Slashdot Mirror

- 3 points, further reading, and a thought on the Internet as a tool for DD -

1. Direct democracy has only been objected to on two grounds worth discussing - the impracticality argument and 'the crowd is stupid' argument. The former is no longer valid and the latter it is only proven true in specific circumstances.

2. People are not necessarily dumb. Yes, people in North America are dumb en masse. However, there is no systemic pressure to educate because it's not easier to get elected (manipulate the masses) if voters are well-informed and educated. There may not be any mass conspiracy to keep people stupid but there's no incentive to educate them.

3. Crowd-sourcing is the BEST solution for certain types of political-arena questions. Any decisions requiring predictions surrounding complex systems, for example, are best tackled through crowd-sourcing. E.g., Prediction Markets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market)

Some reading/viewing:

O’Mahony, S. & F. Ferraro. (2007). The Emergence of Governance in an Open Source Community. Academy of Management Journal. Vol. 50, No. 5
(link to article about the above article: http://www.techforce.com.br/news/linux_blog/scientific_study_about_debian_governance_and_organization)

Tetlock, P. (2005). Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
(link to above: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7959.html)

Surowiecki, J. (2007). Power: 2012. Presented at the NewYorker Conference 2007: 2012: Stories from the Near Future , New York. Retrieved December 8, 2008,
(link to above from: http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2007/surowiecki)

Surowiecki, J. (2004). The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations
(link to above: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds)

Esser, J.K. & N.R. Ahlfinger. (2001). Testing the groupthink model: Effects of promotional leadership and conformity predisposition. Social Behaviour and Personality: An International Journal. Vol. 29: No. 1.
(link to slideshow discussing above: http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/~hfairchi/courses/Spring2011/p103/ErinKomplin.pdf)

Fleeger, W. E., & M. L. Becker. (2008). Creating and sustaining community capacity for ecosystem-based management: Is local government they key Journal of Environmental Management. Vol. 88: pp. 1396-1405.


Final thought
In group decision making and consensus building, indirect processes are often used to alleviate some of the exogenous influence that social dynamics can have on the decisions reached. Information communication technologies (ICTs) have potential to mitigate effects of power stratification within communities by acting as a mediator of inter-personal relations, buffering the effect of power influence between community members. However, they are often viewed as second-rate communication options, with face-to-face being the ‘gold standard’. While ICTs certainly have weaknesses, they are currently under-utilized as participatory mechanisms and their potential in mitigating power effects in collective action and decision making has, to date, gone unacknowledged and under-explored.

There is evidence that ICT's can alleviate
-- Power Stratification
-- ‘Groupthink’

I teach physics at a community college in California, so I'm one of the gatekeepers who washes out STEM majors. It's my job to do that. Society can't afford to have anesthesiologists who can't convert grams to milligrams, or civil engineers who can't add force vectors. A lot of the people who don't succeed in my class are very nice, sincere people. It's just that their talent lies somewhere else than in math and science. The sooner they find that out, the sooner they can find a more appropriate major.

In addition to the good but untalented students described above, there are many who don't succeed for other reasons. There's a book called Academically Adrift, by Arum and Roksa, which is summarized here: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand . One of their findings is that the average time studying has dropped dramatically in the last 50 years. The average number of hours per week was 25 in 1961, 20 in 1981, and 13 in 2003. This drop is still present when you control for the fact that different people go to college now than in 1961.

Another finding, which has been replicated by others, is that students' critical thinking and writing skills show extremely small improvements over the course of a college education. The improvements are so small that they are undetectable on the individual level, and still quite small even when you average over a large number of students. Well, maybe we shouldn't expect critical thinking and writing skills to increase so much. Maybe they're innate talents, or maybe they're fixed at an earlier age. But if you get a degree in a field like English or philosophy, essentially the only thing the school *claims* you're getting out of it is critical thinking and writing skills. And greater improvement in these areas is found to be correlated with faculty's high expectations, high standards, and approachability; the fact that there is so little improvement on average suggests that the lack of improvement is caused by faculty's low expectations, low standards, and lack of approachability. For example, a third of college students report that by the time they graduate, they have *never* taken a course that assigned more than 40 pages of reading per week.

The thing is, in STEM, you can't just BS your way through your term paper. There are right and wrong answers. We can't just lower standards the way the humanities have done.

