Expertise in one area of knowledge does not confer expertise in any other. Your expert knows about climate change science. His expertise therefore ends at point #3. For the next two points, one would consult an economist; for the last two, an expert in US politics. I don't think your expert knows much about either of those areas. It's perfectly reasonable to ignore his non-expert advise.
Re:What the CIA needs:
on
IT at the CIA
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
NATO wanted to know the bore of the gun of a Soviet tank. There was
one in East Germany. The US used satellites at a cost of millions of
dollars. The British used someone to break into the facility to measure
the bore. The cost was to replace the lock but the person who did it
risked his life. The French took a Russian officer out to dinner, after
having plied him with good food and lots of alcohol and just asked the
him what the bore was.
Not an anecdote, but an old joke, I think. And there's some truth to
it. But that truth cuts both ways. Americans and Brits expend great
effort to find out what the bore dimension is. The French are
satisfied to learn what a drunken Russian officer says it is.
That's not the same thing at all.
My father once suggested a paintball system wherein everyone carried a paint-ball gun. If you drive like an asshole, people nail you. If you get over a certain number of hits, and a cop sees you, you get a ticket.
Now, in my scheme, the DMV mails you three postcards every now and then. When you see an asshole, write down his plate and mail the card in. If your plate collects three cards in a month, you get a ticket. If you mail a card that produces a ticket, you get three more cards. Almost all abuses can be prevented by clever design, starting with: the postcards have identifiers, so the DMV knows who mailed them in. Details left as an exercise.
Alas, I know too much about government-acquired information systems to believe that such a thing could be built...
"God is good to people who really look for him."
This is actually a premise we can test, and it's simply false. Many studies have been done comparing religious and
non-religious people, and it's never been found that religious people end up with "better luck" (better health, better
livelyhood, better children, etc) that non-religious people.
You're trying to test a different premise: God is good -- here on this earth in material ways we can detect -- to people who really look for him. Jesus said not to expect that.
Seems to me that could equally be the basis for an argument against an "Author". If you look at life on earth,
there is basically only one way to do it. It's all genes and DNA and every complex living thing shares something in
common with the others. There is no "artistic expression" that shows up at all.
Ah, reductionism, the universal solvent. Turns everything into tasteless, useless goo.
There's also no artistic expression in writing. There's basically only one way to do it. It's all permutations of the same 26 characters, and every work shares something in common with the others...
No artistic expression in painting; it's all done with globs of pigment on a surface...
The main worry here is Mitre. If they are involved in government research, what are these guys up to? Is our government
playing games with spam or is there some real, nefarious
purpose here?
I've worked for MITRE for the past 11 years.
We don't do spam. We do systems engineering, R&D, and IT support for
the government: originally for the Air Force, then the other armed
services, the FAA, and the IRS. MITRE is not an ordinary defense
contractor; it comprises three Federally Funded Research and
Development Centers. The idea is to provide expert, unbiased
technical advice which the customers can't keep in-house and which
they can't get from for-profit contractors.
We always have a bunch of part-time undergraduate co-op students
around -- I had one working for me in 2000. The two people named in
the Salon article were co-ops in the nanotech research department in
1999. I'm quite sure that their duties didn't include a "someone
likes you" spam engine, and I imagine they'll get an earful -- if they
are still working for us, three years later -- from their unlucky
manager.
I don't think it was very nice of Salon to link MITRE into this
story. If you google for Tseng and Schleier-Smith, you find the MITRE
link. If you paste that link into your story, it looks like MITRE is
somehow connected. But we aren't.
There are two
glaring changes that have been made to what I wrote, and
someone added to the message that Dr. Cindy Williams is
the same Cindy Williams from "Laverne and Shirley."
Persistance is not a new problem, of course. Even before DejaNews, a
lot of USENET posters realized that our articles would never
completely go away -- we knew we were writing for posterity, and
planned accordingly. I wrote several hundred articles between 1983
and 1999, mostly in the politics groups. The only one that really
embarasses me now is the one I sent to "misc.test" without "ignore" in
the subject line:-).
