Given that modern switches (transistors), operate at much smaller voltages than the old electromechanical relays and vacuum tubes of yore, I'd argue that Tempest related issues are becoming less of an issue as time goes on, rather than more.
Indeed, with the number of transistors in modern electronics, there's probably a sort of "natural jamming" going on, where the sheer volume of radiated transmissions is sufficient to overwhelm any listener. Of course, signal processing equipment has also become more sophisticated in the meantime, so I might not be 100% on target in that assessment.
Indeed, that seems to be the case at first, but, in this case, first impressions are misleading. After page 80 or so (about half way) the number of redactions drops precipitously. Indeed, one of the most interesting sections (the one on Tempest) is notable for its lack of redaction. There's some fascinating stuff there about how the NSA discovered that EM leakage was an issue, and what they tried at first to contain such noise.
What Java and.NET do is optimize your code for you. By virtue of their virtual machine architecture, Java and.NET can look at the bytecode and apply some "higher level" optimizations to the code before running it through an optimizing compiler to produce assembly.
In essence, by using Java or.NET, you're leveraging Sun or Microsoft's optimizations, rather than having to figure out those optimizations by yourself. For the vast majority of cases that's beneficial - Sun and Microsoft have far larger budgets than you do, and can spend much more time looking at these sorts of things. However, if your program is esoteric, or if you're looking at hardware that is outside the mainstream, you'll run into trouble, since the very optimizations that help Java and.NET on "standard" (x86) architectures may in fact hurt you on your nonstandard architecture.
And they consist of very dated (if effective) technology that tends to be utilitarian in design to begin with.
Well, not always dated, necessarily. Take the B-52, for example. Yeah, the airframe is old, but the avionics and control systems have been significantly upgraded since the planes were originally built. As I understand it, the space shuttle has also gone through multiple upgrade cycles.
Frankly, I don't know who to admire more - the engineers who build these things, or the engineers who have to go back over them and upgrade the designs.
Frankly, I think the opinion that "good programmer == big ego" is nonsense. The best programmers I know are all some of the humblest programmers as well. They know how much they don't know and are always open to feedback and potential improvement.
As I see it, a person with a big ego is more likely to be a bad programmer. They are likely to think that their way is the best and will remain wedded to outdated techniques, leading to obsolete skill sets. Moreover, they're not likely to admit to problems without prodding, even when admitting such a thing would be better for the project as a whole.
Finally, let's not forget the effect that big egos have on those who work with them. It doesn't matter how skilled the big-ego "superstar" programmer is if no one else can get along with him or her.
While I agree that formal status reports are silly, I disagree with our opinion about daily status meetings. On the team that I work on, every day we have a 15 minute stand-up meeting where everyone goes around and says what they're working on today. Not only does it benefit our manager, but it also benefits the entire team, as it helps us not step on each others' toes, as it were. It also helps with problem solving, as a single team member can ask about an issue, and get feedback from the entire team, rather than having to go around and ask people individually.
That is utterly and completely not true. In fact, in my experience, the best programmers I've met are some of the humblest people I know.
Actually, I'd argue that having a big ego is a sign of a bad programmer. The fact that he or she has a big ego means that he or she is much less likely to ask for help when things go wrong. Instead, they're likely to hide and try to cover things up, which simply hurts the project in the long run.
Re:Can we get back to the old definition of WMDs
on
Botnets As "eWMDs"
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· Score: 1
Its an academic point, since, once the mass is converted into energy, there's no way to get it back as mass again. Therefore, it may as well be destruction, since the reaction is, for all intents and purposes, one-way.
Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx
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USPS Server Meltdown
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· Score: 1
I fully agree on that point. At the very least, the application developer ought to have returned a well-formed error message stating something to the effect of, "Sorry, the postal service's servers are down, so we can't calculate your shipping at this time."
Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx
on
USPS Server Meltdown
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· Score: 1
Charge a fee that is close to what you expect to pay. Over on a few and under on a few, but should even out at the end.
That works only as long as your shipping volume is relatively low. If its not, then even small discrepancies in shipping costs can result in the books not balancing, as that "negligible difference" isn't really so negligible when its multiplied by hundreds or thousands of packages.
Re:Can we get back to the old definition of WMDs
on
Botnets As "eWMDs"
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· Score: 1
That only applies to chemical reactions, not atomic ones.
In any atomic reaction, whether it be fission or fusion, the end result is slightly less massive than the initial components. The difference in mass is converted into energy by the famous conversion, e=mc^2.
