Not entirely true. Ron Paul, who until now has always been pushed aside as irrelevant to the party, predicted it clearly and concisely. He predicted what would happen, approximately when, and exactly why. And all three of those came to be. ("When" was of course inexact... nobody is claiming clairvoyance here.)
One could just as easily point out that Marxist economists predict there will be an economic recession every few years -- but "when" is inexact. They can point out a number of facts about the state of the economy which are certainly true and make deductions that are controversial from those facts.
The point being, at any given moment, there will be different economists with different ideologies making different predictions from more or less the same data, and if you accept enough fuzziness in the predictions -- such as, "'When' was inexact" -- you will inevitably find that several different economists from different schools of thought predicted what happened.
The point of the article is that modelling techniques for complex systems fundamentally don't work. Economics is a chaotic system: there are patterns, but it looks very much like the details are unpredictable.
One thing that struck me as I read the article, is that it's fairly obvious that, given several different models, one would choose a model that affirms one's biases.
And to some extent, it seems to me much like shooting baskets while playing basketball in gym class: every time you miss, you can think that you almost got it right this time.
For some perverse reason, these sorts of US policy discussions always seem to just discuss the current case (and sometimes historic cases) in the US, and argue from that and from some ideological assumptions.
But the US isn't the only developed country in the world; from what I gather, the financial burden on college students elsewhere is considerably less. Could we discuss what works and doesn't work elsewhere?
In the first place, the meaning of a word is its use. Using "hacker" to mean people who bypass computer security to steal data or sabotage systems has been the overwhelmingly dominant use of the expression for thirty years, well-established in journalism and entertainment. I've read the essays by RMS and ESR describing the "hacker ethic", and I've read Steven Levy's "Hackers", and those are literally the only places I've ever seen "hacker" used with the positive meaning of unorthodox, enthusiastic, and highly skilled programmers, aside from the occasional references to RMS, ESR, and Levy, to complain about the prevailing usage of the term
Second, even from those accounts of the early history of programming at MIT, it was clear that "hacker" had an ambiguous meaning, at best. As I recall, Levy describes "hack" as a slang term in general use at MIT, to mean a clever and well-executed prank, such as disassembling a car and reassembling it in the owner's room. The MIT hackers were notorious for ignoring inconvenient rules governing computer access; Levy mentions how many of them took correspondence courses on locksmithing, so they could bypass locked doors.
This is the sort of routine task of calculation that we use computer programs to automate. Sure, it's not much trouble to do this trivial task once, on one computer. It's another matter to do this, and a few thousand other similarly trivial tasks on a few thousand servers in a datacenter daily.
It was in the book, at the very end -- I think the last paragraph described the protagonist looking at the circle.
What puzzles me is that I thought Carl Sagan was an atheist, so I'm not sure why there's a "message from God" subplot. Perhaps an indication of what he thought would constitute a persuasive message from God?
Unless you really hate seeing advertising, you are benefiting from the exchange, and few people are bothered by advertising that much.
Sorry, I guess my last post could have been read as implying a contrast between what people know and what they think they know, but that wasn't what I meant.
That doesn't square with the fact that, in the US, wages in real terms have been static since the early 1970s. Per capita productivity has more than doubled in the same period of time. That is, most people in the US have a standard of living equal to that of the 1970s, even though we're producing more than twice as much stuff.
My name & address are already public record (as are everyone that owns land), so anything about people showing up on my doorstep is irrelevant.
You've mentioned this a couple of times. But I know you only as Aqualung812; I doubt that your pseudonym appears on that public record of land ownership. It may be the case that I could link the one to the other with some datamining, but that isn't a given.
I actually agreed with much of what you said a couple of posts up; I think a lot of the responses to privacy concerns, especially around Slashdot, are unrealistic, if not outright paranoiac; in particular, people tend to bring up the fear of political persecution, when in a relatively open society, going public is a better defense than going underground.
But I can't go all the way to a position that privacy concerns are baseless. There are people who actually do have reason to worry about people finding out too much of their personal information too easily. I've known people who live under repressive governments, for whom it really is a difficult decision whether to be publicly identified with their political views. But I believe a more common issue, and one that's actually come up in the course of my work, is women who have to contend with sexual harassment and stalking.
