It is you (the car's owner) and the manufacturer who are responsible for those decisions, depending on circumstances.
Your point is well made but you left out the driver (likely "you"), the lessee/renter (likely "you"), the car's owner if it's not you, the people who repaired the brakes or repaired the car in any way that would affect the braking system, and possibly others.
Liability can get complicated. Sometimes it takes lawyers, a judge, and a jury to untangle the mess.
More and more, algorithms are designing or at least re-designing algorithms.
In some systems, we are so far removed from "the person" that no one person could possibly understand the system in any reasonable period of time. By the time he did understand the system, the system would have very likely been decommissioned as obsolete or it would have re-trained itself and no longer be what it once was.
1) Admit more students to any given program that you need, because some will drop out and some will choose other careers. For example, a person training to be a physicist on the government dime might graduate and suddenly have a "calling" to become a high school physics teacher and go to teaching-college on his own dime.
2) I wouldn't ban non-government-guaranteed loans to students, provided they are willing to do so at non-usurious interest rates. I doubt many commercial banks would offer loans unless the parents put up collateral, but non-profits would likely do so. If memory serves, Benjamin Franklin provided for student loans in his will. Such altruism should not be prohibited.
3) Students who don't maintain the best grades may lose their scholarships but they should not be kicked out of their programs unless they are actually flunking. A student whose family couldn't afford to send him to engineering school for four years may be able to pay for his final year if his grades slip below "excellent" after 3 years. The number of students who are expected to "stay in the program on their own dime" would be baked into the "freshman class size" calculation above.
Any such system would also have to factor in things like: * People change careers in mid-life, so the number of people you expect to need in any given field 4, 6, or 10 years from now may change in ways you can't predict today. * Industries change, which also messes up future-need predictions. * People trained in one area can, upon graduation, choose a related field with relatively little additional training. This can leave graduates who are trained in the desired field competing with others who graduated in related fields. It can also leave some fields under-served if their trainees "jump ship" and want to work in a different field.
'Free college for all' isn't even a worthwhile goal. Just stupid.
Assuming "all" means all who have the brains to graduate, at what level should we draw the line for "free education for all"?
In the USA, we tend to draw the line after 12th grade. In some other countries, they draw it 2, 3, or 4 years higher (I think Belize has free college tuition, for example). In some others, even some graduate degrees are tuition-free, albeit with strings attached (I think Cuba has free medical schools, but all doctors work for the state and they don't get paid much).
Some countries draw the line much lower, only offering free tuition to 8th grade or even lower grades.
There may be some countries that do not offer free schooling at all.
Where should America draw the line, and why?
Note: I'm not talking about "automatic admission/admission by entitlement" like the USA does for K-12 students for the vast majority of its public K-12 schools, or "compulsory attendance or registered home-schooling" like almost all of the USA does from age 6 to 16 or so (those ages may vary by state). I'm talking about "if you DO get admitted, you won't pay tuition."
If your parents live nearby you might have the option of living with them. I'm sure you still have to pay a fee for parking if you drive your car in, and there are the usual "mandatory fees" like the student union fees.
College of the Ozarks is essentially free to students, but you have to work for it.
In some states, veterans get tuition at public or in some cases even private schools partly or fully covered.
If you can get admitted to one of the US military academies, the tuition is free but you pay for it with a commitment to serve. Similar military scholarships for ROTC students and some graduate students are also available.
I don't know about today, but in the recent past some loans were forgivable after 10 years of employment in certain high-need "social service" jobs such as teaching in a low-income school.
Decades ago, the terms "least publishable unit" and "least patent-able unit" were being thrown around.
Bear in mind that patent laws and publishing practices have undergone some changes in the years since.
Under an "LPA" philosophy of the time, you did what you could to maximize the number of publications and patents you could get out of any invention or research, because when it came to getting money from entities that don't look too closely, "weight-ness makes great-ness" and both will be good for your employer/institution and your personal career.
Some things have changed.
The USA has a new patent review process. Many more journals are open/non-paywalled. Many more "journals" and "conferences" are "fake/in name only."
Some things haven't:
Many people including many academics are still motivated by greed and prestige.
