Obama has a pen and a phone, and he's not afraid to use them.
The Republicans have been looking for an excuse to impeach President Obama that would pass the laugh test. If Obama openly defied a shutdown of surveillance programs, that would give them not only a good reason, but one that might actually have some bipartisan support.
Except Obama hasn't been threatening to use executive order to counter Congress on surveillance. (actually, given that the programs are legal under the PATRIOT act, wouldn't a countermanding executive order cease surveillance?) Anyway, the "threat" of executive order has been to move policy upon which Congress has failed to act these past five years: immigration, education or jobs training, and background checks probably most notable. The power of executive orders is really very limited - he can't order anything that violates law; he can at most change the extent to which those laws are enforced. You know, like how he's already told INS not to bother deporting non-criminal, undocumented immigrants if they were brought into the country as minors.
What has YOUR guy been doing all this time? Oh yeah, reauthorizing it year after year.
Never have I voted for Obama.
He's not talking about Obama. He's talking about your Representative and Senators. You know, the people who actually write, sponsor, and submit bills for presidential signature. House votes have been 275/174, 280/138, and 250/153, Senate votes have been 89/10, 89/10 and 72/23. Those are pretty sizeable bipartisan majorities, especially in the Senate.
So, how about your senators? How many times have you written then about your privacy concerns?
Subsequent terror attacks against the US were not thwarted by high technology, even with all of the high technology and invasiveness that has followed. Those that were detected in advance were done so because someone in the public reported it, those that were tried and failed did so because of problems of the terrorists' makings, and those that succeeded (like Boston) happened in part because high technology failed to do its job and find those who would do us ill.
The trouble is that the TLAs get a lot of public reports and a lot of diplomatic tips. After every 'successful' event, from Fort Hood to Eric Snowden, it turns out there were warnings and signs that got overlooked or ignored. Now, it's possible that these warnings only exist because the individuals were actually dangerous. It's also possible that they're overlooked because they're so ubiquitous as to be useless. If you think back through your own 'file,' are you going to find anti-establishment outbursts in high school? Heated reactions to an idiotic co-worker? Times you've said congress "should just die in a fire?"
If you've got 10,000,000 tips, and 4 of them actually identify someone on the verge of violence, then those tips are pretty useless. If you're a human, you ignore them. If you ignore them, then after-the-fact, some reporter can plant a bright red Incompetent flag on your face. The CYA strategy is to look for ways to cross-reference those 10,000,000 data to find which ones identify the same person and try to whittle down to a manageable number. It's still going to be useless, but at least you'll be able to blame the technology: the algorithm didn't get enough data.
The real problem is that people have built a narrative of War around these terrorist organizations, aggrandizing them into cohesive structures with homogeneous goals and internal coordination that doesn't exist. We should treat the Boston Marathon attack the same way we treated Columbine: a criminal outburst by individuals with perceived persecution trying to make a big statement of outrage. The attackers may have been encouraged by 3rd parties, but they are fundamentally individual decisions and acts.
I'm pretty sure that if you'd asked Wells Fargo to take a bag of cash to the New York offices of The Reasonably Sincere Gentlemen in favor of a British Monarch, the well known 19th Century anti-American terrorist organization that, uh, President Monroe had banned, testimony from the clerk who took the order would be acceptable in court, as would the paper records they keep.
All that's changed is that the words "on a computer" have come into being. The Clerk is no longer human, it's a collection of computers managed by a collection of humans, but it's still a third party that's being a witness to the crime.
"Interrogating" a computer introduces a qualitative change in the nature of the investigation. In your example, the police would have to ask the teller if you specifically had made such transaction. They could not, as a practical matter, bring in the telephone book and ask the teller whether each of the named individuals had made a similar transaction. That is, the constraints of time and money restricted police to investigating people who had done something to rouse their attention, and each succeeding bit of data would justify ever greater intrusion into your personal effects.
"On a computer," the marginal effort required to search everyone, without prior suspicion or cause, is nearly zero. The whole framework where your personal life is private, unless you behave badly and come under suspicion, goes away. They are watching you, right now, in many of the same ways that used to be reserved for mob muscle and drug dealers. Who am I talking to? Who are they talking to? Do any of them read radical newspapers or visit questionable bookstores? If someone came around and asked my neighbors these questions every night, I'd call it stalking or harassment, but the government builds an infallible database of exactly that data, and somehow it's ok?
Tor (and Tor hidden services) can no longer be considered completely secure. It's much better than nothing, but if you become a target, the NSA and other government agencies can and have used methods to track people down who use Tor.
I'm cool with that. If the government has reason to suspect me, and they can demonstrate to an independent 3rd party that I'm a legitimate target, then it's fair game to investigate me, tap my phone, tap my internet, and root through my trash. What bothers me is that they are currently monitoring who I talk to, what sources (if not what content) I read, and who I associate with online, completely devoid of any 3rd party validation.
Judicial oversight has migrated from "you need a warrant to collect this personal information" to "you need a warrant before a human looks at this personal information." Creating the database is surveillance, and my 'effects' are not secure if the government has a copy of them in Bluffdale. We need to revise the definition of business records. The NRA has been extremely successful in preventing one particular kind of business record from being compiled into a national database, and it seems like similar definitions and restrictions ought to be applied to 1st amendment activities as to 2nd amendment activities.
