This touches on one of the points of why questions like these are bad. There are many things a good developer will not know off the top of their head but can easily find out when it pops up. However, asking during an interview usually comes across as wanting an answer pulled from existing knowledge.
Super genius? I get the impression all it really does is zero in on people with the same subculture background as the interviewer. It is about as useful in determining intelligence as asking which techie news sites they follow, with all the factionalism involved in that.
Does anyone in the industry who actually works with computers believe these kinds of claims? Such technologies are great for getting buy in from marketing, the legal dept, underwriters, and content owners, but outside making the life of developers more difficult I have not heard of them actually stopping reverse engineering.
The only time these kinds of tools seem to 'work' is when you are producing something which lacks the popularity to be worth the effort, which is not a good sign.
Hate to break it to you, but you are pretty powerless. Sure there are things within the range of the average person, we have a great deal of say over our own lives, but compared to the concentrated power of wealthy individuals or corporations, our options are very limited since we have pretty close to zero leverage.
Government is a major way for average people to have power and influence, it is our tool for dealing with other states and other powerful entities. You are protected each and every day, but so much of it has become invisible that you just take it for granted that you as an individual have caused the outcome.
As for the whole idea of 'if enough people', well, part of the reason for having regulation and protection is so that small groups within the population have similar protections as the masses, to give some balance beyond 'if enough people agree with me'.
Generally in small claims court you can not sue for court costs.
This is why we have the whole class action system, for cases where individual lawsuits are cost prohibitive in relation to the potential individual damages, but the aggregate effect might get the company's attention. Granted companies have worked really hard to paint class action lawsuits as bad things done by slimy people, but what do you expect to happen to one of the few tools average people might actually be able to leverage against them?
This only really works if lots of consumers do this, at which point you are just talking about a crowd implemented regulation. The point of regulation is to protect people who do not have the political power as individuals to be a blip on company's radar.
That type of research really does not seem like something Uber really has the resources for. Google has money to burn so they can have these kinds of pie in the sky research projects, but what has Uber really done from a technological perspective? A cell phone app and some centralized logistics? They did an ok job scaling, but it is still not that impressive of a technical accomplishment.
That being said, the idea of Uber running self driving cars is kinda scary. The company already has a reputation for skirting or ignoring laws/regulations and treats things like insurance as 'customer beware'. In fact their general attitude of 'look out for yourself' would speak to some potentially scary vehicle behavior settings.
The point is that with the GPL they cannot commercially fork code written by me. Of course they can do whatever they want with their own code.
Well, that is one of the sticking points that people argue about, what counts as their own code? The people behind GPLv3 have been very careful to keep that boundy at very specific places so that companies who use code on servers do not need to share, but companies that embed the code in physical devices (except medical ones) do. But as we move to more and more web centric functionality, the differnce becomes less functional and more technical.
'Sensible' is pretty subjective. At minimal I think it should be described as 'political'. GPLv3 was an exercise in power and diplomacy, multiple groups coming together and figuring out who could be sacrificed and who could not. For the most part, customers wanted to tinker with their toys, but not have their own livelihood threatened, so GPLv3 put new restrictions on things they purchase, but was careful to avoid the industries where they were likely to be employed. The embedded camp in GPL has always been weak and they paid for it, the web/server camp has always been strong and they demonstrated it.
Well, they derive how much the shielding should be blocking, so they can go back to fundamentals there.
It is possible that there are historical measurements that were recorded and examine those for possible differences, but ideally in order to run an experiment like this you would need to be taking specific measurements along with recording specific information about the reactor state and shielding involved, which may not have been done already.
Ideally they would be using their own, very carefully built shielding with carefully measured density and thickness (so the absorption can be calculated fresh) and be taking multiple measurements with known precisions from various points around the reactor: at least two, so you know what the flux is with and without your calibrated shield at specific points in the reactors time of operation. I really do not know if measurements have been done that would meet these criteria.
