Anyway-
It seems the whole mess was a storm in a teacup.
It seems it was just some setup where if a student reported a laptop missing the school which owned those laptops could remotely access it to try to figure out where it was and who was using it.
This is incorrect. It was not "just" some setup where a laptop could be located. It was a setup where other things could be done, such as having pictures taken of the user in their own home. This was admitted The fact that the stated intent was to only perform some minor, legitimate function does not mean the illegitimate functions did not exist.
And the responses you quote are bureaucrateeze for an organization that screwed up trying to backpedal. I'll do a gloss on some:
* No. At no time did any high school administrator have the ability or actually access the security- tracking software. We believe that the administrator at Harriton has been unfairly portrayed and unjustly attacked in connection with her attempts to be supportive of a student and his family. The district never did and never would use such tactics as a basis for disciplinary action.
Note the shiftiness here. They don't believe the administrator did it, the district would never do such a thing.
It sounds like a flat-out denial because of the wording, but there's nothing about the facts of this case. This really boils down to a general statement that the official district policy is not to break the law.
* Only two members of the technology department could access the security feature.
What does "could" mean? Policy? De facto practice? Number of people your admin said you should call when you want this done? How many people had the password to the web site? Under what conditions would they use it
* During the 2009-10 school year, 42 laptops were reported lost, stolen or missing and the tracking software was activated by the technology department in each instance.
Again, a non-answer: "How many times was the system used?" and the answer is "Forty-two laptops went missing, and we used the system all of those times." This doesn't address the main issue: Were there other times? Can administrators even tell?
* The district learned of the allegations Thursday, February 18th. No complaints were received prior to this date.
Hmm. Quick for a bureaucracy to do review of policy, investigation of authorization requests, logs & electronic audit trails, and interviews to see how the system was used in practice. At this point I'm wondering if they even have those things.
9. Is remote access activity by the district logged?
Yes. There is a log entry for every instance of the security feature activation. The logs will be reviewed as part of the special review conducted under the direction of special outside counsel.
Aah. Here we go; so there are logs. Maybe they are good electronic ones held by a third party, maybe editable ASCII text that wasn't backed up, and maybe just paper notebooks. Still better than nothing.
But--they haven't been reviewed yet. Which explains why every other paragraph is so evasive. They don't actually know squat at this point.
The district is basically blustering. I consider it a warning sign anytime a response to a credible claim of a serious violation is "No one did anything wrong!" before that can possibly be known; it implies to me a culture where it's just *assumed* everything acts correctly, and the people who should be enforcing good behavior are more interested in PR. Good organizations I've worked with say things like they are "reviewing logs to confirm that our stringent safeguards were followed" and "we take all violations seriously". Flat-out support comes after the facts are in.
It is possible that they are in this mode because of the lawsuit. I
A lot of news outlets are quoting the vice principal on this:
That quote derived from the plaintiffs, not from the vice principal. Read the article you linked to again, it clearly identifies the source of this complaint.
The school district still seems to be sticking to the claims that the instances of activation all refer to "lost or stolen" laptops, and that they were never photographed for other reasons.
Now, if I had to guess which story is more credible, I'm absolutely going with the plaintiff's. The district's claims all sound like they are based on theory--there's no mention, say, of a review of activation logs or safeguards to prevent this abuse of the system, so it's not even clear how they'd know it wasn't abused in this one case.
But you are misinforming people about the facts when you say news organizations have independently confirmed the act in question took place by speaking with the vice principal.
The necessary reasons for countries as they exist today mostly go away when the Internet fully connects individuals.* Obsolescence is a terrible thing for bureaucracy, but can be framed as the primary driver of most "issues" governments have with the Internet.
* physical defense and security being the only notable exception.
Can you give one example of a core role that becomes obsolete? I assume there must be something. The post? That was a core role a couple centuries ago, I guess.
Most state funds go to transportation infrastructure, "physical defense" (ie, military), law enforcement & prisons, education, health care, retirement pensions and other social safety nets (not in that order). Research funding, parks, civil courts, disaster recovery aid & regulatory enforcement and the like are a few of the other less-expensive things that get money.
*None* of those vanish when the internet connects individuals. [I understand that some will pick their least favorite (the military, or the social safety net) and say the government shouldn't be doing it anyway, but that desire's independent of 'connectivity'.] A few clerks may lose their jobs due to on-line requests being filled, but I'm not even sure what people are imagining when they think the internet will somehow obsolete governments--let alone why a state bureaucrat would be living in existential dread.
I assume this particular case boils down to people evading taxation, which is going to be an issue as long as the government spends any money at all. It'll be, unavoidably, the very last state function that becomes obsolete.
Yeah, okay... How come the telegraph isn't being nominated?
Because Wired magazine doesn't sell more copies when they spew idiotic hype about the telegraph?
Seriously. There are hundreds of distinct "nominees" for the Nobel Peace Prize each years. The committee solicits recommendations from thousands of people. Good for them that they cast a wide net to look for ideas. A lot of them will be at this level of idiocy; the Nobel committee will simply ignore them.
Wired apparently chose to nominate "The Internet," a transparently self-serving attempt to make the subject of their reporting seem more important. The Nobel committee itself won't release lists of who's been recommended for 50 years (see http://nobelprize.org/nomination/peace/), but Wired is free to announce that they nominated it, then cover a story which they created themselves. This is entirely consistent with their tradition a tradition of superficial gee-whiz features about things that sound possibly intriguing in a summary and are found to be inaccurate, irrelevant or meaningless after two seconds of thought.
Many other major things in modern history had something to do with government invention and usually some million people died in the ordeal.
So loans to a company making a roadster is like . . . oh, wait, you're trying to get *me* to stumble into Godwin's law in a discussion about electric vehicles. Well played, sir.;)
Keep the market competitive, keep contracts honored, protect the goddamn borders and then some. Everything else is pissing the taxpayer's money away for issues of political importance, more often than not political capital. Once you enable political capital to be a viable alternative to monetary capital, you will notice that people are constantly producing political capital, because it's so easy to write pamphlets, manuscripts, ideas, manifests and declaration and so incredibly hard to have a viable business running.
