If you are intent on using this particular medium, then it should be trivial to add steganography to the equation and get past the "no encryption (as far as anyone could prove)" part. There are way to do that, where it would be impossible to prove stego was being used--as long as they don't have access to the software at either end.
This exactly. Just factoring out the number of papers that Chinese researchers have to retract due to peer review issues (see here https://qz.com/978037/china-pu...), their actual output does not exceed ours.
In fact the probabilities of being alone and not being alone are close to equal.
From the actual paper's Conclusion:
"...we find a substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps even in our observable universe (53%–99.6% and 39%–85% respectively). ’Where are they?’ — probably extremely far away, and quite possibly beyond the cosmological horizon and forever unreachable."
>And so androids, not possessing that history, would certainly show up with a very different psychology.
Unless we have competing lines of androids, all vying to pass the Turing test or some other form of competition seen as necessary by their respective creators. In that case, we should expect them to behave competitively, and hence they will be just as evil as we are (if not more efficiently so).
As many are observing, we are coming apart at the seams. People are finding it harder than it should be just to get along with neighbors, coworkers, etc. This is unfortunate, but not unexpected, when you rapidly (in just a generation or two) throw off all social convention as being evil. I'm not arguing that things were perfect back in the good old days, but some aspects of social life may have been easier to get through than they are now.
Now to say something uncomfortable: When there are some defined boundaries in society, then it's more obvious to everyone when someone is going outside them. But the existence of boundaries means that people have their "place". As soon as you put it that way, everyone screams (--and I can hear you), "Nope, we gave up all that crap, and we're not going back to those unenlightened, un-liberated days ever!"
OK, then live with the harassment, because you won't be able to fix the harassment by itself. It's just one manifestation of the general tendency today to behave in whatever way our instincts propel us to act. ("If it feels good, do it!") Until you fix _that_, any particular manifestation will remain out of control.
(Just for the record, I'd prefer an environment where people were encouraged to have more self-control, not less.)
...who will then charge the gov't 10x what that person was costing us before. So is the NSA's actual functionality being reduced--or just shifted elsewhere?
(And why are only NSA people demoralized? I'd be demoralized if I worked in _any_ branch of gov't...the way things are going. Private-sector jobs providing goods and services that people actually want is the most satisfying kind of work, IMHO.)
I think the take-away is not so much that smartphones are making a generation miserable, but rather that for whatever the reason, we're seeing radical changes in mental health and other aspects of development that we should at least be concerned with. If everything turns out fine, and the next generation is smarter, wiser and healthier than we, then great. But whenever there is rapid change, we should at least be watching so that we can help the next generation should they need it.
(Yet, other commenters are pointing out that smartphones are qualitatively different than preceding technologies (like television), which some of us were never convinced were harmless either...time will tell. We'll see if as time goes on, young people are electing better leaders, managing their money and lives more wisely and so on.)
Many mentioned under-commenting, but don't forget the waste that is over-commenting. I want to scream every time I see a function (e.g., a graphics function) that takes two variables, x and y, and someone took the time to comment those as "the x coordinate" and "the y coordinate". No kidding!!! Or if you're using ghostdoc, they get commented as just "the x" and "the y". When the best comment you can come up with adds no information, just skip it. Over-commented code is not better in any way.
There is less than zero chance that the President (Obama) didn't know about or sign off on this surveillance. The idea that a sitting President investigating his opponent would be done by lower level people without his knowledge is preposterous.
Why is that preposterous? Have you never conceived of a low-level person, interested in swaying the outcome of the election and thinking that they were doing the side of Good a favor---using the technology at their disposal, with the intent of leaking the information to (in this case) the DNC?
You realize all those people leaving the NSA are probably going to work for outside contractors that are doing the exact same things? You know, security companies that other governments hire to hack into yet different countries...or vendors to police departments who want to pwn potential criminals' computers, and so on. I doubt that with their specialized skill sets that they're just going out into the private sector to write reports all day long.
(Although I will say that a job in the private sector is a lot less demoralizing than a government job. Not that everyone in the private sector cares deeply about what they do, but the percentage is a lot higher.)
I've made a similar case against teaching students all about fiction, poetry and drama in so-called English classes, as nobody needs that crap except future English teachers, authors and poets. (And if we make this change, even future English teachers won't need to study fiction, poetry or drama.) We should replace all that useless garbage with reading comprehension (using NON-fiction exclusively), writing (again, non-fiction) and critical thinking studies. Our current educational emphases come to us from a distant past and seriously need revamping. We need critical thinkers far worse than we need people who can create fiction.
So we have news stories featuring all the ways of intercepting visible light from people's monitors to spy on them from a distance (or pick up audio emissions from the computer circuitry, etc.), and now we're proposing sending information through home lighting, which radiates out of every window???