Many women I know are hesitant to post photos of themselves online, because doing so risks a flood of harassing email. They're usually circumspect about using their last names when they meet someone casually, because it would be easy to track them down, using their full name. The most serious cases of stalking involve women who are splitting up with partners or divorcing husbands; I've known of a few episodes in which women moved to different cities and changed their names to frustrate the efforts of an ex-husband or ex-boyfriend to find them. This came up a few times when I had a job working on a "community" site for a cable TV station; we had a "real names" policy, but allowed some women in those circumstances to use "realistic" pseudonyms, for that very reason.
Which is part of what's so infuriating about the Google+ real names policy, by the way; they're unwilling to make a similar accomodation, and a lot of the critics of Google+'s policy have pointed out this issue.
A private investigator I knew told me that for a long time, tracking down people who've moved and changed names was the bread-and-butter of the profession, but these days it's so easy to do that via the Internet that there are far fewer PIs than there used to be. I would guess there are more bad reasons than good reasons to try to "disappear", but I think it's worth considering that there are good reasons.
So, by and large, I think the people who think we should chill out about the risks to privacy have the better case, but that doesn't mean we can just go to sleep on the issue.
Look at what *actually* happens during periods of social upheaval: secret police become ineffective. How useful is it to track someone's location by mobile phone GPS, when what it tells you is that the person you're tracking is somewhere in a crowd of 100,000 anti-government demonstrators?
There's danger from secret police in a repressive society when everything is quiet. There's greater danger from the secret police if there was a period of social upheaval, and it failed; secret police are vengeful. That would be a good time to lose your mobile phone, and look for a nice, friendly expatriate colony.
And if you're not in a particularly repressive society, if you can pretty much express your political views with impunity, then hiding your views because there's a possibility that some day, there could be repression, is cowardice.
I wonder often these days if the underlying problem is simple: there's not as much work to do as there used to be. It stands to reason that after a few centuries of increasing productivity -- producing more with less effort -- that we'd eventually be able to cut back on how much effort we had to expend to live comfortable lives. Yet it just doesn't seem to work out that way, does it?
Stalker? There are many easier ways of stalking me, starting with just following my car or bike when I leave my house.
Much of the point is trying to keep the stalker from finding out where you live. Harassing phone calls and emails can be very upsetting, but physical confrontation by a stalker is much worse.
The lack of clear demands is a serious problem for this incipient movement. At the movement, *every* political faction I know of is trying to co-opt it. I've been getting fundraising emails from the Democrats, claiming that they represent the aspirations of the protesters. The BBC had a story claiming the slogans of the Occupy Wall Street protesters were indistinguishable from those of the Tea Party. I saw Bloomberg News interviewing traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange who shamelessly claimed that they were on the side of the protests -- only wouldn't the protesters please protest the government, instead of the traders who were busy trying to create jobs?
The lack of a key demand makes it incredibly easy for the power structure to undermine a movement.
That was clumsy phrasing on my part. My point was that it is a perfectly clear, simple name for a word processor, and that usually the name of the application is more important than the name of the suite.
I think this does point to underlying problems with office suite applications: each one is exceedingly complicated, and their functions overlap (by design), so there's pressure to pick just one and use it for everything.
When I did temp clerical jobs, it was usually Excel spreadsheets that got used for everything. At least a database in a spreadsheet makes some sense. In Powerpoint, that's just grotesque.
I've never understood why people get bent out of shape over the name. You only have to remember it long enough to install it. It's the apps they'll be using, and the word processor is called Writer in LibreOffice just as it was in OpenOffice.org. Does anyone think Writer is a weird name for a word processor?
After reading more discussion of the story, I came across a lot of discussion of how it makes sense for the military to use mostly conventional operating systems, device drivers being one of those reasons. Specialized operating systems and hardware are just too difficult to support and maintain.
At this point, I'm guessing that the accounts I've read of these tight access control systems either exist only in a handful of places -- the NSA's basement, maybe -- or else they're just proposals that keep getting cited, ghosts of systems that never existed, in another variant of "security theater".
