Anyway, another facinating thing to look for on the map is the Nile River. It on the top right of Africa. It's a very thin bright line with a kink in it. Each bank of the river is densely populated and well developed, but beyond that it is pitch black and empty
Well, of course. The Nile valley is the only part of Egypt that has water or real soil. The rest is pretty damned useless has been since the Pharoahs.
Crossing that one border isn't trivial. And when they do, what are the chances that hax0r599 will do what he's supposed to? Odds are he'll decide that running water, heat in the winter and more than 900 calories a day beats the hell out freezing, starvation and having you, your parents, and your grandparents sent off to the death camps.
It is axiomatic in the security biz that everyone is undersecured. But consider the huge number of attacks we get every day. There are plenty of free-range viruses. There are lots and lots and lots of exploits and attacks. Some of the people creating them are damned bright and very well trained.
And that's just the hobbyists. We aren't even addressing the ones who do it for money.
So why hasn't computing crashed and burned forever under the weight of all of these? It's because, in our sloppy suboptimal way, we have learned to respond. The procedures for identifying a new attack or vulnerability aren't great. But they are good enough. Our collective immune system responds.
If North Korea is training 100 l33t hax0rs a year it's a drop in the slop bucket of pros and amateurs already out there doing harm.
If the numbers aren't that impressive, then how about the kinds of attacks they can do? My suspicion is that it isn't nearly as bad as it seems at first glance. This is North Korea we are talking about. There aren't that many people who have grown up living and breathing OS source code. Of the few really skilled people they have many (most? all?) are probably needed in other capacities making them unavailable to write the next Big Worm.
And how good will they be? Creativity, the free play of ideas, and the ability to see things from a different perspective - all of which are important to being a really good code monkey let alone a world class security breaker - are capital crimes in North Korea. Praising the Great Leader and lock-step conformity don't cut it when you are trying to come up with the unexpected and the truly creative.
So even if it's not pure propaganda from Seoul I'm not all that worried.
If they're trying to push the stock up they've chosen a, herm, peculiar way of doing it.
Re:Say it enough times, and it becomes the truth
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Shocking Clothing
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· Score: 1
With all due respect you are wrong. Most people do telegraph their intent. The typical rape is preceded by several minutes of increasing intimidation. The typical robbery a bit less but still in the ballpark.
The guys doing the crime are generally looking to get what they want easily. So they test the waters. They see if they can intimidate and control. Some cops call it the "interview" stage of the crime. Add to it that they tend to assess you before acting and a person who isn't in condition white (bonus points if you know what I'm talking about) generally has enough time.
Many, probably most, also have a plan. Mess up the plan even a little and they don't know what to do. This gives you the initiative.
If you disrupt the plan by drawing and presenting then better than nine times out of ten the bad guy will decide that what he wants isn't even worth what he's going to have to pay for it.
Useless for dusters, though. Shoot them, pigpile them, or wait for them to go down on their own is about the only choice.
Break things. If the leg doesn't work they can't stand on it no matter what sort of drugs they are on.
Re:Say it enough times, and it becomes the truth
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Shocking Clothing
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· Score: 1
It bears repeating. The NIJ (sorry, but the link to the study has gone stale) estimated that in defensive firearms use the defender was disarmed less than 1/10,000 of 1% of the time. We are AWARE (www.aware.org) has had a largish cash prize in escrow for years now for anyone who can find a case of it happening. Kleck and Sayles found that firearms use was the single most effective means of preventing armed robbery and rape. The percentage of completed attacks fell to as close to zero as their sample size would allow them to say.
Actually, if you use your gun the odds are greater than 95% that you won't have to shoot. The bad guys will generally decamp.
Re:stun guns are not that effective
on
Shocking Clothing
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· Score: 1
Why do I bother feeding the trolls? *sigh*
Just so you know, Mr. Ayoob's grandfather immigrated to the this country. Syrian Christian I believe.
Mas is probably North America's foremost authority on the legal and ethical aspects of the use of deadly force. He is also one of the best instructors in the practical use of firearms for self protection. He's a long time police captain and prosecutor.
Take a look at his site: http://www.ayoob.com
Re:stun guns are not that effective
on
Shocking Clothing
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· Score: 1
I have been. Several times. With ones that had every kind of special square wave, ones that had been hopped up to deliver a stronger charge (and eat the battery faster). It hurt. Like getting stung by several hornets at once. I didn't lie down and flop.
