I vaguely recall that division sold the top secret low-noise low-cavitation propellors of nuclear submarines technology to the Ruskies....
How things have changed since...
I did a search on that. That was 30 years ago. Toshiba Machinery and Norway's government owned Kongsberg both were involved in that debacle. Clearly the sales were a violation of export control but at the time it seems that nobody was talking about holding Norway responsible for their part in that and there was some debate about whether that particular sale really was the cause for Soviet submarines getting quieter. Senator Nunn at the time said that Soviet subs were getting quieter prior to the sale.
I've been there several times and I have an ex-girlfriend who was born and raised in Guangdong province, which is the part of China just outside Hong Kong and Macau. She and I talked about this. I can't say for all of China, but definitely in Guangdong and Hong Kong and Macau the people there have, by western standards, weird ideas about dead people. There is some real fear of the dead and of ghosts. Of course there is still land in Hong Kong where they could possibly put a cemetery, even if it just was for cremated remains. The real problem is that no Chinese person in Hong Kong wants to live anywhere near a cemetery and they raise holy hell every time any developer tries to put one near where they live. So the upshot is that nobody can ever build a new cemetery anywhere because there isn't any more land that really isn't inhabited by somebody close enough to complain about it. Think of it kind of like trying to build an above ground nuclear waste disposal site and you're really close to the kind of vehement opposition that cemeteries get there. I think it's been well over 10 years, maybe multiple decades, since the last "new" cemetery got opened there and people threw fits about that but it got done anyway. The government simply doesn't want public order disturbed and have the PLA start flexing its muscle so it's just easier to not build new cemeteries so the residents don't complain and if they have to spend many thousands of dollars of money they don't really have to find a place to stash the ashes of Uncle Fong because they are too scared to live near a cemetery that might solve the problem, then that's just how it is. Short of basically having the PLA kill people or throw them in jail if they complain, there's no real solution for this when citizens are convinced that even seeing a cemetery might bring them "bad luck".
While I've got no idea whether this site is a reliable source for such information, it does seem like a step backward.
Nuclear weapons are always a bad idea. The public relations cost of using them alone could devastate our country. They were always sold to the American public as a temporary weapons system due to the Soviet, then Chinese, threat. Today no country on earth will let lose with these armaments because the retaliation would be devastating.
Even North Korea must know that internally.
We don't really know what some of the leaders of nuclear states are thinking. And it's not only North Korea to worry about.
1) President Xi is more belligerent than any Chinese leader since Mao and he seems to think he is Mao. The CCP has been whipping up the military into an anti-US frenzy for years now and it's only gotten worse under Xi. While I think he is rational, if perhaps a bit short sighted at times, my fear is not that he will start nuking anybody but military people under him may quickly spin out of control in ways he doesn't anticipate and the end result could be an angry China suicidally starting a nuclear war with the US when they start losing a conventional war that they started.
2) Putin is also not crazy, but he's been whipping the Russian military into an anti-US and anti-Western frenzy to support his own power and again, things by those people could spiral out of control. And I do believe that Putin could actually believe he could "win" a nuclear war.
3) North Korea's leader will definitely want to try to nuke everybody he can if the US attacks just to take as many people with him as he can. I'm not sure that NK has any operational nuclear weapons that can go on missiles, but if I'm wrong, it's going to be bad. I could see him even doing a dirty bomb strike internally within NK borders just to take out American troops if they invade.
4) I certainly don't trust Pakistan's leadership and won't rule out that they might think that a nuclear strike against India might get them all quickly to heaven when the inevitable retaliation occurs.
I'm not worried at all that the UK, France, Israel or India will use their weapons against the USA.
You might think my fears are exaggerated, but William Poundstone wrote a book called _Prisoner's Dilemma_ where in part he talks about how nations make irrational decisions based on the thinking that "We've already lost so much, we can't quit now". It's kind of like buying a stock and watching it fall in price and holding on because you refuse to lose money on the sale, but you are ignoring the chance that the price could continue to fall. I can't rule out at all that China and North Korea in particular might make irrational decisions that lead to nuclear war as things spiral out of control and they refuse to accept defeat. Or imagine this plausible scenario - Putin orders real nuclear weapons to be put on planes that skirt the airspace of the mainland USA and one of his pilots goes rogue or the plane develops mechanical problems, crashes in US territory, and the nukes on board blow up. You might also remember how back when Reagan was president some Russian officer watching a radar screen saw it "detect" incoming American missiles and he disobeyed his standing orders to not order a retaliatory strike. I'm not convinced at all that a similar thing can't happen now and maybe this time after years of being told how the US is "out to get us in Russia" that guy does order a retaliatory strike over an error and a nuclear war starts. I know that it's always fun to say that the US president, whoever it is, is going to go rogue and nuke somebody, but I don't find that likely. Remember Trump talks a lot. He doesn't actually do much. I find it very likely that he'll actually do absolutely nothing about North Korea and the situation will just get worse and worse with more provocations on their side and Trump continuing to spout of dire warnings and in the end doing nothing.
I don't believe the universe exists merely to screw me over personally, but based on what I've done with investments in the stock market, here's what I think. Bitcoin has long since passed being at the stage where I could gamble a little money on it and if it didn't go up, I could accept the loss. Now it involves a major financial commitment to me to get just one coin. If I made the kind of cash where I could just throw away $6000 and shrug it off if need be, I wouldn't be posting here. So I figure realistically 2 outcomes are possible.
