I think we can agree on that. However, let me give you a different scenario. Suppose you are a Senator or Congressperson and I come to you and say, "Look, there is a small trade association meeting taking place in a couple of months. All in the public eye and nothing behind closed doors. We'd like you to come along given your role on [such and such] committee. We're going to be based at the Florida Disney resort, in the main resort hotel. We're happy to cover the cost of your flights and because this takes place during a school holiday, you would be welcome to bring your family and let them loose in Disney while you're working with us. The meeting is scheduled to take one or two days, but we're going to book for a week, just in case..." [Nudge, nudge, wink, wink...]...
Now, no money has changed hands. I haven't "given" you a dime. Instead what I've done is given you a week's free holiday in Florida Disney in return for a day of intense lobbying at something I want you to agree to... And the best bit is, I didn't lobby you at all. I just invited you to attend an industry conference.
Sorry that this is a bit of a tangential question to the OP...
I notice that the amount of "lobbying" being reported in the media seems to be on the rise again, perhaps after a bit of a post-2008 lull.
However, it really isn't clear what is permitted as "legal" lobbying and what is considered "illegal"? Is this in-person requests for meetings to put forward a case? Is this industry-funded "research" offered up as candidate for government policy? Is this the offer of all-expenses-paid "junkets" to take law-makers on expensive trips to "see for themselves" [and be wined and dined in the process].
Forgive the cynicism, but I've reached a point where any time I read "lobbying" my brain substitutes "illegal bribery"... I wondered if anyone could point me at guidelines that help show what is permitted vs not permitted, and/or where this is tracked and monitored for compliance?
Given that the two places with the most lobbyists are Washington and Brussels, it is getting increasingly difficult to see how regular citizens are being properly represented at the "legislative table". Interested in any analysis of that, too...
Lots of excellent discussion here, but perhaps there is another aspect of this to consider...
Think about all the really big issues that have happened with financial institutions over the last 10-15 years, such as:-
1. Nick Leeson at Barings [lost his employer an estimated $1.4 Billion in 1995]
2. Jerome Kervial at Societe Generale [lost his employer $7 Billion in 2007]
3. Bruno Iksil at JPMorgan [lost his employer an estimate $7 Billion in 2012]
In fact, if you're interested, there is a complete ranking at Wikipedia:-
What this shows us is that all of the biggest losses [and at this point I will concede that the Wikipedia article lists only trading losses, but these are by far the largest, financially-impacting losses we observe] come not from data security issues, or software vulnerabilities, but from an absolute lack of fundamental operational controls on the financial side of the institutions that have experienced these losses.
Yes, it is true to say that "because: Cyber" seems to have created a bit more interest in boardrooms around the world, but the cold, hard fact remains that the vast majority of losses [whether numerically or by value] originate from operational control failures, not IT Security. This being the case, when an institution comes to look at safeguards, IT and Cyber Security controls are almost always going to play "second fiddle" to the operational risks the institution carries.
Having worked for both blue chip companies and financial institutions for the last ~ 30 years, my own personal experience is that IT Controls are generally seen as a poor relation to Operational Controls - and attract budgets and resources accordingly. As an IT professional with many years working in IT Security, IT Risk Management and Cyber Security, I would like to see cyber risk treated more seriously by large corporations. Unfortunately, in the absence of actual, head-line grabbing real-world examples of multi-billion-dollar losses from cyber events, the institutions carrying these risks will consider them to be "black swan" events - undeniably high risk, but so rare as to be irrelevant... until they are themselves hit.
The only way to ensure that the information of private citizens is adequately protected by the corporations that hold and process it is to follow up incidents such as this with hard-hitting fines, along with jail time for relevant executives [CEO, CIO, CTO]. Unless we see that happen [and just consider for a moment the likely lobbying effort against this] then there will be no safety and no recourse for individually impacted citizens.
Some may be thinking that perhaps legislation like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act [and clause 404 of that bill] might be sufficient to address the gap. The sad fact is that, in the 15 years since it was introduced, SOX has become a "paper exercise". There is no evidence to suggest that anything equivalent but addressing data breaches would be any more useful 15 years from now.
Unless something fundamentally changes, the balance of probability will condemn this particular topic to irrelevance.
So you are able to deduce the means and motives of intelligence gathering programs using only the content of two employees e-mail conversation?
No, not at all, nor did I claim to. My post was pointing out an exchange between two employees of a private contractor, individuals who did not represent and could not speak on behalf of the strategic intelligence agencies, their motives or plans.
My observation was meant merely to indicate that, just as NASA now relies on private contractors to make service supply missions to the ISS, so the NSA, DHS and others may rely on private contractors to design, build and/or operate the technoloy that gathers data on their behalf. My observations were meant to illustrate that not all participants in that process may have the same motives in mind - and that some contractors may place profits ahead of delivery of fully-working solutions.
I made no observation on the strategy or intent of the agencies concerned.
It's a while since Edward Snowden's documents were released on line, but I vaguely remember one - a memo between two employees of one of the contractors employed by the US Government [logically that would be BAH, but I do not recall for sure] in which one person was basically saying,
"This is madness - the proposal we've got here would generate so much data that the analysts simply wouldn't be able to assimilate it, much less find anything of value!"
The response was, essentially, some "Management Speak" to the effect of, "Look, our job is not to question our most important client when they want to spend money. You and I both know that they won't be able to make sense of all of this data, but as long as they are paying us, today, to collect and store it, then tomorrow they can pay us to develop the technology to help them make sense of it. Remember, our role here is to maximise shareholder value - in our company..."
If I can find the link to the piece [I am pretty sure it was one of Greenwald's articles] then I'll post it as a link. But if this is vaguely true, then the OP makes complete sense.
It is also worth noting what isn't being said. At no point [in this coverage] is anyone saying, "Wait - if we can't cope with the amount of data we're collecting today, maybe we should scale back what we collect - apply some filters and narrow our search criteria - until we get a more precise data set." Well, maybe that option was reviewed and discarded. Even so, it's quite remarkable that nobody thought to figure out how they were going to analyze all the yottabytes of data that they knew would be generated by the collection systems...
Definitely sounds like a contractor-led initiative to me...
Whilst the headline of this article is certainly correct, it addresses only one small facet of a much larger problem with international finance. Public Ledger cryptosystems are far, far more than a form of digital cash. For example, one of the most lucrative forms of income for the big banks comes in the form of foreign currency exchanges, where it is customary to charge, for example, 2.75% "service charges" on transactions made in "non-local" currencies. Conversions from one currency to another always involve a "spread" - a difference between buying price and selling price - which is where the banks are creaming fat profits.
