You say "ludicrously simple" but in today's 8-week-bootcamp to "Javascript ninja rockstar" culture, I've all but given up on trying to explain to front-end developers why client-side validation alone isn't sufficiently secure. I explain it to them once, shrug off their uncomprehending stares and wait for them to implement what I just told them not to, demonstrate the "hack" in front of them, wait for them to protest that "well, anybody who is competent enough to think of THAT is surely unstoppable anyway!" and then hunker down for a month of explaining again, and again, and again to management that yes, deadlines are super-duper important and yes, we have client deliverables to meet but this is a real security problem and yes, it really needs to be fixed.
That the cumulative time we spend arguing about something that never should have even come up in the first place is an order of magnitude greater than the time that would have been spent just fixing the damned thing in the first place never seems to make much impression on anybody, either.
Let's hear the anti-privacy advocates tell us one more time that we need to force everybody to use real identities all over the internet because only criminals have to hide behind anonymity. Come on, anti-privacy advocates, you're always so vocal the rest of the time, where are you now?
I've begun to lose hope that the world will ever realize that censorship is all or nothing - if you support censorship of anything, for any reason, you're implicitly (whether you intend to or not) support censorship of any other thing. If we all, as a populace, reject censorship outright, they can never censor us. If we accept it in any form, it will always grow.
Of course, with these age checks, the sites themselves (and the government) will have a permanent, verifiable record of what kind of things you look at online. Which, as we know from the history of the surveillance state, almost always ends up "leaked" when it has the potential to embarrass somebody...
a total n00b is many many levels abstracted from anything that might generate any actual insight
There's another insidious flip-side to this trend - I've been coding professionally now for 25 years (with four years of college before that and five years of hobby programming before that), and along the way I've picked up on things like pointers, recursion, memory management, algorithmic efficiency, TCP/IP, encryption, SQL, file systems, backwards compatibility, versioning, design, release planning, unit testing, and maybe a few other things. What I haven't quite gotten around to learning, though, is how to hook up Angular 2, Bootstrap, Rails, Node, Express, and MongoDB into a working application (it's on my list of things to get around to). So somebody who comes out of a bootcamp who knows how to do exactly that, and assumes that that is the entire sum of programming knowledge puts together a behemoth that is full of security and scalability problems and ignores any advice I might give him because he knows all this new-fangled Angular stuff and since I don't, I must be obsolete anyway.
"it is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws; we need to protect ourselves with mathematics. Encryption is too important to be left solely to governments." -- Bruce Schneier
Yeah - as afraid as I am to post this opinion on slashdot of all places, I can't see how net neutrality as I understand it can be a Good Thing. Maybe I don't understand it that well, but figuring out what net neutrality really is is like figuring out the whole political situation in the middle east - anybody with enough knowledge to be able to answer the questions already has such strongly held opinions that they get angry at you for even asking in the first place. As I understand it, net neutrality is a set of U.S. government regulations that prohibit an ISP like Comcast from charging, say Netflix, more per GB than they charge me per GB. I can definitely see why Netflix would want that sort of regulation, and I can sort of see why I might prefer it, but we're still talking about the government prohibiting a specific type of contractual agreement between two corporate entities - that almost never goes well for anybody except the incumbents.
You know, people keep saying that: if we don't open our country up to the tidal wave of highly-skilled immigrants that are chomping at the bit to come over here and do the jobs Americans don't know how to do, we're going to lose out to another, more enlightened, more progressive nation. I'm still left scratching my head as to exactly what we'd be losing in this scenario, except for a bunch of immigrants who are doing "highly-skilled" jobs rather than Americans. I guess they move over here and buy cars and houses and groceries, so that stimulates the economy, but if that's why we're importing people, why limit ourselves to just those with "high-tech" degrees? From my perspective as an (American) programmer, it seems like the vast majority of H1B-visa immigrants are coming in from India. Yet... if India is brimming with highly-skilled technical talent, why exactly is it that India itself hasn't become this progressive bastion of technical enrichment? They don't even have to sift through immigration queues, they're already there!
You mean "aisle". "Isle" refers to an island. "Aisle" is the walkway separating two sets of seats, such as those that the members of the house of representatives sit in when the legislature is in session.
So... wait... are you saying that you actually did think that he was launched into outer space and his spaceship crashed and that's what the article was about and that's why you clicked through it? Yes, I can see where American English slang would ruin your day most days.
