Security practitioners need to learn to speak the language of business users and try to understand the kinds of problems they're facing, according to Roger Fradenburgh, a consultant at Greenwich Technology Partners Inc. in Boston.
[sigh] Why is it always the case that [insert random technical speciality here] has to "learn to speak the language of business users"? Technical language exists for a reason: more precise expression of problems and solutions. If business users can't even "speak the language", how can they express their problems, and more importantly, how can they even begin to understand the issues involved in implementing the solutions to their problems. In fact, if they don't "speak the language" then they're unlikely to understand that security (or whatever other speciality we're talking about) is an issue at all. Which might explain some of the problems we're having these days.
Note that I'm not saying that said business user has to be an expert in the field of security or anything else. But they should be at least conversant with the basic issues involved, and aware of what kind of questions they need to be asking. I have led several design teams involved in developing extremely cross-disciplinary products. I wouldn't claim to be an expert in any of the specific disciplines (otherwise I wouldn't need the team, would I), but I at least made the effort to understand the disciplines well enough that I could "speak the language" and ask the right questions, and make informed decisions based on the answers I got. By the same token, if I was running a business I'd make damn sure that I understood enough of each of the elements of my business (including security if that was an issue) that I could ask good questions, understand the answers, and make decisions based on those answers. How can "business users" make decisions if they don't understand what they're deciding?
What you have described as a union sounds more like a company that provides contract labour to other companies. Not that I'm saying that's a bad thing. Just trying to put more of a "free market" spin on it.
There are clearances and there are clearances, and not all agencies handle clearances the same way. The standard DOD policy excludes dual citizens. However, anyone who got their clearance before that policy was implemented (August 2000) and hasn't been up for review recently may have slid through. I don't know if the NSA conforms to standard DOD policy, or makes their own rules (plus, as someone else pointed out, the GCHQ and NSA work quite closely, and have a lot of reciprocal clearance agreements).
Even if aliens can't get a clearance and work directly for the government, they can still work for third-party private-sector contractors who are doing government work.
No, they can't. Most contractors that do federal work require you to be a US citizen as a minimum. Anyone who deals with classified info will require that you be able to get a clearance. If you are an alien, you will not get a clearance. Hell, even being a dual-citizen (US plus something else) is enough to eliminate your chances of getting cleared.
This is not quite as easy as it sounds, but I think it's doable with today's technology.
Only if you assume an asteroid on a relatively benign trajectory. Getting a nuke (and realsitically that's the only thing with sufficient energy density to make this feasible) of sufficient size into a trajectory to intercept an incoming asteroid is hard, even when you assume that we'll have several years of warning (which we won't necessarily have). If it's an asteroid on a "fast" or out-of-plane trajectory we'll have trouble intercepting it simply because generating the requisite delta-v will be difficult to impossible. If it's a long-period comet, we're screwed.
The problem is that very few people are self-motivated to learn to the degree that you apparently are, and even fewer have the necessary skills to learn new stuff.
You will forget most of the facts and trivia that you learned in college, unless you use them on a daily basis. But they aren't the important part anyway. College teaches you two things:
The fundamental principles of your chosen field, which provides a framework or conetxt for new knowledge, and
How to learn, which helps you to understand how to fit new knowledge into the framework you have been building
Yes, college will not prepare you directly for the workplace, in the sense that they will teach you C# programming. What it will teach you is how to learn the stuff that you need to once you are in the workplace, and how to fit it into your growing knowledge base. Sounds like you already had those skills, so perhaps college was a waste of time for you. That doesn't make it a waste of time for everyone else.
I'm all for self-study (and do a lot of it myself). But I beleive there are some benefits to the college environment. Some of the other (IMHO) benefits of college that you can't get by self-study are:
You are exposed to material that you wouldn't necessarily have been even vaguely interested in otherwise, often to find that it's far more interesting than it looekd from the outside.
You have access to resources that are simply not available to a lone student: clusters, labs, industrial-strength software .
You can interact both with your peers, and with the professors, in a face to face fashion. In both cases I have ended up with extremely valuable insights that I wouldn't have otherwise discovered. The workplace is fine for peer interaction, but my experience is that people there are much more focussed on getting the job done "the way it's always been done", rather than thinking about new ways to tackle the problem. That's fine, because in a commercial environment you can't afford to be too experimental. But that's why college is valuable. It's an environment where you can play with new ideas, and be exposed to lots of other folks playing with new ideas - which can spark even more new ideas. Ofetn the insights gained from looking at a problme from multiple perpesectives give a you a much deeper understanding of the problem and of potential solutions. Admittedly, this tends to be more true at the graduate level than during undergrad. (aside: you could probably get the same environment at places like Bell Labs or PARC, but college is a lot easier to get into).
