Correct. What keeps US banks solvent is the capital requirements imposed by federal and state banking regulators. These requirements demand, among other things, that loans be accounted for in particular ways and that the bank invest its assets only in certain kinds of ways.
Also, note that deposit accounts are not assets of a bank, but liabilities; loans are not liabilities, but assets. (That is, if you go down to the bank and deposit $100, the bank's assets don't change, because they record both $100 in additional cash and $100 in additional liability to a depositor. A bank can make money only by profitably investing deposited amounts.)
Your assertion that "people in general are still lazy, apathetic, and just plain don't care" is completely false. If I had the energy and motivation to adduce the facts which demonstrate this, you would be very sorry for having made such a rash generalization.
One can bitch and moan all one likes about how nasty Repressive Regime X is, and how we should write sternly-worded letters to the embassy, yada, yada, yada. If this makes a difference, great, but in my view it's unlikely.
The fact of the matter, however, is that the people who write censorware(*) -- the software itself, the software used to develop the "blacklist," and so on -- are generally members of the Western computing community. Some of them, and their friends, are Slashdot readers. They are members of user groups. They can be identified. They should be made persona non grata.
One might say that if person Z didn't work for the censorware companies, another would, so we can hardly fault person Z. Ridiculous. One might as well say that since there will always be people who write viruses, there is no fault in writing and distributing your own. Censorware aimed at choking off the free speech of an entire people is a damned sight more noxious than a virus. (I am reminded of Jack London's description of "scabs" (strikebreakers), which is perhaps extreme in the labor context in our day but may find some analogy here.)
(* Excepting people who write genuinely multipurpose software tools. And I'd except people who write software which is by its nature limited to filtering for a not-large number of machines -- i.e., for home or business use -- though perhaps not everyone would.)
(The commonwealth ranks higher in total tax burden -- i.e., federal and state taxes combined -- because it has a lot of people in high federal income tax brackets, but it still doesn't make the top 10.)
I'm not quite sure what your point is here other than to bring up the sci-fi-versus-fantasy holy war. Nothing about Asimov's "invented" future has come to pass; Herbert's "future" is a stylized medievalism. That's not to say their work is not of lasting value, but they're not prophets (yet). (Dick is to my mind the sci-fi writer whose work is most inarguably of lasting value, but I don't know what it means to say he "invented" the future.)
Clarke's invention of geosynchronous orbit is fortuitous at best; sci-fi writers don't "invent" the future any more than Hollywood actresses do (notwithstanding the fact that Hedy Lamarr co-invented cellular communications).
This rings true with me. I've read a fair amount of King (though given the volume of his output, far from half) and IMHO the very best stuff he's written is the shorter stuff. Carrie is in my view one of the best novels of the 70s -- it's both a great read and relentless in pursuit of its themes. At the same time, I can't believe anyone will be plowing through The Tommyknockers 50 years from now.
I've read a few of the titles you list as well, but that doesn't mean they're widely read. Data is not the plural of anecdote.
That having been said, I might agree that The Time Machine is still widely read; that book is more a story of a dystopian future along the lines of 1984 than a fictional exploration of time travel, and holds up reasonably well.
My previous list left out Twain's A Connecticut Yankee... (sci-fi?) and The Mysterious Stranger (fantasy, of a sort), though they may be less widely read than I imagine. Speaking of Arthur, I am also reminded that the novels comprising T.H. White's retelling of the Arthur legend, The Once And Future King, date from the late 1930s and early 1940s. That's still a pretty short list, however, given the voluminous amount of sci-fi and fantasy produced before 1950.
imho thats one of the great things about sci-fi, its timeless, and I dont think that just because the books will be old in 50 years time people will stop reading them.
I think this optimistic: how many people do you know who have read lots of sci-fi from the 30s and 40s? Take, for example, Edgar Rice Burroughs, who was both incredibly prolific and incredibly popular in his time (roughly, from 1914-50). Some extremely hardcore sci-fi buffs dip into his oeuvre; most don't. Even H.G. Wells and Jules Verne are rarely read in the original (though derivative works based -- usually quite loosely -- on their writings continue to be popular).
