"without specifying any important parameters such as number of computers or environment in which they are used"
on laptop and desktop computers
"but noting that some were laptop and some were desktop because that makes the result sound a little more convincing"
in the U.S. per year
Encryption is a lot more expensive in Scotland. They can always look up yer kilt and ken yer keys!
was $235,
If this were a porn moneyshot, TFA author would now be panning away from the dick and squirting liquid soap everywhere, seemingly drenching the victim.
while the cost savings from reduced data breach exposure was $4,650.
Or $100,000, or life imprisonment, depending on your particular situation. Statistics: on average, not very useful.
Questions like that are good to ask those who believe in some omnipotent god, and are good to offer to militant atheists who think that god can be disproven by logic.
It may help both to accept that, if such god exists, it must exist outside of logic.
Training is specific to an individual task or set of tasks while education is broader and has more to do with cultivating independent thought.
So training is bad education? Every talent can be reduced to (possibly multiple simultaneous) walks of a graph, wisely choosing from a set of alternatives at each node.
In theory, you could train someone to just detect earthquakes given a set of input data (from seismometers and such) and leave them worthless at anything else geology-related.
True. But it's an arbitrary human decision to categorise various things under "geology", so it's equally arbitrary to suggest that having a general knowledge of "geology" is education while only knowing one subset is "training". The training might in fact be regarded as education stimulating statistical thought.
It's no different from training to do a sport
On the contrary, some (not all!) sports played at high level require a sharp mind: to analyse the field, to predict, to respond at the right moment, etc. It is the cunning, unpredictable players who will shine. Sportspeople also have to be physically fit and nerds remember the jocks at school who bullied them, so may assume that sports aren't really for the mentally fit.
Education is more meta and has more to do with the effective use of training [...]. From a practical standpoint, an educated person can effectively organize their own training to great effect as well as (hopefully) organizing the training of others into a cohesive whole
OK, but good training encourages self-improvement. Back to the tree-walk, the organisation of learning ("learning how to learn") is itself a talent which can be learned. Looking at education this way, is it not just another subject to be trained? Components of this training are part of all good "training"/"education" in any field.
The "class-obsession" you talk about has more to do with how training and education are used in practice.
It's true that the rich have better access to education/training, as they have better access to anything. I maintain that "training" is used in order to denigrate the education of certain classes. I can understand the distinction between, say, a more "vocational" education and a more "academic" education, where the former involves a different skillset. But I think it's a mistake to suggest that they're not both education. Indeed, what's happened in the UK - with everything turning into a University and everything becoming a degree - is the result of one group attempting to tilt at this windmill, and a cynical Tory party responding to it in a self-serving manner. "Let's educate everyone!" pretended Thatcher. But most people were already being educated. Now, in an attempt to make one technique fit all, far fewer are receiving an education.
In egalitarian societies, a real education is additionally offered to the brightest non-upper class
In an egalitarian society, there is certainly no "upper class" from which to differentiate a "non-upper class", and education is not only offered to the bright.
as weak AI becomes smarter and more common
This is only a transitional step to creating AI more intelligent than humans, surely? If AI is a threat then it is a threat to everyone. You may say that at some point AI becomes strong enough to deserve rights, but humans are great at denying rights to things which look sufficiently different.
Since a large percentage of the populace is only marginally educated,
As someone who went to an uppity private school on scholarship, I'd have to agree: the people around me were only marginally educated. Boarding school was training, if you like, in saying the right things to the right people.
this does not bode well.
In the long term, our economic system does not bode well. Although his thoughts about alternatives were somewhat(!) unscientific, Marx's predictions about capitalism were sound and have mostly been realised.
I think you are confusing between particular radio waves or particular stones cut in a particular way, and the ability to produce a particular radio wave or create a particular cut.
Regulation is necessary because there is no alternative spectrum if your scheme doesn't work out. Meanwhile it doesn't matter if some group of dairy farmers don't want to provide milk to Seattle any more - someone new without the anti-Seattle thing can always step in and produce.
Military competition between governments is very different from the competition of a capitalist market. Anyway, key components of the modern Internet were produced through government-funded academia - Berners-Lee always comes to mind, his motivation having been to assist cooperation.
