I think it's a perception issue. There's even an ad campaign: If you have a problem, "There's an app for that." Software development can move very fast, and a lot of people see software as technology. So, "Do [x], but with a computer or phone," starts to look like what techies do, and the set of problems you can solve with a phone is pretty small and personal.
Real technology, like driverless cars to prevent ~1M annual fatalities, solar energy and other efforts to minimize global warming, or curing river blindness, takes a long time to develop and spends a long time looking like it won't work. A lot of it is developed by existing companies that don't need media-driven VC, and may even try to hide development from their competitors. Real technology looks incremental.
Internet-style atheism has this unfortunate habit of going on to argue that any religion which presents myths as myths isn't really religion.
If you reject the literal resurrection of the Biblical Jesus, you are not a Christian in any religious sense, no more than your religion is Judaism if you reject the notion of ancient Semites literally encountering a deity (and/or Ancient Aliens). One cannot maintain disbelief and faith simultaneously. They are literal antonyms.
Jesus himself is supposed to have used allegory and metaphor extensively. Why should it be faith-breaking to believe that the resurrection is also metaphorical or symbolic? Our forebears were great fans of tall tales, lies, and fantasy. This literal, word-for-word truth stuff is a modern distortion: just because God didn't literally impregnate a human virgin and reanimate the decaying flesh of that dead offspring, doesn't mean there is no God, nor that He didn't "adopt" a human to speak for Him.
Fructose is far worse than glucose, so any sugar with a higher percentage of fructose, (such as HFCS), has measurably worse health effects.
The real question is whether 55% fructose HFCS is meaningfully different from 50% fructose cane sugar. That's a difference of 2 grams (21.5 vs 19.5) in a 12 ounce soda. It seems intuitively silly to say that 19.5g of fructose in a cane-sugar sweetened soda is just fine, but that 21.5 in an HFCS soda is deadly.
Now, if the problem with HFCS is that it's all monosaccharides, where sucrose is a disaccharide, then I can get that. But that doesn't seem to be the argument that anti-HFCS people are making. They seem to think that the location of a double-bonded oxygen, which your body can easily isomerize, has an extremely sharp benign-to-toxic threshold.
We are the result of the portion of the species that survived because of cooked meat.
We are the result of the portion of the species that survived because they learned to extract nutrients from almost any source. Spoiled cabbage, desiccated fish, even seeds that have to be ground to dust between stones to get a few carbon molecules.
You can't start your argument by saying that "We are supposed to be cave men and only eat mastodons, because millions of years tuned us to a carnivore diet," then turn around and say "We are supposed to eat cooked meat because we've had fire for 20,000 years." We've had agriculture almost as long as fire.
Well then, it follows logically that if taxes == compassion & empathy, then the the only compassionate and empathetic thing to do is to tax 100% and distribute it where needed (we won't discuss who makes those decisions nor what standards/definitions they use).
Why is it that so many people seem to think in such extremes? Like the only two legitimate options are 0% tax for everyone and 100% tax for everyone? The only two ways to drive are 100 mph and stopped.
Is this supposed to be a rhetorical device? "If a little is good, then too much can not exist." Everything that follows a patently ridiculous claim is going to be viewed with suspicion and doubt: it makes the writer look incapable of reasonable argument.
In order to have a free & open society where individual rights and freedom are paramount and Rule of Law is the norm for rich and poor alike
Access to the Law has a cost and is inherently more available to the rich. If access to the Law is paid by the communal wealth of your small neighborhood, then it is more accessible by rich neighborhoods. Rich people and residents of rich neighborhoods have a vested interest in direct control. If equal access to the Law is your norm, then rich people have to pay for the poor people, and rich neighborhoods have to pay for the poor neighborhoods.
Universities have been outsourcing their IT for years. At my school, we use Microsoft for email, Elucian for student records, Plesk for web services, and I can't recall which company does personnel. Company comes in and claims that, because of their existing infrastructure, they can offer better services at lower per-student cost, and budget pressure takes over. Contracting out the actual staffing of help desk is just the next logical step.
