I don't have a mobile because, at least in Canada, they are ridiculously expensive and I haven't yet found a use for one that is worth the cost of owning it. However, I'd hardly say that I'm resisting technology or estranging myself from normal society, well, at least more than anyone else posting on Slashdot.
All that does is change the question to why a conference called the "Open Source Summit 2017" does not use Linux to present. I suspect the reason is that presentations are all about polish and while I love Open Source software the one (and perhaps only) thing that commercial software does seem to do better is polish.
I thought the main opposition from dark sky projects usually came from those arguing that street lights reduce crime? A lack of advertising after dark is a good reason for dark sky preserves plus it also reduces energy use.
Which fucking part of her job was technical or scientific? She's a manager.
Yes, a manager of people working in a highly technical and complex profession. As Equifax has just clearly demonstrated putting someone who has no clue about the job in a position of authority over those who do it is a recipe for disaster. How is someone like that going to ask the tough questions, spot mistakes that have been made, judge when something is really important and needs addressing vs. just sounds bad, select the best course of action to take when presented with choices, make judgements about which of her staff are competent etc.?
you fight oppression with deeds. The South was basically dragged kicking and screaming, literally at the barrel of a gun circa 1864...
Who was wielding that gun? The US as a whole was convinced that oppression was a very bad idea by the words and ideas which were freely expressed. Having lost that argument a group of states then decided they were just going to ignore it can carry on regardless. So yes, sometimes action is required but only after the argument of words and ideas has been won otherwise you won't have anyone willing to take that action.
If the country had both a history and a present-day pattern of oppressing "fucking assholes" you might have a point
No, the point is even more valid when you have a history of oppression. History has shown time and time again that the way you fight the words and idea of oppression is with better words and ideas.
You cannot get rid of entrenched attitudes like racism, sexism and other bigotry by suppressing it. All this does is hide it from view where it festers and erupts and then all of a sudden you wake up to find you have a sexist, racist Oompa Loompa as a leader.
The idea is so old there is even incorporated into a children's fairy tale. Remember sleeping beauty where the king bans all spinning wheels but she still gets pricked because the first time she sees one she is so curious about it?
Yes nothing says she (or anyone with a liberal arts degree) can't be a good security officer.
It's not impossible but it is implausible, especially for a major company where security is essential to the core business and her degree is not in any technical/scientific field at all. Besides, there is now ample evidence that she is an utterly incompetent security officer: 10 weeks to identify the breach, 6 weeks to notify, sequential PIN numbers, UK data exported to the US (which is probably illegal) due to an error etc. plus of course the breach itself.
Still when Equifax collapses and she gets fired at least she will be able to sing for her supper.
Just be thankful you get any ports at all. With them now adding wireless charging I would not be surprised if a future iPhone model has no ports at all.
No. Governments help companies to hopefully provide employment and maximize the tax revenue generated from the company and it's employees.
....and how do they do that? By funding the research required for them to develop a better widget, process etc. I am not arguing that doing this is bad I am simply arguing that this leads to a short term gain. The same is true for military technology: this is just applied research which relies on improving existing technology. Applied research is extremely important but it is the last step in the science and technology food chain and if you fail to feed it with new scientific understanding and ideas it will eventually run out of steam and the rate of technological progress will become increasingly slower.
To use your rather unrealistic example no company will ever fund something like the Alcubierre drive because it requires funding fundamental research and that research is just as likely to show that such a device is impossible to build. This is why fundamental research is driven by curiosity, and not a desire to build better widgets. You never know what you will find nor how it might be exploited to build something useful.
I'm not so sure apathy covers it. Their response - creating an extremely dodgy website which many people are convinced does not work - goes way past apathy and puts them firmly in the incompetent pile, at least in my opinion.
As autonomous cars get better and better, we'll see more and more accidents attributed to driver inattention
Not if we can have a system which is better at driving than a human. In fact, other than the "cool factor" I'm not sure I see the point of a semi-autonomous system which requires me to watch the road all the time since it is no different from driving myself and potentially a lot more annoying. Frankly, it sounds more like paying to debug a final system which will drive itself.
Possibly not if Moore's law fails. However, this study arguably just shows the failure of focussing entirely on applied research. For each of their case studies they focus on one thing, such as Moore's law, crop yields etc. and conclude that it gets harder each year to drive the increases. This is because each of these areas is sticking to one fundamental approach and refining and improving it more and more which is clearly going to get harder over time.
