On the other hand, if they don't kill it, the presenter may well have just committed a number of crimes in front of a live audience, and probably a fair few cameras)...
If they don't, he'll just have some nastygrams to hang on his wall, and a story of being oppressed by the man, without any lingering consequences.
They might just be ignoring it entirely, figuring that the Streisand effect is not with them on this one; but the path of maximum vindictiveness actually requires them to let him go ahead...
I was talking about fuel sources. "Foreignness" of a fuel source is often seen as a drawback; because it commonly implies a degree of vulnerability to geopolitical price shocks and/or serious externalities that hide out in the DoD budget...
Because that is a common concern, it made my list of examples of factors by which one might judge various fuels, in coming up with an "efficiency" number. Coming up with those factors, and putting precise weights on them, won't be trivial; but it would serve the exceptionally valuable purpose of forcing people to think about what they actually want.
It is easy to pass a credit based on an essentially emotional "hybrids good" feeling; but that leads to sub-optimal lawmaking.
If you are going to poke a system, you should know what you want, as precisely as possible, and focus on getting it. In many(though not necessarily every) cases, the best way to do this is simply define what you want, assign Pigovian taxes/credits appropriately, and let the market work it out. The case of lightbulbs is a good example: if the price of electricity accurately captures its externalities, you don't need to do any dictating of lightbulb efficiency, people's pocketbooks will do it for them(as long as you require that efficiency information be easily available at point of sale). Don't bother with some "CFLs only" campaign.
If electricity prices cannot be made to capture their externalities, and you still need to do something, again, do it as directly as possible: don't say "only X or Y technology". Just say "X lumens/watt, or better. in 2015, Y lumens/watt or better. Figure it out."
That is what I most dislike about many of these behavior modification schemes(above and beyond any theoretical/ethical questions about behavior modification schemes in general). They are absurdly specific, mistaking the best known "solution" to whatever problem they are attacking for their actual objective, and then subsidizing the former by name, instead of stacking the deck toward the latter.
Their leadership might; but the vast majority of their membership won't be painting themselves red or stripping in public(pity...) about it.
Blowflies are very much out of the "nature red in tooth and claw" school, only nastier. They need substantial amounts of protein to successfully lay their eggs and develop their horrid maggots. The nicest ones deal with this by hunting down and infesting carrion. The less pleasant ones don't like to wait. In tropical areas, this so-called "fly-strike"(infestation of wounds/sores/damp areas by live maggots feeding on host tissue) is a nontrivial health threat to both humans and animals. I leave the google-images-ing of "flystrike" "Myiasis" and "screwworm" to the reader; but it isn't pretty.
PETA's leadership are genuinely odd ducks; but their rank and file are mostly tactless idealists who are all warm and fuzzy about animals(you'll notice, for instance, that the idea that pets=slavery doesn't feature strongly in fundraising/membership drive literature). Even if they aren't idealistic/fuzzy enough to care about poor children in dusty countries who have maggots in their eye sockets, the fact that these insects will infest, and kill slowly and painfully, all sorts of cute fuzzy animals should do the trick...
Assuming that introducing market distortions is, in fact, desirable(and, let's be frank, those already exist in vast numbers and a variety of forms for fossil fuels, roads, etc. so anybody whining about it being a liberal envirohippy conspiracy can spare me...) it seems like attempts to classify by "type" are far inferior to attempts to classify by efficiency.
All you have to do is calculate an adequately accurate conversion factor between a few fuel sources, based on what variables you care about(ie. co2 emmissions, foreignness, renewability, presumably a weighted average of some kind.) Then you could simply slap an "efficiency under expected conditions" number on each vehicle, without regard for how it achieves it, and go from there. Who cares if it is gasoline, hybrid, electric, diesel, alien tech, when we could know how efficient it is at moving from point A to point B at the lowest cost across the variables that concern us?
(If one were feeling really radical, one could simply apply a system of Pigovian taxes and/or credits to the fuel sources, and let car buyers follow their economic incentives from there; but I'm guessing that that'll be a non-starter.)
Just for the sake of accuracy, there is one combination of law and technology that doesn't fit this pattern; but we'll be exporting icicles from hell, by unicorn, before it comes up:
The abolition of intellectual property(and related things like DRM anti-circumvention laws) would make piracy impossible by definition, while sharply reducing the power and scope and suppressive capabilities of the combination of law and technology.
I don't get the sense that this scheme has many defenders, certainly none with any influence; but it is the sole exception to the above claim.
