> A comb for the pointy-hair on the sides of your head and wax for the shiny top.
Do whatever the little white dog tells you to do.
Actually, I would Scott Adams' "serious" books: The Dilbert Principle and Way of the Weasel are pretty good explanations of why managers act the way they do. Your typical PHB usually has very good business reasons for the stupid things he does, but since he's technically incompetent, he'll attempt to achieve these valid business goals by means that are unlikely at best, and impossible at worst.
Witness our earlier Slashdot thread about a judge not knowing that "storing" logs in RAM is fundamentally different than "storing" logs on disk. She's got a good legal reason to expect that when someone is told to "turn over the logs", that they turn over all the logs. But because she's an idiot, she's very angry and confused when she finds out that RAM just. doesn't. work. like. that.
Your advantage is that you've got the technical background; the Adams books will explain good (techie) management skills in language that you can use with fellow PHBs. Tell your fellow managers "I make sure my employees can leave by 5pm", and they'll wonder why you're harboring a bunch of slackers. But if you phrase it as "if my employees can't get their work done by 5, then the fault is with our management/scheduling/business processes, so let's, as managers, figure out how to improve those processes", and all of a sudden the PHBs love it.
PHBs are funny that way. As soon as it sounds like it's their idea, they love it. Your job, as a non-pointy-haired boss, is to make sure that the ideas your fellow PHBs "love" will be good ones.
> I'm trying to think of the last time I read an article by Dvorak, and said "You know, he's got a good point". It's almost like he intentionally trolls his readership by stating the most outrageous possible point of view, just to stir up hits and discussion.
"This time." Centralization and decentralization has always been a pendulum sort of affair, varying with the relative costs of bandwidth, CPU, and storage.
Once upon a time, there was the mainframe. Nobody ever got fired for buying (or more accurately, leasing) IBM!
Then came the microcomputer. Decentralize! Applications run right on your desk! Buy Apple! No more monthly payments to IBM! (At 9600 baud, dumb terminal bandwidth is expensive. 8-bit micros are cheap!)
Then came the dickless workstation. Oops, "diskless". Centralize! It's a client/server world! Buy Oracle, and run it on your Sun! No more huge capital outlays for PCs that become obsolete the day they're purchased! (Workstations are expensive, but this new ethernet stuff is cheap!)
Then the PC-as-workstation. Decentralize! Don't rely on that expensive server! (Doesn't matter how much cable you run, if you have 100 users trying to render the Sistine Chapel on X Terminals, bandwidth and server-side processing power are shockingly expensive again, local storage and processing power are suddenly cheap again.)
We're currently on our way back to the server. This time, the excuse is DRM. An application that doesn't exist locally can never be used locally once the vendor decides to kill it.
But ultimately, the root cause is that bandwidth is relatively cheap again. Doesn't matter whether the application is Windows (which needs to call the mothership for patches every few days) or Steam (for the same reason).
> > The US government is wise not trust a Chinese implementation of those standards for its data, because the US government can't guarentee the absence of Chinese-added backdoors.
> >So stop buying from Seagate and put a few tax dollars back into manufacturing hard drives here. You provide jobs for Americans *and* data security for the federal government. Win-win to me.
Sure, that's better than selling our secrets to the Chinese, but where's the win to the American hard drive user?
Geek: Have you got anything without added backdoors?
NSA: Try that Hitachi Deathstar, it doesn't have that many backdoors in it since the Japanese bought IBM's hard drive division.
Geek: I don't want any government's backdoors!
CIA: Can't hd have the Western Digital? Hasn't got as many backdoors in it as the Hitachi Deathstar!
Yankees (Singing): Back-door-back-door! Back-DOOOR! For Homeland and more!
Geek: How about this old IDE drive and this 8-bit ISA-bus IDE controller?
Everyone: Eeeew!
Geek: What do you mean 'Eeeww'? I don't like backdoors!
Yankees: Lovely backdoors! Wonderful backdoors!
DHS: Shut up! Bloody Yankees! You can't have an IDE without the controller card, and you can't have the controller card without the backdoor! Unless he wants to go back to MFM/RLL, and then we can recover everything even after a low-level format! The very first backdoor!
Geek: I don't like backdoors!
DHS: Sshh, citizen, don't cause a fuss, or we'll have your backdoor! We love it. Mmm, backdoors, CALEA for the telephone switches, backdoors, the Clipper Chip for the phones, backdoors in newfangled BIOSes, TPMs, DRMs, backdoors into the backdoors, it's backdoors into everything!
Yankees (singing): Back-door-back-door! Back-DOOOR! Lovely backdoor! Backity door! Safety galore! For homeland and more! Backdoor! Lovely backdoor! Backity door! For the children and more...
Nothing to see here. Especially that Getty watermark in the hair of that guy in the lab coat in doc_image.jpg. And definitely not the Corbis watermark in the left-hand skull/shoulder X-Ray picture in header.jpg. Or the one that looks like some sort of text on the shoulder (and the hair, and the shelf all the way to his elbow) of the guy in the library in header.jpg that I can't quite make it out yet, but I'm sure someone else on Slashdot will. Umm, I mean, "Move along."
