- Power not really distributed, just obfuscated (lies with devs).
- Slow and overly complex.
The Blockchain solves 1 and only 1 problem at great cost. That problem is the Byzantine General's problem which handles the problem of bad actors in a system. Is that really the problem here? It seems like the problem is with token/identity assignment, generally sloppy corporate coding and the inevitable appearance of Murphy's Law. I don't think that any of these issues are analogs to the Byzantine General's problem.
A better solution would be to add a CC chip reader to each laptop and cell phone and put tokens on those chips which are used to validate transactions. As for server security, just generally doing a better job of the nuts and bolts of information handling solves most of those issues (like using an encryption key on those CC chips to encrypt PII). These breaches are rarely cracking of encryption or other "front-door" techniques. Its usually a 3rd party with sloppy security (like the trucking company or similarly "low tech" industries), not Hollywood style genius level hacking.
There are also techniques for applying operations on encrypted data without ever decrypting it. But those are really hard and very few companies have the expertise to make that work.
And those trying to tie hurricanes in with climate change invariably focus on the North Atlantic because that's the storm basin whose recent history fits their desired narrative. Meanwhile, storm frequency in the East Pacific is flat. The West Pacific is mostly flat with a recent slight downward trend. The South Pacific is down, as is the North Indian Ocean.
It should be noted that most climate change models currently don't predict a significant increase in the number of hurricanes in a season. This was not true in the past but we get better with modeling over time so its not surprising. Most do however predict that the storms will be larger on average. That part seems to be holding worldwide.
All you'll do is discourage those banks and lenders from doing business WITH YOU and nothing more.
I disagree, this is the first good idea about what to do about Equifax I've heard. If many many people all locked their Equifax accounts, then lenders would start expecting that this is common, rational behavior. They would then stop seeing the need to use Equifax. This is the first real idea that has a chance at actually impacting their business which is the only way to reform this horribly broken industry.
I am pretty sure that none of Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk could get a 900
850 is the max for the scale people generally refer to when talking about credit scores. Googling around, some banks seem to use internally a different score scale, but let's set that aside for a sec.
People can, and in fact do get perfect score. If you understand exactly how it works, its' not that difficult. It has very little to do with how much money you make, and is a pretty artificial metric.
Another big misconception about credit scores is that a "perfect" score is best. A credit score isn't how likely you are to pay back a debt, its a measure of how much money a lender makes on average on your debt. So if you always pay on time or ahead of time, then your credit score can actually go down. Keeping a small balance on your credit cards causes your credit score to go up because you are paying interest. So a good credit score can actually better for you than a perfect one as it means that you are paying less interest than others even if you might (but probably won't) get a higher insurance premium. This makes sense if you understand that their customers are not individuals, they are insurance companies, banks and the like.
I worked for a company that was quite similar to Equifax and had the same level of PII on about half as many people. When I started, they seemed to take security seriously. But there were several other large breaches at other companies while I was there and nothing happened to those companies. So I watched as the company took greater and greater risks with security (often to save days or weeks of work for a single engineer). By the time I left, its security was on par with a company I worked for before that sold products for new mothers and kept no PII at all.
Unless and until the FTC starts fining these companies large enough fines to cause the execs to take notice, these breaches will continue and only get worse. Security is a process and a breach like this usually required multiple lazy or sloppy decisions just to make the exploit possible. These breaches aren't national state actors writing custom exploits. These are script kiddies trolling for sloppy systems they can exploit. And those systems wouldn't be exploitable by those kiddies unless the engineers and IT folks were being so lazy and sloppy with security. There aren't even good risk reward decision making on these issues. The attitude is if I can save 1 dollar by doing less security, we will. Until fines and criminal charges start becoming a real risk, companies will continue to be breached over and over again.
There are no goalkeepers in football, only soccer.
You seem to be confusing football, you know, the sport in which the foot is used to move a ball around a field, and what the Americans erroneously call football, even though in it mostly hands are used to carry an object which is not a ball but a spheroid prolate, meaning the more apt name for the sport would be 'handegg'.