A lot of students are urged by their parents to go into STEM because they think the kids will make a lot of money. Once the kids are in college, they often realize that if their only goal is to make a lot of money, they are much better off getting an undergraduate degree in business. Unless you're in particular subfields such as finance, business is by far the easiest major.

Models aren't equal to models, and even rough models of chaotic phenomena can be very useful and predictive, if they are the right ones. Read this for some acknowledgement of which brand of economics has been right during the last few years. Here is another account, including some pointers to predictions of the current crisis reaching as far back as 1999. Krugman even has a "model" of how good models get out of fashion.

Economics suffers from the manipulation by political interests, and by the wish of many practitioners to project their moral ideals onto the world. Many economists simply go and try to prove that the world works however they want it to work, and find funding for that from rich supporters. That makes the endeavour biased.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell

Good article about this. I don't think "stole" is a fitting word. Recognized that it was a revolutionary idea, improved upon it, and made it available to everyone. Xerox didn't know what they had and wasn't going to do anything with it.

Xerox didn't market their idea as successfully as Apple but that doesn't really matter. Xerox invented it and developed it to a demonstrable technology. Apple saw it, liked it, and used it without Xerox's permission. I personally think that's great and everyone benefits but they shouldn't be changing their tune now that others are doing it to them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU

Fairly well known bit of computer history...

"The first successful commercial GUI product was the Apple Macintosh, which was heavily inspired by PARC's work; Xerox was allowed to buy pre-IPO stock from Apple, in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product.[6] Much later, in the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit in which Apple accused Microsoft of violating its copyright by appropriating the use of the "look and feel" of the Macintosh GUI, Xerox also sued Apple on the same grounds. The lawsuit was dismissed because the presiding judge dismissed most of Xerox's complaints as being inappropriate for a variety of legal reasons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)

More here...

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

No, like non-modal copy and paste, and pull-down menus. Also, refreshing the window views of non-active windows was an Apple invention. The Apple programmer that implemented it was not aware that the Xerox scientists had not figured out how to do it, and thought it was part of the overall requirements.

The other thing was the mouse. Dr. Engelbart invented the device and Xerox implemented it in their machines. However, the version from Xerox included a laser for tracking and some very complex mechanisms that was not only expensive to mass produce, but also did not stand to strenuous and constant use nor did it work properly in anything other than the special reflective surface made for it.

An industrial designer hired by Apple came up with the cheap, durable, and still accurate version that is common now after given an explanation of the concept by Jobs. Jobs also gave some very specific design requirements that were not considered by Xerox; mainly, that it had to be cheap, it had to be durable, and it had to work on any surface.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell

Knowledge, it's a wonderful thing.

              -dZ.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell

Well, not wrong so much as wrong implication. You seem to think becasue the started a lawsuit they actual had a case or would win; Also it had more to do with Xerox trying to be technically correct in saying that the never said Apple could SELL it... which was just legal crappery.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell

Greed would be the answer to your question... An possibly new executive not being aware of Apples history.

Yes, Xerox tried to sue. It doesn't prove anything; Thet didn't win, they didn't bring it back to court. BTW: that lawsuit was about royalties.

oh, and here:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell

Here's the correct URL to the PARC story. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

Relevant : "After Jobs returned from PARC, he met with a man named Dean Hovey, who was one of the founders of the industrial-design firm that would become known as IDEO. “Jobs went to Xerox PARC on a Wednesday or a Thursday, and I saw him on the Friday afternoon,” Hovey recalled. “I had a series of ideas that I wanted to bounce off him, and I barely got two words out of my mouth when he said, ‘No, no, no, you’ve got to do a mouse.’ I was, like, ‘What’s a mouse?’ I didn’t have a clue. So he explains it, and he says, ‘You know, [the Xerox mouse] is a mouse that cost three hundred dollars to build and it breaks within two weeks. Here’s your design spec: Our mouse needs to be manufacturable for less than fifteen bucks. It needs to not fail for a couple of years, and I want to be able to use it on Formica and my bluejeans.'"

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell Good article about this. I don't think "stole" is a fitting word. Recognized that it was a revolutionary idea, improved upon it, and made it available to everyone. Xerox didn't know what they had and wasn't going to do anything with it.

I believe Xerox got Apple stock worth $1M for it.

Depends on how you define got. According to The New Yorker:

So Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if parc would “open its kimono.”

Xerox didn't get a $1M, they were given the chance to spend $1M on Apple stock.

