The article answers some of that better than the ridiculous flame-throwing summary.
Mr. Bridenstine, a former Navy pilot who is now in his third term in the House of Representatives, has become immersed in space issues. In 2016, he sponsored a bill called the American Space Renaissance Act, which proposed broad, ambitious goals for the nation’s space program, including directing NASA to devise a 20-year plan. Although it did not reach a vote, some of the ideas were incorporated into other legislation.
Seems like the guy has some plans already in mind. Probably why he got the job.
Mr. Bridenstine has since moderated his public views, saying he supports NASA research into the causes of extreme weather.
During his confirmation hearing, he agreed that human activity “absolutely” contributed to climate change, but sparred with Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, over whether it was “a contributor” or the “primary cause.”
So, in the face of new evidence about climate change and its causes, maybe he changed his mind. We should be welcoming news that people like this are coming around. And no gay people in space? Coal-powered rockets? Really?
In his confirmation hearing, Mr. Bridenstine tried to make a distinction between views he espoused as a politician and how he would act as the manager of a large federal agency. “I want to make sure that NASA remains, as you said, apolitical,” Mr. Bridenstine said to Mr. Nelson.
And more...
Other than the confirmation hearing, Mr. Bridenstine has spent much of the last seven months keeping quiet. He largely stopped making any public statements and voting on bills to avoid conflicts of interest.
He attended the first meeting of the National Space Council meeting, a panel revived by the Trump administration to coordinate space issues between various federal agencies, but did not speak or participate.
And during Mr. Trump’s State of the Union address in January, he brought a guest: Bill Nye “the Science Guy.”
Many people probably don't agree with his views, but that doesn't necessarily mean he'll be imposing those views on NASA. He's clearly stated otherwise in his confirmation hearings. I suppose there's the possibility he's just lying, but he's on public record, speaking to Congress, stating otherwise.
LinkedIn is a site for sharing public, professional information. I point prospective employers or contracting agencies to my LinkedIn page, so for me, there's zero information I consider private on that site. Granted, I give these sites the *minimum* amount of required information, as you suggest, and that can be surprisingly little. Hell will freeze over before I give LinkedIn my e-mail's password, like they asked for.
It seems like I drive LinkedIn crazy by not uploading a picture of myself, because they constantly bother me about it, and even gave me a little questionnaire about why I seemingly refused to do so. Sort of hilarious, really. At this point, I'm doing it just to annoy them a bit. Who gives a crap what I look like if someone is hiring me for my professional coding and game development experience? Apparently, only LinkedIn seems bothered by it.
I've heard it most of my life. "It's a crime of power and control." They don't mean it isn't *categorized* as a sex crime, though. They're talking about motivations, etc.
Personally, I've always though that it's probably overly-simplistic to boil an entire category of crime down to a single, universal motive.
It's not just the pay. Your managers and co-workers tend to think of you as the job you were hired for, not the next job you might now be qualified for. It's extremely difficult, in my experience, to break through that ceiling at many companies. But if you jump companies, you can often negotiate a substantial pay boost AND position improvement.
Naturally, you can't jump too often, as that makes you look like a flight risk, but these days, I think having some breadth of experience looks good on an IT resume.
These guys are what give capitalism a really bad name. Yes, a company can't exist without profits, but it's not like there aren't plenty of diseases we can't cure still. And if you think about it, indefinitely siphoning money from seriously ill people as a business model is pretty sick, no pun intended. We only put up with it as a society because it provides a powerful incentive to actually develop treatments in the first place. But if people start seeing that as a second-best option, I think society will quickly lose patience with them.
Fortunately, there are almost always those willing to offer an improved service that others aren't, if there aren't any significant barriers to doing so. In the end, it doesn't really matter that some slime think it's better NOT to cure people of illnesses outright, letting them suffer for the rest of their lives while bleeding money from them. There will also be those that choose to offer better services, like full cures, for lower overall profits. Because it's the right thing to do.
