Throughout history, when kids don't go to school they ended up working, usually to help out the parents or other family. So it is ridiculous to claim that keeping kids out of school removes people from the work force. It actually adds people to the work force.
Maybe you could argue that in the long run it reduces the level of education required to do more sophisticated jobs; but that isn't the case you made.
I've seen a few 3d movies now, and in my experience, you notice it for a few minutes and think "that's interesting", but if you are absorbed in the story you quickly forget that you are watching it in 3d. The point of watching a movie is to immerse yourself in the story. If you are noticing the 3d effects, you are not immersed, you are looking at the medium itself, not the story. Saying a movie was better in 3-d is kind of like saying "That novel was really good. The leather binding really made it better."
Because of that, and because it is extra bother to wear uncomfortable glasses, and extra expense for admission, I think 3d will prove to be a fad that settles down to a minimal sustainable level. It probably will never go away, but it will never take over either.
It seems most people are assuming that giving someone a perceptual capability that everyone else has would cause them to react to it the same way that everyone else does. But what if not? What if someone who lacks an ability to perceive something also has not developed a way of incorporating that sense into their thought processes, and if it is introduced later it causes them pain, confusion, or dysphoria?
For example, imagine someone whose eyes are very insensitive to light, and sees everything very dimly. They grow up with that perceptual weakness being normal for them. If their eyesight were suddenly "fixed" to normal sensitivity, they might experience unbearable brightness, to the point of pain, similar to a normal person looking into the sun. Imagine someone who grew up deaf to high-pitched sounds suddenly hearing them; maybe they would suddenly experience a cacophony of noise around them in everyday life that is so annoying and distracting that they have a hard time coping? So similarly, if someone who grew up colorblind is suddenly able to see a new color, but their brain has not developed to handle it, might they not be able to cope with the new stimulation in a normal way?
You are missing the whole point. By interested party, he means anyone who has the power to log activity at the domain server (e.g. someone in a controlling company or a government). The DNS is a bottleneck, and someone controlling any DNS server in the chain can easily track all the sites you visit if the requests have a personal identifier like an IP in them.
On the Iran point, it is about a controlling entity blocking certain users from a random site that it doesn't control, not a user being blocked by the site itself.
Another example of a big danger is a targeted pharming attack by a hacker (maybe this could be called spear pharming, similar to spear phishing?)
Regarding your point #2, it is correct, and is consistent with the original article, not in disagreement. The problem is that the article summary is mischaracterizing the article.
The summary says: The study showed that a persons unique odor stayed the same even if they varied their diet with strong smelling foods such as garlic and spices.
The article says: Scientists revealed an individual's odour signature remains detectable even when their diet is changed to include strong smelling foods such as garlic and spices.
So the article doesn't say that a person's odor doesn't change even if they vary their diet. Anyone whose eaten garlic knows that to be plainly false. It says that a person's unique odor signature is detectable even if they eat strong smelling foods like garlic, i.e. the garlic does change their scent, but the body's unique contribution is still detectable under the garlic.
That depends on the state. In Massachusetts, the disabled and those who don't understand English very well have the right to bring an assistant of their choosing into the booth with them. If they don't have someone, a poll worker can do it. If assistance is blocked by a poll worker, then vote suppression is happening and should be reported.
There are two major differences between ATM banking and voting that make all the difference:
1) Banking is a zero-sum game. If you deposit $x in the machine, your account and the bank's cash must go up by $x. If they don't, there are many alarms that go off, both in the bank, and in your personal life. In a voting machine, there is no zero-sum that can be checked. No one has to vote for every candidate, and there is no physical deposit that can be checked later. Your vote is conjured up out of thin air and it can disappear or be duplicated or shifted without a balancing transaction.
2) ATM transactions are not anonymous and voting is. ATM transactions are associated with you and your accounts right from the point of initiation, and your identity is tracked on every receipt, your bank records, and the statements you get at the end of the month which you can carefully read and verify. Voting is anonymous by nature, and there are no accounts or monthly statements which you can verify.
These are not implementation details, these are inherent in the problem statement.
The general reason is because more intelligent people tend to think they know more and are better qualified to determine "what's best", whether that's true or not.
That's because it IS true. More intelligent people DO know more and are better qualified than the average person. That's the definition of intelligence: someone who is right more often than others. You might argue that some people are smarter in some areas than in other areas, but in any particular area the whole concept of "intelligence" is that it means you are better!!
You might as well be saying "people who know more and are better qualified to determine what's best tend to think they know more and are better qualified to determine what's best".