Cryptocurrencies introduce direct competition to this rip-off market. If it is cheaper for me to convert some of my local currency [Pounds Sterling] into Bitcoin and then, upon arrival in say the United States, covert that from Bitcoin into US Dollars - then if those conversions have significantly lower transaction fees than a conventional Bureau de Change type of deal, then they offer a fantastic and useful market-disrupting alternative.
An even more useful application of Bitcoin technology is the ledger itself. When transactions are conducted in a publicly-shared ledger, then it is possible for entities to exchange funding without actually needing a central bank at all. Most of the big banks are already looking at the "public ledger" aspect of the technology - not necessarily to start offering Bitcoin exchanges in high street branches, but to look to cut out central agencies like SWIFT and CLS and their kind.
Interestingly, the central clearing banks (Federal Reserve, Bank of England, ECB, etc) could themselves be replaced by a public ledger for much of the daily transaction volumes that privately held banks (your JPMorgans and Barclays of this world) actually need. So maybe the central banks are looking to regulate cryptocurrency and related technologies as part of a move in self-preservation?
International governance regarding patents specifically excludes the granting of a patent for "a formula". Since all software is based entirely on mathematical formulae - which is how computers work - it follows that software is therefore excluded from patent protection on aforementioned grounds.
Note: each time I see the above argument quoted in an internet-based discussion [and not just by me, since this is a widely-held view] there is invariably a response along the lines of, "Wait - when that particular rule was written, the authors did not anticipate the software industry, since computers had not been invented. But really, you know, software should not be excluded like that..." Each time, my response is: "The reading of the relevant rules and agreements that exclude software on the basis that it is simply a sequence of mathematical formulae is no 'more broad' than many of the most vexatious claims made by patent trolls. Put simply - you can't have it both ways..."
In the UK, it is quite common to sign a *lease deal* for a new car. However, this type of "ownership process" rarely involves the dealership directly.
Instead [here in the UK] the client typically either enters into a hire-purchase type of agreement with the vendor of the vehicle [which in this case would be Kia Canada, Inc], or they enter into a quite separate leasing contract with a third party leasing company. Then what happens is the leasing company pays the dealership the ticket price of the car [sometimes less than that] and the dealer is fully paid for the vehicle. The leasing company then takes over collection of the monthly payments from the driver.
This is common because dealerships don't want to turn into debt collection agencies [in the UK the law on debt collection requires i.e. licenses], they just want their money.
So I would be asking someone to go over that paperwork with a very fine eye for detail. In the event that the dealership had out-sourced the purchase deal [perhaps for a commission on the sale of the loan] then their act of disabling the vehicle would effectively constitute an entirely different type of act.
Now this is where things get interesting. The law usually includes provisions for things like "Criminal damage" in anticipation of physical acts, i.e. "brick through windscreen", but what if the damage was caused electronically? Can you really call something "criminal damage" if the damage can be "reversed" remotely, as happened here? I guess the only alternative to criminal damage in this scenario would be some form of hacking charge, on the grounds that the dealership illegally tampered with the car's internal computer systems without authorisation.
I don't know if Daniel Lallier will be taking any legal action against the dealership for the aggravation they have caused him, but I certainly hope that a local public prosecutor will pick up this case and go after the dealership. Ignorance of the law is no defence, or so we're told, so I'd certainly hope that some form of punitive damages would be sought, to make it clear to others that this sort of thing is not acceptable.
Take a moment and think about the nature of punishments as they are handed down to first individuals and then to corporations. I think you'll find that across the western world, punishments to private individuals continue to increase [larger fines, longer prison sentences] whilst the punishments for corporations are becoming weaker and even less effective.
It is common practice to hear politicians [particularly around election time] to start spouting phrases such as "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime", or other similarly empty sound-bites. It is common to see politicians and prosecutors hand down the most egregious punishments to individuals, such as the charges put before Aaron Swartz, for example. [ When Aaron was accused of downloading publicly available academic journals from JSTOR whilst studying at MIT, he was challenged with a $1 Million fine and 35 years in prison...]... Compare the harm between Aaron's actions and those of Home Logic.
The only way to stop companies from abusing laws prohibiting auto-dial systems and un-solicited spam would be simple legislation. For example, un-solicited telephone calls and emails should be met with a simple 3-strikes policy:-
Strike 1 - first offence - take the total compensation value paid to all directors and senior staff of the company in the previous tax year and fine those individuals exactly 35% of the amount they were paid. To determine which individuals are to be included in the fine, bell-curve the salaries paid to every employee of the company and select the top 20% by income.
Strike 2 - second offence - repeat the compensation calculation, but this time increase the penalty to 50% of total income for the top 30% of earners. Additionally, fine the company an amount equal to 30% of pre-tax profits declared in the previous 3 years.
Strike 3 - third offence - immediate, mandatory jail time for the CEO, COO, CFO and all board level directors, for a minimum term of 3 years. Fine the company 60% of pre-tax profits declared in the previous 5 years. Bar every existing director from every holding a directorship again, in any company, for life. Bar every existing director from ever holding public [elected] office, for life.
I guarantee you that if those were the penalties handed down to the companies that repeatedly and flagrantly abuse the laws, that abuse would stop, overnight. The only way to get the attention of these people is to hit them where it hurts.
With respect to the examples being "20th century chemicals", whilst I will agree with you, the reason for including them was to show that there has been a long history of implementing such "solutions" before appropriate testing has been conducted. As for other examples, how about:-
Asbestos (fire retardant - no longer deployed but much remains in places like land-fills, older buildings, etc)
Tetra-Ethyl Lead (the anti-knock additive in petrols)
Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers (flame retardants)
Chloroflurocarbons (fire suppressants)
Whilst I'd concede that some of these might not be "household names", there is plenty of evidence to suggest that they should never have been released in to use...
We need to consider this story in abstract - and when we do it is much more disturbing.
In essence, what has happened here is that a pesticide supplier, i.e. a commercial organisation that is required by law to have their products tested and approved by a Federal agency, developed and tested a product which has now been shown to be detrimental to the environment in a pretty significant way.
But what would have happened if the detrimental impact from this chemical had caused sterility in men, for instance? Or early onset dementia? Or some other unpleasant, irreversible side effect? The whole point behind having Federal agencies and licensing requirements is to ensure that no chemicals released into the environment have such results.
It's easy to think that, in the 21st century, these are exaggerated or "doomsday" scenarios. If we thought that, we'd be wrong. Mankind does not learn from past mistakes in this regard. In the mid 1940s, the US released huge volumes of DDT into the environment. The chemical caused the shells of (wild) bird eggs to be super-thin and especially brittle and was responsible for the near-extinction of the Bald Eagle. In the 1950s, the drug thalidomide became widely available - resulting in literally thousands of individuals being born with mal-formed limbs, unable to care for themselves. The list goes on...