1) If I get in, for sure it will tank and I'll lose thousands of dollars. I wouldn't be surprised if within 6 months its value has decreased by 50%.
2) If I don't get in, it will continue to defy logic and continue to increase in value.
I'll go for #1 which is the only logical course of action.
Illusory superiority is something we probably all have mentally: We all think we're above average employees, when obviously that's impossible.
Studies have shown that incompetent people are actually supremely confident in their own abilities and highly competent people express some doubts about themselves as they are smart enough to recognize how things could be better. So it really is quite possible that the people who got fired have inflated and incorrect opinions of their value to Tesla.
I live in a large, major metropolitan area of the USA and I have to say that both on my commute and just any general driving where I live, everything is getting much worse in terms of other drivers. We have problems here with aggression. Here's an example I see all the time. If you're coming to a stop at a red light, cars behind you will whip over into the next lane if it's empty so they can attempt to go fast and get in front of you once the light turns green. We also have a really big and constant problem here where large numbers of drivers for some reason have decided that left turn people have the right of way, so they will turn in front of oncoming traffic. In a small number of places, poor traffic light planning has made people have to take left turns at intersections with no left turn signal, so there I get this behavior a bit. But I'm seeing it a lot at intersections where they do have left turn signals. Everybody is just extremely impatient. One week on my drive to work I counted 3 different accidents that all seemed to be the result of a left turn driver failing to yield to oncoming traffic. I don't really have a fix for people who magically think the laws of physics don't apply to them (ie. oncoming cars won't hit them) and that they have the right of way when they don't.
I'm more inclined to believe that it's another state-actor or else a very, very large criminal enterprise, something on the international scale.
If a state-actor they want to limit the US and the West generally from bringing Cuba into the fold.
I agree with you. And a smarter administration would be asking the following questions instead of just assuming "evil Cubans did this 'cause they're commies!"
Is there a nation that thrives on chaos and disorder in the world, particularly when it is the cause of such chaos and disorder?
Is there a nation that regards human life so little that it sent agents on a public airline with a radioactive element to kill a dissident and gave no concern to the impact the radioactivity would have on its own agents or the unknowing passengers?
Is there a nation that would benefit from Cuban-USA relations deteriorating?
make accumulating a large digital cinematic library feasible
If you don't have the video in your possession, I don't think it counts as "accumulating a library".
You might not believe how many women disagree with you. It's always the women who force their men ti rip their discs and then get rid of the discs permanently.
I assume Microsoft can't offer support for this software, and I very much doubt Russian authorities would crack down on the copyright infringement, so what's the point of paying for a license that holds no legal significance to anyone involved?
I am asking this in all seriousness - Who actually needs support from Microsoft? If these Russian users are just using Office and Windows and they bought them for compatibility reasons, they don't care about support they were never going to use. Now if you tell me that a huge percentage of the software buys were for Exchange servers, I'd be a lot more inclined towards your argument.
It isn't so bad for/. readers but what about those friends and family who are more-and-more at risk?
This comment is just bizarre and completely backwards. The only people who care about this stuff are people on places like Slashdot. Friends and family who don't work in IT are not losing any sleep over this at all. I can give you my complete guarantee on that. The people who actually do care are few in number.
I can give you a real, no joke answer to that question. In 2014 when the Democrats retake the White House. And sorry folks, but no matter how bad Trump is in 2020, he's winning re-election. The Democrats will again fail to nominate someone who can win a national election in 2020 but they should get it right in 2024. There will likely be a lot of environmental damage to clean up by the time 2024 comes around.
I live in what we call a "red state" (supports the Republican Party in case you don't know what that means) and I'm surrounded by lots of extremely conservative people. They typically think that Fox News is completely fair and objective and right down the middle in its reporting and that CNN is insanely on the left. They usually don't even know that MSNBC even exists. Their heads would explode if they did.
I used to hold up CNN as an example of a news source that I felt was pretty fair to everybody, but not any more. Chris Cillizza writes a lot of articles for their website and he's definitely biased towards the Democratic Party. He sometimes writes articles that make a lot of good points and sometimes you get partisan hack pieces. Other writers are about the same. I can't say I'm surprised to see some Musk bashing. I'd simply say that being 2 years late on a car model when you're not GM, Ford or Chrysler is maybe not that much of a big deal or a surprise. It's not like being 10+ years late. And the monorail reference is stupid. Springfield got the monorail on time. The point was that they didn't really need it in the first place, not that it was years late in being delivered. Musk has a 100 day contract to deliver to South Australia. If he fails to meet the deadline, blast him then. Everybody smart enough not to get paid for writing for CNN probably gets that his "verbal approval" for the hyperloop is vague and preliminary. I like Musk because we need dreamers to see a better future. For example, we last went to the moon over 40 years ago and we still don't know if or when we'll ever go back, let alone get to Mars, in large part because nobody has the vision needed to make tomorrow happen. Everybody would rather just stay in their comfortable rut.
Corrupt Chinese businessmen already have a great money laundering scheme for getting money out of the country. Have a look at property prices in Australia and New Zealand, (there are probably other places too).
They've definitely gone up in Hong Kong too, to the detriment of locals. Hong Kong was already a challenging place to live in due to sky high property prices before mainlanders started messing with the local property market. It's gotten much worse in recent years, which some didn't think was possible.