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded â" here and there, now and then â" are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as âoebad luck.â -- Robert Heinlein
So who is Heinlein talking about here? Is he praising the innovative products created by Jamie Dimon, Brian Moynihan, and Warren Buffett? The creative process that keeps Apple and Samsung trading court cases? The real estate speculators. Maybe Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, finding ever more creative ways to monetize the same content delivery.
Probably not. Heinlein is probably referring to John Galt, the mythical capitalist who creates a whole market, recruits the best people he can by paying them as much as he can and training them to become better than they are. He probably means people like Henry Ford, Timothy Berners-Lee and Steve Jobs. My impression is that those really revolutionary market changes don't come from people with a plan of becoming billionaires, but from people who want to change the world. They are people who take huge risks, often quitting their jobs, to pursue their fantasies.
If you remove the social safety net, you make that risk much greater, without really increasing the potential payoff. If quitting your job means you lose your baby's healthcare, is that a risk you really want to take? If your first prototype might be subjected to a patent infringement suit brought by a multinational team of lawyers, before you can even make a sale, is that a risk you really want to take? We're nearly at the point where the tiny minority are kept from creating, but it's not the 99% stopping them. It's the 1%er's, worried that their formulaic profits might be disrupted.
As a society, the US does not value education. Sure, when asked we do. But in reality, we don't.
So true. I recently had the opportunity to visit the UK. Do you know who's featured on their 10-pound note? Charles Darwin. And Michael Faraday on the 20. Throughout the world, people carry portraits of their nation's leading scientists everywhere they go. Here in the US, our currency features politicians. Maybe you can argue that Ben Franklin counts as a scientist, but I'm pretty sure we all know he's on that bill for his ambassadorial work (200 years ago, I might add).
You want to improve things, it's not by going back to old teaching methods, it's by allowing teachers to teach thinking again and not by forcing them to be pawns in the organized "sheltering of young minds" that the administrations seem to be all too happy to go along with.
If there's one thing I've learned from the political narrative in the US, it is that teachers are government employees, too incompetent to tie their own shoes, let alone develop a curriculum and shape young minds. The only people we should trust with such sensitive tasks are the elected members of school boards, and possibly Congress. After all, those people are accountable to the voters, so they're guaranteed to have the people's best interest in mind. Teachers are only accountable to their unions, and we know that "union" is a euphemism for organized crime.
No, the way to fix our schools is to standardize on one message. In fact, technology allows us very easily to deliver exactly the same content to everyone. My proposal is that we contract K-12 education out to one of the existing MOOC companies and replace all those overpaid "teachers" with an iPad and a room monitor. We could even improve the security of our precious children by training the room monitors in appropriate defensive skills. Or even arming them. Nothing says "education" like a room full of kids being forced at gunpoint to watch indoctrination videos six hours a day. Brought to you by EduKart.
of course, we'll never see names being named, because finger-pointing is a favorite game at Cabinet meetings, and certainly the Executive would never take responsibility
Why should a Secretary take responsibility, when CGI Group built the database, wrote the website, and designed the hardware? Responsibility for this failure seems to lie pretty firmly in the (ironically, Canadian) company contracted to implement it.
And Team Blue would like you to think a badly crafted law, a poorly coded website, and Obama's sad political skillz at negotiating will still triumph. Instead of delaying it to fix the problems they knew about, they decided to move forward and really turn people against it.
Team Red keep decrying how badly crafted the ACA is, but I have yet to see any suggestions for improving it. Plenty of advice to postpone its implementation (indefinitely) or to offer exemptions to any and all, but those 'improvements' amount to repeal not revise. So this is my honest question: how do you fix ACA so that no one shows up at the Emergency Room without a means to pay for their care?
Because that's the pre-ACA system: hospitals were (are) required by law to provide emergency care without consideration of compensation. ACA offers one structure to ensure that those costs are covered by the person who receives care. What's your alternative?
Congress has a terrible approval rating. Individual representatives and senators each have approval ratings above 50%, generally above 60%, and will all be safely re-elected whenever their term is up. This cognitive dissonance, where "my" representative is the only decent person in congress would be really fascinating, if only it weren't happening in my own country and fucking up my own government.
I for one am happy that someone is willing to stand up and say current behaviors are driving our country toward an inevitable debt burden we can never hope to repay, regardless of whether the message is popular.
The party out of the White House always says this. The Democrats abhorred the outrageous spending on military actions and Medicare expansion during the Bush years. The Republicans abhorred the outrageous spending on social programs during the Clinton years. "We spend to much and are dooming our children to poverty and economic collapse," has been a rallying cry since at least Reagan.
Strangely, neither party, once in power, actually reduces spending. Neither party is especially interested in changing those programs that actually affect the budget. What we currently get from the GOP is "We need to cut $1000B from the $600B discretionary budget, so we can afford to reduce revenues by $200B."
This tactic, of claiming the party in-power is destroying the country, while continuing exactly those same behaviors when the tables turn, is the partisan rhetoric that polarizes the people and prevents any rational compromise to solve actual problems.
We didn't. Early computers were funded from commercial sources not taxation, and they had practical applications right from the start.
ENIAC was arguably the first general purpose electronic computer, and it was built for the US military (a wing of their government). Zuse's Z3 was arguably the first general purpose electric computer, and it was built for the German Air Ministry (a wing of their government). Of course, these devices are practical applications representing the culmination of centuries of prior basic research. The basics of electrical and electronic science was performed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, largely by aristocrats who could be considered to be functionally the government of the day, many of whom supported their work with the labor of their tenants, which was pretty nearly taxation at the time. It wasn't until the nineteenth century that practical applications (notably the telegraph) began to appear. Even after the point where commercial interests began to involve themselves, taxation and government programs continued to support development of technologies like transistors, network communication technologies, and photolithography.
