The only safe views to hold in a surveillance state are bland views. Be grey, keep your head down, express no strong views. Do nothing of note have friends who do nothing of note.
The other method is something called "data pollution". Get large group of people to download a software that will go to certain websites automatically, make random friends on facebook or make calls in a pattern. If enough people collude to pollute the data they produce, the pollution will hide patterns. It will not hide real data but it will make massive data mining operations of limited use.
Say that to Amazon. After they started using their own data, they disbanded their entire staff of experts for recommendations. The computer algorithms were giving three times more sales and costing a fraction of the price of the salaries of the experts.
Say that to Google. When they made their translate program, they didn't use experts but used web-pages to learn translation. Or the auto-completion of queries. Or even pagerank itself.
Unscientific sampling? Big data is about the opposite of sampling. Sampling is a subset of big data. Before, statistics was hypothesis testing but big data is about lots and lots of automated hypothesis testing. The mathematics and statistics is basically the same. Why can't data be assumed to be normally distributed? If you have big data, you can just plot the damn thing or measure how close to normal it is. You know what the cure for analyzing data that is not independent is, yes more data for more complex tests across groups.
In fact, big data has shown to be a better predictor than experts in many fields. See Amazon's voice, IBM Watson and google translate. The limitations of big data is the same as for the conventional hypothesis testing and probably it's being conducted by statistically illiterate CS people.
Funny enough, a PhD is almost an automatic disqualification, as is "currently working on one". Why? Because in general someone that has gone through that amount of theoretical work generally has little interest in doing actual grunt work required to get a product out.
There is a branch of computer science PhDs who are called "systems" computer science. It's about writing lots of code and building/adding/testing large systems. There is very little pure theoretical science anymore - even the most theoretical ones now rely on software and creating software to test and validate their ideas.
There's very little "interesting" work going on, as that is usually in the frameworks you use, or attempting to work around some bug in a framework. So if your job is creating frameworks, graphics engines. OS kernels, or the like, then you might benefit from a PhD or two being on the team. Otherwise, unless they are a very special kind of person, not so much.
Depends on the product though. But as you said, there is very little interesting work but what if that little piece of interesting work turns out to be the most crucial part of the project? For example, 99% of Google could be made by anyone but the magic is in the PageRank which is probably 1% of it. In the end, what was the difference between Google and it's competitors like Yahoo, Altavista and other search engines? That 1% in PageRank.
Theoretically, hiring a PhD would give you some guarantee about what the programmer is capable of doing - you can expect him to know not only how 2nd degree equations work, but also the basics of transcendental functions and how to apply base concepts into real-life problems. Theoretically. In practice, shure, maybe most dropouts don't have the basis to understand a lot of stuff - but many PhDs don't understand it either. And some of them, while understanding it, are unable to put in in practice.
PhD is a degree for showing you can create something new, not as an expertise indicator. The reason for getting a PhD is to get into research and not into the job market. If you have a PhD working the same thing as a non-PhD, then the PhD is wasted.
I'm one of the few (only?) completely self-taught developers on the company I work for (>100 developers). For most tasks, no "special" knowledge is needed - a monkey could do it. Even so, some academic folks struggle with concepts. For non-trivial, conceptual tasks, I'm usually at the top of the list of the guys to ask stuff. I've done stuff ranging from math coprocessor emulation to signal processing, image processing, 3d programming, embedded systems, compression algorithms, data processing/mining, etc. I'm probably not better than a good PhD (or a guy like me with proper academic background), but I'm way better than *a lot* of median ones. I would recommend to anyone that wants to be serious either in programming or CS to get a degree - proper mathematics is something that is usually hard to learn without a teacher - but having expectations on a guy just because he has a degree is just stupid. As it is having great expectations regarding a high-school dropout.
Someone who doesn't have formal academic degree will regret not having a degree; someone who has a degree will regret not having more industry experience. Academia isn't a magical place, it can be dull and inspiring as being a code monkey in a cubicle if you let it be.
Graduate students doing research in mathematics are actually encouraged to learn mathematics on their own, in the direction they choose - some consider teachers to be a hindrance in exploring mathematics. Besides, there is no such thing as proper mathematics.
