Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announces a multi-billion dollar investment in a fleet of submarines.
You kid, but wait till Google has some shit that China, Iran, or even the US doesn't like. Or Greenpeace or some other aggressive group doesn't like.
Accidents do happen at sea!
If someone did sink one of these platforms, it wouldn't matter one damn bit so far as information availability is concerned, although it would cost Google some money. The GFS replicates information far and wide, and doesn't (can't, really, and do what it does) depend upon a centralized data store.
And besides, what "shit" would Google store that would really torque someone off? First and foremost Google is an index, not a storage system for other people's data. And if it bothers someone that a particular site or sites are online, there are more efficient ways to block access to said sites than blowing up Google facilities.
I generally agree with you. However, I feel the need to point out an enormous difference between being a pedophile and using drugs: you have a choice as to whether to use drugs, whereas if you find children sexually attractive there is generally nothing you can do to stop it.
Well, how about the pedophile being strapped into a chair with his eyelids glued open, in front of a screen projecting a series of images, with pictures of small children in provocative poses shown at random intervals. Whenever such a picture is displayed, the subject is given a massive electric shock while simultaneously receiving a jolt of skunk odor. Repeat this process daily for a couple of months. I bet when it's all done your pedophile won't have much interest in small children.
We can discuss the violation of civil liberties this would require in another thread. That, or we can all go watch A Clockwork Orange.
On the other hand, who cares what 64% of Germans think? Or anyone else? I don't care what 100% of my fellow Americans think. Other than the few people in the intelligence community that actually deal with the reality of this, nobody else's opinion matters one little bit because it is just that: opinion. And the intelligence folks who probably know exactly what went on aren't talking, and can't be depended upon to tell the truth even if they were, so I don't care what they think either.
I'm so goddamn sick and tired of news organizations presenting "polls" as if they represent some sort of evidence. Sure, if you're trying to market a new brand of shampoo I suppose such research makes sense. In determining who was responsible for a terrorist attack it's pointless.
Depends upon where you are. In the United States, everything is an intrinsic right, except those few that are reserved for the Federal Government. That government has been treading on our rights for some time now, and this is just the latest extension.
People make the mistake of assuming that the Constitution enumerates all the rights that we citizens have, and that the rest are privileges granted by the Government. The exact opposite is true, and we've been remiss in reminding our elected leaders of that fact.
Maybe... but China's activities and that of our own government in matters regarding widespread surveillance of public communications would indicate that, simplistic or otherwise, the GP is correct. That's because the control and monitoring of telecommunications on a grand scale is power. Power is invariably abused.
It often depends (largely on who the victor turns out to be.) Seriously though, violence for its own sake is rarely useful, but violence with a purpose can sometimes be worthwhile in the long run. Still, I wouldn't have wanted to be a member of the East India Company right around then.
There are civilized countries around where this is common practice - after positive test you are brought to a hospital where a blood test is done.
A lot of what passes for police work here in the U.S. is now based upon the convenience of the officers. The decision to use breathalyzers in the first place is an example of that, especially when there are more accurate (if less efficient and more costly) alternatives available.
That is fine. IF the driver was driving in an erratic manner they are unsafe. However ANY driver should be able to face their accuser and if the accuser is an electronic device they shouldn't have to tolerate "poof then magic occurs" This is to protect the innocent from an abusive state. Most cops are honest great people but anyone that does not think there is rogue and corrupt governments is gullible.
They do face their accuser. The cop who pulled them over is their accuser.
Maybe... but I'd be surprised if the vendor represented to the State that the devices were unreliable or could not be trusted. Given that the things don't work, I'd say the State could go after them on several levels.
If push comes to shove, the binaries could probably be extracted and disassembled. That would be expensive, I suppose, but given that this is a compact embedded system the code probably isn't that complex.
Everything you say is true enough: as someone who spent more than a few years hacking assembler on a number of different processors I can agree. However, that's still no excuse.
