It's even more basic than that. According to TFA the design goal was: "creating a cutting-edge website that would use the latest technologies to dazzle consumers with its many features. "
In other words, even if they had gotten this thing up and working as they wanted, right on time, it would have been an accessibility nightmare that would never work unless you have a brand new computer configured with no security anyway.
I am pointing out the consequences that follow the acceptance of the authoritarian principle.
You can deny it all you want but history shows it to be true.
"That's almost as big a leap as saying a sip of alcohol will lead to becoming a meth abuser since they are both technically drugs."
Not quite. More like saying that once you accept the use of alcohol as a crutch, it's easier to accept using other drugs as crutches as well - and I think that's true. Of course I can see why you liked yours better, since it's obviously wrong.
"If you don't like the concept at all, you can turn it off."
Hm really? I am not using google, but you are. Can I 'turn it off' so that I will know if I get a message from you, you actually wrote it, you didnt just click ok on the bots suggestions? Can I 'turn it off' so it will quit snooping on me in anticipation of offering you a 'suggestion?'
And if not, just how am I supposed to effectively turn this off, short of blocking all communications that are touched through google and refusing delivery?
"Honestly given the number of drunk idiots on the road, combined with the number of people who can't even drive properly when they are sober let alone inebriated (anyone who claims they aren't impaired at 0.08 is kidding themselves), I'm surprised people don't support this measure more."
And the worst part is, I always stay sober and drive, I've driven for years and never done anything wrong, but I will probably die in a head on collision with some drunk idiot who could not be avoided eh?
No, I get where you are coming from. There is something very basic in human consciousness that screams for a strong man to find the miscreants and spank them with inhuman(e) force. And this is the appeal of fascism...
But if you have any historical understanding you will know it does not, ultimately, work out as a good deal.
A critical element for any just set of laws is that the people who are subject to them get fair warning of what those laws are. When the law grows so enormous that even the law makers and the law arguers cannot possibly know and understand them all, it is no longer a system of justice and demands reform.
"The only rational explanation is that they don't exist. It's pure fiction"
Eh, not *pure* fiction.
But Al Qaeda certainly appear to have "shot their load" and exhausted their capabilities to carry out sophisticated long range attacks in 2001 and done virtually nothing concrete since. Instead you have the rise of local "affiliates" focused on local issues. The groups in Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and Mali come to mind specifically. All are formidable in their own territory, but none seem likely to have the capability or even the will to pull off sophisticated attacks very far outside their own homelands.
But the more worrisome aspect is to what a large degree they appear to be the creation of US policy that supposedly is aimed at improving, not eroding, our security. It's been understood for years that the drone strikes in Yemen are the major recruitment tool for AQ there, yet the strikes continue relentlessly.
Chess is of course a slightly different situation.
The chess algorithm cannot literally be 'smarter' than the people that wrote it (they are perfectly capable of doing the same thing it does) but a computer can still execute that algorithm faster - it can do calculations that would take the human days to accomplish in seconds. In time to actually use those calculations to choose a move.
Similarly, a compiler can produce reasonably optimised output MUCH faster than a human programmer. Never denied it.
"The compilers, for the most part, are smarter than people at optimizing code."
No, they emphatically are not. No computer algorithm is any smarter than the people that wrote it (in fact it's always going to be dumber.) If the compiler is better than YOU are at optimizing code, that may well be true and understandable - presumably optimising assembler is not your specialty, after all.
But a competent assembler specialist (someone in the same league, skillwise, with the guys that write the compiler) will beat the hell out of any compiler ever made. There just is no question. He knows every technique the compiler knows, but he is better equipped to know when and where to use them.
Compilers serve many valid purposes. They allow less skilled programmers to still produce a usable product. They allow more skilled programmers to produce a usable product more quickly. They facilitate portability. Plenty of good reasons for them to exist and be used. But beating a competent human at optimisation tasks is not one of them.
"Java has the added advantage that it uses Just-In-Time compiling, so there's a lot of cases where Java, or.Net or any other language that uses an intermediate byte-code and actually outperform C."
