My argument is that what happens while you are fighting the dispute is different.
Sure, if the transaction is fraudulent, you eventually get your money back for good. And yes, during the initial dispute you get the money back; but it may not be until AFTER your mortgage bounced that you found out you were out the money to begin with.
With a credit card, I don't have vital bills that MUST be paid (like the mortgage) that bounce until I discover the fraud. With a credit card, I'm not out the money again if the bank refuses the initial dispute.
I don't think Micro-USB was an evil plot; the connector is sturdier, and takes up less space inside the phone. Plenty of vendors are using it: my Moto does, as does my wife's Nokia, BB, etc... it isn't exactly tough to find cheap 3rd-party chargers and cables. Good 'ol monoprice has cables starting at $0.68, and perfectly fine car chargers for $1.53.
Twice now I've had IBM/Lenovo laptops that use the same connectors as their predecessors, yet have increased wattage requirements that make the old supplies risky to use. I remember when our office transitioned from 600's to T20's. So many people were re-using the plug-and-voltage-compatible supplies and burning out the power regulators on the system board that IT started putting bright green stickers on every machine warning you that you should only use the higher-power supplies.
Again, from T60 -> W500's... increased wattage requirements, same voltage and connector. While this one isn't burning out laptops, the older bricks run HOT.
The lack of even the rudimentary security is precisely the reason I refuse to carry a debit card. Without your knowledge, your checking account is empty and your mortgage bouncing.
With a credit card, you get to argue with the bank about their money.
With a debit card, you get to argue with the bank about your money.
What happens when the bank denies your dispute? With credit cards, you get nastygrams. With debit cards, your mortgage starts bouncing. Again.
I'll take an ATM card any day of the week over a signature debit card.
The U.S. government is built on what is called the "Federal System." The individual state governments have far more power and responsibility than they do in most countries, where the states are little more than administrative regions. As a result, they have different revenue needs, and have individually decided on different means of meeting those needs. Some states don't charge income tax at all; they choose to collect their revenue from consumers through property and/or income tax. The individual states tax, spend, and borrow according to their own plans; they have their own unique sets of criminal and civil laws. (One state, Louisiana, bases their civil code on an entirely different system of laws, and this is perfectly allowed.) Most day-to-day government services that a citizen interacts with are provided and funded by state (and by delegation, local) governments.
It was entirely correct for your CompSci degree work to have no immediate real-world application. It's a highly-mathematical field, and not designed to be an applied science.
If you don't want to do theoretical work for your eventual job (most people don't), the degree should have given you enough foundation to supplement with self-learning. For you, the degree existed to give you the skills you need to rapidly pick up other skills useful to your employer. Actually doing so is YOUR responsibility, not your degree's, not your professors', and not your college's.
I remember that one of my CompSci courses was Computer Languages. The professor deliberately chose a textbook that was 15 years old at the time. Why? So we could concentrate on learning how to analyze and learn computer languages FAST. If there were modern, useful, languages in that book, chances are we would have already learned them in other coursework and therefore not understood what the course was trying to teach us. Learning the foundations of OOP is much easier if you are doing it in SmallTalk and LISP instead of C++, which most geeks can code without really understanding what's going on.
If you wanted "applied CompSci" you should have taken more Software Engineering courses.
Software Engineering can be just as rigorous and academic as any other Engineering discipline. Yes, there are some Software Engr. courses that would be better shuttled off to vo-tech, but the same could be said for Intro to CS courses.
Software Engineering is indeed less heavy on abstract theory vs. CS, but as an Engineering field, that makes sense and is perfectly proper. There are lots of problems worthy of intense study, PhDs, and professorships that simply aren't designed to be tackled by your average CS egghead. Engineers have to actually get stuff built, not just admire the elegance of some framework that hasn't seen a single major project. Software Engr. has plenty of rigorous things to study like system architecture, project management, documentation practices (trading-off time vs. usefulness), scheduling, reliability, interface design, testing methods, etc.
