Hypocrisy is all part of the game. To paraphrase Casablanca, everyone is shocked, shocked to find that spying is going on in here, even as they're busy collecting everything they can themselves. It's de rigeur, though, even though everyone knows everyone else is doing it, they have to act surprised. Gestures are made, a few spies are expelled or arrested (and then quietly exchanged for the spies arrested by the other country), and life goes on as usual.
Tl;dr, this isn't just France, this is part of how espionage plays out worldwide. We're only noticing it because Snowden is high profile.
Standard Oil wouldn't be the exact parallel, since Standard Oil was a horizontal monopoly. App store control is more like a vertical monopoly, in that if you use an Apple device, you're required to buy through them. Google is slightly weaker, since you can freely buy stuff for Android from other (non-Google) App stores, and is probably the sort of model you'd see if someone (probably the FTC) forced Apple to open iOS to others (like Amazon or Google).
Apple's move is probably the stupidest of them, because it's entirely knee-jerk. I'm fine with removing the Confederate Battle Flag (or other symbols thereof) from places of reverence, such as statehouses and memorials, because I see it as a symbol of oppression, hate, slavery, and treason (and yes, I'm from the South, from a Southern family on both sides). And like the Nazi Swastika, it has no place in anything of that sort.
Now, there is a time and place when it is absolutely appropriate - and that is in historical pieces, including wargames set in that time period. Symbols, even hateful symbols, in the appropriate context are just that - appropriate. There is no reason to censor that, and moreover, it takes away some of the sting to water down those symbols. Some places, you WANT that horror, because it's meant to remind you of what that symbol means. Taking it out makes things silly. Imagine Wolfenstein with no Swastikas, or Inglorious Basterds where they weren't allowed to carve Swastikas into the heads of the captured Nazis, just a cross.
And that's what Apple did, in yanking every single Civil War game, even games featuring the Confederate Army flying that flag because it was the flag they flew at that time (1863+). To me, that's stupid (especially since they didn't yank things like old seasons of "The Dukes of Hazzard"). Certainly, if a game was glorifying the Confederacy, I'd expect it to be yanked, just like I'd expect a game glorifying the Nazis to be yanked.
Incidentally, you do see a lot of games that will censor the Swastika, and that's because they can't sell it in Germany otherwise, due to the absolute ban on it in any form for any reason in Germany (see the Hearts of Iron series, for instance). I think that's silly, but then, I also don't live in Germany.
Allow me to try and clear some things up.
First, money, of any kind, whether it's metallic, paper, or electronic, is essentially worthless in and of itself. (Yes, we can quibble about that, but bear with me a moment.) This is because money is a representation of a certain amount of productivity. Societies do not _need_ money, it is merely a massive convenience, such that instead of the cobbler trying to barter shoes with everyone, he can simply exchange the shoes for money, and use the money to buy food, and that person can use the money to buy something else, et cetera. That's what has the real value - the things the money represents because it can be exchanged for them.
Now, none of these things are static. If you increase the amount of goods, but keep the amount of money the same, then the value of each piece of money goes up. Conversely, if there's more money, but the same amount of goods, the value of money goes down. Moving to the real world, we can't stringently control the amount of goods produced. It's generally increasing over time, and that's a good thing. We're making more stuff. Go us! So what happens if we don't print any more money? There should be enough, right? Not printing more means everyone gets richer?
What happens is called deflation, and in a modern economy it's very, VERY bad. Why? Well, that dollar you have today is going to be worth more tomorrow. Why spend it? Better to save it. All of a sudden lots of people start thinking this way, and nobody's buying anything, causing the economy to come to a screeching halt. This is great-depression style stuff. We really really want to avoid this. So what do we do? Well, we print more money. We force some inflation to occur, because while a lot of inflation is bad, a little bit is something that can be accounted for with interest rates, which fluctuate based on the expected rate of inflation.