Sorry, pharmaceutical companies. You'll have to deal with that. If you start deliberately avoiding effective treatment, you invite societal wrath - probably resulting in even more soul-crushing regulation.
I work in the videogame industry, and so I've worked my entire career with the knowledge that absolutely everything I was working on was covered under the blanket NDA everyone signs before they're hired. There's a lot of people interested in the stuff we're working on, and so I guess human nature being what it is, it's hard not to tell people what neat stuff you see being worked on. But leaks tend to kill the careful marketing plan put in place for the game you may have spent several years developing.
So, I guess I'm sort of used to that. You simply don't talk about what you're working on unless you have express permission, or you risk get disciplined or fired. Given that there's a lot of interest in what Apple does, I can see why maintaining internal secrets is important to them as well.
I'm actually fairly impressed when I've worked at a company with several hundred people and there WEREN'T leaks. I can imagine how difficult that must be when you have many thousands of employees.
MIDI has been a forgotten step child -- which sucks.
Time to buy those old MIDI devices off eBay while we still can.
I'm not sure I'd agree with that. MIDI is alive and well. It's just a lot of the dedicated MIDI-driven hardware has long since gone obsolete in favor of pure software solutions, which I think are ultimately both more powerful and easier to use, if slightly less impressive to look at. But MIDI is still the universal language of digital instruments.
Because my guess is that few people actually run into the problems poster described. I actually uninstalled Thunderbird and switched to Windows Mail because I was having severe performance problems with Thunderbird. I've never experienced any issues with Windows Mail. It's a very basic app, but it works just fine for me.
Not looking forward to seeing these changes, especially with links opening to Edge and upcoming ads. May push me to find a different client, or see if Thunderbird's performance is still an issue.
Anyone can get distracted for just a few minutes, no matter how doting the parents are. That's all it takes for tragedy to occur. Many years ago, my young cousin drowned in my aunt and uncle's pool. She simply wandered off and fell in. That's what toddlers do, after all. I'm sure they would have given anything for a device like this to warn them.
I hope this works. It's a simple idea that could potentially save some heartbreak like our family had to go through.
If I want to flash my firmware, I should have to toggle a switch.
Granted, if the router is going to be in an out-of-the-way place, then I might need to leave that switch enabled all the time, leaving me vulnerable to fake updates. But for everyone else, hardware should prevent a bad actor from installing a new binary, signed (with a stolen key) or not.
I think your risk assessment needs re-assessing.
What do you think is more likely: that a) a vulnerability will be found in the router's firmware which requires patching, or b) that the encryption keys will be lost, the update domain hi-jacked or intercepted, and the bad actor will manage to deliver an update package complete with malware, signed with stolen keys?
I'd bet a goodly sum that option a) is vastly more likely to occur than b), simply based on history. And yet you want to disable automatic updates by default? For consumer-oriented products, that seems completely backwards to me.
Believe it or not, some artists don't need mind-altering substances to create fantastical, highly imaginative works. I'd guess their minds work just a bit differently than most people's from the get-go.
I certainly understand that sentiment, but I suppose I've had to force myself to make peace with some of the realities of my data being collected and used online, and the tradeoffs it entails, both positive and negative.
For instance, Amazon is astoundingly convenient for me. Other than grocery shopping (and I could probably use them for that too, but I like my local QFC), I order almost everything I need online. The downside, obviously, is that a single online entity knows about ALL my shopping and reading habits. Other than a certain creep factor, is that a terrible thing? Forced to look objectively at it, I'm hard pressed to find a reason why that's so bad.
For Google, I suppose they have more sensitive information on me, based on what I've searched for in the past. They apparently store searches for 18 months. I'd be slightly embarrassed if they released that information to the public, I suppose. Let's face it - most people probably would have the same reaction, because we all search for stupid or private stuff at one time or another, and it's a bit of a pain to always remember to use incognito mode. So, at this point, I guess I just have to hope they're taking good care of that information. I'm not sure what more we can realistically do.
