Your points are good but talk to any religious zelots and you wouldn't win an argument with them either. As for my not taking quantum physics on faith I don't. What I don't see is any movement of scientist signing petitions saying the science is crap. In the early days there were many who dismissed it as they should have. But then the science got more and more solid. Papers were published and then not shot down. Predictions were made and then shown to be true. The decenters were shown to be wrong. But nobody called for their heads. The controversial issues were not argued in the press. People didn't make dramatic films supporting their cause of this particle or that. They didn't round up movie stars to shout their cause. All that isn't science it is propaganda.
Only time is going to tell with this issue. The only number I will dispute is the 98% of scientists agreeing number. I have "faith" that number is wrong in that when Queen Elizabeth I's men asked people if they were church of England I bet more than 98% said yes. But then when Queen Mary's men asked the same question a similar number said they were Catholic. Right now it would be career suicide for any but the most established or most fringe to come out against man made global warming.
But if my business were saving the environment I would drop the man made global warming stuff as a risk to my credibility all the while still pushing for greener living independent of the huge big energy interests. The best place to hit people is their self interests, green living would almost certainly be healthy living without diesel soot in our lungs, etc. But things like a carbon tax is the exact opposite it hits people in their self interests; bad idea. This whole slashdot article began with the fact that people like me are getting ticked with the zealotry of the GW people. As I have said, my worry is that people will become ticked with the whole green movement.
I like that you picked years that NOAA got sort of right. 2005 they said it was going to be a light year with around 7 and there were around 15. Plus I just checked your numbers on 2008 it was 7-10 not your 6-9. They still got it right but your numbers were wrong. Also these are the August forecasts. Also you need to break down their numbers a bit more. They don't just pick the number as there is an fairly consistent number of hurricanes each year with ups and downs from things like el nino. So lets look at 2007 where you say they were one off. Their detailed prediction was:
"NOAA's forecast called for seven to nine hurricanes, three to five major hurricanes, and 13-16 named storms."
There were six hurricanes during the season, only two of which were classified as major. And even then the last one Karen was a squeaker it came in on the last day or so and many argued wasn't even a hurricane.
And here is a good one from the 70s proving my point of who really knows:
"The National Science Board's Patterns and Perspectives in Environmental Science report of 1972 discussed the cyclical behavior of climate, and the understanding at the time that the planet was entering a phase of cooling after a warm period. "Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end, to be followed by a long period of considerably colder temperatures leading into the next glacial age some 20,000 years from now."[26] But it also continued; "However, it is possible, or even likely, that human interference has already altered the environment so much that the climatic pattern of the near future will follow a different path."
It then goes on to talk about Time and Newsweek articles blah blahing about going into an ice age.
Here is where I get anxious about claims of man made global warming. I really believe that we need to cut way back on fossil fuels for a wide variety of great reasons ranging from their sources, pollution, to the costs. I don't particularly like power companies and would love if every house could go off the grid. I would love an electric car with a decent range and a battery that wouldn't end up being a pain. I see energy independence as a something that would strengthen most societies. So taking the flakiest of these beliefs I am still more certain of the benefits from less reliance on fossil fuels from dubious countries than I am as to the possible global warming reduction benefits. But my real anxiety comes from the worry that if it turns out that man made global warming is a crock of crap that many otherwise respectable organizations will loose huge amounts of credibility. NASA, New Scientist, Scientific American, etc will all have huge amounts of egg on their faces after their relentless and largely one sided support on this issue. This is not good in a time when teaching evolution in schools is not just debated but often prevented through legislation. But again, I don't debate that at least my part of the world is warmer and quite possibly the whole thing. But this whole issue is one of religion and no longer science. People who are religious about man made global warming grab every bit of supporting evidence and hold up like a religious tome and call
12,000 years ago there was a mile of ice where I live. A few weeks ago it was 28C(normally about 5C this time of the year). So yes there is climate change. But every year the Hurricane people have said that there would be X hurricanes this year; yet nearly every year they were very wrong. Often they got it exactly wrong as to big years and quiet years. So I am leery of any predictions that go far into the future when we can all agree that weathermen's (climatologists) predictions are basically a joke.
Also in the 1970s these same climatologists were claiming that the ice age was right around the corner.
I am absolutely not equipped to say that they are right or wrong. What I will say is that they are often wrong about what is going to happen tomorrow. So I place zero value of what they say will happen years into the future. I will buy their analysis of the past, the science of making a history of what happened is getting better and better. The why.... not so much.
If I were a government official making plans I would plan for 3 scenarios. It gets warmer, it gets colder, it stays the same.
The loser schools in Nova Scotia have "upgraded" to Robo calls. I have two kids in two schools and most times their stupid robo-calls don't even bother identifying which school is calling. Then it takes them forever to get around to the point which is usually something like "Please return your textbooks as we are still paying too much for paper versions."