Since there has never been a successful government that declined to intervene in economic matters of import--whether for technology, societal or just plain politica onesl--an assertion that a government like that would do better than the market system we currently have is a huge leap of faith. Since I'm not a radical, I'd prefer to tinker with hours rather than trust people who just sort of make up wild claims about some new organizational system.
There's certainly no mainstream theoretical economic model that supports claims of zero government intervention. There are empirical arguments about rent-seeking and dangers of over-intervention, which are entirely legitimate and should be remembered. But there are also empirical cases of highly productive government intervention, so I'm not buying argument from first principles on Tesla. Whether these loans are good or bad will depend on the specifics of the situation and how likely they are to produce something.
The government isn't supposed to invest in these things to make a profit. It's supposed to invest in them, like DARPA projects, because the overall benefits might be good for the state.
If it were a good deal in strictly financial terms for the government, then it'd be a good deal for private investors, and the government shouldn't be involved.
Bullshit. If you want to encourage technology development, then let people keep their money and invest it as they see fit, rather than having their money diverted to failed companies for political reasons. Tesla is not a viable business.
-jcr
Sorry, the fact is that major technology jumps in modern history have government intervention, from vaccines to biotech to railroads to the internet. I know it doesn't match the way some people want things to work, but not much I can do about it.
Private money goes mostly to short term, 3-5 year horizon projects. You don't need to subsidize those (not that we don't, through IP law), but any technology that has longer time to profitability needs help.
The Tesla model S sedan will retail for $50,000+ which means that less than 20% (and that is being very generous) of Americans will be able to afford this car. Tesla is a niche and it will always be niche. The best that they (and the taxpayers) could hope for is for them to be bought by one of the major auto manufacturers. Why should the taxpayers be financing car production by boutique manufacturers for wealthy people?
It's new technology; even if this model never takes off the expertise can spill over. It's not like giving money to Ford to keep more Mustangs on the street. It's a potential benefit even if the parent business fails.
It's a pretty good way encourage technology development. A lot of private people think they may be able to make it profitable eventually, they've put in their money, so the government leverages work that may prove valuable beyond the short-term by giving loans. No new government buildings needed, no new bureaucracy you can't kill.
I don't know enough about Tesla or the industry to say if this particular one is the best use of money, but it's not unique or anything. Corporations often get subsidies for new tech; basic research just doesn't get done at measurable levels these days in private industry. Bell Labs isn't what it used to be.
If the government subsidizes heavily so that average people can buy this particular car then you have to explain why the government should be in the business of picking winners and losers in the market for private automobiles.
The "picking winners and losers" thing has really become a meme. Government policies necessarily determine winners and losers all the time, of course, with zoning laws, housing subsidies, mileage standards, public roads, wars for oil, leasing out of federal land, tarriffs, and so on.
If we (ie, the people through the government) chose to spend massive subsidies on electric cars, it would be because we thought the benefits (noise, local pollution, energy flexibility, global warming) outweighed the costs. We'd be saying that cars that spew out those pollutants are "losers," and it's worth paying for them to get off the roads. That is fundamentally a government business--making decisions about the common areas in communities.
If Tesla is such a good investment then why cant they raise $450 million from the private equity market instead of from taxpayers; 99% of whom will never sit behind the wheel of a Tesla?
Because, obviously, a good investment for the government is not the same as a good investment for a private investor. We don't expect corporations to identify candidates in kindergarten and pay for their schooling through 12th grade and college. They'd never get their money back, at least not in a free labor system, but society as a whole benefits.
Your points are really all cookie-cutter stuff, by which I mean they apply to any government intervention, not just Tesla, not just for putatively rich people. But even in freshman college micro-economic models, concepts like externalities might justify state intervention, and in the real world, actual or de facto subsidies for other industries require it. Given this specific intervention is a loan, not some recurring grant and not regulation, which will let the company live or die in the market (as evidenced by the actual story), do you have any actual reason to oppose *this one*, and not just all?
Actually, there are only a handful sources of similar content of similar quality, and the two that immediately spring (WSJ and the Economist) are behind pay walls.
God knows the NYT has its flaws (WMD and Whitewater, as high-profile examples), but in terms of original national (US) reporting it's way above the AP or the BBC. I think the WSJ is (was?) better, but their big stories (Enron, back-dating options, Vioxx, for example) are obviously business related. McClatchy seems to have an edge documenting issues with the 'official unnamed' sources, but doesn't do as much elsewhere. Most other quality sites simply do different things altogether.
Personally, I pay for the WSJ and browse the NYT free on line. This will probably make me switch to the NYT for a year and see how I like it as a daily news source. So, yeah, in my one case their strategy will work.
Like the TV show Heroes? It's fun to watch but certainly not realistic. For example: How can Sylar pick-up a person and throw him against a wall? Newton's Law dictates that Sylar should be pushed backward with an equal force (recoil). Also where is the energy coming from? Sylar must eat 50,000 calories a day* to maintain that level of "toss people against walls" energy output.
I'd rather stick with SCIENCE fiction, with emphasis on the science and making it not violate known universal laws/theories.
IMHO these complaints are overly fastidious, and not just because it's just a silly show.
I always thought it was obvious, to science fiction nerds, that if you're writing about telekinesis or similar nonsense you simply assume that the bulk of the force is between the victim and some object (like the ground, or a wall) and that the energy comes not directly from Sylar's biochemistry but from some ability to tap into other energy sources. A normal human, as an analogy, can bring down the side of a mountain--by starting a landslide. Looked at simplistically, it "violates" the principles you mention (where does the energy come from? how does he exert the force?) far worse than tossing a guy across the room, but obviously if the conditions are right and you understand what's really happening it's not just plausible, but trivial to explain.
Good, fun hard SF for me is coming up with inventive, lively explanations of why the conditions are right for whatever cool thing they want to have happen. Not that I have any desire to have a good writer waste time on psychic powers these days, which are overdone, old and cliched, but there are other things just as superficially unlikely should still make appearances.
