Let me take a crack at decimating this "made to order results" "scientific" paper.
First some notes:
The actual paper is hiding safely away from the world behind a paywall . Where is Aaron Schwartz when you need him to help you take on the depredations of university administrators?... oh yeah, that's right. We can only read the abstract, so it's hard to critique because of course the most interesting - and indictable - parts of a paper are:
1) the methods.. because if the methods are invalid, who *cares* what conclusion was reached?
2) The statistical analysis because bad math sinks papers
3) The full conclusions- do 1 and 2 above actually support 3? Often, actually, no.
and of course somewhere down the line at the bottom of the barrel lay the abstract, living there with it's close cousins, Daily Mail headlines.
2) This guy's salary is in direct competition for college money with his own class of test subjects' salaries. Enough said.
So shall we?
1) Tenure is a function of time. Tenured profs can be expected to be older. Older people are a class of people known to perform differentially on a variety tasks.
Perhaps the author knew in advance what the age profile of the tenured faculty under study was. Perhaps drawing subjects from such an age profile would be more or less guaranteed to result in a skewed statistic, one where what is actually being measured is - simple aging.
huh.
2) Tenured professors are a select group who can be operationally defined as "those who have mastered the incentive system put to them by, oh by administrators like the co-author of this study ! "
What are those incentives and do they impact the performance of professors ? Do those incentives, for instance, condition the professor to dedicate a substandard amount of time and energy to his or her own research rather than to teaching freshmen? Especially with respect to non-tenured, "whew !, glad got this job !" type employees?
Do I even need to answer that question? Haven't we all seen it in action? Isn't the person who wrote this paper as acutely aware of this fact as anyone ?
If I were a professor at this guy's university, I'd be doing a very long slow burn right now. They incentivize me - directly, openly and consciously using words , in the case of my department at my alma mater with words like "don't waste your time preparing for your classes the only thing they care about is you getting your research funded".. I mean literally those are the words from the tenured professors to the non-tenured (but hopeful!) "assistants professors" in the department of my own alma mater.
Then those same people turn around and use the fact that I did exactly as required against me. Nicely done!
Sniff sniff.. smells like Management Technique #10,305 aka The Devils Fork -
EITHER fire the employee for not doing as required OR fire the employee for doing as required.
It's amusing to see the university system rip its own asshole apart trying to keep itself alive, which is all this is. The tuition party is over, and they know it. Now reality is setting in and they're starting to cannibalize essential functions and relationships. I think that's called "panic".
You know what the single biggest money maker on campus is? The bookstore. I knew the person who ran ours (a very large university system). The numbers were fucking unbelievable. It's basically an acting subsidiary of the US Mint.
And you know what they've started to go after, in an attempt to save themselves? The bookstores. The cost of the books to students. That can't be good (for them, not you). and it is a very clear signal that behind the glossy brochures and sprawling sports complexes, administrators are actually shitting their collective pants, throwing anything over board that they can lift.
Of course, it's all for naught, since no man can lift himself and what's really sinking the university is a combination of the very many weddi
Yeah what you said isn't true. People in refugee camps aren't neutral victims of a war they don't take sides in and don't care who wins. Just the opposite. They want Assad out of there too.
They don't have enough fuel to launch their mig 29s (see above) and the ability of the average NK soldier or officer to act absent direction is nil. What you're saying is NK has some kind of dead man's switch whereby the body will attack even if the head is off. It's hard to believe that with our ability to fuck with their computers, fuck with their very old "long range artillery" with all our ability to direct force against a conventional army that we can't preemptively take out the creakiest conventional army ever assembled.
Compared to N Korea, what we can do is magic. The only way NK is relevant at all is as a feeder for WMD -which require state level power to create - to sub state actors. That's the issue we should be thinking about.
Honestly if I were POTUS I would baby walk KJU right down the path his mouth will take him until it was clear to everyone he intended to (had to now...) try to made good on his promise to wipe Japan or the US or SK off the map, then hit him preemptively and with zero warning.
Yeah that's right , perfect thank you for outing yourself as a racist asshole because the people in refuge camps are assholes.. or dickheads... take your pick. Because people "over there" and anyway not us if they're suffering brought it on themselves.
Oh wait. Except the American taxpayer, especially the Tea Party and the 1% who fund them.... now THOSE people, damn, they're oppressed through no fault of their own.
Dude, if you're characterizing N Korea as simply a "poor nation" then you really do know NOTHING about N Korea. It's a fucking nationwide prison camp. It's a brutal cult of personality metastasized into a gun wielding psychopath. If the US did anything little part of what N Korea does everyday, you'd be the first to freak out.
Why do some people's sympathies and sensitivities stop at their own nation?
I think the concept of nuclear winter has more or less be proven as a fact Not saying Sagan was a competent nuclear strategist , just.. facts are facts.
Yeah we're the only ones' to ever use them-= against a nation trying to help Hitler win WWII. A nation responsible for the Rape of Nanking. A nation that refused to unconditional surrender. . Oh, and nuking those cities , how ever little you like it, saved lives and set Japan on the path to being the prosperous, free, liberal democracy and first rate nation that it has been for decades now.
We freed the Japanese people from the wanton abuse they were doomed to be suffering at the hands of their former nationalistic and militaristic government. A government that led them into an appalling war. You don't hear them complain too much about it. You have to conceive of the idea that some governments are illegitimate and only inflict suffering on anyone unlucky enough to be born within their borders. Sure people go along with it, but so what? Doesn't mean that if they had another choice, if they knew anything else they wouldn't prefer it. No really blames the run of the mill mid-century Japanese person for what Hirohito and his generals did. It's too bad that those run of the mill people paid the price for it. Leaders are good at insulating themselves from their consequences of their actions. What can anyone say?