I don't fret too much as the school system in NS is such an epic fail that I realized that it exists for comedy purposes only. The latest was where they pointed out that NS isn't near the bottom of the heap as rated by the PISA scores(Internationally recognized scholastic test) if NS is at the top of the margin of error and the rest of the provinces are at the bottom of their margins of error. Even with this twisting of reality two provinces crushed NS. Another good example was where a local grade 12 class had something like 7 math teachers before Christmas. The schoolboard did everything they could to say it didn't impact the students. Only one student passed the already dumbed down standardized test. Students were on the radio begging for something to be done.
Only a few years ago I saw a CIBC ATM crash and it was OS/2 but recently they went with much larger screens and when that crashed it was Windows.
The question I have is in maintaining OS/2 applications what programming tool do you use? So regardless of the potential quality of such an old system I would think the costs in staying in that game would be prohibitive. Where do you get a 386 these days?
If not April fools then I would love to see a US court enforce this. Canada and the UK are both sovereign countries. Poor US losing its influence now beating up the few countries that barely care about it.
I have zero doubt that this is a ploy to create a system where newcomers have to "respect" a regulatory regime that would make newcomers behave just like the incumbents.
One of the things that the old players probably fear the most is newcomers doing "evil" things such as offering data at a low price without making the customer first sign up for a bunch of crap they don't want. Also I can see them somehow figuring out a ruleset that makes 3 year contracts a de-facto standard.
In Atlantic Canada I am counting the days until I can dump Telus for one of the two new players coming this spring.
The nature of the fake user data may have influenced the results. If I thought I had the phone of some some MBA tool I would hand it to a bum. If it looked like someone nice I would go out of my way to help it on its way home.
Also if some guy found the phone of what seemed to be a hot chick he might tend to be more chivalrous.
For real phones the worst case scenario for the phone would be if it were a politician's. That phone's data would be on the net in two seconds.
Right now in Canada there is a big "Robocall" scandal where one party automatically called tens of thousands of people affiliated to other parties to tell them that their polling station had moved. The people would either say, "Too far" or not find the non-existent poll and not vote. This proves that there are Canadians who are motivated, funded, and capable to mess with an election using electronic means. What the hell chance do any electronic voting systems have?
Here in Halifax the morons have voting over the phone and are thinking about online municipal voting. They say it increases "Voter participation" basically they are sick of people not giving a crap about their self importance and think that throwing democracy in the toilet is the way to go.
This has political ramifications beyond the obvious, the bad people will always win, scenario. Even if the system was theoretically 100% secure I would never trust any party elected electronically. Thus my confidence in their right to be in power would be zero. What impact would this have on people abiding by laws, paying taxes, and other civic relationships. Take Greece as an example of where this has broken down. People there don't pay taxes because nobody else pays taxes. If you are fool enough to want to pay taxes you will find yourself sucked dry because the system is so screwed up that it has now adapted to the fact that people will cheat 100% of the time.
On top of all that the government insists on keeping these proprietary systems as secret as possible. Every single time the systems have been handed to security researchers they have torn them to shreds.
The only electronic voting that I would like to see is a polling system where you go in, pick your stuff and the computer prints out the results on a ballot you put into the machine. You can then look over your ballot and see that all is good. Worse case if there is a power outage or whatnot you could fill the ballot in by hand. Then you put the ballot into a ballot box which is the primary record of the election. This way the computer is more auditing the election. You would get instant poll results subject to verification by counting. I have worked at a polling station and it is often the first time for everyone so I can see a situation where people might mess up. The computer would not override them but if the computer strongly disagreed (ballot box stuffing) then everything would now be carefully scrutinized. Also the benefits to an electronic voting system of this nature is that it allows for complicated ballots to be filled out correctly. No hanging chads.
The list of major hacks on major companies is just too long. Most companies hope for the best with security and more design for the eventuality that they will be hacked and thus look to quickly mitigate the damage through good backups and whatnot. It turned out that Nortel's computer system was completely pwned for over 10 years. If Google has been hacked by the Chinese then no company in the world can claim to have a secure voting system, full stop.
One last problem is that if one party wins an election through fraud, proving that they are evil, they will now be able to structure the system so that they always win from then on. Thus good government is dead the instant a party wins through electronic fraud as the only party who could beat them would have to be more evil.
I am so sick of people coming to me having seen my successful apps and saying, "hey you and I should make an app together." I just tell them, "I have about 20 years of projects floating around in my head with them coming out one at a time. It would be faster for you to learn to program apps. I can suggest some great online resources."
These bozos seem genuinely hurt that I don't want to make them a pile of cash. The only time I have collaborated on an app the other half brought a huge non programming resource to the party; Not just an idea for the next todo list app.
