I have a wonderful Panasonic device I bought last year. It is a combination DVR/VCR/DVD recorder, with TV Guide Online. It is one of the best purchases I ever made. The integration of the functions is great. I can select a program in the TV guide mode, and with a click or two of the remote tell it to record that show to the hard disk when it comes on. Most of the time I don't need to get it off the hard disk, so I just delete it when I'm done. But occasionally, like for a good movie, I can edit out the commercials, and then copy it to a DVD in high-speed copy mode, and voila, there's my archive copy. It also supports recording one show while playing back a different one, or chasing playback where it plays the same show that is being recorded ahead. It's a perfect example of well-designed integration of functions, and got me to replace the stack of components I had before. Even my girlfriend, who tends to rail on bad technology design every chance she gets, fell in love with it.
Anyway, Panasonic discontinued this model, and hasn't replaced it with a new one with the same capabilities. I suspect it has to do with pressure from the movie industry; I saw a rumor to that effect somewhere online, but I don't know for sure. I can't imagine Panasonic did it voluntarily, because during the time it was on the market (2006-2007) it was a hot seller. I guess I got lucky buying it in the window of opportunity.
So I suspect there would be a lot more variety of video gadgets, and a lot more familiarity and interest in them among Americans, if the movie industry weren't allowed to strong arm the electronics market. I think if you looked at the economics of it, they are single-handedly responsible for depressing a big segment of the economy.
1) Because this really isn't about crime at all, that's just an element added to make it more palatable to the gullible. It is about increasing the ways and means the government has to monitor ordinary citizens at home and abroad. Note that one category of people in the database is "subjects of terrorist investigations." That basically means anyone the government decides to investigate. Interpol's purpose is really to do police work. Note the quote from the article, "if existing systems are connected up to it then the intelligence agencies would have to approve," by the Northrup Grumman spokesperson interviewed. They all know that this is intended to involve intelligence agencies, not just police agencies.
2) Because the purpose of this initiative is to get around laws, not to enforce laws. It allows a quid pro quo of "You investigate my people and I'll investigate yours, and we'll share information", thus extending the reach of government monitoring. For example, if in the US it would be illegal or unpopular to take everyone's fingerprints at the border, but it isn't in another country, the US can obtain prints of any of it's own citizens who travel to that country through this sharing.
3) Because interpol involves countries that have more resistance to US bullying. This plan is starting with countries that the US can push around, or are otherwise "yes-men" to the US. Only once the desired procedures are established and in place will they try to recruit other countries who might otherwise have objected to methods introduced during the formative phase
4) Because interpol has been around a while and has learned something about proper policies and procedures, which the US doesn't want to abide by. The Bush policy is "shoot first, don't answer questions later," which goes against the policies of good police work.
5) Because by starting a brand new initiative and organization, the US can completely control it.
There is a huge difference between high level goals and the details of operating decisions. Companies make all kinds of decisions, some of which lose money and some of which make money. There is nothing that says a company can't spend too much on pencils, or pay too much for a web site from the CFO's cousin. In a typical company, how many purchase order decisions are made by putting out requests for bids? In most companies none. It is up to the management to decide what something is worth to the company. A corporation has to act in the interests of its shareholders as represented by the board of directors, and they don't particularly care about this level of detail.
The power the shareholders have is in the actions the board takes. The board is not going to fire a CEO because he paid too much for a web site. They won't even know, and don't care. They deliberately delegate operating decisions to the CEO because that is his job.
And in smaller companies, the shareholders often are the management. So they ARE operating in the shareholders' interests.
Well, yes and no. Yes, the cynical me says lots of government contracts probably do get done this way even though they aren't supposed to. But at least the government has policies and laws that say they aren't supposed to work this way, and I bet the *majority* is still done honestly (I hope).
But private companies are under no obligation to be fair in who they buy from. There are no laws that say a company must buy from the best, or cheapest, or whatever. They just pick who they feel like working with and that's it. If they want to buy work from their buddy then they do it. That's not fraud or conspiracy or collusion. It's not even secret or embarrassing. That's what business is all about, they just call it "networking" whereas in the government they call it "cronyism".
Public companies at least have some obligation to shareholders to be fiscally responsible, but for the most part dealing with this kind of issue doesn't get raised to the level of the board of directors unless it dramatically affects the quarterly results, so the management is free to do whatever it wants anyway. CEOs in the private sector are cowboys and apparently as a country we like it that way, evidenced by the fact that so many people these days balk at regulation.
So, no, this would not be better in the private sector. In fact, it is the status quo in the private sector which is why it is rarely news. It is not status quo in the government, or at least it shouldn't be, which is why we get so upset when it happens there. We expect the government to serve the people, and we want it to. We don't expect the private sector to serve the people we expect it to serve the company owners, and it does.
The real story here is that cronyism has spread like a cancer into many areas of government, and this item in particular shows how the very forces that are claiming to enhance our national security are actually sabotaging it. The answer isn't to leave it to the private sector and let the cancer win, the answer is to kill the cancer before it kills us.
In case no one has a dictionary anymore, the word Memorial does not imply any kind of threat.
