it to log ssh connections. Can you tweak the ssh daemon with as little interference on the client side as possible. And then use that to log all access to production systems, in other words : execute a man-in-the-middle attack on the firewall to get full accountability of the production network).
But this is child's play compared to what the devOps guys really want. They want an API they can use for problems like "we have a network with nodes N, links L(n1, n2, capacity, cost function), peering links P, and data transmission requests from the applications R(app1, app2, dataSize, profit, constraints). Configure the applications and network so that cost is minimized, profit is maximized and all specified constraints are followed (e.g. "maximum latency for video : 2s, max latency for voip 50msec, ...). Oh and do tell us which improvements to the network would bring the most benefit in terms of $ per increase in maximum bandwidth transmitted."
If you have a company whose profit is mostly determined by the capacity of it's network, any advantage you have in this is going to pay out hugely. For a netflix, amazon, bing, microsoft's online office and other apps, google, yahoo, any online advertising company, any online voip company, ... having a functioning algorithm like this means a vast advantage over competitors.
The big issue is that it's much easier for a capable programmer to become a devOps engineer than it is for operational people to become devOps engineers. Not that we have any kind of surplus of capable programmers at all, but I doubt that even if they have no choice many sysadmins will become good programmers.
So the issue is, this is about automating network/system operations the way ford automated car production : if you work in operations, one of 3 things is going to happen :
1) you move to development/engineering, and spend most of your time writing and debugging programs
2) you become a robot, a call center employee, the interface between a computer system and external parties, in other words, your job is reduced to "you want fries with that ?" level
3) you're fired (which it will be for a lot of people)
For the vast majority of people in operations it will mean a gradual move to option 2, and after a few years option 3 if you didn't manage to get recruited for engineering ... Of course this does mean that if you do succeed it will mean an increase in salary, potentially a big one. But most people won't succeed (which is of course the reason for the salary increase in the first place).
And that is of course the big issue. The IT workforce is going to drop massively if these guys succeed, and consist entirely of call-center employee
You know, the nice thing about the greedy capitalists that are amazon ... they'll probably enable streaming for any tablet they can.
Put horns on it, produce 2000 of it and have them charge the enemies. I assure you it will discourage warfare like nothing else.
Sounds like that's exactly what they're doing.
Obviously we need to tax these "iOS fat cats" and send some of their profits to the poorer developers, eh comrade!
You clearly completely miss the purpose of tax. The tax must obviously go to the "poorer" non-developers.
Yes, all of which are designed to ensure competence, not to assign blame. If an executive hires an incompetent, the fault for any future problems lies with that executive. Who is more the fool: the fool ... or the man who hires him?
That depends on the division of costs versus rewards. In nearly all organizations I've worked for, it goes somewhat like this :
Hiring a competent developer, who will be hard to find, but won't screw up :
1) costs : go to the executive, since he's responsible for hiring
2) rewards : go to the middle manager, since the hiring guy is never the manager with final responsibility for the product
(and costs for hiring competent people have gone up a *lot*)
Hiring the first fool that passes basic checks, who is easy to find, but screws up a lot :
1) costs : go to the middle manager with final responsibility for the product (ie. someone else)
2) rewards : go to the hiring executive (look ! quarterly quota filled in a week's time)
So who's the greater fool ? By large, it's the executive that tries to find competent employees. And this is ignoring the fact that in languages like java, vb (and more and more) C#, competent employees are a liability. Especially for a consulting business, competent employees are a liability. Once you have one or two really competent guys, you want to hire lots of fools.
Actually most bridge architecture in the real world is retrofits ...
Everything the US did there was agreed upon by the allied powers, and the real orders for censorship came from European powers, who couldn't be bothered to have their own soldiers enforce them. So the US did. That does not mean the US liked those impositions on Germany by the allied powers, only that it thought it could prevent matters getting out of hand -again- by having a large force stationed there observing and enforcing international treaties. It worked -thank God-.
Or that's what I was taught in school anyway. Granted that was Belgium. Although, given what happened in Belgium right after the war, I must admit I am in full agreement with that assessment : had it been up to Belgian soldiers, Germans -normal Germans- would have had the choice : executions based on flimsy evidence, everything they own disappearing and humliation, or another war, which was the fate that awaited many in Belgium for real or imagined collaboration.
Similar things happened in other countries, most notably in the Netherlands, but it happened everywhere from Portugal to Poland and Iceland to Greece.
So frankly, what you should blame the US for is for not standing up enough for those poor ex-Nazi's. That might also put things in perspective.
