So what you're saying is: you have no quarrel with the article as such, but you only think Slashdot's editors are at fault for putting it in here because it's too simple? Is that it?
If so perhaps it's good that it was placed on slashdot so as to show us an example of how a train of thought has to be shortened to be suitable for the mainstream media.
Just so that you know... people who think at the level of this article are the voters who ultimately determine whether and to what extent measures will be taken to address the problem. Not us.
On the whole I'd say it's a good idea to drive that point home to Slashdotters once in a while.
What you seem to forget is that the current trend in development (buzzworded 'Internet of Things") is about to make the infrastructure that is open to unauthorised access a million times more pervasive, and the real-world impact of such unauthorised access a thousand times more severe. As in people getting killed.
This article is one of the first (more or less mainstream) articles where the danger is recognised, named, and presented in a way even Joe Sixpack can wrap his grey matter round.
Please bear in mind that whether *you* realise something is dangerous doesn't matter one way or another because you have zero impact on the trend. You don't matter (and neither do I or any other geek for that matter).
It's only when mainstream media get hold of the idea, the public learns from them, and politicians start worrying because it's what their voters worry about that you'll see any potential for serious adjustment.
So, if you think about it for a few minutes, you ought to be glad that this article is written and you'll see how unhelpful your comment really is.
I've recently had good experiences with running SQL queries on fairly large (# records: 200 mln. plus) databases on a Teradata machine in a corporate environment. I wasn't involved in any sysadmin work, just the statistical modeling / analysis side of things.
The company I consulted for uses SAS (on the mainframe, AIX boxes, and PC's) for almost all of its dataprocessing needs, including ETL work. Now they're looking at "Big Data" and discovered they need parallel processing to make it cost-effective (outperforms the mainframe, no per CPU-second charges, ability to let analysts work on AIX boxes or PC's etc.).
I was able to show significant cost and performance savings in SQL queries over the mainframe (and AIX boxes). Interestingly substantial (50%-100%) speedups were also possible by accessing the Teradata machine in its native SQL (bypassing the SAS "in-database" Teradata support).
The interesting thing about Teradata is that they offer genuine parallel processing (like Hadoop), but offer it as an end-user ready SQL interface to a database engine (you still need sysadmins though). Contrast this to Hadoop where the Hadoop layer is basically the start of the road and you usually have to worry about hardware issues and software architecture issues (such as which database engine to choose) as well. Sometimes you have to take the custom-made route (e.g. Wall-street firms doing automated trading) but sometimes it's an outright liability in a DIY-hostile environment (e.g. in large corporations).
The teradata machine I worked with supports SQL, SAS, and R (which competes with SAS of course, and usually out-competes it when it comes to advanced statistics if you know what you're doing but we had to use SAS exclusively, by order) and could easily handle terabytes of data.
So my suggestion is to take a look at it.
It's not Open Source (although it does support R), and it's less fun for tinkerers, and it's harder to custom-parallise your own algorithms on (I hear, I never tried). On the other hand it does provide a ready-to-run parallelised SQL database and lots of storage. It's not cheap though, but in a corporate environment that's usually not the first consideration.
So do I, but the mainstream seems to be moving towards something very different.
As in: the majority of consumers seems to want maximum "comfort" (read: "ease of use and no hassle", a.k.a. "I'm lazy and dumb so I need smart appliances"), and that's what industry will provide (on pain of being marginalised and ultimately disappearing).
And guess what? Ease of use and "no hassle" means offloading lots of detailed control decisions to the manufacturer. And that means that said manufacturer has got to distinguish themselves by offering comfort and taking away decisions and cares from home-owners.
It is understood that home-owners are willing to pay for that and that manufacturers incur no penalties by offering dumb gear and putting the "intelligence" on their servers. Those decisions (blinds closed or open, heating higher or lower, anticipating the home-owner's homecoming, level of lighting, when to switch on the air conditioning, burglar alarms, suppressing false alarms cause e.g. by pets etc. etc.), still have to be taken of course. Just not by the home-owner.
Taken together this means a big fat premium on supplying dumb, (but sensor-rich) proprietary hardware, collecting as much data as possible on the habits and preferences of the home-owner, his/her family, children, pets, neighbours etc.etc., storing and analysing all that on the company's servers, and selling the resulting control information to the home-owner as a service. Look for upcoming legislation that not only allows but also compels "domestic service" companies to "share" their information with everyone from law-enforcement, insurance companies (think fire insurance, burglary insurance, health insurance (!)), medical care providing companies (think monitoring of elderly people), market research companies, advertising companies and any other interested party you can think of.
