Most of now have privacy policies where we disclose what data we collect and what we do with it. If that disclosure is defective, you're in legal jeopardy for failure to disclose. Thanks for the poison pill, MS!
And, haven't they considered that the whole Apple/FBI thing might have implications for them and their developers, just maybe? If not legal issues, then PR at the very least? Stunning!
The 64-bit version of Office isn't exactly a resounding success. The Office install program even strongly encourages you to use the 32-bit version unless you have a compelling reason to install the 64-bitter. Memory bloat is an issue, but the biggie is compatibility with add-ins: a lot of them are NOT 64-bit ready, including some of Microsoft's own. The 64-bitter doesn't feel any more responsive and starts up slower on older systems.
There are some strong similarities between Office and VS: flagship products, extensive 3rd-party ecosystem including add-ins, IO-bound, massive codebase & dependencies. Emphatically not just a matter of a changing a few compile switches!
Reminds me of scenes from Gibson's Neuromancer-era books where people could illicitly buy "ice" to penetrate a particular type of target. Ice for hard targets was pricey but very user-friendly: just a particular shape they dropped onto the target in their VR headset and then watched it eat its way in, all without knowing its workings.
Electricity, my car's brakes, email: failure NOT OK. Their dependability is what makes them useful.
Nimble; agile. failing fast. It's a valuable idea, but it's not for every organization. If you're developing something new, failure is probably OK as long as you can pick up the pieces.
If you're on the operational side of making something work day in and day out, it it NOT OK. Most outfits fall into that category.
Seems like I'm hearing more & more of my customers adopting the"fail fast, fail often" mantra. I say you have to seriously consider which kind of outfit you are before you drink that particular Kool Aid du jour!
Long term, it's probably true that the effect will be a wash.
The typical cycle of automation is that there's some kind of crunch (bad economy, rising wages, etc.) which causes businesses to streamline, including adopting automation.
However, managers are lazy like everybody else, and continually keeping their operations lean & mean would take sustained effort, so head counts creep up again.
When the economy eventually expands (it will, sooner or later), businesses hire even more. They don't automate then because a) automation requires making an investment, yet they can't be sure that the good times will last so it's safer to hire someone who can be easily fired, and b) automating takes management time & effort, plus productivity typically takes a short-term hit, neither of which is acceptable during an expansion phase, i.e. "can't you see we're busy making money now?" In management-speak: staffing up is more flexible and less disruptive than automation.
Sounds good in theory, but look around any retirement home for a strong counterexample. You'll see a lot more people watching TV than painting, writing books, studying, etc. Yes, they're old, but that's not why they're vegging out. It's because they're people. It's often been said that most people start dying the minute they retire.
Can anybody say for a fact whether they have this kind of regulation in France or Belgium?
My guess is that ID most likely is required, seeing how ID seems to required for almost everything in much of Europe. If so, doesn't seem to have hindered the Paris & Brussels terrorists from reportedly buying entire cases of burner phones.
Or maybe the other old-fashioned way: people talk.
But, finding and getting witnesses to talk takes old-fashioned police work. Often lots of it. You can't can't blame the cops for wanting to automate their work like the rest of the data-driven corporate world: push a button, out comes a bad guy handcuffed & ready to prosecute.
That then brings us back to the real discussion we should be having: how powerful do we want the cops and the state to be? Many people will say that everybody should obey all laws at all times, and that law enforcement should be powerful enough to make that stick. Imagine police that sees everything and has automated capabilities to analyze and prosecute every little thing. Toss a chewing gum wrapper on the ground? A drone spots it, ticket via e-mail, the fine automatically deducted from your bank account -- all before the wrapper even hits the pavement. Serves 'em right, you say? Everybody'd have to give up on even thinking about breaking the law. Sound good (aside from the free will thing)?
Problem is that the design of laws themselves are inherently limited by what can and can't be reasonably enforced. In other words, laws are (mostly) tailored to what the authorities can enforce. Give the police more power and the gov't will make more & more laws to take advantage of those new capabilities, often at the behest of special interests. Kissing in public? Late for work? Chewing gum on the street? Mismatched socks?
"Give a child a hammer and he will find a nail to hit."
It's easier to learn entry-level stats with a cookbook approach than it is to learn advanced algebra or calculus. Especially if the stats course is designed for soft-sciences majors. Just memorize a few formulas and procedures and you'll at least do OK on the exam.
That may be the situation in your neck of the woods, but I assure you that most banks do take locking down their communications very seriously. I've informally heard of big messes that all the bank's horses and all the bank's men couldn't untangle.