Anyone who views an offer of debate as an "attempt to silence"(barring extreme cases like someone with a particularly mockable speech impediment, for which "debate" might well just involve having the crowd laugh at his expense. I'm assuming that you don't become head of ASCAP that way, though. Almost certainly a lawyer or business type who knows how to talk to a boardroom.) must see acting with impunity, and without external input, as their right be default, and thus the idea of someone else having equal footing becomes an attack, not simple justice.
It is rather like the fanatics of various stripes who scream that they are persecuted when they are not allowed to persecute others. Their worldview is warped so far toward themselves as the default, that any attempt to prevent them from harming others is seen as an assault on their rights.
Yup, I'm pretty sure we do. Regardless of one's feelings about piracy, positive or negative, it is an uncomfortable fact that any combination of law and technology sufficient to stamp out, or even seriously inconvenience, piracy will necessarily be downright authoritarian in power and scope, corrosive to privacy, and almost perfectly suited to the suppression of any other flavor of information, art, culture, speech, etc.
These are just architectural necessities of any anti-piracy system that isn't going to be a penny-ante joke. Whatever you think about piracy, they are quite arguably too high a price to pay.
Likelihood that I get fired because something important runs out of storage and falls over(and, naturally, it'll be most likely to run out of storage under heavy use, which is when we most need it up...): Relatively high...
Likelihood that I get fired because I buy a few hundred gigs too much, that sit in a dusty corner somewhere, barely even noticed except in passing because there is nobody with a clear handle on the overall picture(and, if there his, he is looking at things from the sort of bird's eye view where a few hundred gigs looks like a speck on the map): Relatively insignificant...
Given that virtually every system(if not on the printed card, just by asking the teacher) exposes the real numerical average, I don't really see this as an issue.
Unless both you and your teacher are terminally out to lunch, you'll know what your numbers are. Good students typically keep an eye on them if they are in dangerous territory, and good teachers spend a lot of time hounding bad students about pulling their numbers up a bit.
There is also the fact that, at all but the most control-freaky institutions, teachers enjoy some discretion. If you got a 69%; but the teacher thinks you were really heading in the right direction or something, they can find a way to give you that extra 1%. If they don't, they can just point at the numbers and let you head to summer school.
Deciding how much granularity to expose in the final grade is a judgment call, as is deciding the cutoff between pass and fail; but the raw data are always available to a substantially greater level of granularity than is probably even meaningful. Even modestly organized teachers commonly have records, down to the point, of how you did on each assignment during the term, and there are typically enough points in a term that that represents.25% or smaller granularity, almost certainly well down in the noise.
I hope that this will serve as a viable reply to the persistent "but you have no expectations of privacy in public in the real world, why worry online?" crowd.
The real world is(relatively) harmless because(outside of East Germany, and the UK) persistent, comprehensive surveillance is extremely expensive and/or time consuming. Only people with stalkers, secret agents, or private investigators on their tail need worry.
On the internet, which masterfully makes data collection and mining much easier, comprehensive surveillance, and making something of the results, is relatively trivial. Hence the concern.
Unless you have some particularly classy TOSLINK gear, there are no lasers involved, just LEDs(and at 650nm, so all the eye's brightness adjustment and blink features work normally).
There might have been some good reason for it back in the early 80's; but the fact that TOSLINK is optical at all looks like crazy overkill by today's standards. S/PDIF signals can be transmitted electrically over a single RCA cable just fine at modest distances(3.1Mb/s just isn't that challenging), and the cost constraints on TOSLINK(LEDs rather than lasers, usually just plastic fiber), mean that its range is scarcely any better.
I still want to know what Intel has up their sleeves for this "light peak": You can get 10Gb optical interfaces right now, off the shelf; but they are quite expensive, and the connectors and cabling aren't something you'd trust a noob to get too many mating cycles out of. What are they going to do to change that? Are there some substantial economies to be had if you compromise on max link length? Do they have some clever new optical connector design?
A 10Gb/s SFP+ optical interface is ~$200(bracketed, I'm sure, by Ebay and Cisco, on the low and high ends, respectively). That is not exactly going to fly in consumer electronics land(Oh, double the BOM cost, no problem!). Therefore, I can only conclude that Intel has some clever plan. If they have a clever plan, though, why are they talking about consumer electronics, rather than absolutely cleaning up in the relatively short range, high-speed, datacenter interconnect market?(Not that they'd necessarily ignore the consumer market; but if they can do what "light peak" promises, one would conclude that they can do 10Gb ethernet, at least over modest distances, substantially more cheaply than anybody else. That would be worth a bundle.)
I don't think that the notion is that all medical code is going to be written by happy-go-lucky FOSS volunteers, the notion is that people ought to be able to inspect the code that is going to becoming a part of their life-critical systems...
