It's not just Internet-connected infrastructure. In many cases, people took the proper precautionary steps, but weren't actively paranoid. To protect your infrastructure today, you really do need to be paranoid. People bring in gadgets infected with malware, plug the malware-infected gadget into a PC, and the PC infects every system on the network. OK, so you ban people from bringing in gadgets, and now you remove all secretarial PCs from the main network. Maybe you even disable every USB port and force people to use PS/2 keyboards and mice. Well, the next infection comes in from a contractor who installs software directly from the manufacturer. If the hackers know that you use Flash and/or Java in your company's intranet, it's not inconceivable that they manage to infect Flash or Java. I mean, we're talking about nation states here. They can do whatever the fuck they want, and money is not much of an issue.
Somewhere along the line, people with resources a hundred times greater than yours will come up with a line of attack that you didn't defend against. And if you protect against everything obvious, who knows what the crazy fuckers will do? If I were on the Iranian nuclear power commission, I'd probably give the Americans and Israelis a semi-obvious backdoor to my network, just so that they don't send in black ops teams. I'm not saying that I think the Americans and Israelis would be so stupid, but, then again, these people probably grew up watching James Bond movies. They probably think that shit is exciting.
Exactly the opposite. I would be incredibly surprised if it weren't popular. That's exactly my point. It plays into the socioeconomic demographics of Slashdot so well, there's no way that Slashdot would ever let this story go, without it taking up a month's worth of analysis by outraged bloggers. Why do they obsess over this guy, and not over all the others that come before him? That's what my post is about: do they identify with him or is there a deeper reason?
Still, a truly cynical person would point out that nothing ever changes unless the middle class can be mobilized, making cases like this very important. Social justice for the poor is impossible, unless the middle class is also being persecuted.
Yeah, seriously. It's like a bunch of buzzwords arranged together in random order. I'm very surprised that they resisted using the buzzword du jour, "crowdsource".
Yeah, it reminds me of Missing white woman syndrome, a strange media bias that over-represents attractive, young, upper-middle class woman, in cases of abduction. Swartz obviously wasn't a missing white woman, but a similar medias bias comes into play. People cast him as an innocent martyr, squashed under the boot of an authoritarian system, ignoring all of the victims that weren't upper-middle class, professional males.
You can look at it as media bias, racism, classism, tribalism, or a combination of all of the above. I guess I consider it "all of the above".
Not obtuse. Just an elitist. Elitism isn't always a bad thing, in my opinion, but it does lead you to discount the usefulness of user-submitted content, even when that content is quite useful. The IMDB, Wikipedia, Newegg, and Amazon can be tremendously useful, as long as you keep in mind their limitations and drawbacks. Elitists can't see anything but the limitations and drawbacks, while populists refuse to admit there are any.
Re:Uh...it's still there, you know
on
The Web We Lost
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Amazingly, it's still around. It's at bbs.iscabbs.com now, I believe. Visiting it is like going back in time to 1995. The same exact people are having the same exact arguments that they were 15-20 years ago. I think it's some form of Hell for all involved.
Well, yes, but I think Kaspersky is advocating that we swing the pendulum in the opposite direction: instead of making trade-offs against security, we make a niche OS that makes all of its trade-offs in favor of security, trying to keep in mind the specific needs of industrial control systems. He's also advocating -- if you'll forgive me -- a paradigm shift, in which security becomes the mantra, rather than stability. This is unsurprising, coming from a security professional. I can't say whether he's an ideological fool or a visionary, but they are not mutually exclusive.
Of course, convincing people to use an operating system that made all of its trade-offs against ease-of-use, backwards compatibility, features, and stability may end being even harder than writing it.
I think there are two divergent groups following it. The first are hipsters who love celebrity gossip, but would never admit it. They love it, because it's celebrity gossip that's socially acceptable for college-educated, professional males. The second group are postmodernists, who can't believe how surreal the whole thing is. There is, of course, some cross-over.
Myself, I'm interested in the postmodern aspects of the story. I think it could work very well as some kind of postmodern novel or film.
Wikipedia has a pretty decent overview. It's actually kind of interesting and not too technical. Basically, it involves more system calls. Think of it as having more middle men involved in the process. Early microkernels implemented rather inefficient designs, leading people to believe that the concept itself was inefficient. Newer evidence reveals that it isn't quite that bad, and that it's possible to be very competitive with monolithic kernels.