It's a funny thing to watch a university that was part of the development of open, distributed electronic mail abdicate its management to Microsoft. It feels like selling out, although it's probably just the natural progression of technological maturity. My only compensation is to imagine that the university is using some of those people to develop the next cool technology, and I just don't know about it yet.
The millennial generation, because of a greying population, won't have retirement, they'll have to work until they die.
The millenial generation has seen their jobs stolen by outsourcing to India, by immigrants both legal and illegal, and now by people who've been dead for half a decade. Those kids just can't catch a break.
Watchlists and mass surveillance already sweep up more people and information than "they" can follow. They've poisoned their own data set, and there's little need to go out and create a handful of honey pots.
Those agencies still believe in the myth that big data can pull the One True Terrorist out of a hundred million, if you just give it a big enough data set. They can't. They don't have enough of a positive control population to train their algorithms. The data may be helpful, after the fact, to find co-conspirators, but even that hasn't really worked out so far. If big data really worked, I wouldn't be seeing ads for TVs for a month after I bought one.
They want the public to believe that big data can identify the One True Terrorist, because it serves the two-fold goals of making the public feel like the government is keeping them safe and serves as a deterrent against organizing or conspiring. All of the "you can't trust your devices" paranoia furthers these goals.
Why can they ban people harassing celebrities, but not ISIS accounts?
Because they get complaints from the targets of harassment? I'm sure, if the recipients of ISIS DM's started complaining to twitter about them, that they could be subject to ban. The NSA doesn't have to read the DMs between third parties, and has to go out of their way to get them. For the NSA to claim they're being harassed by messages between ISIS and John Doe strains any definition of harassment.
So willful, active support for terrorism is a lesser crime than violating copyright? Is that what Witters suggests?
No, he's suggesting that a business which makes its product available to terrorists is 'providing material support to terrorists,' and it doesn't matter if that product is, itself, not physically material. He's suggesting that a company providing material support to terrorists should not be able to use copyright law to hide from the NSA.
The fundamental claim that we should all be worried about is that doing business with a terrorist, even if you don't know they're terrorists, is equivalent to actively promoting their cause. You know, so if you're an electric company, and one of your customers sets off a bomb, you may be liable for prosecution.
Hacking the voter registration system allows you to create fake voters. Fake voters can mail in ballots just as easily as real voters, and no one is likely to notice the identical quinquagintatuplets as unusual if they don't show up in person.
These security experts wouldn't recommend it, but they're relying on security through obscurity.
The wouldn't recommend that obscurity be your only security, but I think they would all agree that obscurity can be a useful component of a comprehensive security plan.
For example, if you run a web server, everyone knows it. Controlling the server signature to not obscure the specific version or modules that server runs means an attacker can not target known version-specific vulnerabilities, but has to try a bunch of them. This gives the server the opportunity to detect multiple exploit attempts and ban the source (or whatever). Using unpopular/obscure software, like ngnix or lighthttpd instead of apache/IIS, may also reduce the attack profile (ie, worms or script kiddies), while being less intrinsically secure.
That's not my point.... the simple fact that he would even mention it as a contributing factor to not bother with AV software *IS* evidence that it is lulling him into the exact same sense of security that might happen with AV software
I interpreted it more along the lines of "AV software targets vectors that are generally not relevant or redundant on linux, so I don't bother with it." Kind of like how you might choose not to run OpenGL or a multitasking scheduler on a DOS box - you can think of some edge cases where it might be helpful, but it's not generally going to do anything. You would definitely be justified in saying, "I don't run openGL because I'm on DOS," but it wouldn't be that you think DOS has great graphics.
Some of the most important work in medicine gets done free -- peer-reviewing journal articles and grant applications.
To be honest, peer review is not done for free. The people who do it don't have their salaries docked for time spent on these third-party activities, because they're considered part of the job. (NIH reviewers even get a small stipend for the days they spend in Bethesda) When professors go up for tenure and promotion, they list the journals and agencies they review for - they're badges of academic legitimacy. While it is true that time spent reviewing grants is time not spent preparing lectures, grading papers, or doing your own experiments, peer review is definitely something that a university considers its faculty paid to do. Just not paid by the journals that benefit.
