Intelligence agencies are not going to give up trying to get the bad guys.
I'm glad to hear that as I'm sure everyone else is.
Now if you could give up trying to spy on all the other guys, we could become friends. You see, the problem is your "kill 'em all, let god sort 'em out" approach of just vacuuming everything in and leaving the decision about who the bad guys actually are until later.
This and more. There's also a massive difference between actually abusing a child and trading pictures of nude kids on the beach. And many more details.
That's the main problem with the public court of opinion - our own and the medias tendency to simplify. To replace details with labels.
Every witch hunt in history has this problem. They all start with something arguably reasonable. You want to get rid of the witch because she poisoned your cows. You want to kick out jews because they steal money from the people. You want to drive the heathen out of the community because he erodes moral values. You want to put the paedophile behind bars because he abuses children. More or less reasonable arguments, maybe not true but there's a causality in the thinking that we can relate to. But a few steps further the cause is lost or abstracted and the individual becomes a group, and the causality is not even assumed anymore, just implicit in the group attribution. Now you want to burn all witches, kill all jews, slaughter all heathen or castrate all paedophiles. Not because they've one anything, only because they belong to a group that you've given the "evil" label.
Not the purposefully coordinated kind where everyone meets in a dark room somewhere to plot their actions, but the kind where everyone sharing fundamentally rotten values leads to effectively coordinated flock behaviour.
Which is not a conspiracy. The first rule of searching for the truth is to call things by their proper names. A conspiracy, by both legal and colloquial definition, requires agreement between the parties. Agreement requires communication (not necessarily verbal, but explicit). If everyone on the highway drives too fast, you can argue about "everyone sharing [fundamental values] leads to effectively coordinated flock behaviour", but that still only makes it a lot of speeding tickets and not a conspiracy.
It's important to make the distinction because it changes how to approach the problem. A conspiracy you would try to shatter in a different way than you would tackle a culture problem.
the ongoing work, which has been divided into three steps.
None of which is validation of the information.
It'll be interesting to watch how much of this is going to end up being disclosure, how much a witch hunt and how much targeted disinformation. It's already far too popular to destroy peoples' lives by accusing them of kiddie porn, now you can make an anonymous account on Github and add your enemies.
We seem to forget too often that the more vile the crime, the more sure you need to be that you actually have the guilty party. Falsely accusing someone of a petty theft is bad, but it will be forgotten. Falsely accusing someone of murder, rape or kiddie porn, not so much.
but had the first degree women friends of the Professor on Facebook not replied to that first woman saying that they were also in an online sexual relationship with the Professor, then the first woman wouldn't have considered his behavior sexual harassment, and she would have never retroactively taken back her consent to the online relationship.
Sadly, this seems to be the case for many recent sexual harassment cases, which is bad firstly because it turns innocent (not necessarily morally good, but criminally innocent) people into victims of the system and secondly because it muddies the water when it comes to real cases. Too many of these "angry ex-lover" cases, and people will tend to believe that actual cases are of the same kind.
She also said she felt trap near the end, but really how trapped could she have been?
You can feel very trapped in relationships, ask any of your married friends.;-)
Seriously, over the Internet, when it's not really an actual relationship - yes, she does have attachment issues.
Psych problem or not, when you're sending nude pictures to someone who's not your significant other, and you're not in the sex industry, then you should realize that something is not as it should be.
Robocop is not even close to a corporations-rule-the-world dystopia. Try cyberpunk. WTF happened to/. that people bring up a stupid 80s movie instead of Gibson and Sterling.
You're right, it's not that the OS doesn't matter at all. If you run your home on any kind of windows, I believe you are incredibly smart because you just made sure that if you're ever accused of a crime, you'll be among the 1% that can make the insanity defense work.
But for the question of connectedness and building a smart home infrastructure, the focus should not be on choosing the right OS, but on defining the right protocols. Once that is done, the right OS will win by merit. But if you go about it the wrong way and look for picking the right OS first, then you'll create lock-in effects and very soon the right OS will become the wrong OS.
security is frequently hampered by management that
...did not receive useful information about information security.
Fixed that for you. I know the frustration, I've been there many times. I do agree that management decisions can affect information security dramatically. However, I don't think it's management stupidity. Or rather: A different kind.
