Sure, "only" 800-900K people have a top secret security clearance (quite a lot more have lower clearances, as in Secret, but not Top Secret). People are denied clearance for all sorts of reasons; in most cases it's not because the person is suspected of being treasonous, but because they fit a profile where, statistically speaking, they could be convinced to violate their clearance more easily. A large number of denials are based on credit reports; money troubles could be a way for foreign agents to get an "in", by helping you out economically. A history of drug use or alcohol abuse renders you susceptible to blackmail, close emotional ties with non-citizens can be a problem as well.
Remember, classification exists for a reason. If you have agents collecting information from foreign powers (read: spying) you want to make sure the foreign power doesn't identify them. So anything that reveals the source of the information has to be kept from leaking. If you didn't provide some assurance that a spy's identity would be protected (by keeping distribution of the identifying information to a small number of people, and making reasonably sure they could be trusted), you couldn't recruit any spies at all.
Beyond that, you don't need a clearance (or a very high one) for most federal government work. Yeah, Defense work will need it, as will Intelligence and some State Department jobs, but most everything else is low or no clearance. Secret level clearances are actually pretty trivial (mostly a matter of verifying you have no criminal record and doing a credit check), only the top secret clearances actually involve a full range of denial reasons.
Oh, and one more reason everyone doesn't have them: For Top Secret clearances, you need to fill out an annoying ass form and they spend $10K or so and many months investigating your background to make sure you didn't lie. So you need to want to work for the federal government (which pays less for the same education than most private sector jobs), live where such jobs are available, and they need to want you. If any of those aren't the case, spending the money to clear you would be pointless.
Barely legal? How so? Write-in candidacies are perfectly legal, they're just rarely successful. Just because she lost the primary doesn't mean she *can't* run as a write-in.
The thriving market for fake AV scams simply means people are too cheap to pay full price for a commercial AV scanner, or too stupid to find a legit free one. Computers are appliances to 90% of the world's population, and no other appliance requires expensive upgrades to determine if it's being misused. Even without a car alarm, you'll notice if your car isn't where you parked it, but a most infected computers don't advertise as such. People know they need an AV scanner, and hey, the computer just offered them one, "Score! No need to go shopping for one!" All viruses (that aren't autonomous worms) spread based on misplaced trust or greed, and getting a cheap AV scanner appeals to both instincts.
Increasing the supply of doctors would require lowering the cost to train doctors; after all, if the wages for doctors drop and the cost to become a doctor does not, less people would pursue the profession and you'd end up back where we started. You can't magically increase the number of doctors and lower their pay without a lot of government support (to lower the cost of medical school, limit the cost of malpractice insurance, etc.) in ways that defy free market ideology.
Actually, for the purposes of novelty seeking behavior, the DRD4 variant increases novelty seeking behavior the most when you have a heterogeneous mix, one normal and one variant copy (by 2.1x according to the info on 23andme, which is the result of one large scale study). Two variant copies increase the level by 2.0x. So if you have any copies, you're predisposed towards liberalism, while having no copies means you're not. Other genes and environmental factors determine how far you follow that innate predisposition; you aren't automatically liberal or conservative just because you seek or avoid novelty.
Of course, the DRD4 variant linked to "liberalism" is also linked (loosely) to ADHD. Even if you believe liberalism is superior to the alternatives, I'm not sure you want to increase liberalism in the population by making them all predisposed to ADHD (no, it won't make everyone ADHD, in the same way it won't make everyone a liberal, but the same gene triggers propensities in that direction).
Killer apps only count when they're exclusive, or at least a better experience. Left 4 Dead 2 has been out for a year on PC and 360 (and probably PS3, though I don't pay much attention to the PS3). Mac users getting one game a year after everyone else (while 99% of games don't ever get there) is not going to sell the platform to gamers.
Trying and failing to live up to "higher" standards is commendable. The same cannot be said for "basic" standards. There's a huge difference between trying to be polite to your coworkers on a day-to-day basis and failing, vs. preaching peace and love while arranging the Crusades, or preaching protection of the weak while molesting children then covering it up. Amazingly, in my 28 years of life (most of which was spent as an atheist), I never killed, never raped, never molested a child, never stole (past the age of 13, and it was shoplifting Playboys, not armed robbery) never fought with anyone who didn't attack me first, etc. Yet somehow, the Catholic church can do or incite all those things, and we're supposed to forgive them because they are poor, fallible men? Sure, you have to expect some bad apples in any large organization, but organization wide conspiracies to cover up child molestation is not something that should be answered with "oh, we're all sinners anyway." We all commit minor sins, but the Catholic church is actually setting a lower bar for morality than we actually expect of the average person.
