I've not read the entire case, but it definitely lays down precedent that something like this would be a search. Via the Wikipedia entry, "Justice Scalia also discussed how future technology can invade on one's right of privacy and therefore authored the opinion so that it protected against more sophisticated surveillance equipment." That leads me to believe that even though there's a different electromagnetic wave involved, the court would likely see it as a "search," thus necessitating a warrant.
It's definitely a dumb idea to have these things just roaming the streets, and that's without even considering the privacy concerns. It's absurdly hard to actually identify items that only rarely occur, say weapons, in samples like this. The human eye just isn't that good at it. It gets worse the more samples you take. The only place I can see for this is scanning at the border where people being smuggled in would be pretty obvious. At the border, a search like this makes sense since by law it's necessary to declare many items that you bring into a country. Otherwise, not only is it mostly a waste of time, but a dead ringer for an unreasonable search. The article was light on just how prevalent their use is outside of ports and points of entry, so it's hard to say if there's any serious danger to the average person on the street.
Also, health concerns are probably overblown. If the dose is in micro Sv, that's a small fraction of the regular background dose.
If it's going to become increasingly easy to build nuclear weapons in the future, why worry about maintaining obsolete stockpiles and fading institutional knowledge of said obsolete, more difficult to build stockpiles?
I just recently converted to android. Maybe I'm just late to the game, and we're on the tail end of this exodus now. My first impression, having been on the platform for a week, is that there has been almost no development, especially in making games, for android that is anywhere comparable to the iphone. I would posit that this "exodus" is made up. The market is still nowhere near as developed as the app store. Any discussion about a comparison of the two models is premature at best.
It might be also of some comfort to note that one of my law classes just went over a stat that said something to the effect like 95% of all cases never even make it to trial. Most cases are settled outside of the courtroom and handled pretty much by the attorneys. Only the most complicated usually make it to trial. Come to think of it, that may actually not bring any comfort at all. My point is, though, that most of the workings in the criminal justice system are out of the hands of poorly informed jurors. They only get the really tricky ones that are hotly contested and the most difficult to rule on.
Let me be the first to say that this sounds awesome, and I have a very strong urge to attempt to try and enter the sixth grade again! I can't tell you how much I would have loved to have had the opportunity to be so fully engaged in grade school.
Basically 90% of my public school education consisted of insufferable lectures with a worksheet at the end, and maybe if you're lucky a paper to discuss. Not until I got to the very end of high school did I get to engage in anything that wasn't essentially passive rote learning. Even the dual-enrollment/AP stuff I took relied soley on often dry discussion though, and had nothing on the proposed pedagogical model put forward by Q2L.
I'm sure that my public school education is somewhat representative of the majority experience. I'm sure there is a lot of collective envy with stuff like this:
A core goal of our pedagogy is to help students learn to reason about their world. Systemic reasoning, or the ability to see the world in terms of the many interrelated systems that make it up--from biological to political to technological and social--supports students in meeting this goal.Enduring understandings include:
1. Understanding of feedback dynamics (i.e., reinforcing and balancing feedback loops): understanding that small level changes can affect macro-level processes.
2. Understanding of system dynamics: understanding that multiple (i.e. dynamic) relationships within a system.
3. Understanding hidden dimensions of a system: understanding that modifications to system elements can lead to changes that are not easily recognizable within a system.
4. Understanding of the quality of relationships within a system: understanding when a system is working or not working at optimal levels.
5. Homological understanding: understanding that similar system dynamics can exist in other systems that may appear to be entirely different.
I would kill to be able to go back in time and have an education under people pushing such an enlightened philosophy.
While it may be good science, it is probably a very bad for the journalism business, and really would make things terribly inconvenient. A large enough section of the population is not at all interested in reading articles that take the time to painstakingly prove each assertion made in an article, and for the most part this is for good reason. Good journalism is about taking complex ideas from many disciplines and distilling them into consumable, simpler ideas for the masses. There are many who would describe this as "dumbing things down" and hate the impurity of it. The fact of the matter is that we can't all be purists about everything. The point of journalism is not to make everyone experts about everything that gets reported on, but rather just to offer primers and spark interest. Holding journalists to such high expectations is idealistic, and ultimately unfeasible. Sometimes they have to deal in broad strokes.