I'm pessimistic about being able to opt out, let alone to stop this kind of thing. For one thing, mass-production will drive down the price of the "mainstream" systems (whatever form they will take), thus marginalising any non-mainstream hardware. Of course manufacturers have zero interest in supplying hardware that will work without their (or another company's) service package so stand-alone or "user-controlled" hardware will come at a premium. In addition you may find that your insurance premiums are higher than without "smart home" automation.
All in all, the stable market situation will probably be a load black-box hardware that needs daily updates and tuning by proprietary off-site control software that eats your privacy for breakfast (on an ongoing daily basis).
First we pass a law that is an open invitation to unintended use (like this seizure law) because it conveniently neglects to mention where it is to be applied and where it isn't.
Then we come over all indignant when that law (which is "on the books") is used outside its originally intended area of application.
Am I the only one who thinks that Congress is to blame here (for passing sloppy legislation), not the IRS or The Government?
Might it not be a good idea to work harder to phrase legislation in such a way that it's difficult to abuse? Or would that cramp the style of "tough-on-crime" politicians?
IMHO your "opinion" is very very humble indeed and belongs in the category of "uneducated careless speculation with a sensationalist bent".
It may have escaped your notice, but doctors who help out in West-African hospitals come into close contact with a constant stream of very ill people who are in the stadium where they really are contagious, every day for months at a stretch.
Their protective clothing prevents transmission in the vast majority (say 99,9%) of cases (something you can tell by the fact that we still have doctors left treating Ebola patients). The real danger comes when you take off your protective suit. That has to be done carefully so as not to touch the splatters of blood, muckus, tears, sweat etcetera that very ill patients secrete and if possible it has to be decontaminated first.
Now I'm sure your "humble" and uneducated opinion never has been schooled in elementary probability so you wouldn't understand things like P(contagion_after_100_days) = 1 - [P(no_contagion_after_1_day)]^100, but try it this way.
Playing the lottery every day makes it unlikely that you won't win a single prize.
And so it is with medical personnel who treat Ebola patient for months. They run a risk.
So it's no conspiracy (I can feel your incredulity and disappointment) and no case of "fsking idiots" (a term which I'd like to reserve for you personally).
It's easy to shout your (thoroughly humble) head off about stuff you don't understand, but it's not helping anybody and it stands in the way of a rational attitude towards Ebola.
P.S. there is absolutely nothing "insightful" about your post. On the other hand it's revealing. Revealing of a mindset that couples a penchant for conspiracy theories with a complete lack of understanding of risk and a disdain for plain ordinary everyday scientific commonsense that seems to have whizzed over your (so very humble) head.
is that the Government is actually doing something sensible.
Like airing the vulnerability, launching an investigation, and giving off a signal that the *manufacturers* should pay attention to security and at least make a reasonable effort to make their kit tamper-resistant
It would be in total accordance with a certain political outlook to suppress the news, pose as being "tough on crime" by imposing ridiculous penalties on offences that could be construed as breaking into medical equipment, and criminalising research into and publications of weaknesses.
Perhaps I'm being optimistic... perhaps this will still happen. That "certain political outlook" I mentioned could be a bit behind the tech news on this issue. We can still hope though.
You argue that "capital" and "labor" are essentially equal to the identity of an enterprise.
I really didn't: when I said "bundle" I left the relative proportions unspecified. But I agree with you in that the relative importance of people's identity varies sharply with the scarcity of people's skills and that depends on the setting.
We agree that in a environment where people do routine work, so many people share the required skill that identity of who provides this skill no longer matters. And that's where vast majority of the working population is employed.
Of course there are settings where individual skills matter to a greater degree. One can think of e.g. professional sportspeople, scientists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, politicians, artists, inventors.
But their numbers are small compared to "ordinary" workers, so that by and large I think the proposition holds. Yes, there are exceptions, but 99% of the working population is rather un-exceptional.
I fear that the negative reactions here indicate (once again) that Slashdot readership consists mainly of techies. And such people often have difficulties understanding understanding how society works (even if they tend to have vocal opinions on any subject that comes along). Let me try to bring some perspective into the discussion.
Lest somebody misunderstand, the very essence of an enterprise (any enterprise) is that it is a bundle of labour and capital whose essential structure and identity is independent of and more persistent than the labour it employs. The identity behind its labour component is no more important than the identity of its capital component.
