So, the team comprised of the hero, his hot chick, and his sidekicks learn of a relic they have to retrieve or destroy before the bad people get to it first, and on the way they learn of the original "mother tongue" and have to figure out What This Means and How It Works to save all of us from the relic...
Nelson’s philosophy toward computing is widely reported on being that a user interface should be so simple that in an emergency, a beginner is able to understand it within ten seconds.
So, he envisions a world where the hot chick working with the hero is able to h4xx0r the system to shut off The Device before it destroys the {airplane, ship, military base, power plant, city, region, country, world, universe}? Cool...
How often does it *really* matter if you get from New York to Paris in three hours instead of six?
Quite a bit. Right now many US-Europe flights are redeyes, so many effectively lose the following day recuperating. On top of that, have you ever been on a redeye over the Atlantic with a screaming child sitting a few rows ahead of you, while you're trying to sleep? I had murder on my mind, I don't care what age the kid was.
If you can get to western Europe in three hours from the US east coast then you can save a day or two in travel time. Hell, you can almost make it a weekend or a long day trip. If you have a limited amount of vacation time then you can use this to your advantage, assuming that the cost is right. Concorde was not- my wife got to fly it as a kid because her father found some kind of awesome package deal they offered to fill seats, but by and large it was too expensive. If the price comes down, even to double or triple a normal Coach seat, it might well be worth the money.
I'm fine with them working on fuel efficiency now. Get better engines and fuselage shapes, then work on refining shapes and engines for faster speeds.
That's why I never got on the https bandwagon. I couldn't self-sign without generating error messages in the browser, and none of the content that I served at the time had any need to be secure. It was self-publishing, for crissake, effectively vanity publishing.
Come to think of it, so is everything on facebook, twitter, and most other websites, including this one. I guess it's not really important for almost anyone.
I have an idea- if you need something to be secure, don't use HTML or HTTP at all. Use a real protocol, one designed for security, and don't use a web browser.
There was a chemistry teacher at my high school who had a copy printed off and bound on his front counter desk.
Of course, he also like to set up those little green plastic army men on that counter during tests, pour flammable liquid over the scene, then light it and play with them, making sound of death and agony as they melted.
Areogel is what you're talking about, and it's not a gel at all in its final state, it's a solid. I think the name comes from the gel state it is in while being manufactured, before they dry it out.
I was actually thinking much the same thing though. Since areogel is incredibly light weight, and since there are already materials scientists working on ways of mitigating the deleterious effects of small objects striking satellites and space stations, it might be somewhat more practical to design a structure to act as a space debris scrubber, with lots and lots of surface area and some kind of magnetic field to attempt to attract large numbers of very small metallic objects from a distance. Attract them and provide them with a fairly soft impact so that they don't punch through and don't break off pieces of the collecting device in the impact. After the useful life of the collecting device is ended, deorbit it, and send up another.
I've never worked with aerogel personally, so I really don't know how much mass it takes for a given volume or what kind of thickness would really be required to reduce the differences in velocity between the debris and the collector. I also don't work with rockets, so I don't know how much mass versus volume is feasible to launch (ie, the collector might be light weight enough to allow the thrust of the rocket to lift it, but it might be too bulky to launch due to aerodynamics), so someone more qualified should probably evaluate such an idea further. I do think, though, that if something suitably large could orbit for a long enough duration it would be able to help soak up the crap that's been up there for years and to make orbit a safer place.
For all we know, there might be a market for a netting device as well, but I'd be worried that the net would itself become small bits of space debris if it's damaged or destroyed by that which it's attempting to capture.
I don't know that I entirely agree that it needs to necessarily be evenly enforced. Everyone tends to rack up infractions whenever they're in an environment with rules, but the number and nature of infractions are what can determine if someone should be terminated, not simply that an infraction has occurred. If an employee excels for the company and the company generally knows and acknowledges this, then the company is more likely to ignore infractions from that employee. If an employee doesn't do good work or causes a lot of problems for other employees, be they equals or superiors, then I could honestly expect that simple infractions will carry more weight against that employee than average.
