Yeah, as the poster above me said, this is pretty common. I took a SE (software engineering is not engineering!) course in the second year of my Computer Engineering coursework; we actually wrote code, but only after weeks of coming up with requirements, designing, setting up tests, etc.
The real danger lies elsewhere. Stories like this and the cyber-war story about the US and China are the ones that you need to follow and think about.
It looks a lot like the butterfly effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect in the fact that one small chance encounter or small piece of information can greatly affect the outcome of a particular chain of events. Your company makes cheeseburger boxes for a company whose CEO, in turn, is a friend of or associate of some political figure. This information is gleened from your system via email, and phishing email is used to get that political figure to open an email which is a dupe of a previous email sent, but contains an active-x payload... this in turn leads to more serious and useful information down the road... and viola! you have enough for a hack on the RNC mail server...
That is how spying works, a little bit at a time, patiently looking for a chink in the armor.
Reminds me of the information security training I had to take before starting my job here at a national lab. First, we watched a video in which an ex-KGB boss who now provides security consulting worldwide says, "Do not think that because you are low-ranking or do not work with classified information, that you are not a potential target for espionage" and goes on to tell us how almost certainly at least a few of the people we work with have been or will be targeted for espionage or potential defection. Then we were told how several pieces of non-classified information can be put together to create classified information, even unintentionally.
Even if you don't work for the government, you have to be really careful if you want your data to be secure.
Re:Skill and not language used?
on
The Return of Ada
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Perhaps a language which is slower and a bit more difficult to write prevents programmers from dumping so many lines of semi-working crap, requiring them to put a little more thought into the code?
You know, I *just* heard a Dick Cheney shooting joke on the radio this morning, and one from my coworkers yesterday, but I'll be DAMNED if it hasn't stayed funny after so long! I break into uncontrollable laughter every time somebody mentions Cheney in conjuction with any firearm-related topic, honest.
If you don't want to eat food that has been sprayed, fair enough; it's your choice and as long as you don't force it on others, no problem. I would like to add that, having applied pesticide/herbicide and vaccinated/medicated cattle, all of these things have a (usually pretty large) minimum time-to-market that must pass between the time of application/administration. You will not be eating any *American-grown* (I cannot guarantee other countries) crops that were sprayed with Roundup mere days before harvest; that would be pretty stupid from an economic standpoint, too.
I do think that it is in the farmer's best interests, and in the best long-term interests of Monsanto, to have a sane level of government regulation on the design and testing of GM foods. All it takes is one real crisis and the public is likely to lose faith in a very promising technology; the result could easily be similar to the now-prevalent and foolish fear of nuclear power.
From my reasonable levels of spelling and grammar, you've probably guessed that I'm a mature student; this was a group assignment, so this old fart ended up as a slave-driver to a bunch of kiddies.
As long as you're not that obnoxious old guy who won't stop talking about how long he worked before coming back to get a degree, or how he lived in Europe for 5 years, or how he's super-successful and shouldn't even be taking this course. Or the old guy who either constantly sucks up to the professor or shows no because the prof. is younger than him.
This isn't a personal attack--I'm just taking an opportunity to vent about the crap I've experienced... most of the biggest annoyances in any of my classes have been over-30s. Now, I never seem to see them in any actual *difficult* courses, such as Circuits, Physics, Multivariable Calculus, etc., or in fact any engineering courses, so I think my school tends to have a different class of 'mature students' than you are:)
Consuming crop products being literally irrigated with roundup week killer
Speaking as someone who has grown up on a farm and spent a good many years working on them... No. You're wrong. Stop reading organic advocacy websites. In my entire experience in farming, I have occasionally seen fertilizer added to irrigation water, but not Roundup. I have personally performed Roundup applications using a variety of equipment, and the procedure is always to spray the mix on the LEAVES of weeds, which then die within an hour or so; I did this with small spray tanks on a 4-wheel ATV. On the larger scale, farmers use tractors or airplanes to apply pesticides and herbicides, both of these being applied with relative infrequency. Irrigating with Roundup would be a huge waste of an expensive herbicide, and almost certainly illegal since excess irrigation water often runs into drainage ditches, which run into lakes and rivers; these are definitely very closely watched by the EPA.
You have lived a happy and fulfilling life without having to use violence or being subject to violence because of the efforts of many many violent people. Pretty much any civilization is achieved through violently gaining sovereignty, then maintaining it through the threat or application of force.
The only in-class programming we ever did in high school was implementing the Monty Hall game in TI-BASIC. Helping the teacher explain IF-ELSE statements to my classmates was... fatiguing. Especially since as the sole owner of a TI-86 in a class full of TI-83 users, some of the stuff I knew was plain wrong. Still have that program (named GOAT) on my TI somewhere... I should reimplement it in Reverse Polish Lisp on the HP-48.
