That is not the problem. "Cheaper than possible" will fail just the same if made in the US or Europe, the price-point where the problem starts will just be significantly higher. So making them in the US or Europe would actually be considerably worse.
I have a ton of different 12V adapters that are all interchangeable. I would have been perfectly fine with paying $1 less for each external disk and get adapters separately. I do however think this is not about providing value to the customer, but about reducing support-calls from those unable to understand what a power adapter is and why they need to get one separately. (Yes, many people are that incompetent with regards to technology...) These support-calls may well be more expensive than including power adapters with everything.
On the other hand, PBKDF2 has been available since 2000, packing hashing, iteration and salting in a nice package. And Argon2 now adds large memory and other nice properties and essentially solves the problem. People just seem to be completely unaware of this.
Given the prevalence of humans using 123456 as a "password", it's not that people are unaware; they simply don't give a shit enough to care.
Well, my customers come from industries that should care, but yes, that is decidedly one of the roots of the problem.
Doing password storage badly needs to be classified by default as gross negligence and result in severe personal consequences for those that have done it, just the same as gross malpractice. It is regrettable that this may mean formal engineering qualification requirements or the like for people implementing password-handling software, but apparently the industry is completely unable to regulate itself and enforce minimal quality standards. And as long as people do not need formal qualifications, these formal qualifications cannot be stripped from them if they screw up.
As for users, using a bad password should just mean that they lose all expectation on privacy. Unfortunately, password quality enforcement schemes do not work and requirements to change them regularly make things worse.
Indeed. And there is ample historical and current precedent for that situation. Which is why, in a modern, enlightened system, everybody has the same rights. Of course, the ever-present enemies of freedom are always hard at work. Whether it is apparently only some group getting more rights (e.g. politicians not being snooped on by the GCHQ or politicians being exempt from getting punished for corruption as is currently happening Romania) or some other group getting less rights ("nasty" people being denied rights or due process), it is always the stepping-stone to remove the respective rights and go one step closer to totalitarianism.
This process has been going on since the idea of rights was established. The enemies of freedom, which today unfortunately often are members of the government or even its head, need to be kicked frequently to remind them that what they are doing ultimately leads to catastrophe and hence must not be done.
Well, as usual in such press-releases. I am also more than a bit doubtful about the scaling properties. If you have "modules" in a QC, then you do not have a larger QC, but several smaller ones, a bit similar to a multi-core CPU. Two 32 bit CPUs do not make a 64 bit CPU, similarly with QCs. As QCs scale meaningfully only with the number of entangled bits (you cannot break down computations into ones using smaller data-types), this seems a bit pointless.
Have one computer for whatever is only available on Windows, and a different computer for the rest. Sounds extreme, but I do not really see any other sane option.
I plan to lock Win7 into a non-networked VM with Office for the rare cases I have to work on a word-document, win10 on a separate computer only for gaming with no email or browsing except gaming-related, and a Linux-box for everything else.
If it works, don't fix it? You know, one of the most fundamental engineering principles?
Steam is essentially a package manager, launch-menu and a shop. It works. If your fancy, gold-plated uber 4k display (Why are you not on 8k? Obviously you are a lamer...) does not give you the best experience for that, then that is a very minor thing because this is not an application you use intensively.
The number of times I have had to explain to customers how to do password storage right is staggering. Most still believe a single hash is enough (well, to be fair, for a high-entropy password it is). Some have at least heard of salting the hash. But as soon as you come to iteration, most are clueless, and if you put in things like a large-memory-property (to prevent brute-forcing by FPGAs and graphics-cards), you have lost them completely. Many people just stop learning when there is no direct need to and these are the same people that in many cases write security-critical software.
On the other hand, PBKDF2 has been available since 2000, packing hashing, iteration and salting in a nice package. And Argon2 now adds large memory and other nice properties and essentially solves the problem. People just seem to be completely unaware of this.
This is slashdot. You will always find inaccuracies because of lack of detail as nobody writes a dissertation here. (And even in a dissertation, that problem would exist. I know, I did one.) It is completely clear what I meant and were I simplified. Your argument has no merit.
I use "rough" intentionally, because that is what I mean. If there were only minor deviations and the theory would essentially be correct in all situations, I would not use "rough". However, as in the example with classical mechanics, it is quite possible that there are situations were the model basically fails completely, and that is why I call it a "rough" approximation.