Massad Ayoob, whom I mentioned in another post on this thread, uses a stun gun as the signal for his advanced students to empty their guns rapid fire. In many years of this nobody has failed to shoot. Personally, I think he's crazy. Some day one of them is going to go "Ouch!" and hit him really hard.
Well, not really. New York State was the last holdout, but they finally legalized Pepper Spray.
Not that that is a great thing of itself. The stuff does not, will not work against a motivated, goal-oriented attacker. Phil Messina has done a lot of research (read thousands of tests) on the stuff in support of this. The FTC forced the manufacturers to write a letter some years back denying that it would stop attackers. The American Society of Law Enforcement Trainers has written that it is best used against non-violent but non-compliant suspects. And I've had personal experience of the special cop-only-not-for-sale-to-mere-civilians stuff. It hurt but it didn't stop me.
OK, a bit of background here. My wife and I have been adjunct professors of PE. Published in journals and everything. We specialize in crime prevention and women's self defense. And we test out a lot of self defense products. This critique is by no means exhaustive, but it should give people some things to think about. For more background on where we are coming from look at some of our class notes.
It won't work Stun guns have a poor record in police work. Even the manufacturers say that you should hold the stun gun against the eyes, throat or genitals for 4-5 seconds. I maintain that if you can hold a shocker against someone's goolies for the count of four you aren't in a fight. Look at the video on the home site. It doesn't incapacitate. It just gives a little spark.
It is using an inappropriately low level of force for the threat it is designed to defend against Without pussyfooting what are we talking about? Rape. Armed Robbery. Abduction. Ask any trained police officer - the guys who carry clubs, guns and a lot of training in unarmed tactics - what they would do if a bigger, stronger person was attempting to do these to them. They will mostly say "Shoot him". What we are talking about with this jacket is the equivalent of slapping someone in the face. It doesn't go nearly far enough for what it's supposed to do or what women will buy it for.
It encourages an attitude of helplessness and dependency The most important thing, in the end the only vital thing in self defense is attitude. The attitude that you will do whatever you need to to keep yourself safe. This sort of device fosters dependency and complacency. The woman is led to believe that her magic jacket will keep her safe from harm. When it doesn't (and it won't) she will be left for vital seconds without an idea of what to do.
It provides very limited protection Even if this device worked it would provide protection against a very limited range of things - grabs to the arms and torso. Not against strikes. Not against attacks to the head. Not against being dragged down (one of the most common attacks against women).
Reliability We have no idea about battery life. How long does this work for in active duty? How long does it hold its charge? How well does it work after the normal wear and tear that a real garment goes through? How prone is it to shorts?
I could go on. But you get the idea. This is a clever hack. But it is not the sort of self defense tool I would feel comfortable recommending to most women.
Two things come to mind here, Benjamin Franklin and the Hatch Act.
Franklin, a prodigious inventor, was asked why he never sought patents for his creations. He said (I think this is pretty close to an exact quote) "Just as I have benefited from the work of others others will benefit from mine."
Fast forward to the late nineteenth century. The Federal government created the land grant universities and their twins the Extension Services to improve agriculture. Science was done with a stable funding base for the benefit of American agriculture. And for about a century it worked very well as a way of creating new crops, improving techniques, and disseminating knowledge to farmers.
In the 1980s it all began to go sour. "Business - Academy partnerships" used federal money to directly support proprietary research. Extension agencies began to be used as means of pushing the resulting products to farmers. Research was subverted not to improve agriculture but to improve the bottom lines of the new "partners".
There was a corresponding drop in the number of strains of crops and animal breeds produced by the universities. The original recipients, family farmers, were pushed aside so that the benefits of public money and research could go to the agricultural firms owned by the same people who were using taxpayer money to support their own products.
This is bad. But worse is coming out of it. Research at the land grant colleges used to be open to all. Now it is almost all proprietary. New information doesn't get to the farmers who need it. Scientists can not engage in the absolutely vital presentation of papers and discussion with their peers which is essential to sustained progress.
The good of each is not the good of all.
I see the same thing happening here. There is, of course, a need to protect one's investment. But we are moving so far in that direction that we are destroying the preconditions for scientific progress - the free, promiscuous exchange of information and ideas.