Computers can be hacked, all computers are insecure given enough time (or secret knowledge, or collusion on the part of vendors,) using them for elections is irredeemable in the eyes of any sane person.
So can people-based systems. Think bribery, blackmail, having a partisan spy in the process, etc. By having both computers and humans doing the vote-counting in parallel - using computers to count paper ballots to provide "instant results" with human auditing in the days that follow - it's harder to hack the vote count. If the computer is accurate but the people are cheating, the discrepancy will be noticed. If the computer is hacked but the people are honest and accurate, the discrepancy will be noticed. If both are compromised but by opposing parties, the discrepancy will be noticed.
As far as pre-vote things like maintaining the voter rolls, printing ballots, etc. those have been mechanized or computerized for decades. There is no turning back that clock. However, frequent, regular, and "deep" audits of all steps can help make sure most problems are detected before election day and those that can't be detected until election day - such as "print on demand" ballots - are caught before votes are cast.
If you write electronic voting machine software you're a traitor, no if's and's or but's.
I see where you are coming from but I disagree.
* There are elections that are not secret ballot, such as votes in Congress which are almost always done either electronically or by voice vote. * There are elections that are almost entirely done by proxy, such as stockholder elections. * There are electronic voting systems that are nothing more than a computer-assisted counter of a paper ballot. * In theory (and hopefully in practice) there are electronic voting systems that are nothing more than a print-on-demand ballot-printer for a paper ballot or a computer-assisted vote-marker of a paper ballot.
The combination of the last two easily falls into the category of "electronic voting machines/systems" but because the actual ballot is seen and cast by the voter and is inherently audit-able, it is no more or less "hack-able" than a pure paper-ballot system would be. In fact, it may be less vulnerable because to "hack" it you would need to hack both the counting machines and the humans that audited the count, which may be harder than hacking a human-vote-counter and a human auditor and all the people supervising the count and audit.
There are plenty of complex systems with no "backdoors."
I assume "backdoor" means an intentional feature, not an unintentional security bug. If you meant an unintentionall bug, then we agree.
I also assume "the complex system" as the part that was built, not the hardware or software levels below "the system.". That is, if you claim all complex OSes that are sold independently of hardware have backdoors, you are claiming that these backdoors exist regardless of which hardware they run on, as long as the hardware works as advertised.
Ok, this IS always a bad thing for the typical end user, but I can see two rwal-world use cases:
* For debugging. In this case, the customer wants the fearure. For the general case, there are better, safer ways of debugging, but there nay be cases where this is preferable.
* Espionage, in which case tge real customer - your aversary - wants the feature.
Either this isn't the real reason they are dropping support, or the person who made the decision is incompetent or ignorant.
If it's the first, fine, just come clean with the real reason. "We'd rather spend or resources improving the product on other platforms" would at least be a reason I couldn't call bogus.
If the decision was made incompetently or in ignorance, then it should be revisited.
If you are hiring me, I expect to be able to cover my cost of living and then some.
This means housing within a 45-minute commute that's AT LEAST in the "top half of the bottom half" of the housing market, tuition for my kids at a good school if the local school isn't good, food, utilities, etc. etc.
Oh, and I'm "redlining out" any area that is too dangerous to live, too far away from a grocery store to shop, too far from medical, police, fire, and other essential services for me to want to live in, any place I wouldn't want my kids to grow up in, any place without decent telecommunications and other utilities, etc. even if they aren't in the "bottom quarter" of the local housing stock.
So, if you are in San Francisco, prepare to shell out. If you are in some middle-sized city east of Colorado and west of the expensive East Coast states, I'll work for a lot less.
For big companies, have them set aside money in an external fund or buy insurance to cover the cost of removal if the company goes bankrupt, and require that the company have a decommissioning plan in place prior to building.
For smaller companies, either do the same or decide, as a local government, that the community is willing to take on the risk of paying for abandoned equipment if the company goes under.
Either way, don't leave the land-owner with the legal responsibility to pay for removal.
Do the same for any other privately-funded infrastructure that is likely to require removal at the end of its life.
It would cost a bit more but maybe it's time for camera-cards, USB sticks, and the like to routinely use strong encryption with a non-secret-by-default key stored on a the medium itself.
