This is not an easy concept for people to wrap their heads around. I blame Star Trek...any time Enterprise breaks orbit it just "flies away."
A good illustration for me of orbital mechanics is the idea that, say you can produce a constant thrust and move away from the surface at a constant 55 mph. Yes, eventually you will reach "orbit," meaning, the altitude that the LEO satellites occupy (the ISS is what, 200 miles up? So you'd get there in ~4 hours). And then when you stop thrusting you will fall back down, the same as if you pushed for 4 seconds instead of 4 hours. While you were up there you might see the ISS whipping past you at 17,000 mph.
This kind of simple ballistics is lost on most people. Most people don't even know in which direction the earth rotates:(
So far as destroying satellites...destroying them shouldn't be necessary, just either A) disabling them and/or B) moving them away from the Earth. I don't have the chops nor data to figure out what you'd have to do to accelerate a satellite out of LEO so that it leaves the neighborhood, so to speak. But, why blow it up spectacularly when you can just throw it away?
I would say your boss needs to understand the most basic maxim of IT: "In theory, practice and theory are the same; in practice, they are not."
Anyone who has actually had to do installs knows that ABSOLUTELY NO AMOUNT OF LAB TESTING WILL PREPARE YOU COMPLETELY FOR THE REAL WORLD. See: Murphy's Law. See Also: Any angry IT guy: "Dammit, it's ALWAYS something!"
The keys aren't lost, they are "revoked." So you can no longer decrypt your own data, because someone else now controls that process.
Obligatory analogy: Someone stole your car keys, and he happens to be in cahoots with all the locksmiths in town. He didn't steal your car, but if you want to drive it, you had better pony up.
It's a plausible scenario but unlikely; you can probably make as much or more money with less risk by simply stealing proprietary data and selling it.
Actually, I think most of the people convicted of spying for other governments or otherwise committing treason have been trusted government employees vice private-sector workers of some kind.
One, that depends on how much research people do. Honestly most people I know don't shop around so it's perfectly plausible that someone might just go straight to Amazon and buy it without looking for a better price.
Two, I'm not clear on the difference between "overcharging" and "overpricing." If they sometimes accidentally charge too little, maybe sometimes they accidentally charge too much. That's all I mean.
Seems as if everything is completely polarized now. You get to choose between theocracy, or unrestricted experimentation...at least, that's what people tell me. How did it get like this? Why is there no dialogue?
I once read Mao's book on guerilla warfare and he points out that you have to polarize the target culture. You want people to be with you or against you...no middle ground willing to "negotiate" because they keep you from accomplishing your goals. I wonder if the black-and-white mentality so pervasive is an artifact of the culture wars going on or what.
Anyway, very good observations here. I keep reading religious or scientific people basically painting themselves into a corner with these extreme statements and I wish more people would realize...you don't have to agree with the Pope or with Dawkins or whomever, but you really ought to be thinking and talking about the issue instead of imagining it's universally "settled" and ignoring its existence.
What's it like being Russian or Chinese, and working at an ISP or in law enforcement?
What's it like having some of the worst spammers and for-crime hackers living in your country, not giving a shit, and having the world think you're a bunch of assholes?
In the States we have our own problems, mostly the fact that our society is so open that law enforcement is not able to go after everyone (for now, anyway). But you just know that the equivalent entities in China or Russia just don't care. Homegrown hackers are dicking with competitor nations? Nice one, comrade!
Our shenanigans are cheeky and fun, while theirs are cruel and tragic.
Symantec, just like all the corporations, should listen to their customers and work to improve their software.
On the other hand, I have to ask myself why I should listen to a guy who is stuck supporting software he hates, rather than really doing anything about it. You're basically irrelevant so long as the corporation has made management happy. Management is happy because the consultants took care of some hair-on-fire issue worth $1m in revenue and then took them out to lunch (and billed them for it). Management haa more pressing issues than whether or not some tech is pissed off at the very INJUSTICE of some customer's box booting in 3 minutes instead of 2. They bought the suite because they had to be compliant with SarbOx or HIPAA or, worst of all, esoteric state & local standards, and they are worried about a 50,000 seat enterprise, not your puny helpdesk.
