The math was based on conspiracies that were proven to be true. The PRISM program at the NSA revealed by Snowden, the Tuskeegee syphillis experiments, and the FBI hiding the fact that it's forensic analysis was faulty.
But this sounds like you didn't read the article or the paper. He didn't say he had proven anything. It was a mathematical model based on things we do know. I know slashdot doesn't like to read the articles, but for this particular story there seems to be an abundance of commenters proclaiming that they don't believe any of it without even knowing what "it" is because they haven't read it.
He did not do any analysis on the likelihood that an unknown conspiracy would have been revealed, because... um, it's an unknown conspiracy. He did give numbers on 4 known conspiracy theories though and the numbers seem plausible. He gives no guesses whatsoever about the number of total conspiracies undiscovered or otherwise.
No one creates a cure for cancer on their own. Lots of people have to be involved, there would be years of lab work, the data has to be gathered from studies to prove effectiveness, and so forth. The CEO could try to keep it hush hush but there would be too many people around who would have to know there was such cure either present or at the stage of trials. The CEO could demand that all records be retrieved and hidden, but the people doing the retrieving and hiding are now in the know also. You can hide studies but you can't make people forget that they worked on those studies.
The model used in this math does actually assume that all conspirators are intent on keeping the secret in the first place, rather than there being some internal good guy who wants to blow the whistle. Whereas in this case most of those conspirators would have an interest in getting that secret out. Sure you can pay them off, but even that is hard to keep secret because now you've got stockholders wondering where all that money went and such payments do not provide guarantees of silence.
There is some of this in the US but it is very rare. Where it exists it is mostly for customers who want to buy "green" energy. But it has to be supported by the local utilities (possibly due to regulation).
That's now how the math was done. It required one person to reveal, even inadvertently, that there was a conspiracy. It doesn't assume that it was all blown wide open with the public convinced of the conspiracy either. It took just Edward Snowden to open the doors on a conspiracy involved tens of thousands of people (the conspiracy kept in place by laws forbidding disclosure of classified materials). Much of the general population already believed that there was a conspiracy involved with the NSA, there just had been no supporting evidence for it. By its very actions after the disclosure the NSA effectively confirmed that Snowden was not just making things up.
A conspiracy theorist of course shows up quickly, but this is not a disclosure of the conspiracy. After all quite a large number of the general population believed that the NSA was snooping on its own citizens, but there was no supporting evidence for it. And the NSAs own actions after the Snowden revelations effectively confirmed that Snowden was not just making things up. That's vastly different than some kooks living in an Airstream trailer with a newsletter.
Oh bullshit. The government needs to reduce energy usage. The utilities are insistent on the idea of profits-uber-alles. All the government is doing here is encouraging customers to save power, it is no different from a private citizen trying to form a boycott. Saying that this is a "taking of value" implies that the utilities deserve these profits, which they do not. If it is a taking then even a simple advertisement campaign to discourage excessive and unnecessary power usage would be a taking.
The government is not fascist. But maybe it should be if it's the only way to smack these utilities in the face and turn them into responsible citizens. The government has a vested interest in reducing energy usage in the defense of its citizens and economy, whereas the utilities have a vested interest in increasing energy usage. This was not always true, in the past there were voluntary energy conservations programs, but over time everything has turned into a profits centric model where they felt it was better to build more and more polluting plants.
They think the free market is a magic bullet. Any market ever has had some interference somewhere so these nutcases can always fall back and claim a true free market could still theoretically work despite all the empirical evidence against it.
The problem to some is that they only look at profits alone. The "substantial savings to customers" is not a concept they want to accept, as they think customers can reduce costs merely by buying from someone else. The government has a vested interest in reducing energy usage despite the loss in profits to some companies, but free market believers don't like externalities because it screws up their naive models. Almost everybody in America gets only one choice of electricity provider, take it or leave it, there is no free market by its very nature. And those utilities will fight viciously against anything that brings in competition (like municipal utilities).
Because the free market does not work. You are a captive buyer of energy utilities, you have not ability to pick and choose who you buy electricity from. The utilities in turn do not charge their customers solely on the amount of electricity used or cost of infrastructure. The utilities when left to their own devices have shown that they will discourage energy conservation as it cuts into their profits.
The math seems to be about the likelihood of someone spilling the beans. Thus the more conspirators the harder to keep the secret. Even posthumously (people do find letters or diaries revealing secrets after death). The best way to keep the secret is to keep the number of conspirators to a minimum. The most popular conspiracy theories on the other hand usually involve a huge number of people all trying to keep a secret from being exposed. Thus Yugo with a smaller number of employees would stand a better change of a coverup than Cadillac.
His equation also assumed a best case scenario for the conspirators - they are all good at keeping secrets and there was no external investigation.