I used to live in a small town in my state. I moved to the largest metro area over 20 years ago. I had a friend in my hometown that I have completely lost touch with him because he doesn't have any phone at all. I would be shocked if he had a cell phone. He is the cheapest person I've ever seen in my life. He had a good job that paid him well in the local community, but he just refused to pay monthly charges for a phone so he never had one. He had no internet either. I used to send him email, but his work got picky about employees sending and receiving personal email, so that option went away. My only way to contact him became to visit him whenever I was in town and hope he was home, but the last time I tried that he wasn't home and it just became more hassle than it was worth as he didn't live particularly close to my relatives. I would guess maybe I last saw him 17 years ago. If his mother needed to talk to him she either had to call him at work or call his apartment complex's business office and ask them to send somebody down to his apartment and bring him to their phone so she could talk to him. It was a small complex, so amazingly they were willing to do it. All he did was live like a miser and save every extra dime he got. He never married and has no kids so I guess when he dies some distant cousin is going to inherit his money. He probably can never get a date if he even wanted to. Can you imagine telling a woman that you don't have any phone or personal email at all because you're too cheap to pay for it? Yeah, that's going to go over well. The town he lives in isn't that small where he can do that and get away with it.
What I don't like about IT in general is that people can mess up badly, get fired or be allowed to "retire", then go to another company and mess things up there as well. I would love the idea of a professional organization that would ban incompetent people from working in the field after a fair finding of facts.
It may not be as bad as you think. I've personally known of a small number of women who got jobs in various levels of IT management they weren't qualified for and they always ended up having to answer for it. I do want to say that I have also had fantastic female managers in IT, but they were qualified for the jobs. One unqualified lady worked for the government and since they almost never fire anybody, they took away all her direct reports and made her an office of one until she retired. The other few that I knew all eventually got shown the door, one did get a big golden parachute though, and they left IT permanently because they couldn't snowball anybody worthwhile into hiring them again in the field. Those ladies were hired because desperate companies needed to quickly put women in management and they found the first candidates they could get who wanted to take the job. Being qualified for it wasn't a consideration so they had no way to get other jobs in IT as most companies don't hire only because of XX chromosomes so they actually want to know what you've done that makes you a good candidate. When you have interviewers who actually care about the applicants' background and can ask good questions, you can eliminate the bs artists pretty well. One lady I worked for used to constantly spew out the tech double talk du jour ("eat our own dogfood", "rightsize", etc.). Any good interviewer could find in 5 minutes that her actual IT skills were zero.
For the record I've worked for some really excellent women managers in my IT career, but hands down the 2 worst managers I've ever worked for were both women and one of them was moved into management by the company because it had no female managers in any IT office and somehow she got the break of a lifetime and got picked out of the ranks and trained for management simply to show that women could make it. Her lack of solid IT experience eventually became too big a problem to ignore and she was given a golden parachute to leave and is no longer in the industry. I sure wouldn't rule out a very similar thing going on with Equifax here.
But even more, I strongly suspect it's going to come out that Equifax has outsourced its IT to India and probably only has minimal US based IT staff, the vast majority of whom will be on H1-B visas. That doesn't in and of itself mean that they're incompetent, but I've seen this kind of thing before. What happens is that the company outsources or essentially only hires H1-Bs because it doesn't respect the job and while the workers end up being competent, they do only what they are told and no more. So they don't keep up with security patches because nobody told them to do that and they're too overworked to have spare time to look into it. And it could also be that Equifax's management insists that they can't have any downtime at all - ever. It's not common, but I've seen companies insist that they can't ever have any downtime so they don't ever patch anything.
I would have expected this kind of thing in Serbia for sure, not Macedonia. I guess poverty is playing a role here. Macedonia is said to be one of the poorest countries in Europe and that probably makes it easy for Russians to use them as cheap labor for this kind of thing.
China is propping up North Korea because they want a buffer state in the way. They're not exactly pleased with Kim Jong Un's nuclear ambitions, but the last thing they want is a regime change to a more democratic model.
You are correct in your understanding of the situation. I'm not completely convinced that they would really go to North Korea's aid if the US preemptively attacked them. But it's not my decision to make.
I suspect Trump may be trying to broker Putin's help here. This may be a problem that Putin can't solve even if he wanted to. He said as much a few days ago. But Putin, like many Russians, sees the world as a zero sum game and he loves nothing more than to see chaos and disorder effect the USA so he can pose himself as a solution to it. To get Putin's help, the problem has to framed into a situation where Putin wins big time (prestige maybe) and Trump loses big time if Putin solves it. I'm not sure that Trump can agree to that price.
China doesn't see the world as zero sum, but I don't think they fear democracy on the border so much as they do fear US troops on the border in a unified Korea under South Korean rule. As Victor Cha points out in his excellent book, _The Impossible State_, China has less leverage than outsiders think but also more than they have been willing to use. To get China's help, the US has to frame this so that continuing makes China pay a price so high that they will see any alternative as better. There are ways the US could maybe make this kind of case, but will they? Don't know. But continuing in the present situation where North Korea flies missiles over Japan and eventually they will do that to Guam and they'll keep doing nuclear tests is not anything I would agree to accept if I was president. It's hard for me to think that most Chinese are going to be cool with their soldiers being killed to prop up North Korea. There's just not much support for North Korea in general in the Chinese public with the exception of the few, really hard core people who back everything the government does. Trump could potentially tell Xi that if North Korea is allowed to survive the US will pressure China constantly on Hong Kong (the Chinese government is not in compliance with some of the handover treaty) and Taiwan and push for overthrow of the CCP and generally make his life hell day in and day out for the party and its leaders. That might be another way to get China's support. But right now China sees the current situation as its best option, which means provocations will continue and escalate from North Korea.