What keeps the ideas coming is fundamental research which opens up entirely new approaches to solving problems. As the quote says "No amount of continuous improvement of the candle would have lead to the electric light bulb". Indeed the entire IT revolution owes its existence to the discovery of quantum mechanics and its application to understanding condensed matter physics. Without this applied researchers would be still be working on improving the valve.
The problem is that governments love to focus less on helping companies develop better widgets. The economic returns are almost immediate - or at least immediately obvious - and so useful to a politician seeking re-election. What they need to do is to put more money into fundamental research so that as fields run out of ideas there are completely new areas full of potential ideas to improve our lives in ways we cannot yet imagine. The problem is that the return on this investment is both uncertain and likely 50+ years away and the average politician has trouble caring about anything further away than the next election.
The legal right must include the ability to share information with others. Once you can do that it is not just a battle of the minds with you vs. the company engineers but the internet vs. the company engineers and that battle is a lot harder to win for the company. Even Apple still seems to regularly have its iPhones jail broken despite decades of top Apple coders trying to stop it.
First sale doctrine means you can do what you wish with something you purchase.
It may well do that but the problem is very few people have the time or money to fight the small army of lawyers that a large corporation will fling at you to make you stop doing it because they can probably make some sort of dodgy argument under the DMCA. If they can do that then it won't matter whether it was wrong because the price of justice will be more than you can afford.
Correction: competent financial institutions know this. Incompetent ones clearly do not and, as recent events show, it is not always easy to tell the competent from the incompetent.
But he specifically attacked US entities. Effectively if we follow your reasoning this is becomes reduced to a state sponsored attack on the US by the UK.
No for three reasons. First and foremost what he did is illegal under UK law so he was breaking UK law and should be answerable for that in the UK. Secondly there was no physical attack he merely persuaded some computers to send information the US did not want sent.
Lastly, even if it were not illegal under UK law, a citizen of a country exercising their rights and freedoms under that country's laws does not make it a "state sponsored attack". State sponsored attacks are conducted by someone on a government payroll, not some young idiot with too much time on his hands. If a US citizen in the US posts an illegal message on a Chinese website which criticizes the Chinese government does that mean that China should regard that as a state sponsored attack and not the action of an individual US citizen exercising their right to free speech? If you don't think British law does enough to protect against actions like this then you can try to persuade the UK government to change the UK laws or you can block any connection from the UK. You do not just get to enforce US laws in the UK.
In which case you had better have the money to mount an equally relentless defence of that data. This was also not some minor slip-up like a few files on a USB stick or temporary files on someone's hacked desktop this looks like pretty much their entire database. It is possible to protect such valuable assets - the Crown Jewels have been safely kept for centuries with a thief only once, briefly, getting their hands on them but they never made it out of the Tower.
Credit databases like this are the "Crown Jewels" of online data due to their value for identity theft. I don't think it is asking too much that the extremely rich and profitable companies which manage these data look after them in a similar fashion.
To avoid inconveniences like this, firms like Equifax will simply move vulnerable assets outside of the reach of US Law.
Many countries have laws to prevent the export of sensitive personal data. Both the EU and Canada have laws that require any export of data has to be to a country where there is the same level of protection under the law for privacy. This is what causes Universities in Canada headaches with using US-hosted online assignments or has required special safeguard guarantees from the US before the EU would share air passenger data etc.
This is also what probably protected Canada from this breach. According to my Canadian bank, Equifax Canada was not affected by this breach because all their data is kept on Canadian-based systems. While they did not say explicitly I suspect that this is because there would be significant legal obstacles to hosting such sensitive data in the US.
Many companies make a thing on a single assembly line because it's less expensive then running two or more lines, and then artificially limit its capabilities when a version of it is sold as a lower-end model.
That's absolutely fine provided that anyone who purchases their product has the legal right to enable the full functionality themselves assuming that they can figure out how to do that. This is what ultimately limits this sort of behaviour. Unfortunately, all the modern DRM laws have killed this balance by making it illegal in many countries to develop and/or share methods to turn on blocked functionality.
He did not commit any crime while in the US jurisdiction so no. He was in the UK at the time and subject to UK law so he should only be tried in the UK. To do otherwise means that the UK has lost all sovereignty because then while in the UK you don't just have to follow UK law but also US law over which the UK has no control.
Extradition is intended to prevent someone committing a crime while in a country's jurisdiction and then running away to a foreign country to escape answering for it. If the US does not think that UK law is strict enough to prevent hacking attacks like this the solution is to block all internet connections from the UK not try to enforce US law on someone who has probably never even visited the US.