The health insurance industry only has the power it enjoys now because it's the patient's only bulk bargaining agent in the current monopoly environment.
Except that the insurance industry has no motivation to control costs. They run, essentially, as a cost-plus provider, meaning that their profit margin is some percentage of whatever the cost of care. If the cost of drugs goes up, the insurance company doesn't "eat" that cost, they raise premiums.
Floods are steady and the damage as a % of GDP has fallen 75% since 1950.
Economic cost of flooding is a terrible metric for "the amount of flooding." Damage due to flooding is easily mitigated by engineering: dikes near populated areas, overflow zones, dams... Damage due to flooding is easily mitigated by population changes: mandate expensive flood insurance in flood-prone areas so people leave; inform property owners of flood-prone areas; build an extensive rail/road infrastructure so businesses can move away from river transport. It can be mitigated by changing the economy: in 1950, 7% of US GDP was farming - much of is done in river basins for irrigation. In 2000, 0.7% of US GDP was farming.
You can do a small physics experiment to prove that CO2 increases are causing all of the ocean temp increases? No, you cannot.
"Climate change" is not a synonym for "atmospheric CO2." There is absolutely no question that ocean temperatures have risen dramatically in the last 100 years. That is climate change. That is the energy source Nye is claiming can "reasonably" be connected to more energetic and wetter storms. He is not wrong.
There's a lot of evidence and theory supporting the hypothesis that man-made CO2 emissions have contributed to the rise in surface and ocean temperatures, but that's a separate issue. Regardless of whether you're a pro- or anti-AGW person, it is an empirical fact that 379 consecutive months of above average temperature demonstrates that the global temperature is rising. You can't deny that data, or the consequences of that temperature trend, just because you don't like some people's explanation of the cause.
The difference is that spontaneous fire tornadoes are pretty chaotic and inefficient. Red and yellow fires with lots of partially burned hydrocarbons. These folks are excited because they've managed to arrange an airflow around the fuel that results in much more complete combustion, hence a blue flame like in your furnace or stove.
To be fair, ethernet went through the 10B-2 phase, which gave you all the disadvantages of TR, but let you use much less expensive wire and much less of it. I remember walking the length of the network at my first job, carrying a terminator, unplugging each device in series to figure out where the problem was.
The fact that the Clintons have abused their political office to enrich themselves massively is self-evident from their net worth and their control of the Clinton foundation.
Essentially every member of congress makes an absolute shit ton of money during their first term. Speaking fees, legal stock market trading on confidential information, there's all kinds of things congress has decided to allow themselves because they "don't amount to corruption," in a quid-pro-quo sense. Not saying it's good; just saying it's normal.
But such claims of graft or unethical behavior are usually brought up by one party because they think their candidate is less tainted. In this case, the Clintons have been in public office for 30 years; they and their foundation have been subject to public disclosure of their financial records for much of that time. The Trumps have made their money by selling their name and managing mob-controlled construction projects and has kept his finances strictly private. DJT, in particular, has made a special point of emphasizing that he doesn't do anything unless he gets paid. How is he going to get paid as President?
There are relatively few online games which involve "solving puzzles to move to the next level".
I agree, unless they're talking about specific types of online games (eg, Lumosity). I think it's much more important that games - online or not - encourage you to focus on one activity for an extended period. Much different than, say, television, which gives you at most 8 minutes before a commercial break. Online games may have a more extended pseudo-narrative, covering several levels or encounters. Focus. Long-term memory. Those sound like good academic skills.
"Academic performance" is only paying attention to that part of the body of knowledge that will appear on the tests on Fridays and the Final.
