I'm pretty sure by age 12, you can pretty much tell who the academic stars will be, who is mediocre and who the lazy slobs are.
This is a dangerous attitude, and I think it's actually one of the strengths of American education that we don't adopt that attitude. I think the ideal high school experience is a combined, diverse high school for everyone--but with lots of elective hours and extracurriculars so that gifted students can advance faster and follow their interests.
The notion that "by age 12, you can pretty much tell who the academic stars will be" leads to bad systems like the one that's common in German-speaking countries. You have a Gymnasium for your "academic stars", who are generally college-bound. You have Hochschule for the rest, and you have Lehre (apprenticeships) that culminate in eg. a plumber certification, or an electrician's license.
Students are split like that in what we'd call the 8th grade. This is thankfully a bit older than "age 12", but it is still far too young. Seeing some of my 16-year-old relatives who are already set for a lifetime career as a welder makes me sad. K-12 education with "forks in the road" hampers freedom and it represents a waste of potential.
Yes, it is over-hyped and has some serious weaknesses (like the part where it's capped at 20m Bitcoin, the most that will ever exist).
But I see it as a demo, not a finished solution. It shows the feasibility of a very interesting idea--anonymous, non-physical money. That idea is a bit fringe now because it's so easy to use anonymous, physical money -- like cash and bullion -- but if advanced counterfeiting tech continues on the same trend, it will outpace countermeasures. The gov't will have motivation to move off of physical currency entirely. And virtual money (like bank transfers, credit cards, Paypal, etc) are heavily regulated and designed not to be anonymous.
So the more the government tries to limit the use and exchange of cash, the stronger the motivation to use Bitcoin (or Bitcoin 2.0).
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence."
That's the real story for me, and I find it disheartening. Some dudes from 4chan just hacked the emails, phone systems, and then simply sat in on a phone conference between the FBI and British police.
I had the same reaction when I learned about the Wikileaks cables. 3 million people have access to the database? Many of those with 'secret' clearance? Unlimited downloads? Some kid downloads the _entire database_ logged by himself, on his work computer, without raising so much as a single eg. Nagios alert? Wait, no audit whatsover?? They literally discovered him because he bragged about it to his friends.
It's doubly disheartening since the heads of intelligence in the free world used to be so badass. We all read about Bletchley Park during WWII, about Alan Turing, about the Enigma, about OXCART and HEXAGON during the Cold War. These used to be lean, incredibly focused organizations with large budgets; they used to attract the smartest people in the world, who dedicated their lives to these projects knowing that freedom and democracy were at stake.
Today, our military and intelligence agencies seem to have devolved into a bureaucratic stupor. We layer one embarrassing mistake on top of another. Plenty of raw data on Osama bin Laden before 2001, for example, but no actual intel until far too late. He then proceeded to live in a big, comfortable house in the 'burbs in an ostensibly allied country, while we spent an epic amount of cash ransacking a different country and not finding him for a solid 10 years. Meanwhile, the CIA interrogated and tortured a German-Lebanese dude named Khalid el-Masri for several months at a "secret location" because they confused him with a different "el-Masri". Wikileaks showed that "CLASSIFIED", "SECRET" and "TOP SECRET" are a joke. And now, Anon drove the point home, repeatedly.
It's triply disheartening because there _are_ intelligence agencies today that are lean, mean, and narrowly focused. They're just not ours. They're not anywhere that's free and democratic. And you can bet that when they sit in on a conference call between the FBI and Scotland yard, they don't run to Pastebin to brag about it afterward.
So what are dollars backed by? The "full faith and credit" of a government, which can simply poof them into existence. In the case of US Dollars, this has worked reasonably well. In the case of Zimbabwean Dollars, not so much.
Maybe you want to go back to a Gold Standard, where the bills are "backed" by vaults full of metal. Then what is gold backed by? It's turtles all the way down.
UItimately, the only reason Bitcoin has value is the same reason USD, bars of gold, or anything else has "value": because some critical mass of people agree that it does.
To quote Warren Buffet:
"[Gold] gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head."
I certainly agree that cannabis should be legal and that its legal position relative to alcohol and tobacco is ridiculous. I also agree that the general lack of rationality and open-mindedness surrounding that debate is frustrating.
However, I don't think it's fair to blame just the gov't. California had an election this November on legalizing pot, and it failed by a significant margin. This is partly due to popular stupidity, and partly, I suspect, because the puritan types show up to elections more reliably than people who care about marijuana. If even California, the hippy state, can't muster a majority on that issue, how can we expect the rest of the US to do better?
We're a democracy, after all. The federal gov't keeps a hypocritical drug policy around in part because a majority of Americans still seem to want it that way.
America is in an amazing position where despite our culture's lack of respect for education and academia, and despite the very uneven quality of our K-12 education system, we have many of the world's best universities. Students from all over the world dream of making it into places like Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, and MIT. And every year, thousands of them do.
Some of the smartest people I've met at Stanford are international students. The thought that they might be forced to go home after they graduate is sad, and the people who think this is desirable strike me as either stupid or profoundly short-sighted.
Worrying about H1Bs because they'll "increase competition for jobs" is false economics. Jobs are not like poker chips, little entities that can be won or lost or "stolen". The job market is not a zero-sum game. Whenever Google hires a brilliant, top-0.1% programmer from China, for example, it results in more jobs for Americans. It creates jobs both directly--that programmer may soon have a few people reporting to him--and indirectly, through all the money he's spending in America and the value he's adding to Google.