Its called football because its played on foot as opposed to on horseback like polo. Both soccer and football started in the 19th century before any of our other modern sports existed (except track, boxing and wrestling). There is some variant on football in many cultures around the world. The medieval Italian one is my favorite. Think UFC fighting plus american football played on something the size of a basketball court with the goal being to throw a round ball into a square tent. It was called Calcio Fiorentino (also known as calcio storico "historic football").
Congress can no more grant extra powers to the President than they can remove powers from the President. Any law passed by Congress surrendering their powers to the President is unconstitutional on it's face. Amending the constitution is the only way to do that.
That's completely unworkable in the real world. In practice, Congress makes a law and the Executive enforces it. But the exact minutia of how a law is enforced must have discretion as to the most effective way to enforce that law. For instance, Congress can tell the military to fight a war with some country, how the war is fought is up to the generals (and reality) as long as they abide by the laws set forth by Congress. To expect every single minor detail to be inscribed in law would produce ridiculous (Vogon levels even) levels of bureaucracy. In practice in an area of public policy, Congress sets out a set of policies in law and the Executive handles the minutia of enacting it. Where that line is set is by Congress and they very often decide to give a very large amount of leeway for the Executive to enact policy often because they are career politicians and know that the correct decision today can be the wrong one tomorrow.
Ah Kamala Harris, you clearly didn't live in SF when she was DA here. She was a Willie Brown appointee who was so hated that she almost lost election when she had no opponent. She never gave a single shit about her constituents. She worked in SF government during a period of high corruption (they found ballot boxes floating in the bay multiple times after Brown's elections) and low progress. I fear how she would fair at the national level if she ever got any power. You think the Clintons were corporate hacks (I don't think that's really fair), Harris actually is.
In "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman (1985), he describes and analyses exactly this kind of problem. Politics, religion, and education is transformed into entertainment, and thus loses its original context, value and meaning. Instead, entertainment serves its own purpose - to entertain and keep distracted. Often, or most of the time in today's media world, it also serves the purpose of showing advertisement, as is described in this summary. Your teacher is no longer there to give you an education, but to sell her own brand and promote others.
Its a phenomenon that's at least 2000 years old. Perhaps you have heard the phrase Bread and Circuses. Take heart, its not a permanent trend. Its yet another swing of the pendulum. Hopefully it will die down soon somehow...could take some time though.
I've been smoking marijuana on and off for almost 20 years now. I'm not addicted, and I've never been tempted to smoke during the work day or even the night before work. My clients have always been happy with my work and past clients even reach out to me asking me to come back (I'm a software contractor). I'm known for being reliable, quick thinking, creative, and productive.
And yet, companies still hire tobacco smokers that waste gobs of time each day taking smoke breaks and drive up healthcare costs.
Taxes on tobacco are so high that all the health care costs are covered already. In fact, we passed that milestone in 1983. Since then taxes on tobacco has gone up about 3x. So be careful what you wish for. If all smokers suddenly stopped tomorrow, you would probably owe several thousand dollars extra in local taxes to cover the shortfall.
I've only heard it in replay, but back in 1994, they interviewed a Hutu woman in Rwanda during the height of the genocide. They were on the phone with her as she hid in her home as the Tutsi militias knocked on her door.
Pretty sure you mean it was a Tutsi women hiding from Hutu militias. Although in rural areas of Rwanda there was Hutu on Hutu killings too. The Hutu/Tutsi division is pretty artificial, its an easy mistake to make.
And people who are good doing the hands on work make for poor leaders.
I've never seen a good leader who wasn't also a good worker. I don't believe such a beast exists. I've seen people who can fool you 50% of the time into thinking they are, but that's the best I've seen. To manage a job, you should understand the job and the easiest way to do that is to actually do the job.
Git is "the state of the art" version control system.
For a single developer it does not really matter what he is using, however using "the state of the art" can hardly be a mistake.
Of course if you say its "the state of the art" then we must all use it for all possible uses then. Look kid, there are many revision control systems. For a single dev, almost all of them are better than git. You know what git is good for? Its good for large scale open source projects. Your team at work should probably be using perforce as its scaling issues with 1000s of devs likely wouldn't matter for your team of 8 (or whatever). Yet you still insist on using something that isn't really as good for day to day dev because its "state of the art". Have fun manually merging things constantly (perforce doesn't make you do this unless you actually made two conflicting modifications). In git, conflicts happen far too often. Also, since you probably rarely change your remote repo to which you are pushing code, you don't actually use the main advantage of git.
