At one point there was a claim that their business had improved after the leak became known. I never even tried to check whether this was true or not. (Perhaps a lot of people didn't catch on that most of the "female" accounts appear to be men who were paid to post as women.)
Actually, what he was was "it's being determined that she did no wrong", which is a true statement, even though I believe she committed a crime. (I'm not sure, it depends on exactly how several different laws are written, as there are several possible crimes involved, and IANAL, so she might, technically, not have been in violation.)
In any case, this was in response to the question "How's that working out for you", to which the correct answer would be "It's being a minor scandal that's being swept under the carpet." Most people seem to care more about other aspects, so it doesn't seem to be doing her as much damage as it should, and the decision has clearly been not to prosecute. To me this is clearly an example of how the rich and powerful are subject to different laws than the rest of us.
FWIW, I haven't decided who I'm going to vote for, but it certainly won't be any Republican that I've heard. If it looks close I may even vote for the Democratic candidate, though maybe not, since Obama has been such a total failure. (As would reasonably have been predicted from his position in the Senate overseeing the intelligence community.)
If you're going for that approach, use a linear accelerator rather than a ring collider. (You would probably still want storage rings, etc.) That would let you handle leptons as well as baryons. And you don't need anywhere near as many steering magnets. Of course you don't get the multiple cycles through your accelerator, but it's fairly easy to mimic that by increasing the length, and since you're out in space and don't need to build the enclosure, you could even alter the distance between magnets in different experiments. You might want to build this fairly far out in the system, though. You want the solar wind to be weak enough not to be a problem (unless you orient it to point directly at, or away from, the sun, in that case perhaps you could use it...control would be a bit dicey, though). It might well be possible to build an accelerator over a AU in length. Controlling noise would be a problem, and station keeping. And power. But I don't see any reason that it isn't doable in principle.
Perhaps. That kind of thing can't really be answered. But I think it unlikely. Prior to about 1850 most military action HAD to be managed locally due to slow communications. So I expect changes prior to 1860 to have been minor. It would probably have avoided the Civil War, which was one of the main forces driving centralization of power in the US government (and in the Confederacy, for that matter).
OTOH, there needed to be SOME kind of action restraining states from warring against each other. It hadn't happened yet, but the stresses were clearly there at the time the Constitution was adopted. So the question becomes what alternatives were available. Private armies have their own notable drawbacks, so devolving the armies back below the state level of power is probably not a good choice. I'm not certain WHAT the correct answer would have been. Perhaps the Constitution was as nearly perfect as possible at the time, and prohibition is a clear indication that an easy popular means of amending it would not be ideal. Occasionally I've thought the main answer is a limit on the length of any one law...but that only works if you also limit the number of laws and the number of external references (function call analogs) that any one law can make. Other times I've though that any law that cannot be understood by the average high school senior should be stricken. Unfortunately, that doesn't deal with the problem of bureaucratic overreach. The only thing that seems reasonably likely to work is actually limiting the concentration of power.
But Patrick Henry was right in his analysis of the Constitution: "I smell a rat. It squints towards monarchy."
The Constitution was not cynical ENOUGH towards government. Perhaps there should have been a direct ban on the federal government controlling any troops beyond the District of Columbia, and delegate that to the states. That would, of course, have drastically altered history from the 1860's onwards...and possibly as early as 1812.
Sorry for the typo. There is, of course, no way to correct it once posted. Still, the affected phrase should have read: Sparta was a monarchy with two simultaneous kings
While you actually do have some nearly decent points hidden within your abusive illiteracy and category failure, you need to study your history a bit more carefully. E.g., Sparta was a monarchy with two simultaneous kinds, and derived from a more conventional monarchy. The "communism" that they implemented is approximately that of a military corps, though they did need to raise their own recruits internally.
There are other category failures in your diatribe. You fail to make reasonable distinctions between things are are actually quite different. But you could probably rephrase it so that most of what you posted made reasonable sense.
As opposed to who? Most people chose what they considered the lesser evil. What continually surprises me are the number of people who don't realize that they chose evil...as in less than half good, and the dominant half largely in control.