That's not including the other benefits provided (health, dental, life insurance) and taxes (e.g. Social Security and Medicare matches) paid on behalf of the worker. That said, that wouldn't add up to $48/hour even then. Maybe the high $20s.
Per the above post they could not bill enough (a mere $500) to cover the costs involved, or to establish a reasonable fee that would encourage the $75 annual payment. If the cost is just $500 for a single firefighting job, everyone would act as a free rider, and the fire department would not recoup their expenses, leading to the nearby town's taxpayers subsidizing the rural area's firefighting costs even more than they already do (the $75 is already below cost).
Entrapment would be if the FBI offered him money to divulge company secrets out of the blue. He made an offer to Country X; the intent to commit a crime was his alone, not prompted by law enforcement.
Industrial espionage is great if it provides a benefit commensurate to the cost and risk. Like I said, if there was some secret technology to be gained, or some other private information of significant economic value to be gained, I'd understand it. But I'm not seeing Akamai customer lists (trivial to divine simply by seeing which sites load against Akamai servers) as that valuable. I suppose the contract values might be mildly helpful in negotiating rates with Akamai if Country X was trying to help its own businesses' competitiveness, but the benefit to be gained is tiny.
automatically assumes that a foreign country is interested in pedestrian industrial espionage, particularly when there is no technology involved, just business contact and contract info? Oh boy, freepills.com pays Akamai $200/month to host their images, that was totally worth the expense and risk of a diplomatic incident!
I think only one screen is stylus sensitive, but on the other hand, you can rotate the DSi 180 degrees and the stylus sensitive part will be on the left hand side. You just need to flip the display to compensate for that and it would work.
Most forms of anti-biotic resistance impose a cost (less efficient reproduction, use of resources to produce outer coatings that prevent contact with the anti-biotics, etc.). If anti-biotics stop being available for a long time, non-resistant forms that don't pay that cost eventually win out. How long that takes is open to question though.
Young Earth creationism is actually a very small minority of Islam, and it appears to have been imported from Christian Evangelicals in the West. It was basically a non-existent belief as recently as fifty years ago.
If the Earth's rotation were so slow that millions of years could pass in a "day", then the Earth would have been half frozen and half cooked all the time, with a narrow, possibly habitable zone at the meeting point. That sort of thing would show up quite clearly in the archaeological record. Beyond that, there is no natural mechanism I'm aware of that could impart the necessary rotational energy to said slowly spinning Earth that wouldn't also tear it apart in the process (presumably a sufficiently large thruster running for incredible lengths of time might do it, but that would be tricky to do, since said thruster would need fuel, and would be frozen or melting most of the time).
To my knowledge, as long as you release the source code changes you made when releasing your device, you're okay. And if you're doing this for personal use and not selling it, then you don't owe a penny. Everyone sued by BusyBox had used BusyBox source, not acknowledged it, and sold products with it without releasing the source.
Thanks. I skimmed the article and missed the actual functional details near the bottom. Kinda wish they'd started with "What's new" then explained why it mattered, rather than explaining why "something" mattered before specifying what "something" is.
Are you trolling? Because "Open Software is in fact pretty much Close Software (GPL anyone?)" is a patently ridiculous statement. Yes, you can argue that the viral nature of the GPL is not a good thing for certain business models, but arguing that open source is closed is flat out Orwellian.
Agreed. The summary is "not news" and the blog entry itself is a rhetorical argument in favor of the "Open Compliance Programme"; slightly spammish, but mostly boring. News flash: Managers are conservative and want something proven to work, rather than the latest and greatest.
Remember, I'm not arguing that there was any organization on the left. If even two left leaning people were burying stories based on their biases, rather than the caliber of the stories, then I'm correct. So no, technically, I can't prove it. But are you going to try and claim that of the thousands (millions?) of left leaning Digg users, none of them made an effort to bury right leaning stories based on political biases rather than story quality?
Well, as noted, a system with pure "Digg-ing" is just as susceptible to the problem (without introducing random voting). The front page only has so many slots. So the same group of buriers just needs to vote up enough stories they agree with to flood the front page, and everything else is effectively buried.
