The most common underlying basis of humor is subverted expectations. We expect people to behave according to the norms of society, we expect people to act to the best of their intelligence, we expect misfortune to be avoided, and we expect that words will be used according to their common meanings.
Subvert any of those expectations, and you have various kinds of humor. How funny a particular joke is perceived to be is related to how strongly the viewer is attached to their expectations. Since a computer is only an expert in the things they've been explicitly exposed to, it's very difficult to subvert their expectations. Watson would be familiar with all of the meanings of each word in a script, for example, so it would have a difficult time identifying the usual meaning that a human would expect from a situation, and would therefore likely fail to notice that when a different meaning was used, it was an attempt at humor.
As another example, consider a military comedy, like Good Morning, Vietnam. Much of the humor is derived from Robin Williams' fast-paced ad-lib radio show contrasting the rigid military structure, and the inversion where a superior at the radio station is practically inferior in every way. A computer, properly educated in the norms of military behavior, might recognize that the characters' behaviors are contrary to expectations, but then to really understand the jokes, the computer must also have an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture from the period to understand why Williams' antics were more than just absurd drivel.
Finally, a computer must also understand that humor is also based largely on the history of humor. Age-old jokes can become funny again simply because they aren't funny in their original context any more, so their use in a new context is a subverted expectation in itself. Common joke patterns have also become fixed in human culture, such that merely following a pattern (like the Russian Reversal) is a joke in itself.
Algorithms simply haven't combined all of the relevant factors yet to recognize humor. Here on Slashdot, for instance, a computer would need to recognize the intellectual context, the pacing of a comment, the pattern of speech, and even how much class a commenter maintains, in order to realize when someone is trying to be funny.
It's cheaper to include extra screws than to pay customer service to deal with the the complaints of missing parts, or to cover the extra cost of a more thorough inspection process. The easiest way to tell if a unit was packed properly is to weigh it precisely, and only ship the units that weigh the correct amount. A missing screw may fall within the error margin of the scale, so by throwing in an extra screw or three, the risk of actually being short a part is greatly reduced.
Of course, they won't promise those extra screws in the instructions, so it's entirely possible to be human/robot error, unless you counted the parts prior to assembly... you did count your parts, right?
...believing they'll ride on a dragon's back and live in a magical castle, we give them therapy and some pills.
I recently returned from a vacation, and drove home from the airport to return to my house filled with small robots, vision-enabled game consoles, and mechanized automatons of all kinds. I guess I need some pills.
Sci-fi nerds think they'll ride on a spaceship and live on Mars
No, I don't think I will live on Mars, but I think that some human will, someday. The ultimate distinguishing feature of a human is the extent to which it modifies itself and its environment, so I find it perfectly reasonable to expect that the hostilities of another planet can be overcome with the right technology. There will need to be advances in several fields (rocketry, communications, biotech, medicine, and logistics, to name a few offhand), but we're close.
To make an analogy, if we were walking from New York to Los Angeles, we've probably hit the California state line by now. The road ahead is still going to take a lot of effort, and it's still going to take a long time. We're not done yet, and everybody knows it. There is some uncertainty as to exactly how long it will take to make those last few steps, but perhaps it's time to start thinking about what we'll do when we finally arrive at our destination.
I dream about the leisure society with basic income and healthcare for all, because we already have the technology and resources to do so.
Interesting. Are you actually an expert in what it takes to have a "leisure society with basic income and healthcare for all", and do you understand the sheer amount of resources required to make that happen? And you want that to happen for all people... Let's do some math*.
If we all split everything equally, then every human gets 71,538 square meters. That's it. That's your whole life. From that area's resources, you must derive your "basic income and healthcare" using today's technology.
Of course, much of that is ocean, which really means you only get around 24,000 square meters of land If you want to use the ocean's resources, you'll have to build suitable boats from the resources on the land. About a third of of that area, though, is practically devoid of easily-accessible resources since it's desert. That leaves only about 16,000 square meters of usable land with resources.
