The atomic bomb keeps the big players in check, and that in turn trickles down to the smaller players. You can't stop the little skirmishes between the big players, but they're always somewhere else where none of the players who matter give a crap.
The interesting side effect is that everybody wants to become a big player, or wants to cozy up with one. The EU was established with this idea in mind. A lot of countries in Asia look to the U.S. for help (Russia and China, while they have strong economic influence in many places especially in the Middle East, South America, and Africa, have limited interest in external affairs and really don't let too many cozy up to them). And of the rest, they're either too unstable and thus one of the places the big players meddle in, or if they're stable enough, have nuclear ambitions to become a big player.
This peace will not last. It cannot last. Humanity as a species is not there yet. Unfortunately, the bomb that has given rise to the current time of peace will probably also be the cause of our extinction in the future.
I would say that one of the most important thing in programming is to break down a problem into parts that are useful and easy to manage.
'nuff said.
It's problem solving. It's breaking a problem down horizontally (layers) and vertically (features). It's reducing problems into the fundamentals and solving those first. It's prioritizing. It's learning what needs balancing, how to balance it, and why.
Programming is as much a work of art as it is an engineering exercise. Just like when creating a building, the architect and engineer have two diametrically opposing responsibilities, so does creating a program have the same challenge between design and engineering. Programming is figuring out how to walk that line between form and function.
1) They probably have info on everybody here. Every person who visits this site with any regularity probably has an FBI file, courtesy of the NSA. Note that Slashdot doesn't use HTTPS. Note that this is ground zero for intellectuals, which as we've seen in China and Iran, make up the bulk of their dissenters.
2) If you're willing to pay the Best Buy tax and have a LiveCD saved off somewhere prior to being targeted, you probably can get a clean system. I'm not sure it matters though, as that machine's going to be compromised the moment it goes online anyway. So your choice is either to be secure by not exposing your communications to the rest of the world, or to not be secure the moment you try.
3) They're not going to black van you. The important stuff isn't what you do at home, by yourself, with yourself. I.e., they're not interested in your masturbation, intellectual or physical. They're interested in your communications. Because words spoken in an empty room have no power, but those spoken to an audience does. If you speak, they'd want to make sure you're not too loud, that not too many others hear. In more repressive places, they don't want you to speak at all. And without the affirmation of others, you become one of those crazy people with crazy ideas, i.e. easily discredited, powerless. That's the ultimate goal.
4) If you're as clean as you say you are, you should run for public office. But I sincerely doubt it. Everybody's got dirt somewhere. And if you don't, something you've done, or someone close to you did, can probably be made to look bad. Suffice to say, if you feel that the system works as intended, you should try it out. Sadly, myself and many others here are fairly certain it doesn't work the way it's supposed to. The best anybody (EFF, ACLU, etc.) can really do, short of something violent, tragic, and likely not nearly as beneficial as it would initially appear (reference Arab Spring, where things are worse now than they were before), is hold off the inevitable.
5) This is not a result of terrorism. Terrorism is just the latest key to the uneducated American psyche. Before that, it was communism. Before that, it was something else, Native Americans maybe. This is a power grab by someone, or several individuals. Just like wealth has been moving from the general population to a select few over the past 20 years, so has power. Hoover was the perfect example of such a power grab in the past, and guess what, that happened in the 20's when there was a similar wealth distribution. Most people have no idea about Hoover, and even if they did, don't understand the significance of his actions. That's because:
6) Most people just don't care. They're not willing to sacrifice their time and energy into serving other people. If they run for public service, they're going to make sure it serves themselves first and foremost. That's just how things are. The founders based the foundation of their system upon an enlightened society. They themselves were fairly enlightened individuals, albeit with the occasional shortcoming. We're about as far away from that as we can get, and getting farther with every passing moment. The attacks on education, the attacks on information, these are all methods to keep people in the dark, unenlightened.
7) The nihilist parts of Nietzsche are good too. Actually, the part you like comes out of his nihilism. Privacy implicitly assumes that it's possible for there to be nobody else present but you and yourself alone. In fact, that actually may be why most people don't care for their privacy; they start from the position that they don't have it in the first place.