> the statement that, "the risks to national security in transferring high technology to China" referring to hard drive technology just sounds a bit silly. I'd bet dollars to donuts that any technology latent in a commercial hard drive that the Chinese might be after can be reverse engineered right off the shelf. The only exception might be the encryption component, but - someone correct me here if I'm completely wrong - as I understand it 128-bit encryption is no longer restricted by the US government, presumably because they can break it, and that is why 128-bit is also the current 'limit' or whatever on commercial encryption products.
When all else fails, question your initial assumption.
From TFA:
"Seagate would be extremely sensitive," said an industry executive who participates in classified government advisory groups. "I do not think anyone in the U.S. wants the Chinese to have access to the controller chips for a disk drive. One never knows what the Chinese could do to instrument the drive."
Allow me to attempt a translation: "Seagate would be extremely sensitive", said someone who may have had a need to know more about hard drives than you or I do. "I do not think anyone in the US wants the Chinese to have access to the controller chips for a disk drive. One never wants the Chinese or the US public to know what we're already doing to instrument the drives."
To put it another way... if the 128-bit encryption standards, as publicly documented, aren't a concern for reverse-engineering, there are plenty of sorts of things hidden in the bowels of the firmware that could be.
The US government is wise not trust a Chinese implementation of those standards for its data, because the US government can't guarentee the absence of Chinese-added backdoors.
Unfortunately, that same logic leads to only one conclusion: The US consumer is wise to trust neither Chinese nor American implementations of standards for its data, because the US consumer can't guarantee the absence of Chinese- or US-added backdoors.
> Be respectful. Think teamwork. Don't try to rain on the parade the college is throwing for him. Nobody will thank you for that. Not that you seem to be leaning that way, but it bears mentioning on Slashdot.
And by "respectful", we mean "moon him so wide the Goatase Guy would be impressed", and by "teamwork", we mean "everyone in the auditorium", and by "don't try to rain on the parade", we're not sure, but it probably involves some sort of Rube Goldberg contraption involving an enema bag, a colostomy bag, and an industrial-size manure spreader.
Nobody would thank you for that unless you get video of it from at least three strategically-placed cameras.
Not that you seem to be leaning that way, but it bears mentioning we'd at least fund your bandwidth bill, if not your legal defense team, if you had a change of heart.
Or you could just take the high road. Even a thousand-goatse-moon and a spraydown with a million gallons of manure won't make MPAA's bullshit smell any sweeter. So let him say his piece, and then hoist him by his own petard. The Emperor has no clothes, and the more he brags about how good he looks, the more obvious it'll be to your classmates who's full of shit. MPAA's business practices are their own worst enem...y.
> Going from Chinese civil rights violations to nonsensical ranting about Microsoft in three steps isn't in itself remarkable. But doing it with an "In Soviet Russia..." post in the middle certainly is!
Really?
The original poster wasn't talking about China -- he was claiming that Post-9/11 America is a "freer" country than China, because relatively few Americans' rights had been abused.
Programmers (application developers or operating systems designers) secure computer systems from malicious users by denying our programs the ability to escalate their own privileges.
Pre-9/11 America was designed along the same principles: Governments, in order to secure the liberty of their citizens, limited their own powers.
An operating system isn't secure "because it hasn't been hacked". It can only be deemed secure when userland processes can't be compromised by bad input, and if (that is, when) a userland process is compromised, the operating system denies the compromised process the ability to take over the rest of the machine. Segmentation fault: Core dumped.
Likewise, a country isn't free "because no US bloggers have been imprisoned for criticizing the US government". A country can only be deemed free when a blogger can't be legally imprisoned for criticizing his or her government, and if (that is, when) some grandstanding politician manages to pass law like that, the law is immediately struck down as unconstitutional.
You secure a system by making it hard to compromise. When the guy in Marketing wants software to be automatically installed when a user visits a web page "because everyone hates installing software", the only correct response is "NO."
You secure a citizen's rights by making it hard for anyone, even yourself, to take them away. When the guy on the campaign trail wants to spy on everyone "because it's for the children", the correct response must again be "NO."
> and how many bloggers are imprisoned because they don't like the government in the US?
"Look, just because we turned off all the compiler warnings, didn't check the lengths of input strings, didn't do bounds-checking on my arrays, ran multiple network-facing services with full Administrator privileges, how many XP systems have been remotely compromised? UPnP, DCOM, RPC, Messenger, IE, Outlook, and Word are totally secure!" - Some marketroid at a Windows XP release party in late 2001.
Never mind Steve Austin. We can make him better... stronger... stretchier!
(Now where was I? Oh yeah--the important thing was that I had a Stretch Armstrong action figure, which was the style at the time. They didn't have fluidic muscles because of the gas crisis. The only thing you could get was those cornsyrup-in-latex ones...)