My own understanding of the whole thing is rather shallow, so I can't really get very technical. I've always been somewhat interested in this sort of thing, but not so much that I was willing to pay rapt attention in my compsci classes.
Don't take this as a critique of just Obama. GWB before him was responsible for TSA (a very liberal, nanny-statist thing) and for Iraq (a very right-wing, "bomb them into stone age" thing.) Clinton before that bombed Yugoslavia (a right-wing, interventionist thing) and was instrumental in splitting Kosovo (a liberal thing, but with a touch of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who is hardly a liberal.)
You have some idiosyncratic ideas on what constitutes left-wing and right-wing ideology.
My own views generally align with politicalcompass.org. You should check that site out. It's actually pretty insightful, at times. It's also fun to see where you chart -- it sounds like you're hardcore right-libertarian. Myself, I'm left-libertarian, and I think that your characterization of the TSA being left-wing is very silly. It's an authoritarian policy, completely unrelated to any kind of economic theory. Police states are authoritarian, not left-wing or right-wing.
I wonder how many of his defenders on Slashdot realize that this is Weev, the former president of the GNAA?
Still, I'm impressed with Slashdot's integrity, for once. After ten years of crapflooding and trolling by the GNAA, I would have thought that Slashdot would be a bit more antagonistic toward him.
Nice series of strawman and ad hominem attacks there, but that's pretty standard on Slashdot.
You think that people are too willfully ignorant to truly know what they want, yet you can't see the arrogance of that attitude? I bet you use the word "sheeple" quite often, don't you? Don't worry, some day Ron Paul will win that election!
It's fun to play "internet psychiatrist", but it's just cheesy, pseudo-intellectual bullshit. I will give you points for making a good go at it, but you're so wildly off the mark that it's actually quite funny. If you go though my history, I think you can find much, much better ammunition than what you dug up. I've admitted several times to being bipolar, and it would it have been pretty easy, I would imagine, for such an astute person as you to craft a devastating blow to my poor, fragile ego. Seriously, you think I'm a narcissistic theist? Go back through my history and come up with a better insult than that, please.
In the meantime, I think I'll just stick to "arrogant douchebag" for you.
Unfortunately, you are falsely assuming that "people" want what they actually would want, if they weren't under the influence of false social conditioning, delusions and willful ignorance.
This is a very arrogant, patriarchal view. Even when you're right and people switch over, they will still resent your attitude. I find such ideologically-driven software to be very annoying, personally. I feel like I'm being forced to join some kind of cult whenever I use certain programs, because you have to agree with the underlying ideology of the programmer/designer in order to get anything done. Firefox seems to be going in this direction, unfortunately. Mozilla has developed a messiah complex, where they think they're destined to save the world, rather than simply rendering HTML.
Like anyone else, they ignore the parts they disagree with and deliberately interpret the rest of it in a way that allows them to retain their power and privilege, couching it in populist rhetoric. When was the last time you saw someone interpret something in a way that didn't allow them to rationalize their behavior or validate their ideology?
Religion, law, and even science get interpreted in a way most beneficial to the one doing the interpretation.
First, I just want to say that I agree with you. However, it's a bit arrogant to insist that people do everything your way, instead of giving them the ability to do things the way they prefer. If people want to contribute to Wikipedia using a WYSIWYG editor, then Wikipedia should provide such a feature, even if it runs counter to everything that the web stands for. Getting people to contribute and lowering the barrier to entry is more important than ideological purity.
Ideological purity for its own sake leads to the Reign of Terror.
Is it a bad sign that grassroots, word-of-mouth advertising is now indistinguishable from shills, viral advertising campaigns, and astroturfing? It's only a matter of time before corporate America catches on to the fact that we're getting pissed off by this and sells our outrage back to us, in the form of even more cynical advertising methods.