It might take more time, but then, if that becomes a problem, they can always script a system wherein they manually mark the stories to be buried and vote up everything that isn't on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, "only" 800-900K people have a top secret security clearance (quite a lot more have lower clearances, as in Secret, but not Top Secret). People are denied clearance for all sorts of reasons; in most cases it's not because the person is suspected of being treasonous, but because they fit a profile where, statistically speaking, they could be convinced to violate their clearance more easily. A large number of denials are based on credit reports; money troubles could be a way for foreign agents to get an "in", by helping you out economically. A history of drug use or alcohol abuse renders you susceptible to blackmail, close emotional ties with non-citizens can be a problem as well.
Remember, classification exists for a reason. If you have agents collecting information from foreign powers (read: spying) you want to make sure the foreign power doesn't identify them. So anything that reveals the source of the information has to be kept from leaking. If you didn't provide some assurance that a spy's identity would be protected (by keeping distribution of the identifying information to a small number of people, and making reasonably sure they could be trusted), you couldn't recruit any spies at all.
Beyond that, you don't need a clearance (or a very high one) for most federal government work. Yeah, Defense work will need it, as will Intelligence and some State Department jobs, but most everything else is low or no clearance. Secret level clearances are actually pretty trivial (mostly a matter of verifying you have no criminal record and doing a credit check), only the top secret clearances actually involve a full range of denial reasons.
Oh, and one more reason everyone doesn't have them: For Top Secret clearances, you need to fill out an annoying ass form and they spend $10K or so and many months investigating your background to make sure you didn't lie. So you need to want to work for the federal government (which pays less for the same education than most private sector jobs), live where such jobs are available, and they need to want you. If any of those aren't the case, spending the money to clear you would be pointless.
Barely legal? How so? Write-in candidacies are perfectly legal, they're just rarely successful. Just because she lost the primary doesn't mean she *can't* run as a write-in.
Because in most other advanced countries, those speeds would run you a quarter that price or less.
The thriving market for fake AV scams simply means people are too cheap to pay full price for a commercial AV scanner, or too stupid to find a legit free one. Computers are appliances to 90% of the world's population, and no other appliance requires expensive upgrades to determine if it's being misused. Even without a car alarm, you'll notice if your car isn't where you parked it, but a most infected computers don't advertise as such. People know they need an AV scanner, and hey, the computer just offered them one, "Score! No need to go shopping for one!" All viruses (that aren't autonomous worms) spread based on misplaced trust or greed, and getting a cheap AV scanner appeals to both instincts.
Increasing the supply of doctors would require lowering the cost to train doctors; after all, if the wages for doctors drop and the cost to become a doctor does not, less people would pursue the profession and you'd end up back where we started. You can't magically increase the number of doctors and lower their pay without a lot of government support (to lower the cost of medical school, limit the cost of malpractice insurance, etc.) in ways that defy free market ideology.
Actually, for the purposes of novelty seeking behavior, the DRD4 variant increases novelty seeking behavior the most when you have a heterogeneous mix, one normal and one variant copy (by 2.1x according to the info on 23andme, which is the result of one large scale study). Two variant copies increase the level by 2.0x. So if you have any copies, you're predisposed towards liberalism, while having no copies means you're not. Other genes and environmental factors determine how far you follow that innate predisposition; you aren't automatically liberal or conservative just because you seek or avoid novelty.
Of course, the DRD4 variant linked to "liberalism" is also linked (loosely) to ADHD. Even if you believe liberalism is superior to the alternatives, I'm not sure you want to increase liberalism in the population by making them all predisposed to ADHD (no, it won't make everyone ADHD, in the same way it won't make everyone a liberal, but the same gene triggers propensities in that direction).
Killer apps only count when they're exclusive, or at least a better experience. Left 4 Dead 2 has been out for a year on PC and 360 (and probably PS3, though I don't pay much attention to the PS3). Mac users getting one game a year after everyone else (while 99% of games don't ever get there) is not going to sell the platform to gamers.
Trying and failing to live up to "higher" standards is commendable. The same cannot be said for "basic" standards. There's a huge difference between trying to be polite to your coworkers on a day-to-day basis and failing, vs. preaching peace and love while arranging the Crusades, or preaching protection of the weak while molesting children then covering it up. Amazingly, in my 28 years of life (most of which was spent as an atheist), I never killed, never raped, never molested a child, never stole (past the age of 13, and it was shoplifting Playboys, not armed robbery) never fought with anyone who didn't attack me first, etc. Yet somehow, the Catholic church can do or incite all those things, and we're supposed to forgive them because they are poor, fallible men? Sure, you have to expect some bad apples in any large organization, but organization wide conspiracies to cover up child molestation is not something that should be answered with "oh, we're all sinners anyway." We all commit minor sins, but the Catholic church is actually setting a lower bar for morality than we actually expect of the average person.
