Exactly, it akin to nuking a safe harbour and burning down the port because Captain Jack Sparrow sailed in through the heads. Merchants are not going to sail billions of dollars woth of container ships into that kind of environment.
True, I should of used scare quotes to indicate that a lot of people with the HR title of "software engineer" are not engineers at all, they're software developers.
No, unlike software engineers, real engineers are legally accountable (at least in the west). If you sign off on a doggy bridge design and the bridge falls down, it will be shown (by other engineers) that you failed in your due dilligence, you will go to jail, you will never hold another engineering position on a western project. You will get sued in civil court, not just by the victims but also by the insurance companies that will have to pay to clean up your mess and build a new bridge.
Politicians have nowhere near this level of accountability. If they are warned about (say) levees but ignore the problem for decades. When they inevetibly break at the hieght of a king tide, it's called a "natural disaster", "a freak occurence" or if they're really nailed to the wall, "aging infrastructue".
This is why we need open source software. We are wasting our time with speculation if we could just look at the code.
This is by far the lamest and most impractical meme slashdot has created to date. Have you looked at the size and complexity of any popular OSS application/library? A cleverly hidden back door could take you an eternity to find, and that's when you already understand the design (or lack thereof). Not only that, but you then have to build it to verify the binaries on the machine are the same as what you built from the source. When all is said and done and you have complete trust in the software you then run it on chips provided by the same company you don't trust.
There is no surefire way to determine if these kind of devices (and the companies that supply them) are trustworthy, just as there is no surefire way to determine if a person is trustworthy. Trust is subjective, all anyone can really do is examine their reputation and track record, and perform random spot checks. Sure you can do more than spot check, you could sniff every transaction on the wire. But just as you can never be absoluely certain there are no bugs, you also can never be absoluely certain there are no back doors.
Financial institutions primarily catch internal "cyber-thieves" by auditing the information trail they alter, not by reviewing the code they alter.
Our salesman will be around in a jiffy with a selection of new boxers in your size. *Ding-Dong* - That'll be him now, don't worry about your pants and wallet, we have your banking details and we've seen what you put in your boxer shorts.
(2) you are the person everyone complains about and has to spend extra time tracking down because you're the only one not using the new technology.
I don't mind advertising, I just don't want to be "on call" 24/7 to everyone I've met in the last 50yrs. I don't own/use a mobile phone, FB, etc. This situation pisses other people off a lot more than it inconveniences me.
Why is it so hard to make a viable electronic voting system?
Trust, with an ATM you are implicitly trusting the bank to be honest. Electronic voting cannot be made trustworthy since someone has to maintain the machines, networks and counting software, the potential security holes in paper voting are well understood by all sides and trust is not a requirement when all sides get to watch the polling booths and count the ballots together in front of each other and independent observers. So, if your going to add a paper trail to an electronic vote to give you the essential ability to audit a count, then why do we need or even want a computer network?
Even if you could make a fair electronic voting system that did not require implicit trust, I don't think it's enough, a voting system must also be "seen to be fair". The judicial arm of government should be the umpire in any system, with the power to order recounts or a do-over, they should not have the power to decide the winner by devinig voter's intentions from mangled ballots.
No they simply told the locals that if they wanted to be part of the land grants then they must keep their goats in pens or get rid of them, along with other conditions such as planting trees on steep land (which encouraged people to plant orchards). Ferral goats were shot on sight by locals who were hired as rangers by the project. Given that this is China, the government could quite simply have banned goats on state land and shot any disobedient goat hearders on sight. But no culling scheme is as effective as changing local habits that go back 1000yrs. Now that it's been running for 20yrs even the most bitter traditionalists in the local population cannot deny the benificial transformation that has occured.
A female dominated polygamous society that spends most of the day eating fresh fruit and screwing? Count me in!
However there's a flaw in your vision of paradise, bonobo's are the hippies of the ape world, they have a complex society that allows them to spend their days eating fresh fruit and fucking. They are not known to kill others of their species, territorial disputes, mating rights, etc, are settled via bonobo politics and diplomacy. So of the 3 species in your vision, I think they are the species most likely to be picking daisies.
Now if a regular chimp got hold of a predator they wouldn't hesitate to shoot you in the face and rip your genitals off.
