Don't you see, it's the inability for folks like you to accept the occasional failure - and those who have vested interest in keeping things as they are, but they could be overcome without you - that keeps us from ever hoping to change anything, and not the entitlement types you speak of.
No, the problem is that people like you only see one solution to a problem. It's the State or nothing. Nothing else works but the State, or the evil insurance companies may destroy us.
I don't mind change, when I feel like someone has actually thought it through. I just see people who think that voting for higher taxes is equivalent to charity, and that government programs are the only possible or desirable solution for badly managed health care. "Change" and "progress" doesn't mean "the government does it for me," because it is clear that the government can suck at it as much as anyone else.
And if you don't like the example of Social Security, let's look at actual government-run health care: the VA Hospitals. The government can't even operate a health care system with even a subset of the population successfully.
Bear in mind, I don't think it is impossible for you to bring in someone to run a government health care system properly. At least for certain periods of time. What I am concerned about is that this system will not be able to be overturned when it goes bad because it becomes a political football. Honestly, I think we'd probably do better with our health care system if we let the programs and organizations fail once in awhile, but our health care system is based on doing everything we can to prop up whatever we have so politicians can pretend to "do something" when even they know things are fucked.
Jason, if you really believe the drivel you spout, then you should prepare your kids for a life of burger flipping, 'cos that'll be the only thing left that computers can't do cheaper.
I think this guy is completely right about not need to teach everyone coding, and completely wrong about computers writing all the code.
However, the fact that his kids might be burger flippers or not is irrelevant. His kids and everyone else's might well become burger flippers in the future. The fact that there is an undesirable future if what he suggests comes to pass doesn't mean that such a future is impossible. There are already whole job descriptions in almost every industry where humans are no longer required, and there will almost certainly be added a lot more in the future.
In case it makes you feel any better, one of the jobs that could be automated is flipping burgers. So, his children may not even be subjected to that.
Both size and homogeneity are critical factors in successful programs. Look at Canada or Denmark... or New Hampshire. Small populations, not very much actual diversity.
They also don't have the same traditions as the US as a whole. I daresay, it has helped them in some ways, but I think some of this is also what allows us to be a leading country rather than a country content to fall into line. We have the ambition to do things, which makes us loud and brash, but also got us to the Moon.
Mostly, I think it is the attitude that we'd rather do for ourselves, and not have it done for us, even if it makes us less content and lacking in certain creature comforts provided by a paternalistic state.
For some value of "working". Many of the objections to health care, for instance, aren't that we're going to immediately implode from free health care. It's that 50 years down the line, we'll have completely fucked it up. And there is plenty of evidence to show that this could happen.
Add to that the observation that any entitlement that gets into place will become permanent because it will quickly create dependency among voters. What person near retirement age is going to vote to overhaul Social Security? They won't risk it. They want their promised retirement. Who will vote to overturn a mediocre single payer system or even reform it if the politicians have you convinced that reform will destroy your health care. No one would ever get elected who would do that.
So yeah, it will work just long enough to create dependency. And that's why no one even wants to give it a chance. And I don't really blame them, because history has shown that it will become untouchable, even if in dire need of reform.
It is true that plastics would be okay all by themselves. Many oil companies would prefer to make plastics over petrol. And in plastic form, they aren't really an AGW problem, they're a different problem.
However, I would not underestimate the amount of effort required to move all transport to electric. You're not going to move giant freighters to electric power unless you make them nuclear powered, and diesel freighters are down and dirty.
You can make the changes slowly and they will eventually take, but you're not undoing a century of fossil fuel use with any of the existing solutions in anything resembling a short period of time.
I will say this, hopefully the Rockefellers use their money to fund something other than fossil fuels, rather than just reinvesting in McDonalds or something. It's not like there won't be takers for ExxonMobil stock. They make money hand over fist. There's always a buyer for that stock.
The old money Rockefeller descendants and their foundations are not the same people as those who made the money. They're pretty much the poster children for old money guilt. John D. Rockefeller would probably make ExxonMobil look like a Green Party front organization if he was still alive.
If you have a certain sized organization, you will find that paying for RHEL support is sort of silly. You literally have hundreds of SA's and developers on your staff, many of them experts, and some even contributors. At that point, you're *better* than their support.
However, that is only true for organizations over a certain size or competence level. There are a lot of small shops who run Linux who could use the help. There are also a lot of... less capable... large shops that could use the help too.