Hey Americans, why not live with some very basic rules. Like, don't work for the NSA? If you're ever in a jury where the NSA is presenting data against someone, find that person innocent?
If ethical people refuse to work for the NSA, then only unethical people will work for the NSA. One might question whether that is already the case.
It is unlikely that NSA evidence will ever be reported as such in open court. Their whole argument for classifying these programs is that knowledge of them would eliminate their usefulness. Further, presenting that evidence in court would open it to legal challenge, and most of us hope that the only court willing to support these programs is the FISA kangaroo court. No, much better not to present the NSA's part of the evidence as anything more than 'an anonymous tip.' Especially if you can detain indefinitely without charges anyone you think might be convicted based on the secret evidence.
I know that by saying "is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television" they are talking about the politicization of scientific issues. The objection I put forth is that discouraging science being "up for grabs" in *any* realm or discouraging debate of scientific issues is basically the exact same thing.
I think Pop Sci, and their explanation of this policy in particular, do a great job of stating that they do want to encourage real debate and discussion of science topics, for exactly the reason that we don't know everything yet. The problem is deciding what constitutes "real" debate and discussion.
If you've ever tried to debate gun control, abortion, or vivisection with someone, you know that facts and logic go right out the window, and every statistic you throw up in support of your position can be countered by a matching and completely incompatible statistic from the other side. Neither side will change their position, which is based more on emotion and personal ethics than reason. It is issues like these that have defined the way in which many people see and understand debate. There's little distinction between repeatably tested facts and weaker forms of evidence. Whoever yells louder or can more vehemently discredit the opposition 'wins.'
Historically, scientific debate has been a (sometimes only slightly) loftier process, largely restricted to experts (loosely defined) and objective evidence. It generally uses more formal language that excludes emotional phrases like "fucking moron." There are people in the general public who have the interest to really follow the arguments and raise excellent and interesting points. Or even just to raise relevant questions that help clarify the discussion for the less expert. PopSci should be lauded for having tried to allow the most open and inclusive discussion possible. Nor is it any surprise that when science is used to support one or another public policy, then the scientific discussion gets clouded by political discussion. People are a lot more passionate about their political positions than their scientific positions, so that side of the debate will quickly overwhelm the less passionate, more technical scientific debate.
I see this decision as PopSci's admission that they can't separate the political and scientific discussions fairly, and will have to revert the scientific discussion to the more formal forum of articles and letters-to-editor. I don't see that as a bad thing - maybe it will help people recognize the difference between scientific debate and political debate.
What god complexes people have to assume they are worthy of the NSA snooping on them. Be a good person and you have nothing to worry about. Government agencies have snooped on their citizens for decades, remember the analog phone system?
You may not have noticed, but the major change to surveillance in the past couple decades is that official interest is not longer required. Human attention is no longer required. You need not do anything to rise to "worthy" of NSA snooping: they're doing it already.
Analog phone taps are an excellent demonstration: to tap a phone, you used to have to have a lawyer draft a warrant, have a judge authorize said warrant, pay some guy to drive a over to the subject house and install a physical device on the identified wire, then pay some other guy to record and listen to any conversations. Major expenses that would only be taken if there was reasonable likelihood of getting actionable information. Today, some geek in the back room greps on a database they've already archived.
The reason they haven't come around knocking on your door isn't that you're "a good person," but just that your particular sins have not been grepped yet. You're no more than 3 steps from Aaron Alexis: know someone who knows someone; visited the same blog; bought the same brand of shoe. Enough such coincidences, and all of a sudden, you're worthy of human attention and intervention. Then, god forbid you own a pressure cooker.
It doesn't become surveillance when a human looks at the data, it's surveillance when they collect the data
Mark my words, it will be common for people with identical conditions and similar physical attributes to be treated differently by Obamacare.
Of course they will. "Obamacare" is not some kind of monolithic, one-size-fits all program that uniformly matches symptom A with pathology B and treatment C. It's a framework within which private companies are expected to compete, innovate, and distinguish themselves. There's no way a single payer system would ever get implemented, and this rich new market of people who have to buy insurance is a glorious opportunity for the invisible hand to optimize medical care, with some guidance to minimize the fraudulent offerings.
What I don't get about this is what's so horribly wrong with a captain abandoning the ship?
He's allowed to leave; he doesn't have to go down with the ship in the event of every accident. But he's also supposed to be the most capable and informed person on the boat and the most qualified to organize evacuation efforts. It's his responsibility and obligation to do everything he can to ensure the safety of people who have entrusted their lives to his judgement.
A captain abandoning his still-occupied ship is like a homeowner sneaking out the back without telling his guests that the kitchen is on fire.
It's also a lot easier and safer to cut up something of that size in drydock.
Ships of this size are rarely dismantled in a drydock. Usually they're run up on the beach at Alang or Chittagong and cut apart, mostly by hand. You can actually see these operations in google maps. Check the satellite view of Alang, Gujarat, India, and you'll see dozens of ships in all stages of disassembly.
And assuming you are trying to run a VPN, you'd need an absolutely enormous OTP to handle all of the traffic you'd generate on a daily basis.