In frustration, I read the linked article, because I couldn't tell what the actual was about, from the Slashdot summary. Here's a better summary:
Researchers gave each person a national treasury of €20. In order to avert catastrophe, a minimum of €150 in the main pool had to be collected total. If catastrophe is not averted, each player's account is depleted by €15. Players got to keep any remaining money in their national treasury. In almost every game, people contributed enough money to avert catastrophe. It was only when the catastrophe was made more unpredictable that the game collapsed. Instead of requiring €150 to completely avert disaster, the catastrophe had a chance of happening based on how much money was allocated. In the second scenario, people promised enough money to minimize the risk, yet they did not allocate it, thinking that the odds would not be significantly increased if they underfunded the mitigation. Because so many people "embezzled", the odds were significantly affected and the catastrophe invariably occurred.
Basically, the players should have studied their Kant.
It's easy to say that, but it's expensive as hell to modernize even just NYC, much less the entire state. Nobody is ever going to finance something like that, when the current infrastructure works tolerably well (most of the time). It used to really bug me (losing power whenever there's a moderately powerful storm really sucks), but I guess I've gotten used to it, as well. Nowadays, I too laugh at the naive fools who think they're going to change anything in New York. Politics in NY are more complicated than they may seem to outsiders -- the same as anywhere else, really. We're just better at hiding our dysfunctional government from outsiders than some other states.
I had the same exact question, so I read his Wikipedia article. If there weren't citations for everything in the article, I'd assume that some liberal had written it as a scathing parody of the Tea Party extremists in the Republican party. I'm still a little shell-shocked and experiencing some denial that people like this truly exist.
It's time for the North to secede from the Union. The South can have their theocratic confederation. I don't care any more. They can keep everything: the oil, the farms, the National Guard, the military bases -- everything. I don't want to be in the same country as them any more.
According to the Wikipedia article, these guys are simply trying to simplify, optimize, and reduce fragmentation in the ARM/Linux world. They're not trying to claim anything except that their tools and validation suite make your life easier.
It's sort of like the Linux Standard Base, if you remember that initiative. The LSB was invented to address concerns of fragmentation and difficulty in porting applications to Linux, because the distributions were so radically different from each other. While it didn't work out as well as hoped, it did manage to reduce the idiosyncrasies.
Slashdot Mirror
But Slashdot bans people based on IP address. Does that mean that Slashdot itself is ignorant?
It's not just Internet-connected infrastructure. In many cases, people took the proper precautionary steps, but weren't actively paranoid. To protect your infrastructure today, you really do need to be paranoid. People bring in gadgets infected with malware, plug the malware-infected gadget into a PC, and the PC infects every system on the network. OK, so you ban people from bringing in gadgets, and now you remove all secretarial PCs from the main network. Maybe you even disable every USB port and force people to use PS/2 keyboards and mice. Well, the next infection comes in from a contractor who installs software directly from the manufacturer. If the hackers know that you use Flash and/or Java in your company's intranet, it's not inconceivable that they manage to infect Flash or Java. I mean, we're talking about nation states here. They can do whatever the fuck they want, and money is not much of an issue.
Somewhere along the line, people with resources a hundred times greater than yours will come up with a line of attack that you didn't defend against. And if you protect against everything obvious, who knows what the crazy fuckers will do? If I were on the Iranian nuclear power commission, I'd probably give the Americans and Israelis a semi-obvious backdoor to my network, just so that they don't send in black ops teams. I'm not saying that I think the Americans and Israelis would be so stupid, but, then again, these people probably grew up watching James Bond movies. They probably think that shit is exciting.
And you are surprised that this story is popular?
Exactly the opposite. I would be incredibly surprised if it weren't popular. That's exactly my point. It plays into the socioeconomic demographics of Slashdot so well, there's no way that Slashdot would ever let this story go, without it taking up a month's worth of analysis by outraged bloggers. Why do they obsess over this guy, and not over all the others that come before him? That's what my post is about: do they identify with him or is there a deeper reason?
Still, a truly cynical person would point out that nothing ever changes unless the middle class can be mobilized, making cases like this very important. Social justice for the poor is impossible, unless the middle class is also being persecuted.
Yeah, seriously. It's like a bunch of buzzwords arranged together in random order. I'm very surprised that they resisted using the buzzword du jour, "crowdsource".
Yeah, it reminds me of Missing white woman syndrome, a strange media bias that over-represents attractive, young, upper-middle class woman, in cases of abduction. Swartz obviously wasn't a missing white woman, but a similar medias bias comes into play. People cast him as an innocent martyr, squashed under the boot of an authoritarian system, ignoring all of the victims that weren't upper-middle class, professional males.