The rest of your post is not coherent to me, sorry. I'm not sure what you mean by "singular, central plan" - there are various authorities responsible for managing various parts of the radio spectrum, and most of them continually review their allocations in the light of the interests they serve. Long-term licences in the UK - the nearest we have to an absolute sell-off - have resulted in potential natural monopolies becoming realised as actual monopolies, e.g. Arqiva owning almost all the digital TV and radio broadcast network and in the radio case sticking with the lame, FM-trailing DAB.
Why should property rights suddenly be suspended for beaches?
Property rights are the principles which result in the protections offered by society to allow you to enjoy your property. They do not imply the potential to own everything.
there has never been an instance observed of a central authority doing better than a free competition.
This one is pointless to argue against as-is because it inevitably ends up with a no true Scotsman fallacy whenever a counterexample is put forward ("ah, but that wasn't truly free competition!"). But it is productive to compare systems before and after significant state intervention, e.g. the National Health Service in the UK, or the Internet vs. half a dozen competing private internetwork providers pre-1995, to see that regulated authorities sometimes provide something much better.
Haircuts services are one commodity. Frequencies are another.
No, that's not how a "commodity" tends to be defined. A commodity is something which is produced or sourced. In the narrowest definition, it's what's produced, i.e. goods or services. In the "commodities market" sense, it encompasses raw materials, foods and even electricity. Availability of a natural resource cannot be treated like something which is produced or sourced.
Indeed if someone were to be sold a true range of frequency,
To sell something, you have to have a legitimate owner. Unless the government is the default owner of everything, there is no right in the first place to sell some range of frequencies. You may offer some argument based on who has done work to make something available, but the first man to mine some coal does not have a claim to all the coalmines in the world (to which the same mining technique can be applied). At best, he has a patent on the mining technique - just as radio equipment engineers may have secured patents on various stages of the transceiver, or a particular modulation method.
then they'd have an incentive to invest in technology that increased the accuracy of receivers.
Maybe. There is no guarantee that "owners" of various bandwidths would use them in a way which benefits the majority. There is no guarantee that one single firm doesn't end up buying them all up. A natural monopoly cannot be overcome by simply having some other guy create a competing good/service.
Of course we have more radio waves available, in an economic sense, than we did in the past. Technology improves.
We have more efficient usage of finite useful bandwidth (sometimes!). But that's not an argument for anything - especially since some of the most efficient long-distance protocols were created by public enterprise (academic and military) and by radio amateurs.
There's no exclusivity like licensure. Appropriate the spectrum and it will be traded much more freely.
"will" = "might". I see no reason to believe that traded spectrum is going to be used more efficiently than spectrum managed at various levels. It's not like some other guy can just create a competing spectrum - and there's the rub.
Radio technology as humans can use it was made by people.
The tech is not the same as the airwaves, though. Shipbuilders or deep-sea cable layers do not buy the oceans. Airplane builders do not buy out the skies. And see above re legitimate sale.
There will be a lot more drive to improve and expand technology when the pieces belong to someone.
Alternatively, there may be no drive because a group of consolidated owners don't have to worry about competition any more.
Competitive markets just happen to be the best thing we know of to create prosperity across the board.
They work well sometimes. Not everything is a nail. Absolutism is the burden every intelligent young person has to lift from their shoulders.
Indeed, the argument must always be based on technical need - and, where there are competing providers, on the basis of equitable access.
In practice and to take a physical counterpart, Ofcom has been slowly but surely requiring BT (the ex-state and still vaguely regulated UK telecoms provider) to allow competing companies to make use of its ducts and poles. Where natural monopolies are otherwise inevitable, you require physical or technical sharing of resources. That certainly doesn't mean that other providers get free access, but that no company can profit merely from having a natural monopoly.
What is need? I need a haircut - in fact I need one every week, as long as someone else is paying.
In what sense is the cutting of your hair based on the allocation of licences to exploitation of natural resources?
The radio ranges are not invaluable.
Yes they are. They're not the product of man's mind. You can't create more frequencies by re-investing your profits.
In fact, lots of people have gotten rich by getting politicians to tip the rules in their favor, allowing them to get a license while excluding others.
There's the problem - exclusive access.
They have a particular value, which should be set by the highest bidder.
