Yes, but Hawking bets against himself. For example, if he feels there is a ToE, he will place a bet that there isn't. That way, he only has to pay out after having the satisfaction of being right.
We abhor unsubstantiated rules, and at age 6 she does understand the reasoning for most of the things we expect of her.
No, she doesn't. She has memorized or remembered the reasoning for those things, but she doesn't truly understand them. At that age her brain simply hasn't matured enough to truly understand. Which isn't a bad thing - it's normal.
Just a quick note writing PHP and writing Swing GUIs is not "junk". They are important tasks that need to be done and, contrary to popular opinion, are done a lot better by skilled professionals.
Also, I'll chime in and point out that having an undergrad emphasis on "security" is horrible. Security is HARD and you need a solid foundation in operating systems, networking, databases, web programming, programming languages and a lot of other areas. If you are requiring security classes instead of those other classes, you are doing the students a disservice.
Do you have any idea how hard some things are? Voyager is 8.5 BILLION miles away. Being able to hit it with a signal is amazing. That the signal is strong enough to be understood - that's taking it to another level altogether. There have been thousands of engineers, working for decades to get that to happen. The fact the speed of light annoys you isn't visionary, it's childish. You are upset because the Universe isn't cooperating with the miracles you think are possible. Too bad. No one has invented an everfull cookie jar, and no one has figured out a practical way around the speed of light.
Now, I'm not saying we will never beat the speed of light by finding some sort of loophole, or that we won't come to a new understanding of the Universe. However, the fact that no one has convinced you everything we know isn't wrong isn't visionary - it shows a fundamental lack of understanding regarding how science works.
The interviewee has a CCIE which is one of, if not the most, difficult of the technical certifications. Someone with the knowledge and skill to pass the certification has been working for years with enterprise networks. In fact, he's a senior network engineer for a multi-billion dollar company. Which means he would be aware of security in an enterprise environment, deal with password management and segregation of duties. And with policies, too. Since he probably spends a lot of his time writing them.
I'm not saying a lot of people RTFA but, if you are going to say the guy doesn't understand the issues, you might want to read about him first.
Well, I don't accept your premise, but even if I did, why would someone suddenly want to leave just because they completed one training course?
Because training can be expensive? From Wikipedia:
In addition, according to a survey by Cisco the average cost to prepare for CCIE certification is $9,050 as of April 2006, spent mostly on practice equipment and self study material.
So, the question you have to ask is: "Would someone work at a crappy place for 6 months if it would get them $10k in training?" I'm thinking there are a lot of people out there who would. Just the exam is $1400 plus travel expenses, so you are probably looking at a total of $2500. If the company lets you do that in the first month or two, that's a pretty nice "bonus" for those willing to wander down that path.
Sending something at 1% of the speed of light is not too far off our current capability.
I think you better check your numbers. The fastest ship we have launched is the New Horizons probe which is headed for Pluto. It has a speed relative to Earth of 16.26 km/s. Note: The fastest ship if we include gravity assists is Voyager 1 at 17.15 km/s relative to Earth. However, the speed of light is 300,000 km/s. So, 1% would be 3,000 km/s and we are running around 17 km/s as our best effort, which means we need to get 200x faster to reach the 1% goal.
Moral of the story: Light is really, REALLY fast and we can't build anything (larger than a few atoms) that can travel fast enough to be conveniently compared to the speed of light. (Yet.)
If you run fiber between populated areas, the cost of that fiber can be split among a few million customers. If you run fiber to a remote power station, dam or pipeline - you can't split the cost since there is only one customer.
As was stated above, its stupid that so many key systems are connected to the Internet (i.e. why power stations aren't mandated to have a separate network for critical computers to their word processing/Internet browsing computers is beyond me), but that is the way it is.
Because resources aren't infinite. If they had to run their own fiber to all the control systems, it would be vastly more expensive, which means something else important wouldn't get done.
Sure, in a perfect world, they would have a stand-alone network that used encrypted traffic and proven authentication methods. But the world isn't perfect, and companies and government agencies don't have the money to do everything the Right Way. So, they make decisions, and trade-offs, to do the best they can with what they have. Obviously, things haven't gone too bad, (so far), since we haven't encountered regular large-scale power outages or the entire Manhattan skyline being used as Blinkenlights. So they must have made some good decisions in the past.
Is it really that big of an issue though these days?
Yes. You don't transport ammunition with airplanes, you transport it with ships.
Wouldn't sending in drop shipments or using captured enemy weapons/ammo suffice in a time of need?