American Heritage Dictionary
memorial (m-môr'-l, -mr'-)
n.
1. Something, such as a monument or holiday, intended to celebrate or honor the memory of a person or an event.
2. A written statement of facts or a petition presented to a legislative body or an executive.
adj.
1. Serving as a remembrance of a person or an event; commemorative.
2. Of, relating to, or being in memory.
A memorial is for remembering someone, for commemorating someone. There is nothing in the meaning of the word that says they are required to be dead or anything like it. One instance of a memorial is when the person being remembered is dead, but that's not a requirement, only that you want them to be remembered. Most people can't remember what they had for breakfast unless you remind them, so the student's use of the word in "S.A.V.E-Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage" is perfectly ordinary usage for something that is intended to evoke a memory of that person.
You are putting a spin on this that isn't there when you say there is a threat implied.
Also, the complete phrase was "S.A.V.E-Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage". S.A.V.E. is a student run environmental organization on campus who he was also blaming for not objecting strongly enough to the garage. He is obviously not threatening the student group, many of which were apparently his friends. The whole point of the phrase is to label the garage with the names of those he is saying are responsibile for the whole boondoggle so you remember who they are.
Of course it's a simulation! Everything we see is a simulation. When you look in a particular direction and see a refrigerator, what's really happening is some energy is falling on your retina, stimulating nerve responses that cause a model of a refrigerator to be activated in your mind. The refrigerator only exists in your head. It is an internal model that serves your own purposes to explain the stimuli.
Furthermore, since everyone has their own, there is more than one simulation, and they all work subtly differently, and they all have evolved as a response to different stimuli over time. Everyone has their own simulation of the universe in their own head.
I have interviewed the CEOs and CTOs of many large registrars. Tim Ruiz, the CTO of GoDaddy, has assured me they have never once abused their position and they would fire any employee caught abusing data inside their company. Pat Kane, the Director of Business Operations of Verisign, has told me they can't even log their servers because the log files would fill up too fast and the data wouldn't be valuable unless they sell it. Since Verisign is a public company, they may sell the data in the future but they currently don't because ISPs can do it better, and the ISPs sample sizes are large enough. It is just too costly to gather, and Verisign would need to file a service plan with ICANN before would be allowed to sell data like this. Paul Stahura, the President of eNom, has told me they don't allow datamining either.
DomainTools.com is a division of Name Intelligence, and I, Jay Westerdal, the President and CEO of the Name Intelligence, have a strict policy against domain name research theft. People's queries are never used to register domain names, period. I serve as the secretary of the ICANN Registars Consistency, and although we are not a tiny company, we are still a relatively small company.:) We enjoy building tools for Domainers and anyone seeking more knowledge about domains.
There is lots of wiggle room in those statements, and you can outright choose not to believe the people referenced, but it sounds to me like those companies aren't deliberately revealing the information. However it is certainly possibly that someone is getting it without their knowledge, such as through software or protocol exploits, or employees acting in their own interests.
According to one of the articles linked, the command line is actually a worse alternative. NSLookup requests go through your ISP's domain name server, which logs the NXD (Non-eXistent Domain) responses. Many ISPs augment their revenue by selling this information.
Doing a whois request at a reliable registrar's web-site doesn't go through your ISP's DNS. The larger registrars are probably more trustworthy than your run-of-the-mill ISP. For example, I believe GoDaddy and Network Solutions have stated that they would never provide such information to third parties.
If you read TFA, they are not opening up the designs for any parts, or making the software public. They are just making the *specifications* (i.e. the technical requirements) public. This is to encourage more competition in the bidding process. I don't think the project manager is right to call this "open source". They are probably just trying to get some public play out of using that phrase.
But be that as it may, it is still interesting that they even published the specifications, given the forces at work in the world today. As any engineer that has built a system knows, it is *much* easier to build something when you have been given detailed specs than when you have to come up with the requirements yourself. Also, the specs are very revealing about what the actual capabilities and weaknesses the final result will have. This could be useful information for someone who wants to compete with, or interfere with, the US space program. So this move is rather interesting.
Pretty much any publication that reviews the same products that the advertisers sell is subject to this conflict of interest. This includes web sites and print magazines. Another classic example is stereo equipment. You'll almost never find a bad review of a product in a major audiophile magazine. They always find something positive to say about a product.
I think what surprises and annoys people is that these kind of publications strive to give the impression of objectivity, even when they aren't objective. Readers want that impression, so the magazine presents itself that way to attract readers. Then when the ugly truth comes out, the readers feel like they were fooled and get angry. And they have a right to be angry; they *were* fooled.
But the fact is that the readers aren't the real customers of the magazine! The advertisers pay the bills, and they are the magazine's actual customers. Revenue from the purchasers is zero or very small compared to that from the advertisers. In blunt terms, most magazines are an eyeball gathering service that is sold to advertisers. So, of course, they are going to serve the advertisers interests over the readers' interests. The readers are the pawns in the game between the publication and the advertisers.
In the US there is a magazine called Consumer Reports which doesn't take advertising and reviews products. It sounds similar to Which? CR is a great magazine, and recognizes that the only way to be objective is to not take advertising.