I have no doubt based on the behavior I see on the road every day in the large American metropolitan area I live and work in that once self driving cars become ubiquitous, somebody is going to figure out how to hack the AI to make it more aggressive. I see people all the time who take crazy chances on the road to get in front of other drivers. Human beings are really good at being jerks and ruining a good thing for everybody else by exploiting it first. So I expect somebody to figure out how to make the AI make the car its controlling go as fast as possible after a light goes green and do other perhaps risky behaviors under the assumption that the others cars will have AI that will let them. Once that happens, it probably will get very unsafe with large numbers of hacked cards jockeying for position all the time on the road under the assumption that the other guy will obey the rules so they don't have to.
White Sox last time, now the Red Sox? What's with teams named after socks?
The Cincinnati Reds were originally the Cincinnati Red Stockings and the name got shortened a long time ago to just Reds. I guess it was just an easy nickname to use and no chance of offending anybody to name yourself after socks. One of the more interesting baseball team names is the Nippon Ham Fighters in the Japanese league. Many Americans incorrectly parse that as Nippon - Ham Fighters like "Ham Fighters" was a thing when actually it should be Nippon Ham - Fighters. Fighters is the team name and Nippon Ham was the owner for a while. It probably didn't help that it was officially spelled as Nippon - Ham Fighters in English. Not sure why they put the - in that location.
I don't tend to expect much from Trump (other than crazy uncle-style Tweeting at all hours) but even he seems to want to do something for the Dreamers. Hopefully, a deal can get done soon.
I don't know how you can seriously believe that. This is just red meat for his supporters, just like talk about The Wall is. One of the things about Trump is that he's actually pretty smart and I think everything he does is according to a plan, it's just not always a good plan and it doesn't always work. He knows full well that Congress will never, ever, pass a law on this for the reasons stated by others here - Republicans who do so will lose in the primaries and Democrats will have to give up something they'll never agree to (ie. funds for the wall) to get it done.
Blocking YouTube is a bit harsh, but I can understand blocking Facebook.
Don't worry. Zuckerberg is trying everything he can think of to change this. That's part of the reason he's learning Mandarin - so he can personally beg the CCP to let Facebook in. If he ever succeeds, I can promise you that what he's going to have to agree to in order to make it happen is going to make freedom advocates very unhappy.
And it's not a case of big, bad commie government doesn't understand anything it can't control. The Chinese government wants stability in the country because if the general population doesn't revolt, they can stay in power. I have been to China several times within the past 10 years and my last 2 girlfriends were born and raised in China ladies. I can tell you that China has quite possibly the most unsophisticated investors on the planet. Here in the USA, if people don't have the money to invest in the stock market, they won't do so. Sometimes they don't have time to research it so they won't invest. And I know some people who have the money but aren't interested in doing it themselves so they just pay people to invest their money for them. In China, lack of knowledge about the stock market and limited funds do not discourage investment. It's crazy, but it's like the entire country is filled with people who fall for Ponzi schemes. The most recent of the two Chinese ladies I mentioned earlier knew on some level that it actually was possible to lose money in the stock market, but she seemed to think that only stupid people ever lost money and the fact that I wasn't putting every dime I had into the market meant that I was throwing away free money. She didn't claim to know what I should be putting that money into, and I do actually put some money into investments, but she often complained that I wasn't putting enough in. Everything I've read about investors in China just convinces me that the general public sees the stock market as a "can't lose" proposition and I can certainly understand the government not wanting to see tons of rip offs done with ICOs that go nowhere and then the population gets upset and social upheaval results.
I agree that Sun made mistakes, but I see 2 major mistakes that you overlooked in your otherwise fine post.
1) I don't have the numbers to back this up, but the internet bubble had to have had a catastrophic effect on their finances. Almost all of those startups that went bust were using Sun equipment and there is no way that equipment was fully paid for by the time those companies went bust. What looked like a huge sales win for Sun suddenly rebounded on them when the market got flooded with excess equipment that wasn't fully paid for.
2) The change in the early 2000s to really cheap Intel/AMD CPU hardware running Linux was completely unanticipated by Sun and they had to scramble after the fact to make something for this market. HP and IBM looked bad in the internet bubble because nobody wanted their stuff, but they rebounded big time when businesses switched to commodity hardware running Linux because they had the ability to make those kinds of machines. Sun lost tons of sales and by the time they competed in that market with their own offerings, the lost business didn't come back.
Oracle Linux: you squandered solaris, one of the great operating systems of our time, and did everything you could to make it a complete pain in the ass to own.
Yeah, Solaris really was great. I spent years as a Solaris admin on my 2 jobs previous to this one and I do miss Solaris at times. I'm not knocking Linux at all, which we use at my current job, but I did like Solaris. Now if you want to talk about not very good OSes, I'd put AIX, DGUX and HPUX as some of the ones I worked with and didn't like much. Every now and then on my current job, and by the way as a company I think we don't officially support Solaris internally any more, I run into people who if they even hear the word Solaris they start foaming at the mouth in anger. I press for details and the typical story is that they only got Linux training and not much of that and their previous employer had maybe 1 old Sun box somewhere in a data center and they didn't know how to administer it because they never got Unix admin training, only a scant amount of Linux admin training, and they aren't always the same. Sorry folks, but don't be playa hatin' just because you didn't get the right training. Totally agree with you here.
