Wall Street Journal had an article about this two days ago. Sales of SUV's have dropped about 25% in the last six months, with specific makes (Jeep Cherokee, Ford Explorer) dropping more like 33%. What people are buying instead are large sedans, the Ford LTD kinds of things that can carry 6 people, and, as it turns out, as much or *more* weight than many SUV's. I got interested in the latter point a couple of years ago and found a Consumer Reports list of net/gross vehicle weight. A Ford Taurus was rated to carry more weight than a Ford Explorer. Remember all those dangerous exploding Firestone tires a few years back? It turns out those Explorers were only supposed to be carrying 1000 pounds total weight. With full tanks (240 pounds) and five adults (200 pounds apiece) they were over their design load. Since then they've greatly increased the Explorer's net/gross ratio.
Instinctual behavior comes from somewhere. Fear of falling is not simple: you have to recognize what height is. Sight, abstraction to positional awareness, risk assessment. That's a whole lot of code. (And a lot of code down the drain when you stick the baby in one of those thingies where they can walk around with wheeled support to keep them from falling over, and walk right off the edge of the stairs. It's horrible to laugh at that, but, dude.)
I'm saying that if an OS can be attacked by a rootkit, it is "vulnerable". Whether or not it is possible to make an OS that is "invulnerable" is completely irrelevant to the discussion.
A lot of the junk in there IS junk -- detritus from long-past viruses and stuff like that. A lot of it we have no idea. Some of it is clearly regulatory. Now we're beginning to get reliable tools that tell us which is which. I just think the summary is misleading in the same way that an extron/intron duality implies: it says that there are two categories of DNA, expressed DNA and junk. That's clearly not true, and it's been known for 50 years that that's not true. The big question is exactly how not true, and with stuff like this we can begin to answer that question. I'm going to be unsurprised if we find that the majority of intron material is useful at a lower information density than exons. Maybe stuff in there somehow determines how the circulatory, nerve, and lymphatic systems route through the body, or governs parts of apoptosis. There's a *lot* of developmental information we haven't begun to track down yet and that seems a likely place for it to be stored.
>Scientists once thought of that stuff as junk, but many now believe it may regulate how the genes work or provide some other function.
To clarify: a stretch of DNA that actually gets turned into RNA and thence into proteins is an exon, and the DNA that lives between exons is called an intron. It's been known for a long time that there are sequences before an exon that control it: regulators, promotors, and repressors, that are activated or deactivated by proteins binding to them during DNA reading, and in some cases there are sections of DNA that are processed into RNA, that help stabilize the RNA and are then clipped out before the RNA becomes protein, so they also have a function. (This is part of the reason that making insulin artificially has been tricky: you can't just stick the DNA into a bacterium and have it crank out insulin because the DNA is in a couple sections and requires post-processing.)
Also, many of the introns contain echoes of old sequences that used to be useful way back when, and aren't anymore, or bits of viruses that integrated into the genome hundreds or thousands of generations ago and are now widely spread in the population, and some intron bits are designed to facilitate shuffling of chunks of DNA into different orders for proteins that come in a wide variety of flavors with the same start and end sequences. Antibodies, for instance, have long, consistent, identical start and end chunks with wildly variable center chunks. (Think of a key, with differing teeth to fit various locks, but the same end piece, to fit your hand. Likewise an antibody has a hypervariable section that, for each antibody, can adhere to precisely one antigen, and a nonvariable section that signals passing cells that it has/hasn't found any of that antigen.)
Getting to go play around and make any set of repressor/promoter sequences and change the distances between them is a really nice tool, and being able to make massive sequences like this, helps play with gene interactions and with massive proteins like antibodies. Think of this as the beginnings of the transition from transistors to integrated chips, or maybe it'd be more apt to say from single computers to the beginnings of networks.