Yeah how am I ill informed? Huh? If it was YOU and YOURS would you want a super power to level the murderer? Sure you would. Golden Rule applies. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is not that hard to think through.
Day 1- sudden death of top 5000 scientists and military personnel.
Day 2- Massive air drops of millions of Coke cans, Kit Kat bars and Happy Meals. Blanket the country completely. You know what people are going to do? They're going to run around looking for the next drop and then they're going to sit down and eat it because half the country (or more) is in a state of more or less permanent starvation. Then they're going to be full. Then they're going to hang out thinking, hmmm, maybe we should just see what happens next.... hey! is that another kit kat bar?
Even at that, all that means is we need another way to take the regime down. It's called selective elimination. You decapitate the people who make decisions and have the know how and willingness to use the nukes and conventional arms through *whatever means* and the people who are left are just bewildered and incapable of marshaling a fight, even supposing they wanted to.
We;re talking about a dictatorship with no real continuity of power in place. Even if the generals are cynical puppet masters, we can rest assured that the level of competence and know how below them is paper thin. That's how dictatorships are structured to keep the fat cats at the top happy and everyone beneath them who might be a threat in fact *not a danger to them* in any way.
From your POV N Korea is all about making a suicidal war machine out to face down the world at any cost . From THEIR POV, they are worried about the ambitious young men underneath them who show any sign of wanting to move up in the hierarchy through the accumulation of personal capital, competence and influence.
The people with any real power or decision making capability or know how or knowledge form a paper thin facade over an intimidated and largely incompetent inner core. That's how that works. N Korea is a paper tiger with long fangs called nukes that look bad. That's all they have, the ability to look bad. Let me kill or neutralize any 5000 N Koreans I want and I'll topple that shithole with nary a shot fired.
If he's "done", the most organized members of the rebel forces are the moslem brotherhood and al qaeda. Which means he'll probably be replaced by a islamic fundamentalist government.
It's just not true. Those forces are there, but most people anywhere aren't fanatics, by definition. Being Muslim is not the same as being in al Queda, sympathizing with al Queda or anything else.
Where is the al Queda take over of Libya? Where is the al Queda take over of Egypt? Even the Muslim brotherhood couldn't hold onto power in Egypt . People hated them and hated their focus on religion and piety and the moves to exclude people based on religion and ethnicity, all at the expense of material prosperity and progress and modernity and , you know, living.
Where is the al Queda take over of Iraq? Given a choice between self determination and the fucking Taliban, people will choose self determination. Sure al Queda and Taliban are harassing forces in Iraq, good at IED detonation mostly. And? And? Where is THAT going? Nowhere.
Three weeks of day and night bombing of Syria by allied forces and Assad is done and it's over. Why are we beating around the edges like this? We are totally missing an opportunity to show that the West actually gives a shit about freedom for everyone in the ME. I know people here do because I talk to them but somehow that doesn't translate into DOING anything about it.
This is what the world is. The world is still full of super assholes under whom there is no justice, no civilization just barbarity, brutality and the rule of the iron glove. This is the swamp out of which extremism is bred. Ye\s, it's not it's only source, but it's a major source and with extremism you're always playing a numbers game, an odds game. You want to reduce the head count one way or another.
For some unknown reason Americans believe that there's a peaceful, non-violent way to deal with people who want to be violent (liberals) . Or alternatively they believe they don't have to care because it won't effect them and , implicitly they only care about their own skins (conservatives) . Both sides are wrong. Violent lawless assholes don't respond to either carrots or sticks, they respond to being dead. And you DO have to care about people in far removed places but that is a "big system, big picture" kind of thinking which conservatives are constitutionally incapable of .
Same thing with Syria now. Same thing with Iran. The reason all these countries want more time to *negotiate* is because time is on their side. Wait long enough and it will be impossible to do anything about it. Iran will have nukes. Syrian resistance will be dead. N Korea will have even more plutonium to give to terrorist groups.
Here's what our hand wringing policy in Syria is forging for us:
Long story short- the assurance that we lose no matter how it turns out; either Assad will stay in power, and we lose, or the rebels take over, and we lose.
Anyone who thinks Syria is just some place "over there" , like say former CIA director Gates apparently does, is a fucking asshole. There is no "over there' anymore. That's a side effect of something called "globalization". What happens in the geo-politics of far removed nations WILL impact us one way or another. A good way to make people hate us is to sit by while they're slaughtered for no reason. This isn't targeted drone strikes Assad is doing, it's mass murder.
Ditto N Korea. WTF are we waiting for? N Korea needs to be brought down through whatever means. How hard can it be to ruin this country? How hard a target is Pyongyang? We need to work out a deal with the Chinese , emphasizing that plutonium wandering the earth looking for a home isn't in their own long term best interests either. The squirt and his army have to go.
We can actually do this now or we can wish we'd done it later. If we can blow up Iran's centrifuge, if we can go into a gigantic fuckign tail spin and have repeated Constitutional crises over one day of terrorist attacks and we're a flexible democratic nation then guess how the Assad or N Korean political machine is going to fare under sustained American and allied firepower? That's the one thing we know how to do and we do well- ruin the other side's regime just like that.
We need to fucking topple these dictators and remove the threat of proliferation of WMD now while we can. An no, this isn't Iraq II- we know they have them. With WRT to Iraq, ask Iraqis if they like the outcome of that war or they'd perhaps prefer to go back to living under Uday and Cusay. Because it seems to me that their opinions are the ones that matter.
Establishing democratic institutions once the dick-tater is gone is a multi generational a trial and error process . Ask Egypt. But they're as smart as anyone anywhere and they WILL work it out for themselves, in Egypt, in Libya in Iraq and in Afghanistan too. Over time, over a few generations maybe, but it will happen.