Please read this article. It's not very long.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell

Apple asked Xerox politely if it could have its lunch money and Xerox handed it over willingly in exchange for lunch... futures.

Look, I don't know about making this a metaphor. Point is that the "Apple stole from Xerox" thing is basically a myth. It was all above board. Xerox may seriously regret giving away the idea of the century in exchange for basically nothing but that doesn't change what happened.

Care to dispell that in a meaningful way

McAllen, Texas

I suspect there's a "Whoosh" floating around your post.

GP is, I believe, referring to how the patent system fails to allow for innovations that are simultaneously developed independently, whether by complete strangers or by peers known to each other in their field.

go back 30 years

We can go back much further than that. Examples of concurrent independent development abound. To paraphrase an excerpt from this article: Calculus - Newton and Leibniz. Evolution - Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace. Oxygen - Carl Wilhelm and Joseph Priestley. Colour photos - Charles Cros and Louis du Hauron. Logarithms - John Napier, Henry Briggs, Joost Burgi. Sunspots - Fabricius, Galileo, Harriott, Scheiner. Piston engine plane - the Wright brothers and Santos Dumont. And so and so on.

It is a very strange belief that a bureaucracy enforcing the exclusive profit of singular entities within a society of billions of creative individuals will somehow ultimately encourage innovation to flourish, rather than stifle it.

Patents dictate that the fruits of your labors are not yours to trade as you wish, if any stranger you never met and never knew "invented" those fruits "first".

Sure, but that concept has always existed in property law, going back to Pierson v. Post. The first to possess something has ownership of it, regardless of the fact that the second person "worked really hard".

I think you misunderstand the point of the patent system. It's not a reward for hard work. It's a monopoly right, grudgingly paid for a limited time in exchange for public disclosure. As a result, "the fruits of your labors" are irrelevant - the important point is whether you disclosed those labors.
Take one of your examples, Charles Cros. He also invented a primitive phonograph, and kept the idea secret for 8 months. How does that help society? In the meantime, Edison built one and filed a patent on it, disclosing the idea publicly.

The only true benefit of patents is that they document the specifics of innovation, and this aspect does not actually require any grant of exclusivity.

The true benefit of patents is that they encourage - or rather, require - that documentation of the specifics of the idea. The grant of exclusivity is because otherwise, many inventors would keep their ideas secret.

I suspect there's a "Whoosh" floating around your post.

GP is, I believe, referring to how the patent system fails to allow for innovations that are simultaneously developed independently, whether by complete strangers or by peers known to each other in their field.

go back 30 years

We can go back much further than that. Examples of concurrent independent development abound. To paraphrase an excerpt from this article: Calculus - Newton and Leibniz. Evolution - Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace. Oxygen - Carl Wilhelm and Joseph Priestley. Colour photos - Charles Cros and Louis du Hauron. Logarithms - John Napier, Henry Briggs, Joost Burgi. Sunspots - Fabricius, Galileo, Harriott, Scheiner. Piston engine plane - the Wright brothers and Santos Dumont. And so and so on.

It is a very strange belief that a bureaucracy enforcing the exclusive profit of singular entities within a society of billions of creative individuals will somehow ultimately encourage innovation to flourish, rather than stifle it.

Patents dictate that the fruits of your labors are not yours to trade as you wish, if any stranger you never met and never knew "invented" those fruits "first".

The only true benefit of patents is that they document the specifics of innovation, and this aspect does not actually require any grant of exclusivity.

Well this is interesting. The Lacey Act makes it unconditionally illegal to import various flaura/forna irrespective of whether regional gonvernments complain or not, so long as there is a foreign law that protect the plants/animals. It becomes a matter of law whether the Madagascan government has laws on the books that it is ignoring. I suspect that Gibson is not telling the whole truth, but at the same time, respect that fact that they need not.

Sadly:
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8026807.stm
"A car driver has crashed into crowds watching a Dutch royal parade, killing five people, in an attempted attack on the royal family, officials say."

The death toll might have been a lot higher if the person (who had lost a job and was about to be evicted, or something like that) had been targeting the crowd specifically and not the royal family.

Thanks for the tip, although I tend to feel that Atticus Finch is right, that in our society, "The easiest way to get shot is to carry a gun."

