"... that some low level inflation is better than low level deflation."
Are you serious? The healthiest markets today are ALL deflationary markets. Look at smartphones, computers, consumer electronics. Any commodity that is either getting better for the same money, or cheaper to produce. That's deflation.
Government and big investment bankers have been pushing for an inflationary economy because for several reasons (time value of money being just one of them), it is INFLATION that helps the rich. It directly benefits Government, bankers, and Wall Street. It hurts everybody else by, among other thing, insidiously leeching from production and savings.
I think it is hilariously ironic that Feinstein was the victim of the very same surveillance state that she so vigorously and enthusiastically helped to create and maintain.
I honestly don't see where she has any room to bitch, without being a hypocrite of the first order.
"The write speed has scaled with capacity. I see no reason to think the next generation will be any different."
Nor do we have any reason to think it won't.
I was just raising the question. It is a bit strange that they didn't mention the write speed at all, since it's one of the most important metrics for high-volume media.
"Stop treating real world systems like 0th-order mathematical abstractions. You can't prove its opposite. All you can prove is "not 100.0000000000% trustworthy" (for an infinite number of 0s)."
That's pretty hilarious. *I* wasn't treating it mathematically at all, I was just stating a fact. Generally speaking, there is no way to prove that someone hasn't broken your trust. But you can prove that they have.
But YOU were certainly treating it like a mathematics exercise!
I retract the above statement. At least in regard to this particular topic. The blog post does link more than just that one story into a theme. Still, I would not have brought it up unless I'd seen that kind of thing quite a bit on Slashdot lately.
"Except that NONE of these studies say polygraphs "don't work". Instead they say they are imperfect, and often used incorrectly or even maliciously. Which is a different thing."
I concede this. So I will amend my original comment. Here is my revised version:
"Polygraphs do not work well enough to be taken seriously as indicators of truth. The government knows this, so instead it uses them as instruments of intimidation."
I agree that is a more accurate statement. Satisfied?
Those were only a few sources. You can find a great many studies if you spend a few minutes with a search engine. The upshot is: there is very little evidence that it is actually the polygraph, and not the polygraph examiner, doing the "lie detection". And that means they are not very damned good at it.
What good does it do to have 1TB optical disks, if the write speed is only 350kB/sec? It would take more than a month of steady writing to fill up a disk.
It will probably be faster than that, but who knows? I checked TFA, and it says absolutely nothing about bandwidth, either read or write.
It wouldn't matter if it was. Time after time, we have seen problems arise... not because of "online technology", but because of human failure. Failure of the people you're supposed to trust at "the other end".
PEOPLE at these organizations have repeatedly failed in areas of organizational ability, reliability, and trustworthiness.
Unless and until we have the technology that can replace human trustworthiness (or lack thereof), "cloud" storage will not be ready for prime time. Even if you make it snoop-proof, who's to say it will still exist a week from now?
You can't prove reliability and trustworthiness, you can only prove its opposite. And they have. Many many times now.
"Anyway, there is evidence that they work significantly better than chance on untrained people that believe they work. In other words, most of the time for most people."
"Most psychologists agree that there is little evidence that polygraph tests can accurately detect lies."
And from the second:
"For federal agencies, the polygraph is a way to get around discrimination laws. There is virtually no appeal you can make if you are failed by a federal polygrapher. The polygraph is a license to abuse power."
And from the conclusion of the third:
"The instrument cannot itself detect deception... false positive rate (innocent persons found deceptive) ranged from 0 to 75 percent and averaged 19.1 percent;"
An average of over 19% false positive rate (government's own figures), and as high as 75%, means the polygraph is effectively useless as a lie detector for any serious purposes. That's a HUGE false positive rate. It simply isn't a basis for punishing someone when there is an almost 20% chance on average that the results are false. And that's just false positives... there are false negatives too.
I repeat: the government knows this, and uses it more as an instrument of intimidation, in order to try to wring confessions out of people, than anything else. Many ex-government-polygraphers -- and subjects of polygraph exams, for that matter -- have told the same story.
"But they are still a useful tool that can catch most liars most of the time."
No, they are not. There is a boatload of studies to show it, too.
Generally speaking, polygraphs have been shown to be less good at detecting lies than a friend is. And that's not very good.
The government uses polygraphs as an effective tool of interrogation, attempting to get information that is given away due to intimidation. Not as actual lie detectors. There is a very big difference.