All that goes double for the people doing SCADA (industrial system control and data acquisition) for hydro dams, power plants and other systems that could kill people or cause major disasters. They weren't always that careful, but they're now getting religion.
Authentication and tamper-proofing are built on encryption, too. Privacy is indisputably very important, but much of the modern world couldn't even exist without trustworthy authentication and communication. Those are built on the same technology (including encryption) as privacy.
For example, when bank computers are talking (between banks, or even just internally), they need to be 100.0000% certain who they're talking to and that the message received is the same as the one that was sent. It's flat-out impossible to do that on a large scale without encryption. Otherwise, they'd end up talking to impostors, or some "man in the middle" could just add a few extra zeros to that bank transfer. The same goes for control centers talking to hydroelectric dams, nuclear reactors, traffic lights, etc.
If we establish precedents that could lead to more encryption backdoors, those will get out sooner or later, as surely as the air in your car's tires eventually escapes. Then you can watch the carnage when traffic lights show green on all sides, floods when dams open all their floodgates simultaneously, and the pandemonium when banks have to turn off credit card readers and ATMs. I'm not ready to go back to standing in line at the bank for cash, or wait for sales clerks to phone in every credit card transaction for authorization.
Really, a "security" organization like the FBI want to roll the dice on this? Newsflash: there are highly-motivated, well-financed bad people out there who will exploit any security weaknesses for financial and political reasons, or just for the hell of it. And they'll spy, bribe, blackmail, extort, kidnap, torture, and threaten families to get those backdoors if they're there to be had.
This particular case is just the excuse the FBI's been waiting for. They've been all hot & bothered about unbreakable encryption, been lying in wait to make their move. This is it.
They picked an infamous case and are milking it like it's 911 all over again. In reality, the perps are very dead so we're reasonably sure there's no imminent danger from them, and the police has already subpoenaed the phone company for calling records to find any associates. What are they hoping to find -- a recipe for hummus?
The real prize for the FBI is that, once Apple creates this hack, the FBI will either have a handy decoder to use at will in the future, or they'll have a handy legal precedent for forcing computer manufacturers' hands. Either way, the FBI wins big if Apple loses.
Speaking of Apple losing: I wouldn't bet on it. Even in the traditional "lawyers, guns & money" match-up, Apple wins hands-down in 2 out of 3. Then add - Motivation: Apple stands to regain or lose the trust of the entire international market over this, worth $billions & billions. The stakes for Apple couldn't be higher. - Public image & trust: let's just say that Apple is a very strong brand name... - PR/communications savvy: not even a fair fight - Public sentiment about the "authorities": something's driving voters to Trump & Bernie, and it ain't their hair styles. - Tim Cook: outspoken member of a community that's hyper-aware that you've gotta fight for your rights
Most people need externally-imposed structure, even though they hate it. Otherwise, it's too easy to put things off until "later." Case in point: statistics inform me, dear reader, that you're probably 10+ pounds over your ideal weight. As a/. reader, you probably consider yourself to be above-average motivated, etc, but I'll bet you're (still) planning to get rid of the weight, and how's that working out? Now, if you suddenly couldn't get any kind of sex whenever you're 3+ lbs. over your ideal weight, how long would it take you to get and stay skinny?
For many people, financial need is what gives them that sense of urgency. Some may view having a "crappy" job like working as a waiter as human bondage that should be automated, but they're ignoring the fact that said job is what gets that person up in the morning and gives their life structure. Otherwise, it's just too easy to smoke a joint and think about what you'd like to do today... but probably won't get around to doing.
I grew up with a lot of kids with rich-kid allowances. Not huge amounts of money, but typically in that annual $30 - 60K range that's being proposed for a UBI. In about half the cases they've wasted their potential. In other words, they're middle-aged fuck-ups still sucking on the parental teat, and their well-meaning parents can't bring themselves to cut them off.
And guess what? They mostly spend their days pleasantly high or buzzed. Based on this (not conjecture), my experience is that giving many people an allowance gives them one less reason to stay off drink and drugs.
let me know where I can get free food, free gas and a free mortgage!
Nobody's interested if the free food that has viruses in it. Same for free gas that has water in it, or a rent-free house with a gas leak. Such things are called toxic waste and/or public hazards.
Just print up whatever piece you like with appropriately-sized empty pockets where you can glue original Lego bricks (available as small as 1x1) or plates that will mate with the other bricks in your project. Tight tolerances and the right kind of plastic only really matter for the actual pins and sockets which must mate with the other blocks. And, there's always sandpaper if the body of a printed piece is a shade too large. That is how real manufacturers typically do things: they use high-precision or high-strength inserts only where it counts.