As for the situation with libel law in Great Britain, as long as it's true in my book it's not libel. If your business or reputation can't stand up to the facts, then you need to change business or remake your repuation.
You realize when you say things like a mafia run state would be a "libertarian utopia," you are no better than the people that yell about Obama "turning America socialist/communist," and you're only a step above the ones that paint Hitler mustaches on his portrait. Don't promote insipid straw men.
Actually, home ownership for all is a terrible idea. Not everyone needs to be a home owner, per se. Obviously, everyone needs housing, just not to own a house. Very high rates of home ownership have been consistently shown to be correlated with high rates of unemployment. A house is a tremendous fixed cost, and one of those costs is ones mobility as a worker. If your homeowner there is a tremendous disincentive to move to find a job. When recessions hit, this disincentive pushes unemployment higher and causes the recession to deepen and last longer. Home ownership for everyone is not only unaffordable, but it is dangerous economically. A mobile and flexible labor force is important for any economy.
Now to what extent did things like the CRA actually create this crisis is a whole other story. Government pushed home ownership certainly contributed, but it went hand in hand with a basically industry wide lapse of reason when it came to assessing risk in the financial sector.
Well, ideally the Bolivian government would negotiate the best price they could for selling off the lithium to foreign firms that hold a comparative advantage in producing batteries. If foreigners had to buy lithium batteries from Bolivia that were much higher priced due to Bolivia's high cost of producing batteries en masse would depress demand for the lithium in the first place, leaving Bolivia no better off. The best thing for Bolivia to do is to negotiate the best trade deal possible and take the gain from that deal and invest it in infrastructure and education making the Bolivian economy that much more sustainable.
Have you been to West Virginia? It's dirt poor now. They have both poverty and environmental destruction. People want to act like there is a constant negative association between the two, when there is none. I wouldn't advocate a complete end to coal mining like some I know. Just from observation the whole practice could be a lot saner.
Morales has no intention of leaving the lithium on the ground. He has example after example of resource rich developing country gaining no benefit from allowing foreign firms come and extract said resources. That lithium is a Bolivian resource and Morales government has every right to negotiate the best price he can for the Bolivian people, and to keep the extraction process from causing negative externalities. Practicing sound economics does not mean giving into to corporate imperialism.
Oh no I understand your argument. Resource extraction of any kind is never sustainable on a long enough time scale. Any country, region, etc. that builds its economy entirely on resource extraction is doomed to one day be overrun by poverty. The sad thing is the decision to sacrifice the long term health of the are has already been made here for the most part. That's why I'm on board with Morales. He's one leader that has learned from history, at least in this respect.
I am actually very aware of strip mining practices. My father actually works at one, funnily enough. It was a matter of economics and not ideals which is rather disheartening, but we had mountains of debt and there aren't exactly a lot of good paying jobs to go around. Moral of the story, take care of natural resources on lands so people aren't left with tough decisions of supporting a family or soul-crushing environmental destruction like my dad was.
If you'll notice, the article specifically mentioned that the Bolivian salt flats with these lithium deposits are projected to only be a sustainable source for a few decades. We are very aware of the scarcity of the resource.
As for promoting hydrogen, I've always understood fuel cells to be just simply to inefficient. Plus, batteries are recyclable, so I'm not sure how non-renewable of a resource you can consider them.
I generally lean towards advocating market based solutions and free trade in most economic situations. Coming from rural southwestern Virginia, however, and seeing the grip the coal industry has on politics in some areas around here I know how people can really be disadvantaged by mismanagement of natural resources. I also think back to the damage done by the informal imperialism in the Middle-East at the hands of BP (formerly known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) and their like. In this case I can't help but be supportive of Morales' efforts to put these lithium reserves to work for the Bolivian campesinos. Having mineral resources has proven to be a curse just as often as it has been a blessing in modern history. Here's to hoping one Latin American government can get it right.