Technical knowledge per se isn't so important. What is very important is having the ability to think rationally, being able to make realistic connections between cause and effect, being able to differentiate and talk about different levels of abstraction, being able to understand how the physical world interacts with one's mental models, being able to debug problems that exist in complex systems, etc. These are all abilities that are correlated with being technically proficient. So while I don't care whether a candidate knows the details of my favorite technology, I do think that if he has some technical skill it bodes well for his analytical abilities.
When Obama answered the joke question by a technical guy about the best sorting algorithm for some situation, and he laughingly answered "probably not a Bubble Sort", it spoke volumes. Not about whether he was technically correct, but that he even understood the question, and understood the right kind of answer needed.
I've had enough of bureaucrats who lack any ability to understand or care about the consequences of their actions, and don't have a clue that they don't have a clue.
They are already doing it. Microsoft has been feeding the government with information obtained when you let the MS Malicious Software Removal tool analyze your computer.
It isn't such a big leap of faith to think that the next step might be to secretly let the government install control software, too. Only to be used for "good" purposes, of course.
I have hard time believing it is not intentional incompetence or malice. But at this point it doesn't matter. They have been committing crimes by not keeping a record of government email, and by using GOP computers to handle whitehouse email, and by not supplying the records to Congress after being subpoenaed, and by ordering the Justice Department not to enforce the subpoena. This is a massive cover up on a huge scale, and they have managed to block every attempt by Congress to investigate it. Whether they are covering up malice or negligence doesn't make the cover up legal.
However, the reason it must be malice (aka intentional incompetence), is that for these purposes it doesn't matter whether the files were correctly converted from one format to another. They could have given over all the records to Congress in whatever disordered form it was in, and let Congress figure out how to sort through it. There are very easy ways to pull information out of a complete morass of files. For example, just text index the whole mess, and search for any text containing interesting phrases, and then follow the references in those text blocks to related text blocks. You could probably get 90% of the meaning of a collection of email in random formats just by doing things like that. But obviously the whole point is to block that from happening, not enable it.
It's tempting to think that when something goes wrong it's the victim's fault for letting it happen. But you can't always resist the boss (or the corporate culture) when he is telling you to do something that isn't ideal. That's just life. You have to deal with it.
The author was dealt a losing hand, and he had no choice but to play it when he was told to support software before the organization was ready. Upper management made the decision to push the software out, and the consequences should have been dealt with at the level the decision was made. In this case it seems like the author's boss (the CIO) or higher made that call, and he should not have been so glib about dismissing the problems that resulted. That's someone who isn't taking responsibility for his own decisions.
But it was completely wrong for Dirk, the VP of Software, to complain that he and his staff were called over the weekend. That is what the "engineer on call", as the article refers to him, is there for; he might be called in an emergency, even at inconvenient times. And Dirk must have been aware that the company was releasing new software, so it is part of his job to be ready for problems. By ignoring the call to him because he was annoyed, Dirk was putting the company at risk. That's not the right guy to have at the helm of an important department.
If Dirk wanted to get angry at someone he should have gotten angry at the CIO, who was responsible for the situation. It sounds to me like he was afraid to get angry at his boss, or knew it would be fruitless (given the CIO's later dismissal of the situation that would have been accurate), so he took out his anger on someone who he could beat up on without consequences, a peer. That is the mark of a real asshole.
The author and his support department may have been incompetent, or may not have been, but this situation doesn't spread any light on that. It does however show that both his boss and the VP of Software were irresponsible. This whole arrangement of people was dysfunctional.
Get them to buy you another computer, a desktop, and keep it in a locked room. Keep all your confidential information on that computer, and access it via remote desktop from your laptop. Then you can remote desktop into it from your laptop whether you are at home or in your cube. You can leave your monitor, laptop, etc. in your cube if you want and if it gets stolen, it's the company's problem to replace it. This way it's just hardware that only costs a few bucks to replace. The biggest problem with having something stolen is the information that's on it, not the hardware itself, and in this case you'd keep the information on the locked up computer, not on the stuff that might be stolen.
Corporations, as all organizations, do have personalities. Corporations are comprised of people, and are run by people. Without people, a corporation is a set of books on a shelf. The people who run a corporation give it it's personality because they decide how it acts, and it will act according to those people's preferences.
They act inconsistently because they are a group, and no group of people is completely consistent. And individual people also act inconsistently! But that doesn't mean they don't have personality; that is part of what defines their personality.
This is exactly right. All voting technologies, paper or electronic, will have vulnerabilities. The way to solve this problem is to have enough redundancy in the system that makes it very difficult for all mechanisms to fail, or be corrupted, simultaneously and similarly. We have learned this lesson from building fault-tolerant computer systems, and need to apply it here, too. We also need to include the human element in the fault-tolerant design, as people are also subject to failure and corruption.