I know one thing- I'm certainly not going to complain about a company that I work for while I'm on company time, and I generally avoid criticism except in company-managed and solicited situations when there's a chance of it being noted for the record, and when making criticism that's solicited I'm very careful about what I say. One would be a fool to give someone in authority a documented reason to add to the demerits pile.
I really don't think that something like using a competitor's products instead of products from one's own company would result in too many lost jobs, unless one's job specifically was for doing promotions. Even in that case, I'd think it would apply to a paid promoter providing said product, not simply consuming it. If one is at a social event and the competitor's product is the only one available (as is common with exclusivity agreements with vendors) then it may not be possible to have one's company's own product.
I'd be that there's existing caselaw on such matters.
Right, as long as they don't do it on company equipment, and to an extent, doing it on company time while on one's own equipment could also be grounds for termination, though that would be because the employee is slacking off on the clock instead of working. This would probably only really apply to hourly employees.
Well, at least to the SunOS example, remember, the bulk of the people using that box were programming students and I'd think that a very much higher percentage of the users were actually looking for vulnerabilities intentionally compared an average segment of the population. If anything, it was a pressure-cooker environment where people were trying to break in and had local accounts allowing for the running of all kinds of tools to attempt to do so.
I'll agree that most OSes weren't secure either- Microsoft couldn't have implemented protected mode in early PCs because Intel's processors lacked it in hardware, while Apple chose not to implement it even though the 68K architecture had it available.
I'll even agree that users can be a problem much of the time, but when one doesn't even have the option for users to learn good practices and educates them to do poorly they will do poorly. We can't know truly how people would be today regarding the security of their PCs if PCs had always been somewhat secure platforms because we don't know how users would act if they'd always been used to secure platforms.
...if you like excessive nudity and bouncing breasts in your horror movies. There was some movie out recently where one of the female actresses ran around naked for something like five minutes, and the whole spectacle was recorded in titillating detail in 3d. For those who want the most sex in cinema, 3d could work quite well. The depth of field is short, the actual on-screen duration for the needed 3d is short relative to the whole picture, and the content will mesmerize those individuals most likely to pay for the privilege enough to keep it viable.
On a more serious note, if 3d is applied to much narrower field depths then the audience might not get nearly as many headaches, as their eyes won't be straining opposite instincts nearly to the degree that they do when the effects go off to infinity. Trouble is, those aren't the kinds of films where 3d will be appreciated, unless, again, porn or on-screen nudity are primary applications.
Cathodes still offer the fastest refresh rates and highest contrast ratios, and on top of that are the most durable displays manufactured. CRT televisions also have much longer lifespans and can generally be serviced if problems develop, unlike throw-it-away LCD and Plasma units. On top of that, CRTs aren't fixed resolution or refresh rate, so different inputs can be handled optimally instead of having to interpolate or antialias the image to make it show if it's not the same as the physical display like on an LCD.
If they offered a widescreen 32" CRT television with 1080p and HDMI that would fit into a 33" by 24" space I'd buy it. Kids couldn't wreck it with a Nintendo Wii controller, if I bump into it I won't break it or knock it off of the cabinet, and since all of my equipment is 10-20" deep it's no hardship to have depth to my TV and my cabinet. Since I don't plan on moving it once it's set up, weight is not really an issue to me either, other than the benefits of having something difficult to knock over and difficult to steal.
Yeah, I hear you. I was used to 1280x1024 or 1600x1200, so these 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratios take some getting used to.
What really irks me, though, is a seeming lack of development for inexpensive high-res monitors that go beyond "1080p". My current display is a 20" 4:3 ratio 1600x1200 unit, and if I wanted to go bigger I'd want more than 1080 rows. I sort of understand the complaints that audiophiles had back in the eighties with the Red Book CD standard and being limited to 44KHz 16 bit audio and no functional implementation of more than stereo audio. Before that they enjoyed quadraphonic sound in whatever quality the analog recording equipment and playback equipment could achieve, and while lower end equipment and poor media maintenance might have led to results less than 44KHz 16 bit, high end stuff and good practices would have yielded much better sound. By releasing Compact Disc as the high end system and later as the de facto standard for everyone they cut off the ability to get more.