A lot of people have forgotten this, because in the late 1970s we wound up with a specific situation marked by low growth and high inflation, and this was a big problem. We became paranoid about inflation, and the sorts of policies associated with increasing it, and forgot that there's something far worse on the other end of it. Printing more money would have made the situation back then would have made things worse, but in 2010 it was what was needed. It's supposed to be the job of Congress to do that sort of thing, especially by spending on things like infrastructure that not only pump more money into the economy, but also build stuff that's of use later. Thanks to politics, though, the Federal Reserve basically had to come up with a way to do so without Congress.
Furthermore, it's completely wrong to state that Quantitative Easing is responsible for the wealth gap. That has primarily to do with how all the increases in productivity have gone to the rich, rather than to the middle class and the poor, and that's true no matter how much or little each dollar of that is worth.
AMD Driver issues are the number 1 reason why my next build will be using NVidia cards. Two current systems, I've had tons of trouble with the AMD drivers on the one - zero issues on the other which has NVidia. Anecdotal as hell, but it's hard to ignore present personal experience like that.
Yes. Something like this card could last you years and years if you're not concerned with getting ridiculous framerates on ultra-max settings on the latest bleeding edge games. I'd even go so far as to say there's not much use for this card unless you're intent on gaming at "4k" resolution.
Since this is Slashdot, here's the requisite car analogy. Why spend tons of money on a sports car with tons of horsepower, when an economy class import will get me to and from work for a fraction of the price? Because if you're the sort of person who wants a car for the things that one does, then yes, that's the one for you. The sports car is for someone entirely different, who wants to go take it to the track on weekends, etc.
The ideal solution would be to have the backbone infrastructure be owned and maintained either by the government, or by a heavily regulated corporate entity kept entirely separate from the companies that provide service over it. Then you let companies compete to provide service over that infrastructure, on a level playing field, instead of letting some of them try to leverage local monopolies in infrastructure into the service field.
After all, it works pretty well when it comes to roads and highways.
China is also a wonderful example of how important Clean Air (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-30826128) and Clean Water (http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/apr/23/china-half-groundwater-polluted) regulations can be, and what happens when you don't have them.
At one point in time, there were no regulations about clean air, clean water, safe food, etc. Nobody figured they were needed.
Then some people figured out that they could make more money by not giving a shit about what they dumped into the rivers, spewed into the sky, or whether the meat/produce/etc they were selling was safe to eat, etc. After a while, there was enough of a public outcry about stuff like rivers literally catching on fire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River#Environmental_concerns), smog so thick you can't go outside some days (go visit Beijing if you want to see what that's like today), tainted food, and so forth, that laws were passed making it illegal to do sociopathic crap like that.
It'd be great if we lived in a world where we didn't need laws like that, because everyone would do the right thing to begin with. We don't. Corporations are entirely sociopathic constructs, and have proven time and again that they cannot be left unsupervised. And who does the supervising? It takes someone with the power to enforce stuff on them, and that's the Government. Consumers and market forces are simply not strong enough to account for all the negative externalities. This isn't to say that corporations aren't useful, just that they need a check on them. Government needs a check on it, too, for that matter, but that's what democracy and elections is supposed to be about.
9/11 made people afraid to fly without all sorts of additional "security measures" in the form of the TSA. That doesn't mean that the fear is in any way rational, or that the answer is to refuse to fix the actual problems (like how TEPCO knew back in 2008 that Fukushima Daiichi was vulnerable to a Tsunami, but did squat about it: http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0... ) and just bury our heads in the sand.
No, instead we're left with aging plants using older, much more questionable designs that are too costly to upgrade or replace, in large part because of that fear. Nuclear should be much more cost effective than it is, for many reasons, and the newer designs are built in such a way that the events that led to all of the incidents you cite would never be an issue. We've learned our lessons, but we're still stuck with the old designs because people don't understand the difference, just like we're largely stuck with the abomination that is the TSA thanks to the same sort of thing.
Well, there's the fact that most respectable polling outfits tend to try and operate legally, however quaint a notion that may be in this day and age.