Slashdot Mirror
I vaguely recall that division sold the top secret low-noise low-cavitation propellors of nuclear submarines technology to the Ruskies....
How things have changed since...
I did a search on that. That was 30 years ago. Toshiba Machinery and Norway's government owned Kongsberg both were involved in that debacle. Clearly the sales were a violation of export control but at the time it seems that nobody was talking about holding Norway responsible for their part in that and there was some debate about whether that particular sale really was the cause for Soviet submarines getting quieter. Senator Nunn at the time said that Soviet subs were getting quieter prior to the sale.
I've been there several times and I have an ex-girlfriend who was born and raised in Guangdong province, which is the part of China just outside Hong Kong and Macau. She and I talked about this. I can't say for all of China, but definitely in Guangdong and Hong Kong and Macau the people there have, by western standards, weird ideas about dead people. There is some real fear of the dead and of ghosts. Of course there is still land in Hong Kong where they could possibly put a cemetery, even if it just was for cremated remains. The real problem is that no Chinese person in Hong Kong wants to live anywhere near a cemetery and they raise holy hell every time any developer tries to put one near where they live. So the upshot is that nobody can ever build a new cemetery anywhere because there isn't any more land that really isn't inhabited by somebody close enough to complain about it. Think of it kind of like trying to build an above ground nuclear waste disposal site and you're really close to the kind of vehement opposition that cemeteries get there. I think it's been well over 10 years, maybe multiple decades, since the last "new" cemetery got opened there and people threw fits about that but it got done anyway. The government simply doesn't want public order disturbed and have the PLA start flexing its muscle so it's just easier to not build new cemeteries so the residents don't complain and if they have to spend many thousands of dollars of money they don't really have to find a place to stash the ashes of Uncle Fong because they are too scared to live near a cemetery that might solve the problem, then that's just how it is. Short of basically having the PLA kill people or throw them in jail if they complain, there's no real solution for this when citizens are convinced that even seeing a cemetery might bring them "bad luck".
While I've got no idea whether this site is a reliable source for such information, it does seem like a step backward.
Nuclear weapons are always a bad idea. The public relations cost of using them alone could devastate our country. They were always sold to the American public as a temporary weapons system due to the Soviet, then Chinese, threat. Today no country on earth will let lose with these armaments because the retaliation would be devastating.
Even North Korea must know that internally.
We don't really know what some of the leaders of nuclear states are thinking. And it's not only North Korea to worry about.
1) President Xi is more belligerent than any Chinese leader since Mao and he seems to think he is Mao. The CCP has been whipping up the military into an anti-US frenzy for years now and it's only gotten worse under Xi. While I think he is rational, if perhaps a bit short sighted at times, my fear is not that he will start nuking anybody but military people under him may quickly spin out of control in ways he doesn't anticipate and the end result could be an angry China suicidally starting a nuclear war with the US when they start losing a conventional war that they started.
2) Putin is also not crazy, but he's been whipping the Russian military into an anti-US and anti-Western frenzy to support his own power and again, things by those people could spiral out of control. And I do believe that Putin could actually believe he could "win" a nuclear war.
3) North Korea's leader will definitely want to try to nuke everybody he can if the US attacks just to take as many people with him as he can. I'm not sure that NK has any operational nuclear weapons that can go on missiles, but if I'm wrong, it's going to be bad. I could see him even doing a dirty bomb strike internally within NK borders just to take out American troops if they invade.
4) I certainly don't trust Pakistan's leadership and won't rule out that they might think that a nuclear strike against India might get them all quickly to heaven when the inevitable retaliation occurs.
I'm not worried at all that the UK, France, Israel or India will use their weapons against the USA.
You might think my fears are exaggerated, but William Poundstone wrote a book called _Prisoner's Dilemma_ where in part he talks about how nations make irrational decisions based on the thinking that "We've already lost so much, we can't quit now". It's kind of like buying a stock and watching it fall in price and holding on because you refuse to lose money on the sale, but you are ignoring the chance that the price could continue to fall. I can't rule out at all that China and North Korea in particular might make irrational decisions that lead to nuclear war as things spiral out of control and they refuse to accept defeat. Or imagine this plausible scenario - Putin orders real nuclear weapons to be put on planes that skirt the airspace of the mainland USA and one of his pilots goes rogue or the plane develops mechanical problems, crashes in US territory, and the nukes on board blow up. You might also remember how back when Reagan was president some Russian officer watching a radar screen saw it "detect" incoming American missiles and he disobeyed his standing orders to not order a retaliatory strike. I'm not convinced at all that a similar thing can't happen now and maybe this time after years of being told how the US is "out to get us in Russia" that guy does order a retaliatory strike over an error and a nuclear war starts. I know that it's always fun to say that the US president, whoever it is, is going to go rogue and nuke somebody, but I don't find that likely. Remember Trump talks a lot. He doesn't actually do much. I find it very likely that he'll actually do absolutely nothing about North Korea and the situation will just get worse and worse with more provocations on their side and Trump continuing to spout of dire warnings and in the end doing nothing.
What do you all think>?
I don't believe the universe exists merely to screw me over personally, but based on what I've done with investments in the stock market, here's what I think. Bitcoin has long since passed being at the stage where I could gamble a little money on it and if it didn't go up, I could accept the loss. Now it involves a major financial commitment to me to get just one coin. If I made the kind of cash where I could just throw away $6000 and shrug it off if need be, I wouldn't be posting here. So I figure realistically 2 outcomes are possible.