Here is a briefing on the PLAID 6 protocol with more specifics on the actual algorithms and cryptography in general involved. PDF link if the first one doesn't work for you.
In one paragraph the article calls the Internet "meritocratic," but still wants to argue that it "subverts" democracy. Maybe, there is no "tyranny of the minority." Just maybe, people look at a lot of institutions as absurd and really would like to see Stephen Colbert in charge of them, and it's just taken the Internet increasing the flow of information for us to realize this.
If a military base is attacked, would it be a proportional, legitimate response to bring down the attacker's power grid if that would also shut down its hospital systems, its air traffic control system, or its banking system?"
Seriously, if any military official takes more than two seconds to realize that it is clearly insane and has not learned one thing from our struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Alienating the populace of a nation like that has no benefit and is outright counterproductive. An attack on civilians like this works only in the context of strategic, conventional total war. We haven't fought a conventional war in 50 years. For any foreseeable conflict that U.S. could be involved in, it would be only sane to scrap the idea of attacking civilian infrastructure of any kind, information infrastructure included.
We should also consider whether it might be necessary to harden some of the local infrastructure of our communities. The old Bell System used to arrange cables in a ring around a city, so that a cut in any one location could be routed around. It's not clear how much modern telephone companies have continued that practice. It might not have helped in Morgan Hill, as the attackers apparently even disabled an unused cable that could have been used to recover from the broken connections.
Always assume the enemy knows the system. Hardening wouldn't hurt, but redundancy is the most important thing. Hardening a system tends to make it that much more vulnerable to a single insider. Redundancy mitigates this effect. Having such a small group be able cause so much disruption from such a relatively simple act makes it obvious that the city placed way too much on a single point of failure remaining in tact. Have redundant fiber. Have auxiliary wireless setups. Maintain a base of ham volunteers. Multiply your points of failure.
Personally, I think this sort of lax infrastructure security has become endemic. The 'war on terror' rhetoric we were fed for so long has us looking for the next suicide jet-liner attack or what have you, completely distorting any real conception the public had of real-world modern security risks.
There is nothing particularly insightful about the article. Obviously the largest portion of the computer using population would never need cutting edge power, so effectively "good enough" has always been the paradigm. How many of us have super computers? This is just a piece with some wishful thinking hoping that people eventually see through Microsoft's coerced perpetual upgrade cycle.
Oh my... we have already used one chair throwing reference in this thread. A more appropriate response would have been, "I imagine that is one alarm clock that is about to get f**king killed!" Alternatively, "Ballmer's lack of reply is most likely due to the torment caused by the voices in his head switching their chant from 'developers, developers, developers...' to 'Oracle, Oracle, Oracle...,' would have worked as well. Please practice proper meme etiquette in the future.
With regard to your post above, does the fact that bandwidth is oversold not change the economics of it to something that is different from other utilities? Another honest question, is it still today necessary to oversell bandwidth to such ratios as 10:1 or higher?
Some bloggers also speculated that the plan was part of a scheme to discourage people from watching streaming videos online rather than watching Time Warner Cable on television, which Time Warner officials denied.
I wouldn't actually be all that upset if Time Warner was able to kill video streamed over the Internet. I like the way the Internet is now. Maybe I'm being too conservative, but moving video over from the sunk cost that is the cable network we already have in place is going to be too costly and to me seems dangerous to the Internet as we know it.
I personally think tiered pricing is a move in the right direction, though. As it stands now, heavy transfer people are being subsidized by those who are light users. This does not exempt communications companies from being held responsible for the universal service funds they most likely squandered, but consumption based billing only makes sense. It always surprises me how this remains a perpetual issue.
Traitor! When the war with machines comes benjamindees will go down as the quisling that taught them they were self-sufficient. You fool! You've completely cut us out of the loop. Now we don't even have a shot at getting that utopian neural simulation of a world to enjoy while we humbly serve as batteries.
