No, the conclusion was that the headline is using hyphens incorrectly. It should read: "Police-nation wide-use, wall-penetrating radars to peer into homes."
Management estimates, not opinions. Management estimates have a risk attached to them, and it can be a really solid risk: you can have a 1% chance of hitting it big, or a 95% chance of taking market dominance; and you can predict this quite easily, if you know what you're doing.
In this case, HP and Oracle assert that they were looking at made-up bullshit, not management estimates: Autonomy was throwing out this ideal situation that had near-0% likelihood of occurring, and claiming it as the high-probability outcome.
You pretty much nailed why I don't have $25 million dollars right now: up at 4am, check foreign markets, check news, analyze stock graphs, analyze off-hours trading patterns, make predictions, place orders, place stop losses, check market all day, then spend the evening obsessing over the market and searching through sectors, funds, and individual stocks for good opportunities was a suicide mission. I'd have scaled one of the towers on Wall Street and jumped from the top before I got 2 years in.
I'll be out of debt soon. I don't need millions of dollars; I'll be filthy fucking rich when I have no debt. Those traders can all go suck cocks.
Uh, negative on that, Jim. I used to make 1% per day in the stock market; I buy at good buy times and sell at good sell times. I currently don't trade because I don't care to lose money; if I'm not playing to win, I'm playing to fund someone else's golden toilet seat.
I know people whose accounts were halved and worse, and haven't recovered. Even if I invest in SCHD and JNK, I'll have to keep appraised of the market; it could easily go south, and then I'll have to just hold onto it--but it's easy for things to crash down and never recover, which is what happened to IndyMac Bancorp, THM, and a few others. Some of that money just went away.
This image tells a grand story: if you bought in at 1929, you were fucked; 1932, you were rich. 2000 was a bad year; 2003 was great. The DOW is nearly level with 2008. Both the DOW and S&P are showing extreme volatility; the line on the left, followed to the bottom of the second drop, is where the S&P should end up.
Buying in now is buying into a volatile market. Not great unless you have good reason to buy.
You had good sense on investment. I was being told to buy in 2008, right before the bust, on a house I wouldn't be able to sell now because it's worth $50k less. I bought a house that I could pay off quick; in 2016, I'll have some $2200/mo less of expenses, which means I could go out and buy a brand-new Cintiq 2700QHD Touch every month and still have near $1000 left to spend, after paying all my bills.
I'll just max out my 401(K) and use that as a leverage source. When I take loans, it'll be at low rates, paying interest to myself.
My parents's reasoning was never sound in any context. They're the "I saw it on TV, Obama is putting us in concentration camps, we need to stock up on guns now" type.
Imagine a person says there's a button inside that says "Push for Service", and you go there, and you find no button; or they tell you it electrocutes people, but you have no evidence of whether or not this is true.
I've recognized that my parents's experiences are useless and largely discount them. They're as useful as dogma out of a random religious text or 1700s medical journal about how leeches solve all your problems. I've gained nothing from my parents's guidance.
You are in effect, claiming I'm taking advantage of my parents's experiences by ignoring my parents's experiences, which has the same effect as not being exposed to my parents at all. This is like saying I'm taking advantage of a suitcase full of money by walking past it (more like counterfeit money that will get you thrown in jail if you try to spend it).
The increased yearly capacity in US oil production since Bush's second term is, itself, bigger than the yearly capacity of all OPEC countries combined. The Keystone XL pipeline will vastly scale that up, dwarfing OPEC; but Keystone is now questionable, since oil needs to cost at least $80-$90/barrel for it to be profitable.
I just buy "Green" electricity. By contract, my energy supplier must produce at minimum as much solar energy as has been bought from them. If they have a 10MW solar installation and sell 8MW to customers, they're fine (the utilities buy the other 2MW off them as extra power); if they sell 12MW to customers, they need to buy 2MW more solar generation capacity.
I want a Solar-Wind-Geothermal-Nuclear option, but can't get it. Anything but the 13GW coal plant here (we have 11 coal power plants within 20 miles of my house, one of which is over 13,000 megawatts output).
Yeah but that's what happened. Everyone big in oil sold off their oil. 401(k) funds bought into it. Individual retail investors saw the price dip and, thinking they're savvy day traders, bought in. Now the big price crash comes, and the big players will buy back from the idiots who are crying about all the money they lost and toweling out.