The web, though, is run by advertising. Is it possible for a site to be a business success without advertising?
It seems to me that ideally, the DOJ shouldn't care how the states implement their voting systems, as long as they work. For the DOJ to go so far as to sue New York to implement a particular method that they favor implies ulterior motives.
The pressure to convert states to e-voting exhibits the beginning of a bad tendency. The next step would be to electronically coordinate the systems, and the next would be run them from a central place.
What I suspect is that the DOJ wants a central point of coordination for the counting of votes. The value of a single point of coordination is you only have to control that one place to be in control of the system.
It is like the secret wiretapping room in AT&T's switching center. If you have one (or a few) central points of control, they can be compromised, possibly by accident, or possibly on purpose.
People in the systems design business know that single points of failure can bring a whole system down when even a small component is compromised. Distributed designs are more tolerant of problems. I fear that if the voting system were made electronic, it would make possible the corruption of the system on a scale not possible before. And if it is possible, it will eventually happen. The only way to avoid such corruption is to avoid the possibility of central points of failure or of control in the design of the system.
If the DOJ had the country's best interests in mind it would not be discouraging, but mandating, that multiple systems be used to tally votes, that they use different technologies both electronic and manual, that they are monitored by different people, that they are manufactured by different companies, that they have thorough and open review before approval, etc. Centralizing on one system, or even on one type of system, will not make the system less corruptible, it will make it more corruptible. The fact that they are pushing what is in many ways counter to the construction of a robust system implies they have different goals.
The DOJ is under the control of the executive branch of government. The historical pattern of this administration has been to try to exert control over as many systems as possible to further their own agenda. This seems to be in that spirit, and where it leads is very dangerous.
No, that's not what I am saying. I made no assertion about free markets working or not. I am simply pointing out that an organization's *efficiency* is not a result of it's being successful in business. There are a lot of factors that make a business successful, and it's efficiency is probably not even near the top. Note that the discussion here is about the efficiency of an organization, not the efficiency of a market, which is a totally different meaning of the word.
Somebody needs to explain that bottom sign for me. No parking during a 1 hour window. On monday and thursday only. Weird, maybe it's a garbage pickup time or maybe a plow? Nope, it only goes from March to December. Can't be garbage or it'd be year round and can't be the plow or it would be during winter. Why on God's earth would they make that restriction?
It's called street-cleaning. Most cities do it when the weather allows (i.e. not winter), once or twice a week.
My sense is just the opposite: that the biggest and longest lived companies waste the most, not the least (AT&T, IBM, Raytheon, etc). Less efficient businesses do not go out of business, rather, entrenched businesses have the luxury of being less efficient. Bigger (usually as a result of having succeeded over a longer period of time), longer-lived companies usually have lower profit margins than smaller ones, and make it up in volume. Their momentum (experience, contracts, brand name, lobbying efforts, diversification) is what keeps them going, not their efficiency.
This is one of the greatest ideas I've heard in a long time. If you've ever been caught in a disaster (like 9/11, for example), you know that right away virtually all land lines and cell phones become unusable because the switching circuits are immediately overloaded. This is due to the centralized model, where the switching systems are designed to handle slightly more than average loads, and can't handle more. By distributing the call network, it would dramatically reduce the bottleneck problem, making it much more likely that your calls would get through. Then add the other advantages mentioned and you have a solution to several very real problems.
There are a bunch of technical details that would have to be solved, but those have known solutions that will only get easier with time. Cell phones are getting more powerful all the time, and most people are not on the phone much of the time, so the device has lots of bandwidth that could be better used. Encryption can be done end-to-end with the available compute power. The battery power usage may actually be improved by the reduced power necessary to make calls that are shorter distance. Bandwidth congestion would be reduced because of the locality of transmission. It would be easy to drop repeaters in strategic locations if that helps long distance connectivity; that would be a lot cheaper than having to put cell towers *everywhere*.
This is an architectural idea that from a technical point of view is almost a no-brainer; it is great!
The problems are going to be business and political ones, because it bypasses existing centralized power structures. The switching companies will see their lives flashing before their eyes, and the government will not have central points to wire tap. These factions currently control all the infrastructure, and they will not want a revolutionary change like this to happen.
Maybe a way to get this going is for determined, maverick companies to do it fast enough that the big boys are caught off guard, and don't respond quickly enough. Also, the new business infrastructure needs to eliminate any central points of control (like a single critical vendor) that could be shutdown by the powers that be when they wake up.
One example might be an open source hardware/software effort that implements the devices. If a critical mass of phones gets out there quickly enough that are not dependent on the existing infrastructure, perhaps it could work. If a company (Google?) comes out with an open phone architecture which supports this as a third-party app while simultaneously working with the existing cell phone infrastructure, it could hit like wildfire.
The only significant obstacle I can see is that the carrier spectrum is still a centrally controlled resource. It is possible that the govt would simply outlaw the usage of spectrum for these purposes. If someone can figure out how to tie this new capability in with existing spectrum allocations that have the necessary distance and bandwidth properties in such a way that you couldn't disallow it without disallowing other necessary functions, that would be interesting.