For example, you could make a system that has simultaneous redundant and different technologies, such as both electronic and paper trails. Then each of these subsystems could have their information flows be split at the source and channeled through completely different paths to different counters. There could be multiple sets of people with different political allegiances doing redundant counting. With this kind of system failures would be discovered, and could be tracked back to their sources. This kind of redundancy would cost more, but it could be done pretty straightforwardly if it is really what people wanted.
The main problem of course and it is the big one, is that it is not clear that the authorities actually WANT the system to be incorruptible. There are a huge number of power plays that go on in government, and the bigger the election, the more power is involved. There is so much back-room bargaining, lobbying, and cronyism, both within government and between government and big business, that the people in power don't really want transparency and fault-tolerance because it would interfere with their power. Fair voting only helps the little people, not the people who are already in power, and the system can only be changed by the people in power.
You seem particularly incensed that people are considering the idea that the US might be involved. Whether or not that is the case, there are other possible explanations that involve deliberate action and not coincidence. For example, it might be Iran itself. I could easily see Iran doing it in preparation for their elections. If, as the news indicates, Iran is planning to cut off internet access, then it is very possible that they experimented with cutting communications lines, or splicing in equipment to control access. The means of cutting access, whether a cable-cut or router outage, is just a detail. They are very overt about wanting to control communications into and out of the country.
The article you referenced and claimed "roundly dismissed" the assertions, doesn't actually dismiss anything. The fact remains that there were a multitude of internet cable interruptions (about 5 at last count) within the space of a couple of weeks, in a variety of locations all surrounding the middle east. The probability of this happening by chance is virtually nil.
There were a lot of stupid theories put forth as to why, and a lot of them can be shot down...that doesn't mean it wasn't deliberate, though, it just means those theories were wrong. Stupid theories are promulgated around every major interesting event. You are right that it didn't cut off access to Iran, and wasn't the opening salvo to war, or prevent the opening of the Bourse, but so what? Those were just wrong theories.
But there are lots of other less dramatic but just as valid reasons why someone might have done it. For example, perhaps it was Iran itself, or the US, or another government, or non-government, simply putting wiretaps in place to monitor communications. Cutting off the communication channel, as you and others pointed out, didn't happen, but so what? That was just bad information or bad theorizing. But simply putting in monitoring equipment could be very valuable. Also, the act of breaking the lines could be an experiment to watch what happens, see how the networks get rerouted, see how countries handle the outage, see how long it takes to repair, etc. If someone smart were thinking of doing this in the future, you'd want to run an experiment first to figure out what would happen. There are a lot of subtle but valid reasons to do it, and as these events showed, it isn't hard to do. My point is there has been no reliable evidence that these interruptions were not deliberate, only that the wild and crazy theories were not the reason.
And yes, you are right, that totalitarian regimes are very dangerous and damaging. But that is a non sequitur when it comes to whether the internet outages were deliberate, or worth speculating about. They are independent notions. To argue that one is very dangerous and deserves our attention, therefore we shouldn't worry about conspiracies in other areas makes no sense. To make it non-political, would you argue that there are gangs committing violent crimes in distant cities that are very dangerous to a lot of people, therefore you shouldn't worry about indications that a mysterious stranger is casing your own house? They are different threats, and both are worthy of attention.
There was a great movie about this subject made in the 50's called "The Man in the White Suit", with Alec Guinness. In the movie, a scientist invents a fabric that repels dirt and doesn't wear out. After initially being heralded as a hero, all the vested interests (pun unintended) in the world's textile and clothing industries think it will mean the end for them, and they want him dead. The movie might take on renewed relevance...
The exact quote from a letter from U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell is "We have lost intelligence information this past week as a direct result of the uncertainty created by Congress' failure to act," which was in TFA, if you had bothered to read it. Their obvious position is that "intelligence" information is "important" information, or they wouldn't be bothering with this at all.
I find it interesting that rather than address the issue on the merits, you chose instead to make an ad hominem attack on all reporters, say they are unintelligent and shouldn't be trusted, and project an air of arrogance and disdain to further deflect any disagreement.
You seem to be willfully diverting the question from the merits of the administration's remarks to an untruthful characterization of the reporting, a typical tactic of administration apologists. So let's summarize:
1) The administration says something 2) It gets accurately reported 3) You call reporters unintelligent, an ad hominem attack on the messenger, without actually showing they did anything wrong 4) You assume an air of arrogance and disdain to deflect any questioning of your unjustified statements 5) In the end you have contributed nothing to the discussion of what actually happened
Maybe next time you can actually address the issue rather than mischaracterizing its reporting? What's actually a bit sad is that your comment was modded +3 insightful for making that little bit of flamebait.