Incidentally, no, we do not have 100% correctness. We have pretty good correctness in the sense that results are within the margins of error from what the theory predicts in the cases tried and where the experimental results are observed trough a number of indirections. For classical mechanics, high accuracy in all observed situations was true for a long, long time as well. Then new experiments were done with new technology, because some small deviations crept up in some experiments that eventually could not be explained away with observational errors anymore. The experiments done to confirm Quantum Theory are pretty limited in comparison to the situations that are physically possible and there are some experiments underway that have not yet had conclusive results, for example the experiment whether computations on larger number of entangled particles actually behave according to theory (i.e. whether quantum computing actually works when you have a few hundred entangled particles or more). Sure, these experiments are hugely difficult and complicated, but the same is true for the experiments needed to show the limitations of classical mechanics when you take the state-of-the-art of technology back then into account.
I am not saying the science is bad. I am just saying there are good reasons to believe the currently known models are incomplete and should not be taken as absolute. We may eventually have a GUT (Grand Unifying Theory) and then really have a "true" and complete model of physics. But at this time we are not there and it is unclear whether we will ever get there.
The machine isn't allowed to read players' outward signs either, so it is balanced.
Not really. The pro poker players learned and succeeded in a situation with outward signs, so their skills are severely reduced in this situation. It is quite possible that if they spent a few years playing against this automaton, they would win again. Same, incidentally, for the recent stunt with that top Go player: He was playing against the machine like he would play against a human. That severely reduced the quality of his strategy.
Of course, these limitations are intentional, because the people organizing these demonstrations what to give the impression that weak AI is actually much stronger than it is. So they cheat, with the machine being very familiar (in the statistical sense) with how humans play, but the humans essentially being clueless about their automatized opponent. As neither the Go player nor these poker players are CS experts, they do not really understand this, at least not before. The Go player thought after the 5 rounds played (if I remember correctly) that he could probably beat the machine far more often with an adapted strategy, because he found essential weaknesses even in these few rounds he played.
And statistics don't take players' dynamic heuristics into account. Guessing a players' hole cards based on their behavior, particularly when they can regularly change up their tactics, that's extremely difficult stuff. Playing in a manner that allows money to be won in a timely manner, as opposed to a zero-sum game, that's even more difficult.
Indeed. That is why I think that in a fair competition, where the pro players actually have extensive knowledge about their automatized opponent and the opportunity to try out strategies, the results would likely have looked quite a bit differently.
While I like well-written fantasy, at this time, that is all it is. Improved weak AI can never do such a thing, except by accident. And strong AI is not available at all and it is unclear whether it ever will be.
Yea. A very nice example of "over-fitting", which is when you train too strongly on a specific sub-set of the more general thing you want to train a statistical classificator on. As statistical classificators really have no understanding (i.e. non-statistical "model") of what they classify, training them is tricky and more data can be harmful, if it is a worse fit for the general thing than less data.
Your powers of deduction are amazing in their ineffectiveness. By now everybody else in this thread has probably seen that it is of course "Business Continuity Management". Google has about 521'000 hits for it (in quotes, i.e. the full term), hence it can hardly be an obscure concept.
Indeed. There are however a lot of amateurs around and quite a few BCM and DR plans that are not very good or not adequately tested. This story demonstrates that nicely. The thing is that both BCM and DR and respective tests are costly and do not directly create value and so the bean-counters always try to reduce them, because they do not grasp risk management.
That is really not how this works. DR is how you re-establish normal operations. BCM is what you do before you reach that state.
Also, have you missed the part were I said "An that is why you run BCM and recovery tests"? You do not just need plans for BCM and DR, you need to test them and that was my whole point.
How could I accept such a statement? That would be "belief" in the religious sense. I am a person of science and science at this time says "we have no clue". You really have this backwards. You are also wrong about this preventing the finding of such a theory (if it exists): That is only prevented if you _require_ some "magic" in there for general intelligence.
It is unknown at this time, whether such "magic" is needed or not, even if I personally lean in that direction because there are just too many parts that do not fit a physicalist model. It may still turn out said "magic" is not needed, and as long as the question is open, there is a chance of finding that theory. Of course, in the other case, such a theory would not exist and hence cannot be found.