In summary: Business as usual. 25000 years and we're fundamentally no different today than the humans alive then. Did you really expect a different outcome?
Remember that these are with respect to targeted attacks. The techniques described are only put into use against you if they think you're doing something wrong. They can target anyone but they can't target everyone at once. But the attacks apply to everyone.
And really, running off a live CD isn't the way to defeat this. It is to simplify the renderer (cut the JS/CSS crap, go back to plain HTML), overhaul the browser security structure, and keep the playing field diverse. The more products are out there, the more 0-days they have to gather to attack any given individual. That's why they aim for the browser bundle. It's generic, and so if they break one person's security infrastructure (however flimsy it might turn out to be), they break everybody else's. But it doesn't mean they don't have attacks ready for Lynx+TOR or Konqueror+TOR. It's just less likely.
I think TBB should move away from Firefox. Yes, it's popular. But it's also far too complex, and is getting worse with each version. Do a security audit of something like Konqueror and go with that.
Here's how I see it: Government agencies tend to take the path of least resistance to accomplish their assigned goals.
It's a bit more than that. There's a smell of corruption, on a very large scale.
The government can forcibly compel companies in the U.S. to work for them in secret. This ability to perform MITM/MITS attacks is only due to the free pass they're given to intimidate any entity into cooperating with them (see Qwest for an idea of what happens if someone doesn't cooperate).
That's secret police type of stuff right there, and antithetical to this country's founding principles. This isn't the path of least resistance. This is government turning on its population. It's degredation of the fundamental inalienable rights of the People via ever-expanding government powers enabled by a systemic, protracted attack on the system of checks and balances. To put it another way, it's the SS and KGB, 21st-century style.
But unlike similarly-repressive governments like Iran and China, this isn't motivated by religion or ideology. It's motivated by the plain old simple human greed of those with money.
He doesn't have the specifics from TAO (the branch of the NSA that deals with targeted attacks on tehnically sophisticated individuals), only the high-level overview of how operations are supposed to work.
So he could be supporting TOR not knowing exactly whether it's vulnurable or not. He thinks it's secure, and I think a lot of experts agree that it's theoretically secure. But if TAO has a working quantum computer in a room that can crack every encryption algorithm, he wouldn't know of it.
Actually, if you went back to the 1920's, plutonium was available in every corner drugstore. Radiation was supposed to cure everything from acne to cancer.
Is it just me, or has there recently been a rash of poorly-edited summaries that have been nothing more than a brain dump of the submitter? Like dupes, it used to happen occasionally, but now it's at least once or twice a day.
That aside, a story about the psychology of online feedback on Slashdot. What could possibly go wrong...
And if I was going to read or participate in a discussion on this sort of thing, I'd rather be surrounded by Slashdot types.
There are a lot of topics that this would apply to. The only discussion topic that wouldn't fit would be celebrity gossip (OMG, Snooki had a baby!) and maybe fashion.
Editorial usage does not require a release by the model. That's why the papparazzi can take pictures of celebrities and then sell them for a ton of money, and the celebrities have no recourse.
The only thing that the site can run afoul of is copyright infringement. But the submitter usually holds the copyright (unless it's a selfie, the one taking the picture and the submitter are the same person) so there's no legal issues there.
Sometimes, it's not about the money. Sometimes, it's about giving an aspiring author that shot at the big money. Publishers might not want to take a chance on an unpublished author's own work, but if the author produces a work that's tied to an existing money-making series, one that can't go wrong, then they'd be more willing to take a look at the author.
Only if the co-authored series is successful would the aspiring author then gets his or her own deal.
It's actually one of my favorites. I read through the whole collection as a child, and even having not read any of the stories again for over 20 years, still remember how he cheated Death, the Devil, and God Himself. It was amusing at the time, and still is now. What I took away from the story back then was that Someone fucked up big giving him the stacked deck and loaded dice.
As far as I can recall (note that I haven't read them in some 20 years), there are definitely darker ones that don't involve death, or only invoke death as a means to ultimately resolve the story.