What interests me, though, is the demographic shift this will tend to have on any number of results. Landline use skews older and older each year, nevermind peoples' habits with the phone. I usually don't even answer my mobile unless I recognize the caller - if it's important, they can leave a message and I'll call back.
I'd estimate you could solve some large portion of the problem just by banning Tata and Infosys from using them. Those are the two primary sources of abuse of the H-1B program right there.
That's the question - not for Snowden, but for the policymakers, including both elected and career/appointed officials, that decided that it was worth discarding privacy concerns or worries that things were going too far, to the point that they finally pushed someone in their organization to blow the whistle? He wasn't even the first, either, just the biggest. Think of all the abuses we wouldn't have known about if it weren't for people like John Kiriakou or Thomas Drake, for instance. Classification of information is not meant as a shield to prevent wrongdoing from coming to light; yet that's exactly what some people try to use it as. They wring their hands and bemoan the fact that legitimate secrets were exposed in the course of bringing misconduct to light.
And yet, that is on their hands, at least in part, because if there wasn't wrongdoing covered up in the first place, I don't think any of those people would have risked ruining their lives and careers to expose things. Even if you're one of the people that thinks what was done wasn't wrong in the first place, is it really right in a democracy for that to be decided in secret? If half the country is going to be pissed off if they knew what you were up to, that should be a sign that you shouldn't just get a secret order approving it, it needs to go before a public debate.
For one, the language is already written.
And no, the actual regulatory part of the order is amazingly short and concise. The only reason it's so long is because it's padded out with all the comments, including complaints and dissents from the two Republican commissioners that have no real bearing on the actual implementation of the rule as it now stands.
Completing a college education in the USA, on a foreign student visa, in no way entitles you to stay in the US. You still have to find a job that will sponsor you for a work visa, or otherwise apply for a green card etc, just like everyone else in the rest of the world.
Now, they're certainly not barred from applying, but getting that degree doesn't specifically help them unless they've somehow made the right contacts along the way. If anything, that's one thing we really should look at fixing, because if someone has come to the US and gotten a college education here, those are generally the sort of people we should want to have immigrate here.
Some good people pass through there. Note that I said pass through, because the best and brightest tend to not stay around - once they find something better, they move on. The few good ones that do stay are the rare exception.
Part of the problem, too, is that in an organization that largely promotes from within, if you aren't retaining the best members of your staff, you wind up with another problem in people tend to get promoted based on longevity rather than being particularly good at the job or suited for the promotion. And then when those people are the ones making the hiring decisions, well...
It's the same way in the corporate world, roughly - perhaps some places are better, and maybe that's why we don't hear about them because they're not getting hacked into, but it seems like those are but a tiny minority at most. I know I certainly wouldn't trust a random corporate executive to get it any better. Most of the ones who say that they could do it better for the government are just looking to get fat on contracting money, and probably won't do a damn bit better.
While you can't just blindly throw money at a problem, it is part of the issue. Seriously, would you want to work for the Federal Government in cybersecurity? About the only advantage it has is that you can't be replaced by an H-1B, and perhaps the fact that there's a pension (that a certain party would love to take away from you). If you try to get by with not paying for the best security personnel, you shouldn't be surprised when you don't get the best security personnel. The pay is comparatively low, the working conditions and locations generally suck, and let's not even start on how intrusive it gets with your personal life. You get to be a political punching bag and the butt of everyone's jokes, too. But hey, I guess it's job security.
I used to know some guys who worked for US-CERT, or similar parts of the government, who were pretty smart and technically savvy. Pretty much every one of them left, and went somewhere better in the corporate world for more money, better opportunities, and such. And that's exactly what I'd expect to keep happening.
Furthermore, this is nothing new. In fact, it's been a known issue for a long time. The NSA is not only responsible for signals intelligence, but also has the responsibility of securing U.S. Government communications, i.e. Information Assurance. In the past, this meant coming up with strong codes and encryption systems of our own, while the other part of NSA worked on breaking enemy systems (like the WW2 Japanese Naval and Diplomatic codes for instance).