> A lot of nuclear materials can under-go a chain reaction if a significant mass is accumulated. It has to do with production versus escape of neutrons and scales as volume-to-area. So, if two sub-critical masses were combined, they could become critical. I am somewhat leary of a "spill" making something go critical, unless the mass was over-critical and the container provided some damping effect.
Actually, the "spill" makes it more likely, not less likely.
Fissionables in solution are tricky things to deal with. Consider the following four cases:
1) Homer Simpson drops a subcritical hunk of a water-soluble U235 salt into a swimming pool. No big deal. It's a single subcritical mass of U235, and the neutrons fly straight out of it and into the surrounding water, and not enough bounce back into the mass to present a problem. Homer reaches in with a net, and pulls the chunk of salt out of the net. "No problemo."
2) A little while later, as the harmless chunk dissolves into the huge pool, there will be localized spots near the chunk, with both sufficiently-high concentration of fissionable materials and the right amount of moderating material between them for a criticality incident. "D'OH!"
3) "Aha! I'm smart! I'll prevent that scenario by dissolving it, a bit at a time, by adding it to the pool by using a salt shaker near the pump intake!" Congrats! The U235 atoms are, at all times, sufficiently widely-dispersed, that there is no criticality risk. "Woohoo!"
4) A few weeks after your swim, the place is shut down and everyone gets fired. The maintenance guy forgets to drain the pool. The water gradually evaporates, and concentrations in the remaining water begin to rise... and a few years later, some guy spraying graffiti by the abandoned poolhouse wonders WTF that blue flash was. "D'OH!" again.
I'm on a roll here, so I may as well close off the "security by obscurity" issue. There are places where security by obscurity works, and this is one of them.
The deal here is that criticality incidents, especially involving fissionables in solution are a function of degree of enrichment (in the case of uranium as the solute), nuclear properties of the solvent, local concentrations of the ions in solution, and a whole boatload of other things, in order to build cool toys, you often have to deal with them all, simultaneously. I'm not in the building-of-cool-toys industry, and have mercifully I've never had a need to know.
Some of these things are public domain, but others (particularly those things pertaining to the design of shipborne Naval reactors, which use HEU because there simply isn't enough space on all types of ships to permit the use of LEU-based designs) are classified. Given a description of an incident, however, it may be possible to place upper and lower bounds on some of the classified parameters - bounds that are narrower than the published numbers, and there are plenty of adversaries who would be delighted to deduce things about our Naval capabilities (a lot more interesting/useful than even our bomb designs), given just a few more missing puzzle pieces. The math is hard, and denying adversaries the pieces of the puzzle that they can use to derive the whole picture isn't security by obscurity, it's just good security practice.
Hmm. Take the high road, and go with "It's a TRAP!", or take the low road, and have Carrie Fisher muttering "You came in that thing? You're braver than I thought!"
"How old is the Universe? How old is the Earth? Please answer with numbers."
Because (believe it or not) there are people who don't know the difference between "the universe", "the Galaxy", and "the Solar System", and there are fundies that actively exploit that ignorance.
It's easy to screen out the radical fundamentalists. They answer "6000 years" and are at least honest about their base.
But the dangerous ones are the ones who "teach the controversy", because "Them crazy scientists can't seem to agree on anything! Some of 'em say everything's 14 billion years old, and some of 'em the world's just 4.6! They can't both be right!"
Vote only for a politician who is smarter than a fifth-grader; that is, one who knows that "The Universe", is approximately 14 billion years old (I'll take any number between 10B and 15B) is much bigger and older than "The Solar System", which is 4.6 billion years old (hell, I'll take anything between 5 and 4.5).
> But really folks, is invisible surveillance really that much more dangerous than the visible kind? I don't think so. If the crazies are so worried, let them run around planting signs everywhere: Never Forget The Eye in the Sky!
Reminds me of a little song I heard when I was growing up. Once upon a time, today's world would have been looked upon as the demented fantasy of a heavy metal band.
Up here in space,
I'm looking down on you.
My lasers trace
Everything you do.
You think you've private lives, think nothing of the kind!
There is no true escape, I'm watching all the time!
(CHORUS):
I'm made of metal, my circuits gleam!
I am perpetual, I keep the country clean!
I'm elected, electric spy...
I'm protected, electric eye...
Always in focus,
You can't feel my stare,
I zoom into you,
You don't know I'm there
I take a pride in probing all your secret moves,
My tearless retina takes pictures that can prove...
(CHORUS)
Electric eye (in the sky)
Feel my stare (always there)
There's nothing you can do about it! Develop and expose!
I feed upon your every thought, and so my power grows!
(CHORUS)
I'm elected, electric spy
I'm protected, electric eye
I'm elected, electric spy
I'm elected
Protective,
Detective,
Electric
Eye!
- Judas Priest, Electric Eye, 1982.
Not bad. Pretty much got everything right. "Keeping the country clean" as the excuse for the power grab. "Elected. Protective. Detective." as the correct chronological order in which to implement it.