It's much harder to deal with other people posting crap that's
attributed to you. I always hated that threat. Everything I posted after 1995 was digitally
signed... for what little good that could do me.
KSR was an important SF figure through the 1990s. But he can hardly be said to have "dominated" the genre. On what evidence? Awards? Sure, he collected two Hugos for best novel. But so did Connie Willis... and Bujold gathered three.
It's more precise to say that the Bible includes works in many literary forms, including poetry, letters, and history... all
inspired by God and completely true in the message conveyed to the original readers
I must disagree. I would argue that is a decidedly imprecise way to describe them. It relies on a function of faith as well as
several of belief, before it can be accepted as precise. I do not share that faith and belief. Therefore, for me, that statement is
not precise.
I see that you disagree. But that fact does not alter the accuracy or precision of my statement -- which is either true, or not true, independently of what you do or do not believe. If I were in your shoes, I'd have said, "that may be more precise, but it is wrong".
Thanks for the thoughtful discussion, and for the tip on 1 Cor. 14:36. I've read various exegesis on that passage, hadn't come across that detail before. (But I don't think it quite makes your point... after verse 35, what difference whether Paul is now talking to the men in verse 36? Just quibbling...)
When I was a lowly bookseller at a big national chain, *cough* Borders *cough*, one of the most heavily
shop-lifted sections of the store was the christian Bible section.
I'm not surprised. Anyone who would steal a Bible really needs one. Things that are really needed will be stolen more frequently. QED. Right?
They get deeper and more interesting than that, but this is basically
what it boils down to. They're a combination of mythology and history,
and should be read as such...
Fair enough, so long as you avoid the trap of believing that "myth" ==
"false". It's more precise to say that the Bible includes works in
many literary forms, including poetry, letters, and history... all
inspired by God and completely true in the message conveyed to the
original readers, and to us today if we are careful with our
hermeneutics. I recommend How
To Read the Bible for All Its Worth, by Gordon Fee and Douglas
Stuart... they say it better than I can.
Of course, you only stand to lose probably $50 to fraudulent charges depending on your card agreement, and the
card company would probably even waive that.
Fifty bucks. Plus the hassle of waiting for your replacement cards to arrive. Plus dealing with the newspaper, the carpet store, and everybody else who had your number for a legit charge and now find it won't go through. Plus going through your statement to find the bogus charges. The hassle factor is real, and exceeds $50 for many people.
But yeah, it's the credit card companies that will lose enough money to make suing worthwhile. They all have contracts with the merchants. Wonder what the terms say about this sort of thing?
Re:Not new. Imagine a roll-up screen.
on
Paintable LCDs
·
· Score: 1
Imagine you had the money to pay for the research into rapid deployment of high-tech command centers to remote locations. Get the picture? Who needs CRTs when you have tent walls.
That's right on the money. I've been an observer at a field artillery staff exercise. Some of their work is automated, but a great deal of it is not. What do they use for information display? Post-It tape flags on a big map, each carefully annotated by hand. What do they use for information exchange? You walk over to the S-2's tent and look at his map for a while. Very, very low-tech. But it gets the job done.
What do they need instead? A big, flat, high-resolution display that you can hang on the tent wall -- and that you can roll up, toss in the back of the truck with all the other shit when it's time to move (maybe in a big hurry), and expect it to work later. The rest of the hardware and software is easy by comparison.
...[she] was strongly dissuaded from registering as a Democrat, because, as the pollster said, the county was largely
Republican and she "could not vote if she was a Democrat"
That's how it works in Massachusetts, with the parties reversed. We don't have elections. We have Democratic primaries:-)
But you can register Independent and then vote in either party's primary.
Leave your draconian country while you can. Few countries permit such embarassing
yet incredibly futile actions. Much less condone them. Look to Amnesty International for a list of countries with
human rights violations and campaigns they have engaged in; their largest human rights campaign was directed
against the US rights violations.