Until you grasp the bigger picture and understand why, in the grand scheme of things, bloaty software is not the dealbreaker you imagine it to be, then you will be stuck implementing shit you hate for people you think are stupid. If you want to advance, get it in your skull now that being a helpdesk jockey does not make you equivalent to Einstein, no matter how much/. you read.
Negative. Encryption is above enforcing an access control.
So, perhaps I want to make my work freely distributable, with the caveat that in order to view my PDF or whatever, you have to give me your e-mail address (easy enough, you can opt out if you don't like it). I can use PKI to force you to request a key to decrypt the file (which has to go to a valid e-mail address).
This would be clunky...It'd be much better if there were just some open framework for doing this transparently to the user (e.g. if we all agreed on some addendum to OpenDocument so that, say, OpenOffice would automagically do the requesting and decryption for you).
This is actually applicable to a current customer of mine. They are a nonprofit and don't want to charge money for the material they produce, but they do need to cite hard figures for who is downloading, reading, and using their material so they can keep their budget going. DRM as currently envisioned might be a poor fit, but something "DRM-like" seems to be the right direction.
On the other hand I'm reading the thread to find wild-assed ideas that work better:)
Well, I think limiting "science" to "analysis" is both A) part of a larger cultural trend and B) a philosophical and cognitive dead end.
For the past who-knows-how-long, literary study has been dominated by "analysis" via deconstruction. Deconstructing literature (or sculpture, or Allman Brothers lyrics, or published military doctrine) is a phenomenally valuable tool. But it's a tool. It's not the desired end state. It's funny because as part of a larger cultural trend deconstruction is not too different from the current views in science and engineering fields, yet scientists and engineers still talk down to literary critics.
I think where it's most obvious is in a lack of imagination in our scientific and political discourse...I think it's led to some seriously bad juju in the past, oh, 6 years, notably the failure of the American intelligence community to react against the demands of the executive branch in preparing to go to war. Check out this talk on the subject. The author points out how the way we discuss, think about, and model groups is inadequate, and draws heavily upon bioinformatics--wherein synthesis is at least as important as analysis, if not more.
Bodnar says to his students, "What do you call half a fruit fly? Dead!" I think the same applies to the way people try to analyze the world today. Synthesis is not a "tool for analysis," it's half of a loop (with analysis comprising the other half) that we use to build knowledge.
You're not making any cogent arguments here. Your conclusions are built into your assumptions, capisce? You're starting out assuming that "analysis" is the end-all and be-all of thought, and this is self-evident because of the usefulness of analytical products, which are themselves good because other products are not. What you have failed to do is "close the loop" and bring this into the bigger picture.
I seriously have questions with the usefulness of, say, the "countless" devices that were built in "the labs." Ever read up on bioinformatics? It's the study of information flow in complex (biological) systems. We get absolutely NOTHING without the synthetic steps of the discovery cycle. Zero. Zilch. Nada. "Analysts" are useful, but they are not the cum of Christ as you make them out to be.
My last roommate was like this. I loaned him a book on the emergent properties of ant colony behavior to try to get him to understand that you can't model a colony as an aggregate of 1000 ants, you have to modify it as a colony. It's the same issue as when you try to model the behavior of, say, a platoon of soldiers, modeling the behavior of one infantryman is sometimes useful, but when you want to grok "What a platoon does," it's not the final step, any more than modeling "half an infantryman" makes sense (outside of certain gory first-person shooters, anyway) when you want to describe one soldier's behavior.
I think if you study a little bit of history then you will discover that most of our most robust theories come from the synthetic steps. Darwin's theory, for example, is the result of synthesis, not only analysis.
Y'know, I do have to say it's a little funny and a little sad that I, the big bad religionist, know more about the underpinnings of science than a lot of people who "do" science day-in, day-out. But then, Hitchens is way better in his Bible knowledge than me, so, six of one, I suppose.
Yah, I guess so. Recently I read that when you dissect "humor" a lot of it is about aggression and fear response--like animal display behavior the actually heads off "real" confrontation.
Can't say I've ever heard any songs about Hitler's...um...shortcomings, though.
Whence this idea that life is about "problem-solving?" Literary critics "solve" works of literature with depressingly robotic methods of analysis. All my engineer friends sit around and smugly congratulate themselves about how good they are at "solving problems" or "designing solutions."