Terrorists take note: the globalization that permitted you to attack us, attacks back. you can't shut the flood gates against modernity and democracy once you open them, and open them you did.
The whole question is idiotic. It frames the issue as if a programming job consisted of discrete puzzles with some hypothetical difficulty rating X to be solved . Since we don't have hard problems to solve generally, why buy the services of someone who can solve them instead of someone less capable but cheaper?
Ever program? Because if you had you'd know that mundane code written by your cheap developers leads very quickly to *puzzles* no one in the world is smart enough to solve, i.e. problems which are intractable. Guaranteed you have a lot of those in your code base. You also have things less grievous than the classic "big ball of mud" being generated all the time - ways of solving ordinary problems which are just bad and wasteful of time and resources.. this the invisible drip drip drip that causes IT projects to go over budget and miss their deadlines. Nothing is obvious wrong, it's just that mediocre developers are mediocre across an entire range of activities, not just "top prize " problems and competent developers carry that competence around with them and bring it everything they do.
Think smart people are expensive? Just wait until all those devs you hired are standing around doing nothing waiting for one of their kind to figure out what the blocking issue is. Just take the salary of each one and multiply by the number of such people updating their FB profiles to pass the time, times the number of hours they spend doing that, times the number of times one of their kind causes another such incident. That's their REAL hourly rate.
" Phrases like that are just idiot scaremongering. What could one hacker accomplish? "
Depends what they're hacking , doesn't it? If you're hacking a computer, then, who knows really.. I'd have to work it out and have access to the data to work it out.
If they're hacking viruses OTOH then we're talking about something of a potentially unlimited death toll. I am sure you think about computers and hacking all the time like most people here. I invite you to venture outside your chosen area of specialization and have a gander at what is going on in other fields, what type equipment is needed to be productive in those other fields and what the implications of those two things could be if there were such a thing as a biological / genetic black hat hacker.
As far as stats goes, I have good reason to have confidence in my analytic skills. The fact is, there is nothing in any corpus of events which can be classify as "terrorism" , neither its frequency nor type- which can be used to infer anything at all about either the likelihood of a attack in the future or what the potential magnitude of the effect could be.
The later is a technical question and the former is locked entirely within the hearts of the terrorists themselves.
Because no one would lie and terrorists are always foreign?
If we're going to solve this problem, let's state it clearly.
Small groups of people, with a limit now tending towards one, are acquiring the ability to inflict damage, now tending towards death, on larger and larger numbers of people, now tending towards everyone.
How can we stop them before they do that ? How do we need to arrange or change the things ion the world so that that never happens?
All of this Snvowden, NSA, War on Terror, WMD al Queda stuff flows directly from that basic fact.
We're never going to be in agreement on what to do until we're all on the same page as to what the problem really is. That's the problem.
Really, I don't see a solution outside of genetically engineering people so they don't want to do that. Religion doesn't work (fundamentalism of all kinds , Islamic and Christian) . Providing people with stuff and money doesn't work (bin Laden), education doesn't work (Pol Pot) democratic institutions don't work (Timothy McVeigh) . Maybe those things reduce the probability, the sheer availability of accomplices to a Pol Pot or a bin Laden. At best that buys us time.
I am not saying genetic engineering is what we should do. I can't even say that it will work, but that and making the creation of an equitable and fair world a top priority (as opposed to our current one- making small numbers of people very rich) are our best bet as far as we know.
It's not a slippery slope. It's a reality. The world has moved significantly down the road of choosing which lives are worthwhile, and which are just too big of a hassle.
What? As opposed to what earlier time? 1100AD? Earlier? Later? 1500AD? 1700 AD? Oh I see, you are only talking about post-slavery days.. so 1900 and beyond.. back during the bright, human rights upholding days of the industrial revolution with, you know child labor and no sufferage.. oh you mean later than that? About when Civil Rights became a *thing*. ?
No later than THAT? Jesus buddy, we're running out of room on this end of history.
It';s not that they care. It's that they know. That's the invasion of privacy. That's the dehumanization.
Along these lines it's amusing to read that the very-married ex Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who's famous for asserting that everyone should just get over their need for privacy is spending 6 million soundproofing his New York love nest so his neighbors won't hear him having loud sex with his girlfriends... did I say whores? No. I didn't .
I should add- this is one of the reasons I have never applied to large companies like Google and Yahoo. They just know way way too much about me.
You're going to sit across a desk in an interview with someone who knows absolutely everything about everywhere you've ever surfed at any time in your life, or at least, as deep as that person cares to know.
You've got to be crazy.
You think you're sitting there presenting yourself in your best light, as you do in an interview but trust me, the full force of dehumanization-via-transparency is in effect. It's not that they'll let on, it's that they'll know at all. I don't have anything THAT bad to hide, but just like everyone else online, I have surfed some kinky (some would say! ) porn and flamed out into angry trolling (some would say!) in online arguments . They know all about that or can find out.
The power imbalance is incredible. You're effectively stripped bare with none of the dignity that PRIVACY is supposed to have afforded you. Without privacy, you cannot create a face for the faces you meet. Someone who is watched and recorded loses their humanity and becomes an object to the watcher's subject.
You are no longer a person with any mystery. You lose the ability to define how others see you and in that you lose the incentive to be something more, to realize your potentiality and re-define yourself to yourself and others, perhaps defining yourself as something great, or noble or extraordinary. All that happening, that mechanism, that thing we have always done over the course of human history is totally shot to hell when you're rendered like a piece of meat, categorized, transparent, marked and grade and delimited by others - others whose lives you don't have an equal view into and whose process is invisible to you.