It is for this reason that any contemporary HR policy is aimed at (and this is important) divorcing the work from specific individuals.
What this means is that all and any employees must (and this is essential) be plug-replaceable as a matter of policy.
Those that aren't should either be unique individuals like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, the actual owners of the company, or leaving.
That is one of the drivers (not the only one of course) behind the desire for standardisation of work procedures and documentation of ideas and knowledge.
The result of careful execution of such policy is a situation in which personnel really is replaceable. Even when it concerns 10%-30% of the employees. Which is what we are now seeing illustrated at Cisco.
So there's no need to be surprised. And no need to be disgruntled. It's simply the consequence of a certain feature of our society we collectively decided we want and actively maintain. And it has truly served us well for the past century and a half and its end-result is the envy of our neigbours.
Unfortunately the current economic tide makes the downsides (for such they are) of this state of affairs more visible: i.e. employees are just another commodity and any successful enterprise will treat them as such. . As a result, employees can get a rough deal (if they get any deal at all, i.e. if they are employed).
Let's be clear about this: I don't know how to make those downsides go away without wrecking the competitiveness of enterprises. But I suspect it will involve a realignment in the balance of power between labour and capital.
One way of achieving this is through the use of force. Also known as "legislation". Fortunately we have a mechanism in place for effecting change. It's called Politics. But what actual policy should be enacted through Politics? If knew (and could prove it) I'd tell you, but I don't.
One of the problems is the constraints imposed on all of us through competition.
I.e. if the policy we adopt is too disadvantagous for enterprises, they will simply take their capital, set up shop elsewhere, and drive the disadvantaged enterprises off the market.
So it's up for debate really, and this isn't a new debate. It's a debate about a basic balance in our society that needs to be realigned from time to time.
There are a number of relevant things to know about Florian Mueller before you start asking him questions.
Things that people with short memories will have forgotten by now since they happened all of three years ago. Detailed summaries of his doing can still be found on Groklaw though.
You see, mr. Mueller is not just *any* publicist. He's a publicist who is, basically, for hire by large companies to provide a congenial account of their doings and their position. In short: he is a lobbyist.
His (former) clients seem to include SCO (the company who tried to claim crippling copyrights on Linux and engaged in an intense campaign of legal blackmail aimed at companies using Linux) and one of his current clients seems to be Oracle (the company that reied to shut down Android by claiming copyright on Java library API's).
Err, sorry, but how would *you* know anything about that?
Did you do any kind of analysis tracing existing malware to point-sources? Or did you see any data on that and did you identify and count those point-sources?
No? Then what is your opinion worth?
You seem to be confusing *operators* (i.e. the ones that actually push the button and run botnets, burglarise computers, and/or spread malware) with *researchers*, *designers* and *programmers* who never hack, but who write (and sell) the tools the operators use.
If you had actually read the article, you would have noticed that it's talking about those tool-makers, not operators. I could very well believe that those toolmakers number only about 100 world-wide.
You're probably speaking in jest, but unfortunately it's true.
If Google focuses on filtering content rather than providing it then it can certainly comply quicker and more completely with all such take-down orders.
The question of whether Google can " control and censor every last thing" is totally irrelevant, as the suit is addressed to Google on basis of what you can find using Google... as opposed to what you can find "on the Internet".
It's simply a matter of where you put your priorities. Which in term depends on how reasonable you think the demands to censor search results are.
As noted in earlier posts, techies don't appreciate the extent to which society can suppress behaviour it doesn't want.
Lawsuits like this may well lead to a shift in Google's priorities and a substantial increase in the extent to which it filters search results.
It's quite OK to mass-produce cellphones that can be tapped and controlled in this way.
But apparently it's not OK to sell software to allow people to use their perfectly ordinary cellphone to pick up other conversations from its vicinity.
How about securing the transmissions of cellphones instead of prosecuting someone for doing the obvious?
Allowing the security services to *monitor* the whole country looks like a panicky move and leaves the door wide open to abuse.
Curtailing the freedom of speech of journalists and bloggers, as in:
The legislation makes it an offence if a person "discloses information... [that] relates to a special intelligence operation" and does not state any public interest exemptions, meaning it could apply to anyone including journalists.