Some tools, I'm afraid, are bad in themselves. This is one of them. A tool which can be used to divine a person's innermost thoughts and feelings - and this one will be able to by its essential nature - does something which nobody should be able to do without consent. Hence the taboos we have concerning doctor-patient confidentiality, the seal of the confessional and so on.
The obvious response to your thoughts on crime is a simple one. What is a crime? That can change quite literally overnight. If, just to choose a near-fetched example, it was decided that being associated or affiliated with suspected terrorists was a crime and if the definition of "terrorist" were tweaked to include anyone who does anything that appears to be illegal for political purposes then being having a friend in Greenpeace suddenly becomes a crime. Can't happen, though. Nope.
Your thoughts on warrants are pleasantly naive. There is a pet Federal judge who does nothing but sign warrants for the Feds. Not one has ever been rejected. Ever. And we have already seen the requirements for warrants pretty much tossed down the outhouse with Patriot I and the Homeland Security Act. Roving, warrantless wiretaps and searches are now the law of the land. How much more so for information which the government has already legally obtained?
Well, actually, yes. As of the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill.
Everything you do. Everything you feel.
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The Searchable Life
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Demographers can already do amazing things with small amounts of data. I once talked with one who was able to tell me a lot about my hobbies, my political beliefs, religion and personal life based on three or four simple questions about alcohol, music, and color preferences.
Intelligence analysis (the military sort) is based on getting all sorts of data down to the pictures in a wallet and making connections.
What they are doing here is automating the process and feeding it all the data about everyone. There has been some talk here about the enormous amounts of processing power, the huge databases and whatnot making it impossible. I'm not so confident. The data don't have to all be available at once. Just as long as they can be accessed and processed eventually.
When they are combined and the patterns teased out (which the above-mentioned disciplines already do very well) you can get a pretty accurate picture of the person. And know what sort of things that person likes or dislikes. Whom they are likely to associate with. Political leanings. Mental stability. And so on.
Not only privacy but free will are at risk. The propaganda or the interrogation techniques or so on can be individually and automatically tailored to you personally. In advance. And they will almost certainly work.
You can even tell a lot by lack of data. There will be patterns that people who tend not to show up much in the databases will fall into. What things they are hiding. Transactions that they are trying to hide. Likely associates. With so many data the lack of information is itself information. Sort of like the soldier whose military records consist of a rank, an entrance date, and a discharge date. You KNOW he was doing special operations and was probably on loan to Three Letter Agencies.
I'm afraid it's a little short-sighted. To understand this one has to think a little, not just fall back to a reflexive non-thinking response like "Government, taxes, bad, yuck." <OL> <LI>The initial one may be free. The upgrade certainly won't be. <LI>If the TCO of a Linux server is less than that of a Microsoft one the free disk is a false economy. <LI>If there are no alternatives Microsoft can apply monopoly pricing at some future date. This will raise the price at the next go-around. The only reason they are offering a more reasonable price is that there are credible threats. <LI>Your taxes are not the only place you spend money. If governments go to Linux/Open Source/Free Software alternatives to Windows/Office/etc will be more readily available in general. The price you pay for your open source software will be lower. And even if you go with MS it will have to lower its prices to compete with its OS competitors.
Re:Nearly classical economics
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Mighty Amazon
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· Score: 1
I have to both agree and disagree with you.
The reason I go to Amazon isn't just price, but some of the other features - having someone else do the book searches for me, their wonderful and wonderfully expensive (for me) use of cluster analysis to figure out what I'll probably like, the lists people make, and so on.
But a lot of people really do shop just for price. Identical goods. Lower cost of getting them. Bam. Amazon can lure people like me with the extras. But it's not for everyone.
In some ways the warranties, the known face at the other end, and the customer service could be seen as price as well. There are costs in having to replace things, not getting the merchandise, spending time doing your own research, wasting money on something you find out really wasn't what you were looking for and so on.
You could make a case that the premium services available at Amazon reduce your costs as a consumer. So it's still about "cost to get what you want".
A lot of people don't like Amazon's practice of patenting everything under the sun. I don't like their practice of patenting everything under the sun. Ultimately it is destructive to the long term development of the industry in the same way that the new NDA-driven brand of industry/university research is to science. But these articles give some idea of the why.
