While it involves encryption and passwords, the basic premise is nothing new. There needs to be perhaps a look at the powers of the court in the US in regards to the whole "Contempt of Court" charge.
Many years ago there was a man who was getting divorced from his wife. During the proceedings his assets were being split up and half or whatever value was being given to the wife. The Wife accused that he husband had secret offshore bank accounts that contained millions. The Husband said he did not or perhaps even pled the 5th, or simply refused to divulge the information (I forget which). The judge found him in "Contempt of Court" and sentenced him to jail until such time as he released the information on his offshore bank accounts. He was in jail for many *years*, perhaps is still in jail.
There are a couple things wrong with that. First is a sentence with no end, which is a problem. Second is being forced or "compelled" by court to release information he may not have. Considering the guy was or is in jail for years, either he doesn't have the information to release (or he does and it is a ton of money, and/or he really hates his wife, or possibly by doing so perhaps would convict himself of another crime if the money was illegal in some way, hence the 5th usage perhaps).
At any rate the whole encryption/password thing is the technological component, but the basic idea predates that by quite a bit.
I didn't really learn about "projections" in high school I don't think, or not that I remember anyway. It became very clear when I went to University for GIS however. Professionally I recall using Lambert conformal conic for a lot of things. However like any projection it really depends on what you are using it for and at what scale. Different projections work better for what and where you are using it for. As you say, none are going to be perfect, that is just the nature of the beast. What is good about GIS VS a paper map on the wall is that they can more less be changed at will now. It used to more of a PITA sometime ago, but most software does things automatically now for you. In addition in recent times we have things like Google Earth and Maps, none of which used to be around 20 years ago...
In a school type situation I see no reason why it should be bounded by a "paper map on a wall" these days, and in fact I bet it would blow a lot students minds playing around at changing projections and seeing what the results are. As you say, these things were not nefarious in nature, only the focus of what they show may have been important to the author which might not be all that relevant depending on what you are using it for. Might also be a subject lesson on perception and not to believe everything you see, or at least to think critically about it...
I forget the Doc I watched, but it was all about the for profit university scams in the US. Basically the next big housing crisis. There is a whole industry of "education" gaming the student loan system in the US for fun and profit. It is so overt one has to wonder why nothing has been done, then you consider how many Billions (indeed Trillions) are at stake to understand how in the broken US political system the status quo is just fine. The loans are guaranteed by government, and are not even disposed of through bankruptcy. It is a ticket to generate free money off the backs of the poor and uneducated (literally). Heck even the ads for these school are borderline profiling to the point they are hard to watch. It is just another debt for profit scheme where a wealthy few destroy the lives of many. The reason the cost keeps going up is the whole whatever the market will take, which being artificially inflated just keeps going up.
Eventually the bottom will fall out of it all, it is just a matter of when, and what the impacts will be. Sooner or later folks with fake degrees and no job will just default on loans (regardless of them not going away or not). Folks won't be able to afford the costs even with loans. Folks will figure out that getting that piece of paper doesn't necessarily translate into any type of good employment. Once all that kicks in, some serious economic stuff is going to happen nationally. About the only thing slowing it down is the fact that the loans don't go away, so continued payment even a bit, keeps it rolling along. However as the saying goes you can't get blood from a stone.
This is what essentially birthed the whole OC enthusiast market, As when the lower clocked model became more popular and sold more they couldn't keep up with demand, and the chips all basically costing them they same, they simply took perfectly good chips that could pass the higher test, but down clocked them anyway for sale. People found out, and starting Over clocking them. I recall people trying to get chips with certain serial numbers so you could tell what batch they came from and what plant they were made in as a tell as to if you had a better chance at a "good" one or not.
Over the years this seems much less now, and pretty much everything you get is going to more less be about the same. Indeed the last CPU I bought was a "K" variant that was left purposefully unlocked for that express purpose. Though I must say it kind of takes a bit of the shine out of it...
I think I actually still have about 6 or 8 of the 66 and 100 Mhz Celerons that I bought as a lot for a dual cpu (back when that was two physical processors) rig I made on an Abit BP6 (with pretty golden orbs coolers)... I believe it dies how it lived, playing Warcraft 2 or 3 or possibly Enemy Territory... damn that was a great game...
You're right. I didn't notice the funky numbers. This study, and the example they use is total BS, or at least not well done.
I was about to post about how I got into my field, and how it was not easy, and that many look at short term gains over long term advantage, but it is all moot really.
First of all you are right in a big chunk of the stats they use are utterly irrelevant to the workforce numbers in relation to college degrees. Anyway as you say between the ages of 15-18 won't have one. Even at 20-21 is questionable. I was 18 when I went to school, did a 4 year degree at university and a 1 year certification at college, meaning I hit the workforce May 1 after just turning 23 years old two months earlier.