Those who disclosed such information would face up to 10 years' jail.
veers into police-state territory, given the vague way in which it's phrased. I think that the balance between on the one hand safeguarding the effectiveness of anti-terrorism measures and on preventing miscreants from benefiting from bloggers and journalists and a general gag-order on the other has been upset.
For example reporting on the crackdown of the past few days would probably fall under it. Reporting like the articles that exposed the TSA's practices of make-work and unprofessional conduct could fall under it, if the prosecutors happened to feel like it.
I'm not given to quoting historical figures as a rule, but I'll make an exception now:
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. [Franklin, B. ((11 Nov. 1755) Reply to the Governor] .
Have they really considered the costs and benefits of this little gag-law? Are their "Special Intelligence Operations" that fragile that they come apart when people report about them? I can't imagine it.
As usual with BillyBob and his "coussins", the other extreme is *under-thinking* the problem.
The problem is to find those drones in the first place, especially if they're coming in low and slow, or high enough to be out of slingshot range.
The "droneshield" thingy seems to tackle the problem by analysing ambient sounds. From the webpage the article refers to:
Drones present many threats to military and homeland security forces and facilities. "Low, Slow, and Small" UAS are a growing threat that legacy CUAS will not detect. DroneShield compliments (sic) radar and RF detection systems against smaller, low signature UAS because acoustic emissions are difficult to conceal or spoof.
So it tells you if it hears a drone buzzing nearby, which is useful,... but it doesn't (yet) do target-acquisition for BillyBob's anti-drone-slingshot batteries.
That's my advice. Mainstream engineering isn't about individuals, let alone "stars". It's about reliably delivering commodities, in bulk, standardised, to spec and within budget.
Maintenance programming is an example. Large development projects under the "waterfall" method (often) is an example. Custom-building standard systems is another. In such cases you're better off with predictable but competent standardised performance from a team of 9-5 programmers that with mob of empassioned risk-takers.
This "passion" thing is needed when individual performance counts. As in: when the "old" way of doing things no longer suffices (the old machinery has bogged down and needs to be replaced by something new), or when clear efficiency improvements can be realised (this is common engineering practice), or when there is room to experiment (e.g. in Open Source Software), or when your task is to see how far the envelope can be pushed and to come up with something new (e.g. research).
Of course there's a difference between not keeping up with mainstream engineering (as the opening post suggests) and spending your time "innovating" when there are adequate standard methods available.
If you believe that, then any ' citizen" of the "Khalifate" (ISIS), North Korea, Iran, China, Russia, or whoever can make the very same claim with the same amount of justification.
And who's to say they're in the wrong to just install a missile battery in orbit to "reclaim their property" or to extract "reasonable compensation" from returning mining vessels?
Or even to send their own mining vessels (possibly armed) to the very same asteroids that Congress so graciously told you that you can keep the mining proceeds of?
The kind of attitude you display leads straight to armed conflict (if the rewards are high enough). Are you prepared to fight that conflict and hold the rest of us harmless from it, both financially and militarily?
Somehow I doubt that.
And last but not least: how about giving private citizens and private companies the power to mess about with chunks of rock near Earth's orbit? And what if those clowns decide it makes financial sense to install a motor on a really big asteroid and push it into earth orbit (for easier access)? And how about if North Korea or the Khalifate do that?
As far as I can see around me, there are not many openings for mere "coders" who just happen to have picked up some training in R.
Most R code does things like model fitting, parameter estimation, data visualisation, data analysis etc.. The code mostly is just a way to capture and operationalise an idea in statistics or data processing. If you can recognise, grasp, and follow through that idea then the code usually starts to make sense pretty quickly.
On the other hand, if you can't, then you'll be hard put to understand the code on its own terms and you really shouldn't try to modify it because you won't know what to look out for.
As I see it, the openings in "R" are for people who are "numerate", know about statistics, data analysis, a little database knowledge and who also happen to know R.
People like that are also likely to be able to work effectively with SAS, SPSS, SQL, Matlab and other high-level programming languages.
I'm just waiting for a response to your suggestion from one of the more cost-cutting carries along the following lines:
"Dear Daniel Ravennest,
having studied you proposal with the utmost attention, we failed to note any innovative elements in it.
We would like to point out that your suggestion has already been implemented in the form of business class or first class travel.
Rather than complicating matters by offering a more heterogeneous product palette, we are currently researching a range of options which we consider to be both more realistic and more closely aligned with our mission and our strategic objectives.
