Since you read the paper, perhaps you can let the rest of us know what happens when 10% of a population each believe a contradictory idea. This seems like a far more common situation than 10% believing one idea and 90% having no opinion on the matter at all.
Then you have Health Care and Abortion debates. Also Israel.
And then there is Congress... which seems to believe nothing at all, regardless of percentages of population.
I tend to think of ethics as a code of behavior, often appropriate to a particular field or church. Morals are more like to be normatively oriented, i.e. preferential or without perhaps without systemic or codified justification. The problem is that ethics use rules as boundaries, and like any system of rules, they can be navigated to immoral ends. The problem with morality is that without a referent, a person can use it to justify anything. Ethics are a necessary evil, perhaps, (i.e. one that causes more good than harm) although they are often controlled by the politics of a profession, and sanctions are rare in most fields compared tot he frequency of violations. Morality is what good people turn to in a crunch, if they are thoughtful: what is the right act? Why do all the events that have led me and other parties to this point urge me, properly, to a certain course of action? What must I do, even if it breaks the rules?
Morality is Chaotic Good. Ethics is lawful good, neutral, or evil.
What I've seen is that "most adults" have been indoctrinated with the idea that morals are an outdated tool used by society to control the weak-minded. Quite often they will respond with variations of "how dare you push your moral code on me" and "I can decide for myself what's right and wrong". With that kind of self-oriented view of right and wrong, none of this surprises me.
No. Most adults rarely, if ever, think about morality. They think about what they happen to be working on. People in certain professions think about ethics. Thinking about morality is relatively rare. I have observed it most frequently in people confronted with terrible, wonderful, or large decisions. "How ought this to work, morally?" It's an English major question, an artist's question--sometimes a programmer's question, depending on what you design. But it is rare question, because more of life is procedure than is morality.
I've heard the term "social diffusion of responsibility" for the kids in groups (it actually refers to bystanders being less willing to help someone when they're in a crowd than when they're alone, unless someone takes charge), but it doesn't quite capture the theory of the anonymous twit.
The output has already been pre-sold - the Southern California Public Power Authority recently signed a 30-year power purchase agreement with EnviroMission that will effectively allow the tower to provide enough energy for an estimated 150,000 US homes. Financial modelling projects that the tower will pay off its purchase price in just 11 years - and the engineering team are shooting for a structure that will stand for 80 years or more.
Financial modelling at the rate they're getting--which will be above market rates for electricity, via government subsidies/mandates that a certain percentage of power generation be green. It's still good, but their financial modelling won't reflect true cost.
Republicans? No. Republicans are not living on the moon. Or in the solar system, for that matter--neither are Democrats.
But anyone who proposes a bold new space initiative is living on the moon right now. I suppose they're doing it now because they're worried about funding cuts in the budget deal--that's the only logical thing I can think of--but when we have a Congress acting so childishly that they refuse to pay their credit card bill because they disagree with their spouse about how much to spend, we're not gonna be putting space travel on the credit card.
We need to give space travel more military significance and/or wait till the economy is recovering if we expect a push like this to be successful. In the meantime, there's nothing wrong with working on privatizing space flight.
Leading to losses totalling 36 million does not mean that he personally stole 36 million. He may have just had a commission--at that quantity, he sounds like a wholesaler.
That's up to 675,000 people he's hurt, so he gets less than two years per hundred thousand people.
On the one hand, that seems really freaking low. On the other, more time won't necessarily help anyone--it won't make him less likely to commit crimes in the future, and the deterrent effect probably isn't great.
Also, there were people at Nuremberg who got ten years, so going much higher than that would be comparatively high by that standard.
Not necessarily--maybe you only get treatment where there's more good than harm. Problem is we don't have good statistics on that because most people lie about it.
In general though, I would hope they are among the least competent people in government. These are the people who defend laws that are very often unconstitutional. They were the ones defending the the various civil rights abuses caused by the war on drugs.
Neal Katyal defended Guantanamo detainees before becoming acting S/G. He is a highly competent man and a humble one.
The office much more frequently defends laws that are constitutional, and much more frequently than that decides not to appeal cases the government has lost.
The majority of civil rights abuses are not defended by the SG's office, but by the state attorneys general. If the SG's office were doing it, it would be far more competently done--and the Supreme Court already comes down against such rights too frequently, because for the most part the people whose rights are violated are particularly unsympathetic characters. (Which is no excuse, but it is a large part of why the scope of rights in the US has contracted since the civil rights era.)
A politician can render a competent worker incompetent by telling him not to apply that competency.