The problem with that today is that there's no longer a difference. Everyone is using the same hardware and software platforms. The same systems that the US Government uses are also the ones used by cybercriminals in Krasnovia, terrorists hiding in caves in Dirka-Dirkastan, and other governments around the world, not to mention our own citizens. In theory that means the NSA would have to balance between using flaws it finds to exploit its targets, and making sure the flaws get patched so we're not vulnerable. If the results we see are the only measure, then they're perhaps tilting badly towards the intelligence/exploit side.
I would note though that this isn't the only factor. Overall I'd say that the executives in charge, whether we're talking about the corporate world C*O types or Government SES types, put far too much value on accessibility, availability, and ease of use, and don't take the risks seriously enough. It's either that or they're bullshitting us about how damaging it was when the breach does occur, because if it was truly unthinkably bad then they should've taken it more seriously in the first place.
There are definitely some important points to be made in the comparison here, but some of them are a bit off. For one, it makes the comparison to sharing customer lists for Tylenol/Bayer Aspirin/etc, but that's a bit off.
There is a value in 'information sharing', it just depends on the information being shared. Sharing the sorts of data associated with an intrusion, so that others can check their networks for similar activity or vulnerabilities? That's a good thing. The comparison here would be having Tylenol's makers share the information on how their supply chain was possibly compromised in the first place, so that we don't wind up having them fix the problem, only for other companies to get hit with the same thing because the details were kept secret.
That's what's important - the information about the vulnerabilities and exploits, not the customer data. This is why we have to be especially wary about nebulous proposals that hand over truckloads of unnecessary data, since there are certainly agencies in the government that would love to have free access to it in order to entirely unrelated things like go on witch-hunts.
At the same time, we have to keep in mind that most companies won't share information about attacks unless they're required to do so. Imagine if Tylenol had just ignored clear signs of a break-in at their plant, and ignored the possibility that thousands or millions of capsules could have been poisoned, and decided to just pretend nothing ever happened, only for it to come to light years later, because that was roughly what has happened in many past instances of major retailers getting hacked.
I would argue it's less about that mindset, and more about what the speaker is trying to do. "Government Subsidies" has taken something of a pejorative tone to it, and thus if I want to sway people against a company such as Tesla, or the benefits it is receiving, it is to my subtle advantage to characterize it more negatively. I can use the word "subsidies" rather than the more correct "tax break" because the average person doesn't really know (or care) about the difference, mostly from apathy and not any particular ideological take on the role of government. It's about the optics and tone of the word used, and it likely says more about the speaker's viewpoint on the recipient of the assistance than anything else.
We don't buy any substantive amount of oil from the Middle East. That's never been the problem.
The problem is, the Middle East is where Europe/Asia buys significant amounts of its oil. If the price goes up, or the supply gets cut/disrupted/etc, then Europe/etc will start buying from the people we normally do, causing the price to rise due to increasing demand. In some ways it won't even matter if America is self-sufficient entirely, as long as our allies and trading partners are in a shaky position.
That said, it's definitely a valid point that reducing the demand for fossil fuel, here in the USA and elsewhere, will reduce the outsize sway that the Middle East holds on politics.
In fairness, as horrible as he is/was, the FBI and others have been asking for intrusive powers for a long, long time. This will not change if the Patriot Act goes away tomorrow, in whole or part. Make no mistake, the protection of Civil Liberties is a constant battle. Regardless of whether they mean good or ill, there will always be someone tempted to exceed what is reasonable, in pursuit of "the bad guys." It is up to the rest of us to rein them in, and ensure that our government does not go too far. Essentially, we have to be vigilant about this, because it's going to keep coming back, and we have to keep beating it down.