But really, just forget the whizzbang 3D printer thingy. Take Lego brick(s) and apply Sugru, Fimo, acrylic or urethane resin, whatever, around them to make your piece. You could use other Lego pieces as scaffolding or molds (use mold release) if necessary. You'll save hours of frustration and get a much better surface finish than any 3D printer in the bargain.
Reading the original article, it's pretty clear the data-recovery company decided to pitch a press release to capitalize their little brush with celebrity. It's a slow tech news season and all, so PCWorld took the bait and published the press release with little change.
People recover CP/M floppies every day. It's a routine job well within any decent recovery company's skill set. The only thing that's special is the Roddenberry connection.
Insurers are the *last* people who want to see global risk diminish. Their business model is to figure out how much they'll have to pay out & mark that up by x%. The last thing they want is to have claims go down, since that would eventually cause the industry to reduce premiums, thus reducing the $ profit. Notice the % stays the same, but the $ go down.
Sometimes insurance companies will offer you ways to reduce risk, but that's either PR spin or they figure they can gain a short-term advantage over their competitors. In the long term, they love risk as long as the field is level for all the insurers.
No more sealed-edge pilfer-proof packaging that makes it:
- unreasonably hard to get at the contents
- necessary to use tools
- hard to return the product
- easy to cut your hand on jagged edges
Imagine if beer were packaged like that! Wouldn't be good for sales...
How about a flat $50K/year tax payable straight to the gov't? Think of that as a tariff or duty. This would have several advantages:
- Simple & stupid, can't game a flat fee
- That kind of revenue wold keep the gov't interested in enforcing the program
- Makes the process of hiring offshore much more expensive. Remember, the idea is that hiring offshore is supposed to be a *last* resort, so $50K wouldn't deter someone who truly needed a particular skill.
- Makes it impractical to hire offshore lower-level employees, the kind that we already have plenty of and who are blatantly being replaced with foreigners just to save money.
Slashdot Mirror
And whatever happened to 3 strikes laws?! If this guy isn't a poster boy for that, what is?
Most of now have privacy policies where we disclose what data we collect and what we do with it. If that disclosure is defective, you're in legal jeopardy for failure to disclose. Thanks for the poison pill, MS!
And, haven't they considered that the whole Apple/FBI thing might have implications for them and their developers, just maybe? If not legal issues, then PR at the very least? Stunning!
The 64-bit version of Office isn't exactly a resounding success. The Office install program even strongly encourages you to use the 32-bit version unless you have a compelling reason to install the 64-bitter. Memory bloat is an issue, but the biggie is compatibility with add-ins: a lot of them are NOT 64-bit ready, including some of Microsoft's own. The 64-bitter doesn't feel any more responsive and starts up slower on older systems.
There are some strong similarities between Office and VS: flagship products, extensive 3rd-party ecosystem including add-ins, IO-bound, massive codebase & dependencies. Emphatically not just a matter of a changing a few compile switches!
Undetectable hi-res surveillance cameras the size of a flea just got one giant leap closer to reality.
Reminds me of scenes from Gibson's Neuromancer-era books where people could illicitly buy "ice" to penetrate a particular type of target. Ice for hard targets was pricey but very user-friendly: just a particular shape they dropped onto the target in their VR headset and then watched it eat its way in, all without knowing its workings.
Electricity, my car's brakes, email: failure NOT OK. Their dependability is what makes them useful.
Nimble; agile. failing fast. It's a valuable idea, but it's not for every organization. If you're developing something new, failure is probably OK as long as you can pick up the pieces.
If you're on the operational side of making something work day in and day out, it it NOT OK. Most outfits fall into that category.
Seems like I'm hearing more & more of my customers adopting the"fail fast, fail often" mantra. I say you have to seriously consider which kind of outfit you are before you drink that particular Kool Aid du jour!
Long term, it's probably true that the effect will be a wash.
The typical cycle of automation is that there's some kind of crunch (bad economy, rising wages, etc.) which causes businesses to streamline, including adopting automation.
However, managers are lazy like everybody else, and continually keeping their operations lean & mean would take sustained effort, so head counts creep up again.
When the economy eventually expands (it will, sooner or later), businesses hire even more. They don't automate then because a) automation requires making an investment, yet they can't be sure that the good times will last so it's safer to hire someone who can be easily fired, and b) automating takes management time & effort, plus productivity typically takes a short-term hit, neither of which is acceptable during an expansion phase, i.e. "can't you see we're busy making money now?" In management-speak: staffing up is more flexible and less disruptive than automation.
Wash, rinse & repeat.
...or maybe they go to Walmart and buy some day-to-day Made in China stuff. $15/hr doesn't automatically translate into eating out and getting a maid.