Just because you are training yourself to manipulate your brain waves to get the effects you want doesn't mean it isn't thought. You constantly manipulate your own thoughts in a bio-feedback loop to get the effects you want; it is called "learning".
When you learn to ski, for example, you start out thinking consciously about what movements are necessary, and gradually through practice (bio-feedback), you train your mind and body to act appropriately without consciousness of the steps involved. I don't think you'd argue that your body isn't controlled by your thoughts.
In fact, I'd go out on a limb here and say that when people get good at this technology, they might actually start to feel like the device or game being controlled feels a bit like a part of their body, because they'll be able to control it without conscious thought, just like they could ski or walk without conscious thought!
I think you're confusing the relationships here. The way I understand it is that when you talk, certain parts of your brain related to speech formulation activate. When you *imagine* yourself talking, the same parts of your brain activate. But that doesn't mean your larynx starts moving.
The same is true for other physical activities. This effect is often referenced in discussions about why visualization is an effective exercise.
Eventually, the criminals are just going to start building a database with whatever information they can find.
This is really important. There are a lot of people who argue that if you have nothing to hide, you don't need to worry about the government tracking your information. This argument tends to have the implicit assumption that the government has your best interests at heart and wouldn't [fill in your worst abuse here]. However, even if you believe this, clearly it is not true about criminals. It is becoming rapidly evident that no organization, including the government, can stop data leaks when arbitrary means to get it are used. Employees and systems are fooled, phished, socially engineered, stolen from, and mess up on a regular and frequent basis. If your information gets out there, it can be gotten.
And if all the information gathered from small leaks in many places were accumulated and mined in one nefarious database, run by someone whose main purpose was to screw over as many people as possible, it would be a huge danger. There would be no "unsubscribe", or "do not call" or FOIA requests that can help you, and no morals to control behavior. Information cannot be revoked.
They only way to defend yourself is to create as many obstacles as possible to collecting and coalescing the information in the first place. Even people you trust can accidentally lose control of the information.
This is the best argument yet for why it *does* matter that you minimize what information is known about you, no matter who it is or for what purpose, no matter how benign it may seem.
The music industry is going through changes analogous to the ones the publishing industry went through over time.
In the first era, publishing books was a laborious and time consuming process, and only one copy could be made easily. Books cost huge amounts of money, and were hand printed and illustrated. Then when the printing press was invented, it created a second era, which dramatically brought down the price of books due to mass production, and made it possible for countless people to read things they never would have been able to before. It also led to the rise of publishing empires who controlled what and who was published. If you could afford a printing press, you could publish what you wanted, but not many had the resources and wherewithal to become a major publishing machine. And lastly with the rise of the internet era, web sites and blogs, which are essentially free ways to publish and mass-distribute your work, it became possible for anyone to have their writing accessible to all, and to build a following, without the need for a publisher in the middle. Many blogs are now major writing outlets, and don't go through publishers they way they would have needed to in years gone by. Technology has created a whole new market and business model.
The record companies are in the same state the publishing companies were in during the rise of the third era; technology has made it possible to bypass them and they are running scared.
But you don't see blogs as a substitute for publishing books. People still buy books from book publishers. Yet blogs have become a huge global force just as important as books. Newspapers, being in between, have suffered and have been forced to become more like blogs. The difference between blogs and traditional printed media is that blogs are streams. The value people find in blogs is that they are a constant stream of creative content from the writer, i.e. a subscription. People see value in getting the latest thing from the writer, in a timely way, with predictability and quality. So what people see as the value of blogs is access to the talent on an ongoing basis, not an individual item of production. And there still is value in producing and buying books, because they are a different product meeting a different need.
So I see that the music distribution business will change in similar ways. It may become impossible to charge for individual songs, but people will pay for ongoing access to the talent. The musicians will be forced to actually be productive on an ongoing basis, and to create a stream of content, which has subscription value. They will no longer be able to build huge fortunes on a few moments of inspiration, and will have to work for their supper on a continuing basis. But in the end, those who have talent will be able to create that stream of value, though probably not on the scale that musicians get paid today.
And there will still be a market for high-production quality compilations of music, like CD compilations with good editorial judgment, and high-quality artwork and music. But along side them, as important or more so, there will be talent streams.
Things will be different, and talented musicians will be able to make a moderate amount of money, and the people who make fortunes today riding a few creative successes probably won't be able to do that. But is that such a bad thing?