"If your system only protects users who aren't idiots, you're a sorry excuse for an admin."
Sorry, but it won't wash. To paraphrase Robert Heinlein: "Nothing can be made foolproof, because fools are so ingenious."
There is no choice but to assume your users have at least some degree of smarts. Yes, IT departments can do better. But if your user is sending lists of passwords via Gmail, about the only thing you can do about that is chastise the user, or block gmail.
... And here's another indication: you know how "politically correct" Slashdot has been in recent years. Make a disparaging comment about Republicans, or "Tea Party", or Libertarians -- no matter how insulting or counter-factual -- get modded up or at least left alone. Make some factual comments about Democrats, as I have here, get modded down as "troll", "flamebait", or "overrated" (I have received all 3 in this one thread).
Spin it like you want, but the fact is that the Democrats are the ones who have been getting their proposed laws passed. Period.
Therefore, it is the Democrats who have been running the government.
I don't deny (and I mentioned as much above) that the Republicans have been complicit in all this Democrat control-freakishness. But the fact still remains that it is Democrat-proposed bills and laws that have been getting passed. It is still the Democrats who have basically been in charge.
"The best way to prevent leaks like those that have happened lately is to have a REAL, RESPONSIVE, FUNCTIONAL whistle blower program so people do not have to take the law into their own hands."
It would be really great if our ostensible "leaders" would get this straight. Unfortunately, they were caught with their balls out and they have been too busy trying to hide them behind something to see straight.
Besides: we already know that polygraphs don't work worth a shit except as tools of intimidation.
Looks to me like they're trying to keep secrets from their bosses (us) by spying on themselves. Yeah, that's the ticket. I'm sure they'll get a lot of new recruits now.
"On the minimum wage, some graphs of the historical value adjusted for inflation show that $10.10 is in fact matching inflation. It just seems like a large jump because real wages have been decreasing for decades."
You missed my point I think, which was that according to the Democrats themselves, minimum wage is intended to compensate for inflation (as opposed to creating inflation). But: the minimum was raised to $7.25 about 5 years ago... so what does raising it to $10.10 say about real inflation? They're in a position in which they have to either admit that $10 is a ridiculous figure, or admit that their numbers for inflation are scarcely more than fabrications. (I say this knowing other figures that show inflation is in fact higher than the government admits; the minimum wage thing is just one way to show that to other people.)
As for those charts you reference, I take any current data from the government with a grain of salt the size of a bowling ball. Especially CPI (which is one of the major things they base their inflation figures on) and GDP, which they haven't calculated honestly at least since I have been old enough to know what they were. As a matter of fact, learning about economics and things like how government calculates CPI, when I was still a youngster in college, was one of the things that began to really clue me in to the fact that our government has been habitually less than honest with its citizens.
"You were doing fine for about one sentence. Then you got all partisan."
The WHOLE POINT is partisan. The comment I was replying to is partisan. The reality of our existence for the last 5 years or so has been very partisan.
"Look at what the economy has done under the reps, look at what it's done under the dems, realize that most of the presidents who presided over a time of economic health were receiving a windfall that had nothing to do with their administration and little to do with the prior administration. For example, the economy surged under Clinton, but it was a bubble that would have happened no matter who was president."
But that was then. Prior (recent) decades have very little to do with the current situation because of the 2008 disaster. It really does make a very big difference. The Democrats have been trying to use the same policies that failed during the Great Depression... as though they learned nothing from history over the last 80 years. (Which really isn't too surprising, because they listened to their own propaganda about that period rather than looking at the actual historical evidence, which says FDR prolonged the Depression by as much as 10 years with his foolish policies. His own Treasure Secretary thought he was a nutcase.)
Regardless of who caused the economic slump of 2008 (I have opinions but that's a completely different discussion), it has been up to the Democrats to pull us out, and they have done a singularly terrible job of it.
"I don't know if the libertarians could improve anything, but I know the republicrats are not the solution."
I won't argue with you there. One of my very biggest objections to the Democrats' behavior this past 5 years is that I suspect it could lead to a backlash flood of votes for hard-right-wing Republicans, starting this year. And I don't want to see that either.
Just the other day someone tried to argue to me that the sad state of the economy was the fault of Libertarians. And of course I replied (paraphrase) "Ahem... it wasn't Libertarians who made the laws, it was the Democrats."