We're enormously lucky that people like that want to pull up their roots and move to America in the first place. America's image--it's position as a global hub for innovation and research--is one of its greatest assets. It is certainly not guaranteed to stay that way.
For now, the best and brightest want to be here. I think it's absolutely essential that we take advantage of this as much as possible, for as long as we can.
Actually, there often is an incentive to seed, but it's not a cut of trackers' ad revenue.
Certain private trackers have vast amounts of high-quality content; they generally always have a ratio requirement. For example, if you're downloaded more than X GB, then you must maintain a ratio of 0.5 (ie, in that bracket, your total cumulative downloads can never be more than twice as much as you've uploaded).
Since you're competing for upload slots with the things like dedicated seedboxes on absurdly fast connections, maintaining a ratio can be difficult, even if you're constantly seeding everything you've ever downloaded. Throw in the respect of your peers and additional incentives (eg "power user" designation with extra privileges for people who have a very high ratio), and you definitely do enjoy an "economic benefit", just not in the form of money.
The leaks don't discredit diplomacy, they simply reveal its normally hidden workings, which are a bit rough around the edges. Not all diplomats are particularly diplomatic.
Ultimately, though, the leaks give me more confidence in diplomacy, because they show that even authoritarian, closed governments like that of China have a solid underpinning of common sense. The cables reveal that China is not nearly as friendly towards North Korea as their Communist affiliation forces them to pretend; in private, they concede that Kim Jong Ill is nuts. The cables also reveal that many middle eastern leaders are just as concerned as we are about the prospect of Iran becoming a nuclear power.
Of course the gov't has a legitimate interest in keeping certain secrets, but at the same time, letting politicians do things without even telling voters about it--let alone taking responsibility--is always going to be abused.
I wish we took a middle route. For example, things could be classified, but with the requirement that they have to be reevaluated every year. Anything the gov't does should be public as soon as it's safe. Currently, it seems like the path of least resistance is to keep anything that's classified secret indefinitely, which is dangerous and wrong.
If classified docs were actually released in a timely way, the government could build trust--if we knew that foreign policy from five years ago was reasonable, then we could be more confident that whatever is happening in secret today is reasonable. As is, we just found out through Wikileaks that Hillary Clinton ordered the state department to spy on a bunch of European diplomats (steal credit card info, frequent flyer numbers, etc). Not long ago, Wikileaks gave us video of American helicopters machine-gunning a photographer in Baghdad; he had been working for Reuters, and some soldiers mistook his camera for "a weapon".
The sad reality: Wikileaks is a necessary institution. It is a blunt instrument, but it is the only effective check we currently have on a government that often hides wrongdoing from us in the name of national security.
At least at my school, the gov't largely pays for the R&D grad students do. And undergrads, for that matter, since undergrad research opportunities abound. It also has need-blind admission. Tuition is, in fact, less than a third of the cash flow here. You can't take that $50,000/year at face value.
Yes. I got National Merit back in high school three years ago. So did one of my friends; he got an automatic full ride to a private college, generally considered the best in my state.
I have to disagree with the idea, often-repeated on Slashdot, that $50k/year for college "isn't worth it". Even with a very mercenary take on it -- just considered future income potential -- based on all my friends who have recently graduated, it's worth it. Some are amortizing their tuition in a very short amount of time, assuming they weren't on financial aid.
If I consider things like the friends I've made and the experiences I couldn't have gotten anywhere else, it's absolutely worth it. Last year, I took a quarter off of school to race across Australia with Stanford's Solar Car Project. That quarter didn't cost any tuition; it did cost me most of my summer income in travel expenses. Summer income I got from a job programming. Also definitely worth it.
Google follows a really interesting pattern. As far as I can tell, all their software is reactive, rather than proactive.
It is the result of saying "Everyone's using X, but it sucks. We can do it better." They then take a very methodical, PhD-oriented approach to solving the problem. A few parts innovation, many parts simple engineering.
It started with just Larry and Sergey, working on their PhDs, using AltaVista and realizing that there was a capital-B Better Way.
Then, Gmail was a response to the festering bag of fail that was Hotmail. I distinctly remember the moment when I got my account, back at the very beginning when each one had two invites. I had been in middle of my annoying daily routine, cleaning my Hotmail inbox to get it under 2MB. Gmail had a gigabyte of storage and Google search. My 14-year-old mind was blown.
Google News was a response to all those spammy, human-curated news portals like Yahoo and MSN.
Google Maps was a response to MapQuest.
Chrome was a response to IE and FF just not being fast or stable enough.
Now, VP8 is a response to patent-encumbered codecs and shitty Flash.
Now they have 10000 employees, but the basic formula hasn't changed. Is there software that Google has made that hasn't been a direct response to an existing product?
That said, I think there's definitely a case to be made that Google is the software industry's first adult. Software's awkward adolescent foibles are on their way out. No more 90s, no millions and millions of VC dollars being spent on Pets.com, no more Netscape and Microsoft working furiously on really terrible codebases adding incompatible nonstandard crap to the internet. No more Myspace, no more Geocities. No more paperclips bouncing around asking me if I'm writing a letter; I'm using Google Docs now.