They're wasting time and money on this because they think that a non-binding declaration that "Apple Pie Is Really Great (and November's only a few months away)" is a little too obvious. Proposing and voting on bills that nobody in their right minds would vote against during election season is an age-old (as in Roman-era) tactic, especially when there are so many more dangerous, difficult, controversial issues that can be postponed by this kind of action.
There's a 200-person AMD facility next door: they announced its closing yesterday. 100 people laid off (in November) and some fraction of the remainder moved to another facility, the remainder laid off when the facility closes its doors some time early next year. It's nice that they gave them that much time, but it was still a shock. I believe they were doing work on Celeron stuff.
Back in the day, every new-hire at Hewlett Packard, and I mean up to the executive level, spent the first month doing assembly, winding inductors, working on the sheet-metal-forming lines, and generally at least getting some experience in all the job levels below that for which the person was hired. It's a similar concept tp your internship-of-royalty thing.
Hey now. I work for NatSemi and we're doing pretty well. Of course, part of the reason is because we've dumped all our digital stuff and now do (mostly) pure analog design, where the competition isn't as harsh financially -- but last year we posted the best year we've ever had.
>Why do so many people think Colombus discovered America? He got it into the permanent record, where the vikings, chinese, etc. didn't.
To be fair, lots of people DO know other people got here first. It didn't become a big deal in the world because there wasn't any compelling economic reason for their discovery to be important. The route the Vikings took was followed by fishing fleets, which were working the North Banks between Greenland and Newfoundland in the 1400's: because there was incentive, they were going there, and in those communties it was well-known that there were landmasses to the southwest of Greenland. But until someone found a good source for slaves, and soon thereafter, silver and gold, there wasn't any reason for the general public to pay attention to the New World any more than to news of Madagascar, the southeastern coast of Africa, the Spice Islands, or Australia until such time as they started being Important.
That's an incredibly depressing thought. The area where I grew up had a lot of mining history in the 1890's and some up until the 1940's. When I was young and we'd go out exploring in our Jeep sometimes we'd come across old mine buildings way up in the middle of nowhere that had been similarly abandoned at the end of one season and just never opened back up: cookhouses with all the spices still on racks on shelves, bunkhouses with newspapers and gloves. Two years ago I was hiking way above treeline and came across a place that probably closed in 1978 and there were file cabinets filled with maintenance reports on the bearing wear on some of the air-powered drills. It's *weird* to walk into someone's life from (30-100) years ago. (No, there were no boxes full of old tapes in any of the aforementioned places.)
There are lots of animals (fish and amphibians, mostly, for vertebrates, but most insects) that can freeze solid, and I mean -40C, and live afterwards. They produce weird proteins that mess with how the ice crystals form, such that the crystals don't rupture cells (by keeping them from being long needle-like crystals, essentially.) As a child, I found I could freeze grasshoppers slowly (in a dixie cup of water, say) through 10 freeze/thaw cycles, and they were still alive, albeit not in good health. For some reason, quickly freezing them (in a bit of kleenex, so it was just their body mass that had to be cooled) usually killed them. It's possible that their bodies recognized they were going to freeze and started producing the aforementioned chemicals, and the time lag that took exceeded the time it took to freeze when thrown directly in an extremely cold freezer. After all: that very rarely happens in real life so it's probably too energy-intensive to maintain the capability to survive those situations. In contrast, slow cooling to below freezing is fairly common so maintaining the ability to survive that is an enormous benefit.
That's kind of like saying multiple sclerosis isn't a vulnerability. If you have two OSes, and one can't be hacked by a rootkit and one can, I'd say that the latter is, y'know, more VULNERABLE to rootkits.
It makes you wonder about development cycles when people are producing malware for software that's not even been released yet. Is this a negative-day vulnerability? (and how does one quantify it when MS isn't yet saying when Vista's going to hit the market?)
The STM/AFM tips we used to use were done by electroetching in sodium hydroxide. They were pretty damn sharp and they were cheap and fast. I just made one last night, by mistake, when I thought the stainless steel wire I grabbed to use as an electrical connection to something I was anodizing, was actually aluminum. The steel etched down to points so sharp I couldn't feel them until after I was bleeding.
