It's the administrator you want, not Microsoft
on
Anatomy of a Hack
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· Score: 1
The thing is, I think you guys are confusing "Windows machine" with "naively configured machine". I'll concede in advance that there is a high correlation.;-)
You seem to be extrapolating from the fact that Sasser and friends were a widespread pain in the ass that Windows sucks. The latter may be true, but the former doesn't imply it. I got the feeling (just from reading the reports at the time, nothing fancy) that those worms mostly spread through stupidly configured home-user systems, not professionally-run boxes with competent sysadmins. (I think it's safe to say that if you don't have competent sysadmins, you're pretty screwed on any OS.)
Of course you shouldn't run your web server as root/Administrator/whatever. Of course you shouldn't leave convenient hacking tools installed by default. But let's be fair, those are poor administration, and not unique to Windows. If you run Apache on Linux, but leave a hole in a CGI app that's running at too high a privilege level, you're just as screwed.
Re:Error parsing construct..
on
Anatomy of a Hack
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· Score: 2, Interesting
<sigh>
You may not have R'd TFA, but if you had, you'd notice that the techniques they illustrate to gain increasing and ultimately complete access to the network aren't particularly Windows-centric. The attack starts with a SQL injection vulnerability, for example, which is just as possible on a fully patched LAMP box if it's carelessly set up. The tools and specifics might be different on another system, but don't kid yourself that running non-MS machines at the edge of your networks is some kind of panacea. It's not.
I agree wholeheartedly. A couple of friends are junior doctors who get the worst kind of over-working day-in, day-out. The problem is, they know that if they're not there (even if they're tired) then possibly nobody will be, and if you're paying a visit to the emergency ward, you probably have better chances with a tired doctor than no doctor at all.
I don't think these guys are in it for the money; they're the kind of person who wouldn't walk away from that responsibility even if it means sleeping at the hospital and being on call 24/7 for days at a time. It sucks, but it's not their fault, and their employers ought to treat them better.
Why should your co-worker who are "single" be satisfied with working 80 hrs?
That's a good question. I don't understand why anyone would work an 80 hour week, other than perhaps junior doctors and the like whose work really is a matter of life and death. And their employers should really look after them better, for their own benefit and that of their patients as well.
OK, if you think you're really God's gift to workers, here are a few facts from the land of reality:
I've worked my share of 80+ hour weeks, and productivity doesn't go down.
Yes, it does, at least in the sustained case we're talking about. Everybody has found this, from relatively straightforward manual work in manufacturing to complex thought-based work like software-development.
As I noted in my previous reply, it's also commonly found that people who've worked for so long don't realise how impaired they are. Neither do tired drivers: driving after 18 hours without sleep, your reaction time is reduced to that of someone on the legal drink-drive limit in my country, yet many accidents are caused by drivers falling asleep at the wheel, presumably unaware of the danger they posed.
All your barriers are mental ones:
Actually, that part is pretty much true. Physical performance degrades much more slowly than mental performance.
I wonder how well the army would function with your mentality:
Why don't you find out? The military is one of the foremost researchers into the effects of sleep deprivation and extended periods of work without rest, and even basic military training normally involves exercises to put troops through this so they know what it's like. There's plenty of published information from military sources available on the web.
How many hours a week do you think Phd students work? More than 40, and do you think they're doing negative work?
Well, since I work in a major university city, and probably half my close friends have or are studying for PhDs, I'm pretty well placed to answer that one. And the answer is that they work a lot in the crunch periods before deadlines. Unfortunately, they also often burn out and have to take a few days off afterwards to recover, too, just like anyone else. I see this all the time among people I know very well.
I think you people are just lazy: you don't want to do much work, you want loads of money, so you make up reasons why you're not allowed to so much as break a sweat or work a second over 40 hours. No wonder all the jobs are going to places where they know the meaning of hard graft.
And they'll come back again, once the economy has stabilised, and the workers in the popular outsourcing destinations realise how much the megacorps who employ them are taking the piss.
Of the nearly 400 separate media visits (with over 1,000 journalists)and 181+ congressional representatives who have visited GITMO (including last weeks visit by a bi-partisan congressional group), I have yet to see any reporting anything that rises to the level of 'torture' or even any serious complaints by the prisoners (unless you include the 5 cases where Korans were mishandled).