I was going to say, it looks like every other blog out there. That and it doesn't work on Firefox 3.6, which is what I primarily use. It also works poorly on IE, though the layout IE is showing is probably better than the layout Firefox 23 is showing.
My opinion? Kill the fancy graphics and the fancy Javascript/CSS/HTML BS. Just make something that's simple and will work irrespective of browser. Typography issues are more important than adding useless pictures.
tl;dr: Go back to the serif font from 10 years ago, keep the current layout.
No, both TFA and you are conflating two different issues. Actually, there are three issues at play, two of which are mutually exclusive and the other two are related but not exactly the same.
Over 65 is retirement age. You're not socially expected to work anymore (though you may still need to). So the fact that seniors take more risks has nothing to do with age discrimination, which has the greatest effect on people between 55 and 65, i.e. below 65. Falling for a con is not the same as gambling, but the elderly are more susceptable to being conned as well.
The second line of thought is more reasonable: it's psychological. They're not interested in the losses incurred from risk, but are more interested in the off-chance of a reward. Because face it, the safe way has been done for 65 years already, i.e. they're bored with their life so far. In fact, that's pretty much how they got to retirement age. So they're more willing to incur a big loss if it also means a big reward.
The fucked up thing is that like all other things, it's easier to recover from a loss when younger than when older. So it's actually better to take these types of risks in youth, especially financial ones. What people calculate in their heads to largely stem this however, is that if they take a life-changing risk at 35, they could be living for 50 more years with the consequences of the risk (or 0 more years if the consequence is death). However, if they take the risk at 65, not only are they only going to live with its consequences for only 20 years, a 30 year reduction, they'd have lived 30 more years consequence-free (alive, in the case of death).
But I'd also say it's largely a product of natural selection. Early risk takers don't always survive to have children. So with every generation, only the less-risk prone members of society remain to pass their genes on.
You don't get it. For these people, it's not about technology. It's not about creating cool toys or making fancy gadgets. It's not about progress. They don't do these things for the love of the field or their profession (which as an executive of Microsoft, basically amounts to being a liar, cheat, and swindler).
It's about money. That's how they keep score between each other.
That's the biggest sign of Microsoft losing focus. When their little side projects (Zune, Kin, XBox etc.) stayed side projects, it didn't matter whether it failed or not because they didn't affect the money train of Windows and Office. But when their copy-of-a-competitor-and-almost-guaranteed-to-fail side projects start worming their way into their traditional, core, revenue-generating products, then it becomes a big, big problem.
And not only did Metro infect their consumer products, but also their enterprise products. That's worse than Kodak inventing the CCD and killing themselves off. It's a Darwin award waiting to happen.
With that kind of leadership and management, I'd say there's definitely a big question mark over their future. The question is whether they'll continue this trend and ultimately end up destroying themselves by alienating all of their customers, or if they'll be able to reverse it in time before they stop bleeding. With Windows 8.1 and Surface 2, it's really, really not looking good.
It sounds like LinkedIn on steroids. It pretty much does the linking for you.
Actually, based on my understanding, it's not for you. Or me. Or most people here. It's really for HR types, and recruiters, and managers, and such looking to solve their problem of finding the right person for the right job. The manager defines the job needed doing, and the system finds the people that would be the best fit for it.
What it comes down to is that George Lucas was as bad at directing a software company as he was at directing movies. Classic rags-to-riches untouchable syndrome where the support people become yes men (JK Rowling is another such example, but seems to have managed it better; Obama is yet another example).
Look at Episodes I-III. Look at the revised Episodes IV-VI. That is the real George Lucas. Hardly deserving of the cult status he currently enjoys.
Slashdot Mirror
The atomic bomb keeps the big players in check, and that in turn trickles down to the smaller players. You can't stop the little skirmishes between the big players, but they're always somewhere else where none of the players who matter give a crap.
The interesting side effect is that everybody wants to become a big player, or wants to cozy up with one. The EU was established with this idea in mind. A lot of countries in Asia look to the U.S. for help (Russia and China, while they have strong economic influence in many places especially in the Middle East, South America, and Africa, have limited interest in external affairs and really don't let too many cozy up to them). And of the rest, they're either too unstable and thus one of the places the big players meddle in, or if they're stable enough, have nuclear ambitions to become a big player.