So everyone's stake is in "solving" phenomena and acting as if they suddenly have plucked some kind of new jewel of meaning that nobody ever saw before. You spend 8 years in the academy just to conclude that Shylock was a transsexual or to make some snippet of code run a little faster, and then you and your friends sit there back-patting and agreeing about how deluded the religious people are for being into something that is "meaningless."
This tack is, to me, completely boring and a sign of intellectual sloth. It's just that our culture for some reason glorifies "analysts" more than...synthetists? People who help us assemble the big picture instead of parsing our beliefs into their components, as if the whole is understandable from the parts, as if this somehow helps us come to grips with life.
Yep. He uses this as a fork: His other argument is that extreme religion is bad because it kills people. Trace this with me. He starts out by saying religious extremists are bad because they kill people. Then he says that the moderate religious--the monastics, the ones doing charity work, the ones arguing against the killing, the ones who are inspired by their faith to do good things--are also bad because they are somehow "enablers."
Sorry, the argument just doesn't fly. Dawkins, like legions of secularists before him, simply cannot tolerate ANY competition. He cannot stop at setting up a wall of separation between Church and State, since plenty of religious people agree that it's a good idea. He can't stop at specifying limits on education like "Teach religion in religion class and science in science class." He has to exterminate every idea that competes with his own.
In my opinion he has completely gone off the deep end here. We had the same issues with the eugenecists: yeah, if everyone likes blonde hair, eventually, everyone will be blonde. There will be a selection pressure and it'll happen. This doesn't justify killing everyone without blonde hair. Likewise, since he is obviously operating from his "meme" perspective, he thinks he can justify attacking ideas he doesn't like. Sorry, if the ideas are good, they will win out. Unless of course he's wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Dammit, I don't know what I was thinking. :(
Four points off my geek card
This is not an easy concept for people to wrap their heads around. I blame Star Trek...any time Enterprise breaks orbit it just "flies away."
:(
A good illustration for me of orbital mechanics is the idea that, say you can produce a constant thrust and move away from the surface at a constant 55 mph. Yes, eventually you will reach "orbit," meaning, the altitude that the LEO satellites occupy (the ISS is what, 200 miles up? So you'd get there in ~4 hours). And then when you stop thrusting you will fall back down, the same as if you pushed for 4 seconds instead of 4 hours. While you were up there you might see the ISS whipping past you at 17,000 mph.
This kind of simple ballistics is lost on most people. Most people don't even know in which direction the earth rotates
So far as destroying satellites...destroying them shouldn't be necessary, just either A) disabling them and/or B) moving them away from the Earth. I don't have the chops nor data to figure out what you'd have to do to accelerate a satellite out of LEO so that it leaves the neighborhood, so to speak. But, why blow it up spectacularly when you can just throw it away?
I would say your boss needs to understand the most basic maxim of IT:
"In theory, practice and theory are the same; in practice, they are not."
Anyone who has actually had to do installs knows that ABSOLUTELY NO AMOUNT OF LAB TESTING WILL PREPARE YOU COMPLETELY FOR THE REAL WORLD. See: Murphy's Law. See Also: Any angry IT guy: "Dammit, it's ALWAYS something!"
I actually hate car analogies, but I recognize yours is a lot better :)
I'll bow to superior expertise gracefully.
The keys aren't lost, they are "revoked." So you can no longer decrypt your own data, because someone else now controls that process.
Obligatory analogy: Someone stole your car keys, and he happens to be in cahoots with all the locksmiths in town. He didn't steal your car, but if you want to drive it, you had better pony up.
It's a plausible scenario but unlikely; you can probably make as much or more money with less risk by simply stealing proprietary data and selling it.
Actually, I think most of the people convicted of spying for other governments or otherwise committing treason have been trusted government employees vice private-sector workers of some kind.
One, that depends on how much research people do. Honestly most people I know don't shop around so it's perfectly plausible that someone might just go straight to Amazon and buy it without looking for a better price.
Two, I'm not clear on the difference between "overcharging" and "overpricing." If they sometimes accidentally charge too little, maybe sometimes they accidentally charge too much. That's all I mean.
Yes, your store will be called "noprofitfairyland" because I'm going to shop at your competitor's store, which is cleaner and has lower prices.
Amazing!
How many times do you suppose Amazon has "accidentally" overcharged people and contacted them to issue a refund?
Last I heard, Fukuyama had renounced the neocons and their agenda.