So any programmer that gets involved with a relationship where one person is just looking over their shoulder saying "too big, too small, size does matter after all." should just run.
I was going over some grade 10 math with my daughter. The questions in the book covered transformations of parabolas. Something I haven't touched in a dogs age. So I leaf through the textbook for how to do it. Nada, nothing, not a word. There were a few factoids about parabolas being used in satellite dishes and that was it. None of the formula needed or even a hint of how to solve the problems in the book. Online I had the method in 30 seconds.
Then there were many questions that were obviously written by English majors. "Draw all the different ways that 10 people could put on 8 different shirts." First is that 10 people sharing 8 shirts? Or 8 shirts per person? The first has quite a few different possibilities that would take quite a while to draw but the second is just absurd.
What bothers me is that there are so many great math books out there, "Jenny Olive's Student Survival Guide." "Mathematics for the millions" "Basic Math" "Calculus made Easy" and then the Great Courses people have some awesome lecture series; Why not have the teacher show those and then take questions?
One complaint that I have with all the textbooks is that they are based on really low expectations. The school board says we will cover this tiny portion of the mathematical body of knowledge and then the textbook stretches out what should be taught in a week or two into an entire year's effort. To use Jenny Olive's book as a text book you could go from basic algebra to calculus in 500 pages. That could be fit into junior high no problem. Or "Mathematics Describing the Real World: Precalculus and Trigonometry" by the Great Courses people is 36 lectures. So say one a week for the school year and you are ready to start calculus which that same guy covers in his next 36 lectures. If there are some students who fall behind, then you let them work at their own speed watching the lectures, working on the problems, and asking questions. There is no rule saying the whole class has to be on the same page.
I call it the Feature to Production ratio. That is the ratio of required production capacity to develop the stream of incoming features as compared to the actual production capacity. I am not joking when I say that I am right now at around 10-20 to 1. I can't say exactly as I don't even bother examining the incoming stream in detail; I just pick the most valuable features out of the stream and pretend the rest don't exist.
I would say the main problem is that the incoming stream sometimes contains interesting Gems that can distract from finishing an earlier, nearing completion, feature.
In a perfect world there would be a certain amount of self filtering that would polish the gems and then hold on to them until the last feature was completed and deployed.
Harper is not right wing. Harper is a technocrat. Technocrats need to control information. This would be the ultimate control. Harper doesn't care about reading Joe Nobody's email. A good example of what this bill would be used for would be to find who leaked the information about the Minister who's career just ended.
Where Joe Nobody will get nailed is that their communications will be run through filters and false positives will be generated. Then when you do things like board airplanes or cross borders you will be interrogated about the sales chearleading you did when you said to your team, "Go knock'em dead. Totally destroy them. Our product will be like a bomb stuck up their asses." Poof you find your computer's seized, your accounts frozen, and any attempts to clarify and correct meeting a wall of "national security".
Can you imagine what would have happened though before the G20 in Toronto. I suspect an email with "The police suck" might have gotten you arrested.
The effort to fight NIMBY types and tree huggers is the same if your reactor generates 100W or 100GW. Thus even if you could get a small reactor for free the cost is still extreme.
Plus the type of customer who will buy one of these are the core customers of the power company. The power company can't afford to lose these customers. Thus they will block their use through regulations where only they can pass muster.
I second this post. I have done the exact same with the DNC in Canada. Nada. I heard about one company getting a small fine (small compared to the profit these companies raked in.)
I might have submitted 30 valid complaints. I never even got a letter.
All that will happen is Canadian/Offshore companies will call the US as US companies now call Canada to get around Canadian rules.
It is now so bad that I don't answer long distance calls where I don't recognize the number.
What is needed is a rapid response/fine structure. Telcos have to block the number the instant they have proof that it is making naughty calls. Not 30 days but 24hours. Also what is stopping these agencies from buying one of these scam offers and then having the FBI track where the money goes and shutting seizing the whole pile?
I have been enjoying the Stanford CompSci stuff. It lacks polish but it is great. I love the teaching company stuff as well. Online lectures are still all a bit of a dogs breakfast but they can only get better and better. But at some point I could see the free online product being better than that offered by most Podunk universities. There will always be gaps such as doing a chemistry lab but at some point soon online free will be better than the worst North American institutions.
I have four questions:
These online courses in many cases are certainly better lectures than those given by 99% of local lecturers so when will local courses use this resource?
When will you be able to get a usable certificate from these places?
And when will employers begin recognizing them?
And what happens to the whole going to University experience if you sit in front of a computer for 4 years? This last leads me to believe that the most likely outcome will be a blending of bricks, mortar, and internet.
And a side point. This doesn't just apply to University. The Teaching company has HS level courses that blow anything I took completely out of the water.
I love how they are always trying to protect the children when all they want is to make their jobs easier. Can you imagine if say Coca cola were able to make laws. How many laws would they pass to make selling cola easier?
