Theranos has managed to stay alive despite being clearly criminal fraudsters on a large scale. There is a type of investor that is impressed by this, because they essentially operate the same way.
At least if you do in on a large enough scale. Small-time criminals doing much less damage would face a lengthy time behind bars. Of course, this speaks volumes of those that provided the money as well. Morality not required and actually a hindrance. That they (Theranos _and_ the investors) seem to get away with it is a pretty bad sign for the state of society as a while.
I put incoming information into three categories - stuff I need to know, stuff I want to know, and stuff I don't care about at all.
Same here. Plus I have "stuff I don't want to know now, but maybe later" and occasionally I pull up something of that later. And I do aggressive filtering. Quite a bit of "legitimate" email goes into my SPAM folder, because it is newsletters and such. I have stopped unsubscribing, I just add a custom rule and never see their great messages again.
The other thing I found valuable, is to read aggregated news with a specific scope. For example, Slashdot is still useful to follow the most important things in IT vulnerabilities, if you do not mind getting the information a few days late. No need to follow this anywhere else.
But in the end, it boils down to daring to be uninformed on many topics (you can always change that if the need arises for a specific topic) and just getting comfortable with the idea of ignoring a lot of the "information" that is presented to you. Most is of very transient value anyways, you just need to get over the feeling of "missing out". And with that, "information overload" becomes a non-issue.
I disagree. Being able to think independently seems to be something people do not learn, it seems to be nature. The only thing education may be able to do is bring it out a bit earlier, if that. You can have the most highly educated and intelligent morons that cannot think independently about anything, except maybe some narrow field of specialization and even there they are not really original. No, the problem is with the people. "Corporate cancerism" (like the term, BTW!) is just large corporations having found out after a very long learning process (they are not smart either), that they can too use propaganda techniques and statistical mass-evaluations that traditionally were only available to nation-states. There is a reason the texts by Goebbels are used directly or indirectly today in marketing education. The results are usually not so visible, because products live in many different spaces and people have a lot of "true" beliefs, so each one gets a smaller part. But look at some extremes, like the Church of Apple or the Cult of Rust and you find the same mindlessly cheering crowds that screamed their lungs out for the Fuehrer and with about as much understanding of what is going on.
Unfortunately, I do not see any solution that can be established. Sure, a meritocracy, where a strong capability for independent thought would be an absolute requirement and a strong and reasoned adherence to principles of human rights would be an absolute requirement to wield power of any kind would probably work. It would also probably have to draft people into position of power, as those with these qualities usually do not want power or only very little. But I do not see any way to establish that. Greed, fear, arrogance, racism and its variants, etc. are motivating lots of the wrong people to seek power. And the results are predictably pathetic: Wars, poverty, hunger, sickness, lack of education, etc. are the reality for most human beings and it does not look like this is going to change.
Matches my observation. The average person is astonishingly stupid. And then there are all those that are below average or not so much above. In the end, there are not many people around that are independent thinkers and can actually verify an argument or a statement of fact. Most just estimate the "reputation" of the one making a statement using a process that is not in any way suitable for that and then believe according to that score. That leads to the most hilariously stupid beliefs.
My personal estimation is that the independent thinkers are around 10%, not more. Even in a class of, say, CS students that should be smarter then the average, you only have something like 10-15% of them and that is an observation I share with several friends who also teach academically. These few people that have actual insight then just get swamped by the unthinking morons and that is it.
And that is also why democracy does not work. If 90% of the population can be easily manipulated because they understand nothing, democracy just becomes a game of who manipulates public opinion better.
The fascinating thing is that the morons often do not actually lack in intelligence, they lack in the will and skill to apply it. For example, they may be able to solve a complicated engineering problem, but are complete unable to think rationally about a moral question or a trend in society. That is not lack of intelligence, that is lack of wisdom. People can be highly intelligent and completely unable to think independently at the same time. And yet, some people of decidedly lower intelligence can do it. They may take longer, they need to read up and consult experts, but in the end, they actually can find a reliable, verified answer.
And yes, the only thing the Internet does here is making it abundantly clear how pathetically stupid most people actually are and that for most people actual independent application of intelligence is not something they can do. It is like this humanity is a mix of two different species: A small minority of independent thinkers and a large majority of basically herd animals.
Not anytime soon. There is no reason for it. AMD64 is a patch on top of the Intel 32 bit instruction set, which itself is a patch on top of the Intel 16 bit instruction set. We are not talking about a well-designed and thought out instruction set like the 68000 had, we are talking about the mess Intel put into its CPUs. Hence there is no gain by having the hardware stop support the older modes.