To say that Software Engineering should be shuffled off to vo-tech because they take some courses in coding is like saying Mechanical Engineers should do the same because most of them learn to operate machine tools. We don't propose Civil Engineers get shuffled off to vo-tech because they merely make use of physics and chemistry.
SirWired
Also an example of lazy/overworked professors
on
Plagiarism Inc.
·
· Score: 1
Any professor (or TA) that is more than minimally aware of the abilities of their students should be able to spot a ghost-written paper a mile away. The typical student who hires one is lazy and shows no aptitude whatsoever for the subject matter in class. These students can be sussed out with a simple one-on-one meeting asking them to clarify or expand on some of their ideas. If this short meeting was made a major part of the paper's grade, buying a paper would be a lot less useful since it would still require you to master the subject matter.
I've encountered plagiarized stuff in my professional work and it was trivially easy to spot.
SirWired
Plenty of blame to go around here...
on
Plagiarism Inc.
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
While this scumbag's business is about 100% pure fail, anybody involved deserves exactly what they get.
I am having a hard time mustering up sympathy for his writers that aren't getting paid on time (or at all.) They knew going in that the entire concept was scuzzy, and it should not come as any sort of surprise that the CEO of this fine example of capitalism is himself a little lacking in the ethics department.
Interesting that there aren't any complaints from customers in that article... I wonder if Mr. Scumbag-in-chief actually has sufficient "boss" skills to avoid hiring lazy employees that would produce plagarized product?
SirWired
Porn and Strip clubs unethical?
on
Plagiarism Inc.
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I hope this guy isn't one of their essay writers. Porn shops and strip clubs may be seedy, nasty, and often run by unsavory people, and they most certainly are often run in an unethical manner or carry unethical merchandise (and are not my cup of tea), but the concept of a porn shop or strip club itself is not unethical.
Running a shop whose sole purpose in life is to write papers for students to (unethically) pass off as their own work IS most certainly unethical.
I was actually referring to those "power a laptop off of butane" guys, who have indeed been promising shipping product for many years, yet consistently fail to deliver.
While I think removing works from the Public Domain was a bad idea, I'm a little fuzzy as to what on earth that has to do with the 1st amendment. I can understand why removing say, the law or official publications from the public domain would be bad and stifle free speech, but I'm not sure how removing private works from public domain would rise to the level of a constitutional violation.
I'm not trying to be combative here... I genuinely want to know!
Unlike the fuel cell guys, which are constantly promising consumer products shipping in "just a few months", I'm glad these folks realize their work is still well away from widespread application where it's really needed.
In high-school I was a game tech at an arcade across the street. (A dream job for a geek! Much better than McD's, even though McD's paid better.)
The manual for Cyclone/Storm Stopper, etc. explicitly let you set the number of mSec the jackpot light would be lit. The manual also included suggested payout layouts and jackpot light times for maximum play at specific average payouts. (i.e. if you want five tickets average per play, set up the non-jackpot lights like this, the jackpot minimums and increment like that, and jackpot light time for another value.) It was a delicate balancing act involving many tradeoffs. Starting the jackpot large and incrementing quickly gets a lot of players attracted to the machine, but the ensuing need to drop the non-jackpot payouts causes players to leave quickly. Setting the jackpot timing too fast means some moron who puts a couple of hundred tokens in the thing will take his compulsive gambling somewhere else. (Yes, we had compulsive gamblers at a kiddie arcade; we had a setup where you could "bank" tickets long-term, so you could save tickets over months to save up for a CD player or a TV. We dropped the average ticket value for the higher-end prizes to keep highly-skilled players from costing us too much.)
Our arcade machines were not bright enough to adjust parameters based on average payout, but they were all adjustable, which we did by monitoring the token and ticket counters for each machine on a weekly basis. If a machine paid out too high or two low, we would adjust the odds and/or payouts.