What makes Heroes non-science fiction is not any one example--which could hand-waved quite adequately by a good SF writer. The Heroes problem is their utter indifference to *any* explanation, which is partly tone and also leads to wild inconsistencies in logic and consistency.
Is anyone writing SF like that these days? It seems to have stopped in the '70s or early '80s. Maybe it's just what my reading habits are these days, but I'd love a writer with the approach to science (and a better approach to plot and characters) of a vintage Larry Niven.
I'm shocked I tell you! Huge company with an armada of lawyers steals everything from a startup. Next thing you know the execs at B&N will be rewarded for their cleverness.
It's never happened before.
Indeed.
Also, never before in the history of corporate America, has a small company make a predictable copy of product and then sued a bigger competitor for it's equally predictable product. This is all thoroughly uncharted territory.;)
Absent a lot more information, there's really no way to figure if B&N is remotely guilty of anything at all. Talks about licensing do *not* prevent you from working on a similar product yourself; the practice is routine. If your internal project fails or is delayed, you want a backup--that doesn't commit you to buying or licensing before you've signed a deal. And Slashdot, of all places, should be sceptical of claims that a company "deserves" some space in the IP world just for itself because they thought about something similar.
They are misrepresenting the site as presenting all reviews, not just ones that they approve. That's fraud with material financial consequences.
Are they misrepresenting it? That would be the key question as to whether it is or should be illegal.
If they just say "These are customer reviews," there's no claim about completeness. Any more than review excerpts that appear on the inside covers of books purport to be a scientific sampling of critical opinion. Or audience snippets about some new musical that appear on TV ; they aren't really just broadcasting what everyone said.
This is plain caveat emptor; I can't believe anyone is surprised let along indignant about it. Do people really believe they don't need to visit a third party site to do research these days? Consumer Reports has stayed in business for a reason; I do my research on-line but the principle is the same. You can't expect someone who profits from making a sale to try and talk you out of it.
They are trying to sell you something, it clearly states it's their site, and you should probably be skeptical about everything you read on it. Especially for an electronics retailer, where "anti-advertising" existing stock presumably means eating a considerable loss (unlike, say, Amazon.) You can also hold it against them and choose not to shop there if you don't like it. (In my case, untrustworthy reviews give me an active reason to leave a site and do research, so vendors that post more-or-less unfiltered reviews get more business from me.)
If they are telling you anywhere it's "all user comments," then you have a case, but I've never seen that claim even on Amazon. And if they are telling the would-be poster that his comments will be posted independent of content, the poster has a claim. Otherwise? There are tons of review sites, aren't there?
If a sensitive package got delivered, by mistake, and it wasn't returned, and the resident of the house didn't respond to reasonable contact requests and showed no sign of being home, you might well see some analagous action. Not "burning down the house", but a court order to retrieve property that didn't belong to him. It certainly doesn't seem unreasonable to consider such action.
The "burning down the house" analogy, is vastly overstating things, as are most other posters. This is hardly a permanent deactivation--the account is down, you call Google, they explain the situation and you get it sorted out. If the gentleman did nothing wrong, it'd be a nuisance, but quickly resolved. If the account is one of the many abandoned or semi-abandoned ones floating around the internet, sealing it off is I think very prudent.
In both the analogy and the actual case, context matters a lot. I'd certainly hope the judge grilled the bank about other options and how they'd tried to contact the account owner, and asked Google to try and contact him on the court's behalf first. Ask Google if any of the messages have been read. Plus the actual legal standing, how harmful the information could be, and a dozen other factors not described in detail.
But the outrage level over this seems *way* too high. There's this attitude around the internet that it's a rank injustice to be inconvenienced by anything that wasn't your fault. (Not attributing this to you, but many posters certainly channel this feeling.) Meh. Try out another analogy, some days you wake up and find your driveway blocked by firetrucks helping out a neighbor, or your street blocked off because police are investigating a crime. We live in a world with other people, sometimes their crises are more important than our daily routine. It happens.
Technically, "net neutrality" refers to the traffic being completely agnostic about what a packet is--phone, video, http, etc.
Most of the insidious scenarios painted by the loss of neutrality do relate to content filtering--ie, Comcast makes a deal with Amazon and gimps the connections to, say, Powell's dodgy enough customers just think Amazon is the place to shop.
If it's really as described in this case, for bandwidth management, I personally don't think it's all that scary. There are issues about transparency, and for some users this might mean their ISP isn't providing sufficient bandwidth anymore. But IMHO it's not automatically different than simple changing the maximum bandwidth available to a customer.
On the other hand, if a AT&T gimped VOIP to knock Skype out of business, or Comcast filtered video so you needed their cable services, you could get filtering-by-protocol that was just about as evil as the content filtering.
I thought about what is different between the message you're giving and the GP his version of the message. Both basically say the same, but your version is better.
[ . . . ]
Something to be learned from that.
Well, thanks.
I'll add, along those lines, that the second approach suggests you're willing to work with the manager if things start going poorly. Someone who says "This project is failing, fix it before I quit" creates problems for a manager. Someone who says "Can we figure out a better approach?" creates opportunities.
On what planet? In the interviewer's mind, that translates into: "Given the doomed projects coming up, this guy is going to quit within three months. No Hire."
You may need to work on your interviewer mind melding skills.
Just ask yourself it that's what you'd think as a manager interviewing an employee. "I have two candidates, one who will understand what's going on in the workplace around him, and one who won't. I obviously need to hire the clueless one, since the smart one will recognize that I am an incompetent who will do nothing but feed him projects are destined to fail." I imagine probably not? Then why do you think anyone else would think that way?
You may be confusing a candidate's being able to distinguish good and bad projects with a candidate who's just a prima donna. The guy who projects a sense of entitlement, who will only want to work on the central aspects of high-profile projects, yeah, he's not going to get an offer. As I said in my grandparent post, you want to make sure you're not coming off that way. Explain why the project failed. Don't explain why it was "beneath you."
Also, this is distinct from concerns about someone being overqualified. Overqualified (ie, should be running a team on paper but is applying for a grunt job) is a concern. Then you're worried that they might leave; but you're also worried that they're apparent "underperforming" is because actually quite incompetent, so exuding cluelessness will not help.