Bottom line: the moment we put profit ahead of public safety, scandals follow. As a sophisticated society, with a well-developed and functioning scientific community, there should be no excuses for the situation we see described in this article. The doubly sad and shocking thing is that it seems it will only be when we experience a potentially extinction-level event that we will see a determination to do something about this. By then it might be too late.
Are you sure? I thought that both pounds and kilograms measured weight.
IIRC (it has been a long time since I studied physics), mass was measured in Newton's. The definition of weight as distinct from mass is that all matter has mass all the time, but it only has weight when that mass is experiencing the force of gravity within a gravitational field.
Thus, I have a constant mass... If I weighed myself on Earth I will weigh more than if I weighed myself on the Moon. Even though my mass remains constant, my weight will vary proportionally with local gravity. This is why F=ma is true anywhere in the universe.
I wonder if any regular Slashdot reader has knowledge of the 10Ks that were filed by Monsanto during this period. Under Securities Law, the SEC requires that publicly listed companies like Monsanto complete a number of publications. The annual 10K includes a section, (Item 1A, Risk Factors) in which Monsanto should have been fully disclosing the risks that they were attempting to protect with the edits that they were inducing these "independent" specialists to produce.
If the "evidence" that was being claimed via these "independent" results were substantially different from what the company knew to be reality, then it is entirely within the realm of possibility that a class-action lawsuit could be raised by shareholders who could reasonably claim that they were materially misled.
Why am I focusing on this dimension first and foremost? Simply because we've seen how little large corporations care for the opinions of employees, of adversely affected clients, of the neighbours to their industrial plants, pipelines and processing centres or even the law. The only thing that really seems to worry a CEO these days is a posse of angry shareholders with the power to vote them out of their job.
This forum is blessed with a simply *massive* brains trust, with technical skills and experience contributed regardless of age, ethnicity or gender. Unless a contributor selects a user name which explicitly identifies them by age, gender or background, the way that Slashdot operates actually promotes equality. In other words, as Slashdot shows, equality is possible, it just needs to be implemented thoughtfully...
Having read the email/document that forms the subject of this article, one of the things I observe is that the document itself discusses both conscious and subconscious bias as it can be applied in a workplace [and for this post I'll group together *all* forms of bias, not merely gender bias].
So let's think about this for a moment. Most of us probably work for organisations which claim [publicly at least] to be a meritocracy. But how objective are the performance review procedures? [ Or recruitment, for that matter? ] Here are a few points to consider:-
If your recruitment process gives hiring managers application forms with the age and/or name of the candidate included, then your organisation has an open door for selection bias.
If your appraisal process includes a ranking process that is susceptible to tactical voting ["I'll give your promotion candidate the nod if you do the same for me", then your organisation has an issue with performance review bias.
If your organisation allows a single manager - *any* single manager - to make recruitment, promotion and/or disciplinary decisions in isolation, then your organisation is at risk of allowing "individual bias" to harm your employees.
Creating a truly neutral, inclusive and meritocratic workplace is *HARD*. It requires leadership, sponsorship [from the top], honesty, integrity and commitment. But it also requires something that large, modern organisations have gradually sacrificed. As individuals are pushed ever harder, as we move into more and more of a "performance culture", acts of mutual support and inclusiveness are not merely not helpful for the giver, but they are detrimental - they help someone else to succeed to the giver's loss.
These two things, then, are not mutually exclusive, but they are rarely found in the same organisation in full and effective health.
I'm concerned at the way that the author of the original piece chose to express their views. I do not believe that the author did themselves or their suggestions any favours. I also worry that some of the issues a rooted far more deeply, insidiously and tenaciously than we might yet be willing to accept.
OK, here's a huge detour - a bit of potted history of mad cow disease...
Human's don't contract "mad cow disease" (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, to give the disease its full name). Rather, we contract what medicine knows as vCJD, or variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the history of BSE actually concerns the way that it was introduced to the animal population and how it spread.
Western nations like the UK (where BSE was most prevalent) have followed intensive farming practices since at least the end of the Second World War, a time where national farms simply had to produce as much food as possible given the rationing that was necessary during the conflict. For beef and dairy farmers, "intensive farming" includes the act of turning livestock not just into omnivores, but cannibals. Included in the "meal" fed to cattle we can find quite high levels of ground-up bone meal which is produced from recycled bones harvested from abattoirs. Crucially, that source of bones included the spines of processed beef cattle, which of course includes the spinal column, essentially an extension of brain tissue.
A couple of years before the outbreak of BSE in the UK, the animal feeds lobby persuaded the British government that it would be safe to make a small but significant change in the way that animal feed based on these recycled bones was made. The change reduced the amount of time for which the ground-down material had to be "cooked", on the basis of the fact that doing so would reduce the amount of [gas] energy required to cook it, significantly reducing production costs and thereby "bringing down prices for the consumer".
Everything up to this point in this post can be validated from information sources widely available on the internet. What follows contains more conjecture because the facts are less widely available. The readers is invited to evaluate and form their own opinions.
This small and apparently harmless change to the preparation and recycling of bone meal [including spinal matter] for animal feed meant that not all of the brain or spinal tissue was completely cooked at the end of the process. It was therefore possible for any latent BSE infection in the brain/spine of one cow to be ground up into meal and fed to another cow. It is possible that the bacterial infection was not killed by stomach enzymes after ingestion, but was in fact able to enter the bloodstream of the subject, flow to the brain or spine and thereby infect a new subject.
It is similarly possible that the widespread nature of the feed generation practices allowed the creation of a feedback loop in which ultra-low levels of the BSE infection were returned to herds, thus allowing for a gradual but progressive increase in levels of the infection. Evidence that shows this is scarce.
When forming their own opinion as to the truth or otherwise/probability or otherwise of this account being accurate, the reader is invited to search for or recall news coverage of the UK BSE outbreak from the late 1980s. At that time, it may be remembered that outbreaks were reported that were initially isolated to single farms. This gave the impression that the issue could have been caused by geographic factors. It was far less obvious, but equally likely, that it could have been caused by the feeding practices of individual farmers.
It was theorised [but never really shown conclusively] that BSE in cattle made the leap to vCJD in humans when processed beef - i.e. ground-up beef that included bonemeal, such as that used in beefburgers - entered the human food chain without being properly cooked. If that meat had been prepared in an abattoir that did not have good controls over the break-up of bovine spinal matter, then it was possible that microscopic particles of uncooked brain/spine could enter the human food chain.
OK, end of huge detour...
Unless Diabetes can be spread by one aspect of its infection vector being successi
At a technical level, this makes no sense for Apple. One of the biggest criticisms of the watch has been the poor battery life and the fact that it often cannot cope with a full day of use without running flat.