Dignity and humanity is something you can never ever have at a Google interview or a Yahoo interview, no matter how far down how many Googlers mod this post and no matter how much they deny it, rest assured, it's true.
Here's a great quote - an excerpt from an excerpt - that appeared here:
One way of beginning to understand privacy is by looking at what happens to people in extreme situations where it is absent. Recalling his time in Auschwitz, Primo Levi observed that "solitude in a Camp is more precious and rare than bread." Solitude is one state of privacy, and even amidst the overwhelming death, starvation, and horror of the camps, Levi knew he missed it.... Levi spent much of his life finding words for his camp experience. How, he wonders aloud in Survival in Auschwitz, do you describe "the demolition of a man," an offense for which "our language lacks words."...
One function of privacy is to provide a safe space away from terror or other assaultive experiences. When you remove a person's ability to sequester herself, or intimate information about herself, you make her extremely vulnerable....
The totalitarian state watches everyone, but keeps its own plans secret. Privacy is seen as dangerous because it enhances resistance. Constantly spying and then confronting people with what are often petty transgressions is a way of maintaining social control and unnerving and disempowering opposition....
And even when one shakes real pursuers, it is often hard to rid oneself of the feeling of being watched -- which is why surveillance is an extremely powerful way to control people. The mind's tendency to still feel observed when alone... can be inhibiting.... Feeling watched, but not knowing for sure, nor knowing if, when, or how the hostile surveyor may strike, people often become fearful, constricted, and distracted.
I've quoted from that book before, back when the CNET reporters' emails were read by HP. We thought that
Your ISP. Your ISP may have everywhere you've ever surfed keyed by your name, your ID (whatever you showed them) and your router. Your ISP knows everything. Think they collect and share that data ? Think they can make money by doing that? It's not even illegal to cyber stalk someone if you're they're ISP, phone company or any other company you give info to as we're finding out . Since it's not illegal to do it and they can make money doing it, (it's safe to assume) they do it.
Your browser. Your browser hands over everything about your machine , your plugins, your OS on every request. You'd be surprised how personally identifiable that info is. Here, have a depressing look:
I was unique amongst the 3-4 million people they tested so far. . Great.
There are companies that sift through your fingerprinty clickstream (all of the above plus the URLs you go to) solely the purpose of identifying you uniquely. Then they sell that information.
You can fight back to a degree. First you need an ISP that doesn't know you're you. You can use someone else's ISP account, say, your roommate's. If they don't know you live there (don't be too sure) then they don't know it's you. That would work.
BTW that is part of the reason MUNI (free, municipal) WIFI is blocked by the telcos every time a city tries to get it going. It provides low cost, shared internet that anonymizes your activities to the extent that the ISP->Your ID connection is broken. MUNI WIFI sends shivers down telco's executives spines because it digs straight into their profit sweet spot- selling you out to the highest bidder.
To fight the browser ID thing, you need to dump your browser and aim for a a configuration that is as generic as possible. Possibly you'd have to switch out your OS, depending on how uniquely identifying it turns out to be (moire than you suppose) You can also use Tor or another anonymous proxy.
Then you'd have to dump all your accounts online and never go back. No continuation of support from vendors. No using your credit card- that would match your name to your new online browser ISP identity. No getting your Amazon wishlists or pandora lists or anything. WRT to your previous online life, you're in the witness protection program.
Then there's your friends who will accidentally out you via FB or Gmail or other social media. You can't let them email you, chat with you or anything. You can never permit your identity to be connected by anyone at all with your new email, browser, or ISP.
It's not that it's impossible, it's that it's unlikely you'd be assiduous enough to maintain it supposing you were willing to give it a go at all.
It's a thoughtful point you're presenting but I have to counter. The value of writing the book is not to be found in the (opportunity) cost of writing it, it's to be found in
the many multiples of time units saved across very many people across a wide expanse of time who aren't , in isolation and individually (re-)wasting time to try to decipher WTF is going on in the code.
the time saved by the original developer because bug fixes are something more people can do.
the time saved by the original developer because feature adds is something anyone can do.
the innovation which takes place because writing something fundamentally novel which integrates with the existing code base is now a thinkable proposition to a large number of interested people.
the expansion of the market into areas which would otherwise be too costly and time consuming to enter into by experts who want that expansion to happen and have the motivation and knowledge to make it happen.
In my admittedly radical opinion, there is no such thing as "time wasted over-documenting" for an open source project.
I know large companies which appear to ostensibly have this attitude, but the people n(or usually person) *in charge* of documenting is the *WRONG* perons for the job. Typically, a dev who has an attitude that his (it's always a guy....) documentation *should be* (that part just kills me) good enough for anyone intelligent enough to be concerned about and supported. You have to love documentation and have a passion and empathy for people, a strong desire to succeed in rendering down highly technical information so even a high-schooler could catch on and a willingness to accept that the definition of being effective is measured by your customer, not yourself.
In this context, let me give a shout out to one Lisa Friendly, wherever she may now be, who was the editor in charge and also chief author of the Java Tutorials when Java was owned by Sun Microsystems. There was a person who,demonstrably had all those qualities in super abundance.
Arguably, Gosling made the language,and she made it a success.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah and how many people of all nationalities would die trying to invade Japan? What would Japan be today is it had not surrendered?
You go fuck yourself. You're literally engaging in the No True Scotsman argument fallacy, just substituting Tea Partier for Scotsman.
Jesus.
Let me take a crack at decimating this "made to order results" "scientific" paper.
First some notes:
The actual paper is hiding safely away from the world behind a paywall . Where is Aaron Schwartz when you need him to help you take on the depredations of university administrators?... oh yeah, that's right. :
We can only read the abstract, so it's hard to critique because of course the most interesting - and indictable - parts of a paper are
1) the methods.. because if the methods are invalid, who *cares* what conclusion was reached?