Although, I guess, that is changing, since the easiest way to get shot is probably now to have your robot carry your gun for you.
    http://slashdot.org/story/06/11/14/0132216/Machine-Gun-Sentry-Robot-Unveiled
    http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/02/23/090223fa_fact_ratliff

Or:
    "Intrinsic/mutual security vs. extrinsic/unilateral"
        http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1783364&cid=33537044
        "If you see my other reply, you'll see that all this military technology is ironic and, essentially, making us less secure in the 21st century because it is designed from the wrong paradigm of extrinsic unilateral security (not intrinsic mutual security). For example, having a loaded self-propelled Howitzer cannon in your suburban backyard does not make you safer from home intrusion in a small community (or cancer, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, the real killers of most US Americans) -- it makes you seen as a nutcase and your neighbors start talking about how to deal with you and get rid of it in case it went off accidentally or kids took it for a "joyride". But if you insulate your house to keep it warm at low cost, use the savings to put solar panels of the roof to power a fridge full of cool beers for passers-by, and then grown an organic garden producing abundant veggies you share with your neighbors, then you are going to have a lot more security and health and prosperity for both yourself and your community for a lot less cost than buying and maintaining a Howitzer in your backyard." [Some typos fixed]

Are school grades helping to create such a secure society?

the law. It was petty retribution for pointing out they were spying on all Americans and in the process wasting a Billion $ with a contractor that was incompetent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Andrews_Drake and http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer

I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:

ABC (Australia) Science, ABC (US) Science, Air & Space Magazine, ARKive, Ars Technica, BBC SciTech News, CBS Sci-Tech News, Chet Raymo, Cosmos News, Current: Science, Discover, Discovery News, Edge, Economist Science, EurekAlert!, Flyp media, Futurity, h+, Inkling Magazine, LiveScience, Massimo Pigliucci, Mother Jones Environment, MSNBC Science News, National Geographic News, National Public Radio (US), Natural History Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times Science, New Yorker Science, Newsweek Science, Orion, PhysOrg, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, R&D Magazine, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Science Daily, Scientific American, Seed Magazine, Science Cheerleader, Science News, Schrodinger's Kitten, Slashdot Science, Smithsonian, Space.com, The Technium, Time Magazine Science, USA Today Science, US News & World Report Science, Wired News, World Changing

Just to begin with, on your point on putting in so many hours, even ignoring how the people you cite in finance are often playing a zero sum game with each other and other people's money ( http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/25/110725fa_fact_cassidy ) that may add little social value overall, and 70% of what most doctors do is useless to harmful ( http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-triumph-of-new-age-medicine/8554/ ), consider the law of diminishing returns on overwork:
""Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?": America's misguided culture of overwork: Germany's workers have higher productivity, shorter hours and greater quality of life. How did we get it so wrong?"
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010
"Since the start of the recession, the number of unemployed in the U.S. has doubled. Those who are fortunate enough to still have jobs are often working longer hours for less pay, with the ever-present threat of losing being laid off. But even before the recession, American workers were already clocking in the most hours in the West. Compared to our German cousins across the pond, we work 1,804 hours versus their 1,436 hours -- the equivalent of nine extra 40-hour workweeks per year. The Protestant work ethic may have begun in Germany, but it has since evolved to become the American way of life.
According to Thomas Geoghegan, a labor lawyer in Chicago and author of "Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life," European social democracy -- particularly Germany's-- offers some tantalizing solutions to our overworked age. In comparison to the U.S., the Germans live in a socialist idyll. They have six weeks of federally mandated vacation, free university tuition, nursing care, and childcare. In an attempt to make Germany more like the U.S., Angela Merkel has proposed deregulation and tax cuts only to be met with fury on the left. Over multiple trips spanning a decade, Geoghegan decided to investigate how the Germans were living so well, and by extension, what we might be able to learn from them.
Salon spoke to Geoghegan over the phone about Germany's luxurious worker benefits, our own dysfunctional attitudes towards work, and how we can make our lives more like theirs. ...
We don't have any material value of leisure time, which is extremely valuable to people. We don't have any way of valuing what these European public goods are really worth. You know, it's 50,000 dollars for tuition at NYU and it's zero at Humboldt University in Berlin. So NYU adds catastrophic amounts of GDP per capita and Humboldt adds nothing. Between you and me, I'd rather go to school at Humboldt.
So much of the American economy is based on GDP that comes from waste, environmental pillage, urban sprawl, bad planning, people going farther and farther with no land use planning whatsoever and leading more miserable lives. That GDP is thrown on top of all the GDP that comes from gambling and fraud of one kind or another. It's a more straightforward description of what Kenneth Rogoff and the Economist would call the financialization of the American economy. That transformation is a big part of the American economic model as it has morphed in some very perverse directions in the last 30 or 40 years. It's why the collapse here is going to take a much more serious long-term toll in this country than in the decades ahead."

