Conflicted?
So no conflicts about not paying debts to banks, stopping FDA approval on drugs so that he can short pharmaceuticals' stock or on the price hike of Thiola?
A World War II German Enigma machine will be among the valuables a US court plans to seize from convicted felon and shamed former pharmaceuticals exec Martin Shkreli. The Enigma box is listed among the valuable assets American prosecutors plan to take to help cover the $7.4m in forfeiture the New York Eastern District ordered …
This is the US we're talking about, that sort of behaviour is considered laudable over there, or at least it is by the people that matter (ie the ones with all the money).
Shkreli just rocked the boat a little too much, if he'd only increased the price by ten times rather than twenty he might have stayed under the radar.
He had help with the price hike on Thiola from the FDA. If they weren't so pernicious folks in the US would be able to pay pennies for the stuff. It isn't like the brand of tiopronin they sell in other parts of the world is substantially different but somehow because somehow the ball got dropped on thalidomide the FDA makes it cost prohibitive to get some meds even if they've been around and safe for a hundred years with a little help and fear mongering from big pharma of course.
.. the Enigma system was among the world's most sophisticated ciphers in its time, and its complexity was famously cracked by superboffin Alan Turing's team at Bletchley Park.
I think by now it is firmly established that the original Enigma system was cryptanalyzed and broken by the Polish Cipher Bureau in cooperation with the French intelligence, well before the Bletchey Park was even established. Turing and his team had full access to the PCB's work and were able to build upon it to break later versions on Enigma.
I do not mean to denigrate Turing's and the whole Bletchey team's contribution to this effort - but we must give credit where credit is due.
Yes, but what Alan Turing broke was the newer Enigma with the plug board, which had stumped the Poles. That was a very clever piece of thinking in his part.
The history has been firmly established for many decades now, and the Pole's hugely important role in the endeavour has been widely acknowledged for a very long time.
On the shoulders of giants and all that.
> Alan Turing broke was the newer Enigma with the plug board, which had stumped the Poles
Except it didn't exist at the time of the PCB. Turing's work was based on 'Rejewski' et al and it was Welchman who developed the diagonal board without which the bombes would have been too slow to be of use. The roles of a dozen others who made the mistake of not being English or keeping their oaths are lost from history.
>On the shoulders of giants and all that.
Very apposite, although unlike Newton, Turing himself never claimed the work as his own - that's down pop historians and shoddy film makers
Very apposite, although unlike Newton, Turing himself never claimed the work as his own - that's down pop historians and shoddy film makers
Correct, and those are the same pop historians and shoddy film makers that helped to bury the many contributions Gordon Welchman made to these efforts. I was quite impressed that the BBC made a rather good documentary about it.
No, the Enigma with plugboard didn't stump the Poles at all.
What stumped them was that the German military switched from three wheels to five wheels. With three available wheels they could put into the Enigma in six different ways. If you have five wheels, you have five choices for the first wheel, four choices for the second wheel, and three choices for the third wheel, for a total of 60 combinations, ten times as many.
There was no mathematical difficulty. The problem was that it was ten times more work to create the pre-calculated tables that the Poles were using, and they just didn't have the manpower to do it.
Don't forget the very small matter that the Polish intelligence enigma breaking efforts were disrupted somewhat by the rather inconvenient invasion and occupation of Poland by German right near the start of the war!
Which is why (so I believe) that all their enigma breaking material was rushed out of Poland to England, so Turing et al could continue their work.
... the US has almost certainly broken up its Bombes...
There's one here:
https://www.nsa.gov/resources/everyone/digital-media-center/image-galleries/cryptologic-museum/current-exhibits/
I've seen it. A quality NCR product. Would probably start right up. I'm not sure they could find anyone who knew how to run it though.
Now, you can imagine the scale on which they had these.running. Over a hundred of them.
https://cryptologicfoundation.org/m/cch_calendar_mobile.html/event/2016/09/01/1472706000/1943-first-bombe-to-nebraska-ave-/78139?get_id=Ihz0LulkBZG4YiNh9auJsZr9gadJQvVgwOnaBAR6PYbwmUngTR38yElAjGLLkBLgKn6kH7W7VAPDSu6lKv9hVhO2fzvSQkSPaTh9ILGziFi%2F5OuF9%2FAhxGGWLiOQGIsZyxI7HZ4hlzKK
Whereas Bletchley had tens of them. And remember, Nebraska Ave was cracking and reading the Japanese Navy as well. Simultaneously.