2) The statistical analysis because bad math sinks papers
3) The full conclusions- do 1 and 2 above actually support 3? Often, actually, no.
and of course somewhere down the line at the bottom of the barrel lay the abstract, living there with it's close cousins, Daily Mail headlines.
2) This guy's salary is in direct competition for college money with his own class of test subjects' salaries. Enough said.
So shall we?
1) Tenure is a function of time. Tenured profs can be expected to be older. Older people are a class of people known to perform differentially on a variety tasks.
Perhaps the author knew in advance what the age profile of the tenured faculty under study was. Perhaps drawing subjects from such an age profile would be more or less guaranteed to result in a skewed statistic, one where what is actually being measured is - simple aging.
huh.
2) Tenured professors are a select group who can be operationally defined as "those who have mastered the incentive system put to them by, oh by administrators like the co-author of this study ! "
What are those incentives and do they impact the performance of professors ? Do those incentives, for instance, condition the professor to dedicate a substandard amount of time and energy to his or her own research rather than to teaching freshmen? Especially with respect to non-tenured, "whew !, glad got this job !" type employees?
Do I even need to answer that question? Haven't we all seen it in action? Isn't the person who wrote this paper as acutely aware of this fact as anyone ?
If I were a professor at this guy's university, I'd be doing a very long slow burn right now. They incentivize me - directly, openly and consciously using words , in the case of my department at my alma mater with words like "don't waste your time preparing for your classes the only thing they care about is you getting your research funded".. I mean literally those are the words from the tenured professors to the non-tenured (but hopeful!) "assistants professors" in the department of my own alma mater.
Then those same people turn around and use the fact that I did exactly as required against me. Nicely done!
Sniff sniff.. smells like Management Technique #10,305 aka The Devils Fork -
EITHER
fire the employee for not doing as required
OR
fire the employee for doing as required.
It's amusing to see the university system rip its own asshole apart trying to keep itself alive, which is all this is. The tuition party is over, and they know it. Now reality is setting in and they're starting to cannibalize essential functions and relationships. I think that's called "panic".
You know what the single biggest money maker on campus is? The bookstore. I knew the person who ran ours (a very large university system). The numbers were fucking unbelievable. It's basically an acting subsidiary of the US Mint.
And you know what they've started to go after, in an attempt to save themselves? The bookstores. The cost of the books to students. That can't be good (for them, not you). and it is a very clear signal that behind the glossy brochures and sprawling sports complexes, administrators are actually shitting their collective pants, throwing anything over board that they can lift.
Of course, it's all for naught, since no man can lift himself and what's really sinking the university is a combination of the very many weddi
Yeah what you said isn't true. People in refugee camps aren't neutral victims of a war they don't take sides in and don't care who wins. Just the opposite. They want Assad out of there too.
It seems like the encryption of Tor - any version including the latest- cannot be trusted. Anyone know?
North Korea does not have a modern military.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/03/25/a-photo-that-makes-north-korea-look-a-lot-less-scary/
They don't have enough fuel to launch their mig 29s (see above) and the ability of the average NK soldier or officer to act absent direction is nil. What you're saying is NK has some kind of dead man's switch whereby the body will attack even if the head is off. It's hard to believe that with our ability to fuck with their computers, fuck with their very old "long range artillery" with all our ability to direct force against a conventional army that we can't preemptively take out the creakiest conventional army ever assembled.
Compared to N Korea, what we can do is magic. The only way NK is relevant at all is as a feeder for WMD -which require state level power to create - to sub state actors. That's the issue we should be thinking about.
Honestly if I were POTUS I would baby walk KJU right down the path his mouth will take him until it was clear to everyone he intended to (had to now...) try to made good on his promise to wipe Japan or the US or SK off the map, then hit him preemptively and with zero warning.
Yeah that's right , perfect thank you for outing yourself as a racist asshole because the people in refuge camps are assholes.. or dickheads... take your pick. Because people "over there" and anyway not us if they're suffering brought it on themselves.
Oh wait. Except the American taxpayer, especially the Tea Party and the 1% who fund them.... now THOSE people, damn, they're oppressed through no fault of their own.
Kill yourself.
Dude, if you're characterizing N Korea as simply a "poor nation" then you really do know NOTHING about N Korea. It's a fucking nationwide prison camp. It's a brutal cult of personality metastasized into a gun wielding psychopath. If the US did anything little part of what N Korea does everyday, you'd be the first to freak out. Why do some people's sympathies and sensitivities stop at their own nation?
I think the concept of nuclear winter has more or less be proven as a fact Not saying Sagan was a competent nuclear strategist , just.. facts are facts.
Yeah we're the only ones' to ever use them-= against a nation trying to help Hitler win WWII. A nation responsible for the Rape of Nanking. A nation that refused to unconditional surrender. . Oh, and nuking those cities , how ever little you like it, saved lives and set Japan on the path to being the prosperous, free, liberal democracy and first rate nation that it has been for decades now.
We freed the Japanese people from the wanton abuse they were doomed to be suffering at the hands of their former nationalistic and militaristic government. A government that led them into an appalling war. You don't hear them complain too much about it. You have to conceive of the idea that some governments are illegitimate and only inflict suffering on anyone unlucky enough to be born within their borders. Sure people go along with it, but so what? Doesn't mean that if they had another choice, if they knew anything else they wouldn't prefer it. No really blames the run of the mill mid-century Japanese person for what Hirohito and his generals did. It's too bad that those run of the mill people paid the price for it. Leaders are good at insulating themselves from their consequences of their actions. What can anyone say?