Bezos wants to make money and survive. And it's darned hard to run something like Amazon like a business. Now this should be obvious. But it brings back memories of my days as an economist (oh, the shame! the shame!)
They, like ebay, are working in as close to a frictionless economy as we are likely to get. If any facet of their business can be done more cheaply by someone else, they're screwed. We're even seeing one of the previously fictional economist's assumptions becoming true. The market setting prices immediately through the auction mechanism.
How does a firm survive in nearly classical economic conditions? It reduces costs at every point and provide barriers to entry to new firms, and damn the effect on every other part of the information industry. You also see it in the way that they provide "like goods" ("People who shopped for this also shopped for this") and pricing that varies from person to person for the same item based on their best guess as to what that person is willing to pay right now.
This is particularly true when they are competing with ebay which really doesn't have any pricing mechanism except for the pure market-driven auction one.
Back in the day, before globalization, before the demise of family-wage jobs, before the unions were smashed flat there were other possibilities.
One of the purposes of tariffs and trade agreements, back in the day was to keep jobs from leaving the country.
But that day is past. The race to the bottom has been enshrined not merely as a matter of current policy but the cornerstone of international law (cf. GATT, NAFTA, WTO and so on). Here in the States most educated White men vote Republican. Most IT people educated White men. If we voted against our best interests we have nobody but ourselves to blame.
Early on we thought that we would be safe. Steel and textiles might go overseas, but not high-tech. Then semiconductors moved away. And consumer electronics. That's alright, we said, the engineering and design, the programming and the day-to-day business of managing information will stay here. They followed. Because jobs like those are even easier to move - you don't even have to absorb the fixed costs of a factory, just phone lines.
And the jobs that stayed? Wages are sinking there because we weren't politically active. We let the big employers pervert the H1-B visa program EXPLICITLY to cut our wages and job security.
The action by Sun employees to fight back against job destruction fell off the screen. Largely because we didn't keep attention on it.
So look for a recovery in the IT industry. But don't ever look for a recovery in salaries or security. At least not until people pull their heads out and undo the disastrous effects of the Reagan "revolution" and its sequels.
For a couple good if older references take a look at "America, What Went Wrong" and "America, Who Really Pays the Taxes".
I used to be very much against private ownership of firearms. Then I started taking a look at the evidence and changed my mind. Here are a few of the most useful authors I encountered:
1) Gary Kleck - self described left-leasning liberal criminologist:
Point Blank - Guns and Violence in America Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control
2) Don Kates - lawyer, civil rights activist The Great American Gun Debate: Essays on Firearms & Violence Armed: New Perspectives on Gun Control
3) John Lott - U. Chicago economist
More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws (Studies in Law and Economics (Chicago, Ill.).)
4) Joyce Lee Malcolm Guns and Violence: The English Experience
5) David Kopel
The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies
As I say, this left-wing anti-gunner ended up changing his mind as a result of reading this sort of stuff. I still think that the Republicans are the Devil and Bill Clinton's policies were those of moderate Republican of 40 years ago, but I have to admit the Right is right once in a while. This is one of those whiles.
Nasreddin was a Sufi. Supposedly, he was blessed - or cursed - by his shaykh with the highest possible state of enlightenment possible for a human being. But he could only communicate and teach it through jokes.
Nasreddin's tomb is impressive. It has huge barred doors closed with thick iron chains. But it has no walls.
Quite a number of people have said, in effect, "Being a manager is being a manager. It has nothing to do with the process being managed." Thus, it is not a problem if software PMs know nothing about the field.
One wonders what color the sunsets are on the planet this people come from.
I've worked in several industries other than software - construction, education, medical research, nursing, and nuclear engineering. In all of them a manager had to understand what it was he or she was in charge of. They were generally senior practitioners in the field?
Why?
Because you would have to be insane to pick managers any other way.
Look at what a PM has to do. He has to make schedules and estimate costs. He has to make sure all the members of the team are working efficiently. He has to handle the unexpected, keep the customers happy, manage the supply chain so that the vendors deliver what is needed without robbing the company blind. And so on.
Unless you have a thorough understanding of the industry you are working in none of this will happen. Estimation will consist of dollar figures and dates pulled out of your butt. You won't have the confidence of the people who are working for you. A crew can deal with a boss who is a competent jerk. But they can't be effective if they know he hasn't got a clue about what he's doing.