It's almost as though some American servicemen suspect that what we are doing isn't upholding our ideals, while the same is not true of the members of terrorist organizations.
With the exception of the president, who is elected and may have personally classified something at some point, you didn't elect any of the people who classified those documents either...
I suspect that, if he had them, he'd release them. For reasons that should be obvious, American news stories about wikileaks tend to focus on wikileaking of American documents; but if you head over to wikileaks directly, and trawl through the archvies, there is all kinds of stuff, pertaining to a wide variety of institutions and governments and issues. Shockingly, leaks of grindingly technical minutes of some obscure EU trade negotiation just don't have the media impact of videos of helicopters shooting stuff.
Further, I'm guessing that wikileaks has a much, much easier time in places where it has embedded sympathizers, and in places with languages that they have people who speak. There is no evidence that wikileaks has any spies of its own, just that they operate a convenient system for whistleblowers to make drops. How many whistleblowers with big caches of digital documents(and internet connections) do you fancy there are in North Korea?
Do you honestly think that the Wikileaks guy is some kind of Obama fan? Going by the plain facts(and he seems like the sort to do so), Obama has basically continued doing exactly what we were doing before, more so, in some cases(ie. his state secrets position is even more extreme than Bush's, and he has approved what amounts to an undeclared war with the hinterlands of Pakistan).
He is much more polite and diplomatic, and doesn't go mouthing off about "crusades" and "axis of evil", which idiots mistake for him being a moderate; but when it comes to using force, spying, and arguing for the US's right to do those things, there is virtually no change.
More likely, they either only have access to reports up to that time(source got cut off, reassigned, KIA, etc.) or are only releasing the older stuff, as it is informative without being as compromising of present-day activity(the same reason they are holding back 15K CIA-related documents)...
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, if they don't kill it, the presenter may well have just committed a number of crimes in front of a live audience, and probably a fair few cameras)...
If they don't, he'll just have some nastygrams to hang on his wall, and a story of being oppressed by the man, without any lingering consequences.
They might just be ignoring it entirely, figuring that the Streisand effect is not with them on this one; but the path of maximum vindictiveness actually requires them to let him go ahead...
I was talking about fuel sources. "Foreignness" of a fuel source is often seen as a drawback; because it commonly implies a degree of vulnerability to geopolitical price shocks and/or serious externalities that hide out in the DoD budget...
Because that is a common concern, it made my list of examples of factors by which one might judge various fuels, in coming up with an "efficiency" number. Coming up with those factors, and putting precise weights on them, won't be trivial; but it would serve the exceptionally valuable purpose of forcing people to think about what they actually want.
It is easy to pass a credit based on an essentially emotional "hybrids good" feeling; but that leads to sub-optimal lawmaking.
If you are going to poke a system, you should know what you want, as precisely as possible, and focus on getting it. In many(though not necessarily every) cases, the best way to do this is simply define what you want, assign Pigovian taxes/credits appropriately, and let the market work it out. The case of lightbulbs is a good example: if the price of electricity accurately captures its externalities, you don't need to do any dictating of lightbulb efficiency, people's pocketbooks will do it for them(as long as you require that efficiency information be easily available at point of sale). Don't bother with some "CFLs only" campaign.
If electricity prices cannot be made to capture their externalities, and you still need to do something, again, do it as directly as possible: don't say "only X or Y technology". Just say "X lumens/watt, or better. in 2015, Y lumens/watt or better. Figure it out."
That is what I most dislike about many of these behavior modification schemes(above and beyond any theoretical/ethical questions about behavior modification schemes in general). They are absurdly specific, mistaking the best known "solution" to whatever problem they are attacking for their actual objective, and then subsidizing the former by name, instead of stacking the deck toward the latter.
Their leadership might; but the vast majority of their membership won't be painting themselves red or stripping in public(pity...) about it.
Blowflies are very much out of the "nature red in tooth and claw" school, only nastier. They need substantial amounts of protein to successfully lay their eggs and develop their horrid maggots. The nicest ones deal with this by hunting down and infesting carrion. The less pleasant ones don't like to wait. In tropical areas, this so-called "fly-strike"(infestation of wounds/sores/damp areas by live maggots feeding on host tissue) is a nontrivial health threat to both humans and animals. I leave the google-images-ing of "flystrike" "Myiasis" and "screwworm" to the reader; but it isn't pretty.
PETA's leadership are genuinely odd ducks; but their rank and file are mostly tactless idealists who are all warm and fuzzy about animals(you'll notice, for instance, that the idea that pets=slavery doesn't feature strongly in fundraising/membership drive literature). Even if they aren't idealistic/fuzzy enough to care about poor children in dusty countries who have maggots in their eye sockets, the fact that these insects will infest, and kill slowly and painfully, all sorts of cute fuzzy animals should do the trick...