What this all boils down to is that they have all the tools they already need to nail organized crime as any judge will sign warrants for that. Where the judges are "uncooperative" is when it comes to trolling to see if protesters are planning on embarrassing the government or police.
What Canadians want is more protection of our rights and more exposure of what the police and government are hiding. This law proposes the exact opposite.
I can't imagine the surveillance they will now rain down on someone who say does a freedom of information request on the RCMP. A situation that no judge in a million years would agree to.
A good example of a law that most Canadians would want is that the police can't use a drone without a warrant. I don't want them peeking over my bushes.
Did they wipe their firmware? Personally I would bring a burner phone and laptop. Take devices that are about to be retired and dispose of them upon returning.
A noodled firmware would allow the bypassing of any level of HD encryption.
Also assume that the devices are hacked the moment you board the plane. Keep the important bits in your head and don't tell them to the sexy lady who finds you so interesting.
I am sick of having my "Culture" dictated to me from Ontario. Canada has thousands of cultures. But in summary our culture is primarily a mix of British and American. Just check out our spelling and pronunciation. So a mix of British and American content serves me just fine.
The worst part of the Can Con crap is that it suffers the problem of any single source of wealth. A tiny few have mastered draining this well before anyone else can get a taste. Then they pump out some crap starring Gordon Pinsent or some other Canadian "No-fail-mainstay". I am not sure is the worst Canadian genre: when Torontonians try to imitate sophisticated New Yorkers, when they are covering "important issues" such as Indians or gay kids being bullied, or some depressing crap about some salt of the earth town that has collapsed resulting in domestic abuse and drinking. The Canada of most Canadians is none of the above. I strongly doubt that Canadians download hardly a lick of anything made in Canada about Canada. But that is not to say good stuff isn't made here. Stargate, battlestar galatica, and the x-files were all made here but they weren't aimed as Canadian Content. They were just smart people making good shows. No internet tax required.
Then there is our public radio CBC. Some of it is great but nearly every show is regularly interrupted while they showcase some band that would have trouble getting a gig at a shady nightclub.
Something needs to give
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BTJunkie No More?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Copyright does need to change somewhat. A key to human success is where one person invents something cool and others build on that in an endless chain. I think we do need copyright to prevent a publishing company from stealing a book from an author and printing away or a Chinese company taking that same book and flooding the market with knockoffs. But it has gone too far where a modern musician can't play with some distinctive riffs from a 40 year old Beatles song without being in the center of a lawyer pile-up.
Many of Gutenberg's first bibles were burned as work of the devil. I suspect that this was the Church not liking their loss of bible creation control. I doubt that any of the upset priests thought the devil had anything to do with their printing.
Some people use their real names and locations on Twitter. This makes it easier (though not exact) to figure out who they really are. I'm with you, though. I don't give out my real name or exact location on Twitter. (My Slashdot account is from a time when I did use my real name. If I could retroactively change it, I would. Yes, I could create a new account with my pseudonym, but I'm lazy.;-) )
Still there must be a zillion Jason Levines out there. At the border they would get a huge number of false positives if they matched just "Jason Levine" to you. Even better for foreign names where there are many possible English translations. But it would be a whole lot easier if they were getting IP addresses from Twitter and account info from ISPs to match up IP addresses. Then they could even say "Ah ha we got you Indigo123."
The first level of programming is hacker. Most of us started there. Basically you are screwing around and after a while your screwing around gets better and better until someone pays you. This is programming as art but this is still fingerpainting. People can get really really good screwing around but there is a limit. Often a master of level 1 might know PHP inside and out. The next level is where you are properly educated. Not necessarily a degree but you need to learn the core, assembly, some discrete math, etc. At this level you can start doing things like building VMs, your own compiler, use OpenGL, etc. Many people graduate from a university thinking they are already level 2 but even their fingerpainting sucks. Many people mistake UML, SCRUM, and other faddish things as level 2; wrong. Hard core math is a key piece in level 2.
Level 3 looks a huge amount like level 1 as you often go back to fingerpainting. The difference is that there is less time wasted screwing around. It is like one of those artists who walks up to the canvas and with 3 strokes give you Jimmy Hendrix.
So if you want to move past hacker the next thing to learn is real computer science.
But.... programming is much more than programming. It is project management, communications, database admin, server admin, graphic design, psychology, plus much more non coding stuff. One of the few certifications that will get you way ahead in programming, oddly enough, would be from the PMI (Project Management Institute).
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Your points are good but talk to any religious zelots and you wouldn't win an argument with them either. As for my not taking quantum physics on faith I don't. What I don't see is any movement of scientist signing petitions saying the science is crap. In the early days there were many who dismissed it as they should have. But then the science got more and more solid. Papers were published and then not shot down. Predictions were made and then shown to be true. The decenters were shown to be wrong. But nobody called for their heads. The controversial issues were not argued in the press. People didn't make dramatic films supporting their cause of this particle or that. They didn't round up movie stars to shout their cause. All that isn't science it is propaganda.