I know a lot of people think this, but it's nonsense, as a moments reflection should make clear.
I have no doubt that a poor coder might find JIT improves the performance of his code, but that really doesnt justify the assertion. You would need to show that JIT can actually beat a well written C program, and it wont. It cannot. Absolute worst case, if he has to, the C coder could simply implement a VM and JIT in his program and achieve the same results - and that is a tie. C cannot possibly lose that comparison, the worst it could possibly do is tie.
"Yeah, outside a few rather narrow cases, modern CPUs have just gotten too complicated to write efficient assembly for."
You say this as if there were some other way. But when you code in a higher level language, the compiler mechanically translates what you wrote into assembly before handing it off to the assembler to actually generate the object anyway. Compilers have certainly seen a lot of improvement but compiler generated assembler code still tends to be awful, and a good assembler programmer will always be able to beat it if given a chance.
I suspect what has really happened is simply that employers are heavily biased towards cheap and quick, and assembler isnt optimal there. And that in turn has resulted in fewer people learning assembler, making it even harder and more expensive to do things that way, sort of a vicious circle.
The machine is more of a convincer here than anything else. Yes, the investigator may well notice something on his charts that gives him a clue where to push. Other times he will do the opposite, pushing randomly to see what gives a reaction. But the greatest value of the machine is the pure intimidation factor. People in this day and age believe in machines. You tell them that machine is a 'lie detector' which will tell you when they are lying and it could just be a rock with a couple LEDs mounted it would still work on those who believe it will work. If they dont believe they can lie anymore they wont be able to, simple as that.
It's a useful tool for an interrogator and I can completely understand why they want to use them. On the other hand the potential for false positives is immense, and the whole thing is closer to voodoo than science, so it's also completely understandable that they arent admissible in court. If the feds are relying on these things for their security clearances I fear it's a bad idea for both reasons - false positives and false negatives. A well prepared liar will normally beat this and go right through - a good person who is not lying, but simply upset and stressed out by the process might well 'fail' as well.
I can see why they want to shut down people that teach others how to defend themselves against these things, but again I think it's counterproductive and misguided. Real threats, foreign agents, are going to have access to this knowledge no matter what. Why should they be given an advantage in federal hiring over good loyal american citizens?
*IF* the DMA device is physically incapable of affecting memory outside a clearly defined area whose contents are never trusted by the ARM coprocessor then that could be true, but it's a big if and it has to be proven not assumed.
" I don't understand why the baseband would have to deal with anything else, and why it would be the master processor and not just a blackbox "device" that the main OS sees and communicates with, in a properly isolated fashion."
Because it is simpler/faster/easier/cheaper to simply give the baseband DMA, and once that is done any notion that the ARM chip is truly a 'master processor' is gone with the wind.
It's not, it's the games and graphics coprocessor. It does not have control of the system and could not be trusted even if every single line of code executing on it were mathematically proven.
"Russia's KGB has done things worse then our CIA, and nobody went back and convicted those guys."
Actually quite a few KGB agents have been caught and convicted and rotted in prison. Not all, or even nearly all, no, but certainly enough to prove your statement wrong. The US has caught a number of them over the years, but even much smaller and less powerful states such as Estonia have done it too.
Sovereign immunity is some real bullshit, but it does NOT apply here. Sovereign immunity is what is cited to prevent individuals from suing the federal government in the federal court system. It does not in any way shape or form prohibit a sovereign state from charging, arresting, convicting, and punishing those who commit criminal acts on their soil. Even your link says nothing of the sort - if you had researched the case that is referring to you would have known that it involved civil suits against a successor government directly for the acts of a former regime. It may be a flawed judgement but it doesnt matter - even taking it at face value it simply doesnt apply.