The vendors will deliver crud and demand gold bars for it. Because they know nobody will do anything about it.
The customers will be unhappy. How else? They've been promised the moon in two weeks. A year later they haven't got anything. In an established industry like construction the liquidated damages would have begun months ago.
I passed this thread around the office where I work - a medium large construction company. The unanimous response was "How the hell can you make money like that? Are software executives all smoking crack or something?"
My wife is a programmer for the Portland, OR school district. For quite a while she's been trying to gather the information and courage to push for Linux in her office. Steve Duinn's column and the links and comments on Slashdot have given her the ammunition she needs.
Well, that and the terrible state of school finances in Oregon. The licensing fees she will save by making the switch will pay for a new machine. It's a powerful argument in Oregon where school financing is in dire straits.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, another facinating thing to look for on the map is the Nile River. It on the top right of Africa. It's a very thin bright line with a kink in it. Each bank of the river is densely populated and well developed, but beyond that it is pitch black and empty
Well, of course. The Nile valley is the only part of Egypt that has water or real soil. The rest is pretty damned useless has been since the Pharoahs.
Crossing that one border isn't trivial. And when they do, what are the chances that hax0r599 will do what he's supposed to? Odds are he'll decide that running water, heat in the winter and more than 900 calories a day beats the hell out freezing, starvation and having you, your parents, and your grandparents sent off to the death camps.
It is axiomatic in the security biz that everyone is undersecured. But consider the huge number of attacks we get every day. There are plenty of free-range viruses. There are lots and lots and lots of exploits and attacks. Some of the people creating them are damned bright and very well trained.
And that's just the hobbyists. We aren't even addressing the ones who do it for money.
So why hasn't computing crashed and burned forever under the weight of all of these? It's because, in our sloppy suboptimal way, we have learned to respond. The procedures for identifying a new attack or vulnerability aren't great. But they are good enough. Our collective immune system responds.
If North Korea is training 100 l33t hax0rs a year it's a drop in the slop bucket of pros and amateurs already out there doing harm.
If the numbers aren't that impressive, then how about the kinds of attacks they can do? My suspicion is that it isn't nearly as bad as it seems at first glance. This is North Korea we are talking about. There aren't that many people who have grown up living and breathing OS source code. Of the few really skilled people they have many (most? all?) are probably needed in other capacities making them unavailable to write the next Big Worm.
And how good will they be? Creativity, the free play of ideas, and the ability to see things from a different perspective - all of which are important to being a really good code monkey let alone a world class security breaker - are capital crimes in North Korea. Praising the Great Leader and lock-step conformity don't cut it when you are trying to come up with the unexpected and the truly creative.
So even if it's not pure propaganda from Seoul I'm not all that worried.
Shades of "Blazing Saddles" where Clevon Little holds a gun to his head and says "Nobody move or the n***er gets it."
If they're trying to push the stock up they've chosen a, herm, peculiar way of doing it.
With all due respect you are wrong. Most people do telegraph their intent. The typical rape is preceded by several minutes of increasing intimidation. The typical robbery a bit less but still in the ballpark.
The guys doing the crime are generally looking to get what they want easily. So they test the waters. They see if they can intimidate and control. Some cops call it the "interview" stage of the crime. Add to it that they tend to assess you before acting and a person who isn't in condition white (bonus points if you know what I'm talking about) generally has enough time.
Many, probably most, also have a plan. Mess up the plan even a little and they don't know what to do. This gives you the initiative.
If you disrupt the plan by drawing and presenting then better than nine times out of ten the bad guy will decide that what he wants isn't even worth what he's going to have to pay for it.
Useless for dusters, though. Shoot them, pigpile them, or wait for them to go down on their own is about the only choice.
Break things. If the leg doesn't work they can't stand on it no matter what sort of drugs they are on.
It bears repeating. The NIJ (sorry, but the link to the study has gone stale) estimated that in defensive firearms use the defender was disarmed less than 1/10,000 of 1% of the time. We are AWARE (www.aware.org) has had a largish cash prize in escrow for years now for anyone who can find a case of it happening. Kleck and Sayles found that firearms use was the single most effective means of preventing armed robbery and rape. The percentage of completed attacks fell to as close to zero as their sample size would allow them to say.