The example used was a 21 year old with an engineering degree? So he took at best a 3 year degree (and I know of no engineering degrees that are 3 years, and I looked into engineering at Waterloo once upon a time) and is unhappy with prospects?
Your new grads that are not coming out of some community college program are going to be 22-24 years old depending on degree. Also there are a number of degrees that are pretty much useless unless you also got your Masters or Phd (you know who you are). So if you went to school and got a History or political science degree, well good for you, but I know of no one that does that now. Same for economics, though I know a couple who went on to get their CA, but you have to go and *do* that. Even high science, the problem is demand, in that there are only so many placements for someone that has a degree in high particle physics or whatever... Again many use their BA to go onto Law, or their BSc to go onto to Med, but again being disappointed with your useless degree not giving you a job in your "field" is a bit silly. Heck I know fellow grads that have since gone back and gotten teaching degrees or whatever as either their primary degree wasn't working out for them job wise or they simply didn't enjoy it and wanted to do something else. The teacher example is now a Vice Principle and is doing a heck of a lot better than me probably!
Also when I went into school for my Computer Science degree it was at the height of what we now know as the Dot Com Bubble, and when I graduated it was just *after* that bubble burst... So you can imagine how my prospects changed in a very short period of time, so current grads can suck it.
Take a job, any job in your field and get some experience. Use that to get something slightly better, repeat over several years. Eventually you will be in a better position literally and figuratively. I started at minimum wage, and did contracts for years, even some freelance consulting. A degree doesn't get you a job, it qualifies you an interview maybe for a chance of gaining some experience. Having more experience and knowledge gets you the "job".
After reading the article (unslashdotlike I know), I really only have 3 questions...
1) Didn't really explain what a magnetic dipole was, nor how one might be constructed or what it might take to do so at the scale involved. All of those things seem kinda important.
2) As much as I can fathom, it at least involves a) magnets, and b) electricity. At the scale required, I'll go out on a limb and say really ridiculously big/strong magnets and a lot of power. Even if we concede that we're capable of building such things as super powerful magnets, and large independent power sources, the question I would have is how would you propose to get that out of our atmosphere? We've put some radiological power sources in space in the past, however I think even these had outputs of like 450W which isn't exactly stellar (pardon pun)... However the big thing would be unless said magnets were more less totally non-active unless power is applied, how the heck would those interact well with anything as complex as a rocket launch? I'm guessing not well.
3) Time. It mentions that it took 500 million years for the atmosphere to blow away, however it didn't really indicate how long it might take for any kind of change due to a magnetic field. We have trouble building things that last more than 10 years, never mind some small fraction of the cosmic time previously indicated...
This has been around for a very long time and is nothing new. I agree, it is ridiculous and unrealistic, but it is what it is. There are a number of reasons why I believe it is done.
Firstly likely the person that put together test doesn't know a snippet of code from his elbow to start with. That could be the Manager, or the folks from HR. Could be they just stole the method from somewhere else to use. Secondly is the same reason why they want someone with 20 years of coding experience with 10 different specific languages for an entry level job. Part of this again could be the person who wrote the job description doesn't know what any of those things are really, only that they are important and someone told them they were used somewhere in the organization. The other somewhat unreasonable expectation is that the person being hired is able to literally walk out of the interview and sit down at a desk and start coding on a particular established project...
Many many moons again I remember I had a particularly bad C programming "professor". His class was a joke. I'd already taken C at a higher level at a different school, but was required to take it again. His overheads (yes this was a million years ago) were filled with errors and he was a horrible teacher. He had a Phd I believe, I'm not sure if it was really related or not. In any case his final exam worth 60% of the grade consisted of some paper, a pencil and several problems he wanted solved using perfect code. His grading consisted of a couple red "X's" and a seemingly random percentage as your grade. I complained, and asked him to explain to me exactly what was wrong with specific sections, to which he refused. I thought about going to the head of the department, when I leaned he was the head of the department. I let it go and moved on with my life (I passed the course anyway, I had a 97% going into the exam anyway, it was the principle of the thing).
Several years after that (still about 100,000 years ago) I applied for a job, which admittedly was a bit out of my pay grade at the time in hindsight, however either the other applicants were few or horrible as I won an interview. There were a bunch of components to the interview, but one of them was the technical test. Again, like above you're sitting in a room with a #2 pencil and a bunch of paper, and several questions and the ask is for actual code. At this point I *had* at least done some contracts which did require coding, however I always have my reference material, the internet, and most importantly all my previous code I've written in the past which has been leveraged and re-leveraged a million times over, "stealing" this or that sections of code I've already written that would work with minor modifications.
