Ireland: "While there are a number of political parties in the state, the political landscape has been dominated for decades by Fianna FÃil and Fine Gael, historically opposed and competing entities"
The current assembly seems to disagree with two party assumption as image from wikipedia points out. But then again, Ireland doesn't have first-past-the-post system (and so doesn't most of the countries on that list). My wild guess is that there is confusion around here about what first-past-the-post system means.
Oh and regarding your original statement:
In any first-past-the-post election system, you will end up with a two-party system.
I can't say you're wrong but I'd generalize it bit further: any single-seat district system (that first-past-the-post is example of) has the tendency of becoming two-party system.
Former flash memory industry worker here. Flash does not work that way. Write Enable is attached to whatever logic circuitry is there - to be asserted following the sequence of address/data write cycles from the CPU or controller to the flash. Write Enable is a dynamic signal tied to the controlling circuitry and logic - it's not something connected to a switch that can be turned on or off by the system's owner.
Ahem... A simple ON/OFF (not ON/ON) switch could control whether the host WE output is connected to flash WE input or not (with big enough pullup/down resistor (can't remember the polarity, won't bother to check the sheets) on the flash side to set default state when disconnected) - in the case it's in OFF position the host WE signal simply goes nowhere. Please don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to argue that this would make much sense (could make, maybe it doesn't), just wanted to point out you're wrong (you're welcome!).
"There's a small but hopefully growing subculture of people who are buying the active ingredients of drugs," he says. "It's encouraging to see people take control of their own health."
Kinda reminds me of Chinese chemical plants selling sildenafil citrate for under 100 USD per kilogram (worth 10k 100mg pills) on alibaba. Those poor "cheap viagra" spammers, the Chinese are going to put them out of business:(
In economics this phenomena in general is called perverce incentive. That is, someone tries to put in place an incentive to reward for productive behaviour but in the end a "workaround" is found to comply with the incentive criteria by doing something very counter-productive.
Doing coding? One organization decided to start giving bonuses to coders by lines of code written. Suddenly all this extra whitespace appears out of nowhere and when looking into your favourite VCS you'll see same lines having a lot of small cosmetic changes changes all over. What an increase in productivity!
Want to make company more profitable? Why don't you give the new CEO incentives that are bound to short-term profits. No way (s)he will do cuts that rise profits momentarily but neglecting long-term viability of the company and by the time the damage is seen in the company profits the CEO is elsewhere continuing on solid path of "success". Pump and dump schemes are another related story (where the company holders have the incentives as well).
Have extra employees in organization and want to do some lay-offs to increase profits? You are likely to keep employees who are best at securing their positions with schemes such as refusing to share relevant information to keep yourself irreplaceable rather than those that are actually valuable to the company. Just imagine what your organization looks like after couple of rounds of these (unfortunately, I've witnessed some horrors like this - the most incompentent "developer" I've seen came from organization that did this, besides lacking relevant coding skills was also very unhelpful to collaborate with neighbor organization that our success was bound with. But he surely made sure it looked like it was the other ones fault.).
I'd say in general the problem is neglecting abuse schemes of incentives and quite often underestimation of intelligence is involved as well. Arrogance to say. Think about mushroom management of R&D organization. No way that employees (with higher average IQ than management) will be able to predict how management is trying to piss on them and no way they will find a strategic behaviour scheme to defend themselves from that which might be not that productive for the whole company...
I'd probably could think of couple of other examples as well but let's talk about law enforcement instead! Arrest quotas, anyone?
Air isn't homogeneous in temperature, and so there's a lot of refraction that destroys small details.
There might be some ways to estimate (and cancel) refraction such as using broader spectrum of wavelengths (that have slightly different refractive attributes) but when talking about orbit there are enough refractions on a way making the estimates unreliable. Being able to "photograph" the scene without it changing over longer period can help filtering the noise. But then again, one of course can argue that at least theoretically it would be possible to have "perfect" conditions though I'd focus bit more on practice. I would suggest you getting rather "zoomy" lens (with focal length over meter) and observe using it in different weather conditions rather than engaging in baseless it's-theoretically-(im)possible discussions.
