If we're going to contemplate a rethink of the mechanics of government, can I suggest that we start at "first principles"?
I may have this completely wrong (and happy to be corrected, but this is secondary to my point)... but I think that the origins of what we currently think of as representative democratic government originates in the UK in the Middle Ages. In return for money for wars, the King was forced to give up some power and through that deal, the UK gradually transitioned to representative government. The House of Commons in the UK was founded in 1341 - the fourteenth century!
Here's the key part... The technology of the day was "horse and rider". It took between 4 days and one week to travel from London to York. The fastest means of communication was a courier on a fast horse... This meant that the only way the areas in the north of the country could participate in the decisions of government was to pick a volunteer who would travel to London (the seat of power) and represent the town or village. What has happened, then is that we have adopted a model of government that was effectively forced by the limitations of transport of the age.
In other words, we have based today's model of government upon a set of conditions that are very nearly 700 years old and are completely out-dated.
With modern communications technologies it is entirely practical for our government to allow us, as citizens, to participate at a much greater level than we do today. Indeed, any major decision could easily be supported by an all-digital referendum. For example, we might decide that we would only go to war with another country if a democratic majority of citizens agreed that it was necessary to do so.
When I make this observation in discussions with friends, I sometimes get challenges along the lines of, "It would be too easy to rig those sorts of votes..." but to which my response is always to point out that every single day we process billions of dollars worth of transactions electronically. Many people conduct their banking by mobile phone. Many more use the internet. So there are ways and means by which we could make this secure.
You might wonder why is it that we don't have this form of more democratic voting already? Why do we continue to rely upon representative government if a better alternative is available? The answer is simple: corruption is much easier to achieve when you only have a small number of people you need to bribe/blackmail/coerce. No? Just look at the amount of money in politics. Just look at the amount spent in campaign contributions? Just look at the number of lobbyists running around in the halls of power. A move toward distributed democratization would truly give power back to the people. It would also reduce the vast and expensive machine of government to an administrative office that served the will of the people.
One of the challenges faced by the analysis in the paper is that it seems to have been forced to assume that external influences on the nature of research have not changed since the "Golden Age of Science" in the early part of the 20th century.
We are now living in what many people refer to as "The Information Age" - i.e. one in which knowledge has intrinsic value.
Much more importantly, we are also living in a much wealthier age, one in which there are no shortage of Venture Capital firms, VC funds and even large, established organisations that run their own so-called moon-shot programs.
Look at the world of Investment Banking and you will see that there are literally trillions of dollars of capital, all swirling around, ready to invest in "the next big thing". Whilst I would be very reluctant to say what sort of influence that amount of pressure has on scientific research (in that it is not clear to me whether that would tend to drive down risk taking and lead to less ambitious experimentation, or whether it would drive up diversity and willingness to take research risks), it seems obvious to me that it will have an impact.
Now look at the overlaps and partnerships which occur between university research programs and big industry. Not only do we have industry directly funding university research, we also have many more cases of very capable research teams setting themselves up in business on the back of their discoveries.
So whilst I don't feel as though I have enough hard data to be able to objectively assess the assertion of the original article, I rather think that the pervasive environment around the scientific community - and in particular the way that the scientific community interacts with the rest of society, has changed out of all recognition in the time period that the paper discusses.
On this basis I would have to respectfully say that this simply doesn't work as a like-for-like comparison. There are just too many contributing factors here.
In fairness, the DoD Evaluation Criteria go back to 1983 - I am sure that there are more recent versions that could be referenced.
But rather than focus on the Orange Book specifically, consider instead as an example of a principle. That principle was a determined effort to design a set of operating criteria and behaviours that would result in a secure operating system. So yes, I think it can be done.
You make some excellent points here, but I think you are dangerously close to falling in to a trap... Specifically, I think we need to be very careful if we think about what topics would/would not fall into some form of "fact checking" control.
You see, the problem is that modern politics has politicized *so much* that we can't safely rule anything out. For example, one only has to read Donald Trump's Twitter feed to see that very broad range of topics that interest him. We must of course consider ALL of those topics to be political in nature once they appear on the Trump's Twitter feed... There are of course other examples, but you get the point - there isn't a neat line we can draw around a range of topics and declare with any confidence, "This is all political, anything not on this list isn't..."
So I think we need to keep working at your suggestion, just come up with a better way of figuring out what the scope needs to be. Personally, I'd go so far as to suggest that if we get to the point of full accountability on social media, and then every social media platform has a set of published conditions under which your identity will be released to authorities - then at that point we can rely upon the general public to flag content where they believe lies are being offered.
This is a terrible example, but... If I go to the cnn.com web site without an ad blocker, I see commercials claiming that some random financial institution is offering refunds - so if I am or was a customer, I should click the commercial to find out if I am in line for a *"huge"* payout... Any reasonable person would look at that advertisement and immediately conclude that it is click-bait. Yet the advertisers get away with posting it on a daily basis - and CNN get a slice of the revenue for hosting something that is clearly a fraudulent commercial.
What I'm arguing for is a law that requires anyone posting content like that on line (user content in a forum, or commercials) to be required to have a "complain about this content" button that would trigger a challenge. I'd like to see the hosting company required to investigate (maybe based on a threshold number of complaints). But most importantly, I'd like to see the obnoxious outfits like "Outbrain" and others get hit with a massive lawsuit from a decent Attorney General or three. Once word gets round that such blatant lies won't be tolerated and that anyone perpetrating the lie will be dealt with, the rot will stop.
The problem is, when blatant lies like Outbrain's go un-challenged, we are telling that companies and others that it's perfectly OK to lie on the internet, because there are no negative consequences for doing so. That's what we've got to stop.
This is a fabulously important question for us to look at.
The answer is: because we continue to operate operating systems and software which are acutely vulnerable to malware - and because we refuse to learn from the lessons of past mistakes.
A big part of the problem is that we've now had malware present in our lives for such a long period of time that there are professional developers and system designers working today who have never known a technology community without malware. Given this context, it is not entirely surprising that we have come to collectively accept this situation as a "given".
The important thing that we need to remember is that it is entirely possible to design and produce a technology stack that is not vulnerable to malware. It's certainly not going to be easy, but it's also not impossible. So now the question becomes: how badly do we want it? The problem is, nobody is asking that question, there is not public discussion or debate.
So the most widespread software in use today (the Microsoft Windows platform, Android, iOS, etc) are not being design in a way where the designers have been given a (design) brief or have been set design objectives with respect to the ability of that software to withstand malware.
So we have logical partitioning and "containerisation" as third-party add-ons (which have to be paid for). We have come to accept this as "the norm". But just think for a moment about that situation in, say, motor vehicles. Imagine that cars and trucks were sold without brakes. Or without locks on the doors. Imagine that you had to buy your car and then somehow get it to a brake system specialist and pick and choose a reasonable set of brakes for your vehicle. Oh, and if you chose wrong and your car didn't stop and you rolled into someone - well, that's just your fault... Would that be acceptable to motorists today?
Somehow I don't think so.
So why should we be willing to accept and pay for incomplete, vulnerable and defective software - and then, having made a purchase (and if you want a copy of, say Windows 10 Pro for a new-build PC, then you are looking at hundreds of dollars), you need to go and spend a bunch more cash making that product secure.
It's really easy to discuss this and fall in to the trap of bashing Microsoft, Apple or Google for shipping vulnerable or incomplete software. But the truth is that we're responsible for this, not them. We're responsible, because enough of us are willing to just roll over and accept this situation. If we collectively pushed back hard enough, maybe used the law, maybe worked to overturn those horrible EULA "this software comes without any warranty, expressed or implied" schtick and had lawmakers push for tighter and more stringent controls, then maybe we'd get better software.
Sadly, I can't see the market fixing this. If it were possible, it would have happened by now.