Slashdot Mirror
That's old hat. It's already been done, and what's more, they've landed them on an aircraft carrier:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"In God We Trust - All Others We Monitor"
Hypocrisy is all part of the game. To paraphrase Casablanca, everyone is shocked, shocked to find that spying is going on in here, even as they're busy collecting everything they can themselves. It's de rigeur, though, even though everyone knows everyone else is doing it, they have to act surprised. Gestures are made, a few spies are expelled or arrested (and then quietly exchanged for the spies arrested by the other country), and life goes on as usual.
Tl;dr, this isn't just France, this is part of how espionage plays out worldwide. We're only noticing it because Snowden is high profile.
Standard Oil wouldn't be the exact parallel, since Standard Oil was a horizontal monopoly. App store control is more like a vertical monopoly, in that if you use an Apple device, you're required to buy through them. Google is slightly weaker, since you can freely buy stuff for Android from other (non-Google) App stores, and is probably the sort of model you'd see if someone (probably the FTC) forced Apple to open iOS to others (like Amazon or Google).
Apple's move is probably the stupidest of them, because it's entirely knee-jerk. I'm fine with removing the Confederate Battle Flag (or other symbols thereof) from places of reverence, such as statehouses and memorials, because I see it as a symbol of oppression, hate, slavery, and treason (and yes, I'm from the South, from a Southern family on both sides). And like the Nazi Swastika, it has no place in anything of that sort.
Now, there is a time and place when it is absolutely appropriate - and that is in historical pieces, including wargames set in that time period. Symbols, even hateful symbols, in the appropriate context are just that - appropriate. There is no reason to censor that, and moreover, it takes away some of the sting to water down those symbols. Some places, you WANT that horror, because it's meant to remind you of what that symbol means. Taking it out makes things silly. Imagine Wolfenstein with no Swastikas, or Inglorious Basterds where they weren't allowed to carve Swastikas into the heads of the captured Nazis, just a cross.
And that's what Apple did, in yanking every single Civil War game, even games featuring the Confederate Army flying that flag because it was the flag they flew at that time (1863+). To me, that's stupid (especially since they didn't yank things like old seasons of "The Dukes of Hazzard"). Certainly, if a game was glorifying the Confederacy, I'd expect it to be yanked, just like I'd expect a game glorifying the Nazis to be yanked.
Incidentally, you do see a lot of games that will censor the Swastika, and that's because they can't sell it in Germany otherwise, due to the absolute ban on it in any form for any reason in Germany (see the Hearts of Iron series, for instance). I think that's silly, but then, I also don't live in Germany.
Allow me to try and clear some things up. First, money, of any kind, whether it's metallic, paper, or electronic, is essentially worthless in and of itself. (Yes, we can quibble about that, but bear with me a moment.) This is because money is a representation of a certain amount of productivity. Societies do not _need_ money, it is merely a massive convenience, such that instead of the cobbler trying to barter shoes with everyone, he can simply exchange the shoes for money, and use the money to buy food, and that person can use the money to buy something else, et cetera. That's what has the real value - the things the money represents because it can be exchanged for them.
Now, none of these things are static. If you increase the amount of goods, but keep the amount of money the same, then the value of each piece of money goes up. Conversely, if there's more money, but the same amount of goods, the value of money goes down. Moving to the real world, we can't stringently control the amount of goods produced. It's generally increasing over time, and that's a good thing. We're making more stuff. Go us! So what happens if we don't print any more money? There should be enough, right? Not printing more means everyone gets richer?
What happens is called deflation, and in a modern economy it's very, VERY bad. Why? Well, that dollar you have today is going to be worth more tomorrow. Why spend it? Better to save it. All of a sudden lots of people start thinking this way, and nobody's buying anything, causing the economy to come to a screeching halt. This is great-depression style stuff. We really really want to avoid this. So what do we do? Well, we print more money. We force some inflation to occur, because while a lot of inflation is bad, a little bit is something that can be accounted for with interest rates, which fluctuate based on the expected rate of inflation.