Unfortunately, that isn't how cost psychology works...
Any expenses necessary to maintain the status quo are simply necessary, or even "emergency". They don't count.
Any expenses incurred deviating from the status quo are radical, fiscally imprudent experiments that we can ill-afford.
Any attempt to actually assign numbers to these two categories, and compare them, makes you a pointy-headed wonk who is too boring for television.
Assuming that introducing market distortions is, in fact, desirable(and, let's be frank, those already exist in vast numbers and a variety of forms for fossil fuels, roads, etc. so anybody whining about it being a liberal envirohippy conspiracy can spare me...) it seems like attempts to classify by "type" are far inferior to attempts to classify by efficiency.
All you have to do is calculate an adequately accurate conversion factor between a few fuel sources, based on what variables you care about(ie. co2 emmissions, foreignness, renewability, presumably a weighted average of some kind.) Then you could simply slap an "efficiency under expected conditions" number on each vehicle, without regard for how it achieves it, and go from there. Who cares if it is gasoline, hybrid, electric, diesel, alien tech, when we could know how efficient it is at moving from point A to point B at the lowest cost across the variables that concern us?
(If one were feeling really radical, one could simply apply a system of Pigovian taxes and/or credits to the fuel sources, and let car buyers follow their economic incentives from there; but I'm guessing that that'll be a non-starter.)
Just for the sake of accuracy, there is one combination of law and technology that doesn't fit this pattern; but we'll be exporting icicles from hell, by unicorn, before it comes up:
The abolition of intellectual property(and related things like DRM anti-circumvention laws) would make piracy impossible by definition, while sharply reducing the power and scope and suppressive capabilities of the combination of law and technology.
I don't get the sense that this scheme has many defenders, certainly none with any influence; but it is the sole exception to the above claim.
Anyone who views an offer of debate as an "attempt to silence"(barring extreme cases like someone with a particularly mockable speech impediment, for which "debate" might well just involve having the crowd laugh at his expense. I'm assuming that you don't become head of ASCAP that way, though. Almost certainly a lawyer or business type who knows how to talk to a boardroom.) must see acting with impunity, and without external input, as their right be default, and thus the idea of someone else having equal footing becomes an attack, not simple justice.
It is rather like the fanatics of various stripes who scream that they are persecuted when they are not allowed to persecute others. Their worldview is warped so far toward themselves as the default, that any attempt to prevent them from harming others is seen as an assault on their rights.
Oracle's pet linux is branded "Unbreakable"...
Yup, I'm pretty sure we do. Regardless of one's feelings about piracy, positive or negative, it is an uncomfortable fact that any combination of law and technology sufficient to stamp out, or even seriously inconvenience, piracy will necessarily be downright authoritarian in power and scope, corrosive to privacy, and almost perfectly suited to the suppression of any other flavor of information, art, culture, speech, etc.
These are just architectural necessities of any anti-piracy system that isn't going to be a penny-ante joke. Whatever you think about piracy, they are quite arguably too high a price to pay.
He said that he hates to do it. I said that it would likely work. There is no implied contradiction here.
Receiving the news that what you hate to do is what the situation likely requires is not fun; but it can be informative...
This sounds like one of those situations where a DMCA takedown would work...
Wired, having y'know, actual printed copies and stuff, could probably be intimidated into an actual settlement more easily...
Likelihood that I get fired because something important runs out of storage and falls over(and, naturally, it'll be most likely to run out of storage under heavy use, which is when we most need it up...): Relatively high...
Likelihood that I get fired because I buy a few hundred gigs too much, that sit in a dusty corner somewhere, barely even noticed except in passing because there is nobody with a clear handle on the overall picture(and, if there his, he is looking at things from the sort of bird's eye view where a few hundred gigs looks like a speck on the map): Relatively insignificant...
Given that virtually every system(if not on the printed card, just by asking the teacher) exposes the real numerical average, I don't really see this as an issue.
.25% or smaller granularity, almost certainly well down in the noise.
Unless both you and your teacher are terminally out to lunch, you'll know what your numbers are. Good students typically keep an eye on them if they are in dangerous territory, and good teachers spend a lot of time hounding bad students about pulling their numbers up a bit.
There is also the fact that, at all but the most control-freaky institutions, teachers enjoy some discretion. If you got a 69%; but the teacher thinks you were really heading in the right direction or something, they can find a way to give you that extra 1%. If they don't, they can just point at the numbers and let you head to summer school.