This peace will not last. It cannot last. Humanity as a species is not there yet. Unfortunately, the bomb that has given rise to the current time of peace will probably also be the cause of our extinction in the future.
I would say that one of the most important thing in programming is to break down a problem into parts that are useful and easy to manage.
'nuff said.
It's problem solving. It's breaking a problem down horizontally (layers) and vertically (features). It's reducing problems into the fundamentals and solving those first. It's prioritizing. It's learning what needs balancing, how to balance it, and why.
Programming is as much a work of art as it is an engineering exercise. Just like when creating a building, the architect and engineer have two diametrically opposing responsibilities, so does creating a program have the same challenge between design and engineering. Programming is figuring out how to walk that line between form and function.
OK, a couple of things.
1) They probably have info on everybody here. Every person who visits this site with any regularity probably has an FBI file, courtesy of the NSA. Note that Slashdot doesn't use HTTPS. Note that this is ground zero for intellectuals, which as we've seen in China and Iran, make up the bulk of their dissenters.
2) If you're willing to pay the Best Buy tax and have a LiveCD saved off somewhere prior to being targeted, you probably can get a clean system. I'm not sure it matters though, as that machine's going to be compromised the moment it goes online anyway. So your choice is either to be secure by not exposing your communications to the rest of the world, or to not be secure the moment you try.
3) They're not going to black van you. The important stuff isn't what you do at home, by yourself, with yourself. I.e., they're not interested in your masturbation, intellectual or physical. They're interested in your communications. Because words spoken in an empty room have no power, but those spoken to an audience does. If you speak, they'd want to make sure you're not too loud, that not too many others hear. In more repressive places, they don't want you to speak at all. And without the affirmation of others, you become one of those crazy people with crazy ideas, i.e. easily discredited, powerless. That's the ultimate goal.
4) If you're as clean as you say you are, you should run for public office. But I sincerely doubt it. Everybody's got dirt somewhere. And if you don't, something you've done, or someone close to you did, can probably be made to look bad. Suffice to say, if you feel that the system works as intended, you should try it out. Sadly, myself and many others here are fairly certain it doesn't work the way it's supposed to. The best anybody (EFF, ACLU, etc.) can really do, short of something violent, tragic, and likely not nearly as beneficial as it would initially appear (reference Arab Spring, where things are worse now than they were before), is hold off the inevitable.
5) This is not a result of terrorism. Terrorism is just the latest key to the uneducated American psyche. Before that, it was communism. Before that, it was something else, Native Americans maybe. This is a power grab by someone, or several individuals. Just like wealth has been moving from the general population to a select few over the past 20 years, so has power. Hoover was the perfect example of such a power grab in the past, and guess what, that happened in the 20's when there was a similar wealth distribution. Most people have no idea about Hoover, and even if they did, don't understand the significance of his actions. That's because:
6) Most people just don't care. They're not willing to sacrifice their time and energy into serving other people. If they run for public service, they're going to make sure it serves themselves first and foremost. That's just how things are. The founders based the foundation of their system upon an enlightened society. They themselves were fairly enlightened individuals, albeit with the occasional shortcoming. We're about as far away from that as we can get, and getting farther with every passing moment. The attacks on education, the attacks on information, these are all methods to keep people in the dark, unenlightened.
7) The nihilist parts of Nietzsche are good too. Actually, the part you like comes out of his nihilism. Privacy implicitly assumes that it's possible for there to be nobody else present but you and yourself alone. In fact, that actually may be why most people don't care for their privacy; they start from the position that they don't have it in the first place.
In summary: Business as usual. 25000 years and we're fundamentally no different today than the humans alive then. Did you really expect a different outcome?
Remember that these are with respect to targeted attacks. The techniques described are only put into use against you if they think you're doing something wrong. They can target anyone but they can't target everyone at once. But the attacks apply to everyone.