A lot of people have forgotten this, because in the late 1970s we wound up with a specific situation marked by low growth and high inflation, and this was a big problem. We became paranoid about inflation, and the sorts of policies associated with increasing it, and forgot that there's something far worse on the other end of it. Printing more money would have made the situation back then would have made things worse, but in 2010 it was what was needed. It's supposed to be the job of Congress to do that sort of thing, especially by spending on things like infrastructure that not only pump more money into the economy, but also build stuff that's of use later. Thanks to politics, though, the Federal Reserve basically had to come up with a way to do so without Congress.
Furthermore, it's completely wrong to state that Quantitative Easing is responsible for the wealth gap. That has primarily to do with how all the increases in productivity have gone to the rich, rather than to the middle class and the poor, and that's true no matter how much or little each dollar of that is worth.
AMD Driver issues are the number 1 reason why my next build will be using NVidia cards. Two current systems, I've had tons of trouble with the AMD drivers on the one - zero issues on the other which has NVidia. Anecdotal as hell, but it's hard to ignore present personal experience like that.
Yes. Something like this card could last you years and years if you're not concerned with getting ridiculous framerates on ultra-max settings on the latest bleeding edge games. I'd even go so far as to say there's not much use for this card unless you're intent on gaming at "4k" resolution.
Since this is Slashdot, here's the requisite car analogy. Why spend tons of money on a sports car with tons of horsepower, when an economy class import will get me to and from work for a fraction of the price? Because if you're the sort of person who wants a car for the things that one does, then yes, that's the one for you. The sports car is for someone entirely different, who wants to go take it to the track on weekends, etc.
The ideal solution would be to have the backbone infrastructure be owned and maintained either by the government, or by a heavily regulated corporate entity kept entirely separate from the companies that provide service over it. Then you let companies compete to provide service over that infrastructure, on a level playing field, instead of letting some of them try to leverage local monopolies in infrastructure into the service field.
After all, it works pretty well when it comes to roads and highways.
China is also a wonderful example of how important Clean Air (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-30826128) and Clean Water (http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/apr/23/china-half-groundwater-polluted) regulations can be, and what happens when you don't have them.
At one point in time, there were no regulations about clean air, clean water, safe food, etc. Nobody figured they were needed.
Then some people figured out that they could make more money by not giving a shit about what they dumped into the rivers, spewed into the sky, or whether the meat/produce/etc they were selling was safe to eat, etc. After a while, there was enough of a public outcry about stuff like rivers literally catching on fire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River#Environmental_concerns), smog so thick you can't go outside some days (go visit Beijing if you want to see what that's like today), tainted food, and so forth, that laws were passed making it illegal to do sociopathic crap like that.
It'd be great if we lived in a world where we didn't need laws like that, because everyone would do the right thing to begin with. We don't. Corporations are entirely sociopathic constructs, and have proven time and again that they cannot be left unsupervised. And who does the supervising? It takes someone with the power to enforce stuff on them, and that's the Government. Consumers and market forces are simply not strong enough to account for all the negative externalities. This isn't to say that corporations aren't useful, just that they need a check on them. Government needs a check on it, too, for that matter, but that's what democracy and elections is supposed to be about.
9/11 made people afraid to fly without all sorts of additional "security measures" in the form of the TSA. That doesn't mean that the fear is in any way rational, or that the answer is to refuse to fix the actual problems (like how TEPCO knew back in 2008 that Fukushima Daiichi was vulnerable to a Tsunami, but did squat about it: http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0... ) and just bury our heads in the sand.
No, instead we're left with aging plants using older, much more questionable designs that are too costly to upgrade or replace, in large part because of that fear. Nuclear should be much more cost effective than it is, for many reasons, and the newer designs are built in such a way that the events that led to all of the incidents you cite would never be an issue. We've learned our lessons, but we're still stuck with the old designs because people don't understand the difference, just like we're largely stuck with the abomination that is the TSA thanks to the same sort of thing.