The math is there, you can look it up and read it. Sure there are some assumptions but they're not based on the number of expected conspiracies out there.
If one person dies, it still leaves behind the other people who know of the conspiracy. Of course, some conspiracies are easier to keep quiet about. If you have say 5 people who have any knowledge or evidence of the conspiracy then they can keep quiet until they all die pretty easily. If there are 5000 people who know of the conspiracy then it's much more difficult, probabilistically, to have all of them take the secret to their grave. Thus the likelihood that no one has spilled the beans on a fake moon landing is extremely small, but the likelihood that three people who worked together to have someone assassinated can keep that secret is very high.
Because there would be hundreds of thousands of people in the know on this. Any one of them can leak it. Are all of them bound by a pact of evil to never reveal what they know?
The advertisers aren't really broadcasting, they're insinuating themselves into a point-to-point network connection. When I go and visit a web site with 4K of actual content I end up getting 4MB of advertisements and advertising infrastructure and tracking along for the ride.
I am also sure that I am moral and ethical when I block ads. I am also moral and ethical when I leave the room if a television ad is playing.
However I find it morally and ethically wrong for advertisers to piggy back upon my paid for and limited bandwidth! I don't get charged for all the junk that shows up in my physical mailbox, so why do I end up paying for the junk that shows up on the internet? If my viewing advertisements is so extremely valuable to advertisers then they can help foot part of the bill for my ISP.
That's the annoying thing for me. Some of these content creators are essentially using the web as a hobby. They've got a lousy blog, they fancy themselves as a journalist, and think that if it gets popular they can quit their day job. I say keep the damn job and keep your hobby as a hobby and not as a revenue generator. The internet worked just fine for a few decades without all the greedy SOBs screwing it up.
And yet even though I have adblock I have never seen any ads. As far as I can tell ALL ads are blocked, so if there are indeed curated ads that can buy their way onto a white list that they are so few in number as to be negligable.
I visit a web page, I do not visit the advertiser's web page. Much of the time the owner of the web page is ignorant of the actual ads being served up by third parties.
Slashdot Mirror
No, because then he'd get in trouble with the Time Cube.
Nonsense, the lizard people as everyone knows live in Buckingham Palace.
There are baby turtles too. Remember the big bang theory.
The math was based on conspiracies that were proven to be true. The PRISM program at the NSA revealed by Snowden, the Tuskeegee syphillis experiments, and the FBI hiding the fact that it's forensic analysis was faulty.
But this sounds like you didn't read the article or the paper. He didn't say he had proven anything. It was a mathematical model based on things we do know. I know slashdot doesn't like to read the articles, but for this particular story there seems to be an abundance of commenters proclaiming that they don't believe any of it without even knowing what "it" is because they haven't read it.
He did not do any analysis on the likelihood that an unknown conspiracy would have been revealed, because... um, it's an unknown conspiracy. He did give numbers on 4 known conspiracy theories though and the numbers seem plausible. He gives no guesses whatsoever about the number of total conspiracies undiscovered or otherwise.
No one creates a cure for cancer on their own. Lots of people have to be involved, there would be years of lab work, the data has to be gathered from studies to prove effectiveness, and so forth. The CEO could try to keep it hush hush but there would be too many people around who would have to know there was such cure either present or at the stage of trials. The CEO could demand that all records be retrieved and hidden, but the people doing the retrieving and hiding are now in the know also. You can hide studies but you can't make people forget that they worked on those studies.
The model used in this math does actually assume that all conspirators are intent on keeping the secret in the first place, rather than there being some internal good guy who wants to blow the whistle. Whereas in this case most of those conspirators would have an interest in getting that secret out. Sure you can pay them off, but even that is hard to keep secret because now you've got stockholders wondering where all that money went and such payments do not provide guarantees of silence.
There is some of this in the US but it is very rare. Where it exists it is mostly for customers who want to buy "green" energy. But it has to be supported by the local utilities (possibly due to regulation).
That's now how the math was done. It required one person to reveal, even inadvertently, that there was a conspiracy. It doesn't assume that it was all blown wide open with the public convinced of the conspiracy either. It took just Edward Snowden to open the doors on a conspiracy involved tens of thousands of people (the conspiracy kept in place by laws forbidding disclosure of classified materials). Much of the general population already believed that there was a conspiracy involved with the NSA, there just had been no supporting evidence for it. By its very actions after the disclosure the NSA effectively confirmed that Snowden was not just making things up.
A conspiracy theorist of course shows up quickly, but this is not a disclosure of the conspiracy. After all quite a large number of the general population believed that the NSA was snooping on its own citizens, but there was no supporting evidence for it. And the NSAs own actions after the Snowden revelations effectively confirmed that Snowden was not just making things up. That's vastly different than some kooks living in an Airstream trailer with a newsletter.