I.e. somebody was stupid or cheap or likely both. Why else would anybody run any mission-critical hardware on Windows in the first place? Because developers are cheaper. Stupid.
The right way to do this is to use a proper embedded OS with long-term support or to do it with Linux or one of the xBSDs and, and that is the important thing, with a fully documented and open driver. Tell the vendor to **** off if they cannot provide that. If it just costs more, _pay_ it!
Tell them two weeks before. If they are smart, they will have arranged something longer term along the lines of consulting for you with you before. Or they will have arranged for a definite end-date, but they will assure your continued employment before. If they are not smart, do not depend on them being honorable.
You have to tell them two weeks before, everything else is their problem. Of course, they may still make you an offer for more time when you give them that notice, but you should only accept that if it is substantially better than your current conditions.
That _is_ a problem with Bitcoin, because first, security requirements for normal banking are significantly lower as it is far harder to steal electronically from a normal bank. It requires deep insider knowledge, the right timing and getting the money out in some form that cannot be traced. And second, all these trading platforms are new, unregulated and hence cheaply and insecurely built. And if you do not believe that, check in a real bank what amount of security systemd, reviews, etc. they are merely doing because they are required to by law.
Both things make exchanges very nice targets and it basically only needs somebody competent to try.
Seriously, most targets, including banks, do not get successfully compromised only because nobody competent tries. All these bullshit hype exchanges were built fast, cheaply and motivated primarily by greed going strong and are very juicy targets, because unlike with basically all other targets, you can actually steal things directly over the Internet from them that are a (not very good, but still) approximation to money.
So far every "High Security" lab that worked for some time had germs escape and infect people and that includes nasties like Marburg. These labs cannot be made as secure as they would need to be for this research. Lets just hope the fools at work on this do not create a bug that kills but has a long incubation time. However, them being fools, my hopes are slim.
Slashdot Mirror
Theranos has managed to stay alive despite being clearly criminal fraudsters on a large scale. There is a type of investor that is impressed by this, because they essentially operate the same way.
At least if you do in on a large enough scale. Small-time criminals doing much less damage would face a lengthy time behind bars. Of course, this speaks volumes of those that provided the money as well. Morality not required and actually a hindrance. That they (Theranos _and_ the investors) seem to get away with it is a pretty bad sign for the state of society as a while.
Well said.
Hence it is just another distro backdoored by corporate interests.
Very poetic. Unfortunately not fictional.
I put incoming information into three categories - stuff I need to know, stuff I want to know, and stuff I don't care about at all.
Same here. Plus I have "stuff I don't want to know now, but maybe later" and occasionally I pull up something of that later. And I do aggressive filtering. Quite a bit of "legitimate" email goes into my SPAM folder, because it is newsletters and such. I have stopped unsubscribing, I just add a custom rule and never see their great messages again.
The other thing I found valuable, is to read aggregated news with a specific scope. For example, Slashdot is still useful to follow the most important things in IT vulnerabilities, if you do not mind getting the information a few days late. No need to follow this anywhere else.
But in the end, it boils down to daring to be uninformed on many topics (you can always change that if the need arises for a specific topic) and just getting comfortable with the idea of ignoring a lot of the "information" that is presented to you. Most is of very transient value anyways, you just need to get over the feeling of "missing out". And with that, "information overload" becomes a non-issue.
I disagree. Being able to think independently seems to be something people do not learn, it seems to be nature. The only thing education may be able to do is bring it out a bit earlier, if that. You can have the most highly educated and intelligent morons that cannot think independently about anything, except maybe some narrow field of specialization and even there they are not really original. No, the problem is with the people. "Corporate cancerism" (like the term, BTW!) is just large corporations having found out after a very long learning process (they are not smart either), that they can too use propaganda techniques and statistical mass-evaluations that traditionally were only available to nation-states. There is a reason the texts by Goebbels are used directly or indirectly today in marketing education. The results are usually not so visible, because products live in many different spaces and people have a lot of "true" beliefs, so each one gets a smaller part. But look at some extremes, like the Church of Apple or the Cult of Rust and you find the same mindlessly cheering crowds that screamed their lungs out for the Fuehrer and with about as much understanding of what is going on.
Unfortunately, I do not see any solution that can be established. Sure, a meritocracy, where a strong capability for independent thought would be an absolute requirement and a strong and reasoned adherence to principles of human rights would be an absolute requirement to wield power of any kind would probably work. It would also probably have to draft people into position of power, as those with these qualities usually do not want power or only very little. But I do not see any way to establish that. Greed, fear, arrogance, racism and its variants, etc. are motivating lots of the wrong people to seek power. And the results are predictably pathetic: Wars, poverty, hunger, sickness, lack of education, etc. are the reality for most human beings and it does not look like this is going to change.