Most of the professors I know are, or at least started out, genuinely interested in seeing student absorb new information and gain new skills. An incessant barrage of "Will this be on the test?" and "What should I know for the test?" type questions gets them trained pretty quickly to cater to those students who only care about the test. Other students hear mostly questions related to what's going to be on the test. It all sets up a horribly pathological positive feedback loop where once-enthusiastic teachers come to believe that students only care about the test, so they pre-emptively answer questions about test content, giving the rest of the students the impression that the tests are the only thing that matters.
Never mind the headaches associated with trying to give a 'participation' grade to reward those students who actually are interested, ask good questions, and do work that's not reflected in the tests. Or the tears when a test question is not exactly like one of the practice problems.
If there were 1,000 police watching the demonstrations that would be no difference than if the helicopter recorded everything.
If there are 1000 police at a protest, then it's clear to the protesters that LEO is observing. A small drone, high above is effectively secret. LEO presence discourages (you can say intimidates) peaceful protesters from getting out of hand. A drone flying high overhead has no preventative role, it can only be punitive. Maybe more importantly, if an LEO sees you, there's small chance he will recognize you. If he recognizes you, there is small chance he will remember you next year. A drone flying over a protest, then next month's protest, and so on, with automated recognition, gets to build a database of "usual suspects." Exercising your right to free assembly and free speech should not make you a suspect.
I guess law enforcement shouldn't be able to use aircraft or cameras. Maybe they shouldn't be able to use cars or computers, either.
A large part of your privacy derives from the cost of individual investigation. Back in the day when a wire tap involved a human making physical connections and a transcriptionist listening to every conversation, taps were infrequently used, and used only when an investigator was pretty sure it would be fruitful. When surveillance meant sending a team of officers, in shifts, to personally watch their suspect, they were already pretty sure they'd get good information. Budgetary constraints are very strong. If "wiretap" is only a matter of keying a few keywords into a database, then the only limits to frivolous investigation are the police actually following their official procedures and the judge. Rules or laws are not enough to keep law enforcement from stepping on your rights, or to make citizens good, safe drivers.
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I think it's a perception issue. There's even an ad campaign: If you have a problem, "There's an app for that." Software development can move very fast, and a lot of people see software as technology. So, "Do [x], but with a computer or phone," starts to look like what techies do, and the set of problems you can solve with a phone is pretty small and personal.
Real technology, like driverless cars to prevent ~1M annual fatalities, solar energy and other efforts to minimize global warming, or curing river blindness, takes a long time to develop and spends a long time looking like it won't work. A lot of it is developed by existing companies that don't need media-driven VC, and may even try to hide development from their competitors. Real technology looks incremental.
Internet-style atheism has this unfortunate habit of going on to argue that any religion which presents myths as myths isn't really religion.
If you reject the literal resurrection of the Biblical Jesus, you are not a Christian in any religious sense, no more than your religion is Judaism if you reject the notion of ancient Semites literally encountering a deity (and/or Ancient Aliens). One cannot maintain disbelief and faith simultaneously. They are literal antonyms.
Jesus himself is supposed to have used allegory and metaphor extensively. Why should it be faith-breaking to believe that the resurrection is also metaphorical or symbolic? Our forebears were great fans of tall tales, lies, and fantasy. This literal, word-for-word truth stuff is a modern distortion: just because God didn't literally impregnate a human virgin and reanimate the decaying flesh of that dead offspring, doesn't mean there is no God, nor that He didn't "adopt" a human to speak for Him.
Fructose is far worse than glucose, so any sugar with a higher percentage of fructose, (such as HFCS), has measurably worse health effects.
The real question is whether 55% fructose HFCS is meaningfully different from 50% fructose cane sugar. That's a difference of 2 grams (21.5 vs 19.5) in a 12 ounce soda. It seems intuitively silly to say that 19.5g of fructose in a cane-sugar sweetened soda is just fine, but that 21.5 in an HFCS soda is deadly.
Now, if the problem with HFCS is that it's all monosaccharides, where sucrose is a disaccharide, then I can get that. But that doesn't seem to be the argument that anti-HFCS people are making. They seem to think that the location of a double-bonded oxygen, which your body can easily isomerize, has an extremely sharp benign-to-toxic threshold.