I've been involved in a few RHEL to CentOS migrations and they mostly go well if we've been running RHEL for awhile and you have the right people. With the wrong people, you just have a lot of people confused about what is going on, despite the fact that its like 99.9% the same code. Of course, most of the confused people are the business people, so there is some truth that the value of RH is the fact that a business person has heard of it.
Unfortunately, the FedGov lurves its Red Hat. It also loves Windows too. Expect that the growth in government services will keep increasing the revenues of both companies for the foreseeable future.
I am not overly concerned about that. That is the sort of threat that our armed forces are actually good at dealing with. If they want to create a country, they have to set up logistics and stability. Those can be smashed and denied to them.
Yes, they have made inroads in a turbulent area where there is a weak government on one side and a civil war on the other. We can actually help Iraq and others sort that out with normal military assistance.
Of course, I am not suggesting that an ISIS regime is easy for the people over there, but to some degree they're going to have to figure this out for themselves (with our assistance where required) or they will keep falling down this well.
However, the terrorist angle is the one that is most threatening in the sense that it is more likely to drive internal policy and the rise of demagogues like Trump. I don't feel threatened by terrorists directly, but already I wait in lines for security theater when I get on a plane, and I have to listen to increasingly strident politicians try to scare me into voting for them. I'm not scared, but I know a lot of people are mad and/or scared and they want to feel safe.
And it's not just about terrorists, its about guns, and drugs, and illegal immigrants. It's getting to be so that I can't even figure out who to vote for any more.
Why would they forge reviews? Comcast getting one whole shiny star would actually be an improvement. Their executives have bonus clauses for every.05 of a star that they can get.
Unfortunately, they also appear to have bigger bonus clauses for how many people they can piss off at once. I hear that they've had to create a new bonus tier for their most recent efforts.
Theoretically it is very easy to create, although people may not trust that it was actually done that way.
The user will generate a personal key on their device for their data or more importantly, be able to enter their own encrypted key file manually. The data sent will be encrypted with that key. Apple will store the data in a bucket labelled by the device ID or Apple ID. Now Apple is storing your data on their computers and they can access it, but they can't read it unless they can break the encryption or get the key and unencrypt the key.
On your phone, all apps are closed and flash images purged and your unencrypted secret key is deleted from memory when you lock the phone and only decrypted by entering your password on the unlock screen or on some other password screen. Now a locked phone means that even your device cannot access its own stored data on the server.
The decrypt-encrypt scheme is definitely processor heavy, there is still a race condition for the lock, and there are other disadvantages, but I'm only talking about a very blunt, brute force encryption protection scheme. Surely the geniuses at Apple could do better than I.
Or they could have saved themselves about a billion dollars and not started a "Teacher in Space Program" to begin with.
Note to self, if I get a management job at the NSA: I should avoid allowing any program called "Activist Administrators in National Security". Otherwise, I may have to get rid of that pesky activist before he sees something by blowing up Fort Meade using a convoluted plot which revolves around using nitroglycerin as a coolant for supercomputers.
I'm sorry, but fucking around with water systems isn't really part of saving the world, is it?
You never know; some hacker might have been able to help in Flint (where part of the problem was using water from a polluted source, but the other part of the problem was not using enough of some of the chemical treatment).
You know, I find the potential value of a hacker in that system to be so small as to make it near zero.
Sure, they can hack in. And then what? Do they know what the chemical treatment required for the Flint Water District is? Are they going to re-route the water through a series of tubes away from the lead tubes through the tubes that go to where they make Perrier water? I guess that instead of a V-LAN, they'd configure the water routers to make a new W-LAN for the H20 packets.
Hackers are good at hacking, not fixing water treatment. Being an environmental engineer is actually a real job description that you need to have a college education for in the field. The next thing you'll be telling me is that hacking into the Department of Transportation will allow hackers to fix the gradient on that one curve on Interstate 81.
While an insecure control system is very undesirable, you should be able to be able to overlay more modern security on top of it in the places where network interconnection is absolutely needed. You should be okay if the only remote access to your 1980's HVAC is through the 2010's firewall and intrusion detection system.
Where interconnection is not required, this is all fixed instantly by air gaps between the control systems and everything else.
I am thinking that this is due to incompetence, not the age or lack of security of the control systems.
Except I have a lot of trouble believing that such events haven't already happened, yet there have been no attacks.