Something big may be coming down the pipeline in the middle east. If and when it comes, it's not going to be pleasant.
Agreed. So who has the wherewithal to cut these cables, what could the fifth or sixth cable be, and why would they do it?
Also, you basically made my day by not misusing "begs the question." Kudos!
Wasn't there research about 10 years ago involving targeting and inducing cancer cells to undergo apoptosis?
Seems as if everything is completely polarized now. You get to choose between theocracy, or unrestricted experimentation...at least, that's what people tell me. How did it get like this? Why is there no dialogue?
I once read Mao's book on guerilla warfare and he points out that you have to polarize the target culture. You want people to be with you or against you...no middle ground willing to "negotiate" because they keep you from accomplishing your goals. I wonder if the black-and-white mentality so pervasive is an artifact of the culture wars going on or what.
Anyway, very good observations here. I keep reading religious or scientific people basically painting themselves into a corner with these extreme statements and I wish more people would realize...you don't have to agree with the Pope or with Dawkins or whomever, but you really ought to be thinking and talking about the issue instead of imagining it's universally "settled" and ignoring its existence.
What's it like being Russian or Chinese, and working at an ISP or in law enforcement?
What's it like having some of the worst spammers and for-crime hackers living in your country, not giving a shit, and having the world think you're a bunch of assholes?
In the States we have our own problems, mostly the fact that our society is so open that law enforcement is not able to go after everyone (for now, anyway). But you just know that the equivalent entities in China or Russia just don't care. Homegrown hackers are dicking with competitor nations? Nice one, comrade!
Our shenanigans are cheeky and fun, while theirs are cruel and tragic.
Symantec, just like all the corporations, should listen to their customers and work to improve their software.
/. you read.
On the other hand, I have to ask myself why I should listen to a guy who is stuck supporting software he hates, rather than really doing anything about it. You're basically irrelevant so long as the corporation has made management happy. Management is happy because the consultants took care of some hair-on-fire issue worth $1m in revenue and then took them out to lunch (and billed them for it). Management haa more pressing issues than whether or not some tech is pissed off at the very INJUSTICE of some customer's box booting in 3 minutes instead of 2. They bought the suite because they had to be compliant with SarbOx or HIPAA or, worst of all, esoteric state & local standards, and they are worried about a 50,000 seat enterprise, not your puny helpdesk.
Until you grasp the bigger picture and understand why, in the grand scheme of things, bloaty software is not the dealbreaker you imagine it to be, then you will be stuck implementing shit you hate for people you think are stupid. If you want to advance, get it in your skull now that being a helpdesk jockey does not make you equivalent to Einstein, no matter how much
Thus opening the floodgates of Alice/Bob/Eve slashfic...
Negative. Encryption is above enforcing an access control.
:)
So, perhaps I want to make my work freely distributable, with the caveat that in order to view my PDF or whatever, you have to give me your e-mail address (easy enough, you can opt out if you don't like it). I can use PKI to force you to request a key to decrypt the file (which has to go to a valid e-mail address).
This would be clunky...It'd be much better if there were just some open framework for doing this transparently to the user (e.g. if we all agreed on some addendum to OpenDocument so that, say, OpenOffice would automagically do the requesting and decryption for you).
This is actually applicable to a current customer of mine. They are a nonprofit and don't want to charge money for the material they produce, but they do need to cite hard figures for who is downloading, reading, and using their material so they can keep their budget going. DRM as currently envisioned might be a poor fit, but something "DRM-like" seems to be the right direction.
On the other hand I'm reading the thread to find wild-assed ideas that work better
Well, I think limiting "science" to "analysis" is both A) part of a larger cultural trend and B) a philosophical and cognitive dead end.
For the past who-knows-how-long, literary study has been dominated by "analysis" via deconstruction. Deconstructing literature (or sculpture, or Allman Brothers lyrics, or published military doctrine) is a phenomenally valuable tool. But it's a tool. It's not the desired end state. It's funny because as part of a larger cultural trend deconstruction is not too different from the current views in science and engineering fields, yet scientists and engineers still talk down to literary critics.
I think where it's most obvious is in a lack of imagination in our scientific and political discourse...I think it's led to some seriously bad juju in the past, oh, 6 years, notably the failure of the American intelligence community to react against the demands of the executive branch in preparing to go to war. Check out this talk on the subject. The author points out how the way we discuss, think about, and model groups is inadequate, and draws heavily upon bioinformatics--wherein synthesis is at least as important as analysis, if not more.