Any lab experiment which is conducted to seek the truth even if it does not yield a commercially viable result is still a truth discovered. A so-called failed experiment still is a success at discovering a method which does not work to achieve desired results, and discovering what does not work in some cases can be more important then finding out what does and is an actual truth discovered.
The problem there are infinite number of truths to be discovered. There already have hundreds of dissertations and results that will never be read.
For example, in any subfield of mathematics, there are infinitely many theorems but probably infinitely many useful ones as well. However, only a small fraction is published that lends to solving a goal common goal to the community.
There might be infinite ways something won't work. There is no inherent guarantee that it's finite and even if it's finite, it's a small finite number.
Aside from the fact that the Apple logo alone will have people lined up outside of Apple stores across the country to buy this thin, I'm inclined to ask what this watch actually DOES (aside from the obvious "tells time").
Similar to Motorola Motoactv I'm thinking...
Pedometer: counts number of steps taken.
ANT connection: heart rate, NIKE+ speed things on shoes etc
GPS: like Garmin
+ all iPod nano stuff
I think this will be a fitness watch. If they make it fully waterproof, then it will succeed where Motorola Motoactv didn't.
Last year, there was such a push to show iPhone as a workout tool - so many movies with actors running with an iPhone. They probably now want the iWatch for fitness. The silly Nintendo Fit sold so well, I think Apple can also sell its watch as the weight loss watch.
And, as you said bluetooth for music and cell phone usage so that it's a remote control for the iPhone in your pocket.
This seems to be broadly supported by history as well, since the most prosperous trade often occurred when and where cultures mingled freely.
An economist in a talk said that he found that economic power came from the social structure. A social structure that is created to funnel the efforts and innovation of the society to a select few powerful group of people will very quickly stagnate. Good economic development is correlated with societies where these efforts and innovations benefit widely and are distributed.
When cultures mingle, there is a bit of lack of central power in these boundaries. So, maybe this is the cause of good economic development.
and the professors don't want to teach and have the big lectures that at times are just out of the textbook and are sleep though.
I don't see the point of a lecture anymore. Why not make each class into a movie and show that movie? With sound effects and flashy animations? Then have lab hours to work on the problems.
Anyway. students enter a comatose state right after the professor starts talking and hardly interact with the professor. There is absolutely no point of a lecture in the modern environment.
This is why, no matter how well trained you get security, social engineering attempts like this will succeed more often than not.
As long as the security is better trained than the social engineer, this will not succeed.
People are pretty much indoctrinated since birth to try to get along. So if someone looks authoritative, there's a default reaction to simply go with it.
Something that can be easily changed with training.
There's only so many things a person can pay strict attention to at a time. Eventually they're going to reach the limit of things they can keep straight in their heads. And openings in their awareness will occur.
The human brain does not work that way. With increasing complexity, the human brain groups patterns of actions into one and there is no shown limit of how much stimulus a human brain can handle in this way.
There's only so long that people can keep up such vigilance before they start relaxing. It's not laziness so much as stimulus saturation.
Again, that is not how the human brain and body works. Elite marathon runners can run at 12mph for 2-2.5 hours straight, a speed that most people cannot reach running or even if they do reach it, can only sustain it for a few seconds. With training, people can stay vigilant for hours. The gulf between a trained personnel and an average person is immense.
I don't care how much money "security" firms and agencies throw at the situation. The only way to avoid it is to not have such events in the first place.
The solution is to train the security staff, analyze security holes and create training regimens to block those holes. This costs money and as long as the cost of training is more than the cost of social engineers conning their way through for a free show, such social engineering freebies will be tolerated.
But other than that I'm at a loss as to what it could have that my smartphone has.
The answer is possibly a fitness gadget. With the advent of ANT+ and sensors, it would be a pedometer, a GPS based walk or run information recording device like Garmin Forerunner and Motorola Motoactv and possibly apps about calories and food and so on, sleep patterns recorder and whatever other sensors that could record on the state of the human body.