Oh, that's just silly. People all over the world are trying hard to get into the United States. As for Amnesty... I dropped out of AI a long time ago, when it became clear that they have one standard for the US, another for the rest of the world.
Darlin', don't talk about things you don't understand.
Darlin', don't talk about things you don't know anything about.
Darlin', if you don't like it here, go back to your own miserable country.
-- Randy Newman, "Christmas in Capetown"
Hang on a minute though. It's a bit much to have a go at Microsoft about file extensions. Unix? Written in
C?.c and.h files? What would happen if you didn't have extensions?
Answer: not much. The C compiler is happy to compile files that don't end in ".c" if that's what you want. The preprocessor will include files that don't end in ".h". Those suffixes are for the convenience of the programmer. OK, make(1) depends on them, but then make is also for the convenience of the programmer.
Groceries are a tough business. You get maybe a 4% margin on
things. It's almost better to put your money in a passbook and draw 2%
or 3% at zero risk.
Umm...those aren't comparable. Yes, they net about 4% on that gallon of milk.
Fortunately for them, that's not an annual rate. The milk sits
in the cooler for what, maybe a week? 4% compounded every week for a
year is... yikes, over 700%. Those aren't comparable, either.
Groceries are a tough business. But it's a lot more profitable than
passbook savings.
Once we minorities get reparations from the descendants from the Whites
that fucked over our ancestors then maybe we could compromise.
It's sure going to be interesting, sorting out who pays whom. A great
many of the people who think of themselves as "we minorities" are
actually descendants of those white slaveholders. Think about it.
There once was a contractor, who shall remain nameless to keep the
lawyers away. While researching his report, he found a few of my
papers on the net. That was smart, because they were relevant. Then he
cut huge chunks of text from my papers and pasted them into his report.
That was dumb... because his customer asked me to review his work. The
first thing I thought was, "wow, this guy can write!" Then the truth
sank in.
My management wanted to ignore the whole thing at first, pretend it
never happened. I explained that we weren't the only victims, and that
other people might notice. I told them that if that happened, then it's
going to look like we aren't smart enough to identify our own
work. Wouldn't that look good?
So in my review of his paper, I included copies of my papers, with the identical text
sections highlighted and correlated in each. Then I said I thought it was
pretty good work.
The final published report looked a lot different.
Watermarking, in the way the RIAA means to use it, will never
work. Period. No argument.
The RIAA is using a different definition of "work". You think it means
"secure, unbreakable". They just mean "good enough to protect our profits".
Illustration: satellite TV signals are encrypted. Are they secure?
Heck, no! But almost everybody pays anyway. Why? Some pay for moral
reasons, some fear the law... but many find it too much trouble
to steal the signal. They don't have the skill to become pirates, and
it's hard for them to make a bargain with someone who does. How can they find
this person? How can they trust them? It's hard for a seller to advertise or build a
reputation for honesty when his service is unlawful. And, of course,
legal recourse is unavailable to both parties. Yes, I've seen the ads, I know about the black market... but for most people it's just easier to pay. And that's good enough for the satellite TV guys.
The RIAA doesn't need an unbreakable watermark. They just need
something good enough to stop most people from exchanging songs. Sure,
you can crack it, but you're not a threat. Napster is a threat,
because it's so easy, everyone can do it.
Being a liberal, I would have a hard time noticing any bias in PBS programming. Do any conservatives read slashdot? If so, is PBS biased in your opinion?
Don't know what you mean by "conservative".
I consider myself a liberal in the old sense of the world, which today equates to something like small-L libertarian. But I do think that PBS shows a political bias.
There's lots of anecdotal evidence, which is tricky to evaluate. Example: covering the 1992 election returns, the WGBH newsroom burst into applause when Clinton reached the required number of electoral votes. Now that's evenhanded!
Systematic studies are harder. You can examine the stories on a topic and show that the number of stories describing Bush's proposed federal tax cut as "huge" greatly outnumber those that call it "small in comparison to JFK's cut". But somebody has to evaluate and label those stories, so there's observer bias to worry about.