When I read the article, the first thing I thought was 'I thought we could all agree on this?' That's the 1 big (important) thing the ID and Evo people agree on: We came from a single source.
Maybe I'm being picky, but I think that is an oversimplification that is too conciliatory between the two positions, and isn't technically correct. Evolutionists, being scientists, think that there are many possible explanations, some of which are more likely than others given the evidence known at the moment, and which may change over time as more is learned. ID people think there is one explanation, it will never change, and it has nothing to do with evidence, it has to do with belief, and specifically discounts physical evidence.
Your statement saying that the two groups agree on that point is like looking at two ships whose paths crossed at sea, and saying they were on the same course at that point. In reality they may never have even seen each other.
If you look at the actual documents released by the CIA, you'll see that the number 1 item on the list of family jewels is totally blacked out; number 2 is the use of a member of the mafia to attempt to assassinate Castro. See the summary on page 5 of the scanned pdf here.
Pages 8-10, which provide more detail of the deleted item, are also completely obliterated.
If the CIA were involved in the assassination of Kennedy, this is exactly where the item would be...
Of course, a really clever CIA might fabricate just such a redaction to incite all manner of speculation and spread FUD about the rest of what they did...
A federal appeals court on Monday ruled that e-mail users have privacy rights that prohibit federal agencies from conducting warrantless searches of electronic correspondence during investigations
the district court reasoned that e-mails held by an ISP were roughly analogous to sealed letters
While it would be great to afford e-mail the same privacy protections as sealed letters, there seems to be a corner case here that would make this difficult:
(1) the ruling seems to apply only to the federal government, and (2) unlike regular mail, email is not handled by the federal government, or even by a single entity that could be held to the same standard (like, for example, fedex, in the case of physical mail).
So given that e-mail is typically unsealed, and potentially flows through numerous independent, non-federal agencies, how would one enforce this ruling? Wouldn't it be legal for a private ISP (non-federal) to look at your e-mail and then give its findings to the government? After all, you gave your email to the private party, so they haven't taken it from you without your permission, and being private, they are not bound by the ruling.
The question of whether Vista is a failure is moot because the usual meaning of failure doesn't apply in this case. Most Windows purchases in a few years will be Vista simply because it is the latest version of the OS and eventually, most people want to have the latest version. They may delay for an SP or two, but not forever. So in that sense, Vista cannot be a failure. The Dell issue is just a speed bump.
The real measure is whether the dissatisfaction with Vista will increase the rate of switchers to another track, e.g. Mac or Linux. The only way to tell is to compare the rates of switching to and from Windows before and after the Vista dust has settled down.
If the net switching rate away from the Windows to other OSes jumps significantly enough for MS to feel it in their pocket, then it could be considered a failure. I don't think we have those numbers yet.
You, personally, may not trust the prediction unless you understand that the predictor understood something technical about it, but that is simply your theory for evaluating the likelihood of the prediction being right, in other words, you are making your own prediction, a meta-prediction. Your meta-theory seems to require that the predictor have a deeply scientific or technical understanding. I don't agree that is a requirement for making a valid prediction when it comes to future trends.
Many people incorporate lots of things into their predictions, such as certain trusted people's opinions, gut feel, and other things that are hard to quantify. But predictive value is about correlating predicted results with actual results, regardless of whether it fits your meta-theory.
It doesn't matter if he reads tea leaves to make his predictions; if it turns out his predictions are right more often than other people's then his predictions have value. It might then be an interesting pursuit to figure out his rationale, but it doesn't change its efficacy.
(BTW, I'm not saying Cringely's predictions have value, I'm just disagreeing with your assumptions and your logic).
This administration has had a pattern of changing laws, and reinterpreting laws, so that they are less objectively verifiable, and more based on a "trust my judgement" attitude. To me, this is a dangerous path to take, and it seems to be present in these proposed changes as well.
The article says
McConnell wants to: _Give the NSA the power to monitor foreigners without seeking FISA court approval, even if the surveillance is conducted by tapping phones and e-mail accounts in the United States.
He wants to change the law to allow surveillance of foreigners inside the US, as opposed to the current law which, as I understand it, only allows surveillance of communications that involve a party outside the US. The current law has an objective standard that can be verified for compliance, namely that the communications goes outside the US. By changing the law to a characterization of the person, not the communications, it becomes less objective and more subject to abuse. Who is considered a foreigner by the people who want to spy on them? Someone who has lived in another country? A person with a green card? A person with a foreign accent? It is also easier to claim a "mistake" after the fact, and after the damage is done, when the criteria is so subjective.
"Determinations about whether a court order is required should be based on considerations about the target of the surveillance, rather than the particular means of communication or the location from which the surveillance is being conducted"
Once again, he is saying we should trust him to decide before the fact, based on his own judgment, whether seeking a court order to do the surveillance is even required. But more than saying the court should decide based on looser criteria, here he is saying the he shouldn't even have to go to the court at all, based on the extremely vague criteria "considerations about the target"
_Give telecommunications companies immunity from civil liability for their cooperation with Bush's terrorist surveillance program. Pending lawsuits against companies including Verizon and AT&T allege they violated privacy laws by giving phone records to the NSA for the program.