When my Windows box blue-screens and I lose an hour's work I say a few choice words, press the reset button, and get on with life. When an evidence-collection device malfunctions and a person's life is trashed as a result... it's a different matter entirely. If the manufacturer can't demonstrate to the court that his device works, and works reliably, then he should go into another business. I don't want my life dependent upon someone else's poor design and testing methodologies.
If it turns out that there's no way to produce such a device within the economic constraints you mention, then perhaps society would benefit from their being removed from service. It appears from the numerous cases being affected by this one vendor's product that there are some serious issues with these machines, and law enforcement's growing dependence upon them.
Well, I think in most of the situations where governments use software, the public's needs are just as well served by open protocols and document formats. Open software would be nice, but you're right that it wouldn't be economically practical at this point. Perhaps had it been mandated thirty years ago... but it wasn't.
However, in situations where an individuals life and liberty are at risk... yes, you're absolutely right. Cameras, breathalyzers, ODB interfaces, surveillance systems of all kinds, there are tons of PC-based and embedded systems in use by law enforcement.
All in all, I'm not sure sure that such source code shouldn't be truly "open". I know what you're saying, and it's logical enough. However, being available to defense lawyers and such leaves too much room for a serious defect to simply be swept under the rug by an out-of-court settlement. Consequently, people involved in similar cases would not be able to benefit from discovery.
Besides, if the stuff is bought and paid for by tax dollars, and it is used for law enforcement purposes, the code should be open for inspection by all. It is, after all, our software. Cops won't like that, but that's too bad.
rule that all programming used for government functions be open source, unless there's an overriding reason for it to be closed. This outfit appears to have manufactured and marketed a fundamentally flawed piece of technology that may very well have resulted in prison time for innocent people. Not acceptable... a manufacturer's need to maintain a competitive edge should not be held more important than our right to not be falsely accused and wrongly imprisoned. Now, of course there may be other issues with CMI's product other than the firmware, but a detailed examination of the code is a good first step.
Furthermore, the people responsible for the decision to market the Intoxilyzer should be held accountable for the device's failures, especially if they sold it knowing that the design was defective. Sure, it costs more money to properly certify a design, and to implement effective quality controls. Still, if auto manufacturers have to suffer multi-million-dollar lawsuits over tiny flaws in vehicle design, these guys should hardly get off scot-free.
I dunno... I get 8 mb down / 1 mb up from Comcast for $86/month. I could really use the fast backchannel, so the GP's $72 sounds pretty reasonable in comparison.
'A lot of the people who run these systems feel that they're not bound by the same rules as traditional IT,' Finisterre said. 'Their industry is not very familiar with hacking and hackers in general.'"
He's attempting to lay blame for these infrastructural issues at the feet of the engineering staff. What he doesn't understand is that engineering systems have very different operational requirements from running a server farm or a few thousand desktops. Engineers avoid IT like the plague, because IT people will come down on engineering systems like a ton of bricks, enforcing arbitrary company-wide standards regardless of the damage they do. For example, if you have a timing-sensitive real time process running on a PC, it may not be wise to put the Symantec Antivirus pig on that particular box. Yet I've seen that happen, usually without the person in charge of that equipment even being notified. Afterwards, everybody wonders what happened with something goes seriously wrong with a production process. IT's attitude in such cases is usually "we followed company policies. Not our fault." The hell it wasn't.
The reality is that IT misguided or ignorant departments are frequently a far bigger danger to process control and real-time data acquisition systems than any number of Chinese crackers. That's because they rarely make the slightest effort to accommodate the needs of the technical staff, and have often gone to extreme lengths to have upper management approve utterly Draconian policies that MUST be applied to ALL computers.
Engineers are often justifiably leery of having IT involvement in any of their projects. The consequence of that, of course, is that now you have people with no specific security training implementing remote communications. Of course, a lot of these problems could be ameliorated with some simple requirements such as "all off-site communications MUST be secured with a VPN" or something similar.
Ultimately, what it comes down to is communications being handled by conscientious, well-trained individuals that are open-minded and willing to accommodate the special needs of engineering systems. I can't tell you how rarely I've seen that happen.