Another variation on the same story we get here every month or so. "Such-and-such is so complex now that the individual is no longer able to contribute anything truly new, as the stuff that one person can do on their own has already been done." That's the price of technological progress, people.
Sure, the exceptions jump out at us, as some of you are posting. But they jump out at us because they are the exceptions nowadays. As things progress we should expect that the serious front-line work will require more than one programmer.
Without knowledge of software engineering and the software world in general, there is a huge risk that the developers will in fact BS the leader 1) because he won't be able to judge the people he is hiring, and 2) he won't be able to filter their advice appropriately once he's hired them.. One hiring mistake, and any startup is finished.
He needs to very carefully hire someone with experience both in software and hiring developers, and then trust that person. It's the only way he'll have a fighting chance. I've seen the alternative happen too many times...
It's easier and more practical to abandon rural gravel roads that only lead to a few farm houses, which simply become long driveways leading to those houses. So the homeowner isn't trying to drive down them at 70 mph in a sports car, but rather at 20mph in a pickup truck, hence no worries about breaking an axle. The houses slowly fall in value, but are lived in until that generation is gone. The land remains in use as farm land. Problem solved. Happens near where I live, and it's no big deal, simply the evolution of transportation.
You have indeed conflated pro-business Republicanism with rank-and-file conservatism, as I suspected.
A quick glance at a graph of federal spending as a percent of GDP for the last 100 years shows an upward trend no one can miss. Conservatives (but not necessarily Republicans) would like to see that return to pre-FDR levels, but hold little hope of it happening. And I think they would see government stay entirely out of the same-sex marriage debate--taking neither side, but leaving that up to the States or the people. (Seems like I've read that phrase someplace...)
Politics are dominated by two parties (which are both marching further to the far-right end of the spectrum in a global sense)
Surely you're not calling our slide into a police state, with government consuming an ever-growing percentage of GDP a move to the right. Obamacare was move to the right??
Unless you've redefined the political spectrum recently, these are all moves that liberals I know still applaud. I can hear them clapping. (They're not actually happy, but they never were. Obamacare wasn't far enough for them!)
There are a few actual conservatives left in this country, and they'd still like to see us shrink the size of government as a percent of GDP, reduce taxes, reduce the intrusion of government into our personal lives, and so on. We're getting farther from their goals, not closer. They've basically given up all hope for the US.
Perhaps you're confusing conservatives with Republicans. Repubs abandoned conservatism about a decade ago, leaving the conservatives I know with no one to (willingly) vote for.
With coding standards to follow, and tools that uniform-ify your code, it should be easier to anonymize it than with regular prose. And regular prose is apparently trivial to anonymize: see "Practical Attacks Against Authorship Recognition Techniques" by Michael Brennan and Rachel Greenstadt.
the ability to think rationally and analytically. We live in a world full of people who think with their emotions, and can't reason more than one cause/effect level deep in anything. They are superstitious as a result, and make bad decisions constantly. A lot more good things would flow out of a more rational populace. It might start by turning off the damn television once in a while, too.
In fact, courses in practical reasoning ought to be part of every young person's curriculum all the way through high school and college. Not just a single course, but one per semester, because thinking clearly about things obviously doesn't come naturally to people.
Centralize all our data, and it will get "borrowed". Keep it widely scattered and in varying formats, and it will be too expensive to aggregate it all.
With Microsoft's P language, Not Invented Here has clearly struck again. From their own documentation and examples, P doesn't support state nesting, which is the most powerful feature that UML statecharts have--and statecharts have had it since their inception (Harel, 1988). Skip P, and go for an open-source implementation of UML statecharts. Check out Boost's implementation, or this free one here: A Lightweight Implementation of UML Statecharts
If you think programming is far more engineering than art, then you must be in a highly structured environment, program for the DoD, etc. Out here in the real world, people around me code without a shred of design work or planning of any sort. They just sit down and start typing...whatever organically evolves is what happens. Code is created with no foresight at all. I wish it were more engineering than art, though. Sad to see all the effort wasted so often.
As actually practiced, it should be called a craft, rather than art or engineering. And most developers I watch are quite Amish.
In all fairness, UML wasn't meant to express things like individual "for" loops. It's utility is at a much higher level. However, some of its formalisms, such as class diagrams and statecharts are very much one-to-one with actual code. (See this http://www.codeproject.com/Art... for an example.)
And if you need any more reasons to understand why graphical languages didn't make it, just consider the fact that most of the silly icons had a text window behind them where you could put specific text, even short scripts. Why was that needed if graphical programming was so complete? Just like CASE tools and object databases, graphical programming was just an attempt by vendors to shake some more money loose from unsuspecting clients.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are intent on using this particular medium, then it should be trivial to add steganography to the equation and get past the "no encryption (as far as anyone could prove)" part. There are way to do that, where it would be impossible to prove stego was being used--as long as they don't have access to the software at either end.