At the time, I was the chairman of a company that was building shopping centers in China. The company was a partnership of three entities: a major U.S. bank, a Chinese state-owned enterprise, and my firm. We were building centers in third- and fourth-tier cities. The anchor tenant was a multinational hypermarket. Nearly all the employees were Chinese. It was an exhilarating adventure for me, but it was of little consequence politically. The enterprise was building Chinese shopping centers in Chinese cities for Chinese consumers.
A guy in China, with a company in China full of Chinese employees gets blackmailed in China through e-mail by an unidentified person.
Headline reads "Chinese hacker..."
There is absolutely nothing in the story that says the nationality of the blackmailer was Chinese. It could have been anyone in the whole world. Just because the incident happened in China does not mean "Chinese hackers".
Even in the US, nobody has any real expectation of privacy from unencrypted emails and website visits. Everyone knows that every e-mail you send can be read by an admin the IT department easily. Even websearch is recorded by google, every visit to a webpage tracked through advertising.
Many attacks come from China because it is the best place to end traces. Attacks from US, Europe, Russia could easily be tracked back because of government monitoring and inter-government co-operations on monitoring whereas an attack source from China is a dead end. If I were to "hack" anything, the first thing I would do is find a Chinese "proxy" to do it through.
Sounds like excuses. Run to the gym near the office before 8am or only run to home after work and for mornings, run to a co-worker's house who will let you shower in his house and you pay for gas.
You can do jumping jacks or rope skipping for aerobic workout. If you just run for aerobic exercise, then you're doing it wrong.
If joints don't wear out for the elite marathoners who run the most miles at the highest intensity, then it's more likely that joints don't wear out.
The biggest difference between an elite runner and an amateur runner is the number of miles run. If you are one of those people who believe that elite runners are super-human genetic freaks, then you can make all sorts of claims.
Then there are long term issues like joint wear. I used to enjoy running but my knees wore out and knee replacement really doesn't fix that.
The whole joint wear thing is absolute bullshit.
There are former long distance runners who have run for decades at 120 miles per week and now even in their 60s and 70s, don't have joint wear. Plus, in their youth, they were running elite marathon pace, around 12 mph for marathons.
Why is it that joint wear only happens to the "exercise" runners?
I'll get sweaty or smelly, and that's just socially unacceptable.
You can run without getting sweaty if you keep your pace down to around 12 minutes or less. If it's summer, run with the shirt in your pocket and then when you reach your destination, dry off in the restroom and put the shirt on. It will be no worse than the smell from walking around.
The happiest and joyous moments of our lives are when we have spent large amounts of energy. The times when we did nothing and spent very little energy is not memorable or significant part of our lives.
Our bodies are designed to want to expend energy, efficiently expending energy helps. But, the whole point of being alive is to spend energy.
Isn't saying humans had to survive on limited resources for hundreds of thousands of years a wild guess? It could be very well that humans did pretty well hunting and gathering. There are many animals out there who don't have to survive on limited resources - like deer. They have all the food they want out there.
We've had nice paper thin displays for years now. But a thin display doesn't mean a thin tablet. Until we have thin CPUs and thin RAM sticks, and thin flash memory and thin connectors, we aren't going to have a paper thin tablet.
All that can be squeezed into a quarter sized "paper-clip" or a stiff spline.
When you get all the components you need for a tablet you end up with something just as thick as what we've got on shelves today. By no means thick, but not paper-thin.
And that is why the whole video is about the UI aspect of using paper thin tablets and not about the technology of paper thinness.
The topic should probably have been called new UI for using multiple tablets on a desk. Plus, new bending gestures when the display is thin.
the word "delay" means a quantity of time as large as forever
Or as little as a few days.
Anyone else read the arrogant comment attributed to some unnamed source at Intel, stating that Intel was frustrated with "everyone doing a half-assed Google TV so it's going to do it themselves and do it right." ?
Well the product isn't even out and you're foretelling failure?
And who in their right mind at Intel decided to blast the media with their arrogant claims before they actually secured the elusive content agreements? Are they this completely incompetent as to think that Internet TV has anything at all to do with their fabulous semiconductor technology, instead of realizing it has everything to do with negotiation and leverage?
