So when you work for a big company, they talk a big game about being part of the team and so forth -- then turn around and treat you like a prisoner. Sure, they are within their rights, but I find it interesting that people like you are willing to defend them.
Really, the worst? This is an infection that is not hard to control with quarantines, good hygiene and good sanitation -- none of which are a challenge in this century. It would be a pretty serious leap for the plague to evade all of the above.
We have better medicine
More importantly, we have better medical practices. Doctors wash their hands between seeing patients. Highly infectious patients are kept under special quarantines. Corpses are not handled without gloves. Medical instruments are carefully disposed of. These things are more relevant to the plague than antibiotics, which are just a treatment for those who become infected.
Good thing that bacteria cant become resistant to antibiotics, right?
Sure, but there is more to keep in mind when it comes to this particular infection:
Cleanliness slows the spread immensely, especially around areas where the bacteria live. One of the main reasons for the plague's spread in the middle ages was poor hygiene, as evidenced by the reduced rates of infection in communities where bathing and washing hands were common.
We do not leave dead animal carcasses rotting in our streets. One of the ways this infection spreads is by fleas jumping from a dead animal to a live one.
We have quarantine protocols for serious diseases, which help reduce contact between infected and uninfected people.
So even if by some strange twist, the plague were to develop resistance to antibiotics, it would be unlikely to become an epidemic. Indeed, only a tiny handful of people become infected in modern times, and that is despite the fact that we have much larger populations and higher population densities.
Why was this guy trying to pry a mouse away from a cat? That appears to be the most interesting story here...
Really though, from TFA:
it is treatable with antibiotics
the bacteria thrives in forests, grasslands and any wooded areas inhabited by rats and squirrels
Without the help of modern medicine, Europeans in the Middle Ages could do little to combat the plague.
So this is a bacterium that is common in the wild, which can be contracted by humans but is treatable with modern medicine. It is not as though we are facing another plague here...
Sure but if it's all through the computer, how do you know they didn't just get someone else to do it for them, for another hundred bucks?
You think having a human standing there watching people helps? I have seen students hide thumb drives under their desks, so that the next set of students taking a CS101 exam can cheat. I have seen students writing codes of dots and shapes on the sides of exams to pass answers on to their friends. I have seen students pay for their homework to be done by other students.
People who are not interested in learning, who just want a job ticket, seem to have little difficulty with cheating at current universities.
I've been a software engineer for 12 years now, and many things I learned for my [CS] degree at university have benefited my work immensely.
Not that though.
That is because a CS degree is not a vocational IT associates degree or some sort of vocational certification; computer science is a well developed field that covers more than just "how to program using an object oriented language." The P vs. NP problem is not just an important theoretical problem, it is a problem with immense practical significance. That is why it is considered one of the most important questions in computer science, as opposed to other, lesser-known questions about lower bounds (e.g. the 3SUM problem).
The things that a university really offers are accreditation that you have truly mastered the topics
Does it though? I am discouraged by the number of CS graduates who cannot explain basic, fundamental questions like the P vs. NP problem. A lot of schools seem to only require that their CS graduates be able to write a few moderately challenging programs, and even then, only in a particular programming language or class of languages.
We constantly have to re-invent ourselves with new skills because things change so rapidly.
On the surface, things may change rapidly. Fundamentally, though, things change slowly. A trendy language or toolkit is just a surface change, perhaps one that introduces a new style of programming. On the other hand, beneath the surface, things have not changed all that much; we still have object oriented programming, we still have relational databases and ORMs, parallel programming is still hard and poorly understood, we still have the three tiered (or N-tiered) model, etc. Styles, names, and trends change quickly, but fundamental issues and designs do not.
- how ya gonna stop cheating? With an entirely remote degree course you can't. Therefore, to an employer, it's not worth much.
As opposed to IRL courses? People cheat their way through "valuable" degree programs all the time, and employers do not really care. Those employers who are really concerned with whether their students actually know what their degree asserts they should know give job candidates tests.
Yeah, sure, whatever, start the snark about how degrees aren't worth anything anyway, I disagree
Considering the number of people I have met with a BS in CS who cannot even explain the P vs. NP problem, I think that at least a large number of degrees in CS are poor certifications of knowledge.
Well, if you can attack system from the guest machine, then I think the answer to that question is obvious: the user can try the attack, and whether or not the attack works will determine whether or not they are in a VM.