For the arcade overall, we shot for an average of 7 tickets (worth about a penny each) for each token (worth about 21.7 cents each.)
"He was nothing but a nerdy college kid messing with computers in his garage when he struck it rich, and now he is at the apex."
He was indeed a nerdy college kid, that is without dispute. But he was also at Harvard at the time, and he did not exactly come from a humble background. His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother was on the board for a bank and the US United Way.
By no means is Bill Gates a moron, and certainly his upbringing was not a total pre-requisite to his success. But much of his later success was probably stoked by having access to a computer from his high-end prep school, and his family connections were certainly not a hindrance to his admission to Harvard. (High SAT scores themselves certainly don't get you into Harvard, and Bill Gates certainly didn't win admission through his social skills.)
Just nit-picking here though... overall your post is excellent!
If you don't want to be a cog, open your own business, and then you can just complain to yourself.
Me, I LIKE being an employee. Somebody else gets to worry about the random non-tech crap I really would never want to deal with. I understand that this means there will be some limits on my behavior, and yes, some limits on what I get paid. Like everything in life, it's a trade-off, and one I have willingly made.
As a front-lines IT grunt, it's your job to implement policy. It isn't your job to mouth off about it throughout the company outside your management chain to try and get it changed. That would be insubordination.
Feel more than welcome to complain internally within your group. But when talking to customers (end customers, and the other, non-IT staff in the organization) it is reasonable to expect you, employee (in your capacity as such), not to publicly disparage the policies of your employer. It's not professional, and I'm pretty sure it's sufficient grounds to fire you unless you are protected from such by some other arrangement (civil service laws, union, etc.)
You can talk to whatever legislative body pays the bills and ask them to encourage open source, you can talk to the media as a private citizen, you can do a lot of things. But you can't necessarily do those things at work, and you can't do them in your capacity as an employee. This goes for any employer.
This guy's rambling post reminds me of every last name-dropping, frat-boy, asshole I've ever worked with. He drops more names, completely at random, than your stereotypical Hollywood Agent. He must have had some really good editors throughout the years, because I can't imagine reading an entire book by this clown. Maybe this is what passes for journalism in the perpetually retarded, and wrong, "IT Analyst" industry.
This sounds like nothing more than a standard for a docking station cable. If they can't get the cable/connector price down to a real low level, I don't see it having any other use. I guess it would be kind of neat to have your monitor act as your docking station, but that isn't exactly earth-shattering.
We certainly do ban speech all the time, such as the iconic "fire" example.
As far as banning conspiracy theories, the only thing I can think of that would be even remotely constitutional would be during the formal suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus, and even that is highly controversial.
The point I was making in my post, as you appear to have noticed, was that merely offering a hypothetical is not the same as advocacy.
The government can, does, and should, have opinions.
As I pointed out in another reply, the govt. is by no means required to remain silent about matters of controversy, nor would we wish it to do so.
We pay our public servants to have opinions. When the govt. prosecutes somebody for a crime, they are publicly stating their belief that the defendant is guilty. When we pay govt. scientists to study something, the money is wasted unless they can publicize their conclusions.
The specific article was about govt. counters to conspiracy theorists. Are you saying that because some people express the opinion the holocaust never happened, the govt. should omit all mention of it from schoolbooks? Are you saying that it is tyranny for the govt. to publicly disagree with Truthers or Birthers?
Silencing speech is indeed a bad thing, but the govt. practices speech all the time, and uses your tax dollars to do so.
If the government starts spending my tax money to at best argue global warming or at worst silence people who don't think there's enough evidence to support it, I'd feel both ripped off / used and controlled.
It sounds like you are saying you are wary of the govt. practicing speech with which you do not agree.