Here's a suggestion: read slashdot at -1. Here's a site that caters to the smart people on the net, and reading at -1 is an exercise in masochism. Now go to the most popular site on the net, which has no quality filtering, and start looking around. It necessarily must be worse than slashdot at -1.
First off, we're both assuming it actually happened... it sounds kind of sketchy.
Secondly: yeah, it's that he was trying to hide something, that says outright and blatantly that he has a vulnerability.
I think there's a more interesting question underneath all this. Almost everyone I've ever gotten to know well had some pretty weird skeletons in their closets, stuff that made them vulnerable. One question is: can people find these? Another, more fundamental one has to do with assumptions people make about each other.
Is a person who is covered in tattoos and has drunken, half-clothed, pot-smoking pictures posted on the Internet more vulnerable than the businessman who secretly goes to appointments with a dominatrix? I don't think that question can be simply answered, because if that's ALL the businessman does, while the tattoo person goes on to molest rabbits and burn down churches but doesn't post about them, that's a really big problem. But if the tattoo person has no big foul secrets, no habits that haven't been documented in mind-numbing plenty on myspace, then the businessman IS the more vulnerable one of the pair.
My point is this: I think there's an assumption that a person who displays a few bad habits must have even more that aren't displayed, so is therefore less trustworthy than someone who hides a vice. I also think that's a very poor assumption, that's based in prejudice rather than reason.
I agree with what you're saying, but this reminds me of the proprietary/opensource debate. Person A posts about what he does so everyone can see it, Person B doesn't post about what she does. Therefore, fewer -- but not zero -- people can blackmail B. Does that make B innately more trustable? Security through obscurity isn't a great plan.
Really, the only thing you can say when you see stupid stuff posted on Myspace/Facebook is "this person *certainly* does stupid things" and "this person is willing to post about them online".
I would argue that a person who is completely transparent about what he/she does -- demonstrates that he/she doesn't MIND if the parents find out -- is a known security risk, compared to a person who might-or-might-not do stupid stuff and doesn't post about it. Hence the investigation done before getting clearance, which is the same as a customer security audit of complicated software by examining all the API's and the software history, but not ever seeing the source code.
Everyone wants to be the underdog, because in Western civilization we cheer for underdogs. Witness the popularity of Jeff Foxworthy. So it's always a useful rhetorical device.
You're right: the mod system does work very well. Slashdot attracts people who are *likely* to have a certain set of opinions, but that clearly doesn't silence the people who disagree. The widely-held opinions are modded up, and the people who disagree with the widely-held opinions claim that they're the underdogs. Same as has happened in every political arena in the US and England since, well, forever.
>Just how many investigations can a publically trade company handle before their stock turns to worthless paste?
Gee, I dunno, let's ask Microsoft or IBM.
If a company is financially strong, they'll shrug off investigations *even if* the allegations are found to be true. It's only when companies are already tottering, that investigations can make investors lose confidence.
The stupid, en masse, sentenced Socrates to death. That was a pretty big effect, given his reputation.
I agree with you, in part: the Internet gives people a venue to isolate themselves without acknowledging that fact: surround themselves with a bunch of other people saying the same thing, so they can feel like there are enough people that they can fool themselves into thinking they're a majority. (this applies very much to copyright infringement discussions on slashdot, for instance.) But the same thing happens with Faux News fanatics, or, 400 years ago, Catholics in the European religious wars. The mob effect is magnified, but it's not clear to me that it's enough larger than what has always existed to be a critical problem.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't buy SUV's just for the sake of vanity.
"internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills."
They also buy them because they think a high-clearance vehicle makes it easier to spot someone who is hiding on the other side of the car. I'm serious. Read the linked article. It's one of the most brilliant essays written in the last ten years.