One of the very few checks against abuse of government power that we have is that companies who comply with a request that is illegal may be punished for their compliance through civil liability. This responsibility makes them think twice. This proposed change removes any incentive for a company to think twice about it's own culpability. The only logical thing for a company to do if this change were made would be to rollover instantly to any request for surveillance, since it would be the path of no risk.
These changes are simply more ways to dismantle checks and balances in the system, and make it harder for anyone in power to be held accountable.
Even if you believe that the people currently in power are acting in your interests and can be trusted, what happens when the next guy takes power? Will you trust him to act in your best interests? How will you know if he is, if there are no longer any objective criteria to measure his actions against?
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I have a wonderful Panasonic device I bought last year. It is a combination DVR/VCR/DVD recorder, with TV Guide Online. It is one of the best purchases I ever made. The integration of the functions is great. I can select a program in the TV guide mode, and with a click or two of the remote tell it to record that show to the hard disk when it comes on. Most of the time I don't need to get it off the hard disk, so I just delete it when I'm done. But occasionally, like for a good movie, I can edit out the commercials, and then copy it to a DVD in high-speed copy mode, and voila, there's my archive copy. It also supports recording one show while playing back a different one, or chasing playback where it plays the same show that is being recorded ahead. It's a perfect example of well-designed integration of functions, and got me to replace the stack of components I had before. Even my girlfriend, who tends to rail on bad technology design every chance she gets, fell in love with it.
Anyway, Panasonic discontinued this model, and hasn't replaced it with a new one with the same capabilities. I suspect it has to do with pressure from the movie industry; I saw a rumor to that effect somewhere online, but I don't know for sure. I can't imagine Panasonic did it voluntarily, because during the time it was on the market (2006-2007) it was a hot seller. I guess I got lucky buying it in the window of opportunity.
So I suspect there would be a lot more variety of video gadgets, and a lot more familiarity and interest in them among Americans, if the movie industry weren't allowed to strong arm the electronics market. I think if you looked at the economics of it, they are single-handedly responsible for depressing a big segment of the economy.
1) Because this really isn't about crime at all, that's just an element added to make it more palatable to the gullible. It is about increasing the ways and means the government has to monitor ordinary citizens at home and abroad. Note that one category of people in the database is "subjects of terrorist investigations." That basically means anyone the government decides to investigate. Interpol's purpose is really to do police work. Note the quote from the article, "if existing systems are connected up to it then the intelligence agencies would have to approve," by the Northrup Grumman spokesperson interviewed. They all know that this is intended to involve intelligence agencies, not just police agencies.
2) Because the purpose of this initiative is to get around laws, not to enforce laws. It allows a quid pro quo of "You investigate my people and I'll investigate yours, and we'll share information", thus extending the reach of government monitoring. For example, if in the US it would be illegal or unpopular to take everyone's fingerprints at the border, but it isn't in another country, the US can obtain prints of any of it's own citizens who travel to that country through this sharing.
3) Because interpol involves countries that have more resistance to US bullying. This plan is starting with countries that the US can push around, or are otherwise "yes-men" to the US. Only once the desired procedures are established and in place will they try to recruit other countries who might otherwise have objected to methods introduced during the formative phase
4) Because interpol has been around a while and has learned something about proper policies and procedures, which the US doesn't want to abide by. The Bush policy is "shoot first, don't answer questions later," which goes against the policies of good police work.
5) Because by starting a brand new initiative and organization, the US can completely control it.
There is a huge difference between high level goals and the details of operating decisions. Companies make all kinds of decisions, some of which lose money and some of which make money. There is nothing that says a company can't spend too much on pencils, or pay too much for a web site from the CFO's cousin. In a typical company, how many purchase order decisions are made by putting out requests for bids? In most companies none. It is up to the management to decide what something is worth to the company. A corporation has to act in the interests of its shareholders as represented by the board of directors, and they don't particularly care about this level of detail.
The power the shareholders have is in the actions the board takes. The board is not going to fire a CEO because he paid too much for a web site. They won't even know, and don't care. They deliberately delegate operating decisions to the CEO because that is his job.
And in smaller companies, the shareholders often are the management. So they ARE operating in the shareholders' interests.
Well, yes and no. Yes, the cynical me says lots of government contracts probably do get done this way even though they aren't supposed to. But at least the government has policies and laws that say they aren't supposed to work this way, and I bet the *majority* is still done honestly (I hope).
But private companies are under no obligation to be fair in who they buy from. There are no laws that say a company must buy from the best, or cheapest, or whatever. They just pick who they feel like working with and that's it. If they want to buy work from their buddy then they do it. That's not fraud or conspiracy or collusion. It's not even secret or embarrassing. That's what business is all about, they just call it "networking" whereas in the government they call it "cronyism".
Public companies at least have some obligation to shareholders to be fiscally responsible, but for the most part dealing with this kind of issue doesn't get raised to the level of the board of directors unless it dramatically affects the quarterly results, so the management is free to do whatever it wants anyway. CEOs in the private sector are cowboys and apparently as a country we like it that way, evidenced by the fact that so many people these days balk at regulation.