Like a terabyte HD filled with/dev/rand. OTP is obviously not a good solution for routine encryption, but is a reasonable option for even fairly large amounts of sensitive data. Even video conferencing. Although frankly, if your pad is a couple of terabytes, you can probably reuse it safely, at least once or twice. It does require a shift of paradigm - many of us have gotten used to the notion that nearly-unbreakable encryption is "easy." Wrap your data in a 2048-bit symmetric-key algorithm, and bing-bang-bop, you're safe. The revelation that this might not be true will encourage people to return to tiered protocols, presumably concentrating "real" secrets into a narrower-bandwidth, more identifiable, but also more secure channel. If being one packet among trillions no longer provides any meaningful sense of anonymity, then you might as well put all your secret data in a big red box and protect that box very well.
I'm not sure I understand why this is surprising to the researchers... I mean, if the independent evolution of certain abilities in diverse species happens, doesn't it make sense that it would be expressed in the genetic code in the same ways ?
Remember that a lot of science is about coming up with actual evidence to support or refute the way you think the world works.
This is a little different, though. Wings, for example, have definitely evolved independently several times. This is why bird wings look nothing like cockroach wings. The genetic code that represents cockroach wings and bat wings are not very similar, but it's a great example of convergent evolution producing qualitatively similar function through very different processes. Likewise, it could happen that bats and dolphins solve the echolocation problem in completely different ways. What these people show is that, if you start with the same fundamental structures (ie, mammals), then 1) the modifications that allow for good echolocation are quite limited, and 2) happen frequently enough that they can be selected in multiple populations in a conserved pattern.
I think this is pretty exciting. Most mutations turn out to be non-functional or lethal; only a small percentage happen in the coding domains and produce a functional-but-different protein. This work is evidence that, on a large scale and across whole families of genes, those same mutations occur, provide an advantage, and get reinforced in the population. And that it happens over just a few million years. It suggests that, in order to develop echolocation, none of these species developed a whole new organ system, but just refined their existing structures. Gradual changes over time, without any wholesale de novo introduction of features.
Yeah, you might expect that all to be true beforehand, because it's completely consistent with the way we think genetics and evolution work, but now there's quantitative data to support it.
Underlying genetic evolution is the notion that genes pick up random mutations over time. Most of these have no effect on function, so you can estimate how long ago two species diverged by counting how many differences are in the genome. These guys had the clever idea of taking species that we think diverged a long time ago, but that have a similar trait (ie, echolocation), with the hypothesis that the genes controlling that might be more similar, even in these very different animals, than the genes for dissimilar traits.
Imagine a software project that forks and is maintained by separate groups. Over time, the two projects look more and more different. Now imagine that both of these forks end up with a new feature in common that didn't exist in the pre-fork code. The study hypothesis is essentially that code related to the new feature will be similar between the two projects, where code associated with other features that aren't the same between projects, will be more different
Genetically, this might happen either because the random mutations in hearing genes that facilitate echolocation facilitate echolocation in any environment, provide a survival advantage, and become conserved in multiple environments. As dolphins and echolocating bats diverged, acute hearing was favored in both species, so their hearing genes are more similar than those of echolocating and non-echolocating bats, even though the genes for "wings" are more similar between bats than dolphins. Because it seems unlikely that the large number of differences that separate bats as a group from dolphins might have come up separately, the study proposes that the first bat-ears were as different from dolphin-ears as bat wings are different from dolphin flippers, and that the specialization into echolocating bats brought those hearing genes closer together, following a convergent path.
This is a much more subtle form of convergent evolution that, say, wings. "Wings" as a feature provide a definite advantage, and wing structures have evolved multiple times in multiple forms. The genes that define insect wings are completely different from those that define bat wings. It's a dramatic demonstration of nature using multiple solutions to the same problem. The current study suggests that nature is also capable of finding the same solution from multiple starting points.
Someone good at statistics will probably be able to figure out X in the statement "when X million tax dollars are spent, on average one person will die in the effort of making that money".
In the US, the median income is $40k. $1M tax requires an 'extra' 25 jobs beyond what people would take to feed and clothe themselves. The workplace fatality rate is 3.5 per 100,000 (source), or 1 per 28,600. This means you get $1.1B of revenue per fatality. US personal tax receipts are almost $2T, so you could argue that the federal government kills almost 1800 people per year through the tax burden.
This income include social security and medicare, and I'm quite certain that spending on those two programs alone saves more than 2000 people/year.
I don't think the number is very large.
Thus demonstrating Scheier's point that we're really not very good at estimating risk
I have watched untold billions of dollars going into worthless educational initiatives and NEA kickback, while we crank out generation upon generation of illiterates, and introduce social experiments disguised as education initiatives.
Per capita spending on students is about $10k/year, summed across all levels of government. For comparison, per capita spending is $16k/year for medicare recipients. Government places a 60% higher priority on keeping retired people healthy than on educating the next generation. In my school district, I pay three times as much for trash collection as for schools. The total spending on education may be a large number, but it is a shockingly small fraction of government spending.
1. sports programs need to be separated from academia. move them to camps, state or privately funded. They don't belong in school.
You know, there was a time when education was supposed to produce well-rounded, generally capable human beings. Physical fitness is part of that. Competition is part of that. Very often, the people who compete well in reading don't compete well in baseball, and vice-versa, so the presence of an athletic program helps people find their own areas of strength.
Sport has definitely taken excessive dominance in some districts, but that's not a good reason to extract those programs from all districts. This notion that school is essentially a job training program is not healthy. School is a largely consequence-free opportunity to expose (or force) young people into diverse activities to help them find their own aptitudes and interests.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Slashdot Mirror
Obama has a pen and a phone, and he's not afraid to use them.
