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Comment Re:Glitches (Score 1) 144

I still see no 'hacking' part in it

Consider a case where you have a senile cashier in your local grocery store and you find out that if you buy a certain combination of items and give him a 10 dollar bill, he'll confuse it with a 100 dollar bill and give you $92 back.

Would you call that hacking?

However, if you notice that the elderly clerk is not at the register and ask the manager to call him because you really like to do business with him personally, you might be conducting a fraud.

Comment Business cycles and regulation play a role (Score 1) 614

Many companies - especially the industrial ones - work on long business cycles. Things like assembly lines or CT scanners are supposed to run for decades.

Imagine a company producing CT scanners who's been on the market for some time. They would have dozens of versions of their scanners in the field, some of them more than a decade old, using old software. To update an old system with new software (such as one supporting new browsers) requires to run a full round of system tests. In the case of medical software, it's even mandated by government regulation.

This would mean you would have to rebuild all 20 (or more) machines in your test lab to perform the tests (simulators are not good enough for FDA) at a huge cost. On top of that, you might not even be able to get some of the parts for the machines that were produced in the previous millennium.

Comment Re:Glitches (Score 5, Informative) 144

I assume you didn't read into the case. The prosecutors were never trying to argue that Nestor (the accused) used hacking to find the glitch. They were trying to argue that the combination of keys that activates the glitch is so complex that it should by itself be considered 'hacking'.

However, the 'combination of keys' used was not that extraordinary - all were legal game-play moves. Boiled down to the fact that switching a denomination of a game could change the payout the machine would give you on games you already won (but did not cash out yet).

The prosecution was trying to paint is as access rights violation but they failed to show just what exactly did the defendants do that they were 'not entitled' to do.

It still might be a fraud. Especially since Nestor convinced the operator in one case to switch on the feature that enabled the glitch. But hacking is out of the question.

Comment Re:Not really (Score 3, Insightful) 717

Gun related crimes are not being done using legally held weapons. You're no better off with a printed gun than you are with a black market S&W. In one case you leave traces of your presence in the black market, in the other you leave traces of downloading the schematics from the internet. In the long run owning a 3D printer and gun schematics will be equal to having the means to murder someone. If your average Joe Blow has an opportunity and a motive on top of that, he'd still get busted.

Comment Who wants your stuff? (Score 1) 205

The most important thing is to show them that there is a demand for what you do. This is where great ideas make it or fail. Henry Ford didn't invent mass production. It's just that nobody thought there would be enough demand for so many automobiles. Same goes for every other successful enterprises. Who would want a personal computer? Who would want a phone without physical buttons?

So who wants your stuff? How much do they want it? How much are they willing to pay for it?

Comment Re:I'm tired of H1B politics (Score 1) 419

I blame the lack of programming apprenticeships, personally.

I wholly agree on that. But in addition, the deeper problem seems to be that the incentive for the colleges is to have as many graduates as possible - that's where the cash flow comes from. I think that's the reason why they've become a bit loose on the requirements.

Comment Re:I'm tired of H1B politics (Score 1) 419

Sure. So let's look at the examples I've given (real problems I've encountered):

didn't understand the concept of exceptions, were wondering why you can't just insert a string into the middle of a text file and were surprised that you can have more than one table in a SQL database.

Meaning - knowing how the concept of exceptions work, knowing how file system works conceptually and have a basic idea of what relational databases are.

Are you saying these are too specific and not in the scope of CS/SW Engineering degrees? I don't buy that. I KNOW these things are in software and CS related curriculi. I'm just irritated by the fact that people who don't grasp these basic things still get the degree.

Comment Re:I'm tired of H1B politics (Score 2) 419

Maybe the whole concept of colleges in engineering is broken. I've met with people with a CS masters degree who didn't understand the concept of exceptions, were wondering why you can't just insert a string into the middle of a text file and were surprised that you can have more than one table in a SQL database.

I'm not saying that every graduate is bad but that even the reputable colleges hand out degrees to people who have no business having them.

If I look at the (CS/SW related) degree from the employers perspective, all that it grants is that the holder knows how to use variables, loops and branching in programming and that he/she has a rudimentary idea about what a compiler, an OS and a file system is. Is that really worth the 4-5 years and $100K (and more) spent on a something a high school kid could learn in half a year?

That produces a disconnect between the graduates expectations and the company's requirements - the graduate has invested time and money into his degree and expects a salary of a professional and the company doesn't want to pay that much for somebody with so little training. I believe the really good graduates do actually get god jobs out of school - it's just the average and below average people who cannot get employed.

Comment Re:Over thinking it (Score 1) 288

Not only over thinking - he's thinking in the wrong directions.

His blunt weapons are useless in an airplane - no room to make a swing at a target positioned as high as a human head. Has he seriously not thought about a shiv on a two foot pole? The projectile weapons are little more than an annoyance. Yes, even the crossbow, which could seriously injure one person with a lucky shot and that's it.

His "Plausible attack scenarios" are laughable as well. Even if you manage to keep the cockpit door open, what then? You still have to deal with two non-compliant pilots. There is a person who tried - and not with weapons made of fashion magazines- he had hammers and a freaking dart gun. He failed. And being on a cargo plane he didn't even have to deal with a cabin full of pissed-off passengers

.

Seriously, the only 'plausible' danger would be to quietly set up a bomb as a part of a suicide attack or a timed bomb to explode in the next flight and he didn't demonstrate anything like that.

Comment Re:More facetime (Score 5, Insightful) 1145

First off, the jokes (as described) were juvenile, but in no way misogynistic.

This.

She didn't even bother to look up what the term 'sexism' means before going on a tantrum.

What she think it means: Any kind of language oriented on sexual organs or any kind of sexual acts.

What it means: Sexism /noun/ - Prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex.

A couple of examples:

Not sexism: "I'd like to fondle my dongle." "I want to have sex with that girl".

Sexism: "OMG a woman behind a steering wheel! Everybody run for cover!" "Get back into the kitchen, biatch!"

Of course, there is this other thing, called "sexual harassment" which does include things like asking somebody for sexual favors. However, from what I can gather, this is not what the guys in question did. They were not addressing her or even talking about her. It really was just a case of using foul language.

Comment Re:Bogus (Score 1) 353

First the OP used the ad hominem circumstantial.

It's not 'ad hominem'. I did not call the author an idiot. I called him potentially biased. It's like an oil company doing research on global warming. It might not be wrong, but don't take their word for it.

Then he criticized the use of standard metrics without a hint of why they're inappropriate or what alternatives he would suggest.

Salary - of course it's going to be lower considering higher administrative costs of an H1B. Does not automatically mean the person is worse.

rate of patent production - people who produce the most IT patents are generally not innovative

alma mater university rank - yeah, US universities are at the top of the ranking so the US graduates will get better numbers here. But if you take the best 5 students from all lower tier universities and compare them to the average graduate from top 10 universities, are they going to be worse? I don't know but the article does not attempt to consider this.

employment in R&D - this is also biased against the H1Bs. You see, the most renowned employers don't have trouble getting US graduates to apply for their R&D positions. It's the medium sized manufacturer in Cleveland who fails to attract MIT graduates and has to look for an H1B. Does not mean they are worse.

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