So, no, this would not be better in the private sector. In fact, it is the status quo in the private sector which is why it is rarely news. It is not status quo in the government, or at least it shouldn't be, which is why we get so upset when it happens there. We expect the government to serve the people, and we want it to. We don't expect the private sector to serve the people we expect it to serve the company owners, and it does.
The real story here is that cronyism has spread like a cancer into many areas of government, and this item in particular shows how the very forces that are claiming to enhance our national security are actually sabotaging it. The answer isn't to leave it to the private sector and let the cancer win, the answer is to kill the cancer before it kills us.
memorial (m-môr'-l, -mr'-)
n. 1. Something, such as a monument or holiday, intended to celebrate or honor the memory of a person or an event. 2. A written statement of facts or a petition presented to a legislative body or an executive.
adj. 1. Serving as a remembrance of a person or an event; commemorative. 2. Of, relating to, or being in memory.
A memorial is for remembering someone, for commemorating someone. There is nothing in the meaning of the word that says they are required to be dead or anything like it. One instance of a memorial is when the person being remembered is dead, but that's not a requirement, only that you want them to be remembered. Most people can't remember what they had for breakfast unless you remind them, so the student's use of the word in "S.A.V.E-Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage" is perfectly ordinary usage for something that is intended to evoke a memory of that person.
You are putting a spin on this that isn't there when you say there is a threat implied.
Also, the complete phrase was "S.A.V.E-Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage". S.A.V.E. is a student run environmental organization on campus who he was also blaming for not objecting strongly enough to the garage. He is obviously not threatening the student group, many of which were apparently his friends. The whole point of the phrase is to label the garage with the names of those he is saying are responsibile for the whole boondoggle so you remember who they are.
Of course it's a simulation! Everything we see is a simulation. When you look in a particular direction and see a refrigerator, what's really happening is some energy is falling on your retina, stimulating nerve responses that cause a model of a refrigerator to be activated in your mind. The refrigerator only exists in your head. It is an internal model that serves your own purposes to explain the stimuli.
Furthermore, since everyone has their own, there is more than one simulation, and they all work subtly differently, and they all have evolved as a response to different stimuli over time. Everyone has their own simulation of the universe in their own head.
According to one of the articles linked, the command line is actually a worse alternative. NSLookup requests go through your ISP's domain name server, which logs the NXD (Non-eXistent Domain) responses. Many ISPs augment their revenue by selling this information.
Doing a whois request at a reliable registrar's web-site doesn't go through your ISP's DNS. The larger registrars are probably more trustworthy than your run-of-the-mill ISP. For example, I believe GoDaddy and Network Solutions have stated that they would never provide such information to third parties.
If you read TFA, they are not opening up the designs for any parts, or making the software public. They are just making the *specifications* (i.e. the technical requirements) public. This is to encourage more competition in the bidding process. I don't think the project manager is right to call this "open source". They are probably just trying to get some public play out of using that phrase.
But be that as it may, it is still interesting that they even published the specifications, given the forces at work in the world today. As any engineer that has built a system knows, it is *much* easier to build something when you have been given detailed specs than when you have to come up with the requirements yourself. Also, the specs are very revealing about what the actual capabilities and weaknesses the final result will have. This could be useful information for someone who wants to compete with, or interfere with, the US space program. So this move is rather interesting.
Pretty much any publication that reviews the same products that the advertisers sell is subject to this conflict of interest. This includes web sites and print magazines. Another classic example is stereo equipment. You'll almost never find a bad review of a product in a major audiophile magazine. They always find something positive to say about a product.
I think what surprises and annoys people is that these kind of publications strive to give the impression of objectivity, even when they aren't objective. Readers want that impression, so the magazine presents itself that way to attract readers. Then when the ugly truth comes out, the readers feel like they were fooled and get angry. And they have a right to be angry; they *were* fooled.
But the fact is that the readers aren't the real customers of the magazine! The advertisers pay the bills, and they are the magazine's actual customers. Revenue from the purchasers is zero or very small compared to that from the advertisers. In blunt terms, most magazines are an eyeball gathering service that is sold to advertisers. So, of course, they are going to serve the advertisers interests over the readers' interests. The readers are the pawns in the game between the publication and the advertisers.
In the US there is a magazine called Consumer Reports which doesn't take advertising and reviews products. It sounds similar to Which? CR is a great magazine, and recognizes that the only way to be objective is to not take advertising.
The web, though, is run by advertising. Is it possible for a site to be a business success without advertising?
They way I heard it, Unix is Multics with its balls cut off...
It seems to me that ideally, the DOJ shouldn't care how the states implement their voting systems, as long as they work. For the DOJ to go so far as to sue New York to implement a particular method that they favor implies ulterior motives.
The pressure to convert states to e-voting exhibits the beginning of a bad tendency. The next step would be to electronically coordinate the systems, and the next would be run them from a central place.
What I suspect is that the DOJ wants a central point of coordination for the counting of votes. The value of a single point of coordination is you only have to control that one place to be in control of the system.
