It's something of a common joke that the japanese are using world's fastest supercomputer to improve the environment, while the americans are using the world's second-fastest supercomputer to design bigger nuclear weapons.
Yeah, but what the jokers don't tell you is that on nights and weekends, the Japanese supercomputer is used to model giant fighting robots piloted by school children, one of whom is only doing it because his dad runs the project.
It's quite chilling when you consider that it's well known that giant fighting robots piloted by school children will be the next wave in advanced strategic weaponry, and will make the horrors of (completely unprovoked) nuclear war seem pale by comparison, while still being somehow analogous.
Don't even TRY and tell me that you spent less than $6 in your entire life on Gauntlet or Gauntlet II
Oh, man. Why did you have to remind me of that? Over the course of my life, I must have spent hundreds of dollars on the various Gauntlet games. Those things were made to eat quarters.
When warrior needs food...badly, how can you deny him?
I remember going to one of the MIT Fleas, back when l0pht became @stake, and they had a big van pulled up and were selling off their old junky equipment. Presumably they were buying more modern gear with all that VC. I bought a big brick of a hard drive from them. It had some nice mp3s on it (among other junk), and served me well until I sold it again at the flea, l0pht sticker and all.
Anyway, hung on the side of the van was a big sign reading:
L0PHT SELLS OUT
Until today, I had no idea just how much they had.
You write that as if Geer (or the parent poster) is complaining, or wanted it both ways, but we have no comment from him, and the parent post didn't seem to indicate that he should have it both ways, either.
Perhaps he felt his politics were more important, and he's just fine with being fired, and expected it all along. Why would he want to work for a security company that would fire him for criticising Microsoft's patently terrible security record?
He's certainly had a successful career before @stake, and may indeed continue to have one, either with another company or as a consultant to clients who value the integrity they may think he has displayed.
A friend on IRC pointed out where the real shift for these jobs will be
Haha! I got the India thing from a friend on IRC, too!
It was just an example, anyway, and it doesn't really matter which country it is, but while we're on the subject, check this link from a quick google search out -- if it is to be believed, Indian workers are getting trained with fake accents.
So, give that to your IRC friend, and then I can send your response to my IRC friend, and so on...
Its putting food on someone's table, and is better than them being on welfare.
"In other news, a recent crackdown on inner-city crime has caused a loss of jobs in the window-repair and alarm-system industries."
So should we all go around breaking windows to generate repair jobs? No. This is known as the broken-windows fallacy. What the naive "destruction == job-creation" analysis misses is that in the absence of all this destruction, people can put their time and capital to more productive uses. IOW, when people stop breaking in and stealing stuff, more businesses move in, existing businesses have to spend less on security, and more jobs are created.
The short-term, localized job-creation benefit of crime is more than offset by the long-term, distributed opportunity cost.
I personally fail to see how it is some great inconvenience to have telemarketers calling you every so often.
In the case of telemarketers, what is being destroyed is time and productivity. That "inconvenience", even though it is seems negligible, can really add up when integrated over the number of people it affects.
Let us suppose that there are 500 telemarketers whose full-time job it is to talk to people who do not want to hear from them (some of the 50 million people who explicitly said so by signing up for the list). They call these people, and take some time reading scripts to them and getting yelled at.
Clearly, they are wasting at least 500 full-time jobs worth of other people's time. But telemarketers use machines to do the dialing and ringing and so on, so they actually waste *more* of the victims' time. And it takes time to recover from an interruption, so you can add that time on there too.
This is time that people would otherwise be spending productively participating in the economy or resting to recharge for productively participating in the economy when they go back to work. People whose evenings are constantly disturbed by telemarketers go back to work less happy, less rested, and less productive, and so their employers, who were giving the employees this time off for a good reason, suffer because the returns on their investment in employee time off are lowered.
And, of course, we have the fact that the telemarketers are talking to people who don't want their crap anyway, so the whole thing is fruitless.