I read Bruce Schneier's Secrets and Lies, and in one chapter, he describes different tiers of access controls, ranging from discretionary access control, as on Linux, Unix, and newer versions of Windows, to mandatory access control, based on the Bell-LaPadula model, which I can't imagine using for anything but narrowly defined tasks. In Schneier, and elsewhere I've read descriptions of the more restrictive access controls, I get the impression that there are decades of experience with implementing these systems, that sure, Linux or Windows are fine for kids playing games, but people doing anything important are using operating systems with security systems that make damned sure you're using your system only for its intended purpose.
And yet, as people pointed out above, the article points out that the IT staff was using malware removal advice from Kaspersky's public Website, which strongly implies that the infected systems are running some version of Windows and the malware is common.
So, if the US military isn't using strict access controls or other exceptionally strong security measures when the stakes are this high, if they're just using conventional operating systems that everyone uses, then who ever actually uses secure operating systems?
A few people I know have had email accounts hijacked by spammers. In each case, it was a purely Web-based email service, the user used a weak password, and the user didn't notice the account had been hijacked until told by others, because the user seldom used the account.
On the whole, that makes this seem like a minor nuisance, not a crisis. Remind people to use strong passwords, and consider closing disused email accounts.
I had just started on "Dive Into Python 3" about a week ago, and yesterday I was going to re-download the zip file with the PDF of the book and the example programs on a virtual machine, when I discovered his site was down. Fortunately, I had the file elsewhere. I figured the site was down because of a temporary glitch.
Incidentally, I had planned to order a physical copy of the book, but from the reviews on Amazon, the printing of "Dive Into Python 3" is of extraordinarily poor quality, with incorrect rendering of much of the source code, so that one is better off sticking to the free PDF. I hope it remains available for a while.
It doesn't sound like there's an explanation yet for why he did this.
Slashdot Mirror
Not entirely true. Ron Paul, who until now has always been pushed aside as irrelevant to the party, predicted it clearly and concisely. He predicted what would happen, approximately when, and exactly why. And all three of those came to be. ("When" was of course inexact... nobody is claiming clairvoyance here.)
One could just as easily point out that Marxist economists predict there will be an economic recession every few years -- but "when" is inexact. They can point out a number of facts about the state of the economy which are certainly true and make deductions that are controversial from those facts.
The point being, at any given moment, there will be different economists with different ideologies making different predictions from more or less the same data, and if you accept enough fuzziness in the predictions -- such as, "'When' was inexact" -- you will inevitably find that several different economists from different schools of thought predicted what happened.
The point of the article is that modelling techniques for complex systems fundamentally don't work. Economics is a chaotic system: there are patterns, but it looks very much like the details are unpredictable.
One thing that struck me as I read the article, is that it's fairly obvious that, given several different models, one would choose a model that affirms one's biases.
And to some extent, it seems to me much like shooting baskets while playing basketball in gym class: every time you miss, you can think that you almost got it right this time.
For some perverse reason, these sorts of US policy discussions always seem to just discuss the current case (and sometimes historic cases) in the US, and argue from that and from some ideological assumptions.
But the US isn't the only developed country in the world; from what I gather, the financial burden on college students elsewhere is considerably less. Could we discuss what works and doesn't work elsewhere?
Given the widespread "gold-farming" and organized crime involvement in MMORPGs, this is a natural direction for them to move.
In the first place, the meaning of a word is its use. Using "hacker" to mean people who bypass computer security to steal data or sabotage systems has been the overwhelmingly dominant use of the expression for thirty years, well-established in journalism and entertainment. I've read the essays by RMS and ESR describing the "hacker ethic", and I've read Steven Levy's "Hackers", and those are literally the only places I've ever seen "hacker" used with the positive meaning of unorthodox, enthusiastic, and highly skilled programmers, aside from the occasional references to RMS, ESR, and Levy, to complain about the prevailing usage of the term
Second, even from those accounts of the early history of programming at MIT, it was clear that "hacker" had an ambiguous meaning, at best. As I recall, Levy describes "hack" as a slang term in general use at MIT, to mean a clever and well-executed prank, such as disassembling a car and reassembling it in the owner's room. The MIT hackers were notorious for ignoring inconvenient rules governing computer access; Levy mentions how many of them took correspondence courses on locksmithing, so they could bypass locked doors.