Video cards seem to be the one aspect of computers that doesn't follow both Moore's Law and the cost reduction model that we've seen elsewhere. It would appear that for most computer components and systems, over time power increases and costs drop. In the case of video cards though, prices seem to have been stable or on the increase for the various classes of components at a given point. When my first-generation 3dFX card was top-of-the-line-consumer class it was less than $200 if memory serves. My (at the time) high end Matrox G-series dual head card was about the same price or maybe a little more expensive. Modern ATI and nVidia products seem to be more expensive compared to what the previous cards were introduced at.
I guess that the cost to game is why I got out of most computer gaming. I found myself with less and less time to play, and it's hard to justify $300 for an expansion card when I'll use it twice a month and when it'll be "obsolete" in six. Ditto for the games themselves, when they're $50 each it's hard to play more than one with such a small amount of time. I get a lot more value for my money buying games at a books/media store that buys the remnants that didn't sell originally a year ago and sells them for $10 a title or less, plus they work on hardware I already have.
I had to deal with a friend's 7 box that had a rootkit that hijacked clicking on the results of Google searches, redirecting to ad sites that then went on to try to install more malware. Windows 7 may not be vulnerable to many of the old problems, but it's still exploitable through the web browser.
Back as a college student in the nineties I used the university's SunOS box for much of my homework. Even with thousands of users on simultaneously there weren't nearly the problems that we see even today on Windows. I had a GUI environment, a web browser, and e-mail client, a rudimentary word processor with typesetting, all without having to drop to a command line shell. Worst case it seemed if someone screwed up all they did was to toast their own home directory.
Microsoft could have chosen the virtual machine route for Windows 95, or could have found ways to install some kind of "compatibility mode" even back then, but they chose instead to work on Microsoft Plus! and UI prettiness. They could have worked to bring the consumer and professional development lines closer together faster than Windows XP, but again chose not to. They could have bit the bullet and pissed off some users because Clarisworks 4.0 for the PC wouldn't load, but those users wouldn't have had much of a viable alternative in a PC OS anyway, and probably would have stuck around regardless. Instead, they chased profit and prettiness in the UI at the expense of all of us and the security and integrity of our data.
Back to the university computers- certainly I couldn't modify the software choices installed for everyone by the administration, but I was free to install my own software choices in my own home directory and to run those, which I did. They were slow to update the browser, so I would compile from source when a new one was out. I still had choices even in the days when it wasn't *my* computer, and the platform was certainly more stable than anything out of Redmond, even today.
I know your post was intended for humor, but I have a more serious question that maybe someone can answer...
Did the modifications to the centrifuge control serve to damage the centrifuge, the contents of the centrifuge, or both? If the point was to damage the centrifuge, then the solution is determining why the centrifuges failed, correcting that, and ordering new centrifuges. If the point was to damage the nuclear material so that it isn't good enough to be used in a bomb, then the solution is to, again, determine why the centrifuges failed, and to figure out if it's possible to reprocess the material a second time to get it right, and if not, to start on a new batch of material. If the point was to do both, then not only do the centrifuges need to turn out bad product, but they have to do it subtly enough to not attract attention while the centrifuges slowly damage themselves, leading to a lot of bad product and a lot of bad centrifuges at the same time. Solution, determine the source of the problem, then replace the centrifuges and start processing again.
I would think that the goal would be to make the Iranians involved *think* that they were getting the grade of Uranium Hexafluoride that they had planned on while instead delivering to them substandard product, so when they built weapons they had Uranium that either would reach critical mass or else wouldn't be nearly as efficient and would cause a much smaller boom. Achieving this would require not damaging the centrifuges yet damaging what they produce. This would allow an adversary of Iran to take this in to account in both diplomatic circles (being willing to push Iran harder despite the threat of a nuclear exchange) and in military ones (actively planning strategy considering nuclear fizzles), and if that's the case, this worm's discovery means that it's only a short-term problem for the Iranians, not a long-term problem that would allow for strategic thinking. The discovery means that Iran is set back, not thwarted as it would have been if the worm had gone on undetected for years and years, and while expensive for Iran (even if they can reprocess existing product that wasn't processed right the first time), it's not damning to the long term goals.