Even more seriously, if the data contains flaws and errors that reduce the value of the data when the google is trying to sell it, we can't correct those problems.
Is that actually a problem for us, rather than Google? I mean, what they general sell is targeted advertising. Why would you or I really care if their data is correct or not? I don't really understand that aspect of your question.
The data that credit-reporting companies have on us impacts our daily lives about 1000x more than what Google collects about me, because they draw conclusions about that data (a credit score) that have very definite real-world effects on me in the form of loan rates or even credit approval / denial.
As far as I understand it, Google sells access to your data in the form of targeted ads, not your data itself, because it's so incredibly valuable. And that access is more in the form of "I want to show ads to this demographic", so probably nothing that could personally identify anyone. In some ways, I suppose that's lucky for us, because they have a very big financial incentive to guard against leaking it.
Then again, Facebook let all their data escape, so...
The switch to python 3 as the default is also in progress, which is a good idea but is destabilizing a lot of stable, older python programs which are not python 3 compatible.
Do we need to give them another decade to get Python 3 compatibility in place? I could see how just ten short years to make these changes might be rushing things a bit.
The surveillance imposed on us today far exceeds that of the Soviet Union.
He's technically correct that far more data is collected, but I feel his comparison really falls flat. That's because the critical part in the case of the Soviet Union (or East Germany, I'd think) is the legitimate fear of what might be done with that information.
For most US citizens, the dangerous part of so much data collected on you is that a hacker might get that information via a breach and steals your identity. It's creepy to have your personal data bought and sold as a commodity, but generally not outright dangerous. Few US citizens fear a knock at the door at 3am because you criticized a prominent politician, party boss, or anyone else for that matter. In fact, I'd venture it's never even crossed most people's minds.
I'm not defending all the rampant data collection / spying, because I think it has a lot of potential for future abuse, both by corporations and the government. But there's a world of difference between that and the surveillance of the USSR, or even modern day China, in which you can literally be arrested for speaking ill of the party.
I just tried that with Alexa, and it recognized the follow-up question. So, good for Amazon on that one. But Alexa still falls woefully short in other areas, though. For the shopping list functionality, you can't even say something simple like: "Alexa, add milk, eggs, and cheese to my shopping list."
Alexa: "I added "milk eggs cheese to your shopping list."
Me: "Alexa, remove "milk eggs cheese" from shopping list.
Alexa "You can remove items from the shopping list in the Alexa app."
*facepalm* This is why I have a good chuckle whenever someone calls these digital helpers "AI". Well, it's still early days, so these things will improve over time, presumably.
Once rules against "hateful" content are established, you had best hope people you disagree with aren't put in charge, lest you find you are silenced.
Your argument is precisely why I think it's fine for a private individual or corporation to set rules as they see fit*. But it would be a bad idea for the government to impose those rules on us from above. I don't give two tweets if a corporation tries to "silence" me. I can pick a new corporation to do business with, or start my own damned company. I don't have that choice with the government.
* There are obviously some caveats here, such as Common Carriers and their restrictions, or not setting laws that violate national laws or regulations.
How did you employees THINK you earned your paycheck? By siphoning user's private data and selling it to corporations, politicians, or anyone else who wanted to pay, that's how. Now you're crying because it didn't happen *exactly* like you think it did? Or someone said slightly mean things about the results of your actions?
Grow up, snowflakes. You're in bed with a corporation that doesn't value people or their privacy very highly. Actions and internal memos speak louder than public statements. Time to deal with that fact.
Slashdot Mirror
The article answers some of that better than the ridiculous flame-throwing summary.
Mr. Bridenstine, a former Navy pilot who is now in his third term in the House of Representatives, has become immersed in space issues. In 2016, he sponsored a bill called the American Space Renaissance Act, which proposed broad, ambitious goals for the nation’s space program, including directing NASA to devise a 20-year plan. Although it did not reach a vote, some of the ideas were incorporated into other legislation.
