I acknowledge that the airline captain has some responsibility for our security. But part of this responsibility is being a steward for our overall well-being. And in this case, the "security" aspect is so vastly overwhelmed by the damage it did to passengers in other ways, that it was obviously a bad call on the captain's part.
It really does break both ways. Over-reacting to perceived threats has a cost too.
Warning - semi-political (but hopefully non-partisan) political content ahead: This is the same thing the FDA does with drug approvals. They are overwhelmingly biased toward preventing bad drugs that they prevent access to a lot of things that could help. Studies show that the FDA's difference between up-side and down-side risk costs a lot of lives on net. For example, the FDA delayed the approval of beta-blockers (used to prevent second heart attacks) for several years after they were widely available and saving lives in Europe. Analysts estimate that this delay alone cost tens of thousands of American lives.
Sometimes, accepting a risk provides the greatest net benefit.
I think godelski is being far too permissive in his odds. As he says, we need to examine how (un)likely is it that somebody is trying to execute this terrorist action, including being competent enough to create a workable bomb, to sneak it through security, and so forth. That's all his numbers show.
But we've also got to factor in
A) How likely is it that this bomb is going to have some bluetooth component? It seems like needless complexity, so we should weigh strongly against this. Further, it's less likely that our hypothetical terrorist needs to have expertise in this domain as well.
B) How likely is it that he would clearly paint the word "BOMB" on the side of his device (figuratively, of course, since this is digital)? That's amazing levels of stupidity. And then intersect that with the claim that he's competent in all the other things (bomb making, sneaking through security, making a bluetooth trigger for his bomb) but is so incredibly stupid that he'd label it a bomb.
Factoring all of this in, godelski is being far too generous in assessing this with odds similar to finding the winning Powerball ticket outside the front door while simultaneously being hit by lightning.
I acknowledge that the airline captain has some responsibility for our security. But part of this responsibility is being a steward for our overall well-being. And in this case, the "security" aspect is so vastly overwhelmed by the damage it did to passengers in other ways, that it was obviously a bad call on the captain's part.
Oh for sure. I'm admittedly several orders of magnitude too conservative in the simple case. I'll be honest, I expect that to be several orders of magnitude conservative to reality, as you point out.
It's exactly why I'm telling people they are being crazy in this thread. Because people are still defending the "Free Palestine, F Israel" device name as if it's a threat. The supposed threat there is that this starts a fight on the plane. To which the obvious answer is to arrest the person that gets so irritated by a trivial to ignore protest that they decide to start a fight on a plane. Arresting the person making the tacky protest is crazy. The logic people are arguing for is "arrest an annoying person because their annoyance might cause a crazy person to act crazy". Why isn't the answer "arrest the crazy person?" This whole thread is batshit levels of insane
Essentially, put in the effort and do the liquid bowel prep.
It's not just about effort. I must do the liquid prep due to my Crohn's disease. And while I am able to get the liquid down (as you note, it helps to make it as cold as possible; also, suck on an ice cube before drinking to numb the taste buds), I can't keep it down. Within an hour it has me evacuating from both ends.
For my last test, I barely slept at all the night before on account of the vomiting, and even once I got to the hospital I was lying on the wonderfully cold tile of the floor between rolling over to vomit in a trash can.
They know it affects me badly, but still assess that it's necessary due to my risk factors. And because I'm losing much of the drug due to the vomiting, the prep is poor, so I have to start fasting a day early to ensure that I get sufficiently cleaned out. It's torture all around.
It must be really challenging to feel like you are an outlier, and that medical advice does not fit you.
There are going to be niche clinical situations where the benefits outweigh the risks of what is otherwise generally not recommended. If you’re not able to tolerate the liquid prep, you’re obviously better to take an oral fleet than no prep at all.
I generally agree with your point about it being simply emergent behavior.
But on the other hand, the timing (having seen over the past week or so several articles about the most disastrous IPCC model now having become implausible) makes me wonder if some individual actors are thinking they need something to shore up their disaster prophesying.
Trademarks are a fundamentally different kind of IP.
With copyright and patent, the creator of the work is being protected. But with trademark law, it's not about protecting the content of the IP as such. It's about protecting the consumer from being misled into thinking they're getting the real thing.