No matter how capable you are, you can't do your job if you're told not to.
I think the moral is more that there have to be checks on the power of any government agency--in this case, both the Supreme Court and Congress would not have allowed DOMA to be undefended once certiorari was granted.
Here, nobody at the SG's office was rendered incompetent by the decision not to defend DOMA. They are very good.
Google Plus is able to leverage the fact that there are a lot of Gmail users and a lot of people who use facebook--people already have a relationship with the company and already have familiarity with the kind of interaction they offer.
But the DOMA decision was highly controversial, even within the office, and is by far an outlier. For the most part, when new administrations come in they are gung-ho to use the SG's office to get all of their preferred cases to SCOTUS (i.e. the ones they'll win on), but the SG's office never winds up trying to do that because the long term institutional role of the office would be greatly undermined if they did.
In addition, its mandate is *not* to defend DOMA--its mandate is to represent the United States Government, which does not mean fighting every case where they have an unsanctionable argument. In addition, where the issue comes before the Supereme Court, there is *zero* chance that there will not be competent representation if they drop out--it would be more worrying at the circuit level.
I am always suspicious when government is the solution. I prefer to keep it in the hands of private companies.
Private companies are motivated by profit.
Agencies are directed by political appointees, but good ones tend to have a culture which focuses on institutional competence. (e.g. the solicitor general's office.) It does not make sense for individual companies to take the same measures that a society does--there are collective action problems. Some of those goals can be assumed by an agency working for government.
If you get good people staffing it, not a bad idea. It could focus on a lot of the massive but individually low-level threats, rather than some of the high-level stuff that the FBI does.
Not necessarily. If you reread the post, you'll see I allow for the possibility that Management had not given their security people enough authority to do their job. See the disjunction between the em-dashes.
Not at all--you are now talking about between the wars. Previously you said the US was not a superpower until after the end of the war. I was disagreeing with the latter point. There are major distinctions--for one, the Battleship was no longer the lynchpin of military prowess, as of mid-morning December 7, 1941. (And if that had not put the nail in the coffin, the sinking of the Yamato at Leyte was another symbolic end to the era of the battleship.) In addition, the size of the fleet in the Pacific before the war was tiny compared to late in the war. The US was very clearly a super power before the end of the war. I did not say it was one during the Depression--Roosevelt was greatly concerned with the state of Readiness of the United States prior to the war.
And, of course, there's a subtle difference between a junked car and an aircraft carrier. Even a small aircraft carrier. =)
The British Navy was sort of displaced by the Germans--it's more a question of types, though, with U-boats instead of surface ships. The U-boats were more effective at closing the North Atlantic than the Surface ships were at keeping it open.
Yeah, I don't think they should have to pay either. Even if the policy specifically covered digital attacks, Sony still would have had to do their due diligence.
Most (all?) of the attacks I heard about were silly things Sony shouldn't have been vulnerable to, like SQL injections. This is an absolutely massive company, there is no excuse for not having proper penetration testing and security audits done on their sites, and making the insurance pay out in this case is kind of like trying to make insurance pay for a wheel barrel of money you left on your front porch.
I was just thinking to myself, what this story needs is some more lawyers.
In this case, maybe.
On the one hand, I would hate to be a SONY shareholder right now, or to be the big guys at SONY and realize (probably) that you had hired someone incapable of managing the security you need for a target that large--or given them too little power to do it--and be hit with the double whammy of insurance refusing to cover you. I would also hate to be sony's lawyers who approved either their security policies or their insurance policies.
But on the other hand, companies that are big targets *will not* take the necessary risk mitigation steps if they are not financially accountable for their actions. If Sony's only loss is to income and share price, it is still a big loss, but it is a much bigger incentive for smaller companies to protect user data if the ability to insure against data theft is limited.
Or you could do as we did, that is, try it and see. Empirical studies FTW!
If your armor didn't fit right, the poor interaction between the various plates, belts and arming points would soak up a lot of energy. It was quite wearying. The difference an arming belt made was quite dramatic.
I was making the assumption that the average slashdot user would find it more efficient to think about it than to conduct an empirical study.:)
Slashdot Mirror
It matters a little. It's hard to use illegally gathered information against you in court.
Since you read the paper, perhaps you can let the rest of us know what happens when 10% of a population each believe a contradictory idea. This seems like a far more common situation than 10% believing one idea and 90% having no opinion on the matter at all.
Then you have Health Care and Abortion debates. Also Israel.
And then there is Congress... which seems to believe nothing at all, regardless of percentages of population.