(I'm going to try and ignore the video for Turbo Lover and the suspicious resemblance to the cyborg-on-a-motorcycle sequence from Terminator 2. He wound up getting elected as Governor, and you'd think that if a hair metal band really had come from the future, they'd have at least hinted at the Governator in a backwards-masked portion of the track... There's such a thing as taking pop culture too seriously, after all.)
> Why would you want three sockets rather than four? Easy, latency. Any CPU in a 3S system is one hop away from any other CPU. In a 4S system, you can be two hops away. This adds latency, and more importantly, you take a big hit on cache coherency latency. This kills performance."
Lawrence: Three chips at the same time, man.
Peter: That's it? If you had a million dollars, you'd use three sockets at the same time?
Lawrence: Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I worked at AMD I could hook that up, too; 'cause I hate motherboard layouts with latency.
Peter: Well, not all layouts.
Lawrence: Well, the type of chips that'd triple up on a board like that would.
Peter: Good point.
Lawrence: Well, what about you now? what would you do?
Peter: Besides three chips at the same time?
Lawrence: Well, yeah.
Peter: Idle.
Lawrence: Idle, huh?
Peter: I would relax... I would sit on my ass all day... I would idle.
Lawrence: Well, you don't need a million dollars to idle, man. Take a look at that fourth chip: it's two hops away, don't do shit.
"Nothing to see here. Please move along, but no, no, no,
not over that bridge, you idiot! That's another one of
those fucking pathological edge cases that invalidates what would have been an otherwise great TSP equivalence proof, and now I have to start all over again! Curse you, Konigsberg, why didn't the Brits and the Russians and the Germans finish you off when you were fair game!"
(Did I mention how much I hated my Computability and Complexity courses when I was in college?)
> The old EQ Skinner Box model strikes again. Every year or so, release an expansion that completely invalids any progress made in the last expansion. Problem is, it works as a money making venture, so other games follow the same suit rather than attempting to create games where content is for fun rather than for grind > >In the long run, however, it tends to kill the game.
"How do you kill that which has no life?"
Easy. Release an expansion pack for Star Wars Galaxies.
> So If we get an infinite number of Humans, and have them type on an infinite number of Typewriters, We'll still have a season of crap on TV.......
An infinite number of rednecks, an infinite number of shotguns, and an infinitely-long Texas highway, will eventually reproduce this Slashdot thread. In Braille.
> "Who can resist the union of the two towers." --Saruman
"Sure, the high tech industry produces more revenue and innovation than the entertainment industry, but when it comes right down to it, we still prefer to snort our cocaine from between Titney's Pears than from the Commander's Taco. Can you really blame us?"
- Bipartisan Statement: Sen. Porkin' Hitch (D-isney), Sen. Serious Tubes (R-IAA)
> Since this 3oz liquid horse shit has been going on, Hawley has been saying it's based on "scientific findings" like a broken record. But he has yet to show these "scientific findings".
I can partially sympathize with him. The TATP plot wouldn't have worked, but there are probably other things that could be smuggled onboard and used to bring down a plane. By limiting quantities and the sizes of things that could be used as mixing/pressure vessels, some risk may have been mitigated.
> Hawley has been saying it's based on "scientific findings" like a broken record. But he has yet to show these "scientific findings".
And I can even go so far as to say I agree with him on his lack of specifics. There's no need to censor recipes, but there's no need to publicize them. Better to let the bad guys Google it themselves, wind up with something copied out of a 60s-era cookbook, and Darwinize themselves out of the gene pool without hurting anybody.
> Oh, I'll report if I get on the "No-fly" list for this. Because, obviously, I'm a "threat" for pointing out Government stupidity.
And therein is the root cause: bureaucracy. Kip Hawley may not be an idiot, but he's a bureaucrat. It doesn't matter how smart you are if the system you're working with is fundamentally flawed. That applies from Kip all the way down to the goon who barks at you for failing to remove your shoes soon enough, or the goon who barks at you even louder for removing your shoes before you were ordered to.
Since the typical TSA Goon is too poorly-educated to understand chemistry, and the typical civilian is too poorly-educated to understand either chemistry or risk, that neither audience needs to know.
There's the first idiocy: A bureaucracy is happy to tell you "what" (three ounce containers, one Freedom Baggie) to do, but never "why". The TSA goon enforces the policy with mindless efficiency; he is trained to be mindless. His civilian subjects see the policy as wholly arbitrary unfounded in reason or logic, because no reason or logic has ever been supplied, and treat him as the goon he is -- and he likewise learns to regard the cilivian subjects as idiots, because they're too stupid to follow a rule as simple as "3 oz containers in a 1-liter baggie".
And here's the second level of idiocy: Since nobody has a "need to know" the reason, nobody's allowed to know, and it's not too big a step before you get is afraid to know and is afraid to even think.
Some guy ahead of me was raising a fuss about the 3/1/1 rule, and I would have loved to have explained to him the reasoning behind the rule. Of course, I didn't. If I'd said "Dude, it's about limiting the size of reaction/pressure vessels and the amount of reagents that can be smuggled in without having more than a certain number of people buying airline tickets within a certain timeframe, just chill out and toss the toothpaste", I'd probably still be in some black hole somewhere.