Oh bullshit. The government needs to reduce energy usage. The utilities are insistent on the idea of profits-uber-alles. All the government is doing here is encouraging customers to save power, it is no different from a private citizen trying to form a boycott. Saying that this is a "taking of value" implies that the utilities deserve these profits, which they do not. If it is a taking then even a simple advertisement campaign to discourage excessive and unnecessary power usage would be a taking.
The government is not fascist. But maybe it should be if it's the only way to smack these utilities in the face and turn them into responsible citizens. The government has a vested interest in reducing energy usage in the defense of its citizens and economy, whereas the utilities have a vested interest in increasing energy usage. This was not always true, in the past there were voluntary energy conservations programs, but over time everything has turned into a profits centric model where they felt it was better to build more and more polluting plants.
They think the free market is a magic bullet. Any market ever has had some interference somewhere so these nutcases can always fall back and claim a true free market could still theoretically work despite all the empirical evidence against it.
The problem to some is that they only look at profits alone. The "substantial savings to customers" is not a concept they want to accept, as they think customers can reduce costs merely by buying from someone else. The government has a vested interest in reducing energy usage despite the loss in profits to some companies, but free market believers don't like externalities because it screws up their naive models. Almost everybody in America gets only one choice of electricity provider, take it or leave it, there is no free market by its very nature. And those utilities will fight viciously against anything that brings in competition (like municipal utilities).
The commerce crosses state lines. Seriously, have you read the constitution yet or the court decisions that have come down over the centuries?
Because the free market does not work. You are a captive buyer of energy utilities, you have not ability to pick and choose who you buy electricity from. The utilities in turn do not charge their customers solely on the amount of electricity used or cost of infrastructure. The utilities when left to their own devices have shown that they will discourage energy conservation as it cuts into their profits.
These aren't exactly secret conspiracies. They're widely known by the public and those who perpetuate them will often brag about it.
And this was exactly one of the existing exposed conspiracies that was used to develop the model. Specifically the PRISM program by the NSA.
The math seems to be about the likelihood of someone spilling the beans. Thus the more conspirators the harder to keep the secret. Even posthumously (people do find letters or diaries revealing secrets after death). The best way to keep the secret is to keep the number of conspirators to a minimum. The most popular conspiracy theories on the other hand usually involve a huge number of people all trying to keep a secret from being exposed. Thus Yugo with a smaller number of employees would stand a better change of a coverup than Cadillac.
His equation also assumed a best case scenario for the conspirators - they are all good at keeping secrets and there was no external investigation.
And the fraudulent data was not wholesale invention of numbers either.
The math is there, you can look it up and read it. Sure there are some assumptions but they're not based on the number of expected conspiracies out there.
If one person dies, it still leaves behind the other people who know of the conspiracy.
Of course, some conspiracies are easier to keep quiet about. If you have say 5 people who have any knowledge or evidence of the conspiracy then they can keep quiet until they all die pretty easily. If there are 5000 people who know of the conspiracy then it's much more difficult, probabilistically, to have all of them take the secret to their grave. Thus the likelihood that no one has spilled the beans on a fake moon landing is extremely small, but the likelihood that three people who worked together to have someone assassinated can keep that secret is very high.
Because there would be hundreds of thousands of people in the know on this. Any one of them can leak it. Are all of them bound by a pact of evil to never reveal what they know?
Dong today. Dong tomorrow. Every day dong. Thread is dong too.
See episode 2 of Black Mirror, Fifteen Million Credits. Part of the story background involves having to pay to avoid advertising.
The advertisers aren't really broadcasting, they're insinuating themselves into a point-to-point network connection. When I go and visit a web site with 4K of actual content I end up getting 4MB of advertisements and advertising infrastructure and tracking along for the ride.
I am also sure that I am moral and ethical when I block ads. I am also moral and ethical when I leave the room if a television ad is playing.
However I find it morally and ethically wrong for advertisers to piggy back upon my paid for and limited bandwidth! I don't get charged for all the junk that shows up in my physical mailbox, so why do I end up paying for the junk that shows up on the internet? If my viewing advertisements is so extremely valuable to advertisers then they can help foot part of the bill for my ISP.
That's the annoying thing for me. Some of these content creators are essentially using the web as a hobby. They've got a lousy blog, they fancy themselves as a journalist, and think that if it gets popular they can quit their day job. I say keep the damn job and keep your hobby as a hobby and not as a revenue generator. The internet worked just fine for a few decades without all the greedy SOBs screwing it up.
And yet even though I have adblock I have never seen any ads. As far as I can tell ALL ads are blocked, so if there are indeed curated ads that can buy their way onto a white list that they are so few in number as to be negligable.
I visit a web page, I do not visit the advertiser's web page. Much of the time the owner of the web page is ignorant of the actual ads being served up by third parties.