OTOH: China turned the loess plataue from a moonscape into one of the largest apple producving regions in the world in under 20yrs. The area is about the size of France and was previuously known as "the most erroded place on Earth". Changing the locals from goat hearders using state land into government sanctioned property owners was a key ingredient to the success, as was the Chinese government's desire to stop millions of tons of silt filling up the three gorges dam. However one of my favorite good news stories about rehabilitating an area is a ted talk on How to grow a rainforest.
So my take home from these examples is that it CAN be done if the problem is viewed in a scientific manner with a heavy emphasis on imporoving the material lives of the locals by assisting them with high tech analysis on how to optimize and maintain the benifits of their natural resources given their real world technological and infrastructure constraints. Giving peseants a chunk of land on the proviso they stick to the basic tenents of the project is a fantastic motivator.
Interestingly the area was once a natural 'paradise' where Chinese civilization first arose ~10kya, but by the middle ages it was a man made wasteland that forced the main population to largely abandon the area to goat hearders who have inadvertently kept it from regenerating for the last 1000yrs. All they really had to do was plant trees in the right places and stop mowing every new shoot down with hungry goats but when people have been doing the same thing for 1000yrs it's very difficult to convince them that there might be a better way to use what they have.
Be they good or bad (cultural revolution), such long term socio-economic projects cannot be done without a stable government, which is a huge problem in Africa. In the case of the loess plateau it was a joint project between China and the IMF, the $500M was well spent from what I've seen.
5 (motivated and experienced) employes will spontaneously self-organise into an efficient team. 50,000 (motivated and experienced) employess is an entirely different ball game. The efficientcy of a large organisation has virtually nothing to do with government vs private control. Humans evolved to cope with groups of 1-200 individuals. The invention of agriculture 10K yrs ago changed all that and our wetware simply hasn't had time to properly adapt to the new social environment it created. As tool-makers we try and solve this by inventing yet more tools that are intended to map our 'new' society onto our tribal O/S, eg; religions, governments, corporations, and slashdot.
It's all relative. Go live in Mongolia for a while and watch the locals laugh their arse off at you trying to milk a Yak. Thing is, no matter what form of ignorance a person is trying to cure, experts are more than willing to help, provided the novice is willing to accept it.
People often misdiagnose ignorance as stupidity because the behaviour of the afflicted is almost identical. As Einstien once quipped to a reporter; "I cannot teach you how to bake a cake if you don't know what milk and flour are."
I get 2-3 of them a week. The one who came around the other day tried to tell me he was not selling anything and was only checking that my newly installed smart meter was charging me the correct rates but was evasive when I asked him directly if he was trying to get me to switch providers. I was feeling playful so I took him on a bit of a ride, I let him copy the stuff from my bill on to the contract but when he asked for my phone number, I said; "I'm a bit busy right now and I never sign a contract on my doorstep. How about you leave it with me and I will fill out the rest after I've read it?" - The instant his heart broke was clearly reflected in his eyes. Sounds cruel and it is, but sometimes you just have to pull on the moccasins, play the senile old man part, and fight these time-wasting youngsters with their own weapons.
Yeah, because collective punishment is more than just a war crime, right? Seriously, people with a "kill em all and let god sort it out" mentality are the last people on Earth I would want to see wearing a uniform.
Yep and they are worth every penny they get, I read (with great delight) in this morning's paper that the ACCC were going to ban retail power companies from door to door selling, due to the number of complaints the practice has received from the public.
time is not an illusion at all, it is the increase in entropy of the structures of the visible universe
"Increase" is over time so your definition of 'time' includes 'time'. As Fynman himself would say "you have cheated very badly". Entropy is said to be the reason why we can only travel forward in time, ie: it defines the "arrow of time" not time itself. Although it could just as easily be worded the other way around, ie: the arrow of time is why entrophy always increases.
Time, space and the fundemental forces are what I like to call "miracles", they are "a given" and (for now) we just have to accept they exist because the best we can do with our current level of understanding is describe how they behave.
These stories of corporate evil have been posted on Slashdot since 1997. You'd think these issues of corporate responsibility and malfeasance would have been solved already.
Slashdot Mirror
some mushroom hunter gets a free ride home.
If ever there was a slashdot post that was in dire need of a "whoosh" reply, the parent is it.
Yep, here's one such example from recent history.
Exactly, it akin to nuking a safe harbour and burning down the port because Captain Jack Sparrow sailed in through the heads. Merchants are not going to sail billions of dollars woth of container ships into that kind of environment.