To the end user, it would "just work" except there would be a "quick erase" mode that would scramble the key then either do a normal operating-system-level "long" or "quick" format using the new key.
Even a "quick format" by the OS would be good enough since the left-over data would be encrypted with a now-deleted key.
Now, the key itself would need to be stored on a different part of the device than the rest, one that does not have "wear leveling" applied to it.
It would also require a device that had its own intelligence, but that's a very low bar these days.
As an option, manufacturers could have a volatile and non-volatile copy of the key and allow the host device to read and write the volatile copy (with or without write-back to the non-volatile copy), allowing the device to behave both as a "normal" memory stick or camera card or, optionally, as an "encrypted" data stick or camera card where the host device held the key when power was not supplied to the device.
I hate to blame the messenger, but either you didn't buy the right service level agreement or Google broke the contract.
If it's the first case, blame yourself and learn a lesson. You get what yo pay for. If Google doesn't offer the level of service you need, go elsewhere. If they do, either pay up or go elsewhere.
In the second case, you are rightfully upset but you should be talking to lawyers before talking to Slashdot.
The good news is it's really not necessary to go that far back, it's just the more excessive optimisations that need to be scaled back and more thoughtfully applied - if at all.
For some types of chips and applications, perhaps having real security means not being able to do fancy optimizations that degrade security.
I wonder how well typical PC operating systems would work if they were re-compiled to not take advantage of optimizations and run on a completely-de-optimized architecture-compatible CPU with buses, memory, chipsets, etc. that were similarly "de-optimized" and had other things in them like less-tightly-packed circuits to prevent certain side-channel attacks (e.g. rowhammer).
Slashdot Mirror
It is you (the car's owner) and the manufacturer who are responsible for those decisions, depending on circumstances.
Your point is well made but you left out the driver (likely "you"), the lessee/renter (likely "you"), the car's owner if it's not you, the people who repaired the brakes or repaired the car in any way that would affect the braking system, and possibly others.
Liability can get complicated. Sometimes it takes lawyers, a judge, and a jury to untangle the mess.
A person designed those algorithms.
More and more, algorithms are designing or at least re-designing algorithms.
In some systems, we are so far removed from "the person" that no one person could possibly understand the system in any reasonable period of time. By the time he did understand the system, the system would have very likely been decommissioned as obsolete or it would have re-trained itself and no longer be what it once was.
Get a Freon education courtesy of Willis Carrier???
Your basic idea makes some sense.
I would make several changes:
1) Admit more students to any given program that you need, because some will drop out and some will choose other careers. For example, a person training to be a physicist on the government dime might graduate and suddenly have a "calling" to become a high school physics teacher and go to teaching-college on his own dime.
2) I wouldn't ban non-government-guaranteed loans to students, provided they are willing to do so at non-usurious interest rates. I doubt many commercial banks would offer loans unless the parents put up collateral, but non-profits would likely do so. If memory serves, Benjamin Franklin provided for student loans in his will. Such altruism should not be prohibited.
3) Students who don't maintain the best grades may lose their scholarships but they should not be kicked out of their programs unless they are actually flunking. A student whose family couldn't afford to send him to engineering school for four years may be able to pay for his final year if his grades slip below "excellent" after 3 years. The number of students who are expected to "stay in the program on their own dime" would be baked into the "freshman class size" calculation above.
Any such system would also have to factor in things like:
* People change careers in mid-life, so the number of people you expect to need in any given field 4, 6, or 10 years from now may change in ways you can't predict today.
* Industries change, which also messes up future-need predictions.
* People trained in one area can, upon graduation, choose a related field with relatively little additional training. This can leave graduates who are trained in the desired field competing with others who graduated in related fields. It can also leave some fields under-served if their trainees "jump ship" and want to work in a different field.
'Free college for all' isn't even a worthwhile goal. Just stupid.
Assuming "all" means all who have the brains to graduate, at what level should we draw the line for "free education for all"?
In the USA, we tend to draw the line after 12th grade.
In some other countries, they draw it 2, 3, or 4 years higher (I think Belize has free college tuition, for example).