The only reason for an antitrust suit would be when the company stifles innovation.
You seem to be confusing "innovation" with "competition." They're not the same, and one does not imply the other.
True enough, although the intent of the Sherman Antitrust Act and similar laws are to prevent harm to the consumer. Stifling innovation or competition does exactly that, harm the consumer.
Not so weird. The Feds regularly (and I would assume illegally) punish uncoooperative corporations. Remember what happened to Qwest when it refused to be a party to illegal wiretapping.
Forgetting innovation for the moment... Federal regulators had to approve the deal before it could go through. Is the Department of Whatever-Passes-for-Justice-Nowadays saying that the Federal government slipped up in this case? If so, maybe they should be taking a closer look at whoever authorized the acquisition in the first place.
It's all very well telling them to "go ahead", at the end of the day we have to share our atmosphere with those arseholes.
Nice. In one fell swoop you just characterized a nation of some 280 million souls as "arseholes". Good going. Well, I may be an American arsehole, but you, my friend, are a dick. Or is it just Americans that are arseholes? I mean, it's common knowledge that all pollution comes from America. China, Mexico, Russia... they've all got such fucking strict environmental regulations that the people that live there wouldn't dare to fart. That would mean emitting a little greenhouse gas, and we can't have that.
Grow up. The world is full of arseholes, and many of them are a lot worse than the U.S.
But see, you work so hard, are the greatest manufacturer, so there's your excuse and now I must just shut up and let you pollute the planet!
Yes, precisely true. You don't have any choice in the matter, any more than you have with China's efforts to turn the skies black. Deal with it.
Tell you what, why don't you apply the same thought process that sparked your last post (and I'm being generous here) to China, or Mexico, or any of fifty other industrial wannabes that put out immense quantities of multiple pollutants with not a care in the world. For example, if a tank full of naptha or some other dangerous hydrocarbon overflows because of poor management in Mexico, they just throw some dirt on it and forget about it. Fuck the water table, fuck their own people, we want to be like the Americans were fifty years ago, making lots of money and soiling our own nest. That's their choice. There's a reason so many Mexicans are spilling across the border into the U.S.... if nothing else, it's a lot cleaner up here. For now, anyway.
Here in the U.S., a tank going over is a major event, the Feds generally get involved, and substantial penalties are levied (that on top of cleanup costs.) That applies to a whole lot of different industries. So don't you dare try to lump us in with any third-world operations that don't give a damn. Matter of fact, Mexico is doing the U.S. more damage, environmentally speaking, than China is at the moment.
Furthermore, dimbulb, we didn't take our polluting industries to China... we were specifically invited to go there and "partner" with existing Chinese corporations. That's a requirement under Chinese law, I understand. Actually we were tricked into going there via an interlocking web of lies whose sole purpose was and is the transfer of as much of our technical and scientific knowledge to China as possible. China got what it wanted: everything we know about running an industrial economy. The fact they chose to not bother with pollution controls (which they are perfectly capable of building or buying, just takes the political will) is hardly our fault. They made a conscious decision to do what they're doing, with full knowledge of the consequences. We chose to spend the requisite billions of dollars in a (largely successful, especially compared to the likes of China and Mexico) effort to undo a century of industrial debauchery. To date, China has not.
I get the fact that you don't like Americans. Frankly, I don't much like you either (generally I find willful ignorance offensive in any form, but you take the cake.) However, I stand by my original remarks: your attitude is irrational and not based on fact.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announces a multi-billion dollar investment in a fleet of submarines.
You kid, but wait till Google has some shit that China, Iran, or even the US doesn't like. Or Greenpeace or some other aggressive group doesn't like.
Accidents do happen at sea!
If someone did sink one of these platforms, it wouldn't matter one damn bit so far as information availability is concerned, although it would cost Google some money. The GFS replicates information far and wide, and doesn't (can't, really, and do what it does) depend upon a centralized data store.