We are the result of the portion of the species that survived because of cooked meat.
We are the result of the portion of the species that survived because they learned to extract nutrients from almost any source. Spoiled cabbage, desiccated fish, even seeds that have to be ground to dust between stones to get a few carbon molecules.
You can't start your argument by saying that "We are supposed to be cave men and only eat mastodons, because millions of years tuned us to a carnivore diet," then turn around and say "We are supposed to eat cooked meat because we've had fire for 20,000 years." We've had agriculture almost as long as fire.
just wait til they outsource professors to H1B...
H1b is a fairly common visa status for postdocs and non-tenure track faculty.
H-1Bs working at universities "include 21,754 professors, lecturers and instructors, 20,566 doctors, clinicians and therapists, 25,175 researchers, post-docs and biologists,
So, already there.
Well then, it follows logically that if taxes == compassion & empathy, then the the only compassionate and empathetic thing to do is to tax 100% and distribute it where needed (we won't discuss who makes those decisions nor what standards/definitions they use).
Why is it that so many people seem to think in such extremes? Like the only two legitimate options are 0% tax for everyone and 100% tax for everyone? The only two ways to drive are 100 mph and stopped.
Is this supposed to be a rhetorical device? "If a little is good, then too much can not exist." Everything that follows a patently ridiculous claim is going to be viewed with suspicion and doubt: it makes the writer look incapable of reasonable argument.
In order to have a free & open society where individual rights and freedom are paramount and Rule of Law is the norm for rich and poor alike
Access to the Law has a cost and is inherently more available to the rich. If access to the Law is paid by the communal wealth of your small neighborhood, then it is more accessible by rich neighborhoods. Rich people and residents of rich neighborhoods have a vested interest in direct control. If equal access to the Law is your norm, then rich people have to pay for the poor people, and rich neighborhoods have to pay for the poor neighborhoods.
Universities have been outsourcing their IT for years. At my school, we use Microsoft for email, Elucian for student records, Plesk for web services, and I can't recall which company does personnel. Company comes in and claims that, because of their existing infrastructure, they can offer better services at lower per-student cost, and budget pressure takes over. Contracting out the actual staffing of help desk is just the next logical step.
It's a funny thing to watch a university that was part of the development of open, distributed electronic mail abdicate its management to Microsoft. It feels like selling out, although it's probably just the natural progression of technological maturity. My only compensation is to imagine that the university is using some of those people to develop the next cool technology, and I just don't know about it yet.
The millennial generation, because of a greying population, won't have retirement, they'll have to work until they die.
The millenial generation has seen their jobs stolen by outsourcing to India, by immigrants both legal and illegal, and now by people who've been dead for half a decade. Those kids just can't catch a break.
Watchlists and mass surveillance already sweep up more people and information than "they" can follow. They've poisoned their own data set, and there's little need to go out and create a handful of honey pots.
Those agencies still believe in the myth that big data can pull the One True Terrorist out of a hundred million, if you just give it a big enough data set. They can't. They don't have enough of a positive control population to train their algorithms. The data may be helpful, after the fact, to find co-conspirators, but even that hasn't really worked out so far. If big data really worked, I wouldn't be seeing ads for TVs for a month after I bought one.
They want the public to believe that big data can identify the One True Terrorist, because it serves the two-fold goals of making the public feel like the government is keeping them safe and serves as a deterrent against organizing or conspiring. All of the "you can't trust your devices" paranoia furthers these goals.
Why can they ban people harassing celebrities, but not ISIS accounts?
Because they get complaints from the targets of harassment? I'm sure, if the recipients of ISIS DM's started complaining to twitter about them, that they could be subject to ban. The NSA doesn't have to read the DMs between third parties, and has to go out of their way to get them. For the NSA to claim they're being harassed by messages between ISIS and John Doe strains any definition of harassment.
So willful, active support for terrorism is a lesser crime than violating copyright? Is that what Witters suggests?
No, he's suggesting that a business which makes its product available to terrorists is 'providing material support to terrorists,' and it doesn't matter if that product is, itself, not physically material. He's suggesting that a company providing material support to terrorists should not be able to use copyright law to hide from the NSA.