Google approaches software the way a civil engineering firm would approach a skyscraper: they are actual engineers. They collaborate with academia. They write papers. They sit on the W3C and help create standards. They have architects, PMs, devs, testers, and even lawyers to support their projects.
In a way, this is a sad thing. It was a magical time, when a university student in Finland could just sit down, write a simple OS for x86, and watch half the internet run on it a few years later. When a kid from Texas could create a whole new genre of games in a few thousand lines of C. Sometimes I worry that I was born a couple years too late.
Halfway through my CS degree, I hope that the era of cowboy coders isn't entirely done. It would be a terrible shame if CS became just another engineering specialization. At the same time, Google's professionalism is a breath of fresh air.
Why is it that the Westboro Baptist Church gets away with picketing real-life funerals again and again, while this schmuck gets four months for internet douchebaggery? By "picketing", I mean standing there with giant signs that say things like "god hates fags" at the funeral of a dead soldier: http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20060121/NEWS/601210405?p=3&tc=pg
The way I see it, free speech comes at a cost: you have to put up with other people saying things that are stupid, offensive, and downright wrong. If you want a right to free speech, you can't have a right not to be offended.
Mr. Coss' behavior was certainly wrong, but nobody should serve jail time for posting to a Facebook page.
Yeah. They have load balancers with hardware support for this stuff.
There's a cheaper, lower-tech solution, though: the servers can just look at the IP addresses requests are coming from.
Gmail, for example, is excellent about this: if I'm logged in from two IPs simultaneously, it displays that info prominently. If I go from my dorm to a coffee shop (all in a couple minutes and without clearing my cookies), Gmail asks me to log in again, presumably because my IP has changed.
I think you wouldn't even need a fancy heuristic: simply tie a session to both the cookie _and_ the IP address+port. If someone else tries to steal the cookie, they can't do anything with it. People roaming around (eg on the campus WiFi) wouldn't pose a problem because that's all behind a NAT, so your external IP+port stays the same even if your local IP changes. This wouldn't solve the problem of eavesdropping--people could still see my Facebook session--but at least they couldn't jump in and start posting on my wall.
Facebook already has similar protections: for example, on a recent trip to Thailand, I got a screen that said I was logging in from an "unfamiliar location" and asked me to answer my security question. Tying sessions to IPs seems like a simple thing to add. Enlighten me, though--is there a common situation where this would fail? Are there people out there whose external IPs do change a lot?
Anonymous political speech, yes. That's what the Federalist papers were. That's what WikiLeaks is, and I don't think it's hyperbole to say that WikiLeaks is one of the best things the internet has ever been used for.
Anonymous political donations are a different thing entirely. The former is an attempt to change government by having a more compelling argument than your opponents; the latter is an attempt to change government by having more money than they do.
Incidentally, that money goes to TV ads, newspaper ads, billboards, door-to-door canvassing, etc--the IRL equivalents of spam. So the difference between anonymous political speech and anonymous political donations is like the difference between writing a blog and hiring a botnet to send spam.
"None of the above" should be the default option, but not for people who didn't show up.
Casting a ballot with that option is the "vote of no confidence" you described. Not showing up to vote at all is mere apathy.
And @iluvcapra,
the problem with a no-confidence plebiscite is the resolution... you'd end up in a situation where the body went months or years without a leader
...I don't see this as a problem in our system, since you only need a plurality (not an outright majority) to win.
Someone will always win. If the winner had 30% of the vote and the loser had 20%, and the other 50% of voters chose "None of the above", then that winner has a much weaker mandate than if everyone is forced to pick a candidate and he wins 60-40. He's in office either way, but there is definitely a difference.
Yes, evolution is alive and well. A species of bacteria evolved in the early 70s that can digest nylon.
I think this news is a nice reality check on that annoying but vocal cadre of environmentalists that are always predicting some kind of terrible apocalypse within the next couple of decades. Global cooling, for example. Not to mention a nifty "myth busted" moment for that old Hollywood trope of a post-nuclear wasteland.
I'm definitely not saying we shouldn't take care of our environment, by the way, and I'm certainly not an AGW denialist. The specific way things are now matters a lot to us fickle and fragile humans. If the sea level rises by another yard, the crabs will just move. The Venetians are the ones that would be screwed.
I'm just saying that nature is more resilient than people usually imagine.
Not quite. Hypothetically, what it only costs them $50 to manufacture, but it costs them $6 billion a year in R&D to develop?
Then, selling i5s for $200 and i7s for $300 might be a perfectly fair price, and doing that by selling $200 chips with a $100 optional software upgrade might be reasonable as well.
I can see where you're coming from, but what if the majority of the cost of a CPU is simply there to amortize R&D? From what I've read, this seems to be the case. Intel spends $6 billion a year in R&D.
Even if the unit production cost on their current, mature production lines is a small fraction of the sale price, that doesn't necessarily mean that the sale price is too high, or that Intel has a monopoly.
By the way, I'm not suggesting that they don't have monopoly. Intel has a $100b market cap at this point, which is more than 20 times that of their main competitor, AMD. That certainly leaves room for suspicion. All I'm saying is that the fact that the marginal cost of adding cores to chips is small doesn't, by itself, indicate that Intel is behaving like a monopoly.
It seems to me that many media companies are in denial about a simple fact--you can't share a secret with a million people and expect them to keep it.