Revision control is good but that doesn't mean you are an expert in different revision control systems, especially if you've only used 1 or 2 of them. Older devs will likely have seen 4 or 5 roll through at least and understand that newer isn't always better.
It is just that [women] are less likely to make that choice [to become programmers].
And that's fine, if that's what they want. We should make sure that there isn't bias against women, and if there is, we should root it out. But on the other hand, we shouldn't force women to become programmers, either.
That's a bit disingenuous isn't it? We've been doing that for at least 20 decades and has it changed that makeup of the tech industry at all?
Yet, my large city has couple hundred of you, willing to come in the office, network with employees outside of work that are outside their team, and is a crap load more flexible. Let's be honest, why should we hire you?
Not trying to be cruel here, just honest. I have a mortgage in another city. I pay a company to manage it for me. I moved because it needs to happen or I could stay in my little crappy town, with 20% less mortgage cost and a 40% less salary, along with 80% less opportunity. Weigh the benefits and negativities in moving.
And there are a dozen or more companies in this area willing to hire me at higher rates. Competitors of yours that values my skills more highly than yours.
Not trying to be cruel here, but your company is facing several lawsuits for product quality and perhaps this is a root cause of why. Your staff is of questionable skill and seems to like to say phrases (like 'Big Data') that they clearly don't understand. You have Physicists doing Machine Learning instead of, you know, hiring people who specialize in Machine Learning/AI. Perhaps this is why the land on which your office is built is worth more than the actual business you work for.
Fifty miles per hour seems like a lot until you realize that means winds are still up to 150mph.
It's like driving with the top down on the autobahn.
Its more like standing in the middle of the autobahn while traffic zooms past you. Its not the 150mph wind that gets you, its the 4x4s flying at 100mph that you have to worry about.
the San Francisco metro area (San Francisco–Oakland–Hayward, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area)
There's your problem right there. Most people that live in the SF Bay Area would include San Jose in that with more than 2m people. The US census for some weird reason divides the bay area into two pieces, San Jose and SF. No idea why and everyone here thinks that people who live in San Jose live in the "Bay Area" as do those that live in San Jose.
A few years ago I started using Scala and have even worked at shops where I convinced them to let me use it on larger scale telecom projects. There are things in Scala that can be terse and weird, but it's more than just a clean version of Java. If you learn all the tricks, it's got a lot of syntactic sugar and functional syntax that lend itself to shorter more manageable code. I'm still using it for some pretty big projects like BigSense.io.
Although it's not just Scala, Groovy and Clojure are both languages that try to leverage the existing JVM and the rich base of Java libraries with a newer language.
Java was a big stepping stone during its time. It did a lot of things right, but the backwards comparability and keeping in horrible concepts (checked exceptions, no real properties, interfaces) has kept it from really growing as a language. I think the future of the JVM won't include as much Java.
A clean version of Java? More like a write-once language. Back in the the 80s when it was C (procedural) and LISP (functional) were the main languages. LISP lost due to its tendency to produce non-maintainable code bases that multiple programmers had a hard time working on together. Have fun learning that lesson again. Once was enough for me...
SQL is similarly not obscure in its area, but worth learning and you rarely see it in a list of general programming languages (because it isn't). But the commercial vendors all ship their SQL with strong variants that extend the language and do more common language functions like looping. I speak of PL/SQL, TSQL, and their ilk, which all have a touch of obscurity in the same way R does.
SQL is not in any way obscure and is in fact the exact opposite of obscure. More programmers know SQL than any other language, Java is second.
Right now every US presidential candidate needs a billionaire backer to run. That usually means bad things. Maybe Notch and his $$ can balance the scales a bit and back Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren? But then again, I don't know his politics and perhaps this is a terrible suggestion.
Slashdot Mirror
And dirty assholes at that.
I think you mean shitty assholes.
Blockchain:
- Unclear accountability (the real reason for popularity)
- You're putting data on lots of computers, in different jurisdictions.