I do very little coding these days. However what little I do people are usually impressed I can pull something out so quickly, which is almost entirely because I've probably already written something similar at some point in the past and all I have to do is find it, modify it and bam! Done, Whenever I think about backing up my work computer the first thing I think about it the tiny amount of space occupied by my library of code. Could I do it from scratch, sure it would just take me a lot longer... Could I write it using a pencil and paper and have it compile without issue and work properly on the first pass? Probably not.
Anyway it is a stupid method, but it's been around forever and I don't see it going anywhere. Really they should let you use whatever you want, if you have the resources to get to the eventual answer who cares. Hell even if you give it to someone else to do, at least you have the networking skills to know people who know how to do it!:p
Considering Samsung's history, this should be hardly be surprising. Though presidential involvement is a bit, at least in the regard that anything was done about it. Just off the top of my head I can think of two Samsung scandals in the recent past about price fixing and collusion once for memory chips, and another time for LCD's...
An analogy I like to use is that of applications themselves. In trying to modernize a legacy application the estimated price tag came back at about 1 million bucks. Management balked at that saying we have 30 applications we support it isn't feasible to spend 30 million (even if staggered over time apparently) to modernize all our applications! Rather management gets sold on the idea of building 1 mega application that will do the work of 30. The idea being is that economies of scale and leveraging existing systems will make the super system cheaper than building 30 individual ones.
From experience, while not a totally bad idea, but what gets forgotten is that planning and the implementing 30 times the amount of complexity has it's own cost associated with it. While integration is great in most cases, and desirable it also comes with more risk in dependencies and implementation costs due to the requirement of parallel development. So if you change a shared table for one application, what impact will that have on the other 29? If that table does have impact, you just took out 29 applications. There can also be situations where it will stagnate development because it is so hard to change anything in the model that is important.
At any rate, these unified structures, while the have benefits, also have their own challenges. In this case with an IT organization, you would also get the usual internal political power struggles as well I would imagine. Also "5 years" isn't a long time really when looking at cycles, a lot of that waste could be associated with growing pains and sorting out the whole transformation which I'm sure took a few years before it was really doing anything very well.
That was my concern buried in the article. The fact that these planets because they orbit so close to their star are likely tidal locked. Meaning one side all sun, the other none. Now I can get behind the whole idea that it wouldn't totally be an block to life, I'd even go so far to say in such occurrences perhaps a "ring" of life when light and temp are moderate around the border...
However what I am curious about is the magnetic field. From my understanding, a planets magnetic field is largely produced by the rotational action of a molten core. What I am not sure of is if that core would rotate in a planet that isn't itself rotating. Being tidal locked, they would not be, or would they be, just only in sync with the orbit of the sun, and if so is that orbit fast enough (though apparently they are pretty fast) to generate a rotational molten core? As without it, no magnetic field, and without that field the likelihood of life likely drops pretty precipitously.
I love how everyone is using these to blame jobs etc...
Consider.
It is the first generation (I being in the one previous to that) that has never been more connected VIA the internet and various other pieces of technology than ever before. So people are surprised in a 6% change in physical movement? There is much less need for movement so there is less.
Second, is that the trend for sometime has been more and more urbanization. If you already live in an urban center there is also much less need for movement.
Anyway I am sure jobs, and economy factors into it as well, but it is far from the whole story.
I always find it fascinating when modern science and ancient history collide. There have been a number of stories like this over the years as technology advances. It hits me in both my science and technology spot as well as being a fan of ancient history and trying to piece together things from so long ago.
That said when I read it I some how saw some bearded ancient historian crying in the corner as scientists take irreplaceable artifacts of the past, smash them, and grind up the remains for magnetic analysis. I don't *know* how they actually did it, but that's the image in my head....:)
Firstly it should be pointed out that all the data that they have used in the past about how Canada is a haven for copyright infringement has been disproved. Multiple times. The numbers they use are largely made up, and have no real basis in reality. So them coming out again, with more of the same BS should be rightly ignored.
2) REP
As the first point alludes, their reputation for bending "facts" as it suits them really isn't doing their cause or reputation any favors. In addition, in Canada they once had an ally in the Conservative party, who tasked a Minister to draft a set of laws to curtail copyright infringement in Canada. However, once release it became very transparent, and easily discoverable, that those laws were drafted by the RIAA/MPAA, verbatim. Word for word. It was a bit of irony that the laws themselves might be considered plagiarism. Once this became clear, it was all swept away, and interfering in a sovereign nations law creation process isn't going to win over a lot of fans (or voters to whom politicians might care about).