One such programme, which we propose to field-test within the next three months, consists of administering sedatives and muscle relaxants (provided free of charge during the initial testing phase) to all economy passengers around 30 minutes before boarding. This courtesy relaxant will be individually dosed to wear off within hours of touchdown.
We believe that this will both eliminate disorderly conduct, increase security, reduce catering demands, and prevent injuries on the flight."
As far as I know (it's mentioned in the original article), German law demands things like adequate insurance cover, driver's health certificates and high vehicle maintenance standards. Sounds reasonable huh?
This applies for all taxicab companies, no matter their size. What Uber is doing is to make an end-run around those laws by offering taxicab rides from drivers who *don't* meet those requirements. Makes it easy to undercut people who do abide by the law eh? Sounds like unfair competition to me.
So how the hell is enforcing such laws "Socialist"?
And whoever decided this Anonymous Coward's drive-by comment qualifies as "insightful"?
Slashdot Mirror
So what you're saying is: you have no quarrel with the article as such, but you only think Slashdot's editors are at fault for putting it in here because it's too simple? Is that it?
If so perhaps it's good that it was placed on slashdot so as to show us an example of how a train of thought has to be shortened to be suitable for the mainstream media.
Just so that you know ... people who think at the level of this article are the voters who ultimately determine whether and to what extent measures will be taken to address the problem. Not us.
On the whole I'd say it's a good idea to drive that point home to Slashdotters once in a while.
Nice snarky comment, but not helpful.
What you seem to forget is that the current trend in development (buzzworded 'Internet of Things") is about to make the infrastructure that is open to unauthorised access a million times more pervasive, and the real-world impact of such unauthorised access a thousand times more severe. As in people getting killed.
This article is one of the first (more or less mainstream) articles where the danger is recognised, named, and presented in a way even Joe Sixpack can wrap his grey matter round.
Please bear in mind that whether *you* realise something is dangerous doesn't matter one way or another because you have zero impact on the trend. You don't matter (and neither do I or any other geek for that matter).
It's only when mainstream media get hold of the idea, the public learns from them, and politicians start worrying because it's what their voters worry about that you'll see any potential for serious adjustment.
So, if you think about it for a few minutes, you ought to be glad that this article is written and you'll see how unhelpful your comment really is.
The company I consulted for uses SAS (on the mainframe, AIX boxes, and PC's) for almost all of its dataprocessing needs, including ETL work. Now they're looking at "Big Data" and discovered they need parallel processing to make it cost-effective (outperforms the mainframe, no per CPU-second charges, ability to let analysts work on AIX boxes or PC's etc.).
I was able to show significant cost and performance savings in SQL queries over the mainframe (and AIX boxes). Interestingly substantial (50%-100%) speedups were also possible by accessing the Teradata machine in its native SQL (bypassing the SAS "in-database" Teradata support).
The interesting thing about Teradata is that they offer genuine parallel processing (like Hadoop), but offer it as an end-user ready SQL interface to a database engine (you still need sysadmins though). Contrast this to Hadoop where the Hadoop layer is basically the start of the road and you usually have to worry about hardware issues and software architecture issues (such as which database engine to choose) as well. Sometimes you have to take the custom-made route (e.g. Wall-street firms doing automated trading) but sometimes it's an outright liability in a DIY-hostile environment (e.g. in large corporations).
The teradata machine I worked with supports SQL, SAS, and R (which competes with SAS of course, and usually out-competes it when it comes to advanced statistics if you know what you're doing but we had to use SAS exclusively, by order) and could easily handle terabytes of data.
So my suggestion is to take a look at it.
It's not Open Source (although it does support R), and it's less fun for tinkerers, and it's harder to custom-parallise your own algorithms on (I hear, I never tried). On the other hand it does provide a ready-to-run parallelised SQL database and lots of storage. It's not cheap though, but in a corporate environment that's usually not the first consideration.
So do I, but the mainstream seems to be moving towards something very different.
As in: the majority of consumers seems to want maximum "comfort" (read: "ease of use and no hassle", a.k.a. "I'm lazy and dumb so I need smart appliances"), and that's what industry will provide (on pain of being marginalised and ultimately disappearing).
And guess what? Ease of use and "no hassle" means offloading lots of detailed control decisions to the manufacturer. And that means that said manufacturer has got to distinguish themselves by offering comfort and taking away decisions and cares from home-owners.
