Being bad at defense doesn't necessarily imply being bad at offense. Security is hard because you have to win 100% of the time. Being good at cyberespionage means getting a win now and then. I'm not saying the US is good at it, just that neither the OMB breach nor the Snowden incident bear on that. And a lot of the info released by Snowden indicate they were pretty good at it (at least targeting their own citizens) or those disclosures wouldn't be such a big deal.
I've never been caught. Does that make me good at cyberespionage? I think there's more to it than that. You might argue necessary but not sufficient, but I'd even disagree with that. The fact that the NSA was outed by Snowden has not made everything they're doing ineffective or we wouldn't be so worried about it.
"Airbus did not anticipate that a pilot would stall a plane and fly it directly into the ocean"
Stalling and flying into the ground have been two common failure modes since flying began and they often happen in sequence. I would think they would be high in the list of misuse cases any aircraft designer would consider.
"we should refrain from being quick to judge which is more or less intuitive."
We should not be quick to judge which UI is more effective, but by definition we can be quick to judge which is more intuitive. In fact, the more time you spend with a system, the less qualified you are to comment on whether it is intuitive. Judging whether a UI is intuitive should take very little time and no expertise past understanding basic operations. I'm certainly not qualified to judge, but I'd think anyone who has experience with modern flight systems would be qualified to comment on whether a particular design was intuitive.
I think he meant "stall a plane and keep it stalled for many minutes, flying it into the ocean". Stall/spin accidents are common, but they normally arise from loss of control at low altitude when there's not enough time or space to recover.
That kind of implies that everything we create inherently belongs to the government, "they" let us use it for the period of copyright, and then it's theirs again to sell off. I can make a case for copyright ending and creative works no longer having an owner, but I can't make a case (philosophically) for them to automatically belong to the government.
But in a democracy the government isn't "they", it is "we". If we all have the right to copy and distribute a particular creative work, then we can collectively decide to trade that right for something we find more valuable (such as cancer research).
It tends to forbid code duplication, which is what the lungs are. Redundant implementations are two implementations which work a different way, which no, are not forbidden by DRY.
> It tends to forbid code duplication, which is what the lungs are.
Lungs are not code duplication any more than running two instances of an application to provide greater peak performance or hot-standby is code duplication. You are confusing duplication of elements of the real system with duplication of specification (programming is executable specification, not the real system.)
You should've suggested (in the DRY sense) removing extra copies of sequences in DNA--excepting, you know, that I don't think that we know that is safe (those may be there for redundancy as well).
Perhaps you work somewhere where the concept of redundancy is important?
Stop being obtuse; you clearly seem to see the point I was getting at.
I certainly see the argument you were trying to make. I also think the way you tried to make it is totally invalid and casts no light on whether the TSA should or shouldn't use the processes they are planning to adopt.
Principle zero is that the system should correctly perform the work required by its owners. If what you're saying is that an additional system should be injected that has access to all the required information, and the TSA should query that system, then I won't argue. That would be a balancing act of coordination costs versus the cost of the technical debt added to the TSA, but I don't feel I have sufficient insight to analyze that balance where I currently am. Likewise if you are arguing any other rearrangement of information owners such that some process can access information and inform the TSA's decisions.
If what you're saying is that the TSA should not perform some work because it's not simple to do that work in accordance with other system design principles, then I fear you have fundamentally misunderstood what those principles are for.
I withdraw my claim that the TSA should not seek to optimize according to design principles. I still believe that you are applying them too broadly, but it isn't a position I care to defend at the moment.
Stephen King wrote a book called On Writing that is part memoir and part guide to writing. It's not intended to be a full writing course, but it's a great intro to the important bits presented in a really entertaining way.
I also really like the Self-Publishing Podcast. If you're interested in being an indie author rather than pursuing traditional publishing, it's a fantastic look at three guys finding their way in that industry. The Writing Excuses podcast (recommended earlier by joanofarf) is a better podcast for the craft of writing, but I find the Self-Publishing guys both entertaining and inspirational.
I don't think jasonjei was being dismissive of real ADHD. He was just pointing out that it is often over and mis-diagnosed. Many kids are considered misbehaving or diagnosed with a medical problem because they can't sit still for hours at a time, but that really is just kids being kids.
I think jasonjei and you are on the same side of this issue. He was a normal kid that didn't want to be mis-labeled, and you have a real condition that deserves consideration. You should both be opposed to the lazy parents/teachers/doctors who extend ADHD diagnoses far beyond its real scope to medicate normal kids into compliance.
A good starting point for that would be to allow invites from people you have already added to your contact list, i.e. X@example.com authorised Y@gmail.com to get status updates and Y added them to their contact list, but authorisation requests from X to Y still appear to be dropped.
This makes perfect sense to me. Chat is an important part of a service that my company provides to our users. We received great response after launching "gtalk integration" for chat until some new users started reporting problems due to this issue. We tried the other way around ie. having them send an invite to us but sadly that doesn't work as well. Hope google comes up with a better solution soon.
You could allow invites, then use subsequent content to determine spam vs non-spam. Block content when its spam and notify the user, blacklist the JID where it came from and eventually domains where there is a high proportion of spam. Also allow users to report spammers. You could possibly even get clever and learn to recognise patterns in the JIDs and domains chosen by spammers, but this is bound to block legitimate content as well.
You could perhaps increase the requirements for sending invites, such as having the recipients server send a CAPTCHA, although spammers seem to be able to get around CAPTCHAs anyway. Perhaps there would be some other solutions that I haven't thought of.
It seems like this solution means that if you want to have your own domain, either you must be rich or the website must be profitable. You're basically saying that only the rich should have access to domain-branded blogs and other non-commercial sites, and everyone else can make do with subdomains like a blogspot or blogger website. I think raising fees would have consequences for well-intentioned users far beyond the effect it had on domain squatters.
In particular I refer to the .com namespace which, after all, should be used for commercial purposes. We already have .name and so forth for personal sites. Given that .name presents the ultimate namespace collision factory we do come down to a scarcity problem though. Thoughts on how we can handle that?
Also: Note that I said we should argue about the value of $X. I did not at all imply that $X should be such that "only the rich" have access to the ability to purchase a domain. That said, people spend $1200 annually for cell phone service, which I think we can draw comparisons between and DNS. If a person pays $1200 a year for a number they can be reached at through the POTS, is it unreasonable to expect them to pay $X (which we still haven't defined, simply said should be higher than $10) to be reachable on the Internet?
That's an US centered view. No regular person spends anywhere near $100/month on cellphone service where I live, nor could many afford it. For $80/month, you can get a cellphone plan with unlimited sms and calls, 100mbps home internet, 100 TV channels, and a POTS-over-IP line. And yet, many still can't afford cable TV or home Internet.
And this is the problem is pricing global product and/or services; what's reasonable in a market like the US is prohibitively expensive in many others.
"It seems like this solution means that if you want to have your own domain, either you must be rich or the website must be profitable"
Not really. Looks like the namespace is big enough for all of us. Your post made me curious how crowded the .com space really is and within 30s of trying, I found this free gem: notrichbuthappy.com Nothing wrong with it for a blog, right?
Not at all. I wasn't saying the .com namespace was crowded. I was responding to someone who thought it was and who thought the appropriate solution was increasing domain registration prices.