How is being able to tell your interviewer "I quit in the middle of projects I don't think will succeed, because it's good for my career" good for your career?
"I wanted to work on a project that was going to be successful, and I left when I became convinced that I couldn't contribute effectively given the current set up."
Showing you know the difference between a good project and bad project, especially ahead of time, is a plus in an interview. Showing you care enough about the end result, and not just a paycheck, is a plus. You should be able to communicate both of these things pretty convincingly if you left a high-profile disaster ahead of time. Make sure you're professional enough to talk about these things without badmouthing co-workers or sounding like a legend-in-your-own-mind, but other than that you're fine
Even if a project was successful, interviewees should be able to explain what they learned from the things that didn't work well. If it was unsuccessful, they should have a long list of mistakes that they now recognize first hand--and if you're going to claim you recognized all these things at the time they were happening, why did you stay?
I'd be just as interested in hearing the answer to that question. It's not like either situation would make you start with a presumptive strike against you--both should be pretty easy to explain. But there should be some level of awareness demonstrated, shouldn't there? If someone's attitude is "I did what I was told, my section worked fine," you know (at best) you're dealing with someone who has a pure grunt mentality and will never take responsibility for the overall product quality. I'd find working on a project like that very frustrating, and would be suspicious people who didn't.
Well, we could also start cutting up death row inmates for organs, which is a much more certain benefit than what you describe. In terms of utilitarian logic this makes more sense. One of the many reasons not to be a strict utilitarian, IMHO.
Ignoring ethics, the proposal is, I suspect, pretty weak practically. I don't know enough to do hard numbers. But the number of death row inmates (especially with exhausted appeals) in the US is pretty low, HIV transmission rates are naturally low, and if you try to make up by lots of sex (or even worse, direct injection) your experiment environment wouldn't model the real world system at all.
So it's quicker result, but not a quicker answer. Barring a very strong signal, and possibly not even then, you'd have nothing until you do the full size study anyway, and actions taken on interim results from prisoners could cause harm (by, e.g., encouraging risky behavior in recipients, or exposing people to side effects that have no benefits.)
The original smallpox immunization test was run on an orphan girl by exposing her to smallpox after she'd been immunized. Practices have been changed since then.
The 'ultimate' endpoint for a vaccine trials compares two large groups, one vaccinated, one not, over a long period of time and compare to infection rates. Since volunteers are assigned randomly to one group, if the overall rates are lower in the vaccine group than the control, and the difference holds up to statistical analysis, you have good evidence it works. The signal is weak, meaning the trials have to be long and large to tell the difference. They are expensive.
In the early stages of trials, you're looking more directly for markers that the vaccine might be working--are you stimulating antibody production of the type you intended to do? These are smaller and cheaper, and can at least tell you it won't work.
But you've now lost all correlation between the two cycles, which was the driving force for the hypothesis.
Scientifically, this is like suspecting someone of a murder solely because an eyewitness placed him at the crime; proving the eyewitness was mistaken; then, insisting he could still be the murderer because no one has proven he wasn't there. I mean, sure, that's technically true, but it's not a very promising lead anymore, is it?
Going back to the science, to support the original hypothesis you'd probably need hard evidence to validate that cosmic rays really do cause climate change, then additionally show it's at least plausible that the cycles do line up, best measurements to contrary.
Incidentally, I don't have any great knowledge of astronomy, but I do suspect the 'models' of the Milky Way have smaller error bars than you imply. It'd take a lot of energy to change the momentum of something that big, and if we collided with something that big we should still be able to see it . . .
The idea of programming as a semiskilled task, practiced by people with a few months' training, is dangerous. We wouldn't tolerate plumbers or accountants that poorly educated.
Not at all. Most homeowners do a lot more around the house with a lot less training, whether opening up the garbage disposal or trying to manage their retirement accoutns. The goal of these classes--especially for scientists--is the equivalent: Not to get people ready for programming a bug-free third party app; it's so they don't have to sit on their hands waiting for someone else to "build tools" to solve a perfectly manageable, one-off program that will let them move their research forward.
There may be things where there's a nice pre-built commercial or open source app; there will also be problems where there's a need for paid consultants. But there's a lot of ground in the middle, especially in specialized fields.
The plane iced up and lost speed, and the computer sent the plane into a dive to regain the critical speed. The pilots responded by thinking "Down? We don't want to go down!" and pulled up, which meant they lost the acceleration, the ability to stay airborne, and fifty-some passengers. The transcripts are chilling and gruesome.
Human nature apparently makes people more willing to trust human judgment than machines. I very much *don't* want to give the public, who may be perfectly sensible and intelligent in their areas of expertise but who are utterly ignorant of modern aircraft the right to override actual, scientific determination of what the safest way is to handle a specific emergency. Which is exactly what will happen if airlines need to pander to passengers going by zero knowledge and a ton of gut instinct about what makes them feel good.
Could be.
On the other hand, a name is just "imaginary property", so we have no reason to assume the pro-piracy opponents would even consider this a crime, would we?;)
At no point in any of the three articles did I see anyone accused of "lying" about class sizes or professor salaries. The number of classes less than 20 people actually did increase--at least partly by bogus 'load balancing'. And the professor salaries increased, both by raising them in reality and because the old reported numbers didn't include benefits (as they should have).
I also couldn't find the source for the claim about filling out fraudulent applications, though it's possible I missed it.
None of this is to defend the ranking gaming, but the summary gives an extremely different picture than I got from the source material, which mostly is in the category of 'administering to the test'
The Waits case relied on something more than just sound. The song was made to mimic a specific Waits song ("Step Right Up"), plus Waits had been vocal about rejecting any commercial deal (and criticizing artists who did). The issue wasn't copyright infringement, IIUC, but more falsely implying Waits endorsed the product. I assume it's legally the same as if you put Joe Montana's name or picture on a football without paying him.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway- It seems the whole mess was a storm in a teacup.
It seems it was just some setup where if a student reported a laptop missing the school which owned those laptops could remotely access it to try to figure out where it was and who was using it.