I think that the company is wrong to hire someone so untested at such a high salary and to then expect more senior staff making less money to train that new coder in the rest of the business. If the new hire came in with a total sum of more skills and readiness for the application than the existing employees then that new hire might deserve the higher wages, but if the new hire only has the programming language (and as a new college grad, it's difficult to necessarily gauge that individual's abilities) without knowledge of the application he'd be coding for and without insight into the industry he serves then I don't think that the hiring decision is right.
I can predict exactly what will happen here. The project manager (the one who made the initial complaint) won't allocate his resources of his team well. He won't put in any more than the 40 hours he's required to. The new hire won't get the mentoring he'll need, and might not even be utilized to the specialty that he was supposedly hired for. The project will come in late, over budget, and mediocre. Even if the more senior man is held at fault, he will leave or retire without anything like being fired. In the mean time the new hire, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as he might be at the start, will become as jaded and cynical as his fellow coworkers, not because he wants to, but because cynicism easily trumps optimism when one is surrounded by it. The company will suffer because its employees will see that there is no benefit to giving one's effort to the company, as the company will not reciprocate. The company won't be any more than a bloated, corporate, bureaucratic shell like so many large companies are these days. The new hire, while making extraordinary money, will feel empty and hollow because so much of his life is dedicated to a job that doesn't fulfill him.
the argument that will be used is that the software engineer or programmer didn't do the use cases to foresee the potential for misuse and abuse of the product by criminals - and that they were therefore negligent - I don't buy this argument but lawyers are a slimy lot !
Why don't you buy it? I'm amazed that Microsoft hasn't had the crap kicked out of them due to how vulnerable their software has been to exploitation, and exploitation that has left numerous unaffiliated companies that don't even use Microsoft operating systems. Users whose computers are easily compromised and companies who have suffered the ill effects of attacks made by compromised or hijacked computers should have one hell of a case.
As far as liability for physical devices goes, while the OP's point that as an owner, misusing a product (like drunk operation of a motor vehicle) might not open the manufacturer to liability, I don't think that would even come close to the argument in a lawsuit. The argument would revolve around how 1) the manufacturer used consumer equipment and communications protocols for their equipment allowing other consumer equipment to contact the manufacturer's devices, and 2) that the manufacturer also neglected to provide sufficient safeguards to keep out those who aren't authorized to use the equipment, and the consumer protocols and equipment selected by the manufacturer made it unduly easy for even the technological layman to tamper with only minimal instruction or assistance.
IMHO, the state of commercial software development is atrocious. I don't expect every software product or operating system to be completely immune to exploitation, but the fact that commercial operating systems with large paid development teams and oversight by paid management still manage to have hundreds or thousands of weaknesses that lead to remote exploits or infections through applications like the friggin' web browser despite many users' attempts to lock down ports, installing antivirus and malware programs, and hiding behind firewalling routers, developers should be ashamed of themselves. Having worked in a company that was developing a communications application, and whose job was quality assurance, I can tell you that part of the problem is that most developers lack the devious streak to know how their software could be misused. They only see how they can make it function for X circumstances, not how Y and Z circumstances could lead to its compromise. As the QA tester it was far, far too easy to break or exploit communications daemons, and when the programmers were confronted by the evidence they got defensive and indignant instead of wanting to know more about the nature of the test or the fault. As long as that attitude prevails in programming this sort of thing will continue to plague our software, and in my opinion, development companies should be responsible for the ramifications of their decisions.
sounds like, to me, Lockheed Martin needs to build another one in the same hand-crafted, manual way that they build prototype units, which is to say with lots and lots of labor and at considerable expense.
I don't think that the Federal Government has any misdemeanor-class laws, only felonies. Plus, if you've gotten to the point that the Feds have to get involved, my guess is that they aren't necessarily too worried about overkill.
Given that there was the whole New York vs. New Jersey angle in the case (IIRC), and since basically all of the people involved either bought or attempted to buy something from this person, I'd say that Interstate Commerce was full engaged in and fully applies...
Slashdot Mirror
But they clearly are not derived from the mother tongue, they *must* have been written by aliens.