First, trolling and disagreement aren't the same thing.
What you point out here is the sad fact that large part of population and mass media do not really distinguish between these two. Labeling someone as troll either because they disagree with your personal opinions or some publicly spread opinion is not that rare these days...
Conventionally avoiding hostile ground-based aerial defenses is very relevant exercise as they are one of most relevant threats and knowing how to avoid these can prevent from losing planes by doing something stupid. However for planes that have been optimized against ground-based single-point (rx & tx at same location) radars this isn't really most significant threat. If one wants still to use single-point radar to target the plane, one should do that from above instead.
However opposite to subject, exercise to escape unexpected illumination (obvious targeted radar dosage) is not really useless and this was achieved by improvised means so I suppose using transponders to find out where to send the radar dosage was sufficient here.
You're forgetting one thing: if the fact that you shoot once in a while without hitting makes the potential attacker less eager to attack, you're not dead. The most significant impact of any aerial defense system is limiting enemy aerial operations.
This isn't Hollywood, but expect some moron screenwriter to now use this in their plot.
Thank you, Sir, for your comment made my day.
In general, interesting question is what kind of firmware update mechanisms are in place during normal operation and whether they could be compromised. And I have the feeling that monitors are least interesting ones in this pool. Watch the JTAG lines on PCI bus! However, if attacker can access these mechanisms we can safely assume she could do anything she wants by conventional means, eg by asking the graphics card nicely to display desired image, no need to bother with monitor firmware...
Oh come on, there's nothing that newspeak wouldn't solve. Of course Apple is happy to provide products for totally peaceful operations by US department of defense.
It has been relatively interesting to observe the development of internet censorship in Failland and the rest of EU. Here it all started with legislation that was supposed to censor child pornography. It was immediately abused and quite soon systematically used to censor unlawfully known "pirate sites" such as torrent trackers (such as certain famous bay from friendly neighbor). Combined together with legislation allowing ISPs to spy legally on all traffic by their clients and several years to develop spying infrastructure ISPs and certain copyright holders have managed to deploy efficient enough spying on customers to detect for example torrent tracker traffic to harass the connection holder (by for example dropping connections). In the case there was unencrypted traffic (such as torrent tracker traffic), they have been known to pass the information to IPR trolls that used it to harass individual consumers with gross overestimated damage compensations along with lawsuit threat. It shouldn't be a surprise that all damages are overestimated and aren't based on any real facts or numbers. The damage compensations mandated by court decisions have have mostly been based on actual damages and has been estimated based on facts. This broke the rule of sensemaking damage compensations. And I find it sad.
What this atmosphere created was business opportunities for VPN providers. They compete directly with content providers as "unrestricted internet access providers" that allows access to common file sharing methods that compete with content "industry". For consumer this is good but what comes to typical IPR legislation in EU, consumer is pretty much pissed on.
Now back to UK. Single operator might have optional content filter that is enabled by default now but the fact is that there is a lot of less optional content filters such as ones for "known pirate sites". In similar manner, this has opened business opportunities for VPN providers and they do compete with content providers. But whenever something is censored, slippery slope (it's logical fallacy only when you argue against something on basis it will happen) should be considered - what will come next and what will be the improvised interpretations of what lawmakers come up with that will become common.
Linux servers don't get "constantly rooted and defaced". But, regardless, nobody is saying Linux is invulnerable. We'll have to settle on merely being orders of magnitude more secure than Windows, which is the point of the comparison.
AFAIK most of the security issues around lunix installations are related to false sensation of security under which the user installs bit too liberally things on their server and "once it works, don't touch it" is sadly common practice encouraging neglecting security updates. Also, more things installed in luserspace, more things requiring potential security updates. Some distributions, especially certain infamous South African one, makes it far too easy to install a lot of crap.
All self-developed things on top of common stack coming from a distribution is yet another story...