We arent talking about civil suits against regimes. We are talking about criminal charges against criminal actors. If you had actually read the judgement you would have noticed e.g. paragraph 87 specifically explains that foreclosing the former does not rule out the latter:
"The Court does not consider that the United Kingdom judgment in Pinochet (No. 3) ([2000] 1 AC 147; ILR, Vol. 119, p. 136) is relevant, notwithstanding the reliance placed on that judgment by the Italian Court of Cassation in Ferrini. Pinochet concerned the immunity of a former Head of State from the criminal jurisdiction of another State, not the immunity of the State itself in proceedings designed to establish its liability to damages."
Eh, you might find the Italians alone have convicted more than one of them.
While they have a de facto immunity based on the unwillingness of the US Government to obey any law, and the military superiority associated with a military budget no one else comes close to. Operations like that are often clearly illegal and in some cases there is even an obligation to prosecute. But in the real world it is rarely pursued because there is no practical way to enforce a judgement, and courts are well aware that pronouncing judgements they cannot enforce just tends to make them look weaker.
But any student of history would tell you this is a very dangerous course for the US Government to be taking. It's hard to see much upside to it to begin with, and the downside is really a national poison. We have already poisoned our relations with friendly nations all around the world, and it appears to be our policy to simply continue doing so. One day, and we can argue over how long, but one day inevitably we wont be the hyperpower anymore, we wont be able to get away with this, and worse yet, the other players, some of whom will be in really good positions to mess with us... they are ALL going to hate our guts.
All true, but I have an account, classic discussion is set, and while there might be some small issues with it it's far preferable to the nonsense you get when you allow scripting here.
You are right, and it's a colander instead of a nearly seaworthy boat that just needs some holes patched because of 'nimble' development practices and several decades of constantly reinventing the wheel and selling it over and over again with a little more gee-whiz each time.
If you want a secure computer you need a conservative stack, free from the ground up, with security designed in from day one, and an emphasis on mathematically correct code rather than features. Otherwise, you are trying to bail a colander.
"Unfortunately, its been years since it was reasonable to use slashdot without javascript."
I must disagree as I am using it that way right now, and have been for years. It works fine. Whenever I start allowing any scripts is when it really borks.
I am too. I noticed recently youtube has a picture it scraped up from a google+ account I never consented to be made, never told it to use, and really it's a mystery where it came from or who it is. But it's now me, and I cant get rid of it. Might just delete my youtube account as a result.
Google used to be useful but lately it's about the creepiest thing on the web (for me, at least, since I can and do avoid facebook entirely.)
Apparently your idea of "good" package management is a system that is needlessly complex and therefore needlessly brittle. Personally I like package management that just works without needless fuss and breaking other things. Nice to have a choice.
I have never been able to stand running Ubuntu for more than a few minutes to begin with.
Now it's gone from technically awful to actively evil, it would be nice to be able to switch away as a statement, but that would require actually using it to start with.
"So then don't do a sloppy implementation, and reap the benefits."
You think simply designing a technically superior product would allow me to compete with the big automotive manufacturers around the world? Are you dreaming?
I could tell you how to do it in general terms but it involves a lot of very painstaking work by some top dollar professionals. The auto companies have the funds to do it, but they arent going to devote those funds to the job unless the liability is calculated as exceeding the cost. Which is obviously not the case at present.
Stop breathing. Seriously. You're wasting oxygen that something more useful, like a cockroach, could be breathing.
"Fearing the loss of third party cookies (which IMO is not that much of a privacy issue)"
Your opinion is not relevant.
"ad companies were forced to develop alternative methods to track people."
No. No one is forcing you to track people, full stop. It's a matter of choosing to be evil.
"Granted, it is not as effective (in the same scope) as third party cookies, but the added benefit of being able to track users across devices - if approximately - gives then an edge over the old methods"
It's less effective for now and breaking it completely will be the next item on the agenda of whitehats worldwide.
Slashdot Mirror
It's even more basic than that. According to TFA the design goal was: "creating a cutting-edge website that would use the latest technologies to dazzle consumers with its many features. "
In other words, even if they had gotten this thing up and working as they wanted, right on time, it would have been an accessibility nightmare that would never work unless you have a brand new computer configured with no security anyway.
