The amount of objections that citizens raise doesn't appear to be related to the size of a nuclear plant. They just seem to object to its very existence. Therefore it makes sense, that once you've got through the planning process, reviews, delays, hostility and protests you may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb and make the plant as large as practically possible.
I have never found a working environment where I thought it was too risky to leave my wallet in my jacket, on the back of my chair when I left the room. From my perspective (purely selfish, I know) my wallet is infinitely more valuable than anything a co-worker could discover on my computer, and much more valuable than any damage they could do and have it blamed on me.
From this I would suggest that the risk of losing my wallet, or my car keys (also left in my jacket) is still higher than the risk of someone in the building accessing my computer with malice in mind. I also know I am not alone in this practice: everyone here is trusting and honest enough that they have no fear of leaving personal items unattended in, on, or near their desks.
So, given that none of our organisation's machines are directly accessible from the outside and that the risk of an unauthorised intrusion from within is smaller than anyone's threshold for personal paranoia where exactly does the need for strong passwords come from?
Yes, but sadly you don't get to choose the criteria. What tends to happen is the HR person is so scared of being blamed if the candidate turns out to be a turkey, that they will ask for qualificatios more as a CYA thing. That way if the recruit is useless, they will be able to defend their choice (or ratification) by pointing to the certificate and saying that it therefore wasn't their fault - it was a poor accreditation process.
This is especially true when the candidate comes through a recruitment agency, since they are paid at least a proportion of their fee when the person joins (more being paid after they've been in the job a finxed time, 3 or 6 months is usual). So there is a real financial cost to choosing an idiot, you can't just fire them.
but some people go out and get the certification so they can get past the HR droid
Yes, this is a massive problem. In order to get to the face-to-face you have to go through the screening process. This is normally carried out either by the HR trainee or, worse, by a recruitment "consultant". All they've been given is a tick-box of "must-haves" (i.e. a wish list of tangible qualities) and told to go through a pile of CVs.
All they'll do is toss the ones which don't meet the criteria.So you can be the best LAMP-er in the world, but unless you have the random qualification that someone though might be useful you don't even get a chance. So while certification bears no correlation to usefulness in the real world, it's a necessary stamp on your CV to get you through the door.
Explain to the candidates what your requirements are then ask them to describe a piece of work they have completed which was comparable to that. Have them explain the issues involved, how they approached it what difficulties they had to overcome and what they would do differently in the future.
Since you're looking to recruit a number of people, I'd say that their ability to work together - personalities, maturity, compatibility are at least as important as skills and experience. So don't just pick the top X according to how they rank at interview, consider if you think they can work together as a team.
It's doing exactly what it was designed to (although making it hard for legitimate subscribers to access the content sounds like it needs tweaking). The crashing failure is the business model. What Murdoch seems to have not understood is that while he can put up the price of the paper product and only lose a small proportion of his customers, sothe difference between a price of 50p and 51p is small, but on the internet the difference between 0p and 1p is huge.
We know this,which is why celebrities are used to endorse everything from politicians right up to soap powder. They are familiar faces and we tend to trust the famialiar. I would expect this effect (or corrections reinforcing wrong beliefs) could be reversed just as easily by having the same (or more worthy/familiar) celeb making the correction. Provided it's done in a non-confrontational way, even with the original celeb endorsing the new one.
But we'll always be in a transition. Just because this generation of children are brought up in the presence of desktop computers and laptops doesn't mean that those will be the platforms of choice for the next generation in 20 years time. For them the equivalent of todays PC might be more like an iPad which is used in completely different ways from todays machines.
However, it's more likely that the next generation of children will have access to something as far removed from todays PCs as the current kids are from ZX81s and Tandy boxes. As for what the internet (which is really what it's about - not the PCs themselves) will have become, it's impossible to say
cheap supposedly non-smart phone (so called "feature" phone) these days let's you access the Internet, runs full web browsers, runs apps
Yes, you're correct. However almost nobody uses those features. Unless you buy something like a Backberry, iphone or a high end job specifically to run applications most people, even with the phone's abiity to do so, don't bother.
I don't even use the GPS on my phone. I have never felt the need to explore it's features, functions, inbuilt apps, internet connectivity, ringtones, games or any of the other stuff it comes with - or could be loaded with. Like most people that I know, all I want/need is to speak to people, send the occasional text, take the occasional photo and sometimes listem to music.Most people I know, see at work, sit next to on trains, notice in pubs or anywhere else don't feel the need to constantly fiddle with their phones, either.