Have you seen the syntax they expect? We're being sabotaged, I tell you!
So, the team comprised of the hero, his hot chick, and his sidekicks learn of a relic they have to retrieve or destroy before the bad people get to it first, and on the way they learn of the original "mother tongue" and have to figure out What This Means and How It Works to save all of us from the relic...
So, he envisions a world where the hot chick working with the hero is able to h4xx0r the system to shut off The Device before it destroys the {airplane, ship, military base, power plant, city, region, country, world, universe}? Cool...
It made emacs seem like emacs?
*ducks*
Quite a bit. Right now many US-Europe flights are redeyes, so many effectively lose the following day recuperating. On top of that, have you ever been on a redeye over the Atlantic with a screaming child sitting a few rows ahead of you, while you're trying to sleep? I had murder on my mind, I don't care what age the kid was.
If you can get to western Europe in three hours from the US east coast then you can save a day or two in travel time. Hell, you can almost make it a weekend or a long day trip. If you have a limited amount of vacation time then you can use this to your advantage, assuming that the cost is right. Concorde was not- my wife got to fly it as a kid because her father found some kind of awesome package deal they offered to fill seats, but by and large it was too expensive. If the price comes down, even to double or triple a normal Coach seat, it might well be worth the money.
I'm fine with them working on fuel efficiency now. Get better engines and fuselage shapes, then work on refining shapes and engines for faster speeds.
That's why I never got on the https bandwagon. I couldn't self-sign without generating error messages in the browser, and none of the content that I served at the time had any need to be secure. It was self-publishing, for crissake, effectively vanity publishing.
Come to think of it, so is everything on facebook, twitter, and most other websites, including this one. I guess it's not really important for almost anyone.
I have an idea- if you need something to be secure, don't use HTML or HTTP at all. Use a real protocol, one designed for security, and don't use a web browser.
I kept the important ones on the fridge with a magnet, so I knew where I could find them.
There was a chemistry teacher at my high school who had a copy printed off and bound on his front counter desk.
Of course, he also like to set up those little green plastic army men on that counter during tests, pour flammable liquid over the scene, then light it and play with them, making sound of death and agony as they melted.
Areogel is what you're talking about, and it's not a gel at all in its final state, it's a solid. I think the name comes from the gel state it is in while being manufactured, before they dry it out.
I was actually thinking much the same thing though. Since areogel is incredibly light weight, and since there are already materials scientists working on ways of mitigating the deleterious effects of small objects striking satellites and space stations, it might be somewhat more practical to design a structure to act as a space debris scrubber, with lots and lots of surface area and some kind of magnetic field to attempt to attract large numbers of very small metallic objects from a distance. Attract them and provide them with a fairly soft impact so that they don't punch through and don't break off pieces of the collecting device in the impact. After the useful life of the collecting device is ended, deorbit it, and send up another.
I've never worked with aerogel personally, so I really don't know how much mass it takes for a given volume or what kind of thickness would really be required to reduce the differences in velocity between the debris and the collector. I also don't work with rockets, so I don't know how much mass versus volume is feasible to launch (ie, the collector might be light weight enough to allow the thrust of the rocket to lift it, but it might be too bulky to launch due to aerodynamics), so someone more qualified should probably evaluate such an idea further. I do think, though, that if something suitably large could orbit for a long enough duration it would be able to help soak up the crap that's been up there for years and to make orbit a safer place.
For all we know, there might be a market for a netting device as well, but I'd be worried that the net would itself become small bits of space debris if it's damaged or destroyed by that which it's attempting to capture.
I don't know that I entirely agree that it needs to necessarily be evenly enforced. Everyone tends to rack up infractions whenever they're in an environment with rules, but the number and nature of infractions are what can determine if someone should be terminated, not simply that an infraction has occurred. If an employee excels for the company and the company generally knows and acknowledges this, then the company is more likely to ignore infractions from that employee. If an employee doesn't do good work or causes a lot of problems for other employees, be they equals or superiors, then I could honestly expect that simple infractions will carry more weight against that employee than average.