With that being an established fact, why on earth would Apple contemplate adding a power-hungry cellular transceiver in to it?
As we know, rumours of the iPhone8 have been circulating for some time now. Apple are notoriously secretive because they like the publicity value of being able to release something that is completely unexpected in to the marketplace. For this reason we've also seen them adopt a practice of seeding misinformation into the rumour-mill, just to throw competition and scoop-hungry journalists off track.
I have zero inside knowledge - this is pure guesswork - but I would suspect that this is one of those misinformation rumours. Unless Apple are going to debut some brand new battery technology with the next Watch, this one's a dud.
As this article
https://www.theguardian.com/te...
in the Guardian reported almost exactly one year ago to the day, it is possible to use "side channel data" such as battery life to track a user between different web sites. Unfortunately, that tracking capability only exists if the user is internet-connected at the time...
Similarly, the ability to track a mobile device via a wifi transponder is only possible if the device has wifi enabled.
So what we have here is a new tracking vector, since now we have the means to track someone via a bluetooth emission that a device on their person might make. Of course, the range of bluetooth means that this is only really viable in say a commercial environment like a department store, or a shopping mall, or similar.
Yet another case of someone adding a feature without stopping to think about how it could be subverted or used against the owner of the device that supports it.
I think this is a topic that we can deconstruct and conclude that the answer is "it depends". Suppose that I want the ability to write posts to slashdot anonymously. However, slashdot need to have the ability to call me out if I post something that is defamatory or illegal [in the UK certain statements can be construed to incite religious hatred, which is now illegal, for example].
So what this needs is a mechanism by which I can post to slashdot, but that when I do, my "identity" is different every single time. If we can design a mechanism by which it is impossible for slashdot [or any other site] to aggregate all of my actions over time and attribute them to me, but can take a single action of mine and attribute it] then we are close to our goals.
If we define the problem in this way, then perhaps we are moving towards something that works a bit like a cryptographic one-time-pad. For any single instance [of me posting something to slashdot] you have the ability to perform a computationally complex action that can be used to determine that I was the originator, but the only way to aggregate all/. posts and attribute mine to me would be the equivalent of a massively extended brute force crack... This works for individual web sites, but maybe not for access sessions.
To safely anonymise access sessions, we would need some form of abstraction integrated directly with the routing protocol, again such that it might be possible to deconstruct a single "session" [or maybe even trace a single given packet would be better] but not have the ability to do more than that because the protocol itself imposes a degree of abstraction and chaos.
The more I tihnk aobut it, the more I tihnk we could do it [basically scale TOR to work for the entire net, with refinements. Unfortunately, I think that legislation would be passed that would outlaw it before it could be finished...
The practices outlined in this research don't just harm the credibility of scientific journals, they also undermine what could be the legitimate work of hard-working scientists who have submitted papers in good faith.
I can only hope that this analysis gets properly peer-reviewed (to verify if these journals really are publishing charlatans) and then anyone who has submitted legitimate research to these entities demand a full refund. If money changed hands, there is an implicit contract [if not an explicit one] that the publication in question actually performs "peer review" work... It certainly does not appear to be the case here.
I wonder if the entities named will try and claim this was down to a "rogue reviewer" or that they are actually more of a "vanity publishing" service, just for scientists? Or maybe they'll sue.
It's odd, isn't it: governments the world over are never short of things that they want to legislate against, but somehow they fail to take account of shady practices like these... I wonder... do you think that the current PoTUS would consider these to be fine, upstanding publishers or "Fake News! Sad!" ???
This might be a bit of a novice or silly question, but is there a reason why this specific release of this specific GNU/Linux distro has a dedicated posting here on Slashdot?
This isn't flame-bait and I'm not trolling... I'm actually trying to understand the process of selecting news-worthy submissions for posting. I can't recall seeing similar articles like this [either for earlier ubuntu distributions, or others] and I didn't see anything in the article that highlights this as special other than the unusually short lifespan of this particular release. Is that the reason for the posting, or could it be something else?
The danger is that if we accept a scientific analysis which over-reaches the facts, then we are at risk of encouraging this behaviour.
If we let supposition stand and, to borrow a line from "Dead Poets Society", we "let rumour fester into fact..." then we actually undermine the credibility of the entire scientific process. I am sorry if that comes across as a provocative or controversial claim to make, but I just think that with something like this, it's better to be cautious in our claims, and to carefully state where and how we are estimating. That doesn't necessarily subvert or detract from the work, but it does help to differentiate between provable fact and projection.
If you click through and read the article, you will find a discussion that explains that this entire conclusion was based on a rare set of footprints that were found to be of a certain spacing. They then started a variety of different extrapolations, covering values such as estimating the height of the dinosaur's hips above the ground, the weight of the dinosaur and so on.
Their determination that this set of tracks came from a Tyrannosaur was made on the basis that there is no knowledge of any other matching species in that area at that time.
Having measured the stride of this dinosaur and estimated the height of its hips above the ground, they then used measurements taken from "living, walking bipeds" to make their claim.
Now, I'm all in favour of scientific research and analysis. I love reading about cutting edge insights to the world around us. I think it enriches our lives. On the other hand, when I read this article published on the Science website, the first thought that came to me was, "There are an awful lot of assumptions and approximations in here..."
They don't know, definitively, that this was a T-Rex.
They don't know what it was doing at the time the tracks were made [for example, if it had been stalking prey, maybe it was treading softly, moving slowly, so perhaps it's steps were uncharacteristic.
They don't know whether it was injured, or weak, or unwell. You can't determine the nutritional state of a hundreds-of-millions-of-years-dead dinosaur from a footprint, can you?
They are also assuming that things like the metabolic efficiency, the muscular strength and even the bone density of dinosaurs are all perfectly equivalent to what we see today. In other words, they are cherry-picking facts to fit their theories.
I am absolutely certain that there is some great research and excellent work being undertaken by the Team that made this announcement, but this is far, far short of science. This is assumption and theory and conjecture based upon an entirely incomplete fact base.
In one sense it is not worth being concerned over one-off articles like this. In the fullness of time we would expect scientific peer review to challenge and refine both the method of analysis and the final conclusions of this piece of work. Well, hopefully. The concern with this specific story is evidenced by the fact that it has been picked up and linked here, on slashdot. Which means it will be picked up by other science and tech news outlets and perhaps even broader news media. This is fine if the original work is robust and defensible, but in this case [at least as far as the original piece goes] that does not appear to be true... Oh well.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we can agree on that. However, let me give you a different scenario. Suppose you are a Senator or Congressperson and I come to you and say, "Look, there is a small trade association meeting taking place in a couple of months. All in the public eye and nothing behind closed doors. We'd like you to come along given your role on [such and such] committee. We're going to be based at the Florida Disney resort, in the main resort hotel. We're happy to cover the cost of your flights and because this takes place during a school holiday, you would be welcome to bring your family and let them loose in Disney while you're working with us. The meeting is scheduled to take one or two days, but we're going to book for a week, just in case..." [Nudge, nudge, wink, wink...]...