Someone speaking from a German point of view might suggest that if you have to work more than 40 hours a week, either you or your organization are not very competent, and if that much work did indeed need to be done, it would probably be better socially if it was done by

Gee, I wonder if the TSA will still claim, "our boys followed procedure, we stand behind them."

Too bad for him he was caught before they've finished unionizing. If he got away with it a little longer he would just sit in the TSA equivalent to a "rubber room".

But Susan Landau, a former engineer at Sun Microsystems, and the author of a new book, âoeSurveillance or Security?,â notes that, in 2003, the government placed equipment capable of copying electronic communications at locations across America. These installations were made, she says, at âoeswitching officesâ that not only connect foreign and domestic communications but also handle purely domestic traffic. As a result, she surmises, the U.S. now has the capability to monitor domestic traffic on a huge scale. âoeWhy was it done this way?â she asks. âoeOne can come up with all sorts of nefarious reasons, but one doesnâ(TM)t want to think that way about our government.

As I understand it, she left during the Sun/Oracle transition but here's her page there:
https://labs.oracle.com/people/slandau/

But Susan Landau, a former engineer at Sun Microsystems, and the author of a new book, âoeSurveillance or Security?,â notes that, in 2003, the government placed equipment capable of copying electronic communications at locations across America. These installations were made, she says, at âoeswitching officesâ that not only connect foreign and domestic communications but also handle purely domestic traffic. As a result, she surmises, the U.S. now has the capability to monitor domestic traffic on a huge scale. âoeWhy was it done this way?â she asks. âoeOne can come up with all sorts of nefarious reasons, but one doesnâ(TM)t want to think that way about our government.

As I understand it, she left during the Sun/Oracle transition but here's her page there: https://labs.oracle.com/people/slandau/

i will just leave this relevant article here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande

I don't think anybody on a tech website should comment on a medical doctor's salary. There are a lot of tech jobs that pay comparable to the doctor's salary

If by "comparable" you mean "able to be compared" then sure... as in tech salaries are much lower than doctor salaries so they are comparable. There may be a small percentage of tech jobs that pay a high salary, but compare median tech salary to median doctor salary.

I'm sure we'll see a downward pressure on their salary anyway, but the upfront costs needs to be addressed.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. Considering that doctor salaries are one of the biggest costs of health care it's kind of important.

Mostly by looking at the artificial scarcity of available seats in medical schools, and how much those institutions are allowed to charge for education.

Yes, but tuition would come down on its own as more schools open and doctor salaries decrease.

Oh wait... See what happens when you try to meddle with the cost structure? We introduce more governmental intervention.

That's completely backwards, the reason there aren't more medical schools is that the government regulates them. To increase the seats available at medical schools you just have to make it easier to become a medical school, i.e. less government intervention. You should take a look: http://www.medicalschools.com/medical-school-accreditation.html

Now I *wonder* if there's a conflict of interest when the US gives complete authority over medical school accreditation to a panel of privately employed doctors who are keen to protect their own salaries.

We get less governmental intervention if we eliminate all the redundant governmental medical insurance providers and consolidate them into a single universal care system where the only things the government do are pay claims and encourage preventative medicine.

Yes we get less government intervention when the government increases the number of people in government programs and illegalizes private business. I'm not sure how to respond. Surely you see the contradiction?

All I see in your 6 points is that hospitals should eat the costs for America's health care. That is the only complete bullshit that I saw in your post. You haven't came close to bringing universal coverage in your arguement.

I did a little more research and some people ARE experimenting with the idea I've outlined here. Check out this article: The Hot Spotters: Can we lower medical costs by giving the neediest patients better care? http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/24/110124fa_fact_gawande

Before you call it "complete bullshit" you should think about it some more! It makes sense, and if nobody does it there's probably a financial reason why.

Your logic appears to be "hospitals could save some of their loses by providing free preventative care but they don't" equates to "universal coverage won't save medical costs". Those have very little to do with each other.