// my mother was part of the effort.
With all the respect where respect is due (and none where it's not applicable) as long as the Polish insist on piping up *Every Single Damn Time* the Enigma and Turing or the Brits are mentioned anywhere loudly protesting "but no, no, it was actually us!" I will not cease vigorously downvoting every such comment I can find. Yes, I know of your early work. No, what you broke was not what later required halls of Bombes to break. And the public at large will keep seeing a typewriter whenever they look at an Enigma, never mind Polish or British achievements. Get a f###ing grip already. And no, I'm not even British.
As a country which has suffered greatly (for a long time) before, during and after the Second World War, and the significant contributions and sacrifices of its people towards fighting for good are very sadly overlooked or forgotten about, I think the Polish people are more than entitled to often feel quite upset that their contributions to history are too often relegated to footnote status by many of the others who record the history of that period.
We owe every Polish person who helped to defeat the Nazi regime just as much respect and thanks and we do all of the people of every single country (and there were many) who fought on the Allied side.
well, the Poles DO pontyfy incessantly about their greatness / suffering, regardless of whether others ignore it (usually) or applaud...
And I speak as authority, because? Well, married to a Pole, fathered two Polettes, actually a Pole myself. There must be a Polish joke to cover THAT! :)
When visiting Warsaw I was made aware of just what had happened to the Polish people. There are parts of the city that have been meticulously rebuilt after the Germans and then the Russians destroyed them. You'd never know that they weren't the original buildings dating back hundreds of years. They were also beautiful to look at. It was at once both a slightly depressing and truly uplifting sight. One of my Polish friends said that Poles are tough and if you knock it down we'll build it back up, knock us down we get right back up.
The other vivid memorys I have of Poland is of being chased around by a market trader insisting that I wanted to buy a pair of (very shiny) chrome trainers that weren't in my size. That and the taxi driver taking me back to the airport beating the traffic by driving on the tram tracks for sort distances.
>No, what you broke was not what later required halls of Bombes to break
As would Turing's redesign without Welchman's genius - unfortunately he later committed the unforgivable crime of becoming American, so we don't like to speak of him.
With hindsight and a modern CS perspective these are easy systems to model and understand - you should perhaps make the effort to do so before lecturing on the subject.
If you were you'd share our respect and acknowledgement of the Polish contribution to winning the war.
Not just code breaking but things like the Polish squadrons that helped win the Battle of Britain.
It's probably one reason that even with the hatred of current immigration levels I haven't heard anybody have a go at the Poles. Jokes about them, sure, but culturally they fit well and we get on with them, and many of us recognise them as allies when the shit hits the fan.
"credit where credit is due" - it was teamwork, a great many people worked on it and never sought any recognition - I knew a school master many years ago who worked on the project. But that was all he ever said about it ... on the other hand, he did the crossword every morning and never wrote down anything - just did the whole thing in his head. Needless to say - as kids, we were beyond impressed.
Bletchley Park wasn't just about knowing how to break an enigma message, it was a huge industrial operation that collated thousands of messages from dozens of outstations and had to do it very quickly.
Some of this work was based on the leg up they got from the Polish cryptanalysts, but thereafter Enigma had to be cracked and re-cracked and for long periods in the middle of WW2, Bletchley was completely blind to some Enigma versions, particularly naval Enigma which put the battle of the Atlantic in the balance. Many more breakthroughs had to be made. To state that breaking enigma was about knowing how to decrypt an early version of it is oversimplifying matters. The Polish input was the seed for the subsequent work and is well acknowledged, and anyone that gets a tour of BP will hear all about it and get shown the very nice monument to them.
Bletchley Park wasn't just about knowing how to break an enigma message, it was a huge industrial operation that collated thousands of messages from dozens of outstations and had to do it very quickly.
Perhaps the real reason some are happy that "pop historians and shoddy film makers that helped to bury the many contributions Gordon Welchman made to these efforts." is to keep the focus on Turin and Enigma, and so deflect attention away from the big picture and Welchman.
It is interesting that Welchman was still considered to be a security threat in 1982, because of his book "The Hut Six Story", which "included details that were "still classified""
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-27128685 ]
Aside: If you are interested in the bigger picture, I recommend reading "Bletchley Park's Secret Sisters: Psychological Warfare in World War II" published in 2005.