True, I should of used scare quotes to indicate that a lot of people with the HR title of "software engineer" are not engineers at all, they're software developers.
or even subjected to civil or criminal liability
No, unlike software engineers, real engineers are legally accountable (at least in the west). If you sign off on a doggy bridge design and the bridge falls down, it will be shown (by other engineers) that you failed in your due dilligence, you will go to jail, you will never hold another engineering position on a western project. You will get sued in civil court, not just by the victims but also by the insurance companies that will have to pay to clean up your mess and build a new bridge.
Politicians have nowhere near this level of accountability. If they are warned about (say) levees but ignore the problem for decades. When they inevetibly break at the hieght of a king tide, it's called a "natural disaster", "a freak occurence" or if they're really nailed to the wall, "aging infrastructue".
This is why we need open source software. We are wasting our time with speculation if we could just look at the code.
This is by far the lamest and most impractical meme slashdot has created to date. Have you looked at the size and complexity of any popular OSS application/library? A cleverly hidden back door could take you an eternity to find, and that's when you already understand the design (or lack thereof). Not only that, but you then have to build it to verify the binaries on the machine are the same as what you built from the source. When all is said and done and you have complete trust in the software you then run it on chips provided by the same company you don't trust.
There is no surefire way to determine if these kind of devices (and the companies that supply them) are trustworthy, just as there is no surefire way to determine if a person is trustworthy. Trust is subjective, all anyone can really do is examine their reputation and track record, and perform random spot checks. Sure you can do more than spot check, you could sniff every transaction on the wire. But just as you can never be absoluely certain there are no bugs, you also can never be absoluely certain there are no back doors.
Financial institutions primarily catch internal "cyber-thieves" by auditing the information trail they alter, not by reviewing the code they alter.
Your boxers have a hole in them
Our salesman will be around in a jiffy with a selection of new boxers in your size. *Ding-Dong* - That'll be him now, don't worry about your pants and wallet, we have your banking details and we've seen what you put in your boxer shorts.
(2) you are the person everyone complains about and has to spend extra time tracking down because you're the only one not using the new technology.
I don't mind advertising, I just don't want to be "on call" 24/7 to everyone I've met in the last 50yrs. I don't own/use a mobile phone, FB, etc. This situation pisses other people off a lot more than it inconveniences me.
Why is it so hard to make a viable electronic voting system?
Why is it so hard to make a viable electronic voting system? Trust, with an ATM you are implicitly trusting the bank to be honest. Electronic voting cannot be made trustworthy since someone has to maintain the machines, networks and counting software, the potential security holes in paper voting are well understood by all sides and trust is not a requirement when all sides get to watch the polling booths and count the ballots together in front of each other and independent observers. So, if your going to add a paper trail to an electronic vote to give you the essential ability to audit a count, then why do we need or even want a computer network?
Even if you could make a fair electronic voting system that did not require implicit trust, I don't think it's enough, a voting system must also be "seen to be fair". The judicial arm of government should be the umpire in any system, with the power to order recounts or a do-over, they should not have the power to decide the winner by devinig voter's intentions from mangled ballots.
Not really a skill you pick up out of curiosity.
It is if you're a Mongolian child, which was sorta my whole point.
Regardless of the level of corruption, weak governments are never stable.
Follow the youtube link I provided.
No they simply told the locals that if they wanted to be part of the land grants then they must keep their goats in pens or get rid of them, along with other conditions such as planting trees on steep land (which encouraged people to plant orchards). Ferral goats were shot on sight by locals who were hired as rangers by the project. Given that this is China, the government could quite simply have banned goats on state land and shot any disobedient goat hearders on sight. But no culling scheme is as effective as changing local habits that go back 1000yrs. Now that it's been running for 20yrs even the most bitter traditionalists in the local population cannot deny the benificial transformation that has occured.
Planet of the Bonobos.
A female dominated polygamous society that spends most of the day eating fresh fruit and screwing? Count me in!
However there's a flaw in your vision of paradise, bonobo's are the hippies of the ape world, they have a complex society that allows them to spend their days eating fresh fruit and fucking. They are not known to kill others of their species, territorial disputes, mating rights, etc, are settled via bonobo politics and diplomacy. So of the 3 species in your vision, I think they are the species most likely to be picking daisies.