I believe there are two kinds of companies. Those that understand information security and those that don't. You can spot them by one simple thing: Those that do have a position - the CISO or similar - whose job it is to translate between management and information security. Those that don't have nobody and suffer from a management and an information security that speak different languages.
As it turns out, that manager was a criminal:
You're right, there are three kinds of companies. There are also the criminally incompetent.
I'm so amazed at this mantra of "corporations good, government bad" that gets repeated ad nauseam in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary that I'm about one inch short of deciding that the entire USA is some kind of religious nutjob cult to the god of imaginative economy.
I don't want government nor private corporations into my house to watch me 24/7. But when I think about the potential consequences, I'm more afraid of corporations and what they would do with it than of the government.
Good points with solid first-hand experience, thank you.
Yes, it's an additional burden and I don't think the two-data-points requirement is great, though I can't immediately think of a better solution that isn't trivial to game.
The problem is that there's no good way to make the rules better. Keeping business-country-VAT is an open invite to more Amazons to incorporate in low-tax countries. Putting a only-applies-to-more-than-one-million-revenue-companies exception on it would mean the same thing has different taxes depending on whom you buy it for (and would utterly destroy small shops that happen to be in a high-VAT-country).
No matter how you skin the cat, the result is ugly.
It is *our* fault for installing AV software and going back to picking our noses. *MILLIONS* of people are being exploited using the same attack vectors with malware and spyware... this business of calling everyone "fucking idiots" is getting old.
Amen. The fault lies entirely with the security "industry", which is unfortunately not as mature as it would like to be.
I am actually writing a blog, which I will not link here, where I try to be better than the usual crap. And there are some very good blogs out there. The majority, however, are basically stream-of-consciousness of some dude on some topic.
Many of us are in this middle ground - our time is valuable, but not valuable enough that hiring someone to run errands is a real alternative.
I'd definitely go to the slightly more expensive supermarket if it means I wait less. In fact, I do. But my selection is based on subjective personal experience and not hard data.
Yes, Dennett is brilliant because contrary to too many modern philosophers he actually has quite a broad non-philosophical knowledge and understanding. I've read Popper and wanted to vomit, for example.
It is mind-boggling that you seem to think killing off trade because of overweight administrative burdens is a good thing.
I don't.
What I do think is that "whaaaa, we have to comply with laws!!! how could you!!!" is a valid business argument.
And I also do think that paying taxes in the country of the buyer was a good and necesssary step to stop all the tax-dodger multinational corporations from incorporating in the low-tax country and using their internal accounting to shift all income there.
An exception or lighter rules for small businesses would have been great, though.
The UK is a special case here in that you don't have to register for VAT at all unless your revenue is quite considerable (much bigger than any microbusiness). So yes, for the UK, a lot suddenly changed.
Look at the length of the document you just linked to. Seriously.
It has a TOC. It took me literally 10 seconds to find what I was looking for in it.
We simply don't know yet.
We can agree on that. Maybe I've just been in too many positions where people came to me all day long complaining that this or that change or proposed change will make the sky fall. Maybe I've become desensitized to these alarms, because I've heard a new one like it every week for a decade.
Right now, on "we don't know" we can agree. Because I wouldn't bet my house on that nothing bad will happen, either. But I don't see the sky falling.
Which did not exist before the invention of OOP... oh, wait...
I don't want them implementing fifty different versions of move_student
If only someone had thought of a way to define shared functions. He could call it a collection, or an archive, or a library, no that's crazy...
but it's still a useful way of keeping a complex program from getting out of control.
Being organized and professional is a useful way of keeping a complex program under control. With the right approach, it almost doesn't matter which language or paradigm you use. And with the wrong approach - ditto.
Slashdot Mirror
Are are aware that VW is our low-end brand, yes?
BMW and Mercedes are the high-end brands, as is Porsche.
Intelligence agencies are not going to give up trying to get the bad guys.
I'm glad to hear that as I'm sure everyone else is.
Now if you could give up trying to spy on all the other guys, we could become friends. You see, the problem is your "kill 'em all, let god sort 'em out" approach of just vacuuming everything in and leaving the decision about who the bad guys actually are until later.