Do realize that's a square patch of land about 415 feet on each side. It's roughly double the area of a FIFA-sanctioned international match soccer field, and that is your whole fair share of non-desert land.
Looking toward your "healthcare" need, you only have about 2000 square meters of arable land, most of which overlaps your 5000 square meters of grassland.
For illustration, that's a square patch 146 feet on each side. 1.6 times the size of an Olympic swimming pool, and that's going to feed you (fairly) for your whole life. If you need to grow raw materials for your medicinal needs, that will come out of your food supply. If your "leisure society" includes grilling a steak in the summer, you're going to have to devote quite a lot of your farmland to rais
So you have a woman's name and phone number. Good for you. I have a large book full of them. It still gets dropped on my porch now and then.
So some guy has your address. Good for him. He could have just as easily followed you home, and there's a very good chance that you never would have noticed.
Now, both of you have a choice to make. What will you do with that information? Will you get on with your life peacefully, as a law-abiding member of society, or will you jump the line over to being a criminal stalker or arsonist? That's the question that really matters, not whether some third party recognized you and announced that recognition to the world.
As soon as your child needs something more than you can supply, you must put their needs first, and send them somewhere with more resources.
As you said, "the parent teaching didn't force the issue", and I see that as the parent's key failure. When the three brothers started having trouble, the parents should have recognized their shortcomings and moved the kids to a more capable environment.
It's not easy to admit that you can't meet a need, but for the sake of the student, it must be done.
I was homeschooled until high school, and had to deal with exactly that problem.
My father was at work (as an programmer/engineer/manager), and my mother was not particularly strong in the sciences at which I excelled. By 7th grade, I had surpassed their knowledge of basic science, and especially anything computer-related. My daily lesson plan devolved into a cycle of reading material I mostly already knew, asking questions to which I wouldn't get answers, and eventually doing a half-assed job in other subjects to meet the required level of completion that would let me escape to more entertaining things, like teaching myself another programming language.
In retrospect, the single thing my parents did right, above all else, was to teach me how to learn. By the time I got to the public high school, I was able to appreciate my classes as a source of knowledge, rather than a daily prison forcing doctrine into my head. That survives to this day, and is one of the main reasons why I continue to find new fascinating things to explore and learn about the world.
My advice, as someone who survived, is to see homeschooling as a chance to influence the core values your child uses through the rest of his life. Emphasize sportsmanship, creativity, logic... whatever you hope for your child, you can instill at an early age, but you should also be aware of your limits. As soon as your child needs something more than you can supply, you must put their needs first, and send them somewhere with more resources.
Firefighters know that being a firefighter is risky. There are the obvious dangers during the emergency, and some less obvious ones like lung damage, extended fatigue, traumatic horror......and now a bit of chemical risk as well. To someone who expects to risk their lives for the sake of others, this is just another item in the long list of hazards.
Sure, we should do our best to investigate the hazards and minimize them, but overall I think this might just be one of the least-dangerous parts of the job.
That's almost exactly what one aspect of my project was.
My project was, in brief, allowing medical researchers to search through patient records for patients matching particular criteria. The system could recommend related criteria, as well, based on the correlation to the already-shown results.
Early tests were particularly useless, as the system noticed a strong correlation between being pregnant and being female. It also suggested that if you included people who had smoked within the last six months, there was a strong correlation with those who had smoked within the last year.
Once the obvious correlations were flagged as being obvious, though, the system started making some valid observations, noting that particular variations in drug treatments had particular variations in outcome. That was enough to get a few researchers' attention, but I left the project before seeing any published papers.
As someone with a bit of experience in Big Data and medical technology...
A test that falsely indicated HIV 9 times out of 10 is absolutely wonderful, if it actually catches that one correct positive reliably. A false negative is far more dangerous, and it's the job of the doctor to try multiple tests to confirm a diagnosis. If the initial screening comes back positive, the patient can be warned off intercourse for a while or start some initial therapy while another test is tried, without significant risk to the patient's health.