For 5 years now, going on 6, Democrats have solidly controlled spending, and monetary and fiscal policy. Despite all the Democrat bitching about Republicans, the Democrats haven't been blocked for long over any of their larger spending or fiscal policy issues.
And you can see the result. Obama and friends have been spending your children's livelihood away, while at the same time working to deprive them of jobs.
Look at the facts: jobs are up a bit since the 2009 low... but really not that much. Even with that, many of the "buffer" of people who stopped looking for work, are now starting to look again, which keeps even the official unemployment numbers pretty high. And on top of that, inflation is high again. And no surprise, since it was the inevitable result of Obama's (and the Fed's) monetary policy since 2008.
(Before anybody starts arguing with me about inflation: if you're a Democrat, the official bottom line is that minimum wage hikes follow inflation, rather than lead them, right? Isn't that official Democrat dogma? That minimum wage hikes don't cause inflation? Well, if that's so, then tell me: why is Obama making noises about raising minimum wages to $10.10, when it was raised to $7.25 only about 5 years ago? That's 39% in just 5 years... that's HUGE. And if you don't believe that logic -- which is your own party's logic -- then just take a look at your grocery bill.)
What we have is 70s stagflation all over again. What the government did about it THEN didn't help... and they can't even do that now because the Fed doesn't have room to do more "Quantitative Easing" or lowering of interest rates!
Thanks, Obama and Democrats. I'll be sure to tell the children who was in charge.
Slashdot Mirror
Thread, topic, whatever. I think my meaning was clear.
In any case, as I mentioned in that other topic, I think this is hilariously ironic.
Way to be a world-class hypocrite, Dianne!
Um... seems to me we have some duplication here.
I don't know about anybody else, but I sure thought this is what that other thread was all about.
"... that some low level inflation is better than low level deflation."
Are you serious? The healthiest markets today are ALL deflationary markets. Look at smartphones, computers, consumer electronics. Any commodity that is either getting better for the same money, or cheaper to produce. That's deflation.
THIS is what your "low-level inflation" has done over the last 100 years.
Government and big investment bankers have been pushing for an inflationary economy because for several reasons (time value of money being just one of them), it is INFLATION that helps the rich. It directly benefits Government, bankers, and Wall Street. It hurts everybody else by, among other thing, insidiously leeching from production and savings.
"This is communist accusations"
I think it is hilariously ironic that Feinstein was the victim of the very same surveillance state that she so vigorously and enthusiastically helped to create and maintain.
I honestly don't see where she has any room to bitch, without being a hypocrite of the first order.
"The write speed has scaled with capacity. I see no reason to think the next generation will be any different."
Nor do we have any reason to think it won't.
I was just raising the question. It is a bit strange that they didn't mention the write speed at all, since it's one of the most important metrics for high-volume media.
"Stop treating real world systems like 0th-order mathematical abstractions. You can't prove its opposite. All you can prove is "not 100.0000000000% trustworthy" (for an infinite number of 0s)."
That's pretty hilarious. *I* wasn't treating it mathematically at all, I was just stating a fact. Generally speaking, there is no way to prove that someone hasn't broken your trust. But you can prove that they have.
But YOU were certainly treating it like a mathematics exercise!
Haha. :)
I retract the above statement. At least in regard to this particular topic. The blog post does link more than just that one story into a theme. Still, I would not have brought it up unless I'd seen that kind of thing quite a bit on Slashdot lately.
"Except that NONE of these studies say polygraphs "don't work". Instead they say they are imperfect, and often used incorrectly or even maliciously. Which is a different thing."
I concede this. So I will amend my original comment. Here is my revised version:
"Polygraphs do not work well enough to be taken seriously as indicators of truth. The government knows this, so instead it uses them as instruments of intimidation."
I agree that is a more accurate statement. Satisfied?
Those were only a few sources. You can find a great many studies if you spend a few minutes with a search engine. The upshot is: there is very little evidence that it is actually the polygraph, and not the polygraph examiner, doing the "lie detection". And that means they are not very damned good at it.
I included 3 links -- and I could include far more if I wanted to -- in a comment to someone else in this thread. Feel free to follow them and read.
You could also find a lot of information on it yourself with a couple of minutes on Google.
Why did we get a comment containing a link to a blog post about a news article elsewhere on the internet?
I mean, holy crap, Slashdot, can't you even bother to give us a link to the actual article anymore? We have to go on a link-to-a-link goose chase?