Want to send your account password to your bank? One sender, one trusted recipient, and a world of potential eavesdroppers. That's a problem crypto can solve.
But if the final destination of your precious content is every Joe's TV, iPod, and computer screen, any "encryption" you have between here and there is fundamentally futile. It only takes one of those Joes to start seeding it on BitTorrent, and the more annoying you try make the DRM, the more likely people will be to simply use that as their source instead of paying you.
Besides, after all that work designing and implementing a complex DRM scheme, every single frame of that movie you just sold me is gonna be rendered to my computer's framebuffer. Which gets sent to the display driver. Which is... drumroll... whatever I felt like installing. In theory, I can make my own driver that writes an AVI. So even in theory, DRM is broken.
It's the same kind of denial that leads companies to think streaming video is meaningfully different from just giving me a file to download. If you're sending the bits to my computer, you cannot possibly control what I subsequently do with them.
IMO, the RIAA could make so much more money if they just accepted filesharing as fact and focused on monetizing it. They should look at the bright side--way more people are listening to way more music now than they did back in the day when songs came in plastic cartridges and brick-sized Walkmen roamed the earth. Organize some shows. Sell some merchandise. Sell me a DVD that has awesome-quality 24K soundfiles on it. Get your song on the next Rock Band.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to Lollapalooza 2010. It was awesome, worth every penny of the $180 I paid. How did I decide to go? I found a bunch of the lesser-known artists on Youtube, and liked what I saw. They earned their cash. The record execs, trying to prop an obsolete business model with lawsuits, did not.
I'm currently "training for a STEM job", as you would put it, by pursuing at degree in computer science. I don't think my choice was a mistake. I see the fact that our industry is a global one as an opportunity, not a threat.
The US is in the enviable position that a lot of other countries' best and brightest want to work here. By restricting the number of H1Bs that companies can hire, the goverment is squandering some of that opportunity. And it's doing so at the behest of people like you, who think of jobs like poker chips--little non-replaceable entities that you can gain, lose, give away, or have "taken" from you. That's not what jobs are. Consider, for example, what happens when Intel hires a rockstar Chinese chip fab engineer. That engineer creates a cadre of supporting positions--testers, integration engineers, PMs, EE interns from the local college, etc. Maybe he, a litho expert from India, and an industrial robotics expert from the US end up leading a project to build a new fab in America. Maybe that fab leads to a couple million processors every year that are being etched in America instead of China.
Collaboration like this is what put America on top of the innovation food chain in the first place. Google was started by a Russian guy and an American who were grad students at Stanford. Tesla Motors was co-founded by an American and Elon Musk.
The way I see it, every country starts with roughly the same bell curve of talent and ability. Some have great education systems and make the most of it. Others, not so much. Where America sits on that scale is for another post. But the crazy thing is: America can cheat. We can cherry-pick the smartest and most innovative people from places like India and China. We can skim off the top of a pool of 2.5 billion people, simply by letting them in.
That some of us think it's good for our government to prohibit us from hiring those people boggles my mind.
I think it's not a question of ethics, and here's why: you can't share a secret with a million people and expect them to keep it.
The idea that you can "lend" something that consists purely of a stream of bits (such as a song or video) to someone, or sell it to them while preventing them from sharing it, is a myth. (Software is a bit different, because software is more than just bits; for example, MS does have partial success in getting people to pay for Windows by denying pirates the aspects of Windows that are a service, such as Windows Update.) It's fundamentally impossible; this manifests itself, for example, in the way DRM schemes consistently turn out to be weak.
I think that actions can be moral, and they can be legal; fortunately, there is strong correlation between the two. However there are actions that are legal but not moral, and there are actions that are morally acceptable but not legal. I think that filesharing falls into the latter category. I think that most people on Slashdot would agree with me: copyright law is the result of corporations' desire for guaranteed profit, not necessarily the result of artist's needs and certainly not a reflection of moral truths.
Information wants to be free. I see piracy as a temporary condition, a response to a legal system that's currently in deep denial. The sooner we fix it, the better, both for artists and for consumers.
I'm a sophomore undergraduate at a relatively large university in California, and the volume of filesharing I see my classmates engage in is enormous.
Most of the discussion about filesharing (here on Slashdot and elsewhere) seems to focus on P2P, but in my experience BitTorrent/Gnutella/P2P darknets are just the tip of the iceberg.
The vast majority of the filesharing volume I see here is by sneakernet and private servers. The house I live in has a server with upwards of 3 TB of movies and music; all of our residents can log in.
I've seen people merge their own several-GB collections with the collection on the server. Last year, I lived in a frosh dormitory; there was no server, but it was common for people to lend each other iPods or merge media collections on each other's laptops. That kind of sharing takes a few minutes to transfer a few GB--it's on an entirely different plane from the type of sharing the RIAA and MPAA focus on, transferring one song or one movie at a time over P2P.
Incidentally, the media server setup I described is not unique to the house I live in--most of the houses and some of the dorms at my university have one; nor is it unique to colleges and universities--the startup I interned at two years ago had one, too.
So when the RIAA/MPAA sues a single mom for her kid's Kazaa downloads, I see it as beating a dead horse. The real sharing is on the scale of GB and TB at a time, not individual songs. On the rare occasion when I do find something missing from the media libraries I have access to, I'll torrent it using PeerGuardian to block corporate IPs, so I'm unlikely to show up on any logs the RIAA keeps.