I'm going to respectfully disagree with you on that. In April this year, Facebook posted profits that rose 65% over the same period in 2017, with $12 billion in revenue (in a *quarter*) and profits at a record-setting $4.9 billion. I don't think you can get more mainstream than Facebook. In the same time period, Google posted profits of $9.4 billion, up from $5.4 billion a year earlier. Googles revenue for the quarter jumped 26% to $31.1 billion.
So I'd have to say that I think that the well established Social Media players understand profits very well indeed.
However, there are other factors playing here, and one of them concerns the psychological means that these companies use to keep their users "addicted" [sic]. There is an excellent paper that discusses this, called Deceived by Design.
Now, although this paper was written primarily with focus on the way that Tech Companies are using techniques to discourage users from exercising our rights to privacy, the principles that are described can also be applied to keeping users "going back for more".
Here's another way to think about it: in the 21st century, we understand the basics of addiction and we understand chemical addictions to things like alcohol and a range of habit-forming drugs (nicotine, pain-killers, plus of course illegal narcotics). We also understand addictions for things like gambling, self-harm, sex, and so on. Yet we're only just beginning to talk about addictions to social media. I have friends who will unashamedly admit to checking their Facebook Feed 50, 60 times a day. We shrug and consider that irrelevant. Yet if that same person were smoking 50, 60 cigarettes a day, we'd likely tell them to cut back and get help.
I think that mainstream social media are much, much smarter than the established industries that deal with regulation, likely because a large part of their business model is understanding "what makes people tick". As a quick check, I just ran a search using Google, asking the question, "how many psychologists does Facebook employ?" and the first returned hit was to LinkedIn, with the result heading that read, "783 Facebook Psychology Jobs | LinkedIn"...
I am concerned that companies like Facebook have become the 21st Century equivalent of Microsoft - the company that can do no wrong and is immune to meaningful regulation.
The Gaia Theory/Principle/Hypothesis - see href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis">here, suggests one possible answer for the observed data.
I am very much aware that the Gaia Theory receives a very skeptical view from the broader scientific community. I am certainly not making any claim as to its veracity here, but there do seem to be interesting parallels between the Gaia theory and the observed results.
It's important to note, however, that Gaia breaks down, potentially significantly, with edge cases. For example, the introduction of the Lion Fish to the Caribbean - an area where it has no natural predators - has resulted in a largely un-checked population explosion; the same is true of Crown-of-Thorns starfish. So it is possible that Gaia breaks down either where one species is introduced to an otherwise relatively stable ecosystem, or where an apex predator is introduced that has or develops the ability to consume multiple different species for food.
This is somewhat different from the idea of mutualism, but I'd still be interested in seeing an attempt to apply Gaia theory to the observed data.
There are numerous steps that Facebook could take that would allow them to positively identify every single registered user. This would reduce the potential for fake content, because anyone found to be posting the same would be identifiable, would lose their accounts and would not be able to re-activate them.
The problem is that not only might this discourage people from creating an account, but it would also introduce an operational cost for Facebook themselves, since they would have to pay people to review such content and make decisions about revoking access.
But it is possible, all of it.
In fact, this is an excellent example of the reason that there needs to be a tighter form of regulation around companies like Facebook, because - as this example clearly shows - unless there is a legal obligation for Facebook to do something, they won't - because it will dent their profits. Going even further, strengthening the requirement for Facebook (and similar organisations) to establish the identity of users doesn't really have a material impact on the free speech of those users. Facebook wouldn't be telling those people what to write or not write. Instead, they would be making their users accountable for their actions.
Which, on reflection, seems entirely reasonable.
No, I don't have a Facebook account. Never have. Never will.
In May this year, reports emerged to warn of new, un-traced pollutants that were extending the damage to the ozone layer, particularly in the southern hemisphere.
Now, barely 5 months later, we have this very different perspective. Not being a climate scientist, I'm not sure how we can discern which of these two articles carries the most accurate reporting. (In that it seems unlikely that new damage observed in May could be healed this quickly).
I am a little concerned that the more recent of these two articles (carried in the BBC and linked in this slashdot piece) seems to make no reference of the concerns raised earlier this year. Very interested to know if anyone can shed light on this apparent disparity.
Is it to cater for system-on-a-chip systems, or maybe laptops, where there is no dedicated GPU? For example, something like we see in Intel's Core i7 7700T and 8700T processors, which bundled Iris graphics with the core processor on one chip?
On the one hand, it is always good to see innovation and improvement in technology. Kudos to AMD and Intel for continuing to develop and evolve new technologies.
On the other hand, am I the only one that thinks that both companies have completely lost the plot when it comes to model/variant naming conventions?
In fairness, a big part of the problem is not entirely the fault of the chip makers... As the core computing world (desktop/mobile/server) matures, we are seeing the most successful companies achieve dominance through an ability to tweak their designs to more closely match the demands of their clients. Everything is up for optimisation - clock speed, core and thread counts, L1 and L2 cache, TDP, power consumption, the works. This generates a *lot* of different processor models.
The problem is that when many of these chip permutations then make their way in to the retail channel, the resultant model naming conventions and "chip families" just result in endless confusion. Whilst it's also fair to say that it is not too difficult to figure out low, medium and high performance models [start by looking at prices within a given range, then dig for details], we're increasingly needing to become chip specialists who have a very clear idea of our intended use cases if we want to have confidence that we've bought the best chip for our desired task profile.
I'm curious to know if slashdot readers think this is a fair criticism and/or whether there would be any interest in having a more uniform way of assessing the relative merits of different chips. For example, if I compare the Intel Core i7-7700T with the Core i7-8700T, not only is the move from 7th generation to 8th generation relatively easy to spot, but when we look at the specifications, then with pretty much everything except the base processor frequency, we can see the improvements delivered by the later generation. That sort of direct comparison just doesn't seem possible with the latest product announcements...
What would you do differently? Or are the current naming conventions from AMD and Intel easy enough to follow?
I absolutely understand the point you make here. I think there is a difference between the two views we have expressed - I specifically chose to use the term, "something we need", whereas you, with equal validity, chose to express the same thing as "something you choose".
I do not pretend to know whether high-speed internet access is a "luxury" at one extreme or a "basic human right" at the other (I have seen both arguments made - but here I'm doing my best to duck that question). Having said that, I would like to live in a country where a child living on a farm in rural Kansas has the same access to the world as one living in a multi-million-dollar mansion in The Hamptons. If they can both get decent internet, then that, at least, is a great equalizer.
I do not for one moment pretend that internet access is in any way, shape or form equivalent in life importance to healthcare... but if I can use healthcare as an example... One of the things I'd like to have is a country where the level and quality of medical care you get (if you had a stroke, say) was the same, irrespective of your Zip code. In the 21st century, I don't think the wealthiest country in the world should run a "Zip Code Lottery" for health care services. Hopefully most people would agree that this is something we should strive for.
Could we do something approaching similar with broadband? Yes, of course we could. Should we? That is something I, personally would be in favour of, although I concede that it needs to be a collective decision.
At the heart of my thoughts on this, however, is a basic truth: that for as long as we get *services* from for-profit companies, those services will only ever be "what they want to provide" and never, "what we actually want". It doesn't *have* to be this way. Believing it does is a mistake that the telecommunications lobby would love us all to make.
Right... And the only reason I was cautious about this option is the potential for a backlash for the people who live in urban areas: "Hey, how come we got to pay taxes to subsidize people who live out in the countryside. If they want fast internet, why don't they move to the city?"
The answers might be obvious to you and I (because you can't really have a large farm in the middle of a city - and people who live and work on farms have just as much a right to high speed internet as anyone else), but I think we still need to make this point sufficiently clear so we all stay within the same frame of reference.
The problem with Option 1 is that it is bound to generate resistance from the very vocal right wing - the idea that "you pay for what you want" and "let market forces decide". The problem is that the things we think of as "services" should not have to be run "for profit". The whole idea of a service is that it should be operated for the most cost-effective means possible, which makes the notion of operating at a profit a bit of a non-starter.