You bring up another problem. Bandwidth.
What good does it do to have 1TB optical disks, if the write speed is only 350kB/sec? It would take more than a month of steady writing to fill up a disk.
It will probably be faster than that, but who knows? I checked TFA, and it says absolutely nothing about bandwidth, either read or write.
"Bandwidth isn't cheap in some areas..."
It wouldn't matter if it was. Time after time, we have seen problems arise... not because of "online technology", but because of human failure. Failure of the people you're supposed to trust at "the other end".
PEOPLE at these organizations have repeatedly failed in areas of organizational ability, reliability, and trustworthiness.
Unless and until we have the technology that can replace human trustworthiness (or lack thereof), "cloud" storage will not be ready for prime time. Even if you make it snoop-proof, who's to say it will still exist a week from now?
You can't prove reliability and trustworthiness, you can only prove its opposite. And they have. Many many times now.
"Anyway, there is evidence that they work significantly better than chance on untrained people that believe they work. In other words, most of the time for most people."
There is also a lot of evidence that they don't. Or rather: it may be "significantly more than chance", but not enough more to be really useful.
Quote from the first sentence of that first link:
"Most psychologists agree that there is little evidence that polygraph tests can accurately detect lies."
And from the second:
"For federal agencies, the polygraph is a way to get around discrimination laws. There is virtually no appeal you can make if you are failed by a federal polygrapher. The polygraph is a license to abuse power."
And from the conclusion of the third:
"The instrument cannot itself detect deception... false positive rate (innocent persons found deceptive) ranged from 0 to 75 percent and averaged 19.1 percent;"
An average of over 19% false positive rate (government's own figures), and as high as 75%, means the polygraph is effectively useless as a lie detector for any serious purposes. That's a HUGE false positive rate. It simply isn't a basis for punishing someone when there is an almost 20% chance on average that the results are false. And that's just false positives... there are false negatives too.
I repeat: the government knows this, and uses it more as an instrument of intimidation, in order to try to wring confessions out of people, than anything else. Many ex-government-polygraphers -- and subjects of polygraph exams, for that matter -- have told the same story.
"But they are still a useful tool that can catch most liars most of the time."
No, they are not. There is a boatload of studies to show it, too.
Generally speaking, polygraphs have been shown to be less good at detecting lies than a friend is. And that's not very good.
The government uses polygraphs as an effective tool of interrogation, attempting to get information that is given away due to intimidation. Not as actual lie detectors. There is a very big difference.
"If your system only protects users who aren't idiots, you're a sorry excuse for an admin."
Sorry, but it won't wash. To paraphrase Robert Heinlein: "Nothing can be made foolproof, because fools are so ingenious."
There is no choice but to assume your users have at least some degree of smarts. Yes, IT departments can do better. But if your user is sending lists of passwords via Gmail, about the only thing you can do about that is chastise the user, or block gmail.
But maybe you should do the latter anyway.
... And here's another indication: you know how "politically correct" Slashdot has been in recent years. Make a disparaging comment about Republicans, or "Tea Party", or Libertarians -- no matter how insulting or counter-factual -- get modded up or at least left alone. Make some factual comments about Democrats, as I have here, get modded down as "troll", "flamebait", or "overrated" (I have received all 3 in this one thread).
Spin it like you want, but the fact is that the Democrats are the ones who have been getting their proposed laws passed. Period.
Therefore, it is the Democrats who have been running the government.
I don't deny (and I mentioned as much above) that the Republicans have been complicit in all this Democrat control-freakishness. But the fact still remains that it is Democrat-proposed bills and laws that have been getting passed. It is still the Democrats who have basically been in charge.
"The best way to prevent leaks like those that have happened lately is to have a REAL, RESPONSIVE, FUNCTIONAL whistle blower program so people do not have to take the law into their own hands."
It would be really great if our ostensible "leaders" would get this straight. Unfortunately, they were caught with their balls out and they have been too busy trying to hide them behind something to see straight.
"But who monitors the monitors?"
Precisely.
Besides: we already know that polygraphs don't work worth a shit except as tools of intimidation.
Looks to me like they're trying to keep secrets from their bosses (us) by spying on themselves. Yeah, that's the ticket. I'm sure they'll get a lot of new recruits now.
"On the minimum wage, some graphs of the historical value adjusted for inflation show that $10.10 is in fact matching inflation. It just seems like a large jump because real wages have been decreasing for decades."