In some others, even some graduate degrees are tuition-free, albeit with strings attached (I think Cuba has free medical schools, but all doctors work for the state and they don't get paid much).
Some countries draw the line much lower, only offering free tuition to 8th grade or even lower grades.
There may be some countries that do not offer free schooling at all.
Where should America draw the line, and why?
Note: I'm not talking about "automatic admission/admission by entitlement" like the USA does for K-12 students for the vast majority of its public K-12 schools, or "compulsory attendance or registered home-schooling" like almost all of the USA does from age 6 to 16 or so (those ages may vary by state). I'm talking about "if you DO get admitted, you won't pay tuition."
If your parents live nearby you might have the option of living with them. I'm sure you still have to pay a fee for parking if you drive your car in, and there are the usual "mandatory fees" like the student union fees.
Until the 1960s Rice University didn't charge any tuition.
Family Money. Scholarships. Loans
College of the Ozarks is essentially free to students, but you have to work for it.
In some states, veterans get tuition at public or in some cases even private schools partly or fully covered.
If you can get admitted to one of the US military academies, the tuition is free but you pay for it with a commitment to serve. Similar military scholarships for ROTC students and some graduate students are also available.
I don't know about today, but in the recent past some loans were forgivable after 10 years of employment in certain high-need "social service" jobs such as teaching in a low-income school.
Decades ago, the terms "least publishable unit" and "least patent-able unit" were being thrown around.
Bear in mind that patent laws and publishing practices have undergone some changes in the years since.
Under an "LPA" philosophy of the time, you did what you could to maximize the number of publications and patents you could get out of any invention or research, because when it came to getting money from entities that don't look too closely, "weight-ness makes great-ness" and both will be good for your employer/institution and your personal career.
Some things have changed.
The USA has a new patent review process.
Many more journals are open/non-paywalled.
Many more "journals" and "conferences" are "fake/in name only."
Some things haven't:
Many people including many academics are still motivated by greed and prestige.
Note to self: No fake/misleading papers are ever published in the USA.
In what peer-reviewed study did you read this? Has this study been reliably replicated?
[sarcasm, if any, is inherited from parent post]
There was a 1990s sci-fi show, Earth, Final Conflict I think, where people had a vertical version of this called a "global."
It was basically a roll-up-into-a-tube cell phone/computer.
Computers can be hacked, all computers are insecure given enough time (or secret knowledge, or collusion on the part of vendors,) using them for elections is irredeemable in the eyes of any sane person.
So can people-based systems. Think bribery, blackmail, having a partisan spy in the process, etc. By having both computers and humans doing the vote-counting in parallel - using computers to count paper ballots to provide "instant results" with human auditing in the days that follow - it's harder to hack the vote count. If the computer is accurate but the people are cheating, the discrepancy will be noticed. If the computer is hacked but the people are honest and accurate, the discrepancy will be noticed. If both are compromised but by opposing parties, the discrepancy will be noticed.
As far as pre-vote things like maintaining the voter rolls, printing ballots, etc. those have been mechanized or computerized for decades. There is no turning back that clock. However, frequent, regular, and "deep" audits of all steps can help make sure most problems are detected before election day and those that can't be detected until election day - such as "print on demand" ballots - are caught before votes are cast.
If you write electronic voting machine software you're a traitor, no if's and's or but's.
I see where you are coming from but I disagree.
* There are elections that are not secret ballot, such as votes in Congress which are almost always done either electronically or by voice vote.
* There are elections that are almost entirely done by proxy, such as stockholder elections.
* There are electronic voting systems that are nothing more than a computer-assisted counter of a paper ballot.
* In theory (and hopefully in practice) there are electronic voting systems that are nothing more than a print-on-demand ballot-printer for a paper ballot or a computer-assisted vote-marker of a paper ballot.
The combination of the last two easily falls into the category of "electronic voting machines/systems" but because the actual ballot is seen and cast by the voter and is inherently audit-able, it is no more or less "hack-able" than a pure paper-ballot system would be. In fact, it may be less vulnerable because to "hack" it you would need to hack both the counting machines and the humans that audited the count, which may be harder than hacking a human-vote-counter and a human auditor and all the people supervising the count and audit.