Now, the really interesting case would be if humans are actually using "magic" as part of the process, but it is not actually needed for general intelligence.
I do realize that especially in the US, physicalism is used as a stance to oppose religion. Unfortunately, the way it is done in many cases is basically fundamental religion, just with "Physics" instead of "God". It claims it has absolute truth. Actual science, including physics, does not claim that. There is really no need to accept the concept of "God" in order to have dualist leaning. While dualism has been hijacked by religion time and again, it is not a religious idea.
Not all of them, but I agree that it is a lot of them. In particular, for many people there will eventually not be any kind of work left they are better at than a machine.
However, here are some really hard fields, where automation will not get things done anytime soon: - General human interaction (requires a "world model" on the level of a human), including teaching - Special purpose engineering, including writing non-trivial software - Doing the creative part of science, i.e. modeling and selecting promising directions - Non-derivative art
Some hot candidates for being mostly or completely automatized in our lifetimes: - Driving cars, buses, trucks, trains, ships and possibly airplanes - L1 customer support - Many aspects of bureaucracy - Selling standardized things - Most manufacturing jobs
I can very well understand that many people are scared of this. It will remove the traditional way to earn a living for many people. I expect that at the end, we will see maybe 5-10% of the population still working for money, not many more. And that can go two ways: First, we manage to still distribute the wealth of society reasonably in an alternate way so people have a lot of free time and at the same time the means to do something with that time. Or, second, we create a dystopia were most people are poor.
You need both. BCM to continue operating while the DR activities are ongoing and DR to get back to normal. For example, a fail-over system is a BCM measure, while restoring from backups is DR. For a university it may be acceptable to just do without IT until DR is completed. Both are absolute standard terms in enterprise IT.
@Entrope: Incidentally, a civil question gets a civil answer. The first 2 Google hits also decipher BCM in the context here and if you add "outage" it is a few more. So I guess you were not even trying, except trying to be an ass.
Slashdot Mirror
That is not the problem. "Cheaper than possible" will fail just the same if made in the US or Europe, the price-point where the problem starts will just be significantly higher. So making them in the US or Europe would actually be considerably worse.
I have a ton of different 12V adapters that are all interchangeable. I would have been perfectly fine with paying $1 less for each external disk and get adapters separately. I do however think this is not about providing value to the customer, but about reducing support-calls from those unable to understand what a power adapter is and why they need to get one separately. (Yes, many people are that incompetent with regards to technology...) These support-calls may well be more expensive than including power adapters with everything.
I mean, power adapters falling apart? Somebody obviously squeezed another cent out of the $0.05 housing, making it impossible to produce quality.
On the other hand, PBKDF2 has been available since 2000, packing hashing, iteration and salting in a nice package. And Argon2 now adds large memory and other nice properties and essentially solves the problem. People just seem to be completely unaware of this.
Given the prevalence of humans using 123456 as a "password", it's not that people are unaware; they simply don't give a shit enough to care.
Well, my customers come from industries that should care, but yes, that is decidedly one of the roots of the problem.
Doing password storage badly needs to be classified by default as gross negligence and result in severe personal consequences for those that have done it, just the same as gross malpractice. It is regrettable that this may mean formal engineering qualification requirements or the like for people implementing password-handling software, but apparently the industry is completely unable to regulate itself and enforce minimal quality standards. And as long as people do not need formal qualifications, these formal qualifications cannot be stripped from them if they screw up.
As for users, using a bad password should just mean that they lose all expectation on privacy. Unfortunately, password quality enforcement schemes do not work and requirements to change them regularly make things worse.
Indeed. And there is ample historical and current precedent for that situation. Which is why, in a modern, enlightened system, everybody has the same rights. Of course, the ever-present enemies of freedom are always hard at work. Whether it is apparently only some group getting more rights (e.g. politicians not being snooped on by the GCHQ or politicians being exempt from getting punished for corruption as is currently happening Romania) or some other group getting less rights ("nasty" people being denied rights or due process), it is always the stepping-stone to remove the respective rights and go one step closer to totalitarianism.
This process has been going on since the idea of rights was established. The enemies of freedom, which today unfortunately often are members of the government or even its head, need to be kicked frequently to remind them that what they are doing ultimately leads to catastrophe and hence must not be done.
Exactly.