Telemarketers calling people who don't want their crap represent a net drain on the economy. The fact that the drain is spread out over lots of other businesses and workers and produces a tiny, localized benefit doesn't mean that it's good for the national economy as a whole, anymore than thieves are.
Finally, when you consider the fact that many of these jobs are going over to India, anyway, we lose even the job-creation benefit, and the drain is even greater.
Nice troll. If the developers decide to re-write openssh from scratch, am I suddenly obligated to audit their development tree?
Apparently, if I don't do so, then I am not allowed to point out the flaw in someone's post when they say that a bug found in newly-released code is the result of increased auditing by the developers.
Nobody is allowed to say anything about openssh unless they audit all the code!
Speaking of which, why didn't *you* find this bug while it was still in the development tree? Why didn't you help the developers instead of trolling on slashdot? The PAM code has been in the development tree for *months*. Why is it that people who complain the loudest always do the least to help out?
Well, I haven't had time to trace it down entirely, nor will I in the near future, but it doesn't surprise me that those modules would work fine, as one is a session module and the other is, I think, an interactive one.
However, you used to be able to use PAM for plain-old password authentication with authmethod password, and they seem to have just ripped support for that out in auth-passwd.c.
Now, I may have sort of a weird setup, but when things worked in all the previous versions, something stops working suddenly in a new version, and you see that they re-wrote that part of the code, well, it's not too much of a leap to think that the re-write introduced some problems.
Nor does it seem like FUD when that re-write demonstrably introduced another flaw (the subject of this/. story).
I think it depends on the person's post -- did they give "direct consent" to be contacted with email advertisements from you? If they are just griping and not asking for alternatives, then I would say they did not.
On the other hand, if it really does reduce spam, efficiency at every single other Californian company will rise because workers have to spend less time deleting spam, and sysadmins will have to spend less time dealing with spam-related problems.
The time saved then can be devoted to producing legitimately-marketable products.
Also, nice way to troll about Davis. In case you missed schoolhouse rock, it's the duly-elected representatives in the state legislature that draws up and passes bills. This bill was passed 29 to 7.
That one, though, was from someone I've never heard of before, asking questions about things discussed on my website. Does that count as solicited or unsolicited?
That depends -- was it an "electronic mail message initiated for the purpose of advertising or promoting the lease, sale, rental, gift offer, or other disposition of any property, goods, services, or extension of credit."?
Qualifications: - Minimum 5 years experience neural implantation - Minimum 4 years experience xenobiology
Awww, man! It's so frustrating! Here I am with 3 years of experience in neural implantation and xenobiology, but all the low-level jobs have been outsourced to India.
So, you'll start to see a dialog box every time a flash/pdf/java applet wants to display itself.
For those of us without the plugin, this is what web browsing is already like. You'll get no sympathy here.
In fact, I'd love nothing more than for everyone to be as annoyed by embedded plugins as I am, so that web sites are forced to stop using them.
I've got nothing against helper applications that display a PDF or swf file or launch a java applet for you in another window after you click on a link, but this business of flash ads, java applets, and other embedded programs ambushing you in the midst of otherwise-readable content has got to go.
You mean something like the Logitech model M-S35? I have five of them (to handle future replacements), but mine are the less-streamlined, older submodel that you can't buy new anymore (hence the hoarding), and of which I can find no picture.
Combine one of those with the classic IBM model M keyboard and you have the ultimate input experience.
I agree with your analysis for the most part, but think it may be a bit idealized.
the more jobs replaced by Robots, the cheaper a robot must be to compete with an out of work laborer
There are a couple of things that put a floor on how cheap workers will be able to get.
The first, and most obvious, is the minimum wage, which suggests that robots need only be cheaper than paying someone $5.15 an hour to do the same task.
The second is the cost of living. If a worker is not able to support himself on a wage, it's not really worth his time to work. His time might be better spent on welfare, in the army, in criminal pursuits, or in jail.