Mmm... this is interesting: http://everyday-ethics.org/2008/11/ethics-vs-morals-not-as-easy-as-it-seems/
I tend to think of ethics as a code of behavior, often appropriate to a particular field or church. Morals are more like to be normatively oriented, i.e. preferential or without perhaps without systemic or codified justification. The problem is that ethics use rules as boundaries, and like any system of rules, they can be navigated to immoral ends. The problem with morality is that without a referent, a person can use it to justify anything. Ethics are a necessary evil, perhaps, (i.e. one that causes more good than harm) although they are often controlled by the politics of a profession, and sanctions are rare in most fields compared tot he frequency of violations. Morality is what good people turn to in a crunch, if they are thoughtful: what is the right act? Why do all the events that have led me and other parties to this point urge me, properly, to a certain course of action? What must I do, even if it breaks the rules?
Morality is Chaotic Good. Ethics is lawful good, neutral, or evil.
What I've seen is that "most adults" have been indoctrinated with the idea that morals are an outdated tool used by society to control the weak-minded. Quite often they will respond with variations of "how dare you push your moral code on me" and "I can decide for myself what's right and wrong". With that kind of self-oriented view of right and wrong, none of this surprises me.
No. Most adults rarely, if ever, think about morality. They think about what they happen to be working on. People in certain professions think about ethics. Thinking about morality is relatively rare. I have observed it most frequently in people confronted with terrible, wonderful, or large decisions. "How ought this to work, morally?" It's an English major question, an artist's question--sometimes a programmer's question, depending on what you design. But it is rare question, because more of life is procedure than is morality.
No. They are not capable of faster-than-ludicrous-communication.
I've heard the term "social diffusion of responsibility" for the kids in groups (it actually refers to bystanders being less willing to help someone when they're in a crowd than when they're alone, unless someone takes charge), but it doesn't quite capture the theory of the anonymous twit.
In my dabbling in graduate courses, I found many CS students who couldn't software engineer themselves out of a bag.
Software engineering is not an efficient solution for escaping a bag.
FTA:
The output has already been pre-sold - the Southern California Public Power Authority recently signed a 30-year power purchase agreement with EnviroMission that will effectively allow the tower to provide enough energy for an estimated 150,000 US homes. Financial modelling projects that the tower will pay off its purchase price in just 11 years - and the engineering team are shooting for a structure that will stand for 80 years or more.
Financial modelling at the rate they're getting--which will be above market rates for electricity, via government subsidies/mandates that a certain percentage of power generation be green. It's still good, but their financial modelling won't reflect true cost.
Republicans? No. Republicans are not living on the moon. Or in the solar system, for that matter--neither are Democrats.
But anyone who proposes a bold new space initiative is living on the moon right now. I suppose they're doing it now because they're worried about funding cuts in the budget deal--that's the only logical thing I can think of--but when we have a Congress acting so childishly that they refuse to pay their credit card bill because they disagree with their spouse about how much to spend, we're not gonna be putting space travel on the credit card.
We need to give space travel more military significance and/or wait till the economy is recovering if we expect a push like this to be successful. In the meantime, there's nothing wrong with working on privatizing space flight.
Leading to losses totalling 36 million does not mean that he personally stole 36 million. He may have just had a commission--at that quantity, he sounds like a wholesaler.
That's up to 675,000 people he's hurt, so he gets less than two years per hundred thousand people.
On the one hand, that seems really freaking low. On the other, more time won't necessarily help anyone--it won't make him less likely to commit crimes in the future, and the deterrent effect probably isn't great.
Also, there were people at Nuremberg who got ten years, so going much higher than that would be comparatively high by that standard.
Not necessarily--maybe you only get treatment where there's more good than harm. Problem is we don't have good statistics on that because most people lie about it.
Poster probably works in admin for an educational institution; call it a 401(k), the logic still applies at this level of generality.
What also works, and studies back it up is just putting in a dummy thermostat. people who complain it's too(hot/cold) suddenly stop afterwards.
Efficiency through lying. How normatively cute. :)
(The other common placebo example is the close door button in elevators.)
In general though, I would hope they are among the least competent people in government. These are the people who defend laws that are very often unconstitutional. They were the ones defending the the various civil rights abuses caused by the war on drugs.
Neal Katyal defended Guantanamo detainees before becoming acting S/G. He is a highly competent man and a humble one.
The office much more frequently defends laws that are constitutional, and much more frequently than that decides not to appeal cases the government has lost.