- Can't really delete anything (privacy nightmare)
- Not really anonymous.
- Encryption will be broken in time.
- Power not really distributed, just obfuscated (lies with devs).
- Slow and overly complex.
The Blockchain solves 1 and only 1 problem at great cost. That problem is the Byzantine General's problem which handles the problem of bad actors in a system. Is that really the problem here? It seems like the problem is with token/identity assignment, generally sloppy corporate coding and the inevitable appearance of Murphy's Law. I don't think that any of these issues are analogs to the Byzantine General's problem.
A better solution would be to add a CC chip reader to each laptop and cell phone and put tokens on those chips which are used to validate transactions. As for server security, just generally doing a better job of the nuts and bolts of information handling solves most of those issues (like using an encryption key on those CC chips to encrypt PII). These breaches are rarely cracking of encryption or other "front-door" techniques. Its usually a 3rd party with sloppy security (like the trucking company or similarly "low tech" industries), not Hollywood style genius level hacking.
There are also techniques for applying operations on encrypted data without ever decrypting it. But those are really hard and very few companies have the expertise to make that work.
And those trying to tie hurricanes in with climate change invariably focus on the North Atlantic because that's the storm basin whose recent history fits their desired narrative. Meanwhile, storm frequency in the East Pacific is flat. The West Pacific is mostly flat with a recent slight downward trend. The South Pacific is down, as is the North Indian Ocean.
It should be noted that most climate change models currently don't predict a significant increase in the number of hurricanes in a season. This was not true in the past but we get better with modeling over time so its not surprising. Most do however predict that the storms will be larger on average. That part seems to be holding worldwide.
I do not think normal hacking is under their jurisdiction. While most people have heard of Mossad Israel have a bunch of other organizations.
Unit 8200 is the part of Mossad that handles cyber operations.
All you'll do is discourage those banks and lenders from doing business WITH YOU and nothing more.
I disagree, this is the first good idea about what to do about Equifax I've heard. If many many people all locked their Equifax accounts, then lenders would start expecting that this is common, rational behavior. They would then stop seeing the need to use Equifax. This is the first real idea that has a chance at actually impacting their business which is the only way to reform this horribly broken industry.
850 is the max for the scale people generally refer to when talking about credit scores. Googling around, some banks seem to use internally a different score scale, but let's set that aside for a sec.
People can, and in fact do get perfect score. If you understand exactly how it works, its' not that difficult. It has very little to do with how much money you make, and is a pretty artificial metric.
Another big misconception about credit scores is that a "perfect" score is best. A credit score isn't how likely you are to pay back a debt, its a measure of how much money a lender makes on average on your debt. So if you always pay on time or ahead of time, then your credit score can actually go down. Keeping a small balance on your credit cards causes your credit score to go up because you are paying interest. So a good credit score can actually better for you than a perfect one as it means that you are paying less interest than others even if you might (but probably won't) get a higher insurance premium. This makes sense if you understand that their customers are not individuals, they are insurance companies, banks and the like.
> Talk about incompetence compounded
Well, their Chief Security Officer is a liberal arts diversity hire. What do you expect?
Experian's Tom King is a diversity hire? Are you sure? Seems like more of a typically corporate exec...
Unless and until the FTC starts fining these companies large enough fines to cause the execs to take notice, these breaches will continue and only get worse. Security is a process and a breach like this usually required multiple lazy or sloppy decisions just to make the exploit possible. These breaches aren't national state actors writing custom exploits. These are script kiddies trolling for sloppy systems they can exploit. And those systems wouldn't be exploitable by those kiddies unless the engineers and IT folks were being so lazy and sloppy with security. There aren't even good risk reward decision making on these issues. The attitude is if I can save 1 dollar by doing less security, we will. Until fines and criminal charges start becoming a real risk, companies will continue to be breached over and over again.
You seem to be confusing football, you know, the sport in which the foot is used to move a ball around a field, and what the Americans erroneously call football, even though in it mostly hands are used to carry an object which is not a ball but a spheroid prolate, meaning the more apt name for the sport would be 'handegg'.