Disclaimer: I'm now back in school for the third time (PhD this time) after my most recent stint in industry. Obviously I wouldn't keep going back if I didn't see any value there...
I know that a properly managed government agency is a huge stretch of the imagination for many people, and not without reason.
Especially when you've actually worked with government agency, and seen the "management" first-hand.:P
I do agree that the prize concept is a worthwhile one. But I have a hard time seeing it work in a federal context. Based on my own experience , there's a high likelihood of the prize competitions coming with multiple layers of rules and requirements, and most likely an innate bias towards whatever the governments "preferred" solution. Not saying they'll all turn out that way. But a private org like the X-prize foundation, which just wants to get some problem solved, is a whole different beast than a government agency, which typically wants to specify the solution ahead of time.
Actually, the maximum speed that you could theoretically reach is the same in both cases: c
The difference is that it will take a chemical rocket much more propellant to get there, because it is far less efficient in its use of propellant mass (i.e. it has a lower specific impulse).
Ion engines still use propellant (typically Xenon, but I haven't looked at what this particular mission is doing), they simply accelerate the propellant using electrostatic fields (in the case of ion engines) instead of chemical combustion. The key to ion engines isn't so much the solar power, as the fact that they have a much greater specific impulse (a rocket engineering term that relates to the efficiency with which propellant is used). Where a chemical engine may top out at ~400 s of specific impulse, ion engines have hit around 4000 s, or an order of magnitude greater propellant efficiency. That translates into a much smaller amount of propellant to do the same mission.
The tradeoff is betwen the extra time it takes to get to the destination (due to the low thrust of an ion engine), and the reduced cost created by being able to launch a much smaller amount of mass into space in order to do the mission.
btw, they are planning on bigger engines in the future, so hopefully they will go faster someday.
The issue with ion enginer thrust is not so much size, as it is power. The thrust you get is directly proportional to the amount of power you can generate. If you're using solar arrays, then you're limited to something between 15-20 kW (the Boeing 702 has solar arrays that produce ~15 kW at end-of-life).
Actually, I consider an expression of "the market". Admittedly, most of the transactions that take place in the market are for financial profit and short-term gain. But not all of them are, and the X-prize is a prime example of one that isn't. Not soem government-run mega-program, but a bunch of people who got together and said "Hey! There's something we want (commercial spaceflight in this case) that doesn't exist yet, but that we want to see. So we'll offer some money and prestige to the first team that can give us what we want".
Prizes have been used for a long time to develop things for which there is no apparent short-term profit - the X-prize was inspired by the aviation prizes of the 20's and 30's. Before that there were various prizes for things like navigation aids during the Renaissance period. I'm not saying that they don't work. My point was more that trying to slap a bounty on every conceivable idea, all under the purview of some centralized body, will result in an incredible amount of bureaucratic overhead and waste.
that'll work as well as deregulating electricity did with California electricity prices.
CA didn't deregulate electricity prices. They just moved the regulations. Under the system they set up, electricity generators could charge whatever they liked, but electricity distributors could only charge the consumer a fixed price. This broke the supply-demand feedback mechanism, and caused the distributors to get squeezed into bankruptcy.
Somethigns are too expensive and have too few chance of a decent return for private companies to go into. Space is one of them.
Tell that to the folks at XM Radio, Orbview, Space Imaging. Or to Richard Branson for that matter.
Funny thing is, we already have a system almost exactly like what you describe. In fact we've had it for a long time. The difference is that it's a distributed system, instead of being under the central control of some single body. And we leave it to individual donors to decide which prize projects to support, and also to decide when they feel that "the prize" has been won. This has the dual advantage of significantly reducing the bureaucratic overhead that is required, while at the same time allowing prize projects that prove far more useful than the original prize donors anticipated to reap larger rewards than they could under the centralzied prize system.
We call this distributed prize system "the market". You may have heard of it.
Right. Because the democrats all voted against PATRIOT. And they certainly didn't support things like the DMCA. Nor do they want to nationalize healthcare. And I'm sure the dems would stop the pointless "war on drugs" if only the republicans would let them. And I'm sure I've never heard a democrat discuss the idea of banning unhealthy foods. Please.
The dems may not tell you who you can and can't sleep with, or whether or not to pray. But they're more than happy to tell you what you can and can't eat, drink, smoke, listen to, watch, read, say, or do. Both parties will happily shove their middle finger "up your you know where".