But I think we have to be very careful how we discuss the funding of projects like this [where there is little to no market incentive to make the up-front investment]. This starts to look scarily similar to orbital launch vehicles and the pork-barrel politics of "cost-plus contracts". The last thing I want do is give the telecommunications industry the idea that they can make a pitch for "cost plus" contracts to cover rural areas. Heck no.
Really please compare wiring up say the Shenandoah valley with Richmond and get back to me on how the technical requirements are no different. When you can't use line of site, when there are no buried conduit just telephone polls along side thin strips of asphalt joining small communities. It gets even harder when you push east out of the valley into the Mountains."
We might be discussing this at crossed purposes.
What I am trying to convey here is that running a buried cable across 10km of urban New York is similar in terms of effort and technical requirements (i.e. the actual technical performance of the cable and the devices attached to it) as running buried cable across 10km of rural New York State. The relevant factors are going to be the distances involved. In fact, we could argue that trenching cables across upstate New York is less of an effort because there is *far* less risk that your trench could disturb something else important!!!
But even so, the real point is that a 10km trenched cable run == a 10km trenched cable run in terms of the technical performance characteristics demanded of the technology involved.
That's why I wrote technical requirements . If I wanted to discuss the relative difficulty of trenching a cable through the mountains, then I would have used the term logistical and environmental requirements.
I think we are actually in broad agreement; I just think that you might have mis-interpreted the point I was trying to make as being broader than I had intended.
You raise a fair point, but I don't think that the argument stands up to scrutiny. The reasons for this are mainly technical...
Firstly, the model you describe is fine in an area where there is no risk of network saturation. At first glance, this seems like a non-issue - after all, aren't rural areas light on traffic by default? The problem comes when the amount of traffic carried by a common wireless network has to scale. There is only so much network frequency allocated to (for example) 4G. By contrast, a wired network - which doesn't leak traffic out of a physical cable - is much more resilient to scaling. When a link becomes saturated it's easier to spot. With luck, it should be possible to route around it (at least, if the cabled network has any resiliency built in to it).
Secondly, a 4G model can be a lot more fragile, for at least 2 reasons. Providers of the signal masts deploy them without overlap (or with minimal overlap), which means that the failure of a single mast can take out an entire area. Secondly, in the case of any form of emergency scenario, a variety of different federal agencies have the ability to turn up and grab (and hold) all available bandwidth. Basically, 4G and older networks recognise certain types of connected devices as "priority", which means that if I am a FEMA worker, I can turn up at a disaster area and be guaranteed a network connection if there is a functional tower in range...
I'm less confident of offering a third technical basis, because I have only indirect experience. Basically, wifi networks [in my personal experience] are good with "bursty" traffic - i.e. web searches, email, etc, but they are much less reliable at sustained streaming of content. Maybe I have experienced this with older network access points, but if I wanted to enjoy any streaming network service - and why shouldn't I? - then wired is the way to go... [and that's purely on reliability, before we consider the bandwidth issue, covered above].
I think your views on i.e. 4G are entirely fair, but only up to a point. As an example to quote in support of my position, consider a typical office scenario - if wireless network was so good, why would companies continue to roll out Cat6 cables to every desk or floor port? Why not just slap a wireless adapter in the middle of every ceiling and be done with it? The answer is simple - it just doesn't scale reliably.
The excerpt quoted in the original post hints at but doesn't state the one glaringly obvious point: the fact that the technical requirements to offer broadband to rural communities are no different from those required for urban areas. The only variable is the perceived "return on investment" that the providers might receive in return for their capital outlay.
In a nutshell, this encapsulates the key weakness of competitive markets and capitalism - it breaks down when something we need is not economically viable to those able to provide it - without an economic incentive, why would they bother?
Whilst the political aspects of this debate could keep us in debate for hours, I think the potential solutions boil down to just two:-
1. Have rural municipalities provide the service, funded out of general taxation.
2. Write the contracts offered to providers in the urban areas so that the grant of each "urban area license" *also* requires the provider to offer their services to a rural area, such that the sum total of all urban contracts at the national level also includes a requirement to provide rural services so that the whole country is covered.
Want the contract for cable in Manhattan? Great - but you get to do the *whole* of New York State, including all rural areas, or you pay penalties.
Now, if those contracts were written such that in return for the award, the companies were accepting a legal liability for non-performance such that if they failed to provide services to the rural areas, they would have to pay fines and penalties, then they will be incentivized to provide a complete service. Then, all we'd need would be an independent (i.e. government operated) monitoring function (say the FCC) with a clear, documented and unambiguous set of tests that will be covered. Live in rural New York State and can't get broadband? Report your issue with the monitoring function and encourage your neighbours to do the same, and the NY State provider (or county provider, or whatever) has to pay fines until they fix the issue.
It's really important to make this model one in which the incumbent is hit with financial penalties if they fail to meet the agreed targets, or they would simply walk away from the contract.
Let's be honest, many of these companies have dedicated internet cables across the Atlantic which run at Gigabit+ speeds. Over thousands of miles. Any they claim they can't offer say 200Mb/s to every address in the country? Come on, who are they trying to kid.
The issue here is economic, plain and simple. The providers want all of the most lucrative areas [where densities are maximized and their profits will be fat] and they're not interested in locations with poor likely return. So the ONLY ways to address this are to either cover those locations with a national non-profit (i.e. government funded) provider, paid for out of federal taxes, or to write the contracts for existing commercial operators to give them a legal obligation to provide full, national coverage.
Will that hurt their profits? Yes. But nobody is sticking a gun to their heads and telling them that they *have* to bid for the lucrative franchises.
Oh, and write the franchises so that they run for fixed terms, with explicitly documented investment requirements and objective measures [i.e. so much fiber laid, so many homes connected, fix times at measurable values, etc. If the company doesn't meet their contract, they are out after 5 years.
This is one of those "devil in the detail" stories.
For example, if the government used the resources of AWS for a basic "elastic compute" facility - i.e. to cope with surges in demand of their own in-house compute farms, and if (big if) all the applications that the government ran used a form of Application Level Enryption (ALE) that did not require the use of cloud-provider-owned HSMs, then this looks like a more-or-less conventional facilities outsourcing program.
But what if it's not so clear-cut as that? What if the government stores data in the could, long term? What if the government uses Amazon HSMs to secure their content? By implication, the risk here is that this would give Amazon administrators access to the government's data. Should that happen, the least dangerous thing I'd expect to see is Amazon starting to shut down accounts for anyone on a government watch list. The worst-case scenario is much more significant.
So a big part of the potential issue list for this sort of model will depend significantly upon the architecture that the Cloud providers agree to. Disclosure: I've worked for a very large financial institution that discussed cloud services with Amazon - and they absolutely refused to allow us to host our own HSMs in Amazon data centers. How likely are they to change that answer?
The second question, after the relative safety of the data once it's in the cloud, concerns the way that the government is setting about this sort of procurement. There was, if I recall, some interesting material in the documentation released by Edward Snowden. The short version of this story is that BAH were putting together a proposal to meet a government RFC, in which a BAH technician raised the concern that even though it would be possible to implement the solution as requested, there was no way that the government would be able to interpret all the data the new system would collect. A BAH Manager wrote back, "Look, you're technically correct, OK? But your job isn't to tell the client that their idea won't work, your job is to sell the client whatever the client asks for. Then, next year, when the client realizes that this solution doesn't work, we can sell them an upgrade to fix that problem..."
In other words, there is the danger that some of the providers that tender for this sort of business [and note: I am not for one moment suggesting that any company would certainly do this; rather, I am pointing out an implementation risk] might well be able or tempted to sell a solution to the government that just doesn't work. It's my experience that too often when a government runs a bidding process for a solution, the people responding to the bid know so much more about the topic than the person managing the bid, they run rings around them.
This is particularly relevant because of the subject matter likely involved here. I can easily see the government saying that the entire bidding and outsourcing process has to be classified because "national security", which means that proper accountability controls will be pushed aside.