And really, running off a live CD isn't the way to defeat this. It is to simplify the renderer (cut the JS/CSS crap, go back to plain HTML), overhaul the browser security structure, and keep the playing field diverse. The more products are out there, the more 0-days they have to gather to attack any given individual. That's why they aim for the browser bundle. It's generic, and so if they break one person's security infrastructure (however flimsy it might turn out to be), they break everybody else's. But it doesn't mean they don't have attacks ready for Lynx+TOR or Konqueror+TOR. It's just less likely.
I think TBB should move away from Firefox. Yes, it's popular. But it's also far too complex, and is getting worse with each version. Do a security audit of something like Konqueror and go with that.
Here's how I see it: Government agencies tend to take the path of least resistance to accomplish their assigned goals.
It's a bit more than that. There's a smell of corruption, on a very large scale.
The government can forcibly compel companies in the U.S. to work for them in secret. This ability to perform MITM/MITS attacks is only due to the free pass they're given to intimidate any entity into cooperating with them (see Qwest for an idea of what happens if someone doesn't cooperate).
That's secret police type of stuff right there, and antithetical to this country's founding principles. This isn't the path of least resistance. This is government turning on its population. It's degredation of the fundamental inalienable rights of the People via ever-expanding government powers enabled by a systemic, protracted attack on the system of checks and balances. To put it another way, it's the SS and KGB, 21st-century style.
But unlike similarly-repressive governments like Iran and China, this isn't motivated by religion or ideology. It's motivated by the plain old simple human greed of those with money.
He doesn't have the specifics from TAO (the branch of the NSA that deals with targeted attacks on tehnically sophisticated individuals), only the high-level overview of how operations are supposed to work.
So he could be supporting TOR not knowing exactly whether it's vulnurable or not. He thinks it's secure, and I think a lot of experts agree that it's theoretically secure. But if TAO has a working quantum computer in a room that can crack every encryption algorithm, he wouldn't know of it.
Yes, but that requires management to actually read the papers in order to make an informed decision and *gasp* know what they're doing.
It's so much easier to just count the number of published papers. It is college after all, where they rate wine by the ABV.
Actually, if you went back to the 1920's, plutonium was available in every corner drugstore. Radiation was supposed to cure everything from acne to cancer.
Is it just me, or has there recently been a rash of poorly-edited summaries that have been nothing more than a brain dump of the submitter? Like dupes, it used to happen occasionally, but now it's at least once or twice a day.
That aside, a story about the psychology of online feedback on Slashdot. What could possibly go wrong...
And if I was going to read or participate in a discussion on this sort of thing, I'd rather be surrounded by Slashdot types.
There are a lot of topics that this would apply to. The only discussion topic that wouldn't fit would be celebrity gossip (OMG, Snooki had a baby!) and maybe fashion.
But why ARE we paying for France to buy drones?
Because otherwise, they'd surrender.
Editorial usage does not require a release by the model. That's why the papparazzi can take pictures of celebrities and then sell them for a ton of money, and the celebrities have no recourse.
The only thing that the site can run afoul of is copyright infringement. But the submitter usually holds the copyright (unless it's a selfie, the one taking the picture and the submitter are the same person) so there's no legal issues there.
the obituaries of much more significant pioneers of geeky, nerdy things are routinely dropped from consideration after submission
Whom are you talking about?
Sometimes, it's not about the money. Sometimes, it's about giving an aspiring author that shot at the big money. Publishers might not want to take a chance on an unpublished author's own work, but if the author produces a work that's tied to an existing money-making series, one that can't go wrong, then they'd be more willing to take a look at the author.
Only if the co-authored series is successful would the aspiring author then gets his or her own deal.
It's actually one of my favorites. I read through the whole collection as a child, and even having not read any of the stories again for over 20 years, still remember how he cheated Death, the Devil, and God Himself. It was amusing at the time, and still is now. What I took away from the story back then was that Someone fucked up big giving him the stacked deck and loaded dice.
As far as I can recall (note that I haven't read them in some 20 years), there are definitely darker ones that don't involve death, or only invoke death as a means to ultimately resolve the story.