This more or less the same problem as with proprietary systems developed for "society-critical" use-cases (such as voting mechanisms/juridical sentencing algorithms/etc) in general. As part of public infrastructure they should be inspectable by the public (think about typical vote counting where all parties have sent their representatives to watch each other). Typical proprietary "solution" works on black-box basis and the promise that "it works as expected but you're not allowed to inspect it".
In classic conditions no solutions such as these would be accepted but I've seen lately a lot of stupidity like this, especially related to "IT". One thing to remember there that over past two decades there has been gross lack of understanding among people with public decision-making authority (especially related to "IT" - in general applies to things that are under "rapid development") and there has been rarely competence to evaluate solutions for example in order to maintain the "good practices" related to voting mentioned above.
You're both wrong. I started writing software before I knew what multiplication meant. Computer science, with the sole exception of the statistics-heavy research that you do at grad school level, doesn't require even the most basic math skills.
Any definitions in computer science are similar to ones in mathematics. If one understands how things are defined in computer science, one will understand how abstract mathematical definitions works and how one can work with them. How logic works. This is (extremely roughly) 'core' of mathematics along with the abstract thinking it prepares for. I can't really define what 'mathematics' means (on level required by itself) but let's just say first time I encountered mathematics was in university (anything prior to that was closer to 'calculus'). I could give long rant about what's wrong with math teaching but let's not do it here...
Now to coding which is separate issue: pedagogically playing is very important part of learning procedure especially for kids (analogue for 'playing' to adult engineers would be close to 'testing'). When they're in safe environment, it doesn't really matter that they don't understand what they are doing - they can see what their scripts/code/whatever they produce by trial and error and repeating that is expected to introduce chance of gaining understanding on how things work. Playing is no only OK but recommended as well!
By contrast, every programmer needs to get good at architecting software properly. Of course, you can somewhat learn that as you go along, so long as you're exposed to good code and can use it as an example (or bad code, and can use it as a cautionary tale).
I'd say this is roughly true. Now, how one can architect solutions made of pieces they don't really understand? Or, how one can distinguish 'bad code' from 'good code' without deeper knowledge on how things work? Using purely trial-and-error one sees only the outcome but not necessarily all related factors (such as performance/efficiency) and this might be non-trivial for some. Of course, intuition helps a lot and in right environment (right examples, competent advice from seniors) it is likely to transfer into competence. But there's no guarantee on this and results vary individually.
Like mentioned above, playing is good but the problem arises once people with playing-competences enter industry as developers without right guidance (ie non-technical employer). Dubious software is very big liability and causes a lot of costs. Typically not hiring anyone is more profitable than hiring not-that-competent "developer". It's not that uncommon that less competent developer was hired to produce a "solution" and later significantly more time from more competent developers has to be spent to deal with the SW and the fact that you can't just rewrite it because it's in production. Hell, I'd even go further by claiming that over 99% of security vulnerabilities are caused by someone not bothering (or lacking knowledge how) to do their job right.
While during most of day-to-day work one can get around with using implementations made by someone else, it doesn't mean one wouldn't need to have at least rough understanding how they work (read: how they should be expected to work and how to test that they indeed do). When one wants to hire a developer for their project, one needs to filter a lot of "IT monkeys" (roughly someone at their trial-and-error stage without deeper understanding but who has managed to do things with few languages/environments that they don't really fully understand) from the applicants to avoid hiring someone lacking deeper understanding that is required to write good code. And this costs time that could be spent otherwise. If education institution is "snob" enough to require certain demonstrated understanding before granting a degree, having such degree helps in this process.
Quite typically when there's some news on a leak I tend to be disappointed to not find a decent download link for the original leak/dump/etc for the noble purpose of mirroring the information. It seems that media isn't always too eager to publish the sources of their news which could be considered as relevant part of investigative journalism, which makes me sad.
Still, one can for i in $(seq 1 211); do wget https\://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2861555/pages/1-p$i-large.gif; done [had to add backslash to escape the URL and display it correctly].