We can make quantum-secure cryptosystems without any special electronic systems or quantum computers. Plenty of work on this has been done; McEliece is a famous one, but there are others based on lattice problems. If quantum computers were tomorrow's headline, the only real problem would be that popular crypto standards do not include quantum-secure algorithms.
Politicians talk a big game when it comes to religion, but practical matters of government almost always leave religion in second place, at least at the national level. You see it here in America, with Christian politicians talking about how faithful they are, then turning around and decrying any attempt to end the death penalty (as if they are without sin). Do you really think Muslim politicians are better than Christian politicians?
It is easy to reinterpret or ignore religious traditions when they get in the way of conducting government business.
Sure, if you get lucky and the users within your network happen to connect to your entry node. Except that there are hundreds of thousands of Tor nodes in the world and they are not all in Ethiopia.
The standard ways to block Tor are:
Block publicly listed entries, which is why bridge nodes exist.
Block TLS connections that match the Tor fingerprint, which the Tor developers are constantly working to thwart i.e. by making Tor look more like Firefox. This is the DPI approach mentioned in TFA.
Not only is this not the first case, but it is a problem that the Tor developers have been addressing for some time. There are two techniques that are known to be used to block Tor:
Blocking all entry nodes; China, for example, does this. Bridge nodes mitigate this problem, but a determined government like the Chinese government can compile a list of all bridge nodes, and block those too.
Distinguishing Tor from an HTTPS connection; this is a more technically advanced method that is favored by governments that lack the resources to compile lists of bridges. Since Tor has a unique pattern of TLS connections, it can be identified and blocked by a national firewall; fixing this problem is an ongoing effort (the goal is to make Tor look like Firefox).
How about letting businesses build reputations for selling safe, reliable drugs? You know, like how things worked at a certain other online drug store...
Sure, that is a risk and it should not be downplayed. My point is that for some people, the choice is between not receiving treatment or taking a chance on an online pharmacy (or receiving treatment legally, but not being able to eat or pay rent).
"Counterfeit" does not necessarily mean "fake" or "mislabeled," it may me "the real deal, but in violation of a patent or trademark." Unless the FDA is publishing a chemical test that demonstrates that these drugs were not what they claimed to be, I would bet that the word "counterfeit" in this context means the latter.
Sure, that is a serious risk, but when some people have to choose between rent and their medication, it is a risk that they might be willing to take. If your doctor prescribed a medicine that cost you $200 even though you were insured, and that $200 would be the difference between eating and not eating, what would you do? Your choices are basically (a) forgo treatment or (b) seek a cheap alternative.
I cannot understand why anyone would see an add for drugs online and actually go ahead and purchase that online without doing to your doctor/pharmacist, talking to them about the drug and then getting it through official channels.
When a 30 day supply of a medication that greatly improves your life costs hundreds of dollars from legal channels, and only a fraction of that from online pharmacies, what do you do? This is one of the problems with health insurance in America -- you have uninsured and in some cases insured people who cannot afford medicines. There is also the consequences of the war on drugs, which leaves us vulnerable to the demands of pharmaceutical companies for medicines that can be grown in our backyards (and I am not just talking about marijuana, although that is a prominent example).
By the way, you are also wrong in that the HFT is damaging the economy in concept, the money is changing hands
Not all trades are beneficial to the economy. If I produce something and sell it, that is useful for the economy. HFT firms are not producing anything or providing useful services, they are leaching money from people who are.
In reality the stock market trading is actually a zero sum game
No, the stock market is a positive sum game, because companies turn profits and those profits are reflected in the dividends they pay or in the equity of the stock. One investor seeing a profit does not imply another investor seeing a loss.
Futures markets are zero sum games in theory; in practice, high-frequency trading firms turn futures markets into negative sum games. Futures markets do serve a useful purpose in an economy, by helping people hedge against risks (which was the entire purpose of the earliest recorded futures contracts), and speculators in futures markets can provide a useful service by taking on risk for other investors. High frequency traders take speculation to an economically damaging extreme.
HFT is not 'good' or 'bad', it makes extracting money from the trades quicker and more efficient, and with real competition it would be up to the exchanges to decide if they want to compete one with another by allowing or prohibiting these sorts of trades.
Except that HFT firms compete on CPU and network speeds, not trading strategies; HFT firms cannot use the best strategies based on the information that is available, because it takes too long to compute actions based on those strategies. HFT firms are parasites that extract money from the market without providing any useful goods or service in return. Using futures contracts as a hedge against risk is harder because of HFT firms; companies that are providing useful goods and services are being hurt by HFT firms, who do not provide a useful service.