Similarly, Big Data is just a term for a particular approach to model design. Having huge amounts of data doesn't magically improve your analysis algorithm, and you still need to have a properly-skilled expert testing your algorithm to make sure that it's correct before it's used for business decision.
TFA is actually covering opinion polls relating to several government agencies, but in typical Slashdot form, TFS only focuses on the NSA section, because that will be more inflammatory.
Ah, yes, of course a well-respected research center doesn't know how to run a simple opinion poll...
Don't worry. I'm sure the majority of Slashdot will ever-so-helpfully explain exactly how to run the survey to get the results that Slashdot expects, validity be damned.
Are your findings the results of a properly-controlled survey, or are they the results of talking among your technologist peers and subject to confirmation bias?
It's poorly worded above, but perhaps a better way to say it is that the time-dependent churn in a particular model is negligible (to a statistical irrelevance) if you can get enough data quickly enough. Effectively, once your data stream outpaces the time-dependent effects, those effects may no longer be relevant variables in your calculations.
For example, I'd expect that Google can collect enough data in an hour to determine if a UI improvement is helpful, or if a particular change to PageRank results in more accurate results. Because Google has such a high volume of data collection all of the time, a very short sampling duration all but eliminates the variation due to the time of day, day of the week, or season of the year.
I'm not suggesting that a Big Data solution is somehow magically independent of time. Rather, what I'm saying is that the "store first, ask questions later" approach that is central to Big Data lends itself readily to collecting useful samples quickly enough that delta-t is negligible.
This pretty much sums up the entirety of Big Data.
Data analysis can highlight the correlations that would otherwise go unnoticed, and the "big" data sets involved help to ensure that the noticed correlations are statistically significant. With a large enough sample size, the effects of time can be eliminated from the statistics, supporting analysis of even highly-dynamic models. To a statistician, this is all trivial, given a large enough data set.
Once correlations are discovered, interpreting them in the business context is a different matter for which computers are not well-suited. As the phrase goes, correlation is not causation. A business expert must analyse the observations and figure out what it all means. There may be a correlation indicating a causal relationship, or there may be a hidden cause not covered by the available data.
Even if a causal relationship can be identified, the management may not want to act on it. Sure, the company might make more money by changing their behavior in a particular market segment, but if that segment is dying, it may not be worth the expense to change now. That's also not a task for computers, yet.
Big Data techniques are effectively just a tool. It does one job particularly well, and does a few other jobs well enough to be useful. It is still up to humans to determine if Big Data is the best tool for a particular situation.
With a warrant, they try and try but they just can't find your stash.
With a suitable search warrant, the police can tear your house apart to find your stash. You cannot legally prohibit them from opening your house, and you cannot stop them from executing the search warrant to the full extent of its authorization.
Encryption is the same way. The encrypted container is the house;
And likewise, you cannot prohibit them from opening the encrypted volume.
What if...
Then it's a decision for a judge to make. The judge would be the one to decide if, by not providing a password, you are violating the court orders. You can provide evidence for your story, and the police can provide their own evidence. If you claim that somehow you had a 50-gig corrupt file, and the police show encryption software and logs of file access on volumes that don't exist, you're going to have a hard time convincing a judge of your story.
A better analogy would be evidence locked in a safe. The police can see the safe and can infer that it holds evidence, but you can claim to have forgotten the combination, or claim it's an antique to which you never knew the combination, or claim that it broke. If you can make a convincing case, you have a shot. If the police have evidence that you opened the safe a day earlier, you're pretty much screwed.
Just like that zone of lawlessness inside of peoples minds that the pesky 5th amendment creates, think of all the criminals going free because we can't force them to incriminate themselves!
Well, yeah. Remember that the Constitution's version of "due process" is not supposed to actually restrict the government, so much as it protects the people from the historical (at the time) abuses governments had commonly employed.
The 5th Amendment protects against defendants being forced to create evidence against themselves. Remember the fun of the Inquisition, where the accused would be tortured or killed if they didn't confess? The 5th Amendment is a counter to that, and not much more. It's not a magic wand that allows you to hide crimes you actually committed. Notably, it does not allow you to hide evidence that already exists.