Would still appreciate valid download link for originals though.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see what Wikipedia has to say:
Ireland: "While there are a number of political parties in the state, the political landscape has been dominated for decades by Fianna FÃil and Fine Gael, historically opposed and competing entities"
The current assembly seems to disagree with two party assumption as image from wikipedia points out. But then again, Ireland doesn't have first-past-the-post system (and so doesn't most of the countries on that list). My wild guess is that there is confusion around here about what first-past-the-post system means.
Oh and regarding your original statement:
In any first-past-the-post election system, you will end up with a two-party system.
I can't say you're wrong but I'd generalize it bit further: any single-seat district system (that first-past-the-post is example of) has the tendency of becoming two-party system.
Former flash memory industry worker here. Flash does not work that way. Write Enable is attached to whatever logic circuitry is there - to be asserted following the sequence of address/data write cycles from the CPU or controller to the flash. Write Enable is a dynamic signal tied to the controlling circuitry and logic - it's not something connected to a switch that can be turned on or off by the system's owner.
Ahem... A simple ON/OFF (not ON/ON) switch could control whether the host WE output is connected to flash WE input or not (with big enough pullup/down resistor (can't remember the polarity, won't bother to check the sheets) on the flash side to set default state when disconnected) - in the case it's in OFF position the host WE signal simply goes nowhere. Please don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to argue that this would make much sense (could make, maybe it doesn't), just wanted to point out you're wrong (you're welcome!).
"There's a small but hopefully growing subculture of people who are buying the active ingredients of drugs," he says. "It's encouraging to see people take control of their own health."
Kinda reminds me of Chinese chemical plants selling sildenafil citrate for under 100 USD per kilogram (worth 10k 100mg pills) on alibaba. Those poor "cheap viagra" spammers, the Chinese are going to put them out of business :(
In economics this phenomena in general is called perverce incentive. That is, someone tries to put in place an incentive to reward for productive behaviour but in the end a "workaround" is found to comply with the incentive criteria by doing something very counter-productive.
Doing coding? One organization decided to start giving bonuses to coders by lines of code written. Suddenly all this extra whitespace appears out of nowhere and when looking into your favourite VCS you'll see same lines having a lot of small cosmetic changes changes all over. What an increase in productivity!
Want to make company more profitable? Why don't you give the new CEO incentives that are bound to short-term profits. No way (s)he will do cuts that rise profits momentarily but neglecting long-term viability of the company and by the time the damage is seen in the company profits the CEO is elsewhere continuing on solid path of "success". Pump and dump schemes are another related story (where the company holders have the incentives as well).
Have extra employees in organization and want to do some lay-offs to increase profits? You are likely to keep employees who are best at securing their positions with schemes such as refusing to share relevant information to keep yourself irreplaceable rather than those that are actually valuable to the company. Just imagine what your organization looks like after couple of rounds of these (unfortunately, I've witnessed some horrors like this - the most incompentent "developer" I've seen came from organization that did this, besides lacking relevant coding skills was also very unhelpful to collaborate with neighbor organization that our success was bound with. But he surely made sure it looked like it was the other ones fault.).
I'd say in general the problem is neglecting abuse schemes of incentives and quite often underestimation of intelligence is involved as well. Arrogance to say. Think about mushroom management of R&D organization. No way that employees (with higher average IQ than management) will be able to predict how management is trying to piss on them and no way they will find a strategic behaviour scheme to defend themselves from that which might be not that productive for the whole company...
I'd probably could think of couple of other examples as well but let's talk about law enforcement instead! Arrest quotas, anyone?
Quoting another anonymous "coward":
Air isn't homogeneous in temperature, and so there's a lot of refraction that destroys small details.
There might be some ways to estimate (and cancel) refraction such as using broader spectrum of wavelengths (that have slightly different refractive attributes) but when talking about orbit there are enough refractions on a way making the estimates unreliable. Being able to "photograph" the scene without it changing over longer period can help filtering the noise. But then again, one of course can argue that at least theoretically it would be possible to have "perfect" conditions though I'd focus bit more on practice. I would suggest you getting rather "zoomy" lens (with focal length over meter) and observe using it in different weather conditions rather than engaging in baseless it's-theoretically-(im)possible discussions.
First, trolling and disagreement aren't the same thing.