Yeah but the Democrats will at least stay out of your business.
The Dems will be just as much in your business as the Republicans. Just different parts of your business. Both parties want to run your life. And their policies are gradually converging - many of their major policy differences are a matter of degree rather than kind.
The electoral college exists for the simple reason the the United States is just that, a bunch of independent states that have joined in a union. The president is the leader of that union, as elected by the states in the union. Part of the point of the EC (at least nominally) is to prevent less populous states from being oppressed by more populous states. There is some population dependence, but a lot less than you would see with a pure popular vote at the national level.
Aside: not saying I agree with this system, just trying to explian why it exists.
Shoot, even Orson Wells was trying to get Hoovers endorsement on '1984', hopefully to sell books.
Uh... I think you mean George Orwell. You know, the same chap who wrote 'Animal Farm'.
Orson Welles was the guy behind the panic-inducing radio broadcast of War of the Worlds, the movie 'Citizen Kane', etc. He never had anything to do with '1984'.
Not sure about the others, but I'm pretty sure that Windows swiped the dock concept from NeXT. Since NeXT is the predecessor to the modern Mac OS I'm not sure it's fair to say that Apple lifted the minimized idea from Windows.
I didn't know the Air Force was so involved. Thanks.
No problem. I think most people are unaware of how big the USAF involvement in space is. The military has been a big player in the space industry from the beginning, and the modern US military relies heavily on space assets for weather, comm, navigation, surveillance, reconnaissance, and intelligence gathering. They do a lot of launches (think about what it would take to populate just the GPS conmstellation alone), and have a lot of infrastructure to support those opeations.
The commercial launches may one day be handled by private enterprise, but there will always be regulation which goes along with them. This area could more easily be handled in the future by something like the FAA.
Actually, at this point even NASA launches are handled by private enterprise. You may want to read up about United Space Alliance. Commercial launches tend to be managed by the launch vehicle contractor, although the actual pad management and launch operations may be run by the Air Force in some cases (launches from the Cape or Vandenberg. However, companies like Sea Launch do the whole launch themselves without NASA or Air Force involvement.
The military launches really should be handled by the military.
The military does handle military launches. And everything else. The US Air Force' 45th Space Wing runs Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS), which handles all (military, civil, and commercial) of the launches out of the Cape, aside from NASA manned launches (see here for more). The USAF also operates Vandenberg Air Force Base on the California coast, which handles launches into polar orbits.
But what are all those educated people supposed to do once they're educated. Building a viable space industry provides both a way to gather funds to help educate people, and a place for thseo educated people to work.
The US benefits greatly from its space program, just not in the ways that you think. It may have started as propaganda and military posturing, but the benefits in terms of things like navigation (who doesn't use GPS?), communications (phones, TV, radio, you name it), and weather prediction (both mundane "hope my cookout does get rained on" and life-saving "there's a hurricane coming") have been tangible and financially successful. Commsats in particular make big bucks - they are commercial ventures, and wouldn't be launched if they didn't turn a handsome profit. Weathersats tend to be less profitable (still mostly run by the government too), but they really do save lives. So does GPS.
I'm not saying that it's not important to educate your children to read. Just that it doesn't need to be an either-or proposition. Unfortunately, space is not a panacaea either, mostly because money alone is not the answer: there are plenty of kids in the US that can't read properly either, and loads of money being spent on education to very minimal effect.
Thank you! I was about to post the exact same thing.
Sometimes it amazes (or amuses) me how knowledgeable the/. crowd acts about space, while actually being fairly ignorant about the whole thing. I make a habit of clicking on the link to any space-related story just to see what kind of idiot stuff will get posted.:)
Slashdot Mirror
[sigh] Why is it always the case that [insert random technical speciality here] has to "learn to speak the language of business users"? Technical language exists for a reason: more precise expression of problems and solutions. If business users can't even "speak the language", how can they express their problems, and more importantly, how can they even begin to understand the issues involved in implementing the solutions to their problems. In fact, if they don't "speak the language" then they're unlikely to understand that security (or whatever other speciality we're talking about) is an issue at all. Which might explain some of the problems we're having these days.
Note that I'm not saying that said business user has to be an expert in the field of security or anything else. But they should be at least conversant with the basic issues involved, and aware of what kind of questions they need to be asking. I have led several design teams involved in developing extremely cross-disciplinary products. I wouldn't claim to be an expert in any of the specific disciplines (otherwise I wouldn't need the team, would I), but I at least made the effort to understand the disciplines well enough that I could "speak the language" and ask the right questions, and make informed decisions based on the answers I got. By the same token, if I was running a business I'd make damn sure that I understood enough of each of the elements of my business (including security if that was an issue) that I could ask good questions, understand the answers, and make decisions based on those answers. How can "business users" make decisions if they don't understand what they're deciding?