You can look at it as media bias, racism, classism, tribalism, or a combination of all of the above. I guess I consider it "all of the above".
Seeing as how there's only a single submitter, your use of a plural pronoun seems to indicate that you advocate a "singular they".
I find your heresy to be an abomination.
So? There's nothing wrong with that.
Out of all the problems in the summary, I'm surprised that you attacked it for something that's not even truly wrong.
Ron Paul is a member.
You are obtuse.
Not obtuse. Just an elitist. Elitism isn't always a bad thing, in my opinion, but it does lead you to discount the usefulness of user-submitted content, even when that content is quite useful. The IMDB, Wikipedia, Newegg, and Amazon can be tremendously useful, as long as you keep in mind their limitations and drawbacks. Elitists can't see anything but the limitations and drawbacks, while populists refuse to admit there are any.
Amazingly, it's still around. It's at bbs.iscabbs.com now, I believe. Visiting it is like going back in time to 1995. The same exact people are having the same exact arguments that they were 15-20 years ago. I think it's some form of Hell for all involved.
Well, yes, but I think Kaspersky is advocating that we swing the pendulum in the opposite direction: instead of making trade-offs against security, we make a niche OS that makes all of its trade-offs in favor of security, trying to keep in mind the specific needs of industrial control systems. He's also advocating -- if you'll forgive me -- a paradigm shift, in which security becomes the mantra, rather than stability. This is unsurprising, coming from a security professional. I can't say whether he's an ideological fool or a visionary, but they are not mutually exclusive.
Of course, convincing people to use an operating system that made all of its trade-offs against ease-of-use, backwards compatibility, features, and stability may end being even harder than writing it.
I think there are two divergent groups following it. The first are hipsters who love celebrity gossip, but would never admit it. They love it, because it's celebrity gossip that's socially acceptable for college-educated, professional males. The second group are postmodernists, who can't believe how surreal the whole thing is. There is, of course, some cross-over.
Myself, I'm interested in the postmodern aspects of the story. I think it could work very well as some kind of postmodern novel or film.
Wikipedia has a pretty decent overview. It's actually kind of interesting and not too technical. Basically, it involves more system calls. Think of it as having more middle men involved in the process. Early microkernels implemented rather inefficient designs, leading people to believe that the concept itself was inefficient. Newer evidence reveals that it isn't quite that bad, and that it's possible to be very competitive with monolithic kernels.
My own understanding of the whole thing is rather shallow, so I can't really get very technical. I've always been somewhat interested in this sort of thing, but not so much that I was willing to pay rapt attention in my compsci classes.
The headlines have never really been very good. Just be glad when they have any relation to the story whatsoever.
Don't take this as a critique of just Obama. GWB before him was responsible for TSA (a very liberal, nanny-statist thing) and for Iraq (a very right-wing, "bomb them into stone age" thing.) Clinton before that bombed Yugoslavia (a right-wing, interventionist thing) and was instrumental in splitting Kosovo (a liberal thing, but with a touch of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who is hardly a liberal.)
You have some idiosyncratic ideas on what constitutes left-wing and right-wing ideology.
My own views generally align with politicalcompass.org. You should check that site out. It's actually pretty insightful, at times. It's also fun to see where you chart -- it sounds like you're hardcore right-libertarian. Myself, I'm left-libertarian, and I think that your characterization of the TSA being left-wing is very silly. It's an authoritarian policy, completely unrelated to any kind of economic theory. Police states are authoritarian, not left-wing or right-wing.
I wonder how many of his defenders on Slashdot realize that this is Weev, the former president of the GNAA?
Still, I'm impressed with Slashdot's integrity, for once. After ten years of crapflooding and trolling by the GNAA, I would have thought that Slashdot would be a bit more antagonistic toward him.
Nice series of strawman and ad hominem attacks there, but that's pretty standard on Slashdot.
You think that people are too willfully ignorant to truly know what they want, yet you can't see the arrogance of that attitude? I bet you use the word "sheeple" quite often, don't you? Don't worry, some day Ron Paul will win that election!