That's how you take someone's money. Sell them expensive shit, then buy it back from them for half as much.
I constantly hear stories about how kids are taken away at 10 years old and live in a house with 14 year olds and wind up giving blowjobs or getting buttfucked every day. Foster care will stretch your ass and throat out.
I've learned to discount what my parents, and older people in general, tell me. They have a history of being wrong; when I learned to ignore their advice (well, I listen, process it, and reject almost all of it--sometimes something important is in there, but rarely), my life suddenly got better.
I avoided buying a house that would lock me into debt I can't handle, instead renting for 4 years; now I own a house I'll have paid off when I'm 30, and be completely out of debt and have no rent at that time. My constant argument with my superiors has pushed my career upwards, whereas I was always told to hide away and not create waves. Things change because of my influence; I even just went to a hearing to have a law changed, because I complained about the law being ridiculous, bringing no benefit to society, and doling out fines to people who can't afford them. After I testified, the committee reached a unanimous vote to amend the law to not apply in an appropriate subset of situations; all of Council is in agreement with this decision; it's now being argued with State legislature (State traffic law doesn't allow local ordinance to retract specific parking violations).
By contrast, the advice of my elders has always been to make immediate, desperate decisions on major purchases; to collect as much debt as I can, as long as the payments are less than my income so that it can be managed; and to do all the standard college, mortgage, and family stuff that everyone else does. All of that has turned out to be a waste of time and money.
I'm pretty sure my parents's experience and knowledge is all fucked up. I have vastly more life experience and knowledge than my parents now, because I've done so many things and learned so much. I've made mistakes--many of my own, most at the advice of my parents--but the cost has been low. I've failed a clearance, been unemployed, learned to cook; I've been a technical investor (and made 1% per day for a while, but it was too much work) and even headed an illegal gambling ring with a front company and business partners (the whole shebang: thousands of dollars of income, plus even more defrauding the government with misreported taxes as advised by my parents and their aged, experienced friends in the business). I've explored political theory pertaining to taxes, economics, and social policy, and taken a position similar to the Labor party of the early 1900s.
If you're over 12 and you're trying to take advantage of your parents's experiences and knowledge, you're about 90% likely fucking up your life.
A superficial understanding is often all somebody needs.
Consider an executive-level business strategist. Your Chief Information Officer is afraid to allow virtualized desktops over VPN because it goes across the Internet and could be listened in on or hijacked by hackers. Hackers might get into your connection somehow, put viruses on it or suck your credit cards. He knows encryption needs keys, but doesn't understand how you can get those keys by logging in with you username and password from anywhere: couldn't a hacker just pick up your password when you log in, or read your key when you send it to the server? What does your CTO tell your CIO?
Your CTO must explain key exchange to your CIO.
A key exchange protocol uses asymmetrical encryption. To set this up, the server first generates a large random number, from which it mathematically derives two other large random numbers called "Keys". Whenever either of these keys is used to encrypt something, only the opposite key can be used to decrypt it; we make one key Private and one Public. The Private key is kept a secret; the Public key is given to everyone.
With this setup, we can both send secret messages and prove who we are. We can send secret messages by using the Public key to encrypt the message, so only the holder of the Private key can read it; while the server can prove its identity by using the Private key to encrypt a message, as any message decrypted by the Public key must have been encrypted using the Private key known only to that server. A few simple diagrams makes this easy to digest; it's difficult when it's a blob of text or inane rambling.
So now we know it's possible to both prove who you are and to send a secret message.
Everybody has copies of well-known public keys for certificate authorities like Verisign. The Public key for an established server is signed by a Certificate Authority, essentially using the Private key to encrypt a message that says a particular Public key belongs to a particular person or organization, and thus any message signed by that Public key comes from them. Because the server's Public key is signed by an establihed and well-known Certificate Authority, the server can simply send the Public key to the client and then send a signed message that provably came from that server; substituting a different Public key in this process won't work, because it won't identify the server.
When you connect to the VPN, the client uses the Public key to send a secret message to the Server. This includes a randomly-generated encryption key. The Server then uses that encryption key for all further communication with the client. In this way, it's never possible for anyone to pretend to be the server or to read any message sent by the client, even when the client first establishes the connection and negotiates an encryption key.