It is understood that home-owners are willing to pay for that and that manufacturers incur no penalties by offering dumb gear and putting the "intelligence" on their servers. Those decisions (blinds closed or open, heating higher or lower, anticipating the home-owner's homecoming, level of lighting, when to switch on the air conditioning, burglar alarms, suppressing false alarms cause e.g. by pets etc. etc.), still have to be taken of course. Just not by the home-owner.
Taken together this means a big fat premium on supplying dumb, (but sensor-rich) proprietary hardware, collecting as much data as possible on the habits and preferences of the home-owner, his/her family, children, pets, neighbours etc.etc., storing and analysing all that on the company's servers, and selling the resulting control information to the home-owner as a service. Look for upcoming legislation that not only allows but also compels "domestic service" companies to "share" their information with everyone from law-enforcement, insurance companies (think fire insurance, burglary insurance, health insurance (!)), medical care providing companies (think monitoring of elderly people), market research companies, advertising companies and any other interested party you can think of.
I'm pessimistic about being able to opt out, let alone to stop this kind of thing. For one thing, mass-production will drive down the price of the "mainstream" systems (whatever form they will take), thus marginalising any non-mainstream hardware. Of course manufacturers have zero interest in supplying hardware that will work without their (or another company's) service package so stand-alone or "user-controlled" hardware will come at a premium. In addition you may find that your insurance premiums are higher than without "smart home" automation.
All in all, the stable market situation will probably be a load black-box hardware that needs daily updates and tuning by proprietary off-site control software that eats your privacy for breakfast (on an ongoing daily basis).
My comment was posted before I'd thought things through. The Slashdot virus must have infected me.
Then we come over all indignant when that law (which is "on the books") is used outside its originally intended area of application.
Am I the only one who thinks that Congress is to blame here (for passing sloppy legislation), not the IRS or The Government?
Might it not be a good idea to work harder to phrase legislation in such a way that it's difficult to abuse? Or would that cramp the style of "tough-on-crime" politicians?
IMHO your "opinion" is very very humble indeed and belongs in the category of "uneducated careless speculation with a sensationalist bent".
It may have escaped your notice, but doctors who help out in West-African hospitals come into close contact with a constant stream of very ill people who are in the stadium where they really are contagious, every day for months at a stretch.
Their protective clothing prevents transmission in the vast majority (say 99,9%) of cases (something you can tell by the fact that we still have doctors left treating Ebola patients). The real danger comes when you take off your protective suit. That has to be done carefully so as not to touch the splatters of blood, muckus, tears, sweat etcetera that very ill patients secrete and if possible it has to be decontaminated first.
Now I'm sure your "humble" and uneducated opinion never has been schooled in elementary probability so you wouldn't understand things like P(contagion_after_100_days) = 1 - [P(no_contagion_after_1_day)]^100, but try it this way.
Playing the lottery every day makes it unlikely that you won't win a single prize.
And so it is with medical personnel who treat Ebola patient for months. They run a risk.
So it's no conspiracy (I can feel your incredulity and disappointment) and no case of "fsking idiots" (a term which I'd like to reserve for you personally).
It's easy to shout your (thoroughly humble) head off about stuff you don't understand, but it's not helping anybody and it stands in the way of a rational attitude towards Ebola.
P.S. there is absolutely nothing "insightful" about your post. On the other hand it's revealing. Revealing of a mindset that couples a penchant for conspiracy theories with a complete lack of understanding of risk and a disdain for plain ordinary everyday scientific commonsense that seems to have whizzed over your (so very humble) head.
Like airing the vulnerability, launching an investigation, and giving off a signal that the *manufacturers* should pay attention to security and at least make a reasonable effort to make their kit tamper-resistant
It would be in total accordance with a certain political outlook to suppress the news, pose as being "tough on crime" by imposing ridiculous penalties on offences that could be construed as breaking into medical equipment, and criminalising research into and publications of weaknesses.
Perhaps I'm being optimistic ... perhaps this will still happen. That "certain political outlook" I mentioned could be a bit behind the tech news on this issue. We can still hope though.
I really didn't: when I said "bundle" I left the relative proportions unspecified. But I agree with you in that the relative importance of people's identity varies sharply with the scarcity of people's skills and that depends on the setting.
We agree that in a environment where people do routine work, so many people share the required skill that identity of who provides this skill no longer matters. And that's where vast majority of the working population is employed.
Of course there are settings where individual skills matter to a greater degree. One can think of e.g. professional sportspeople, scientists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, politicians, artists, inventors.