Well, the idea is that leakage appears everywhere and some tiny percentage of neutrons are always slipping between branes. So if you have a high flux source a certain number of neutrons would leak in the space between the source and the shield and of those neutrons a certain amount would leak a second time from elsewhere back into our universe between the end of the shield and the detector.
The idea would be to look for neutron counts higher than they should be getting given the amount of shielding. So if it should be blocking 99% but they are seeing 2%, then they would have a possible positive result. So they would be looking for statistically significant differences that could only be explained by neutrons skipping between universes.
It would kinda go the other direction. If they saw leakage beyond what could be accounted for by quantum tunneling then they might have a positive result.
Even within the bounds of a republic, the US system has rather significant flaws. The system was cobbled together without many functioning models to draw from and we are kinda stuck with that legacy of amateur state builders.
Mega commercial farms have cozier relationships with manufacturers and are both less likely to see this stuff as a problem and more likely to have dedicated (internal or vendor supplied) people working with them. And since the big farms make up the bulk of the market, the smaller ones and their problems are not going to have much impact on what types of devices get built.
I had read the original on Wired before it got posted to slashdot and could not figure out why people were talking about the seat in relationship to the sensor failure. I did not even consider people interpreting 'bum sensor' as 'sensor for your butt'
Just because they are a good CEO does not mean they would be a good engineer, so it is still valid to point out why one might not wish to engage the services of an engineer with the same attitudes.
Regulation might be a nice pretext here, but I am skeptical that manufacturers were forced against their will to close their systems so that 3rd party shops could not repair them or produce replacement parts. Given how powerful their lobby is, any regulation that is in place was in no small part written by those same manufacturers.
Eh, it really depends on the types of places one works for. For corporate positions no one ever asks, but research oriented ones sometimes still care even for senior positions.
Slashdot Mirror
This touches on one of the points of why questions like these are bad. There are many things a good developer will not know off the top of their head but can easily find out when it pops up. However, asking during an interview usually comes across as wanting an answer pulled from existing knowledge.
Super genius? I get the impression all it really does is zero in on people with the same subculture background as the interviewer. It is about as useful in determining intelligence as asking which techie news sites they follow, with all the factionalism involved in that.
Does anyone in the industry who actually works with computers believe these kinds of claims? Such technologies are great for getting buy in from marketing, the legal dept, underwriters, and content owners, but outside making the life of developers more difficult I have not heard of them actually stopping reverse engineering.
The only time these kinds of tools seem to 'work' is when you are producing something which lacks the popularity to be worth the effort, which is not a good sign.
Hate to break it to you, but you are pretty powerless. Sure there are things within the range of the average person, we have a great deal of say over our own lives, but compared to the concentrated power of wealthy individuals or corporations, our options are very limited since we have pretty close to zero leverage.
Government is a major way for average people to have power and influence, it is our tool for dealing with other states and other powerful entities. You are protected each and every day, but so much of it has become invisible that you just take it for granted that you as an individual have caused the outcome.
As for the whole idea of 'if enough people', well, part of the reason for having regulation and protection is so that small groups within the population have similar protections as the masses, to give some balance beyond 'if enough people agree with me'.
Generally in small claims court you can not sue for court costs.
This is why we have the whole class action system, for cases where individual lawsuits are cost prohibitive in relation to the potential individual damages, but the aggregate effect might get the company's attention. Granted companies have worked really hard to paint class action lawsuits as bad things done by slimy people, but what do you expect to happen to one of the few tools average people might actually be able to leverage against them?
This only really works if lots of consumers do this, at which point you are just talking about a crowd implemented regulation. The point of regulation is to protect people who do not have the political power as individuals to be a blip on company's radar.
That type of research really does not seem like something Uber really has the resources for. Google has money to burn so they can have these kinds of pie in the sky research projects, but what has Uber really done from a technological perspective? A cell phone app and some centralized logistics? They did an ok job scaling, but it is still not that impressive of a technical accomplishment.
That being said, the idea of Uber running self driving cars is kinda scary. The company already has a reputation for skirting or ignoring laws/regulations and treats things like insurance as 'customer beware'. In fact their general attitude of 'look out for yourself' would speak to some potentially scary vehicle behavior settings.