Seems like the guy has some plans already in mind. Probably why he got the job.
Mr. Bridenstine has since moderated his public views, saying he supports NASA research into the causes of extreme weather.
During his confirmation hearing, he agreed that human activity “absolutely” contributed to climate change, but sparred with Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, over whether it was “a contributor” or the “primary cause.”
So, in the face of new evidence about climate change and its causes, maybe he changed his mind. We should be welcoming news that people like this are coming around. And no gay people in space? Coal-powered rockets? Really?
In his confirmation hearing, Mr. Bridenstine tried to make a distinction between views he espoused as a politician and how he would act as the manager of a large federal agency. “I want to make sure that NASA remains, as you said, apolitical,” Mr. Bridenstine said to Mr. Nelson.
And more...
Other than the confirmation hearing, Mr. Bridenstine has spent much of the last seven months keeping quiet. He largely stopped making any public statements and voting on bills to avoid conflicts of interest.
He attended the first meeting of the National Space Council meeting, a panel revived by the Trump administration to coordinate space issues between various federal agencies, but did not speak or participate.
And during Mr. Trump’s State of the Union address in January, he brought a guest: Bill Nye “the Science Guy.”
Many people probably don't agree with his views, but that doesn't necessarily mean he'll be imposing those views on NASA. He's clearly stated otherwise in his confirmation hearings. I suppose there's the possibility he's just lying, but he's on public record, speaking to Congress, stating otherwise.
LinkedIn is a site for sharing public, professional information. I point prospective employers or contracting agencies to my LinkedIn page, so for me, there's zero information I consider private on that site. Granted, I give these sites the *minimum* amount of required information, as you suggest, and that can be surprisingly little. Hell will freeze over before I give LinkedIn my e-mail's password, like they asked for.
It seems like I drive LinkedIn crazy by not uploading a picture of myself, because they constantly bother me about it, and even gave me a little questionnaire about why I seemingly refused to do so. Sort of hilarious, really. At this point, I'm doing it just to annoy them a bit. Who gives a crap what I look like if someone is hiring me for my professional coding and game development experience? Apparently, only LinkedIn seems bothered by it.
??? Do people say this?
I've heard it most of my life. "It's a crime of power and control." They don't mean it isn't *categorized* as a sex crime, though. They're talking about motivations, etc.
Personally, I've always though that it's probably overly-simplistic to boil an entire category of crime down to a single, universal motive.
It's not just the pay. Your managers and co-workers tend to think of you as the job you were hired for, not the next job you might now be qualified for. It's extremely difficult, in my experience, to break through that ceiling at many companies. But if you jump companies, you can often negotiate a substantial pay boost AND position improvement.
Naturally, you can't jump too often, as that makes you look like a flight risk, but these days, I think having some breadth of experience looks good on an IT resume.
These guys are what give capitalism a really bad name. Yes, a company can't exist without profits, but it's not like there aren't plenty of diseases we can't cure still. And if you think about it, indefinitely siphoning money from seriously ill people as a business model is pretty sick, no pun intended. We only put up with it as a society because it provides a powerful incentive to actually develop treatments in the first place. But if people start seeing that as a second-best option, I think society will quickly lose patience with them.
Fortunately, there are almost always those willing to offer an improved service that others aren't, if there aren't any significant barriers to doing so. In the end, it doesn't really matter that some slime think it's better NOT to cure people of illnesses outright, letting them suffer for the rest of their lives while bleeding money from them. There will also be those that choose to offer better services, like full cures, for lower overall profits. Because it's the right thing to do.
Sorry, pharmaceutical companies. You'll have to deal with that. If you start deliberately avoiding effective treatment, you invite societal wrath - probably resulting in even more soul-crushing regulation.