Hmm... the first part is right. I'm not equating it to "universal coverage won't save medical costs" though. I'm saying, if proponents of universal coverage are lying or misleading about that, can you trust them with the other numbers?

I mean, it's a common enough theme and it's always touted as a major cost saver. Are you claiming that you haven't heard that before? Let me quote Obama:

[W]hen somebody doesn't have health insurance, they're forced to get treatment at the ER, and all of us end up paying for it. The average family pays a thousand dollars in extra premiums to pay for people going to the emergency room who don't have health insurance. So you'

$35 (1968) is roughly equivalent to $73.80 to $107.00 (1980) using various indices

or, going the other way:

$850 (1980) is roughly equivalent to $277 to $403 (1968).

The value of gold was not allowed to inflate for several years (fixed at $35/oz. in 1934). John Seabrook wrote an article in 1989, Invisible Gold that briefly touched on the value of gold from the Gold Standard through the 1980s.

You know what? I think I'll take a photo of my cellphone's innards, photoshop conveniently spy-sounding labels into the photo, bring my cellphone to a university professor who will testify that my device has a microphone, a crystal, an antenna and a processor that definitely has the potential to turn it into spying device then write an article about it.

Except everything you are saying here is not nearly as absurd and ridiculous as you hope it would be.

The USA is engaged in warrantless spying to such an extent, that it's not even something targeted, but rather, it's a data mining operation of the highest order. And yes, cell phone data is mined, you can be sure of it. So yes, your cell phone is in all likelihood spying on you as we speak. It's spying on you for the benefit of the government and also for the benefit of the corporations.

Read this and think again about your cell phone:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer

You're a fool. The classified material that he "took" (according to him he forgot it was in his filing cabinet) was declassified months after he took it. All he did with it was let it sit around. For further information read this wonderful article from the Wall Street Journal.

This is a big fat witch hunt by bureaucrats with too much ego and power at their disposal. There (was) a good complete article on this complete story over at the New Yorker. Short recap: the NSA has had running for a number of years a project called Echelon which sucks in every bit of email, cell phone, satellite and any other type of electronic communication and tries to process in (they called all the electronic eavesdropping "total information awareness") --Carnivore and Omnivore installations at AT&T sites are part of this--. Now this left them with a great big haystack and finding needles turned into a big pain. One crypt analyst came up with a solution and called it 'thin thread'. It was rejected by the current bureaucracy because they had another project already underway called trailblazer. So this 'thin thread' project was on the shelf. People got re-assigned and it time passed. Trailblazer failed after a few years and a few hundred million dollars. Thin thread was pulled off the shelf, but since the original team had already been reassigned, new people were working on it. Some careful controls that limits spying on Americans was built into the original version. The powers that be went out of their way to spy on Americans (even though thats not part of the NSA mandate, and illegal). The original developers protesters complained, then left. The witch hunt that followed is part the Thomas Drake trial. ---sorry for the long blurb, the New Yorker piece is 10 pages, and there is a lot of dirt I left out--,
Sincerely (hello you NSA people!),
Anonymous Coward.

I found the following article from the New Yorker to provide considerable information about what led up to the charges:
New Yorker: The Secret Sharer

If you missed it,a few weeks ago here we had another story about Drake. The story of his case is less of an impenetrable vast state chasing him and more like a handful of people whom he knew from his previous job (critical point: at the NSA) trying to manipulate the law to get him put away for whistleblowing on the NSA's spying program—which he claims he didn't even actually do.

This guy's problems are way more Orwellian than anything the average citizen has ever experienced in the United States. Read the New Yorker article I linked to, and you'll gain a new appreciation for why the government has become so messed up over the past decade. Men with no oversight are doing what they will in the name of national security because they've convinced themselves that they can't permit 9/11 to reoccur, and that it was their fault. They've driven themselves mad, falling into the mentality of "those who prefer security to freedom." It's not that they're innately cruel tyrants, or sadists, it's that they're paranoid and guilt-wracked—a horribly dangerous combination when you add on the "defend the collective" mentality that causes police officers to protect each other when corruption charges manifest.

Whoever leaked these documents is at fault here, be it Bradley Manning or anyone else who had access to the documents and leaked them. I'm guessing they signed something saying they wouldn't do that so they're at fault.

Because bureaucracies handling security classifications operate solely in the public interest, and have no need or desire to censor information which might cause policy-makers to look bad or provide evidence arguing against current policy trends.