Re:Even though no one dies from them.
on
Botnets As "eWMDs"
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· Score: 1
First, if a hospital has its critical infrastructure exposed on the Internet, I'd be blaming the hospital, not the hacker. Second, how is the hacker even going to access the hospital's systems if they've been "involuntarily airgapped" by the natural disaster?
Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx
on
USPS Server Meltdown
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· Score: 5, Insightful
To be fair, what sort of "backup" calculation would you have done here, short of reverse-engineering the USPS algorithm for calculating shipping rates?
I'm not usually a rabid free-market libertarian, but this here can be seen as a result of the fact that the USPS isn't really beholden to its customers. Can you imagine FedEx or UPS being afflicted by such an issue? And, if they were, would they blow off inquiries with a glib, "We expect the servers to be down for the rest of the day?" Of course not, because, for FedEx, UPS, DHL, et. al. such an outage directly affects the health of the organization. If people can't calculate shipping rates, they can't ship, and if they don't ship, the company doesn't make money. The close linkage between revenue and working services tends to put more impetus behind keeping things working and making sure that they get fixed quickly if they do happen to go down.
I know you're just trying to own a troll, but I have to thank you for posting these links. I'm a relative newcomer to Python, and I've been trying to get my hands on some tools like these.
Well, I really like Python, but I agree with the grandparent that lack of good debugging tools is really annoying. Frankly, I'd like a debugger that'd allow me to easily insert breakpoints and watchpoints into a program. Also, I'd like the debugger to be standardized and included with the default distribution of the language. C, C++, Java, Perl and Ruby all come with debuggers. Why doesn't Python?
More than just debuggers, though, the lack of external tool support for Python in general bothers me. Frankly, I'd like a sort of Python IDE that'd do the sort of things that Eclipse does for Java, or Anjunta does for C/C++.
Well, those languages can also be used to write command line programs as well. Also, given that the OP comes from a Windows programming background, its more than likely that he/she has some desktop GUI application experience.
Many universities have a "Student Legal Services" department that has a set of lawyers that look at issues like this. I'd advise the OP to go talk to them, since they'd probably be the most familiar with the contracts used by University.
This is true, but I'm not sure that making a new law for this circumstance is such a good idea. Laws are made by lawmakers, and, as we all know, lawmakers usually make laws to be overly broad, which leads to all sorts of unintended consequences down the road.
But does this meet the threshold for assisted suicide? I mean, its not quite the same as what Dr. Kevorkian did. Lori Drew did not administer a fatal dose of barbituates to Megan Meier.
And in the case of a mentally ill person, where do you draw the line? If you mistreat someone every day of their lives, tell them they are worthless, that nobody will ever love them, and then hand them a gun and tell them that the world will be better off without them, then technically you didn't pull the trigger, right? But as a competent adult you should know the likely end result of your actions will be the death of an individual, and if you engage in a series of actions that is likely to end with that scenario then you are guilty of either murder or manslaughter.
Er, no you're not. If you mistreat someone like that, you're guilty of abuse and/or negligence. But, if the person takes their own life as a result of such abuse, its still ruled a suicide, and you're not liable for their death (as a criminal matter - you can still be sued for wrongful death in civil court). I think you're underestimating the extraordinarily high burden of proof that criminal law carries. The prosecution has to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it was your actions that caused the death. In any suicide, such a threshold is extraordinarily difficult to meet. Even if the victim names you on their suicide note, the defense can undermine it by stating that the fact that the person committed suicide is proof that their mental state was disturbed, and the victim's perceptions were distorted.
I was trying to make the point that it wasn't Lori Drew's fault that Megan Meier was depressed. The fact that Lori Drew's statements exacerbated Megan Meier's depression means that the case should be in civil court at worst.
That's pretty close to saying that cigarette companies have nothing to do with smokers dying of cancers and other smoking related illness.
How so? If I smoke cigarettes, I can become physically addicted to them. How can I become physically addicted to someone's speech?
Megan Meier could have disregarded Lori Drew's messages without any physical symptoms. She could have reported the hurtful and damaging statements to an adult authority figure. The fact that she did not do so and instead took her own life is at least 51% her own fault.
For child abuse charges to apply, the adult has to be in direct contact with the child. I'm not too sure on the specifics, but it doesn't sound like Lori Drew ever really came into direct contact with Megan Meier. It seems that all of their interaction was over the Internet.