I work in the videogame industry, and so I've worked my entire career with the knowledge that absolutely everything I was working on was covered under the blanket NDA everyone signs before they're hired. There's a lot of people interested in the stuff we're working on, and so I guess human nature being what it is, it's hard not to tell people what neat stuff you see being worked on. But leaks tend to kill the careful marketing plan put in place for the game you may have spent several years developing.
So, I guess I'm sort of used to that. You simply don't talk about what you're working on unless you have express permission, or you risk get disciplined or fired. Given that there's a lot of interest in what Apple does, I can see why maintaining internal secrets is important to them as well.
I'm actually fairly impressed when I've worked at a company with several hundred people and there WEREN'T leaks. I can imagine how difficult that must be when you have many thousands of employees.
MIDI has been a forgotten step child -- which sucks.
Time to buy those old MIDI devices off eBay while we still can.
I'm not sure I'd agree with that. MIDI is alive and well. It's just a lot of the dedicated MIDI-driven hardware has long since gone obsolete in favor of pure software solutions, which I think are ultimately both more powerful and easier to use, if slightly less impressive to look at. But MIDI is still the universal language of digital instruments.
Because my guess is that few people actually run into the problems poster described. I actually uninstalled Thunderbird and switched to Windows Mail because I was having severe performance problems with Thunderbird. I've never experienced any issues with Windows Mail. It's a very basic app, but it works just fine for me.
Not looking forward to seeing these changes, especially with links opening to Edge and upcoming ads. May push me to find a different client, or see if Thunderbird's performance is still an issue.
Anyone can get distracted for just a few minutes, no matter how doting the parents are. That's all it takes for tragedy to occur. Many years ago, my young cousin drowned in my aunt and uncle's pool. She simply wandered off and fell in. That's what toddlers do, after all. I'm sure they would have given anything for a device like this to warn them.
I hope this works. It's a simple idea that could potentially save some heartbreak like our family had to go through.
and by then hopefully you will have been alerted to the leak.
Companies have been known to sit on this type of information for many months, sometimes even *years*, so I'm not sure that's something we can rely on.
If I want to flash my firmware, I should have to toggle a switch.
Granted, if the router is going to be in an out-of-the-way place, then I might need to leave that switch enabled all the time, leaving me vulnerable to fake updates. But for everyone else, hardware should prevent a bad actor from installing a new binary, signed (with a stolen key) or not.
I think your risk assessment needs re-assessing.
What do you think is more likely: that a) a vulnerability will be found in the router's firmware which requires patching, or b) that the encryption keys will be lost, the update domain hi-jacked or intercepted, and the bad actor will manage to deliver an update package complete with malware, signed with stolen keys?
I'd bet a goodly sum that option a) is vastly more likely to occur than b), simply based on history. And yet you want to disable automatic updates by default? For consumer-oriented products, that seems completely backwards to me.
Keep your bits on your own machines, kids!
Except your backups!
Believe it or not, some artists don't need mind-altering substances to create fantastical, highly imaginative works. I'd guess their minds work just a bit differently than most people's from the get-go.
Can these questions be answered in the affirmative for any advanced weapons system? Seems sort of an impossibly high bar they've set.
I certainly understand that sentiment, but I suppose I've had to force myself to make peace with some of the realities of my data being collected and used online, and the tradeoffs it entails, both positive and negative.
For instance, Amazon is astoundingly convenient for me. Other than grocery shopping (and I could probably use them for that too, but I like my local QFC), I order almost everything I need online. The downside, obviously, is that a single online entity knows about ALL my shopping and reading habits. Other than a certain creep factor, is that a terrible thing? Forced to look objectively at it, I'm hard pressed to find a reason why that's so bad.
For Google, I suppose they have more sensitive information on me, based on what I've searched for in the past. They apparently store searches for 18 months. I'd be slightly embarrassed if they released that information to the public, I suppose. Let's face it - most people probably would have the same reaction, because we all search for stupid or private stuff at one time or another, and it's a bit of a pain to always remember to use incognito mode. So, at this point, I guess I just have to hope they're taking good care of that information. I'm not sure what more we can realistically do.