Going slashdot via https has always redirected to the unencrypted http://slashdot.org./
Then I guess you'll like this.
I was going to say, it looks like every other blog out there. That and it doesn't work on Firefox 3.6, which is what I primarily use. It also works poorly on IE, though the layout IE is showing is probably better than the layout Firefox 23 is showing.
My opinion? Kill the fancy graphics and the fancy Javascript/CSS/HTML BS. Just make something that's simple and will work irrespective of browser. Typography issues are more important than adding useless pictures.
tl;dr: Go back to the serif font from 10 years ago, keep the current layout.
No, both TFA and you are conflating two different issues. Actually, there are three issues at play, two of which are mutually exclusive and the other two are related but not exactly the same.
Over 65 is retirement age. You're not socially expected to work anymore (though you may still need to). So the fact that seniors take more risks has nothing to do with age discrimination, which has the greatest effect on people between 55 and 65, i.e. below 65. Falling for a con is not the same as gambling, but the elderly are more susceptable to being conned as well.
The second line of thought is more reasonable: it's psychological. They're not interested in the losses incurred from risk, but are more interested in the off-chance of a reward. Because face it, the safe way has been done for 65 years already, i.e. they're bored with their life so far. In fact, that's pretty much how they got to retirement age. So they're more willing to incur a big loss if it also means a big reward.
The fucked up thing is that like all other things, it's easier to recover from a loss when younger than when older. So it's actually better to take these types of risks in youth, especially financial ones. What people calculate in their heads to largely stem this however, is that if they take a life-changing risk at 35, they could be living for 50 more years with the consequences of the risk (or 0 more years if the consequence is death). However, if they take the risk at 65, not only are they only going to live with its consequences for only 20 years, a 30 year reduction, they'd have lived 30 more years consequence-free (alive, in the case of death).
But I'd also say it's largely a product of natural selection. Early risk takers don't always survive to have children. So with every generation, only the less-risk prone members of society remain to pass their genes on.
You don't get it. For these people, it's not about technology. It's not about creating cool toys or making fancy gadgets. It's not about progress. They don't do these things for the love of the field or their profession (which as an executive of Microsoft, basically amounts to being a liar, cheat, and swindler).
It's about money. That's how they keep score between each other.
In a word: Metro.
That's the biggest sign of Microsoft losing focus. When their little side projects (Zune, Kin, XBox etc.) stayed side projects, it didn't matter whether it failed or not because they didn't affect the money train of Windows and Office. But when their copy-of-a-competitor-and-almost-guaranteed-to-fail side projects start worming their way into their traditional, core, revenue-generating products, then it becomes a big, big problem.
And not only did Metro infect their consumer products, but also their enterprise products. That's worse than Kodak inventing the CCD and killing themselves off. It's a Darwin award waiting to happen.
With that kind of leadership and management, I'd say there's definitely a big question mark over their future. The question is whether they'll continue this trend and ultimately end up destroying themselves by alienating all of their customers, or if they'll be able to reverse it in time before they stop bleeding. With Windows 8.1 and Surface 2, it's really, really not looking good.
Err, that's true of all old school tech R&D. Look at Xerox PARC, HP Labs, or especially the now-defunct Bell Labs, who gave us modern computing.
Research that needs to have ROI is not research.
This is Microsoft. Their data center is in the U.S. The only backdoor any three-letter agency needs to gain entry is the loading dock.
It sounds like LinkedIn on steroids. It pretty much does the linking for you.
Actually, based on my understanding, it's not for you. Or me. Or most people here. It's really for HR types, and recruiters, and managers, and such looking to solve their problem of finding the right person for the right job. The manager defines the job needed doing, and the system finds the people that would be the best fit for it.
It's something along those lines anyway.
What it comes down to is that George Lucas was as bad at directing a software company as he was at directing movies. Classic rags-to-riches untouchable syndrome where the support people become yes men (JK Rowling is another such example, but seems to have managed it better; Obama is yet another example).
Look at Episodes I-III. Look at the revised Episodes IV-VI. That is the real George Lucas. Hardly deserving of the cult status he currently enjoys.