Slashdot Mirror
I've not read the entire case, but it definitely lays down precedent that something like this would be a search. Via the Wikipedia entry, "Justice Scalia also discussed how future technology can invade on one's right of privacy and therefore authored the opinion so that it protected against more sophisticated surveillance equipment." That leads me to believe that even though there's a different electromagnetic wave involved, the court would likely see it as a "search," thus necessitating a warrant.
It's definitely a dumb idea to have these things just roaming the streets, and that's without even considering the privacy concerns. It's absurdly hard to actually identify items that only rarely occur, say weapons, in samples like this. The human eye just isn't that good at it. It gets worse the more samples you take. The only place I can see for this is scanning at the border where people being smuggled in would be pretty obvious. At the border, a search like this makes sense since by law it's necessary to declare many items that you bring into a country. Otherwise, not only is it mostly a waste of time, but a dead ringer for an unreasonable search. The article was light on just how prevalent their use is outside of ports and points of entry, so it's hard to say if there's any serious danger to the average person on the street. Also, health concerns are probably overblown. If the dose is in micro Sv, that's a small fraction of the regular background dose.
If it's going to become increasingly easy to build nuclear weapons in the future, why worry about maintaining obsolete stockpiles and fading institutional knowledge of said obsolete, more difficult to build stockpiles?
I just recently converted to android. Maybe I'm just late to the game, and we're on the tail end of this exodus now. My first impression, having been on the platform for a week, is that there has been almost no development, especially in making games, for android that is anywhere comparable to the iphone. I would posit that this "exodus" is made up. The market is still nowhere near as developed as the app store. Any discussion about a comparison of the two models is premature at best.
It might be also of some comfort to note that one of my law classes just went over a stat that said something to the effect like 95% of all cases never even make it to trial. Most cases are settled outside of the courtroom and handled pretty much by the attorneys. Only the most complicated usually make it to trial. Come to think of it, that may actually not bring any comfort at all. My point is, though, that most of the workings in the criminal justice system are out of the hands of poorly informed jurors. They only get the really tricky ones that are hotly contested and the most difficult to rule on.
Let me be the first to say that this sounds awesome, and I have a very strong urge to attempt to try and enter the sixth grade again! I can't tell you how much I would have loved to have had the opportunity to be so fully engaged in grade school.
Basically 90% of my public school education consisted of insufferable lectures with a worksheet at the end, and maybe if you're lucky a paper to discuss. Not until I got to the very end of high school did I get to engage in anything that wasn't essentially passive rote learning. Even the dual-enrollment/AP stuff I took relied soley on often dry discussion though, and had nothing on the proposed pedagogical model put forward by Q2L.
I'm sure that my public school education is somewhat representative of the majority experience. I'm sure there is a lot of collective envy with stuff like this:
A core goal of our pedagogy is to help students learn to reason about their world. Systemic reasoning, or the ability to see the world in terms of the many interrelated systems that make it up--from biological to political to technological and social--supports students in meeting this goal.Enduring understandings include:
1. Understanding of feedback dynamics (i.e., reinforcing and balancing feedback loops): understanding that small level changes can affect macro-level processes.
2. Understanding of system dynamics: understanding that multiple (i.e. dynamic) relationships within a system.
3. Understanding hidden dimensions of a system: understanding that modifications to system elements can lead to changes that are not easily recognizable within a system.
4. Understanding of the quality of relationships within a system: understanding when a system is working or not working at optimal levels.
5. Homological understanding: understanding that similar system dynamics can exist in other systems that may appear to be entirely different.
I would kill to be able to go back in time and have an education under people pushing such an enlightened philosophy.
While it may be good science, it is probably a very bad for the journalism business, and really would make things terribly inconvenient. A large enough section of the population is not at all interested in reading articles that take the time to painstakingly prove each assertion made in an article, and for the most part this is for good reason. Good journalism is about taking complex ideas from many disciplines and distilling them into consumable, simpler ideas for the masses. There are many who would describe this as "dumbing things down" and hate the impurity of it. The fact of the matter is that we can't all be purists about everything. The point of journalism is not to make everyone experts about everything that gets reported on, but rather just to offer primers and spark interest. Holding journalists to such high expectations is idealistic, and ultimately unfeasible. Sometimes they have to deal in broad strokes. As for the situation with libel law in Great Britain, as long as it's true in my book it's not libel. If your business or reputation can't stand up to the facts, then you need to change business or remake your repuation.