The retail investor has been almost eliminated from the trading in the last 5 years by HFT
Which is another consequence of the negative effects of HFT.
all thanks to government
Only in the sense of a lack of action by the government. Allowing HFT to continue unchecked is the problem here.
If you want to blame everything on a bunch of guys who were acting inside the rules and regulations they were told to abide by, that's fine. But the real damage was done by incompetent legislators and regulators who failed to pay attention and adequately oversee the industry they were charged with.
So bankers need to be told by the government that they should not take advantage of people? Do we really need the government dictating morals and ethics?
And that's not even touching the mass market of morons
So how many bankers are willing to donate a couple hundred million dollars to improve the education system, so that people understand that an adjustable-rate mortgage is not something that will work in their favor? You know, since it is the fault of the uneducated masses for having been taken advantage of by the innocent bankers who were just doing their jobs...
When I was an engineering student, we had to take an engineering ethics course. We were taught that engineers should not think about the moral consequences of what they design; an engineer is supposed to design what they were hired to design, and leave the moral thinking to the people for whom the system is built. Engineers are not supposed to spend their time worrying about how the bombs they design will be used, only about ensuring that the bomb work as specified, that no plagiarism occurred, and that we do not leak trade secrets.
Morality stopped mattering long ago. As long as a business is not breaking any laws and not lying to its investors, ethical issues are settled, even if the business is knowingly and deliberately putting vulnerable people into risky positions. Bankers do not go home at night and worry about all the poor people who will lose their homes as a result of bad loans; they did their jobs up to the ethical standard they were taught, and the counterparty should have done a better job of reviewing the terms of those loans.
After all, if it is profitable and legal, it is a niche that should be filled.
First of all, I seriously doubt that you want to remove all regulations on trading; you probably draw some of your confidence in the market from those regulations.
That being said, high-frequency trading is damaging to the economy, by any reasonable, non-religious measure. Profit from HFT is based entirely on the speed of one's computer; it has nothing to do with the information available to investors, it has nothing to do with optimizing your trading strategy (mixed strategies take too long to compute anyway -- HFT is based on executing a suboptimal strategy too quickly for anyone with a theoretically better strategy to compete), and it is not a useful form of arbitrage. HFT turns futures markets into negative sum games for investors who are looking to hedge risks and even for speculators, siphoning money away from people who are using futures contracts in productive ways and filling the pockets of people who are doing nothing productive.
HFT firms are parasites, nothing more. The sooner we get rid of them, the better.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, next time you come to my house for a "friendly" visit, expect the same treatment if you use my network...
So when you work for a big company, they talk a big game about being part of the team and so forth -- then turn around and treat you like a prisoner. Sure, they are within their rights, but I find it interesting that people like you are willing to defend them.
This is possibly the worst infection to evolve
Really, the worst? This is an infection that is not hard to control with quarantines, good hygiene and good sanitation -- none of which are a challenge in this century. It would be a pretty serious leap for the plague to evade all of the above.
We have better medicine
More importantly, we have better medical practices. Doctors wash their hands between seeing patients. Highly infectious patients are kept under special quarantines. Corpses are not handled without gloves. Medical instruments are carefully disposed of. These things are more relevant to the plague than antibiotics, which are just a treatment for those who become infected.
Good thing that bacteria cant become resistant to antibiotics, right?
Sure, but there is more to keep in mind when it comes to this particular infection:
So even if by some strange twist, the plague were to develop resistance to antibiotics, it would be unlikely to become an epidemic. Indeed, only a tiny handful of people become infected in modern times, and that is despite the fact that we have much larger populations and higher population densities.
Really though, from TFA:
it is treatable with antibiotics
the bacteria thrives in forests, grasslands and any wooded areas inhabited by rats and squirrels
Without the help of modern medicine, Europeans in the Middle Ages could do little to combat the plague.
So this is a bacterium that is common in the wild, which can be contracted by humans but is treatable with modern medicine. It is not as though we are facing another plague here...
Sure but if it's all through the computer, how do you know they didn't just get someone else to do it for them, for another hundred bucks?
You think having a human standing there watching people helps? I have seen students hide thumb drives under their desks, so that the next set of students taking a CS101 exam can cheat. I have seen students writing codes of dots and shapes on the sides of exams to pass answers on to their friends. I have seen students pay for their homework to be done by other students.