Lets take an example of govt. speech against conspiracy theories that you likely have no problem with... Holocaust Deniers. The U.S. and state/local governments spend your tax dollars making sure that every schoolchild across the country is told about the horrors of the holocaust. I doubt there is a public-school World History class anywhere in the country that does not make at least some mention of it. Most sane people would regard the holocaust as an absolute fact; but since some people disagree, does that mean the govt. (through the school system) should remain silent on the subject?
If the govt. scientists believe in global warming, why should they NOT say so? Why can they not relay their understanding of the truth? It is their job to do so, and indeed it would be a waste of tax dollars for them to study something and be silent. It doesn't mean they are correct, but no political principle requires them to not argue for their conclusions. The govt. is not required to remain silent about a topic, just because it is a matter of controversy.
I, as most citizens, would have a real problem with active disinformation. Stating something the speaker knows not to be true certainly is dishonest and poisons the public discourse. But, on matters of controversy, as long as the speaker (the govt. included) is not simply inventing facts out of whole cloth, then the speech should be allowed. If the govt. happens to be making the speech, so be it.
If you read the damn paper, you will learn that a banning of such sites is listed as one of many responses that could be taken, but the author pointedly did not suggest that actually be done. The bulk of the paper focuses on when and how the govt. should attempt to counter conspiracy theories.
As far as the govt. infiltrating groups that propound conspiracy theories: This is stated as a mechanism for the govt. to sow its own views into the groups, not as a law-enforcement mechanism. I view this as nothing more than speech. Just as citizens can speak, so can the government. If Joe Random Citizen can join a group and talk about random B.S., why can Joe Random PR-Flack not do the same?
The 6th amendment guarantees access to counsel (among other things.) What does it have to do with stopping search of affects owned by an attorney?
Now, it does limit what can be done with anything collected (and in practice, it changes how the search is conducted), under the idea that you cannot receive effective advice of counsel if the papers are subject to search, but that does not stop the search from taking place to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
My argument is that what happens while you are fighting the dispute is different.
Sure, if the transaction is fraudulent, you eventually get your money back for good. And yes, during the initial dispute you get the money back; but it may not be until AFTER your mortgage bounced that you found out you were out the money to begin with.
With a credit card, I don't have vital bills that MUST be paid (like the mortgage) that bounce until I discover the fraud. With a credit card, I'm not out the money again if the bank refuses the initial dispute.
SirWired
I don't think Micro-USB was an evil plot; the connector is sturdier, and takes up less space inside the phone. Plenty of vendors are using it: my Moto does, as does my wife's Nokia, BB, etc... it isn't exactly tough to find cheap 3rd-party chargers and cables. Good 'ol monoprice has cables starting at $0.68, and perfectly fine car chargers for $1.53.
SirWired
Twice now I've had IBM/Lenovo laptops that use the same connectors as their predecessors, yet have increased wattage requirements that make the old supplies risky to use. I remember when our office transitioned from 600's to T20's. So many people were re-using the plug-and-voltage-compatible supplies and burning out the power regulators on the system board that IT started putting bright green stickers on every machine warning you that you should only use the higher-power supplies.
Again, from T60 -> W500's... increased wattage requirements, same voltage and connector. While this one isn't burning out laptops, the older bricks run HOT.
SirWired
The lack of even the rudimentary security is precisely the reason I refuse to carry a debit card. Without your knowledge, your checking account is empty and your mortgage bouncing.
With a credit card, you get to argue with the bank about their money.
With a debit card, you get to argue with the bank about your money.
What happens when the bank denies your dispute? With credit cards, you get nastygrams. With debit cards, your mortgage starts bouncing. Again.
I'll take an ATM card any day of the week over a signature debit card.
SirWired
The U.S. government is built on what is called the "Federal System." The individual state governments have far more power and responsibility than they do in most countries, where the states are little more than administrative regions. As a result, they have different revenue needs, and have individually decided on different means of meeting those needs. Some states don't charge income tax at all; they choose to collect their revenue from consumers through property and/or income tax. The individual states tax, spend, and borrow according to their own plans; they have their own unique sets of criminal and civil laws. (One state, Louisiana, bases their civil code on an entirely different system of laws, and this is perfectly allowed.) Most day-to-day government services that a citizen interacts with are provided and funded by state (and by delegation, local) governments.