You can't even say that Obama didn't know what people thought was good. Listen to what he actually promised before he was first elected. Some people disagreed that that was good, but there's always disagreement. The *ONLY* mainly good thing I can name that he's done is increased health care coverage, and he did that in such a way as to run up the expenses and fatten the pockets of the insurance companies. (And it also facilitates more widespread federal snooping into the lives of citizens. So I, O but definitely, qualify that as "mainly good".)
They aren't actors, they're liars. They're saying this for two reasons: 1) to get their claim on the record. 2) some people will pretend to believe them.
There may be another reason that I'm just not cynical enough to think of. Every time I've thought I was too cynical the government* has proven that, on the contrary, I wasn't cynical enough.
* By government here one needs to include the major corporations.
Actually, real journalism, as I defined it, does exist. My local paper is still reasonably trustworthy about local events. Most sports news fits the definition I use. Etc. But political journalism has fallen on extremely hard days, with repeated scandals. And trust isn't an absolute, it's relative. You judge it against not only the reliability of the source, but also against the cost of false positives and false negatives. (So sports scandals have just about no effect on my evaluation of the trust of sports journalism.)
Yes, a lot of people are indifferent. Others are antipathetic. Some times the same person is both towards slightly different areas of science. (How do you feel about economics? Parapsychology?)
You may quibble about how well the science is carried out in a particular area, but that's not quite the same as either being indifferent or antipathetic. I am quite upset about how pharmacological science is done, with intentionally concealed failures, lack of reporting of adverse effects, trumpeting of only slightly statistically significant results, etc., but I'm neither apathetic nor antipathetic towards it as a science. So that's another gradation.
In this particular case it seemed to me (I haven't reread the context, so my memory has gotten a bit fuzzed..and it's not germane, so I'm not going to bother) that apathetic and antipathetic attitudes were both displayed.
I think you overrate the "disposable income" available to "most people". If you don't have much spare cash, you spend it on things that provide immediate gratification, because things that are long term are out of reach.
When I was growing up, I strongly believed in saving. And when, as an adult, I saved I noticed the money that I had saved evaporating into inflation higher than interest rates. Now that inflation is relatively low, interest rates are a joke. It's enough to make me understand the "gold bugs".
Well, I'm in a category where I have some of my money invested in stocks. That is, usually, growing faster than inflation. But then I'm considerably about the median income level. (Though I'm well below the mean...and when the median is well below the mean, that should tell you about the income structue. And let's not even contemplate the mode.)
If you can't tell that it's believable, does it count as "real journalism"? Perhaps is does if a historian will someday be able to validate it. Perhaps not.
It's my opinion that "real journalism" requires trustworthy sources of information available to the reader, not only to the investigative reporter. And trust is subject to being lost when unethical activities are detected. (Also, unfortunately, when they are fabricated, if the fabrications can't be detected as such.) For news organization the prime unethical activity is lying to the readers.
I'll admit that I *would* need to check back through my records to be explicit. I'm not even sure it wasn't DES. This isn't something I track carefully, and so I don't tend to remember details, but only highlights. This http://www.rt.com/usa/rsa-nsa-... could be the story I'm not-quite remembering, or it could have been one of the others.
So I don't know which story I'm remembering, but a simple google search for "NSA cryptographic key weakening" turns up a bunch. In only some of them does the NSA appear to have acted dubiously, but since everything it does is so secretive the key word may well be "appear". Of course we can't know...which is what secretive is all about.
We don't KNOW that they weakened elliptic curve encryption, outside of providing some dubious suggested parameters. There's other, more popular, encryption that we KNOW they weakened.
It doesn't even need to be (and probably won't be) a generalized speed up in rate of computation. Most algorithms used for cryptography NOW are susceptible to a speed up in factorization. And that's one thing quantum computers are practically guaranteed to speed up. It's less clear that they will provide much general speed-up...and there's some evidence that that's unlikely until algorithms are redesigned, in which case you'd get better results on cheaper hardware if you just designed it for parallel processing.
Then again, designing quantum algorithms is a largely unstudied area, and there could be lots of breakthroughs.