This and more. There's also a massive difference between actually abusing a child and trading pictures of nude kids on the beach. And many more details.
That's the main problem with the public court of opinion - our own and the medias tendency to simplify. To replace details with labels.
Every witch hunt in history has this problem. They all start with something arguably reasonable. You want to get rid of the witch because she poisoned your cows. You want to kick out jews because they steal money from the people. You want to drive the heathen out of the community because he erodes moral values. You want to put the paedophile behind bars because he abuses children. More or less reasonable arguments, maybe not true but there's a causality in the thinking that we can relate to. But a few steps further the cause is lost or abstracted and the individual becomes a group, and the causality is not even assumed anymore, just implicit in the group attribution. Now you want to burn all witches, kill all jews, slaughter all heathen or castrate all paedophiles. Not because they've one anything, only because they belong to a group that you've given the "evil" label.
Not the purposefully coordinated kind where everyone meets in a dark room somewhere to plot their actions, but the kind where everyone sharing fundamentally rotten values leads to effectively coordinated flock behaviour.
Which is not a conspiracy. The first rule of searching for the truth is to call things by their proper names. A conspiracy, by both legal and colloquial definition, requires agreement between the parties. Agreement requires communication (not necessarily verbal, but explicit).
If everyone on the highway drives too fast, you can argue about "everyone sharing [fundamental values] leads to effectively coordinated flock behaviour", but that still only makes it a lot of speeding tickets and not a conspiracy.
It's important to make the distinction because it changes how to approach the problem. A conspiracy you would try to shatter in a different way than you would tackle a culture problem.
the ongoing work, which has been divided into three steps.
None of which is validation of the information.
It'll be interesting to watch how much of this is going to end up being disclosure, how much a witch hunt and how much targeted disinformation. It's already far too popular to destroy peoples' lives by accusing them of kiddie porn, now you can make an anonymous account on Github and add your enemies.
We seem to forget too often that the more vile the crime, the more sure you need to be that you actually have the guilty party. Falsely accusing someone of a petty theft is bad, but it will be forgotten. Falsely accusing someone of murder, rape or kiddie porn, not so much.
but had the first degree women friends of the Professor on Facebook not replied to that first woman saying that they were also in an online sexual relationship with the Professor, then the first woman wouldn't have considered his behavior sexual harassment, and she would have never retroactively taken back her consent to the online relationship.
Sadly, this seems to be the case for many recent sexual harassment cases, which is bad firstly because it turns innocent (not necessarily morally good, but criminally innocent) people into victims of the system and secondly because it muddies the water when it comes to real cases. Too many of these "angry ex-lover" cases, and people will tend to believe that actual cases are of the same kind.
She also said she felt trap near the end, but really how trapped could she have been?
You can feel very trapped in relationships, ask any of your married friends. ;-)
Seriously, over the Internet, when it's not really an actual relationship - yes, she does have attachment issues.
Psych problem or not, when you're sending nude pictures to someone who's not your significant other, and you're not in the sex industry, then you should realize that something is not as it should be.
As long as it has an "off" switch, they can do what they want.
I actually like my cars to be quiet, one of the reasons I like driving BMWs and am very interested in electric cars.
Robocop is not even close to a corporations-rule-the-world dystopia. Try cyberpunk. WTF happened to /. that people bring up a stupid 80s movie instead of Gibson and Sterling.
True, a unified "EU VAT" would be ideal. But given the realities of politics, it's not something that will happen within this decade.
You're right, it's not that the OS doesn't matter at all. If you run your home on any kind of windows, I believe you are incredibly smart because you just made sure that if you're ever accused of a crime, you'll be among the 1% that can make the insanity defense work.
But for the question of connectedness and building a smart home infrastructure, the focus should not be on choosing the right OS, but on defining the right protocols. Once that is done, the right OS will win by merit. But if you go about it the wrong way and look for picking the right OS first, then you'll create lock-in effects and very soon the right OS will become the wrong OS.
security is frequently hampered by management that
...did not receive useful information about information security.
Fixed that for you. I know the frustration, I've been there many times. I do agree that management decisions can affect information security dramatically. However, I don't think it's management stupidity. Or rather: A different kind.