And besides, what "shit" would Google store that would really torque someone off? First and foremost Google is an index, not a storage system for other people's data. And if it bothers someone that a particular site or sites are online, there are more efficient ways to block access to said sites than blowing up Google facilities.
I generally agree with you. However, I feel the need to point out an enormous difference between being a pedophile and using drugs: you have a choice as to whether to use drugs, whereas if you find children sexually attractive there is generally nothing you can do to stop it.
Well, how about the pedophile being strapped into a chair with his eyelids glued open, in front of a screen projecting a series of images, with pictures of small children in provocative poses shown at random intervals. Whenever such a picture is displayed, the subject is given a massive electric shock while simultaneously receiving a jolt of skunk odor. Repeat this process daily for a couple of months. I bet when it's all done your pedophile won't have much interest in small children.
We can discuss the violation of civil liberties this would require in another thread. That, or we can all go watch A Clockwork Orange.
On the other hand, who cares what 64% of Germans think? Or anyone else? I don't care what 100% of my fellow Americans think. Other than the few people in the intelligence community that actually deal with the reality of this, nobody else's opinion matters one little bit because it is just that: opinion. And the intelligence folks who probably know exactly what went on aren't talking, and can't be depended upon to tell the truth even if they were, so I don't care what they think either.
I'm so goddamn sick and tired of news organizations presenting "polls" as if they represent some sort of evidence. Sure, if you're trying to market a new brand of shampoo I suppose such research makes sense. In determining who was responsible for a terrorist attack it's pointless.
Uh, you do know what country heads the Human RIghts Council, don't you?
I'd only start worrying about that when the UN gets a genuine army rather than a bunch of "peacekeepers" donated by member states.
Unlikely. The U.N. is not self-sustaining: if they tried anything like that they'd find themselves without funding the very next day.
Depends upon where you are. In the United States, everything is an intrinsic right, except those few that are reserved for the Federal Government. That government has been treading on our rights for some time now, and this is just the latest extension.
People make the mistake of assuming that the Constitution enumerates all the rights that we citizens have, and that the rest are privileges granted by the Government. The exact opposite is true, and we've been remiss in reminding our elected leaders of that fact.
Viva la overly simple worldview
Maybe ... but China's activities and that of our own government in matters regarding widespread surveillance of public communications would indicate that, simplistic or otherwise, the GP is correct. That's because the control and monitoring of telecommunications on a grand scale is power. Power is invariably abused.
It sounds a lot like terrorism to me.
It often depends (largely on who the victor turns out to be.) Seriously though, violence for its own sake is rarely useful, but violence with a purpose can sometimes be worthwhile in the long run. Still, I wouldn't have wanted to be a member of the East India Company right around then.
(emphasis mine)
hmm, I wonder what was on your mind.
Pretty much the same thing that's on my mind when my girlfriend is in the room. Yes, I have a girlfriend.
There are civilized countries around where this is common practice - after positive test you are brought to a hospital where a blood test is done.
A lot of what passes for police work here in the U.S. is now based upon the convenience of the officers. The decision to use breathalyzers in the first place is an example of that, especially when there are more accurate (if less efficient and more costly) alternatives available.
That is fine. IF the driver was driving in an erratic manner they are unsafe. However ANY driver should be able to face their accuser and if the accuser is an electronic device they shouldn't have to tolerate "poof then magic occurs" This is to protect the innocent from an abusive state. Most cops are honest great people but anyone that does not think there is rogue and corrupt governments is gullible.
They do face their accuser. The cop who pulled them over is their accuser.
Maybe ... but I'd be surprised if the vendor represented to the State that the devices were unreliable or could not be trusted. Given that the things don't work, I'd say the State could go after them on several levels.
If push comes to shove, the binaries could probably be extracted and disassembled. That would be expensive, I suppose, but given that this is a compact embedded system the code probably isn't that complex.
Everything you say is true enough: as someone who spent more than a few years hacking assembler on a number of different processors I can agree. However, that's still no excuse.
