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Comment Mitigation and diversion (Score 1) 5

"Brazilian authorities said that the National Civil Defense's warning platform was taken offline after being targeted by a likely hacker attack ...."

Not to be all negative and such, but if they did that, they might be leaving themselves open to another type of attack based on their lack of a warning system. I'm not sure exactly what the warning system is meant to accomplish anyway; if it's something like warning of severe weather, that's one thing; if it's meant to warn the populace to take cover against incoming missiles or to be on the look-out for some threat, like I don't know, terrorists in clown masks or something, that would be different.

In other words, this silly message potentially could be a diversion.

And if it's only one letter, does it really count as 1337-speak?

Comment Re:Thinking Too Small (Score 1) 180

In return for those protections, the corporations and people who comprise them pay taxes.

I pay taxes, but I don't get limited liability protection.

What you're describing is a system that has produced nearly every genocide in the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as mass suffering and general slaughter.

Have you ever done track and field? I think you could probably set a record for leaping to conclusions. You also got yourself a big ol' false dichotomy there.

Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, the Kim's, Castro, Guevara - all murdering, power mad monsters. And, Socialists.

And Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos),George W Bush (Afghanistan and Iraq), and Barack Obama (Libya)?

Comment Re:The bailout record: taxpayer profit (Score 1) 180

A valid point: the money loaned to bank to prevent collapse was eventually repaid, though there was no way to know in advance that that would happen. It's also irrelevant: I was replying to the comment that "If a company goes bust, it's its debtors that foot the bill, not the government", which may be generally true but is not exactly what happened in that case.

Comment Good idea... but (Score 2, Informative) 48

We really should abandon the Student Loan idea.
1) It is not reasonable to expect people that by definition have NOT had a college education to make good decisions about student loans. Some of their parents may have collage degrees, but not all.

2) They are long term loans that cannot be refinanced. If interest rates rise, the borrowers make out like a bandit. But if they fall, they get screwed.

3) Scholarships are better ideas.

Why scholarships are better:

You can quite easily pick the person who really needs it and/OR the person that most benefits from it.

You can get much stricter on which education institutions qualify for them. This will end a bunch of scams, such as the schools that if graduate from get a $60,000 per year job but cost $900,000 to go to.

You can put in grade requirements for continuing them for next year.

Scholarships fight educational inflation, while loans encourage it. If schools know the main government scholarships only pay Y on average, they will have immense pressure to keep their costs below Y. The government can easily set the values of the scholarships to discourage inflation because they do not want to pay more.

But banks will always be willing to increase the amount they loan to the students. To them, the cost of education is a GOOD thing because larger loans means larger profits.

Comment Re:Listen we are a nation of 12-year-old so it's (Score 1) 48

I don't care how much of an idiot you are, you're simply too stupid to respond to further. I don't want things to be as they were in my childhood. Back then, things were a mess. BECAUSE government tried either to micromanage everything or manage nothing at all. The idea of a third way, where governing is about just that, placing control mechanisms in place but not do the management, is obviously far beyond your pea-brain.

Comment Re:3D printing whole rockets was such a dumb idea. (Score 1) 47

Oh god. If I spent enough time digging through my ancient Slashdot posts, somewhere back there there are posts of me going, "While I loved the strategy behind Falcon 9, I'm really not keen on this plan to make Starship out of huge carbon fibre tanks, that sounds like a really failure-prone solution..." I'm glad they only spent like a year on that idea before deciding it was dumb; somewhere back there there's also a bunch of posts of me cheering their switch to steel ;) . SpaceX still keep having random COPV problems (most of which they don't even make themselves). Not too encouraging for the notion of the cold gas thruster add-on to the Roadster, where the plan is to replace the back seat with COPVs, so you have a COPV right behind your head.

Electron has been getting by on CF, and honestly I'm impressed, but they've also been only working with very small launch vehicles thusfar. We'll see how neutron goes...

Comment Re:That's 12-year-old thinking (Score 1) 48

The problem is that you can ALWAYS get around rules. It isn't possible to make perfect rules for anything above a minimal level of complexity - that's just a variant of the Turing-Church Halting Problem.

So you are forced to invert the dynamics. There's no real alternative. Instead of you creating a high level of complexity that the departments will work their arses off to avoid, you force the departments themselves to create the regimens that they're prepared to live with. But you have to do so cleverly. They will always create regimens that mean they do the least work necessary (because that's cheap on resources and they will ALWAYS consider this sort of extra work to be an imposition) and have the least amount of culpability.