In a sense, then, it doesn't matter what the original wage of a job was -- if robots are able to get the cost down below a certain point, humans will never be able to take the job back. It also suggests that automation will be used less in places where the cost of living is lower.
This is, in fact, what we see -- automated production methods are used more in developed countries. Yet, in those countries, even with unemployment fairly high, minimum-wage workers aren't cheap enough or desperate enough to replace automated crop harvesting machinery in the places where it has been adopted.
I agree with you that robotic labor will affect low wage jobs first, especially since those sorts of jobs are more easily automated, anyway. We tend not to pay people much if their jobs don't take much intelligence and creativity. Since robots don't have much of either, they are a good fit.
Unfortunately, there are an awful lot of low-wage, menial jobs, and there are also an awful lot of people who might not be able to retrain to do anything but a menial job. Robots may be able to put a lot of people permanently out of work.
Eventually, perhaps, the cost of living will fall and unemployment will be high enough that workers will be able to replace robots, but I worry that there may be an awful lot of social problems along the way.
To pay for the robot, you have to pay for all the labor and materials used to make it and maintain it. Businesses won't buy robots if they cost more than a human worker. Therefore, the labor required for creating and maintaining the robots will have to be less than the labor replaced by the robots for the robots to be practical.
Some people may be needed to build and maintain the robots, but robots cannot create as many jobs as they replace.
Slashdot Mirror
It's something of a common joke that the japanese are using world's fastest supercomputer to improve the environment, while the americans are using the world's second-fastest supercomputer to design bigger nuclear weapons.
Yeah, but what the jokers don't tell you is that on nights and weekends, the Japanese supercomputer is used to model giant fighting robots piloted by school children, one of whom is only doing it because his dad runs the project.
It's quite chilling when you consider that it's well known that giant fighting robots piloted by school children will be the next wave in advanced strategic weaponry, and will make the horrors of (completely unprovoked) nuclear war seem pale by comparison, while still being somehow analogous.
Don't even TRY and tell me that you spent less than $6 in your entire life on Gauntlet or Gauntlet II
Oh, man. Why did you have to remind me of that? Over the course of my life, I must have spent hundreds of dollars on the various Gauntlet games. Those things were made to eat quarters.
When warrior needs food...badly, how can you deny him?
I remember going to one of the MIT Fleas, back when l0pht became @stake, and they had a big van pulled up and were selling off their old junky equipment. Presumably they were buying more modern gear with all that VC. I bought a big brick of a hard drive from them. It had some nice mp3s on it (among other junk), and served me well until I sold it again at the flea, l0pht sticker and all.
Anyway, hung on the side of the van was a big sign reading:
Until today, I had no idea just how much they had.
Choose one: your politics, or your job.
That's life.
You write that as if Geer (or the parent poster) is complaining, or wanted it both ways, but we have no comment from him, and the parent post didn't seem to indicate that he should have it both ways, either.
Perhaps he felt his politics were more important, and he's just fine with being fired, and expected it all along. Why would he want to work for a security company that would fire him for criticising Microsoft's patently terrible security record?
He's certainly had a successful career before @stake, and may indeed continue to have one, either with another company or as a consultant to clients who value the integrity they may think he has displayed.
A friend on IRC pointed out where the real shift for these jobs will be
Haha! I got the India thing from a friend on IRC, too!
It was just an example, anyway, and it doesn't really matter which country it is, but while we're on the subject, check this link from a quick google search out -- if it is to be believed, Indian workers are getting trained with fake accents.
So, give that to your IRC friend, and then I can send your response to my IRC friend, and so on...
Its putting food on someone's table, and is better than them being on welfare.
"In other news, a recent crackdown on inner-city crime has caused a loss of jobs in the window-repair and alarm-system industries."
So should we all go around breaking windows to generate repair jobs? No. This is known as the broken-windows fallacy. What the naive "destruction == job-creation" analysis misses is that in the absence of all this destruction, people can put their time and capital to more productive uses. IOW, when people stop breaking in and stealing stuff, more businesses move in, existing businesses have to spend less on security, and more jobs are created.