Once you put information into anything except your own head, it's fair game for a subpoena or search warrant. Period. Encryption doesn't matter. You can be compelled to provide keys or passwords, because the keys and passwords themselves aren't evidence against you. They just unlock the evidence that already exists.
Jokes aside, that's about it. The case in question is a bog-standard investigation and prosecution. The only notable twist is the guy's political connections. There's really no reason for widespread coverage.
This stunt may as we'll be Operation Our Favorite Crime, spreading awareness of Anonymous' obsession with this particular flavor of felony. We'll put it up next to the neckbeard ranting about his favorite video game, and the fat guy touting the virtues of his favorite food. Just like the armchair art critic and the armchair gourmet critic (and the nerd typing Slashdot comments when he should be sleeping) this will accomplish nothing to make the world a better place, but it will give a few individuals a few moments of pride in their hollow awareness campaign.
So in other words, justice is being served, and a sentence is being delivered that the judge (within the guidelines set by legislators) feels is appropriate to the crime committed.
There's nothing left for Anonymous to do, except to remind the world that this guy did something bad, and by so doing, perpetuate the shame and embarrassment his friends and family are subjected to. It won't affect the perpetrator himself, because he'll be in prison for the entire life of this "operation".
Harassing innocent bystanders is what Anonymous does best.
I seem to recall tales of trade cities that were quite paranoid about outsiders learning their craft, some of which predated industrialized Great Britain or Germany by a rather large number of years.
Perhaps the most well-known example is Murano, whose artistic glassblowing techniques were held in high esteem by the region. An older example would be Damascus metalworking, and I have vague recollections of similar industrial pride dating back to Egypt.
I'm afraid my memory is not a particularly reliable source, but I believe there were often stiff penalties for trying to export the local expertise. Perhaps someone with a more complete knowledge of history can fill in the details...
There is a risk, calculated or otherwise, that you are Pierre Mohammed Finklestein III of Bychawa, Poland.
I have determined this based on my keen understanding of the information I have about you. With a little more information I could reduce the uncertainty...
For quite some time, I've argued in favor of teaching a programming class with QBasic. No, not the early BASICs that required line numbers, but the later QBasic that shipped with certain versions of DOS and Windows.
Later BASIC variants have one defining characteristic that makes them perfect for educational use: Zero overhead. For the simplest example programs, there is absolutely no boilerplate required to allocate memory, configure the process, or tell the compiler/interpreter how to work. An example that demonstrates three things has three lines.
For the very first stages of programming education, that's all you need. It's enough to show that instructions are executed sequentially, that you have to be explicit, and to walk through the compile/execution process. It hits all of the major concepts, with no extra parts to confuse the new students. From my time teaching CS, those basic concepts comprise the bulk of the initial difficulties most struggling students face. Once they understand those building blocks fully, the students can begin learning algorithms, design patterns, and all those more substantial parts of a full CS education... and that work should be done in a language that can trace its heritage to C.
Last time I was in school, I had a better grasp of "modern technology" than most of my professors. This was in a computer science program. It's not a problem, because my CS professors didn't need to teach me how to use Facebook or make a slideshow shiny enough to woo investors. They still understood algorithms better than I did, and that was the knowledge they were passing on.
In today's shocking news story, we find that older people are familiar with an older generation of tools. For most "primary and secondary teachers", their job is to teach the basic skills and concepts that are elemental for the more advanced intellectual tasks encountered in a professional career. Sure, technology can assist in that endeavor, but it's not the whole solution. Teachers only need enough technology knowledge to use the technology needed for their classes. Anything more is gratuitous.
Slashdot Mirror
The most common underlying basis of humor is subverted expectations. We expect people to behave according to the norms of society, we expect people to act to the best of their intelligence, we expect misfortune to be avoided, and we expect that words will be used according to their common meanings.