This exactly. Just factoring out the number of papers that Chinese researchers have to retract due to peer review issues (see here https://qz.com/978037/china-pu...), their actual output does not exceed ours.
From the actual paper's Conclusion:
"...we find a substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps even in our observable universe (53%–99.6% and 39%–85% respectively). ’Where are they?’ — probably extremely far away, and quite possibly beyond the cosmological horizon and forever unreachable."
>And so androids, not possessing that history, would certainly show up with a very different psychology.
Unless we have competing lines of androids, all vying to pass the Turing test or some other form of competition seen as necessary by their respective creators. In that case, we should expect them to behave competitively, and hence they will be just as evil as we are (if not more efficiently so).
As many are observing, we are coming apart at the seams. People are finding it harder than it should be just to get along with neighbors, coworkers, etc. This is unfortunate, but not unexpected, when you rapidly (in just a generation or two) throw off all social convention as being evil. I'm not arguing that things were perfect back in the good old days, but some aspects of social life may have been easier to get through than they are now.
Now to say something uncomfortable: When there are some defined boundaries in society, then it's more obvious to everyone when someone is going outside them. But the existence of boundaries means that people have their "place". As soon as you put it that way, everyone screams (--and I can hear you), "Nope, we gave up all that crap, and we're not going back to those unenlightened, un-liberated days ever!"
OK, then live with the harassment, because you won't be able to fix the harassment by itself. It's just one manifestation of the general tendency today to behave in whatever way our instincts propel us to act. ("If it feels good, do it!") Until you fix _that_, any particular manifestation will remain out of control.
(Just for the record, I'd prefer an environment where people were encouraged to have more self-control, not less.)
...who will then charge the gov't 10x what that person was costing us before. So is the NSA's actual functionality being reduced--or just shifted elsewhere?
(And why are only NSA people demoralized? I'd be demoralized if I worked in _any_ branch of gov't...the way things are going. Private-sector jobs providing goods and services that people actually want is the most satisfying kind of work, IMHO.)
I think the take-away is not so much that smartphones are making a generation miserable, but rather that for whatever the reason, we're seeing radical changes in mental health and other aspects of development that we should at least be concerned with. If everything turns out fine, and the next generation is smarter, wiser and healthier than we, then great. But whenever there is rapid change, we should at least be watching so that we can help the next generation should they need it.
(Yet, other commenters are pointing out that smartphones are qualitatively different than preceding technologies (like television), which some of us were never convinced were harmless either...time will tell. We'll see if as time goes on, young people are electing better leaders, managing their money and lives more wisely and so on.)
Many mentioned under-commenting, but don't forget the waste that is over-commenting. I want to scream every time I see a function (e.g., a graphics function) that takes two variables, x and y, and someone took the time to comment those as "the x coordinate" and "the y coordinate". No kidding!!! Or if you're using ghostdoc, they get commented as just "the x" and "the y". When the best comment you can come up with adds no information, just skip it. Over-commented code is not better in any way.
Why is that preposterous? Have you never conceived of a low-level person, interested in swaying the outcome of the election and thinking that they were doing the side of Good a favor---using the technology at their disposal, with the intent of leaking the information to (in this case) the DNC?
You realize all those people leaving the NSA are probably going to work for outside contractors that are doing the exact same things? You know, security companies that other governments hire to hack into yet different countries...or vendors to police departments who want to pwn potential criminals' computers, and so on. I doubt that with their specialized skill sets that they're just going out into the private sector to write reports all day long.
(Although I will say that a job in the private sector is a lot less demoralizing than a government job. Not that everyone in the private sector cares deeply about what they do, but the percentage is a lot higher.)
I've made a similar case against teaching students all about fiction, poetry and drama in so-called English classes, as nobody needs that crap except future English teachers, authors and poets. (And if we make this change, even future English teachers won't need to study fiction, poetry or drama.) We should replace all that useless garbage with reading comprehension (using NON-fiction exclusively), writing (again, non-fiction) and critical thinking studies. Our current educational emphases come to us from a distant past and seriously need revamping. We need critical thinkers far worse than we need people who can create fiction.
So we have news stories featuring all the ways of intercepting visible light from people's monitors to spy on them from a distance (or pick up audio emissions from the computer circuitry, etc.), and now we're proposing sending information through home lighting, which radiates out of every window???
For one example, see
"Obfuscating Document Stylometry to Preserve Author Anonymity"
Gary Kacmarcik & Michael Gamon
This technique is not an automated one, but hey, all you need is more software.