You can also examine the political leanings of the news staff. I'm always amused at how news organizations are terribly worried with diversity when the number of left-handed lesbians is at issue, but perfectly happy when Democrats outnumber Republicans by five to one. Maybe you believe that an editor's political beliefs don't influence the stories she chooses to cover -- but I don't.
One objective measure: count the number of times reporters use the adjectives "conservative" and "liberal" to describe people. Unbiased, middle-of-the-road reporting will see just as many people on the left hand as on the right. So unbiased reporting will use the two terms equally often. Try it on NPR radio and see what you get!
I would have thought the brand of thuggish, anti-union conservatism so popular among
geeks the past few years would be on the wane...
Thuggish? That term attaches best to unions, not to their opponents. You want to see "thuggish", go watch what happens to truckers that drive where the Teamsters have decreed that no trucks should go.
U.S. labor law is so screwed up, union violence isn't even illegal. The Cato Institute reports:
Under the Supreme Court's 1973 Enmons decision, vandalism, assault, even murder by union officials are exempt
from federal anti-extortion law. As long as the violence is aimed at obtaining property for which the union can assert
a "lawful claim"--for example, wage or benefit increases-- the violence is deemed to be in furtherance of "legitimate"
union objectives.
I don't think "thuggish" was the right word.
Maybe you meant to say "running-dog lackey collaborators of the Western imperialist hegemons" instead.
"The idea becomes plausible and has mindshare." That's not the entire
cause of schoolyard shootings, but it's surely a part of the cause.
Check out a recent article in
The Atlantic Monthly, titled A New Way to
Be Mad. Much of the article is about the form of madness known as
apotemnophilia, which, roughly speaking, is the psychotic desire to
have parts of your body amputated, with or without a surgeon's help. Thirty years ago, nobody had heard of it. Today it affects thousands. The rest of the article is about where the psychosis comes from.
Why do pathologies sometimes arise as if from nowhere? Can the mere description of a condition make it contagious?
Towards the end, the author
discusses the concept of "semantic contagion".
The idea of having one's legs amputated might never even enter the minds
of some people until it is suggested to them. Yet once it is suggested,
and not just suggested but paired with imagery that a person's past may
have primed him or her to appreciate, that act becomes
possible... Toss this mixture into the vast fan of
the Internet and it will be dispersed at speeds unimagined even a decade
ago.
Something like this is happening with schoolyard shootings. Anyway, it's an interesting article. It won't change your mind about
censorship, but it might make you think about it more closely.
Slashdot Mirror
Expertise in one area of knowledge does not confer expertise in any other. Your expert knows about climate change science. His expertise therefore ends at point #3. For the next two points, one would consult an economist; for the last two, an expert in US politics. I don't think your expert knows much about either of those areas. It's perfectly reasonable to ignore his non-expert advise.
Not an anecdote, but an old joke, I think. And there's some truth to it. But that truth cuts both ways. Americans and Brits expend great effort to find out what the bore dimension is. The French are satisfied to learn what a drunken Russian officer says it is. That's not the same thing at all.
Which reminds me of the old saying: there is no such thing as portable code, there is only code that has been ported.
Now, in my scheme, the DMV mails you three postcards every now and then. When you see an asshole, write down his plate and mail the card in. If your plate collects three cards in a month, you get a ticket. If you mail a card that produces a ticket, you get three more cards. Almost all abuses can be prevented by clever design, starting with: the postcards have identifiers, so the DMV knows who mailed them in. Details left as an exercise.
Alas, I know too much about government-acquired information systems to believe that such a thing could be built...
You're trying to test a different premise: God is good -- here on this earth in material ways we can detect -- to people who really look for him. Jesus said not to expect that.
Ah, reductionism, the universal solvent. Turns everything into tasteless, useless goo.
There's also no artistic expression in writing. There's basically only one way to do it. It's all permutations of the same 26 characters, and every work shares something in common with the others...
No artistic expression in painting; it's all done with globs of pigment on a surface...