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Throughout history, when kids don't go to school they ended up working, usually to help out the parents or other family. So it is ridiculous to claim that keeping kids out of school removes people from the work force. It actually adds people to the work force.
Maybe you could argue that in the long run it reduces the level of education required to do more sophisticated jobs; but that isn't the case you made.
I've seen a few 3d movies now, and in my experience, you notice it for a few minutes and think "that's interesting", but if you are absorbed in the story you quickly forget that you are watching it in 3d. The point of watching a movie is to immerse yourself in the story. If you are noticing the 3d effects, you are not immersed, you are looking at the medium itself, not the story. Saying a movie was better in 3-d is kind of like saying "That novel was really good. The leather binding really made it better."
Because of that, and because it is extra bother to wear uncomfortable glasses, and extra expense for admission, I think 3d will prove to be a fad that settles down to a minimal sustainable level. It probably will never go away, but it will never take over either.
It seems most people are assuming that giving someone a perceptual capability that everyone else has would cause them to react to it the same way that everyone else does. But what if not? What if someone who lacks an ability to perceive something also has not developed a way of incorporating that sense into their thought processes, and if it is introduced later it causes them pain, confusion, or dysphoria?
For example, imagine someone whose eyes are very insensitive to light, and sees everything very dimly. They grow up with that perceptual weakness being normal for them. If their eyesight were suddenly "fixed" to normal sensitivity, they might experience unbearable brightness, to the point of pain, similar to a normal person looking into the sun. Imagine someone who grew up deaf to high-pitched sounds suddenly hearing them; maybe they would suddenly experience a cacophony of noise around them in everyday life that is so annoying and distracting that they have a hard time coping? So similarly, if someone who grew up colorblind is suddenly able to see a new color, but their brain has not developed to handle it, might they not be able to cope with the new stimulation in a normal way?
To be fair, the "drugs" claim was made by a school administrator. And he might be lying. Given the circumstances in this case, I believe the kid more.
You are missing the whole point. By interested party, he means anyone who has the power to log activity at the domain server (e.g. someone in a controlling company or a government). The DNS is a bottleneck, and someone controlling any DNS server in the chain can easily track all the sites you visit if the requests have a personal identifier like an IP in them. On the Iran point, it is about a controlling entity blocking certain users from a random site that it doesn't control, not a user being blocked by the site itself. Another example of a big danger is a targeted pharming attack by a hacker (maybe this could be called spear pharming, similar to spear phishing?)
Regarding your point #2, it is correct, and is consistent with the original article, not in disagreement. The problem is that the article summary is mischaracterizing the article.
The summary says: The study showed that a persons unique odor stayed the same even if they varied their diet with strong smelling foods such as garlic and spices.
The article says: Scientists revealed an individual's odour signature remains detectable even when their diet is changed to include strong smelling foods such as garlic and spices.
So the article doesn't say that a person's odor doesn't change even if they vary their diet. Anyone whose eaten garlic knows that to be plainly false. It says that a person's unique odor signature is detectable even if they eat strong smelling foods like garlic, i.e. the garlic does change their scent, but the body's unique contribution is still detectable under the garlic.
That depends on the state. In Massachusetts, the disabled and those who don't understand English very well have the right to bring an assistant of their choosing into the booth with them. If they don't have someone, a poll worker can do it. If assistance is blocked by a poll worker, then vote suppression is happening and should be reported.
There are two major differences between ATM banking and voting that make all the difference:
1) Banking is a zero-sum game. If you deposit $x in the machine, your account and the bank's cash must go up by $x. If they don't, there are many alarms that go off, both in the bank, and in your personal life. In a voting machine, there is no zero-sum that can be checked. No one has to vote for every candidate, and there is no physical deposit that can be checked later. Your vote is conjured up out of thin air and it can disappear or be duplicated or shifted without a balancing transaction.
2) ATM transactions are not anonymous and voting is. ATM transactions are associated with you and your accounts right from the point of initiation, and your identity is tracked on every receipt, your bank records, and the statements you get at the end of the month which you can carefully read and verify. Voting is anonymous by nature, and there are no accounts or monthly statements which you can verify.
These are not implementation details, these are inherent in the problem statement.
That's because it IS true. More intelligent people DO know more and are better qualified than the average person. That's the definition of intelligence: someone who is right more often than others. You might argue that some people are smarter in some areas than in other areas, but in any particular area the whole concept of "intelligence" is that it means you are better!!
You might as well be saying "people who know more and are better qualified to determine what's best tend to think they know more and are better qualified to determine what's best".