Well, as usual in such press-releases. I am also more than a bit doubtful about the scaling properties. If you have "modules" in a QC, then you do not have a larger QC, but several smaller ones, a bit similar to a multi-core CPU. Two 32 bit CPUs do not make a 64 bit CPU, similarly with QCs. As QCs scale meaningfully only with the number of entangled bits (you cannot break down computations into ones using smaller data-types), this seems a bit pointless.
That is different and essentially data from an autopsy. It makes sense to get that and privacy does not really apply anymore.
The problem is these things are always tested on "shifty bastards". As soon as precedent is available, they get extended to ordinary people.
Have one computer for whatever is only available on Windows, and a different computer for the rest. Sounds extreme, but I do not really see any other sane option.
I plan to lock Win7 into a non-networked VM with Office for the rare cases I have to work on a word-document, win10 on a separate computer only for gaming with no email or browsing except gaming-related, and a Linux-box for everything else.
If it works, don't fix it? You know, one of the most fundamental engineering principles?
Steam is essentially a package manager, launch-menu and a shop. It works. If your fancy, gold-plated uber 4k display (Why are you not on 8k? Obviously you are a lamer...) does not give you the best experience for that, then that is a very minor thing because this is not an application you use intensively.
The number of times I have had to explain to customers how to do password storage right is staggering. Most still believe a single hash is enough (well, to be fair, for a high-entropy password it is). Some have at least heard of salting the hash. But as soon as you come to iteration, most are clueless, and if you put in things like a large-memory-property (to prevent brute-forcing by FPGAs and graphics-cards), you have lost them completely. Many people just stop learning when there is no direct need to and these are the same people that in many cases write security-critical software.
On the other hand, PBKDF2 has been available since 2000, packing hashing, iteration and salting in a nice package. And Argon2 now adds large memory and other nice properties and essentially solves the problem. People just seem to be completely unaware of this.
This is slashdot. You will always find inaccuracies because of lack of detail as nobody writes a dissertation here. (And even in a dissertation, that problem would exist. I know, I did one.) It is completely clear what I meant and were I simplified. Your argument has no merit.
I use "rough" intentionally, because that is what I mean. If there were only minor deviations and the theory would essentially be correct in all situations, I would not use "rough". However, as in the example with classical mechanics, it is quite possible that there are situations were the model basically fails completely, and that is why I call it a "rough" approximation.
Incidentally, no, we do not have 100% correctness. We have pretty good correctness in the sense that results are within the margins of error from what the theory predicts in the cases tried and where the experimental results are observed trough a number of indirections. For classical mechanics, high accuracy in all observed situations was true for a long, long time as well. Then new experiments were done with new technology, because some small deviations crept up in some experiments that eventually could not be explained away with observational errors anymore. The experiments done to confirm Quantum Theory are pretty limited in comparison to the situations that are physically possible and there are some experiments underway that have not yet had conclusive results, for example the experiment whether computations on larger number of entangled particles actually behave according to theory (i.e. whether quantum computing actually works when you have a few hundred entangled particles or more). Sure, these experiments are hugely difficult and complicated, but the same is true for the experiments needed to show the limitations of classical mechanics when you take the state-of-the-art of technology back then into account.
I am not saying the science is bad. I am just saying there are good reasons to believe the currently known models are incomplete and should not be taken as absolute. We may eventually have a GUT (Grand Unifying Theory) and then really have a "true" and complete model of physics. But at this time we are not there and it is unclear whether we will ever get there.
The machine isn't allowed to read players' outward signs either, so it is balanced.
Not really. The pro poker players learned and succeeded in a situation with outward signs, so their skills are severely reduced in this situation. It is quite possible that if they spent a few years playing against this automaton, they would win again. Same, incidentally, for the recent stunt with that top Go player: He was playing against the machine like he would play against a human. That severely reduced the quality of his strategy.
Of course, these limitations are intentional, because the people organizing these demonstrations what to give the impression that weak AI is actually much stronger than it is. So they cheat, with the machine being very familiar (in the statistical sense) with how humans play, but the humans essentially being clueless about their automatized opponent. As neither the Go player nor these poker players are CS experts, they do not really understand this, at least not before. The Go player thought after the 5 rounds played (if I remember correctly) that he could probably beat the machine far more often with an adapted strategy, because he found essential weaknesses even in these few rounds he played.