Is the law inadequate in this case? I don't think so. While what Lori Drew did was despicable and wrong, I don't believe it is right to make all despicable and wrong things illegal. Laws should arbitrate instances where one person violates the rights of another. Nothing in this case shows how Lori Drew violated Megan Meier's rights.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that modern switches (transistors), operate at much smaller voltages than the old electromechanical relays and vacuum tubes of yore, I'd argue that Tempest related issues are becoming less of an issue as time goes on, rather than more.
Indeed, with the number of transistors in modern electronics, there's probably a sort of "natural jamming" going on, where the sheer volume of radiated transmissions is sufficient to overwhelm any listener. Of course, signal processing equipment has also become more sophisticated in the meantime, so I might not be 100% on target in that assessment.
Indeed, that seems to be the case at first, but, in this case, first impressions are misleading. After page 80 or so (about half way) the number of redactions drops precipitously. Indeed, one of the most interesting sections (the one on Tempest) is notable for its lack of redaction. There's some fascinating stuff there about how the NSA discovered that EM leakage was an issue, and what they tried at first to contain such noise.
What Java and .NET do is optimize your code for you. By virtue of their virtual machine architecture, Java and .NET can look at the bytecode and apply some "higher level" optimizations to the code before running it through an optimizing compiler to produce assembly.
In essence, by using Java or .NET, you're leveraging Sun or Microsoft's optimizations, rather than having to figure out those optimizations by yourself. For the vast majority of cases that's beneficial - Sun and Microsoft have far larger budgets than you do, and can spend much more time looking at these sorts of things. However, if your program is esoteric, or if you're looking at hardware that is outside the mainstream, you'll run into trouble, since the very optimizations that help Java and .NET on "standard" (x86) architectures may in fact hurt you on your nonstandard architecture.
And they consist of very dated (if effective) technology that tends to be utilitarian in design to begin with.
Well, not always dated, necessarily. Take the B-52, for example. Yeah, the airframe is old, but the avionics and control systems have been significantly upgraded since the planes were originally built. As I understand it, the space shuttle has also gone through multiple upgrade cycles.
Frankly, I don't know who to admire more - the engineers who build these things, or the engineers who have to go back over them and upgrade the designs.
Frankly, I think the opinion that "good programmer == big ego" is nonsense. The best programmers I know are all some of the humblest programmers as well. They know how much they don't know and are always open to feedback and potential improvement.
As I see it, a person with a big ego is more likely to be a bad programmer. They are likely to think that their way is the best and will remain wedded to outdated techniques, leading to obsolete skill sets. Moreover, they're not likely to admit to problems without prodding, even when admitting such a thing would be better for the project as a whole.
Finally, let's not forget the effect that big egos have on those who work with them. It doesn't matter how skilled the big-ego "superstar" programmer is if no one else can get along with him or her.
While I agree that formal status reports are silly, I disagree with our opinion about daily status meetings. On the team that I work on, every day we have a 15 minute stand-up meeting where everyone goes around and says what they're working on today. Not only does it benefit our manager, but it also benefits the entire team, as it helps us not step on each others' toes, as it were. It also helps with problem solving, as a single team member can ask about an issue, and get feedback from the entire team, rather than having to go around and ask people individually.
That is utterly and completely not true. In fact, in my experience, the best programmers I've met are some of the humblest people I know.
Actually, I'd argue that having a big ego is a sign of a bad programmer. The fact that he or she has a big ego means that he or she is much less likely to ask for help when things go wrong. Instead, they're likely to hide and try to cover things up, which simply hurts the project in the long run.
Its an academic point, since, once the mass is converted into energy, there's no way to get it back as mass again. Therefore, it may as well be destruction, since the reaction is, for all intents and purposes, one-way.
I fully agree on that point. At the very least, the application developer ought to have returned a well-formed error message stating something to the effect of, "Sorry, the postal service's servers are down, so we can't calculate your shipping at this time."
Charge a fee that is close to what you expect to pay. Over on a few and under on a few, but should even out at the end.
That works only as long as your shipping volume is relatively low. If its not, then even small discrepancies in shipping costs can result in the books not balancing, as that "negligible difference" isn't really so negligible when its multiplied by hundreds or thousands of packages.
That only applies to chemical reactions, not atomic ones.
In any atomic reaction, whether it be fission or fusion, the end result is slightly less massive than the initial components. The difference in mass is converted into energy by the famous conversion, e=mc^2.
First, if a hospital has its critical infrastructure exposed on the Internet, I'd be blaming the hospital, not the hacker. Second, how is the hacker even going to access the hospital's systems if they've been "involuntarily airgapped" by the natural disaster?