It's this second level of idiocy that's the real problem: the notion that, in a bureaucracy, anyone who does think through the reasoning behind a policy, must be a threat.
More than however many years since (a plot that's mentioned in TFA that I no longer want to type on a web form), more than 5 years since 9/11, two years since the bogus liquid plot, and only now, on an obscure web forum, does the bureaucracy actually come out and admit why the rules are what they are.
The original policy isn't a great idea, but it isn't exactly a dumb idea either. But it's taught arbitrarily to the goons, it's enforced arbitrarily against the goons' victims, and ends up with all three sides (Policymaker, Goon, and Civilian alike) regarding each other with nothing but contempt and suspicion. To the point that I (like
> System Administrators must be much different at other companies because I haven't met one that I've particularly thought deserves a whole freaking day devoted to celebrating them.
"What was your username again?"
> I Choose Not to Participate (Score: 5, Doomed) by eldavojohn (898314)
> What's missing from the home experience isn't the cabinet, its the people and the loud environment. North Americans are more interested in being frugal than social.
It won't replace the ego boost from the throngs of humans crowding over your shoulder in awe of your godlike playing skills, but the Arcade Ambience project is a pretty good replacement for the background sounds of dozens of arcade machines.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not the iPod's halo effect. That's the Vista Black Hole of Suck effect.
Do whatever the little white dog tells you to do.
Actually, I would Scott Adams' "serious" books: The Dilbert Principle and Way of the Weasel are pretty good explanations of why managers act the way they do. Your typical PHB usually has very good business reasons for the stupid things he does, but since he's technically incompetent, he'll attempt to achieve these valid business goals by means that are unlikely at best, and impossible at worst.
Witness our earlier Slashdot thread about a judge not knowing that "storing" logs in RAM is fundamentally different than "storing" logs on disk. She's got a good legal reason to expect that when someone is told to "turn over the logs", that they turn over all the logs. But because she's an idiot, she's very angry and confused when she finds out that RAM just. doesn't. work. like. that.
Your advantage is that you've got the technical background; the Adams books will explain good (techie) management skills in language that you can use with fellow PHBs. Tell your fellow managers "I make sure my employees can leave by 5pm", and they'll wonder why you're harboring a bunch of slackers. But if you phrase it as "if my employees can't get their work done by 5, then the fault is with our management/scheduling/business processes, so let's, as managers, figure out how to improve those processes", and all of a sudden the PHBs love it.
PHBs are funny that way. As soon as it sounds like it's their idea, they love it. Your job, as a non-pointy-haired boss, is to make sure that the ideas your fellow PHBs "love" will be good ones.
"This time." Centralization and decentralization has always been a pendulum sort of affair, varying with the relative costs of bandwidth, CPU, and storage.
Once upon a time, there was the mainframe. Nobody ever got fired for buying (or more accurately, leasing) IBM!
Then came the microcomputer. Decentralize! Applications run right on your desk! Buy Apple! No more monthly payments to IBM! (At 9600 baud, dumb terminal bandwidth is expensive. 8-bit micros are cheap!)
Then came the dickless workstation. Oops, "diskless". Centralize! It's a client/server world! Buy Oracle, and run it on your Sun! No more huge capital outlays for PCs that become obsolete the day they're purchased! (Workstations are expensive, but this new ethernet stuff is cheap!)
Then the PC-as-workstation. Decentralize! Don't rely on that expensive server! (Doesn't matter how much cable you run, if you have 100 users trying to render the Sistine Chapel on X Terminals, bandwidth and server-side processing power are shockingly expensive again, local storage and processing power are suddenly cheap again.)
We're currently on our way back to the server. This time, the excuse is DRM. An application that doesn't exist locally can never be used locally once the vendor decides to kill it.
But ultimately, the root cause is that bandwidth is relatively cheap again. Doesn't matter whether the application is Windows (which needs to call the mothership for patches every few days) or Steam (for the same reason).
>
>So stop buying from Seagate and put a few tax dollars back into manufacturing hard drives here. You provide jobs for Americans *and* data security for the federal government. Win-win to me.
Sure, that's better than selling our secrets to the Chinese, but where's the win to the American hard drive user?
Geek: Have you got anything without added backdoors?
NSA: Try that Hitachi Deathstar, it doesn't have that many backdoors in it since the Japanese bought IBM's hard drive division.
Geek: I don't want any government's backdoors!
CIA: Can't hd have the Western Digital? Hasn't got as many backdoors in it as the Hitachi Deathstar!
Yankees (Singing): Back-door-back-door! Back-DOOOR! For Homeland and more!
Geek: How about this old IDE drive and this 8-bit ISA-bus IDE controller?
Everyone: Eeeew!
Geek: What do you mean 'Eeeww'? I don't like backdoors!
Yankees: Lovely backdoors! Wonderful backdoors!
DHS: Shut up! Bloody Yankees! You can't have an IDE without the controller card, and you can't have the controller card without the backdoor! Unless he wants to go back to MFM/RLL, and then we can recover everything even after a low-level format! The very first backdoor!