Perhaps you should talk to the ones who've been released? The things they described weren't exactly flattering, and I'm not talking about flushing a holy book down the toilet. We just had reports yesterday about prisoners being forced to listen to Harry Potter for hours to break down their resistance to interrogation. There have also been reports of stress positions, confinement in darkness, and various other common methods that most people would call "torture".
As for the lack of trials, as most detainees are considered more on the grounds of prisoners of war and not criminals they cannot therefore be given a criminal trial.
Sorry, but you're mistaken. They're being deemed "enemy combatants", which conveniently means that they receive neither criminal trials nor the protections afforded to prisoners of war by the Geneva Convention. Their presence in a US-run facility that is not actually on US-soil has been used as a means to circumvent the US court system on several occasions, although at the last count IIRC the Supreme Court had come down against that.
On the other hand each detainee has been given a military hearing to determine their status which resulted in several (at least 38) being released.
Well, that's OK then. Several British citizens were held against their will for years, without charge or trial, and then released to the British authorities. Those authorities immediately released the former detainees without charge, despite presumably being shown any evidence the US had to justify detaining them in the first place. Do you really not see anything wrong with that?
Oh, and by the way: 38 down, around 600 to go.
On the Iraq front, the latest casulty report's I've seen put 'civilian' deaths around 26,000.
Even if that figure is accurate, what's the quality of life like for the remainder? How many more are dying every day?
As for the spread of democracy, where have you been hiding your head lately. More countries than ever have begun allowing their people (or in some cases more of their people) to elect or be elected as representatives.
Just out of interest, are you including Iraq within that group?
Even a recent poll of Iranians show that 74% believe that the US presence in Iraq will help them move from a theocracy to a full fledged democracy.
Is that the same Iran that just elected a hardline religious leader to run the country?
On a final note, using the BBC as an example of international reporting was a poor choice. They have so much trouble with bias reporting in Iraq that their Chairman was forced to resign not too long ago.
You need to do a little more research again, I'm afraid. The two senior staff at the BBC resigned, despite widespread support from within the organisation and after a lengthy public stand-off with the government, after one of their reporters said something that couldn't be backed up at the time, prompting the suicide of a government scientist who was found to have leaked information. The reporter who supplied that story also resigned.
That report was subsequently shown to be correct, and the reporter vindicated.
Public confidence in the BBC actually rose after that incident, which demonstrated that its staff right up to the top level were prepared to challenge the government and stand by their claims, even if they unjustly lost their jobs as a result.
I'll take news from the BBC over just about any other major news network any day, thanks.
Well that's a load of rubbish. I've worked my share of 80+ hour weeks, and productivity doesn't go down.
Curiously enough, one of the most common problems cited with staff who work long hours for extended periods is that they aren't even aware of the drop in their performance.
there are a whole lot of employers out there who would look at her time vs. her predecessors' and conclude that she was only working 57% as hard.
But let's face it, companies like that are never going to be winners, so do you really want to work for them in the first place?
Most research puts sustainable peak performance at around 35-40 hours per week, depending on industry, circumstances, etc. After that, you get rapidly diminishing returns.
By 60 hours per weeks, the extra work since 40 cancels out and you only get the same amount done.
By 70-80 hours per week, you're actually doing negative work: the amount of extra work you create through your mistakes and inability to function effectively outweighs the amount of extra work you get done.
It's staggering that so many managers in IT today haven't worked out what Ford found for himself nearly a century ago, a conclusion that plenty of other successful companies across a range of industries have reached for themselves since. It's not like this is some big secret or anything! So do yourself a favour, and find a job working for enlightened management. The others have no future anyway.
Your argument only holds if we only try to do the same jobs, but now with increased automation. A smart industry/society would realise that if the easy stuff just got easier, we have more resources to focus on harder stuff.
Of course, that means in the long run employment will go up, because all the guys good enough to do the job before will be burned out in a couple of years, and the companies will have to hire 2-3 substandard guys to replace them since the smart ones will stay well away.
Whether this is a good thing for either the industry or society as a whole is left as an exercise for the reader.
I do agree with much of what you just wrote; I was only pointing out that the "can't avoid a hazard" hazard has apparently been taken into account already.
What if for some reason you need to get somewhere in a hurry? I know I wouldn't give a shit about speed limits in such a situation, especially since no one obeys them anyway.
I guess it depends why you're in a hurry. British law is actually phrased rather carefully here; for example, section 87 of the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984 states:
"No statutory provision imposing a speed limit on motor vehicles shall apply to any vehicle on an occasion when it is being used for fire brigade, ambulance or police purposes, if the observance of that provision would be likely to hinder the use of the vehicle for the purpose for which it is being used on that occasion."