During the April update this year, I had 3 W10 installations to get through the process. None of them worked, although one in particular went spectacularly wrong and wiped out files on the system's hidden boot partition, basically resulting in the system attempting to reboot and crashing out. There was no choice left but to perform a clean installation, then let that fresh image update.
The broken process left all sorts of log and event files scattered across my SSD and I provided them to MS, who were unable to determine the cause.
The really interesting thing for me is that the image that ate itself happens to run on the same hardware as another W10 image. I have 2 licensed copies of Windows and I use a "drive bay" to swap different bootable drives in to the same hardware. So when I upgraded the "other" image on the same platform, I was surprised to see the upgrade generate a completely different set of errors.
The biggest configuration difference between these two builds is that I use one for gaming and one for office work. Although both had the latest nVidia drivers on board, the gaming build used nVidia desktop "Surround" to create a single workspace of 5760x1200, whilst the office build just treated the display space as 3 connected monitors.
The most frustrating thing is that the feedback I was getting from the triage team who helped me (they were all volunteers and they were all excellent) was that MS had been shipping code they knew to have multiple bugs and issues in it. The problem they were having in triage was that there were *so many* bugs, it was proving next to impossible to narrow down to a specific fault.
Nadella might have turned around Microsoft's economic slide into oblivion, but his governance of the technical robustness of his company's products is, sadly, non-existent. Worse for me, both of these W10 licenses were for new-build hardware; I had no older licenses that I could grandfather in, so I'm out of pocket over £400 and have 2 systems [one box] that I simply don't trust to work reliably when MS push updates. If it were a case of "free but buggy or purchased but robust", I'd take "purchased but robust" every time. What I've actually got is "purchased but buggy". The most offensive thing is: Microsoft's actions - their continued pushing of buggy code, when there are NO COMMERCIAL DRIVERS FOR DOING SO is just plain offensive.
I wish they would just stop. Produce zero new features until ALL the bugs are squashed.
There's a reason I'm writing this post whilst running Mint Linux - and it's because I'm not trusting Windows at the moment. If I don't need to go back to Windows, I won't. I have nothing but respect and admiration for the triage volunteers over there, but Microsoft the company really don't care. That stinks.
As an aside, it's interesting to see the relatively large number of comments this thread has attracted already. That strongly suggests that this is a widespread concern or issue.
In the summer of 2016 I purchased an HP OfficeJet 8100 printer. Relatively fast print speed, duplex printing, offered as an "office printer", able to handle reasonable workloads, but with longevity and long term reliability in mind. Worked perfectly up until earlier this year. Only ever used 100% original HP inks.
Earlier this year (March?) Microsoft shipped a major update to Windows 10 that nuked my Windows build and forced a clean OS re-installation. By the time I got to installing the printer driver, I was so tired that I mistakenly agreed to activating the "phone home" feature of the software part of the driver. Within a day the printer died, with the diagnostics complaining of a print head failure.
I've done a lot of hardware maintenance in my time, on equipment far more delicate than a print head. I stripped the head from the printer, cleaned it, put it all back together but this made no difference. The printer had been bricked, remotely. The bricking happened the moment I connected my printer software to the internet. Coincidence? I think not. There was *nothing* wrong with the print head.
This is a long-standing tactic of these companies. It's about time a consumer watchdog took them to task. Better, it's about time a government prosecuted them for it. It's about time a few company directors did some serious jail time for fraud.
It's worth bearing in mind that as you increase the amount of RAM, particularly in high performance systems like those with i9 processors, that the system has to reduce the memory access speeds accordingly.
I know that this is something to do with the actual RAM timing profile, but I am not aware of the precise technical driver behind it.
In other words, if you are adding RAM to gain maximum performance, then there is a sweet spot that you can actually go beyond - and to go beyond will have the effect of slowing your machine down. Note that this "maximum speed limit" is really only related to machines with memory running at absolute maximum performance, so it's possible that RAM clocked at "normal" speeds might not experience this limitation.
I may have got this completely wrong, but didn't a certain very large and well known Wall Street bank get found out from doing exactly this?
If I recall, the ruse went something like this:-
1. A client of the bank used the trading platform provided by the bank to put in a purchase for a large enough quantity of stock that it would likely have the effect of adjusting the price of that stock.
2. The bank made a determination that this would be a "market moving" trade, and so, using an "ultra fast" computer link, ordered that precise amount of the stock for the bank's own portfolio.
3. In response to the bank's purchase, the price of the stock went up.
4. Then the bank processed the purchase order from their client, except that what actually happened at this point was that the bank sold the client the shares from the bank's own portfolio, because of course the bank had just "beaten the client to the punch".
5. The bank booked the difference in prices as an operating profit.
Having said that, it's worth bearing in mind that this sort of practice is only really effective in high frequency trading scenarios. If the client is adopting a buy-and-hold strategy [something along the lines of a Warren Buffet approach] then, excepting the odd period of extreme volatility [witness last week's sell-off], perhaps coming just in time to bolster Q3 earnings?, those sorts of short-term variations won't have so much impact on the long-term growth of a stock or the market in general.
This might be an accurate statement in the US, but it's certainly not true worldwide. I am a (very small scale) UK investor, primarily investing a monthly contribution to an ISA account (UK-specific, limited tax-free savings). I chose to invest, via a "fund supermarket" into a primarily equities portfolio (composition varies).
This operates in exactly the way you describe, but the OP and your comments both stand. For example, if you are a "buy-and-hold" investor, then paying for the benefits of a fund supermarket, when you are not actively trading your portfolio, could soon become expensive. The platform I use bills out at half of one percent of balance per year.
At first blush that might not sound like much, but say you've got $100,000 (or £100,000) invested and say you're just cranking the handle each month, adding at the rate of say 500-1000 monthly. You're going to pay *at least* 500 yearly in fees: for what? You're making 12 transactions - all purchases. Say each of those transactions is for 1000... Now let's do the math.
500 / 12 = 41.67...
So, each month you're buying say (£/$)1000 in additional stocks, for which you're paying (£/$)41.67 in transaction fees. In other words, the fees you're paying amount to 4.17% of the transaction value.
And the real kicker is that the more successful *you* are - i.e. the better your fund accumulates in value, the *more* that is taken from you in fees - taken by a company that has done absolutely nothing to help enhance the value of your investment. A fund supermarket is a terrific means to simplify your investing, but it's a huge drain on your wealth through cunningly-disguised fees.
Unfortunately for most of us, your observations are largely entirely correct - unless or until your personal wealth rises to the point where you would be considered a "High Net Worth" individual (which today is going to mean a net worth of at least 10 million), then your legal options as an investor are to chose between a variety of schemes that are carefully designed to rip you off. Above that threshold, then the biggest opportunities that come your way are likely to be in the form of tax breaks - because you can afford to swing very large sums of money in to investment vehicles that are simply not available to the man-on-the-street.
Fascinating bit of research; kudos to the authors.
Just one bit of pedantry (sorry!). When the OP writes, "This is a clue to astronomers that something potentially big, i.e. a super-Earth, is pushing these objects into similar types of orbits.", the use of the term "super-Earth" prompted a non-technical friend of mine [who was reading the article over my shoulder] to ask, "So there's, like, an amazing Earth, way out in space, right on the edge of our solar system?"
Obviously I explained that in this context the phrase simply meant, "physically bigger than the Earth in size and/or mass" and that in reality, any planet orbiting beyond Pluto would be a barren world of rock and/or ice, to which the response was, "Well, why doesn't the article say that, then?"
Given the way that lots of content covered by slashdot gets picked up by the mainstream media, maybe we should try and avoid terms liable to confuse or be misunderstood by less technical readership?
Slashdot Mirror
If we're going to contemplate a rethink of the mechanics of government, can I suggest that we start at "first principles"?
