No. First of all, there's a direct public interest in having a government agency which tries to make sure that commercial crypto is secure. That's economically important. It helps businesses and individuals and benefits the general economy. Second, even the spook half of the NSA needs to exist. SIGINT is important. The problem with the NSA rests on overeager SIGINT attempts which violate our rights. But legitimate SIGINT still needs to occur. And if we abolished the NSA the abuses would likely simply migrate to another agency.
There are many other explanations: First in the case in question, it may very well have been that the math teaching was so bad in that particular case that no teaching worked better than teaching math badly. Given how many bad teachers there are out there and how much they turn kids off of math, that wouldn't be at all surprising. Moreover, while it may be true that many kids aren't wired for mat, the best math students are wired for math at that age or much younger. Those kids need some form of organized input so that they can really take advantage of that ability. If kids can benefit from math instruction we can't say no to them on the off chance that it might hurt the more slowly developing kids.
You are confusing two separate points. First, no one here has made the claim that intelligence is not genetic. It is clearly partially genetic. The matter at issue is whether or not there's any substantial genetic component to measured differences between intelligence levels in racial groups or whether that is due primarily to cultural and environmental effects. Also, if you are going to cite sources, try not to cite ones which have been as widely discredited ok?
You are correct that there's evidence for there being correlation between mental abilities and race. But that doesn't mean it is at all genetic. Much of it is almost certainly cultural and environmental. For example, if you get less nutrients growing up you likely aren't going to be as smart as someone else who does get enough nutrients. That's because early brain growth is determined in part by how much resources the brain has available. Similarly, certain cultures have games and habits with young children that may encourage certain forms of mental development or practicing certain skills. Moreover, some types of intelligent tests are very culturally based (there are some fascinating cross cultural studies about how people naturally organize things into groups. While in most Western societies we consider organization into functional categories to be ideal and consider people not as bright if they have trouble, in many other societies and even some Western societies, given a set of objects they will try categorize by which groups of objects can be used together. The classic example of this is giving a bunch of tools and a bunch of possible things that the tools can modify. The "correct" Western response is to group into tools and non-tools. But in some cultures they instead group into which are connected to relevant processes). So yes, such correlation does exist, but there's no strong evidence that such correlation actually means much at all.
Yes, they definitely extracted mitochondrial DNA (that's DNA that isn't in the nucleus but is rather in the mitochondria and is only passed down by your mother). Yes, the DNA looks different enough that they're pretty sure this isn't any form of contamination from modern samples (always a worry when doing this sort of thing). However, it is far from clear that this DNA is belonged to another species. There are multiple possible other explanations which could make this not another species. The details are a bit technical, but anthropologist John Hawks has a piece on his blog laying out the basic issues- http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_dna/denisova-krause-2010.html. A slightly more lay-oriented piece by Carl Zimmer (the writer for Science Times and author of the very excellent book Parasite Rex) is also worth reading: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2010/03/24/the-x-womans-fingerbone/. The bottom line is that concluding that this is a new species is as of yet very premature.
I'm amazed at how long Spirit and Opportunity have lasted. Spirit is stuck in place but is still giving us very good data and Opportunity is still kicking and researching well. Aside from some minor problems with the robotic arm, Opportunity is doing fine. These missions have now lasted years when they were expected to last 90 days. These are really amazing pieces of engineering and I hope that NASA is taking a lot of notes about them for how to design future probes. The engineers who made these must be very proud. And now one of their two babies is getting to make decisions for itself! Awww...
Ricci flow is an incredibly clever and sophisticated set of techniques. It is a very difficult technique to use and is by no means a "cheat code" for manifold questions. Most obviously, Ricci flow has been used with success to answer some aspects of the geometrization conjecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometrization_conjecture but still leaves a lot. In order to have a truly good understanding of low-dimensional manifolds we are likely going to need some additional technique that has not yet been discovered.
Sometimes it's worth it... Not always, but given the wide belief that censorship is wrong, if that's what it takes to start a revolution, then perhaps it's necessary...