I know one thing- I'm certainly not going to complain about a company that I work for while I'm on company time, and I generally avoid criticism except in company-managed and solicited situations when there's a chance of it being noted for the record, and when making criticism that's solicited I'm very careful about what I say. One would be a fool to give someone in authority a documented reason to add to the demerits pile.
I really don't think that something like using a competitor's products instead of products from one's own company would result in too many lost jobs, unless one's job specifically was for doing promotions. Even in that case, I'd think it would apply to a paid promoter providing said product, not simply consuming it. If one is at a social event and the competitor's product is the only one available (as is common with exclusivity agreements with vendors) then it may not be possible to have one's company's own product.
I'd be that there's existing caselaw on such matters.
Right, as long as they don't do it on company equipment, and to an extent, doing it on company time while on one's own equipment could also be grounds for termination, though that would be because the employee is slacking off on the clock instead of working. This would probably only really apply to hourly employees.
In a broader sense Moore's law has been applied to computing power doubling every eighteen months. Yes, specifically it's it's transistor density.
Well, at least to the SunOS example, remember, the bulk of the people using that box were programming students and I'd think that a very much higher percentage of the users were actually looking for vulnerabilities intentionally compared an average segment of the population. If anything, it was a pressure-cooker environment where people were trying to break in and had local accounts allowing for the running of all kinds of tools to attempt to do so.
I'll agree that most OSes weren't secure either- Microsoft couldn't have implemented protected mode in early PCs because Intel's processors lacked it in hardware, while Apple chose not to implement it even though the 68K architecture had it available.
I'll even agree that users can be a problem much of the time, but when one doesn't even have the option for users to learn good practices and educates them to do poorly they will do poorly. We can't know truly how people would be today regarding the security of their PCs if PCs had always been somewhat secure platforms because we don't know how users would act if they'd always been used to secure platforms.
...if you like excessive nudity and bouncing breasts in your horror movies. There was some movie out recently where one of the female actresses ran around naked for something like five minutes, and the whole spectacle was recorded in titillating detail in 3d. For those who want the most sex in cinema, 3d could work quite well. The depth of field is short, the actual on-screen duration for the needed 3d is short relative to the whole picture, and the content will mesmerize those individuals most likely to pay for the privilege enough to keep it viable.
On a more serious note, if 3d is applied to much narrower field depths then the audience might not get nearly as many headaches, as their eyes won't be straining opposite instincts nearly to the degree that they do when the effects go off to infinity. Trouble is, those aren't the kinds of films where 3d will be appreciated, unless, again, porn or on-screen nudity are primary applications.
Cathodes still offer the fastest refresh rates and highest contrast ratios, and on top of that are the most durable displays manufactured. CRT televisions also have much longer lifespans and can generally be serviced if problems develop, unlike throw-it-away LCD and Plasma units. On top of that, CRTs aren't fixed resolution or refresh rate, so different inputs can be handled optimally instead of having to interpolate or antialias the image to make it show if it's not the same as the physical display like on an LCD.
If they offered a widescreen 32" CRT television with 1080p and HDMI that would fit into a 33" by 24" space I'd buy it. Kids couldn't wreck it with a Nintendo Wii controller, if I bump into it I won't break it or knock it off of the cabinet, and since all of my equipment is 10-20" deep it's no hardship to have depth to my TV and my cabinet. Since I don't plan on moving it once it's set up, weight is not really an issue to me either, other than the benefits of having something difficult to knock over and difficult to steal.
Yeah, I hear you. I was used to 1280x1024 or 1600x1200, so these 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratios take some getting used to.
What really irks me, though, is a seeming lack of development for inexpensive high-res monitors that go beyond "1080p". My current display is a 20" 4:3 ratio 1600x1200 unit, and if I wanted to go bigger I'd want more than 1080 rows. I sort of understand the complaints that audiophiles had back in the eighties with the Red Book CD standard and being limited to 44KHz 16 bit audio and no functional implementation of more than stereo audio. Before that they enjoyed quadraphonic sound in whatever quality the analog recording equipment and playback equipment could achieve, and while lower end equipment and poor media maintenance might have led to results less than 44KHz 16 bit, high end stuff and good practices would have yielded much better sound. By releasing Compact Disc as the high end system and later as the de facto standard for everyone they cut off the ability to get more.