And statistics don't take players' dynamic heuristics into account. Guessing a players' hole cards based on their behavior, particularly when they can regularly change up their tactics, that's extremely difficult stuff. Playing in a manner that allows money to be won in a timely manner, as opposed to a zero-sum game, that's even more difficult.
Indeed. That is why I think that in a fair competition, where the pro players actually have extensive knowledge about their automatized opponent and the opportunity to try out strategies, the results would likely have looked quite a bit differently.
While I like well-written fantasy, at this time, that is all it is. Improved weak AI can never do such a thing, except by accident. And strong AI is not available at all and it is unclear whether it ever will be.
Yea. A very nice example of "over-fitting", which is when you train too strongly on a specific sub-set of the more general thing you want to train a statistical classificator on. As statistical classificators really have no understanding (i.e. non-statistical "model") of what they classify, training them is tricky and more data can be harmful, if it is a worse fit for the general thing than less data.
Your powers of deduction are amazing in their ineffectiveness. By now everybody else in this thread has probably seen that it is of course "Business Continuity Management". Google has about 521'000 hits for it (in quotes, i.e. the full term), hence it can hardly be an obscure concept.
Indeed. There are however a lot of amateurs around and quite a few BCM and DR plans that are not very good or not adequately tested. This story demonstrates that nicely. The thing is that both BCM and DR and respective tests are costly and do not directly create value and so the bean-counters always try to reduce them, because they do not grasp risk management.
That is really not how this works. DR is how you re-establish normal operations. BCM is what you do before you reach that state.
Also, have you missed the part were I said "An that is why you run BCM and recovery tests"? You do not just need plans for BCM and DR, you need to test them and that was my whole point.
How could I accept such a statement? That would be "belief" in the religious sense. I am a person of science and science at this time says "we have no clue". You really have this backwards. You are also wrong about this preventing the finding of such a theory (if it exists): That is only prevented if you _require_ some "magic" in there for general intelligence.
It is unknown at this time, whether such "magic" is needed or not, even if I personally lean in that direction because there are just too many parts that do not fit a physicalist model. It may still turn out said "magic" is not needed, and as long as the question is open, there is a chance of finding that theory. Of course, in the other case, such a theory would not exist and hence cannot be found.
Now, the really interesting case would be if humans are actually using "magic" as part of the process, but it is not actually needed for general intelligence.
I do realize that especially in the US, physicalism is used as a stance to oppose religion. Unfortunately, the way it is done in many cases is basically fundamental religion, just with "Physics" instead of "God". It claims it has absolute truth. Actual science, including physics, does not claim that. There is really no need to accept the concept of "God" in order to have dualist leaning. While dualism has been hijacked by religion time and again, it is not a religious idea.
Not all of them, but I agree that it is a lot of them. In particular, for many people there will eventually not be any kind of work left they are better at than a machine.
However, here are some really hard fields, where automation will not get things done anytime soon:
- General human interaction (requires a "world model" on the level of a human), including teaching
- Special purpose engineering, including writing non-trivial software
- Doing the creative part of science, i.e. modeling and selecting promising directions
- Non-derivative art
Some hot candidates for being mostly or completely automatized in our lifetimes:
- Driving cars, buses, trucks, trains, ships and possibly airplanes
- L1 customer support
- Many aspects of bureaucracy
- Selling standardized things
- Most manufacturing jobs
I can very well understand that many people are scared of this. It will remove the traditional way to earn a living for many people. I expect that at the end, we will see maybe 5-10% of the population still working for money, not many more. And that can go two ways: First, we manage to still distribute the wealth of society reasonably in an alternate way so people have a lot of free time and at the same time the means to do something with that time. Or, second, we create a dystopia were most people are poor.
That is really not how this works. And no, definitions are not "cute", they are essential.
You need both. BCM to continue operating while the DR activities are ongoing and DR to get back to normal. For example, a fail-over system is a BCM measure, while restoring from backups is DR. For a university it may be acceptable to just do without IT until DR is completed. Both are absolute standard terms in enterprise IT.
@Entrope: Incidentally, a civil question gets a civil answer. The first 2 Google hits also decipher BCM in the context here and if you add "outage" it is a few more. So I guess you were not even trying, except trying to be an ass.
Don't play if you have no clue about the game....