Sci-fi really does wear out its welcome, either because it is superseded by actual events (does anyone still want to read a marvelous story about a ship that travels under the surface of the sea? no?) or because the imagined science diverges so far from the known reality (are there aliens living on Mars? no, there aren't) that the concept is no longer intriguing. Horror does better because its fundamental premise that the rational view of the world is incomplete; vampires aren't materially more implausible now than when Stoker first put pen to paper.
Other than Shelley's Frankenstein, Poe's stories, Stoker's Dracula, Lovecraft's stories, Howard's "Conan" stories and Orwell's 1984, I can't think of any pre-1950 sci-fi, fantasy and horror writing (excepting fantasy aimed primarily at young children) which is still actually read widely.
(* Emphasize "actually" and "widely"; the fact that the "Indiana Jones" film series is an update of the Allan Quartermain stories does not mean many people are actually reading the Quartermain novels, nor does the fact that you might be reading them so indicate.)
Further to this, see Douglas Hofstadter's fine piece on the subject, an unauthorized copy of which can be found here.
Re:Postal & Linux & Loki == Joy!
on
Loki Goes Postal
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· Score: 1
I don't mean to pick a fight, but your comment illustrates exactly why it's pretentious. "Look at me, I'm hipper and edgier than you, I 'get' it and you don't." I don't think there's anything to "get" in this game other than an extremely fleeting thrill of violating a taboo. RWS think they're being quite clever, but there's nothing really clever going on there.
Re:Postal & Linux & Loki == Joy!
on
Loki Goes Postal
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· Score: 1
I wonder if they have toned down the gib-factor at all? Then again, with America's recent blood-lust, this may sell quite well.
Actually, to the extent this was ever funny, it's less so now. There's a difference between cleverly subversive and pointlessly distasteful; "Postal" wasn't even close to the line. (And I did give it a try, once upon a time -- I d/l'ed the demo and played a game or two. I have a dark sense of humor, and this didn't make me smile, not once.)
Don't get me wrong; I don't want Congress to pass a law or for Kyle's mom to march on Washington, etc. But at the end of the day, your time is more precious than you know; don't waste it on pretentious cooler-than-thou crap like Postal.
In my Finance course, I learn how to balance a corporate stock portfolio, but I have no clue how to start a business or pay my employees.
Then perhaps it would have been a novel idea for you to find out what finance was before you took a class in that subject. (I suspect you will also find the novels of Charles Dickens receive a quite superficial treatment in most botany courses, and that most faculty who teach Byzantine art history spend very little time discussing the Lorentz transforms.)
FYI, here's how to start a business: Go down to city hall and fill out a DBA ("doing-business-as") form. Now start doing business under that name. Congratulations on your new business!
Also FYI, here's how to pay your employees. First, get some money and put it in a checking account. Second, write them some checks, or hire a payroll processing firm like ADP to write the checks for you. (They're in the book.)
These and many other very simple questions are addressed in books with titles like "Starting Your Own Business In East Carolina For Idiots And Dummies" which are written at a third-grade level and which are available in your local bookstore for $20 or so. Shockingly, most finance professors will spend their time discussing such trivia as the capital asset pricing model rather than covering this material. Similarly, law professors almost never tell you where the courthouses are, and medical school professors almost never tell you where all the hospitals are.
In my System Analysis & Design course, I spend 3 hours constructing data-flow diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams, and Ghantt charts for programs that take around an hour to code!
If that shocks you, listen to this: In my chemistry lab, my TA made us spend two hours determining the pH of an unknown acid -- when in fact he knew the answer the entire time!
Just because we want there to be zero false negatives doesn't mean we'd have to crank down the level of false negatives that low. Cars are required to have a certain level of safety protection because ideally we want there to be zero highway fatalities, but we don't make people drive around in tanks at 5 mph.