IIRC, it has been successfully argued that the driver of a vehicle transporting a patient to a hospital in a medical emergency can avail themselves of this exemption even if not a medical professional driving an ambulance. (Note to anyone thinking of trying it: I've never seen the court case if it exists, nor do I advocate playing the hero rather than calling 999!)
That all said, I think the police usually respond to "I was late for a dinner date" with "Well, you're going to be much later now, aren't you?" as they take an unusually long time to write the speeding ticket.
These vary by a huge amount just between inexperienced and very experienced drivers, even without taking into consideration the effects of tiredness, alcohol, drugs, etc.
However, the distance covered while an average, reasonably alert driver reacts represents only a relatively small amount of the overall stopping distance at medium speeds, and becomes less significant the faster you get.
I know that my old Corsa could stop from around 60mph in about 3/4 of the official safe stopping distance listed in the British Highway Code, including thinking time, because I once had to do an emergency stop in it. That was when I was young and a relatively inexperienced driver.
I'm now a much more experienced driver with a much higher performance car. I've never had to perform a high speed emergency stop in the new car, but I did try various tests of its braking from high speed shortly after buying it. On that basis, I'm confident that I could stop the car from 70mph under good conditions in no more than 2/3 of the official Highway Code distance, including thinking time. (According to reviews of the car, and the statistical performance of a driver with my experience, it's probably less than that in reality.)
Personally, I tend to follow a little further back than I probably need to, just to allow that bit of extra time to react if anything unexpected does happen, if someone behind me is too close (as it likely on a high speed road), etc. But really, human reaction time isn't much of an argument for not changing speed limits in 50 years. What we should be looking at is the speed limits that statistically are most likely to minimise the damage caused by accidents, and those are certainly very different to what we have here in the UK right now.
Furthermore, if limits were GPS enforced I would have had an accident today, having been forced into a maneouvre under hard acceleration to avoid another road user, which terminated at around NSL+20%.
According to TFA, you can over-ride the limiter to avoid a hazard. It doesn't say how, though...
Cameras in public aren't too threatening - after all, it's public, where expectations of privacy come only from one's incompetence at spotting voyeurs, or their incompetence at staring.
That is only true up to a point. It is not natural for all your movements through anywhere public to be logged in some centralised database for future reference.
The stored records will be used to track people wherever they drive. The entire population will be tracked everywhere we go, and people's sense of privacy will go extinct.
Indeed. Although of course, in the first area likely to be subject to this, the London congestion charging zone, there are already cameras to do this. They are only supposed to be there to identify people breaking the congestion charging rules, but it's pretty well-acknowledged that they're being abused for other purposes as well, contrary to guarantees given prior to their installation. It's also pretty well-acknowledged that they aren't much good at their real job, either: according to the local paper, one elderly gentleman who lives near me (miles from London) was sent three congestion charge penalty notices in rapid succession, despite not having driven to London in years, and having no difficulty proving that he was miles away at the times he was alleged to be breaking the rules.
But hey, if you think this is scary, wait until they impose the biometric ID cards with the National Identity Register behind them. Compared to tracking cars, that will be 1984 ten times over when the inevitable problems start occurring, and a significant number of people in the country actually want them! (IME a much more significant number strongly oppose them, but this government was elected by just over 1/5 of the voting population thanks to our wonderful electoral system, so I don't suppose popular will really means that much to them.)
... and for those of us that don't watch tv, OR listen to bbc radio ?
Well, for one thing, I don't know a single person for whom that's true, while I know several who only use the radio and/or Internet services but don't have a TV. I'm sure there must be such people, but IME there are far fewer of them than any other group relevant to this discussion.
Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, I believe that everyone benefits from having a good quality national broadcaster, in the same way that everyone benefits from having a national rail network even if they don't travel by train, and everyone benefits from a good quality national education system even if they don't themselves study or have offspring who do.
I don't see how you can possibly argue that changing the system to stop overcharging millions of people, at the expense of perhaps a few thousand in the whole country who still receive side-benefits anyway, is unreasonable.
Congratulations. Despite the other replies, I think your post was one of the most insightful comments I've ever read on this forum.
I actually don't agree with your first sentence: I'd say the complexity suggests that today's string theory is "dirty" -- in the sense that a "cleaner" explanation/perspective is probably available -- rather than actually incorrect.