Now, no money has changed hands. I haven't "given" you a dime. Instead what I've done is given you a week's free holiday in Florida Disney in return for a day of intense lobbying at something I want you to agree to... And the best bit is, I didn't lobby you at all. I just invited you to attend an industry conference.
Sorry that this is a bit of a tangential question to the OP...
I notice that the amount of "lobbying" being reported in the media seems to be on the rise again, perhaps after a bit of a post-2008 lull.
However, it really isn't clear what is permitted as "legal" lobbying and what is considered "illegal"? Is this in-person requests for meetings to put forward a case? Is this industry-funded "research" offered up as candidate for government policy? Is this the offer of all-expenses-paid "junkets" to take law-makers on expensive trips to "see for themselves" [and be wined and dined in the process].
Forgive the cynicism, but I've reached a point where any time I read "lobbying" my brain substitutes "illegal bribery"... I wondered if anyone could point me at guidelines that help show what is permitted vs not permitted, and/or where this is tracked and monitored for compliance?
Given that the two places with the most lobbyists are Washington and Brussels, it is getting increasingly difficult to see how regular citizens are being properly represented at the "legislative table". Interested in any analysis of that, too...
*Darl* McBride, but yes, agreed...
Lots of excellent discussion here, but perhaps there is another aspect of this to consider...
Think about all the really big issues that have happened with financial institutions over the last 10-15 years, such as:-
1. Nick Leeson at Barings [lost his employer an estimated $1.4 Billion in 1995]
2. Jerome Kervial at Societe Generale [lost his employer $7 Billion in 2007]
3. Bruno Iksil at JPMorgan [lost his employer an estimate $7 Billion in 2012]
In fact, if you're interested, there is a complete ranking at Wikipedia:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What this shows us is that all of the biggest losses [and at this point I will concede that the Wikipedia article lists only trading losses, but these are by far the largest, financially-impacting losses we observe] come not from data security issues, or software vulnerabilities, but from an absolute lack of fundamental operational controls on the financial side of the institutions that have experienced these losses.
Yes, it is true to say that "because: Cyber" seems to have created a bit more interest in boardrooms around the world, but the cold, hard fact remains that the vast majority of losses [whether numerically or by value] originate from operational control failures, not IT Security. This being the case, when an institution comes to look at safeguards, IT and Cyber Security controls are almost always going to play "second fiddle" to the operational risks the institution carries.
Having worked for both blue chip companies and financial institutions for the last ~ 30 years, my own personal experience is that IT Controls are generally seen as a poor relation to Operational Controls - and attract budgets and resources accordingly. As an IT professional with many years working in IT Security, IT Risk Management and Cyber Security, I would like to see cyber risk treated more seriously by large corporations. Unfortunately, in the absence of actual, head-line grabbing real-world examples of multi-billion-dollar losses from cyber events, the institutions carrying these risks will consider them to be "black swan" events - undeniably high risk, but so rare as to be irrelevant... until they are themselves hit.
The only way to ensure that the information of private citizens is adequately protected by the corporations that hold and process it is to follow up incidents such as this with hard-hitting fines, along with jail time for relevant executives [CEO, CIO, CTO]. Unless we see that happen [and just consider for a moment the likely lobbying effort against this] then there will be no safety and no recourse for individually impacted citizens.
Some may be thinking that perhaps legislation like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act [and clause 404 of that bill] might be sufficient to address the gap. The sad fact is that, in the 15 years since it was introduced, SOX has become a "paper exercise". There is no evidence to suggest that anything equivalent but addressing data breaches would be any more useful 15 years from now.
Unless something fundamentally changes, the balance of probability will condemn this particular topic to irrelevance.
So you are able to deduce the means and motives of intelligence gathering programs using only the content of two employees e-mail conversation?
No, not at all, nor did I claim to. My post was pointing out an exchange between two employees of a private contractor, individuals who did not represent and could not speak on behalf of the strategic intelligence agencies, their motives or plans.
My observation was meant merely to indicate that, just as NASA now relies on private contractors to make service supply missions to the ISS, so the NSA, DHS and others may rely on private contractors to design, build and/or operate the technoloy that gathers data on their behalf. My observations were meant to illustrate that not all participants in that process may have the same motives in mind - and that some contractors may place profits ahead of delivery of fully-working solutions.
I made no observation on the strategy or intent of the agencies concerned.
It's a while since Edward Snowden's documents were released on line, but I vaguely remember one - a memo between two employees of one of the contractors employed by the US Government [logically that would be BAH, but I do not recall for sure] in which one person was basically saying,
"This is madness - the proposal we've got here would generate so much data that the analysts simply wouldn't be able to assimilate it, much less find anything of value!"
The response was, essentially, some "Management Speak" to the effect of, "Look, our job is not to question our most important client when they want to spend money. You and I both know that they won't be able to make sense of all of this data, but as long as they are paying us, today, to collect and store it, then tomorrow they can pay us to develop the technology to help them make sense of it. Remember, our role here is to maximise shareholder value - in our company..."
If I can find the link to the piece [I am pretty sure it was one of Greenwald's articles] then I'll post it as a link. But if this is vaguely true, then the OP makes complete sense.
It is also worth noting what isn't being said. At no point [in this coverage] is anyone saying, "Wait - if we can't cope with the amount of data we're collecting today, maybe we should scale back what we collect - apply some filters and narrow our search criteria - until we get a more precise data set." Well, maybe that option was reviewed and discarded. Even so, it's quite remarkable that nobody thought to figure out how they were going to analyze all the yottabytes of data that they knew would be generated by the collection systems...
Definitely sounds like a contractor-led initiative to me...
Whilst the headline of this article is certainly correct, it addresses only one small facet of a much larger problem with international finance. Public Ledger cryptosystems are far, far more than a form of digital cash. For example, one of the most lucrative forms of income for the big banks comes in the form of foreign currency exchanges, where it is customary to charge, for example, 2.75% "service charges" on transactions made in "non-local" currencies. Conversions from one currency to another always involve a "spread" - a difference between buying price and selling price - which is where the banks are creaming fat profits.