It is like the secret wiretapping room in AT&T's switching center. If you have one (or a few) central points of control, they can be compromised, possibly by accident, or possibly on purpose.
People in the systems design business know that single points of failure can bring a whole system down when even a small component is compromised. Distributed designs are more tolerant of problems. I fear that if the voting system were made electronic, it would make possible the corruption of the system on a scale not possible before. And if it is possible, it will eventually happen. The only way to avoid such corruption is to avoid the possibility of central points of failure or of control in the design of the system.
If the DOJ had the country's best interests in mind it would not be discouraging, but mandating, that multiple systems be used to tally votes, that they use different technologies both electronic and manual, that they are monitored by different people, that they are manufactured by different companies, that they have thorough and open review before approval, etc. Centralizing on one system, or even on one type of system, will not make the system less corruptible, it will make it more corruptible. The fact that they are pushing what is in many ways counter to the construction of a robust system implies they have different goals.
The DOJ is under the control of the executive branch of government. The historical pattern of this administration has been to try to exert control over as many systems as possible to further their own agenda. This seems to be in that spirit, and where it leads is very dangerous.
No, that's not what I am saying. I made no assertion about free markets working or not. I am simply pointing out that an organization's *efficiency* is not a result of it's being successful in business. There are a lot of factors that make a business successful, and it's efficiency is probably not even near the top. Note that the discussion here is about the efficiency of an organization, not the efficiency of a market, which is a totally different meaning of the word.
Somebody needs to explain that bottom sign for me. No parking during a 1 hour window. On monday and thursday only. Weird, maybe it's a garbage pickup time or maybe a plow? Nope, it only goes from March to December. Can't be garbage or it'd be year round and can't be the plow or it would be during winter. Why on God's earth would they make that restriction?
It's called street-cleaning. Most cities do it when the weather allows (i.e. not winter), once or twice a week.
My sense is just the opposite: that the biggest and longest lived companies waste the most, not the least (AT&T, IBM, Raytheon, etc). Less efficient businesses do not go out of business, rather, entrenched businesses have the luxury of being less efficient. Bigger (usually as a result of having succeeded over a longer period of time), longer-lived companies usually have lower profit margins than smaller ones, and make it up in volume. Their momentum (experience, contracts, brand name, lobbying efforts, diversification) is what keeps them going, not their efficiency.
This is one of the greatest ideas I've heard in a long time. If you've ever been caught in a disaster (like 9/11, for example), you know that right away virtually all land lines and cell phones become unusable because the switching circuits are immediately overloaded. This is due to the centralized model, where the switching systems are designed to handle slightly more than average loads, and can't handle more. By distributing the call network, it would dramatically reduce the bottleneck problem, making it much more likely that your calls would get through. Then add the other advantages mentioned and you have a solution to several very real problems.
There are a bunch of technical details that would have to be solved, but those have known solutions that will only get easier with time. Cell phones are getting more powerful all the time, and most people are not on the phone much of the time, so the device has lots of bandwidth that could be better used. Encryption can be done end-to-end with the available compute power. The battery power usage may actually be improved by the reduced power necessary to make calls that are shorter distance. Bandwidth congestion would be reduced because of the locality of transmission. It would be easy to drop repeaters in strategic locations if that helps long distance connectivity; that would be a lot cheaper than having to put cell towers *everywhere*.
This is an architectural idea that from a technical point of view is almost a no-brainer; it is great!
The problems are going to be business and political ones, because it bypasses existing centralized power structures. The switching companies will see their lives flashing before their eyes, and the government will not have central points to wire tap. These factions currently control all the infrastructure, and they will not want a revolutionary change like this to happen.
Maybe a way to get this going is for determined, maverick companies to do it fast enough that the big boys are caught off guard, and don't respond quickly enough. Also, the new business infrastructure needs to eliminate any central points of control (like a single critical vendor) that could be shutdown by the powers that be when they wake up.
One example might be an open source hardware/software effort that implements the devices. If a critical mass of phones gets out there quickly enough that are not dependent on the existing infrastructure, perhaps it could work. If a company (Google?) comes out with an open phone architecture which supports this as a third-party app while simultaneously working with the existing cell phone infrastructure, it could hit like wildfire.
The only significant obstacle I can see is that the carrier spectrum is still a centrally controlled resource. It is possible that the govt would simply outlaw the usage of spectrum for these purposes. If someone can figure out how to tie this new capability in with existing spectrum allocations that have the necessary distance and bandwidth properties in such a way that you couldn't disallow it without disallowing other necessary functions, that would be interesting.
When I read the article, the first thing I thought was 'I thought we could all agree on this?' That's the 1 big (important) thing the ID and Evo people agree on: We came from a single source.
Maybe I'm being picky, but I think that is an oversimplification that is too conciliatory between the two positions, and isn't technically correct. Evolutionists, being scientists, think that there are many possible explanations, some of which are more likely than others given the evidence known at the moment, and which may change over time as more is learned. ID people think there is one explanation, it will never change, and it has nothing to do with evidence, it has to do with belief, and specifically discounts physical evidence.