And "btute" is undoubtedly a typo.
Even more seriously, if the data contains flaws and errors that reduce the value of the data when the google is trying to sell it, we can't correct those problems.
Is that actually a problem for us, rather than Google? I mean, what they general sell is targeted advertising. Why would you or I really care if their data is correct or not? I don't really understand that aspect of your question.
The data that credit-reporting companies have on us impacts our daily lives about 1000x more than what Google collects about me, because they draw conclusions about that data (a credit score) that have very definite real-world effects on me in the form of loan rates or even credit approval / denial.
Does Google sell it outright?
As far as I understand it, Google sells access to your data in the form of targeted ads, not your data itself, because it's so incredibly valuable. And that access is more in the form of "I want to show ads to this demographic", so probably nothing that could personally identify anyone. In some ways, I suppose that's lucky for us, because they have a very big financial incentive to guard against leaking it.
Then again, Facebook let all their data escape, so...
I've been half tempted to get a job at Valve with the sole purpose of putting together an underground team to finish HL3.
The switch to python 3 as the default is also in progress, which is a good idea but is destabilizing a lot of stable, older python programs which are not python 3 compatible.
Do we need to give them another decade to get Python 3 compatibility in place? I could see how just ten short years to make these changes might be rushing things a bit.
Stallman:
The surveillance imposed on us today far exceeds that of the Soviet Union.
He's technically correct that far more data is collected, but I feel his comparison really falls flat. That's because the critical part in the case of the Soviet Union (or East Germany, I'd think) is the legitimate fear of what might be done with that information.
For most US citizens, the dangerous part of so much data collected on you is that a hacker might get that information via a breach and steals your identity. It's creepy to have your personal data bought and sold as a commodity, but generally not outright dangerous. Few US citizens fear a knock at the door at 3am because you criticized a prominent politician, party boss, or anyone else for that matter. In fact, I'd venture it's never even crossed most people's minds.
I'm not defending all the rampant data collection / spying, because I think it has a lot of potential for future abuse, both by corporations and the government. But there's a world of difference between that and the surveillance of the USSR, or even modern day China, in which you can literally be arrested for speaking ill of the party.
"Aligned with the truth" really stood out to me as well. If that isn't a corporate-lawyer-stamped-and-approved phrase, I don't know what is.
If they ship me an omelette, I'll be genuinely impressed.
I just tried that with Alexa, and it recognized the follow-up question. So, good for Amazon on that one. But Alexa still falls woefully short in other areas, though. For the shopping list functionality, you can't even say something simple like: "Alexa, add milk, eggs, and cheese to my shopping list."
Alexa: "I added "milk eggs cheese to your shopping list."
Me: "Alexa, remove "milk eggs cheese" from shopping list.
Alexa "You can remove items from the shopping list in the Alexa app."
*facepalm* This is why I have a good chuckle whenever someone calls these digital helpers "AI". Well, it's still early days, so these things will improve over time, presumably.
But who decides what's "hateful"?
Once rules against "hateful" content are established, you had best hope people you disagree with aren't put in charge, lest you find you are silenced.
Your argument is precisely why I think it's fine for a private individual or corporation to set rules as they see fit*. But it would be a bad idea for the government to impose those rules on us from above. I don't give two tweets if a corporation tries to "silence" me. I can pick a new corporation to do business with, or start my own damned company. I don't have that choice with the government.
* There are obviously some caveats here, such as Common Carriers and their restrictions, or not setting laws that violate national laws or regulations.
How did you employees THINK you earned your paycheck? By siphoning user's private data and selling it to corporations, politicians, or anyone else who wanted to pay, that's how. Now you're crying because it didn't happen *exactly* like you think it did? Or someone said slightly mean things about the results of your actions?
Grow up, snowflakes. You're in bed with a corporation that doesn't value people or their privacy very highly. Actions and internal memos speak louder than public statements. Time to deal with that fact.