I am not a lawyer, but, from the looks of it, neither are you...
While I agree that certain types of surveillance and warrants cannot be effectively served without some sort of forced secrecy (rendering an ISP or telecom provider an accomplice for informing the subject of a wiretap warrant that they are one), the notion that the lack of a law restraining the executive branch in a specific manner leaves the executive free to behave in violation of the constitution is laughable.
First off, 4th amendment.
Secondly, the elastic clause: "To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof."
This, along with the enormous body of legislative and case law between the founding of our country and the present, affords specific powers to the FBI and somewhat clear restrictions on their actions.
Thirdly, use your brain: What good would a constitution be if it served as a subtractive set of only the things that the executive couldn't do? It's clearly, on the face of it, idiotic. The powers and duties of the executive branch are specifically enumerated. You should read Article II, Section 3, Clause 4. This clause regards the caring for the faithful execution of the law, and there's no part in there that says "when not oppressing people." The duties and restrictions of the executive are one and the same. This is something that members of the executive have been willfully neglecting for quite some time.
Any action by the executive that violates the constitutional rights of individuals is a civil rights violation and subject to investigation by... oh.. the FBI... Crap.
I think what he's saying (or at least what I'm saying now) is that you don't necessarily have to have met a very high standard to receive a degree from a number of programs. Similarly, those without degrees can, in fact, be hot shit.
The absolute best and brightest programmers I've worked with have been decorated as follows:
- GED, dropped out of college. - Almost finished college. - BS Math. - BA Music. - PhD Econ, PhD Physics.
That's from brightest down. That's right, the most rock-star coder (and Director/VP/CTO) that I've worked with was a double drop-out. The standard deviation, in my experience, is pretty large. You'll note that there are no CS, EE, or ECE folks on that list (but a few on my top 10). The programmers that I've seen truly excel after CS programs were the sort that I think would have been pretty darn good with or without the formal education.
Closed game consoles have more inertia to the publishing and distribution process, and it is *extremely* rare for a game to be pulled after it has been on the market for a while...
I know that a lot of the venom towards the walled garden takes the position that it's from the user perspective, but the idea of doing speculative development just to have your app blocked (possibly because Apple may be duplicating the behavior in secret) is certainly a bummer.
Buzz Hays, from the Sony 3D Technology Center says that the 3D isn't a problem, just the techniques involved in making it?
Sorry, but what that really means is that the visual vocabulary available to filmmakers using pseudo-3D is limited because of the risk of eye-strain.
Why? Because this isn't actually 3D. It's stereoscopic, but the ability to focus at different depths is not available to the viewer. Depth-of-focus and stereo convergence being in sync is something that our brain learns to do at a very young age (first few years of life). Making 3D films to avoid giving headaches means making films to minimize the breakage of this every-day principle. Artistically, that sucks, and even the best executions of this are going to cause headaches in some.
Every reader here should have called BS as soon as they read where Buzz Hays works. Culver City, for those who don't know, is the home of Sony Pictures. They'll happily sell you on the idea that 3D is totally awesome and totally safe if it means a few more bucks of margin.
The first amendment applies to government interference in free speech. Forcing specific ADA requirements on website presentation is a government restriction on speech.
Whether it be public or private property on which the law applies, it's still the law that we're concerned with.
These companies are providing public access to public web-sites using cables strung over public land subsidized by public money. I can see why they would want to call it private...
That said, the Obama administration played right into the hands of panicked internet regulation doomsday Republicans with their ADA-waving "websites are public places and subject to specific access requirements" talk in the last couple of weeks.
If we're going to talk about amendments, let's talk about the first one.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not vegan or anything, and I have no real issue with, say, eating or wearing squirrels.
I just think that the gag doesn't really take very well. Basically, it's too try-hard to be funny. Additionally, I don't really want to drink my beer out of an animal.
It's not gross because some cute fluffy creature died. It's gross because a beverage is served out of a corpse.
Normally I'm not too put off by much of what anyone does, but the use of actual formerly-alive animals in this little costumed joke is pretty friggin' gross.