The fundamental claim that we should all be worried about is that doing business with a terrorist, even if you don't know they're terrorists, is equivalent to actively promoting their cause. You know, so if you're an electric company, and one of your customers sets off a bomb, you may be liable for prosecution.
We all vote by mail, so hack all you want.
Hacking the voter registration system allows you to create fake voters. Fake voters can mail in ballots just as easily as real voters, and no one is likely to notice the identical quinquagintatuplets as unusual if they don't show up in person.
These security experts wouldn't recommend it, but they're relying on security through obscurity.
The wouldn't recommend that obscurity be your only security, but I think they would all agree that obscurity can be a useful component of a comprehensive security plan.
For example, if you run a web server, everyone knows it. Controlling the server signature to not obscure the specific version or modules that server runs means an attacker can not target known version-specific vulnerabilities, but has to try a bunch of them. This gives the server the opportunity to detect multiple exploit attempts and ban the source (or whatever). Using unpopular/obscure software, like ngnix or lighthttpd instead of apache/IIS, may also reduce the attack profile (ie, worms or script kiddies), while being less intrinsically secure.
That's not my point.... the simple fact that he would even mention it as a contributing factor to not bother with AV software *IS* evidence that it is lulling him into the exact same sense of security that might happen with AV software
I interpreted it more along the lines of "AV software targets vectors that are generally not relevant or redundant on linux, so I don't bother with it." Kind of like how you might choose not to run OpenGL or a multitasking scheduler on a DOS box - you can think of some edge cases where it might be helpful, but it's not generally going to do anything. You would definitely be justified in saying, "I don't run openGL because I'm on DOS," but it wouldn't be that you think DOS has great graphics.
Some of the most important work in medicine gets done free -- peer-reviewing journal articles and grant applications.
To be honest, peer review is not done for free. The people who do it don't have their salaries docked for time spent on these third-party activities, because they're considered part of the job. (NIH reviewers even get a small stipend for the days they spend in Bethesda) When professors go up for tenure and promotion, they list the journals and agencies they review for - they're badges of academic legitimacy. While it is true that time spent reviewing grants is time not spent preparing lectures, grading papers, or doing your own experiments, peer review is definitely something that a university considers its faculty paid to do. Just not paid by the journals that benefit.
The health insurance industry only has the power it enjoys now because it's the patient's only bulk bargaining agent in the current monopoly environment.
Except that the insurance industry has no motivation to control costs. They run, essentially, as a cost-plus provider, meaning that their profit margin is some percentage of whatever the cost of care. If the cost of drugs goes up, the insurance company doesn't "eat" that cost, they raise premiums.
Floods are steady and the damage as a % of GDP has fallen 75% since 1950.
Economic cost of flooding is a terrible metric for "the amount of flooding." Damage due to flooding is easily mitigated by engineering: dikes near populated areas, overflow zones, dams... Damage due to flooding is easily mitigated by population changes: mandate expensive flood insurance in flood-prone areas so people leave; inform property owners of flood-prone areas; build an extensive rail/road infrastructure so businesses can move away from river transport. It can be mitigated by changing the economy: in 1950, 7% of US GDP was farming - much of is done in river basins for irrigation. In 2000, 0.7% of US GDP was farming.
You can do a small physics experiment to prove that CO2 increases are causing all of the ocean temp increases? No, you cannot.
"Climate change" is not a synonym for "atmospheric CO2." There is absolutely no question that ocean temperatures have risen dramatically in the last 100 years. That is climate change. That is the energy source Nye is claiming can "reasonably" be connected to more energetic and wetter storms. He is not wrong.
There's a lot of evidence and theory supporting the hypothesis that man-made CO2 emissions have contributed to the rise in surface and ocean temperatures, but that's a separate issue. Regardless of whether you're a pro- or anti-AGW person, it is an empirical fact that 379 consecutive months of above average temperature demonstrates that the global temperature is rising. You can't deny that data, or the consequences of that temperature trend, just because you don't like some people's explanation of the cause.