Geek: I don't like backdoors!
DHS: Sshh, citizen, don't cause a fuss, or we'll have your backdoor! We love it. Mmm, backdoors, CALEA for the telephone switches, backdoors, the Clipper Chip for the phones, backdoors in newfangled BIOSes, TPMs, DRMs, backdoors into the backdoors, it's backdoors into everything!
Yankees (singing): Back-door-back-door! Back-DOOOR! Lovely backdoor! Backity door! Safety galore! For homeland and more! Backdoor! Lovely backdoor! Backity door! For the children and more...
Nothing to see here. Especially that Getty watermark in the hair of that guy in the lab coat in doc_image.jpg. And definitely not the Corbis watermark in the left-hand skull/shoulder X-Ray picture in header.jpg. Or the one that looks like some sort of text on the shoulder (and the hair, and the shelf all the way to his elbow) of the guy in the library in header.jpg that I can't quite make it out yet, but I'm sure someone else on Slashdot will. Umm, I mean, "Move along."
When all else fails, question your initial assumption.
From TFA:
Allow me to attempt a translation: "Seagate would be extremely sensitive", said someone who may have had a need to know more about hard drives than you or I do. "I do not think anyone in the US wants the Chinese to have access to the controller chips for a disk drive. One never wants the Chinese or the US public to know what we're already doing to instrument the drives."
To put it another way... if the 128-bit encryption standards, as publicly documented, aren't a concern for reverse-engineering, there are plenty of sorts of things hidden in the bowels of the firmware that could be.
The US government is wise not trust a Chinese implementation of those standards for its data, because the US government can't guarentee the absence of Chinese-added backdoors.
Unfortunately, that same logic leads to only one conclusion: The US consumer is wise to trust neither Chinese nor American implementations of standards for its data, because the US consumer can't guarantee the absence of Chinese- or US-added backdoors.
And by "respectful", we mean "moon him so wide the Goatase Guy would be impressed", and by "teamwork", we mean "everyone in the auditorium", and by "don't try to rain on the parade", we're not sure, but it probably involves some sort of Rube Goldberg contraption involving an enema bag, a colostomy bag, and an industrial-size manure spreader.
Nobody would thank you for that unless you get video of it from at least three strategically-placed cameras.
Not that you seem to be leaning that way, but it bears mentioning we'd at least fund your bandwidth bill, if not your legal defense team, if you had a change of heart.
Or you could just take the high road. Even a thousand-goatse-moon and a spraydown with a million gallons of manure won't make MPAA's bullshit smell any sweeter. So let him say his piece, and then hoist him by his own petard. The Emperor has no clothes, and the more he brags about how good he looks, the more obvious it'll be to your classmates who's full of shit. MPAA's business practices are their own worst enem...y.
Really?
The original poster wasn't talking about China -- he was claiming that Post-9/11 America is a "freer" country than China, because relatively few Americans' rights had been abused.
Programmers (application developers or operating systems designers) secure computer systems from malicious users by denying our programs the ability to escalate their own privileges.
Pre-9/11 America was designed along the same principles: Governments, in order to secure the liberty of their citizens, limited their own powers.
An operating system isn't secure "because it hasn't been hacked". It can only be deemed secure when userland processes can't be compromised by bad input, and if (that is, when) a userland process is compromised, the operating system denies the compromised process the ability to take over the rest of the machine. Segmentation fault: Core dumped.
Likewise, a country isn't free "because no US bloggers have been imprisoned for criticizing the US government". A country can only be deemed free when a blogger can't be legally imprisoned for criticizing his or her government, and if (that is, when) some grandstanding politician manages to pass law like that, the law is immediately struck down as unconstitutional.
You secure a system by making it hard to compromise. When the guy in Marketing wants software to be automatically installed when a user visits a web page "because everyone hates installing software", the only correct response is "NO."
You secure a citizen's rights by making it hard for anyone, even yourself, to take them away. When the guy on the campaign trail wants to spy on everyone "because it's for the children", the correct response must again be "NO."
"Look, just because we turned off all the compiler warnings, didn't check the lengths of input strings, didn't do bounds-checking on my arrays, ran multiple network-facing services with full Administrator privileges, how many XP systems have been remotely compromised? UPnP, DCOM, RPC, Messenger, IE, Outlook, and Word are totally secure!"
- Some marketroid at a Windows XP release party in late 2001.
Never mind Steve Austin. We can make him better... stronger... stretchier!
(Now where was I? Oh yeah--the important thing was that I had a Stretch Armstrong action figure, which was the style at the time. They didn't have fluidic muscles because of the gas crisis. The only thing you could get was those cornsyrup-in-latex ones...)
Actually, the "spill" makes it more likely, not less likely.
Fissionables in solution are tricky things to deal with. Consider the following four cases:
1) Homer Simpson drops a subcritical hunk of a water-soluble U235 salt into a swimming pool. No big deal. It's a single subcritical mass of U235, and the neutrons fly straight out of it and into the surrounding water, and not enough bounce back into the mass to present a problem. Homer reaches in with a net, and pulls the chunk of salt out of the net. "No problemo."