Technical knowledge per se isn't so important. What is very important is having the ability to think rationally, being able to make realistic connections between cause and effect, being able to differentiate and talk about different levels of abstraction, being able to understand how the physical world interacts with one's mental models, being able to debug problems that exist in complex systems, etc. These are all abilities that are correlated with being technically proficient. So while I don't care whether a candidate knows the details of my favorite technology, I do think that if he has some technical skill it bodes well for his analytical abilities.
When Obama answered the joke question by a technical guy about the best sorting algorithm for some situation, and he laughingly answered "probably not a Bubble Sort", it spoke volumes. Not about whether he was technically correct, but that he even understood the question, and understood the right kind of answer needed.
I've had enough of bureaucrats who lack any ability to understand or care about the consequences of their actions, and don't have a clue that they don't have a clue.
They are already doing it. Microsoft has been feeding the government with information obtained when you let the MS Malicious Software Removal tool analyze your computer.
Here is one article about it:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/042908-microsoft-botnet-hunting-tool-helps-bust.html
It isn't such a big leap of faith to think that the next step might be to secretly let the government install control software, too. Only to be used for "good" purposes, of course.
I have hard time believing it is not intentional incompetence or malice. But at this point it doesn't matter. They have been committing crimes by not keeping a record of government email, and by using GOP computers to handle whitehouse email, and by not supplying the records to Congress after being subpoenaed, and by ordering the Justice Department not to enforce the subpoena. This is a massive cover up on a huge scale, and they have managed to block every attempt by Congress to investigate it. Whether they are covering up malice or negligence doesn't make the cover up legal.
However, the reason it must be malice (aka intentional incompetence), is that for these purposes it doesn't matter whether the files were correctly converted from one format to another. They could have given over all the records to Congress in whatever disordered form it was in, and let Congress figure out how to sort through it. There are very easy ways to pull information out of a complete morass of files. For example, just text index the whole mess, and search for any text containing interesting phrases, and then follow the references in those text blocks to related text blocks. You could probably get 90% of the meaning of a collection of email in random formats just by doing things like that. But obviously the whole point is to block that from happening, not enable it.
It really depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is....
It's tempting to think that when something goes wrong it's the victim's fault for letting it happen. But you can't always resist the boss (or the corporate culture) when he is telling you to do something that isn't ideal. That's just life. You have to deal with it.
The author was dealt a losing hand, and he had no choice but to play it when he was told to support software before the organization was ready. Upper management made the decision to push the software out, and the consequences should have been dealt with at the level the decision was made. In this case it seems like the author's boss (the CIO) or higher made that call, and he should not have been so glib about dismissing the problems that resulted. That's someone who isn't taking responsibility for his own decisions.
But it was completely wrong for Dirk, the VP of Software, to complain that he and his staff were called over the weekend. That is what the "engineer on call", as the article refers to him, is there for; he might be called in an emergency, even at inconvenient times. And Dirk must have been aware that the company was releasing new software, so it is part of his job to be ready for problems. By ignoring the call to him because he was annoyed, Dirk was putting the company at risk. That's not the right guy to have at the helm of an important department.
If Dirk wanted to get angry at someone he should have gotten angry at the CIO, who was responsible for the situation. It sounds to me like he was afraid to get angry at his boss, or knew it would be fruitless (given the CIO's later dismissal of the situation that would have been accurate), so he took out his anger on someone who he could beat up on without consequences, a peer. That is the mark of a real asshole.
The author and his support department may have been incompetent, or may not have been, but this situation doesn't spread any light on that. It does however show that both his boss and the VP of Software were irresponsible. This whole arrangement of people was dysfunctional.
Get them to buy you another computer, a desktop, and keep it in a locked room. Keep all your confidential information on that computer, and access it via remote desktop from your laptop. Then you can remote desktop into it from your laptop whether you are at home or in your cube. You can leave your monitor, laptop, etc. in your cube if you want and if it gets stolen, it's the company's problem to replace it. This way it's just hardware that only costs a few bucks to replace. The biggest problem with having something stolen is the information that's on it, not the hardware itself, and in this case you'd keep the information on the locked up computer, not on the stuff that might be stolen.
Corporations, as all organizations, do have personalities. Corporations are comprised of people, and are run by people. Without people, a corporation is a set of books on a shelf. The people who run a corporation give it it's personality because they decide how it acts, and it will act according to those people's preferences.
They act inconsistently because they are a group, and no group of people is completely consistent. And individual people also act inconsistently! But that doesn't mean they don't have personality; that is part of what defines their personality.
This is exactly right. All voting technologies, paper or electronic, will have vulnerabilities. The way to solve this problem is to have enough redundancy in the system that makes it very difficult for all mechanisms to fail, or be corrupted, simultaneously and similarly. We have learned this lesson from building fault-tolerant computer systems, and need to apply it here, too. We also need to include the human element in the fault-tolerant design, as people are also subject to failure and corruption.