End of rant -- thanks, I feel better now...
What you have described as a union sounds more like a company that provides contract labour to other companies. Not that I'm saying that's a bad thing. Just trying to put more of a "free market" spin on it.
'Cos god said so? :)
There are clearances and there are clearances, and not all agencies handle clearances the same way. The standard DOD policy excludes dual citizens. However, anyone who got their clearance before that policy was implemented (August 2000) and hasn't been up for review recently may have slid through. I don't know if the NSA conforms to standard DOD policy, or makes their own rules (plus, as someone else pointed out, the GCHQ and NSA work quite closely, and have a lot of reciprocal clearance agreements).
No, they can't. Most contractors that do federal work require you to be a US citizen as a minimum. Anyone who deals with classified info will require that you be able to get a clearance. If you are an alien, you will not get a clearance. Hell, even being a dual-citizen (US plus something else) is enough to eliminate your chances of getting cleared.
Only if you assume an asteroid on a relatively benign trajectory. Getting a nuke (and realsitically that's the only thing with sufficient energy density to make this feasible) of sufficient size into a trajectory to intercept an incoming asteroid is hard, even when you assume that we'll have several years of warning (which we won't necessarily have). If it's an asteroid on a "fast" or out-of-plane trajectory we'll have trouble intercepting it simply because generating the requisite delta-v will be difficult to impossible. If it's a long-period comet, we're screwed.
As I tell a lot of my friends in the US: Australians don't drink Fosters - they ship it all overseas, because they know Americans will drink anything
You will forget most of the facts and trivia that you learned in college, unless you use them on a daily basis. But they aren't the important part anyway. College teaches you two things:
- The fundamental principles of your chosen field, which provides a framework or conetxt for new knowledge, and
- How to learn, which helps you to understand how to fit new knowledge into the framework you have been building
Yes, college will not prepare you directly for the workplace, in the sense that they will teach you C# programming. What it will teach you is how to learn the stuff that you need to once you are in the workplace, and how to fit it into your growing knowledge base. Sounds like you already had those skills, so perhaps college was a waste of time for you. That doesn't make it a waste of time for everyone else.I'm all for self-study (and do a lot of it myself). But I beleive there are some benefits to the college environment. Some of the other (IMHO) benefits of college that you can't get by self-study are:
- You are exposed to material that you wouldn't necessarily have been even vaguely interested in otherwise, often to find that it's far more interesting than it looekd from the outside.
- You have access to resources that are simply not available to a lone student: clusters, labs, industrial-strength software .
- You can interact both with your peers, and with the professors, in a face to face fashion. In both cases I have ended up with extremely valuable insights that I wouldn't have otherwise discovered. The workplace is fine for peer interaction, but my experience is that people there are much more focussed on getting the job done "the way it's always been done", rather than thinking about new ways to tackle the problem. That's fine, because in a commercial environment you can't afford to be too experimental. But that's why college is valuable. It's an environment where you can play with new ideas, and be exposed to lots of other folks playing with new ideas - which can spark even more new ideas. Ofetn the insights gained from looking at a problme from multiple perpesectives give a you a much deeper understanding of the problem and of potential solutions. Admittedly, this tends to be more true at the graduate level than during undergrad. (aside: you could probably get the same environment at places like Bell Labs or PARC, but college is a lot easier to get into).
Disclaimer: I'm now back in school for the third time (PhD this time) after my most recent stint in industry. Obviously I wouldn't keep going back if I didn't see any value there...Especially when you've actually worked with government agency, and seen the "management" first-hand. :P
I do agree that the prize concept is a worthwhile one. But I have a hard time seeing it work in a federal context. Based on my own experience , there's a high likelihood of the prize competitions coming with multiple layers of rules and requirements, and most likely an innate bias towards whatever the governments "preferred" solution. Not saying they'll all turn out that way. But a private org like the X-prize foundation, which just wants to get some problem solved, is a whole different beast than a government agency, which typically wants to specify the solution ahead of time.
The difference is that it will take a chemical rocket much more propellant to get there, because it is far less efficient in its use of propellant mass (i.e. it has a lower specific impulse).
The tradeoff is betwen the extra time it takes to get to the destination (due to the low thrust of an ion engine), and the reduced cost created by being able to launch a much smaller amount of mass into space in order to do the mission.
btw, they are planning on bigger engines in the future, so hopefully they will go faster someday.