I believe there are two kinds of companies. Those that understand information security and those that don't. You can spot them by one simple thing: Those that do have a position - the CISO or similar - whose job it is to translate between management and information security. Those that don't have nobody and suffer from a management and an information security that speak different languages.
As it turns out, that manager was a criminal:
You're right, there are three kinds of companies. There are also the criminally incompetent.
This one million times.
I'm so amazed at this mantra of "corporations good, government bad" that gets repeated ad nauseam in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary that I'm about one inch short of deciding that the entire USA is some kind of religious nutjob cult to the god of imaginative economy.
I don't want government nor private corporations into my house to watch me 24/7. But when I think about the potential consequences, I'm more afraid of corporations and what they would do with it than of the government.
No, it's not the OS that's needed, but the protocols.
Literally my first thought on reading the summary: "Someone doesn't know what an OS is."
In a properly engineered environment, the OS of the individual components shouldn't matter.
Good points with solid first-hand experience, thank you.
Yes, it's an additional burden and I don't think the two-data-points requirement is great, though I can't immediately think of a better solution that isn't trivial to game.
The problem is that there's no good way to make the rules better. Keeping business-country-VAT is an open invite to more Amazons to incorporate in low-tax countries. Putting a only-applies-to-more-than-one-million-revenue-companies exception on it would mean the same thing has different taxes depending on whom you buy it for (and would utterly destroy small shops that happen to be in a high-VAT-country).
No matter how you skin the cat, the result is ugly.
It is *our* fault for installing AV software and going back to picking our noses. *MILLIONS* of people are being exploited using the same attack vectors with malware and spyware... this business of calling everyone "fucking idiots" is getting old.
Amen. The fault lies entirely with the security "industry", which is unfortunately not as mature as it would like to be.
I am actually writing a blog, which I will not link here, where I try to be better than the usual crap. And there are some very good blogs out there. The majority, however, are basically stream-of-consciousness of some dude on some topic.
True, I mixed them up.
For my hometown, this exists. It will check a number of options including public transport, car rental and taxi service as well as walking.
Many of us are in this middle ground - our time is valuable, but not valuable enough that hiring someone to run errands is a real alternative.
I'd definitely go to the slightly more expensive supermarket if it means I wait less. In fact, I do. But my selection is based on subjective personal experience and not hard data.
Word Lens is quite cute, and helped me a lot in Russia. It's far from perfect, but "decent" is an attribute I'd definitely give it.
Yes, Dennett is brilliant because contrary to too many modern philosophers he actually has quite a broad non-philosophical knowledge and understanding. I've read Popper and wanted to vomit, for example.
It is mind-boggling that you seem to think killing off trade because of overweight administrative burdens is a good thing.
I don't.
What I do think is that "whaaaa, we have to comply with laws!!! how could you!!!" is a valid business argument.
And I also do think that paying taxes in the country of the buyer was a good and necesssary step to stop all the tax-dodger multinational corporations from incorporating in the low-tax country and using their internal accounting to shift all income there.
An exception or lighter rules for small businesses would have been great, though.
that in the UK alone
The UK is a special case here in that you don't have to register for VAT at all unless your revenue is quite considerable (much bigger than any microbusiness). So yes, for the UK, a lot suddenly changed.
Look at the length of the document you just linked to. Seriously.
It has a TOC. It took me literally 10 seconds to find what I was looking for in it.
We simply don't know yet.
We can agree on that. Maybe I've just been in too many positions where people came to me all day long complaining that this or that change or proposed change will make the sky fall. Maybe I've become desensitized to these alarms, because I've heard a new one like it every week for a decade.
Right now, on "we don't know" we can agree. Because I wouldn't bet my house on that nothing bad will happen, either. But I don't see the sky falling.
it's about isolation and providing a clear API.
Which did not exist before the invention of OOP... oh, wait...
I don't want them implementing fifty different versions of move_student
If only someone had thought of a way to define shared functions. He could call it a collection, or an archive, or a library, no that's crazy...
but it's still a useful way of keeping a complex program from getting out of control.
Being organized and professional is a useful way of keeping a complex program under control. With the right approach, it almost doesn't matter which language or paradigm you use. And with the wrong approach - ditto.