The short-term, localized job-creation benefit of crime is more than offset by the long-term, distributed opportunity cost.
I personally fail to see how it is some great inconvenience to have telemarketers calling you every so often.
In the case of telemarketers, what is being destroyed is time and productivity. That "inconvenience", even though it is seems negligible, can really add up when integrated over the number of people it affects.
Let us suppose that there are 500 telemarketers whose full-time job it is to talk to people who do not want to hear from them (some of the 50 million people who explicitly said so by signing up for the list). They call these people, and take some time reading scripts to them and getting yelled at.
Clearly, they are wasting at least 500 full-time jobs worth of other people's time. But telemarketers use machines to do the dialing and ringing and so on, so they actually waste *more* of the victims' time. And it takes time to recover from an interruption, so you can add that time on there too.
This is time that people would otherwise be spending productively participating in the economy or resting to recharge for productively participating in the economy when they go back to work. People whose evenings are constantly disturbed by telemarketers go back to work less happy, less rested, and less productive, and so their employers, who were giving the employees this time off for a good reason, suffer because the returns on their investment in employee time off are lowered.
And, of course, we have the fact that the telemarketers are talking to people who don't want their crap anyway, so the whole thing is fruitless.
Telemarketers calling people who don't want their crap represent a net drain on the economy. The fact that the drain is spread out over lots of other businesses and workers and produces a tiny, localized benefit doesn't mean that it's good for the national economy as a whole, anymore than thieves are.
Finally, when you consider the fact that many of these jobs are going over to India, anyway, we lose even the job-creation benefit, and the drain is even greater.
Nice troll. If the developers decide to re-write openssh from scratch, am I suddenly obligated to audit their development tree?
Apparently, if I don't do so, then I am not allowed to point out the flaw in someone's post when they say that a bug found in newly-released code is the result of increased auditing by the developers.
Nobody is allowed to say anything about openssh unless they audit all the code!
Speaking of which, why didn't *you* find this bug while it was still in the development tree? Why didn't you help the developers instead of trolling on slashdot? The PAM code has been in the development tree for *months*. Why is it that people who complain the loudest always do the least to help out?
Well, I haven't had time to trace it down entirely, nor will I in the near future, but it doesn't surprise me that those modules would work fine, as one is a session module and the other is, I think, an interactive one.
/. story).
However, you used to be able to use PAM for plain-old password authentication with authmethod password, and they seem to have just ripped support for that out in auth-passwd.c.
Now, I may have sort of a weird setup, but when things worked in all the previous versions, something stops working suddenly in a new version, and you see that they re-wrote that part of the code, well, it's not too much of a leap to think that the re-write introduced some problems.
Nor does it seem like FUD when that re-write demonstrably introduced another flaw (the subject of this
In the newsgroups, no, since this law deals only with e-mail.
As for email, well, I suggest you read the law itself.
I think it depends on the person's post -- did they give "direct consent" to be contacted with email advertisements from you? If they are just griping and not asking for alternatives, then I would say they did not.
This was SB 186
For all you trolls blaming Davis for the actions of the legislature, you can read the actual vote record, and see how the final votes went.
For all you armchair leigslators making guessing about how they define spam, read the bill itself, as enrolled.
On the other hand, if it really does reduce spam, efficiency at every single other Californian company will rise because workers have to spend less time deleting spam, and sysadmins will have to spend less time dealing with spam-related problems.
The time saved then can be devoted to producing legitimately-marketable products.
Also, nice way to troll about Davis. In case you missed schoolhouse rock, it's the duly-elected representatives in the state legislature that draws up and passes bills. This bill was passed 29 to 7.
That one, though, was from someone I've never heard of before, asking questions about things discussed on my website. Does that count as solicited or unsolicited?
That depends -- was it an "electronic mail message initiated for the purpose of advertising or promoting the lease, sale, rental, gift offer, or other disposition of any property, goods, services, or extension of credit."?
Probably not.