Another variation on the same story we get here every month or so. "Such-and-such is so complex now that the individual is no longer able to contribute anything truly new, as the stuff that one person can do on their own has already been done." That's the price of technological progress, people.
Sure, the exceptions jump out at us, as some of you are posting. But they jump out at us because they are the exceptions nowadays. As things progress we should expect that the serious front-line work will require more than one programmer.
Without knowledge of software engineering and the software world in general, there is a huge risk that the developers will in fact BS the leader 1) because he won't be able to judge the people he is hiring, and 2) he won't be able to filter their advice appropriately once he's hired them.. One hiring mistake, and any startup is finished.
He needs to very carefully hire someone with experience both in software and hiring developers, and then trust that person. It's the only way he'll have a fighting chance. I've seen the alternative happen too many times...
But what is its behavior re data remanance? Not the first concern of course, but certainly one of them these days...
It's easier and more practical to abandon rural gravel roads that only lead to a few farm houses, which simply become long driveways leading to those houses. So the homeowner isn't trying to drive down them at 70 mph in a sports car, but rather at 20mph in a pickup truck, hence no worries about breaking an axle. The houses slowly fall in value, but are lived in until that generation is gone. The land remains in use as farm land. Problem solved. Happens near where I live, and it's no big deal, simply the evolution of transportation.
You have indeed conflated pro-business Republicanism with rank-and-file conservatism, as I suspected.
A quick glance at a graph of federal spending as a percent of GDP for the last 100 years shows an upward trend no one can miss. Conservatives (but not necessarily Republicans) would like to see that return to pre-FDR levels, but hold little hope of it happening. And I think they would see government stay entirely out of the same-sex marriage debate--taking neither side, but leaving that up to the States or the people. (Seems like I've read that phrase someplace...)
(But I'm glad to hear you opposed Obamacare.)
Politics are dominated by two parties (which are both marching further to the far-right end of the spectrum in a global sense)
Surely you're not calling our slide into a police state, with government consuming an ever-growing percentage of GDP a move to the right. Obamacare was move to the right??
Unless you've redefined the political spectrum recently, these are all moves that liberals I know still applaud. I can hear them clapping. (They're not actually happy, but they never were. Obamacare wasn't far enough for them!)
There are a few actual conservatives left in this country, and they'd still like to see us shrink the size of government as a percent of GDP, reduce taxes, reduce the intrusion of government into our personal lives, and so on. We're getting farther from their goals, not closer. They've basically given up all hope for the US.
Perhaps you're confusing conservatives with Republicans. Repubs abandoned conservatism about a decade ago, leaving the conservatives I know with no one to (willingly) vote for.
With coding standards to follow, and tools that uniform-ify your code, it should be easier to anonymize it than with regular prose. And regular prose is apparently trivial to anonymize: see "Practical Attacks Against Authorship Recognition Techniques" by Michael Brennan and Rachel Greenstadt.
the ability to think rationally and analytically. We live in a world full of people who think with their emotions, and can't reason more than one cause/effect level deep in anything. They are superstitious as a result, and make bad decisions constantly. A lot more good things would flow out of a more rational populace. It might start by turning off the damn television once in a while, too.
In fact, courses in practical reasoning ought to be part of every young person's curriculum all the way through high school and college. Not just a single course, but one per semester, because thinking clearly about things obviously doesn't come naturally to people.
Centralize all our data, and it will get "borrowed". Keep it widely scattered and in varying formats, and it will be too expensive to aggregate it all.
You were warned, but it's too late now.
With Microsoft's P language, Not Invented Here has clearly struck again. From their own documentation and examples, P doesn't support state nesting, which is the most powerful feature that UML statecharts have--and statecharts have had it since their inception (Harel, 1988). Skip P, and go for an open-source implementation of UML statecharts. Check out Boost's implementation, or this free one here: A Lightweight Implementation of UML Statecharts
If you think programming is far more engineering than art, then you must be in a highly structured environment, program for the DoD, etc. Out here in the real world, people around me code without a shred of design work or planning of any sort. They just sit down and start typing...whatever organically evolves is what happens. Code is created with no foresight at all. I wish it were more engineering than art, though. Sad to see all the effort wasted so often.
As actually practiced, it should be called a craft, rather than art or engineering. And most developers I watch are quite Amish.
In all fairness, UML wasn't meant to express things like individual "for" loops. It's utility is at a much higher level. However, some of its formalisms, such as class diagrams and statecharts are very much one-to-one with actual code. (See this http://www.codeproject.com/Art... for an example.)
And if you need any more reasons to understand why graphical languages didn't make it, just consider the fact that most of the silly icons had a text window behind them where you could put specific text, even short scripts. Why was that needed if graphical programming was so complete? Just like CASE tools and object databases, graphical programming was just an attempt by vendors to shake some more money loose from unsuspecting clients.