Yeah, the article and the summary seem to be anti-Trump, pro H1B, but I'm left scratching my head as to exactly who this is/ever was supposed to be good for. It's definitely good for the immigrants, because they have massively expanded employment opportunities. Is it good for Canadians? I guess it's good for the Canadians who own tech/engineering companies but aren't themselves much interested in tech/engineering and just want the money. Not so good for the Canadian techs/engineers who are suddenly competing with the entire world, strictly non-reciprocally. So I guess I'm supposed to be empathetic to the immigrants who have expanded job opportunities but not empathetic to the Canadians who have reduced job opportunities?
The other problem is that offense is in the eye of the beholder. A man can genuinely not mean to be offensive - legitimately just asking a pretty girl out on a date, and it can be (mis)interpreted as offensive behavior. Now you end up putting management in the position of trying to armchair quarterback male/female interactions - was this really harmful, demeaning, threatening behavior or is she just overreacting? Since there's usually very little disincentive to err on the side of believing the accuser, you end up with men who tread VERY carefully around female coworkers - which is itself considered a different form of sexism, since the women end up finding themselves excluded.
That's kind of what I see every time the subject of women's mistreatment in technology companies comes up - it seems like the women doing the complaining are, for the most part, complaining about the same sorts of things the men face, but attributing it to the fact that they're women (and missing the fact that the men are dealing with most of the same shit). The only exception is that sometimes the men ask the women out on dates, which (apparently?) women don't like, but most of the real mistreatment is dealt out pretty evenly.
Oh, just keep scrolling... But really, his analogy is flawed anyway. We're talking about what should and shouldn't be legal to do with dolls, not people. So, what Dunbal is really proposing is that "murder" of realistic dolls (for instance, crash test dummies or hollywood stage props) should be outlawed. Which, as you point out, is pretty stupid. But this particular topic does tend to bring out the stupids.
Slashdot Mirror
You say "ludicrously simple" but in today's 8-week-bootcamp to "Javascript ninja rockstar" culture, I've all but given up on trying to explain to front-end developers why client-side validation alone isn't sufficiently secure. I explain it to them once, shrug off their uncomprehending stares and wait for them to implement what I just told them not to, demonstrate the "hack" in front of them, wait for them to protest that "well, anybody who is competent enough to think of THAT is surely unstoppable anyway!" and then hunker down for a month of explaining again, and again, and again to management that yes, deadlines are super-duper important and yes, we have client deliverables to meet but this is a real security problem and yes, it really needs to be fixed. That the cumulative time we spend arguing about something that never should have even come up in the first place is an order of magnitude greater than the time that would have been spent just fixing the damned thing in the first place never seems to make much impression on anybody, either.
Let's hear the anti-privacy advocates tell us one more time that we need to force everybody to use real identities all over the internet because only criminals have to hide behind anonymity. Come on, anti-privacy advocates, you're always so vocal the rest of the time, where are you now?
I've begun to lose hope that the world will ever realize that censorship is all or nothing - if you support censorship of anything, for any reason, you're implicitly (whether you intend to or not) support censorship of any other thing. If we all, as a populace, reject censorship outright, they can never censor us. If we accept it in any form, it will always grow.
Of course, with these age checks, the sites themselves (and the government) will have a permanent, verifiable record of what kind of things you look at online. Which, as we know from the history of the surveillance state, almost always ends up "leaked" when it has the potential to embarrass somebody...
a total n00b is many many levels abstracted from anything that might generate any actual insight
There's another insidious flip-side to this trend - I've been coding professionally now for 25 years (with four years of college before that and five years of hobby programming before that), and along the way I've picked up on things like pointers, recursion, memory management, algorithmic efficiency, TCP/IP, encryption, SQL, file systems, backwards compatibility, versioning, design, release planning, unit testing, and maybe a few other things. What I haven't quite gotten around to learning, though, is how to hook up Angular 2, Bootstrap, Rails, Node, Express, and MongoDB into a working application (it's on my list of things to get around to). So somebody who comes out of a bootcamp who knows how to do exactly that, and assumes that that is the entire sum of programming knowledge puts together a behemoth that is full of security and scalability problems and ignores any advice I might give him because he knows all this new-fangled Angular stuff and since I don't, I must be obsolete anyway.
But those genes were FABULOUS!
What is your solution? Never lock up anybody unless you lock up an exactly equal number of representatives from each demographic?
That should really be 87%, shouldn't it? Any other outcome is evidence of despicable bias.
So, you're saying, inject a little artificial stupidity into the artificial intelligence then?
