Most attacks can be avoided by having a secure firewall. The cyberattacks were all successful because the machines were connected to the internet "naked" - no firewall device.
The Karman line is the defined boundary for space. Your claim that "there is no clear 'line'..." can applied to most anything, including boundaries between land and sea.
There is no clear line, or particular grain of sand, that divides land from sea. There is a wetness gradient, where you go from completely dry, to moist sand, to ever more moist sand, to fairly wet sand, to very wet sand, to sand with frothy puddles, to turbid water, ankle high water, knee high water... you get the drift.
Everything in nature lacks a clear boundary - due to planck's constant and such. All you can say is, with error bars, what the boundary is. We know the coastal boundaries of nations, within +/- 25m error. Similarly, the Kamran line is a decent boundary for when space stars from the Earth's surface. Is it exact to the millimeter? No, doesn't have to be. But the property is that buoyant crafts (bouyant due to density or due to propulsion with wings) cannot exist at the Kamran line. Just as the coastal boundaries of nations, while not defining the exact grain of sand land stops and sea begins, generally define the point at which you're dry or wet, within +/- 25m.
You didn't point out that the OP gave a terrible summary. 75,000 sell orders were not issued; a single 75,000 e-mini contract sell order was issued by a single trader to the firm's execution platform (that slices and piecewise sells, rather than issue a single large sell to reduce market impact). The firm's execution platform ultimately sold 35,000 e-mini contracts in 7 minutes before the firm shut it down. The program did what it was instructed to do -- the trader made a fat-finger error of selling $4.1 bn worth of e-mini futures (75,000 contracts).
If a driver presses the accelerator pedal while there's a brick wall in front of the car, you can't blame the engine or wheels for crashing through the wall. Can technology prevent this from happening? Sure, a car can have proximity sensors to prevent stupid users from crashing into a wall. Just because technology can fix the problem doesn't mean technology was the cause of the problem. It usually always is human error, and indeed in this case of fat-fingering in a sell order of 75,000 e-mini contracts.
Large corporations are run by far fewer people than they employ. And it's not a democracy within a corporation. The "suits" make the decisions, leave at 4pm to play golf, while the middle class clerks toil away to 8pm. If the clerks don't like it, they're encouraged to quit and find an identical large corporation where the same scenario repeats itself.
It's like saying Afghanistan is run, maintained, and full of... "people" -- even though all the real power belongs to the Taliban.
That's a retarded example. Farms are treated as businesses, and businesses only pay taxes on profits, not revenue. If you don't post any profits because all your food is consumed by yourself and family with no additional crops to sell, you don't pay any taxes. Even if you do sell some crops, that's only revenue, it's not profit until it surpasses all the costs of doing business (buying a tractor, buying a backhoe, etc.) In fact, the tax system -encourages- spending, because businesses can deduct expenditures from their taxable income. If you spent all your profits on re-investments, buying better equipment, hiring staff, etc., you don't 'lose' any money to the government.
It only beans the station wagon in terms of latency. I'm sure a station wagon has far greater bandwidth than a pigeon. I can fit 500 3TB disks in there (1.5 PB), and drive from California to New York in 1 week (That's 21Gbit/s). Short of a 16-wheeler, I don't think anything at the consumer level has that sort of bandwidth.
We have laws regarding any firefighter / police officer killed in the pursuit of catching someone for committing a crime. The person they pursue is considered guilty of murder.
It's a little silly, in my opinion, to call it murder when a police officer slips on a banana peel and falls down a flight of stairs and dies while pursuing a thief, but that is our current legal system. It is _not_ considered murder if the police officer slips on a banana peel and falls down a flight of stairs and dies while pursuing a donut shopkeeper. The officer has to be acting "in the line of duty" and the person being chased must have committed some other crime in order for the murder charge to stick.
Same is true with firefighters killed while putting out forest fires; if it's a naturally started forest fire, no crime. If it was started by a cigarette butt, the person who threw that cigarette is guilty of murder. Even if the firefighter enters the forest on a "suicide mission", it is considered murder if the fire was initiated by a person.