Yeah, it's long, it's wordy, and it may involve moving some Cheerios around on a desk to make it perfectly clear. It's quite clear enough to show how to make a connection mathematically secret. The only obvious question is valid: what if someone finds out how to break the encryption without the key? Well, then your encryption is broken, and you never use that algorithm again. Typically, that happens in very small part--you can't break it, but you can narrow it down by 1%--at which point we immediately start replacing everything with new encryption algorithms that have been thoroughly attacked and show no weaknesses yet.
Do you think I'd need to explain the mathematics behind the Diffie-Helman differential elliptical curve key exchange protocol for an explanation like this to be useful? What about the mathematics of the SHA-256 hashing scheme, or the AES encryption algorithm, or CTR encoding? Would I need to explain how session hijacking actually works, or just handwave and say that an attacker could listen to a message or could capture it and forward an altered version? I don't think so. The CIO understands all he needs when he sees the function of key exchange protocols.
The only thing of any importance here is their ability to pay attention without their mind wandering.
It's quite easy to identify things by names. People are aware that houses have street numbers, streets, zipcodes, cities, and states; yet they call them "SuperFresh" or "Your mom's house". A routed subnet is like a zipcode, and the router is like the post office. You don't need to unload a hell of numbers on people; even when you do, it's easy to show that something is chunked out (e.g. on a/24 network, 192.168.50 is the network address, and the.1 on the end is the node in that subnet).
By the by, treating networking like either accounting or hierarchical decomposition (e.g. a Work Breakdown Structure's numbering system is 1., 1.1, 1.1.1, etc., same form as an outline) will induce lots of pain. You're working with arbitrary yet fixed-size units, so you won't have a/23 next to a/17 in the same address space. Accounting doesn't work that way (it's blocked out in chunks which each have meaning); and hierarchical decomposition used by project managers uses delineated fields, which can be arbitrary at all levels and laterally (whereas the periods in IP addresses are meaningless).
This isn't really a mystical concept. People can learn.
The level of understanding becomes apparent as the conversation continues. The questions asked and the body language expressed reveal how well a person is absorbing the material being explained. Unless you're completely retarded, you can probably tell when you're losing someone in the hell of jargon.
Not so obvious when someone asks why we don't just hand out printed material instead of explaining things face-to-face when we want to get people up-to-speed in a topic quickly and reliably.
Because you need to be obscenely verbose, or you need to teach people how to learn. People aren't taught to learn, so we can't reliably create a document that follows a fast-uptake model. We can teach any individual or small group something by interacting with them--by talking to them, answering their questions, and watching their reactions to see when we're losing them--and we can write books which will teach nearly anyone anything, but we can't write books that will teach all individuals in the same short time.
It's faster, easier, and more reliable to explain things to people face-to-face, interactively.
An accountant has no frame of reference for this shit. Education doesn't magically make you understand things; you have to have something to attach it to. Accountants are not mathematicians and do not have any theoretical basis to understand the security concepts behind any form of encryption (plaintext and ciphertext analysis, key exchange protocols, etc.) or routing protocols.
What education do you think an accountant has which makes it easier for them to understand that, for example, a computer doesn't really use the IP address of the default gateway, but rather just sends a message out on the local segment asking what MAC address the interface using that IP address has, and then puts that MAC address on packets addressed to things outside of the network? That's how routing works. Computer 192.168.150.28 is not on 192.168.100.0/24, so 192.168.100.30 writes a packet to 192.168.150.28 and puts the MAC for the router on it. The router receives the packet, looks at the IP, says, "That's not me," and checks its routes to see where to send it. Hijacking a MAC involves just spamming out ARP responses telling the local segment that your MAC is associated with the router's IP, so those packets are sent to you--then you forward them on with the router's MAC.
You can go over this slowly with someone--anyone--and catch where they're struggling, and work through it with them. It's universally easy, if you're patient. It works well on small groups; less well on large groups, but well enough that entire books are written on technical subjects to teach the uninitiated to be skilled professionals. Many of us learned computer programming from books. Dealing with 12 people face-to-face is easier: you can go slowly, and pause for questions when someone seems confused.
It's not that hard to explain this shit to people. I explain asymmetric encryption and routing to accountants all the time; it just takes some 20-30 minutes. Knowledge transfers surprisingly quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the conclusion was that the headline is using hyphens incorrectly. It should read: "Police-nation wide-use, wall-penetrating radars to peer into homes."
At one time, they were in the business of teaching grammar.
Why would you use any of Autonomy's products? I can't even tell what it does!