Wall Street Journal had an article about this two days ago. Sales of SUV's have dropped about 25% in the last six months, with specific makes (Jeep Cherokee, Ford Explorer) dropping more like 33%. What people are buying instead are large sedans, the Ford LTD kinds of things that can carry 6 people, and, as it turns out, as much or *more* weight than many SUV's. I got interested in the latter point a couple of years ago and found a Consumer Reports list of net/gross vehicle weight. A Ford Taurus was rated to carry more weight than a Ford Explorer. Remember all those dangerous exploding Firestone tires a few years back? It turns out those Explorers were only supposed to be carrying 1000 pounds total weight. With full tanks (240 pounds) and five adults (200 pounds apiece) they were over their design load. Since then they've greatly increased the Explorer's net/gross ratio.
Instinctual behavior comes from somewhere. Fear of falling is not simple: you have to recognize what height is. Sight, abstraction to positional awareness, risk assessment. That's a whole lot of code. (And a lot of code down the drain when you stick the baby in one of those thingies where they can walk around with wheeled support to keep them from falling over, and walk right off the edge of the stairs. It's horrible to laugh at that, but, dude.)
I'm saying that if an OS can be attacked by a rootkit, it is "vulnerable". Whether or not it is possible to make an OS that is "invulnerable" is completely irrelevant to the discussion.
A lot of the junk in there IS junk -- detritus from long-past viruses and stuff like that. A lot of it we have no idea. Some of it is clearly regulatory. Now we're beginning to get reliable tools that tell us which is which.
I just think the summary is misleading in the same way that an extron/intron duality implies: it says that there are two categories of DNA, expressed DNA and junk. That's clearly not true, and it's been known for 50 years that that's not true. The big question is exactly how not true, and with stuff like this we can begin to answer that question.
I'm going to be unsurprised if we find that the majority of intron material is useful at a lower information density than exons. Maybe stuff in there somehow determines how the circulatory, nerve, and lymphatic systems route through the body, or governs parts of apoptosis. There's a *lot* of developmental information we haven't begun to track down yet and that seems a likely place for it to be stored.
>Scientists once thought of that stuff as junk, but many now believe it may regulate how the genes work or provide some other function.
To clarify: a stretch of DNA that actually gets turned into RNA and thence into proteins is an exon, and the DNA that lives between exons is called an intron. It's been known for a long time that there are sequences before an exon that control it: regulators, promotors, and repressors, that are activated or deactivated by proteins binding to them during DNA reading, and in some cases there are sections of DNA that are processed into RNA, that help stabilize the RNA and are then clipped out before the RNA becomes protein, so they also have a function. (This is part of the reason that making insulin artificially has been tricky: you can't just stick the DNA into a bacterium and have it crank out insulin because the DNA is in a couple sections and requires post-processing.)
Also, many of the introns contain echoes of old sequences that used to be useful way back when, and aren't anymore, or bits of viruses that integrated into the genome hundreds or thousands of generations ago and are now widely spread in the population, and some intron bits are designed to facilitate shuffling of chunks of DNA into different orders for proteins that come in a wide variety of flavors with the same start and end sequences. Antibodies, for instance, have long, consistent, identical start and end chunks with wildly variable center chunks. (Think of a key, with differing teeth to fit various locks, but the same end piece, to fit your hand. Likewise an antibody has a hypervariable section that, for each antibody, can adhere to precisely one antigen, and a nonvariable section that signals passing cells that it has/hasn't found any of that antigen.)
Getting to go play around and make any set of repressor/promoter sequences and change the distances between them is a really nice tool, and being able to make massive sequences like this, helps play with gene interactions and with massive proteins like antibodies. Think of this as the beginnings of the transition from transistors to integrated chips, or maybe it'd be more apt to say from single computers to the beginnings of networks.