You realize when you say things like a mafia run state would be a "libertarian utopia," you are no better than the people that yell about Obama "turning America socialist/communist," and you're only a step above the ones that paint Hitler mustaches on his portrait. Don't promote insipid straw men.
Actually, home ownership for all is a terrible idea. Not everyone needs to be a home owner, per se. Obviously, everyone needs housing, just not to own a house. Very high rates of home ownership have been consistently shown to be correlated with high rates of unemployment. A house is a tremendous fixed cost, and one of those costs is ones mobility as a worker. If your homeowner there is a tremendous disincentive to move to find a job. When recessions hit, this disincentive pushes unemployment higher and causes the recession to deepen and last longer. Home ownership for everyone is not only unaffordable, but it is dangerous economically. A mobile and flexible labor force is important for any economy.
Now to what extent did things like the CRA actually create this crisis is a whole other story. Government pushed home ownership certainly contributed, but it went hand in hand with a basically industry wide lapse of reason when it came to assessing risk in the financial sector.
Well, ideally the Bolivian government would negotiate the best price they could for selling off the lithium to foreign firms that hold a comparative advantage in producing batteries. If foreigners had to buy lithium batteries from Bolivia that were much higher priced due to Bolivia's high cost of producing batteries en masse would depress demand for the lithium in the first place, leaving Bolivia no better off. The best thing for Bolivia to do is to negotiate the best trade deal possible and take the gain from that deal and invest it in infrastructure and education making the Bolivian economy that much more sustainable.
Have you been to West Virginia? It's dirt poor now. They have both poverty and environmental destruction. People want to act like there is a constant negative association between the two, when there is none. I wouldn't advocate a complete end to coal mining like some I know. Just from observation the whole practice could be a lot saner.
Morales has no intention of leaving the lithium on the ground. He has example after example of resource rich developing country gaining no benefit from allowing foreign firms come and extract said resources. That lithium is a Bolivian resource and Morales government has every right to negotiate the best price he can for the Bolivian people, and to keep the extraction process from causing negative externalities. Practicing sound economics does not mean giving into to corporate imperialism.
Oh no I understand your argument. Resource extraction of any kind is never sustainable on a long enough time scale. Any country, region, etc. that builds its economy entirely on resource extraction is doomed to one day be overrun by poverty. The sad thing is the decision to sacrifice the long term health of the are has already been made here for the most part. That's why I'm on board with Morales. He's one leader that has learned from history, at least in this respect.
I am actually very aware of strip mining practices. My father actually works at one, funnily enough. It was a matter of economics and not ideals which is rather disheartening, but we had mountains of debt and there aren't exactly a lot of good paying jobs to go around. Moral of the story, take care of natural resources on lands so people aren't left with tough decisions of supporting a family or soul-crushing environmental destruction like my dad was.
If you'll notice, the article specifically mentioned that the Bolivian salt flats with these lithium deposits are projected to only be a sustainable source for a few decades. We are very aware of the scarcity of the resource.
As for promoting hydrogen, I've always understood fuel cells to be just simply to inefficient. Plus, batteries are recyclable, so I'm not sure how non-renewable of a resource you can consider them.
I generally lean towards advocating market based solutions and free trade in most economic situations. Coming from rural southwestern Virginia, however, and seeing the grip the coal industry has on politics in some areas around here I know how people can really be disadvantaged by mismanagement of natural resources. I also think back to the damage done by the informal imperialism in the Middle-East at the hands of BP (formerly known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) and their like. In this case I can't help but be supportive of Morales' efforts to put these lithium reserves to work for the Bolivian campesinos. Having mineral resources has proven to be a curse just as often as it has been a blessing in modern history. Here's to hoping one Latin American government can get it right.