None in sculpture; it's all stone in shapes...
Sheesh.
I've worked for MITRE for the past 11 years. We don't do spam. We do systems engineering, R&D, and IT support for the government: originally for the Air Force, then the other armed services, the FAA, and the IRS. MITRE is not an ordinary defense contractor; it comprises three Federally Funded Research and Development Centers. The idea is to provide expert, unbiased technical advice which the customers can't keep in-house and which they can't get from for-profit contractors.
We always have a bunch of part-time undergraduate co-op students around -- I had one working for me in 2000. The two people named in the Salon article were co-ops in the nanotech research department in 1999. I'm quite sure that their duties didn't include a "someone likes you" spam engine, and I imagine they'll get an earful -- if they are still working for us, three years later -- from their unlucky manager.
I don't think it was very nice of Salon to link MITRE into this story. If you google for Tseng and Schleier-Smith, you find the MITRE link. If you paste that link into your story, it looks like MITRE is somehow connected. But we aren't.
Persistance is not a new problem, of course. Even before DejaNews, a lot of USENET posters realized that our articles would never completely go away -- we knew we were writing for posterity, and planned accordingly. I wrote several hundred articles between 1983 and 1999, mostly in the politics groups. The only one that really embarasses me now is the one I sent to "misc.test" without "ignore" in the subject line :-).
It's much harder to deal with other people posting crap that's attributed to you. I always hated that threat. Everything I posted after 1995 was digitally signed... for what little good that could do me.
KSR was an important SF figure through the 1990s. But he can hardly be said to have "dominated" the genre. On what evidence? Awards? Sure, he collected two Hugos for best novel. But so did Connie Willis... and Bujold gathered three.
I must disagree. I would argue that is a decidedly imprecise way to describe them. It relies on a function of faith as well as several of belief, before it can be accepted as precise. I do not share that faith and belief. Therefore, for me, that statement is not precise.
I see that you disagree. But that fact does not alter the accuracy or precision of my statement -- which is either true, or not true, independently of what you do or do not believe. If I were in your shoes, I'd have said, "that may be more precise, but it is wrong".
Thanks for the thoughtful discussion, and for the tip on 1 Cor. 14:36. I've read various exegesis on that passage, hadn't come across that detail before. (But I don't think it quite makes your point... after verse 35, what difference whether Paul is now talking to the men in verse 36? Just quibbling...)
I'm not surprised. Anyone who would steal a Bible really needs one. Things that are really needed will be stolen more frequently. QED. Right?
Fair enough, so long as you avoid the trap of believing that "myth" == "false". It's more precise to say that the Bible includes works in many literary forms, including poetry, letters, and history... all inspired by God and completely true in the message conveyed to the original readers, and to us today if we are careful with our hermeneutics. I recommend How To Read the Bible for All Its Worth, by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart... they say it better than I can.
Fifty bucks. Plus the hassle of waiting for your replacement cards to arrive. Plus dealing with the newspaper, the carpet store, and everybody else who had your number for a legit charge and now find it won't go through. Plus going through your statement to find the bogus charges. The hassle factor is real, and exceeds $50 for many people.
But yeah, it's the credit card companies that will lose enough money to make suing worthwhile. They all have contracts with the merchants. Wonder what the terms say about this sort of thing?
That's right on the money. I've been an observer at a field artillery staff exercise. Some of their work is automated, but a great deal of it is not. What do they use for information display? Post-It tape flags on a big map, each carefully annotated by hand. What do they use for information exchange? You walk over to the S-2's tent and look at his map for a while. Very, very low-tech. But it gets the job done.
What do they need instead? A big, flat, high-resolution display that you can hang on the tent wall -- and that you can roll up, toss in the back of the truck with all the other shit when it's time to move (maybe in a big hurry), and expect it to work later. The rest of the hardware and software is easy by comparison.
What sticker are you talking about? Oh, that sticker. I didn't read it. Did I say I would?
That's how it works in Massachusetts, with the parties reversed. We don't have elections. We have Democratic primaries :-)
But you can register Independent and then vote in either party's primary.