Only time is going to tell with this issue. The only number I will dispute is the 98% of scientists agreeing number. I have "faith" that number is wrong in that when Queen Elizabeth I's men asked people if they were church of England I bet more than 98% said yes. But then when Queen Mary's men asked the same question a similar number said they were Catholic. Right now it would be career suicide for any but the most established or most fringe to come out against man made global warming.
But if my business were saving the environment I would drop the man made global warming stuff as a risk to my credibility all the while still pushing for greener living independent of the huge big energy interests. The best place to hit people is their self interests, green living would almost certainly be healthy living without diesel soot in our lungs, etc. But things like a carbon tax is the exact opposite it hits people in their self interests; bad idea. This whole slashdot article began with the fact that people like me are getting ticked with the zealotry of the GW people. As I have said, my worry is that people will become ticked with the whole green movement.
What you seem to be saying is that the NOAA is able to predict the weather. Ha ha ha ha. That is a good one but lets look at the facts that you say I got so wrong.
Think-Tank Says Trained Chimp Can Predict Hurricanes Better Than NOAA And Puts it to the Test
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/18/think-tank-says-trained-chimp-can-predict-hurricanes-better-than-noaa%E2%80%A6-and-puts-it-to-the-test/
I like that you picked years that NOAA got sort of right. 2005 they said it was going to be a light year with around 7 and there were around 15. Plus I just checked your numbers on 2008 it was 7-10 not your 6-9. They still got it right but your numbers were wrong. Also these are the August forecasts. Also you need to break down their numbers a bit more. They don't just pick the number as there is an fairly consistent number of hurricanes each year with ups and downs from things like el nino. So lets look at 2007 where you say they were one off. Their detailed prediction was:
"NOAA's forecast called for seven to nine hurricanes, three to five major hurricanes, and 13-16 named storms."
There were six hurricanes during the season, only two of which were classified as major. And even then the last one Karen was a squeaker it came in on the last day or so and many argued wasn't even a hurricane.
Here is a wiki article on global cooling and ice age predictions in the 70's that you say I made up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
And here is a good one from the 70s proving my point of who really knows:
"The National Science Board's Patterns and Perspectives in Environmental Science report of 1972 discussed the cyclical behavior of climate, and the understanding at the time that the planet was entering a phase of cooling after a warm period. "Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end, to be followed by a long period of considerably colder temperatures leading into the next glacial age some 20,000 years from now."[26] But it also continued; "However, it is possible, or even likely, that human interference has already altered the environment so much that the climatic pattern of the near future will follow a different path."
It then goes on to talk about Time and Newsweek articles blah blahing about going into an ice age.
Here is where I get anxious about claims of man made global warming. I really believe that we need to cut way back on fossil fuels for a wide variety of great reasons ranging from their sources, pollution, to the costs. I don't particularly like power companies and would love if every house could go off the grid. I would love an electric car with a decent range and a battery that wouldn't end up being a pain. I see energy independence as a something that would strengthen most societies. So taking the flakiest of these beliefs I am still more certain of the benefits from less reliance on fossil fuels from dubious countries than I am as to the possible global warming reduction benefits. But my real anxiety comes from the worry that if it turns out that man made global warming is a crock of crap that many otherwise respectable organizations will loose huge amounts of credibility. NASA, New Scientist, Scientific American, etc will all have huge amounts of egg on their faces after their relentless and largely one sided support on this issue. This is not good in a time when teaching evolution in schools is not just debated but often prevented through legislation. But again, I don't debate that at least my part of the world is warmer and quite possibly the whole thing. But this whole issue is one of religion and no longer science. People who are religious about man made global warming grab every bit of supporting evidence and hold up like a religious tome and call
12,000 years ago there was a mile of ice where I live. A few weeks ago it was 28C(normally about 5C this time of the year). So yes there is climate change. But every year the Hurricane people have said that there would be X hurricanes this year; yet nearly every year they were very wrong. Often they got it exactly wrong as to big years and quiet years. So I am leery of any predictions that go far into the future when we can all agree that weathermen's (climatologists) predictions are basically a joke.
Also in the 1970s these same climatologists were claiming that the ice age was right around the corner.
I am absolutely not equipped to say that they are right or wrong. What I will say is that they are often wrong about what is going to happen tomorrow. So I place zero value of what they say will happen years into the future. I will buy their analysis of the past, the science of making a history of what happened is getting better and better. The why.... not so much.
If I were a government official making plans I would plan for 3 scenarios. It gets warmer, it gets colder, it stays the same.