The Republicans have been looking for an excuse to impeach President Obama that would pass the laugh test. If Obama openly defied a shutdown of surveillance programs, that would give them not only a good reason, but one that might actually have some bipartisan support.
Except Obama hasn't been threatening to use executive order to counter Congress on surveillance. (actually, given that the programs are legal under the PATRIOT act, wouldn't a countermanding executive order cease surveillance?) Anyway, the "threat" of executive order has been to move policy upon which Congress has failed to act these past five years: immigration, education or jobs training, and background checks probably most notable. The power of executive orders is really very limited - he can't order anything that violates law; he can at most change the extent to which those laws are enforced. You know, like how he's already told INS not to bother deporting non-criminal, undocumented immigrants if they were brought into the country as minors.
What has YOUR guy been doing all this time? Oh yeah, reauthorizing it year after year.
Never have I voted for Obama.
He's not talking about Obama. He's talking about your Representative and Senators. You know, the people who actually write, sponsor, and submit bills for presidential signature. House votes have been 275/174, 280/138, and 250/153, Senate votes have been 89/10, 89/10 and 72/23. Those are pretty sizeable bipartisan majorities, especially in the Senate.
So, how about your senators? How many times have you written then about your privacy concerns?
Subsequent terror attacks against the US were not thwarted by high technology, even with all of the high technology and invasiveness that has followed. Those that were detected in advance were done so because someone in the public reported it, those that were tried and failed did so because of problems of the terrorists' makings, and those that succeeded (like Boston) happened in part because high technology failed to do its job and find those who would do us ill.
The trouble is that the TLAs get a lot of public reports and a lot of diplomatic tips. After every 'successful' event, from Fort Hood to Eric Snowden, it turns out there were warnings and signs that got overlooked or ignored. Now, it's possible that these warnings only exist because the individuals were actually dangerous. It's also possible that they're overlooked because they're so ubiquitous as to be useless. If you think back through your own 'file,' are you going to find anti-establishment outbursts in high school? Heated reactions to an idiotic co-worker? Times you've said congress "should just die in a fire?"
If you've got 10,000,000 tips, and 4 of them actually identify someone on the verge of violence, then those tips are pretty useless. If you're a human, you ignore them. If you ignore them, then after-the-fact, some reporter can plant a bright red Incompetent flag on your face. The CYA strategy is to look for ways to cross-reference those 10,000,000 data to find which ones identify the same person and try to whittle down to a manageable number. It's still going to be useless, but at least you'll be able to blame the technology: the algorithm didn't get enough data.
The real problem is that people have built a narrative of War around these terrorist organizations, aggrandizing them into cohesive structures with homogeneous goals and internal coordination that doesn't exist. We should treat the Boston Marathon attack the same way we treated Columbine: a criminal outburst by individuals with perceived persecution trying to make a big statement of outrage. The attackers may have been encouraged by 3rd parties, but they are fundamentally individual decisions and acts.
I'm pretty sure that if you'd asked Wells Fargo to take a bag of cash to the New York offices of The Reasonably Sincere Gentlemen in favor of a British Monarch, the well known 19th Century anti-American terrorist organization that, uh, President Monroe had banned, testimony from the clerk who took the order would be acceptable in court, as would the paper records they keep.
All that's changed is that the words "on a computer" have come into being. The Clerk is no longer human, it's a collection of computers managed by a collection of humans, but it's still a third party that's being a witness to the crime.
"Interrogating" a computer introduces a qualitative change in the nature of the investigation. In your example, the police would have to ask the teller if you specifically had made such transaction. They could not, as a practical matter, bring in the telephone book and ask the teller whether each of the named individuals had made a similar transaction. That is, the constraints of time and money restricted police to investigating people who had done something to rouse their attention, and each succeeding bit of data would justify ever greater intrusion into your personal effects.
"On a computer," the marginal effort required to search everyone, without prior suspicion or cause, is nearly zero. The whole framework where your personal life is private, unless you behave badly and come under suspicion, goes away. They are watching you, right now, in many of the same ways that used to be reserved for mob muscle and drug dealers. Who am I talking to? Who are they talking to? Do any of them read radical newspapers or visit questionable bookstores? If someone came around and asked my neighbors these questions every night, I'd call it stalking or harassment, but the government builds an infallible database of exactly that data, and somehow it's ok?
Tor (and Tor hidden services) can no longer be considered completely secure. It's much better than nothing, but if you become a target, the NSA and other government agencies can and have used methods to track people down who use Tor.
I'm cool with that. If the government has reason to suspect me, and they can demonstrate to an independent 3rd party that I'm a legitimate target, then it's fair game to investigate me, tap my phone, tap my internet, and root through my trash. What bothers me is that they are currently monitoring who I talk to, what sources (if not what content) I read, and who I associate with online, completely devoid of any 3rd party validation.
Judicial oversight has migrated from "you need a warrant to collect this personal information" to "you need a warrant before a human looks at this personal information." Creating the database is surveillance, and my 'effects' are not secure if the government has a copy of them in Bluffdale. We need to revise the definition of business records. The NRA has been extremely successful in preventing one particular kind of business record from being compiled into a national database, and it seems like similar definitions and restrictions ought to be applied to 1st amendment activities as to 2nd amendment activities.