For example, you could make a system that has simultaneous redundant and different technologies, such as both electronic and paper trails. Then each of these subsystems could have their information flows be split at the source and channeled through completely different paths to different counters. There could be multiple sets of people with different political allegiances doing redundant counting. With this kind of system failures would be discovered, and could be tracked back to their sources. This kind of redundancy would cost more, but it could be done pretty straightforwardly if it is really what people wanted.
The main problem of course and it is the big one, is that it is not clear that the authorities actually WANT the system to be incorruptible. There are a huge number of power plays that go on in government, and the bigger the election, the more power is involved. There is so much back-room bargaining, lobbying, and cronyism, both within government and between government and big business, that the people in power don't really want transparency and fault-tolerance because it would interfere with their power. Fair voting only helps the little people, not the people who are already in power, and the system can only be changed by the people in power.
You seem particularly incensed that people are considering the idea that the US might be involved. Whether or not that is the case, there are other possible explanations that involve deliberate action and not coincidence. For example, it might be Iran itself. I could easily see Iran doing it in preparation for their elections. If, as the news indicates, Iran is planning to cut off internet access, then it is very possible that they experimented with cutting communications lines, or splicing in equipment to control access. The means of cutting access, whether a cable-cut or router outage, is just a detail. They are very overt about wanting to control communications into and out of the country.
The article you referenced and claimed "roundly dismissed" the assertions, doesn't actually dismiss anything. The fact remains that there were a multitude of internet cable interruptions (about 5 at last count) within the space of a couple of weeks, in a variety of locations all surrounding the middle east. The probability of this happening by chance is virtually nil.
There were a lot of stupid theories put forth as to why, and a lot of them can be shot down...that doesn't mean it wasn't deliberate, though, it just means those theories were wrong. Stupid theories are promulgated around every major interesting event. You are right that it didn't cut off access to Iran, and wasn't the opening salvo to war, or prevent the opening of the Bourse, but so what? Those were just wrong theories.
But there are lots of other less dramatic but just as valid reasons why someone might have done it. For example, perhaps it was Iran itself, or the US, or another government, or non-government, simply putting wiretaps in place to monitor communications. Cutting off the communication channel, as you and others pointed out, didn't happen, but so what? That was just bad information or bad theorizing. But simply putting in monitoring equipment could be very valuable. Also, the act of breaking the lines could be an experiment to watch what happens, see how the networks get rerouted, see how countries handle the outage, see how long it takes to repair, etc. If someone smart were thinking of doing this in the future, you'd want to run an experiment first to figure out what would happen. There are a lot of subtle but valid reasons to do it, and as these events showed, it isn't hard to do. My point is there has been no reliable evidence that these interruptions were not deliberate, only that the wild and crazy theories were not the reason.
And yes, you are right, that totalitarian regimes are very dangerous and damaging. But that is a non sequitur when it comes to whether the internet outages were deliberate, or worth speculating about. They are independent notions. To argue that one is very dangerous and deserves our attention, therefore we shouldn't worry about conspiracies in other areas makes no sense. To make it non-political, would you argue that there are gangs committing violent crimes in distant cities that are very dangerous to a lot of people, therefore you shouldn't worry about indications that a mysterious stranger is casing your own house? They are different threats, and both are worthy of attention.
There was a great movie about this subject made in the 50's called "The Man in the White Suit", with Alec Guinness. In the movie, a scientist invents a fabric that repels dirt and doesn't wear out. After initially being heralded as a hero, all the vested interests (pun unintended) in the world's textile and clothing industries think it will mean the end for them, and they want him dead. The movie might take on renewed relevance...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_White_Suit
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044876/
The exact quote from a letter from U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell is "We have lost intelligence information this past week as a direct result of the uncertainty created by Congress' failure to act," which was in TFA, if you had bothered to read it. Their obvious position is that "intelligence" information is "important" information, or they wouldn't be bothering with this at all.
I find it interesting that rather than address the issue on the merits, you chose instead to make an ad hominem attack on all reporters, say they are unintelligent and shouldn't be trusted, and project an air of arrogance and disdain to further deflect any disagreement.
You seem to be willfully diverting the question from the merits of the administration's remarks to an untruthful characterization of the reporting, a typical tactic of administration apologists. So let's summarize:
1) The administration says something
2) It gets accurately reported
3) You call reporters unintelligent, an ad hominem attack on the messenger,
without actually showing they did anything wrong
4) You assume an air of arrogance and disdain to deflect any questioning of your unjustified statements
5) In the end you have contributed nothing to the discussion of what actually happened
Maybe next time you can actually address the issue rather than mischaracterizing its reporting? What's actually a bit sad is that your comment was modded +3 insightful for making that little bit of flamebait.