It's not an age / generational thing, it's just that they don't offer anything compelling that's we need or want.
Just like my virtualised version of W2K. Just 'cos the supplier won't provide any more updates doesn't mean anything bad will happen. Since I have automatic updates switched off and the machine is secure and doesn't get bugs, virues, trojans it makes very little difference whether the vendor supports it any more or not.
BTW, on a related note. Since the machine runs in a secure environment, it neither has nor needs AV. It's surprising how fast a 256MB P3 is without all that overhead.
It's not the frontier, but the mass market
on
The End of Free
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· Score: 1
The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone,
Most people don't have a smartphone. Most people have a basic mobile where you press a few buttons and talk to people - that's all. Until of if that changes, the massive bulk of the personal comuting iceberg will remain on desktop and laptop computers. That's where free software will retain it's natural lead, no matter what happens to the small (but significant in it's own way) proportion of smartphone users.
We should not get carried away by the hype from the manufacturers of these closed, locked down and heavily restricted devices. While they have a place, the vast bulk of applications - both free and paid-for will remain where the vast bulk of the users are: using devices with screens at least the size of a sheet of paper and with input devices that are usable for the mass creation of content. That's the main reason why PDAs failed to take off and is the main stopper behind smartphoens getting mass appeal. When they do, the free apps will follow.
So in one country the results from a single test have dropped a bit. That's basically just a single data point. Without knowing what's happening to everyone else, who's not american there's very little worth talking about, If it was the whole population of the planet showing signs of decreased creativity then there could be something to worry about. Without all those other comparative data this test tells us nothing.
If you're talking about blog entries. Almost all of them (well, almost all of *mine*:-) are written once and never read, unless you count spiders as reading them.
work hard for a living, and realistic economy. They don't let banks cheat and collapse the country
Yet.
Less than half a century ago China was essentially an agrarian economy. It relied on rice harvests to determine whether the population survived or starved (and they did sometimes starve). It is only since Mao's death that they have started to develop. Give them another half century and they'll be just as dumb, fat and happy as the average american is today - complete with all the problems, corruption, consumption and bullying foreign policy backed by their massive economic and military might.
However, in 50 years the world will be a far hungrier place - not necessarily in terms of food, but raw materials, water, energy (9+billion to share it between). So this all presumes they don't nuke themselves back to the stone age with a civil war
Consider that as your first piece of PhD research
on
Finding a Research Mentor?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
If you can't get over this hurdle, then your chances of doing original and rigorous work in your chosen field don't look that good.
Sometimes it's necessary to stop looking for answers on the internet and start doing plain, old-fashioned manual research. Have you asked the lecturers / staff at your existing college - they must have some contacts, to have taught you in the first place. How about looking up the authors of papers that interest you and actually talking to them.
When officers can enforce their will, irrespective of it's legality. Extra points are given for not punishing said officers after the fact and even more for banning or "disappearing" any reporting of the offence either outright or under the veil of "security interests"..
So far most democracies are somewhere between steps #1 and #2 most of the time. although they make more and more frequent excursions past step #2 and are always trying for their ultimate step #3 (it makes their lives so much easier).
Sounds like Y2K predictions (again, groan)
on
Behind Cyberwar FUD
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· Score: 1
How much FUD can you pack into a paragraph? This piece
What will cyberwar look like?
pretty much presses all the buttons that the gullibly paranoid just love to swallow - after all, everyone loves a crisis.
The things is, all we can say about future threats is that they never turn out the way we've planned for them. Pearl harbour? who'd thought it? Sept 7? oops, didn't see that coming either. Fall of the USSR? dang! we never got to use all those nukes. So if / when there is what historians will look back on as cyberwar (or the first cyberwar), it almost certainly won't be the "war" that the government spent billions preparing for.
Whatever it does turn out to be, there are some blindingly obvious things that can and should be done in preparation. Things like making sure there is absolutely no physical or logical connections between crucial infrastructure and anybodies home computer. Ensuring that none of these mission critical systems, vehicles of war or systems of mass production / finance runs any commercially available software and keeping the knowledge of how they work, or even their existence away from the media, the public and the rest of the planet.
While these measures won't prevent this cyberwar, they might, just, mean that the effects will be reduced to the point that it just seems like a bad day at the office. But at least there's still be an office.