But that was all he ever said about it ... on the other hand, he did the crossword every morning and never wrote down anything - just did the whole thing in his head.
My grandfather (served in WWI and subsequently became a schoolmaster in Peterborough) died peacefully in hospital back in the 80's aged 92, on his lap was that morning's Times open at the Cryptic crosssword - completed in his distinctive hand.
"but it’s a constant reminder that we should use knowledge for good"Yes, because arbitrarily hiking by 56x the price of life-saving medication to $750 per pill, then very publicly sneering about it, is such an obvious example of "using knowledge for good".
Please let this psychopath die in prison.
If it wasn't for the fact that his actions have almost certainly led to deaths, I would say that's much too harsh.
I think the most appropriate punishment will be when the drug dealers in prison find out who he is and charge him a special rate for the stuff he will need to make life endurable.
Please let this psychopath die in prison.
That's too harsh. I prefer him to develop an illness that can only be addressed by very specific medication, which is raised 100x in price just before it can be obtained for him, leaving him ill with no means to get at it. You know, karma..
The difference is subjective.
From my limited understanding of the subject, psychopathy is genetic, whereas sociopathy is supposedly circumstantial.
Personally I think the latter is a myth, otherwise everyone subject to similar circumstances would become a psychopath, which is demonstrably not the case. Again, from my limited exposure to various research material, only 1% of the general populous is considered to be clinically psychopathic.
Someone like Shkreli, who would deliberately kill for no reason other than greed, then publicly sneer about it, is clearly one of them, especially given that there was absolutely nothing harsh about his extremely privileged circumstances at the time, that might otherwise have accounted for his behaviour.
No, seize the illegal gains of criminals to try to compensate the poor sods their solipsistic world view hurt.
Something we should be doing more often I suspect, but more as a 'punishment fit the crime' rather than simple compensation. Rich bastards who rob the poor should have all their assets frozen, be given a job picking sprouts in the Fens, and forced to live on their wages for a couple of years. Much cheaper than prison, and they might learn something useful.
Psychopaths are genetically incapable of learning from their mistakes, because they completely lack the capacity to understand that the harm they cause is in any way "wrong", and therefore in their view cannot possibly be a "mistake".
Rather, it's everyone else who's "wrong" for stopping them, criticising them and punishing them, since in their neoliberal view they should be allowed to run amok with complete impunity. Indeed they view their causing harm, with or without any particular reason--but typically for some personal benefit, to be a sort of "inalienable right", and that our stopping them actually constitutes a form of "violence".
Yes, the twisted mind of a neoliberal psychopath is a vile, mysterious cesspool, full of horrors.
"No it's the courts saying you have no money to pay your fine so will will seizes assets that equivalent to that fine"
Wouldn't it be great if everyon could agree NOT to bid on it xcept for one (maybe a museum) meaning he loses that asset and STILL has a fine at the end.
IIRC during the financial crisis large houses in Dublin had become something of a bubble, and some of them had been bought by the more successful boys with the Armalites. Who ran into a spot of financial bother. When the houses were auctioned they sent the boys round to try to "persuade" bidders to offer more than the owners had paid.
I can imagine Shkreli sending his friends round to discourage purchase of his assets.
Let's face it, after "Enter the Wu-Tang (36 chambers)", which is pure genius and immortal, the Wu-Tang Clan's output has been progressively more shit. That's why they flogged OUATIS to a div with more money than taste. Fair play to them and more fool him.
BTW, did you know "The Clan" recently sued a dog-walking outfit called "Woof-Tang Clan" for breach of copyright? I shit you not.
Look, the guy is not a total tosser, He did at least do his best to effectively erase all public access to a couple of hip-hop recordings and thus improve the world of music by some very small percentage. In recognition of this selfless and valuable act, I propose a reduction of his sentence. About three seconds seems fair.
"It was just a (very good) encryption tool used in normal business well before and after the war."
FTFY
Enigma was widely used after the war, in part because the UK government kept both Bletchley Park and the breaking of Enigma secret, because many foreign governments thought it was secure and unbreakable...
So, in the world of RegUnits (TM), how do we distinguish between the already exalted term of boffin, and superboffin? What extra feat of boffinry do you need to commit to climb the scale of boffinism? Are there additional levels - ultraboffin? Uberboffin?
This has put far too much doubt and confusion into my already fragile world.