1) If I get in, for sure it will tank and I'll lose thousands of dollars. I wouldn't be surprised if within 6 months its value has decreased by 50%.
2) If I don't get in, it will continue to defy logic and continue to increase in value.
I'll go for #1 which is the only logical course of action.
Illusory superiority is something we probably all have mentally: We all think we're above average employees, when obviously that's impossible.
Studies have shown that incompetent people are actually supremely confident in their own abilities and highly competent people express some doubts about themselves as they are smart enough to recognize how things could be better. So it really is quite possible that the people who got fired have inflated and incorrect opinions of their value to Tesla.
I live in a large, major metropolitan area of the USA and I have to say that both on my commute and just any general driving where I live, everything is getting much worse in terms of other drivers. We have problems here with aggression. Here's an example I see all the time. If you're coming to a stop at a red light, cars behind you will whip over into the next lane if it's empty so they can attempt to go fast and get in front of you once the light turns green. We also have a really big and constant problem here where large numbers of drivers for some reason have decided that left turn people have the right of way, so they will turn in front of oncoming traffic. In a small number of places, poor traffic light planning has made people have to take left turns at intersections with no left turn signal, so there I get this behavior a bit. But I'm seeing it a lot at intersections where they do have left turn signals. Everybody is just extremely impatient. One week on my drive to work I counted 3 different accidents that all seemed to be the result of a left turn driver failing to yield to oncoming traffic. I don't really have a fix for people who magically think the laws of physics don't apply to them (ie. oncoming cars won't hit them) and that they have the right of way when they don't.
*grin* subtle, at least initially.
I'm more inclined to believe that it's another state-actor or else a very, very large criminal enterprise, something on the international scale.
If a state-actor they want to limit the US and the West generally from bringing Cuba into the fold.
I agree with you. And a smarter administration would be asking the following questions instead of just assuming "evil Cubans did this 'cause they're commies!"
Is there a nation that thrives on chaos and disorder in the world, particularly when it is the cause of such chaos and disorder?
Is there a nation that regards human life so little that it sent agents on a public airline with a radioactive element to kill a dissident and gave no concern to the impact the radioactivity would have on its own agents or the unknowing passengers?
Is there a nation that would benefit from Cuban-USA relations deteriorating?
The answer to all of the above is Russia.
make accumulating a large digital cinematic library feasible
If you don't have the video in your possession, I don't think it counts as "accumulating a library".
You might not believe how many women disagree with you. It's always the women who force their men ti rip their discs and then get rid of the discs permanently.
I assume Microsoft can't offer support for this software, and I very much doubt Russian authorities would crack down on the copyright infringement, so what's the point of paying for a license that holds no legal significance to anyone involved?
I am asking this in all seriousness - Who actually needs support from Microsoft? If these Russian users are just using Office and Windows and they bought them for compatibility reasons, they don't care about support they were never going to use. Now if you tell me that a huge percentage of the software buys were for Exchange servers, I'd be a lot more inclined towards your argument.
It isn't so bad for /. readers but what about those friends and family who are more-and-more at risk?
This comment is just bizarre and completely backwards. The only people who care about this stuff are people on places like Slashdot. Friends and family who don't work in IT are not losing any sleep over this at all. I can give you my complete guarantee on that. The people who actually do care are few in number.
When will this insanity end?
I can give you a real, no joke answer to that question. In 2014 when the Democrats retake the White House. And sorry folks, but no matter how bad Trump is in 2020, he's winning re-election. The Democrats will again fail to nominate someone who can win a national election in 2020 but they should get it right in 2024. There will likely be a lot of environmental damage to clean up by the time 2024 comes around.
I live in what we call a "red state" (supports the Republican Party in case you don't know what that means) and I'm surrounded by lots of extremely conservative people. They typically think that Fox News is completely fair and objective and right down the middle in its reporting and that CNN is insanely on the left. They usually don't even know that MSNBC even exists. Their heads would explode if they did.
I used to hold up CNN as an example of a news source that I felt was pretty fair to everybody, but not any more. Chris Cillizza writes a lot of articles for their website and he's definitely biased towards the Democratic Party. He sometimes writes articles that make a lot of good points and sometimes you get partisan hack pieces. Other writers are about the same. I can't say I'm surprised to see some Musk bashing. I'd simply say that being 2 years late on a car model when you're not GM, Ford or Chrysler is maybe not that much of a big deal or a surprise. It's not like being 10+ years late. And the monorail reference is stupid. Springfield got the monorail on time. The point was that they didn't really need it in the first place, not that it was years late in being delivered. Musk has a 100 day contract to deliver to South Australia. If he fails to meet the deadline, blast him then. Everybody smart enough not to get paid for writing for CNN probably gets that his "verbal approval" for the hyperloop is vague and preliminary. I like Musk because we need dreamers to see a better future. For example, we last went to the moon over 40 years ago and we still don't know if or when we'll ever go back, let alone get to Mars, in large part because nobody has the vision needed to make tomorrow happen. Everybody would rather just stay in their comfortable rut.
Corrupt Chinese businessmen already have a great money laundering scheme for getting money out of the country. Have a look at property prices in Australia and New Zealand, (there are probably other places too).
They've definitely gone up in Hong Kong too, to the detriment of locals. Hong Kong was already a challenging place to live in due to sky high property prices before mainlanders started messing with the local property market. It's gotten much worse in recent years, which some didn't think was possible.