In britain almost no companies recruit direct. For reasons that can be summarised as laziness on the part of personnel (aka Human Resources) departments, and their unwillingness to learn how to filter technical resumes (aka CVs), the entire recruitment process for IT professionals is outsourced to agencies.
Sadly the induviduals who "work" ( a term used in its loosest possible sense) are even worse at identifying suitable candidates than the HR departments would be. All they do is take a list of keywords dreamed up from deep within the recruiting company and slavishly match them against all the electronic applications they have on file.
What they happens is some random acts of association. Your CV says "3 years C++", the client asked for 2 years, so you're overqualified. They asked for Javascript experience, you have Java so you get sent on an entirely pointless interview that takes a day of vacation (or sick) time. Turn down an interview prospect and you're labeled "hard to please" and no more opportunities come your way.
In fact it's a wonder that any vacancies get filled, that any IT departments get any staff who can actually do the job - rather than fulfill the tick-list the agencies use. In fact the only people who get what they want out of this arrangement are the commission-earning staff, who not only get paid for placing an unsuitable candidate, but then harass that person's previous employer and get paid if they fill the vacancy they created.
... they're unlikely to pay attention to a news report.
If the sorts of issues that scientists get called upon to talk about could be explained in simple terms - one's that don't require long words, and can be completed before the interviewer interrupts again, they would be simple enough to not be issues that scientists were needed to solve.
While scientists probably don't understand the public, that lack of understanding is a failure to comprehend just how dumb the average TV gawper actually is. However, the bigger misunderstanding is between the media and the science. They presume that just because Hollywood can brush off a major scientific incident or discovery in the time it takes Bruce Willis to kill half a dozen baddies, that real-life must be the same. Further, TV is very bad at handling abstract thought. They can't visualise it (obviously) and are not willing to spend time having "talking heads" discuss it's finer points. Just because politicians can get through an interview with platitudes and sound-bites, doesn't mean that a scientist would be equally dismissive and insincere.
If you want to hold them to account for their work, you need to give them the time to make sure you understand it. That takes years, not seconds in front of a camera.
So candidate "X": how would you deal with RF absorbtion and detuning of a microwave antenna when brought into close proximity of a human body?
< candidate answers, based on practical experience >
Interviewer writes down answer, says "That's very interesting, next candidate please"
For countries that require citizens to surrender passwords when subpoena'd the crime could either be contempt of court (for not complying) or refusing to provide a password if there's a specific law against that. I'm sure any half-competent government agency could turn this into a terrorism related situation, as well.
BTW, I'm guessing here - I'm very proud to say IANAL.
Yes. It does make the possession of random data illegal. Since "they" will assume it is encrypted, even though they can't prove it they will demand a password from you. Since you cannot comply you are deemed to have done something illegal. This is one of the few areas of law where you have to prove your innocence. And the only way to do that is to surrender a password (if there was, actually, one) which could just make you guilty of a different offence - depending on what it was you wanted to keep encrypted.
If there is ever a case along the lines of: "Well, m'lud the prosecution have not proved there are any encrypted files - it's just a block of encrypted data, so there is no case to answer" then I suggest we all follow it very closely.
If I wanted to create a decoy I'd just dump some output from/dev/random onto a disk partition and let the government try decrypting that for a few years (so long as they don't hold me in jail in the meantime). It seems that no matter how much you protest that a block of 0's and 1's isn't an encrypted file, it's just random noise, the only way to prove it, one way or the other, is when / if someone actually cracks it.
It's only a 4 inch display at 800x400. That wasn't big enough for even the lowliest laptops 25 years ago and it isn't enough now. It doesn't matter how you try to spin it, market it or come up with some magical new terms to flummox the gullible. It just isn't large enough.
With displays big is good, bigger is better and huge is best. There is no alternative.
Slashdot Mirror
The amount of objections that citizens raise doesn't appear to be related to the size of a nuclear plant. They just seem to object to its very existence. Therefore it makes sense, that once you've got through the planning process, reviews, delays, hostility and protests you may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb and make the plant as large as practically possible.
From this I would suggest that the risk of losing my wallet, or my car keys (also left in my jacket) is still higher than the risk of someone in the building accessing my computer with malice in mind. I also know I am not alone in this practice: everyone here is trusting and honest enough that they have no fear of leaving personal items unattended in, on, or near their desks.
So, given that none of our organisation's machines are directly accessible from the outside and that the risk of an unauthorised intrusion from within is smaller than anyone's threshold for personal paranoia where exactly does the need for strong passwords come from?