So you need to meet three conditions:
1. The department can't evade the bits they're actually able to do
2. The department CAN pass on work they're not equipt to do, but ONLY if it's their responsibility to oversee the department they pass it onto
3. The department IS inescapably culpable for failure to either do the work OR ensure that others do it

You do NOT need the frameworks for each department, and should not attempt to draw those up. Those will be departmentally-specific and timeframe-specific. Far, far better have people who actually know the specific context do that work. No department likes to look like it's being forced to do anything, so making the actual detailed specifics internal, you're utilising their psychology. They're not being "forced", they're defining their additional responsibilities and duties. From a psychological angle, they're much more likely to be receptive to this perspective.

But because the departments are all internally writing their own management protocols, YOU DON'T HAVE TO. You only need to have a framework which obliges them to write up what they will request. This is MUCH lighter and, because it is much lighter, it is far less prone to have failure points where generic ideas don't work for a specific type of work.

If we want to look at this in software terms, only an idiot would write an overly-restrictive langauge that imposes a strict model of thought regardless of the type of work. If you want to provide a high level of confidence in correctness, you don't try to impose it through a myriad of complex hurdles and rigorously controlled APIs. You achieve it by incorporating contracts (function X is guaranteed to take in data meeting these requirements, and is guaranteed to deliver data meeting these other requirements). Contract programming is much, much lighter on the development process, doesn't impose on the programmer, and yet creates a very high level of assurance. Mostly because programmers aren't working to try and cheat with irritating APIs.

In Linux terms, you want a lightweight virtual layer handling filesystems in general, the filesystem policies should be handled by the filesystem not the main kernel. You want the main kernel to be doing as little of the work as possible. As soon as it is heavy and micromanaging everything, you're going to end up with something slow and unstable, that really can't do a whole lot.

You want to push the complexity to the edges, that's where complexity belongs. The bit that changes slowly, can't handle special cases, has least visibility into what is needed, and is really a very blunt instrument wants to be lightweight. One reason for having things like Common Law and Case Law is precisely because the legal system figured all this out centuries ago.

Comment Re:I don't think it would matter (Score 1, Interesting) 48

I disagree. It actually needs less regulation.

The siloing of knowledge and duties is why it was always somebody else's problem. So you simply take out all the regulations that obligate siloing and replace all of that kerfufle with a single rule: "If it's on your plate and nobody else has published that they've done the work so far, it's your responsibility, silos be damned, and failure leaves you liable".

That's it.

That's all we need. A removal of siloed thinking and a duty to complete all of the scheduled work regardless of whose toes it tramples.

That would have solved the problem. But, because departments never like to give up powers they obtain, a side-effect would be that departments would be proactive. They wouldn't walk down piers, looking for strange things. Rather, if they heard of strange things that are their department, if they don't want to be shamed, then they need to ask the company for more information. Because then it's on their plate and not that of a rival department.

The other benefit of using this approach is that it isn't about the special cases, it's about the general problem that underlies all of the special cases of this sort: nobody takes responsibility until it's already a disaster.

If a department is liable for pretending the problems aren't there, then the department wil CYA. If the only way to do so is to do all the outstanding work, regardless of title, then that work will get done. If the only way to get it done right IS to give it to the right department, and they're on the hook until that has happened, you're damned right it'll happen.

I've worked in the public sector, I've seen the paranoia and closed-mindedness first-hand. That's not going to go away. So you solve the issue by exploiting those traits, since you can't eliminate them.

Comment Child abuser asks for immunity? (Score 5, Insightful) 103

They got immunity for things they published and pushed on people on the grounds that others said it, they were just the promoters and publishers.

We finally figured out how to sue them not for publishing, but for their massive and unethical attempts to push and promote what others said.

So now they ask for immunity.

No.

They are the problem. They are guilty. Note, they didn't HAVE to be the problem. They could have promoted things based on truth and value rather than how much attention they got by being outrageous and dishonest.

Comment 3D printing whole rockets was such a dumb idea. (Score 1) 47

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to say about printing small rocket parts, such as for the engines. But they were printing basically sheet metal cylinders, which is such an immensely slow and inefficient way to go about it, and it left them with parts that were heavier and less aerodynamic (rougher surface). Crazy that idea ever got any funding.

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