Speaking from experience, two-factor authentication with a crypto-card type thing is a pain in the ass. I'd be willing to trade some security in exchange for the convenience of not carrying this thing around and having to deal with typing in constant random crap.
First, the vt100 was white-phosphor, not green. The vt220, which I have, has green phosphor. I can happily use the vt220 for hours, but if I focus only on the screen for too long, white things will look purple when I look away. This goes away quickly. I do not use green text on black background for my xterms, because that just doesn't work as well; I usually use grey on black but if black on white is the default, I'll just deal with it--I don't *mind* using black on white terminals. Have you ever used a Sun machine at the Openfirmware prompt? For some reason, that white-on-black destroys my eyes.
Black text on white paper is great in books and has been great for thousands of years. However, screens are active devices, emitting their own light--you can't compare them to ink on paper. Anecdotally, I have a hard time reading books or academic papers on a screen; after a while, the text all kinda melts together. I print out the papers and try to find printed volumes of the books.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to bathe my face in the gentle glow of green pixels.
My mistake, I did mean personal finances. Economics would probably be good too, preferably before anyone is allowed to "discuss" such things as the current sub-prime situation.
Oh, and it's "laissez-faire"... lassie-faire sounds like a place for extremely devoted fans of a certain television celebrity dog.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and as much Bandwidth as they can take?
People act like implementing bandwidth limits and such is some sort of human rights violation--call the UN, my bandwidth has been capped!
Unix is a good operating system, but it's 40 years old. Operating systems research is a good thing, and if Microsoft wants to keep making new systems, more power to them.
Setting aside Linux vs. distribution arguments, most distros come bundled with damn near EVERY media player. Of course, I always just use mplayer, but the choice is there.
According to Variety, the movie's producers believe the theme of finite ecological resources is timely given the increasing threat of global warming.
Great. We'll get to spend half the movie hearing about how Arrakis was once a beautiful planet, until evil corporations and wasteful humans caused global warming and turned it into a desert. Seriously, with a statement like that, I'll be shocked if the producers don't decide to jam something like that in there. Never mind that to the best of my knowledge Arrakis was never supposed to have had plants/oceans/whatever until the God Emperor created them.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, as the poster above me said, this is pretty common. I took a SE (software engineering is not engineering!) course in the second year of my Computer Engineering coursework; we actually wrote code, but only after weeks of coming up with requirements, designing, setting up tests, etc.
The real danger lies elsewhere. Stories like this and the cyber-war story about the US and China are the ones that you need to follow and think about.
It looks a lot like the butterfly effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect in the fact that one small chance encounter or small piece of information can greatly affect the outcome of a particular chain of events. Your company makes cheeseburger boxes for a company whose CEO, in turn, is a friend of or associate of some political figure. This information is gleened from your system via email, and phishing email is used to get that political figure to open an email which is a dupe of a previous email sent, but contains an active-x payload... this in turn leads to more serious and useful information down the road... and viola! you have enough for a hack on the RNC mail server...
That is how spying works, a little bit at a time, patiently looking for a chink in the armor.
Reminds me of the information security training I had to take before starting my job here at a national lab. First, we watched a video in which an ex-KGB boss who now provides security consulting worldwide says, "Do not think that because you are low-ranking or do not work with classified information, that you are not a potential target for espionage" and goes on to tell us how almost certainly at least a few of the people we work with have been or will be targeted for espionage or potential defection. Then we were told how several pieces of non-classified information can be put together to create classified information, even unintentionally.
Even if you don't work for the government, you have to be really careful if you want your data to be secure.
Perhaps a language which is slower and a bit more difficult to write prevents programmers from dumping so many lines of semi-working crap, requiring them to put a little more thought into the code?
You know, I *just* heard a Dick Cheney shooting joke on the radio this morning, and one from my coworkers yesterday, but I'll be DAMNED if it hasn't stayed funny after so long! I break into uncontrollable laughter every time somebody mentions Cheney in conjuction with any firearm-related topic, honest.
Get your stinking manipulators off me you damn dirty robots!
IT BEGAN WITH A BLOODY 'S'!
Pretty sure you can already get the names and addresses of registered sex offenders already. That's kinda what the idea of the registry is.
If you don't want to eat food that has been sprayed, fair enough; it's your choice and as long as you don't force it on others, no problem. I would like to add that, having applied pesticide/herbicide and vaccinated/medicated cattle, all of these things have a (usually pretty large) minimum time-to-market that must pass between the time of application/administration. You will not be eating any *American-grown* (I cannot guarantee other countries) crops that were sprayed with Roundup mere days before harvest; that would be pretty stupid from an economic standpoint, too.
I do think that it is in the farmer's best interests, and in the best long-term interests of Monsanto, to have a sane level of government regulation on the design and testing of GM foods. All it takes is one real crisis and the public is likely to lose faith in a very promising technology; the result could easily be similar to the now-prevalent and foolish fear of nuclear power.