By focusing their legal efforts on P2P users, I think that the media cartels may have drawn out the battle while losing the war. Yes, we're more reticent now to use BitTorrent. But we've merely moved to faster, more local, less traceable forms of sharing.
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I'm pretty sure by age 12, you can pretty much tell who the academic stars will be, who is mediocre and who the lazy slobs are.
This is a dangerous attitude, and I think it's actually one of the strengths of American education that we don't adopt that attitude. I think the ideal high school experience is a combined, diverse high school for everyone--but with lots of elective hours and extracurriculars so that gifted students can advance faster and follow their interests.
The notion that "by age 12, you can pretty much tell who the academic stars will be" leads to bad systems like the one that's common in German-speaking countries. You have a Gymnasium for your "academic stars", who are generally college-bound. You have Hochschule for the rest, and you have Lehre (apprenticeships) that culminate in eg. a plumber certification, or an electrician's license.
Students are split like that in what we'd call the 8th grade. This is thankfully a bit older than "age 12", but it is still far too young. Seeing some of my 16-year-old relatives who are already set for a lifetime career as a welder makes me sad. K-12 education with "forks in the road" hampers freedom and it represents a waste of potential.
BitCoin is very relevant to this, actually.
Yes, it is over-hyped and has some serious weaknesses (like the part where it's capped at 20m Bitcoin, the most that will ever exist).
But I see it as a demo, not a finished solution. It shows the feasibility of a very interesting idea--anonymous, non-physical money. That idea is a bit fringe now because it's so easy to use anonymous, physical money -- like cash and bullion -- but if advanced counterfeiting tech continues on the same trend, it will outpace countermeasures. The gov't will have motivation to move off of physical currency entirely. And virtual money (like bank transfers, credit cards, Paypal, etc) are heavily regulated and designed not to be anonymous.
So the more the government tries to limit the use and exchange of cash, the stronger the motivation to use Bitcoin (or Bitcoin 2.0).
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence."
That's the real story for me, and I find it disheartening. Some dudes from 4chan just hacked the emails, phone systems, and then simply sat in on a phone conference between the FBI and British police.
I had the same reaction when I learned about the Wikileaks cables. 3 million people have access to the database? Many of those with 'secret' clearance? Unlimited downloads? Some kid downloads the _entire database_ logged by himself, on his work computer, without raising so much as a single eg. Nagios alert? Wait, no audit whatsover?? They literally discovered him because he bragged about it to his friends.
It's doubly disheartening since the heads of intelligence in the free world used to be so badass. We all read about Bletchley Park during WWII, about Alan Turing, about the Enigma, about OXCART and HEXAGON during the Cold War. These used to be lean, incredibly focused organizations with large budgets; they used to attract the smartest people in the world, who dedicated their lives to these projects knowing that freedom and democracy were at stake.
Today, our military and intelligence agencies seem to have devolved into a bureaucratic stupor. We layer one embarrassing mistake on top of another. Plenty of raw data on Osama bin Laden before 2001, for example, but no actual intel until far too late. He then proceeded to live in a big, comfortable house in the 'burbs in an ostensibly allied country, while we spent an epic amount of cash ransacking a different country and not finding him for a solid 10 years. Meanwhile, the CIA interrogated and tortured a German-Lebanese dude named Khalid el-Masri for several months at a "secret location" because they confused him with a different "el-Masri". Wikileaks showed that "CLASSIFIED", "SECRET" and "TOP SECRET" are a joke. And now, Anon drove the point home, repeatedly.
It's triply disheartening because there _are_ intelligence agencies today that are lean, mean, and narrowly focused. They're just not ours. They're not anywhere that's free and democratic. And you can bet that when they sit in on a conference call between the FBI and Scotland yard, they don't run to Pastebin to brag about it afterward.
So what are dollars backed by? The "full faith and credit" of a government, which can simply poof them into existence. In the case of US Dollars, this has worked reasonably well. In the case of Zimbabwean Dollars, not so much.
Maybe you want to go back to a Gold Standard, where the bills are "backed" by vaults full of metal. Then what is gold backed by? It's turtles all the way down.
UItimately, the only reason Bitcoin has value is the same reason USD, bars of gold, or anything else has "value": because some critical mass of people agree that it does.
To quote Warren Buffet:
"[Gold] gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head."
I certainly agree that cannabis should be legal and that its legal position relative to alcohol and tobacco is ridiculous. I also agree that the general lack of rationality and open-mindedness surrounding that debate is frustrating. However, I don't think it's fair to blame just the gov't. California had an election this November on legalizing pot, and it failed by a significant margin. This is partly due to popular stupidity, and partly, I suspect, because the puritan types show up to elections more reliably than people who care about marijuana. If even California, the hippy state, can't muster a majority on that issue, how can we expect the rest of the US to do better? We're a democracy, after all. The federal gov't keeps a hypocritical drug policy around in part because a majority of Americans still seem to want it that way.
I couldn't agree more.
America is in an amazing position where despite our culture's lack of respect for education and academia, and despite the very uneven quality of our K-12 education system, we have many of the world's best universities. Students from all over the world dream of making it into places like Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, and MIT. And every year, thousands of them do.