Someone please mod up parent as informative.
This is the sort of routine task of calculation that we use computer programs to automate. Sure, it's not much trouble to do this trivial task once, on one computer. It's another matter to do this, and a few thousand other similarly trivial tasks on a few thousand servers in a datacenter daily.
It was in the book, at the very end -- I think the last paragraph described the protagonist looking at the circle.
What puzzles me is that I thought Carl Sagan was an atheist, so I'm not sure why there's a "message from God" subplot. Perhaps an indication of what he thought would constitute a persuasive message from God?
Unless you really hate seeing advertising, you are benefiting from the exchange, and few people are bothered by advertising that much.
Sorry, I guess my last post could have been read as implying a contrast between what people know and what they think they know, but that wasn't what I meant.
That doesn't square with the fact that, in the US, wages in real terms have been static since the early 1970s. Per capita productivity has more than doubled in the same period of time. That is, most people in the US have a standard of living equal to that of the 1970s, even though we're producing more than twice as much stuff.
My name & address are already public record (as are everyone that owns land), so anything about people showing up on my doorstep is irrelevant.
You've mentioned this a couple of times. But I know you only as Aqualung812; I doubt that your pseudonym appears on that public record of land ownership. It may be the case that I could link the one to the other with some datamining, but that isn't a given.
I actually agreed with much of what you said a couple of posts up; I think a lot of the responses to privacy concerns, especially around Slashdot, are unrealistic, if not outright paranoiac; in particular, people tend to bring up the fear of political persecution, when in a relatively open society, going public is a better defense than going underground.
But I can't go all the way to a position that privacy concerns are baseless. There are people who actually do have reason to worry about people finding out too much of their personal information too easily. I've known people who live under repressive governments, for whom it really is a difficult decision whether to be publicly identified with their political views. But I believe a more common issue, and one that's actually come up in the course of my work, is women who have to contend with sexual harassment and stalking.
Many women I know are hesitant to post photos of themselves online, because doing so risks a flood of harassing email. They're usually circumspect about using their last names when they meet someone casually, because it would be easy to track them down, using their full name. The most serious cases of stalking involve women who are splitting up with partners or divorcing husbands; I've known of a few episodes in which women moved to different cities and changed their names to frustrate the efforts of an ex-husband or ex-boyfriend to find them. This came up a few times when I had a job working on a "community" site for a cable TV station; we had a "real names" policy, but allowed some women in those circumstances to use "realistic" pseudonyms, for that very reason.
Which is part of what's so infuriating about the Google+ real names policy, by the way; they're unwilling to make a similar accomodation, and a lot of the critics of Google+'s policy have pointed out this issue.
A private investigator I knew told me that for a long time, tracking down people who've moved and changed names was the bread-and-butter of the profession, but these days it's so easy to do that via the Internet that there are far fewer PIs than there used to be. I would guess there are more bad reasons than good reasons to try to "disappear", but I think it's worth considering that there are good reasons.
So, by and large, I think the people who think we should chill out about the risks to privacy have the better case, but that doesn't mean we can just go to sleep on the issue.
True.
It's not that people don't know how Google and Facebook make money. It's that most people think that they benefit from the exchange.
Look at what *actually* happens during periods of social upheaval: secret police become ineffective. How useful is it to track someone's location by mobile phone GPS, when what it tells you is that the person you're tracking is somewhere in a crowd of 100,000 anti-government demonstrators?
There's danger from secret police in a repressive society when everything is quiet. There's greater danger from the secret police if there was a period of social upheaval, and it failed; secret police are vengeful. That would be a good time to lose your mobile phone, and look for a nice, friendly expatriate colony.
And if you're not in a particularly repressive society, if you can pretty much express your political views with impunity, then hiding your views because there's a possibility that some day, there could be repression, is cowardice.