I wish Telus in Canada would do the same thing. This whole unlocking thing should be mandated as soon as the contract paying for the phone is done.
The loser schools in Nova Scotia have "upgraded" to Robo calls. I have two kids in two schools and most times their stupid robo-calls don't even bother identifying which school is calling. Then it takes them forever to get around to the point which is usually something like "Please return your textbooks as we are still paying too much for paper versions."
I don't fret too much as the school system in NS is such an epic fail that I realized that it exists for comedy purposes only. The latest was where they pointed out that NS isn't near the bottom of the heap as rated by the PISA scores(Internationally recognized scholastic test) if NS is at the top of the margin of error and the rest of the provinces are at the bottom of their margins of error. Even with this twisting of reality two provinces crushed NS. Another good example was where a local grade 12 class had something like 7 math teachers before Christmas. The schoolboard did everything they could to say it didn't impact the students. Only one student passed the already dumbed down standardized test. Students were on the radio begging for something to be done.
Only a few years ago I saw a CIBC ATM crash and it was OS/2 but recently they went with much larger screens and when that crashed it was Windows.
The question I have is in maintaining OS/2 applications what programming tool do you use? So regardless of the potential quality of such an old system I would think the costs in staying in that game would be prohibitive. Where do you get a 386 these days?
If not April fools then I would love to see a US court enforce this. Canada and the UK are both sovereign countries. Poor US losing its influence now beating up the few countries that barely care about it.
Couldn't have happened to nicer people.
I have zero doubt that this is a ploy to create a system where newcomers have to "respect" a regulatory regime that would make newcomers behave just like the incumbents.
One of the things that the old players probably fear the most is newcomers doing "evil" things such as offering data at a low price without making the customer first sign up for a bunch of crap they don't want. Also I can see them somehow figuring out a ruleset that makes 3 year contracts a de-facto standard.
In Atlantic Canada I am counting the days until I can dump Telus for one of the two new players coming this spring.
The nature of the fake user data may have influenced the results. If I thought I had the phone of some some MBA tool I would hand it to a bum. If it looked like someone nice I would go out of my way to help it on its way home.
Also if some guy found the phone of what seemed to be a hot chick he might tend to be more chivalrous.
For real phones the worst case scenario for the phone would be if it were a politician's. That phone's data would be on the net in two seconds.
Right now in Canada there is a big "Robocall" scandal where one party automatically called tens of thousands of people affiliated to other parties to tell them that their polling station had moved. The people would either say, "Too far" or not find the non-existent poll and not vote. This proves that there are Canadians who are motivated, funded, and capable to mess with an election using electronic means. What the hell chance do any electronic voting systems have?
Here in Halifax the morons have voting over the phone and are thinking about online municipal voting. They say it increases "Voter participation" basically they are sick of people not giving a crap about their self importance and think that throwing democracy in the toilet is the way to go.
This has political ramifications beyond the obvious, the bad people will always win, scenario. Even if the system was theoretically 100% secure I would never trust any party elected electronically. Thus my confidence in their right to be in power would be zero. What impact would this have on people abiding by laws, paying taxes, and other civic relationships. Take Greece as an example of where this has broken down. People there don't pay taxes because nobody else pays taxes. If you are fool enough to want to pay taxes you will find yourself sucked dry because the system is so screwed up that it has now adapted to the fact that people will cheat 100% of the time.
On top of all that the government insists on keeping these proprietary systems as secret as possible. Every single time the systems have been handed to security researchers they have torn them to shreds.
The only electronic voting that I would like to see is a polling system where you go in, pick your stuff and the computer prints out the results on a ballot you put into the machine. You can then look over your ballot and see that all is good. Worse case if there is a power outage or whatnot you could fill the ballot in by hand. Then you put the ballot into a ballot box which is the primary record of the election. This way the computer is more auditing the election. You would get instant poll results subject to verification by counting. I have worked at a polling station and it is often the first time for everyone so I can see a situation where people might mess up. The computer would not override them but if the computer strongly disagreed (ballot box stuffing) then everything would now be carefully scrutinized. Also the benefits to an electronic voting system of this nature is that it allows for complicated ballots to be filled out correctly. No hanging chads.
The list of major hacks on major companies is just too long. Most companies hope for the best with security and more design for the eventuality that they will be hacked and thus look to quickly mitigate the damage through good backups and whatnot. It turned out that Nortel's computer system was completely pwned for over 10 years. If Google has been hacked by the Chinese then no company in the world can claim to have a secure voting system, full stop.
One last problem is that if one party wins an election through fraud, proving that they are evil, they will now be able to structure the system so that they always win from then on. Thus good government is dead the instant a party wins through electronic fraud as the only party who could beat them would have to be more evil.