The issue with ion enginer thrust is not so much size, as it is power. The thrust you get is directly proportional to the amount of power you can generate. If you're using solar arrays, then you're limited to something between 15-20 kW (the Boeing 702 has solar arrays that produce ~15 kW at end-of-life).
Prizes have been used for a long time to develop things for which there is no apparent short-term profit - the X-prize was inspired by the aviation prizes of the 20's and 30's. Before that there were various prizes for things like navigation aids during the Renaissance period. I'm not saying that they don't work. My point was more that trying to slap a bounty on every conceivable idea, all under the purview of some centralized body, will result in an incredible amount of bureaucratic overhead and waste.
CA didn't deregulate electricity prices. They just moved the regulations. Under the system they set up, electricity generators could charge whatever they liked, but electricity distributors could only charge the consumer a fixed price. This broke the supply-demand feedback mechanism, and caused the distributors to get squeezed into bankruptcy.
Somethigns are too expensive and have too few chance of a decent return for private companies to go into. Space is one of them.
Tell that to the folks at XM Radio, Orbview, Space Imaging. Or to Richard Branson for that matter.
We call this distributed prize system "the market". You may have heard of it.
Right. Because the democrats all voted against PATRIOT. And they certainly didn't support things like the DMCA. Nor do they want to nationalize healthcare. And I'm sure the dems would stop the pointless "war on drugs" if only the republicans would let them. And I'm sure I've never heard a democrat discuss the idea of banning unhealthy foods. Please.
The dems may not tell you who you can and can't sleep with, or whether or not to pray. But they're more than happy to tell you what you can and can't eat, drink, smoke, listen to, watch, read, say, or do. Both parties will happily shove their middle finger "up your you know where".
The Dems will be just as much in your business as the Republicans. Just different parts of your business. Both parties want to run your life. And their policies are gradually converging - many of their major policy differences are a matter of degree rather than kind.
Aside: not saying I agree with this system, just trying to explian why it exists.
Uh... I think you mean George Orwell. You know, the same chap who wrote 'Animal Farm'.
Orson Welles was the guy behind the panic-inducing radio broadcast of War of the Worlds, the movie 'Citizen Kane', etc. He never had anything to do with '1984'.
Mr. Pot, meet Mr. Kettle.
Not sure about the others, but I'm pretty sure that Windows swiped the dock concept from NeXT. Since NeXT is the predecessor to the modern Mac OS I'm not sure it's fair to say that Apple lifted the minimized idea from Windows.
No, no... it's a lake of oil... there's no need to drill :p
No problem. I think most people are unaware of how big the USAF involvement in space is. The military has been a big player in the space industry from the beginning, and the modern US military relies heavily on space assets for weather, comm, navigation, surveillance, reconnaissance, and intelligence gathering. They do a lot of launches (think about what it would take to populate just the GPS conmstellation alone), and have a lot of infrastructure to support those opeations.
Actually, at this point even NASA launches are handled by private enterprise. You may want to read up about United Space Alliance. Commercial launches tend to be managed by the launch vehicle contractor, although the actual pad management and launch operations may be run by the Air Force in some cases (launches from the Cape or Vandenberg. However, companies like Sea Launch do the whole launch themselves without NASA or Air Force involvement.
The military launches really should be handled by the military.
The military does handle military launches. And everything else. The US Air Force' 45th Space Wing runs Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS), which handles all (military, civil, and commercial) of the launches out of the Cape, aside from NASA manned launches (see here for more). The USAF also operates Vandenberg Air Force Base on the California coast, which handles launches into polar orbits.
The US benefits greatly from its space program, just not in the ways that you think. It may have started as propaganda and military posturing, but the benefits in terms of things like navigation (who doesn't use GPS?), communications (phones, TV, radio, you name it), and weather prediction (both mundane "hope my cookout does get rained on" and life-saving "there's a hurricane coming") have been tangible and financially successful. Commsats in particular make big bucks - they are commercial ventures, and wouldn't be launched if they didn't turn a handsome profit. Weathersats tend to be less profitable (still mostly run by the government too), but they really do save lives. So does GPS.
I'm not saying that it's not important to educate your children to read. Just that it doesn't need to be an either-or proposition. Unfortunately, space is not a panacaea either, mostly because money alone is not the answer: there are plenty of kids in the US that can't read properly either, and loads of money being spent on education to very minimal effect.
Sometimes it amazes (or amuses) me how knowledgeable the /. crowd acts about space, while actually being fairly ignorant about the whole thing. I make a habit of clicking on the link to any space-related story just to see what kind of idiot stuff will get posted. :)