Some of the smartest people I've met at Stanford are international students. The thought that they might be forced to go home after they graduate is sad, and the people who think this is desirable strike me as either stupid or profoundly short-sighted.
Worrying about H1Bs because they'll "increase competition for jobs" is false economics. Jobs are not like poker chips, little entities that can be won or lost or "stolen". The job market is not a zero-sum game. Whenever Google hires a brilliant, top-0.1% programmer from China, for example, it results in more jobs for Americans. It creates jobs both directly--that programmer may soon have a few people reporting to him--and indirectly, through all the money he's spending in America and the value he's adding to Google.
We're enormously lucky that people like that want to pull up their roots and move to America in the first place. America's image--it's position as a global hub for innovation and research--is one of its greatest assets. It is certainly not guaranteed to stay that way.
For now, the best and brightest want to be here. I think it's absolutely essential that we take advantage of this as much as possible, for as long as we can.
Actually, there often is an incentive to seed, but it's not a cut of trackers' ad revenue.
Certain private trackers have vast amounts of high-quality content; they generally always have a ratio requirement. For example, if you're downloaded more than X GB, then you must maintain a ratio of 0.5 (ie, in that bracket, your total cumulative downloads can never be more than twice as much as you've uploaded).
Since you're competing for upload slots with the things like dedicated seedboxes on absurdly fast connections, maintaining a ratio can be difficult, even if you're constantly seeding everything you've ever downloaded. Throw in the respect of your peers and additional incentives (eg "power user" designation with extra privileges for people who have a very high ratio), and you definitely do enjoy an "economic benefit", just not in the form of money.
The leaks don't discredit diplomacy, they simply reveal its normally hidden workings, which are a bit rough around the edges. Not all diplomats are particularly diplomatic.
Ultimately, though, the leaks give me more confidence in diplomacy, because they show that even authoritarian, closed governments like that of China have a solid underpinning of common sense. The cables reveal that China is not nearly as friendly towards North Korea as their Communist affiliation forces them to pretend; in private, they concede that Kim Jong Ill is nuts. The cables also reveal that many middle eastern leaders are just as concerned as we are about the prospect of Iran becoming a nuclear power.
Of course the gov't has a legitimate interest in keeping certain secrets, but at the same time, letting politicians do things without even telling voters about it--let alone taking responsibility--is always going to be abused.
I wish we took a middle route. For example, things could be classified, but with the requirement that they have to be reevaluated every year. Anything the gov't does should be public as soon as it's safe. Currently, it seems like the path of least resistance is to keep anything that's classified secret indefinitely, which is dangerous and wrong.
If classified docs were actually released in a timely way, the government could build trust--if we knew that foreign policy from five years ago was reasonable, then we could be more confident that whatever is happening in secret today is reasonable. As is, we just found out through Wikileaks that Hillary Clinton ordered the state department to spy on a bunch of European diplomats (steal credit card info, frequent flyer numbers, etc). Not long ago, Wikileaks gave us video of American helicopters machine-gunning a photographer in Baghdad; he had been working for Reuters, and some soldiers mistook his camera for "a weapon".
The sad reality: Wikileaks is a necessary institution. It is a blunt instrument, but it is the only effective check we currently have on a government that often hides wrongdoing from us in the name of national security.
"Debt for the rest of your life"?
As a wise man once said, you're doing it wrong.
At least at my school, the gov't largely pays for the R&D grad students do. And undergrads, for that matter, since undergrad research opportunities abound. It also has need-blind admission. Tuition is, in fact, less than a third of the cash flow here. You can't take that $50,000/year at face value.
Yes. I got National Merit back in high school three years ago. So did one of my friends; he got an automatic full ride to a private college, generally considered the best in my state.
I'm currently majoring in CS at Stanford.
I have to disagree with the idea, often-repeated on Slashdot, that $50k/year for college "isn't worth it". Even with a very mercenary take on it -- just considered future income potential -- based on all my friends who have recently graduated, it's worth it. Some are amortizing their tuition in a very short amount of time, assuming they weren't on financial aid.
If I consider things like the friends I've made and the experiences I couldn't have gotten anywhere else, it's absolutely worth it. Last year, I took a quarter off of school to race across Australia with Stanford's Solar Car Project. That quarter didn't cost any tuition; it did cost me most of my summer income in travel expenses. Summer income I got from a job programming. Also definitely worth it.
Google follows a really interesting pattern. As far as I can tell, all their software is reactive, rather than proactive.
It is the result of saying "Everyone's using X, but it sucks. We can do it better." They then take a very methodical, PhD-oriented approach to solving the problem. A few parts innovation, many parts simple engineering.
Now they have 10000 employees, but the basic formula hasn't changed. Is there software that Google has made that hasn't been a direct response to an existing product?
That said, I think there's definitely a case to be made that Google is the software industry's first adult. Software's awkward adolescent foibles are on their way out. No more 90s, no millions and millions of VC dollars being spent on Pets.com, no more Netscape and Microsoft working furiously on really terrible codebases adding incompatible nonstandard crap to the internet. No more Myspace, no more Geocities. No more paperclips bouncing around asking me if I'm writing a letter; I'm using Google Docs now.
Google approaches software the way a civil engineering firm would approach a skyscraper: they are actual engineers. They collaborate with academia. They write papers. They sit on the W3C and help create standards. They have architects, PMs, devs, testers, and even lawyers to support their projects.