Bodnar says to his students, "What do you call half a fruit fly? Dead!" I think the same applies to the way people try to analyze the world today. Synthesis is not a "tool for analysis," it's half of a loop (with analysis comprising the other half) that we use to build knowledge.
You're not making any cogent arguments here. Your conclusions are built into your assumptions, capisce?
You're starting out assuming that "analysis" is the end-all and be-all of thought, and this is self-evident because of the usefulness of analytical products, which are themselves good because other products are not. What you have failed to do is "close the loop" and bring this into the bigger picture.
I seriously have questions with the usefulness of, say, the "countless" devices that were built in "the labs." Ever read up on bioinformatics? It's the study of information flow in complex (biological) systems. We get absolutely NOTHING without the synthetic steps of the discovery cycle. Zero. Zilch. Nada. "Analysts" are useful, but they are not the cum of Christ as you make them out to be.
My last roommate was like this. I loaned him a book on the emergent properties of ant colony behavior to try to get him to understand that you can't model a colony as an aggregate of 1000 ants, you have to modify it as a colony. It's the same issue as when you try to model the behavior of, say, a platoon of soldiers, modeling the behavior of one infantryman is sometimes useful, but when you want to grok "What a platoon does," it's not the final step, any more than modeling "half an infantryman" makes sense (outside of certain gory first-person shooters, anyway) when you want to describe one soldier's behavior.
I think if you study a little bit of history then you will discover that most of our most robust theories come from the synthetic steps. Darwin's theory, for example, is the result of synthesis, not only analysis.
Y'know, I do have to say it's a little funny and a little sad that I, the big bad religionist, know more about the underpinnings of science than a lot of people who "do" science day-in, day-out. But then, Hitchens is way better in his Bible knowledge than me, so, six of one, I suppose.
Yah, I guess so. Recently I read that when you dissect "humor" a lot of it is about aggression and fear response--like animal display behavior the actually heads off "real" confrontation.
Can't say I've ever heard any songs about Hitler's...um...shortcomings, though.
Wow.
You have GOT to take a history course at some point in your life.
So you mock things you're afraid of?
Whence this idea that life is about "problem-solving?"
Literary critics "solve" works of literature with depressingly robotic methods of analysis. All my engineer friends sit around and smugly congratulate themselves about how good they are at "solving problems" or "designing solutions."
So everyone's stake is in "solving" phenomena and acting as if they suddenly have plucked some kind of new jewel of meaning that nobody ever saw before. You spend 8 years in the academy just to conclude that Shylock was a transsexual or to make some snippet of code run a little faster, and then you and your friends sit there back-patting and agreeing about how deluded the religious people are for being into something that is "meaningless."
This tack is, to me, completely boring and a sign of intellectual sloth. It's just that our culture for some reason glorifies "analysts" more than...synthetists? People who help us assemble the big picture instead of parsing our beliefs into their components, as if the whole is understandable from the parts, as if this somehow helps us come to grips with life.
Yep. He uses this as a fork: His other argument is that extreme religion is bad because it kills people.
Trace this with me. He starts out by saying religious extremists are bad because they kill people. Then he says that the moderate religious--the monastics, the ones doing charity work, the ones arguing against the killing, the ones who are inspired by their faith to do good things--are also bad because they are somehow "enablers."
Sorry, the argument just doesn't fly. Dawkins, like legions of secularists before him, simply cannot tolerate ANY competition. He cannot stop at setting up a wall of separation between Church and State, since plenty of religious people agree that it's a good idea. He can't stop at specifying limits on education like "Teach religion in religion class and science in science class." He has to exterminate every idea that competes with his own.
In my opinion he has completely gone off the deep end here. We had the same issues with the eugenecists: yeah, if everyone likes blonde hair, eventually, everyone will be blonde. There will be a selection pressure and it'll happen. This doesn't justify killing everyone without blonde hair. Likewise, since he is obviously operating from his "meme" perspective, he thinks he can justify attacking ideas he doesn't like. Sorry, if the ideas are good, they will win out. Unless of course he's wrong.
Really? Where in your pantheon do the philosophers who developed the idea of empiricism fit?