And given the guitar market at large, with about ten thousand different guitars in the general shape of a Strat, it's pretty much universally known that the name on the headstock is what you have to look at to differentiate. So long as that name isn't misleading, I have a hard time imagining how they could make a case of it.
I mean, if the headstock says "Fernando Stratoblaster" or something, then MAYBE it's a little confusing. But my guitar, a Kramer Focus 6000 looked very nearly identical to a Strat (the edges are less beveled, the headstock is pointier, but at a quick glance...), but it quite clearly says that it's NOT a strat. Nobody's going to be fooled despite the striking similarity in shape.
I assume that the repository of books was used as training data, but not by way of the annas-archive domain. Instead, it would make a lot more sense for them to download the whole pile via bittorrent, which has nothing at all to do with the domain. In other words, the legal solution here wouldn't have prevented the problem.
> We’re able to provide high-speed access to our full collections, as well as to unreleased collections.
>This is enterprise-level access that we can provide for donations in the range of tens of thousands USD. We’re also willing to trade this for high-quality collections that we don’t have yet.
Which is interesting. What if they had proof of US AI companies paying them (AA) for sourcing “high quality collections we don’t have yet”? Procurement of an illegal act is an illegal act. Might this be enough to garner some legal cover from their presumably well-heeled customers?
So they brewed up a bunch of ugly C macrology that enabled C programmers (or Visual Studio wizards) to define COM interfaces in header and implementation files that just happened to lay out memory in the exact same way as vtables of C++ pure virtual classes.
While C++ programs would use other ugly macros to declare actual honest-for-god C++ classes to implement COM interfaces.
And Visual Basic programmers would ... do whatever it was that Visual Basic programmers did.
We were being a well-behaved MS shop at this point. The new generation of our website was designed with a distributed component architecture being called from ASP (Active Server Pages) using DCOM. We implemented it in C++ using ATL (iirc) to facilitate the COM interfaces. The thing was, even with that help, our actual business logic was absolutely overwhelmed by all the annoying casting back-and-forth between those IUnknown values and C++ native types. It was really annoying.
This was around the timeframe of VB 5, I think, and we discovered that we could write the same logic in VB without all the annoyance. Putting aside our "serious developer" C++ elitism, we were actually productive in doing it all in VB instead of C++, and that generation of the system lasted for a bunch of years. We eventually replaced that with an ASP.Net design in C#, which was a whole lot more manageable.
I recall an internal (never released) project at IBM in the late 1980s. It was a tool for creating client-server GUI apps, programming them with the REXX language. You may remember that client-server was all the rage at the time, and REXX was IBM's favorite scripting language. IIRC, the internal name of the project was "Red October", but I can't find any reference to this online.
The tools lacked the visual GUI builder of VB, but really, that's just a detail. The rest of the framework was really quite powerful, and a GUI builder could have been added. But in true IBM fashion, they had no idea how to market something that wasn't mainframe targeted, and they killed the project. There was a fair amount of acrimony on internal forums about this at the time.
You are correct. The only reference I could find to Red October is a dead link which was never archived (or has since been removed from) @ Wayback Machine Internet Archive: https://www.ibm.com/history/innovation/red-october
Otherwise, the other links point to the game, the movie and the cyberespionage malware attack.
You are correct! I goofEd. It's hard to assimilate a human language on the fly. See that proves I am not an AI :)
It's also worth mentioning Sharpdevelop.net which also gave you the choice of VB.Net or C# and another language, can't recall what it was.
There were so many options available. So many books were written, sold and then became obsolete. I know because I bought tons of them at the now defunct Fry's Electronics and later donated them to the local public library.
But with AI advancing, focusing on programming and earning a CS degree as a future investment does not hold the same appeal that it once did. Of course, this is just my opinion.
It really does break both ways. Over-reacting to perceived threats has a cost too.
Warning - semi-political (but hopefully non-partisan) political content ahead: This is the same thing the FDA does with drug approvals. They are overwhelmingly biased toward preventing bad drugs that they prevent access to a lot of things that could help. Studies show that the FDA's difference between up-side and down-side risk costs a lot of lives on net. For example, the FDA delayed the approval of beta-blockers (used to prevent second heart attacks) for several years after they were widely available and saving lives in Europe. Analysts estimate that this delay alone cost tens of thousands of American lives.
Sometimes, accepting a risk provides the greatest net benefit.
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