Management estimates, not opinions. Management estimates have a risk attached to them, and it can be a really solid risk: you can have a 1% chance of hitting it big, or a 95% chance of taking market dominance; and you can predict this quite easily, if you know what you're doing.
In this case, HP and Oracle assert that they were looking at made-up bullshit, not management estimates: Autonomy was throwing out this ideal situation that had near-0% likelihood of occurring, and claiming it as the high-probability outcome.
Risk computations aren't opinions; they're solid, concrete, mathematical facts.
You pretty much nailed why I don't have $25 million dollars right now: up at 4am, check foreign markets, check news, analyze stock graphs, analyze off-hours trading patterns, make predictions, place orders, place stop losses, check market all day, then spend the evening obsessing over the market and searching through sectors, funds, and individual stocks for good opportunities was a suicide mission. I'd have scaled one of the towers on Wall Street and jumped from the top before I got 2 years in.
I'll be out of debt soon. I don't need millions of dollars; I'll be filthy fucking rich when I have no debt. Those traders can all go suck cocks.
Uh, negative on that, Jim. I used to make 1% per day in the stock market; I buy at good buy times and sell at good sell times. I currently don't trade because I don't care to lose money; if I'm not playing to win, I'm playing to fund someone else's golden toilet seat.
I know people whose accounts were halved and worse, and haven't recovered. Even if I invest in SCHD and JNK, I'll have to keep appraised of the market; it could easily go south, and then I'll have to just hold onto it--but it's easy for things to crash down and never recover, which is what happened to IndyMac Bancorp, THM, and a few others. Some of that money just went away.
This image tells a grand story: if you bought in at 1929, you were fucked; 1932, you were rich. 2000 was a bad year; 2003 was great. The DOW is nearly level with 2008. Both the DOW and S&P are showing extreme volatility; the line on the left, followed to the bottom of the second drop, is where the S&P should end up.
Buying in now is buying into a volatile market. Not great unless you have good reason to buy.
You had good sense on investment. I was being told to buy in 2008, right before the bust, on a house I wouldn't be able to sell now because it's worth $50k less. I bought a house that I could pay off quick; in 2016, I'll have some $2200/mo less of expenses, which means I could go out and buy a brand-new Cintiq 2700QHD Touch every month and still have near $1000 left to spend, after paying all my bills.
I'll just max out my 401(K) and use that as a leverage source. When I take loans, it'll be at low rates, paying interest to myself.
My parents's reasoning was never sound in any context. They're the "I saw it on TV, Obama is putting us in concentration camps, we need to stock up on guns now" type.
Imagine a person says there's a button inside that says "Push for Service", and you go there, and you find no button; or they tell you it electrocutes people, but you have no evidence of whether or not this is true.
I've recognized that my parents's experiences are useless and largely discount them. They're as useful as dogma out of a random religious text or 1700s medical journal about how leeches solve all your problems. I've gained nothing from my parents's guidance.
You are in effect, claiming I'm taking advantage of my parents's experiences by ignoring my parents's experiences, which has the same effect as not being exposed to my parents at all. This is like saying I'm taking advantage of a suitcase full of money by walking past it (more like counterfeit money that will get you thrown in jail if you try to spend it).
The increased yearly capacity in US oil production since Bush's second term is, itself, bigger than the yearly capacity of all OPEC countries combined. The Keystone XL pipeline will vastly scale that up, dwarfing OPEC; but Keystone is now questionable, since oil needs to cost at least $80-$90/barrel for it to be profitable.
I just buy "Green" electricity. By contract, my energy supplier must produce at minimum as much solar energy as has been bought from them. If they have a 10MW solar installation and sell 8MW to customers, they're fine (the utilities buy the other 2MW off them as extra power); if they sell 12MW to customers, they need to buy 2MW more solar generation capacity.
I want a Solar-Wind-Geothermal-Nuclear option, but can't get it. Anything but the 13GW coal plant here (we have 11 coal power plants within 20 miles of my house, one of which is over 13,000 megawatts output).
Yeah but that's what happened. Everyone big in oil sold off their oil. 401(k) funds bought into it. Individual retail investors saw the price dip and, thinking they're savvy day traders, bought in. Now the big price crash comes, and the big players will buy back from the idiots who are crying about all the money they lost and toweling out.
That's how you take someone's money. Sell them expensive shit, then buy it back from them for half as much.