2) A little while later, as the harmless chunk dissolves into the huge pool, there will be localized spots near the chunk, with both sufficiently-high concentration of fissionable materials and the right amount of moderating material between them for a criticality incident. "D'OH!"
3) "Aha! I'm smart! I'll prevent that scenario by dissolving it, a bit at a time, by adding it to the pool by using a salt shaker near the pump intake!" Congrats! The U235 atoms are, at all times, sufficiently widely-dispersed, that there is no criticality risk. "Woohoo!"
4) A few weeks after your swim, the place is shut down and everyone gets fired. The maintenance guy forgets to drain the pool. The water gradually evaporates, and concentrations in the remaining water begin to rise... and a few years later, some guy spraying graffiti by the abandoned poolhouse wonders WTF that blue flash was. "D'OH!" again.
I'm on a roll here, so I may as well close off the "security by obscurity" issue. There are places where security by obscurity works, and this is one of them.
The deal here is that criticality incidents, especially involving fissionables in solution are a function of degree of enrichment (in the case of uranium as the solute), nuclear properties of the solvent, local concentrations of the ions in solution, and a whole boatload of other things, in order to build cool toys, you often have to deal with them all, simultaneously. I'm not in the building-of-cool-toys industry, and have mercifully I've never had a need to know.
Some of these things are public domain, but others (particularly those things pertaining to the design of shipborne Naval reactors, which use HEU because there simply isn't enough space on all types of ships to permit the use of LEU-based designs) are classified. Given a description of an incident, however, it may be possible to place upper and lower bounds on some of the classified parameters - bounds that are narrower than the published numbers, and there are plenty of adversaries who would be delighted to deduce things about our Naval capabilities (a lot more interesting/useful than even our bomb designs), given just a few more missing puzzle pieces. The math is hard, and denying adversaries the pieces of the puzzle that they can use to derive the whole picture isn't security by obscurity, it's just good security practice.
Hmm. Take the high road, and go with "It's a TRAP!", or take the low road, and have Carrie Fisher muttering "You came in that thing? You're braver than I thought!"
Decisions, decisions.
Because (believe it or not) there are people who don't know the difference between "the universe", "the Galaxy", and "the Solar System", and there are fundies that actively exploit that ignorance.
It's easy to screen out the radical fundamentalists. They answer "6000 years" and are at least honest about their base.
But the dangerous ones are the ones who "teach the controversy", because "Them crazy scientists can't seem to agree on anything! Some of 'em say everything's 14 billion years old, and some of 'em the world's just 4.6! They can't both be right!"
Vote only for a politician who is smarter than a fifth-grader; that is, one who knows that "The Universe", is approximately 14 billion years old (I'll take any number between 10B and 15B) is much bigger and older than "The Solar System", which is 4.6 billion years old (hell, I'll take anything between 5 and 4.5).
"Really, I swear on this stack of $100 bills, Senator!"
Reminds me of a little song I heard when I was growing up. Once upon a time, today's world would have been looked upon as the demented fantasy of a heavy metal band.
Up here in space,
I'm looking down on you.
My lasers trace
Everything you do.
You think you've private lives, think nothing of the kind!
There is no true escape, I'm watching all the time!
(CHORUS):
I'm made of metal, my circuits gleam!
I am perpetual, I keep the country clean!
I'm elected, electric spy...
I'm protected, electric eye...
Always in focus,
You can't feel my stare,
I zoom into you,
You don't know I'm there
I take a pride in probing all your secret moves,
My tearless retina takes pictures that can prove...
(CHORUS)
Electric eye (in the sky)
Feel my stare (always there)
There's nothing you can do about it! Develop and expose!
I feed upon your every thought, and so my power grows!
(CHORUS)
I'm elected, electric spy
I'm protected, electric eye
I'm elected, electric spy
I'm elected
Protective,
Detective,
Electric
Eye!
- Judas Priest, Electric Eye, 1982.
Not bad. Pretty much got everything right. "Keeping the country clean" as the excuse for the power grab. "Elected. Protective. Detective." as the correct chronological order in which to implement it.
(I'm going to try and ignore the video for Turbo Lover and the suspicious resemblance to the cyborg-on-a-motorcycle sequence from Terminator 2. He wound up getting elected as Governor, and you'd think that if a hair metal band really had come from the future, they'd have at least hinted at the Governator in a backwards-masked portion of the track... There's such a thing as taking pop culture too seriously, after all.)
> Why would you want three sockets rather than four? Easy, latency. Any CPU in a 3S system is one hop away from any other CPU. In a 4S system, you can be two hops away. This adds latency, and more importantly, you take a big hit on cache coherency latency. This kills performance."
Lawrence: Three chips at the same time, man.
Peter: That's it? If you had a million dollars, you'd use three sockets at the same time?
Lawrence: Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I worked at AMD I could hook that up, too; 'cause I hate motherboard layouts with latency.