No. Ammunition is HEAVY. A single artillery shell is around 100 pounds. Now imagine you have a battery of 8 guns, firing 2 rounds a minute. That's around 1 ton of ammunition a minute. Now, mortar shells are lighter, (3-5 pounds), but you have many more mortars than artillery guns and a higher rate of fire, (20-30 rounds/minute). Same with assault weapons - way lighter ammunition, per round, but many more weapons to supply. So, you can drop ammunition in, and it is definitely better than not having anything to shoot, but it isn't sustainable.
Or is the limitation troop location and training of foreign weaponry?
Moving troops is extremely hard. Unless you have total air superiority, you can't fly them around and you can't openly move them in trucks. Which means spreading trucks out, taking back routes that might not be monitored and otherwise going slow. Of course, that's still faster than having them walk - but many more will be killed en route.
Properly training with a weapon takes time. The M-16 qualification in the US Marine Corps takes 2 weeks. One week of classes and dry firing, and another week at the firing range. However, that doesn't take into account any "combat firing" which would include unknown distances, moving targets, shooting while moving, low-light situations, gas masks or using coordinated firing. From my experience, it takes about a year of regular training, (a couple days a month), to get a "mastery" with the weapon. Some people get there faster, and some never get that level of skill - barely qualifying even after years of training.
I told her that I am paying for this education and I will get as much or as little of it as I like and to please continue.
That's one of the most arrogant, narcissistic comments I've heard in some time. Yes, you are paying for the class but that doesn't give you any rights to disturb the instructor, the other students or ignore the rules of the classroom.
Are you allowed to disturb people in a movie theater because you bought a ticket? Play your music as loud as you want because you pay rent/mortgage or own your house? Show up in a t-shirt to a formal event? No - you aren't. If you do, the usher/police/whoever will show up and ask you to leave. The classroom is no different. If you didn't like the rules, you had the right to drop the class, but not to create your own set of rules.
Oh - and getting the highest grade doesn't mean you deserve a free pass.
Like many politicians before him, Barack Hussein Obama broke a campaign promise. He outright lied in order to get the votes independent voters.
How did he break a promise to fund Constellation? From a previous Slashdot story
"In a recent article on The Space Review, Greg Zsidisin reveals that Barack Obama plans to delay Project Constellation for at least five years, using the redirected funds to nationalize early-education for children under five years old to prepare them for the rigors of kindergarten and beyond, if he is elected president. It is feared that if this happens the Vision for Space Exploration will flounder and that may be the end of human spaceflight altogether."
Seems like he's just following through on what he said almost 2 years ago.
and what's worse is they've instead made things far far worse than they would have been than if they had sat on their hands and done nothing.
How do you know that? Which is the problem - anyone can raise their voice, throw up their hands and shout, "It would have been better if they had !" However, there is no way for you to know the new plan would work better, or at all. They tried something and it didn't work - or didn't work as well as they hoped. So, what if we tried your hands-off approach and it made things worse?
The truth is - you don't know what would have happened. You can guess. You can postulate. You can hypothesize. You can do anything you want. However, you don't KNOW. You can look at previous recessions/depressions and try to extrapolate, but it won't be exact because the world, and its economies aren't the same as they were previously. So, the effect of any other course of action is just a guess. It might be a well-reasoned guess - but it's still a guess.
or if such massive hardware is going to sell more as a very fast deep packet inspection layer 7 device.
There is no way they would be able to do deep packet inspection at those kinds of speeds. Just think about a 1TB hard drive. Now imagine 300 of them. Now, you want to inspect all that data in 1 second. It's just not going to happen. That's why it's listed as a core router - it's job is to move a LOT of data as fast as possible. In fact, other routers do extra work to reduce the processing done by the core routers.
Yes, they've done things differently and that's not always a bad thing. However, there are a lot of things that have become commonplace and ARE bad things. Since you mentioned laziness, why don't we look at the increased consumption of fast food and instant meals. A few generations ago 99% of the time you would have a home cooked meal for supper, and generally bring your lunch to school. Today, the majority of people don't take the time to cook healthy meals and consume whatever junk food is around. I could make the same observation about exercise. We know obesity is bad, but it has skyrocketed, (although it may be leveling off), compared to even 1 generation ago.
I often see Socrates' quote about the next generation of children being spoiled and lazy brought up. However, the Greek Empire fell. At some point they lost their edge, and went down. Rome - same thing. In fact, every Empire at some point lost their edge, got complacent and went down. (Very few were destroyed while still at the top of their game.) Except for the current empires, (influential countries), that are still on top. The big question is: Have they learned from history? Or are they going to get complacent, and be replaced by the next hungry, up-and-coming society?