3) Laws
Just because the US legal system is in shambles, doesn't mean Canada's have to be also. We have stronger privacy laws in Canada, and I think most people of all political stripes are proud of that fact. Considering how the RIAA/MPAA does an end run around the US legal system by suing "John Doe's" by IP address, then having the court held in some crazy place like East Texas where companies vie for citizens appeal, who always rule in favor of these creeps who force the release of personal information, then they drop all of those cases, and re-try them using said personal information in other states of residence seems more than a bit absurd.
4) ISOHUNT
Finally, all that said, Canada has taken real action in the protection of copyright infringement. About the only "haven" that I was ever aware of was ISOHUNT (not including those imported Asian physical CAM DVD's which you can find someplace which are horrible, and really small fry). For whatever reason the guy who ran it had it located in BC. He fought the legal battle against the government for a long time (10 years maybe?), but eventually lost and was forced to shut down. Later it re-opened again, now being hosted in whoknowswhereistan like all the rest of the sites out there, but that is hardly Canada's fault.
That is assuming he did it uniformly over a 20 year period, which is possible, but unlikely.
You would think they would have not only network but physical safeguards in place to prevent this. I see this as more damning of the NSA security procedure than anything else. Regardless of how you slice it, it is a massive amount of data to be able to go "unnoticed" for 20 years!
"Unnamed U.S. officials told the Washington Post this week that Martin allegedly took more than 75 percent of the hacking tools belonging to the NSA's tailored access operations, the agency's elite hacking unit."
Took? They don't have it anymore? Unnamed US officials could have better used the term "copied" I think (though not totally wrong I suppose).
Somehow I finished that sentence with, When reached for comment Martin said "the other 25% of the hacking tools were rubbish!":p
I expect apart from the symbolic nature of the arrests they will have a pretty hard time actually getting any convictions.
Unlike similar things in the past, where things were sold to people to illegally access cable/satellite networks without paying fees, the boxes actually don't do a whole lot but provide hardware. They didn't write the software, nor host the access to the "illegal" content, so I am not sure what they will be convicted with. There is probably a provision about "enabling" activity, but at a certain point that would mean going after the TV makers for being able to play the content, the utilities for allowing said content to "illegaly" flow over their infrastructure, etc... There is a reason why things like Kodi boxes are "gray" market, I'd expect a lot of law would need to be interpreted and clarified before any actual convictions to take place. Perhaps this is the first salvo by the industry to try to establish precedent for future actions, though it very well could backfire on them. Though no doubt something like this will be tried in some favorable Texas court as they like to do in the weird US Judaical system.
"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Reading the article about the Soviet experience with Venus there seemed a pretty heavy reliance on "Pyrotechnic charges"...
Soviet Project Manager: "Vere having a problem with abc operating under extreme pressure..." Soviet Engineer "Have we blown it up yet? Ve could try blowing it up first..."
Also kinda surprised that things like pyrotechnic charges wouldn't accidentally go off under heat/pressure/corrosion.
As I recall when the FBI demanded a website hand over their encryption keys the owner printed it in binary on something like 10,000 pieces of paper... I believe he got in some trouble for that.
However if the FBI is going to only allow FOI requests by fax, well it will certainly open themselves up for some serious abuse when others do likewise and when questioned on it simply point to the FBI itself and say that it seems to be an excepted method for them...
Like like Red said in Shawshank Redemption some times people get Institutionalized...
It isn't so much a technical issue, but one of momentum, which is hard to change in anything but over a long time. Like MS, Oracle has been around and dominate for a very long time. Which means their install base is large. Which means a lot of things use it. Which means a lot of people are trained in it and familiar with it.
The difficulty is that IT shops have to maintain and support applications and databases. having to support more than one is costly. porting existing ones is costly. Training or hiring new staff is costly, etc...
So if you are a new organization, then sure you likely have the flexibility to easily review and select whatever fits your needs. However if you are an existing organization, which most are, and most of your infrastructure is already Oracle, well that is a pretty hard decision for an IT head to try and reverse and change.
However licencing things like this do take a toll, and you will find that organizations start to try to experiment supporting more than one, and expand upon it (we've been dabbling with MS SQL for a number of years now). It is easier to propose to executive management the additional expense and overhead when you can show the increase in existing licencing costs. Over time if Oracle isn't careful will find itself in trouble. However that is likely not anytime soon, so for now, the bean counters just count more beans.
The sad thing really is that statement seems to be a valid business strategy these days, not even remotely limited to Oracle. The term "Lock In" comes to mind. Apple is another great example.
Slashdot Mirror
While it involves encryption and passwords, the basic premise is nothing new. There needs to be perhaps a look at the powers of the court in the US in regards to the whole "Contempt of Court" charge.