Sounds good in theory, but look around any retirement home for a strong counterexample. You'll see a lot more people watching TV than painting, writing books, studying, etc. Yes, they're old, but that's not why they're vegging out. It's because they're people. It's often been said that most people start dying the minute they retire.
Can anybody say for a fact whether they have this kind of regulation in France or Belgium?
My guess is that ID most likely is required, seeing how ID seems to required for almost everything in much of Europe. If so, doesn't seem to have hindered the Paris & Brussels terrorists from reportedly buying entire cases of burner phones.
Or maybe the other old-fashioned way: people talk.
But, finding and getting witnesses to talk takes old-fashioned police work. Often lots of it. You can't can't blame the cops for wanting to automate their work like the rest of the data-driven corporate world: push a button, out comes a bad guy handcuffed & ready to prosecute.
That then brings us back to the real discussion we should be having: how powerful do we want the cops and the state to be? Many people will say that everybody should obey all laws at all times, and that law enforcement should be powerful enough to make that stick. Imagine police that sees everything and has automated capabilities to analyze and prosecute every little thing. Toss a chewing gum wrapper on the ground? A drone spots it, ticket via e-mail, the fine automatically deducted from your bank account -- all before the wrapper even hits the pavement. Serves 'em right, you say? Everybody'd have to give up on even thinking about breaking the law. Sound good (aside from the free will thing)?
Problem is that the design of laws themselves are inherently limited by what can and can't be reasonably enforced. In other words, laws are (mostly) tailored to what the authorities can enforce. Give the police more power and the gov't will make more & more laws to take advantage of those new capabilities, often at the behest of special interests. Kissing in public? Late for work? Chewing gum on the street? Mismatched socks?
"Give a child a hammer and he will find a nail to hit."
Funny, the Constitution is exactly that: absolutist.
It's easier to learn entry-level stats with a cookbook approach than it is to learn advanced algebra or calculus. Especially if the stats course is designed for soft-sciences majors. Just memorize a few formulas and procedures and you'll at least do OK on the exam.
That may be the situation in your neck of the woods, but I assure you that most banks do take locking down their communications very seriously. I've informally heard of big messes that all the bank's horses and all the bank's men couldn't untangle.
All that goes double for the people doing SCADA (industrial system control and data acquisition) for hydro dams, power plants and other systems that could kill people or cause major disasters. They weren't always that careful, but they're now getting religion.
Why aren't big USERS like banks not freaking out?
Authentication and tamper-proofing are built on encryption, too. Privacy is indisputably very important, but much of the modern world couldn't even exist without trustworthy authentication and communication. Those are built on the same technology (including encryption) as privacy.
For example, when bank computers are talking (between banks, or even just internally), they need to be 100.0000% certain who they're talking to and that the message received is the same as the one that was sent. It's flat-out impossible to do that on a large scale without encryption. Otherwise, they'd end up talking to impostors, or some "man in the middle" could just add a few extra zeros to that bank transfer. The same goes for control centers talking to hydroelectric dams, nuclear reactors, traffic lights, etc.
If we establish precedents that could lead to more encryption backdoors, those will get out sooner or later, as surely as the air in your car's tires eventually escapes. Then you can watch the carnage when traffic lights show green on all sides, floods when dams open all their floodgates simultaneously, and the pandemonium when banks have to turn off credit card readers and ATMs. I'm not ready to go back to standing in line at the bank for cash, or wait for sales clerks to phone in every credit card transaction for authorization.
Really, a "security" organization like the FBI want to roll the dice on this? Newsflash: there are highly-motivated, well-financed bad people out there who will exploit any security weaknesses for financial and political reasons, or just for the hell of it. And they'll spy, bribe, blackmail, extort, kidnap, torture, and threaten families to get those backdoors if they're there to be had.
This particular case is just the excuse the FBI's been waiting for. They've been all hot & bothered about unbreakable encryption, been lying in wait to make their move. This is it.
They picked an infamous case and are milking it like it's 911 all over again. In reality, the perps are very dead so we're reasonably sure there's no imminent danger from them, and the police has already subpoenaed the phone company for calling records to find any associates. What are they hoping to find -- a recipe for hummus?
The real prize for the FBI is that, once Apple creates this hack, the FBI will either have a handy decoder to use at will in the future, or they'll have a handy legal precedent for forcing computer manufacturers' hands. Either way, the FBI wins big if Apple loses.
Speaking of Apple losing: I wouldn't bet on it. Even in the traditional "lawyers, guns & money" match-up, Apple wins hands-down in 2 out of 3. Then add
- Motivation: Apple stands to regain or lose the trust of the entire international market over this, worth $billions & billions. The stakes for Apple couldn't be higher.