Yeah how am I ill informed? Huh? If it was YOU and YOURS would you want a super power to level the murderer? Sure you would. Golden Rule applies. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is not that hard to think through.
N Korea invasion plan:
Day 1- sudden death of top 5000 scientists and military personnel.
Day 2- Massive air drops of millions of Coke cans, Kit Kat bars and Happy Meals. Blanket the country completely. You know what people are going to do? They're going to run around looking for the next drop and then they're going to sit down and eat it because half the country (or more) is in a state of more or less permanent starvation. Then they're going to be full. Then they're going to hang out thinking, hmmm, maybe we should just see what happens next.... hey! is that another kit kat bar?
Estimates etc: Links or it didn't happen.
Even at that, all that means is we need another way to take the regime down. It's called selective elimination. You decapitate the people who make decisions and have the know how and willingness to use the nukes and conventional arms through *whatever means* and the people who are left are just bewildered and incapable of marshaling a fight, even supposing they wanted to.
We;re talking about a dictatorship with no real continuity of power in place. Even if the generals are cynical puppet masters, we can rest assured that the level of competence and know how below them is paper thin. That's how dictatorships are structured to keep the fat cats at the top happy and everyone beneath them who might be a threat in fact *not a danger to them* in any way.
From your POV N Korea is all about making a suicidal war machine out to face down the world at any cost . From THEIR POV, they are worried about the ambitious young men underneath them who show any sign of wanting to move up in the hierarchy through the accumulation of personal capital, competence and influence.
The people with any real power or decision making capability or know how or knowledge form a paper thin facade over an intimidated and largely incompetent inner core. That's how that works. N Korea is a paper tiger with long fangs called nukes that look bad. That's all they have, the ability to look bad. Let me kill or neutralize any 5000 N Koreans I want and I'll topple that shithole with nary a shot fired.
If he's "done", the most organized members of the rebel forces are the moslem brotherhood and al qaeda. Which means he'll probably be replaced by a islamic fundamentalist government.
It's just not true. Those forces are there, but most people anywhere aren't fanatics, by definition. Being Muslim is not the same as being in al Queda, sympathizing with al Queda or anything else.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/16/opinion/zuka-syria-resistance-leader/index.html
Where is the al Queda take over of Libya? Where is the al Queda take over of Egypt? Even the Muslim brotherhood couldn't hold onto power in Egypt . People hated them and hated their focus on religion and piety and the moves to exclude people based on religion and ethnicity, all at the expense of material prosperity and progress and modernity and , you know, living.
Where is the al Queda take over of Iraq? Given a choice between self determination and the fucking Taliban, people will choose self determination. Sure al Queda and Taliban are harassing forces in Iraq, good at IED detonation mostly. And? And? Where is THAT going? Nowhere.
Three weeks of day and night bombing of Syria by allied forces and Assad is done and it's over. Why are we beating around the edges like this? We are totally missing an opportunity to show that the West actually gives a shit about freedom for everyone in the ME. I know people here do because I talk to them but somehow that doesn't translate into DOING anything about it.
This is what the world is. The world is still full of super assholes under whom there is no justice, no civilization just barbarity, brutality and the rule of the iron glove. This is the swamp out of which extremism is bred. Ye\s, it's not it's only source, but it's a major source and with extremism you're always playing a numbers game, an odds game. You want to reduce the head count one way or another.
For some unknown reason Americans believe that there's a peaceful, non-violent way to deal with people who want to be violent (liberals) . Or alternatively they believe they don't have to care because it won't effect them and , implicitly they only care about their own skins (conservatives) . Both sides are wrong. Violent lawless assholes don't respond to either carrots or sticks, they respond to being dead. And you DO have to care about people in far removed places but that is a "big system, big picture" kind of thinking which conservatives are constitutionally incapable of .
Same thing with Syria now. Same thing with Iran. The reason all these countries want more time to *negotiate* is because time is on their side. Wait long enough and it will be impossible to do anything about it. Iran will have nukes. Syrian resistance will be dead. N Korea will have even more plutonium to give to terrorist groups.
Here's what our hand wringing policy in Syria is forging for us:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/anti-americanism-spreads-in-syrian-refugee-camps/279538/
Long story short- the assurance that we lose no matter how it turns out; either Assad will stay in power, and we lose, or the rebels take over, and we lose.
Anyone who thinks Syria is just some place "over there" , like say former CIA director Gates apparently does, is a fucking asshole. There is no "over there' anymore. That's a side effect of something called "globalization". What happens in the geo-politics of far removed nations WILL impact us one way or another. A good way to make people hate us is to sit by while they're slaughtered for no reason. This isn't targeted drone strikes Assad is doing, it's mass murder.
Ditto N Korea. WTF are we waiting for? N Korea needs to be brought down through whatever means. How hard can it be to ruin this country? How hard a target is Pyongyang? We need to work out a deal with the Chinese , emphasizing that plutonium wandering the earth looking for a home isn't in their own long term best interests either. The squirt and his army have to go.
We can actually do this now or we can wish we'd done it later. If we can blow up Iran's centrifuge, if we can go into a gigantic fuckign tail spin and have repeated Constitutional crises over one day of terrorist attacks and we're a flexible democratic nation then guess how the Assad or N Korean political machine is going to fare under sustained American and allied firepower? That's the one thing we know how to do and we do well- ruin the other side's regime just like that.
We need to fucking topple these dictators and remove the threat of proliferation of WMD now while we can. An no, this isn't Iraq II- we know they have them. With WRT to Iraq, ask Iraqis if they like the outcome of that war or they'd perhaps prefer to go back to living under Uday and Cusay. Because it seems to me that their opinions are the ones that matter.