Tongue-in-cheek doesn't even begin to describe it.
If someone served up a line of dildos like this, animal rights folks (besides PETA) would be up in arms. That it's beer? That better be some pretty special-tasting beer to warrant such outlandish behavior. That said, $20k jeweled bottles of whiskey are similarly irksome.
Yeah, it's a true problem, but it's a good problem to be able to have.
If you make a codebase truly open for others to use and distribute as they see fit, they may decide to do stupid things to that software and hamstring it for users. That they have the option of doing this is, if you think about it, kind of cool. Handcuffs of the sort that Microsoft is putting on Windows Phone 7 (you must not skin, etc) might seem good for users at first glance, but they might also reduce attractiveness of the platform, adoption, and innovation. For a fledgling platform like Android, this could be a dealbreaker.
Over time, we've seen carriers slowly lose their stranglehold over many facets of your phone, first with little installable applications, now moving onto more open devices like the Nexus One (RIP). If you try and move them more suddenly, like the OpenMoko, you may find the resistance to change too great to overcome. Slow erosion towards the cellular provider becoming more and more just the pipe by which we operate (remember when AOL gave way to ISPs?) is an effective, if somewhat annoying, approach.
Android is more open than iOS in that the market pressures for application openness and full I-can-install-whatever-build-of-the-OS-I-want openness have the chance of being served by a manufacturer that chooses to respond to these market pressures. With the vertically integrated Apple approach to iOS, we have to hope that our little nugget of market pressure to have more open platforms can sway the monolithic controller of the platform. With Android, we merely have to hope that one manufacturer among many looks for a defining competitive advantage, one that can be had with minimal software development effort (i.e. just build and install stock android).
I'll leave it to the peanut gallery to decide whether a move by Apple or one manufacturer among many is more likely.
I imagine that this is why Obama is trying to do this with the FCC (and not congress).
That said, I'm fairly convinced that Julius Genachowski and his crack squad of broadband-all-the-time lawyers and business types have no friggin' clue how the technology works or how to address problems of scale.
Net Neutrality, yes, good. Massive hand-over of wireless spectrum to private wireless providers instead of building up a national infrastructure? Dumb.
Don't forget communication latency. Human-driven robots need to either be semi-autonomous or be slow. At its closest to Earth, you're looking at about six minutes of round-trip latency for Martian control.
Follow the link in my original post. "Muphry's law" is an intentional misspelling of "Murphy's law," and is roughly that criticism of proof-reading or editing will inevitably contain errors.
You are correct. Both the article and the slashdot posting are somewhat misleading (almost intentionally).
I'd expect a disproportionately low number of slashdotters to be fooled by this kind of nonsense.
This is akin to saying that a house could fall on my head today or not. Since there are only two possibilities, there's a 50/50 chance that a house is going to fall on my head today.
That's clearly intuitively wrong, and it's mathematically wrong as well. Similar math teasers (like proving that 1 = 2) have existed for eons. This plays on a common probabilistic mistake, taking the likelihood of some compound situation (two boys) and applying those odds to a situation in which you already have some information determined.
The child you met on the street (boy born on Tuesday) is a coin flip that you've already seen (heads). The child you haven't met is a coin that you're going to flip in the future. The coin flip is 50/50.
No, the grand grand parent was arguing semantics. I just jumped in to suggest that the AGW debate isn't really served by natural vs. anthropogenic, as those aren't really opposites. Once we start down that road, it shuts the door on climate change mitigation until we've determined whether or not we were the cause. Can't we just decide to turn the thermostat down, whether we changed things or not?
On earthquakes being not predictable, chaos and causality junkes (myself included) would refine that by saying that they are predictable, but they are very difficult to predict given the measurements that we currently have.
Are you suggesting that we're not natural? I'd say that we're a part of nature, certainly not alien or above it in some way.
That said, anthropogenic is pretty straight-forward. I'm not trying to wade into the debate about AGW. I just firmly believe that we will make better decisions about our actions if we remember that, regardless of what we do, we are a part of nature, nothing more, nothing less.