Many years ago there was a man who was getting divorced from his wife. During the proceedings his assets were being split up and half or whatever value was being given to the wife. The Wife accused that he husband had secret offshore bank accounts that contained millions. The Husband said he did not or perhaps even pled the 5th, or simply refused to divulge the information (I forget which). The judge found him in "Contempt of Court" and sentenced him to jail until such time as he released the information on his offshore bank accounts. He was in jail for many *years*, perhaps is still in jail.
There are a couple things wrong with that. First is a sentence with no end, which is a problem. Second is being forced or "compelled" by court to release information he may not have. Considering the guy was or is in jail for years, either he doesn't have the information to release (or he does and it is a ton of money, and/or he really hates his wife, or possibly by doing so perhaps would convict himself of another crime if the money was illegal in some way, hence the 5th usage perhaps).
At any rate the whole encryption/password thing is the technological component, but the basic idea predates that by quite a bit.
I didn't really learn about "projections" in high school I don't think, or not that I remember anyway. It became very clear when I went to University for GIS however. Professionally I recall using Lambert conformal conic for a lot of things. However like any projection it really depends on what you are using it for and at what scale. Different projections work better for what and where you are using it for. As you say, none are going to be perfect, that is just the nature of the beast. What is good about GIS VS a paper map on the wall is that they can more less be changed at will now. It used to more of a PITA sometime ago, but most software does things automatically now for you. In addition in recent times we have things like Google Earth and Maps, none of which used to be around 20 years ago...
In a school type situation I see no reason why it should be bounded by a "paper map on a wall" these days, and in fact I bet it would blow a lot students minds playing around at changing projections and seeing what the results are. As you say, these things were not nefarious in nature, only the focus of what they show may have been important to the author which might not be all that relevant depending on what you are using it for. Might also be a subject lesson on perception and not to believe everything you see, or at least to think critically about it...
I forget the Doc I watched, but it was all about the for profit university scams in the US. Basically the next big housing crisis. There is a whole industry of "education" gaming the student loan system in the US for fun and profit. It is so overt one has to wonder why nothing has been done, then you consider how many Billions (indeed Trillions) are at stake to understand how in the broken US political system the status quo is just fine. The loans are guaranteed by government, and are not even disposed of through bankruptcy. It is a ticket to generate free money off the backs of the poor and uneducated (literally). Heck even the ads for these school are borderline profiling to the point they are hard to watch. It is just another debt for profit scheme where a wealthy few destroy the lives of many. The reason the cost keeps going up is the whole whatever the market will take, which being artificially inflated just keeps going up.
Eventually the bottom will fall out of it all, it is just a matter of when, and what the impacts will be. Sooner or later folks with fake degrees and no job will just default on loans (regardless of them not going away or not). Folks won't be able to afford the costs even with loans. Folks will figure out that getting that piece of paper doesn't necessarily translate into any type of good employment. Once all that kicks in, some serious economic stuff is going to happen nationally. About the only thing slowing it down is the fact that the loans don't go away, so continued payment even a bit, keeps it rolling along. However as the saying goes you can't get blood from a stone.
Dammit you beat me to it! :p
This is what essentially birthed the whole OC enthusiast market, As when the lower clocked model became more popular and sold more they couldn't keep up with demand, and the chips all basically costing them they same, they simply took perfectly good chips that could pass the higher test, but down clocked them anyway for sale. People found out, and starting Over clocking them. I recall people trying to get chips with certain serial numbers so you could tell what batch they came from and what plant they were made in as a tell as to if you had a better chance at a "good" one or not.
Over the years this seems much less now, and pretty much everything you get is going to more less be about the same. Indeed the last CPU I bought was a "K" variant that was left purposefully unlocked for that express purpose. Though I must say it kind of takes a bit of the shine out of it...
I think I actually still have about 6 or 8 of the 66 and 100 Mhz Celerons that I bought as a lot for a dual cpu (back when that was two physical processors) rig I made on an Abit BP6 (with pretty golden orbs coolers)... I believe it dies how it lived, playing Warcraft 2 or 3 or possibly Enemy Territory... damn that was a great game...
I recently finished watching the Shannara Chronicles on MTV. What's more surprising is apparently season two is coming this summer...
Reminded me of a bit of Trivia about Sherlock Holmes:
http://www.guinnessworldrecord...
Also apparently there are 272 films about Dracula. Blah Blah Blah! :)
You're right. I didn't notice the funky numbers. This study, and the example they use is total BS, or at least not well done.
I was about to post about how I got into my field, and how it was not easy, and that many look at short term gains over long term advantage, but it is all moot really.
First of all you are right in a big chunk of the stats they use are utterly irrelevant to the workforce numbers in relation to college degrees. Anyway as you say between the ages of 15-18 won't have one. Even at 20-21 is questionable. I was 18 when I went to school, did a 4 year degree at university and a 1 year certification at college, meaning I hit the workforce May 1 after just turning 23 years old two months earlier.