I may have this completely wrong (and happy to be corrected, but this is secondary to my point)... but I think that the origins of what we currently think of as representative democratic government originates in the UK in the Middle Ages. In return for money for wars, the King was forced to give up some power and through that deal, the UK gradually transitioned to representative government. The House of Commons in the UK was founded in 1341 - the fourteenth century!
Here's the key part... The technology of the day was "horse and rider". It took between 4 days and one week to travel from London to York. The fastest means of communication was a courier on a fast horse... This meant that the only way the areas in the north of the country could participate in the decisions of government was to pick a volunteer who would travel to London (the seat of power) and represent the town or village. What has happened, then is that we have adopted a model of government that was effectively forced by the limitations of transport of the age.
In other words, we have based today's model of government upon a set of conditions that are very nearly 700 years old and are completely out-dated.
With modern communications technologies it is entirely practical for our government to allow us, as citizens, to participate at a much greater level than we do today. Indeed, any major decision could easily be supported by an all-digital referendum. For example, we might decide that we would only go to war with another country if a democratic majority of citizens agreed that it was necessary to do so.
When I make this observation in discussions with friends, I sometimes get challenges along the lines of, "It would be too easy to rig those sorts of votes..." but to which my response is always to point out that every single day we process billions of dollars worth of transactions electronically. Many people conduct their banking by mobile phone. Many more use the internet. So there are ways and means by which we could make this secure.
You might wonder why is it that we don't have this form of more democratic voting already? Why do we continue to rely upon representative government if a better alternative is available? The answer is simple: corruption is much easier to achieve when you only have a small number of people you need to bribe/blackmail/coerce. No? Just look at the amount of money in politics. Just look at the amount spent in campaign contributions? Just look at the number of lobbyists running around in the halls of power. A move toward distributed democratization would truly give power back to the people. It would also reduce the vast and expensive machine of government to an administrative office that served the will of the people.
That has to be a good thing.
One of the challenges faced by the analysis in the paper is that it seems to have been forced to assume that external influences on the nature of research have not changed since the "Golden Age of Science" in the early part of the 20th century.
We are now living in what many people refer to as "The Information Age" - i.e. one in which knowledge has intrinsic value.
Much more importantly, we are also living in a much wealthier age, one in which there are no shortage of Venture Capital firms, VC funds and even large, established organisations that run their own so-called moon-shot programs.
Look at the world of Investment Banking and you will see that there are literally trillions of dollars of capital, all swirling around, ready to invest in "the next big thing". Whilst I would be very reluctant to say what sort of influence that amount of pressure has on scientific research (in that it is not clear to me whether that would tend to drive down risk taking and lead to less ambitious experimentation, or whether it would drive up diversity and willingness to take research risks), it seems obvious to me that it will have an impact.
Now look at the overlaps and partnerships which occur between university research programs and big industry. Not only do we have industry directly funding university research, we also have many more cases of very capable research teams setting themselves up in business on the back of their discoveries.
So whilst I don't feel as though I have enough hard data to be able to objectively assess the assertion of the original article, I rather think that the pervasive environment around the scientific community - and in particular the way that the scientific community interacts with the rest of society, has changed out of all recognition in the time period that the paper discusses.
On this basis I would have to respectfully say that this simply doesn't work as a like-for-like comparison. There are just too many contributing factors here.
It is my understanding that it is, indeed possible. For example, consider the DoD Orange Book security classifications for Operating Systems.
See here.
In fairness, the DoD Evaluation Criteria go back to 1983 - I am sure that there are more recent versions that could be referenced.
But rather than focus on the Orange Book specifically, consider instead as an example of a principle. That principle was a determined effort to design a set of operating criteria and behaviours that would result in a secure operating system. So yes, I think it can be done.
You make some excellent points here, but I think you are dangerously close to falling in to a trap... Specifically, I think we need to be very careful if we think about what topics would/would not fall into some form of "fact checking" control.
You see, the problem is that modern politics has politicized *so much* that we can't safely rule anything out. For example, one only has to read Donald Trump's Twitter feed to see that very broad range of topics that interest him. We must of course consider ALL of those topics to be political in nature once they appear on the Trump's Twitter feed... There are of course other examples, but you get the point - there isn't a neat line we can draw around a range of topics and declare with any confidence, "This is all political, anything not on this list isn't..."
So I think we need to keep working at your suggestion, just come up with a better way of figuring out what the scope needs to be. Personally, I'd go so far as to suggest that if we get to the point of full accountability on social media, and then every social media platform has a set of published conditions under which your identity will be released to authorities - then at that point we can rely upon the general public to flag content where they believe lies are being offered.
This is a terrible example, but... If I go to the cnn.com web site without an ad blocker, I see commercials claiming that some random financial institution is offering refunds - so if I am or was a customer, I should click the commercial to find out if I am in line for a *"huge"* payout... Any reasonable person would look at that advertisement and immediately conclude that it is click-bait. Yet the advertisers get away with posting it on a daily basis - and CNN get a slice of the revenue for hosting something that is clearly a fraudulent commercial.
What I'm arguing for is a law that requires anyone posting content like that on line (user content in a forum, or commercials) to be required to have a "complain about this content" button that would trigger a challenge. I'd like to see the hosting company required to investigate (maybe based on a threshold number of complaints). But most importantly, I'd like to see the obnoxious outfits like "Outbrain" and others get hit with a massive lawsuit from a decent Attorney General or three. Once word gets round that such blatant lies won't be tolerated and that anyone perpetrating the lie will be dealt with, the rot will stop.
The problem is, when blatant lies like Outbrain's go un-challenged, we are telling that companies and others that it's perfectly OK to lie on the internet, because there are no negative consequences for doing so. That's what we've got to stop.
This is a fabulously important question for us to look at.
The answer is: because we continue to operate operating systems and software which are acutely vulnerable to malware - and because we refuse to learn from the lessons of past mistakes.
A big part of the problem is that we've now had malware present in our lives for such a long period of time that there are professional developers and system designers working today who have never known a technology community without malware. Given this context, it is not entirely surprising that we have come to collectively accept this situation as a "given".
The important thing that we need to remember is that it is entirely possible to design and produce a technology stack that is not vulnerable to malware. It's certainly not going to be easy, but it's also not impossible. So now the question becomes: how badly do we want it? The problem is, nobody is asking that question, there is not public discussion or debate.
So the most widespread software in use today (the Microsoft Windows platform, Android, iOS, etc) are not being design in a way where the designers have been given a (design) brief or have been set design objectives with respect to the ability of that software to withstand malware.
So we have logical partitioning and "containerisation" as third-party add-ons (which have to be paid for). We have come to accept this as "the norm". But just think for a moment about that situation in, say, motor vehicles. Imagine that cars and trucks were sold without brakes. Or without locks on the doors. Imagine that you had to buy your car and then somehow get it to a brake system specialist and pick and choose a reasonable set of brakes for your vehicle. Oh, and if you chose wrong and your car didn't stop and you rolled into someone - well, that's just your fault... Would that be acceptable to motorists today?
Somehow I don't think so.
So why should we be willing to accept and pay for incomplete, vulnerable and defective software - and then, having made a purchase (and if you want a copy of, say Windows 10 Pro for a new-build PC, then you are looking at hundreds of dollars), you need to go and spend a bunch more cash making that product secure.
It's really easy to discuss this and fall in to the trap of bashing Microsoft, Apple or Google for shipping vulnerable or incomplete software. But the truth is that we're responsible for this, not them. We're responsible, because enough of us are willing to just roll over and accept this situation. If we collectively pushed back hard enough, maybe used the law, maybe worked to overturn those horrible EULA "this software comes without any warranty, expressed or implied" schtick and had lawmakers push for tighter and more stringent controls, then maybe we'd get better software.
Sadly, I can't see the market fixing this. If it were possible, it would have happened by now.