I'm saying that, statistically, we can draw inferences from datasets without understanding and isolating the causal and even contributory natures of the system that we are examining. We need to take care to not reach too far in our conclusions, but random control group selection is an absolutely scientific (and reasonable) approach to attempting to experimentally measure the effectiveness of a single differentiating action. And I never said that economists are scientists.
The argument appears to be:
We can create a control group for cloud seeding...
Well, there's this one other thing that *might* be the cause, making it harder to isolate...
That's okay, because we can control for that...
Okay, but there's one more thing...
Look, statistically, we can control for that, and, given a sufficiently sized sample set, for a broad range of variables...
My brain hurts... But there's one more thing...
You're not listening...
Regression is the essence of statistics. Fail to understand it at your own peril. On slashdot, it just makes you look stupid. In the scientific community, failure to understand regression can make you look jobless.
You need to read up on the scientific method (and wikipedia is fine: here). Control groups, as indicated by their name, are statistical instruments that are, by definition, not identical. They can be practically identical, for the purposes of the experiment.
If we were to take your apparent view of science, nothing in the history of scientific inquiry would have been sufficiently proven, as it is highly unlikely that quantum spin characteristics met the burden of having to be identical in the controls of chemical experiments, or that Galileo's balls met the burden of having to be identical except for their mass.
Statistical controls via randomization are an accepted (and fundamentally sound) approach to the reduction of experimental measurement error. Something being very complex doesn't make it unobservably complex. The assertion is so absurd that it is either a troll or a genuine failure to understand the scalability of reason, causality, and the scientific method.
Despite the largely chaotic nature of cloud formations (and, thus, the difficulty in modelling behavior), we know that certain inputs, situations, and characteristics have a higher likelihood to lead to expected behaviors than others. It's how we can have hurricane season, make reasonable predictions about precipitation much of the time, etc.
Additionally, weather prediction a week out is a significantly different problem (having to do with predicting the global weather system instead of a comparatively local one) than rainfall prediction tomorrow.
Statistically, of course it is possible to conduct an experiment with a control group (or groups) and draw statistical inferences about the effects of different approaches to cloud-seeding.
We draw localized inferences from economic datasets of enormous magnitude, with many unrecorded inputs. To suggest that we can't draw reasonable inferences through large-scale statistical studies of cloud-seeding suggests a superstition about complexity and chaos indicative of your needing to finish more than just your meteorology classes before you make decrees about what we, as scientists can't do.
Suggesting that "there is no possible way to do any sort" of anything is typically a mistake. If you start a sentence like that, you should end it early.
You may be unfamiliar with On2 (makers of VP8), formerly The Duck Corporation.
These guys were doing highly-compressed video in the early '90s, and they've been a background player for quite some time (funny enough, just around the lifetime of patents). Google's looking to do a very giving and unifying thing here (not to mention, cost-saving), but they're not doing it with baskets of rainbows and kittens. They no-doubt have a lengthy patent portfolio to draw on (the reason for buying On2).
I never said that we trust Google more than the government. That's a false dichotomy.
The conjugate of A > B is not A < B, it's A <= B.
That said, given the crazy crap that governments on the eastern side of the Atlantic have been up to, mere corporate consumption feels more benign. From Italy's completely broken sense of transferred responsibility with Youtube to Switzerland banning minorettes to the UK's comprehensive surveillance society to France's historical insistence on the adoption of fatally weak encryption (and my family is French, so we can blame their indirect influence), corporations would have to be of the evil-villain variety to be more frightening. And, no, I wouldn't trust the US government to not abuse information either.
So, even though you went and argued against a point that I didn't make, sure, I trust Google more than I trust our governments. That's not what I was saying, but, yeah, I'm there. I'll take an unknown over a known bad any day.
Of course, we could offer to audit the data. I trust me...
Slashdot Mirror
I am not a lawyer, but, from the looks of it, neither are you...
While I agree that certain types of surveillance and warrants cannot be effectively served without some sort of forced secrecy (rendering an ISP or telecom provider an accomplice for informing the subject of a wiretap warrant that they are one), the notion that the lack of a law restraining the executive branch in a specific manner leaves the executive free to behave in violation of the constitution is laughable.