Time spent editing a journal isn't time spent teaching or researching
It is time spent on research and as academics, we are paid specifically to do that. Not all research is going out and thinking of new things to test and calculate. A very important part of research is checking the data and conclusions to make sure that they are absolutely correct. That is where editing for a journal falls. It is just part of the job we are paid to do by tax payers.
Since you are so concerned about who is paying us to do this then just think about the current system for a second. Why should tax payers be subsidizing the operating cost of a commercial, for-profit publisher by paying the salaries of their reviewers when their profits come from selling the results back to tax payers (either directly or indirectly through upfront costs to publish a paper)? It is far, far easier to defend tax payers covering the salaries of those reviewers if they are working for a non-profit organization that checks and disseminates science that those same tax payers can then access for free themselves.
If you want to be pedantic they are called typhoons in the pacific
That's not being pedantic since it is technically not even right. This is being pedantic: only tropical cyclones which develop in the western Pacific are called typhoons. Those that develop in the central and eastern Pacific are called hurricanes and those that develop in the Indian and southern Pacific are called cyclones.
If you are fair, then you are including the costs of the editors' time. I did in my analysis above.
If you included that then you are just being daft because you don't pay for it. Being an editor, reviewer or author is considered part of an academic's job. The current system relies on us to volunteer our time and so, when comparing alternatives against this system it is extremely fair to rely on the same free services that the current system enjoys.
But the value that a publisher brings to bear is (a) mangement of the peer-review process,
They don't really manage it - that's done by editors who are usually academics too.
(b) a proper typesetting and consistent format --- and believe me, even if you provide incredibly rigid and explicit instructions, people figure out how to screw it up a dozen ways from Sunday,
This is not needed for online publication. You do not have to have lots of rigid rules and the ones you do have can be enforced automatically.
(c) a reputation for publishing only high-quality work, + (d) [which is effectively the same point]
Hence my point that the effort needs to be started by those same academic societies which began the journals in the first place. If physics societies like the IoP or APS put their names to such efforts their reputations will jump start the procedure of acquiring a solid reputation. Ultimately though these things take time to build up - the conference regularly organize has been running for over 30 years and it takes time to build a reputation.
(e) indexing of your article.
This is trivially easy today. Indeed things like ORCID are making it very easy - and free - to unambiguously link researchers and papers.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have a mobile because, at least in Canada, they are ridiculously expensive and I haven't yet found a use for one that is worth the cost of owning it. However, I'd hardly say that I'm resisting technology or estranging myself from normal society, well, at least more than anyone else posting on Slashdot.
All that does is change the question to why a conference called the "Open Source Summit 2017" does not use Linux to present. I suspect the reason is that presentations are all about polish and while I love Open Source software the one (and perhaps only) thing that commercial software does seem to do better is polish.
I thought the main opposition from dark sky projects usually came from those arguing that street lights reduce crime? A lack of advertising after dark is a good reason for dark sky preserves plus it also reduces energy use.
Which fucking part of her job was technical or scientific? She's a manager.
Yes, a manager of people working in a highly technical and complex profession. As Equifax has just clearly demonstrated putting someone who has no clue about the job in a position of authority over those who do it is a recipe for disaster. How is someone like that going to ask the tough questions, spot mistakes that have been made, judge when something is really important and needs addressing vs. just sounds bad, select the best course of action to take when presented with choices, make judgements about which of her staff are competent etc.?
you fight oppression with deeds. The South was basically dragged kicking and screaming, literally at the barrel of a gun circa 1864...
Who was wielding that gun? The US as a whole was convinced that oppression was a very bad idea by the words and ideas which were freely expressed. Having lost that argument a group of states then decided they were just going to ignore it can carry on regardless. So yes, sometimes action is required but only after the argument of words and ideas has been won otherwise you won't have anyone willing to take that action.
If the country had both a history and a present-day pattern of oppressing "fucking assholes" you might have a point
No, the point is even more valid when you have a history of oppression. History has shown time and time again that the way you fight the words and idea of oppression is with better words and ideas.
You cannot get rid of entrenched attitudes like racism, sexism and other bigotry by suppressing it. All this does is hide it from view where it festers and erupts and then all of a sudden you wake up to find you have a sexist, racist Oompa Loompa as a leader.
The idea is so old there is even incorporated into a children's fairy tale. Remember sleeping beauty where the king bans all spinning wheels but she still gets pricked because the first time she sees one she is so curious about it?