Wind mills need a bunch of maintenance after they are built, they still use a good deal of oil for lubrication, etc.
As does every other method of electrical generation.
Not to mention the sheer amount of land space they occupy for relatively little power is pathetic.
That depends on the amount of land space available. I live in Iowa and we have a LOT of space available. It also doesn't take up much of a corn field since you can farm almost directly under the towers. I have a 100 tower wind farm less than 10 miles form my house, and I've driven by it, and even stopped to walk around, and the corn is less than 50 feet from the tower itself. The cables are run underground, so the farmers don't even worry about overhead powerlines when driving their machinery. Oh, and corn doesn't care about pieces of tower falling off - it's a plant.
There is no way wind power can supply enough power for a big city area.
Sure, you have to account for calm days, but for overall generation capacity you can. Iowa gets almost 20% of its electricity from wind - and adoption is only slowed down by how fast they can get the parts for the tower. However, with new manufacturing plants opening in Iowa, the speed wind farms can be built should rise dramatically.
Maybe I'm naive, but I think people shouldn't be fired for making mistakes. After all, you want to learn from your mistakes. What you get with a policy of firing people who make an occasional blunder is a party-line culture. In intelligence, you definitely want free-thinkers. New ideas fail sometimes, but you need new ideas if you want to keep your edge. Instead, fire people who don't learn from their mistakes.
I think the real answer is somewhere in the middle. Yes, people make mistakes and they should have the chance to learn from them. However, if an analysis shows incompetence, irresponsibility or other true failure on the part of the individual - then they have to go. If nothing else, we can modify the rule from The Evil Overlord List: If a 5-year-old can see how the person messed up, then they need to go.
Actually, "windows gadget" is an example of a backronym.
Similar to Packet InterNet Groper being a backronym for PING. However, the creator of ping says it was named for the sound a sonar makes and, since he wrote it, I'm assuming he would know what he named it after.
Slashdot Mirror
What about the effects of cubic miles of salt water being blasted into salty vapor, that will then fall as salty rain on your fields?
Yes, but Hawking bets against himself. For example, if he feels there is a ToE, he will place a bet that there isn't. That way, he only has to pay out after having the satisfaction of being right.
We abhor unsubstantiated rules, and at age 6 she does understand the reasoning for most of the things we expect of her.
No, she doesn't. She has memorized or remembered the reasoning for those things, but she doesn't truly understand them. At that age her brain simply hasn't matured enough to truly understand. Which isn't a bad thing - it's normal.
Just a quick note writing PHP and writing Swing GUIs is not "junk". They are important tasks that need to be done and, contrary to popular opinion, are done a lot better by skilled professionals.
Also, I'll chime in and point out that having an undergrad emphasis on "security" is horrible. Security is HARD and you need a solid foundation in operating systems, networking, databases, web programming, programming languages and a lot of other areas. If you are requiring security classes instead of those other classes, you are doing the students a disservice.
I hate to be a troll but - you are an idiot.
Do you have any idea how hard some things are? Voyager is 8.5 BILLION miles away. Being able to hit it with a signal is amazing. That the signal is strong enough to be understood - that's taking it to another level altogether. There have been thousands of engineers, working for decades to get that to happen. The fact the speed of light annoys you isn't visionary, it's childish. You are upset because the Universe isn't cooperating with the miracles you think are possible. Too bad. No one has invented an everfull cookie jar, and no one has figured out a practical way around the speed of light.
Now, I'm not saying we will never beat the speed of light by finding some sort of loophole, or that we won't come to a new understanding of the Universe. However, the fact that no one has convinced you everything we know isn't wrong isn't visionary - it shows a fundamental lack of understanding regarding how science works.
You need to do your homework - or at least RTFA.
The interviewee has a CCIE which is one of, if not the most, difficult of the technical certifications. Someone with the knowledge and skill to pass the certification has been working for years with enterprise networks. In fact, he's a senior network engineer for a multi-billion dollar company. Which means he would be aware of security in an enterprise environment, deal with password management and segregation of duties. And with policies, too. Since he probably spends a lot of his time writing them.
I'm not saying a lot of people RTFA but, if you are going to say the guy doesn't understand the issues, you might want to read about him first.
Well, I don't accept your premise, but even if I did, why would someone suddenly want to leave just because they completed one training course?