Deciding how much granularity to expose in the final grade is a judgment call, as is deciding the cutoff between pass and fail; but the raw data are always available to a substantially greater level of granularity than is probably even meaningful. Even modestly organized teachers commonly have records, down to the point, of how you did on each assignment during the term, and there are typically enough points in a term that that represents
I was (mostly) joking. The licence plate tracking system they have for enforcing congestion charges in London(among other uses) is pretty spiffy...
I hope that this will serve as a viable reply to the persistent "but you have no expectations of privacy in public in the real world, why worry online?" crowd.
The real world is(relatively) harmless because(outside of East Germany, and the UK) persistent, comprehensive surveillance is extremely expensive and/or time consuming. Only people with stalkers, secret agents, or private investigators on their tail need worry.
On the internet, which masterfully makes data collection and mining much easier, comprehensive surveillance, and making something of the results, is relatively trivial. Hence the concern.
Unless you have some particularly classy TOSLINK gear, there are no lasers involved, just LEDs(and at 650nm, so all the eye's brightness adjustment and blink features work normally).
There might have been some good reason for it back in the early 80's; but the fact that TOSLINK is optical at all looks like crazy overkill by today's standards. S/PDIF signals can be transmitted electrically over a single RCA cable just fine at modest distances(3.1Mb/s just isn't that challenging), and the cost constraints on TOSLINK(LEDs rather than lasers, usually just plastic fiber), mean that its range is scarcely any better.
I still want to know what Intel has up their sleeves for this "light peak": You can get 10Gb optical interfaces right now, off the shelf; but they are quite expensive, and the connectors and cabling aren't something you'd trust a noob to get too many mating cycles out of. What are they going to do to change that? Are there some substantial economies to be had if you compromise on max link length? Do they have some clever new optical connector design?
A 10Gb/s SFP+ optical interface is ~$200(bracketed, I'm sure, by Ebay and Cisco, on the low and high ends, respectively). That is not exactly going to fly in consumer electronics land(Oh, double the BOM cost, no problem!). Therefore, I can only conclude that Intel has some clever plan. If they have a clever plan, though, why are they talking about consumer electronics, rather than absolutely cleaning up in the relatively short range, high-speed, datacenter interconnect market?(Not that they'd necessarily ignore the consumer market; but if they can do what "light peak" promises, one would conclude that they can do 10Gb ethernet, at least over modest distances, substantially more cheaply than anybody else. That would be worth a bundle.)
I don't think that the notion is that all medical code is going to be written by happy-go-lucky FOSS volunteers, the notion is that people ought to be able to inspect the code that is going to becoming a part of their life-critical systems...
Well, do you want your pacemaker to have intuitive manageability through Group Policies, or not?
Not to worry. Authentication dongles will be available in a variety of sizes, to make insertion endurable for all our users.
That the Pacemaker Genuine Advantage warning I got last week was a bit of a shock...
It's almost as though some American servicemen suspect that what we are doing isn't upholding our ideals, while the same is not true of the members of terrorist organizations.
Perhaps we should do something about that...
With the exception of the president, who is elected and may have personally classified something at some point, you didn't elect any of the people who classified those documents either...
I suspect that, if he had them, he'd release them. For reasons that should be obvious, American news stories about wikileaks tend to focus on wikileaking of American documents; but if you head over to wikileaks directly, and trawl through the archvies, there is all kinds of stuff, pertaining to a wide variety of institutions and governments and issues. Shockingly, leaks of grindingly technical minutes of some obscure EU trade negotiation just don't have the media impact of videos of helicopters shooting stuff.
Further, I'm guessing that wikileaks has a much, much easier time in places where it has embedded sympathizers, and in places with languages that they have people who speak. There is no evidence that wikileaks has any spies of its own, just that they operate a convenient system for whistleblowers to make drops. How many whistleblowers with big caches of digital documents(and internet connections) do you fancy there are in North Korea?
Do you honestly think that the Wikileaks guy is some kind of Obama fan? Going by the plain facts(and he seems like the sort to do so), Obama has basically continued doing exactly what we were doing before, more so, in some cases(ie. his state secrets position is even more extreme than Bush's, and he has approved what amounts to an undeclared war with the hinterlands of Pakistan).
He is much more polite and diplomatic, and doesn't go mouthing off about "crusades" and "axis of evil", which idiots mistake for him being a moderate; but when it comes to using force, spying, and arguing for the US's right to do those things, there is virtually no change.
More likely, they either only have access to reports up to that time(source got cut off, reassigned, KIA, etc.) or are only releasing the older stuff, as it is informative without being as compromising of present-day activity(the same reason they are holding back 15K CIA-related documents)...