It's fun to play "internet psychiatrist", but it's just cheesy, pseudo-intellectual bullshit. I will give you points for making a good go at it, but you're so wildly off the mark that it's actually quite funny. If you go though my history, I think you can find much, much better ammunition than what you dug up. I've admitted several times to being bipolar, and it would it have been pretty easy, I would imagine, for such an astute person as you to craft a devastating blow to my poor, fragile ego. Seriously, you think I'm a narcissistic theist? Go back through my history and come up with a better insult than that, please.
In the meantime, I think I'll just stick to "arrogant douchebag" for you.
Unfortunately, you are falsely assuming that "people" want what they actually would want, if they weren't under the influence of false social conditioning, delusions and willful ignorance.
This is a very arrogant, patriarchal view. Even when you're right and people switch over, they will still resent your attitude. I find such ideologically-driven software to be very annoying, personally. I feel like I'm being forced to join some kind of cult whenever I use certain programs, because you have to agree with the underlying ideology of the programmer/designer in order to get anything done. Firefox seems to be going in this direction, unfortunately. Mozilla has developed a messiah complex, where they think they're destined to save the world, rather than simply rendering HTML.
Like anyone else, they ignore the parts they disagree with and deliberately interpret the rest of it in a way that allows them to retain their power and privilege, couching it in populist rhetoric. When was the last time you saw someone interpret something in a way that didn't allow them to rationalize their behavior or validate their ideology?
Religion, law, and even science get interpreted in a way most beneficial to the one doing the interpretation.
First, I just want to say that I agree with you. However, it's a bit arrogant to insist that people do everything your way, instead of giving them the ability to do things the way they prefer. If people want to contribute to Wikipedia using a WYSIWYG editor, then Wikipedia should provide such a feature, even if it runs counter to everything that the web stands for. Getting people to contribute and lowering the barrier to entry is more important than ideological purity.
Ideological purity for its own sake leads to the Reign of Terror.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Is it a bad sign that grassroots, word-of-mouth advertising is now indistinguishable from shills, viral advertising campaigns, and astroturfing? It's only a matter of time before corporate America catches on to the fact that we're getting pissed off by this and sells our outrage back to us, in the form of even more cynical advertising methods.
In frustration, I read the linked article, because I couldn't tell what the actual was about, from the Slashdot summary. Here's a better summary:
Researchers gave each person a national treasury of €20. In order to avert catastrophe, a minimum of €150 in the main pool had to be collected total. If catastrophe is not averted, each player's account is depleted by €15. Players got to keep any remaining money in their national treasury. In almost every game, people contributed enough money to avert catastrophe. It was only when the catastrophe was made more unpredictable that the game collapsed. Instead of requiring €150 to completely avert disaster, the catastrophe had a chance of happening based on how much money was allocated. In the second scenario, people promised enough money to minimize the risk, yet they did not allocate it, thinking that the odds would not be significantly increased if they underfunded the mitigation. Because so many people "embezzled", the odds were significantly affected and the catastrophe invariably occurred.
Basically, the players should have studied their Kant.
It's easy to say that, but it's expensive as hell to modernize even just NYC, much less the entire state. Nobody is ever going to finance something like that, when the current infrastructure works tolerably well (most of the time). It used to really bug me (losing power whenever there's a moderately powerful storm really sucks), but I guess I've gotten used to it, as well. Nowadays, I too laugh at the naive fools who think they're going to change anything in New York. Politics in NY are more complicated than they may seem to outsiders -- the same as anywhere else, really. We're just better at hiding our dysfunctional government from outsiders than some other states.
I had the same exact question, so I read his Wikipedia article. If there weren't citations for everything in the article, I'd assume that some liberal had written it as a scathing parody of the Tea Party extremists in the Republican party. I'm still a little shell-shocked and experiencing some denial that people like this truly exist.
It's time for the North to secede from the Union. The South can have their theocratic confederation. I don't care any more. They can keep everything: the oil, the farms, the National Guard, the military bases -- everything. I don't want to be in the same country as them any more.
According to the Wikipedia article, these guys are simply trying to simplify, optimize, and reduce fragmentation in the ARM/Linux world. They're not trying to claim anything except that their tools and validation suite make your life easier.
It's sort of like the Linux Standard Base, if you remember that initiative. The LSB was invented to address concerns of fragmentation and difficulty in porting applications to Linux, because the distributions were so radically different from each other. While it didn't work out as well as hoped, it did manage to reduce the idiosyncrasies.