- Public image & trust: let's just say that Apple is a very strong brand name...
- PR/communications savvy: not even a fair fight
- Public sentiment about the "authorities": something's driving voters to Trump & Bernie, and it ain't their hair styles.
- Tim Cook: outspoken member of a community that's hyper-aware that you've gotta fight for your rights
I'd have picked a weaker adversary.
Most people need externally-imposed structure, even though they hate it. Otherwise, it's too easy to put things off until "later." Case in point: statistics inform me, dear reader, that you're probably 10+ pounds over your ideal weight. As a /. reader, you probably consider yourself to be above-average motivated, etc, but I'll bet you're (still) planning to get rid of the weight, and how's that working out? Now, if you suddenly couldn't get any kind of sex whenever you're 3+ lbs. over your ideal weight, how long would it take you to get and stay skinny?
For many people, financial need is what gives them that sense of urgency. Some may view having a "crappy" job like working as a waiter as human bondage that should be automated, but they're ignoring the fact that said job is what gets that person up in the morning and gives their life structure. Otherwise, it's just too easy to smoke a joint and think about what you'd like to do today... but probably won't get around to doing.
I grew up with a lot of kids with rich-kid allowances. Not huge amounts of money, but typically in that annual $30 - 60K range that's being proposed for a UBI. In about half the cases they've wasted their potential. In other words, they're middle-aged fuck-ups still sucking on the parental teat, and their well-meaning parents can't bring themselves to cut them off.
And guess what? They mostly spend their days pleasantly high or buzzed. Based on this (not conjecture), my experience is that giving many people an allowance gives them one less reason to stay off drink and drugs.
let me know where I can get free food, free gas and a free mortgage!
Nobody's interested if the free food that has viruses in it. Same for free gas that has water in it, or a rent-free house with a gas leak. Such things are called toxic waste and/or public hazards.
Just print up whatever piece you like with appropriately-sized empty pockets where you can glue original Lego bricks (available as small as 1x1) or plates that will mate with the other bricks in your project. Tight tolerances and the right kind of plastic only really matter for the actual pins and sockets which must mate with the other blocks. And, there's always sandpaper if the body of a printed piece is a shade too large. That is how real manufacturers typically do things: they use high-precision or high-strength inserts only where it counts.
But really, just forget the whizzbang 3D printer thingy. Take Lego brick(s) and apply Sugru, Fimo, acrylic or urethane resin, whatever, around them to make your piece. You could use other Lego pieces as scaffolding or molds (use mold release) if necessary. You'll save hours of frustration and get a much better surface finish than any 3D printer in the bargain.
Reading the original article, it's pretty clear the data-recovery company decided to pitch a press release to capitalize their little brush with celebrity. It's a slow tech news season and all, so PCWorld took the bait and published the press release with little change.
People recover CP/M floppies every day. It's a routine job well within any decent recovery company's skill set. The only thing that's special is the Roddenberry connection.
Insurers are the *last* people who want to see global risk diminish. Their business model is to figure out how much they'll have to pay out & mark that up by x%. The last thing they want is to have claims go down, since that would eventually cause the industry to reduce premiums, thus reducing the $ profit. Notice the % stays the same, but the $ go down.
Sometimes insurance companies will offer you ways to reduce risk, but that's either PR spin or they figure they can gain a short-term advantage over their competitors. In the long term, they love risk as long as the field is level for all the insurers.
No more sealed-edge pilfer-proof packaging that makes it:
- unreasonably hard to get at the contents
- necessary to use tools
- hard to return the product
- easy to cut your hand on jagged edges
Imagine if beer were packaged like that! Wouldn't be good for sales...
You also probably want the employee to have the ability to job hop.
Why free agents? I thought the idea was to fill specific job posts that Americans can't do -- not to expand the general labor pool.
last resort... clearly not true or enforced
Impose a $50K price tag and it will very quickly become last resort. And enforced.
OK, call it a "fee." For, ya know, enhanced security screening and whatnot.
The other beauty of making the fee payable directly to the gov't is that the employer can't extort the money back from the employee.
How about a flat $50K/year tax payable straight to the gov't? Think of that as a tariff or duty. This would have several advantages:
- Simple & stupid, can't game a flat fee
- That kind of revenue wold keep the gov't interested in enforcing the program
- Makes the process of hiring offshore much more expensive. Remember, the idea is that hiring offshore is supposed to be a *last* resort, so $50K wouldn't deter someone who truly needed a particular skill.
- Makes it impractical to hire offshore lower-level employees, the kind that we already have plenty of and who are blatantly being replaced with foreigners just to save money.