You don't need a weak (backdoored) system. You just need to make the private keys that the RIM servers use to talk to the clients to be available to the govt. This usually involves setting up domiciled servers within a country and giving those particular servers' private keys to the local authorities (as opposed to giving the private keys of the main Canadian servers). RIM has set up domiciled servers in Saudi Arabia and China and shared the private keys there. India wants a "me too" piece of the action.
Encryption is useless if there does not exist at least 1 person who can decrypt it. Currently it's the RIM servers. The Indian govt. wants to be added to that list.
Um, whom are you referring to when you say "he should 'give something back'" ? The lectures are not by Bill Gates, they're by Sal Khan. I don't think anybody accuses Khan of not giving back. Bill Gates is merely stating that Sal Khan is doing a good job, but Sal Khan does not work for Bill Gates or for Microsoft. Nor do Bill Gates or Microsoft seem to donate any money to Sal Khan.
1) Fail to respect the laws and regulations of a democratic country -- or -- 2) Benefit from trading with the 2nd largest mobile market in the world (635 million cell phones in India - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_in_India)
Besides, RIM is not India's only cell phone provider. No longer doing business with RIM would mean fewer choices. It would not mean no choice. It is not a "economic suicide" scenario. It's more like a scenario of "which is more important to us: our laws, or a few more phone models added to our stores?"
Exactly. Higher-level languages are _for_ people who already understand lower-level languages. Just as calculator are _for_ people who already understand arithmetic. Schools don't give calculators to kindergarteners or any child who hasn't yet understood arithmetic. First understand arithmetic, and demonstrate you do so by working _without_ a calculator, _then_ be allowed a calculator. Giving people some high-level language on super fast machines with "retina" pixel density and high-level languages is ludicrous when they don't understand the basics. Heck, I'd suggest children be taught on turing machines, and step through _in their head_ their own code. I know way too many programmers who can't play out their own code in their head. Alan Turing did not have access to computers, he developed and tested algorithms _in his head_.
It's not illegal to be a dick. A lot of jerk-like behavior is not illegal. E.g. having five simultaneous girlfriends and lying to each one that they're the only one is perfectly legal. Immoral, yes, but completely legal. Bullying a kid to do homework for you violates school rules and the school can expel the student, but it's not illegal.
Unfortunately, Slashdot is more or less a support group for disgruntled techies, and the focus of their ire for the past several years has been on outsourcing. Oddly, if you suggest to one of these "creative thinkers" (who laugh at the lack of creativity of their overseas counterparts) to start their own company so that they may then hire pure-blooded u.s. citizens, they'll balk. The irony is that these self-proclaimed paragons of creativity themselves lack the creative spark to be entrepreneurs. I believe money talks. I'm a small business owner, and I put a lot of my money where my mouth is regarding my ideas. Arm-chair "creative thinkers" just make a mockery of those with real ideas who've borrowed heavily from a bank, betting the farm on whether their ideas will succeed. Similarly, the arm-chair critics of how much indian companies "suck" should, if they truly believe such indian companies like Infosys are destined to fail, short-sell the stock on the market. It's a public company, and it's easy to short-sell (betting the company tanks). My guess is the same courageous types who thump their chests with ferocity on the soap box that is slashdot will run away with their tails between their legs when it comes to betting with real money on the stock market.
I think a lot of people can take college-level writing courses without getting a college degree. They can also study arts on their free time. Human learning is not confined to a college campus. In fact, most universities would prefer if their alumni continued to learn and grow after graduation.
Then folks will just send 100 quotes and cancel the 99 quotes that were badly delayed.
The HFT guys build a position, thereby taking on risk. They would expect to get paid for taking this risk, of course. Unless you believe folks should take risk and expect nothing in return?
Slashdot Mirror
Most attacks can be avoided by having a secure firewall. The cyberattacks were all successful because the machines were connected to the internet "naked" - no firewall device.
First we have flash memory can that only be written to N number of times, and now they're building a cpu that can only do N computations?
The Karman line is the defined boundary for space. Your claim that "there is no clear 'line' ..." can applied to most anything, including boundaries between land and sea.