It was entirely correct for your CompSci degree work to have no immediate real-world application. It's a highly-mathematical field, and not designed to be an applied science.
If you don't want to do theoretical work for your eventual job (most people don't), the degree should have given you enough foundation to supplement with self-learning. For you, the degree existed to give you the skills you need to rapidly pick up other skills useful to your employer. Actually doing so is YOUR responsibility, not your degree's, not your professors', and not your college's.
I remember that one of my CompSci courses was Computer Languages. The professor deliberately chose a textbook that was 15 years old at the time. Why? So we could concentrate on learning how to analyze and learn computer languages FAST. If there were modern, useful, languages in that book, chances are we would have already learned them in other coursework and therefore not understood what the course was trying to teach us. Learning the foundations of OOP is much easier if you are doing it in SmallTalk and LISP instead of C++, which most geeks can code without really understanding what's going on.
If you wanted "applied CompSci" you should have taken more Software Engineering courses.
Software Engineering can be just as rigorous and academic as any other Engineering discipline. Yes, there are some Software Engr. courses that would be better shuttled off to vo-tech, but the same could be said for Intro to CS courses.
Software Engineering is indeed less heavy on abstract theory vs. CS, but as an Engineering field, that makes sense and is perfectly proper. There are lots of problems worthy of intense study, PhDs, and professorships that simply aren't designed to be tackled by your average CS egghead. Engineers have to actually get stuff built, not just admire the elegance of some framework that hasn't seen a single major project. Software Engr. has plenty of rigorous things to study like system architecture, project management, documentation practices (trading-off time vs. usefulness), scheduling, reliability, interface design, testing methods, etc.
To say that Software Engineering should be shuffled off to vo-tech because they take some courses in coding is like saying Mechanical Engineers should do the same because most of them learn to operate machine tools. We don't propose Civil Engineers get shuffled off to vo-tech because they merely make use of physics and chemistry.
SirWired
Any professor (or TA) that is more than minimally aware of the abilities of their students should be able to spot a ghost-written paper a mile away. The typical student who hires one is lazy and shows no aptitude whatsoever for the subject matter in class. These students can be sussed out with a simple one-on-one meeting asking them to clarify or expand on some of their ideas. If this short meeting was made a major part of the paper's grade, buying a paper would be a lot less useful since it would still require you to master the subject matter.
I've encountered plagiarized stuff in my professional work and it was trivially easy to spot.
SirWired
While this scumbag's business is about 100% pure fail, anybody involved deserves exactly what they get.
I am having a hard time mustering up sympathy for his writers that aren't getting paid on time (or at all.) They knew going in that the entire concept was scuzzy, and it should not come as any sort of surprise that the CEO of this fine example of capitalism is himself a little lacking in the ethics department.
Interesting that there aren't any complaints from customers in that article... I wonder if Mr. Scumbag-in-chief actually has sufficient "boss" skills to avoid hiring lazy employees that would produce plagarized product?
SirWired
I hope this guy isn't one of their essay writers. Porn shops and strip clubs may be seedy, nasty, and often run by unsavory people, and they most certainly are often run in an unethical manner or carry unethical merchandise (and are not my cup of tea), but the concept of a porn shop or strip club itself is not unethical.
Running a shop whose sole purpose in life is to write papers for students to (unethically) pass off as their own work IS most certainly unethical.
I was actually referring to those "power a laptop off of butane" guys, who have indeed been promising shipping product for many years, yet consistently fail to deliver.