Its called football because its played on foot as opposed to on horseback like polo. Both soccer and football started in the 19th century before any of our other modern sports existed (except track, boxing and wrestling). There is some variant on football in many cultures around the world. The medieval Italian one is my favorite. Think UFC fighting plus american football played on something the size of a basketball court with the goal being to throw a round ball into a square tent. It was called Calcio Fiorentino (also known as calcio storico "historic football").
Congress can no more grant extra powers to the President than they can remove powers from the President. Any law passed by Congress surrendering their powers to the President is unconstitutional on it's face. Amending the constitution is the only way to do that.
That's completely unworkable in the real world. In practice, Congress makes a law and the Executive enforces it. But the exact minutia of how a law is enforced must have discretion as to the most effective way to enforce that law. For instance, Congress can tell the military to fight a war with some country, how the war is fought is up to the generals (and reality) as long as they abide by the laws set forth by Congress. To expect every single minor detail to be inscribed in law would produce ridiculous (Vogon levels even) levels of bureaucracy. In practice in an area of public policy, Congress sets out a set of policies in law and the Executive handles the minutia of enacting it. Where that line is set is by Congress and they very often decide to give a very large amount of leeway for the Executive to enact policy often because they are career politicians and know that the correct decision today can be the wrong one tomorrow.
Ah Kamala Harris, you clearly didn't live in SF when she was DA here. She was a Willie Brown appointee who was so hated that she almost lost election when she had no opponent. She never gave a single shit about her constituents. She worked in SF government during a period of high corruption (they found ballot boxes floating in the bay multiple times after Brown's elections) and low progress. I fear how she would fair at the national level if she ever got any power. You think the Clintons were corporate hacks (I don't think that's really fair), Harris actually is.
In "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman (1985), he describes and analyses exactly this kind of problem. Politics, religion, and education is transformed into entertainment, and thus loses its original context, value and meaning. Instead, entertainment serves its own purpose - to entertain and keep distracted. Often, or most of the time in today's media world, it also serves the purpose of showing advertisement, as is described in this summary. Your teacher is no longer there to give you an education, but to sell her own brand and promote others.
Its a phenomenon that's at least 2000 years old. Perhaps you have heard the phrase Bread and Circuses. Take heart, its not a permanent trend. Its yet another swing of the pendulum. Hopefully it will die down soon somehow...could take some time though.
I've been smoking marijuana on and off for almost 20 years now. I'm not addicted, and I've never been tempted to smoke during the work day or even the night before work. My clients have always been happy with my work and past clients even reach out to me asking me to come back (I'm a software contractor). I'm known for being reliable, quick thinking, creative, and productive.
And yet, companies still hire tobacco smokers that waste gobs of time each day taking smoke breaks and drive up healthcare costs.
Taxes on tobacco are so high that all the health care costs are covered already. In fact, we passed that milestone in 1983. Since then taxes on tobacco has gone up about 3x. So be careful what you wish for. If all smokers suddenly stopped tomorrow, you would probably owe several thousand dollars extra in local taxes to cover the shortfall.
I've only heard it in replay, but back in 1994, they interviewed a Hutu woman in Rwanda during the height of the genocide. They were on the phone with her as she hid in her home as the Tutsi militias knocked on her door.
Pretty sure you mean it was a Tutsi women hiding from Hutu militias. Although in rural areas of Rwanda there was Hutu on Hutu killings too. The Hutu/Tutsi division is pretty artificial, its an easy mistake to make.
And people who are good doing the hands on work make for poor leaders.
I've never seen a good leader who wasn't also a good worker. I don't believe such a beast exists. I've seen people who can fool you 50% of the time into thinking they are, but that's the best I've seen. To manage a job, you should understand the job and the easiest way to do that is to actually do the job.
Git is "the state of the art" version control system. For a single developer it does not really matter what he is using, however using "the state of the art" can hardly be a mistake.
Of course if you say its "the state of the art" then we must all use it for all possible uses then. Look kid, there are many revision control systems. For a single dev, almost all of them are better than git. You know what git is good for? Its good for large scale open source projects. Your team at work should probably be using perforce as its scaling issues with 1000s of devs likely wouldn't matter for your team of 8 (or whatever). Yet you still insist on using something that isn't really as good for day to day dev because its "state of the art". Have fun manually merging things constantly (perforce doesn't make you do this unless you actually made two conflicting modifications). In git, conflicts happen far too often. Also, since you probably rarely change your remote repo to which you are pushing code, you don't actually use the main advantage of git.