I used to live in a small town in my state. I moved to the largest metro area over 20 years ago. I had a friend in my hometown that I have completely lost touch with him because he doesn't have any phone at all. I would be shocked if he had a cell phone. He is the cheapest person I've ever seen in my life. He had a good job that paid him well in the local community, but he just refused to pay monthly charges for a phone so he never had one. He had no internet either. I used to send him email, but his work got picky about employees sending and receiving personal email, so that option went away. My only way to contact him became to visit him whenever I was in town and hope he was home, but the last time I tried that he wasn't home and it just became more hassle than it was worth as he didn't live particularly close to my relatives. I would guess maybe I last saw him 17 years ago. If his mother needed to talk to him she either had to call him at work or call his apartment complex's business office and ask them to send somebody down to his apartment and bring him to their phone so she could talk to him. It was a small complex, so amazingly they were willing to do it. All he did was live like a miser and save every extra dime he got. He never married and has no kids so I guess when he dies some distant cousin is going to inherit his money. He probably can never get a date if he even wanted to. Can you imagine telling a woman that you don't have any phone or personal email at all because you're too cheap to pay for it? Yeah, that's going to go over well. The town he lives in isn't that small where he can do that and get away with it.
What I don't like about IT in general is that people can mess up badly, get fired or be allowed to "retire", then go to another company and mess things up there as well. I would love the idea of a professional organization that would ban incompetent people from working in the field after a fair finding of facts.
It may not be as bad as you think. I've personally known of a small number of women who got jobs in various levels of IT management they weren't qualified for and they always ended up having to answer for it. I do want to say that I have also had fantastic female managers in IT, but they were qualified for the jobs. One unqualified lady worked for the government and since they almost never fire anybody, they took away all her direct reports and made her an office of one until she retired. The other few that I knew all eventually got shown the door, one did get a big golden parachute though, and they left IT permanently because they couldn't snowball anybody worthwhile into hiring them again in the field. Those ladies were hired because desperate companies needed to quickly put women in management and they found the first candidates they could get who wanted to take the job. Being qualified for it wasn't a consideration so they had no way to get other jobs in IT as most companies don't hire only because of XX chromosomes so they actually want to know what you've done that makes you a good candidate. When you have interviewers who actually care about the applicants' background and can ask good questions, you can eliminate the bs artists pretty well. One lady I worked for used to constantly spew out the tech double talk du jour ("eat our own dogfood", "rightsize", etc.). Any good interviewer could find in 5 minutes that her actual IT skills were zero.
For the record I've worked for some really excellent women managers in my IT career, but hands down the 2 worst managers I've ever worked for were both women and one of them was moved into management by the company because it had no female managers in any IT office and somehow she got the break of a lifetime and got picked out of the ranks and trained for management simply to show that women could make it. Her lack of solid IT experience eventually became too big a problem to ignore and she was given a golden parachute to leave and is no longer in the industry. I sure wouldn't rule out a very similar thing going on with Equifax here.
But even more, I strongly suspect it's going to come out that Equifax has outsourced its IT to India and probably only has minimal US based IT staff, the vast majority of whom will be on H1-B visas. That doesn't in and of itself mean that they're incompetent, but I've seen this kind of thing before. What happens is that the company outsources or essentially only hires H1-Bs because it doesn't respect the job and while the workers end up being competent, they do only what they are told and no more. So they don't keep up with security patches because nobody told them to do that and they're too overworked to have spare time to look into it. And it could also be that Equifax's management insists that they can't have any downtime at all - ever. It's not common, but I've seen companies insist that they can't ever have any downtime so they don't ever patch anything.
I would have expected this kind of thing in Serbia for sure, not Macedonia. I guess poverty is playing a role here. Macedonia is said to be one of the poorest countries in Europe and that probably makes it easy for Russians to use them as cheap labor for this kind of thing.
China is propping up North Korea because they want a buffer state in the way. They're not exactly pleased with Kim Jong Un's nuclear ambitions, but the last thing they want is a regime change to a more democratic model.
You are correct in your understanding of the situation. I'm not completely convinced that they would really go to North Korea's aid if the US preemptively attacked them. But it's not my decision to make.
I suspect Trump may be trying to broker Putin's help here. This may be a problem that Putin can't solve even if he wanted to. He said as much a few days ago. But Putin, like many Russians, sees the world as a zero sum game and he loves nothing more than to see chaos and disorder effect the USA so he can pose himself as a solution to it. To get Putin's help, the problem has to framed into a situation where Putin wins big time (prestige maybe) and Trump loses big time if Putin solves it. I'm not sure that Trump can agree to that price.
China doesn't see the world as zero sum, but I don't think they fear democracy on the border so much as they do fear US troops on the border in a unified Korea under South Korean rule. As Victor Cha points out in his excellent book, _The Impossible State_, China has less leverage than outsiders think but also more than they have been willing to use. To get China's help, the US has to frame this so that continuing makes China pay a price so high that they will see any alternative as better. There are ways the US could maybe make this kind of case, but will they? Don't know. But continuing in the present situation where North Korea flies missiles over Japan and eventually they will do that to Guam and they'll keep doing nuclear tests is not anything I would agree to accept if I was president. It's hard for me to think that most Chinese are going to be cool with their soldiers being killed to prop up North Korea. There's just not much support for North Korea in general in the Chinese public with the exception of the few, really hard core people who back everything the government does. Trump could potentially tell Xi that if North Korea is allowed to survive the US will pressure China constantly on Hong Kong (the Chinese government is not in compliance with some of the handover treaty) and Taiwan and push for overthrow of the CCP and generally make his life hell day in and day out for the party and its leaders. That might be another way to get China's support. But right now China sees the current situation as its best option, which means provocations will continue and escalate from North Korea.