... no-one can hear you scream
This is especially true when the candidate comes through a recruitment agency, since they are paid at least a proportion of their fee when the person joins (more being paid after they've been in the job a finxed time, 3 or 6 months is usual). So there is a real financial cost to choosing an idiot, you can't just fire them.
but some people go out and get the certification so they can get past the HR droid
Yes, this is a massive problem. In order to get to the face-to-face you have to go through the screening process. This is normally carried out either by the HR trainee or, worse, by a recruitment "consultant". All they've been given is a tick-box of "must-haves" (i.e. a wish list of tangible qualities) and told to go through a pile of CVs.
All they'll do is toss the ones which don't meet the criteria.So you can be the best LAMP-er in the world, but unless you have the random qualification that someone though might be useful you don't even get a chance. So while certification bears no correlation to usefulness in the real world, it's a necessary stamp on your CV to get you through the door.
Since you're looking to recruit a number of people, I'd say that their ability to work together - personalities, maturity, compatibility are at least as important as skills and experience. So don't just pick the top X according to how they rank at interview, consider if you think they can work together as a team.
It's doing exactly what it was designed to (although making it hard for legitimate subscribers to access the content sounds like it needs tweaking). The crashing failure is the business model. What Murdoch seems to have not understood is that while he can put up the price of the paper product and only lose a small proportion of his customers, sothe difference between a price of 50p and 51p is small, but on the internet the difference between 0p and 1p is huge.
We know this,which is why celebrities are used to endorse everything from politicians right up to soap powder. They are familiar faces and we tend to trust the famialiar. I would expect this effect (or corrections reinforcing wrong beliefs) could be reversed just as easily by having the same (or more worthy/familiar) celeb making the correction. Provided it's done in a non-confrontational way, even with the original celeb endorsing the new one.
we're still in a transition period
But we'll always be in a transition. Just because this generation of children are brought up in the presence of desktop computers and laptops doesn't mean that those will be the platforms of choice for the next generation in 20 years time. For them the equivalent of todays PC might be more like an iPad which is used in completely different ways from todays machines.
However, it's more likely that the next generation of children will have access to something as far removed from todays PCs as the current kids are from ZX81s and Tandy boxes. As for what the internet (which is really what it's about - not the PCs themselves) will have become, it's impossible to say
cheap supposedly non-smart phone (so called "feature" phone) these days let's you access the Internet, runs full web browsers, runs apps
Yes, you're correct. However almost nobody uses those features. Unless you buy something like a Backberry, iphone or a high end job specifically to run applications most people, even with the phone's abiity to do so, don't bother. I don't even use the GPS on my phone. I have never felt the need to explore it's features, functions, inbuilt apps, internet connectivity, ringtones, games or any of the other stuff it comes with - or could be loaded with. Like most people that I know, all I want/need is to speak to people, send the occasional text, take the occasional photo and sometimes listem to music.Most people I know, see at work, sit next to on trains, notice in pubs or anywhere else don't feel the need to constantly fiddle with their phones, either.
It's not an age / generational thing, it's just that they don't offer anything compelling that's we need or want.
BTW, on a related note. Since the machine runs in a secure environment, it neither has nor needs AV. It's surprising how fast a 256MB P3 is without all that overhead.
The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone,
Most people don't have a smartphone. Most people have a basic mobile where you press a few buttons and talk to people - that's all. Until of if that changes, the massive bulk of the personal comuting iceberg will remain on desktop and laptop computers. That's where free software will retain it's natural lead, no matter what happens to the small (but significant in it's own way) proportion of smartphone users.
We should not get carried away by the hype from the manufacturers of these closed, locked down and heavily restricted devices. While they have a place, the vast bulk of applications - both free and paid-for will remain where the vast bulk of the users are: using devices with screens at least the size of a sheet of paper and with input devices that are usable for the mass creation of content. That's the main reason why PDAs failed to take off and is the main stopper behind smartphoens getting mass appeal. When they do, the free apps will follow.
taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages
So in one country the results from a single test have dropped a bit. That's basically just a single data point. Without knowing what's happening to everyone else, who's not american there's very little worth talking about, If it was the whole population of the planet showing signs of decreased creativity then there could be something to worry about. Without all those other comparative data this test tells us nothing.
If you're talking about blog entries. Almost all of them (well, almost all of *mine* :-) are written once and never read, unless you count spiders as reading them.
work hard for a living, and realistic economy. They don't let banks cheat and collapse the country
Yet.