The example used was a 21 year old with an engineering degree? So he took at best a 3 year degree (and I know of no engineering degrees that are 3 years, and I looked into engineering at Waterloo once upon a time) and is unhappy with prospects?
Your new grads that are not coming out of some community college program are going to be 22-24 years old depending on degree. Also there are a number of degrees that are pretty much useless unless you also got your Masters or Phd (you know who you are). So if you went to school and got a History or political science degree, well good for you, but I know of no one that does that now. Same for economics, though I know a couple who went on to get their CA, but you have to go and *do* that. Even high science, the problem is demand, in that there are only so many placements for someone that has a degree in high particle physics or whatever... Again many use their BA to go onto Law, or their BSc to go onto to Med, but again being disappointed with your useless degree not giving you a job in your "field" is a bit silly. Heck I know fellow grads that have since gone back and gotten teaching degrees or whatever as either their primary degree wasn't working out for them job wise or they simply didn't enjoy it and wanted to do something else. The teacher example is now a Vice Principle and is doing a heck of a lot better than me probably!
Also when I went into school for my Computer Science degree it was at the height of what we now know as the Dot Com Bubble, and when I graduated it was just *after* that bubble burst... So you can imagine how my prospects changed in a very short period of time, so current grads can suck it.
Take a job, any job in your field and get some experience. Use that to get something slightly better, repeat over several years. Eventually you will be in a better position literally and figuratively. I started at minimum wage, and did contracts for years, even some freelance consulting. A degree doesn't get you a job, it qualifies you an interview maybe for a chance of gaining some experience. Having more experience and knowledge gets you the "job".
After reading the article (unslashdotlike I know), I really only have 3 questions...
1) Didn't really explain what a magnetic dipole was, nor how one might be constructed or what it might take to do so at the scale involved. All of those things seem kinda important.
2) As much as I can fathom, it at least involves a) magnets, and b) electricity. At the scale required, I'll go out on a limb and say really ridiculously big/strong magnets and a lot of power. Even if we concede that we're capable of building such things as super powerful magnets, and large independent power sources, the question I would have is how would you propose to get that out of our atmosphere? We've put some radiological power sources in space in the past, however I think even these had outputs of like 450W which isn't exactly stellar (pardon pun)... However the big thing would be unless said magnets were more less totally non-active unless power is applied, how the heck would those interact well with anything as complex as a rocket launch? I'm guessing not well.
3) Time. It mentions that it took 500 million years for the atmosphere to blow away, however it didn't really indicate how long it might take for any kind of change due to a magnetic field. We have trouble building things that last more than 10 years, never mind some small fraction of the cosmic time previously indicated...
Electrolytes! It's what batteries crave (and plants)!
Say "HDMI" one more motherfscking time! Say it!
For some reason that whole image popped into my head...
This has been around for a very long time and is nothing new. I agree, it is ridiculous and unrealistic, but it is what it is. There are a number of reasons why I believe it is done.
Firstly likely the person that put together test doesn't know a snippet of code from his elbow to start with. That could be the Manager, or the folks from HR. Could be they just stole the method from somewhere else to use. Secondly is the same reason why they want someone with 20 years of coding experience with 10 different specific languages for an entry level job. Part of this again could be the person who wrote the job description doesn't know what any of those things are really, only that they are important and someone told them they were used somewhere in the organization. The other somewhat unreasonable expectation is that the person being hired is able to literally walk out of the interview and sit down at a desk and start coding on a particular established project...
Many many moons again I remember I had a particularly bad C programming "professor". His class was a joke. I'd already taken C at a higher level at a different school, but was required to take it again. His overheads (yes this was a million years ago) were filled with errors and he was a horrible teacher. He had a Phd I believe, I'm not sure if it was really related or not. In any case his final exam worth 60% of the grade consisted of some paper, a pencil and several problems he wanted solved using perfect code. His grading consisted of a couple red "X's" and a seemingly random percentage as your grade. I complained, and asked him to explain to me exactly what was wrong with specific sections, to which he refused. I thought about going to the head of the department, when I leaned he was the head of the department. I let it go and moved on with my life (I passed the course anyway, I had a 97% going into the exam anyway, it was the principle of the thing).
Several years after that (still about 100,000 years ago) I applied for a job, which admittedly was a bit out of my pay grade at the time in hindsight, however either the other applicants were few or horrible as I won an interview. There were a bunch of components to the interview, but one of them was the technical test. Again, like above you're sitting in a room with a #2 pencil and a bunch of paper, and several questions and the ask is for actual code. At this point I *had* at least done some contracts which did require coding, however I always have my reference material, the internet, and most importantly all my previous code I've written in the past which has been leveraged and re-leveraged a million times over, "stealing" this or that sections of code I've already written that would work with minor modifications.