... it's a different matter entirely. If the manufacturer can't demonstrate to the court that his device works, and works reliably, then he should go into another business. I don't want my life dependent upon someone else's poor design and testing methodologies.
When my Windows box blue-screens and I lose an hour's work I say a few choice words, press the reset button, and get on with life. When an evidence-collection device malfunctions and a person's life is trashed as a result
If it turns out that there's no way to produce such a device within the economic constraints you mention, then perhaps society would benefit from their being removed from service. It appears from the numerous cases being affected by this one vendor's product that there are some serious issues with these machines, and law enforcement's growing dependence upon them.
Well, I think in most of the situations where governments use software, the public's needs are just as well served by open protocols and document formats. Open software would be nice, but you're right that it wouldn't be economically practical at this point. Perhaps had it been mandated thirty years ago ... but it wasn't.
... yes, you're absolutely right. Cameras, breathalyzers, ODB interfaces, surveillance systems of all kinds, there are tons of PC-based and embedded systems in use by law enforcement.
However, in situations where an individuals life and liberty are at risk
All in all, I'm not sure sure that such source code shouldn't be truly "open". I know what you're saying, and it's logical enough. However, being available to defense lawyers and such leaves too much room for a serious defect to simply be swept under the rug by an out-of-court settlement. Consequently, people involved in similar cases would not be able to benefit from discovery.
Besides, if the stuff is bought and paid for by tax dollars, and it is used for law enforcement purposes, the code should be open for inspection by all. It is, after all, our software. Cops won't like that, but that's too bad.
rule that all programming used for government functions be open source, unless there's an overriding reason for it to be closed. This outfit appears to have manufactured and marketed a fundamentally flawed piece of technology that may very well have resulted in prison time for innocent people. Not acceptable ... a manufacturer's need to maintain a competitive edge should not be held more important than our right to not be falsely accused and wrongly imprisoned. Now, of course there may be other issues with CMI's product other than the firmware, but a detailed examination of the code is a good first step.
Furthermore, the people responsible for the decision to market the Intoxilyzer should be held accountable for the device's failures, especially if they sold it knowing that the design was defective. Sure, it costs more money to properly certify a design, and to implement effective quality controls. Still, if auto manufacturers have to suffer multi-million-dollar lawsuits over tiny flaws in vehicle design, these guys should hardly get off scot-free.
I dunno ... I get 8 mb down / 1 mb up from Comcast for $86/month. I could really use the fast backchannel, so the GP's $72 sounds pretty reasonable in comparison.
It's all in where you live, I guess.
'A lot of the people who run these systems feel that they're not bound by the same rules as traditional IT,' Finisterre said. 'Their industry is not very familiar with hacking and hackers in general.'"
He's attempting to lay blame for these infrastructural issues at the feet of the engineering staff. What he doesn't understand is that engineering systems have very different operational requirements from running a server farm or a few thousand desktops. Engineers avoid IT like the plague, because IT people will come down on engineering systems like a ton of bricks, enforcing arbitrary company-wide standards regardless of the damage they do. For example, if you have a timing-sensitive real time process running on a PC, it may not be wise to put the Symantec Antivirus pig on that particular box. Yet I've seen that happen, usually without the person in charge of that equipment even being notified. Afterwards, everybody wonders what happened with something goes seriously wrong with a production process. IT's attitude in such cases is usually "we followed company policies. Not our fault." The hell it wasn't.
The reality is that IT misguided or ignorant departments are frequently a far bigger danger to process control and real-time data acquisition systems than any number of Chinese crackers. That's because they rarely make the slightest effort to accommodate the needs of the technical staff, and have often gone to extreme lengths to have upper management approve utterly Draconian policies that MUST be applied to ALL computers.
Engineers are often justifiably leery of having IT involvement in any of their projects. The consequence of that, of course, is that now you have people with no specific security training implementing remote communications. Of course, a lot of these problems could be ameliorated with some simple requirements such as "all off-site communications MUST be secured with a VPN" or something similar.