But their numbers are small compared to "ordinary" workers, so that by and large I think the proposition holds. Yes, there are exceptions, but 99% of the working population is rather un-exceptional.
Lest somebody misunderstand, the very essence of an enterprise (any enterprise) is that it is a bundle of labour and capital whose essential structure and identity is independent of and more persistent than the labour it employs. The identity behind its labour component is no more important than the identity of its capital component.
It is for this reason that any contemporary HR policy is aimed at (and this is important) divorcing the work from specific individuals.
What this means is that all and any employees must (and this is essential) be plug-replaceable as a matter of policy. Those that aren't should either be unique individuals like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, the actual owners of the company, or leaving.
That is one of the drivers (not the only one of course) behind the desire for standardisation of work procedures and documentation of ideas and knowledge.
The result of careful execution of such policy is a situation in which personnel really is replaceable. Even when it concerns 10%-30% of the employees. Which is what we are now seeing illustrated at Cisco.
So there's no need to be surprised. And no need to be disgruntled. It's simply the consequence of a certain feature of our society we collectively decided we want and actively maintain. And it has truly served us well for the past century and a half and its end-result is the envy of our neigbours.
Unfortunately the current economic tide makes the downsides (for such they are) of this state of affairs more visible: i.e. employees are just another commodity and any successful enterprise will treat them as such. . As a result, employees can get a rough deal (if they get any deal at all, i.e. if they are employed). Let's be clear about this: I don't know how to make those downsides go away without wrecking the competitiveness of enterprises. But I suspect it will involve a realignment in the balance of power between labour and capital.
One way of achieving this is through the use of force. Also known as "legislation". Fortunately we have a mechanism in place for effecting change. It's called Politics. But what actual policy should be enacted through Politics? If knew (and could prove it) I'd tell you, but I don't.
One of the problems is the constraints imposed on all of us through competition. I.e. if the policy we adopt is too disadvantagous for enterprises, they will simply take their capital, set up shop elsewhere, and drive the disadvantaged enterprises off the market.
So it's up for debate really, and this isn't a new debate. It's a debate about a basic balance in our society that needs to be realigned from time to time.
Things that people with short memories will have forgotten by now since they happened all of three years ago. Detailed summaries of his doing can still be found on Groklaw though.
You see, mr. Mueller is not just *any* publicist. He's a publicist who is, basically, for hire by large companies to provide a congenial account of their doings and their position. In short: he is a lobbyist. His (former) clients seem to include SCO (the company who tried to claim crippling copyrights on Linux and engaged in an intense campaign of legal blackmail aimed at companies using Linux) and one of his current clients seems to be Oracle (the company that reied to shut down Android by claiming copyright on Java library API's).
As summarised by the following posts:
http://www.groklaw.net/article...
http://www.dailytech.com/Top+A...
http://techrights.org/2010/08/...
My only question to him would be: who is on your current client list?
Based on the paper, I'd say this thing is genuine, even if we don't understand how it works yet.
Did you do any kind of analysis tracing existing malware to point-sources? Or did you see any data on that and did you identify and count those point-sources?
No? Then what is your opinion worth?
You seem to be confusing *operators* (i.e. the ones that actually push the button and run botnets, burglarise computers, and/or spread malware) with *researchers*, *designers* and *programmers* who never hack, but who write (and sell) the tools the operators use.
If you had actually read the article, you would have noticed that it's talking about those tool-makers, not operators. I could very well believe that those toolmakers number only about 100 world-wide.
What you mean is this: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/a... Good informal advice too. A look at the mechanism at work is provided here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
If Google focuses on filtering content rather than providing it then it can certainly comply quicker and more completely with all such take-down orders.
The question of whether Google can " control and censor every last thing" is totally irrelevant, as the suit is addressed to Google on basis of what you can find using Google ... as opposed to what you can find "on the Internet".
It's simply a matter of where you put your priorities. Which in term depends on how reasonable you think the demands to censor search results are.
As noted in earlier posts, techies don't appreciate the extent to which society can suppress behaviour it doesn't want.
Lawsuits like this may well lead to a shift in Google's priorities and a substantial increase in the extent to which it filters search results.
But apparently it's not OK to sell software to allow people to use their perfectly ordinary cellphone to pick up other conversations from its vicinity.
How about securing the transmissions of cellphones instead of prosecuting someone for doing the obvious?