In a way, this is a sad thing. It was a magical time, when a university student in Finland could just sit down, write a simple OS for x86, and watch half the internet run on it a few years later. When a kid from Texas could create a whole new genre of games in a few thousand lines of C. Sometimes I worry that I was born a couple years too late.
Halfway through my CS degree, I hope that the era of cowboy coders isn't entirely done. It would be a terrible shame if CS became just another engineering specialization. At the same time, Google's professionalism is a breath of fresh air.
Why is it that the Westboro Baptist Church gets away with picketing real-life funerals again and again, while this schmuck gets four months for internet douchebaggery? By "picketing", I mean standing there with giant signs that say things like "god hates fags" at the funeral of a dead soldier: http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20060121/NEWS/601210405?p=3&tc=pg
The way I see it, free speech comes at a cost: you have to put up with other people saying things that are stupid, offensive, and downright wrong. If you want a right to free speech, you can't have a right not to be offended. Mr. Coss' behavior was certainly wrong, but nobody should serve jail time for posting to a Facebook page.
Yeah. They have load balancers with hardware support for this stuff.
There's a cheaper, lower-tech solution, though: the servers can just look at the IP addresses requests are coming from.
Gmail, for example, is excellent about this: if I'm logged in from two IPs simultaneously, it displays that info prominently. If I go from my dorm to a coffee shop (all in a couple minutes and without clearing my cookies), Gmail asks me to log in again, presumably because my IP has changed.
I think you wouldn't even need a fancy heuristic: simply tie a session to both the cookie _and_ the IP address+port. If someone else tries to steal the cookie, they can't do anything with it. People roaming around (eg on the campus WiFi) wouldn't pose a problem because that's all behind a NAT, so your external IP+port stays the same even if your local IP changes. This wouldn't solve the problem of eavesdropping--people could still see my Facebook session--but at least they couldn't jump in and start posting on my wall.
Facebook already has similar protections: for example, on a recent trip to Thailand, I got a screen that said I was logging in from an "unfamiliar location" and asked me to answer my security question. Tying sessions to IPs seems like a simple thing to add. Enlighten me, though--is there a common situation where this would fail? Are there people out there whose external IPs do change a lot?
Anonymous political speech, yes. That's what the Federalist papers were. That's what WikiLeaks is, and I don't think it's hyperbole to say that WikiLeaks is one of the best things the internet has ever been used for.
Anonymous political donations are a different thing entirely. The former is an attempt to change government by having a more compelling argument than your opponents; the latter is an attempt to change government by having more money than they do.
Incidentally, that money goes to TV ads, newspaper ads, billboards, door-to-door canvassing, etc--the IRL equivalents of spam. So the difference between anonymous political speech and anonymous political donations is like the difference between writing a blog and hiring a botnet to send spam.
I almost agree.
"None of the above" should be the default option, but not for people who didn't show up.
Casting a ballot with that option is the "vote of no confidence" you described. Not showing up to vote at all is mere apathy.
And @iluvcapra,
Someone will always win. If the winner had 30% of the vote and the loser had 20%, and the other 50% of voters chose "None of the above", then that winner has a much weaker mandate than if everyone is forced to pick a candidate and he wins 60-40. He's in office either way, but there is definitely a difference.
the hardhack tag! Which is the coolest tag on /., in my humble opinion.
Yes, evolution is alive and well. A species of bacteria evolved in the early 70s that can digest nylon.
I think this news is a nice reality check on that annoying but vocal cadre of environmentalists that are always predicting some kind of terrible apocalypse within the next couple of decades. Global cooling, for example. Not to mention a nifty "myth busted" moment for that old Hollywood trope of a post-nuclear wasteland.
I'm definitely not saying we shouldn't take care of our environment, by the way, and I'm certainly not an AGW denialist. The specific way things are now matters a lot to us fickle and fragile humans. If the sea level rises by another yard, the crabs will just move. The Venetians are the ones that would be screwed.
I'm just saying that nature is more resilient than people usually imagine.
Not quite. Hypothetically, what it only costs them $50 to manufacture, but it costs them $6 billion a year in R&D to develop?
Then, selling i5s for $200 and i7s for $300 might be a perfectly fair price, and doing that by selling $200 chips with a $100 optional software upgrade might be reasonable as well.
I can see where you're coming from, but what if the majority of the cost of a CPU is simply there to amortize R&D? From what I've read, this seems to be the case. Intel spends $6 billion a year in R&D.
Even if the unit production cost on their current, mature production lines is a small fraction of the sale price, that doesn't necessarily mean that the sale price is too high, or that Intel has a monopoly.
By the way, I'm not suggesting that they don't have monopoly. Intel has a $100b market cap at this point, which is more than 20 times that of their main competitor, AMD. That certainly leaves room for suspicion. All I'm saying is that the fact that the marginal cost of adding cores to chips is small doesn't, by itself, indicate that Intel is behaving like a monopoly.
It seems to me that many media companies are in denial about a simple fact--you can't share a secret with a million people and expect them to keep it.
Want to send your account password to your bank? One sender, one trusted recipient, and a world of potential eavesdroppers. That's a problem crypto can solve.
But if the final destination of your precious content is every Joe's TV, iPod, and computer screen, any "encryption" you have between here and there is fundamentally futile. It only takes one of those Joes to start seeding it on BitTorrent, and the more annoying you try make the DRM, the more likely people will be to simply use that as their source instead of paying you.