Subvert any of those expectations, and you have various kinds of humor. How funny a particular joke is perceived to be is related to how strongly the viewer is attached to their expectations. Since a computer is only an expert in the things they've been explicitly exposed to, it's very difficult to subvert their expectations. Watson would be familiar with all of the meanings of each word in a script, for example, so it would have a difficult time identifying the usual meaning that a human would expect from a situation, and would therefore likely fail to notice that when a different meaning was used, it was an attempt at humor.
As another example, consider a military comedy, like Good Morning, Vietnam. Much of the humor is derived from Robin Williams' fast-paced ad-lib radio show contrasting the rigid military structure, and the inversion where a superior at the radio station is practically inferior in every way. A computer, properly educated in the norms of military behavior, might recognize that the characters' behaviors are contrary to expectations, but then to really understand the jokes, the computer must also have an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture from the period to understand why Williams' antics were more than just absurd drivel.
Finally, a computer must also understand that humor is also based largely on the history of humor. Age-old jokes can become funny again simply because they aren't funny in their original context any more, so their use in a new context is a subverted expectation in itself. Common joke patterns have also become fixed in human culture, such that merely following a pattern (like the Russian Reversal) is a joke in itself.
Algorithms simply haven't combined all of the relevant factors yet to recognize humor. Here on Slashdot, for instance, a computer would need to recognize the intellectual context, the pacing of a comment, the pattern of speech, and even how much class a commenter maintains, in order to realize when someone is trying to be funny.
Poop.
Calculon is an actor, not a businessrobot.
It's cheaper to include extra screws than to pay customer service to deal with the the complaints of missing parts, or to cover the extra cost of a more thorough inspection process. The easiest way to tell if a unit was packed properly is to weigh it precisely, and only ship the units that weigh the correct amount. A missing screw may fall within the error margin of the scale, so by throwing in an extra screw or three, the risk of actually being short a part is greatly reduced.
Of course, they won't promise those extra screws in the instructions, so it's entirely possible to be human/robot error, unless you counted the parts prior to assembly... you did count your parts, right?
...believing they'll ride on a dragon's back and live in a magical castle, we give them therapy and some pills.
I recently returned from a vacation, and drove home from the airport to return to my house filled with small robots, vision-enabled game consoles, and mechanized automatons of all kinds. I guess I need some pills.
Sci-fi nerds think they'll ride on a spaceship and live on Mars
No, I don't think I will live on Mars, but I think that some human will, someday. The ultimate distinguishing feature of a human is the extent to which it modifies itself and its environment, so I find it perfectly reasonable to expect that the hostilities of another planet can be overcome with the right technology. There will need to be advances in several fields (rocketry, communications, biotech, medicine, and logistics, to name a few offhand), but we're close.
To make an analogy, if we were walking from New York to Los Angeles, we've probably hit the California state line by now. The road ahead is still going to take a lot of effort, and it's still going to take a long time. We're not done yet, and everybody knows it. There is some uncertainty as to exactly how long it will take to make those last few steps, but perhaps it's time to start thinking about what we'll do when we finally arrive at our destination.
I dream about the leisure society with basic income and healthcare for all, because we already have the technology and resources to do so.
Interesting. Are you actually an expert in what it takes to have a "leisure society with basic income and healthcare for all", and do you understand the sheer amount of resources required to make that happen? And you want that to happen for all people... Let's do some math*.
If we all split everything equally, then every human gets 71,538 square meters. That's it. That's your whole life. From that area's resources, you must derive your "basic income and healthcare" using today's technology.
Of course, much of that is ocean, which really means you only get around 24,000 square meters of land If you want to use the ocean's resources, you'll have to build suitable boats from the resources on the land. About a third of of that area, though, is practically devoid of easily-accessible resources since it's desert. That leaves only about 16,000 square meters of usable land with resources.
Do realize that's a square patch of land about 415 feet on each side. It's roughly double the area of a FIFA-sanctioned international match soccer field, and that is your whole fair share of non-desert land.
Looking toward your "healthcare" need, you only have about 2000 square meters of arable land, most of which overlaps your 5000 square meters of grassland.