Actually, if you use your gun the odds are greater than 95% that you won't have to shoot. The bad guys will generally decamp.
Why do I bother feeding the trolls?
*sigh*
Just so you know, Mr. Ayoob's grandfather immigrated to the this country. Syrian Christian I believe.
Mas is probably North America's foremost authority on the legal and ethical aspects of the use of deadly force. He is also one of the best instructors in the practical use of firearms for self protection. He's a long time police captain and prosecutor.
Take a look at his site: http://www.ayoob.com
I have been. Several times. With ones that had every kind of special square wave, ones that had been hopped up to deliver a stronger charge (and eat the battery faster). It hurt. Like getting stung by several hornets at once. I didn't lie down and flop.
Massad Ayoob, whom I mentioned in another post on this thread, uses a stun gun as the signal for his advanced students to empty their guns rapid fire. In many years of this nobody has failed to shoot. Personally, I think he's crazy. Some day one of them is going to go "Ouch!" and hit him really hard.
Well, not really. New York State was the last holdout, but they finally legalized Pepper Spray.
Not that that is a great thing of itself. The stuff does not, will not work against a motivated, goal-oriented attacker. Phil Messina has done a lot of research (read thousands of tests) on the stuff in support of this. The FTC forced the manufacturers to write a letter some years back denying that it would stop attackers. The American Society of Law Enforcement Trainers has written that it is best used against non-violent but non-compliant suspects. And I've had personal experience of the special cop-only-not-for-sale-to-mere-civilians stuff. It hurt but it didn't stop me.
I could go on. But you get the idea. This is a clever hack. But it is not the sort of self defense tool I would feel comfortable recommending to most women.
Two things come to mind here, Benjamin Franklin and the Hatch Act.
Franklin, a prodigious inventor, was asked why he never sought patents for his creations. He said (I think this is pretty close to an exact quote) "Just as I have benefited from the work of others others will benefit from mine."
Fast forward to the late nineteenth century. The Federal government created the land grant universities and their twins the Extension Services to improve agriculture. Science was done with a stable funding base for the benefit of American agriculture. And for about a century it worked very well as a way of creating new crops, improving techniques, and disseminating knowledge to farmers.
In the 1980s it all began to go sour. "Business - Academy partnerships" used federal money to directly support proprietary research. Extension agencies began to be used as means of pushing the resulting products to farmers. Research was subverted not to improve agriculture but to improve the bottom lines of the new "partners".
There was a corresponding drop in the number of strains of crops and animal breeds produced by the universities. The original recipients, family farmers, were pushed aside so that the benefits of public money and research could go to the agricultural firms owned by the same people who were using taxpayer money to support their own products.
This is bad. But worse is coming out of it. Research at the land grant colleges used to be open to all. Now it is almost all proprietary. New information doesn't get to the farmers who need it. Scientists can not engage in the absolutely vital presentation of papers and discussion with their peers which is essential to sustained progress.
The good of each is not the good of all.
I see the same thing happening here. There is, of course, a need to protect one's investment. But we are moving so far in that direction that we are destroying the preconditions for scientific progress - the free, promiscuous exchange of information and ideas.
Some tools, I'm afraid, are bad in themselves. This is one of them. A tool which can be used to divine a person's innermost thoughts and feelings - and this one will be able to by its essential nature - does something which nobody should be able to do without consent. Hence the taboos we have concerning doctor-patient confidentiality, the seal of the confessional and so on.
The obvious response to your thoughts on crime is a simple one. What is a crime? That can change quite literally overnight. If, just to choose a near-fetched example, it was decided that being associated or affiliated with suspected terrorists was a crime and if the definition of "terrorist" were tweaked to include anyone who does anything that appears to be illegal for political purposes then being having a friend in Greenpeace suddenly becomes a crime. Can't happen, though. Nope.
Your thoughts on warrants are pleasantly naive. There is a pet Federal judge who does nothing but sign warrants for the Feds. Not one has ever been rejected. Ever. And we have already seen the requirements for warrants pretty much tossed down the outhouse with Patriot I and the Homeland Security Act. Roving, warrantless wiretaps and searches are now the law of the land. How much more so for information which the government has already legally obtained?
Well, actually, yes. As of the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill.