From my reasonable levels of spelling and grammar, you've probably guessed that I'm a mature student; this was a group assignment, so this old fart ended up as a slave-driver to a bunch of kiddies.
As long as you're not that obnoxious old guy who won't stop talking about how long he worked before coming back to get a degree, or how he lived in Europe for 5 years, or how he's super-successful and shouldn't even be taking this course. Or the old guy who either constantly sucks up to the professor or shows no because the prof. is younger than him.
This isn't a personal attack--I'm just taking an opportunity to vent about the crap I've experienced... most of the biggest annoyances in any of my classes have been over-30s. Now, I never seem to see them in any actual *difficult* courses, such as Circuits, Physics, Multivariable Calculus, etc., or in fact any engineering courses, so I think my school tends to have a different class of 'mature students' than you are :)
Consuming crop products being literally irrigated with roundup week killer
Speaking as someone who has grown up on a farm and spent a good many years working on them... No. You're wrong. Stop reading organic advocacy websites. In my entire experience in farming, I have occasionally seen fertilizer added to irrigation water, but not Roundup. I have personally performed Roundup applications using a variety of equipment, and the procedure is always to spray the mix on the LEAVES of weeds, which then die within an hour or so; I did this with small spray tanks on a 4-wheel ATV. On the larger scale, farmers use tractors or airplanes to apply pesticides and herbicides, both of these being applied with relative infrequency. Irrigating with Roundup would be a huge waste of an expensive herbicide, and almost certainly illegal since excess irrigation water often runs into drainage ditches, which run into lakes and rivers; these are definitely very closely watched by the EPA.
"The IT department is like a box of chocolates... there are a lot of nuts, and you can never get what you want." -- My coworker
There are two kinds of people I cannot stand: Those who are intolerant of other cultures, and the Dutch.
You have lived a happy and fulfilling life without having to use violence or being subject to violence because of the efforts of many many violent people. Pretty much any civilization is achieved through violently gaining sovereignty, then maintaining it through the threat or application of force.
Somebody read Snowcrash too many times.
The only in-class programming we ever did in high school was implementing the Monty Hall game in TI-BASIC. Helping the teacher explain IF-ELSE statements to my classmates was... fatiguing. Especially since as the sole owner of a TI-86 in a class full of TI-83 users, some of the stuff I knew was plain wrong. Still have that program (named GOAT) on my TI somewhere... I should reimplement it in Reverse Polish Lisp on the HP-48.
Speaking from experience, two-factor authentication with a crypto-card type thing is a pain in the ass. I'd be willing to trade some security in exchange for the convenience of not carrying this thing around and having to deal with typing in constant random crap.
First, the vt100 was white-phosphor, not green. The vt220, which I have, has green phosphor. I can happily use the vt220 for hours, but if I focus only on the screen for too long, white things will look purple when I look away. This goes away quickly. I do not use green text on black background for my xterms, because that just doesn't work as well; I usually use grey on black but if black on white is the default, I'll just deal with it--I don't *mind* using black on white terminals. Have you ever used a Sun machine at the Openfirmware prompt? For some reason, that white-on-black destroys my eyes.
Black text on white paper is great in books and has been great for thousands of years. However, screens are active devices, emitting their own light--you can't compare them to ink on paper. Anecdotally, I have a hard time reading books or academic papers on a screen; after a while, the text all kinda melts together. I print out the papers and try to find printed volumes of the books.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to bathe my face in the gentle glow of green pixels.
My mistake, I did mean personal finances. Economics would probably be good too, preferably before anyone is allowed to "discuss" such things as the current sub-prime situation.
Oh, and it's "laissez-faire"... lassie-faire sounds like a place for extremely devoted fans of a certain television celebrity dog.
I think a course in basic economics would be far more useful to far more people than Internet Safety.
It's funny, actually, because my current job is hacking Plan 9 on new architectures and on the BlueGene supercomputers :)
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and as much Bandwidth as they can take?
People act like implementing bandwidth limits and such is some sort of human rights violation--call the UN, my bandwidth has been capped!
Did they have to rip off the Wii design so thoroughly?
Unix is a good operating system, but it's 40 years old. Operating systems research is a good thing, and if Microsoft wants to keep making new systems, more power to them.
Setting aside Linux vs. distribution arguments, most distros come bundled with damn near EVERY media player. Of course, I always just use mplayer, but the choice is there.
According to Variety, the movie's producers believe the theme of finite ecological resources is timely given the increasing threat of global warming.
Great. We'll get to spend half the movie hearing about how Arrakis was once a beautiful planet, until evil corporations and wasteful humans caused global warming and turned it into a desert. Seriously, with a statement like that, I'll be shocked if the producers don't decide to jam something like that in there. Never mind that to the best of my knowledge Arrakis was never supposed to have had plants/oceans/whatever until the God Emperor created them.