Your statement saying that the two groups agree on that point is like looking at two ships whose paths crossed at sea, and saying they were on the same course at that point. In reality they may never have even seen each other.
If you look at the actual documents released by the CIA, you'll see that the number 1 item on the list of family jewels is totally blacked out; number 2 is the use of a member of the mafia to attempt to assassinate Castro. See the summary on page 5 of the scanned pdf here. Pages 8-10, which provide more detail of the deleted item, are also completely obliterated.
If the CIA were involved in the assassination of Kennedy, this is exactly where the item would be...
Of course, a really clever CIA might fabricate just such a redaction to incite all manner of speculation and spread FUD about the rest of what they did...
A federal appeals court on Monday ruled that e-mail users have privacy rights that prohibit federal agencies from conducting warrantless searches of electronic correspondence during investigations
the district court reasoned that e-mails held by an ISP were roughly analogous to sealed letters
While it would be great to afford e-mail the same privacy protections as sealed letters, there seems to be a corner case here that would make this difficult: (1) the ruling seems to apply only to the federal government, and (2) unlike regular mail, email is not handled by the federal government, or even by a single entity that could be held to the same standard (like, for example, fedex, in the case of physical mail).
So given that e-mail is typically unsealed, and potentially flows through numerous independent, non-federal agencies, how would one enforce this ruling? Wouldn't it be legal for a private ISP (non-federal) to look at your e-mail and then give its findings to the government? After all, you gave your email to the private party, so they haven't taken it from you without your permission, and being private, they are not bound by the ruling.
So what do they do when sharing a pot with their mother-in-law?
The question of whether Vista is a failure is moot because the usual meaning of failure doesn't apply in this case. Most Windows purchases in a few years will be Vista simply because it is the latest version of the OS and eventually, most people want to have the latest version. They may delay for an SP or two, but not forever. So in that sense, Vista cannot be a failure. The Dell issue is just a speed bump.
The real measure is whether the dissatisfaction with Vista will increase the rate of switchers to another track, e.g. Mac or Linux. The only way to tell is to compare the rates of switching to and from Windows before and after the Vista dust has settled down.
If the net switching rate away from the Windows to other OSes jumps significantly enough for MS to feel it in their pocket, then it could be considered a failure. I don't think we have those numbers yet.
You, personally, may not trust the prediction unless you understand that the predictor understood something technical about it, but that is simply your theory for evaluating the likelihood of the prediction being right, in other words, you are making your own prediction, a meta-prediction. Your meta-theory seems to require that the predictor have a deeply scientific or technical understanding. I don't agree that is a requirement for making a valid prediction when it comes to future trends.
Many people incorporate lots of things into their predictions, such as certain trusted people's opinions, gut feel, and other things that are hard to quantify. But predictive value is about correlating predicted results with actual results, regardless of whether it fits your meta-theory.
It doesn't matter if he reads tea leaves to make his predictions; if it turns out his predictions are right more often than other people's then his predictions have value. It might then be an interesting pursuit to figure out his rationale, but it doesn't change its efficacy.
(BTW, I'm not saying Cringely's predictions have value, I'm just disagreeing with your assumptions and your logic).
The article says
McConnell wants to: _Give the NSA the power to monitor foreigners without seeking FISA court approval, even if the surveillance is conducted by tapping phones and e-mail accounts in the United States.
He wants to change the law to allow surveillance of foreigners inside the US, as opposed to the current law which, as I understand it, only allows surveillance of communications that involve a party outside the US. The current law has an objective standard that can be verified for compliance, namely that the communications goes outside the US. By changing the law to a characterization of the person, not the communications, it becomes less objective and more subject to abuse. Who is considered a foreigner by the people who want to spy on them? Someone who has lived in another country? A person with a green card? A person with a foreign accent? It is also easier to claim a "mistake" after the fact, and after the damage is done, when the criteria is so subjective.
"Determinations about whether a court order is required should be based on considerations about the target of the surveillance, rather than the particular means of communication or the location from which the surveillance is being conducted"
Once again, he is saying we should trust him to decide before the fact, based on his own judgment, whether seeking a court order to do the surveillance is even required. But more than saying the court should decide based on looser criteria, here he is saying the he shouldn't even have to go to the court at all, based on the extremely vague criteria "considerations about the target"
_Give telecommunications companies immunity from civil liability for their cooperation with Bush's terrorist surveillance program. Pending lawsuits against companies including Verizon and AT&T allege they violated privacy laws by giving phone records to the NSA for the program.
One of the very few checks against abuse of government power that we have is that companies who comply with a request that is illegal may be punished for their compliance through civil liability. This responsibility makes them think twice. This proposed change removes any incentive for a company to think twice about it's own culpability. The only logical thing for a company to do if this change were made would be to rollover instantly to any request for surveillance, since it would be the path of no risk.
These changes are simply more ways to dismantle checks and balances in the system, and make it harder for anyone in power to be held accountable.
Even if you believe that the people currently in power are acting in your interests and can be trusted, what happens when the next guy takes power? Will you trust him to act in your best interests? How will you know if he is, if there are no longer any objective criteria to measure his actions against?