The difference is that spontaneous fire tornadoes are pretty chaotic and inefficient. Red and yellow fires with lots of partially burned hydrocarbons. These folks are excited because they've managed to arrange an airflow around the fuel that results in much more complete combustion, hence a blue flame like in your furnace or stove.
To be fair, ethernet went through the 10B-2 phase, which gave you all the disadvantages of TR, but let you use much less expensive wire and much less of it. I remember walking the length of the network at my first job, carrying a terminator, unplugging each device in series to figure out where the problem was.
The fact that the Clintons have abused their political office to enrich themselves massively is self-evident from their net worth and their control of the Clinton foundation.
Essentially every member of congress makes an absolute shit ton of money during their first term. Speaking fees, legal stock market trading on confidential information, there's all kinds of things congress has decided to allow themselves because they "don't amount to corruption," in a quid-pro-quo sense. Not saying it's good; just saying it's normal.
But such claims of graft or unethical behavior are usually brought up by one party because they think their candidate is less tainted. In this case, the Clintons have been in public office for 30 years; they and their foundation have been subject to public disclosure of their financial records for much of that time. The Trumps have made their money by selling their name and managing mob-controlled construction projects and has kept his finances strictly private. DJT, in particular, has made a special point of emphasizing that he doesn't do anything unless he gets paid. How is he going to get paid as President?
There are relatively few online games which involve "solving puzzles to move to the next level".
I agree, unless they're talking about specific types of online games (eg, Lumosity). I think it's much more important that games - online or not - encourage you to focus on one activity for an extended period. Much different than, say, television, which gives you at most 8 minutes before a commercial break. Online games may have a more extended pseudo-narrative, covering several levels or encounters. Focus. Long-term memory. Those sound like good academic skills.
"Academic performance" is only paying attention to that part of the body of knowledge that will appear on the tests on Fridays and the Final.
Most of the professors I know are, or at least started out, genuinely interested in seeing student absorb new information and gain new skills. An incessant barrage of "Will this be on the test?" and "What should I know for the test?" type questions gets them trained pretty quickly to cater to those students who only care about the test. Other students hear mostly questions related to what's going to be on the test. It all sets up a horribly pathological positive feedback loop where once-enthusiastic teachers come to believe that students only care about the test, so they pre-emptively answer questions about test content, giving the rest of the students the impression that the tests are the only thing that matters.
Never mind the headaches associated with trying to give a 'participation' grade to reward those students who actually are interested, ask good questions, and do work that's not reflected in the tests. Or the tears when a test question is not exactly like one of the practice problems.
If there were 1,000 police watching the demonstrations that would be no difference than if the helicopter recorded everything.
If there are 1000 police at a protest, then it's clear to the protesters that LEO is observing. A small drone, high above is effectively secret. LEO presence discourages (you can say intimidates) peaceful protesters from getting out of hand. A drone flying high overhead has no preventative role, it can only be punitive. Maybe more importantly, if an LEO sees you, there's small chance he will recognize you. If he recognizes you, there is small chance he will remember you next year. A drone flying over a protest, then next month's protest, and so on, with automated recognition, gets to build a database of "usual suspects." Exercising your right to free assembly and free speech should not make you a suspect.
I guess law enforcement shouldn't be able to use aircraft or cameras. Maybe they shouldn't be able to use cars or computers, either.
A large part of your privacy derives from the cost of individual investigation. Back in the day when a wire tap involved a human making physical connections and a transcriptionist listening to every conversation, taps were infrequently used, and used only when an investigator was pretty sure it would be fruitful. When surveillance meant sending a team of officers, in shifts, to personally watch their suspect, they were already pretty sure they'd get good information. Budgetary constraints are very strong. If "wiretap" is only a matter of keying a few keywords into a database, then the only limits to frivolous investigation are the police actually following their official procedures and the judge. Rules or laws are not enough to keep law enforcement from stepping on your rights, or to make citizens good, safe drivers.