This is incorrect. It was not "just" some setup where a laptop could be located. It was a setup where other things could be done, such as having pictures taken of the user in their own home. This was admitted The fact that the stated intent was to only perform some minor, legitimate function does not mean the illegitimate functions did not exist.
And the responses you quote are bureaucrateeze for an organization that screwed up trying to backpedal. I'll do a gloss on some:
* No. At no time did any high school administrator have the ability or actually access the security- tracking software. We believe that the administrator at Harriton has been unfairly portrayed and unjustly attacked in connection with her attempts to be supportive of a student and his family. The district never did and never would use such tactics as a basis for disciplinary action.
Note the shiftiness here. They don't believe the administrator did it, the district would never do such a thing.
It sounds like a flat-out denial because of the wording, but there's nothing about the facts of this case. This really boils down to a general statement that the official district policy is not to break the law.
* Only two members of the technology department could access the security feature.
What does "could" mean? Policy? De facto practice? Number of people your admin said you should call when you want this done? How many people had the password to the web site? Under what conditions would they use it
* During the 2009-10 school year, 42 laptops were reported lost, stolen or missing and the tracking software was activated by the technology department in each instance.
Again, a non-answer: "How many times was the system used?" and the answer is "Forty-two laptops went missing, and we used the system all of those times." This doesn't address the main issue: Were there other times? Can administrators even tell?
* The district learned of the allegations Thursday, February 18th. No complaints were received prior to this date.
Hmm. Quick for a bureaucracy to do review of policy, investigation of authorization requests, logs & electronic audit trails, and interviews to see how the system was used in practice. At this point I'm wondering if they even have those things.
9. Is remote access activity by the district logged?
Yes. There is a log entry for every instance of the security feature activation. The logs will be reviewed as part of the special review conducted under the direction of special outside counsel.
Aah. Here we go; so there are logs. Maybe they are good electronic ones held by a third party, maybe editable ASCII text that wasn't backed up, and maybe just paper notebooks. Still better than nothing.
But--they haven't been reviewed yet. Which explains why every other paragraph is so evasive. They don't actually know squat at this point.
The district is basically blustering. I consider it a warning sign anytime a response to a credible claim of a serious violation is "No one did anything wrong!" before that can possibly be known; it implies to me a culture where it's just *assumed* everything acts correctly, and the people who should be enforcing good behavior are more interested in PR. Good organizations I've worked with say things like they are "reviewing logs to confirm that our stringent safeguards were followed" and "we take all violations seriously". Flat-out support comes after the facts are in.
It is possible that they are in this mode because of the lawsuit. I
A lot of news outlets are quoting the vice principal on this:
That quote derived from the plaintiffs, not from the vice principal. Read the article you linked to again, it clearly identifies the source of this complaint.
The school district still seems to be sticking to the claims that the instances of activation all refer to "lost or stolen" laptops, and that they were never photographed for other reasons.
Now, if I had to guess which story is more credible, I'm absolutely going with the plaintiff's. The district's claims all sound like they are based on theory--there's no mention, say, of a review of activation logs or safeguards to prevent this abuse of the system, so it's not even clear how they'd know it wasn't abused in this one case.
But you are misinforming people about the facts when you say news organizations have independently confirmed the act in question took place by speaking with the vice principal.
The necessary reasons for countries as they exist today mostly go away when the Internet fully connects individuals.* Obsolescence is a terrible thing for bureaucracy, but can be framed as the primary driver of most "issues" governments have with the Internet.
* physical defense and security being the only notable exception.
Can you give one example of a core role that becomes obsolete? I assume there must be something. The post? That was a core role a couple centuries ago, I guess.
Most state funds go to transportation infrastructure, "physical defense" (ie, military), law enforcement & prisons, education, health care, retirement pensions and other social safety nets (not in that order). Research funding, parks, civil courts, disaster recovery aid & regulatory enforcement and the like are a few of the other less-expensive things that get money.
*None* of those vanish when the internet connects individuals. [I understand that some will pick their least favorite (the military, or the social safety net) and say the government shouldn't be doing it anyway, but that desire's independent of 'connectivity'.] A few clerks may lose their jobs due to on-line requests being filled, but I'm not even sure what people are imagining when they think the internet will somehow obsolete governments--let alone why a state bureaucrat would be living in existential dread.
I assume this particular case boils down to people evading taxation, which is going to be an issue as long as the government spends any money at all. It'll be, unavoidably, the very last state function that becomes obsolete.
Yeah, okay... How come the telegraph isn't being nominated?
Because Wired magazine doesn't sell more copies when they spew idiotic hype about the telegraph?
Seriously. There are hundreds of distinct "nominees" for the Nobel Peace Prize each years. The committee solicits recommendations from thousands of people. Good for them that they cast a wide net to look for ideas. A lot of them will be at this level of idiocy; the Nobel committee will simply ignore them.
Wired apparently chose to nominate "The Internet," a transparently self-serving attempt to make the subject of their reporting seem more important. The Nobel committee itself won't release lists of who's been recommended for 50 years (see http://nobelprize.org/nomination/peace/), but Wired is free to announce that they nominated it, then cover a story which they created themselves. This is entirely consistent with their tradition a tradition of superficial gee-whiz features about things that sound possibly intriguing in a summary and are found to be inaccurate, irrelevant or meaningless after two seconds of thought.
Many other major things in modern history had something to do with government invention and usually some million people died in the ordeal.
So loans to a company making a roadster is like . . . oh, wait, you're trying to get *me* to stumble into Godwin's law in a discussion about electric vehicles. Well played, sir. ;)
Keep the market competitive, keep contracts honored, protect the goddamn borders and then some. Everything else is pissing the taxpayer's money away for issues of political importance, more often than not political capital. Once you enable political capital to be a viable alternative to monetary capital, you will notice that people are constantly producing political capital, because it's so easy to write pamphlets, manuscripts, ideas, manifests and declaration and so incredibly hard to have a viable business running.