The majority of civil rights abuses are not defended by the SG's office, but by the state attorneys general. If the SG's office were doing it, it would be far more competently done--and the Supreme Court already comes down against such rights too frequently, because for the most part the people whose rights are violated are particularly unsympathetic characters. (Which is no excuse, but it is a large part of why the scope of rights in the US has contracted since the civil rights era.)
A politician can render a competent worker incompetent by telling him not to apply that competency.
No matter how capable you are, you can't do your job if you're told not to.
I think the moral is more that there have to be checks on the power of any government agency--in this case, both the Supreme Court and Congress would not have allowed DOMA to be undefended once certiorari was granted.
Here, nobody at the SG's office was rendered incompetent by the decision not to defend DOMA. They are very good.
Google Plus is able to leverage the fact that there are a lot of Gmail users and a lot of people who use facebook--people already have a relationship with the company and already have familiarity with the kind of interaction they offer.
Plus, it's not orkut.
But the DOMA decision was highly controversial, even within the office, and is by far an outlier. For the most part, when new administrations come in they are gung-ho to use the SG's office to get all of their preferred cases to SCOTUS (i.e. the ones they'll win on), but the SG's office never winds up trying to do that because the long term institutional role of the office would be greatly undermined if they did.
In addition, its mandate is *not* to defend DOMA--its mandate is to represent the United States Government, which does not mean fighting every case where they have an unsanctionable argument. In addition, where the issue comes before the Supereme Court, there is *zero* chance that there will not be competent representation if they drop out--it would be more worrying at the circuit level.
I am always suspicious when government is the solution. I prefer to keep it in the hands of private companies.
Private companies are motivated by profit.
Agencies are directed by political appointees, but good ones tend to have a culture which focuses on institutional competence. (e.g. the solicitor general's office.) It does not make sense for individual companies to take the same measures that a society does--there are collective action problems. Some of those goals can be assumed by an agency working for government.
If you get good people staffing it, not a bad idea. It could focus on a lot of the massive but individually low-level threats, rather than some of the high-level stuff that the FBI does.
Not necessarily. If you reread the post, you'll see I allow for the possibility that Management had not given their security people enough authority to do their job. See the disjunction between the em-dashes.
Not at all--you are now talking about between the wars. Previously you said the US was not a superpower until after the end of the war. I was disagreeing with the latter point. There are major distinctions--for one, the Battleship was no longer the lynchpin of military prowess, as of mid-morning December 7, 1941. (And if that had not put the nail in the coffin, the sinking of the Yamato at Leyte was another symbolic end to the era of the battleship.) In addition, the size of the fleet in the Pacific before the war was tiny compared to late in the war. The US was very clearly a super power before the end of the war. I did not say it was one during the Depression--Roosevelt was greatly concerned with the state of Readiness of the United States prior to the war.
And, of course, there's a subtle difference between a junked car and an aircraft carrier. Even a small aircraft carrier. =)
The British Navy was sort of displaced by the Germans--it's more a question of types, though, with U-boats instead of surface ships. The U-boats were more effective at closing the North Atlantic than the Surface ships were at keeping it open.
Yeah, I don't think they should have to pay either. Even if the policy specifically covered digital attacks, Sony still would have had to do their due diligence.
Most (all?) of the attacks I heard about were silly things Sony shouldn't have been vulnerable to, like SQL injections. This is an absolutely massive company, there is no excuse for not having proper penetration testing and security audits done on their sites, and making the insurance pay out in this case is kind of like trying to make insurance pay for a wheel barrel of money you left on your front porch.
That would be so fun to do...
(Well, if you had other wheelbarrows.)
I was just thinking to myself, what this story needs is some more lawyers.
In this case, maybe.
On the one hand, I would hate to be a SONY shareholder right now, or to be the big guys at SONY and realize (probably) that you had hired someone incapable of managing the security you need for a target that large--or given them too little power to do it--and be hit with the double whammy of insurance refusing to cover you. I would also hate to be sony's lawyers who approved either their security policies or their insurance policies.
But on the other hand, companies that are big targets *will not* take the necessary risk mitigation steps if they are not financially accountable for their actions. If Sony's only loss is to income and share price, it is still a big loss, but it is a much bigger incentive for smaller companies to protect user data if the ability to insure against data theft is limited.
Or you could do as we did, that is, try it and see. Empirical studies FTW!
If your armor didn't fit right, the poor interaction between the various plates, belts and arming points would soak up a lot of energy. It was quite wearying. The difference an arming belt made was quite dramatic.
I was making the assumption that the average slashdot user would find it more efficient to think about it than to conduct an empirical study. :)