Where does everybody get the ridiculous idea that when things really hit the fan, people (not soldiers) will still care about the difference between civilians and armed forces ? That conflicts play out between armed forces exclusively is an illusion shared only by those living 15000 km away from the nearest small-scale civil unrest.
Why ? Are you seriously under the illusion that even 50% of the human race even wants free speech ?
I'm asking this question, not because I truly do not see the value of free speech, but because that's the question that's being asked in the "united nations" GA. There is general agreement that free speech and western imperialism are synonyms.
That's the real issue with multiple cultures. You best be prepared for the realization that there's exactly 1 culture that values free speech. All other cultures want big exceptions to that : Europe wants laws that forbid saying things that would be hurtful to the more sensitive politicians (e.g. "what exactly is the political history of barosso ?", "how exactly does the dutch monarchy use it's power ?"), or would be hurtful for large groups of people (e.g. "wasn't the prophet of islam a slave driver, child rapist, warmonger, thief and worse ? Are you teaching kids this sort of thing is okay, as long as victims are 'infidels' ?", even if you quote the evidence straight from "holy" texts), and of course everything that would threaten one of the very large unions. India wants any hint about the "ethnic" (in reality : religious) tensions in India erased from the internet, including anything about Pakistan (oh, and vice-versa). China ... well the list is *very* long there (e.g. "what exactly is happening in Tibet" ? and make no mistake, Chinese people do NOT want this attitude to change, especially not on the Tibet issue). And that's ignoring what the many dictators in the UN GA want, although their demands are quite tame compared to the above.
Even otherwise progressive nations like switzerland want their police force to have permission to do whatever it takes (and I really do mean "whatever" here) to take any violation of banker's secrecy offline. Specifically they would like to take a hell of a lot of opinions about the financial meltdown offline, because they give the impression private information is shared (e.g. an ex-banker saying he knows that "the management of X" did Y. That's a HUGE no-no in Switzerland)
Yes the US has free speech issues, I am in full agreement there. However, we should try to see the difference between the splinter and the board.
If the UN has it's way, free speech will be reduced to the lowest-common-denominator of all free speech laws. You don't want that.
No the correct answer is : "You want to learn the basics for no other use than misrepresenting it in political discussions ? Please don't."
In other words, a 3rd party has CONCERNS that MPEG-LA may be able to swipe the sweat right off of the developer's brows due to accidental similarities.
Have you looked at the math behind it ? Accidental similarities is not a very good defense if they're 90% identical, with including at least 3 operations that were, as far as I can tell, invented (from zero) for h264 (and thus effectively owned by MPEG-LA). There is *no* original step in VP8, as far as I can tell. The things they didn't copy from h264 they copied from apple, although the actual path would more likely be apple -> academic papers -> vp8.
Oh and one of the steps VP8 added was actually suggested by MPEG-LA in the standard, in the "avenues for further research" section, with a link to a paper describing exactly what they did.
Let's not pretend this is anywhere near a doubtful case : it's not. MPEG-LA did >90% of the development work that was needed to bring VP8 into the world. Which is probably why VP8 was developed by 6 people where the MPEG-LA needed hundreds.
Let me just say this :
Finally, the problem of patents appears to be rearing its ugly head again. VP8 is simply way too similar to H.264: a pithy, if slightly inaccurate, description of VP8 would be “H.264 Baseline Profile with a better entropy coder”. Even VC-1 differed more from H.264 than VP8 does, and even VC-1 didn’t manage to escape the clutches of software patents. It’s quite possible that VP8 has no patent issues, but until we get some hard evidence that VP8 is safe, I would be cautious. Since Google is not indemnifying users of VP8 from patent lawsuits, this is even more of a potential problem. Most importantly, Google has not released any justifications for why the various parts of VP8 do not violate patents, as Sun did with their OMS standard: such information would certainly cut down on speculation and make it more clear what their position actually is.
Read the article (there's about a page's worth of text in there about patents, including specific processes. It convincingly tears the notion that VP8 is independant from h264 to shreds), this guy's done a lot of research into this :
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377
Then please explain why you know better than 40 years of psychological research. You disagree with long accepted theories, without any explanation, and without doing any research of your own (and despite agreeing that "there is an effect" whatever you mean by that). Books, comics do not, in general, cause any negative psychological effects, as far as is known. I don't know why you keep bringing them into the discussion, since that's entirely beside the point.
Significance is simply a mathematical property of 2 series of numbers as far as I'm concerned. It is generally considered to be whatever amount of difference is required to ensure 95% chance that one series is bigger than another, assuming both follow a normal distribution. Given the law of large numbers, this may not be perfectly accurate in the short term, but it's pretty fucking accurate in the long term even if you screw up the distribution.