Someone is always pissed about something. I'd think that if Trump's business was riddled with holes *this would be about the right time to use those holes before he gets more and more out of control.* Yet we see only one anemic reveal from some Anonymous source which clearly was not some elite hacker who had owned The Donald. And this is a guy who has basically admitted to paying off politicians in so many words, so there should be plenty to find.
I think the real elite hackers are now owned by someone else or they don't have the access that we assume they do. The rest are challengers or script kiddies.
XML is so 2000's. We put our admin passwords and SQL connection strings in JSON configuration files now.
This. You pretty much need to ensure that your hosts are not able to be accessed because there's still the stupid plain text or MD5 hashed password in an unencrypted text file somewhere in order to connect your app to your database.
Not that encryption would matter. If someone breaks into a host that has a public key for a database server, then someone can use that same public key for access to the database server as long as they were doing it from the host that they just broke into. Actually securing connections where access is done automatically really requires a lot of thought and not just one encrypted file somewhere.
If somebody had have died or gotten sick, the hacking party would be the ones to get in shit, not the asshat that put the admin password in a text file...
They both should get in deep shit for it. Yes, the asshole who left the admin password in a text file should get fired.
However, you should be able to leave an admin password posted on a banner on a 24 hr news station and a good person wouldn't use the password to get in and fuck with a water treatment plant. That's like saying that anyone who leaves their door unlocked deserves to have their house broken into and accidentally burned down while people are trying to steal shit.
So, yeah, the both hackers and the admin should be dealt with severely. This isn't an either/or situation.
It grabs headlines. That's why we have the media blaring as loudly as they can about every terrorist act they can. It's all so shocking, and therefor guaranteed to grab eyes and viewer share.
I'm not saying this guy is completely off base, but this reads like the script to The Day after Tomorrow.
I mean really, did anyone actually think the Celts were the first people on Ireland? The stories of the Irish themselves suggest that there was someone who was there first.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you see, it's the inability for folks like you to accept the occasional failure - and those who have vested interest in keeping things as they are, but they could be overcome without you - that keeps us from ever hoping to change anything, and not the entitlement types you speak of.
No, the problem is that people like you only see one solution to a problem. It's the State or nothing. Nothing else works but the State, or the evil insurance companies may destroy us.
I don't mind change, when I feel like someone has actually thought it through. I just see people who think that voting for higher taxes is equivalent to charity, and that government programs are the only possible or desirable solution for badly managed health care. "Change" and "progress" doesn't mean "the government does it for me," because it is clear that the government can suck at it as much as anyone else.
And if you don't like the example of Social Security, let's look at actual government-run health care: the VA Hospitals. The government can't even operate a health care system with even a subset of the population successfully.
Bear in mind, I don't think it is impossible for you to bring in someone to run a government health care system properly. At least for certain periods of time. What I am concerned about is that this system will not be able to be overturned when it goes bad because it becomes a political football. Honestly, I think we'd probably do better with our health care system if we let the programs and organizations fail once in awhile, but our health care system is based on doing everything we can to prop up whatever we have so politicians can pretend to "do something" when even they know things are fucked.
>
Jason, if you really believe the drivel you spout, then you should prepare your kids for a life of burger flipping, 'cos that'll be the only thing left that computers can't do cheaper.
I think this guy is completely right about not need to teach everyone coding, and completely wrong about computers writing all the code.
However, the fact that his kids might be burger flippers or not is irrelevant. His kids and everyone else's might well become burger flippers in the future. The fact that there is an undesirable future if what he suggests comes to pass doesn't mean that such a future is impossible. There are already whole job descriptions in almost every industry where humans are no longer required, and there will almost certainly be added a lot more in the future.
In case it makes you feel any better, one of the jobs that could be automated is flipping burgers. So, his children may not even be subjected to that.
Presumably, this is exactly what happened. Wasn't the remains of LA a crater after the Singularity in one of his books?
The rest of them all got bobbled so even the AIs couldn't get to them.
Both size and homogeneity are critical factors in successful programs. Look at Canada or Denmark... or New Hampshire. Small populations, not very much actual diversity.
They also don't have the same traditions as the US as a whole. I daresay, it has helped them in some ways, but I think some of this is also what allows us to be a leading country rather than a country content to fall into line. We have the ambition to do things, which makes us loud and brash, but also got us to the Moon.
Mostly, I think it is the attitude that we'd rather do for ourselves, and not have it done for us, even if it makes us less content and lacking in certain creature comforts provided by a paternalistic state.