Did you ever hear of New York's "Sullivan Act"? Or how the US marshalls actually kept the peace in Dodge city? (Hint: They usually required that guns be removed at the edge of town.)
The government has a long history of both ignoring and abusively interpreting the 2nd amendment. I'm not saying it probably isn't tactically wise, but I strongly object to the way they ignore the constitution rather than amend it, and even more to the strained interpretations that they put on the words. (There is no indication that the "well organized militia" should be approved of by the state. And I know of no reason to believe that a majority of the founders would have intended such, though clearly some of them were essentially monarchists who just objected to the monarch being distant...and not a part of their in-group.)
Saying that Apple isn't unethical is blatantly wrong. But they tend to be unethical in different ways than does MS. To pick one example, where nearly everybody cheers Apple, but they were clearly acting unethically, consider how they established the iPod against the wishes of the RIAA. They basically strong armed the record companies. Yeah, the RIAA are unethical bastards, and being spread out over an ant hill with only a SMALL amount of honey on them would be too good for them, that doesn't make what Apple did ethical.
Apple will often hide known product defects from potential customers. Another unethical activity. They don't, however, like to intentionally render their products inferior. This doesn't mean they are ethical, it means they have their pride.
While I'll agree that that would be the most prudent practice, past history suggests that when a tool is made available it will be used, whether the use is legal or not. And police and security groups seems to be more prone to this kind of abuse than more ordinary groups which see themselves as less privileged. (I'm not claiming that there aren't other groups that are equally prone to see themselves as more privileged than the "common folk".)
Given National Security Letters, I think we can be rather certain that there are shared secrets. Calling that a conspiracy (on Apple's part) requires an unvalidated assumption.
P.S.: I'm not saying that such shared secrets are guaranteed to exist, I'm saying that's the most reasonable default assumption.
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At one point there was a claim that their business had improved after the leak became known. I never even tried to check whether this was true or not. (Perhaps a lot of people didn't catch on that most of the "female" accounts appear to be men who were paid to post as women.)
Actually, what he was was "it's being determined that she did no wrong", which is a true statement, even though I believe she committed a crime. (I'm not sure, it depends on exactly how several different laws are written, as there are several possible crimes involved, and IANAL, so she might, technically, not have been in violation.)
In any case, this was in response to the question "How's that working out for you", to which the correct answer would be "It's being a minor scandal that's being swept under the carpet." Most people seem to care more about other aspects, so it doesn't seem to be doing her as much damage as it should, and the decision has clearly been not to prosecute. To me this is clearly an example of how the rich and powerful are subject to different laws than the rest of us.
FWIW, I haven't decided who I'm going to vote for, but it certainly won't be any Republican that I've heard. If it looks close I may even vote for the Democratic candidate, though maybe not, since Obama has been such a total failure. (As would reasonably have been predicted from his position in the Senate overseeing the intelligence community.)
If you're going for that approach, use a linear accelerator rather than a ring collider. (You would probably still want storage rings, etc.) That would let you handle leptons as well as baryons. And you don't need anywhere near as many steering magnets. Of course you don't get the multiple cycles through your accelerator, but it's fairly easy to mimic that by increasing the length, and since you're out in space and don't need to build the enclosure, you could even alter the distance between magnets in different experiments. You might want to build this fairly far out in the system, though. You want the solar wind to be weak enough not to be a problem (unless you orient it to point directly at, or away from, the sun, in that case perhaps you could use it...control would be a bit dicey, though). It might well be possible to build an accelerator over a AU in length. Controlling noise would be a problem, and station keeping. And power. But I don't see any reason that it isn't doable in principle.
Perhaps. That kind of thing can't really be answered. But I think it unlikely. Prior to about 1850 most military action HAD to be managed locally due to slow communications. So I expect changes prior to 1860 to have been minor. It would probably have avoided the Civil War, which was one of the main forces driving centralization of power in the US government (and in the Confederacy, for that matter).