Well, there's the fact that most respectable polling outfits tend to try and operate legally, however quaint a notion that may be in this day and age.
What interests me, though, is the demographic shift this will tend to have on any number of results. Landline use skews older and older each year, nevermind peoples' habits with the phone. I usually don't even answer my mobile unless I recognize the caller - if it's important, they can leave a message and I'll call back.
I'd estimate you could solve some large portion of the problem just by banning Tata and Infosys from using them. Those are the two primary sources of abuse of the H-1B program right there.
"Was it worth it?"
That's the question - not for Snowden, but for the policymakers, including both elected and career/appointed officials, that decided that it was worth discarding privacy concerns or worries that things were going too far, to the point that they finally pushed someone in their organization to blow the whistle? He wasn't even the first, either, just the biggest. Think of all the abuses we wouldn't have known about if it weren't for people like John Kiriakou or Thomas Drake, for instance. Classification of information is not meant as a shield to prevent wrongdoing from coming to light; yet that's exactly what some people try to use it as. They wring their hands and bemoan the fact that legitimate secrets were exposed in the course of bringing misconduct to light.
And yet, that is on their hands, at least in part, because if there wasn't wrongdoing covered up in the first place, I don't think any of those people would have risked ruining their lives and careers to expose things. Even if you're one of the people that thinks what was done wasn't wrong in the first place, is it really right in a democracy for that to be decided in secret? If half the country is going to be pissed off if they knew what you were up to, that should be a sign that you shouldn't just get a secret order approving it, it needs to go before a public debate.
For one, the language is already written. And no, the actual regulatory part of the order is amazingly short and concise. The only reason it's so long is because it's padded out with all the comments, including complaints and dissents from the two Republican commissioners that have no real bearing on the actual implementation of the rule as it now stands.
Completing a college education in the USA, on a foreign student visa, in no way entitles you to stay in the US. You still have to find a job that will sponsor you for a work visa, or otherwise apply for a green card etc, just like everyone else in the rest of the world.
Now, they're certainly not barred from applying, but getting that degree doesn't specifically help them unless they've somehow made the right contacts along the way. If anything, that's one thing we really should look at fixing, because if someone has come to the US and gotten a college education here, those are generally the sort of people we should want to have immigrate here.
Some good people pass through there. Note that I said pass through, because the best and brightest tend to not stay around - once they find something better, they move on. The few good ones that do stay are the rare exception.
Part of the problem, too, is that in an organization that largely promotes from within, if you aren't retaining the best members of your staff, you wind up with another problem in people tend to get promoted based on longevity rather than being particularly good at the job or suited for the promotion. And then when those people are the ones making the hiring decisions, well...
Yes, this exactly.
It's the same way in the corporate world, roughly - perhaps some places are better, and maybe that's why we don't hear about them because they're not getting hacked into, but it seems like those are but a tiny minority at most. I know I certainly wouldn't trust a random corporate executive to get it any better. Most of the ones who say that they could do it better for the government are just looking to get fat on contracting money, and probably won't do a damn bit better.
While you can't just blindly throw money at a problem, it is part of the issue. Seriously, would you want to work for the Federal Government in cybersecurity? About the only advantage it has is that you can't be replaced by an H-1B, and perhaps the fact that there's a pension (that a certain party would love to take away from you). If you try to get by with not paying for the best security personnel, you shouldn't be surprised when you don't get the best security personnel. The pay is comparatively low, the working conditions and locations generally suck, and let's not even start on how intrusive it gets with your personal life. You get to be a political punching bag and the butt of everyone's jokes, too. But hey, I guess it's job security.
I used to know some guys who worked for US-CERT, or similar parts of the government, who were pretty smart and technically savvy. Pretty much every one of them left, and went somewhere better in the corporate world for more money, better opportunities, and such. And that's exactly what I'd expect to keep happening.