First off, 4th amendment.
Secondly, the elastic clause:
"To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof."
This, along with the enormous body of legislative and case law between the founding of our country and the present, affords specific powers to the FBI and somewhat clear restrictions on their actions.
Thirdly, use your brain:
What good would a constitution be if it served as a subtractive set of only the things that the executive couldn't do? It's clearly, on the face of it, idiotic. The powers and duties of the executive branch are specifically enumerated. You should read Article II, Section 3, Clause 4. This clause regards the caring for the faithful execution of the law, and there's no part in there that says "when not oppressing people." The duties and restrictions of the executive are one and the same. This is something that members of the executive have been willfully neglecting for quite some time.
Any action by the executive that violates the constitutional rights of individuals is a civil rights violation and subject to investigation by... oh.. the FBI... Crap.
I think what he's saying (or at least what I'm saying now) is that you don't necessarily have to have met a very high standard to receive a degree from a number of programs. Similarly, those without degrees can, in fact, be hot shit.
The absolute best and brightest programmers I've worked with have been decorated as follows:
- GED, dropped out of college.
- Almost finished college.
- BS Math.
- BA Music.
- PhD Econ, PhD Physics.
That's from brightest down. That's right, the most rock-star coder (and Director/VP/CTO) that I've worked with was a double drop-out. The standard deviation, in my experience, is pretty large. You'll note that there are no CS, EE, or ECE folks on that list (but a few on my top 10). The programmers that I've seen truly excel after CS programs were the sort that I think would have been pretty darn good with or without the formal education.
Closed game consoles have more inertia to the publishing and distribution process, and it is *extremely* rare for a game to be pulled after it has been on the market for a while...
I know that a lot of the venom towards the walled garden takes the position that it's from the user perspective, but the idea of doing speculative development just to have your app blocked (possibly because Apple may be duplicating the behavior in secret) is certainly a bummer.
Didn't you know that Apple is more secure?
As soon as I saw "computer-free jailbreak, straight from your browser" I thought "oh man.. here we go."
Buzz Hays, from the Sony 3D Technology Center says that the 3D isn't a problem, just the techniques involved in making it?
Sorry, but what that really means is that the visual vocabulary available to filmmakers using pseudo-3D is limited because of the risk of eye-strain.
Why? Because this isn't actually 3D. It's stereoscopic, but the ability to focus at different depths is not available to the viewer. Depth-of-focus and stereo convergence being in sync is something that our brain learns to do at a very young age (first few years of life). Making 3D films to avoid giving headaches means making films to minimize the breakage of this every-day principle. Artistically, that sucks, and even the best executions of this are going to cause headaches in some.
Every reader here should have called BS as soon as they read where Buzz Hays works. Culver City, for those who don't know, is the home of Sony Pictures. They'll happily sell you on the idea that 3D is totally awesome and totally safe if it means a few more bucks of margin.
The first amendment applies to government interference in free speech. Forcing specific ADA requirements on website presentation is a government restriction on speech.
Whether it be public or private property on which the law applies, it's still the law that we're concerned with.
Someone needs to read up on what a common carrier is.
These companies are providing public access to public web-sites using cables strung over public land subsidized by public money. I can see why they would want to call it private...
That said, the Obama administration played right into the hands of panicked internet regulation doomsday Republicans with their ADA-waving "websites are public places and subject to specific access requirements" talk in the last couple of weeks.
If we're going to talk about amendments, let's talk about the first one.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not vegan or anything, and I have no real issue with, say, eating or wearing squirrels.
I just think that the gag doesn't really take very well. Basically, it's too try-hard to be funny. Additionally, I don't really want to drink my beer out of an animal.
It's not gross because some cute fluffy creature died. It's gross because a beverage is served out of a corpse.
Normally I'm not too put off by much of what anyone does, but the use of actual formerly-alive animals in this little costumed joke is pretty friggin' gross.
Tongue-in-cheek doesn't even begin to describe it.
If someone served up a line of dildos like this, animal rights folks (besides PETA) would be up in arms. That it's beer? That better be some pretty special-tasting beer to warrant such outlandish behavior. That said, $20k jeweled bottles of whiskey are similarly irksome.
Yeah, it's a true problem, but it's a good problem to be able to have.
If you make a codebase truly open for others to use and distribute as they see fit, they may decide to do stupid things to that software and hamstring it for users. That they have the option of doing this is, if you think about it, kind of cool. Handcuffs of the sort that Microsoft is putting on Windows Phone 7 (you must not skin, etc) might seem good for users at first glance, but they might also reduce attractiveness of the platform, adoption, and innovation. For a fledgling platform like Android, this could be a dealbreaker.
Over time, we've seen carriers slowly lose their stranglehold over many facets of your phone, first with little installable applications, now moving onto more open devices like the Nexus One (RIP). If you try and move them more suddenly, like the OpenMoko, you may find the resistance to change too great to overcome. Slow erosion towards the cellular provider becoming more and more just the pipe by which we operate (remember when AOL gave way to ISPs?) is an effective, if somewhat annoying, approach.
Android is more open than iOS in that the market pressures for application openness and full I-can-install-whatever-build-of-the-OS-I-want openness have the chance of being served by a manufacturer that chooses to respond to these market pressures. With the vertically integrated Apple approach to iOS, we have to hope that our little nugget of market pressure to have more open platforms can sway the monolithic controller of the platform. With Android, we merely have to hope that one manufacturer among many looks for a defining competitive advantage, one that can be had with minimal software development effort (i.e. just build and install stock android).
I'll leave it to the peanut gallery to decide whether a move by Apple or one manufacturer among many is more likely.
I imagine that this is why Obama is trying to do this with the FCC (and not congress).
That said, I'm fairly convinced that Julius Genachowski and his crack squad of broadband-all-the-time lawyers and business types have no friggin' clue how the technology works or how to address problems of scale.
Net Neutrality, yes, good. Massive hand-over of wireless spectrum to private wireless providers instead of building up a national infrastructure? Dumb.
Don't forget communication latency. Human-driven robots need to either be semi-autonomous or be slow. At its closest to Earth, you're looking at about six minutes of round-trip latency for Martian control.
Follow the link in my original post. "Muphry's law" is an intentional misspelling of "Murphy's law," and is roughly that criticism of proof-reading or editing will inevitably contain errors.
That is such a beautiful example of Muphry's law.
Though your post could have benefitted from a gaffe or two.
You are correct. Both the article and the slashdot posting are somewhat misleading (almost intentionally).
I'd expect a disproportionately low number of slashdotters to be fooled by this kind of nonsense.
This is akin to saying that a house could fall on my head today or not. Since there are only two possibilities, there's a 50/50 chance that a house is going to fall on my head today.
That's clearly intuitively wrong, and it's mathematically wrong as well. Similar math teasers (like proving that 1 = 2) have existed for eons. This plays on a common probabilistic mistake, taking the likelihood of some compound situation (two boys) and applying those odds to a situation in which you already have some information determined.
The child you met on the street (boy born on Tuesday) is a coin flip that you've already seen (heads). The child you haven't met is a coin that you're going to flip in the future. The coin flip is 50/50.
Who here clicked on the link and then imagined their sweating web admin saying "It's a trap!"
No one ever expects the slashdot site ignition...
No, the grand grand parent was arguing semantics. I just jumped in to suggest that the AGW debate isn't really served by natural vs. anthropogenic, as those aren't really opposites. Once we start down that road, it shuts the door on climate change mitigation until we've determined whether or not we were the cause. Can't we just decide to turn the thermostat down, whether we changed things or not?
On earthquakes being not predictable, chaos and causality junkes (myself included) would refine that by saying that they are predictable, but they are very difficult to predict given the measurements that we currently have.
Are you suggesting that we're not natural? I'd say that we're a part of nature, certainly not alien or above it in some way.
That said, anthropogenic is pretty straight-forward. I'm not trying to wade into the debate about AGW. I just firmly believe that we will make better decisions about our actions if we remember that, regardless of what we do, we are a part of nature, nothing more, nothing less.
I'm saying that, statistically, we can draw inferences from datasets without understanding and isolating the causal and even contributory natures of the system that we are examining. We need to take care to not reach too far in our conclusions, but random control group selection is an absolutely scientific (and reasonable) approach to attempting to experimentally measure the effectiveness of a single differentiating action. And I never said that economists are scientists.
The argument appears to be:
We can create a control group for cloud seeding...
Well, there's this one other thing that *might* be the cause, making it harder to isolate...
That's okay, because we can control for that...
Okay, but there's one more thing...
Look, statistically, we can control for that, and, given a sufficiently sized sample set, for a broad range of variables...
My brain hurts... But there's one more thing...
You're not listening...
Regression is the essence of statistics. Fail to understand it at your own peril. On slashdot, it just makes you look stupid. In the scientific community, failure to understand regression can make you look jobless.
You need to read up on the scientific method (and wikipedia is fine: here). Control groups, as indicated by their name, are statistical instruments that are, by definition, not identical. They can be practically identical, for the purposes of the experiment.
If we were to take your apparent view of science, nothing in the history of scientific inquiry would have been sufficiently proven, as it is highly unlikely that quantum spin characteristics met the burden of having to be identical in the controls of chemical experiments, or that Galileo's balls met the burden of having to be identical except for their mass.
Read up on controls here...
Statistical controls via randomization are an accepted (and fundamentally sound) approach to the reduction of experimental measurement error. Something being very complex doesn't make it unobservably complex. The assertion is so absurd that it is either a troll or a genuine failure to understand the scalability of reason, causality, and the scientific method.
Despite the largely chaotic nature of cloud formations (and, thus, the difficulty in modelling behavior), we know that certain inputs, situations, and characteristics have a higher likelihood to lead to expected behaviors than others. It's how we can have hurricane season, make reasonable predictions about precipitation much of the time, etc.
Additionally, weather prediction a week out is a significantly different problem (having to do with predicting the global weather system instead of a comparatively local one) than rainfall prediction tomorrow.
Statistically, of course it is possible to conduct an experiment with a control group (or groups) and draw statistical inferences about the effects of different approaches to cloud-seeding.
We draw localized inferences from economic datasets of enormous magnitude, with many unrecorded inputs. To suggest that we can't draw reasonable inferences through large-scale statistical studies of cloud-seeding suggests a superstition about complexity and chaos indicative of your needing to finish more than just your meteorology classes before you make decrees about what we, as scientists can't do.
Suggesting that "there is no possible way to do any sort" of anything is typically a mistake. If you start a sentence like that, you should end it early.
That adds a wasteful step.
Use fiber optics... duh.
You may be unfamiliar with On2 (makers of VP8), formerly The Duck Corporation.
These guys were doing highly-compressed video in the early '90s, and they've been a background player for quite some time (funny enough, just around the lifetime of patents). Google's looking to do a very giving and unifying thing here (not to mention, cost-saving), but they're not doing it with baskets of rainbows and kittens. They no-doubt have a lengthy patent portfolio to draw on (the reason for buying On2).
News flash: Google also has lawyers.
Stock up on popcorn...
I was hoping that someone would see it through the same scientific lens.
High-five for you, nerd.
I never said that we trust Google more than the government. That's a false dichotomy.
The conjugate of A > B is not A < B, it's A <= B.
That said, given the crazy crap that governments on the eastern side of the Atlantic have been up to, mere corporate consumption feels more benign. From Italy's completely broken sense of transferred responsibility with Youtube to Switzerland banning minorettes to the UK's comprehensive surveillance society to France's historical insistence on the adoption of fatally weak encryption (and my family is French, so we can blame their indirect influence), corporations would have to be of the evil-villain variety to be more frightening. And, no, I wouldn't trust the US government to not abuse information either.
So, even though you went and argued against a point that I didn't make, sure, I trust Google more than I trust our governments. That's not what I was saying, but, yeah, I'm there. I'll take an unknown over a known bad any day.
Of course, we could offer to audit the data. I trust me...