Because training can be expensive? From Wikipedia:
So, the question you have to ask is: "Would someone work at a crappy place for 6 months if it would get them $10k in training?" I'm thinking there are a lot of people out there who would. Just the exam is $1400 plus travel expenses, so you are probably looking at a total of $2500. If the company lets you do that in the first month or two, that's a pretty nice "bonus" for those willing to wander down that path.
Sending something at 1% of the speed of light is not too far off our current capability.
I think you better check your numbers. The fastest ship we have launched is the New Horizons probe which is headed for Pluto. It has a speed relative to Earth of 16.26 km/s. Note: The fastest ship if we include gravity assists is Voyager 1 at 17.15 km/s relative to Earth. However, the speed of light is 300,000 km/s. So, 1% would be 3,000 km/s and we are running around 17 km/s as our best effort, which means we need to get 200x faster to reach the 1% goal.
Moral of the story: Light is really, REALLY fast and we can't build anything (larger than a few atoms) that can travel fast enough to be conveniently compared to the speed of light. (Yet.)
If you run fiber between populated areas, the cost of that fiber can be split among a few million customers. If you run fiber to a remote power station, dam or pipeline - you can't split the cost since there is only one customer.
As was stated above, its stupid that so many key systems are connected to the Internet (i.e. why power stations aren't mandated to have a separate network for critical computers to their word processing/Internet browsing computers is beyond me), but that is the way it is.
Because resources aren't infinite. If they had to run their own fiber to all the control systems, it would be vastly more expensive, which means something else important wouldn't get done.
Sure, in a perfect world, they would have a stand-alone network that used encrypted traffic and proven authentication methods. But the world isn't perfect, and companies and government agencies don't have the money to do everything the Right Way. So, they make decisions, and trade-offs, to do the best they can with what they have. Obviously, things haven't gone too bad, (so far), since we haven't encountered regular large-scale power outages or the entire Manhattan skyline being used as Blinkenlights. So they must have made some good decisions in the past.
Is it really that big of an issue though these days?
Yes. You don't transport ammunition with airplanes, you transport it with ships.
Wouldn't sending in drop shipments or using captured enemy weapons/ammo suffice in a time of need?
No. Ammunition is HEAVY. A single artillery shell is around 100 pounds. Now imagine you have a battery of 8 guns, firing 2 rounds a minute. That's around 1 ton of ammunition a minute. Now, mortar shells are lighter, (3-5 pounds), but you have many more mortars than artillery guns and a higher rate of fire, (20-30 rounds/minute). Same with assault weapons - way lighter ammunition, per round, but many more weapons to supply. So, you can drop ammunition in, and it is definitely better than not having anything to shoot, but it isn't sustainable.
Or is the limitation troop location and training of foreign weaponry?
Moving troops is extremely hard. Unless you have total air superiority, you can't fly them around and you can't openly move them in trucks. Which means spreading trucks out, taking back routes that might not be monitored and otherwise going slow. Of course, that's still faster than having them walk - but many more will be killed en route.
Properly training with a weapon takes time. The M-16 qualification in the US Marine Corps takes 2 weeks. One week of classes and dry firing, and another week at the firing range. However, that doesn't take into account any "combat firing" which would include unknown distances, moving targets, shooting while moving, low-light situations, gas masks or using coordinated firing. From my experience, it takes about a year of regular training, (a couple days a month), to get a "mastery" with the weapon. Some people get there faster, and some never get that level of skill - barely qualifying even after years of training.
From the secret codes hidden on the paper by the printer.
Perhaps he was using it to keep in touch with his "family".
Unless users install/are tricked into installing a BIOS-level rootkit.
I told her that I am paying for this education and I will get as much or as little of it as I like and to please continue.
That's one of the most arrogant, narcissistic comments I've heard in some time. Yes, you are paying for the class but that doesn't give you any rights to disturb the instructor, the other students or ignore the rules of the classroom.
Are you allowed to disturb people in a movie theater because you bought a ticket? Play your music as loud as you want because you pay rent/mortgage or own your house? Show up in a t-shirt to a formal event? No - you aren't. If you do, the usher/police/whoever will show up and ask you to leave. The classroom is no different. If you didn't like the rules, you had the right to drop the class, but not to create your own set of rules.
Oh - and getting the highest grade doesn't mean you deserve a free pass.
Like many politicians before him, Barack Hussein Obama broke a campaign promise. He outright lied in order to get the votes independent voters.