OTOH, there needed to be SOME kind of action restraining states from warring against each other. It hadn't happened yet, but the stresses were clearly there at the time the Constitution was adopted. So the question becomes what alternatives were available. Private armies have their own notable drawbacks, so devolving the armies back below the state level of power is probably not a good choice. I'm not certain WHAT the correct answer would have been. Perhaps the Constitution was as nearly perfect as possible at the time, and prohibition is a clear indication that an easy popular means of amending it would not be ideal. Occasionally I've thought the main answer is a limit on the length of any one law...but that only works if you also limit the number of laws and the number of external references (function call analogs) that any one law can make. Other times I've though that any law that cannot be understood by the average high school senior should be stricken. Unfortunately, that doesn't deal with the problem of bureaucratic overreach. The only thing that seems reasonably likely to work is actually limiting the concentration of power.
Umh...I wasn't being critical of his spelling.
But Patrick Henry was right in his analysis of the Constitution:
"I smell a rat. It squints towards monarchy."
The Constitution was not cynical ENOUGH towards government. Perhaps there should have been a direct ban on the federal government controlling any troops beyond the District of Columbia, and delegate that to the states. That would, of course, have drastically altered history from the 1860's onwards...and possibly as early as 1812.
Sorry for the typo. There is, of course, no way to correct it once posted. Still, the affected phrase should have read:
Sparta was a monarchy with two simultaneous kings
While you actually do have some nearly decent points hidden within your abusive illiteracy and category failure, you need to study your history a bit more carefully. E.g., Sparta was a monarchy with two simultaneous kinds, and derived from a more conventional monarchy. The "communism" that they implemented is approximately that of a military corps, though they did need to raise their own recruits internally.
There are other category failures in your diatribe. You fail to make reasonable distinctions between things are are actually quite different. But you could probably rephrase it so that most of what you posted made reasonable sense.
As opposed to who? Most people chose what they considered the lesser evil. What continually surprises me are the number of people who don't realize that they chose evil...as in less than half good, and the dominant half largely in control.
You can't even say that Obama didn't know what people thought was good. Listen to what he actually promised before he was first elected. Some people disagreed that that was good, but there's always disagreement. The *ONLY* mainly good thing I can name that he's done is increased health care coverage, and he did that in such a way as to run up the expenses and fatten the pockets of the insurance companies. (And it also facilitates more widespread federal snooping into the lives of citizens. So I, O but definitely, qualify that as "mainly good".)
They aren't actors, they're liars. They're saying this for two reasons:
1) to get their claim on the record.
2) some people will pretend to believe them.
There may be another reason that I'm just not cynical enough to think of. Every time I've thought I was too cynical the government* has proven that, on the contrary, I wasn't cynical enough.
* By government here one needs to include the major corporations.
That they "thought that the Constitution" didn't apply to them is a part of the problem. The other part is that they apparently still think so.
Actually, real journalism, as I defined it, does exist. My local paper is still reasonably trustworthy about local events. Most sports news fits the definition I use. Etc. But political journalism has fallen on extremely hard days, with repeated scandals. And trust isn't an absolute, it's relative. You judge it against not only the reliability of the source, but also against the cost of false positives and false negatives. (So sports scandals have just about no effect on my evaluation of the trust of sports journalism.)
Yes, a lot of people are indifferent. Others are antipathetic. Some times the same person is both towards slightly different areas of science. (How do you feel about economics? Parapsychology?)
You may quibble about how well the science is carried out in a particular area, but that's not quite the same as either being indifferent or antipathetic. I am quite upset about how pharmacological science is done, with intentionally concealed failures, lack of reporting of adverse effects, trumpeting of only slightly statistically significant results, etc., but I'm neither apathetic nor antipathetic towards it as a science. So that's another gradation.
In this particular case it seemed to me (I haven't reread the context, so my memory has gotten a bit fuzzed..and it's not germane, so I'm not going to bother) that apathetic and antipathetic attitudes were both displayed.
I think you overrate the "disposable income" available to "most people". If you don't have much spare cash, you spend it on things that provide immediate gratification, because things that are long term are out of reach.