Yes nothing says she (or anyone with a liberal arts degree) can't be a good security officer.
It's not impossible but it is implausible, especially for a major company where security is essential to the core business and her degree is not in any technical/scientific field at all. Besides, there is now ample evidence that she is an utterly incompetent security officer: 10 weeks to identify the breach, 6 weeks to notify, sequential PIN numbers, UK data exported to the US (which is probably illegal) due to an error etc. plus of course the breach itself.
Still when Equifax collapses and she gets fired at least she will be able to sing for her supper.
Just be thankful you get any ports at all. With them now adding wireless charging I would not be surprised if a future iPhone model has no ports at all.
No. Governments help companies to hopefully provide employment and maximize the tax revenue generated from the company and it's employees.
To use your rather unrealistic example no company will ever fund something like the Alcubierre drive because it requires funding fundamental research and that research is just as likely to show that such a device is impossible to build. This is why fundamental research is driven by curiosity, and not a desire to build better widgets. You never know what you will find nor how it might be exploited to build something useful.
I'm not so sure apathy covers it. Their response - creating an extremely dodgy website which many people are convinced does not work - goes way past apathy and puts them firmly in the incompetent pile, at least in my opinion.
As autonomous cars get better and better, we'll see more and more accidents attributed to driver inattention
Not if we can have a system which is better at driving than a human. In fact, other than the "cool factor" I'm not sure I see the point of a semi-autonomous system which requires me to watch the road all the time since it is no different from driving myself and potentially a lot more annoying. Frankly, it sounds more like paying to debug a final system which will drive itself.
Arggghhh *less* ==> more
Another thing we can outsource to AI.
Possibly not if Moore's law fails. However, this study arguably just shows the failure of focussing entirely on applied research. For each of their case studies they focus on one thing, such as Moore's law, crop yields etc. and conclude that it gets harder each year to drive the increases. This is because each of these areas is sticking to one fundamental approach and refining and improving it more and more which is clearly going to get harder over time.
What keeps the ideas coming is fundamental research which opens up entirely new approaches to solving problems. As the quote says "No amount of continuous improvement of the candle would have lead to the electric light bulb". Indeed the entire IT revolution owes its existence to the discovery of quantum mechanics and its application to understanding condensed matter physics. Without this applied researchers would be still be working on improving the valve.
The problem is that governments love to focus less on helping companies develop better widgets. The economic returns are almost immediate - or at least immediately obvious - and so useful to a politician seeking re-election. What they need to do is to put more money into fundamental research so that as fields run out of ideas there are completely new areas full of potential ideas to improve our lives in ways we cannot yet imagine. The problem is that the return on this investment is both uncertain and likely 50+ years away and the average politician has trouble caring about anything further away than the next election.
The legal right must include the ability to share information with others. Once you can do that it is not just a battle of the minds with you vs. the company engineers but the internet vs. the company engineers and that battle is a lot harder to win for the company. Even Apple still seems to regularly have its iPhones jail broken despite decades of top Apple coders trying to stop it.
First sale doctrine means you can do what you wish with something you purchase.
It may well do that but the problem is very few people have the time or money to fight the small army of lawyers that a large corporation will fling at you to make you stop doing it because they can probably make some sort of dodgy argument under the DMCA. If they can do that then it won't matter whether it was wrong because the price of justice will be more than you can afford.
Financial institutions KNOW this.
Correction: competent financial institutions know this. Incompetent ones clearly do not and, as recent events show, it is not always easy to tell the competent from the incompetent.
But he specifically attacked US entities. Effectively if we follow your reasoning this is becomes reduced to a state sponsored attack on the US by the UK.
No for three reasons. First and foremost what he did is illegal under UK law so he was breaking UK law and should be answerable for that in the UK. Secondly there was no physical attack he merely persuaded some computers to send information the US did not want sent.
Lastly, even if it were not illegal under UK law, a citizen of a country exercising their rights and freedoms under that country's laws does not make it a "state sponsored attack". State sponsored attacks are conducted by someone on a government payroll, not some young idiot with too much time on his hands. If a US citizen in the US posts an illegal message on a Chinese website which criticizes the Chinese government does that mean that China should regard that as a state sponsored attack and not the action of an individual US citizen exercising their right to free speech? If you don't think British law does enough to protect against actions like this then you can try to persuade the UK government to change the UK laws or you can block any connection from the UK. You do not just get to enforce US laws in the UK.