While I think removing works from the Public Domain was a bad idea, I'm a little fuzzy as to what on earth that has to do with the 1st amendment. I can understand why removing say, the law or official publications from the public domain would be bad and stifle free speech, but I'm not sure how removing private works from public domain would rise to the level of a constitutional violation.
I'm not trying to be combative here... I genuinely want to know!
Unlike the fuel cell guys, which are constantly promising consumer products shipping in "just a few months", I'm glad these folks realize their work is still well away from widespread application where it's really needed.
In high-school I was a game tech at an arcade across the street. (A dream job for a geek! Much better than McD's, even though McD's paid better.)
The manual for Cyclone/Storm Stopper, etc. explicitly let you set the number of mSec the jackpot light would be lit. The manual also included suggested payout layouts and jackpot light times for maximum play at specific average payouts. (i.e. if you want five tickets average per play, set up the non-jackpot lights like this, the jackpot minimums and increment like that, and jackpot light time for another value.) It was a delicate balancing act involving many tradeoffs. Starting the jackpot large and incrementing quickly gets a lot of players attracted to the machine, but the ensuing need to drop the non-jackpot payouts causes players to leave quickly. Setting the jackpot timing too fast means some moron who puts a couple of hundred tokens in the thing will take his compulsive gambling somewhere else. (Yes, we had compulsive gamblers at a kiddie arcade; we had a setup where you could "bank" tickets long-term, so you could save tickets over months to save up for a CD player or a TV. We dropped the average ticket value for the higher-end prizes to keep highly-skilled players from costing us too much.)
Our arcade machines were not bright enough to adjust parameters based on average payout, but they were all adjustable, which we did by monitoring the token and ticket counters for each machine on a weekly basis. If a machine paid out too high or two low, we would adjust the odds and/or payouts.
For the arcade overall, we shot for an average of 7 tickets (worth about a penny each) for each token (worth about 21.7 cents each.)
SirWired
Just thought I would point out the following:
"He was nothing but a nerdy college kid messing with computers in his garage when he struck it rich, and now he is at the apex."
He was indeed a nerdy college kid, that is without dispute. But he was also at Harvard at the time, and he did not exactly come from a humble background. His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother was on the board for a bank and the US United Way.
By no means is Bill Gates a moron, and certainly his upbringing was not a total pre-requisite to his success. But much of his later success was probably stoked by having access to a computer from his high-end prep school, and his family connections were certainly not a hindrance to his admission to Harvard. (High SAT scores themselves certainly don't get you into Harvard, and Bill Gates certainly didn't win admission through his social skills.)
Just nit-picking here though... overall your post is excellent!
SirWired
This is EXACTLY why I refuse to carry a debit card. With one swipe, your account is empty and your mortgage bouncing.
With a credit card, you argue with the bank about THEIR money.
With a debit card, you argue with the bank about YOUR money.
Guess which sort of inquiry receives more attention?
SirWired
If you don't want to be a cog, open your own business, and then you can just complain to yourself.
Me, I LIKE being an employee. Somebody else gets to worry about the random non-tech crap I really would never want to deal with. I understand that this means there will be some limits on my behavior, and yes, some limits on what I get paid. Like everything in life, it's a trade-off, and one I have willingly made.
SirWired
As a front-lines IT grunt, it's your job to implement policy. It isn't your job to mouth off about it throughout the company outside your management chain to try and get it changed. That would be insubordination.
Feel more than welcome to complain internally within your group. But when talking to customers (end customers, and the other, non-IT staff in the organization) it is reasonable to expect you, employee (in your capacity as such), not to publicly disparage the policies of your employer. It's not professional, and I'm pretty sure it's sufficient grounds to fire you unless you are protected from such by some other arrangement (civil service laws, union, etc.)
You can talk to whatever legislative body pays the bills and ask them to encourage open source, you can talk to the media as a private citizen, you can do a lot of things. But you can't necessarily do those things at work, and you can't do them in your capacity as an employee. This goes for any employer.