That's not including the other benefits provided (health, dental, life insurance) and taxes (e.g. Social Security and Medicare matches) paid on behalf of the worker. That said, that wouldn't add up to $48/hour even then. Maybe the high $20s.
Per the above post they could not bill enough (a mere $500) to cover the costs involved, or to establish a reasonable fee that would encourage the $75 annual payment. If the cost is just $500 for a single firefighting job, everyone would act as a free rider, and the fire department would not recoup their expenses, leading to the nearby town's taxpayers subsidizing the rural area's firefighting costs even more than they already do (the $75 is already below cost).
Entrapment would be if the FBI offered him money to divulge company secrets out of the blue. He made an offer to Country X; the intent to commit a crime was his alone, not prompted by law enforcement.
Industrial espionage is great if it provides a benefit commensurate to the cost and risk. Like I said, if there was some secret technology to be gained, or some other private information of significant economic value to be gained, I'd understand it. But I'm not seeing Akamai customer lists (trivial to divine simply by seeing which sites load against Akamai servers) as that valuable. I suppose the contract values might be mildly helpful in negotiating rates with Akamai if Country X was trying to help its own businesses' competitiveness, but the benefit to be gained is tiny.
automatically assumes that a foreign country is interested in pedestrian industrial espionage, particularly when there is no technology involved, just business contact and contract info? Oh boy, freepills.com pays Akamai $200/month to host their images, that was totally worth the expense and risk of a diplomatic incident!
Just to be clear, the problem is that the developers didn't bother to make the display flipping option available.
I think only one screen is stylus sensitive, but on the other hand, you can rotate the DSi 180 degrees and the stylus sensitive part will be on the left hand side. You just need to flip the display to compensate for that and it would work.
Most forms of anti-biotic resistance impose a cost (less efficient reproduction, use of resources to produce outer coatings that prevent contact with the anti-biotics, etc.). If anti-biotics stop being available for a long time, non-resistant forms that don't pay that cost eventually win out. How long that takes is open to question though.
Young Earth creationism is actually a very small minority of Islam, and it appears to have been imported from Christian Evangelicals in the West. It was basically a non-existent belief as recently as fifty years ago.
If the Earth's rotation were so slow that millions of years could pass in a "day", then the Earth would have been half frozen and half cooked all the time, with a narrow, possibly habitable zone at the meeting point. That sort of thing would show up quite clearly in the archaeological record. Beyond that, there is no natural mechanism I'm aware of that could impart the necessary rotational energy to said slowly spinning Earth that wouldn't also tear it apart in the process (presumably a sufficiently large thruster running for incredible lengths of time might do it, but that would be tricky to do, since said thruster would need fuel, and would be frozen or melting most of the time).
To my knowledge, as long as you release the source code changes you made when releasing your device, you're okay. And if you're doing this for personal use and not selling it, then you don't owe a penny. Everyone sued by BusyBox had used BusyBox source, not acknowledged it, and sold products with it without releasing the source.
Thanks. I skimmed the article and missed the actual functional details near the bottom. Kinda wish they'd started with "What's new" then explained why it mattered, rather than explaining why "something" mattered before specifying what "something" is.
Are you trolling? Because "Open Software is in fact pretty much Close Software (GPL anyone?)" is a patently ridiculous statement. Yes, you can argue that the viral nature of the GPL is not a good thing for certain business models, but arguing that open source is closed is flat out Orwellian.
Agreed. The summary is "not news" and the blog entry itself is a rhetorical argument in favor of the "Open Compliance Programme"; slightly spammish, but mostly boring. News flash: Managers are conservative and want something proven to work, rather than the latest and greatest.
Remember, I'm not arguing that there was any organization on the left. If even two left leaning people were burying stories based on their biases, rather than the caliber of the stories, then I'm correct. So no, technically, I can't prove it. But are you going to try and claim that of the thousands (millions?) of left leaning Digg users, none of them made an effort to bury right leaning stories based on political biases rather than story quality?
Well, as noted, a system with pure "Digg-ing" is just as susceptible to the problem (without introducing random voting). The front page only has so many slots. So the same group of buriers just needs to vote up enough stories they agree with to flood the front page, and everything else is effectively buried.
It might take more time, but then, if that becomes a problem, they can always script a system wherein they manually mark the stories to be buried and vote up everything that isn't on it.