The burden of proof should be on the government to demonstrate that releasing specific information about government activities is clearly and presently dangerous to the interests of the country as a whole before classifying it. Right now, secrecy is the default state because all information can be used for or against policy makers' pet projects, and government employees who risk their lives and freedoms to publicize abuses should be treated as the heroes they are.

The continuing expansion of government secrecy and opacity is one of my biggest gripes with Obama's administration. Change has to come from the top, because the natural inclination of bureaucracies is to hide everything so they can evade external oversight.

I will give you a very concrete point because you are absolutely correct in saying it: Manning's purported leaks are very much in favor for Citizens outside of the USA as the material of the leaks is all in relation to how the US government relates to other governments: they were mostly honest diplomatic cables. So, it's good for pretty well everyone - integrity wise - except the USA. Manning did a great job: just not for where his citizenship lies.

Now, here's another case of leaking: Thomas Drake. What makes this case more of a test is that he leaked very few documents and the intent behind them was that he truly believed his duty as a citizen was to point out what was happening behind closed doors. His reward for saying: "this isn't right and it must not be kept secret" is being charged under the US espionage act. What happens to him, more than Manning, will shape my opinion of how much hope the USA has in the future.

I don't know.. The whole warrant-less spying of American citizens?

From the article:

In 2007, the indictment says, Drake willfully retained top-secret defense documents that he had sworn an oath to protect, sneaking them out of the intelligence agency’s headquarters, at Fort Meade, Maryland, and taking them home, for the purpose of “unauthorized disclosure.”

He should have taken them to the Inspector General, or Congress.

Sorry, but warrantless wiretaps are OK for at least some national security purposes.

Intelligence Court Upholds Government's Warrantless Surveillance Intercept Power

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review has made public its decision, reached last August, that the federal government has the power to wiretap international phone calls and intercept e-mail messages without a specific court order, even when Americans' private communications may be involved. The case arose from a challenge to this power brought by a telecommunications company whose identity has not been disclosed. The company had refused to turn over its relevant records, claiming that the president lacked constitutional authority to obtain them without a court order.

The "FISA court" issued a secret ruling that Congress acted within its authority when it passed the Protect America Act, which gave the executive branch broad power to eavesdrop on international communications. That ruling, it is now being reported, was upheld upon appellate review.

In his New York Times story on the case, Eric Lichtblau, who disclosed the existence of the warrantless surveillance program, sniffs that the court's ruling "may offer legal credence to the Bush administration's repeated assertions that the president has the power to act without specific court approval in ordering national security eavesdropping that may involve Americans." (emphasis added) I guess so. Rulings by appellate courts, by definition, give "legal credence" to the positions they embrace. And here we're talking about a court with special expertise in the subject matter that is ruling on an essentially novel issue.

This has been ruled upon by courts a number of times.

There is no right to private communications with terrorist groups making war on the United States.

I don't know.. The whole warrant-less spying of American citizens?

There was an interesting article in the New Yorker about two weeks ago, detailing the science behind the attempts to grow artificial meat. Unfortunately that link only gives an abstract and a small section, but it's an interesting read if you wander down to the library and check it out. So far, the state of the art is a piece of artificial meat about 14mm long, 3mm wide, and maybe a couple cells thick, and even then it's just muscle cells without any actin/myosin structure so it'd be like, I dunno, moosh. But they're making progress.

...from 2003 gives some good background, and is well worth a read:

The Great Election Grab: When does gerrymandering become a threat to democracy?

I was told that the cost of insurance was a major factor as to why the private hospitals were so much cheaper than in the US. The country had no liability litigation, so if something went wrong, you had no recourse. Of course there were other factors as well, such as much cheaper labor costs for nurses, maintenance, etc.. but as an example, a hospital stay was $200 a night, and an MRI was $250 wheras an MRI in the states would have been several times that.

I'm going to say that the answer was probably A) labor costs or B) cash-on-the-barrel vs health-insurance-billing-bureaucracy-overhead. Mostly A.

Texas has pretty much eliminated malpractice lawsuits for several years now, and it's still got the city with the second most expensive healthcare per-capita in the US. Doctors are spending much less on insurance here in Texas now, and they've got shiny new toys to prove it. My own doctor started wiring me up for an EKG every year. An OB I know dedicated the exam room next to the room with her ultrasound machine for some new bladder testing machine. I guess they've gotta spend their money on something, it's not like they can charge less when Aetna and everyone else dictates what they'll pay.