They're wasting time and money on this because they think that a non-binding declaration that "Apple Pie Is Really Great (and November's only a few months away)" is a little too obvious. Proposing and voting on bills that nobody in their right minds would vote against during election season is an age-old (as in Roman-era) tactic, especially when there are so many more dangerous, difficult, controversial issues that can be postponed by this kind of action.
There's a 200-person AMD facility next door: they announced its closing yesterday. 100 people laid off (in November) and some fraction of the remainder moved to another facility, the remainder laid off when the facility closes its doors some time early next year. It's nice that they gave them that much time, but it was still a shock. I believe they were doing work on Celeron stuff.
Back in the day, every new-hire at Hewlett Packard, and I mean up to the executive level, spent the first month doing assembly, winding inductors, working on the sheet-metal-forming lines, and generally at least getting some experience in all the job levels below that for which the person was hired. It's a similar concept tp your internship-of-royalty thing.
Hey now. I work for NatSemi and we're doing pretty well. Of course, part of the reason is because we've dumped all our digital stuff and now do (mostly) pure analog design, where the competition isn't as harsh financially -- but last year we posted the best year we've ever had.
>Why do so many people think Colombus discovered America? He got it into the permanent record, where the vikings, chinese, etc. didn't.
To be fair, lots of people DO know other people got here first. It didn't become a big deal in the world because there wasn't any compelling economic reason for their discovery to be important. The route the Vikings took was followed by fishing fleets, which were working the North Banks between Greenland and Newfoundland in the 1400's: because there was incentive, they were going there, and in those communties it was well-known that there were landmasses to the southwest of Greenland. But until someone found a good source for slaves, and soon thereafter, silver and gold, there wasn't any reason for the general public to pay attention to the New World any more than to news of Madagascar, the southeastern coast of Africa, the Spice Islands, or Australia until such time as they started being Important.
That's an incredibly depressing thought.
The area where I grew up had a lot of mining history in the 1890's and some up until the 1940's. When I was young and we'd go out exploring in our Jeep sometimes we'd come across old mine buildings way up in the middle of nowhere that had been similarly abandoned at the end of one season and just never opened back up: cookhouses with all the spices still on racks on shelves, bunkhouses with newspapers and gloves. Two years ago I was hiking way above treeline and came across a place that probably closed in 1978 and there were file cabinets filled with maintenance reports on the bearing wear on some of the air-powered drills. It's *weird* to walk into someone's life from (30-100) years ago.
(No, there were no boxes full of old tapes in any of the aforementioned places.)
There are lots of animals (fish and amphibians, mostly, for vertebrates, but most insects) that can freeze solid, and I mean -40C, and live afterwards. They produce weird proteins that mess with how the ice crystals form, such that the crystals don't rupture cells (by keeping them from being long needle-like crystals, essentially.) As a child, I found I could freeze grasshoppers slowly (in a dixie cup of water, say) through 10 freeze/thaw cycles, and they were still alive, albeit not in good health. For some reason, quickly freezing them (in a bit of kleenex, so it was just their body mass that had to be cooled) usually killed them. It's possible that their bodies recognized they were going to freeze and started producing the aforementioned chemicals, and the time lag that took exceeded the time it took to freeze when thrown directly in an extremely cold freezer. After all: that very rarely happens in real life so it's probably too energy-intensive to maintain the capability to survive those situations. In contrast, slow cooling to below freezing is fairly common so maintaining the ability to survive that is an enormous benefit.
Dude, they gave the-artist-formerly-known-as-prince access to debian developer stuff? That's *great*! Finally an OS with a good soundtrack!
That's kind of like saying multiple sclerosis isn't a vulnerability. If you have two OSes, and one can't be hacked by a rootkit and one can, I'd say that the latter is, y'know, more VULNERABLE to rootkits.
It makes you wonder about development cycles when people are producing malware for software that's not even been released yet. Is this a negative-day vulnerability? (and how does one quantify it when MS isn't yet saying when Vista's going to hit the market?)
and all those astronauts are blowhards anyway.