Look at ITMS: an electronics/software company managed something similar to what you are saying cannot be done.
People are commenting that some people eat 500/1200/etc. calories and still not loosing weight. Can someone explain this to me? Your body needs a certain amount of calories for basic functions and this is around 2000 calories. How can you eat less than 2000 calories and not lose weight. A calorie is the amount of energy in the food that is measured through burning in a bomb calorimeter. Your body can't extract more calories from a 500 calorie Big Mac than 500 calories. If all you eat in one day is 500/1200 calories, where are the extra calories that are needed for basic body functions coming from? Are certain people more efficient at using calories than others? By a factor of 2, only needing 1000 calories? Or by a factor of 4, only needing 500 calories?
The reason is that the body needing 2000 calories is a very very rough approximation (very rough multiplicative factors to BMR and linear approximations from BMR data that is never shown to be linear). You can easily survive on 1000 calories a day if you don't exert yourself.
It is also believed that the body has a mechanism for decreasing calorie expenditure. Feeling sluggish and tired are probably symptoms of the body trying to minimize calorie expenditure.
So, assuming we need 2000 calories every day and that this value is not affected by any other factors is the error here.
What's terrible about getting rid of the other 50%?
Communism is "theoretically" the perfect government system but it doesn't work in practice. Getting rid of employment seems to work well in theory but would it work in practice? Would it result in massive famines, genocides stemming from massive gaps in wealth distribution that eliminating employment would cause?
We in the US and developed countries, have a stable thing working for us with the current world structure and it is natural to doubt what changes would bring. Only a tiny percentage of the world lives in wealth and comfort. We still have no idea on how to solve the problems of hunger and poverty of large populations of the world. Thinking eliminating employment would result in a positive outcome is optimistic, there are many many ways it could go horribly wrong.
I don't have an ad blocker. I use Request Policy to block external requests (and whitelist and temporary whitelist if I want external content in a web page). This blocks most ads by default, without any extra work on my part.
There will be new techniques to serve ads. AdBlock and your technique works because ads come from a different website than the one serving the content. Simply blocking those website like adBlock or by not allowing external requests to be loaded blocks ads. However, advertisers can easily ask the content provider to serve the ad and content together by first contacting the ad website at the server end.
Performance will be an issue for the heavier ads and they could do something like akamai for both content and ads. Both the content provider and ad server use the same set of hosts.
Of course, a new generation of tools would have to be built to counter something like this. But, that's another story.
Slashdot Mirror
The other method is something called "data pollution". Get large group of people to download a software that will go to certain websites automatically, make random friends on facebook or make calls in a pattern. If enough people collude to pollute the data they produce, the pollution will hide patterns. It will not hide real data but it will make massive data mining operations of limited use.
Say that to Amazon. After they started using their own data, they disbanded their entire staff of experts for recommendations. The computer algorithms were giving three times more sales and costing a fraction of the price of the salaries of the experts.
Say that to Google. When they made their translate program, they didn't use experts but used web-pages to learn translation. Or the auto-completion of queries. Or even pagerank itself.
Unscientific sampling? Big data is about the opposite of sampling. Sampling is a subset of big data. Before, statistics was hypothesis testing but big data is about lots and lots of automated hypothesis testing. The mathematics and statistics is basically the same. Why can't data be assumed to be normally distributed? If you have big data, you can just plot the damn thing or measure how close to normal it is. You know what the cure for analyzing data that is not independent is, yes more data for more complex tests across groups.
In fact, big data has shown to be a better predictor than experts in many fields. See Amazon's voice, IBM Watson and google translate. The limitations of big data is the same as for the conventional hypothesis testing and probably it's being conducted by statistically illiterate CS people.
So is 99% of the PhD.
There is a branch of computer science PhDs who are called "systems" computer science. It's about writing lots of code and building/adding/testing large systems. There is very little pure theoretical science anymore - even the most theoretical ones now rely on software and creating software to test and validate their ideas.
Depends on the product though. But as you said, there is very little interesting work but what if that little piece of interesting work turns out to be the most crucial part of the project? For example, 99% of Google could be made by anyone but the magic is in the PageRank which is probably 1% of it. In the end, what was the difference between Google and it's competitors like Yahoo, Altavista and other search engines? That 1% in PageRank.