It is always easy to say it is worth it when you are not the person going to jail or having your family threatened. I can agree that morally it would be worth it, but if I were in such a position I don't know what fraction of Slashdot readers (myself included) would actually do anything. It is really easy to talk about doing the right thing against an oppressive regime when you're elsewhere.
Not necessarily. If I still trust the person but can't afford to keep them due to a bad economy for example it isn't obvious that I should take them off of access to secure data. That's especially the case if in order to do the job they need access to the secure data (which isn't uncommon). Unfortunately, sometimes they need to train someone else to do the job and have the same problem. Sure in an ideal world, as soon as people got their two weeks notice they'd have no access to anything secure, but that's not generally doable. (To use an obvious analogy, if a bank teller gets a two week notice I don't think we expect the bank to not let them handle any cash for those two weeks).
Gerlenter has some really off the wall ideas (see for example this post by Prof. Jeffrey Shallit http://recursed.blogspot.com/2009/02/religion-makes-smart-people-stupid.html). But in this case, some of what Gerlenter has to say might make sense and he certainly has shown from his prior work that he's someone worth paying attention to when he is talking about computers. However, the labeling this as 35 predictions is clearly not a good descriptor of TFA. For example, 12 is not at all a prediction but simply a recap "In short: it's time to think about the Internet instead of just letting it happen." About a third of these are not predictions but rather observations. Of the predictions many of them are so vague or ill-defined as to be nearly meaningless. If he were a psychic I'd consider them to be in the category where people are deliberately vague so they can claim hits later, and in fact in 25 he humorously acknowledges this issue by saying "writers should remember to put their predictions in suitably poetic language, so it's easy to say they were right." There's also a terrible amount of buzzwords: virtual,cyber, lifestream. They don't help making this essay more readable. So if that's what he thinks constitutes poetry I have to wonder if he grew up among Vogons.
Some of his predictions seem also to be very interesting if true but possibly wrong. For example, in regards to 11 which states that "the Internet will never create a new economy based on voluntary instead of paid work" which is probably true under some interpretations and is already possibly falsified under other interpretations (Larry Lessig's "Remix" discusses this issue in detail).
Other predictions such as 9 and 10 which discuss how daily work-live will change are interesting although they sound somewhat pseudo-utopian.
Overall, this is interesting speculation but probably could have been summarized in about a third the length. Still worth reading though.
If the file was stored anywhere obvious that would be a problem. For example, if it is stored on the machine then if someone gets access to the machine they might need to only test a few thousand files, especially if they have any good understanding of the time span from when the encryption was made. If they use a public website then you are vulnerable to having the website go down and can't access it unless you've got internet. Moreover, someone with access to your history might be able to identify the file (or at least would have a very small list of candidates). The use of a pen drive would actually be practical. But that's primarily because a pen drive is a small object that can be easily hidden, not because of any great aspect of this key generation scheme.
The punching bag claim is a classic one. However, the evidence suggests that one actually shouldn't use punching bags to try to release anger. One actually ends up as more angry than trying to keep it under control. Similar remarks apply to screaming or other aggressive acts. This is simply pop-psychology that is utterly wrong. See J. Bushman's 2002 paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin which has been replicated since then. This is one of many pop pysch myths discussed (and mainly debunked) in Richard Wiseman's excellent book "59 Seconds" (from where I first learned of the Bushman study).
I really don't see the philosophical or policy basis for seeing this as something which privacy laws should prohibit. What is visible in public should be photographable to the public. If I can see it with my eyes without violating a law, why shouldn't I be able to photograph it? And if I can do it for individual photos why shouldn't Google be able to do it systematically?
I suspect that to some extent the IIPA sees the US policy as an extension of their own economic interests. For much of history that's exactly how things have worked with colonial powers forcing things on colonies and subservient or conquered countries to serve their own economic interests. However, the end result of this will be pretty clear: If this does go through then people will simply take the 301 Watchlist much less seriously, which will actually hurt the copyright holders and others because the list contains examples of countries that really are abusing copyright in very serious fashions that actually should be dealt with.