Vacuum. Or Paris Hilton. You decide. (You can even decide if there's any difference between the answers. Be sure to show your work.)
The STM/AFM tips we used to use were done by electroetching in sodium hydroxide. They were pretty damn sharp and they were cheap and fast. I just made one last night, by mistake, when I thought the stainless steel wire I grabbed to use as an electrical connection to something I was anodizing, was actually aluminum. The steel etched down to points so sharp I couldn't feel them until after I was bleeding.
Here's a suggestion: read slashdot at -1. Here's a site that caters to the smart people on the net, and reading at -1 is an exercise in masochism.
Now go to the most popular site on the net, which has no quality filtering, and start looking around. It necessarily must be worse than slashdot at -1.
First off, we're both assuming it actually happened... it sounds kind of sketchy.
Secondly: yeah, it's that he was trying to hide something, that says outright and blatantly that he has a vulnerability.
I think there's a more interesting question underneath all this. Almost everyone I've ever gotten to know well had some pretty weird skeletons in their closets, stuff that made them vulnerable. One question is: can people find these? Another, more fundamental one has to do with assumptions people make about each other.
Is a person who is covered in tattoos and has drunken, half-clothed, pot-smoking pictures posted on the Internet more vulnerable than the businessman who secretly goes to appointments with a dominatrix? I don't think that question can be simply answered, because if that's ALL the businessman does, while the tattoo person goes on to molest rabbits and burn down churches but doesn't post about them, that's a really big problem. But if the tattoo person has no big foul secrets, no habits that haven't been documented in mind-numbing plenty on myspace, then the businessman IS the more vulnerable one of the pair.
My point is this: I think there's an assumption that a person who displays a few bad habits must have even more that aren't displayed, so is therefore less trustworthy than someone who hides a vice. I also think that's a very poor assumption, that's based in prejudice rather than reason.
I agree with what you're saying, but this reminds me of the proprietary/opensource debate. Person A posts about what he does so everyone can see it, Person B doesn't post about what she does. Therefore, fewer -- but not zero -- people can blackmail B. Does that make B innately more trustable?
Security through obscurity isn't a great plan.
Really, the only thing you can say when you see stupid stuff posted on Myspace/Facebook is "this person *certainly* does stupid things" and "this person is willing to post about them online".
I would argue that a person who is completely transparent about what he/she does -- demonstrates that he/she doesn't MIND if the parents find out -- is a known security risk, compared to a person who might-or-might-not do stupid stuff and doesn't post about it. Hence the investigation done before getting clearance, which is the same as a customer security audit of complicated software by examining all the API's and the software history, but not ever seeing the source code.
Everyone wants to be the underdog, because in Western civilization we cheer for underdogs. Witness the popularity of Jeff Foxworthy. So it's always a useful rhetorical device.
You're right: the mod system does work very well. Slashdot attracts people who are *likely* to have a certain set of opinions, but that clearly doesn't silence the people who disagree. The widely-held opinions are modded up, and the people who disagree with the widely-held opinions claim that they're the underdogs. Same as has happened in every political arena in the US and England since, well, forever.
>Just how many investigations can a publically trade company handle before their stock turns to worthless paste?
Gee, I dunno, let's ask Microsoft or IBM.
If a company is financially strong, they'll shrug off investigations *even if* the allegations are found to be true. It's only when companies are already tottering, that investigations can make investors lose confidence.
The stupid, en masse, sentenced Socrates to death. That was a pretty big effect, given his reputation.
I agree with you, in part: the Internet gives people a venue to isolate themselves without acknowledging that fact: surround themselves with a bunch of other people saying the same thing, so they can feel like there are enough people that they can fool themselves into thinking they're a majority. (this applies very much to copyright infringement discussions on slashdot, for instance.) But the same thing happens with Faux News fanatics, or, 400 years ago, Catholics in the European religious wars. The mob effect is magnified, but it's not clear to me that it's enough larger than what has always existed to be a critical problem.