PhD is a degree for showing you can create something new, not as an expertise indicator. The reason for getting a PhD is to get into research and not into the job market. If you have a PhD working the same thing as a non-PhD, then the PhD is wasted.
Someone who doesn't have formal academic degree will regret not having a degree; someone who has a degree will regret not having more industry experience. Academia isn't a magical place, it can be dull and inspiring as being a code monkey in a cubicle if you let it be.
Graduate students doing research in mathematics are actually encouraged to learn mathematics on their own, in the direction they choose - some consider teachers to be a hindrance in exploring mathematics. Besides, there is no such thing as proper mathematics.
The problem there are infinite number of truths to be discovered. There already have hundreds of dissertations and results that will never be read.
For example, in any subfield of mathematics, there are infinitely many theorems but probably infinitely many useful ones as well. However, only a small fraction is published that lends to solving a goal common goal to the community.
There might be infinite ways something won't work. There is no inherent guarantee that it's finite and even if it's finite, it's a small finite number.
This hasn't been true for over a decade. This fault was remedied a long long time ago.
Similar to Motorola Motoactv I'm thinking ...
Pedometer: counts number of steps taken.
ANT connection: heart rate, NIKE+ speed things on shoes etc
GPS: like Garmin
+ all iPod nano stuff
I think this will be a fitness watch. If they make it fully waterproof, then it will succeed where Motorola Motoactv didn't.
Last year, there was such a push to show iPhone as a workout tool - so many movies with actors running with an iPhone. They probably now want the iWatch for fitness. The silly Nintendo Fit sold so well, I think Apple can also sell its watch as the weight loss watch.
And, as you said bluetooth for music and cell phone usage so that it's a remote control for the iPhone in your pocket.
An economist in a talk said that he found that economic power came from the social structure. A social structure that is created to funnel the efforts and innovation of the society to a select few powerful group of people will very quickly stagnate. Good economic development is correlated with societies where these efforts and innovations benefit widely and are distributed.
When cultures mingle, there is a bit of lack of central power in these boundaries. So, maybe this is the cause of good economic development.
I don't see the point of a lecture anymore. Why not make each class into a movie and show that movie? With sound effects and flashy animations? Then have lab hours to work on the problems.
Anyway. students enter a comatose state right after the professor starts talking and hardly interact with the professor. There is absolutely no point of a lecture in the modern environment.
As long as the security is better trained than the social engineer, this will not succeed.
Something that can be easily changed with training.
The human brain does not work that way. With increasing complexity, the human brain groups patterns of actions into one and there is no shown limit of how much stimulus a human brain can handle in this way.
Again, that is not how the human brain and body works. Elite marathon runners can run at 12mph for 2-2.5 hours straight, a speed that most people cannot reach running or even if they do reach it, can only sustain it for a few seconds. With training, people can stay vigilant for hours. The gulf between a trained personnel and an average person is immense.
The solution is to train the security staff, analyze security holes and create training regimens to block those holes. This costs money and as long as the cost of training is more than the cost of social engineers conning their way through for a free show, such social engineering freebies will be tolerated.
The answer is possibly a fitness gadget. With the advent of ANT+ and sensors, it would be a pedometer, a GPS based walk or run information recording device like Garmin Forerunner and Motorola Motoactv and possibly apps about calories and food and so on, sleep patterns recorder and whatever other sensors that could record on the state of the human body.
A guy in China, with a company in China full of Chinese employees gets blackmailed in China through e-mail by an unidentified person.
Headline reads "Chinese hacker ..."
There is absolutely nothing in the story that says the nationality of the blackmailer was Chinese. It could have been anyone in the whole world. Just because the incident happened in China does not mean "Chinese hackers".
Even in the US, nobody has any real expectation of privacy from unencrypted emails and website visits. Everyone knows that every e-mail you send can be read by an admin the IT department easily. Even websearch is recorded by google, every visit to a webpage tracked through advertising.