For illustration, that's a square patch 146 feet on each side. 1.6 times the size of an Olympic swimming pool, and that's going to feed you (fairly) for your whole life. If you need to grow raw materials for your medicinal needs, that will come out of your food supply. If your "leisure society" includes grilling a steak in the summer, you're going to have to devote quite a lot of your farmland to rais
So you have a woman's name and phone number. Good for you. I have a large book full of them. It still gets dropped on my porch now and then.
So some guy has your address. Good for him. He could have just as easily followed you home, and there's a very good chance that you never would have noticed.
Now, both of you have a choice to make. What will you do with that information? Will you get on with your life peacefully, as a law-abiding member of society, or will you jump the line over to being a criminal stalker or arsonist? That's the question that really matters, not whether some third party recognized you and announced that recognition to the world.
To that, I'll say again:
As soon as your child needs something more than you can supply, you must put their needs first, and send them somewhere with more resources.
As you said, "the parent teaching didn't force the issue", and I see that as the parent's key failure. When the three brothers started having trouble, the parents should have recognized their shortcomings and moved the kids to a more capable environment.
It's not easy to admit that you can't meet a need, but for the sake of the student, it must be done.
I was homeschooled until high school, and had to deal with exactly that problem.
My father was at work (as an programmer/engineer/manager), and my mother was not particularly strong in the sciences at which I excelled. By 7th grade, I had surpassed their knowledge of basic science, and especially anything computer-related. My daily lesson plan devolved into a cycle of reading material I mostly already knew, asking questions to which I wouldn't get answers, and eventually doing a half-assed job in other subjects to meet the required level of completion that would let me escape to more entertaining things, like teaching myself another programming language.
In retrospect, the single thing my parents did right, above all else, was to teach me how to learn. By the time I got to the public high school, I was able to appreciate my classes as a source of knowledge, rather than a daily prison forcing doctrine into my head. That survives to this day, and is one of the main reasons why I continue to find new fascinating things to explore and learn about the world.
My advice, as someone who survived, is to see homeschooling as a chance to influence the core values your child uses through the rest of his life. Emphasize sportsmanship, creativity, logic... whatever you hope for your child, you can instill at an early age, but you should also be aware of your limits. As soon as your child needs something more than you can supply, you must put their needs first, and send them somewhere with more resources.
That's pretty much it.
Firefighters know that being a firefighter is risky. There are the obvious dangers during the emergency, and some less obvious ones like lung damage, extended fatigue, traumatic horror... ...and now a bit of chemical risk as well. To someone who expects to risk their lives for the sake of others, this is just another item in the long list of hazards.
Sure, we should do our best to investigate the hazards and minimize them, but overall I think this might just be one of the least-dangerous parts of the job.
That's almost exactly what one aspect of my project was.
My project was, in brief, allowing medical researchers to search through patient records for patients matching particular criteria. The system could recommend related criteria, as well, based on the correlation to the already-shown results.
Early tests were particularly useless, as the system noticed a strong correlation between being pregnant and being female. It also suggested that if you included people who had smoked within the last six months, there was a strong correlation with those who had smoked within the last year.
Once the obvious correlations were flagged as being obvious, though, the system started making some valid observations, noting that particular variations in drug treatments had particular variations in outcome. That was enough to get a few researchers' attention, but I left the project before seeing any published papers.
As someone with a bit of experience in Big Data and medical technology...
A test that falsely indicated HIV 9 times out of 10 is absolutely wonderful, if it actually catches that one correct positive reliably. A false negative is far more dangerous, and it's the job of the doctor to try multiple tests to confirm a diagnosis. If the initial screening comes back positive, the patient can be warned off intercourse for a while or start some initial therapy while another test is tried, without significant risk to the patient's health.
Similarly, Big Data is just a term for a particular approach to model design. Having huge amounts of data doesn't magically improve your analysis algorithm, and you still need to have a properly-skilled expert testing your algorithm to make sure that it's correct before it's used for business decision.