I have no doubt based on the behavior I see on the road every day in the large American metropolitan area I live and work in that once self driving cars become ubiquitous, somebody is going to figure out how to hack the AI to make it more aggressive. I see people all the time who take crazy chances on the road to get in front of other drivers. Human beings are really good at being jerks and ruining a good thing for everybody else by exploiting it first. So I expect somebody to figure out how to make the AI make the car its controlling go as fast as possible after a light goes green and do other perhaps risky behaviors under the assumption that the others cars will have AI that will let them. Once that happens, it probably will get very unsafe with large numbers of hacked cards jockeying for position all the time on the road under the assumption that the other guy will obey the rules so they don't have to.
White Sox last time, now the Red Sox? What's with teams named after socks?
The Cincinnati Reds were originally the Cincinnati Red Stockings and the name got shortened a long time ago to just Reds. I guess it was just an easy nickname to use and no chance of offending anybody to name yourself after socks. One of the more interesting baseball team names is the Nippon Ham Fighters in the Japanese league. Many Americans incorrectly parse that as Nippon - Ham Fighters like "Ham Fighters" was a thing when actually it should be Nippon Ham - Fighters. Fighters is the team name and Nippon Ham was the owner for a while. It probably didn't help that it was officially spelled as Nippon - Ham Fighters in English. Not sure why they put the - in that location.
I don't tend to expect much from Trump (other than crazy uncle-style Tweeting at all hours) but even he seems to want to do something for the Dreamers. Hopefully, a deal can get done soon.
I don't know how you can seriously believe that. This is just red meat for his supporters, just like talk about The Wall is. One of the things about Trump is that he's actually pretty smart and I think everything he does is according to a plan, it's just not always a good plan and it doesn't always work. He knows full well that Congress will never, ever, pass a law on this for the reasons stated by others here - Republicans who do so will lose in the primaries and Democrats will have to give up something they'll never agree to (ie. funds for the wall) to get it done.
Blocking YouTube is a bit harsh, but I can understand blocking Facebook.
Don't worry. Zuckerberg is trying everything he can think of to change this. That's part of the reason he's learning Mandarin - so he can personally beg the CCP to let Facebook in. If he ever succeeds, I can promise you that what he's going to have to agree to in order to make it happen is going to make freedom advocates very unhappy.
And it's not a case of big, bad commie government doesn't understand anything it can't control. The Chinese government wants stability in the country because if the general population doesn't revolt, they can stay in power. I have been to China several times within the past 10 years and my last 2 girlfriends were born and raised in China ladies. I can tell you that China has quite possibly the most unsophisticated investors on the planet. Here in the USA, if people don't have the money to invest in the stock market, they won't do so. Sometimes they don't have time to research it so they won't invest. And I know some people who have the money but aren't interested in doing it themselves so they just pay people to invest their money for them. In China, lack of knowledge about the stock market and limited funds do not discourage investment. It's crazy, but it's like the entire country is filled with people who fall for Ponzi schemes. The most recent of the two Chinese ladies I mentioned earlier knew on some level that it actually was possible to lose money in the stock market, but she seemed to think that only stupid people ever lost money and the fact that I wasn't putting every dime I had into the market meant that I was throwing away free money. She didn't claim to know what I should be putting that money into, and I do actually put some money into investments, but she often complained that I wasn't putting enough in. Everything I've read about investors in China just convinces me that the general public sees the stock market as a "can't lose" proposition and I can certainly understand the government not wanting to see tons of rip offs done with ICOs that go nowhere and then the population gets upset and social upheaval results.
I agree that Sun made mistakes, but I see 2 major mistakes that you overlooked in your otherwise fine post.
1) I don't have the numbers to back this up, but the internet bubble had to have had a catastrophic effect on their finances. Almost all of those startups that went bust were using Sun equipment and there is no way that equipment was fully paid for by the time those companies went bust. What looked like a huge sales win for Sun suddenly rebounded on them when the market got flooded with excess equipment that wasn't fully paid for.
2) The change in the early 2000s to really cheap Intel/AMD CPU hardware running Linux was completely unanticipated by Sun and they had to scramble after the fact to make something for this market. HP and IBM looked bad in the internet bubble because nobody wanted their stuff, but they rebounded big time when businesses switched to commodity hardware running Linux because they had the ability to make those kinds of machines. Sun lost tons of sales and by the time they competed in that market with their own offerings, the lost business didn't come back.
Oracle Linux: you squandered solaris, one of the great operating systems of our time, and did everything you could to make it a complete pain in the ass to own.
Yeah, Solaris really was great. I spent years as a Solaris admin on my 2 jobs previous to this one and I do miss Solaris at times. I'm not knocking Linux at all, which we use at my current job, but I did like Solaris. Now if you want to talk about not very good OSes, I'd put AIX, DGUX and HPUX as some of the ones I worked with and didn't like much. Every now and then on my current job, and by the way as a company I think we don't officially support Solaris internally any more, I run into people who if they even hear the word Solaris they start foaming at the mouth in anger. I press for details and the typical story is that they only got Linux training and not much of that and their previous employer had maybe 1 old Sun box somewhere in a data center and they didn't know how to administer it because they never got Unix admin training, only a scant amount of Linux admin training, and they aren't always the same. Sorry folks, but don't be playa hatin' just because you didn't get the right training. Totally agree with you here.