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded â" here and there, now and then â" are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as âoebad luck.â -- Robert Heinlein
So who is Heinlein talking about here? Is he praising the innovative products created by Jamie Dimon, Brian Moynihan, and Warren Buffett? The creative process that keeps Apple and Samsung trading court cases? The real estate speculators. Maybe Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, finding ever more creative ways to monetize the same content delivery.
Probably not. Heinlein is probably referring to John Galt, the mythical capitalist who creates a whole market, recruits the best people he can by paying them as much as he can and training them to become better than they are. He probably means people like Henry Ford, Timothy Berners-Lee and Steve Jobs. My impression is that those really revolutionary market changes don't come from people with a plan of becoming billionaires, but from people who want to change the world. They are people who take huge risks, often quitting their jobs, to pursue their fantasies.
If you remove the social safety net, you make that risk much greater, without really increasing the potential payoff. If quitting your job means you lose your baby's healthcare, is that a risk you really want to take? If your first prototype might be subjected to a patent infringement suit brought by a multinational team of lawyers, before you can even make a sale, is that a risk you really want to take? We're nearly at the point where the tiny minority are kept from creating, but it's not the 99% stopping them. It's the 1%er's, worried that their formulaic profits might be disrupted.
As a society, the US does not value education. Sure, when asked we do. But in reality, we don't.
So true. I recently had the opportunity to visit the UK. Do you know who's featured on their 10-pound note? Charles Darwin. And Michael Faraday on the 20. Throughout the world, people carry portraits of their nation's leading scientists everywhere they go. Here in the US, our currency features politicians. Maybe you can argue that Ben Franklin counts as a scientist, but I'm pretty sure we all know he's on that bill for his ambassadorial work (200 years ago, I might add).
You want to improve things, it's not by going back to old teaching methods, it's by allowing teachers to teach thinking again and not by forcing them to be pawns in the organized "sheltering of young minds" that the administrations seem to be all too happy to go along with.
If there's one thing I've learned from the political narrative in the US, it is that teachers are government employees, too incompetent to tie their own shoes, let alone develop a curriculum and shape young minds. The only people we should trust with such sensitive tasks are the elected members of school boards, and possibly Congress. After all, those people are accountable to the voters, so they're guaranteed to have the people's best interest in mind. Teachers are only accountable to their unions, and we know that "union" is a euphemism for organized crime.
No, the way to fix our schools is to standardize on one message. In fact, technology allows us very easily to deliver exactly the same content to everyone. My proposal is that we contract K-12 education out to one of the existing MOOC companies and replace all those overpaid "teachers" with an iPad and a room monitor. We could even improve the security of our precious children by training the room monitors in appropriate defensive skills. Or even arming them. Nothing says "education" like a room full of kids being forced at gunpoint to watch indoctrination videos six hours a day. Brought to you by EduKart.
of course, we'll never see names being named, because finger-pointing is a favorite game at Cabinet meetings, and certainly the Executive would never take responsibility
Why should a Secretary take responsibility, when CGI Group built the database, wrote the website, and designed the hardware? Responsibility for this failure seems to lie pretty firmly in the (ironically, Canadian) company contracted to implement it.
And Team Blue would like you to think a badly crafted law, a poorly coded website, and Obama's sad political skillz at negotiating will still triumph. Instead of delaying it to fix the problems they knew about, they decided to move forward and really turn people against it.
Team Red keep decrying how badly crafted the ACA is, but I have yet to see any suggestions for improving it. Plenty of advice to postpone its implementation (indefinitely) or to offer exemptions to any and all, but those 'improvements' amount to repeal not revise. So this is my honest question: how do you fix ACA so that no one shows up at the Emergency Room without a means to pay for their care?
Because that's the pre-ACA system: hospitals were (are) required by law to provide emergency care without consideration of compensation. ACA offers one structure to ensure that those costs are covered by the person who receives care. What's your alternative?
Congress has a terrible approval rating. Individual representatives and senators each have approval ratings above 50%, generally above 60%, and will all be safely re-elected whenever their term is up. This cognitive dissonance, where "my" representative is the only decent person in congress would be really fascinating, if only it weren't happening in my own country and fucking up my own government.
I for one am happy that someone is willing to stand up and say current behaviors are driving our country toward an inevitable debt burden we can never hope to repay, regardless of whether the message is popular.
The party out of the White House always says this. The Democrats abhorred the outrageous spending on military actions and Medicare expansion during the Bush years. The Republicans abhorred the outrageous spending on social programs during the Clinton years. "We spend to much and are dooming our children to poverty and economic collapse," has been a rallying cry since at least Reagan.
Strangely, neither party, once in power, actually reduces spending. Neither party is especially interested in changing those programs that actually affect the budget. What we currently get from the GOP is "We need to cut $1000B from the $600B discretionary budget, so we can afford to reduce revenues by $200B."
This tactic, of claiming the party in-power is destroying the country, while continuing exactly those same behaviors when the tables turn, is the partisan rhetoric that polarizes the people and prevents any rational compromise to solve actual problems.
We didn't. Early computers were funded from commercial sources not taxation, and they had practical applications right from the start.
ENIAC was arguably the first general purpose electronic computer, and it was built for the US military (a wing of their government). Zuse's Z3 was arguably the first general purpose electric computer, and it was built for the German Air Ministry (a wing of their government). Of course, these devices are practical applications representing the culmination of centuries of prior basic research. The basics of electrical and electronic science was performed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, largely by aristocrats who could be considered to be functionally the government of the day, many of whom supported their work with the labor of their tenants, which was pretty nearly taxation at the time. It wasn't until the nineteenth century that practical applications (notably the telegraph) began to appear. Even after the point where commercial interests began to involve themselves, taxation and government programs continued to support development of technologies like transistors, network communication technologies, and photolithography.