On the contrary, arguably, this announcement is the result of 3.7p1 and 3.7.1p1 being rushed out the door with new, unvetted PAM code.
That's why it doesn't affect earlier versions.
The PAM support in that version of portable OpenSSH is broken, anyway. They ripped the old PAM support out and replaced it with something half-done.
That's why I backported the security patches, instead of upgrading. Now I'm glad that I did.
Is your date time off or am I just looney?
You're looney. The date there is the compile time of the kernel, not the boot time.
Is it just me, or does it seem like lately there have been A LOT of security issues found in web daemons?
It's just you, because neither SSH nor SMTP have anything to do with the web.
Qualifications:
- Minimum 5 years experience neural implantation
- Minimum 4 years experience xenobiology
Awww, man! It's so frustrating! Here I am with 3 years of experience in neural implantation and xenobiology, but all the low-level jobs have been outsourced to India.
I'm sure he thanks you for submitting his address to the spambots.
I would if I could, but my browser does not support that, AFAIK (bugs 19118, 94035). My understanding is that it is a complicated issue.
So, you'll start to see a dialog box every time a flash/pdf/java applet wants to display itself.
For those of us without the plugin, this is what web browsing is already like. You'll get no sympathy here.
In fact, I'd love nothing more than for everyone to be as annoyed by embedded plugins as I am, so that web sites are forced to stop using them.
I've got nothing against helper applications that display a PDF or swf file or launch a java applet for you in another window after you click on a link, but this business of flash ads, java applets, and other embedded programs ambushing you in the midst of otherwise-readable content has got to go.
I liked the pads though, having your mouse on a futuristic metal surface instead of the usual felt-covered rubber was all part of the charm.
:)
That's why I still use one of those for my mouse pad
You mean something like the Logitech model M-S35? I have five of them (to handle future replacements), but mine are the less-streamlined, older submodel that you can't buy new anymore (hence the hoarding), and of which I can find no picture.
Combine one of those with the classic IBM model M keyboard and you have the ultimate input experience.
Maybe you already received this amount in the form of discounted registration prices.
Apparently you haven't seen their prices.
I agree with your analysis for the most part, but think it may be a bit idealized.
the more jobs replaced by Robots, the cheaper a robot must be to compete with an out of work laborer
There are a couple of things that put a floor on how cheap workers will be able to get.
The first, and most obvious, is the minimum wage, which suggests that robots need only be cheaper than paying someone $5.15 an hour to do the same task.
The second is the cost of living. If a worker is not able to support himself on a wage, it's not really worth his time to work. His time might be better spent on welfare, in the army, in criminal pursuits, or in jail.
In a sense, then, it doesn't matter what the original wage of a job was -- if robots are able to get the cost down below a certain point, humans will never be able to take the job back. It also suggests that automation will be used less in places where the cost of living is lower.
This is, in fact, what we see -- automated production methods are used more in developed countries. Yet, in those countries, even with unemployment fairly high, minimum-wage workers aren't cheap enough or desperate enough to replace automated crop harvesting machinery in the places where it has been adopted.
I agree with you that robotic labor will affect low wage jobs first, especially since those sorts of jobs are more easily automated, anyway. We tend not to pay people much if their jobs don't take much intelligence and creativity. Since robots don't have much of either, they are a good fit.
Unfortunately, there are an awful lot of low-wage, menial jobs, and there are also an awful lot of people who might not be able to retrain to do anything but a menial job. Robots may be able to put a lot of people permanently out of work.
Eventually, perhaps, the cost of living will fall and unemployment will be high enough that workers will be able to replace robots, but I worry that there may be an awful lot of social problems along the way.
To pay for the robot, you have to pay for all the labor and materials used to make it and maintain it. Businesses won't buy robots if they cost more than a human worker. Therefore, the labor required for creating and maintaining the robots will have to be less than the labor replaced by the robots for the robots to be practical.
Some people may be needed to build and maintain the robots, but robots cannot create as many jobs as they replace.