People who are not interested in learning, who just want a job ticket, seem to have little difficulty with cheating at current universities.
I've been a software engineer for 12 years now, and many things I learned for my [CS] degree at university have benefited my work immensely.
Not that though.
That is because a CS degree is not a vocational IT associates degree or some sort of vocational certification; computer science is a well developed field that covers more than just "how to program using an object oriented language." The P vs. NP problem is not just an important theoretical problem, it is a problem with immense practical significance. That is why it is considered one of the most important questions in computer science, as opposed to other, lesser-known questions about lower bounds (e.g. the 3SUM problem).
The things that a university really offers are accreditation that you have truly mastered the topics
Does it though? I am discouraged by the number of CS graduates who cannot explain basic, fundamental questions like the P vs. NP problem. A lot of schools seem to only require that their CS graduates be able to write a few moderately challenging programs, and even then, only in a particular programming language or class of languages.
We constantly have to re-invent ourselves with new skills because things change so rapidly.
On the surface, things may change rapidly. Fundamentally, though, things change slowly. A trendy language or toolkit is just a surface change, perhaps one that introduces a new style of programming. On the other hand, beneath the surface, things have not changed all that much; we still have object oriented programming, we still have relational databases and ORMs, parallel programming is still hard and poorly understood, we still have the three tiered (or N-tiered) model, etc. Styles, names, and trends change quickly, but fundamental issues and designs do not.
- how ya gonna stop cheating? With an entirely remote degree course you can't. Therefore, to an employer, it's not worth much.
As opposed to IRL courses? People cheat their way through "valuable" degree programs all the time, and employers do not really care. Those employers who are really concerned with whether their students actually know what their degree asserts they should know give job candidates tests.
Yeah, sure, whatever, start the snark about how degrees aren't worth anything anyway, I disagree
Considering the number of people I have met with a BS in CS who cannot even explain the P vs. NP problem, I think that at least a large number of degrees in CS are poor certifications of knowledge.
Does the machine KNOW it's a guest?
Well, if you can attack system from the guest machine, then I think the answer to that question is obvious: the user can try the attack, and whether or not the attack works will determine whether or not they are in a VM.
As far as quantum security
We can make quantum-secure cryptosystems without any special electronic systems or quantum computers. Plenty of work on this has been done; McEliece is a famous one, but there are others based on lattice problems. If quantum computers were tomorrow's headline, the only real problem would be that popular crypto standards do not include quantum-secure algorithms.
"What is that?"
"A dinner plate!"
"Why is your dinner plate transmitting UHF at such high amplitude?"
"To keep the food warm!"
"Why is that boom sticking out of it?"
"It's a traditional tribal design!"
"Why is it hooked up to your computer?"
"Just a fancy oven!"
"It seems to be pointed at something over the equation..."
"Pure coincidence!"
Radio is not a universal solution to censorship.
Politicians talk a big game when it comes to religion, but practical matters of government almost always leave religion in second place, at least at the national level. You see it here in America, with Christian politicians talking about how faithful they are, then turning around and decrying any attempt to end the death penalty (as if they are without sin). Do you really think Muslim politicians are better than Christian politicians?
It is easy to reinterpret or ignore religious traditions when they get in the way of conducting government business.
The standard ways to block Tor are:
How about letting businesses build reputations for selling safe, reliable drugs? You know, like how things worked at a certain other online drug store...
Sure, that is a risk and it should not be downplayed. My point is that for some people, the choice is between not receiving treatment or taking a chance on an online pharmacy (or receiving treatment legally, but not being able to eat or pay rent).
Sorry, but were you referring to the American pharmaceutical companies, or the online pharmacies?
"Counterfeit" does not necessarily mean "fake" or "mislabeled," it may me "the real deal, but in violation of a patent or trademark." Unless the FDA is publishing a chemical test that demonstrates that these drugs were not what they claimed to be, I would bet that the word "counterfeit" in this context means the latter.
Sure, that is a serious risk, but when some people have to choose between rent and their medication, it is a risk that they might be willing to take. If your doctor prescribed a medicine that cost you $200 even though you were insured, and that $200 would be the difference between eating and not eating, what would you do? Your choices are basically (a) forgo treatment or (b) seek a cheap alternative.
I cannot understand why anyone would see an add for drugs online and actually go ahead and purchase that online without doing to your doctor/pharmacist, talking to them about the drug and then getting it through official channels.