Since there has never been a successful government that declined to intervene in economic matters of import--whether for technology, societal or just plain politica onesl--an assertion that a government like that would do better than the market system we currently have is a huge leap of faith. Since I'm not a radical, I'd prefer to tinker with hours rather than trust people who just sort of make up wild claims about some new organizational system.
There's certainly no mainstream theoretical economic model that supports claims of zero government intervention. There are empirical arguments about rent-seeking and dangers of over-intervention, which are entirely legitimate and should be remembered. But there are also empirical cases of highly productive government intervention, so I'm not buying argument from first principles on Tesla. Whether these loans are good or bad will depend on the specifics of the situation and how likely they are to produce something.
The government isn't supposed to invest in these things to make a profit. It's supposed to invest in them, like DARPA projects, because the overall benefits might be good for the state.
If it were a good deal in strictly financial terms for the government, then it'd be a good deal for private investors, and the government shouldn't be involved.
Bullshit. If you want to encourage technology development, then let people keep their money and invest it as they see fit, rather than having their money diverted to failed companies for political reasons. Tesla is not a viable business.
-jcr
Sorry, the fact is that major technology jumps in modern history have government intervention, from vaccines to biotech to railroads to the internet. I know it doesn't match the way some people want things to work, but not much I can do about it.
Private money goes mostly to short term, 3-5 year horizon projects. You don't need to subsidize those (not that we don't, through IP law), but any technology that has longer time to profitability needs help.
The Tesla model S sedan will retail for $50,000+ which means that less than 20% (and that is being very generous) of Americans will be able to afford this car. Tesla is a niche and it will always be niche. The best that they (and the taxpayers) could hope for is for them to be bought by one of the major auto manufacturers. Why should the taxpayers be financing car production by boutique manufacturers for wealthy people?
It's new technology; even if this model never takes off the expertise can spill over. It's not like giving money to Ford to keep more Mustangs on the street. It's a potential benefit even if the parent business fails.
It's a pretty good way encourage technology development. A lot of private people think they may be able to make it profitable eventually, they've put in their money, so the government leverages work that may prove valuable beyond the short-term by giving loans. No new government buildings needed, no new bureaucracy you can't kill.
I don't know enough about Tesla or the industry to say if this particular one is the best use of money, but it's not unique or anything. Corporations often get subsidies for new tech; basic research just doesn't get done at measurable levels these days in private industry. Bell Labs isn't what it used to be.
If the government subsidizes heavily so that average people can buy this particular car then you have to explain why the government should be in the business of picking winners and losers in the market for private automobiles.
The "picking winners and losers" thing has really become a meme. Government policies necessarily determine winners and losers all the time, of course, with zoning laws, housing subsidies, mileage standards, public roads, wars for oil, leasing out of federal land, tarriffs, and so on.
If we (ie, the people through the government) chose to spend massive subsidies on electric cars, it would be because we thought the benefits (noise, local pollution, energy flexibility, global warming) outweighed the costs. We'd be saying that cars that spew out those pollutants are "losers," and it's worth paying for them to get off the roads. That is fundamentally a government business--making decisions about the common areas in communities.
If Tesla is such a good investment then why cant they raise $450 million from the private equity market instead of from taxpayers; 99% of whom will never sit behind the wheel of a Tesla?
Because, obviously, a good investment for the government is not the same as a good investment for a private investor. We don't expect corporations to identify candidates in kindergarten and pay for their schooling through 12th grade and college. They'd never get their money back, at least not in a free labor system, but society as a whole benefits.
Your points are really all cookie-cutter stuff, by which I mean they apply to any government intervention, not just Tesla, not just for putatively rich people. But even in freshman college micro-economic models, concepts like externalities might justify state intervention, and in the real world, actual or de facto subsidies for other industries require it. Given this specific intervention is a loan, not some recurring grant and not regulation, which will let the company live or die in the market (as evidenced by the actual story), do you have any actual reason to oppose *this one*, and not just all?
Actually, there are only a handful sources of similar content of similar quality, and the two that immediately spring (WSJ and the Economist) are behind pay walls.
God knows the NYT has its flaws (WMD and Whitewater, as high-profile examples), but in terms of original national (US) reporting it's way above the AP or the BBC. I think the WSJ is (was?) better, but their big stories (Enron, back-dating options, Vioxx, for example) are obviously business related. McClatchy seems to have an edge documenting issues with the 'official unnamed' sources, but doesn't do as much elsewhere. Most other quality sites simply do different things altogether.
Personally, I pay for the WSJ and browse the NYT free on line. This will probably make me switch to the NYT for a year and see how I like it as a daily news source. So, yeah, in my one case their strategy will work.
Like the TV show Heroes? It's fun to watch but certainly not realistic. For example: How can Sylar pick-up a person and throw him against a wall? Newton's Law dictates that Sylar should be pushed backward with an equal force (recoil). Also where is the energy coming from? Sylar must eat 50,000 calories a day* to maintain that level of "toss people against walls" energy output.
I'd rather stick with SCIENCE fiction, with emphasis on the science and making it not violate known universal laws/theories.
IMHO these complaints are overly fastidious, and not just because it's just a silly show.
I always thought it was obvious, to science fiction nerds, that if you're writing about telekinesis or similar nonsense you simply assume that the bulk of the force is between the victim and some object (like the ground, or a wall) and that the energy comes not directly from Sylar's biochemistry but from some ability to tap into other energy sources. A normal human, as an analogy, can bring down the side of a mountain--by starting a landslide. Looked at simplistically, it "violates" the principles you mention (where does the energy come from? how does he exert the force?) far worse than tossing a guy across the room, but obviously if the conditions are right and you understand what's really happening it's not just plausible, but trivial to explain.
Good, fun hard SF for me is coming up with inventive, lively explanations of why the conditions are right for whatever cool thing they want to have happen. Not that I have any desire to have a good writer waste time on psychic powers these days, which are overdone, old and cliched, but there are other things just as superficially unlikely should still make appearances.
What makes Heroes non-science fiction is not any one example--which could hand-waved quite adequately by a good SF writer. The Heroes problem is their utter indifference to *any* explanation, which is partly tone and also leads to wild inconsistencies in logic and consistency.