What you point out here is the sad fact that large part of population and mass media do not really distinguish between these two. Labeling someone as troll either because they disagree with your personal opinions or some publicly spread opinion is not that rare these days...
Conventionally avoiding hostile ground-based aerial defenses is very relevant exercise as they are one of most relevant threats and knowing how to avoid these can prevent from losing planes by doing something stupid. However for planes that have been optimized against ground-based single-point (rx & tx at same location) radars this isn't really most significant threat. If one wants still to use single-point radar to target the plane, one should do that from above instead.
However opposite to subject, exercise to escape unexpected illumination (obvious targeted radar dosage) is not really useless and this was achieved by improvised means so I suppose using transponders to find out where to send the radar dosage was sufficient here.
You're forgetting one thing: if the fact that you shoot once in a while without hitting makes the potential attacker less eager to attack, you're not dead. The most significant impact of any aerial defense system is limiting enemy aerial operations.
This isn't Hollywood, but expect some moron screenwriter to now use this in their plot.
Thank you, Sir, for your comment made my day.
In general, interesting question is what kind of firmware update mechanisms are in place during normal operation and whether they could be compromised. And I have the feeling that monitors are least interesting ones in this pool. Watch the JTAG lines on PCI bus! However, if attacker can access these mechanisms we can safely assume she could do anything she wants by conventional means, eg by asking the graphics card nicely to display desired image, no need to bother with monitor firmware...
Personally I'm bit surprised that those are two options that are considered for any security-critical field application.
Oh come on, there's nothing that newspeak wouldn't solve. Of course Apple is happy to provide products for totally peaceful operations by US department of defense.
"...And Apple Maps, accurate to the last drop!"
I laughed at this though.
It has been relatively interesting to observe the development of internet censorship in Failland and the rest of EU. Here it all started with legislation that was supposed to censor child pornography. It was immediately abused and quite soon systematically used to censor unlawfully known "pirate sites" such as torrent trackers (such as certain famous bay from friendly neighbor). Combined together with legislation allowing ISPs to spy legally on all traffic by their clients and several years to develop spying infrastructure ISPs and certain copyright holders have managed to deploy efficient enough spying on customers to detect for example torrent tracker traffic to harass the connection holder (by for example dropping connections). In the case there was unencrypted traffic (such as torrent tracker traffic), they have been known to pass the information to IPR trolls that used it to harass individual consumers with gross overestimated damage compensations along with lawsuit threat. It shouldn't be a surprise that all damages are overestimated and aren't based on any real facts or numbers. The damage compensations mandated by court decisions have have mostly been based on actual damages and has been estimated based on facts. This broke the rule of sensemaking damage compensations. And I find it sad.
What this atmosphere created was business opportunities for VPN providers. They compete directly with content providers as "unrestricted internet access providers" that allows access to common file sharing methods that compete with content "industry". For consumer this is good but what comes to typical IPR legislation in EU, consumer is pretty much pissed on.
Now back to UK. Single operator might have optional content filter that is enabled by default now but the fact is that there is a lot of less optional content filters such as ones for "known pirate sites". In similar manner, this has opened business opportunities for VPN providers and they do compete with content providers. But whenever something is censored, slippery slope (it's logical fallacy only when you argue against something on basis it will happen) should be considered - what will come next and what will be the improvised interpretations of what lawmakers come up with that will become common.
Linux servers don't get "constantly rooted and defaced". But, regardless, nobody is saying Linux is invulnerable. We'll have to settle on merely being orders of magnitude more secure than Windows, which is the point of the comparison.
AFAIK most of the security issues around lunix installations are related to false sensation of security under which the user installs bit too liberally things on their server and "once it works, don't touch it" is sadly common practice encouraging neglecting security updates. Also, more things installed in luserspace, more things requiring potential security updates. Some distributions, especially certain infamous South African one, makes it far too easy to install a lot of crap.
All self-developed things on top of common stack coming from a distribution is yet another story...
Well, I've always considered BeauHD as perpetrator of shit journalism but this was the actual post that made me filter out his posts.