I am pointing out the consequences that follow the acceptance of the authoritarian principle. You can deny it all you want but history shows it to be true. "That's almost as big a leap as saying a sip of alcohol will lead to becoming a meth abuser since they are both technically drugs." Not quite. More like saying that once you accept the use of alcohol as a crutch, it's easier to accept using other drugs as crutches as well - and I think that's true. Of course I can see why you liked yours better, since it's obviously wrong.
"If you don't like the concept at all, you can turn it off."
Hm really? I am not using google, but you are. Can I 'turn it off' so that I will know if I get a message from you, you actually wrote it, you didnt just click ok on the bots suggestions? Can I 'turn it off' so it will quit snooping on me in anticipation of offering you a 'suggestion?'
And if not, just how am I supposed to effectively turn this off, short of blocking all communications that are touched through google and refusing delivery?
"Honestly given the number of drunk idiots on the road, combined with the number of people who can't even drive properly when they are sober let alone inebriated (anyone who claims they aren't impaired at 0.08 is kidding themselves), I'm surprised people don't support this measure more."
And the worst part is, I always stay sober and drive, I've driven for years and never done anything wrong, but I will probably die in a head on collision with some drunk idiot who could not be avoided eh?
No, I get where you are coming from. There is something very basic in human consciousness that screams for a strong man to find the miscreants and spank them with inhuman(e) force. And this is the appeal of fascism...
But if you have any historical understanding you will know it does not, ultimately, work out as a good deal.
I think you are missing his point here.
A critical element for any just set of laws is that the people who are subject to them get fair warning of what those laws are. When the law grows so enormous that even the law makers and the law arguers cannot possibly know and understand them all, it is no longer a system of justice and demands reform.
"The only rational explanation is that they don't exist. It's pure fiction"
Eh, not *pure* fiction.
But Al Qaeda certainly appear to have "shot their load" and exhausted their capabilities to carry out sophisticated long range attacks in 2001 and done virtually nothing concrete since. Instead you have the rise of local "affiliates" focused on local issues. The groups in Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and Mali come to mind specifically. All are formidable in their own territory, but none seem likely to have the capability or even the will to pull off sophisticated attacks very far outside their own homelands.
But the more worrisome aspect is to what a large degree they appear to be the creation of US policy that supposedly is aimed at improving, not eroding, our security. It's been understood for years that the drone strikes in Yemen are the major recruitment tool for AQ there, yet the strikes continue relentlessly.
KDE is just nuts. Why do I need to install their broken email/PIM app in order to get a desktop clock widget again?
Oh, right, I dont. Uninstall KDE and install WindowMaker. Nice clock.
Chess is of course a slightly different situation.
The chess algorithm cannot literally be 'smarter' than the people that wrote it (they are perfectly capable of doing the same thing it does) but a computer can still execute that algorithm faster - it can do calculations that would take the human days to accomplish in seconds. In time to actually use those calculations to choose a move.
Similarly, a compiler can produce reasonably optimised output MUCH faster than a human programmer. Never denied it.
"The compilers, for the most part, are smarter than people at optimizing code."
No, they emphatically are not. No computer algorithm is any smarter than the people that wrote it (in fact it's always going to be dumber.) If the compiler is better than YOU are at optimizing code, that may well be true and understandable - presumably optimising assembler is not your specialty, after all.
But a competent assembler specialist (someone in the same league, skillwise, with the guys that write the compiler) will beat the hell out of any compiler ever made. There just is no question. He knows every technique the compiler knows, but he is better equipped to know when and where to use them.
Compilers serve many valid purposes. They allow less skilled programmers to still produce a usable product. They allow more skilled programmers to produce a usable product more quickly. They facilitate portability. Plenty of good reasons for them to exist and be used. But beating a competent human at optimisation tasks is not one of them.
"Java has the added advantage that it uses Just-In-Time compiling, so there's a lot of cases where Java, or .Net or any other language that uses an intermediate byte-code and actually outperform C."