When I was growing up, I strongly believed in saving. And when, as an adult, I saved I noticed the money that I had saved evaporating into inflation higher than interest rates. Now that inflation is relatively low, interest rates are a joke. It's enough to make me understand the "gold bugs".
Well, I'm in a category where I have some of my money invested in stocks. That is, usually, growing faster than inflation. But then I'm considerably about the median income level. (Though I'm well below the mean...and when the median is well below the mean, that should tell you about the income structue. And let's not even contemplate the mode.)
If you can't tell that it's believable, does it count as "real journalism"? Perhaps is does if a historian will someday be able to validate it. Perhaps not.
It's my opinion that "real journalism" requires trustworthy sources of information available to the reader, not only to the investigative reporter. And trust is subject to being lost when unethical activities are detected. (Also, unfortunately, when they are fabricated, if the fabrications can't be detected as such.) For news organization the prime unethical activity is lying to the readers.
Yeah. And Henry Kissinger won a Nobel Peace prize. For his work in Vietnam.
They aren't synonyms, but in this context both apply.
I'll admit that I *would* need to check back through my records to be explicit. I'm not even sure it wasn't DES. This isn't something I track carefully, and so I don't tend to remember details, but only highlights. This http://www.rt.com/usa/rsa-nsa-... could be the story I'm not-quite remembering, or it could have been one of the others.
So I don't know which story I'm remembering, but a simple google search for "NSA cryptographic key weakening" turns up a bunch. In only some of them does the NSA appear to have acted dubiously, but since everything it does is so secretive the key word may well be "appear". Of course we can't know...which is what secretive is all about.
We don't KNOW that they weakened elliptic curve encryption, outside of providing some dubious suggested parameters. There's other, more popular, encryption that we KNOW they weakened.
It doesn't even need to be (and probably won't be) a generalized speed up in rate of computation. Most algorithms used for cryptography NOW are susceptible to a speed up in factorization. And that's one thing quantum computers are practically guaranteed to speed up. It's less clear that they will provide much general speed-up...and there's some evidence that that's unlikely until algorithms are redesigned, in which case you'd get better results on cheaper hardware if you just designed it for parallel processing.
Then again, designing quantum algorithms is a largely unstudied area, and there could be lots of breakthroughs.
You are talking about legalities. I'm talking about economic behavior in the marketplace. I didn't accuse Apple of breaking any laws on that occasion.
Did you ever hear of New York's "Sullivan Act"? Or how the US marshalls actually kept the peace in Dodge city? (Hint: They usually required that guns be removed at the edge of town.)
The government has a long history of both ignoring and abusively interpreting the 2nd amendment. I'm not saying it probably isn't tactically wise, but I strongly object to the way they ignore the constitution rather than amend it, and even more to the strained interpretations that they put on the words. (There is no indication that the "well organized militia" should be approved of by the state. And I know of no reason to believe that a majority of the founders would have intended such, though clearly some of them were essentially monarchists who just objected to the monarch being distant...and not a part of their in-group.)
Saying that Apple isn't unethical is blatantly wrong. But they tend to be unethical in different ways than does MS. To pick one example, where nearly everybody cheers Apple, but they were clearly acting unethically, consider how they established the iPod against the wishes of the RIAA. They basically strong armed the record companies. Yeah, the RIAA are unethical bastards, and being spread out over an ant hill with only a SMALL amount of honey on them would be too good for them, that doesn't make what Apple did ethical.
Apple will often hide known product defects from potential customers. Another unethical activity. They don't, however, like to intentionally render their products inferior. This doesn't mean they are ethical, it means they have their pride.
While I'll agree that that would be the most prudent practice, past history suggests that when a tool is made available it will be used, whether the use is legal or not. And police and security groups seems to be more prone to this kind of abuse than more ordinary groups which see themselves as less privileged. (I'm not claiming that there aren't other groups that are equally prone to see themselves as more privileged than the "common folk".)
Given National Security Letters, I think we can be rather certain that there are shared secrets. Calling that a conspiracy (on Apple's part) requires an unvalidated assumption.
P.S.: I'm not saying that such shared secrets are guaranteed to exist, I'm saying that's the most reasonable default assumption.