Matches my observation. The average person is astonishingly stupid. And then there are all those that are below average or not so much above. In the end, there are not many people around that are independent thinkers and can actually verify an argument or a statement of fact. Most just estimate the "reputation" of the one making a statement using a process that is not in any way suitable for that and then believe according to that score. That leads to the most hilariously stupid beliefs.
My personal estimation is that the independent thinkers are around 10%, not more. Even in a class of, say, CS students that should be smarter then the average, you only have something like 10-15% of them and that is an observation I share with several friends who also teach academically. These few people that have actual insight then just get swamped by the unthinking morons and that is it.
And that is also why democracy does not work. If 90% of the population can be easily manipulated because they understand nothing, democracy just becomes a game of who manipulates public opinion better.
The fascinating thing is that the morons often do not actually lack in intelligence, they lack in the will and skill to apply it. For example, they may be able to solve a complicated engineering problem, but are complete unable to think rationally about a moral question or a trend in society. That is not lack of intelligence, that is lack of wisdom. People can be highly intelligent and completely unable to think independently at the same time. And yet, some people of decidedly lower intelligence can do it. They may take longer, they need to read up and consult experts, but in the end, they actually can find a reliable, verified answer.
And yes, the only thing the Internet does here is making it abundantly clear how pathetically stupid most people actually are and that for most people actual independent application of intelligence is not something they can do. It is like this humanity is a mix of two different species: A small minority of independent thinkers and a large majority of basically herd animals.
And the 8080 probably built on the 4004. The point is, Intel never had a good CPU designer back when it counted.
Nobody is "stunned" here. Are you desperately trying to get attention?
Might also have had something to do with the PC beginning to dominate the market. Looking back, a real pity in more than one way.
Sounds unlikely. If there are enough cars you can rent on relatively short notice, that will be vastly cheaper.
Not anytime soon. There is no reason for it. AMD64 is a patch on top of the Intel 32 bit instruction set, which itself is a patch on top of the Intel 16 bit instruction set. We are not talking about a well-designed and thought out instruction set like the 68000 had, we are talking about the mess Intel put into its CPUs. Hence there is no gain by having the hardware stop support the older modes.
I.e. somebody was stupid or cheap or likely both. Why else would anybody run any mission-critical hardware on Windows in the first place? Because developers are cheaper. Stupid.
The right way to do this is to use a proper embedded OS with long-term support or to do it with Linux or one of the xBSDs and, and that is the important thing, with a fully documented and open driver. Tell the vendor to **** off if they cannot provide that. If it just costs more, _pay_ it!
That is not what this is about. Common thieves steal the laptop. Actual "bad guys" do _not_ steal it, they tamper with it.
Or it is much more carefully rate-limited than the login-option or captcha'ed. Seriously, what is bullshit here is the "story".
Look up "hubris" some time. And then try to argue that it does not apply to you. Good luck.
The obligatory troll every self-respecting story must have is found!
Same is true for sysadmins. And (if they are good) consultants.
Tell them two weeks before. If they are smart, they will have arranged something longer term along the lines of consulting for you with you before. Or they will have arranged for a definite end-date, but they will assure your continued employment before. If they are not smart, do not depend on them being honorable.
You have to tell them two weeks before, everything else is their problem. Of course, they may still make you an offer for more time when you give them that notice, but you should only accept that if it is substantially better than your current conditions.
That _is_ a problem with Bitcoin, because first, security requirements for normal banking are significantly lower as it is far harder to steal electronically from a normal bank. It requires deep insider knowledge, the right timing and getting the money out in some form that cannot be traced. And second, all these trading platforms are new, unregulated and hence cheaply and insecurely built. And if you do not believe that, check in a real bank what amount of security systemd, reviews, etc. they are merely doing because they are required to by law.
Both things make exchanges very nice targets and it basically only needs somebody competent to try.
Seriously, most targets, including banks, do not get successfully compromised only because nobody competent tries. All these bullshit hype exchanges were built fast, cheaply and motivated primarily by greed going strong and are very juicy targets, because unlike with basically all other targets, you can actually steal things directly over the Internet from them that are a (not very good, but still) approximation to money.
So far every "High Security" lab that worked for some time had germs escape and infect people and that includes nasties like Marburg. These labs cannot be made as secure as they would need to be for this research. Lets just hope the fools at work on this do not create a bug that kills but has a long incubation time. However, them being fools, my hopes are slim.
You should start taking your medication again....
Pathetic.