Revision control is good but that doesn't mean you are an expert in different revision control systems, especially if you've only used 1 or 2 of them. Older devs will likely have seen 4 or 5 roll through at least and understand that newer isn't always better.
Now get off my lawn...
It is just that [women] are less likely to make that choice [to become programmers].
And that's fine, if that's what they want. We should make sure that there isn't bias against women, and if there is, we should root it out. But on the other hand, we shouldn't force women to become programmers, either.
That's a bit disingenuous isn't it? We've been doing that for at least 20 decades and has it changed that makeup of the tech industry at all?
Yet, my large city has couple hundred of you, willing to come in the office, network with employees outside of work that are outside their team, and is a crap load more flexible. Let's be honest, why should we hire you?
Not trying to be cruel here, just honest. I have a mortgage in another city. I pay a company to manage it for me. I moved because it needs to happen or I could stay in my little crappy town, with 20% less mortgage cost and a 40% less salary, along with 80% less opportunity. Weigh the benefits and negativities in moving.
And there are a dozen or more companies in this area willing to hire me at higher rates. Competitors of yours that values my skills more highly than yours.
Not trying to be cruel here, but your company is facing several lawsuits for product quality and perhaps this is a root cause of why. Your staff is of questionable skill and seems to like to say phrases (like 'Big Data') that they clearly don't understand. You have Physicists doing Machine Learning instead of, you know, hiring people who specialize in Machine Learning/AI. Perhaps this is why the land on which your office is built is worth more than the actual business you work for.
replying to remove bad mod
Fifty miles per hour seems like a lot until you realize that means winds are still up to 150mph.
It's like driving with the top down on the autobahn.
Its more like standing in the middle of the autobahn while traffic zooms past you. Its not the 150mph wind that gets you, its the 4x4s flying at 100mph that you have to worry about.
Funny thing is that you learned racism from the british. And they think you're inferior too.
Its OK, the feeling is mutual.
the San Francisco metro area (San Francisco–Oakland–Hayward, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area)
There's your problem right there. Most people that live in the SF Bay Area would include San Jose in that with more than 2m people. The US census for some weird reason divides the bay area into two pieces, San Jose and SF. No idea why and everyone here thinks that people who live in San Jose live in the "Bay Area" as do those that live in San Jose.
A few years ago I started using Scala and have even worked at shops where I convinced them to let me use it on larger scale telecom projects. There are things in Scala that can be terse and weird, but it's more than just a clean version of Java. If you learn all the tricks, it's got a lot of syntactic sugar and functional syntax that lend itself to shorter more manageable code. I'm still using it for some pretty big projects like BigSense.io.
Although it's not just Scala, Groovy and Clojure are both languages that try to leverage the existing JVM and the rich base of Java libraries with a newer language.
Java was a big stepping stone during its time. It did a lot of things right, but the backwards comparability and keeping in horrible concepts (checked exceptions, no real properties, interfaces) has kept it from really growing as a language. I think the future of the JVM won't include as much Java.
A clean version of Java? More like a write-once language. Back in the the 80s when it was C (procedural) and LISP (functional) were the main languages. LISP lost due to its tendency to produce non-maintainable code bases that multiple programmers had a hard time working on together. Have fun learning that lesson again. Once was enough for me...
SQL is similarly not obscure in its area, but worth learning and you rarely see it in a list of general programming languages (because it isn't). But the commercial vendors all ship their SQL with strong variants that extend the language and do more common language functions like looping. I speak of PL/SQL, TSQL, and their ilk, which all have a touch of obscurity in the same way R does.
SQL is not in any way obscure and is in fact the exact opposite of obscure. More programmers know SQL than any other language, Java is second.
You keep using that word....I do not think it means what you think it means....
Right now every US presidential candidate needs a billionaire backer to run. That usually means bad things. Maybe Notch and his $$ can balance the scales a bit and back Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren? But then again, I don't know his politics and perhaps this is a terrible suggestion.