Won't work. First of all, nukes don't actually do much in space unless they are very close by since the energy spreads out quickly. You won't even get decent size shockwaves since there is no atmosphere to shove out. Also, nukes high in space produce lots of electromagnetic badness that would probably fry the electronics on a lot of satellites. And if you could make nukes somehow large enough to actually deal with the space debris they would melt the satellites also. And again, you wouldn't ever get enough nukes to do this. A quick back of the envelope calculation shows that you would need around about 100,000 warheads assuming 10 megatons each (very rough estimate). The US arsenal is around 5000 nukes in total, most of which have yields much smaller than 10 megatons. There's nowhere near the resources for this to work.
Committed a crime and did something bad are not the same thing always. Sometimes the moral or ethical act is against the law. It doesn't take much effort to give historic or current examples. Just a few people off the top of my head who've committed crimes that are morally either ok or the right thing to do: off the top of my head: abolitionists in the pre-Civil War US, protestors in Iran, and whoever gave Wikileaks their leaked documents about Guantanamo.
Ok. Clearly the fact that the pay cuts for the executives didn't occur is something that this individual should have leaked and was the right thing to do. ( Why didn't the government insist on minimal transparency about the salaries in the first place? Because apparently corruption and lobbying is the same everywhere). Frankly, in TFA I don't see any information listed that shouldn't have become public. It doesn't look like they leaked anything that allowed people to take money from accounts or to steal identities or to create damage to the banks' computer networks. If there's any indication that Neo has done anything bad (other than choosing a really pretentious and unoriginal alias) I don't see it in TFA.
Space elevators http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator would help alleviate this problem since we wouldn't need to send up a lost rocket which pretty much every single launch. The other option is to build successor craft to the shuttle that are reusable and actually cost effective (at this point, it is essentially cheaper to send up most satellites using single-launch rockets rather than reusables). Each of these would help a lot in cutting down the space debris problem. Unfortunately, given human nature, the much cheaper cost of space travel that would come with a space elevator would likely result in a lot more disposable or poorly produced satellites which create more of a problem. Ultimately, the solution will likely rest on a combination of better technology and actual regulation of space debris just as we regulate most pollutants.
After the dismissal of the lawsuit, MagicJack CEO Dan Borislow apologized and told us that his lawyers, Arnold & Porter, did not fully disclose to him the weaknesses in his case or properly analyze California law. During negotiations, we were surprised when MagicJack agreed to a settlement of our legal costs, then backed out.
We would not agree to keep the actual legal dispute confidential under any circumstances. However, we offered not to publish details of our legal costs or their settlement if Borislow would donate $25,000 to charity. MagicJack, however, offered to pay our legal bill only if we'd agree to keep the whole dispute confidential; when we refused, Borislow wrote that he would 'see us in court.' Nonetheless, we're happy with the outcome. The irony for MagicJack is that the proceedings are public record, so the silence it sought was effectively worthless.
To some extent it looks like they weren't litigious pricks as much as having gotten very bad legal advice and then not backed out when they should have. So this may be more in the category of "too stubborn" more than anything else.
Yes this leak isn't a big deal as a leak. Nor for that matter is the recent leak. The problem is they lied under oath. And once people are lying about the state of things you don't know what else they are or will lie about. These might not matter, but they might very well lie about the next leak when it is a serious problem. As with many issues, the initial incident isn't nearly as much of a problem as the coverup.
There's been a lot of controversy over whether Heisenberg deliberately sabotaged the Nazi bomb-making or whether he tried to help but was incompetent or whether the failure was due to factors beyond Heisenberg. Although I have not read the book, I've been told that Paul Rose's book "Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project" presents a strong case that Heisenberg tried his hardest to assist the Nazi regime in the building of the atom bomb.
Which is interesting but never addresses how Keizer ever got in touch with Barth. Did Barth email him out of the blue? Did Keizer contact him on Kennedy's recommendation? It simply strains credulity that the one outlet used by Barth would happen to be a reporter who worked with Kennedy. The're some sort of details we are missing here. And the fact that Keizer doesn't explain those aspects in the above piece doesn't help us much.