Here is a briefing on the PLAID 6 protocol with more specifics on the actual algorithms and cryptography in general involved. PDF link if the first one doesn't work for you.
In one paragraph the article calls the Internet "meritocratic," but still wants to argue that it "subverts" democracy. Maybe, there is no "tyranny of the minority." Just maybe, people look at a lot of institutions as absurd and really would like to see Stephen Colbert in charge of them, and it's just taken the Internet increasing the flow of information for us to realize this.
If a military base is attacked, would it be a proportional, legitimate response to bring down the attacker's power grid if that would also shut down its hospital systems, its air traffic control system, or its banking system?"
Seriously, if any military official takes more than two seconds to realize that it is clearly insane and has not learned one thing from our struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Alienating the populace of a nation like that has no benefit and is outright counterproductive. An attack on civilians like this works only in the context of strategic, conventional total war. We haven't fought a conventional war in 50 years. For any foreseeable conflict that U.S. could be involved in, it would be only sane to scrap the idea of attacking civilian infrastructure of any kind, information infrastructure included.
We should also consider whether it might be necessary to harden some of the local infrastructure of our communities. The old Bell System used to arrange cables in a ring around a city, so that a cut in any one location could be routed around. It's not clear how much modern telephone companies have continued that practice. It might not have helped in Morgan Hill, as the attackers apparently even disabled an unused cable that could have been used to recover from the broken connections.
Always assume the enemy knows the system. Hardening wouldn't hurt, but redundancy is the most important thing. Hardening a system tends to make it that much more vulnerable to a single insider. Redundancy mitigates this effect. Having such a small group be able cause so much disruption from such a relatively simple act makes it obvious that the city placed way too much on a single point of failure remaining in tact. Have redundant fiber. Have auxiliary wireless setups. Maintain a base of ham volunteers. Multiply your points of failure.
Personally, I think this sort of lax infrastructure security has become endemic. The 'war on terror' rhetoric we were fed for so long has us looking for the next suicide jet-liner attack or what have you, completely distorting any real conception the public had of real-world modern security risks.
There is nothing particularly insightful about the article. Obviously the largest portion of the computer using population would never need cutting edge power, so effectively "good enough" has always been the paradigm. How many of us have super computers? This is just a piece with some wishful thinking hoping that people eventually see through Microsoft's coerced perpetual upgrade cycle.
Is this anything like TCMP?
Oh my... we have already used one chair throwing reference in this thread. A more appropriate response would have been, "I imagine that is one alarm clock that is about to get f**king killed!" Alternatively, "Ballmer's lack of reply is most likely due to the torment caused by the voices in his head switching their chant from 'developers, developers, developers...' to 'Oracle, Oracle, Oracle...,' would have worked as well. Please practice proper meme etiquette in the future.
I would agree.
With regard to your post above, does the fact that bandwidth is oversold not change the economics of it to something that is different from other utilities? Another honest question, is it still today necessary to oversell bandwidth to such ratios as 10:1 or higher?
Some bloggers also speculated that the plan was part of a scheme to discourage people from watching streaming videos online rather than watching Time Warner Cable on television, which Time Warner officials denied.
I wouldn't actually be all that upset if Time Warner was able to kill video streamed over the Internet. I like the way the Internet is now. Maybe I'm being too conservative, but moving video over from the sunk cost that is the cable network we already have in place is going to be too costly and to me seems dangerous to the Internet as we know it.
I personally think tiered pricing is a move in the right direction, though. As it stands now, heavy transfer people are being subsidized by those who are light users. This does not exempt communications companies from being held responsible for the universal service funds they most likely squandered, but consumption based billing only makes sense. It always surprises me how this remains a perpetual issue.
Traitor! When the war with machines comes benjamindees will go down as the quisling that taught them they were self-sufficient. You fool! You've completely cut us out of the loop. Now we don't even have a shot at getting that utopian neural simulation of a world to enjoy while we humbly serve as batteries.