There is no clear line, or particular grain of sand, that divides land from sea. There is a wetness gradient, where you go from completely dry, to moist sand, to ever more moist sand, to fairly wet sand, to very wet sand, to sand with frothy puddles, to turbid water, ankle high water, knee high water... you get the drift.
Everything in nature lacks a clear boundary - due to planck's constant and such. All you can say is, with error bars, what the boundary is. We know the coastal boundaries of nations, within +/- 25m error. Similarly, the Kamran line is a decent boundary for when space stars from the Earth's surface. Is it exact to the millimeter? No, doesn't have to be. But the property is that buoyant crafts (bouyant due to density or due to propulsion with wings) cannot exist at the Kamran line. Just as the coastal boundaries of nations, while not defining the exact grain of sand land stops and sea begins, generally define the point at which you're dry or wet, within +/- 25m.
You didn't point out that the OP gave a terrible summary. 75,000 sell orders were not issued; a single 75,000 e-mini contract sell order was issued by a single trader to the firm's execution platform (that slices and piecewise sells, rather than issue a single large sell to reduce market impact). The firm's execution platform ultimately sold 35,000 e-mini contracts in 7 minutes before the firm shut it down. The program did what it was instructed to do -- the trader made a fat-finger error of selling $4.1 bn worth of e-mini futures (75,000 contracts).
If a driver presses the accelerator pedal while there's a brick wall in front of the car, you can't blame the engine or wheels for crashing through the wall. Can technology prevent this from happening? Sure, a car can have proximity sensors to prevent stupid users from crashing into a wall. Just because technology can fix the problem doesn't mean technology was the cause of the problem. It usually always is human error, and indeed in this case of fat-fingering in a sell order of 75,000 e-mini contracts.
Large corporations are run by far fewer people than they employ. And it's not a democracy within a corporation. The "suits" make the decisions, leave at 4pm to play golf, while the middle class clerks toil away to 8pm. If the clerks don't like it, they're encouraged to quit and find an identical large corporation where the same scenario repeats itself.
It's like saying Afghanistan is run, maintained, and full of... "people" -- even though all the real power belongs to the Taliban.
That's a retarded example. Farms are treated as businesses, and businesses only pay taxes on profits, not revenue. If you don't post any profits because all your food is consumed by yourself and family with no additional crops to sell, you don't pay any taxes. Even if you do sell some crops, that's only revenue, it's not profit until it surpasses all the costs of doing business (buying a tractor, buying a backhoe, etc.) In fact, the tax system -encourages- spending, because businesses can deduct expenditures from their taxable income. If you spent all your profits on re-investments, buying better equipment, hiring staff, etc., you don't 'lose' any money to the government.
It only beans the station wagon in terms of latency. I'm sure a station wagon has far greater bandwidth than a pigeon. I can fit 500 3TB disks in there (1.5 PB), and drive from California to New York in 1 week (That's 21Gbit/s). Short of a 16-wheeler, I don't think anything at the consumer level has that sort of bandwidth.
We have laws regarding any firefighter / police officer killed in the pursuit of catching someone for committing a crime. The person they pursue is considered guilty of murder.
It's a little silly, in my opinion, to call it murder when a police officer slips on a banana peel and falls down a flight of stairs and dies while pursuing a thief, but that is our current legal system. It is _not_ considered murder if the police officer slips on a banana peel and falls down a flight of stairs and dies while pursuing a donut shopkeeper. The officer has to be acting "in the line of duty" and the person being chased must have committed some other crime in order for the murder charge to stick.
Same is true with firefighters killed while putting out forest fires; if it's a naturally started forest fire, no crime. If it was started by a cigarette butt, the person who threw that cigarette is guilty of murder. Even if the firefighter enters the forest on a "suicide mission", it is considered murder if the fire was initiated by a person.
You're forgetting that with the Master Key now revealed, it's possible to impersonate devices. You can impersonate a graphics card.
What about Google and the Department of Homeland Security? I wonder why they're considered root CAs.
You don't need a weak (backdoored) system. You just need to make the private keys that the RIM servers use to talk to the clients to be available to the govt. This usually involves setting up domiciled servers within a country and giving those particular servers' private keys to the local authorities (as opposed to giving the private keys of the main Canadian servers). RIM has set up domiciled servers in Saudi Arabia and China and shared the private keys there. India wants a "me too" piece of the action.