According to the linked reports (both those in the summary and this one at ZDNet- http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=31024) the only reporter for InfoWorld who "Barth" was quoted by was Gregg Keizer. This raises a question: Did Keizer know about this deception? And if not, how did he get contacted by Barth initially? It is possible the Keizer was deceived but some sort of answer would be nice.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't it just be easier to abolish the NSA?
No. First of all, there's a direct public interest in having a government agency which tries to make sure that commercial crypto is secure. That's economically important. It helps businesses and individuals and benefits the general economy. Second, even the spook half of the NSA needs to exist. SIGINT is important. The problem with the NSA rests on overeager SIGINT attempts which violate our rights. But legitimate SIGINT still needs to occur. And if we abolished the NSA the abuses would likely simply migrate to another agency.
There are many other explanations: First in the case in question, it may very well have been that the math teaching was so bad in that particular case that no teaching worked better than teaching math badly. Given how many bad teachers there are out there and how much they turn kids off of math, that wouldn't be at all surprising. Moreover, while it may be true that many kids aren't wired for mat, the best math students are wired for math at that age or much younger. Those kids need some form of organized input so that they can really take advantage of that ability. If kids can benefit from math instruction we can't say no to them on the off chance that it might hurt the more slowly developing kids.
You are confusing two separate points. First, no one here has made the claim that intelligence is not genetic. It is clearly partially genetic. The matter at issue is whether or not there's any substantial genetic component to measured differences between intelligence levels in racial groups or whether that is due primarily to cultural and environmental effects. Also, if you are going to cite sources, try not to cite ones which have been as widely discredited ok?
You are correct that there's evidence for there being correlation between mental abilities and race. But that doesn't mean it is at all genetic. Much of it is almost certainly cultural and environmental. For example, if you get less nutrients growing up you likely aren't going to be as smart as someone else who does get enough nutrients. That's because early brain growth is determined in part by how much resources the brain has available. Similarly, certain cultures have games and habits with young children that may encourage certain forms of mental development or practicing certain skills. Moreover, some types of intelligent tests are very culturally based (there are some fascinating cross cultural studies about how people naturally organize things into groups. While in most Western societies we consider organization into functional categories to be ideal and consider people not as bright if they have trouble, in many other societies and even some Western societies, given a set of objects they will try categorize by which groups of objects can be used together. The classic example of this is giving a bunch of tools and a bunch of possible things that the tools can modify. The "correct" Western response is to group into tools and non-tools. But in some cultures they instead group into which are connected to relevant processes). So yes, such correlation does exist, but there's no strong evidence that such correlation actually means much at all.
Yes, they definitely extracted mitochondrial DNA (that's DNA that isn't in the nucleus but is rather in the mitochondria and is only passed down by your mother). Yes, the DNA looks different enough that they're pretty sure this isn't any form of contamination from modern samples (always a worry when doing this sort of thing). However, it is far from clear that this DNA is belonged to another species. There are multiple possible other explanations which could make this not another species. The details are a bit technical, but anthropologist John Hawks has a piece on his blog laying out the basic issues- http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_dna/denisova-krause-2010.html. A slightly more lay-oriented piece by Carl Zimmer (the writer for Science Times and author of the very excellent book Parasite Rex) is also worth reading: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2010/03/24/the-x-womans-fingerbone/. The bottom line is that concluding that this is a new species is as of yet very premature.
I'm amazed at how long Spirit and Opportunity have lasted. Spirit is stuck in place but is still giving us very good data and Opportunity is still kicking and researching well. Aside from some minor problems with the robotic arm, Opportunity is doing fine. These missions have now lasted years when they were expected to last 90 days. These are really amazing pieces of engineering and I hope that NASA is taking a lot of notes about them for how to design future probes. The engineers who made these must be very proud. And now one of their two babies is getting to make decisions for itself! Awww...