When a 30 day supply of a medication that greatly improves your life costs hundreds of dollars from legal channels, and only a fraction of that from online pharmacies, what do you do? This is one of the problems with health insurance in America -- you have uninsured and in some cases insured people who cannot afford medicines. There is also the consequences of the war on drugs, which leaves us vulnerable to the demands of pharmaceutical companies for medicines that can be grown in our backyards (and I am not just talking about marijuana, although that is a prominent example).
By the way, you are also wrong in that the HFT is damaging the economy in concept, the money is changing hands
Not all trades are beneficial to the economy. If I produce something and sell it, that is useful for the economy. HFT firms are not producing anything or providing useful services, they are leaching money from people who are.
In reality the stock market trading is actually a zero sum game
No, the stock market is a positive sum game, because companies turn profits and those profits are reflected in the dividends they pay or in the equity of the stock. One investor seeing a profit does not imply another investor seeing a loss.
Futures markets are zero sum games in theory; in practice, high-frequency trading firms turn futures markets into negative sum games. Futures markets do serve a useful purpose in an economy, by helping people hedge against risks (which was the entire purpose of the earliest recorded futures contracts), and speculators in futures markets can provide a useful service by taking on risk for other investors. High frequency traders take speculation to an economically damaging extreme.
HFT is not 'good' or 'bad', it makes extracting money from the trades quicker and more efficient, and with real competition it would be up to the exchanges to decide if they want to compete one with another by allowing or prohibiting these sorts of trades.
Except that HFT firms compete on CPU and network speeds, not trading strategies; HFT firms cannot use the best strategies based on the information that is available, because it takes too long to compute actions based on those strategies. HFT firms are parasites that extract money from the market without providing any useful goods or service in return. Using futures contracts as a hedge against risk is harder because of HFT firms; companies that are providing useful goods and services are being hurt by HFT firms, who do not provide a useful service.
The retail investor has been almost eliminated from the trading in the last 5 years by HFT
Which is another consequence of the negative effects of HFT.
all thanks to government
Only in the sense of a lack of action by the government. Allowing HFT to continue unchecked is the problem here.
If you want to blame everything on a bunch of guys who were acting inside the rules and regulations they were told to abide by, that's fine. But the real damage was done by incompetent legislators and regulators who failed to pay attention and adequately oversee the industry they were charged with.
So bankers need to be told by the government that they should not take advantage of people? Do we really need the government dictating morals and ethics?
And that's not even touching the mass market of morons
So how many bankers are willing to donate a couple hundred million dollars to improve the education system, so that people understand that an adjustable-rate mortgage is not something that will work in their favor? You know, since it is the fault of the uneducated masses for having been taken advantage of by the innocent bankers who were just doing their jobs...
As if morality matters...
When I was an engineering student, we had to take an engineering ethics course. We were taught that engineers should not think about the moral consequences of what they design; an engineer is supposed to design what they were hired to design, and leave the moral thinking to the people for whom the system is built. Engineers are not supposed to spend their time worrying about how the bombs they design will be used, only about ensuring that the bomb work as specified, that no plagiarism occurred, and that we do not leak trade secrets.
Morality stopped mattering long ago. As long as a business is not breaking any laws and not lying to its investors, ethical issues are settled, even if the business is knowingly and deliberately putting vulnerable people into risky positions. Bankers do not go home at night and worry about all the poor people who will lose their homes as a result of bad loans; they did their jobs up to the ethical standard they were taught, and the counterparty should have done a better job of reviewing the terms of those loans.
After all, if it is profitable and legal, it is a niche that should be filled.
First of all, I seriously doubt that you want to remove all regulations on trading; you probably draw some of your confidence in the market from those regulations.
That being said, high-frequency trading is damaging to the economy, by any reasonable, non-religious measure. Profit from HFT is based entirely on the speed of one's computer; it has nothing to do with the information available to investors, it has nothing to do with optimizing your trading strategy (mixed strategies take too long to compute anyway -- HFT is based on executing a suboptimal strategy too quickly for anyone with a theoretically better strategy to compete), and it is not a useful form of arbitrage. HFT turns futures markets into negative sum games for investors who are looking to hedge risks and even for speculators, siphoning money away from people who are using futures contracts in productive ways and filling the pockets of people who are doing nothing productive.
HFT firms are parasites, nothing more. The sooner we get rid of them, the better.