Why? I was never escorted.
I constantly hear stories about how kids are taken away at 10 years old and live in a house with 14 year olds and wind up giving blowjobs or getting buttfucked every day. Foster care will stretch your ass and throat out.
I've learned to discount what my parents, and older people in general, tell me. They have a history of being wrong; when I learned to ignore their advice (well, I listen, process it, and reject almost all of it--sometimes something important is in there, but rarely), my life suddenly got better.
I avoided buying a house that would lock me into debt I can't handle, instead renting for 4 years; now I own a house I'll have paid off when I'm 30, and be completely out of debt and have no rent at that time. My constant argument with my superiors has pushed my career upwards, whereas I was always told to hide away and not create waves. Things change because of my influence; I even just went to a hearing to have a law changed, because I complained about the law being ridiculous, bringing no benefit to society, and doling out fines to people who can't afford them. After I testified, the committee reached a unanimous vote to amend the law to not apply in an appropriate subset of situations; all of Council is in agreement with this decision; it's now being argued with State legislature (State traffic law doesn't allow local ordinance to retract specific parking violations).
By contrast, the advice of my elders has always been to make immediate, desperate decisions on major purchases; to collect as much debt as I can, as long as the payments are less than my income so that it can be managed; and to do all the standard college, mortgage, and family stuff that everyone else does. All of that has turned out to be a waste of time and money.
I'm pretty sure my parents's experience and knowledge is all fucked up. I have vastly more life experience and knowledge than my parents now, because I've done so many things and learned so much. I've made mistakes--many of my own, most at the advice of my parents--but the cost has been low. I've failed a clearance, been unemployed, learned to cook; I've been a technical investor (and made 1% per day for a while, but it was too much work) and even headed an illegal gambling ring with a front company and business partners (the whole shebang: thousands of dollars of income, plus even more defrauding the government with misreported taxes as advised by my parents and their aged, experienced friends in the business). I've explored political theory pertaining to taxes, economics, and social policy, and taken a position similar to the Labor party of the early 1900s.
If you're over 12 and you're trying to take advantage of your parents's experiences and knowledge, you're about 90% likely fucking up your life.
So, they physically threatened his family? What do you do if someone tries to abduct your children?
A superficial understanding is often all somebody needs.
Consider an executive-level business strategist. Your Chief Information Officer is afraid to allow virtualized desktops over VPN because it goes across the Internet and could be listened in on or hijacked by hackers. Hackers might get into your connection somehow, put viruses on it or suck your credit cards. He knows encryption needs keys, but doesn't understand how you can get those keys by logging in with you username and password from anywhere: couldn't a hacker just pick up your password when you log in, or read your key when you send it to the server? What does your CTO tell your CIO?
Your CTO must explain key exchange to your CIO.
A key exchange protocol uses asymmetrical encryption. To set this up, the server first generates a large random number, from which it mathematically derives two other large random numbers called "Keys". Whenever either of these keys is used to encrypt something, only the opposite key can be used to decrypt it; we make one key Private and one Public. The Private key is kept a secret; the Public key is given to everyone.
With this setup, we can both send secret messages and prove who we are. We can send secret messages by using the Public key to encrypt the message, so only the holder of the Private key can read it; while the server can prove its identity by using the Private key to encrypt a message, as any message decrypted by the Public key must have been encrypted using the Private key known only to that server. A few simple diagrams makes this easy to digest; it's difficult when it's a blob of text or inane rambling.
So now we know it's possible to both prove who you are and to send a secret message.
Everybody has copies of well-known public keys for certificate authorities like Verisign. The Public key for an established server is signed by a Certificate Authority, essentially using the Private key to encrypt a message that says a particular Public key belongs to a particular person or organization, and thus any message signed by that Public key comes from them. Because the server's Public key is signed by an establihed and well-known Certificate Authority, the server can simply send the Public key to the client and then send a signed message that provably came from that server; substituting a different Public key in this process won't work, because it won't identify the server.
When you connect to the VPN, the client uses the Public key to send a secret message to the Server. This includes a randomly-generated encryption key. The Server then uses that encryption key for all further communication with the client. In this way, it's never possible for anyone to pretend to be the server or to read any message sent by the client, even when the client first establishes the connection and negotiates an encryption key.