Demographers can already do amazing things with small amounts of data. I once talked with one who was able to tell me a lot about my hobbies, my political beliefs, religion and personal life based on three or four simple questions about alcohol, music, and color preferences.
Intelligence analysis (the military sort) is based on getting all sorts of data down to the pictures in a wallet and making connections.
What they are doing here is automating the process and feeding it all the data about everyone. There has been some talk here about the enormous amounts of processing power, the huge databases and whatnot making it impossible. I'm not so confident. The data don't have to all be available at once. Just as long as they can be accessed and processed eventually.
When they are combined and the patterns teased out (which the above-mentioned disciplines already do very well) you can get a pretty accurate picture of the person. And know what sort of things that person likes or dislikes. Whom they are likely to associate with. Political leanings. Mental stability. And so on.
Not only privacy but free will are at risk. The propaganda or the interrogation techniques or so on can be individually and automatically tailored to you personally. In advance. And they will almost certainly work.
You can even tell a lot by lack of data. There will be patterns that people who tend not to show up much in the databases will fall into. What things they are hiding. Transactions that they are trying to hide. Likely associates. With so many data the lack of information is itself information. Sort of like the soldier whose military records consist of a rank, an entrance date, and a discharge date. You KNOW he was doing special operations and was probably on loan to Three Letter Agencies.
I'm afraid it's a little short-sighted. To understand this one has to think a little, not just fall back to a reflexive non-thinking response like "Government, taxes, bad, yuck."
<OL>
<LI>The initial one may be free. The upgrade certainly won't be.
<LI>If the TCO of a Linux server is less than that of a Microsoft one the free disk is a false economy.
<LI>If there are no alternatives Microsoft can apply monopoly pricing at some future date. This will raise the price at the next go-around. The only reason they are offering a more reasonable price is that there are credible threats.
<LI>Your taxes are not the only place you spend money. If governments go to Linux/Open Source/Free Software alternatives to Windows/Office/etc will be more readily available in general. The price you pay for your open source software will be lower. And even if you go with MS it will have to lower its prices to compete with its OS competitors.
I have to both agree and disagree with you.
The reason I go to Amazon isn't just price, but some of the other features - having someone else do the book searches for me, their wonderful and wonderfully expensive (for me) use of cluster analysis to figure out what I'll probably like, the lists people make, and so on.
But a lot of people really do shop just for price. Identical goods. Lower cost of getting them. Bam. Amazon can lure people like me with the extras. But it's not for everyone.
In some ways the warranties, the known face at the other end, and the customer service could be seen as price as well. There are costs in having to replace things, not getting the merchandise, spending time doing your own research, wasting money on something you find out really wasn't what you were looking for and so on.
You could make a case that the premium services available at Amazon reduce your costs as a consumer. So it's still about "cost to get what you want".
A lot of people don't like Amazon's practice of patenting everything under the sun. I don't like their practice of patenting everything under the sun. Ultimately it is destructive to the long term development of the industry in the same way that the new NDA-driven brand of industry/university research is to science. But these articles give some idea of the why.
Bezos wants to make money and survive. And it's darned hard to run something like Amazon like a business. Now this should be obvious. But it brings back memories of my days as an economist (oh, the shame! the shame!)
They, like ebay, are working in as close to a frictionless economy as we are likely to get. If any facet of their business can be done more cheaply by someone else, they're screwed. We're even seeing one of the previously fictional economist's assumptions becoming true. The market setting prices immediately through the auction mechanism.
How does a firm survive in nearly classical economic conditions? It reduces costs at every point and provide barriers to entry to new firms, and damn the effect on every other part of the information industry. You also see it in the way that they provide "like goods" ("People who shopped for this also shopped for this") and pricing that varies from person to person for the same item based on their best guess as to what that person is willing to pay right now.
This is particularly true when they are competing with ebay which really doesn't have any pricing mechanism except for the pure market-driven auction one.
An interesting view on nearly classical economics
Back in the day, before globalization, before the demise of family-wage jobs, before the unions were smashed flat there were other possibilities.
One of the purposes of tariffs and trade agreements, back in the day was to keep jobs from leaving the country.
But that day is past. The race to the bottom has been enshrined not merely as a matter of current policy but the cornerstone of international law (cf. GATT, NAFTA, WTO and so on). Here in the States most educated White men vote Republican. Most IT people educated White men. If we voted against our best interests we have nobody but ourselves to blame.