Peter: Well, not all layouts.
Lawrence: Well, the type of chips that'd triple up on a board like that would.
Peter: Good point.
Lawrence: Well, what about you now? what would you do?
Peter: Besides three chips at the same time?
Lawrence: Well, yeah.
Peter: Idle.
Lawrence: Idle, huh? Peter: I would relax... I would sit on my ass all day... I would idle.
Lawrence: Well, you don't need a million dollars to idle, man. Take a look at that fourth chip: it's two hops away, don't do shit.
(Did I mention how much I hated my Computability and Complexity courses when I was in college?)
"Exempting highly-skilled workers from having to pay unemployment insurance premiums, and raising premiums on burger flippers."
That's where it'll stop.
Done.
From Infocom's Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, released in (when else?) 1984.
>
>In the long run, however, it tends to kill the game.
"How do you kill that which has no life?"
Easy. Release an expansion pack for Star Wars Galaxies.
An infinite number of rednecks, an infinite number of shotguns, and an infinitely-long Texas highway, will eventually reproduce this Slashdot thread. In Braille.
"Sure, the high tech industry produces more revenue and innovation than the entertainment industry, but when it comes right down to it, we still prefer to snort our cocaine from between Titney's Pears than from the Commander's Taco. Can you really blame us?"
- Bipartisan Statement: Sen. Porkin' Hitch (D-isney), Sen. Serious Tubes (R-IAA)
I can partially sympathize with him. The TATP plot wouldn't have worked, but there are probably other things that could be smuggled onboard and used to bring down a plane. By limiting quantities and the sizes of things that could be used as mixing/pressure vessels, some risk may have been mitigated.
> Hawley has been saying it's based on "scientific findings" like a broken record. But he has yet to show these "scientific findings".
And I can even go so far as to say I agree with him on his lack of specifics. There's no need to censor recipes, but there's no need to publicize them. Better to let the bad guys Google it themselves, wind up with something copied out of a 60s-era cookbook, and Darwinize themselves out of the gene pool without hurting anybody.
> Oh, I'll report if I get on the "No-fly" list for this. Because, obviously, I'm a "threat" for pointing out Government stupidity.
And therein is the root cause: bureaucracy. Kip Hawley may not be an idiot, but he's a bureaucrat. It doesn't matter how smart you are if the system you're working with is fundamentally flawed. That applies from Kip all the way down to the goon who barks at you for failing to remove your shoes soon enough, or the goon who barks at you even louder for removing your shoes before you were ordered to.
Since the typical TSA Goon is too poorly-educated to understand chemistry, and the typical civilian is too poorly-educated to understand either chemistry or risk, that neither audience needs to know.
There's the first idiocy: A bureaucracy is happy to tell you "what" (three ounce containers, one Freedom Baggie) to do, but never "why". The TSA goon enforces the policy with mindless efficiency; he is trained to be mindless. His civilian subjects see the policy as wholly arbitrary unfounded in reason or logic, because no reason or logic has ever been supplied, and treat him as the goon he is -- and he likewise learns to regard the cilivian subjects as idiots, because they're too stupid to follow a rule as simple as "3 oz containers in a 1-liter baggie".
And here's the second level of idiocy: Since nobody has a "need to know" the reason, nobody's allowed to know, and it's not too big a step before you get is afraid to know and is afraid to even think.
Some guy ahead of me was raising a fuss about the 3/1/1 rule, and I would have loved to have explained to him the reasoning behind the rule. Of course, I didn't. If I'd said "Dude, it's about limiting the size of reaction/pressure vessels and the amount of reagents that can be smuggled in without having more than a certain number of people buying airline tickets within a certain timeframe, just chill out and toss the toothpaste", I'd probably still be in some black hole somewhere.
It's this second level of idiocy that's the real problem: the notion that, in a bureaucracy, anyone who does think through the reasoning behind a policy, must be a threat.
More than however many years since (a plot that's mentioned in TFA that I no longer want to type on a web form), more than 5 years since 9/11, two years since the bogus liquid plot, and only now, on an obscure web forum, does the bureaucracy actually come out and admit why the rules are what they are.
The original policy isn't a great idea, but it isn't exactly a dumb idea either. But it's taught arbitrarily to the goons, it's enforced arbitrarily against the goons' victims, and ends up with all three sides (Policymaker, Goon, and Civilian alike) regarding each other with nothing but contempt and suspicion. To the point that I (like
"What was your username again?"
> I Choose Not to Participate (Score: 5, Doomed) by eldavojohn (898314)
Ah, there's your username.
*clickity-click*
rm -rf /usr/staff/eldavojohn /usr/staff/eldavojohn /usr/staff/eldavojohn/hello.jpg
mkdir
wget http://goatse.cx/hello.jpg >
chown eldavojohn hello.jpg
"Hello, Human Resources? There's something about one of your employees that you need to know about..."
It won't replace the ego boost from the throngs of humans crowding over your shoulder in awe of your godlike playing skills, but the Arcade Ambience project is a pretty good replacement for the background sounds of dozens of arcade machines.