However, the underlying observation of your post -- that the progress with complex models usually starts by finding a simpler view -- seems to be almost universally true. Many problems that were probably regarded as unsolvable at the time they were first posed can now be solved with relatively mundane (by today's standards) mathematics/science. The most powerful proof you can ever give about the unsolvability of a problem is that you can't solve it with the techniques known today.
I studied mathematics through to degree level, and my mathematical education is littered with things I thought "couldn't be done" until someone showed me how. At GCSE level (that's the exams taken at 16 in the UK), I could model movement of a body under constant acceleration, but had no idea how to deal with the problem when acceleration varied. At A-level (exams at 18), I had met calculus, and thought of the scenario as a calculus-based model, not a trivial algebraic exercise. Of course, then you had integration, and there were all these equations you "couldn't" solve by integration. Then I went to university, studied differential equations, and learned to solve those. Sometimes, "impossible" expressions couldn't be integrated, until I met contour integration, and discovered a new way to attack the problem. And so it goes on.
The thing that underlies all these results is that the mathematics is simple and yet remarkably powerful. The best example of this I know is complex numbers: who'd have thought that something as small as inventing the concept of i could lead to a fundamental shift in how almost all non-trivial mathematics is approached?
I'm reminded of a time when the mathematicians and physicists happened to be set essentially the same problem by their respective lecturers at university. It boiled down to some horrible Laplace-type equation. The mathematicians knew how to solve the equation, and did so using a couple of pages of algebraic manipulation. The physicists couldn't remember how to solve the equation, so they simply observed that the answer must always be 0 by the symmetry of the problem.
Ultimately, it all depends on your perspective, and the simpler and more elegant the perspective, the more powerful it tends to be.
Some might argue that the cost of innovation now is prohibitive. The fair assessment of this article might be that all the "easy" innovations, or all the "cheap" innovations have already been discovered.
What happened to standing on the shoulders of giants?
The branches are being fleshed out now, but the trunks are all there in plain view. If that is the case, then innovation isn't slowing because of societal reasons, but is slowing because there's less new shit to discover, lending credence to a simple universe.
Are we really so arrogant as to believe that our society today is reaching the peak of human achievement?
Condi is a national security ADVISOR. She is not the head of a Cabinet like Rumsfeld or Powell were. As an advisor, she merely advises.
And as someone who directly advised the most powerful man in the world, she probably wielded as much power as anyone you mentioned in that post.
If anything, moving her to State may have lessened her powers of persuasion in this area, given the long-running tension between that department and the rest of the Washington spin machine where international issues are concerned.
I'm not even going to get into the whole Iraq thing, it just isn't worth it. Those who cry about "no WMDs" generally aren't worth trying to educate about the war beyond their strict viewpoint. I used to think liberals cared about human rights, but not when human rights are promoted by a Republican apparently.
You're right, it's not worth going into Iraq with someone who posts a comment like that. But since you brought it up and you're so fond of human rights as promoted by a Republican, perhaps you could explain to the numerous "allies" of the US why you're still holding their citizens without trial or charge in Gitmo, under conditions that independent international agencies have repeatedly condemned?
I'm sure the war on terror is bringing many rights to the people of places like Afghanistan and Iraq, though. After all, the former is now run outright by warlords, and senior members of your own armed forces are on record as saying they can't actually enforce international laws there because they might upset those warlords and they need their support. And conditions in Iraq are now worse in many ways than they were before the US-forced invasion, even ignoring the thousands killed as a result of that action who would otherwise be alive today.
Don't kid yourself about how much you're improving life for those in those countries, or "spreading democracy", or "fighting the war on terror", or whatever political weasel-words are being used today to justify a flagrant violation of international law that the US government gets away with by virtue of having more guns than anyone else and for no other reason. Those of us outside the US apparently get to see a much more balanced range of interviews with Iraqi civilians than you guys do -- it's probably covered by BBC news and documentaries several times a month even now -- and many of the comments are pretty damning. The interviews with government officials and military spokespeople, particularly those from the US, that they show right before/after the interviews with Iraqis make very sad viewing. If you thought Comical Ali was good, these guys are really top notch. It would be hilarious, if you weren't talking about ruining the lives of millions of people.
This is what happens when you put someone like Bush at the top, and let him bring people like Rumsfeld, and Cheney, and Rice with him. And the scariest thing is the people who buy it, and even voted for him a second time. You guys really have no clue how bad your international reputation really is right now, but I take comfort in the fact that you'll pay for it dearly in the coming years, all the more so if Bush gets to appoint not one but probably two new Supreme Court Justices during his second term. Sadly, all the US citizens who didn't vote for Bush will pay along with you, and the only thing the rest of us can do for them is offer sympathy.