I'm going to respectfully disagree with you on that. In April this year, Facebook posted profits that rose 65% over the same period in 2017, with $12 billion in revenue (in a *quarter*) and profits at a record-setting $4.9 billion. I don't think you can get more mainstream than Facebook. In the same time period, Google posted profits of $9.4 billion, up from $5.4 billion a year earlier. Googles revenue for the quarter jumped 26% to $31.1 billion.
...
So I'd have to say that I think that the well established Social Media players understand profits very well indeed.
However, there are other factors playing here, and one of them concerns the psychological means that these companies use to keep their users "addicted" [sic]. There is an excellent paper that discusses this, called Deceived by Design.
Now, although this paper was written primarily with focus on the way that Tech Companies are using techniques to discourage users from exercising our rights to privacy, the principles that are described can also be applied to keeping users "going back for more".
Here's another way to think about it: in the 21st century, we understand the basics of addiction and we understand chemical addictions to things like alcohol and a range of habit-forming drugs (nicotine, pain-killers, plus of course illegal narcotics). We also understand addictions for things like gambling, self-harm, sex, and so on. Yet we're only just beginning to talk about addictions to social media. I have friends who will unashamedly admit to checking their Facebook Feed 50, 60 times a day. We shrug and consider that irrelevant. Yet if that same person were smoking 50, 60 cigarettes a day, we'd likely tell them to cut back and get help.
I think that mainstream social media are much, much smarter than the established industries that deal with regulation, likely because a large part of their business model is understanding "what makes people tick". As a quick check, I just ran a search using Google, asking the question, "how many psychologists does Facebook employ?" and the first returned hit was to LinkedIn, with the result heading that read, "783 Facebook Psychology Jobs | LinkedIn"
I am concerned that companies like Facebook have become the 21st Century equivalent of Microsoft - the company that can do no wrong and is immune to meaningful regulation.
The Gaia Theory/Principle/Hypothesis - see href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis">here, suggests one possible answer for the observed data.
I am very much aware that the Gaia Theory receives a very skeptical view from the broader scientific community. I am certainly not making any claim as to its veracity here, but there do seem to be interesting parallels between the Gaia theory and the observed results.
It's important to note, however, that Gaia breaks down, potentially significantly, with edge cases. For example, the introduction of the Lion Fish to the Caribbean - an area where it has no natural predators - has resulted in a largely un-checked population explosion; the same is true of Crown-of-Thorns starfish. So it is possible that Gaia breaks down either where one species is introduced to an otherwise relatively stable ecosystem, or where an apex predator is introduced that has or develops the ability to consume multiple different species for food.
This is somewhat different from the idea of mutualism, but I'd still be interested in seeing an attempt to apply Gaia theory to the observed data.
This is all about profit, plain and simple.
There are numerous steps that Facebook could take that would allow them to positively identify every single registered user. This would reduce the potential for fake content, because anyone found to be posting the same would be identifiable, would lose their accounts and would not be able to re-activate them.
The problem is that not only might this discourage people from creating an account, but it would also introduce an operational cost for Facebook themselves, since they would have to pay people to review such content and make decisions about revoking access.
But it is possible, all of it.
In fact, this is an excellent example of the reason that there needs to be a tighter form of regulation around companies like Facebook, because - as this example clearly shows - unless there is a legal obligation for Facebook to do something, they won't - because it will dent their profits. Going even further, strengthening the requirement for Facebook (and similar organisations) to establish the identity of users doesn't really have a material impact on the free speech of those users. Facebook wouldn't be telling those people what to write or not write. Instead, they would be making their users accountable for their actions.
Which, on reflection, seems entirely reasonable.
No, I don't have a Facebook account. Never have. Never will.
In May this year, reports emerged to warn of new, un-traced pollutants that were extending the damage to the ozone layer, particularly in the southern hemisphere.
See here.
Now, barely 5 months later, we have this very different perspective. Not being a climate scientist, I'm not sure how we can discern which of these two articles carries the most accurate reporting. (In that it seems unlikely that new damage observed in May could be healed this quickly).
I am a little concerned that the more recent of these two articles (carried in the BBC and linked in this slashdot piece) seems to make no reference of the concerns raised earlier this year. Very interested to know if anyone can shed light on this apparent disparity.
Is it to cater for system-on-a-chip systems, or maybe laptops, where there is no dedicated GPU? For example, something like we see in Intel's Core i7 7700T and 8700T processors, which bundled Iris graphics with the core processor on one chip?
On the one hand, it is always good to see innovation and improvement in technology. Kudos to AMD and Intel for continuing to develop and evolve new technologies.
On the other hand, am I the only one that thinks that both companies have completely lost the plot when it comes to model/variant naming conventions?
In fairness, a big part of the problem is not entirely the fault of the chip makers... As the core computing world (desktop/mobile/server) matures, we are seeing the most successful companies achieve dominance through an ability to tweak their designs to more closely match the demands of their clients. Everything is up for optimisation - clock speed, core and thread counts, L1 and L2 cache, TDP, power consumption, the works. This generates a *lot* of different processor models.
The problem is that when many of these chip permutations then make their way in to the retail channel, the resultant model naming conventions and "chip families" just result in endless confusion. Whilst it's also fair to say that it is not too difficult to figure out low, medium and high performance models [start by looking at prices within a given range, then dig for details], we're increasingly needing to become chip specialists who have a very clear idea of our intended use cases if we want to have confidence that we've bought the best chip for our desired task profile.
I'm curious to know if slashdot readers think this is a fair criticism and/or whether there would be any interest in having a more uniform way of assessing the relative merits of different chips. For example, if I compare the Intel Core i7-7700T with the Core i7-8700T, not only is the move from 7th generation to 8th generation relatively easy to spot, but when we look at the specifications, then with pretty much everything except the base processor frequency, we can see the improvements delivered by the later generation. That sort of direct comparison just doesn't seem possible with the latest product announcements...
What would you do differently? Or are the current naming conventions from AMD and Intel easy enough to follow?
And that is *exactly* what we should be doing.
I absolutely understand the point you make here. I think there is a difference between the two views we have expressed - I specifically chose to use the term, "something we need", whereas you, with equal validity, chose to express the same thing as "something you choose".
I do not pretend to know whether high-speed internet access is a "luxury" at one extreme or a "basic human right" at the other (I have seen both arguments made - but here I'm doing my best to duck that question). Having said that, I would like to live in a country where a child living on a farm in rural Kansas has the same access to the world as one living in a multi-million-dollar mansion in The Hamptons. If they can both get decent internet, then that, at least, is a great equalizer.
I do not for one moment pretend that internet access is in any way, shape or form equivalent in life importance to healthcare... but if I can use healthcare as an example... One of the things I'd like to have is a country where the level and quality of medical care you get (if you had a stroke, say) was the same, irrespective of your Zip code. In the 21st century, I don't think the wealthiest country in the world should run a "Zip Code Lottery" for health care services. Hopefully most people would agree that this is something we should strive for.
Could we do something approaching similar with broadband? Yes, of course we could. Should we? That is something I, personally would be in favour of, although I concede that it needs to be a collective decision.
At the heart of my thoughts on this, however, is a basic truth: that for as long as we get *services* from for-profit companies, those services will only ever be "what they want to provide" and never, "what we actually want". It doesn't *have* to be this way. Believing it does is a mistake that the telecommunications lobby would love us all to make.
Right... And the only reason I was cautious about this option is the potential for a backlash for the people who live in urban areas: "Hey, how come we got to pay taxes to subsidize people who live out in the countryside. If they want fast internet, why don't they move to the city?"
The answers might be obvious to you and I (because you can't really have a large farm in the middle of a city - and people who live and work on farms have just as much a right to high speed internet as anyone else), but I think we still need to make this point sufficiently clear so we all stay within the same frame of reference.
The problem with Option 1 is that it is bound to generate resistance from the very vocal right wing - the idea that "you pay for what you want" and "let market forces decide". The problem is that the things we think of as "services" should not have to be run "for profit". The whole idea of a service is that it should be operated for the most cost-effective means possible, which makes the notion of operating at a profit a bit of a non-starter.