How did he break a promise to fund Constellation? From a previous Slashdot story
"In a recent article on The Space Review, Greg Zsidisin reveals that Barack Obama plans to delay Project Constellation for at least five years, using the redirected funds to nationalize early-education for children under five years old to prepare them for the rigors of kindergarten and beyond, if he is elected president. It is feared that if this happens the Vision for Space Exploration will flounder and that may be the end of human spaceflight altogether."
Seems like he's just following through on what he said almost 2 years ago.
and what's worse is they've instead made things far far worse than they would have been than if they had sat on their hands and done nothing.
How do you know that? Which is the problem - anyone can raise their voice, throw up their hands and shout, "It would have been better if they had !" However, there is no way for you to know the new plan would work better, or at all. They tried something and it didn't work - or didn't work as well as they hoped. So, what if we tried your hands-off approach and it made things worse?
The truth is - you don't know what would have happened. You can guess. You can postulate. You can hypothesize. You can do anything you want. However, you don't KNOW. You can look at previous recessions/depressions and try to extrapolate, but it won't be exact because the world, and its economies aren't the same as they were previously. So, the effect of any other course of action is just a guess. It might be a well-reasoned guess - but it's still a guess.
or if such massive hardware is going to sell more as a very fast deep packet inspection layer 7 device.
There is no way they would be able to do deep packet inspection at those kinds of speeds. Just think about a 1TB hard drive. Now imagine 300 of them. Now, you want to inspect all that data in 1 second. It's just not going to happen. That's why it's listed as a core router - it's job is to move a LOT of data as fast as possible. In fact, other routers do extra work to reduce the processing done by the core routers.
Kill it before the USA becomes known as the Zombie Nation.
I believe you mean Zombieland.
See sig.
Yes, they've done things differently and that's not always a bad thing. However, there are a lot of things that have become commonplace and ARE bad things. Since you mentioned laziness, why don't we look at the increased consumption of fast food and instant meals. A few generations ago 99% of the time you would have a home cooked meal for supper, and generally bring your lunch to school. Today, the majority of people don't take the time to cook healthy meals and consume whatever junk food is around. I could make the same observation about exercise. We know obesity is bad, but it has skyrocketed, (although it may be leveling off), compared to even 1 generation ago.
I often see Socrates' quote about the next generation of children being spoiled and lazy brought up. However, the Greek Empire fell. At some point they lost their edge, and went down. Rome - same thing. In fact, every Empire at some point lost their edge, got complacent and went down. (Very few were destroyed while still at the top of their game.) Except for the current empires, (influential countries), that are still on top. The big question is: Have they learned from history? Or are they going to get complacent, and be replaced by the next hungry, up-and-coming society?
Wind mills need a bunch of maintenance after they are built, they still use a good deal of oil for lubrication, etc.
As does every other method of electrical generation.
Not to mention the sheer amount of land space they occupy for relatively little power is pathetic.
That depends on the amount of land space available. I live in Iowa and we have a LOT of space available. It also doesn't take up much of a corn field since you can farm almost directly under the towers. I have a 100 tower wind farm less than 10 miles form my house, and I've driven by it, and even stopped to walk around, and the corn is less than 50 feet from the tower itself. The cables are run underground, so the farmers don't even worry about overhead powerlines when driving their machinery. Oh, and corn doesn't care about pieces of tower falling off - it's a plant.
There is no way wind power can supply enough power for a big city area.
Sure, you have to account for calm days, but for overall generation capacity you can. Iowa gets almost 20% of its electricity from wind - and adoption is only slowed down by how fast they can get the parts for the tower. However, with new manufacturing plants opening in Iowa, the speed wind farms can be built should rise dramatically.
If you can't understand it, it would follow that it would be hard to determine if it was malicious.
Of course, referencing the Underhanded C Contest might have been more direct.
Maybe I'm naive, but I think people shouldn't be fired for making mistakes. After all, you want to learn from your mistakes. What you get with a policy of firing people who make an occasional blunder is a party-line culture. In intelligence, you definitely want free-thinkers. New ideas fail sometimes, but you need new ideas if you want to keep your edge. Instead, fire people who don't learn from their mistakes.
I think the real answer is somewhere in the middle. Yes, people make mistakes and they should have the chance to learn from them. However, if an analysis shows incompetence, irresponsibility or other true failure on the part of the individual - then they have to go. If nothing else, we can modify the rule from The Evil Overlord List: If a 5-year-old can see how the person messed up, then they need to go.
Actually, "windows gadget" is an example of a backronym.
Similar to Packet InterNet Groper being a backronym for PING. However, the creator of ping says it was named for the sound a sonar makes and, since he wrote it, I'm assuming he would know what he named it after.