Ricci flow is an incredibly clever and sophisticated set of techniques. It is a very difficult technique to use and is by no means a "cheat code" for manifold questions. Most obviously, Ricci flow has been used with success to answer some aspects of the geometrization conjecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometrization_conjecture but still leaves a lot. In order to have a truly good understanding of low-dimensional manifolds we are likely going to need some additional technique that has not yet been discovered.
Sometimes it's worth it... Not always, but given the wide belief that censorship is wrong, if that's what it takes to start a revolution, then perhaps it's necessary...
It is always easy to say it is worth it when you are not the person going to jail or having your family threatened. I can agree that morally it would be worth it, but if I were in such a position I don't know what fraction of Slashdot readers (myself included) would actually do anything. It is really easy to talk about doing the right thing against an oppressive regime when you're elsewhere.
Not necessarily. If I still trust the person but can't afford to keep them due to a bad economy for example it isn't obvious that I should take them off of access to secure data. That's especially the case if in order to do the job they need access to the secure data (which isn't uncommon). Unfortunately, sometimes they need to train someone else to do the job and have the same problem. Sure in an ideal world, as soon as people got their two weeks notice they'd have no access to anything secure, but that's not generally doable. (To use an obvious analogy, if a bank teller gets a two week notice I don't think we expect the bank to not let them handle any cash for those two weeks).
Some of his predictions seem also to be very interesting if true but possibly wrong. For example, in regards to 11 which states that "the Internet will never create a new economy based on voluntary instead of paid work" which is probably true under some interpretations and is already possibly falsified under other interpretations (Larry Lessig's "Remix" discusses this issue in detail).
Other predictions such as 9 and 10 which discuss how daily work-live will change are interesting although they sound somewhat pseudo-utopian.
Overall, this is interesting speculation but probably could have been summarized in about a third the length. Still worth reading though.
If the file was stored anywhere obvious that would be a problem. For example, if it is stored on the machine then if someone gets access to the machine they might need to only test a few thousand files, especially if they have any good understanding of the time span from when the encryption was made. If they use a public website then you are vulnerable to having the website go down and can't access it unless you've got internet. Moreover, someone with access to your history might be able to identify the file (or at least would have a very small list of candidates). The use of a pen drive would actually be practical. But that's primarily because a pen drive is a small object that can be easily hidden, not because of any great aspect of this key generation scheme.
The punching bag claim is a classic one. However, the evidence suggests that one actually shouldn't use punching bags to try to release anger. One actually ends up as more angry than trying to keep it under control. Similar remarks apply to screaming or other aggressive acts. This is simply pop-psychology that is utterly wrong. See J. Bushman's 2002 paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin which has been replicated since then. This is one of many pop pysch myths discussed (and mainly debunked) in Richard Wiseman's excellent book "59 Seconds" (from where I first learned of the Bushman study).
I really don't see the philosophical or policy basis for seeing this as something which privacy laws should prohibit. What is visible in public should be photographable to the public. If I can see it with my eyes without violating a law, why shouldn't I be able to photograph it? And if I can do it for individual photos why shouldn't Google be able to do it systematically?
I suspect that to some extent the IIPA sees the US policy as an extension of their own economic interests. For much of history that's exactly how things have worked with colonial powers forcing things on colonies and subservient or conquered countries to serve their own economic interests. However, the end result of this will be pretty clear: If this does go through then people will simply take the 301 Watchlist much less seriously, which will actually hurt the copyright holders and others because the list contains examples of countries that really are abusing copyright in very serious fashions that actually should be dealt with.
Won't work. First of all, nukes don't actually do much in space unless they are very close by since the energy spreads out quickly. You won't even get decent size shockwaves since there is no atmosphere to shove out. Also, nukes high in space produce lots of electromagnetic badness that would probably fry the electronics on a lot of satellites. And if you could make nukes somehow large enough to actually deal with the space debris they would melt the satellites also. And again, you wouldn't ever get enough nukes to do this. A quick back of the envelope calculation shows that you would need around about 100,000 warheads assuming 10 megatons each (very rough estimate). The US arsenal is around 5000 nukes in total, most of which have yields much smaller than 10 megatons. There's nowhere near the resources for this to work.