For some value of "working". Many of the objections to health care, for instance, aren't that we're going to immediately implode from free health care. It's that 50 years down the line, we'll have completely fucked it up. And there is plenty of evidence to show that this could happen.
Add to that the observation that any entitlement that gets into place will become permanent because it will quickly create dependency among voters. What person near retirement age is going to vote to overhaul Social Security? They won't risk it. They want their promised retirement. Who will vote to overturn a mediocre single payer system or even reform it if the politicians have you convinced that reform will destroy your health care. No one would ever get elected who would do that.
So yeah, it will work just long enough to create dependency. And that's why no one even wants to give it a chance. And I don't really blame them, because history has shown that it will become untouchable, even if in dire need of reform.
It is true that plastics would be okay all by themselves. Many oil companies would prefer to make plastics over petrol. And in plastic form, they aren't really an AGW problem, they're a different problem.
However, I would not underestimate the amount of effort required to move all transport to electric. You're not going to move giant freighters to electric power unless you make them nuclear powered, and diesel freighters are down and dirty.
You can make the changes slowly and they will eventually take, but you're not undoing a century of fossil fuel use with any of the existing solutions in anything resembling a short period of time.
I will say this, hopefully the Rockefellers use their money to fund something other than fossil fuels, rather than just reinvesting in McDonalds or something. It's not like there won't be takers for ExxonMobil stock. They make money hand over fist. There's always a buyer for that stock.
The old money Rockefeller descendants and their foundations are not the same people as those who made the money. They're pretty much the poster children for old money guilt. John D. Rockefeller would probably make ExxonMobil look like a Green Party front organization if he was still alive.
If you have a certain sized organization, you will find that paying for RHEL support is sort of silly. You literally have hundreds of SA's and developers on your staff, many of them experts, and some even contributors. At that point, you're *better* than their support.
However, that is only true for organizations over a certain size or competence level. There are a lot of small shops who run Linux who could use the help. There are also a lot of... less capable... large shops that could use the help too.
I've been involved in a few RHEL to CentOS migrations and they mostly go well if we've been running RHEL for awhile and you have the right people. With the wrong people, you just have a lot of people confused about what is going on, despite the fact that its like 99.9% the same code. Of course, most of the confused people are the business people, so there is some truth that the value of RH is the fact that a business person has heard of it.
Unfortunately, the FedGov lurves its Red Hat. It also loves Windows too. Expect that the growth in government services will keep increasing the revenues of both companies for the foreseeable future.
I am not overly concerned about that. That is the sort of threat that our armed forces are actually good at dealing with. If they want to create a country, they have to set up logistics and stability. Those can be smashed and denied to them.
Yes, they have made inroads in a turbulent area where there is a weak government on one side and a civil war on the other. We can actually help Iraq and others sort that out with normal military assistance.
Of course, I am not suggesting that an ISIS regime is easy for the people over there, but to some degree they're going to have to figure this out for themselves (with our assistance where required) or they will keep falling down this well.
However, the terrorist angle is the one that is most threatening in the sense that it is more likely to drive internal policy and the rise of demagogues like Trump. I don't feel threatened by terrorists directly, but already I wait in lines for security theater when I get on a plane, and I have to listen to increasingly strident politicians try to scare me into voting for them. I'm not scared, but I know a lot of people are mad and/or scared and they want to feel safe.
And it's not just about terrorists, its about guns, and drugs, and illegal immigrants. It's getting to be so that I can't even figure out who to vote for any more.
You can now pay for Comcast TV and Internet Service...
FTFY
Why so jaded?
I assume that they will be very efficient about accepting your payments.
Why would they forge reviews? Comcast getting one whole shiny star would actually be an improvement. Their executives have bonus clauses for every .05 of a star that they can get.
Unfortunately, they also appear to have bigger bonus clauses for how many people they can piss off at once. I hear that they've had to create a new bonus tier for their most recent efforts.
Theoretically it is very easy to create, although people may not trust that it was actually done that way.
The user will generate a personal key on their device for their data or more importantly, be able to enter their own encrypted key file manually. The data sent will be encrypted with that key. Apple will store the data in a bucket labelled by the device ID or Apple ID. Now Apple is storing your data on their computers and they can access it, but they can't read it unless they can break the encryption or get the key and unencrypt the key.