Is the implication here that someone/thing/agency might have an inherent right to force me to modify the way I use my web browser (Firefox extensions, for example)?
Not quite. Almost the opposite, in fact: the potential danger here is that a ruling might (deliberately or inadvertently) force you not to modify the way your software displays a web page, even if you want to install software for that purpose deliberately and with the explicit intent of enhancing (from your point of view) what you see.
Obviously anyone running an e-commerce site would prefer you not to be able to compare their prices readily with their major competitors', but that's not really the interests of consumers/society generally. More to the point, neither is adding any sort of compulsion about what people may or may not do with their own computer hardware/software. (/cite DRM, etc.)
The danger of a ruling against the adware software here on the basis that it was adjusting content by looking at the web address of the site visited was that it might be too general, and lead to these other unfortunate implications by precedent. The reasons we really hate adware (at least, the reasons I do) are the deception and aggression, and its those for which they should be closed down. That wasn't the argument here, though, AFAICS.
As a licence fee payer, I have no objection to supporting a national broadcasting organisation that provides good quality TV, radio and Internet services. The price I pay is a bargain compared to the subscriptions demanded by inferior networks in many other countries, and the BBC remains one of our strongest national assets.
What I do object to is the fact that the only people who pay for it are those in the UK with TVs. Why should someone who only listens to BBC radio not contribute, for example? Simply on principle, the BBC should be funded through a flat rate tax on the entire British population. If others benefit as well, e.g., from the BBC News web site, consider it a gift in the interest of good international relations, and a service to our citizens who are abroad.
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The thing is, I think you guys are confusing "Windows machine" with "naively configured machine". I'll concede in advance that there is a high correlation. ;-)
You seem to be extrapolating from the fact that Sasser and friends were a widespread pain in the ass that Windows sucks. The latter may be true, but the former doesn't imply it. I got the feeling (just from reading the reports at the time, nothing fancy) that those worms mostly spread through stupidly configured home-user systems, not professionally-run boxes with competent sysadmins. (I think it's safe to say that if you don't have competent sysadmins, you're pretty screwed on any OS.)
Of course you shouldn't run your web server as root/Administrator/whatever. Of course you shouldn't leave convenient hacking tools installed by default. But let's be fair, those are poor administration, and not unique to Windows. If you run Apache on Linux, but leave a hole in a CGI app that's running at too high a privilege level, you're just as screwed.
<sigh>
You may not have R'd TFA, but if you had, you'd notice that the techniques they illustrate to gain increasing and ultimately complete access to the network aren't particularly Windows-centric. The attack starts with a SQL injection vulnerability, for example, which is just as possible on a fully patched LAMP box if it's carelessly set up. The tools and specifics might be different on another system, but don't kid yourself that running non-MS machines at the edge of your networks is some kind of panacea. It's not.
I agree wholeheartedly. A couple of friends are junior doctors who get the worst kind of over-working day-in, day-out. The problem is, they know that if they're not there (even if they're tired) then possibly nobody will be, and if you're paying a visit to the emergency ward, you probably have better chances with a tired doctor than no doctor at all.
I don't think these guys are in it for the money; they're the kind of person who wouldn't walk away from that responsibility even if it means sleeping at the hospital and being on call 24/7 for days at a time. It sucks, but it's not their fault, and their employers ought to treat them better.
That's a good question. I don't understand why anyone would work an 80 hour week, other than perhaps junior doctors and the like whose work really is a matter of life and death. And their employers should really look after them better, for their own benefit and that of their patients as well.
OK, if you think you're really God's gift to workers, here are a few facts from the land of reality:
Yes, it does, at least in the sustained case we're talking about. Everybody has found this, from relatively straightforward manual work in manufacturing to complex thought-based work like software-development.
As I noted in my previous reply, it's also commonly found that people who've worked for so long don't realise how impaired they are. Neither do tired drivers: driving after 18 hours without sleep, your reaction time is reduced to that of someone on the legal drink-drive limit in my country, yet many accidents are caused by drivers falling asleep at the wheel, presumably unaware of the danger they posed.
Actually, that part is pretty much true. Physical performance degrades much more slowly than mental performance.