Establishing democratic institutions once the dick-tater is gone is a multi generational a trial and error process . Ask Egypt. But they're as smart as anyone anywhere and they WILL work it out for themselves, in Egypt, in Libya in Iraq and in Afghanistan too. Over time, over a few generations maybe, but it will happen.
Terrorists take note: the globalization that permitted you to attack us, attacks back. you can't shut the flood gates against modernity and democracy once you open them, and open them you did.
The whole question is idiotic. It frames the issue as if a programming job consisted of discrete puzzles with some hypothetical difficulty rating X to be solved . Since we don't have hard problems to solve generally, why buy the services of someone who can solve them instead of someone less capable but cheaper?
Ever program? Because if you had you'd know that mundane code written by your cheap developers leads very quickly to *puzzles* no one in the world is smart enough to solve, i.e. problems which are intractable. Guaranteed you have a lot of those in your code base. You also have things less grievous than the classic "big ball of mud" being generated all the time - ways of solving ordinary problems which are just bad and wasteful of time and resources.. this the invisible drip drip drip that causes IT projects to go over budget and miss their deadlines. Nothing is obvious wrong, it's just that mediocre developers are mediocre across an entire range of activities, not just "top prize " problems and competent developers carry that competence around with them and bring it everything they do.
Think smart people are expensive? Just wait until all those devs you hired are standing around doing nothing waiting for one of their kind to figure out what the blocking issue is. Just take the salary of each one and multiply by the number of such people updating their FB profiles to pass the time, times the number of hours they spend doing that, times the number of times one of their kind causes another such incident. That's their REAL hourly rate.
" Phrases like that are just idiot scaremongering. What could one hacker accomplish? "
Depends what they're hacking , doesn't it? If you're hacking a computer, then, who knows really.. I'd have to work it out and have access to the data to work it out.
If they're hacking viruses OTOH then we're talking about something of a potentially unlimited death toll. I am sure you think about computers and hacking all the time like most people here. I invite you to venture outside your chosen area of specialization and have a gander at what is going on in other fields, what type equipment is needed to be productive in those other fields and what the implications of those two things could be if there were such a thing as a biological / genetic black hat hacker.
As far as stats goes, I have good reason to have confidence in my analytic skills. The fact is, there is nothing in any corpus of events which can be classify as "terrorism" , neither its frequency nor type- which can be used to infer anything at all about either the likelihood of a attack in the future or what the potential magnitude of the effect could be.
The later is a technical question and the former is locked entirely within the hearts of the terrorists themselves.
IANAL but I don't think you can lie to a federal officer if he/she is engaged in official duties when questioning you. Lawyers, please join in.
Counseling someone to lie .. is that a crime?
Because no one would lie and terrorists are always foreign?
If we're going to solve this problem, let's state it clearly.
Small groups of people, with a limit now tending towards one, are acquiring the ability to inflict damage, now tending towards death, on larger and larger numbers of people, now tending towards everyone.
How can we stop them before they do that ? How do we need to arrange or change the things ion the world so that that never happens?
All of this Snvowden, NSA, War on Terror, WMD al Queda stuff flows directly from that basic fact.
We're never going to be in agreement on what to do until we're all on the same page as to what the problem really is. That's the problem.
Really, I don't see a solution outside of genetically engineering people so they don't want to do that. Religion doesn't work (fundamentalism of all kinds , Islamic and Christian) . Providing people with stuff and money doesn't work (bin Laden), education doesn't work (Pol Pot) democratic institutions don't work (Timothy McVeigh) . Maybe those things reduce the probability, the sheer availability of accomplices to a Pol Pot or a bin Laden. At best that buys us time.
I am not saying genetic engineering is what we should do. I can't even say that it will work, but that and making the creation of an equitable and fair world a top priority (as opposed to our current one- making small numbers of people very rich) are our best bet as far as we know.
It's not a slippery slope. It's a reality. The world has moved significantly down the road of choosing which lives are worthwhile, and which are just too big of a hassle.
What? As opposed to what earlier time? 1100AD? Earlier? Later? 1500AD? 1700 AD? Oh I see, you are only talking about post-slavery days.. so 1900 and beyond.. back during the bright, human rights upholding days of the industrial revolution with, you know child labor and no sufferage.. oh you mean later than that? About when Civil Rights became a *thing*. ?
No later than THAT? Jesus buddy, we're running out of room on this end of history.
Fuck.
It';s not that they care. It's that they know. That's the invasion of privacy. That's the dehumanization.
Along these lines it's amusing to read that the very-married ex Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who's famous for asserting that everyone should just get over their need for privacy is spending 6 million soundproofing his New York love nest so his neighbors won't hear him having loud sex with his girlfriends... did I say whores? No. I didn't .
http://theblemish.com/2013/07/heres-googles-eric-schmidts-sex-pad/
So I guess privacy IS important after fall.. but just for important people.
I should add- this is one of the reasons I have never applied to large companies like Google and Yahoo. They just know way way too much about me.
You're going to sit across a desk in an interview with someone who knows absolutely everything about everywhere you've ever surfed at any time in your life, or at least, as deep as that person cares to know.
You've got to be crazy.
You think you're sitting there presenting yourself in your best light, as you do in an interview but trust me, the full force of dehumanization-via-transparency is in effect. It's not that they'll let on, it's that they'll know at all. I don't have anything THAT bad to hide, but just like everyone else online, I have surfed some kinky (some would say! ) porn and flamed out into angry trolling (some would say!) in online arguments . They know all about that or can find out.
The power imbalance is incredible. You're effectively stripped bare with none of the dignity that PRIVACY is supposed to have afforded you. Without privacy, you cannot create a face for the faces you meet. Someone who is watched and recorded loses their humanity and becomes an object to the watcher's subject.