You only get to put stuff you own up for bidding. This is either something you create or something that has been freely traded after being created by something else. The spectrum comes under neither of those categories. A free market, at least, does not give an unfair advantage to people who happened to have some amount of money available when a government felt in the mood to give exclusive rights to something.
Let the market operate like it always has when people have let it.
Innovate; consolidate; stagnate; profiteer?
Yes, there's a limited amount of wave lengths. There's a limited amount of everything.
And you have the rights to the limited fruits of your limited labour. IOW, no-one should be able to tell you that they own what you make.
What part of, say, a 100kHz band at 14MHz was the result of anyone's work?
Privately allocating the radio spectrum is only marginally more stupid than privately allocating land. It's a shared resource and should really be allocated according to need rather than on the basis of bidding wars / trade / etc. In particular, it is absurd that individual private companies obtain exclusive access to invaluable ranges where either multiplexing could occur.
Pinterest, Zynga, Yelp, Square, Twitter, and Salesforce.com are some of the more notable tech companies
Pinterest, Zynga - please, Sir, can I have a share of the social media pie?. Yelp - a phone book - bravo, new world. Square - because it's not already too easy to get people spending money. Twitter - RSS for the ADHD-sufferer. Salesforce - because your clients' data's not worth shit.
more than 500 new start-up companies like Kickstarter and Tumblr
Kickstarter - taking out the middleman (hello, I'm your new middleman) Tumblr - absolutely no point whatsoever.
gigantic Google satellite in the old Port Authority Building
What represented a country which actually made things now houses the world's largest ad broker.
Anyone who still takes capitalism seriously is an idiot.
1) "You have an expectation of" are cowardly weasel words for "I think you should have".
2) How are "in public" and "private space" defined? Use definitions which come down to something other than "space where you do not / do have an expectation of privacy".
3) Most material ends up being published from what I think you'd call "private space" - even following someone around inevitably shows them on "private" grounds.
4) What is so special about some kinds of space that you should not have any privacy protection there? In particular, why can I follow your daughter with a remote control car and take upskirt photos? Why am I allowed to place cameras in drains so every woman passing over, including your daughter, provides a nice panty shot for me to publish? Give a sound moral argument.
So what you're saying is that it's OK that the technology may be deployed within a decade to answer AC's question without your getting a say in the matter, but when he (more honestly) asks you directly then it's not his "damn business"?
I like to apply the "your daughter in the bathroom" test. If you're OK with any information being processed for whatever purpose as long as it reaches public space, then you're OK with my using an infrared/whatever camera and sensitive microphone from the street to record and rebroadcast your daughter when she is in the bathroom.
'cos it's none of my damn business, but I happened to be in the street picking up this data.
No-one who identifies himself as a rockstar developer is a rockstar developer, and no good developer would call himself a rockstar. The only thing certain is that in any article about "rockstar developers", a few dozen people will wander in and complain that the only reason the world isn't perfect is because rockstars like them just aren't looked after well enough.
So, for all of you thinking about making this claim: if you're so fucking great, go out and start your own business and rewrite every single software product in your own image. Be the rockstar you think you are, identify everyone's desires, and out-compete every other firm on the planet. Internet capitalism is more meritocratic than most forms of capitalism - if you write a killer operating system or office suite or CRM system or time&billing app or whatever, people will take notice. So team up with as many people as your ego will allow (you're a rockstar so you already have considerable savings) and go get 'em, tiger!
Slashdot Mirror
'After doing all of the math,
"After applying some simplistic formula"
Ponemon
"the guy promoting his firm with this /. article"
found that the cost of FDE
"without specifying any important parameters such as number of computers or environment in which they are used"
on laptop and desktop computers
"but noting that some were laptop and some were desktop because that makes the result sound a little more convincing"
in the U.S. per year
Encryption is a lot more expensive in Scotland. They can always look up yer kilt and ken yer keys!
was $235,
If this were a porn moneyshot, TFA author would now be panning away from the dick and squirting liquid soap everywhere, seemingly drenching the victim.
while the cost savings from reduced data breach exposure was $4,650.
Or $100,000, or life imprisonment, depending on your particular situation. Statistics: on average, not very useful.