SirWired
This guy's rambling post reminds me of every last name-dropping, frat-boy, asshole I've ever worked with. He drops more names, completely at random, than your stereotypical Hollywood Agent. He must have had some really good editors throughout the years, because I can't imagine reading an entire book by this clown. Maybe this is what passes for journalism in the perpetually retarded, and wrong, "IT Analyst" industry.
SirWired
This sounds like nothing more than a standard for a docking station cable. If they can't get the cable/connector price down to a real low level, I don't see it having any other use. I guess it would be kind of neat to have your monitor act as your docking station, but that isn't exactly earth-shattering.
We certainly do ban speech all the time, such as the iconic "fire" example.
As far as banning conspiracy theories, the only thing I can think of that would be even remotely constitutional would be during the formal suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus, and even that is highly controversial.
The point I was making in my post, as you appear to have noticed, was that merely offering a hypothetical is not the same as advocacy.
SirWired
The government can, does, and should, have opinions.
As I pointed out in another reply, the govt. is by no means required to remain silent about matters of controversy, nor would we wish it to do so.
We pay our public servants to have opinions. When the govt. prosecutes somebody for a crime, they are publicly stating their belief that the defendant is guilty. When we pay govt. scientists to study something, the money is wasted unless they can publicize their conclusions.
The specific article was about govt. counters to conspiracy theorists. Are you saying that because some people express the opinion the holocaust never happened, the govt. should omit all mention of it from schoolbooks? Are you saying that it is tyranny for the govt. to publicly disagree with Truthers or Birthers?
I hope not.
SirWired
Silencing speech is indeed a bad thing, but the govt. practices speech all the time, and uses your tax dollars to do so.
If the government starts spending my tax money to at best argue global warming or at worst silence people who don't think there's enough evidence to support it, I'd feel both ripped off / used and controlled.
It sounds like you are saying you are wary of the govt. practicing speech with which you do not agree.
Lets take an example of govt. speech against conspiracy theories that you likely have no problem with... Holocaust Deniers. The U.S. and state/local governments spend your tax dollars making sure that every schoolchild across the country is told about the horrors of the holocaust. I doubt there is a public-school World History class anywhere in the country that does not make at least some mention of it. Most sane people would regard the holocaust as an absolute fact; but since some people disagree, does that mean the govt. (through the school system) should remain silent on the subject?
If the govt. scientists believe in global warming, why should they NOT say so? Why can they not relay their understanding of the truth? It is their job to do so, and indeed it would be a waste of tax dollars for them to study something and be silent. It doesn't mean they are correct, but no political principle requires them to not argue for their conclusions. The govt. is not required to remain silent about a topic, just because it is a matter of controversy.
I, as most citizens, would have a real problem with active disinformation. Stating something the speaker knows not to be true certainly is dishonest and poisons the public discourse. But, on matters of controversy, as long as the speaker (the govt. included) is not simply inventing facts out of whole cloth, then the speech should be allowed. If the govt. happens to be making the speech, so be it.
SirWired
If you read the damn paper, you will learn that a banning of such sites is listed as one of many responses that could be taken, but the author pointedly did not suggest that actually be done. The bulk of the paper focuses on when and how the govt. should attempt to counter conspiracy theories.
As far as the govt. infiltrating groups that propound conspiracy theories: This is stated as a mechanism for the govt. to sow its own views into the groups, not as a law-enforcement mechanism. I view this as nothing more than speech. Just as citizens can speak, so can the government. If Joe Random Citizen can join a group and talk about random B.S., why can Joe Random PR-Flack not do the same?
SirWired
The 6th amendment guarantees access to counsel (among other things.) What does it have to do with stopping search of affects owned by an attorney?
Now, it does limit what can be done with anything collected (and in practice, it changes how the search is conducted), under the idea that you cannot receive effective advice of counsel if the papers are subject to search, but that does not stop the search from taking place to begin with.
SirWired