You are no longer a person with any mystery. You lose the ability to define how others see you and in that you lose the incentive to be something more, to realize your potentiality and re-define yourself to yourself and others, perhaps defining yourself as something great, or noble or extraordinary. All that happening, that mechanism, that thing we have always done over the course of human history is totally shot to hell when you're rendered like a piece of meat, categorized, transparent, marked and grade and delimited by others - others whose lives you don't have an equal view into and whose process is invisible to you.
Dignity and humanity is something you can never ever have at a Google interview or a Yahoo interview, no matter how far down how many Googlers mod this post and no matter how much they deny it, rest assured, it's true.
Here's a great quote - an excerpt from an excerpt - that appeared here:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175
One way of beginning to understand privacy is by looking at what happens to people in extreme situations where it is absent. Recalling his time in Auschwitz, Primo Levi observed that "solitude in a Camp is more precious and rare than bread." Solitude is one state of privacy, and even amidst the overwhelming death, starvation, and horror of the camps, Levi knew he missed it.... Levi spent much of his life finding words for his camp experience. How, he wonders aloud in Survival in Auschwitz, do you describe "the demolition of a man," an offense for which "our language lacks words."...
One function of privacy is to provide a safe space away from terror or other assaultive experiences. When you remove a person's ability to sequester herself, or intimate information about herself, you make her extremely vulnerable....
The totalitarian state watches everyone, but keeps its own plans secret. Privacy is seen as dangerous because it enhances resistance. Constantly spying and then confronting people with what are often petty transgressions is a way of maintaining social control and unnerving and disempowering opposition....
And even when one shakes real pursuers, it is often hard to rid oneself of the feeling of being watched -- which is why surveillance is an extremely powerful way to control people. The mind's tendency to still feel observed when alone... can be inhibiting. ... Feeling watched, but not knowing for sure, nor knowing if, when, or how the hostile surveyor may strike, people often become fearful, constricted, and distracted.
I've quoted from that book before, back when the CNET reporters' emails were read by HP. We thought that
Here's what won't vary if you do that-
Your ISP. Your ISP may have everywhere you've ever surfed keyed by your name, your ID (whatever you showed them) and your router. Your ISP knows everything. Think they collect and share that data ? Think they can make money by doing that? It's not even illegal to cyber stalk someone if you're they're ISP, phone company or any other company you give info to as we're finding out . Since it's not illegal to do it and they can make money doing it, (it's safe to assume) they do it.
Your browser. Your browser hands over everything about your machine , your plugins, your OS on every request. You'd be surprised how personally identifiable that info is. Here, have a depressing look:
https://panopticlick.eff.org/index.php?action=log&js=yes
https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf
I was unique amongst the 3-4 million people they tested so far. . Great.
There are companies that sift through your fingerprinty clickstream (all of the above plus the URLs you go to) solely the purpose of identifying you uniquely. Then they sell that information.
You can fight back to a degree. First you need an ISP that doesn't know you're you. You can use someone else's ISP account, say, your roommate's. If they don't know you live there (don't be too sure) then they don't know it's you. That would work.
BTW that is part of the reason MUNI (free, municipal) WIFI is blocked by the telcos every time a city tries to get it going. It provides low cost, shared internet that anonymizes your activities to the extent that the ISP->Your ID connection is broken. MUNI WIFI sends shivers down telco's executives spines because it digs straight into their profit sweet spot- selling you out to the highest bidder.
To fight the browser ID thing, you need to dump your browser and aim for a a configuration that is as generic as possible. Possibly you'd have to switch out your OS, depending on how uniquely identifying it turns out to be (moire than you suppose) You can also use Tor or another anonymous proxy.
Then you'd have to dump all your accounts online and never go back. No continuation of support from vendors. No using your credit card- that would match your name to your new online browser ISP identity. No getting your Amazon wishlists or pandora lists or anything. WRT to your previous online life, you're in the witness protection program.
Then there's your friends who will accidentally out you via FB or Gmail or other social media. You can't let them email you, chat with you or anything. You can never permit your identity to be connected by anyone at all with your new email, browser, or ISP.
It's not that it's impossible, it's that it's unlikely you'd be assiduous enough to maintain it supposing you were willing to give it a go at all.
HTH.
It's a thoughtful point you're presenting but I have to counter. The value of writing the book is not to be found in the (opportunity) cost of writing it, it's to be found in
the many multiples of time units saved across very many people across a wide expanse of time who aren't , in isolation and individually (re-)wasting time to try to decipher WTF is going on in the code.
the time saved by the original developer because bug fixes are something more people can do.
the time saved by the original developer because feature adds is something anyone can do.
the innovation which takes place because writing something fundamentally novel which integrates with the existing code base is now a thinkable proposition to a large number of interested people.
the expansion of the market into areas which would otherwise be too costly and time consuming to enter into by experts who want that expansion to happen and have the motivation and knowledge to make it happen.
In my admittedly radical opinion, there is no such thing as "time wasted over-documenting" for an open source project.
I know large companies which appear to ostensibly have this attitude, but the people n(or usually person) *in charge* of documenting is the *WRONG* perons for the job. Typically, a dev who has an attitude that his (it's always a guy....) documentation *should be* (that part just kills me) good enough for anyone intelligent enough to be concerned about and supported. You have to love documentation and have a passion and empathy for people, a strong desire to succeed in rendering down highly technical information so even a high-schooler could catch on and a willingness to accept that the definition of being effective is measured by your customer, not yourself.
In this context, let me give a shout out to one Lisa Friendly, wherever she may now be, who was the editor in charge and also chief author of the Java Tutorials when Java was owned by Sun Microsystems. There was a person who,demonstrably had all those qualities in super abundance.
Arguably, Gosling made the language ,and she made it a success.