In which case you had better have the money to mount an equally relentless defence of that data. This was also not some minor slip-up like a few files on a USB stick or temporary files on someone's hacked desktop this looks like pretty much their entire database. It is possible to protect such valuable assets - the Crown Jewels have been safely kept for centuries with a thief only once, briefly, getting their hands on them but they never made it out of the Tower.
Credit databases like this are the "Crown Jewels" of online data due to their value for identity theft. I don't think it is asking too much that the extremely rich and profitable companies which manage these data look after them in a similar fashion.
To avoid inconveniences like this, firms like Equifax will simply move vulnerable assets outside of the reach of US Law.
Many countries have laws to prevent the export of sensitive personal data. Both the EU and Canada have laws that require any export of data has to be to a country where there is the same level of protection under the law for privacy. This is what causes Universities in Canada headaches with using US-hosted online assignments or has required special safeguard guarantees from the US before the EU would share air passenger data etc.
This is also what probably protected Canada from this breach. According to my Canadian bank, Equifax Canada was not affected by this breach because all their data is kept on Canadian-based systems. While they did not say explicitly I suspect that this is because there would be significant legal obstacles to hosting such sensitive data in the US.
Many companies make a thing on a single assembly line because it's less expensive then running two or more lines, and then artificially limit its capabilities when a version of it is sold as a lower-end model.
That's absolutely fine provided that anyone who purchases their product has the legal right to enable the full functionality themselves assuming that they can figure out how to do that. This is what ultimately limits this sort of behaviour. Unfortunately, all the modern DRM laws have killed this balance by making it illegal in many countries to develop and/or share methods to turn on blocked functionality.
He did not commit any crime while in the US jurisdiction so no. He was in the UK at the time and subject to UK law so he should only be tried in the UK. To do otherwise means that the UK has lost all sovereignty because then while in the UK you don't just have to follow UK law but also US law over which the UK has no control.
Extradition is intended to prevent someone committing a crime while in a country's jurisdiction and then running away to a foreign country to escape answering for it. If the US does not think that UK law is strict enough to prevent hacking attacks like this the solution is to block all internet connections from the UK not try to enforce US law on someone who has probably never even visited the US.
Time spent editing a journal isn't time spent teaching or researching
It is time spent on research and as academics, we are paid specifically to do that. Not all research is going out and thinking of new things to test and calculate. A very important part of research is checking the data and conclusions to make sure that they are absolutely correct. That is where editing for a journal falls. It is just part of the job we are paid to do by tax payers.
Since you are so concerned about who is paying us to do this then just think about the current system for a second. Why should tax payers be subsidizing the operating cost of a commercial, for-profit publisher by paying the salaries of their reviewers when their profits come from selling the results back to tax payers (either directly or indirectly through upfront costs to publish a paper)? It is far, far easier to defend tax payers covering the salaries of those reviewers if they are working for a non-profit organization that checks and disseminates science that those same tax payers can then access for free themselves.
If you want to be pedantic they are called typhoons in the pacific
That's not being pedantic since it is technically not even right. This is being pedantic: only tropical cyclones which develop in the western Pacific are called typhoons. Those that develop in the central and eastern Pacific are called hurricanes and those that develop in the Indian and southern Pacific are called cyclones.
If you are fair, then you are including the costs of the editors' time. I did in my analysis above.
If you included that then you are just being daft because you don't pay for it. Being an editor, reviewer or author is considered part of an academic's job. The current system relies on us to volunteer our time and so, when comparing alternatives against this system it is extremely fair to rely on the same free services that the current system enjoys.
But the value that a publisher brings to bear is (a) mangement of the peer-review process,
They don't really manage it - that's done by editors who are usually academics too.
(b) a proper typesetting and consistent format --- and believe me, even if you provide incredibly rigid and explicit instructions, people figure out how to screw it up a dozen ways from Sunday,
This is not needed for online publication. You do not have to have lots of rigid rules and the ones you do have can be enforced automatically.
(c) a reputation for publishing only high-quality work, + (d) [which is effectively the same point]
Hence my point that the effort needs to be started by those same academic societies which began the journals in the first place. If physics societies like the IoP or APS put their names to such efforts their reputations will jump start the procedure of acquiring a solid reputation. Ultimately though these things take time to build up - the conference regularly organize has been running for over 30 years and it takes time to build a reputation.
(e) indexing of your article.
This is trivially easy today. Indeed things like ORCID are making it very easy - and free - to unambiguously link researchers and papers.