Questions like that are good to ask those who believe in some omnipotent god, and are good to offer to militant atheists who think that god can be disproven by logic.
It may help both to accept that, if such god exists, it must exist outside of logic.
Thanks for your response.
Training is specific to an individual task or set of tasks while education is broader and has more to do with cultivating independent thought.
So training is bad education? Every talent can be reduced to (possibly multiple simultaneous) walks of a graph, wisely choosing from a set of alternatives at each node.
In theory, you could train someone to just detect earthquakes given a set of input data (from seismometers and such) and leave them worthless at anything else geology-related.
True. But it's an arbitrary human decision to categorise various things under "geology", so it's equally arbitrary to suggest that having a general knowledge of "geology" is education while only knowing one subset is "training". The training might in fact be regarded as education stimulating statistical thought.
It's no different from training to do a sport
On the contrary, some (not all!) sports played at high level require a sharp mind: to analyse the field, to predict, to respond at the right moment, etc. It is the cunning, unpredictable players who will shine. Sportspeople also have to be physically fit and nerds remember the jocks at school who bullied them, so may assume that sports aren't really for the mentally fit.
Education is more meta and has more to do with the effective use of training [...]. From a practical standpoint, an educated person can effectively organize their own training to great effect as well as (hopefully) organizing the training of others into a cohesive whole
OK, but good training encourages self-improvement. Back to the tree-walk, the organisation of learning ("learning how to learn") is itself a talent which can be learned. Looking at education this way, is it not just another subject to be trained? Components of this training are part of all good "training"/"education" in any field.
The "class-obsession" you talk about has more to do with how training and education are used in practice.
It's true that the rich have better access to education/training, as they have better access to anything. I maintain that "training" is used in order to denigrate the education of certain classes. I can understand the distinction between, say, a more "vocational" education and a more "academic" education, where the former involves a different skillset. But I think it's a mistake to suggest that they're not both education. Indeed, what's happened in the UK - with everything turning into a University and everything becoming a degree - is the result of one group attempting to tilt at this windmill, and a cynical Tory party responding to it in a self-serving manner. "Let's educate everyone!" pretended Thatcher. But most people were already being educated. Now, in an attempt to make one technique fit all, far fewer are receiving an education.
In egalitarian societies, a real education is additionally offered to the brightest non-upper class
In an egalitarian society, there is certainly no "upper class" from which to differentiate a "non-upper class", and education is not only offered to the bright.
as weak AI becomes smarter and more common
This is only a transitional step to creating AI more intelligent than humans, surely? If AI is a threat then it is a threat to everyone. You may say that at some point AI becomes strong enough to deserve rights, but humans are great at denying rights to things which look sufficiently different.
Since a large percentage of the populace is only marginally educated,
As someone who went to an uppity private school on scholarship, I'd have to agree: the people around me were only marginally educated. Boarding school was training, if you like, in saying the right things to the right people.
this does not bode well.
In the long term, our economic system does not bode well. Although his thoughts about alternatives were somewhat(!) unscientific, Marx's predictions about capitalism were sound and have mostly been realised.
Thank you, Cap'n Obvious.
I ain't goin' in no cave.
"Training" is just a class-obsessed synonym for "education".
And the lack of hyphen between "USGS" and "trained" should help resolve the typically awful Slashdot proofreading.
...praised for tweeting near death experience!
(Medics arrive 5 minutes later, revive friend.)
News at 11.
"Programming in PHP is not full blooded software development"
Whether that sentence is factually correct is not a matter for discussion though.
FTFY.
I think you are confusing between particular radio waves or particular stones cut in a particular way, and the ability to produce a particular radio wave or create a particular cut.
Regulation is necessary because there is no alternative spectrum if your scheme doesn't work out. Meanwhile it doesn't matter if some group of dairy farmers don't want to provide milk to Seattle any more - someone new without the anti-Seattle thing can always step in and produce.
Military competition between governments is very different from the competition of a capitalist market. Anyway, key components of the modern Internet were produced through government-funded academia - Berners-Lee always comes to mind, his motivation having been to assist cooperation.