Just because you are training yourself to manipulate your brain waves to get the effects you want doesn't mean it isn't thought. You constantly manipulate your own thoughts in a bio-feedback loop to get the effects you want; it is called "learning".
When you learn to ski, for example, you start out thinking consciously about what movements are necessary, and gradually through practice (bio-feedback), you train your mind and body to act appropriately without consciousness of the steps involved. I don't think you'd argue that your body isn't controlled by your thoughts.
In fact, I'd go out on a limb here and say that when people get good at this technology, they might actually start to feel like the device or game being controlled feels a bit like a part of their body, because they'll be able to control it without conscious thought, just like they could ski or walk without conscious thought!
I think you're confusing the relationships here. The way I understand it is that when you talk, certain parts of your brain related to speech formulation activate. When you *imagine* yourself talking, the same parts of your brain activate. But that doesn't mean your larynx starts moving.
The same is true for other physical activities. This effect is often referenced in discussions about why visualization is an effective exercise.
This is really important. There are a lot of people who argue that if you have nothing to hide, you don't need to worry about the government tracking your information. This argument tends to have the implicit assumption that the government has your best interests at heart and wouldn't [fill in your worst abuse here]. However, even if you believe this, clearly it is not true about criminals. It is becoming rapidly evident that no organization, including the government, can stop data leaks when arbitrary means to get it are used. Employees and systems are fooled, phished, socially engineered, stolen from, and mess up on a regular and frequent basis. If your information gets out there, it can be gotten.
And if all the information gathered from small leaks in many places were accumulated and mined in one nefarious database, run by someone whose main purpose was to screw over as many people as possible, it would be a huge danger. There would be no "unsubscribe", or "do not call" or FOIA requests that can help you, and no morals to control behavior. Information cannot be revoked.
They only way to defend yourself is to create as many obstacles as possible to collecting and coalescing the information in the first place. Even people you trust can accidentally lose control of the information.
This is the best argument yet for why it *does* matter that you minimize what information is known about you, no matter who it is or for what purpose, no matter how benign it may seem.
The music industry is going through changes analogous to the ones the publishing industry went through over time.
In the first era, publishing books was a laborious and time consuming process, and only one copy could be made easily. Books cost huge amounts of money, and were hand printed and illustrated. Then when the printing press was invented, it created a second era, which dramatically brought down the price of books due to mass production, and made it possible for countless people to read things they never would have been able to before. It also led to the rise of publishing empires who controlled what and who was published. If you could afford a printing press, you could publish what you wanted, but not many had the resources and wherewithal to become a major publishing machine. And lastly with the rise of the internet era, web sites and blogs, which are essentially free ways to publish and mass-distribute your work, it became possible for anyone to have their writing accessible to all, and to build a following, without the need for a publisher in the middle. Many blogs are now major writing outlets, and don't go through publishers they way they would have needed to in years gone by. Technology has created a whole new market and business model.
The record companies are in the same state the publishing companies were in during the rise of the third era; technology has made it possible to bypass them and they are running scared.
But you don't see blogs as a substitute for publishing books. People still buy books from book publishers. Yet blogs have become a huge global force just as important as books. Newspapers, being in between, have suffered and have been forced to become more like blogs. The difference between blogs and traditional printed media is that blogs are streams. The value people find in blogs is that they are a constant stream of creative content from the writer, i.e. a subscription. People see value in getting the latest thing from the writer, in a timely way, with predictability and quality. So what people see as the value of blogs is access to the talent on an ongoing basis, not an individual item of production. And there still is value in producing and buying books, because they are a different product meeting a different need.
So I see that the music distribution business will change in similar ways. It may become impossible to charge for individual songs, but people will pay for ongoing access to the talent. The musicians will be forced to actually be productive on an ongoing basis, and to create a stream of content, which has subscription value. They will no longer be able to build huge fortunes on a few moments of inspiration, and will have to work for their supper on a continuing basis. But in the end, those who have talent will be able to create that stream of value, though probably not on the scale that musicians get paid today.
And there will still be a market for high-production quality compilations of music, like CD compilations with good editorial judgment, and high-quality artwork and music. But along side them, as important or more so, there will be talent streams.
Things will be different, and talented musicians will be able to make a moderate amount of money, and the people who make fortunes today riding a few creative successes probably won't be able to do that. But is that such a bad thing?