I do very little coding these days. However what little I do people are usually impressed I can pull something out so quickly, which is almost entirely because I've probably already written something similar at some point in the past and all I have to do is find it, modify it and bam! Done, Whenever I think about backing up my work computer the first thing I think about it the tiny amount of space occupied by my library of code. Could I do it from scratch, sure it would just take me a lot longer... Could I write it using a pencil and paper and have it compile without issue and work properly on the first pass? Probably not.
Anyway it is a stupid method, but it's been around forever and I don't see it going anywhere. Really they should let you use whatever you want, if you have the resources to get to the eventual answer who cares. Hell even if you give it to someone else to do, at least you have the networking skills to know people who know how to do it! :p
Considering Samsung's history, this should be hardly be surprising. Though presidential involvement is a bit, at least in the regard that anything was done about it. Just off the top of my head I can think of two Samsung scandals in the recent past about price fixing and collusion once for memory chips, and another time for LCD's...
An analogy I like to use is that of applications themselves. In trying to modernize a legacy application the estimated price tag came back at about 1 million bucks. Management balked at that saying we have 30 applications we support it isn't feasible to spend 30 million (even if staggered over time apparently) to modernize all our applications! Rather management gets sold on the idea of building 1 mega application that will do the work of 30. The idea being is that economies of scale and leveraging existing systems will make the super system cheaper than building 30 individual ones.
From experience, while not a totally bad idea, but what gets forgotten is that planning and the implementing 30 times the amount of complexity has it's own cost associated with it. While integration is great in most cases, and desirable it also comes with more risk in dependencies and implementation costs due to the requirement of parallel development. So if you change a shared table for one application, what impact will that have on the other 29? If that table does have impact, you just took out 29 applications. There can also be situations where it will stagnate development because it is so hard to change anything in the model that is important.
At any rate, these unified structures, while the have benefits, also have their own challenges. In this case with an IT organization, you would also get the usual internal political power struggles as well I would imagine. Also "5 years" isn't a long time really when looking at cycles, a lot of that waste could be associated with growing pains and sorting out the whole transformation which I'm sure took a few years before it was really doing anything very well.
Which is exactly what they did by the sounds of the article. So I guess they probably weren't all that surprised that it happened. Disappointed maybe.
That was my concern buried in the article. The fact that these planets because they orbit so close to their star are likely tidal locked. Meaning one side all sun, the other none. Now I can get behind the whole idea that it wouldn't totally be an block to life, I'd even go so far to say in such occurrences perhaps a "ring" of life when light and temp are moderate around the border...
However what I am curious about is the magnetic field. From my understanding, a planets magnetic field is largely produced by the rotational action of a molten core. What I am not sure of is if that core would rotate in a planet that isn't itself rotating. Being tidal locked, they would not be, or would they be, just only in sync with the orbit of the sun, and if so is that orbit fast enough (though apparently they are pretty fast) to generate a rotational molten core? As without it, no magnetic field, and without that field the likelihood of life likely drops pretty precipitously.
I love how everyone is using these to blame jobs etc...
Consider.
It is the first generation (I being in the one previous to that) that has never been more connected VIA the internet and various other pieces of technology than ever before. So people are surprised in a 6% change in physical movement? There is much less need for movement so there is less.
Second, is that the trend for sometime has been more and more urbanization. If you already live in an urban center there is also much less need for movement.
Anyway I am sure jobs, and economy factors into it as well, but it is far from the whole story.
I always find it fascinating when modern science and ancient history collide. There have been a number of stories like this over the years as technology advances. It hits me in both my science and technology spot as well as being a fan of ancient history and trying to piece together things from so long ago.
That said when I read it I some how saw some bearded ancient historian crying in the corner as scientists take irreplaceable artifacts of the past, smash them, and grind up the remains for magnetic analysis. I don't *know* how they actually did it, but that's the image in my head.... :)
1) BS
Firstly it should be pointed out that all the data that they have used in the past about how Canada is a haven for copyright infringement has been disproved. Multiple times. The numbers they use are largely made up, and have no real basis in reality. So them coming out again, with more of the same BS should be rightly ignored.
2) REP
As the first point alludes, their reputation for bending "facts" as it suits them really isn't doing their cause or reputation any favors. In addition, in Canada they once had an ally in the Conservative party, who tasked a Minister to draft a set of laws to curtail copyright infringement in Canada. However, once release it became very transparent, and easily discoverable, that those laws were drafted by the RIAA/MPAA, verbatim. Word for word. It was a bit of irony that the laws themselves might be considered plagiarism. Once this became clear, it was all swept away, and interfering in a sovereign nations law creation process isn't going to win over a lot of fans (or voters to whom politicians might care about).