The rest of your post is not coherent to me, sorry. I'm not sure what you mean by "singular, central plan" - there are various authorities responsible for managing various parts of the radio spectrum, and most of them continually review their allocations in the light of the interests they serve. Long-term licences in the UK - the nearest we have to an absolute sell-off - have resulted in potential natural monopolies becoming realised as actual monopolies, e.g. Arqiva owning almost all the digital TV and radio broadcast network and in the radio case sticking with the lame, FM-trailing DAB.
Why should property rights suddenly be suspended for beaches?
Property rights are the principles which result in the protections offered by society to allow you to enjoy your property. They do not imply the potential to own everything.
there has never been an instance observed of a central authority doing better than a free competition.
This one is pointless to argue against as-is because it inevitably ends up with a no true Scotsman fallacy whenever a counterexample is put forward ("ah, but that wasn't truly free competition!"). But it is productive to compare systems before and after significant state intervention, e.g. the National Health Service in the UK, or the Internet vs. half a dozen competing private internetwork providers pre-1995, to see that regulated authorities sometimes provide something much better.
Haircuts services are one commodity. Frequencies are another.
No, that's not how a "commodity" tends to be defined. A commodity is something which is produced or sourced. In the narrowest definition, it's what's produced, i.e. goods or services. In the "commodities market" sense, it encompasses raw materials, foods and even electricity. Availability of a natural resource cannot be treated like something which is produced or sourced.
Indeed if someone were to be sold a true range of frequency,
To sell something, you have to have a legitimate owner. Unless the government is the default owner of everything, there is no right in the first place to sell some range of frequencies. You may offer some argument based on who has done work to make something available, but the first man to mine some coal does not have a claim to all the coalmines in the world (to which the same mining technique can be applied). At best, he has a patent on the mining technique - just as radio equipment engineers may have secured patents on various stages of the transceiver, or a particular modulation method.
then they'd have an incentive to invest in technology that increased the accuracy of receivers.
Maybe. There is no guarantee that "owners" of various bandwidths would use them in a way which benefits the majority. There is no guarantee that one single firm doesn't end up buying them all up. A natural monopoly cannot be overcome by simply having some other guy create a competing good/service.
Of course we have more radio waves available, in an economic sense, than we did in the past. Technology improves.
We have more efficient usage of finite useful bandwidth (sometimes!). But that's not an argument for anything - especially since some of the most efficient long-distance protocols were created by public enterprise (academic and military) and by radio amateurs.
There's no exclusivity like licensure. Appropriate the spectrum and it will be traded much more freely.
"will" = "might". I see no reason to believe that traded spectrum is going to be used more efficiently than spectrum managed at various levels. It's not like some other guy can just create a competing spectrum - and there's the rub.
Radio technology as humans can use it was made by people.
The tech is not the same as the airwaves, though. Shipbuilders or deep-sea cable layers do not buy the oceans. Airplane builders do not buy out the skies. And see above re legitimate sale.
There will be a lot more drive to improve and expand technology when the pieces belong to someone.
Alternatively, there may be no drive because a group of consolidated owners don't have to worry about competition any more.
Competitive markets just happen to be the best thing we know of to create prosperity across the board.
They work well sometimes. Not everything is a nail. Absolutism is the burden every intelligent young person has to lift from their shoulders.
Indeed, the argument must always be based on technical need - and, where there are competing providers, on the basis of equitable access.
In practice and to take a physical counterpart, Ofcom has been slowly but surely requiring BT (the ex-state and still vaguely regulated UK telecoms provider) to allow competing companies to make use of its ducts and poles. Where natural monopolies are otherwise inevitable, you require physical or technical sharing of resources. That certainly doesn't mean that other providers get free access, but that no company can profit merely from having a natural monopoly.
What is need? I need a haircut - in fact I need one every week, as long as someone else is paying.
In what sense is the cutting of your hair based on the allocation of licences to exploitation of natural resources?
The radio ranges are not invaluable.
Yes they are. They're not the product of man's mind. You can't create more frequencies by re-investing your profits.
In fact, lots of people have gotten rich by getting politicians to tip the rules in their favor, allowing them to get a license while excluding others.
There's the problem - exclusive access.
They have a particular value, which should be set by the highest bidder.
You only get to put stuff you own up for bidding. This is either something you create or something that has been freely traded after being created by something else. The spectrum comes under neither of those categories. A free market, at least, does not give an unfair advantage to people who happened to have some amount of money available when a government felt in the mood to give exclusive rights to something.