Cryptocurrencies introduce direct competition to this rip-off market. If it is cheaper for me to convert some of my local currency [Pounds Sterling] into Bitcoin and then, upon arrival in say the United States, covert that from Bitcoin into US Dollars - then if those conversions have significantly lower transaction fees than a conventional Bureau de Change type of deal, then they offer a fantastic and useful market-disrupting alternative.
An even more useful application of Bitcoin technology is the ledger itself. When transactions are conducted in a publicly-shared ledger, then it is possible for entities to exchange funding without actually needing a central bank at all. Most of the big banks are already looking at the "public ledger" aspect of the technology - not necessarily to start offering Bitcoin exchanges in high street branches, but to look to cut out central agencies like SWIFT and CLS and their kind.
Interestingly, the central clearing banks (Federal Reserve, Bank of England, ECB, etc) could themselves be replaced by a public ledger for much of the daily transaction volumes that privately held banks (your JPMorgans and Barclays of this world) actually need. So maybe the central banks are looking to regulate cryptocurrency and related technologies as part of a move in self-preservation?
International governance regarding patents specifically excludes the granting of a patent for "a formula". Since all software is based entirely on mathematical formulae - which is how computers work - it follows that software is therefore excluded from patent protection on aforementioned grounds.
Note: each time I see the above argument quoted in an internet-based discussion [and not just by me, since this is a widely-held view] there is invariably a response along the lines of, "Wait - when that particular rule was written, the authors did not anticipate the software industry, since computers had not been invented. But really, you know, software should not be excluded like that..." Each time, my response is: "The reading of the relevant rules and agreements that exclude software on the basis that it is simply a sequence of mathematical formulae is no 'more broad' than many of the most vexatious claims made by patent trolls. Put simply - you can't have it both ways..."
In the UK, it is quite common to sign a *lease deal* for a new car. However, this type of "ownership process" rarely involves the dealership directly.
Instead [here in the UK] the client typically either enters into a hire-purchase type of agreement with the vendor of the vehicle [which in this case would be Kia Canada, Inc], or they enter into a quite separate leasing contract with a third party leasing company. Then what happens is the leasing company pays the dealership the ticket price of the car [sometimes less than that] and the dealer is fully paid for the vehicle. The leasing company then takes over collection of the monthly payments from the driver.
This is common because dealerships don't want to turn into debt collection agencies [in the UK the law on debt collection requires i.e. licenses], they just want their money.
So I would be asking someone to go over that paperwork with a very fine eye for detail. In the event that the dealership had out-sourced the purchase deal [perhaps for a commission on the sale of the loan] then their act of disabling the vehicle would effectively constitute an entirely different type of act.
Now this is where things get interesting. The law usually includes provisions for things like "Criminal damage" in anticipation of physical acts, i.e. "brick through windscreen", but what if the damage was caused electronically? Can you really call something "criminal damage" if the damage can be "reversed" remotely, as happened here? I guess the only alternative to criminal damage in this scenario would be some form of hacking charge, on the grounds that the dealership illegally tampered with the car's internal computer systems without authorisation.
I don't know if Daniel Lallier will be taking any legal action against the dealership for the aggravation they have caused him, but I certainly hope that a local public prosecutor will pick up this case and go after the dealership. Ignorance of the law is no defence, or so we're told, so I'd certainly hope that some form of punitive damages would be sought, to make it clear to others that this sort of thing is not acceptable.
Take a moment and think about the nature of punishments as they are handed down to first individuals and then to corporations. I think you'll find that across the western world, punishments to private individuals continue to increase [larger fines, longer prison sentences] whilst the punishments for corporations are becoming weaker and even less effective.
It is common practice to hear politicians [particularly around election time] to start spouting phrases such as "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime", or other similarly empty sound-bites. It is common to see politicians and prosecutors hand down the most egregious punishments to individuals, such as the charges put before Aaron Swartz, for example. [ When Aaron was accused of downloading publicly available academic journals from JSTOR whilst studying at MIT, he was challenged with a $1 Million fine and 35 years in prison...]... Compare the harm between Aaron's actions and those of Home Logic.
The only way to stop companies from abusing laws prohibiting auto-dial systems and un-solicited spam would be simple legislation. For example, un-solicited telephone calls and emails should be met with a simple 3-strikes policy:-
Strike 1 - first offence - take the total compensation value paid to all directors and senior staff of the company in the previous tax year and fine those individuals exactly 35% of the amount they were paid. To determine which individuals are to be included in the fine, bell-curve the salaries paid to every employee of the company and select the top 20% by income.
Strike 2 - second offence - repeat the compensation calculation, but this time increase the penalty to 50% of total income for the top 30% of earners. Additionally, fine the company an amount equal to 30% of pre-tax profits declared in the previous 3 years.
Strike 3 - third offence - immediate, mandatory jail time for the CEO, COO, CFO and all board level directors, for a minimum term of 3 years. Fine the company 60% of pre-tax profits declared in the previous 5 years. Bar every existing director from every holding a directorship again, in any company, for life. Bar every existing director from ever holding public [elected] office, for life.
I guarantee you that if those were the penalties handed down to the companies that repeatedly and flagrantly abuse the laws, that abuse would stop, overnight. The only way to get the attention of these people is to hit them where it hurts.
With respect to the examples being "20th century chemicals", whilst I will agree with you, the reason for including them was to show that there has been a long history of implementing such "solutions" before appropriate testing has been conducted. As for other examples, how about:-
Asbestos (fire retardant - no longer deployed but much remains in places like land-fills, older buildings, etc)
Tetra-Ethyl Lead (the anti-knock additive in petrols)
Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers (flame retardants)
Chloroflurocarbons (fire suppressants)
Whilst I'd concede that some of these might not be "household names", there is plenty of evidence to suggest that they should never have been released in to use...
We need to consider this story in abstract - and when we do it is much more disturbing.
In essence, what has happened here is that a pesticide supplier, i.e. a commercial organisation that is required by law to have their products tested and approved by a Federal agency, developed and tested a product which has now been shown to be detrimental to the environment in a pretty significant way.
But what would have happened if the detrimental impact from this chemical had caused sterility in men, for instance? Or early onset dementia? Or some other unpleasant, irreversible side effect? The whole point behind having Federal agencies and licensing requirements is to ensure that no chemicals released into the environment have such results.
It's easy to think that, in the 21st century, these are exaggerated or "doomsday" scenarios. If we thought that, we'd be wrong. Mankind does not learn from past mistakes in this regard. In the mid 1940s, the US released huge volumes of DDT into the environment. The chemical caused the shells of (wild) bird eggs to be super-thin and especially brittle and was responsible for the near-extinction of the Bald Eagle. In the 1950s, the drug thalidomide became widely available - resulting in literally thousands of individuals being born with mal-formed limbs, unable to care for themselves. The list goes on...