Hey Americans, why not live with some very basic rules. Like, don't work for the NSA? If you're ever in a jury where the NSA is presenting data against someone, find that person innocent?
If ethical people refuse to work for the NSA, then only unethical people will work for the NSA. One might question whether that is already the case.
It is unlikely that NSA evidence will ever be reported as such in open court. Their whole argument for classifying these programs is that knowledge of them would eliminate their usefulness. Further, presenting that evidence in court would open it to legal challenge, and most of us hope that the only court willing to support these programs is the FISA kangaroo court. No, much better not to present the NSA's part of the evidence as anything more than 'an anonymous tip.' Especially if you can detain indefinitely without charges anyone you think might be convicted based on the secret evidence.
I know that by saying "is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television" they are talking about the politicization of scientific issues. The objection I put forth is that discouraging science being "up for grabs" in *any* realm or discouraging debate of scientific issues is basically the exact same thing.
I think Pop Sci, and their explanation of this policy in particular, do a great job of stating that they do want to encourage real debate and discussion of science topics, for exactly the reason that we don't know everything yet. The problem is deciding what constitutes "real" debate and discussion.
If you've ever tried to debate gun control, abortion, or vivisection with someone, you know that facts and logic go right out the window, and every statistic you throw up in support of your position can be countered by a matching and completely incompatible statistic from the other side. Neither side will change their position, which is based more on emotion and personal ethics than reason. It is issues like these that have defined the way in which many people see and understand debate. There's little distinction between repeatably tested facts and weaker forms of evidence. Whoever yells louder or can more vehemently discredit the opposition 'wins.'
Historically, scientific debate has been a (sometimes only slightly) loftier process, largely restricted to experts (loosely defined) and objective evidence. It generally uses more formal language that excludes emotional phrases like "fucking moron." There are people in the general public who have the interest to really follow the arguments and raise excellent and interesting points. Or even just to raise relevant questions that help clarify the discussion for the less expert. PopSci should be lauded for having tried to allow the most open and inclusive discussion possible. Nor is it any surprise that when science is used to support one or another public policy, then the scientific discussion gets clouded by political discussion. People are a lot more passionate about their political positions than their scientific positions, so that side of the debate will quickly overwhelm the less passionate, more technical scientific debate.
I see this decision as PopSci's admission that they can't separate the political and scientific discussions fairly, and will have to revert the scientific discussion to the more formal forum of articles and letters-to-editor. I don't see that as a bad thing - maybe it will help people recognize the difference between scientific debate and political debate.
What god complexes people have to assume they are worthy of the NSA snooping on them. Be a good person and you have nothing to worry about. Government agencies have snooped on their citizens for decades, remember the analog phone system?
You may not have noticed, but the major change to surveillance in the past couple decades is that official interest is not longer required. Human attention is no longer required. You need not do anything to rise to "worthy" of NSA snooping: they're doing it already.
Analog phone taps are an excellent demonstration: to tap a phone, you used to have to have a lawyer draft a warrant, have a judge authorize said warrant, pay some guy to drive a over to the subject house and install a physical device on the identified wire, then pay some other guy to record and listen to any conversations. Major expenses that would only be taken if there was reasonable likelihood of getting actionable information. Today, some geek in the back room greps on a database they've already archived.
The reason they haven't come around knocking on your door isn't that you're "a good person," but just that your particular sins have not been grepped yet. You're no more than 3 steps from Aaron Alexis: know someone who knows someone; visited the same blog; bought the same brand of shoe. Enough such coincidences, and all of a sudden, you're worthy of human attention and intervention. Then, god forbid you own a pressure cooker.
It doesn't become surveillance when a human looks at the data, it's surveillance when they collect the data
Mark my words, it will be common for people with identical conditions and similar physical attributes to be treated differently by Obamacare.
Of course they will. "Obamacare" is not some kind of monolithic, one-size-fits all program that uniformly matches symptom A with pathology B and treatment C. It's a framework within which private companies are expected to compete, innovate, and distinguish themselves. There's no way a single payer system would ever get implemented, and this rich new market of people who have to buy insurance is a glorious opportunity for the invisible hand to optimize medical care, with some guidance to minimize the fraudulent offerings.
What I don't get about this is what's so horribly wrong with a captain abandoning the ship?
He's allowed to leave; he doesn't have to go down with the ship in the event of every accident. But he's also supposed to be the most capable and informed person on the boat and the most qualified to organize evacuation efforts. It's his responsibility and obligation to do everything he can to ensure the safety of people who have entrusted their lives to his judgement.
A captain abandoning his still-occupied ship is like a homeowner sneaking out the back without telling his guests that the kitchen is on fire.
It's also a lot easier and safer to cut up something of that size in drydock.
Ships of this size are rarely dismantled in a drydock. Usually they're run up on the beach at Alang or Chittagong and cut apart, mostly by hand. You can actually see these operations in google maps. Check the satellite view of Alang, Gujarat, India, and you'll see dozens of ships in all stages of disassembly.
And assuming you are trying to run a VPN, you'd need an absolutely enormous OTP to handle all of the traffic you'd generate on a daily basis.