Let the market operate like it always has when people have let it.
Innovate; consolidate; stagnate; profiteer?
Yes, there's a limited amount of wave lengths. There's a limited amount of everything.
And you have the rights to the limited fruits of your limited labour. IOW, no-one should be able to tell you that they own what you make.
What part of, say, a 100kHz band at 14MHz was the result of anyone's work?
A power vacuum is always filled.
The TP knows the value of libertarianism in growing the partnership between corporation and state.
Privately allocating the radio spectrum is only marginally more stupid than privately allocating land. It's a shared resource and should really be allocated according to need rather than on the basis of bidding wars / trade / etc. In particular, it is absurd that individual private companies obtain exclusive access to invaluable ranges where either multiplexing could occur.
To the rest of the world, the democrats and the republicans are right wing, and libertarians are cuckoo.
(Except perhaps to the UK, which has become so right wing in the past couple of decades that it has ended up failing almost as hard as America.)
That you think that libertarians aren't part and parcel of the GOP shows that you really don't understand libertarianism.
Yes and the courts in East Germany also defined where you have a "reasonable expectation" of privacy.
I'm looking for a moral argument, not a layman's restatement of the law.
Unfortunately, these sorts of results are not usually confirmed independently, you dalliant goatherder.
Pinterest, Zynga, Yelp, Square, Twitter, and Salesforce.com are some of the more notable tech companies
Pinterest, Zynga - please, Sir, can I have a share of the social media pie?.
Yelp - a phone book - bravo, new world.
Square - because it's not already too easy to get people spending money.
Twitter - RSS for the ADHD-sufferer.
Salesforce - because your clients' data's not worth shit.
more than 500 new start-up companies like Kickstarter and Tumblr
Kickstarter - taking out the middleman (hello, I'm your new middleman)
Tumblr - absolutely no point whatsoever.
gigantic Google satellite in the old Port Authority Building
What represented a country which actually made things now houses the world's largest ad broker.
Anyone who still takes capitalism seriously is an idiot.
The great thing about all these discoveries so far far away is that they're really hard to confirm/falsify.
Oh, the building blocks of life - how exciting! This could mean.. uh... that we need more grant money, please! Work harder, proles!
1) "You have an expectation of" are cowardly weasel words for "I think you should have".
2) How are "in public" and "private space" defined? Use definitions which come down to something other than "space where you do not / do have an expectation of privacy".
3) Most material ends up being published from what I think you'd call "private space" - even following someone around inevitably shows them on "private" grounds.
4) What is so special about some kinds of space that you should not have any privacy protection there? In particular, why can I follow your daughter with a remote control car and take upskirt photos? Why am I allowed to place cameras in drains so every woman passing over, including your daughter, provides a nice panty shot for me to publish? Give a sound moral argument.
So what you're saying is that it's OK that the technology may be deployed within a decade to answer AC's question without your getting a say in the matter, but when he (more honestly) asks you directly then it's not his "damn business"?
I like to apply the "your daughter in the bathroom" test. If you're OK with any information being processed for whatever purpose as long as it reaches public space, then you're OK with my using an infrared/whatever camera and sensitive microphone from the street to record and rebroadcast your daughter when she is in the bathroom.
'cos it's none of my damn business, but I happened to be in the street picking up this data.
No-one who identifies himself as a rockstar developer is a rockstar developer, and no good developer would call himself a rockstar. The only thing certain is that in any article about "rockstar developers", a few dozen people will wander in and complain that the only reason the world isn't perfect is because rockstars like them just aren't looked after well enough.
So, for all of you thinking about making this claim: if you're so fucking great, go out and start your own business and rewrite every single software product in your own image. Be the rockstar you think you are, identify everyone's desires, and out-compete every other firm on the planet. Internet capitalism is more meritocratic than most forms of capitalism - if you write a killer operating system or office suite or CRM system or time&billing app or whatever, people will take notice. So team up with as many people as your ego will allow (you're a rockstar so you already have considerable savings) and go get 'em, tiger!
Also, afk now and I probably won't be reading your response. I can only procrastinate so much. Thanks for taking up my time! ;-)