Encryption is useless if there does not exist at least 1 person who can decrypt it. Currently it's the RIM servers. The Indian govt. wants to be added to that list.
Um, whom are you referring to when you say "he should 'give something back'" ? The lectures are not by Bill Gates, they're by Sal Khan. I don't think anybody accuses Khan of not giving back. Bill Gates is merely stating that Sal Khan is doing a good job, but Sal Khan does not work for Bill Gates or for Microsoft. Nor do Bill Gates or Microsoft seem to donate any money to Sal Khan.
I'm sure the argument works both ways.
1) Fail to respect the laws and regulations of a democratic country
-- or --
2) Benefit from trading with the 2nd largest mobile market in the world (635 million cell phones in India - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_in_India)
Besides, RIM is not India's only cell phone provider. No longer doing business with RIM would mean fewer choices. It would not mean no choice. It is not a "economic suicide" scenario. It's more like a scenario of "which is more important to us: our laws, or a few more phone models added to our stores?"
Exactly. Higher-level languages are _for_ people who already understand lower-level languages. Just as calculator are _for_ people who already understand arithmetic. Schools don't give calculators to kindergarteners or any child who hasn't yet understood arithmetic. First understand arithmetic, and demonstrate you do so by working _without_ a calculator, _then_ be allowed a calculator. Giving people some high-level language on super fast machines with "retina" pixel density and high-level languages is ludicrous when they don't understand the basics. Heck, I'd suggest children be taught on turing machines, and step through _in their head_ their own code. I know way too many programmers who can't play out their own code in their head. Alan Turing did not have access to computers, he developed and tested algorithms _in his head_.
The resources of students have negative cost. That is, they pay _you_ for you to use their resources (their brains).
China seems to have a rather successful economy, and their policy toward RIM is just as strict.
Yeah, I have to agree with naz404; the guy in the picture looks normal, you're probably just creeped out easily by brown folk.
It's not illegal to be a dick. A lot of jerk-like behavior is not illegal. E.g. having five simultaneous girlfriends and lying to each one that they're the only one is perfectly legal. Immoral, yes, but completely legal. Bullying a kid to do homework for you violates school rules and the school can expel the student, but it's not illegal.
Unfortunately, Slashdot is more or less a support group for disgruntled techies, and the focus of their ire for the past several years has been on outsourcing. Oddly, if you suggest to one of these "creative thinkers" (who laugh at the lack of creativity of their overseas counterparts) to start their own company so that they may then hire pure-blooded u.s. citizens, they'll balk. The irony is that these self-proclaimed paragons of creativity themselves lack the creative spark to be entrepreneurs. I believe money talks. I'm a small business owner, and I put a lot of my money where my mouth is regarding my ideas. Arm-chair "creative thinkers" just make a mockery of those with real ideas who've borrowed heavily from a bank, betting the farm on whether their ideas will succeed. Similarly, the arm-chair critics of how much indian companies "suck" should, if they truly believe such indian companies like Infosys are destined to fail, short-sell the stock on the market. It's a public company, and it's easy to short-sell (betting the company tanks). My guess is the same courageous types who thump their chests with ferocity on the soap box that is slashdot will run away with their tails between their legs when it comes to betting with real money on the stock market.
You do realize that India has the notion of serving warrants, right? They can't snoop on you without a warrant, same as in the U.S.
So, if your friends are being laid off because their job went to community college kids for a third of the pay, you're not pissed?
I think a lot of people can take college-level writing courses without getting a college degree. They can also study arts on their free time. Human learning is not confined to a college campus. In fact, most universities would prefer if their alumni continued to learn and grow after graduation.
Or a great investment that costs only $108 per share.
Wouldn't it go against the non-profit ethos to advocate a for-profit dev platform?
Then folks will just send 100 quotes and cancel the 99 quotes that were badly delayed.
The HFT guys build a position, thereby taking on risk. They would expect to get paid for taking this risk, of course. Unless you believe folks should take risk and expect nothing in return?