Early on we thought that we would be safe. Steel and textiles might go overseas, but not high-tech. Then semiconductors moved away. And consumer electronics. That's alright, we said, the engineering and design, the programming and the day-to-day business of managing information will stay here. They followed. Because jobs like those are even easier to move - you don't even have to absorb the fixed costs of a factory, just phone lines.
And the jobs that stayed? Wages are sinking there because we weren't politically active. We let the big employers pervert the H1-B visa program EXPLICITLY to cut our wages and job security.
The action by Sun employees to fight back against job destruction fell off the screen. Largely because we didn't keep attention on it.
So look for a recovery in the IT industry. But don't ever look for a recovery in salaries or security. At least not until people pull their heads out and undo the disastrous effects of the Reagan "revolution" and its sequels.
For a couple good if older references take a look at "America, What Went Wrong" and "America, Who Really Pays the Taxes".
I used to be very much against private ownership of
firearms. Then I started taking a look at the evidence and changed my mind. Here are a few of the
most useful authors I encountered:
1) Gary Kleck - self described left-leasning liberal
criminologist:
Point Blank - Guns and Violence in America
Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control
2) Don Kates - lawyer, civil rights activist
The Great American Gun Debate: Essays on Firearms & Violence
Armed: New Perspectives on Gun Control
3) John Lott - U. Chicago economist
More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws (Studies in Law and Economics (Chicago, Ill.).)
4) Joyce Lee Malcolm
Guns and Violence: The English Experience
5) David Kopel
The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies
As I say, this left-wing anti-gunner ended up
changing his mind as a result of reading this
sort of stuff. I still think that the Republicans
are the Devil and Bill Clinton's policies were
those of moderate Republican of 40 years ago, but
I have to admit the Right is right once in a
while. This is one of those whiles.
Nasreddin was a Sufi. Supposedly, he was blessed - or cursed - by his shaykh with the highest possible state of enlightenment possible for a human being. But he could only communicate and teach it through jokes.
Nasreddin's tomb is impressive. It has huge barred doors closed with thick iron chains. But it has no walls.
Quite a number of people have said, in effect, "Being a manager is being a manager. It has nothing to do with the process being managed." Thus, it is not a problem if software PMs know nothing about the field.
One wonders what color the sunsets are on the planet this people come from.
I've worked in several industries other than software - construction, education, medical research, nursing, and nuclear engineering. In all of them a manager had to understand what it was he or she was in charge of. They were generally senior practitioners in the field?
Why?
Because you would have to be insane to pick managers any other way.
Look at what a PM has to do. He has to make schedules and estimate costs. He has to make sure all the members of the team are working efficiently. He has to handle the unexpected, keep the customers happy, manage the supply chain so that the vendors deliver what is needed without robbing the company blind. And so on.
Unless you have a thorough understanding of the industry you are working in none of this will happen. Estimation will consist of dollar figures and dates pulled out of your butt. You won't have the confidence of the people who are working for you. A crew can deal with a boss who is a competent jerk. But they can't be effective if they know he hasn't got a clue about what he's doing.
The vendors will deliver crud and demand gold bars for it. Because they know nobody will do anything about it.
The customers will be unhappy. How else? They've been promised the moon in two weeks. A year later they haven't got anything. In an established industry like construction the liquidated damages would have begun months ago.
I passed this thread around the office where I work - a medium large construction company. The unanimous response was "How the hell can you make money like that? Are software executives all smoking crack or something?"
I wish I could say that this was new, revolutionary technology. But I can't. I first heard about it close to 30 years ago in Scientific American.
But it's cool as hell. Hope it's just the first of many.
...."How can I get a Beowulf cluster of these?"
:-)t ml
To which I answer:
Just follow the links
http://www.nature.com/nsu/020520/020520-11.h
My wife is a programmer for the Portland, OR school district. For quite a while she's been trying to gather the information and courage to push for Linux in her office. Steve Duinn's column and the links and comments on Slashdot have given her the ammunition she needs.
Well, that and the terrible state of school finances in Oregon. The licensing fees she will save by making the switch will pay for a new machine. It's a powerful argument in Oregon where school financing is in dire straits.
Our hats are off to you guys.