Why don't you find out? The military is one of the foremost researchers into the effects of sleep deprivation and extended periods of work without rest, and even basic military training normally involves exercises to put troops through this so they know what it's like. There's plenty of published information from military sources available on the web.
Well, since I work in a major university city, and probably half my close friends have or are studying for PhDs, I'm pretty well placed to answer that one. And the answer is that they work a lot in the crunch periods before deadlines. Unfortunately, they also often burn out and have to take a few days off afterwards to recover, too, just like anyone else. I see this all the time among people I know very well.
And they'll come back again, once the economy has stabilised, and the workers in the popular outsourcing destinations realise how much the megacorps who employ them are taking the piss.
Perhaps you should talk to the ones who've been released? The things they described weren't exactly flattering, and I'm not talking about flushing a holy book down the toilet. We just had reports yesterday about prisoners being forced to listen to Harry Potter for hours to break down their resistance to interrogation. There have also been reports of stress positions, confinement in darkness, and various other common methods that most people would call "torture".
Sorry, but you're mistaken. They're being deemed "enemy combatants", which conveniently means that they receive neither criminal trials nor the protections afforded to prisoners of war by the Geneva Convention. Their presence in a US-run facility that is not actually on US-soil has been used as a means to circumvent the US court system on several occasions, although at the last count IIRC the Supreme Court had come down against that.
Well, that's OK then. Several British citizens were held against their will for years, without charge or trial, and then released to the British authorities. Those authorities immediately released the former detainees without charge, despite presumably being shown any evidence the US had to justify detaining them in the first place. Do you really not see anything wrong with that?
Oh, and by the way: 38 down, around 600 to go.
Even if that figure is accurate, what's the quality of life like for the remainder? How many more are dying every day?
Just out of interest, are you including Iraq within that group?
Is that the same Iran that just elected a hardline religious leader to run the country?
You need to do a little more research again, I'm afraid. The two senior staff at the BBC resigned, despite widespread support from within the organisation and after a lengthy public stand-off with the government, after one of their reporters said something that couldn't be backed up at the time, prompting the suicide of a government scientist who was found to have leaked information. The reporter who supplied that story also resigned.
That report was subsequently shown to be correct, and the reporter vindicated.
Public confidence in the BBC actually rose after that incident, which demonstrated that its staff right up to the top level were prepared to challenge the government and stand by their claims, even if they unjustly lost their jobs as a result.
I'll take news from the BBC over just about any other major news network any day, thanks.
Curiously enough, one of the most common problems cited with staff who work long hours for extended periods is that they aren't even aware of the drop in their performance.
But then again, you could just be trolling...
But let's face it, companies like that are never going to be winners, so do you really want to work for them in the first place?
Most research puts sustainable peak performance at around 35-40 hours per week, depending on industry, circumstances, etc. After that, you get rapidly diminishing returns.
By 60 hours per weeks, the extra work since 40 cancels out and you only get the same amount done.
By 70-80 hours per week, you're actually doing negative work: the amount of extra work you create through your mistakes and inability to function effectively outweighs the amount of extra work you get done.
It's staggering that so many managers in IT today haven't worked out what Ford found for himself nearly a century ago, a conclusion that plenty of other successful companies across a range of industries have reached for themselves since. It's not like this is some big secret or anything! So do yourself a favour, and find a job working for enlightened management. The others have no future anyway.
Your argument only holds if we only try to do the same jobs, but now with increased automation. A smart industry/society would realise that if the easy stuff just got easier, we have more resources to focus on harder stuff.
That was my immediate reaction, too.
Of course, that means in the long run employment will go up, because all the guys good enough to do the job before will be burned out in a couple of years, and the companies will have to hire 2-3 substandard guys to replace them since the smart ones will stay well away.
Whether this is a good thing for either the industry or society as a whole is left as an exercise for the reader.
I do agree with much of what you just wrote; I was only pointing out that the "can't avoid a hazard" hazard has apparently been taken into account already.
I guess it depends why you're in a hurry. British law is actually phrased rather carefully here; for example, section 87 of the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984 states:
IIRC, it has been successfully argued that the driver of a vehicle transporting a patient to a hospital in a medical emergency can avail themselves of this exemption even if not a medical professional driving an ambulance. (Note to anyone thinking of trying it: I've never seen the court case if it exists, nor do I advocate playing the hero rather than calling 999!)
That all said, I think the police usually respond to "I was late for a dinner date" with "Well, you're going to be much later now, aren't you?" as they take an unusually long time to write the speeding ticket.