NASA has a 68% approval rating, according to TFA.
TFA is actually covering opinion polls relating to several government agencies, but in typical Slashdot form, TFS only focuses on the NSA section, because that will be more inflammatory.
Ah, yes, of course a well-respected research center doesn't know how to run a simple opinion poll...
Don't worry. I'm sure the majority of Slashdot will ever-so-helpfully explain exactly how to run the survey to get the results that Slashdot expects, validity be damned.
Are your findings the results of a properly-controlled survey, or are they the results of talking among your technologist peers and subject to confirmation bias?
It's poorly worded above, but perhaps a better way to say it is that the time-dependent churn in a particular model is negligible (to a statistical irrelevance) if you can get enough data quickly enough. Effectively, once your data stream outpaces the time-dependent effects, those effects may no longer be relevant variables in your calculations.
For example, I'd expect that Google can collect enough data in an hour to determine if a UI improvement is helpful, or if a particular change to PageRank results in more accurate results. Because Google has such a high volume of data collection all of the time, a very short sampling duration all but eliminates the variation due to the time of day, day of the week, or season of the year.
I'm not suggesting that a Big Data solution is somehow magically independent of time. Rather, what I'm saying is that the "store first, ask questions later" approach that is central to Big Data lends itself readily to collecting useful samples quickly enough that delta-t is negligible.
This pretty much sums up the entirety of Big Data.
Data analysis can highlight the correlations that would otherwise go unnoticed, and the "big" data sets involved help to ensure that the noticed correlations are statistically significant. With a large enough sample size, the effects of time can be eliminated from the statistics, supporting analysis of even highly-dynamic models. To a statistician, this is all trivial, given a large enough data set.
Once correlations are discovered, interpreting them in the business context is a different matter for which computers are not well-suited. As the phrase goes, correlation is not causation. A business expert must analyse the observations and figure out what it all means. There may be a correlation indicating a causal relationship, or there may be a hidden cause not covered by the available data.
Even if a causal relationship can be identified, the management may not want to act on it. Sure, the company might make more money by changing their behavior in a particular market segment, but if that segment is dying, it may not be worth the expense to change now. That's also not a task for computers, yet.
Big Data techniques are effectively just a tool. It does one job particularly well, and does a few other jobs well enough to be useful. It is still up to humans to determine if Big Data is the best tool for a particular situation.
They don't produce any offspring that live long enough to breed, making them effectively sterile for generational purposes.
Eventually the first-generation males will die, as well, leaving just the greatly-reduced next-generation population.
Not really.
With a warrant, they try and try but they just can't find your stash.
With a suitable search warrant, the police can tear your house apart to find your stash. You cannot legally prohibit them from opening your house, and you cannot stop them from executing the search warrant to the full extent of its authorization.
Encryption is the same way. The encrypted container is the house;
And likewise, you cannot prohibit them from opening the encrypted volume.
What if...
Then it's a decision for a judge to make. The judge would be the one to decide if, by not providing a password, you are violating the court orders. You can provide evidence for your story, and the police can provide their own evidence. If you claim that somehow you had a 50-gig corrupt file, and the police show encryption software and logs of file access on volumes that don't exist, you're going to have a hard time convincing a judge of your story.
A better analogy would be evidence locked in a safe. The police can see the safe and can infer that it holds evidence, but you can claim to have forgotten the combination, or claim it's an antique to which you never knew the combination, or claim that it broke. If you can make a convincing case, you have a shot. If the police have evidence that you opened the safe a day earlier, you're pretty much screwed.
If the court orders you to teach the police how to read your language, then yes, you are in fact required to do so.
You could try teaching them incorrectly, but that's effectively obstruction of justice and/or perjury, depending on how it's handled.
Just like that zone of lawlessness inside of peoples minds that the pesky 5th amendment creates, think of all the criminals going free because we can't force them to incriminate themselves!
Well, yeah. Remember that the Constitution's version of "due process" is not supposed to actually restrict the government, so much as it protects the people from the historical (at the time) abuses governments had commonly employed.