I personally think everybody is entitled to their own opinions about scientific theories. You are not entitled to your own opinions about facts. If you wish to have this theory, great ! But please explain why the vast majority of studies, including the one this article is about, find significant increases in violent behavior. As to whether this effect is technically "permanent", obviously video games do not exist for longer than a human lifespan yet, which would be the smallest reasonable measure that'd be effectively equal to a permanent change, so that's an open question. The increase in violence effect of playing video games lasts at the very least 10 years, though. Studies to check for effects after 15 years are in progress, but frankly, I seriously doubt you will find them agreeing with your theory.
Also let me ask the obvious question : what would it take for you to change your mind about this ?
Are you really going down this road ? What you're saying is akin to "mathematics has nothing to do with building a computer", with the argument probably being that there are no mathematicians on the factory floor. Same with a codec. In the same way MPEG-LA has a LOT to do with ffmpeg development. You cannot just sit down and develop a better codec.
First you develop a lot of principles you can use, and describe their properties purely theoretically. Then you pay a lot of developers to try to combine those in hundreds of ways until you find a few good ones. This requires actual decent developers with solid theoretical knowledge and years of experience. You know, the kind google complains regularly turn down $200k/year offers. Then you publish the result, various kinds of example code, encoders, good decoders, bad (but fast) decoders... subsequently patenting all this stuff.
No offence, but h264, and the stuff based on it, is pretty close to how the patent system is supposed to work. You do a lot of theoretical work, then publish it for free and for anyone to learn from. But if they want to build stuff with it, that requires they pay you for your work, for a limited time. MPEG-LA seems to me a very good example of the patent system used to accomplish a very worthy goal.
MPEG-LA is not a patent troll. Their patents are not obvious, they're not copies of academics' work, they're not even bought from other parties. They actually worked long and hard on finding all this stuff before they patented it. Why are they not entitled to payment for their work ? Nobody is stopping you from finding and using *other* principles and combinations to implement a codec (which is not what vp8 developers did, so yes MPEG-LA will require payment for users of VP8 as well, which seems perfectly fair to me).
The simple truth is that without MPEG-LA and their investments we would not have video codecs half as good as h264. Nor would be have vp8 or theora codecs. In my book that entitles them to get their investment back and a tidy profit on top of that.
While boats are very efficient, even when heavily loaded, much more so than trucks or trains, it is still a *lot* cheaper (and faster) to move an empty ship around.
1) please look up how valid the FAT patent was in Europe : perfectly valid. For most non-Chinese Asian countries software patents are valid and China is just a matter of time (problem is enforcement, not so much the law) ... which requires you, amongst other things, to never use any other player than their own, if you think that's a better deal, go ahead
2) I believe DiVX has a proper license, and to get their implementation you have to agree to their EULA
You might have mentioned flash as well, since that's at least a workable solution for websites
3) if that were true every implementation except the win7 and ffmpeg one should be blacklisted (specifically the divx one). Browser makers don't like to have bugs "this video works on win2k, but not on winxp" type bugs which are unavoidable when using the OS's codecs. It also adds complexity to the user's experience because they will need to track down the correct codec for their own system. Google is pretty adamant about avoiding that (and their browser is much better for it)
MPEG-LA did invest kind of a huge amount of money to create h264 in the first place. WebM, is partly based on that work. Work which was shared, but not freely shared. See here for example, note what software is used for WebM decoding : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP8#Encoding.
So what's the big deal here ? MPEG-LA advanced the state of the art in compression codecs, by a lot, and they invested money in that project. How is it unfair of them to expect compensation from people using that work, whether that is through using WebM or h264 ?
Anyway, the point is moot, since anything that needs video codecs still needs h264. Only when that changes (which won't be until blue-ray is forgotten in the dustbin of history) will there be a problem : if you buy a license for your software to decode h264, you're perfectly welcome to use that same license for WebM as far as MPEG-LA is concerned.
In fairness ... you might list the full steps from the MPEG-LA's business plans. It goes like this :
1) bring together experts, implementors (on their payroll), testers, ..., and negotiate for years with all sorts of different companies and government agencies until you have enough investment to get a quality video compression format
2) publish all the products of step 1 openly, for everyone to read and use. Write books about it (yes, plural, we're talking dozens)
3) profit
Step 3, the "predatory" part, is kind of a necessity for this whole thing to work ... And you could just as well argue that people using this product without compensating MPEG-LA is just as predatory. H264 is something that you don't write in an afternoon (or with 100 developers in a year's time, for that matter).