Besides, after all that work designing and implementing a complex DRM scheme, every single frame of that movie you just sold me is gonna be rendered to my computer's framebuffer. Which gets sent to the display driver. Which is... drumroll... whatever I felt like installing. In theory, I can make my own driver that writes an AVI. So even in theory, DRM is broken.
It's the same kind of denial that leads companies to think streaming video is meaningfully different from just giving me a file to download. If you're sending the bits to my computer, you cannot possibly control what I subsequently do with them.
IMO, the RIAA could make so much more money if they just accepted filesharing as fact and focused on monetizing it. They should look at the bright side--way more people are listening to way more music now than they did back in the day when songs came in plastic cartridges and brick-sized Walkmen roamed the earth. Organize some shows. Sell some merchandise. Sell me a DVD that has awesome-quality 24K soundfiles on it. Get your song on the next Rock Band.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to Lollapalooza 2010. It was awesome, worth every penny of the $180 I paid. How did I decide to go? I found a bunch of the lesser-known artists on Youtube, and liked what I saw. They earned their cash. The record execs, trying to prop an obsolete business model with lawsuits, did not.
Bullshit.
I'm currently "training for a STEM job", as you would put it, by pursuing at degree in computer science. I don't think my choice was a mistake. I see the fact that our industry is a global one as an opportunity, not a threat.
The US is in the enviable position that a lot of other countries' best and brightest want to work here. By restricting the number of H1Bs that companies can hire, the goverment is squandering some of that opportunity. And it's doing so at the behest of people like you, who think of jobs like poker chips--little non-replaceable entities that you can gain, lose, give away, or have "taken" from you. That's not what jobs are. Consider, for example, what happens when Intel hires a rockstar Chinese chip fab engineer. That engineer creates a cadre of supporting positions--testers, integration engineers, PMs, EE interns from the local college, etc. Maybe he, a litho expert from India, and an industrial robotics expert from the US end up leading a project to build a new fab in America. Maybe that fab leads to a couple million processors every year that are being etched in America instead of China.
Collaboration like this is what put America on top of the innovation food chain in the first place. Google was started by a Russian guy and an American who were grad students at Stanford. Tesla Motors was co-founded by an American and Elon Musk.
The way I see it, every country starts with roughly the same bell curve of talent and ability. Some have great education systems and make the most of it. Others, not so much. Where America sits on that scale is for another post. But the crazy thing is: America can cheat. We can cherry-pick the smartest and most innovative people from places like India and China. We can skim off the top of a pool of 2.5 billion people, simply by letting them in.
That some of us think it's good for our government to prohibit us from hiring those people boggles my mind.
I think it's not a question of ethics, and here's why: you can't share a secret with a million people and expect them to keep it.
The idea that you can "lend" something that consists purely of a stream of bits (such as a song or video) to someone, or sell it to them while preventing them from sharing it, is a myth. (Software is a bit different, because software is more than just bits; for example, MS does have partial success in getting people to pay for Windows by denying pirates the aspects of Windows that are a service, such as Windows Update.) It's fundamentally impossible; this manifests itself, for example, in the way DRM schemes consistently turn out to be weak.
I think that actions can be moral, and they can be legal; fortunately, there is strong correlation between the two. However there are actions that are legal but not moral, and there are actions that are morally acceptable but not legal. I think that filesharing falls into the latter category. I think that most people on Slashdot would agree with me: copyright law is the result of corporations' desire for guaranteed profit, not necessarily the result of artist's needs and certainly not a reflection of moral truths.
Information wants to be free. I see piracy as a temporary condition, a response to a legal system that's currently in deep denial. The sooner we fix it, the better, both for artists and for consumers.
I'm a sophomore undergraduate at a relatively large university in California, and the volume of filesharing I see my classmates engage in is enormous.
Most of the discussion about filesharing (here on Slashdot and elsewhere) seems to focus on P2P, but in my experience BitTorrent/Gnutella/P2P darknets are just the tip of the iceberg.
The vast majority of the filesharing volume I see here is by sneakernet and private servers. The house I live in has a server with upwards of 3 TB of movies and music; all of our residents can log in.
I've seen people merge their own several-GB collections with the collection on the server. Last year, I lived in a frosh dormitory; there was no server, but it was common for people to lend each other iPods or merge media collections on each other's laptops. That kind of sharing takes a few minutes to transfer a few GB--it's on an entirely different plane from the type of sharing the RIAA and MPAA focus on, transferring one song or one movie at a time over P2P.
Incidentally, the media server setup I described is not unique to the house I live in--most of the houses and some of the dorms at my university have one; nor is it unique to colleges and universities--the startup I interned at two years ago had one, too.
So when the RIAA/MPAA sues a single mom for her kid's Kazaa downloads, I see it as beating a dead horse. The real sharing is on the scale of GB and TB at a time, not individual songs. On the rare occasion when I do find something missing from the media libraries I have access to, I'll torrent it using PeerGuardian to block corporate IPs, so I'm unlikely to show up on any logs the RIAA keeps.
By focusing their legal efforts on P2P users, I think that the media cartels may have drawn out the battle while losing the war. Yes, we're more reticent now to use BitTorrent. But we've merely moved to faster, more local, less traceable forms of sharing.