Committed a crime and did something bad are not the same thing always. Sometimes the moral or ethical act is against the law. It doesn't take much effort to give historic or current examples. Just a few people off the top of my head who've committed crimes that are morally either ok or the right thing to do: off the top of my head: abolitionists in the pre-Civil War US, protestors in Iran, and whoever gave Wikileaks their leaked documents about Guantanamo.
Ok. Clearly the fact that the pay cuts for the executives didn't occur is something that this individual should have leaked and was the right thing to do. ( Why didn't the government insist on minimal transparency about the salaries in the first place? Because apparently corruption and lobbying is the same everywhere). Frankly, in TFA I don't see any information listed that shouldn't have become public. It doesn't look like they leaked anything that allowed people to take money from accounts or to steal identities or to create damage to the banks' computer networks. If there's any indication that Neo has done anything bad (other than choosing a really pretentious and unoriginal alias) I don't see it in TFA.
Space elevators http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator would help alleviate this problem since we wouldn't need to send up a lost rocket which pretty much every single launch. The other option is to build successor craft to the shuttle that are reusable and actually cost effective (at this point, it is essentially cheaper to send up most satellites using single-launch rockets rather than reusables). Each of these would help a lot in cutting down the space debris problem. Unfortunately, given human nature, the much cheaper cost of space travel that would come with a space elevator would likely result in a lot more disposable or poorly produced satellites which create more of a problem. Ultimately, the solution will likely rest on a combination of better technology and actual regulation of space debris just as we regulate most pollutants.
After the dismissal of the lawsuit, MagicJack CEO Dan Borislow apologized and told us that his lawyers, Arnold & Porter, did not fully disclose to him the weaknesses in his case or properly analyze California law. During negotiations, we were surprised when MagicJack agreed to a settlement of our legal costs, then backed out. We would not agree to keep the actual legal dispute confidential under any circumstances. However, we offered not to publish details of our legal costs or their settlement if Borislow would donate $25,000 to charity. MagicJack, however, offered to pay our legal bill only if we'd agree to keep the whole dispute confidential; when we refused, Borislow wrote that he would 'see us in court.' Nonetheless, we're happy with the outcome. The irony for MagicJack is that the proceedings are public record, so the silence it sought was effectively worthless.
To some extent it looks like they weren't litigious pricks as much as having gotten very bad legal advice and then not backed out when they should have. So this may be more in the category of "too stubborn" more than anything else.
Yes this leak isn't a big deal as a leak. Nor for that matter is the recent leak. The problem is they lied under oath. And once people are lying about the state of things you don't know what else they are or will lie about. These might not matter, but they might very well lie about the next leak when it is a serious problem. As with many issues, the initial incident isn't nearly as much of a problem as the coverup.
I think the "persuasion" used during Hitler's Government would make even the most stubborn goat be passive.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have disagreed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer.
There's been a lot of controversy over whether Heisenberg deliberately sabotaged the Nazi bomb-making or whether he tried to help but was incompetent or whether the failure was due to factors beyond Heisenberg. Although I have not read the book, I've been told that Paul Rose's book "Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project" presents a strong case that Heisenberg tried his hardest to assist the Nazi regime in the building of the atom bomb.
Which is interesting but never addresses how Keizer ever got in touch with Barth. Did Barth email him out of the blue? Did Keizer contact him on Kennedy's recommendation? It simply strains credulity that the one outlet used by Barth would happen to be a reporter who worked with Kennedy. The're some sort of details we are missing here. And the fact that Keizer doesn't explain those aspects in the above piece doesn't help us much.
According to the linked reports (both those in the summary and this one at ZDNet- http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=31024) the only reporter for InfoWorld who "Barth" was quoted by was Gregg Keizer. This raises a question: Did Keizer know about this deception? And if not, how did he get contacted by Barth initially? It is possible the Keizer was deceived but some sort of answer would be nice.
Er, missing an import phrase there. Female elementary school teachers with math anxiety is the relevant category of teachers.