But I think we have to be very careful how we discuss the funding of projects like this [where there is little to no market incentive to make the up-front investment]. This starts to look scarily similar to orbital launch vehicles and the pork-barrel politics of "cost-plus contracts". The last thing I want do is give the telecommunications industry the idea that they can make a pitch for "cost plus" contracts to cover rural areas. Heck no.
" Whaaaat?
Really please compare wiring up say the Shenandoah valley with Richmond and get back to me on how the technical requirements are no different. When you can't use line of site, when there are no buried conduit just telephone polls along side thin strips of asphalt joining small communities. It gets even harder when you push east out of the valley into the Mountains."
We might be discussing this at crossed purposes.
What I am trying to convey here is that running a buried cable across 10km of urban New York is similar in terms of effort and technical requirements (i.e. the actual technical performance of the cable and the devices attached to it) as running buried cable across 10km of rural New York State. The relevant factors are going to be the distances involved. In fact, we could argue that trenching cables across upstate New York is less of an effort because there is *far* less risk that your trench could disturb something else important!!!
But even so, the real point is that a 10km trenched cable run == a 10km trenched cable run in terms of the technical performance characteristics demanded of the technology involved .
That's why I wrote technical requirements . If I wanted to discuss the relative difficulty of trenching a cable through the mountains, then I would have used the term logistical and environmental requirements .
I think we are actually in broad agreement; I just think that you might have mis-interpreted the point I was trying to make as being broader than I had intended.
You raise a fair point, but I don't think that the argument stands up to scrutiny. The reasons for this are mainly technical...
Firstly, the model you describe is fine in an area where there is no risk of network saturation. At first glance, this seems like a non-issue - after all, aren't rural areas light on traffic by default? The problem comes when the amount of traffic carried by a common wireless network has to scale. There is only so much network frequency allocated to (for example) 4G. By contrast, a wired network - which doesn't leak traffic out of a physical cable - is much more resilient to scaling. When a link becomes saturated it's easier to spot. With luck, it should be possible to route around it (at least, if the cabled network has any resiliency built in to it).
Secondly, a 4G model can be a lot more fragile, for at least 2 reasons. Providers of the signal masts deploy them without overlap (or with minimal overlap), which means that the failure of a single mast can take out an entire area. Secondly, in the case of any form of emergency scenario, a variety of different federal agencies have the ability to turn up and grab (and hold) all available bandwidth. Basically, 4G and older networks recognise certain types of connected devices as "priority", which means that if I am a FEMA worker, I can turn up at a disaster area and be guaranteed a network connection if there is a functional tower in range...
I'm less confident of offering a third technical basis, because I have only indirect experience. Basically, wifi networks [in my personal experience] are good with "bursty" traffic - i.e. web searches, email, etc, but they are much less reliable at sustained streaming of content. Maybe I have experienced this with older network access points, but if I wanted to enjoy any streaming network service - and why shouldn't I? - then wired is the way to go... [and that's purely on reliability, before we consider the bandwidth issue, covered above].
I think your views on i.e. 4G are entirely fair, but only up to a point. As an example to quote in support of my position, consider a typical office scenario - if wireless network was so good, why would companies continue to roll out Cat6 cables to every desk or floor port? Why not just slap a wireless adapter in the middle of every ceiling and be done with it? The answer is simple - it just doesn't scale reliably.
The excerpt quoted in the original post hints at but doesn't state the one glaringly obvious point: the fact that the technical requirements to offer broadband to rural communities are no different from those required for urban areas. The only variable is the perceived "return on investment" that the providers might receive in return for their capital outlay.
In a nutshell, this encapsulates the key weakness of competitive markets and capitalism - it breaks down when something we need is not economically viable to those able to provide it - without an economic incentive, why would they bother?
Whilst the political aspects of this debate could keep us in debate for hours, I think the potential solutions boil down to just two:-
1. Have rural municipalities provide the service, funded out of general taxation.
2. Write the contracts offered to providers in the urban areas so that the grant of each "urban area license" *also* requires the provider to offer their services to a rural area, such that the sum total of all urban contracts at the national level also includes a requirement to provide rural services so that the whole country is covered.
Want the contract for cable in Manhattan? Great - but you get to do the *whole* of New York State, including all rural areas, or you pay penalties.
Now, if those contracts were written such that in return for the award, the companies were accepting a legal liability for non-performance such that if they failed to provide services to the rural areas, they would have to pay fines and penalties, then they will be incentivized to provide a complete service. Then, all we'd need would be an independent (i.e. government operated) monitoring function (say the FCC) with a clear, documented and unambiguous set of tests that will be covered. Live in rural New York State and can't get broadband? Report your issue with the monitoring function and encourage your neighbours to do the same, and the NY State provider (or county provider, or whatever) has to pay fines until they fix the issue.
It's really important to make this model one in which the incumbent is hit with financial penalties if they fail to meet the agreed targets, or they would simply walk away from the contract.
Let's be honest, many of these companies have dedicated internet cables across the Atlantic which run at Gigabit+ speeds. Over thousands of miles. Any they claim they can't offer say 200Mb/s to every address in the country? Come on, who are they trying to kid.
The issue here is economic, plain and simple. The providers want all of the most lucrative areas [where densities are maximized and their profits will be fat] and they're not interested in locations with poor likely return. So the ONLY ways to address this are to either cover those locations with a national non-profit (i.e. government funded) provider, paid for out of federal taxes, or to write the contracts for existing commercial operators to give them a legal obligation to provide full, national coverage.
Will that hurt their profits? Yes. But nobody is sticking a gun to their heads and telling them that they *have* to bid for the lucrative franchises.
Oh, and write the franchises so that they run for fixed terms, with explicitly documented investment requirements and objective measures [i.e. so much fiber laid, so many homes connected, fix times at measurable values, etc. If the company doesn't meet their contract, they are out after 5 years.
This is one of those "devil in the detail" stories.
For example, if the government used the resources of AWS for a basic "elastic compute" facility - i.e. to cope with surges in demand of their own in-house compute farms, and if (big if) all the applications that the government ran used a form of Application Level Enryption (ALE) that did not require the use of cloud-provider-owned HSMs, then this looks like a more-or-less conventional facilities outsourcing program.
But what if it's not so clear-cut as that? What if the government stores data in the could, long term? What if the government uses Amazon HSMs to secure their content? By implication, the risk here is that this would give Amazon administrators access to the government's data. Should that happen, the least dangerous thing I'd expect to see is Amazon starting to shut down accounts for anyone on a government watch list. The worst-case scenario is much more significant.
So a big part of the potential issue list for this sort of model will depend significantly upon the architecture that the Cloud providers agree to. Disclosure: I've worked for a very large financial institution that discussed cloud services with Amazon - and they absolutely refused to allow us to host our own HSMs in Amazon data centers. How likely are they to change that answer?
The second question, after the relative safety of the data once it's in the cloud, concerns the way that the government is setting about this sort of procurement. There was, if I recall, some interesting material in the documentation released by Edward Snowden. The short version of this story is that BAH were putting together a proposal to meet a government RFC, in which a BAH technician raised the concern that even though it would be possible to implement the solution as requested, there was no way that the government would be able to interpret all the data the new system would collect. A BAH Manager wrote back, "Look, you're technically correct, OK? But your job isn't to tell the client that their idea won't work, your job is to sell the client whatever the client asks for. Then, next year, when the client realizes that this solution doesn't work, we can sell them an upgrade to fix that problem..."
In other words, there is the danger that some of the providers that tender for this sort of business [and note: I am not for one moment suggesting that any company would certainly do this; rather, I am pointing out an implementation risk] might well be able or tempted to sell a solution to the government that just doesn't work. It's my experience that too often when a government runs a bidding process for a solution, the people responding to the bid know so much more about the topic than the person managing the bid, they run rings around them.