Here's a better link to the article, the whole article on one page instead of entering on page 3 of 10.

There's some misunderstanding here in these comments. I have his book and what he actually does is document painstaking research into the exact specs on all the bomb's parts down to the diameter of fasteners, etc. He didn't just create a template for a crude uranium-based device. The New Yorker published an interesting article about him in 2008.

This is a rehash of a post from 2009:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/01/25/1831240/Nuclear-Archaeology-Inspires-Replica-of-Hiroshimas-Little-Boy

Which referenced a piece written in 2008:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_samuels

For a more in-depth story about Coster-Mullen and his pursuit of the A-Bomb, check out this New Yorker article published in December 2008.

if he were going to gitmo it would probably have happened sometime in the last decade... this is old news. it's still cool, but it is old.

http://www.google.com/search?q=john+coster-mullen&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_samuels
http://www.mediabistro.com/unbeige/how-john-coster-mullen-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-reverse-engineer-the-bomb_b6222
http://docs.nrdc.org/nuclear/files/nuc_04110001a_024.pdf

See this New Yorker article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/24/110124fa_fact_gawande/

It is a real problem: The Truth Wears Off.

"Has the state of the art in fact advanced more significantly than I thought...?"

Apparently, yes. New Yorker article last week (Mar-21) profiling current chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen (21-years old, ranked #1 in world last year):

"But processors are now so powerful that no human stands a chance of winning a match. I asked Carlsen if he would be interested in a Deep Blue-type contest, and he said no -- it would discourage him. Among the chess elite, the idea of challenging a computer has fallen into the realm of farce and retort. At the London Chess Classic, one commentator quoted the Dutch grandmaster Jan Hein Donner, who, when asked what strategy he would use against a computer, joked, 'I would bring a hammer.'

"Computers have no skills and they have nothing approaching intuition. Carlsen finds their games inelegant, and complains about 'weird computer moves I can't understand', whereas in talking about his own game he speaks of achieving 'harmony' among the pieces on the chessboard, and even of 'poetry'. He told me about watching two advanced computers play one another in a recent match in Norway: 'My conclusions were, one, the best computers are stronger than the best players, and, two, the games are not interesting at all.'"

Abstract here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/03/21/110321fa_fact_max

I think I made it pretty clear that I don't think it's appropriate to take credit away from the people of Tunisia. But just because you give credit to one source, doesn't mean there weren't any other contributing factors. All I'm saying is that Wikileaks contributed to the revolution, and that it might not have happened without it. At the very least, you have to admit that it had some effect.

A lot of news articles mention protesters citing wikileaks during their protests, though I can't find and direct quotes (except in blogs, which you say aren't credible). Here is one such article from the New Yorker (I don't know if you will consider it credible or not). Here is what it says:

Some demonstrators also cited the evidence of cables from the United States Embassy in Tunisia that were released by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks providing vividly detailed accounts of the first family’s self-enrichment and opulent lifestyle.

Admittedly, that is supposedly cited from an article from the New York Times, but when you check the source article, it seems to have since been edited, and says instead:

The protesters, led at first by unemployed college graduates like Mr. Bouazizi and later joined by workers and young professionals, found grist for the complaints in leaked cables from the United States Embassy in Tunisia, released by WikiLeaks, that detailed the self-dealing and excess of the president’s family.

Still, the meaning is the same. The leaks added credibility to the protesters complaints. Without them the protests may not have found the popular support they needed to succeed.

Here is a Tunisian website that translated and distributed the leaks prior to the revolution. If the leaks weren't important, why would Tunisian activists risk doing something like that?

It's not a "controversial" statement. People are questioning the parsimonious rule-lawyering. Is there even a rule written anywhere about how contestants must receive the information?

Even if you dislike the nit-picking, it is indisputable that Watson had an advantage at the buzzer. Even the mainstream media picked up on this fact.

I'm not impressed that Watson can buzz a buzzer faster and more accurately than a human. I'm not impressed that Watson won the game, because all things being equal, accurate buzzing is a huge advantage in Jeopardy. I am impressed that Watson can participate in the game well enough that buzzing becomes an issue, but all the media hype (including, sadly, the hype on slashdot) is about the fact that Watson won, not about the huge improvements in AI that rightfully should be highlighted.