These vary by a huge amount just between inexperienced and very experienced drivers, even without taking into consideration the effects of tiredness, alcohol, drugs, etc.
However, the distance covered while an average, reasonably alert driver reacts represents only a relatively small amount of the overall stopping distance at medium speeds, and becomes less significant the faster you get.
I know that my old Corsa could stop from around 60mph in about 3/4 of the official safe stopping distance listed in the British Highway Code, including thinking time, because I once had to do an emergency stop in it. That was when I was young and a relatively inexperienced driver.
I'm now a much more experienced driver with a much higher performance car. I've never had to perform a high speed emergency stop in the new car, but I did try various tests of its braking from high speed shortly after buying it. On that basis, I'm confident that I could stop the car from 70mph under good conditions in no more than 2/3 of the official Highway Code distance, including thinking time. (According to reviews of the car, and the statistical performance of a driver with my experience, it's probably less than that in reality.)
Personally, I tend to follow a little further back than I probably need to, just to allow that bit of extra time to react if anything unexpected does happen, if someone behind me is too close (as it likely on a high speed road), etc. But really, human reaction time isn't much of an argument for not changing speed limits in 50 years. What we should be looking at is the speed limits that statistically are most likely to minimise the damage caused by accidents, and those are certainly very different to what we have here in the UK right now.
According to TFA, you can over-ride the limiter to avoid a hazard. It doesn't say how, though...
That is only true up to a point. It is not natural for all your movements through anywhere public to be logged in some centralised database for future reference.
Indeed. Although of course, in the first area likely to be subject to this, the London congestion charging zone, there are already cameras to do this. They are only supposed to be there to identify people breaking the congestion charging rules, but it's pretty well-acknowledged that they're being abused for other purposes as well, contrary to guarantees given prior to their installation. It's also pretty well-acknowledged that they aren't much good at their real job, either: according to the local paper, one elderly gentleman who lives near me (miles from London) was sent three congestion charge penalty notices in rapid succession, despite not having driven to London in years, and having no difficulty proving that he was miles away at the times he was alleged to be breaking the rules.
But hey, if you think this is scary, wait until they impose the biometric ID cards with the National Identity Register behind them. Compared to tracking cars, that will be 1984 ten times over when the inevitable problems start occurring, and a significant number of people in the country actually want them! (IME a much more significant number strongly oppose them, but this government was elected by just over 1/5 of the voting population thanks to our wonderful electoral system, so I don't suppose popular will really means that much to them.)
Well, for one thing, I don't know a single person for whom that's true, while I know several who only use the radio and/or Internet services but don't have a TV. I'm sure there must be such people, but IME there are far fewer of them than any other group relevant to this discussion.
Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, I believe that everyone benefits from having a good quality national broadcaster, in the same way that everyone benefits from having a national rail network even if they don't travel by train, and everyone benefits from a good quality national education system even if they don't themselves study or have offspring who do.
I don't see how you can possibly argue that changing the system to stop overcharging millions of people, at the expense of perhaps a few thousand in the whole country who still receive side-benefits anyway, is unreasonable.
Congratulations. Despite the other replies, I think your post was one of the most insightful comments I've ever read on this forum.
I actually don't agree with your first sentence: I'd say the complexity suggests that today's string theory is "dirty" -- in the sense that a "cleaner" explanation/perspective is probably available -- rather than actually incorrect.
However, the underlying observation of your post -- that the progress with complex models usually starts by finding a simpler view -- seems to be almost universally true. Many problems that were probably regarded as unsolvable at the time they were first posed can now be solved with relatively mundane (by today's standards) mathematics/science. The most powerful proof you can ever give about the unsolvability of a problem is that you can't solve it with the techniques known today.
I studied mathematics through to degree level, and my mathematical education is littered with things I thought "couldn't be done" until someone showed me how. At GCSE level (that's the exams taken at 16 in the UK), I could model movement of a body under constant acceleration, but had no idea how to deal with the problem when acceleration varied. At A-level (exams at 18), I had met calculus, and thought of the scenario as a calculus-based model, not a trivial algebraic exercise. Of course, then you had integration, and there were all these equations you "couldn't" solve by integration. Then I went to university, studied differential equations, and learned to solve those. Sometimes, "impossible" expressions couldn't be integrated, until I met contour integration, and discovered a new way to attack the problem. And so it goes on.
The thing that underlies all these results is that the mathematics is simple and yet remarkably powerful. The best example of this I know is complex numbers: who'd have thought that something as small as inventing the concept of i could lead to a fundamental shift in how almost all non-trivial mathematics is approached?