I am so sick of people coming to me having seen my successful apps and saying, "hey you and I should make an app together." I just tell them, "I have about 20 years of projects floating around in my head with them coming out one at a time. It would be faster for you to learn to program apps. I can suggest some great online resources."
These bozos seem genuinely hurt that I don't want to make them a pile of cash. The only time I have collaborated on an app the other half brought a huge non programming resource to the party; Not just an idea for the next todo list app.
So any programmer that gets involved with a relationship where one person is just looking over their shoulder saying "too big, too small, size does matter after all." should just run.
I was going over some grade 10 math with my daughter. The questions in the book covered transformations of parabolas. Something I haven't touched in a dogs age. So I leaf through the textbook for how to do it. Nada, nothing, not a word. There were a few factoids about parabolas being used in satellite dishes and that was it. None of the formula needed or even a hint of how to solve the problems in the book. Online I had the method in 30 seconds.
Then there were many questions that were obviously written by English majors. "Draw all the different ways that 10 people could put on 8 different shirts." First is that 10 people sharing 8 shirts? Or 8 shirts per person? The first has quite a few different possibilities that would take quite a while to draw but the second is just absurd.
What bothers me is that there are so many great math books out there, "Jenny Olive's Student Survival Guide." "Mathematics for the millions" "Basic Math" "Calculus made Easy" and then the Great Courses people have some awesome lecture series; Why not have the teacher show those and then take questions?
One complaint that I have with all the textbooks is that they are based on really low expectations. The school board says we will cover this tiny portion of the mathematical body of knowledge and then the textbook stretches out what should be taught in a week or two into an entire year's effort. To use Jenny Olive's book as a text book you could go from basic algebra to calculus in 500 pages. That could be fit into junior high no problem. Or "Mathematics Describing the Real World: Precalculus and Trigonometry" by the Great Courses people is 36 lectures. So say one a week for the school year and you are ready to start calculus which that same guy covers in his next 36 lectures. If there are some students who fall behind, then you let them work at their own speed watching the lectures, working on the problems, and asking questions. There is no rule saying the whole class has to be on the same page.
I call it the Feature to Production ratio. That is the ratio of required production capacity to develop the stream of incoming features as compared to the actual production capacity. I am not joking when I say that I am right now at around 10-20 to 1. I can't say exactly as I don't even bother examining the incoming stream in detail; I just pick the most valuable features out of the stream and pretend the rest don't exist.
I would say the main problem is that the incoming stream sometimes contains interesting Gems that can distract from finishing an earlier, nearing completion, feature.
In a perfect world there would be a certain amount of self filtering that would polish the gems and then hold on to them until the last feature was completed and deployed.
Harper is not right wing. Harper is a technocrat. Technocrats need to control information. This would be the ultimate control. Harper doesn't care about reading Joe Nobody's email. A good example of what this bill would be used for would be to find who leaked the information about the Minister who's career just ended.
Where Joe Nobody will get nailed is that their communications will be run through filters and false positives will be generated. Then when you do things like board airplanes or cross borders you will be interrogated about the sales chearleading you did when you said to your team, "Go knock'em dead. Totally destroy them. Our product will be like a bomb stuck up their asses." Poof you find your computer's seized, your accounts frozen, and any attempts to clarify and correct meeting a wall of "national security".
Can you imagine what would have happened though before the G20 in Toronto. I suspect an email with "The police suck" might have gotten you arrested.
The effort to fight NIMBY types and tree huggers is the same if your reactor generates 100W or 100GW. Thus even if you could get a small reactor for free the cost is still extreme.
Plus the type of customer who will buy one of these are the core customers of the power company. The power company can't afford to lose these customers. Thus they will block their use through regulations where only they can pass muster.
I second this post. I have done the exact same with the DNC in Canada. Nada. I heard about one company getting a small fine (small compared to the profit these companies raked in.)
I might have submitted 30 valid complaints. I never even got a letter.
All that will happen is Canadian/Offshore companies will call the US as US companies now call Canada to get around Canadian rules.
It is now so bad that I don't answer long distance calls where I don't recognize the number.
What is needed is a rapid response/fine structure. Telcos have to block the number the instant they have proof that it is making naughty calls. Not 30 days but 24hours. Also what is stopping these agencies from buying one of these scam offers and then having the FBI track where the money goes and shutting seizing the whole pile?
I have been enjoying the Stanford CompSci stuff. It lacks polish but it is great. I love the teaching company stuff as well. Online lectures are still all a bit of a dogs breakfast but they can only get better and better. But at some point I could see the free online product being better than that offered by most Podunk universities. There will always be gaps such as doing a chemistry lab but at some point soon online free will be better than the worst North American institutions.
I have four questions:
These online courses in many cases are certainly better lectures than those given by 99% of local lecturers so when will local courses use this resource?
When will you be able to get a usable certificate from these places?
And when will employers begin recognizing them?