You missed my point I think, which was that according to the Democrats themselves, minimum wage is intended to compensate for inflation (as opposed to creating inflation). But: the minimum was raised to $7.25 about 5 years ago... so what does raising it to $10.10 say about real inflation? They're in a position in which they have to either admit that $10 is a ridiculous figure, or admit that their numbers for inflation are scarcely more than fabrications. (I say this knowing other figures that show inflation is in fact higher than the government admits; the minimum wage thing is just one way to show that to other people.)
As for those charts you reference, I take any current data from the government with a grain of salt the size of a bowling ball. Especially CPI (which is one of the major things they base their inflation figures on) and GDP, which they haven't calculated honestly at least since I have been old enough to know what they were. As a matter of fact, learning about economics and things like how government calculates CPI, when I was still a youngster in college, was one of the things that began to really clue me in to the fact that our government has been habitually less than honest with its citizens.
"You were doing fine for about one sentence. Then you got all partisan."
The WHOLE POINT is partisan. The comment I was replying to is partisan. The reality of our existence for the last 5 years or so has been very partisan.
"Look at what the economy has done under the reps, look at what it's done under the dems, realize that most of the presidents who presided over a time of economic health were receiving a windfall that had nothing to do with their administration and little to do with the prior administration. For example, the economy surged under Clinton, but it was a bubble that would have happened no matter who was president."
But that was then. Prior (recent) decades have very little to do with the current situation because of the 2008 disaster. It really does make a very big difference. The Democrats have been trying to use the same policies that failed during the Great Depression... as though they learned nothing from history over the last 80 years. (Which really isn't too surprising, because they listened to their own propaganda about that period rather than looking at the actual historical evidence, which says FDR prolonged the Depression by as much as 10 years with his foolish policies. His own Treasure Secretary thought he was a nutcase.)
Regardless of who caused the economic slump of 2008 (I have opinions but that's a completely different discussion), it has been up to the Democrats to pull us out, and they have done a singularly terrible job of it.
"I don't know if the libertarians could improve anything, but I know the republicrats are not the solution."
I won't argue with you there. One of my very biggest objections to the Democrats' behavior this past 5 years is that I suspect it could lead to a backlash flood of votes for hard-right-wing Republicans, starting this year. And I don't want to see that either.
Oops... we shouldn't forget "energy" spending. Solyndra, Evergreen, Beacon, SunPower, etc. etc. ad nauseum.
and "Health" spending is up 41% during the same period. "Energy" spending is up 2400%.
Of course health spending is up. When you spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars on one website that doesn't work, what do you expect?
(Not to mention that it does not conform to the government's own privacy laws, etc. I am still waiting for that one to blow up.)
This.
Just the other day someone tried to argue to me that the sad state of the economy was the fault of Libertarians. And of course I replied (paraphrase) "Ahem... it wasn't Libertarians who made the laws, it was the Democrats."
For 5 years now, going on 6, Democrats have solidly controlled spending, and monetary and fiscal policy. Despite all the Democrat bitching about Republicans, the Democrats haven't been blocked for long over any of their larger spending or fiscal policy issues.
And you can see the result. Obama and friends have been spending your children's livelihood away, while at the same time working to deprive them of jobs.
Look at the facts: jobs are up a bit since the 2009 low... but really not that much. Even with that, many of the "buffer" of people who stopped looking for work, are now starting to look again, which keeps even the official unemployment numbers pretty high. And on top of that, inflation is high again. And no surprise, since it was the inevitable result of Obama's (and the Fed's) monetary policy since 2008.
(Before anybody starts arguing with me about inflation: if you're a Democrat, the official bottom line is that minimum wage hikes follow inflation, rather than lead them, right? Isn't that official Democrat dogma? That minimum wage hikes don't cause inflation? Well, if that's so, then tell me: why is Obama making noises about raising minimum wages to $10.10, when it was raised to $7.25 only about 5 years ago? That's 39% in just 5 years... that's HUGE. And if you don't believe that logic -- which is your own party's logic -- then just take a look at your grocery bill.)
What we have is 70s stagflation all over again. What the government did about it THEN didn't help... and they can't even do that now because the Fed doesn't have room to do more "Quantitative Easing" or lowering of interest rates!
Thanks, Obama and Democrats. I'll be sure to tell the children who was in charge.