Is anyone writing SF like that these days? It seems to have stopped in the '70s or early '80s. Maybe it's just what my reading habits are these days, but I'd love a writer with the approach to science (and a better approach to plot and characters) of a vintage Larry Niven.
I'm shocked I tell you! Huge company with an armada of lawyers steals everything from a startup. Next thing you know the execs at B&N will be rewarded for their cleverness.
It's never happened before.
Indeed.
Also, never before in the history of corporate America, has a small company make a predictable copy of product and then sued a bigger competitor for it's equally predictable product. This is all thoroughly uncharted territory. ;)
Absent a lot more information, there's really no way to figure if B&N is remotely guilty of anything at all. Talks about licensing do *not* prevent you from working on a similar product yourself; the practice is routine. If your internal project fails or is delayed, you want a backup--that doesn't commit you to buying or licensing before you've signed a deal. And Slashdot, of all places, should be sceptical of claims that a company "deserves" some space in the IP world just for itself because they thought about something similar.
They are misrepresenting the site as presenting all reviews, not just ones that they approve. That's fraud with material financial consequences.
Are they misrepresenting it? That would be the key question as to whether it is or should be illegal.
If they just say "These are customer reviews," there's no claim about completeness. Any more than review excerpts that appear on the inside covers of books purport to be a scientific sampling of critical opinion. Or audience snippets about some new musical that appear on TV ; they aren't really just broadcasting what everyone said.
This is plain caveat emptor; I can't believe anyone is surprised let along indignant about it. Do people really believe they don't need to visit a third party site to do research these days? Consumer Reports has stayed in business for a reason; I do my research on-line but the principle is the same. You can't expect someone who profits from making a sale to try and talk you out of it.
They are trying to sell you something, it clearly states it's their site, and you should probably be skeptical about everything you read on it. Especially for an electronics retailer, where "anti-advertising" existing stock presumably means eating a considerable loss (unlike, say, Amazon.) You can also hold it against them and choose not to shop there if you don't like it. (In my case, untrustworthy reviews give me an active reason to leave a site and do research, so vendors that post more-or-less unfiltered reviews get more business from me.)
If they are telling you anywhere it's "all user comments," then you have a case, but I've never seen that claim even on Amazon. And if they are telling the would-be poster that his comments will be posted independent of content, the poster has a claim. Otherwise? There are tons of review sites, aren't there?
If a sensitive package got delivered, by mistake, and it wasn't returned, and the resident of the house didn't respond to reasonable contact requests and showed no sign of being home, you might well see some analagous action. Not "burning down the house", but a court order to retrieve property that didn't belong to him. It certainly doesn't seem unreasonable to consider such action.
The "burning down the house" analogy, is vastly overstating things, as are most other posters. This is hardly a permanent deactivation--the account is down, you call Google, they explain the situation and you get it sorted out. If the gentleman did nothing wrong, it'd be a nuisance, but quickly resolved. If the account is one of the many abandoned or semi-abandoned ones floating around the internet, sealing it off is I think very prudent.
In both the analogy and the actual case, context matters a lot. I'd certainly hope the judge grilled the bank about other options and how they'd tried to contact the account owner, and asked Google to try and contact him on the court's behalf first. Ask Google if any of the messages have been read. Plus the actual legal standing, how harmful the information could be, and a dozen other factors not described in detail.
But the outrage level over this seems *way* too high. There's this attitude around the internet that it's a rank injustice to be inconvenienced by anything that wasn't your fault. (Not attributing this to you, but many posters certainly channel this feeling.) Meh. Try out another analogy, some days you wake up and find your driveway blocked by firetrucks helping out a neighbor, or your street blocked off because police are investigating a crime. We live in a world with other people, sometimes their crises are more important than our daily routine. It happens.
Technically, "net neutrality" refers to the traffic being completely agnostic about what a packet is--phone, video, http, etc.
Most of the insidious scenarios painted by the loss of neutrality do relate to content filtering--ie, Comcast makes a deal with Amazon and gimps the connections to, say, Powell's dodgy enough customers just think Amazon is the place to shop.
If it's really as described in this case, for bandwidth management, I personally don't think it's all that scary. There are issues about transparency, and for some users this might mean their ISP isn't providing sufficient bandwidth anymore. But IMHO it's not automatically different than simple changing the maximum bandwidth available to a customer.
On the other hand, if a AT&T gimped VOIP to knock Skype out of business, or Comcast filtered video so you needed their cable services, you could get filtering-by-protocol that was just about as evil as the content filtering.
I thought about what is different between the message you're giving and the GP his version of the message. Both basically say the same, but your version is better.
[ . . . ]
Something to be learned from that.
Well, thanks.
I'll add, along those lines, that the second approach suggests you're willing to work with the manager if things start going poorly. Someone who says "This project is failing, fix it before I quit" creates problems for a manager. Someone who says "Can we figure out a better approach?" creates opportunities.
On what planet? In the interviewer's mind, that translates into: "Given the doomed projects coming up, this guy is going to quit within three months. No Hire."
You may need to work on your interviewer mind melding skills.
Just ask yourself it that's what you'd think as a manager interviewing an employee. "I have two candidates, one who will understand what's going on in the workplace around him, and one who won't. I obviously need to hire the clueless one, since the smart one will recognize that I am an incompetent who will do nothing but feed him projects are destined to fail." I imagine probably not? Then why do you think anyone else would think that way?
You may be confusing a candidate's being able to distinguish good and bad projects with a candidate who's just a prima donna. The guy who projects a sense of entitlement, who will only want to work on the central aspects of high-profile projects, yeah, he's not going to get an offer. As I said in my grandparent post, you want to make sure you're not coming off that way. Explain why the project failed. Don't explain why it was "beneath you."
Also, this is distinct from concerns about someone being overqualified. Overqualified (ie, should be running a team on paper but is applying for a grunt job) is a concern. Then you're worried that they might leave; but you're also worried that they're apparent "underperforming" is because actually quite incompetent, so exuding cluelessness will not help.
How is being able to tell your interviewer "I quit in the middle of projects I don't think will succeed, because it's good for my career" good for your career?