Bottom line: the moment we put profit ahead of public safety, scandals follow. As a sophisticated society, with a well-developed and functioning scientific community, there should be no excuses for the situation we see described in this article. The doubly sad and shocking thing is that it seems it will only be when we experience a potentially extinction-level event that we will see a determination to do something about this. By then it might be too late.
Are you sure? I thought that both pounds and kilograms measured weight.
IIRC (it has been a long time since I studied physics), mass was measured in Newton's. The definition of weight as distinct from mass is that all matter has mass all the time, but it only has weight when that mass is experiencing the force of gravity within a gravitational field.
Thus, I have a constant mass... If I weighed myself on Earth I will weigh more than if I weighed myself on the Moon. Even though my mass remains constant, my weight will vary proportionally with local gravity. This is why F=ma is true anywhere in the universe.
I concede that the idea is unlikely to be popular. But I'm open to suggestions for a better way to make a change.
I wonder if any regular Slashdot reader has knowledge of the 10Ks that were filed by Monsanto during this period. Under Securities Law, the SEC requires that publicly listed companies like Monsanto complete a number of publications. The annual 10K includes a section, (Item 1A, Risk Factors) in which Monsanto should have been fully disclosing the risks that they were attempting to protect with the edits that they were inducing these "independent" specialists to produce.
If the "evidence" that was being claimed via these "independent" results were substantially different from what the company knew to be reality, then it is entirely within the realm of possibility that a class-action lawsuit could be raised by shareholders who could reasonably claim that they were materially misled.
Why am I focusing on this dimension first and foremost? Simply because we've seen how little large corporations care for the opinions of employees, of adversely affected clients, of the neighbours to their industrial plants, pipelines and processing centres or even the law. The only thing that really seems to worry a CEO these days is a posse of angry shareholders with the power to vote them out of their job.
Always good to cite your sources:-
http://dailycaller.com/2017/06...
This forum is blessed with a simply *massive* brains trust, with technical skills and experience contributed regardless of age, ethnicity or gender. Unless a contributor selects a user name which explicitly identifies them by age, gender or background, the way that Slashdot operates actually promotes equality. In other words, as Slashdot shows, equality is possible, it just needs to be implemented thoughtfully...
Having read the email/document that forms the subject of this article, one of the things I observe is that the document itself discusses both conscious and subconscious bias as it can be applied in a workplace [and for this post I'll group together *all* forms of bias, not merely gender bias].
So let's think about this for a moment. Most of us probably work for organisations which claim [publicly at least] to be a meritocracy. But how objective are the performance review procedures? [ Or recruitment, for that matter? ] Here are a few points to consider:-
If your recruitment process gives hiring managers application forms with the age and/or name of the candidate included, then your organisation has an open door for selection bias.
If your appraisal process includes a ranking process that is susceptible to tactical voting ["I'll give your promotion candidate the nod if you do the same for me", then your organisation has an issue with performance review bias.
If your organisation allows a single manager - *any* single manager - to make recruitment, promotion and/or disciplinary decisions in isolation, then your organisation is at risk of allowing "individual bias" to harm your employees.
Creating a truly neutral, inclusive and meritocratic workplace is *HARD*. It requires leadership, sponsorship [from the top], honesty, integrity and commitment. But it also requires something that large, modern organisations have gradually sacrificed. As individuals are pushed ever harder, as we move into more and more of a "performance culture", acts of mutual support and inclusiveness are not merely not helpful for the giver, but they are detrimental - they help someone else to succeed to the giver's loss.
These two things, then, are not mutually exclusive, but they are rarely found in the same organisation in full and effective health.
I'm concerned at the way that the author of the original piece chose to express their views. I do not believe that the author did themselves or their suggestions any favours. I also worry that some of the issues a rooted far more deeply, insidiously and tenaciously than we might yet be willing to accept.
OK, here's a huge detour - a bit of potted history of mad cow disease...
Human's don't contract "mad cow disease" (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, to give the disease its full name). Rather, we contract what medicine knows as vCJD, or variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the history of BSE actually concerns the way that it was introduced to the animal population and how it spread.
Western nations like the UK (where BSE was most prevalent) have followed intensive farming practices since at least the end of the Second World War, a time where national farms simply had to produce as much food as possible given the rationing that was necessary during the conflict. For beef and dairy farmers, "intensive farming" includes the act of turning livestock not just into omnivores, but cannibals. Included in the "meal" fed to cattle we can find quite high levels of ground-up bone meal which is produced from recycled bones harvested from abattoirs. Crucially, that source of bones included the spines of processed beef cattle, which of course includes the spinal column, essentially an extension of brain tissue.
A couple of years before the outbreak of BSE in the UK, the animal feeds lobby persuaded the British government that it would be safe to make a small but significant change in the way that animal feed based on these recycled bones was made. The change reduced the amount of time for which the ground-down material had to be "cooked", on the basis of the fact that doing so would reduce the amount of [gas] energy required to cook it, significantly reducing production costs and thereby "bringing down prices for the consumer".
Everything up to this point in this post can be validated from information sources widely available on the internet. What follows contains more conjecture because the facts are less widely available. The readers is invited to evaluate and form their own opinions.
This small and apparently harmless change to the preparation and recycling of bone meal [including spinal matter] for animal feed meant that not all of the brain or spinal tissue was completely cooked at the end of the process. It was therefore possible for any latent BSE infection in the brain/spine of one cow to be ground up into meal and fed to another cow. It is possible that the bacterial infection was not killed by stomach enzymes after ingestion, but was in fact able to enter the bloodstream of the subject, flow to the brain or spine and thereby infect a new subject.
It is similarly possible that the widespread nature of the feed generation practices allowed the creation of a feedback loop in which ultra-low levels of the BSE infection were returned to herds, thus allowing for a gradual but progressive increase in levels of the infection. Evidence that shows this is scarce.
When forming their own opinion as to the truth or otherwise/probability or otherwise of this account being accurate, the reader is invited to search for or recall news coverage of the UK BSE outbreak from the late 1980s. At that time, it may be remembered that outbreaks were reported that were initially isolated to single farms. This gave the impression that the issue could have been caused by geographic factors. It was far less obvious, but equally likely, that it could have been caused by the feeding practices of individual farmers.
It was theorised [but never really shown conclusively] that BSE in cattle made the leap to vCJD in humans when processed beef - i.e. ground-up beef that included bonemeal, such as that used in beefburgers - entered the human food chain without being properly cooked. If that meat had been prepared in an abattoir that did not have good controls over the break-up of bovine spinal matter, then it was possible that microscopic particles of uncooked brain/spine could enter the human food chain.
OK, end of huge detour...