I'm reminded of a time when the mathematicians and physicists happened to be set essentially the same problem by their respective lecturers at university. It boiled down to some horrible Laplace-type equation. The mathematicians knew how to solve the equation, and did so using a couple of pages of algebraic manipulation. The physicists couldn't remember how to solve the equation, so they simply observed that the answer must always be 0 by the symmetry of the problem.
Ultimately, it all depends on your perspective, and the simpler and more elegant the perspective, the more powerful it tends to be.
What happened to standing on the shoulders of giants?
Are we really so arrogant as to believe that our society today is reaching the peak of human achievement?
I truly hope not.
Blockquoth the AC:
And as someone who directly advised the most powerful man in the world, she probably wielded as much power as anyone you mentioned in that post.
If anything, moving her to State may have lessened her powers of persuasion in this area, given the long-running tension between that department and the rest of the Washington spin machine where international issues are concerned.
You're right, it's not worth going into Iraq with someone who posts a comment like that. But since you brought it up and you're so fond of human rights as promoted by a Republican, perhaps you could explain to the numerous "allies" of the US why you're still holding their citizens without trial or charge in Gitmo, under conditions that independent international agencies have repeatedly condemned?
I'm sure the war on terror is bringing many rights to the people of places like Afghanistan and Iraq, though. After all, the former is now run outright by warlords, and senior members of your own armed forces are on record as saying they can't actually enforce international laws there because they might upset those warlords and they need their support. And conditions in Iraq are now worse in many ways than they were before the US-forced invasion, even ignoring the thousands killed as a result of that action who would otherwise be alive today.
Don't kid yourself about how much you're improving life for those in those countries, or "spreading democracy", or "fighting the war on terror", or whatever political weasel-words are being used today to justify a flagrant violation of international law that the US government gets away with by virtue of having more guns than anyone else and for no other reason. Those of us outside the US apparently get to see a much more balanced range of interviews with Iraqi civilians than you guys do -- it's probably covered by BBC news and documentaries several times a month even now -- and many of the comments are pretty damning. The interviews with government officials and military spokespeople, particularly those from the US, that they show right before/after the interviews with Iraqis make very sad viewing. If you thought Comical Ali was good, these guys are really top notch. It would be hilarious, if you weren't talking about ruining the lives of millions of people.
This is what happens when you put someone like Bush at the top, and let him bring people like Rumsfeld, and Cheney, and Rice with him. And the scariest thing is the people who buy it, and even voted for him a second time. You guys really have no clue how bad your international reputation really is right now, but I take comfort in the fact that you'll pay for it dearly in the coming years, all the more so if Bush gets to appoint not one but probably two new Supreme Court Justices during his second term. Sadly, all the US citizens who didn't vote for Bush will pay along with you, and the only thing the rest of us can do for them is offer sympathy.
This all seems fair enough, as long as the other side get to appoint Number Six...
Not quite. Almost the opposite, in fact: the potential danger here is that a ruling might (deliberately or inadvertently) force you not to modify the way your software displays a web page, even if you want to install software for that purpose deliberately and with the explicit intent of enhancing (from your point of view) what you see.
Obviously anyone running an e-commerce site would prefer you not to be able to compare their prices readily with their major competitors', but that's not really the interests of consumers/society generally. More to the point, neither is adding any sort of compulsion about what people may or may not do with their own computer hardware/software. (/cite DRM, etc.)
The danger of a ruling against the adware software here on the basis that it was adjusting content by looking at the web address of the site visited was that it might be too general, and lead to these other unfortunate implications by precedent. The reasons we really hate adware (at least, the reasons I do) are the deception and aggression, and its those for which they should be closed down. That wasn't the argument here, though, AFAICS.
As a licence fee payer, I have no objection to supporting a national broadcasting organisation that provides good quality TV, radio and Internet services. The price I pay is a bargain compared to the subscriptions demanded by inferior networks in many other countries, and the BBC remains one of our strongest national assets.
What I do object to is the fact that the only people who pay for it are those in the UK with TVs. Why should someone who only listens to BBC radio not contribute, for example? Simply on principle, the BBC should be funded through a flat rate tax on the entire British population. If others benefit as well, e.g., from the BBC News web site, consider it a gift in the interest of good international relations, and a service to our citizens who are abroad.
Of course not; there are no absolutes.
Innovate?
<ducks>