To be fair, what sort of "backup" calculation would you have done here, short of reverse-engineering the USPS algorithm for calculating shipping rates?
I'm not usually a rabid free-market libertarian, but this here can be seen as a result of the fact that the USPS isn't really beholden to its customers. Can you imagine FedEx or UPS being afflicted by such an issue? And, if they were, would they blow off inquiries with a glib, "We expect the servers to be down for the rest of the day?" Of course not, because, for FedEx, UPS, DHL, et. al. such an outage directly affects the health of the organization. If people can't calculate shipping rates, they can't ship, and if they don't ship, the company doesn't make money. The close linkage between revenue and working services tends to put more impetus behind keeping things working and making sure that they get fixed quickly if they do happen to go down.
I know you're just trying to own a troll, but I have to thank you for posting these links. I'm a relative newcomer to Python, and I've been trying to get my hands on some tools like these.
Thanks!
Well, I really like Python, but I agree with the grandparent that lack of good debugging tools is really annoying. Frankly, I'd like a debugger that'd allow me to easily insert breakpoints and watchpoints into a program. Also, I'd like the debugger to be standardized and included with the default distribution of the language. C, C++, Java, Perl and Ruby all come with debuggers. Why doesn't Python?
More than just debuggers, though, the lack of external tool support for Python in general bothers me. Frankly, I'd like a sort of Python IDE that'd do the sort of things that Eclipse does for Java, or Anjunta does for C/C++.
Well, those languages can also be used to write command line programs as well. Also, given that the OP comes from a Windows programming background, its more than likely that he/she has some desktop GUI application experience.
Many universities have a "Student Legal Services" department that has a set of lawyers that look at issues like this. I'd advise the OP to go talk to them, since they'd probably be the most familiar with the contracts used by University.
This is true, but I'm not sure that making a new law for this circumstance is such a good idea. Laws are made by lawmakers, and, as we all know, lawmakers usually make laws to be overly broad, which leads to all sorts of unintended consequences down the road.
that she KNEW was depressed that the world
Can you prove that in a court of law?
Suicide was a reasonably forseeable consequence.
Was it? There are plenty of depressed people who do not commit suicide, even in the face of abuse.
But does this meet the threshold for assisted suicide? I mean, its not quite the same as what Dr. Kevorkian did. Lori Drew did not administer a fatal dose of barbituates to Megan Meier.
And in the case of a mentally ill person, where do you draw the line? If you mistreat someone every day of their lives, tell them they are worthless, that nobody will ever love them, and then hand them a gun and tell them that the world will be better off without them, then technically you didn't pull the trigger, right? But as a competent adult you should know the likely end result of your actions will be the death of an individual, and if you engage in a series of actions that is likely to end with that scenario then you are guilty of either murder or manslaughter.
Er, no you're not. If you mistreat someone like that, you're guilty of abuse and/or negligence. But, if the person takes their own life as a result of such abuse, its still ruled a suicide, and you're not liable for their death (as a criminal matter - you can still be sued for wrongful death in civil court). I think you're underestimating the extraordinarily high burden of proof that criminal law carries. The prosecution has to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it was your actions that caused the death. In any suicide, such a threshold is extraordinarily difficult to meet. Even if the victim names you on their suicide note, the defense can undermine it by stating that the fact that the person committed suicide is proof that their mental state was disturbed, and the victim's perceptions were distorted.
I was trying to make the point that it wasn't Lori Drew's fault that Megan Meier was depressed. The fact that Lori Drew's statements exacerbated Megan Meier's depression means that the case should be in civil court at worst.
That's pretty close to saying that cigarette companies have nothing to do with smokers dying of cancers and other smoking related illness.
How so? If I smoke cigarettes, I can become physically addicted to them. How can I become physically addicted to someone's speech?
Megan Meier could have disregarded Lori Drew's messages without any physical symptoms. She could have reported the hurtful and damaging statements to an adult authority figure. The fact that she did not do so and instead took her own life is at least 51% her own fault.
For child abuse charges to apply, the adult has to be in direct contact with the child. I'm not too sure on the specifics, but it doesn't sound like Lori Drew ever really came into direct contact with Megan Meier. It seems that all of their interaction was over the Internet.
Is the law inadequate in this case? I don't think so. While what Lori Drew did was despicable and wrong, I don't believe it is right to make all despicable and wrong things illegal. Laws should arbitrate instances where one person violates the rights of another. Nothing in this case shows how Lori Drew violated Megan Meier's rights.