"it is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws; we need to protect ourselves with mathematics. Encryption is too important to be left solely to governments." -- Bruce Schneier
Yeah - as afraid as I am to post this opinion on slashdot of all places, I can't see how net neutrality as I understand it can be a Good Thing. Maybe I don't understand it that well, but figuring out what net neutrality really is is like figuring out the whole political situation in the middle east - anybody with enough knowledge to be able to answer the questions already has such strongly held opinions that they get angry at you for even asking in the first place. As I understand it, net neutrality is a set of U.S. government regulations that prohibit an ISP like Comcast from charging, say Netflix, more per GB than they charge me per GB. I can definitely see why Netflix would want that sort of regulation, and I can sort of see why I might prefer it, but we're still talking about the government prohibiting a specific type of contractual agreement between two corporate entities - that almost never goes well for anybody except the incumbents.
That's what projects like Freenet are for.
In five years, they'll lower the threshold to $150K, in another five years it'll be $50K, and a few years after that it will be everybody.
You know, people keep saying that: if we don't open our country up to the tidal wave of highly-skilled immigrants that are chomping at the bit to come over here and do the jobs Americans don't know how to do, we're going to lose out to another, more enlightened, more progressive nation. I'm still left scratching my head as to exactly what we'd be losing in this scenario, except for a bunch of immigrants who are doing "highly-skilled" jobs rather than Americans. I guess they move over here and buy cars and houses and groceries, so that stimulates the economy, but if that's why we're importing people, why limit ourselves to just those with "high-tech" degrees? From my perspective as an (American) programmer, it seems like the vast majority of H1B-visa immigrants are coming in from India. Yet... if India is brimming with highly-skilled technical talent, why exactly is it that India itself hasn't become this progressive bastion of technical enrichment? They don't even have to sift through immigration queues, they're already there!
both sides of the isle
You mean "aisle". "Isle" refers to an island. "Aisle" is the walkway separating two sets of seats, such as those that the members of the house of representatives sit in when the legislature is in session.
I'm so slashdot, I don't even read the headlines any more!
clickbait
So... wait... are you saying that you actually did think that he was launched into outer space and his spaceship crashed and that's what the article was about and that's why you clicked through it? Yes, I can see where American English slang would ruin your day most days.
That's not me being a libtard
You're still a libtard, though.
Yeah, the article and the summary seem to be anti-Trump, pro H1B, but I'm left scratching my head as to exactly who this is/ever was supposed to be good for. It's definitely good for the immigrants, because they have massively expanded employment opportunities. Is it good for Canadians? I guess it's good for the Canadians who own tech/engineering companies but aren't themselves much interested in tech/engineering and just want the money. Not so good for the Canadian techs/engineers who are suddenly competing with the entire world, strictly non-reciprocally. So I guess I'm supposed to be empathetic to the immigrants who have expanded job opportunities but not empathetic to the Canadians who have reduced job opportunities?
It's free money! Well, it costs you 2x in taxes, but it's "free", so it must be good!
Somebody want to tell me again that the only people who look for anonymity on the internet are pedophiles and terrorists?
The other problem is that offense is in the eye of the beholder. A man can genuinely not mean to be offensive - legitimately just asking a pretty girl out on a date, and it can be (mis)interpreted as offensive behavior. Now you end up putting management in the position of trying to armchair quarterback male/female interactions - was this really harmful, demeaning, threatening behavior or is she just overreacting? Since there's usually very little disincentive to err on the side of believing the accuser, you end up with men who tread VERY carefully around female coworkers - which is itself considered a different form of sexism, since the women end up finding themselves excluded.
That's kind of what I see every time the subject of women's mistreatment in technology companies comes up - it seems like the women doing the complaining are, for the most part, complaining about the same sorts of things the men face, but attributing it to the fact that they're women (and missing the fact that the men are dealing with most of the same shit). The only exception is that sometimes the men ask the women out on dates, which (apparently?) women don't like, but most of the real mistreatment is dealt out pretty evenly.
Now that's the stupidest thing I've read today
Oh, just keep scrolling... But really, his analogy is flawed anyway. We're talking about what should and shouldn't be legal to do with dolls, not people. So, what Dunbal is really proposing is that "murder" of realistic dolls (for instance, crash test dummies or hollywood stage props) should be outlawed. Which, as you point out, is pretty stupid. But this particular topic does tend to bring out the stupids.
It does seem to me that we keep getting further and further away from actual harm, focusing on "potential harm".