I know a lot of people think this, but it's nonsense, as a moments reflection should make clear.
I have no doubt that a poor coder might find JIT improves the performance of his code, but that really doesnt justify the assertion. You would need to show that JIT can actually beat a well written C program, and it wont. It cannot. Absolute worst case, if he has to, the C coder could simply implement a VM and JIT in his program and achieve the same results - and that is a tie. C cannot possibly lose that comparison, the worst it could possibly do is tie.
"Yeah, outside a few rather narrow cases, modern CPUs have just gotten too complicated to write efficient assembly for."
You say this as if there were some other way. But when you code in a higher level language, the compiler mechanically translates what you wrote into assembly before handing it off to the assembler to actually generate the object anyway. Compilers have certainly seen a lot of improvement but compiler generated assembler code still tends to be awful, and a good assembler programmer will always be able to beat it if given a chance.
I suspect what has really happened is simply that employers are heavily biased towards cheap and quick, and assembler isnt optimal there. And that in turn has resulted in fewer people learning assembler, making it even harder and more expensive to do things that way, sort of a vicious circle.
The machine is more of a convincer here than anything else. Yes, the investigator may well notice something on his charts that gives him a clue where to push. Other times he will do the opposite, pushing randomly to see what gives a reaction. But the greatest value of the machine is the pure intimidation factor. People in this day and age believe in machines. You tell them that machine is a 'lie detector' which will tell you when they are lying and it could just be a rock with a couple LEDs mounted it would still work on those who believe it will work. If they dont believe they can lie anymore they wont be able to, simple as that.
It's a useful tool for an interrogator and I can completely understand why they want to use them. On the other hand the potential for false positives is immense, and the whole thing is closer to voodoo than science, so it's also completely understandable that they arent admissible in court. If the feds are relying on these things for their security clearances I fear it's a bad idea for both reasons - false positives and false negatives. A well prepared liar will normally beat this and go right through - a good person who is not lying, but simply upset and stressed out by the process might well 'fail' as well.
I can see why they want to shut down people that teach others how to defend themselves against these things, but again I think it's counterproductive and misguided. Real threats, foreign agents, are going to have access to this knowledge no matter what. Why should they be given an advantage in federal hiring over good loyal american citizens?
*IF* the DMA device is physically incapable of affecting memory outside a clearly defined area whose contents are never trusted by the ARM coprocessor then that could be true, but it's a big if and it has to be proven not assumed.
" I don't understand why the baseband would have to deal with anything else, and why it would be the master processor and not just a blackbox "device" that the main OS sees and communicates with, in a properly isolated fashion."
Because it is simpler/faster/easier/cheaper to simply give the baseband DMA, and once that is done any notion that the ARM chip is truly a 'master processor' is gone with the wind.
It's not, it's the games and graphics coprocessor. It does not have control of the system and could not be trusted even if every single line of code executing on it were mathematically proven.
"Russia's KGB has done things worse then our CIA, and nobody went back and convicted those guys."
Actually quite a few KGB agents have been caught and convicted and rotted in prison. Not all, or even nearly all, no, but certainly enough to prove your statement wrong. The US has caught a number of them over the years, but even much smaller and less powerful states such as Estonia have done it too.
Sovereign immunity is some real bullshit, but it does NOT apply here. Sovereign immunity is what is cited to prevent individuals from suing the federal government in the federal court system. It does not in any way shape or form prohibit a sovereign state from charging, arresting, convicting, and punishing those who commit criminal acts on their soil. Even your link says nothing of the sort - if you had researched the case that is referring to you would have known that it involved civil suits against a successor government directly for the acts of a former regime. It may be a flawed judgement but it doesnt matter - even taking it at face value it simply doesnt apply.