Furthermore, this is nothing new. In fact, it's been a known issue for a long time. The NSA is not only responsible for signals intelligence, but also has the responsibility of securing U.S. Government communications, i.e. Information Assurance. In the past, this meant coming up with strong codes and encryption systems of our own, while the other part of NSA worked on breaking enemy systems (like the WW2 Japanese Naval and Diplomatic codes for instance). The problem with that today is that there's no longer a difference. Everyone is using the same hardware and software platforms. The same systems that the US Government uses are also the ones used by cybercriminals in Krasnovia, terrorists hiding in caves in Dirka-Dirkastan, and other governments around the world, not to mention our own citizens. In theory that means the NSA would have to balance between using flaws it finds to exploit its targets, and making sure the flaws get patched so we're not vulnerable. If the results we see are the only measure, then they're perhaps tilting badly towards the intelligence/exploit side. I would note though that this isn't the only factor. Overall I'd say that the executives in charge, whether we're talking about the corporate world C*O types or Government SES types, put far too much value on accessibility, availability, and ease of use, and don't take the risks seriously enough. It's either that or they're bullshitting us about how damaging it was when the breach does occur, because if it was truly unthinkably bad then they should've taken it more seriously in the first place.
There are definitely some important points to be made in the comparison here, but some of them are a bit off. For one, it makes the comparison to sharing customer lists for Tylenol/Bayer Aspirin/etc, but that's a bit off.
There is a value in 'information sharing', it just depends on the information being shared. Sharing the sorts of data associated with an intrusion, so that others can check their networks for similar activity or vulnerabilities? That's a good thing. The comparison here would be having Tylenol's makers share the information on how their supply chain was possibly compromised in the first place, so that we don't wind up having them fix the problem, only for other companies to get hit with the same thing because the details were kept secret.
That's what's important - the information about the vulnerabilities and exploits, not the customer data. This is why we have to be especially wary about nebulous proposals that hand over truckloads of unnecessary data, since there are certainly agencies in the government that would love to have free access to it in order to entirely unrelated things like go on witch-hunts.
At the same time, we have to keep in mind that most companies won't share information about attacks unless they're required to do so. Imagine if Tylenol had just ignored clear signs of a break-in at their plant, and ignored the possibility that thousands or millions of capsules could have been poisoned, and decided to just pretend nothing ever happened, only for it to come to light years later, because that was roughly what has happened in many past instances of major retailers getting hacked.
I would argue it's less about that mindset, and more about what the speaker is trying to do. "Government Subsidies" has taken something of a pejorative tone to it, and thus if I want to sway people against a company such as Tesla, or the benefits it is receiving, it is to my subtle advantage to characterize it more negatively. I can use the word "subsidies" rather than the more correct "tax break" because the average person doesn't really know (or care) about the difference, mostly from apathy and not any particular ideological take on the role of government. It's about the optics and tone of the word used, and it likely says more about the speaker's viewpoint on the recipient of the assistance than anything else.
We don't buy any substantive amount of oil from the Middle East. That's never been the problem.
The problem is, the Middle East is where Europe/Asia buys significant amounts of its oil. If the price goes up, or the supply gets cut/disrupted/etc, then Europe/etc will start buying from the people we normally do, causing the price to rise due to increasing demand. In some ways it won't even matter if America is self-sufficient entirely, as long as our allies and trading partners are in a shaky position.
That said, it's definitely a valid point that reducing the demand for fossil fuel, here in the USA and elsewhere, will reduce the outsize sway that the Middle East holds on politics.
In fairness, as horrible as he is/was, the FBI and others have been asking for intrusive powers for a long, long time. This will not change if the Patriot Act goes away tomorrow, in whole or part. Make no mistake, the protection of Civil Liberties is a constant battle. Regardless of whether they mean good or ill, there will always be someone tempted to exceed what is reasonable, in pursuit of "the bad guys." It is up to the rest of us to rein them in, and ensure that our government does not go too far. Essentially, we have to be vigilant about this, because it's going to keep coming back, and we have to keep beating it down.