This is particularly relevant because of the subject matter likely involved here. I can easily see the government saying that the entire bidding and outsourcing process has to be classified because "national security", which means that proper accountability controls will be pushed aside.
That would not be good.
During the April update this year, I had 3 W10 installations to get through the process. None of them worked, although one in particular went spectacularly wrong and wiped out files on the system's hidden boot partition, basically resulting in the system attempting to reboot and crashing out. There was no choice left but to perform a clean installation, then let that fresh image update.
The broken process left all sorts of log and event files scattered across my SSD and I provided them to MS, who were unable to determine the cause.
The really interesting thing for me is that the image that ate itself happens to run on the same hardware as another W10 image. I have 2 licensed copies of Windows and I use a "drive bay" to swap different bootable drives in to the same hardware. So when I upgraded the "other" image on the same platform, I was surprised to see the upgrade generate a completely different set of errors.
The biggest configuration difference between these two builds is that I use one for gaming and one for office work. Although both had the latest nVidia drivers on board, the gaming build used nVidia desktop "Surround" to create a single workspace of 5760x1200, whilst the office build just treated the display space as 3 connected monitors.
The most frustrating thing is that the feedback I was getting from the triage team who helped me (they were all volunteers and they were all excellent) was that MS had been shipping code they knew to have multiple bugs and issues in it. The problem they were having in triage was that there were *so many* bugs, it was proving next to impossible to narrow down to a specific fault.
Nadella might have turned around Microsoft's economic slide into oblivion, but his governance of the technical robustness of his company's products is, sadly, non-existent. Worse for me, both of these W10 licenses were for new-build hardware; I had no older licenses that I could grandfather in, so I'm out of pocket over £400 and have 2 systems [one box] that I simply don't trust to work reliably when MS push updates. If it were a case of "free but buggy or purchased but robust", I'd take "purchased but robust" every time. What I've actually got is "purchased but buggy". The most offensive thing is: Microsoft's actions - their continued pushing of buggy code, when there are NO COMMERCIAL DRIVERS FOR DOING SO is just plain offensive.
I wish they would just stop. Produce zero new features until ALL the bugs are squashed.
There's a reason I'm writing this post whilst running Mint Linux - and it's because I'm not trusting Windows at the moment. If I don't need to go back to Windows, I won't. I have nothing but respect and admiration for the triage volunteers over there, but Microsoft the company really don't care. That stinks.
As an aside, it's interesting to see the relatively large number of comments this thread has attracted already. That strongly suggests that this is a widespread concern or issue.
In the summer of 2016 I purchased an HP OfficeJet 8100 printer. Relatively fast print speed, duplex printing, offered as an "office printer", able to handle reasonable workloads, but with longevity and long term reliability in mind. Worked perfectly up until earlier this year. Only ever used 100% original HP inks.
Earlier this year (March?) Microsoft shipped a major update to Windows 10 that nuked my Windows build and forced a clean OS re-installation. By the time I got to installing the printer driver, I was so tired that I mistakenly agreed to activating the "phone home" feature of the software part of the driver. Within a day the printer died, with the diagnostics complaining of a print head failure.
I've done a lot of hardware maintenance in my time, on equipment far more delicate than a print head. I stripped the head from the printer, cleaned it, put it all back together but this made no difference. The printer had been bricked, remotely. The bricking happened the moment I connected my printer software to the internet. Coincidence? I think not. There was *nothing* wrong with the print head.
This is a long-standing tactic of these companies. It's about time a consumer watchdog took them to task. Better, it's about time a government prosecuted them for it. It's about time a few company directors did some serious jail time for fraud.
It's worth bearing in mind that as you increase the amount of RAM, particularly in high performance systems like those with i9 processors, that the system has to reduce the memory access speeds accordingly.
I know that this is something to do with the actual RAM timing profile, but I am not aware of the precise technical driver behind it.
In other words, if you are adding RAM to gain maximum performance, then there is a sweet spot that you can actually go beyond - and to go beyond will have the effect of slowing your machine down. Note that this "maximum speed limit" is really only related to machines with memory running at absolute maximum performance, so it's possible that RAM clocked at "normal" speeds might not experience this limitation.
I may have got this completely wrong, but didn't a certain very large and well known Wall Street bank get found out from doing exactly this?
If I recall, the ruse went something like this:-
1. A client of the bank used the trading platform provided by the bank to put in a purchase for a large enough quantity of stock that it would likely have the effect of adjusting the price of that stock. 2. The bank made a determination that this would be a "market moving" trade, and so, using an "ultra fast" computer link, ordered that precise amount of the stock for the bank's own portfolio. 3. In response to the bank's purchase, the price of the stock went up. 4. Then the bank processed the purchase order from their client, except that what actually happened at this point was that the bank sold the client the shares from the bank's own portfolio, because of course the bank had just "beaten the client to the punch". 5. The bank booked the difference in prices as an operating profit.
Having said that, it's worth bearing in mind that this sort of practice is only really effective in high frequency trading scenarios. If the client is adopting a buy-and-hold strategy [something along the lines of a Warren Buffet approach] then, excepting the odd period of extreme volatility [witness last week's sell-off], perhaps coming just in time to bolster Q3 earnings?, those sorts of short-term variations won't have so much impact on the long-term growth of a stock or the market in general.
This might be an accurate statement in the US, but it's certainly not true worldwide. I am a (very small scale) UK investor, primarily investing a monthly contribution to an ISA account (UK-specific, limited tax-free savings). I chose to invest, via a "fund supermarket" into a primarily equities portfolio (composition varies).
This operates in exactly the way you describe, but the OP and your comments both stand. For example, if you are a "buy-and-hold" investor, then paying for the benefits of a fund supermarket, when you are not actively trading your portfolio, could soon become expensive. The platform I use bills out at half of one percent of balance per year.
At first blush that might not sound like much, but say you've got $100,000 (or £100,000) invested and say you're just cranking the handle each month, adding at the rate of say 500-1000 monthly. You're going to pay *at least* 500 yearly in fees: for what? You're making 12 transactions - all purchases. Say each of those transactions is for 1000... Now let's do the math.
500 / 12 = 41.67...
So, each month you're buying say (£/$)1000 in additional stocks, for which you're paying (£/$)41.67 in transaction fees. In other words, the fees you're paying amount to 4.17% of the transaction value.
And the real kicker is that the more successful *you* are - i.e. the better your fund accumulates in value, the *more* that is taken from you in fees - taken by a company that has done absolutely nothing to help enhance the value of your investment. A fund supermarket is a terrific means to simplify your investing, but it's a huge drain on your wealth through cunningly-disguised fees.
Unfortunately for most of us, your observations are largely entirely correct - unless or until your personal wealth rises to the point where you would be considered a "High Net Worth" individual (which today is going to mean a net worth of at least 10 million), then your legal options as an investor are to chose between a variety of schemes that are carefully designed to rip you off. Above that threshold, then the biggest opportunities that come your way are likely to be in the form of tax breaks - because you can afford to swing very large sums of money in to investment vehicles that are simply not available to the man-on-the-street.
... "Congratulations, peons!!! Your terms and conditions have just been upgraded from abject slavery to indentured servitude!"
Fascinating bit of research; kudos to the authors.
Just one bit of pedantry (sorry!). When the OP writes, "This is a clue to astronomers that something potentially big, i.e. a super-Earth, is pushing these objects into similar types of orbits.", the use of the term "super-Earth" prompted a non-technical friend of mine [who was reading the article over my shoulder] to ask, "So there's, like, an amazing Earth, way out in space, right on the edge of our solar system?"
Obviously I explained that in this context the phrase simply meant, "physically bigger than the Earth in size and/or mass" and that in reality, any planet orbiting beyond Pluto would be a barren world of rock and/or ice, to which the response was, "Well, why doesn't the article say that, then?"
Given the way that lots of content covered by slashdot gets picked up by the mainstream media, maybe we should try and avoid terms liable to confuse or be misunderstood by less technical readership?