Less than half a century ago China was essentially an agrarian economy. It relied on rice harvests to determine whether the population survived or starved (and they did sometimes starve). It is only since Mao's death that they have started to develop. Give them another half century and they'll be just as dumb, fat and happy as the average american is today - complete with all the problems, corruption, consumption and bullying foreign policy backed by their massive economic and military might.
However, in 50 years the world will be a far hungrier place - not necessarily in terms of food, but raw materials, water, energy (9+billion to share it between). So this all presumes they don't nuke themselves back to the stone age with a civil war
Sometimes it's necessary to stop looking for answers on the internet and start doing plain, old-fashioned manual research. Have you asked the lecturers / staff at your existing college - they must have some contacts, to have taught you in the first place. How about looking up the authors of papers that interest you and actually talking to them.
get out there and network.
So far most democracies are somewhere between steps #1 and #2 most of the time. although they make more and more frequent excursions past step #2 and are always trying for their ultimate step #3 (it makes their lives so much easier).
What will cyberwar look like?
pretty much presses all the buttons that the gullibly paranoid just love to swallow - after all, everyone loves a crisis.
The things is, all we can say about future threats is that they never turn out the way we've planned for them. Pearl harbour? who'd thought it? Sept 7? oops, didn't see that coming either. Fall of the USSR? dang! we never got to use all those nukes. So if / when there is what historians will look back on as cyberwar (or the first cyberwar), it almost certainly won't be the "war" that the government spent billions preparing for.
Whatever it does turn out to be, there are some blindingly obvious things that can and should be done in preparation. Things like making sure there is absolutely no physical or logical connections between crucial infrastructure and anybodies home computer. Ensuring that none of these mission critical systems, vehicles of war or systems of mass production / finance runs any commercially available software and keeping the knowledge of how they work, or even their existence away from the media, the public and the rest of the planet.
While these measures won't prevent this cyberwar, they might, just, mean that the effects will be reduced to the point that it just seems like a bad day at the office. But at least there's still be an office.
Sadly the induviduals who "work" ( a term used in its loosest possible sense) are even worse at identifying suitable candidates than the HR departments would be. All they do is take a list of keywords dreamed up from deep within the recruiting company and slavishly match them against all the electronic applications they have on file.
What they happens is some random acts of association. Your CV says "3 years C++", the client asked for 2 years, so you're overqualified. They asked for Javascript experience, you have Java so you get sent on an entirely pointless interview that takes a day of vacation (or sick) time. Turn down an interview prospect and you're labeled "hard to please" and no more opportunities come your way. In fact it's a wonder that any vacancies get filled, that any IT departments get any staff who can actually do the job - rather than fulfill the tick-list the agencies use. In fact the only people who get what they want out of this arrangement are the commission-earning staff, who not only get paid for placing an unsuitable candidate, but then harass that person's previous employer and get paid if they fill the vacancy they created.
If the sorts of issues that scientists get called upon to talk about could be explained in simple terms - one's that don't require long words, and can be completed before the interviewer interrupts again, they would be simple enough to not be issues that scientists were needed to solve.
While scientists probably don't understand the public, that lack of understanding is a failure to comprehend just how dumb the average TV gawper actually is. However, the bigger misunderstanding is between the media and the science. They presume that just because Hollywood can brush off a major scientific incident or discovery in the time it takes Bruce Willis to kill half a dozen baddies, that real-life must be the same. Further, TV is very bad at handling abstract thought. They can't visualise it (obviously) and are not willing to spend time having "talking heads" discuss it's finer points. Just because politicians can get through an interview with platitudes and sound-bites, doesn't mean that a scientist would be equally dismissive and insincere.
If you want to hold them to account for their work, you need to give them the time to make sure you understand it. That takes years, not seconds in front of a camera.
So candidate "X": how would you deal with RF absorbtion and detuning of a microwave antenna when brought into close proximity of a human body?
< candidate answers, based on practical experience >
Interviewer writes down answer, says "That's very interesting, next candidate please"
BTW, I'm guessing here - I'm very proud to say IANAL.
If there is ever a case along the lines of: "Well, m'lud the prosecution have not proved there are any encrypted files - it's just a block of encrypted data, so there is no case to answer" then I suggest we all follow it very closely.
Could take a while.
With displays big is good, bigger is better and huge is best. There is no alternative.