I run this. No microscope required. :)
There are plenty of complex systems with no "backdoors."
I assume "backdoor" means an intentional feature, not an unintentional security bug. If you meant an unintentionall bug, then we agree.
I also assume "the complex system" as the part that was built, not the hardware or software levels below "the system.". That is, if you claim all complex OSes that are sold independently of hardware have backdoors, you are claiming that these backdoors exist regardless of which hardware they run on, as long as the hardware works as advertised.
Do they give you the option of taking tests on campus or at a testing center, in case you don't want your privacy invaded?
Ok, this IS always a bad thing for the typical end user, but I can see two rwal-world use cases:
* For debugging. In this case, the customer wants the fearure. For the general case, there are better, safer ways of debugging, but there nay be cases where this is preferable.
* Espionage, in which case tge real customer - your aversary - wants the feature.
Beyond this, there isn't much point.
Either this isn't the real reason they are dropping support, or the person who made the decision is incompetent or ignorant.
If it's the first, fine, just come clean with the real reason. "We'd rather spend or resources improving the product on other platforms" would at least be a reason I couldn't call bogus.
If the decision was made incompetently or in ignorance, then it should be revisited.
If you are hiring me, I expect to be able to cover my cost of living and then some.
This means housing within a 45-minute commute that's AT LEAST in the "top half of the bottom half" of the housing market, tuition for my kids at a good school if the local school isn't good, food, utilities, etc. etc.
Oh, and I'm "redlining out" any area that is too dangerous to live, too far away from a grocery store to shop, too far from medical, police, fire, and other essential services for me to want to live in, any place I wouldn't want my kids to grow up in, any place without decent telecommunications and other utilities, etc. even if they aren't in the "bottom quarter" of the local housing stock.
So, if you are in San Francisco, prepare to shell out. If you are in some middle-sized city east of Colorado and west of the expensive East Coast states, I'll work for a lot less.
For big companies, have them set aside money in an external fund or buy insurance to cover the cost of removal if the company goes bankrupt, and require that the company have a decommissioning plan in place prior to building.
For smaller companies, either do the same or decide, as a local government, that the community is willing to take on the risk of paying for abandoned equipment if the company goes under.
Either way, don't leave the land-owner with the legal responsibility to pay for removal.
Do the same for any other privately-funded infrastructure that is likely to require removal at the end of its life.
It would cost a bit more but maybe it's time for camera-cards, USB sticks, and the like to routinely use strong encryption with a non-secret-by-default key stored on a the medium itself.
To the end user, it would "just work" except there would be a "quick erase" mode that would scramble the key then either do a normal operating-system-level "long" or "quick" format using the new key.
Even a "quick format" by the OS would be good enough since the left-over data would be encrypted with a now-deleted key.
Now, the key itself would need to be stored on a different part of the device than the rest, one that does not have "wear leveling" applied to it.
It would also require a device that had its own intelligence, but that's a very low bar these days.
As an option, manufacturers could have a volatile and non-volatile copy of the key and allow the host device to read and write the volatile copy (with or without write-back to the non-volatile copy), allowing the device to behave both as a "normal" memory stick or camera card or, optionally, as an "encrypted" data stick or camera card where the host device held the key when power was not supplied to the device.
I hate to blame the messenger, but either you didn't buy the right service level agreement or Google broke the contract.
If it's the first case, blame yourself and learn a lesson. You get what yo pay for. If Google doesn't offer the level of service you need, go elsewhere. If they do, either pay up or go elsewhere.
In the second case, you are rightfully upset but you should be talking to lawyers before talking to Slashdot.
The good news is it's really not necessary to go that far back, it's just the more excessive optimisations that need to be scaled back and more thoughtfully applied - if at all.
This.
For some types of chips and applications, perhaps having real security means not being able to do fancy optimizations that degrade security.
I wonder how well typical PC operating systems would work if they were re-compiled to not take advantage of optimizations and run on a completely-de-optimized architecture-compatible CPU with buses, memory, chipsets, etc. that were similarly "de-optimized" and had other things in them like less-tightly-packed circuits to prevent certain side-channel attacks (e.g. rowhammer).
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Love that sig!