I wonder often these days if the underlying problem is simple: there's not as much work to do as there used to be. It stands to reason that after a few centuries of increasing productivity -- producing more with less effort -- that we'd eventually be able to cut back on how much effort we had to expend to live comfortable lives. Yet it just doesn't seem to work out that way, does it?
Stalker? There are many easier ways of stalking me, starting with just following my car or bike when I leave my house.
Much of the point is trying to keep the stalker from finding out where you live. Harassing phone calls and emails can be very upsetting, but physical confrontation by a stalker is much worse.
The lack of clear demands is a serious problem for this incipient movement. At the movement, *every* political faction I know of is trying to co-opt it. I've been getting fundraising emails from the Democrats, claiming that they represent the aspirations of the protesters. The BBC had a story claiming the slogans of the Occupy Wall Street protesters were indistinguishable from those of the Tea Party. I saw Bloomberg News interviewing traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange who shamelessly claimed that they were on the side of the protests -- only wouldn't the protesters please protest the government, instead of the traders who were busy trying to create jobs?
The lack of a key demand makes it incredibly easy for the power structure to undermine a movement.
That was clumsy phrasing on my part. My point was that it is a perfectly clear, simple name for a word processor, and that usually the name of the application is more important than the name of the suite.
I think this does point to underlying problems with office suite applications: each one is exceedingly complicated, and their functions overlap (by design), so there's pressure to pick just one and use it for everything.
When I did temp clerical jobs, it was usually Excel spreadsheets that got used for everything. At least a database in a spreadsheet makes some sense. In Powerpoint, that's just grotesque.
I've never understood why people get bent out of shape over the name. You only have to remember it long enough to install it. It's the apps they'll be using, and the word processor is called Writer in LibreOffice just as it was in OpenOffice.org. Does anyone think Writer is a weird name for a word processor?
After reading more discussion of the story, I came across a lot of discussion of how it makes sense for the military to use mostly conventional operating systems, device drivers being one of those reasons. Specialized operating systems and hardware are just too difficult to support and maintain.
At this point, I'm guessing that the accounts I've read of these tight access control systems either exist only in a handful of places -- the NSA's basement, maybe -- or else they're just proposals that keep getting cited, ghosts of systems that never existed, in another variant of "security theater".
You've been hacked, dude. You should use one of those free browser pop-up virus scanners and fix your system.
I read Bruce Schneier's Secrets and Lies, and in one chapter, he describes different tiers of access controls, ranging from discretionary access control, as on Linux, Unix, and newer versions of Windows, to mandatory access control, based on the Bell-LaPadula model, which I can't imagine using for anything but narrowly defined tasks. In Schneier, and elsewhere I've read descriptions of the more restrictive access controls, I get the impression that there are decades of experience with implementing these systems, that sure, Linux or Windows are fine for kids playing games, but people doing anything important are using operating systems with security systems that make damned sure you're using your system only for its intended purpose.
And yet, as people pointed out above, the article points out that the IT staff was using malware removal advice from Kaspersky's public Website, which strongly implies that the infected systems are running some version of Windows and the malware is common.
So, if the US military isn't using strict access controls or other exceptionally strong security measures when the stakes are this high, if they're just using conventional operating systems that everyone uses, then who ever actually uses secure operating systems?
A few people I know have had email accounts hijacked by spammers. In each case, it was a purely Web-based email service, the user used a weak password, and the user didn't notice the account had been hijacked until told by others, because the user seldom used the account.
On the whole, that makes this seem like a minor nuisance, not a crisis. Remind people to use strong passwords, and consider closing disused email accounts.
I had just started on "Dive Into Python 3" about a week ago, and yesterday I was going to re-download the zip file with the PDF of the book and the example programs on a virtual machine, when I discovered his site was down. Fortunately, I had the file elsewhere. I figured the site was down because of a temporary glitch.
Incidentally, I had planned to order a physical copy of the book, but from the reviews on Amazon, the printing of "Dive Into Python 3" is of extraordinarily poor quality, with incorrect rendering of much of the source code, so that one is better off sticking to the free PDF. I hope it remains available for a while.
It doesn't sound like there's an explanation yet for why he did this.