The 5th Amendment protects against defendants being forced to create evidence against themselves. Remember the fun of the Inquisition, where the accused would be tortured or killed if they didn't confess? The 5th Amendment is a counter to that, and not much more. It's not a magic wand that allows you to hide crimes you actually committed. Notably, it does not allow you to hide evidence that already exists.
Once you put information into anything except your own head, it's fair game for a subpoena or search warrant. Period. Encryption doesn't matter. You can be compelled to provide keys or passwords, because the keys and passwords themselves aren't evidence against you. They just unlock the evidence that already exists.
If that's the case here, then Anonymous is just making the injustice worse.
Jokes aside, that's about it. The case in question is a bog-standard investigation and prosecution. The only notable twist is the guy's political connections. There's really no reason for widespread coverage.
This stunt may as we'll be Operation Our Favorite Crime, spreading awareness of Anonymous' obsession with this particular flavor of felony. We'll put it up next to the neckbeard ranting about his favorite video game, and the fat guy touting the virtues of his favorite food. Just like the armchair art critic and the armchair gourmet critic (and the nerd typing Slashdot comments when he should be sleeping) this will accomplish nothing to make the world a better place, but it will give a few individuals a few moments of pride in their hollow awareness campaign.
So in other words, justice is being served, and a sentence is being delivered that the judge (within the guidelines set by legislators) feels is appropriate to the crime committed.
There's nothing left for Anonymous to do, except to remind the world that this guy did something bad, and by so doing, perpetuate the shame and embarrassment his friends and family are subjected to. It won't affect the perpetrator himself, because he'll be in prison for the entire life of this "operation".
Harassing innocent bystanders is what Anonymous does best.
I seem to recall tales of trade cities that were quite paranoid about outsiders learning their craft, some of which predated industrialized Great Britain or Germany by a rather large number of years.
Perhaps the most well-known example is Murano, whose artistic glassblowing techniques were held in high esteem by the region. An older example would be Damascus metalworking, and I have vague recollections of similar industrial pride dating back to Egypt.
I'm afraid my memory is not a particularly reliable source, but I believe there were often stiff penalties for trying to export the local expertise. Perhaps someone with a more complete knowledge of history can fill in the details...
There is a risk, calculated or otherwise, that you are Pierre Mohammed Finklestein III of Bychawa, Poland.
I have determined this based on my keen understanding of the information I have about you. With a little more information I could reduce the uncertainty...
For quite some time, I've argued in favor of teaching a programming class with QBasic. No, not the early BASICs that required line numbers, but the later QBasic that shipped with certain versions of DOS and Windows.
Later BASIC variants have one defining characteristic that makes them perfect for educational use: Zero overhead. For the simplest example programs, there is absolutely no boilerplate required to allocate memory, configure the process, or tell the compiler/interpreter how to work. An example that demonstrates three things has three lines.
For the very first stages of programming education, that's all you need. It's enough to show that instructions are executed sequentially, that you have to be explicit, and to walk through the compile/execution process. It hits all of the major concepts, with no extra parts to confuse the new students. From my time teaching CS, those basic concepts comprise the bulk of the initial difficulties most struggling students face. Once they understand those building blocks fully, the students can begin learning algorithms, design patterns, and all those more substantial parts of a full CS education... and that work should be done in a language that can trace its heritage to C.
Last time I was in school, I had a better grasp of "modern technology" than most of my professors. This was in a computer science program. It's not a problem, because my CS professors didn't need to teach me how to use Facebook or make a slideshow shiny enough to woo investors. They still understood algorithms better than I did, and that was the knowledge they were passing on.
In today's shocking news story, we find that older people are familiar with an older generation of tools. For most "primary and secondary teachers", their job is to teach the basic skills and concepts that are elemental for the more advanced intellectual tasks encountered in a professional career. Sure, technology can assist in that endeavor, but it's not the whole solution. Teachers only need enough technology knowledge to use the technology needed for their classes. Anything more is gratuitous.