Nah, no worries: the idea wasn't going to make money anyway so there's no harm in publishing it.
Ah well, we'll just have to work it into the next free-trade treaty then.
Allowing the security services to *monitor* the whole country looks like a panicky move and leaves the door wide open to abuse.
Curtailing the freedom of speech of journalists and bloggers, as in :
veers into police-state territory, given the vague way in which it's phrased. I think that the balance between on the one hand safeguarding the effectiveness of anti-terrorism measures and on preventing miscreants from benefiting from bloggers and journalists and a general gag-order on the other has been upset.
For example reporting on the crackdown of the past few days would probably fall under it. Reporting like the articles that exposed the TSA's practices of make-work and unprofessional conduct could fall under it, if the prosecutors happened to feel like it.
I'm not given to quoting historical figures as a rule, but I'll make an exception now:
Have they really considered the costs and benefits of this little gag-law? Are their "Special Intelligence Operations" that fragile that they come apart when people report about them? I can't imagine it.
The problem is to find those drones in the first place, especially if they're coming in low and slow, or high enough to be out of slingshot range.
The "droneshield" thingy seems to tackle the problem by analysing ambient sounds. From the webpage the article refers to:
So it tells you if it hears a drone buzzing nearby, which is useful, ... but it doesn't (yet) do target-acquisition for BillyBob's anti-drone-slingshot batteries.
Maintenance programming is an example. Large development projects under the "waterfall" method (often) is an example. Custom-building standard systems is another. In such cases you're better off with predictable but competent standardised performance from a team of 9-5 programmers that with mob of empassioned risk-takers.
This "passion" thing is needed when individual performance counts. As in: when the "old" way of doing things no longer suffices (the old machinery has bogged down and needs to be replaced by something new), or when clear efficiency improvements can be realised (this is common engineering practice), or when there is room to experiment (e.g. in Open Source Software), or when your task is to see how far the envelope can be pushed and to come up with something new (e.g. research).
Of course there's a difference between not keeping up with mainstream engineering (as the opening post suggests) and spending your time "innovating" when there are adequate standard methods available.
And who's to say they're in the wrong to just install a missile battery in orbit to "reclaim their property" or to extract "reasonable compensation" from returning mining vessels?
Or even to send their own mining vessels (possibly armed) to the very same asteroids that Congress so graciously told you that you can keep the mining proceeds of?
The kind of attitude you display leads straight to armed conflict (if the rewards are high enough). Are you prepared to fight that conflict and hold the rest of us harmless from it, both financially and militarily?
Somehow I doubt that.
And last but not least: how about giving private citizens and private companies the power to mess about with chunks of rock near Earth's orbit? And what if those clowns decide it makes financial sense to install a motor on a really big asteroid and push it into earth orbit (for easier access)? And how about if North Korea or the Khalifate do that?
A little less short-sightedness there please.
Most R code does things like model fitting, parameter estimation, data visualisation, data analysis etc.. The code mostly is just a way to capture and operationalise an idea in statistics or data processing. If you can recognise, grasp, and follow through that idea then the code usually starts to make sense pretty quickly.
On the other hand, if you can't, then you'll be hard put to understand the code on its own terms and you really shouldn't try to modify it because you won't know what to look out for.
As I see it, the openings in "R" are for people who are "numerate", know about statistics, data analysis, a little database knowledge and who also happen to know R.
People like that are also likely to be able to work effectively with SAS, SPSS, SQL, Matlab and other high-level programming languages.
We would like to point out that your suggestion has already been implemented in the form of business class or first class travel.
Rather than complicating matters by offering a more heterogeneous product palette, we are currently researching a range of options which we consider to be both more realistic and more closely aligned with our mission and our strategic objectives.
One such programme, which we propose to field-test within the next three months, consists of administering sedatives and muscle relaxants (provided free of charge during the initial testing phase) to all economy passengers around 30 minutes before boarding. This courtesy relaxant will be individually dosed to wear off within hours of touchdown.
We believe that this will both eliminate disorderly conduct, increase security, reduce catering demands, and prevent injuries on the flight."
This applies for all taxicab companies, no matter their size. What Uber is doing is to make an end-run around those laws by offering taxicab rides from drivers who *don't* meet those requirements. Makes it easy to undercut people who do abide by the law eh? Sounds like unfair competition to me.
So how the hell is enforcing such laws "Socialist"?
And whoever decided this Anonymous Coward's drive-by comment qualifies as "insightful"?