Many attacks come from China because it is the best place to end traces. Attacks from US, Europe, Russia could easily be tracked back because of government monitoring and inter-government co-operations on monitoring whereas an attack source from China is a dead end. If I were to "hack" anything, the first thing I would do is find a Chinese "proxy" to do it through.
Sounds like excuses. Run to the gym near the office before 8am or only run to home after work and for mornings, run to a co-worker's house who will let you shower in his house and you pay for gas.
You can do jumping jacks or rope skipping for aerobic workout. If you just run for aerobic exercise, then you're doing it wrong.
But they run at twice or three times the speed and the force of impact is probably the same.
Or maybe it isn't. Anybody done calculations?
If joints don't wear out for the elite marathoners who run the most miles at the highest intensity, then it's more likely that joints don't wear out.
The biggest difference between an elite runner and an amateur runner is the number of miles run. If you are one of those people who believe that elite runners are super-human genetic freaks, then you can make all sorts of claims.
2m/s is 13.4 min/mile and 3m/s is 8.9 min/mile.
Definitely jogging pace but I think walking gait while jogging would probably count as heel striking and bad running/jogging form.
But racewalkers can do 6 min/mile walking.
The whole joint wear thing is absolute bullshit.
There are former long distance runners who have run for decades at 120 miles per week and now even in their 60s and 70s, don't have joint wear. Plus, in their youth, they were running elite marathon pace, around 12 mph for marathons.
Why is it that joint wear only happens to the "exercise" runners?
You can run without getting sweaty if you keep your pace down to around 12 minutes or less. If it's summer, run with the shirt in your pocket and then when you reach your destination, dry off in the restroom and put the shirt on. It will be no worse than the smell from walking around.
The happiest and joyous moments of our lives are when we have spent large amounts of energy. The times when we did nothing and spent very little energy is not memorable or significant part of our lives.
Our bodies are designed to want to expend energy, efficiently expending energy helps. But, the whole point of being alive is to spend energy.
Isn't saying humans had to survive on limited resources for hundreds of thousands of years a wild guess? It could be very well that humans did pretty well hunting and gathering. There are many animals out there who don't have to survive on limited resources - like deer. They have all the food they want out there.
All that can be squeezed into a quarter sized "paper-clip" or a stiff spline.
And that is why the whole video is about the UI aspect of using paper thin tablets and not about the technology of paper thinness.
The topic should probably have been called new UI for using multiple tablets on a desk. Plus, new bending gestures when the display is thin.
Or as little as a few days.
Well the product isn't even out and you're foretelling failure?
Look at ITMS: an electronics/software company managed something similar to what you are saying cannot be done.
The reason is that the body needing 2000 calories is a very very rough approximation (very rough multiplicative factors to BMR and linear approximations from BMR data that is never shown to be linear). You can easily survive on 1000 calories a day if you don't exert yourself.
It is also believed that the body has a mechanism for decreasing calorie expenditure. Feeling sluggish and tired are probably symptoms of the body trying to minimize calorie expenditure.
So, assuming we need 2000 calories every day and that this value is not affected by any other factors is the error here.
Communism is "theoretically" the perfect government system but it doesn't work in practice. Getting rid of employment seems to work well in theory but would it work in practice? Would it result in massive famines, genocides stemming from massive gaps in wealth distribution that eliminating employment would cause?
We in the US and developed countries, have a stable thing working for us with the current world structure and it is natural to doubt what changes would bring. Only a tiny percentage of the world lives in wealth and comfort. We still have no idea on how to solve the problems of hunger and poverty of large populations of the world. Thinking eliminating employment would result in a positive outcome is optimistic, there are many many ways it could go horribly wrong.
There will be new techniques to serve ads. AdBlock and your technique works because ads come from a different website than the one serving the content. Simply blocking those website like adBlock or by not allowing external requests to be loaded blocks ads. However, advertisers can easily ask the content provider to serve the ad and content together by first contacting the ad website at the server end.
Performance will be an issue for the heavier ads and they could do something like akamai for both content and ads. Both the content provider and ad server use the same set of hosts.
Of course, a new generation of tools would have to be built to counter something like this. But, that's another story.