Yeah, it's long, it's wordy, and it may involve moving some Cheerios around on a desk to make it perfectly clear. It's quite clear enough to show how to make a connection mathematically secret. The only obvious question is valid: what if someone finds out how to break the encryption without the key? Well, then your encryption is broken, and you never use that algorithm again. Typically, that happens in very small part--you can't break it, but you can narrow it down by 1%--at which point we immediately start replacing everything with new encryption algorithms that have been thoroughly attacked and show no weaknesses yet.
Do you think I'd need to explain the mathematics behind the Diffie-Helman differential elliptical curve key exchange protocol for an explanation like this to be useful? What about the mathematics of the SHA-256 hashing scheme, or the AES encryption algorithm, or CTR encoding? Would I need to explain how session hijacking actually works, or just handwave and say that an attacker could listen to a message or could capture it and forward an altered version? I don't think so. The CIO understands all he needs when he sees the function of key exchange protocols.
My point is it's a concept that can be explained slowly, clearly, and even visually. You could use Poptarts and licorice rope to make a diagram.
Well it's a good thing I'm not explaining complex mathematical systems, but rather simple procedural systems.
The only thing of any importance here is their ability to pay attention without their mind wandering.
It's quite easy to identify things by names. People are aware that houses have street numbers, streets, zipcodes, cities, and states; yet they call them "SuperFresh" or "Your mom's house". A routed subnet is like a zipcode, and the router is like the post office. You don't need to unload a hell of numbers on people; even when you do, it's easy to show that something is chunked out (e.g. on a /24 network, 192.168.50 is the network address, and the .1 on the end is the node in that subnet).
By the by, treating networking like either accounting or hierarchical decomposition (e.g. a Work Breakdown Structure's numbering system is 1., 1.1, 1.1.1, etc., same form as an outline) will induce lots of pain. You're working with arbitrary yet fixed-size units, so you won't have a /23 next to a /17 in the same address space. Accounting doesn't work that way (it's blocked out in chunks which each have meaning); and hierarchical decomposition used by project managers uses delineated fields, which can be arbitrary at all levels and laterally (whereas the periods in IP addresses are meaningless).
This isn't really a mystical concept. People can learn.
The level of understanding becomes apparent as the conversation continues. The questions asked and the body language expressed reveal how well a person is absorbing the material being explained. Unless you're completely retarded, you can probably tell when you're losing someone in the hell of jargon.
Not so obvious when someone asks why we don't just hand out printed material instead of explaining things face-to-face when we want to get people up-to-speed in a topic quickly and reliably.
Because you need to be obscenely verbose, or you need to teach people how to learn. People aren't taught to learn, so we can't reliably create a document that follows a fast-uptake model. We can teach any individual or small group something by interacting with them--by talking to them, answering their questions, and watching their reactions to see when we're losing them--and we can write books which will teach nearly anyone anything, but we can't write books that will teach all individuals in the same short time.
It's faster, easier, and more reliable to explain things to people face-to-face, interactively.
An accountant has no frame of reference for this shit. Education doesn't magically make you understand things; you have to have something to attach it to. Accountants are not mathematicians and do not have any theoretical basis to understand the security concepts behind any form of encryption (plaintext and ciphertext analysis, key exchange protocols, etc.) or routing protocols.
What education do you think an accountant has which makes it easier for them to understand that, for example, a computer doesn't really use the IP address of the default gateway, but rather just sends a message out on the local segment asking what MAC address the interface using that IP address has, and then puts that MAC address on packets addressed to things outside of the network? That's how routing works. Computer 192.168.150.28 is not on 192.168.100.0/24, so 192.168.100.30 writes a packet to 192.168.150.28 and puts the MAC for the router on it. The router receives the packet, looks at the IP, says, "That's not me," and checks its routes to see where to send it. Hijacking a MAC involves just spamming out ARP responses telling the local segment that your MAC is associated with the router's IP, so those packets are sent to you--then you forward them on with the router's MAC.
You can go over this slowly with someone--anyone--and catch where they're struggling, and work through it with them. It's universally easy, if you're patient. It works well on small groups; less well on large groups, but well enough that entire books are written on technical subjects to teach the uninitiated to be skilled professionals. Many of us learned computer programming from books. Dealing with 12 people face-to-face is easier: you can go slowly, and pause for questions when someone seems confused.
It's not that hard to explain this shit to people. I explain asymmetric encryption and routing to accountants all the time; it just takes some 20-30 minutes. Knowledge transfers surprisingly quickly.