Unless Diabetes can be spread by one aspect of its infection vector being successi
At a technical level, this makes no sense for Apple. One of the biggest criticisms of the watch has been the poor battery life and the fact that it often cannot cope with a full day of use without running flat.
With that being an established fact, why on earth would Apple contemplate adding a power-hungry cellular transceiver in to it?
As we know, rumours of the iPhone8 have been circulating for some time now. Apple are notoriously secretive because they like the publicity value of being able to release something that is completely unexpected in to the marketplace. For this reason we've also seen them adopt a practice of seeding misinformation into the rumour-mill, just to throw competition and scoop-hungry journalists off track.
I have zero inside knowledge - this is pure guesswork - but I would suspect that this is one of those misinformation rumours. Unless Apple are going to debut some brand new battery technology with the next Watch, this one's a dud.
As this article https://www.theguardian.com/te... in the Guardian reported almost exactly one year ago to the day, it is possible to use "side channel data" such as battery life to track a user between different web sites. Unfortunately, that tracking capability only exists if the user is internet-connected at the time...
Similarly, the ability to track a mobile device via a wifi transponder is only possible if the device has wifi enabled.
So what we have here is a new tracking vector, since now we have the means to track someone via a bluetooth emission that a device on their person might make. Of course, the range of bluetooth means that this is only really viable in say a commercial environment like a department store, or a shopping mall, or similar.
Yet another case of someone adding a feature without stopping to think about how it could be subverted or used against the owner of the device that supports it.
OK...
/. posts and attribute mine to me would be the equivalent of a massively extended brute force crack... This works for individual web sites, but maybe not for access sessions.
I think this is a topic that we can deconstruct and conclude that the answer is "it depends". Suppose that I want the ability to write posts to slashdot anonymously. However, slashdot need to have the ability to call me out if I post something that is defamatory or illegal [in the UK certain statements can be construed to incite religious hatred, which is now illegal, for example].
So what this needs is a mechanism by which I can post to slashdot, but that when I do, my "identity" is different every single time. If we can design a mechanism by which it is impossible for slashdot [or any other site] to aggregate all of my actions over time and attribute them to me, but can take a single action of mine and attribute it] then we are close to our goals.
If we define the problem in this way, then perhaps we are moving towards something that works a bit like a cryptographic one-time-pad. For any single instance [of me posting something to slashdot] you have the ability to perform a computationally complex action that can be used to determine that I was the originator, but the only way to aggregate all
To safely anonymise access sessions, we would need some form of abstraction integrated directly with the routing protocol, again such that it might be possible to deconstruct a single "session" [or maybe even trace a single given packet would be better] but not have the ability to do more than that because the protocol itself imposes a degree of abstraction and chaos.
The more I tihnk aobut it, the more I tihnk we could do it [basically scale TOR to work for the entire net, with refinements. Unfortunately, I think that legislation would be passed that would outlaw it before it could be finished...
The practices outlined in this research don't just harm the credibility of scientific journals, they also undermine what could be the legitimate work of hard-working scientists who have submitted papers in good faith.
I can only hope that this analysis gets properly peer-reviewed (to verify if these journals really are publishing charlatans) and then anyone who has submitted legitimate research to these entities demand a full refund. If money changed hands, there is an implicit contract [if not an explicit one] that the publication in question actually performs "peer review" work... It certainly does not appear to be the case here.
I wonder if the entities named will try and claim this was down to a "rogue reviewer" or that they are actually more of a "vanity publishing" service, just for scientists? Or maybe they'll sue.
It's odd, isn't it: governments the world over are never short of things that they want to legislate against, but somehow they fail to take account of shady practices like these... I wonder... do you think that the current PoTUS would consider these to be fine, upstanding publishers or "Fake News! Sad!" ???
This might be a bit of a novice or silly question, but is there a reason why this specific release of this specific GNU/Linux distro has a dedicated posting here on Slashdot?
This isn't flame-bait and I'm not trolling... I'm actually trying to understand the process of selecting news-worthy submissions for posting. I can't recall seeing similar articles like this [either for earlier ubuntu distributions, or others] and I didn't see anything in the article that highlights this as special other than the unusually short lifespan of this particular release. Is that the reason for the posting, or could it be something else?
Genuinely curious.
This is exactly the point.
The danger is that if we accept a scientific analysis which over-reaches the facts, then we are at risk of encouraging this behaviour.
If we let supposition stand and, to borrow a line from "Dead Poets Society", we "let rumour fester into fact..." then we actually undermine the credibility of the entire scientific process. I am sorry if that comes across as a provocative or controversial claim to make, but I just think that with something like this, it's better to be cautious in our claims, and to carefully state where and how we are estimating. That doesn't necessarily subvert or detract from the work, but it does help to differentiate between provable fact and projection.
If you click through and read the article, you will find a discussion that explains that this entire conclusion was based on a rare set of footprints that were found to be of a certain spacing. They then started a variety of different extrapolations, covering values such as estimating the height of the dinosaur's hips above the ground, the weight of the dinosaur and so on.
Their determination that this set of tracks came from a Tyrannosaur was made on the basis that there is no knowledge of any other matching species in that area at that time.
Having measured the stride of this dinosaur and estimated the height of its hips above the ground, they then used measurements taken from "living, walking bipeds" to make their claim.
Now, I'm all in favour of scientific research and analysis. I love reading about cutting edge insights to the world around us. I think it enriches our lives. On the other hand, when I read this article published on the Science website, the first thought that came to me was, "There are an awful lot of assumptions and approximations in here..."
They don't know, definitively, that this was a T-Rex.
They don't know what it was doing at the time the tracks were made [for example, if it had been stalking prey, maybe it was treading softly, moving slowly, so perhaps it's steps were uncharacteristic.
They don't know whether it was injured, or weak, or unwell. You can't determine the nutritional state of a hundreds-of-millions-of-years-dead dinosaur from a footprint, can you?
They are also assuming that things like the metabolic efficiency, the muscular strength and even the bone density of dinosaurs are all perfectly equivalent to what we see today. In other words, they are cherry-picking facts to fit their theories.
I am absolutely certain that there is some great research and excellent work being undertaken by the Team that made this announcement, but this is far, far short of science. This is assumption and theory and conjecture based upon an entirely incomplete fact base.
In one sense it is not worth being concerned over one-off articles like this. In the fullness of time we would expect scientific peer review to challenge and refine both the method of analysis and the final conclusions of this piece of work. Well, hopefully. The concern with this specific story is evidenced by the fact that it has been picked up and linked here, on slashdot. Which means it will be picked up by other science and tech news outlets and perhaps even broader news media. This is fine if the original work is robust and defensible, but in this case [at least as far as the original piece goes] that does not appear to be true... Oh well.