3) Laws
Just because the US legal system is in shambles, doesn't mean Canada's have to be also. We have stronger privacy laws in Canada, and I think most people of all political stripes are proud of that fact. Considering how the RIAA/MPAA does an end run around the US legal system by suing "John Doe's" by IP address, then having the court held in some crazy place like East Texas where companies vie for citizens appeal, who always rule in favor of these creeps who force the release of personal information, then they drop all of those cases, and re-try them using said personal information in other states of residence seems more than a bit absurd.
4) ISOHUNT
Finally, all that said, Canada has taken real action in the protection of copyright infringement. About the only "haven" that I was ever aware of was ISOHUNT (not including those imported Asian physical CAM DVD's which you can find someplace which are horrible, and really small fry). For whatever reason the guy who ran it had it located in BC. He fought the legal battle against the government for a long time (10 years maybe?), but eventually lost and was forced to shut down. Later it re-opened again, now being hosted in whoknowswhereistan like all the rest of the sites out there, but that is hardly Canada's fault.
So in summary the RIAA/MPAA can shove it.
That is assuming he did it uniformly over a 20 year period, which is possible, but unlikely.
You would think they would have not only network but physical safeguards in place to prevent this. I see this as more damning of the NSA security procedure than anything else. Regardless of how you slice it, it is a massive amount of data to be able to go "unnoticed" for 20 years!
"Unnamed U.S. officials told the Washington Post this week that Martin allegedly took more than 75 percent of the hacking tools belonging to the NSA's tailored access operations, the agency's elite hacking unit."
Took? They don't have it anymore? Unnamed US officials could have better used the term "copied" I think (though not totally wrong I suppose).
Somehow I finished that sentence with, When reached for comment Martin said "the other 25% of the hacking tools were rubbish!" :p
I expect apart from the symbolic nature of the arrests they will have a pretty hard time actually getting any convictions.
Unlike similar things in the past, where things were sold to people to illegally access cable/satellite networks without paying fees, the boxes actually don't do a whole lot but provide hardware. They didn't write the software, nor host the access to the "illegal" content, so I am not sure what they will be convicted with. There is probably a provision about "enabling" activity, but at a certain point that would mean going after the TV makers for being able to play the content, the utilities for allowing said content to "illegaly" flow over their infrastructure, etc... There is a reason why things like Kodi boxes are "gray" market, I'd expect a lot of law would need to be interpreted and clarified before any actual convictions to take place. Perhaps this is the first salvo by the industry to try to establish precedent for future actions, though it very well could backfire on them. Though no doubt something like this will be tried in some favorable Texas court as they like to do in the weird US Judaical system.
"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Reading the article about the Soviet experience with Venus there seemed a pretty heavy reliance on "Pyrotechnic charges"...
Soviet Project Manager: "Vere having a problem with abc operating under extreme pressure..."
Soviet Engineer "Have we blown it up yet? Ve could try blowing it up first..."
Also kinda surprised that things like pyrotechnic charges wouldn't accidentally go off under heat/pressure/corrosion.
As I recall when the FBI demanded a website hand over their encryption keys the owner printed it in binary on something like 10,000 pieces of paper... I believe he got in some trouble for that.
However if the FBI is going to only allow FOI requests by fax, well it will certainly open themselves up for some serious abuse when others do likewise and when questioned on it simply point to the FBI itself and say that it seems to be an excepted method for them...
Like like Red said in Shawshank Redemption some times people get Institutionalized...
It isn't so much a technical issue, but one of momentum, which is hard to change in anything but over a long time. Like MS, Oracle has been around and dominate for a very long time. Which means their install base is large. Which means a lot of things use it. Which means a lot of people are trained in it and familiar with it.
The difficulty is that IT shops have to maintain and support applications and databases. having to support more than one is costly. porting existing ones is costly. Training or hiring new staff is costly, etc...
So if you are a new organization, then sure you likely have the flexibility to easily review and select whatever fits your needs. However if you are an existing organization, which most are, and most of your infrastructure is already Oracle, well that is a pretty hard decision for an IT head to try and reverse and change.
However licencing things like this do take a toll, and you will find that organizations start to try to experiment supporting more than one, and expand upon it (we've been dabbling with MS SQL for a number of years now). It is easier to propose to executive management the additional expense and overhead when you can show the increase in existing licencing costs. Over time if Oracle isn't careful will find itself in trouble. However that is likely not anytime soon, so for now, the bean counters just count more beans.
The sad thing really is that statement seems to be a valid business strategy these days, not even remotely limited to Oracle. The term "Lock In" comes to mind. Apple is another great example.