Video cards seem to be the one aspect of computers that doesn't follow both Moore's Law and the cost reduction model that we've seen elsewhere. It would appear that for most computer components and systems, over time power increases and costs drop. In the case of video cards though, prices seem to have been stable or on the increase for the various classes of components at a given point. When my first-generation 3dFX card was top-of-the-line-consumer class it was less than $200 if memory serves. My (at the time) high end Matrox G-series dual head card was about the same price or maybe a little more expensive. Modern ATI and nVidia products seem to be more expensive compared to what the previous cards were introduced at.
I guess that the cost to game is why I got out of most computer gaming. I found myself with less and less time to play, and it's hard to justify $300 for an expansion card when I'll use it twice a month and when it'll be "obsolete" in six. Ditto for the games themselves, when they're $50 each it's hard to play more than one with such a small amount of time. I get a lot more value for my money buying games at a books/media store that buys the remnants that didn't sell originally a year ago and sells them for $10 a title or less, plus they work on hardware I already have.
I had to deal with a friend's 7 box that had a rootkit that hijacked clicking on the results of Google searches, redirecting to ad sites that then went on to try to install more malware. Windows 7 may not be vulnerable to many of the old problems, but it's still exploitable through the web browser.
Back as a college student in the nineties I used the university's SunOS box for much of my homework. Even with thousands of users on simultaneously there weren't nearly the problems that we see even today on Windows. I had a GUI environment, a web browser, and e-mail client, a rudimentary word processor with typesetting, all without having to drop to a command line shell. Worst case it seemed if someone screwed up all they did was to toast their own home directory.
Microsoft could have chosen the virtual machine route for Windows 95, or could have found ways to install some kind of "compatibility mode" even back then, but they chose instead to work on Microsoft Plus! and UI prettiness. They could have worked to bring the consumer and professional development lines closer together faster than Windows XP, but again chose not to. They could have bit the bullet and pissed off some users because Clarisworks 4.0 for the PC wouldn't load, but those users wouldn't have had much of a viable alternative in a PC OS anyway, and probably would have stuck around regardless. Instead, they chased profit and prettiness in the UI at the expense of all of us and the security and integrity of our data.
Back to the university computers- certainly I couldn't modify the software choices installed for everyone by the administration, but I was free to install my own software choices in my own home directory and to run those, which I did. They were slow to update the browser, so I would compile from source when a new one was out. I still had choices even in the days when it wasn't *my* computer, and the platform was certainly more stable than anything out of Redmond, even today.
I know your post was intended for humor, but I have a more serious question that maybe someone can answer...
Did the modifications to the centrifuge control serve to damage the centrifuge, the contents of the centrifuge, or both? If the point was to damage the centrifuge, then the solution is determining why the centrifuges failed, correcting that, and ordering new centrifuges. If the point was to damage the nuclear material so that it isn't good enough to be used in a bomb, then the solution is to, again, determine why the centrifuges failed, and to figure out if it's possible to reprocess the material a second time to get it right, and if not, to start on a new batch of material. If the point was to do both, then not only do the centrifuges need to turn out bad product, but they have to do it subtly enough to not attract attention while the centrifuges slowly damage themselves, leading to a lot of bad product and a lot of bad centrifuges at the same time. Solution, determine the source of the problem, then replace the centrifuges and start processing again.
I would think that the goal would be to make the Iranians involved *think* that they were getting the grade of Uranium Hexafluoride that they had planned on while instead delivering to them substandard product, so when they built weapons they had Uranium that either would reach critical mass or else wouldn't be nearly as efficient and would cause a much smaller boom. Achieving this would require not damaging the centrifuges yet damaging what they produce. This would allow an adversary of Iran to take this in to account in both diplomatic circles (being willing to push Iran harder despite the threat of a nuclear exchange) and in military ones (actively planning strategy considering nuclear fizzles), and if that's the case, this worm's discovery means that it's only a short-term problem for the Iranians, not a long-term problem that would allow for strategic thinking. The discovery means that Iran is set back, not thwarted as it would have been if the worm had gone on undetected for years and years, and while expensive for Iran (even if they can reprocess existing product that wasn't processed right the first time), it's not damning to the long term goals.