The point is that with the GPL they cannot commercially fork code written by me. Of course they can do whatever they want with their own code.
Well, that is one of the sticking points that people argue about, what counts as their own code? The people behind GPLv3 have been very careful to keep that boundy at very specific places so that companies who use code on servers do not need to share, but companies that embed the code in physical devices (except medical ones) do. But as we move to more and more web centric functionality, the differnce becomes less functional and more technical.
'Sensible' is pretty subjective. At minimal I think it should be described as 'political'. GPLv3 was an exercise in power and diplomacy, multiple groups coming together and figuring out who could be sacrificed and who could not. For the most part, customers wanted to tinker with their toys, but not have their own livelihood threatened, so GPLv3 put new restrictions on things they purchase, but was careful to avoid the industries where they were likely to be employed. The embedded camp in GPL has always been weak and they paid for it, the web/server camp has always been strong and they demonstrated it.
Well, they derive how much the shielding should be blocking, so they can go back to fundamentals there.
It is possible that there are historical measurements that were recorded and examine those for possible differences, but ideally in order to run an experiment like this you would need to be taking specific measurements along with recording specific information about the reactor state and shielding involved, which may not have been done already.
Ideally they would be using their own, very carefully built shielding with carefully measured density and thickness (so the absorption can be calculated fresh) and be taking multiple measurements with known precisions from various points around the reactor: at least two, so you know what the flux is with and without your calibrated shield at specific points in the reactors time of operation. I really do not know if measurements have been done that would meet these criteria.
Pretty much yeah. Obvious bills with wide support are easy targets for getting increasingly unrelated and extreme amendments in.
No no no, in this case the problem is wasteful government spending on research that does not result in marketable consumer products.
Well, the idea is that leakage appears everywhere and some tiny percentage of neutrons are always slipping between branes. So if you have a high flux source a certain number of neutrons would leak in the space between the source and the shield and of those neutrons a certain amount would leak a second time from elsewhere back into our universe between the end of the shield and the detector.
The idea would be to look for neutron counts higher than they should be getting given the amount of shielding. So if it should be blocking 99% but they are seeing 2%, then they would have a possible positive result. So they would be looking for statistically significant differences that could only be explained by neutrons skipping between universes.
It would kinda go the other direction. If they saw leakage beyond what could be accounted for by quantum tunneling then they might have a positive result.
Wow. That sounds potentially pretty damn dangerous.
Even within the bounds of a republic, the US system has rather significant flaws. The system was cobbled together without many functioning models to draw from and we are kinda stuck with that legacy of amateur state builders.
Oh, people propose reasonable bills all the time. It is what is done to them next that one will recognize as our congress...
Mega commercial farms have cozier relationships with manufacturers and are both less likely to see this stuff as a problem and more likely to have dedicated (internal or vendor supplied) people working with them. And since the big farms make up the bulk of the market, the smaller ones and their problems are not going to have much impact on what types of devices get built.
I had read the original on Wired before it got posted to slashdot and could not figure out why people were talking about the seat in relationship to the sensor failure. I did not even consider people interpreting 'bum sensor' as 'sensor for your butt'
Just because they are a good CEO does not mean they would be a good engineer, so it is still valid to point out why one might not wish to engage the services of an engineer with the same attitudes.
Or the evil environmental movement crushing american business.
Regulation might be a nice pretext here, but I am skeptical that manufacturers were forced against their will to close their systems so that 3rd party shops could not repair them or produce replacement parts. Given how powerful their lobby is, any regulation that is in place was in no small part written by those same manufacturers.
Eh, it really depends on the types of places one works for. For corporate positions no one ever asks, but research oriented ones sometimes still care even for senior positions.
Not everyone is interested in having a smartphone. I know it is taken as a given by many people, but it really is not a safe assumption to make.
Personally I keep a PaS in my coat/bag, and have no plans to get a smart phone anytime soon.