This more or less the same problem as with proprietary systems developed for "society-critical" use-cases (such as voting mechanisms/juridical sentencing algorithms/etc) in general. As part of public infrastructure they should be inspectable by the public (think about typical vote counting where all parties have sent their representatives to watch each other). Typical proprietary "solution" works on black-box basis and the promise that "it works as expected but you're not allowed to inspect it".
In classic conditions no solutions such as these would be accepted but I've seen lately a lot of stupidity like this, especially related to "IT". One thing to remember there that over past two decades there has been gross lack of understanding among people with public decision-making authority (especially related to "IT" - in general applies to things that are under "rapid development") and there has been rarely competence to evaluate solutions for example in order to maintain the "good practices" related to voting mentioned above.
You're both wrong. I started writing software before I knew what multiplication meant. Computer science, with the sole exception of the statistics-heavy research that you do at grad school level, doesn't require even the most basic math skills.
Any definitions in computer science are similar to ones in mathematics. If one understands how things are defined in computer science, one will understand how abstract mathematical definitions works and how one can work with them. How logic works. This is (extremely roughly) 'core' of mathematics along with the abstract thinking it prepares for. I can't really define what 'mathematics' means (on level required by itself) but let's just say first time I encountered mathematics was in university (anything prior to that was closer to 'calculus'). I could give long rant about what's wrong with math teaching but let's not do it here...
Now to coding which is separate issue: pedagogically playing is very important part of learning procedure especially for kids (analogue for 'playing' to adult engineers would be close to 'testing'). When they're in safe environment, it doesn't really matter that they don't understand what they are doing - they can see what their scripts/code/whatever they produce by trial and error and repeating that is expected to introduce chance of gaining understanding on how things work. Playing is no only OK but recommended as well!
By contrast, every programmer needs to get good at architecting software properly. Of course, you can somewhat learn that as you go along, so long as you're exposed to good code and can use it as an example (or bad code, and can use it as a cautionary tale).
I'd say this is roughly true. Now, how one can architect solutions made of pieces they don't really understand? Or, how one can distinguish 'bad code' from 'good code' without deeper knowledge on how things work? Using purely trial-and-error one sees only the outcome but not necessarily all related factors (such as performance/efficiency) and this might be non-trivial for some. Of course, intuition helps a lot and in right environment (right examples, competent advice from seniors) it is likely to transfer into competence. But there's no guarantee on this and results vary individually.
Like mentioned above, playing is good but the problem arises once people with playing-competences enter industry as developers without right guidance (ie non-technical employer). Dubious software is very big liability and causes a lot of costs. Typically not hiring anyone is more profitable than hiring not-that-competent "developer". It's not that uncommon that less competent developer was hired to produce a "solution" and later significantly more time from more competent developers has to be spent to deal with the SW and the fact that you can't just rewrite it because it's in production. Hell, I'd even go further by claiming that over 99% of security vulnerabilities are caused by someone not bothering (or lacking knowledge how) to do their job right.
While during most of day-to-day work one can get around with using implementations made by someone else, it doesn't mean one wouldn't need to have at least rough understanding how they work (read: how they should be expected to work and how to test that they indeed do). When one wants to hire a developer for their project, one needs to filter a lot of "IT monkeys" (roughly someone at their trial-and-error stage without deeper understanding but who has managed to do things with few languages/environments that they don't really fully understand) from the applicants to avoid hiring someone lacking deeper understanding that is required to write good code. And this costs time that could be spent otherwise. If education institution is "snob" enough to require certain demonstrated understanding before granting a degree, having such degree helps in this process.
Quite typically when there's some news on a leak I tend to be disappointed to not find a decent download link for the original leak/dump/etc for the noble purpose of mirroring the information. It seems that media isn't always too eager to publish the sources of their news which could be considered as relevant part of investigative journalism, which makes me sad.
Still, one can for i in $(seq 1 211); do wget https\://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2861555/pages/1-p$i-large.gif; done [had to add backslash to escape the URL and display it correctly].
Would still appreciate valid download link for originals though.