Oh, that's just silly. People all over the world are trying hard to get into the United States. As for Amnesty... I dropped out of AI a long time ago, when it became clear that they have one standard for the US, another for the rest of the world.
Answer: not much. The C compiler is happy to compile files that don't end in ".c" if that's what you want. The preprocessor will include files that don't end in ".h". Those suffixes are for the convenience of the programmer. OK, make(1) depends on them, but then make is also for the convenience of the programmer.
Umm...those aren't comparable. Yes, they net about 4% on that gallon of milk. Fortunately for them, that's not an annual rate. The milk sits in the cooler for what, maybe a week? 4% compounded every week for a year is... yikes, over 700%. Those aren't comparable, either.
Groceries are a tough business. But it's a lot more profitable than passbook savings.
It's sure going to be interesting, sorting out who pays whom. A great many of the people who think of themselves as "we minorities" are actually descendants of those white slaveholders. Think about it.
David Horowitz has convincingly debunked the whole reparations idea. Check out Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks -- And Racist, Too. I have read many people who say his article is horrible, reprehensible... but not one who could refute any of the actual claims in it.
My management wanted to ignore the whole thing at first, pretend it never happened. I explained that we weren't the only victims, and that other people might notice. I told them that if that happened, then it's going to look like we aren't smart enough to identify our own work. Wouldn't that look good?
So in my review of his paper, I included copies of my papers, with the identical text sections highlighted and correlated in each. Then I said I thought it was pretty good work.
The final published report looked a lot different.
The RIAA is using a different definition of "work". You think it means "secure, unbreakable". They just mean "good enough to protect our profits".
Illustration: satellite TV signals are encrypted. Are they secure? Heck, no! But almost everybody pays anyway. Why? Some pay for moral reasons, some fear the law... but many find it too much trouble to steal the signal. They don't have the skill to become pirates, and it's hard for them to make a bargain with someone who does. How can they find this person? How can they trust them? It's hard for a seller to advertise or build a reputation for honesty when his service is unlawful. And, of course, legal recourse is unavailable to both parties. Yes, I've seen the ads, I know about the black market... but for most people it's just easier to pay. And that's good enough for the satellite TV guys.
The RIAA doesn't need an unbreakable watermark. They just need something good enough to stop most people from exchanging songs. Sure, you can crack it, but you're not a threat. Napster is a threat, because it's so easy, everyone can do it.
Don't know what you mean by "conservative". I consider myself a liberal in the old sense of the world, which today equates to something like small-L libertarian. But I do think that PBS shows a political bias.
There's lots of anecdotal evidence, which is tricky to evaluate. Example: covering the 1992 election returns, the WGBH newsroom burst into applause when Clinton reached the required number of electoral votes. Now that's evenhanded!
Systematic studies are harder. You can examine the stories on a topic and show that the number of stories describing Bush's proposed federal tax cut as "huge" greatly outnumber those that call it "small in comparison to JFK's cut". But somebody has to evaluate and label those stories, so there's observer bias to worry about.
You can also examine the political leanings of the news staff. I'm always amused at how news organizations are terribly worried with diversity when the number of left-handed lesbians is at issue, but perfectly happy when Democrats outnumber Republicans by five to one. Maybe you believe that an editor's political beliefs don't influence the stories she chooses to cover -- but I don't.
One objective measure: count the number of times reporters use the adjectives "conservative" and "liberal" to describe people. Unbiased, middle-of-the-road reporting will see just as many people on the left hand as on the right. So unbiased reporting will use the two terms equally often. Try it on NPR radio and see what you get!
Thuggish? That term attaches best to unions, not to their opponents. You want to see "thuggish", go watch what happens to truckers that drive where the Teamsters have decreed that no trucks should go. U.S. labor law is so screwed up, union violence isn't even illegal. The Cato Institute reports:
I don't think "thuggish" was the right word. Maybe you meant to say "running-dog lackey collaborators of the Western imperialist hegemons" instead.