Ultimately, what it comes down to is communications being handled by conscientious, well-trained individuals that are open-minded and willing to accommodate the special needs of engineering systems. I can't tell you how rarely I've seen that happen.
You seem to be confusing "innovation" with "competition." They're not the same, and one does not imply the other.
True enough, although the intent of the Sherman Antitrust Act and similar laws are to prevent harm to the consumer. Stifling innovation or competition does exactly that, harm the consumer.
A Mickey Mouse case if ever I heard of one.
Or at least a Goofy one.
Attorney: "So, Mr. Mouse, I understand that you're are divorcing Ms. Minnie Mouse because, she is crazy, insane?"
Mickey: "No (ha ha) I said she was fucking Goofy."
Not so weird. The Feds regularly (and I would assume illegally) punish uncoooperative corporations. Remember what happened to Qwest when it refused to be a party to illegal wiretapping.
Why does this remind me of
Because it's probably pretty much the same thing. Careers get made in big antitrust suits (not to mention a lot of billable hours.)
Forgetting innovation for the moment ... Federal regulators had to approve the deal before it could go through. Is the Department of Whatever-Passes-for-Justice-Nowadays saying that the Federal government slipped up in this case? If so, maybe they should be taking a closer look at whoever authorized the acquisition in the first place.
It's all very well telling them to "go ahead", at the end of the day we have to share our atmosphere with those arseholes.
... they've all got such fucking strict environmental regulations that the people that live there wouldn't dare to fart. That would mean emitting a little greenhouse gas, and we can't have that.
Nice. In one fell swoop you just characterized a nation of some 280 million souls as "arseholes". Good going. Well, I may be an American arsehole, but you, my friend, are a dick. Or is it just Americans that are arseholes? I mean, it's common knowledge that all pollution comes from America. China, Mexico, Russia
Grow up. The world is full of arseholes, and many of them are a lot worse than the U.S.
But see, you work so hard, are the greatest manufacturer, so there's your excuse and now I must just shut up and let you pollute the planet!
... if nothing else, it's a lot cleaner up here. For now, anyway.
... we were specifically invited to go there and "partner" with existing Chinese corporations. That's a requirement under Chinese law, I understand. Actually we were tricked into going there via an interlocking web of lies whose sole purpose was and is the transfer of as much of our technical and scientific knowledge to China as possible. China got what it wanted: everything we know about running an industrial economy. The fact they chose to not bother with pollution controls (which they are perfectly capable of building or buying, just takes the political will) is hardly our fault. They made a conscious decision to do what they're doing, with full knowledge of the consequences. We chose to spend the requisite billions of dollars in a (largely successful, especially compared to the likes of China and Mexico) effort to undo a century of industrial debauchery. To date, China has not.
Yes, precisely true. You don't have any choice in the matter, any more than you have with China's efforts to turn the skies black. Deal with it.
Tell you what, why don't you apply the same thought process that sparked your last post (and I'm being generous here) to China, or Mexico, or any of fifty other industrial wannabes that put out immense quantities of multiple pollutants with not a care in the world. For example, if a tank full of naptha or some other dangerous hydrocarbon overflows because of poor management in Mexico, they just throw some dirt on it and forget about it. Fuck the water table, fuck their own people, we want to be like the Americans were fifty years ago, making lots of money and soiling our own nest. That's their choice. There's a reason so many Mexicans are spilling across the border into the U.S.
Here in the U.S., a tank going over is a major event, the Feds generally get involved, and substantial penalties are levied (that on top of cleanup costs.) That applies to a whole lot of different industries. So don't you dare try to lump us in with any third-world operations that don't give a damn. Matter of fact, Mexico is doing the U.S. more damage, environmentally speaking, than China is at the moment.
Furthermore, dimbulb, we didn't take our polluting industries to China
I get the fact that you don't like Americans. Frankly, I don't much like you either (generally I find willful ignorance offensive in any form, but you take the cake.) However, I stand by my original remarks: your attitude is irrational and not based on fact.