Just got through reading the article...
I think that the company is wrong to hire someone so untested at such a high salary and to then expect more senior staff making less money to train that new coder in the rest of the business. If the new hire came in with a total sum of more skills and readiness for the application than the existing employees then that new hire might deserve the higher wages, but if the new hire only has the programming language (and as a new college grad, it's difficult to necessarily gauge that individual's abilities) without knowledge of the application he'd be coding for and without insight into the industry he serves then I don't think that the hiring decision is right.
I can predict exactly what will happen here. The project manager (the one who made the initial complaint) won't allocate his resources of his team well. He won't put in any more than the 40 hours he's required to. The new hire won't get the mentoring he'll need, and might not even be utilized to the specialty that he was supposedly hired for. The project will come in late, over budget, and mediocre. Even if the more senior man is held at fault, he will leave or retire without anything like being fired. In the mean time the new hire, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as he might be at the start, will become as jaded and cynical as his fellow coworkers, not because he wants to, but because cynicism easily trumps optimism when one is surrounded by it. The company will suffer because its employees will see that there is no benefit to giving one's effort to the company, as the company will not reciprocate. The company won't be any more than a bloated, corporate, bureaucratic shell like so many large companies are these days. The new hire, while making extraordinary money, will feel empty and hollow because so much of his life is dedicated to a job that doesn't fulfill him.
the argument that will be used is that the software engineer or programmer didn't do the use cases to foresee the potential for misuse and abuse of the product by criminals - and that they were therefore negligent - I don't buy this argument but lawyers are a slimy lot !
Why don't you buy it? I'm amazed that Microsoft hasn't had the crap kicked out of them due to how vulnerable their software has been to exploitation, and exploitation that has left numerous unaffiliated companies that don't even use Microsoft operating systems. Users whose computers are easily compromised and companies who have suffered the ill effects of attacks made by compromised or hijacked computers should have one hell of a case.
As far as liability for physical devices goes, while the OP's point that as an owner, misusing a product (like drunk operation of a motor vehicle) might not open the manufacturer to liability, I don't think that would even come close to the argument in a lawsuit. The argument would revolve around how 1) the manufacturer used consumer equipment and communications protocols for their equipment allowing other consumer equipment to contact the manufacturer's devices, and 2) that the manufacturer also neglected to provide sufficient safeguards to keep out those who aren't authorized to use the equipment, and the consumer protocols and equipment selected by the manufacturer made it unduly easy for even the technological layman to tamper with only minimal instruction or assistance.
IMHO, the state of commercial software development is atrocious. I don't expect every software product or operating system to be completely immune to exploitation, but the fact that commercial operating systems with large paid development teams and oversight by paid management still manage to have hundreds or thousands of weaknesses that lead to remote exploits or infections through applications like the friggin' web browser despite many users' attempts to lock down ports, installing antivirus and malware programs, and hiding behind firewalling routers, developers should be ashamed of themselves. Having worked in a company that was developing a communications application, and whose job was quality assurance, I can tell you that part of the problem is that most developers lack the devious streak to know how their software could be misused. They only see how they can make it function for X circumstances, not how Y and Z circumstances could lead to its compromise. As the QA tester it was far, far too easy to break or exploit communications daemons, and when the programmers were confronted by the evidence they got defensive and indignant instead of wanting to know more about the nature of the test or the fault. As long as that attitude prevails in programming this sort of thing will continue to plague our software, and in my opinion, development companies should be responsible for the ramifications of their decisions.
sounds like, to me, Lockheed Martin needs to build another one in the same hand-crafted, manual way that they build prototype units, which is to say with lots and lots of labor and at considerable expense.
I don't think that the Federal Government has any misdemeanor-class laws, only felonies. Plus, if you've gotten to the point that the Feds have to get involved, my guess is that they aren't necessarily too worried about overkill.
Given that there was the whole New York vs. New Jersey angle in the case (IIRC), and since basically all of the people involved either bought or attempted to buy something from this person, I'd say that Interstate Commerce was full engaged in and fully applies...