And what happens to the whole going to University experience if you sit in front of a computer for 4 years? This last leads me to believe that the most likely outcome will be a blending of bricks, mortar, and internet.
And a side point. This doesn't just apply to University. The Teaching company has HS level courses that blow anything I took completely out of the water.
I love how they are always trying to protect the children when all they want is to make their jobs easier. Can you imagine if say Coca cola were able to make laws. How many laws would they pass to make selling cola easier?
What this all boils down to is that they have all the tools they already need to nail organized crime as any judge will sign warrants for that. Where the judges are "uncooperative" is when it comes to trolling to see if protesters are planning on embarrassing the government or police.
What Canadians want is more protection of our rights and more exposure of what the police and government are hiding. This law proposes the exact opposite.
I can't imagine the surveillance they will now rain down on someone who say does a freedom of information request on the RCMP. A situation that no judge in a million years would agree to.
A good example of a law that most Canadians would want is that the police can't use a drone without a warrant. I don't want them peeking over my bushes.
Did they wipe their firmware? Personally I would bring a burner phone and laptop. Take devices that are about to be retired and dispose of them upon returning.
A noodled firmware would allow the bypassing of any level of HD encryption.
Also assume that the devices are hacked the moment you board the plane. Keep the important bits in your head and don't tell them to the sexy lady who finds you so interesting.
I am sick of having my "Culture" dictated to me from Ontario. Canada has thousands of cultures. But in summary our culture is primarily a mix of British and American. Just check out our spelling and pronunciation. So a mix of British and American content serves me just fine.
The worst part of the Can Con crap is that it suffers the problem of any single source of wealth. A tiny few have mastered draining this well before anyone else can get a taste. Then they pump out some crap starring Gordon Pinsent or some other Canadian "No-fail-mainstay". I am not sure is the worst Canadian genre: when Torontonians try to imitate sophisticated New Yorkers, when they are covering "important issues" such as Indians or gay kids being bullied, or some depressing crap about some salt of the earth town that has collapsed resulting in domestic abuse and drinking. The Canada of most Canadians is none of the above. I strongly doubt that Canadians download hardly a lick of anything made in Canada about Canada. But that is not to say good stuff isn't made here. Stargate, battlestar galatica, and the x-files were all made here but they weren't aimed as Canadian Content. They were just smart people making good shows. No internet tax required.
Then there is our public radio CBC. Some of it is great but nearly every show is regularly interrupted while they showcase some band that would have trouble getting a gig at a shady nightclub.
Copyright does need to change somewhat. A key to human success is where one person invents something cool and others build on that in an endless chain. I think we do need copyright to prevent a publishing company from stealing a book from an author and printing away or a Chinese company taking that same book and flooding the market with knockoffs. But it has gone too far where a modern musician can't play with some distinctive riffs from a 40 year old Beatles song without being in the center of a lawyer pile-up.
Many of Gutenberg's first bibles were burned as work of the devil. I suspect that this was the Church not liking their loss of bible creation control. I doubt that any of the upset priests thought the devil had anything to do with their printing.
Some people use their real names and locations on Twitter. This makes it easier (though not exact) to figure out who they really are. I'm with you, though. I don't give out my real name or exact location on Twitter. (My Slashdot account is from a time when I did use my real name. If I could retroactively change it, I would. Yes, I could create a new account with my pseudonym, but I'm lazy. ;-) )
Still there must be a zillion Jason Levines out there. At the border they would get a huge number of false positives if they matched just "Jason Levine" to you. Even better for foreign names where there are many possible English translations. But it would be a whole lot easier if they were getting IP addresses from Twitter and account info from ISPs to match up IP addresses. Then they could even say "Ah ha we got you Indigo123."
The first level of programming is hacker. Most of us started there. Basically you are screwing around and after a while your screwing around gets better and better until someone pays you. This is programming as art but this is still fingerpainting. People can get really really good screwing around but there is a limit. Often a master of level 1 might know PHP inside and out. The next level is where you are properly educated. Not necessarily a degree but you need to learn the core, assembly, some discrete math, etc. At this level you can start doing things like building VMs, your own compiler, use OpenGL, etc. Many people graduate from a university thinking they are already level 2 but even their fingerpainting sucks. Many people mistake UML, SCRUM, and other faddish things as level 2; wrong. Hard core math is a key piece in level 2. .... programming is much more than programming. It is project management, communications, database admin, server admin, graphic design, psychology, plus much more non coding stuff. One of the few certifications that will get you way ahead in programming, oddly enough, would be from the PMI (Project Management Institute).
Level 3 looks a huge amount like level 1 as you often go back to fingerpainting. The difference is that there is less time wasted screwing around. It is like one of those artists who walks up to the canvas and with 3 strokes give you Jimmy Hendrix.
So if you want to move past hacker the next thing to learn is real computer science.
But