Now if a regular chimp got hold of a predator they wouldn't hesitate to shoot you in the face and rip your genitals off.
OTOH: China turned the loess plataue from a moonscape into one of the largest apple producving regions in the world in under 20yrs. The area is about the size of France and was previuously known as "the most erroded place on Earth". Changing the locals from goat hearders using state land into government sanctioned property owners was a key ingredient to the success, as was the Chinese government's desire to stop millions of tons of silt filling up the three gorges dam. However one of my favorite good news stories about rehabilitating an area is a ted talk on How to grow a rainforest.
So my take home from these examples is that it CAN be done if the problem is viewed in a scientific manner with a heavy emphasis on imporoving the material lives of the locals by assisting them with high tech analysis on how to optimize and maintain the benifits of their natural resources given their real world technological and infrastructure constraints. Giving peseants a chunk of land on the proviso they stick to the basic tenents of the project is a fantastic motivator.
Interestingly the area was once a natural 'paradise' where Chinese civilization first arose ~10kya, but by the middle ages it was a man made wasteland that forced the main population to largely abandon the area to goat hearders who have inadvertently kept it from regenerating for the last 1000yrs. All they really had to do was plant trees in the right places and stop mowing every new shoot down with hungry goats but when people have been doing the same thing for 1000yrs it's very difficult to convince them that there might be a better way to use what they have.
Be they good or bad (cultural revolution), such long term socio-economic projects cannot be done without a stable government, which is a huge problem in Africa. In the case of the loess plateau it was a joint project between China and the IMF, the $500M was well spent from what I've seen.
Yep, not so long ago in historical terms Ethiopia and Zimbawe were the breadbaskets of Europe.
5 (motivated and experienced) employes will spontaneously self-organise into an efficient team. 50,000 (motivated and experienced) employess is an entirely different ball game. The efficientcy of a large organisation has virtually nothing to do with government vs private control. Humans evolved to cope with groups of 1-200 individuals. The invention of agriculture 10K yrs ago changed all that and our wetware simply hasn't had time to properly adapt to the new social environment it created. As tool-makers we try and solve this by inventing yet more tools that are intended to map our 'new' society onto our tribal O/S, eg; religions, governments, corporations, and slashdot.
It's all relative. Go live in Mongolia for a while and watch the locals laugh their arse off at you trying to milk a Yak. Thing is, no matter what form of ignorance a person is trying to cure, experts are more than willing to help, provided the novice is willing to accept it.
People often misdiagnose ignorance as stupidity because the behaviour of the afflicted is almost identical. As Einstien once quipped to a reporter; "I cannot teach you how to bake a cake if you don't know what milk and flour are."
I get 2-3 of them a week. The one who came around the other day tried to tell me he was not selling anything and was only checking that my newly installed smart meter was charging me the correct rates but was evasive when I asked him directly if he was trying to get me to switch providers. I was feeling playful so I took him on a bit of a ride, I let him copy the stuff from my bill on to the contract but when he asked for my phone number, I said; "I'm a bit busy right now and I never sign a contract on my doorstep. How about you leave it with me and I will fill out the rest after I've read it?" - The instant his heart broke was clearly reflected in his eyes. Sounds cruel and it is, but sometimes you just have to pull on the moccasins, play the senile old man part, and fight these time-wasting youngsters with their own weapons.
Yeah, because collective punishment is more than just a war crime, right? Seriously, people with a "kill em all and let god sort it out" mentality are the last people on Earth I would want to see wearing a uniform.
Yep and they are worth every penny they get, I read (with great delight) in this morning's paper that the ACCC were going to ban retail power companies from door to door selling, due to the number of complaints the practice has received from the public.
time is not an illusion at all, it is the increase in entropy of the structures of the visible universe
"Increase" is over time so your definition of 'time' includes 'time'. As Fynman himself would say "you have cheated very badly". Entropy is said to be the reason why we can only travel forward in time, ie: it defines the "arrow of time" not time itself. Although it could just as easily be worded the other way around, ie: the arrow of time is why entrophy always increases.
Time, space and the fundemental forces are what I like to call "miracles", they are "a given" and (for now) we just have to accept they exist because the best we can do with our current level of understanding is describe how they behave.
These stories of corporate evil have been posted on Slashdot since 1997. You'd think these issues of corporate responsibility and malfeasance would have been solved already.
Sigh, I'd love to be young again.