"I wanted to work on a project that was going to be successful, and I left when I became convinced that I couldn't contribute effectively given the current set up."
Showing you know the difference between a good project and bad project, especially ahead of time, is a plus in an interview. Showing you care enough about the end result, and not just a paycheck, is a plus. You should be able to communicate both of these things pretty convincingly if you left a high-profile disaster ahead of time. Make sure you're professional enough to talk about these things without badmouthing co-workers or sounding like a legend-in-your-own-mind, but other than that you're fine
Even if a project was successful, interviewees should be able to explain what they learned from the things that didn't work well. If it was unsuccessful, they should have a long list of mistakes that they now recognize first hand--and if you're going to claim you recognized all these things at the time they were happening, why did you stay?
I'd be just as interested in hearing the answer to that question. It's not like either situation would make you start with a presumptive strike against you--both should be pretty easy to explain. But there should be some level of awareness demonstrated, shouldn't there? If someone's attitude is "I did what I was told, my section worked fine," you know (at best) you're dealing with someone who has a pure grunt mentality and will never take responsibility for the overall product quality. I'd find working on a project like that very frustrating, and would be suspicious people who didn't.
Well, we could also start cutting up death row inmates for organs, which is a much more certain benefit than what you describe. In terms of utilitarian logic this makes more sense. One of the many reasons not to be a strict utilitarian, IMHO.
Ignoring ethics, the proposal is, I suspect, pretty weak practically. I don't know enough to do hard numbers. But the number of death row inmates (especially with exhausted appeals) in the US is pretty low, HIV transmission rates are naturally low, and if you try to make up by lots of sex (or even worse, direct injection) your experiment environment wouldn't model the real world system at all.
So it's quicker result, but not a quicker answer. Barring a very strong signal, and possibly not even then, you'd have nothing until you do the full size study anyway, and actions taken on interim results from prisoners could cause harm (by, e.g., encouraging risky behavior in recipients, or exposing people to side effects that have no benefits.)
The original smallpox immunization test was run on an orphan girl by exposing her to smallpox after she'd been immunized. Practices have been changed since then.
The 'ultimate' endpoint for a vaccine trials compares two large groups, one vaccinated, one not, over a long period of time and compare to infection rates. Since volunteers are assigned randomly to one group, if the overall rates are lower in the vaccine group than the control, and the difference holds up to statistical analysis, you have good evidence it works. The signal is weak, meaning the trials have to be long and large to tell the difference. They are expensive.
In the early stages of trials, you're looking more directly for markers that the vaccine might be working--are you stimulating antibody production of the type you intended to do? These are smaller and cheaper, and can at least tell you it won't work.
But you've now lost all correlation between the two cycles, which was the driving force for the hypothesis. Scientifically, this is like suspecting someone of a murder solely because an eyewitness placed him at the crime; proving the eyewitness was mistaken; then, insisting he could still be the murderer because no one has proven he wasn't there. I mean, sure, that's technically true, but it's not a very promising lead anymore, is it? Going back to the science, to support the original hypothesis you'd probably need hard evidence to validate that cosmic rays really do cause climate change, then additionally show it's at least plausible that the cycles do line up, best measurements to contrary. Incidentally, I don't have any great knowledge of astronomy, but I do suspect the 'models' of the Milky Way have smaller error bars than you imply. It'd take a lot of energy to change the momentum of something that big, and if we collided with something that big we should still be able to see it . . .
The idea of programming as a semiskilled task, practiced by people with a few months' training, is dangerous. We wouldn't tolerate plumbers or accountants that poorly educated.
Not at all. Most homeowners do a lot more around the house with a lot less training, whether opening up the garbage disposal or trying to manage their retirement accoutns. The goal of these classes--especially for scientists--is the equivalent: Not to get people ready for programming a bug-free third party app; it's so they don't have to sit on their hands waiting for someone else to "build tools" to solve a perfectly manageable, one-off program that will let them move their research forward.
There may be things where there's a nice pre-built commercial or open source app; there will also be problems where there's a need for paid consultants. But there's a lot of ground in the middle, especially in specialized fields.
The most recent bad accident before the recent one--the one we actually know the cause of--was caused by pilots overriding their computerized safety systems: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124212789938210353.html
The plane iced up and lost speed, and the computer sent the plane into a dive to regain the critical speed. The pilots responded by thinking "Down? We don't want to go down!" and pulled up, which meant they lost the acceleration, the ability to stay airborne, and fifty-some passengers. The transcripts are chilling and gruesome.
Human nature apparently makes people more willing to trust human judgment than machines. I very much *don't* want to give the public, who may be perfectly sensible and intelligent in their areas of expertise but who are utterly ignorant of modern aircraft the right to override actual, scientific determination of what the safest way is to handle a specific emergency. Which is exactly what will happen if airlines need to pander to passengers going by zero knowledge and a ton of gut instinct about what makes them feel good.
Could be. On the other hand, a name is just "imaginary property", so we have no reason to assume the pro-piracy opponents would even consider this a crime, would we? ;)
At no point in any of the three articles did I see anyone accused of "lying" about class sizes or professor salaries. The number of classes less than 20 people actually did increase--at least partly by bogus 'load balancing'. And the professor salaries increased, both by raising them in reality and because the old reported numbers didn't include benefits (as they should have).
I also couldn't find the source for the claim about filling out fraudulent applications, though it's possible I missed it.
None of this is to defend the ranking gaming, but the summary gives an extremely different picture than I got from the source material, which mostly is in the category of 'administering to the test'
The Waits case relied on something more than just sound. The song was made to mimic a specific Waits song ("Step Right Up"), plus Waits had been vocal about rejecting any commercial deal (and criticizing artists who did). The issue wasn't copyright infringement, IIUC, but more falsely implying Waits endorsed the product. I assume it's legally the same as if you put Joe Montana's name or picture on a football without paying him.
My main understanding is press accounts, read at the time, the full decision seems to be here, though: http://markroesler.com/pdf/caselaw/Waits%20v.%20Frito-Lay%20Inc.%20_1992_.pdf