On your phone, all apps are closed and flash images purged and your unencrypted secret key is deleted from memory when you lock the phone and only decrypted by entering your password on the unlock screen or on some other password screen. Now a locked phone means that even your device cannot access its own stored data on the server.
The decrypt-encrypt scheme is definitely processor heavy, there is still a race condition for the lock, and there are other disadvantages, but I'm only talking about a very blunt, brute force encryption protection scheme. Surely the geniuses at Apple could do better than I.
Or they could have saved themselves about a billion dollars and not started a "Teacher in Space Program" to begin with.
Note to self, if I get a management job at the NSA: I should avoid allowing any program called "Activist Administrators in National Security". Otherwise, I may have to get rid of that pesky activist before he sees something by blowing up Fort Meade using a convoluted plot which revolves around using nitroglycerin as a coolant for supercomputers.
Yes. Air gap and security guards doing searches should stop most of this stuff.
Some equipment does need network interconnection with the Internet, but the great majority of it does not.
You never know; some hacker might have been able to help in Flint (where part of the problem was using water from a polluted source, but the other part of the problem was not using enough of some of the chemical treatment).
You know, I find the potential value of a hacker in that system to be so small as to make it near zero.
Sure, they can hack in. And then what? Do they know what the chemical treatment required for the Flint Water District is? Are they going to re-route the water through a series of tubes away from the lead tubes through the tubes that go to where they make Perrier water? I guess that instead of a V-LAN, they'd configure the water routers to make a new W-LAN for the H20 packets.
Hackers are good at hacking, not fixing water treatment. Being an environmental engineer is actually a real job description that you need to have a college education for in the field. The next thing you'll be telling me is that hacking into the Department of Transportation will allow hackers to fix the gradient on that one curve on Interstate 81.
While an insecure control system is very undesirable, you should be able to be able to overlay more modern security on top of it in the places where network interconnection is absolutely needed. You should be okay if the only remote access to your 1980's HVAC is through the 2010's firewall and intrusion detection system.
Where interconnection is not required, this is all fixed instantly by air gaps between the control systems and everything else.
I am thinking that this is due to incompetence, not the age or lack of security of the control systems.
Except I have a lot of trouble believing that such events haven't already happened, yet there have been no attacks.
Someone is always pissed about something. I'd think that if Trump's business was riddled with holes *this would be about the right time to use those holes before he gets more and more out of control.* Yet we see only one anemic reveal from some Anonymous source which clearly was not some elite hacker who had owned The Donald. And this is a guy who has basically admitted to paying off politicians in so many words, so there should be plenty to find.
I think the real elite hackers are now owned by someone else or they don't have the access that we assume they do. The rest are challengers or script kiddies.
XML is so 2000's. We put our admin passwords and SQL connection strings in JSON configuration files now.
This. You pretty much need to ensure that your hosts are not able to be accessed because there's still the stupid plain text or MD5 hashed password in an unencrypted text file somewhere in order to connect your app to your database.
Not that encryption would matter. If someone breaks into a host that has a public key for a database server, then someone can use that same public key for access to the database server as long as they were doing it from the host that they just broke into. Actually securing connections where access is done automatically really requires a lot of thought and not just one encrypted file somewhere.
If somebody had have died or gotten sick, the hacking party would be the ones to get in shit, not the asshat that put the admin password in a text file...
They both should get in deep shit for it. Yes, the asshole who left the admin password in a text file should get fired.
However, you should be able to leave an admin password posted on a banner on a 24 hr news station and a good person wouldn't use the password to get in and fuck with a water treatment plant. That's like saying that anyone who leaves their door unlocked deserves to have their house broken into and accidentally burned down while people are trying to steal shit.
So, yeah, the both hackers and the admin should be dealt with severely. This isn't an either/or situation.
It grabs headlines. That's why we have the media blaring as loudly as they can about every terrorist act they can. It's all so shocking, and therefor guaranteed to grab eyes and viewer share.
I'm not saying this guy is completely off base, but this reads like the script to The Day after Tomorrow.
What kind of idiot does that anyway? You don't need global warming to be hit by a plain old hurricane or flood.
I'm not saying the Irish are aliens... but they're aliens.
Whiskey, Guinness, and red-heads. Duh.
Yes.
And the Milesians defeated the Tuatha Dé Danann.
I mean really, did anyone actually think the Celts were the first people on Ireland? The stories of the Irish themselves suggest that there was someone who was there first.