Like a terabyte HD filled with /dev/rand. OTP is obviously not a good solution for routine encryption, but is a reasonable option for even fairly large amounts of sensitive data. Even video conferencing. Although frankly, if your pad is a couple of terabytes, you can probably reuse it safely, at least once or twice. It does require a shift of paradigm - many of us have gotten used to the notion that nearly-unbreakable encryption is "easy." Wrap your data in a 2048-bit symmetric-key algorithm, and bing-bang-bop, you're safe. The revelation that this might not be true will encourage people to return to tiered protocols, presumably concentrating "real" secrets into a narrower-bandwidth, more identifiable, but also more secure channel. If being one packet among trillions no longer provides any meaningful sense of anonymity, then you might as well put all your secret data in a big red box and protect that box very well.
I'm not sure I understand why this is surprising to the researchers ... I mean, if the independent evolution of certain abilities in diverse species happens, doesn't it make sense that it would be expressed in the genetic code in the same ways ?
Remember that a lot of science is about coming up with actual evidence to support or refute the way you think the world works.
This is a little different, though. Wings, for example, have definitely evolved independently several times. This is why bird wings look nothing like cockroach wings. The genetic code that represents cockroach wings and bat wings are not very similar, but it's a great example of convergent evolution producing qualitatively similar function through very different processes. Likewise, it could happen that bats and dolphins solve the echolocation problem in completely different ways. What these people show is that, if you start with the same fundamental structures (ie, mammals), then 1) the modifications that allow for good echolocation are quite limited, and 2) happen frequently enough that they can be selected in multiple populations in a conserved pattern.
I think this is pretty exciting. Most mutations turn out to be non-functional or lethal; only a small percentage happen in the coding domains and produce a functional-but-different protein. This work is evidence that, on a large scale and across whole families of genes, those same mutations occur, provide an advantage, and get reinforced in the population. And that it happens over just a few million years. It suggests that, in order to develop echolocation, none of these species developed a whole new organ system, but just refined their existing structures. Gradual changes over time, without any wholesale de novo introduction of features.
Yeah, you might expect that all to be true beforehand, because it's completely consistent with the way we think genetics and evolution work, but now there's quantitative data to support it.
Underlying genetic evolution is the notion that genes pick up random mutations over time. Most of these have no effect on function, so you can estimate how long ago two species diverged by counting how many differences are in the genome. These guys had the clever idea of taking species that we think diverged a long time ago, but that have a similar trait (ie, echolocation), with the hypothesis that the genes controlling that might be more similar, even in these very different animals, than the genes for dissimilar traits.
Imagine a software project that forks and is maintained by separate groups. Over time, the two projects look more and more different. Now imagine that both of these forks end up with a new feature in common that didn't exist in the pre-fork code. The study hypothesis is essentially that code related to the new feature will be similar between the two projects, where code associated with other features that aren't the same between projects, will be more different
Genetically, this might happen either because the random mutations in hearing genes that facilitate echolocation facilitate echolocation in any environment, provide a survival advantage, and become conserved in multiple environments. As dolphins and echolocating bats diverged, acute hearing was favored in both species, so their hearing genes are more similar than those of echolocating and non-echolocating bats, even though the genes for "wings" are more similar between bats than dolphins. Because it seems unlikely that the large number of differences that separate bats as a group from dolphins might have come up separately, the study proposes that the first bat-ears were as different from dolphin-ears as bat wings are different from dolphin flippers, and that the specialization into echolocating bats brought those hearing genes closer together, following a convergent path.
This is a much more subtle form of convergent evolution that, say, wings. "Wings" as a feature provide a definite advantage, and wing structures have evolved multiple times in multiple forms. The genes that define insect wings are completely different from those that define bat wings. It's a dramatic demonstration of nature using multiple solutions to the same problem. The current study suggests that nature is also capable of finding the same solution from multiple starting points.
Someone good at statistics will probably be able to figure out X in the statement "when X million tax dollars are spent, on average one person will die in the effort of making that money".
In the US, the median income is $40k. $1M tax requires an 'extra' 25 jobs beyond what people would take to feed and clothe themselves. The workplace fatality rate is 3.5 per 100,000 (source), or 1 per 28,600. This means you get $1.1B of revenue per fatality. US personal tax receipts are almost $2T, so you could argue that the federal government kills almost 1800 people per year through the tax burden.
This income include social security and medicare, and I'm quite certain that spending on those two programs alone saves more than 2000 people/year.
I don't think the number is very large.
Thus demonstrating Scheier's point that we're really not very good at estimating risk
I have watched untold billions of dollars going into worthless educational initiatives and NEA kickback, while we crank out generation upon generation of illiterates, and introduce social experiments disguised as education initiatives.
Per capita spending on students is about $10k/year, summed across all levels of government. For comparison, per capita spending is $16k/year for medicare recipients. Government places a 60% higher priority on keeping retired people healthy than on educating the next generation. In my school district, I pay three times as much for trash collection as for schools. The total spending on education may be a large number, but it is a shockingly small fraction of government spending.
1. sports programs need to be separated from academia. move them to camps, state or privately funded. They don't belong in school.
You know, there was a time when education was supposed to produce well-rounded, generally capable human beings. Physical fitness is part of that. Competition is part of that. Very often, the people who compete well in reading don't compete well in baseball, and vice-versa, so the presence of an athletic program helps people find their own areas of strength.
Sport has definitely taken excessive dominance in some districts, but that's not a good reason to extract those programs from all districts. This notion that school is essentially a job training program is not healthy. School is a largely consequence-free opportunity to expose (or force) young people into diverse activities to help them find their own aptitudes and interests.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein