Crime's like any other job: the high-paying, less risky jobs all require tons of skill and training, or family connections. If you haven't got a crime education or a crime pedigree, your only choices are super high-risk jobs like mugging or super low-paying jobs like corner drug sales.
Crime rule #1: If you're going to do crime, don't do crime with anyone you haven't known since high school. Doing crime with random strangers over the Internet is just fcking stupid.
Yes, but. This isn't entirely a binary scientific question. If the question were "are open-access journals worse than traditional journals?", you'd obviously need a control. But "Is the peer review process at open-access journals acceptable?" is not a scientific question, but one of values and personal preference. Most people would decide that a 50% failure rate is not acceptable, control or no control.
Now, we're all *very* curious to know whether traditional journals fare better than open ones, and Science is showing bias and intellectual dishonesty by avoiding that question, BUT that doesn't mean that this study has no value.
The problem is that serious decisions are made by people who have no idea which journals are top quality. Bad tenure decisions, bad engineering choices, and god forbid bad medical decisions are being made daily on the basis of nothing more than "hey, the European Journal of Chemistry sounds legit."
In hindsight, Rockstar probably shouldn't have decided to split the costs of a datacenter with healthcare.gov.
I hear they're having some weird server issues, too. GTA players are signing up for the bronze healthcare plan, hoping that if they do well enough on it the game will bump them up to silver or gold. And uninsured people are signing up for catastrophic care plans that teleport them to the nearest hospital and take away their guns when they get hurt.
Let me tell all of you from outside the U.S. that our government's excuse "hey, we're only spying on foreigners, not Americans" would be disgusting even if it weren't a pack of lies.
Who are you to try to censor what people should read and in what order. Everybody learns differently, there is no one textbook or method to rule them all.
Not censorship, just some advice from someone who does this professionally. Maybe you're different, go ahead and give the Feynman lectures a shot. But don't say I didn't tell you so.
Besides, even if you dont 'get' what Feynmann says first go, you can still pick up on the infectious enthusiasm he has for his subject.
Feynman would be horrified at the idea, but if that's your goal you can get it from other Feynman works. "Surely you're joking", for example. Or his short book of lectures on quantum electrodynamics, which is no more difficult than Lectures on Physics, but much more rewarding and better for impressing the ladies (or gentlemen, if you prefer.)
You do realize that the lectures were used to teach physics to undergraduate freshman at Caltech?
Yes. Feynman himself admitted that that class did not go well, and those students were some of the brightest minds in the country (compliment intended).
Hi. I teach undergraduate physics. If you're a clever high school or early college student interested in physics, you may have heard of Feynman, and you may have heard physics people give rave reviews of the Feynman lectures. And hey, he intended these lectures as a first-year college physics course, so that's perfect for you, right?
Wrong. This is not the right place to start learning physics. Feynman has some beautiful insights about how introductory physics concepts connect to "real" modern physics, and a way of cutting through the red tape to elegantly explain concepts in ways that make experienced physicists drool. But that's not what you need. You need the red tape. You need to learn to apply concepts to real situations, you need to get buried in the algebra, trig and calculus and dig your way back out again. Feynman won't help you about that.
Feynman's Lectures on Physics represent how an experienced modern physicist would teach introductory physics to a roomful of other professional physicists. Feynman was a genius, but his lectures are designed to impress, not to teach. You should absolutely read it, and you will love it, later in your career. But start with a more traditional textbook.
There's a major design problem here: what happens when the plate has no cell reception? * If it keeps displaying the plate number, then a car thief, murderer, or whatever can cover the plate with a transparent conductive film to create a Faraday cage, and keep on driving. * If it automatically switches off, or changes to read "NO SIGNAL" or something, then every law-abiding citizen in a cell coverage hole will be driving around with no license plate.
Also, there are some technology issues with the display. License plates are not just pieces of painted metal: they have retro-reflective glass spheres embedded in them so that they're visible in headlights. E-ink displays use some clever optical tricks that I think won't work with retroreflective coatings.
The summary pushes this as a way to make plate readers even worse, but really smart plates are kind of the opposite of plate readers, and each makes the other less useful. You can either make the plates smart so critical data can be read by "dumb" human readers, or you can make the readers smart enough to read critical info from dumb plates. The "STOLEN" message can be e-printed on the plate, or it can pop up on the police cruiser's screen as the car drives by. Doing both is redundant.
The main difference is that an e-ink plate can be read by people who aren't cops, while the plate reader can give a lot more information to the cops, whether you're breaking the law or not. If "neither" is not an option, smart plates come out ahead on civil liberties grounds. But see my post below on technical problems.
I teach college physics: my students use both iPads and TI calculators. But almost none of them use the programming features on either the calculator or the iPad. It's a rare student who has a creative spirit that's strong enough to bother learning to program on any device, and those that have that drive to make things will find a way to do it on any device they can get their hands on.
And while *you* might have learned to program on a TI, you're a Slashdot reader, you were that rare student. And let's be honest: as a programming interface, the TI is hideously awful.
I agree with your list of ways this could go bad. The big challenge is keeping private keys and authentication logs out of the hands of the key agency, while still allowing the agency to revoke and replace your keys if you get mugged or forget your PIN. I think this is possible, but I'm no crypto expert.
One thing I will say is that well-designed government agencies can have surprisingly effective legal firewalls. It's a lot easier for the cops to get your credit card statement than it is for them to get your income tax returns.
If the bank where I keep a small account for local bills is compromised, I have a hassle with that account until it's sorted out.
That's not what happens, though. More likely, the attackers clean out that account, then use the SS#, birthdate, mother's maiden name and address info the bank was storing to compromise your Gmail, your credit card, your mutual fund account, and worst of all your Slashdot ID. Then you spend $10,000 proving to each of these organization that you're really you. And the problems can go on for months, since that identifying data's still out there and you can't change any of it.
With a well-designed 2-factor national ID system, an attack on my bank can't spread beyond the bank. To get everything I have, the bad guys need to attack either me or the ID agency. If they mug me, take my RSA token and beat me up until I hand over my PIN, I immediately haul my bruised ass down to the post office and go through an annoyingly throrough identity test, and the post office gives me a new token and PIN. The ID agency revokes my compromised key and informs my bank, credit card, and Slashdot that the account was compromised.
If the attackers successfully compromise the ID agency, it's a national emergency, and *everyone's* ID needs to be replaced. You won't have to spend time and money convincing your bank that you're you, because everyone's in the same boat. And since ID compromise is a national disaster, we as a nation can spend a *LOT* of money to ensure sure that never happens. Much more effective than trying to lock down every bank and news for nerds website in the country.
the core of this government is already outlined by its Constitution
I think ID verification is justified with the first line of the Constitution: "We, the people of the United States of America". Okay, so who exactly is "we"?
True, but we'd like to maintain an identity from cradle to grave, so the longer living the better. The US Government, at least, is older than almost every corporation on the planet.
Corporations are often better at securing their own data than governments are theirs.
It's difficult to compare, because governments often have more valuable secrets. In cases where both government and corporations hold the same secrets (plans for military aircraft, for instance), security breaches usually occur through the corporations.
Corporations not only have nationwide reach, many of them have an international reach.
i disagree entirely. identity verification should be done entirely in the private sector explicitly not tied to government whatsoever
That puts your identity data in the hands of a bunch of security amateurs who have an incentive to sell it for profit, and who are weak enough that the government can just take it from them when they want. Is that actually better?
The best you can ever really do with a piece of ID is verify that the person carrying it is the person you gave it to. That's not the same thing at all as confirmation that "you are who you say you are".
This is getting a little existential, but I don't see the difference. The bank needs to verify that the person standing before them is the same as the person who deposited $500 yesterday, Visa needs to verify that the person buying these new shoes is the same as the person who's faithfully paid their bill every month. And when it comes down to it, that's *all* they need to know.
People go on these kicks over ID thinking "if only we know who everyone is, nothing bad can happen, and we can trace it if it does".
Good lord, that's not my goal. I just want to reduce the number of people who can access, collate, and steal my identity data by giving the keys to it to an institution with the power and expertise to keep them safe, and powerful enough that it could take my information from anyone else anyway. If you've got to lend your lunch money to somebody, give it to the biggest bully in school: maybe he'll return it, maybe not, but nobody else is going to take it from him.
Identity verification should be a core function of a national government. This can be done right: by creating an agency that does not aggregate data, and serves no other function than to confirm that you are who you say you are when you ask it to. With proper use of two-factor keys and public cryptography, this agency can make data aggregation very difficult: your bank would know you by a different ID# than your cell phone provider, and neither would need to know your name or social security number.
It's true that a corrupt government can do identity verification very badly, turning it into a panopticon. But corporations don't have the longevity, security, or nationwide reach to be able to do the job well, and a corrupt government can simply force corporations to hand over identity data. So in the worst case scenario, identity verification by corporation is no better than by government. And having no centralized authority at all doesn't work either: the fragmentary system we use now is easy to aggregate, and its resistance to identity theft is only as strong as its weakest link -- which is typically very, very weak.
With identity verification managed by government, we can at least use electoral pressure to hold the identity agency responsible for its actions, and fight corruption within it. If it's managed by anyone else, we have no control over it at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Crime's like any other job: the high-paying, less risky jobs all require tons of skill and training, or family connections. If you haven't got a crime education or a crime pedigree, your only choices are super high-risk jobs like mugging or super low-paying jobs like corner drug sales.
http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/chapter-3/
Crime rule #1: If you're going to do crime, don't do crime with anyone you haven't known since high school. Doing crime with random strangers over the Internet is just fcking stupid.
Any discipline that can list its core ideas in a short Slashdot post isn't worth studying.
Yes, but. This isn't entirely a binary scientific question. If the question were "are open-access journals worse than traditional journals?", you'd obviously need a control. But "Is the peer review process at open-access journals acceptable?" is not a scientific question, but one of values and personal preference. Most people would decide that a 50% failure rate is not acceptable, control or no control.
Now, we're all *very* curious to know whether traditional journals fare better than open ones, and Science is showing bias and intellectual dishonesty by avoiding that question, BUT that doesn't mean that this study has no value.
The problem is that serious decisions are made by people who have no idea which journals are top quality. Bad tenure decisions, bad engineering choices, and god forbid bad medical decisions are being made daily on the basis of nothing more than "hey, the European Journal of Chemistry sounds legit."
Wow, clearly I should avoid publishing in those no-name open journals, and stick to big-name proprietary journals like Science!
Science is just a liiitttle bit biased here. I don't doubt the result, but I'd like to hear it from a neutral source.
In hindsight, Rockstar probably shouldn't have decided to split the costs of a datacenter with healthcare.gov.
I hear they're having some weird server issues, too. GTA players are signing up for the bronze healthcare plan, hoping that if they do well enough on it the game will bump them up to silver or gold. And uninsured people are signing up for catastrophic care plans that teleport them to the nearest hospital and take away their guns when they get hurt.
Wow, what a coincidence that the Canadian authorities happened to open just the right package. A lucky break for them!
There are three reasons to make your text boxes only a couple inches across.
A, because you plan to fill the rest of the screen with ads, in which case, fuck you.
B, because you can't figure out how to make separate layouts for phones vs PCs, in which case fuck you.
C, because you figure your readers will get bored if they have to read a line of text more than five words long, in which case, fuck you.
Let me tell all of you from outside the U.S. that our government's excuse "hey, we're only spying on foreigners, not Americans" would be disgusting even if it weren't a pack of lies.
Not censorship, just some advice from someone who does this professionally. Maybe you're different, go ahead and give the Feynman lectures a shot. But don't say I didn't tell you so.
Feynman would be horrified at the idea, but if that's your goal you can get it from other Feynman works. "Surely you're joking", for example. Or his short book of lectures on quantum electrodynamics, which is no more difficult than Lectures on Physics, but much more rewarding and better for impressing the ladies (or gentlemen, if you prefer.)
Yes. Feynman himself admitted that that class did not go well, and those students were some of the brightest minds in the country (compliment intended).
Hi. I teach undergraduate physics. If you're a clever high school or early college student interested in physics, you may have heard of Feynman, and you may have heard physics people give rave reviews of the Feynman lectures. And hey, he intended these lectures as a first-year college physics course, so that's perfect for you, right?
Wrong. This is not the right place to start learning physics. Feynman has some beautiful insights about how introductory physics concepts connect to "real" modern physics, and a way of cutting through the red tape to elegantly explain concepts in ways that make experienced physicists drool. But that's not what you need. You need the red tape. You need to learn to apply concepts to real situations, you need to get buried in the algebra, trig and calculus and dig your way back out again. Feynman won't help you about that.
Feynman's Lectures on Physics represent how an experienced modern physicist would teach introductory physics to a roomful of other professional physicists. Feynman was a genius, but his lectures are designed to impress, not to teach. You should absolutely read it, and you will love it, later in your career. But start with a more traditional textbook.
"quitting", not quitting.
There's a major design problem here: what happens when the plate has no cell reception?
* If it keeps displaying the plate number, then a car thief, murderer, or whatever can cover the plate with a transparent conductive film to create a Faraday cage, and keep on driving.
* If it automatically switches off, or changes to read "NO SIGNAL" or something, then every law-abiding citizen in a cell coverage hole will be driving around with no license plate.
Also, there are some technology issues with the display. License plates are not just pieces of painted metal: they have retro-reflective glass spheres embedded in them so that they're visible in headlights. E-ink displays use some clever optical tricks that I think won't work with retroreflective coatings.
The summary pushes this as a way to make plate readers even worse, but really smart plates are kind of the opposite of plate readers, and each makes the other less useful. You can either make the plates smart so critical data can be read by "dumb" human readers, or you can make the readers smart enough to read critical info from dumb plates. The "STOLEN" message can be e-printed on the plate, or it can pop up on the police cruiser's screen as the car drives by. Doing both is redundant.
The main difference is that an e-ink plate can be read by people who aren't cops, while the plate reader can give a lot more information to the cops, whether you're breaking the law or not. If "neither" is not an option, smart plates come out ahead on civil liberties grounds. But see my post below on technical problems.
Well duh.
I teach college physics: my students use both iPads and TI calculators. But almost none of them use the programming features on either the calculator or the iPad. It's a rare student who has a creative spirit that's strong enough to bother learning to program on any device, and those that have that drive to make things will find a way to do it on any device they can get their hands on.
And while *you* might have learned to program on a TI, you're a Slashdot reader, you were that rare student. And let's be honest: as a programming interface, the TI is hideously awful.
I agree with your list of ways this could go bad. The big challenge is keeping private keys and authentication logs out of the hands of the key agency, while still allowing the agency to revoke and replace your keys if you get mugged or forget your PIN. I think this is possible, but I'm no crypto expert.
One thing I will say is that well-designed government agencies can have surprisingly effective legal firewalls. It's a lot easier for the cops to get your credit card statement than it is for them to get your income tax returns.
That's not what happens, though. More likely, the attackers clean out that account, then use the SS#, birthdate, mother's maiden name and address info the bank was storing to compromise your Gmail, your credit card, your mutual fund account, and worst of all your Slashdot ID. Then you spend $10,000 proving to each of these organization that you're really you. And the problems can go on for months, since that identifying data's still out there and you can't change any of it.
With a well-designed 2-factor national ID system, an attack on my bank can't spread beyond the bank. To get everything I have, the bad guys need to attack either me or the ID agency. If they mug me, take my RSA token and beat me up until I hand over my PIN, I immediately haul my bruised ass down to the post office and go through an annoyingly throrough identity test, and the post office gives me a new token and PIN. The ID agency revokes my compromised key and informs my bank, credit card, and Slashdot that the account was compromised.
If the attackers successfully compromise the ID agency, it's a national emergency, and *everyone's* ID needs to be replaced. You won't have to spend time and money convincing your bank that you're you, because everyone's in the same boat. And since ID compromise is a national disaster, we as a nation can spend a *LOT* of money to ensure sure that never happens. Much more effective than trying to lock down every bank and news for nerds website in the country.
I think ID verification is justified with the first line of the Constitution: "We, the people of the United States of America". Okay, so who exactly is "we"?
True, but we'd like to maintain an identity from cradle to grave, so the longer living the better. The US Government, at least, is older than almost every corporation on the planet.
It's difficult to compare, because governments often have more valuable secrets. In cases where both government and corporations hold the same secrets (plans for military aircraft, for instance), security breaches usually occur through the corporations.
This is a good point.
That puts your identity data in the hands of a bunch of security amateurs who have an incentive to sell it for profit, and who are weak enough that the government can just take it from them when they want. Is that actually better?
This is getting a little existential, but I don't see the difference. The bank needs to verify that the person standing before them is the same as the person who deposited $500 yesterday, Visa needs to verify that the person buying these new shoes is the same as the person who's faithfully paid their bill every month. And when it comes down to it, that's *all* they need to know.
Good lord, that's not my goal. I just want to reduce the number of people who can access, collate, and steal my identity data by giving the keys to it to an institution with the power and expertise to keep them safe, and powerful enough that it could take my information from anyone else anyway. If you've got to lend your lunch money to somebody, give it to the biggest bully in school: maybe he'll return it, maybe not, but nobody else is going to take it from him.
Identity verification should be a core function of a national government. This can be done right: by creating an agency that does not aggregate data, and serves no other function than to confirm that you are who you say you are when you ask it to. With proper use of two-factor keys and public cryptography, this agency can make data aggregation very difficult: your bank would know you by a different ID# than your cell phone provider, and neither would need to know your name or social security number.
It's true that a corrupt government can do identity verification very badly, turning it into a panopticon. But corporations don't have the longevity, security, or nationwide reach to be able to do the job well, and a corrupt government can simply force corporations to hand over identity data. So in the worst case scenario, identity verification by corporation is no better than by government. And having no centralized authority at all doesn't work either: the fragmentary system we use now is easy to aggregate, and its resistance to identity theft is only as strong as its weakest link -- which is typically very, very weak.
With identity verification managed by government, we can at least use electoral pressure to hold the identity agency responsible for its actions, and fight corruption within it. If it's managed by anyone else, we have no control over it at all.