We arent talking about civil suits against regimes. We are talking about criminal charges against criminal actors. If you had actually read the judgement you would have noticed e.g. paragraph 87 specifically explains that foreclosing the former does not rule out the latter:
"The Court does not consider that the United Kingdom judgment in Pinochet (No. 3) ([2000] 1 AC 147; ILR, Vol. 119, p. 136) is relevant, notwithstanding the reliance placed on that judgment by the Italian Court of Cassation in Ferrini. Pinochet concerned the immunity of a former Head of State from the criminal jurisdiction of another State, not the immunity of the State itself in proceedings designed to establish its liability to damages."
Eh, you might find the Italians alone have convicted more than one of them.
While they have a de facto immunity based on the unwillingness of the US Government to obey any law, and the military superiority associated with a military budget no one else comes close to. Operations like that are often clearly illegal and in some cases there is even an obligation to prosecute. But in the real world it is rarely pursued because there is no practical way to enforce a judgement, and courts are well aware that pronouncing judgements they cannot enforce just tends to make them look weaker.
But any student of history would tell you this is a very dangerous course for the US Government to be taking. It's hard to see much upside to it to begin with, and the downside is really a national poison. We have already poisoned our relations with friendly nations all around the world, and it appears to be our policy to simply continue doing so. One day, and we can argue over how long, but one day inevitably we wont be the hyperpower anymore, we wont be able to get away with this, and worse yet, the other players, some of whom will be in really good positions to mess with us... they are ALL going to hate our guts.
This is just viciously poor strategy.
All true, but I have an account, classic discussion is set, and while there might be some small issues with it it's far preferable to the nonsense you get when you allow scripting here.
You are right, and it's a colander instead of a nearly seaworthy boat that just needs some holes patched because of 'nimble' development practices and several decades of constantly reinventing the wheel and selling it over and over again with a little more gee-whiz each time.
If you want a secure computer you need a conservative stack, free from the ground up, with security designed in from day one, and an emphasis on mathematically correct code rather than features. Otherwise, you are trying to bail a colander.
"Unfortunately, its been years since it was reasonable to use slashdot without javascript."
I must disagree as I am using it that way right now, and have been for years. It works fine. Whenever I start allowing any scripts is when it really borks.
I am too. I noticed recently youtube has a picture it scraped up from a google+ account I never consented to be made, never told it to use, and really it's a mystery where it came from or who it is. But it's now me, and I cant get rid of it. Might just delete my youtube account as a result.
Google used to be useful but lately it's about the creepiest thing on the web (for me, at least, since I can and do avoid facebook entirely.)
Apparently your idea of "good" package management is a system that is needlessly complex and therefore needlessly brittle. Personally I like package management that just works without needless fuss and breaking other things. Nice to have a choice.
That's just a bad way to install period.
Backup ~/, format the drive, do a clean install.
I have never been able to stand running Ubuntu for more than a few minutes to begin with.
Now it's gone from technically awful to actively evil, it would be nice to be able to switch away as a statement, but that would require actually using it to start with.
"So then don't do a sloppy implementation, and reap the benefits."
You think simply designing a technically superior product would allow me to compete with the big automotive manufacturers around the world? Are you dreaming?
I could tell you how to do it in general terms but it involves a lot of very painstaking work by some top dollar professionals. The auto companies have the funds to do it, but they arent going to devote those funds to the job unless the liability is calculated as exceeding the cost. Which is obviously not the case at present.
"Disclaimer: I work for an ad company."
Stop breathing. Seriously. You're wasting oxygen that something more useful, like a cockroach, could be breathing.
"Fearing the loss of third party cookies (which IMO is not that much of a privacy issue)"
Your opinion is not relevant.
"ad companies were forced to develop alternative methods to track people."
No. No one is forcing you to track people, full stop. It's a matter of choosing to be evil.
"Granted, it is not as effective (in the same scope) as third party cookies, but the added benefit of being able to track users across devices - if approximately - gives then an edge over the old methods"
It's less effective for now and breaking it completely will be the next item on the agenda of whitehats worldwide.
"purportedly pro-user organization"
Yeah right. Someone hasnt been paying attention to them for many years, it does appear.