I agree that this may be a serious problem. Along similar lines, I recently read an op-ed written by the wife of a man who happens to have the same name and is about the same age as a fugitive war criminal in the former Yugoslavia. The upshot is that every time they travel, he is detained and it takes hours to establish that he is not the war criminal. One could contemplate that there would be some system by which the small number of people who would have this problem could themselves voluntarily register in a "clear" database which could be relied upon to verify that a particular Mohammad Atta was the electronics engineer from Pittsburgh and not the international terrorist. Of course, such a system would present its own complications.(*)
(* One ns = Time from establishment of such a system to the point when a screenplay is written where an innocent man who happens to look like a terrorist is chased by the terrorist, who wants to take advantage of the innocent guy's registration in the "clear" database.)
The article does indeed identify technological problems with face recognition, but argues that even if these problems were overcome and a 99.99% accuracy rate were possible, the system would still be a bad idea. I took issue with this latter part of his argument. I don't think Schneier(*) seriously argues that it's simply impossible to achieve high rates of accuracy at any point in the future.
The "66%" statistic you assert appears nowhere in the Schneier article. Obviously if reasonable rates of accuracy (>99%, and probably higher) weren't acheivable, implementing the system wouldn't make sense.
(* While I acknowledge that the technological challenges are different, it would still be a little surprising to me if a crypto guru who most days can be found arguing that people shouldn't underestimate the processing power that can be thrown at crypto challenges would turn around and argue that face recognition systems aren't technologically feasible.)
It won't work for the same reason that carry-on baggage checks are largely unsucessful.
What evidence do you have that carry-on baggage checks are largely unsuccessful? Obviously they didn't stop the recent attacks, but I would suspect a lot of air-related violence has been averted by carry-on checks, either directly through interception of weapons or (far more importantly) indirectly by deterring people from trying to carry on weapons in the first place.
I think your point is well-taken but perhaps overstated. To address the fire alarm point, I think I've evacuated my office building at least 4 times each year that I've been in my current position, and to my knowledge there's never been a fire condition in my building that posed any kind of danger to me. But I still evacuate every time, knowing that it is more likely than not that it's a false alarm. Likewise, security personnel are going to know that this system generates false positives, but it's still their job to investigate them. Might people still be slipshod in their investigation? Well, sure. But that doesn't show that the system would be a waste of money; it just means that we have to decide whether the system is worth the money in view of its flaws.
(By way of comparison, the current carry-on baggage scanning procedure could be thought of as generating a near-100% false positive rate, in that everyone's bags are checked regardless of whether there's any reason to suspect them, and almost nobody has anything improper in their carry-ons. Keeping people attentive to the X-ray machines is undoubtedly a management challenge, but there are a variety of responses: spot-checking by undercover personnel carrying fake "bombs", making sure people don't work long shifts staring at the scanner, etc. It seems similar efforts could be made in connection with a face recognition system.)
While I'm generally a Schneier fan, I am more than a little mystified by this article. Schneier's argument is that face recognition systems in airports are bad because they will almost certainly give large numbers of "false positive" results -- i.e., some non-terrorists will be identified as terrorists. But why are false positives so bad?
I imagine that airport patrons identified as "terrorists" by the face recognition system would be detained by security, have their ID rigorously checked and have their luggage rigorously inspected. (With high levels of accuracy, this would amount to a few people per airport per day.) I do not imagine that they would be shot on sight. Inconveniencing (and embarrassing) a few patrons at each airport every day is certainly not a good thing, but it is hardly self-evident that it would be intolerable.
I am not a big fan of universal use of face recognition technology for the reasons outlined in Phil Agre's excellent essay on that subject (linked at the bottom of the Schneier piece as well). But we all understand that some compromises have to be made to make air travel secure. If this is the best argument against using face recognition at airports, it's not a good one.
Re:too many failures !
on
More WTC News
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The second plane hit 18 minutes after the first, and there wasn't a fighter plane in sight
It takes time to scramble fighters -- not a very long time, but maybe 15-20 minutes. And was anyone certain this was a terrorist attack until the second plane hit?
One rented car found with manuals in arab about "How to pilot a commercial plane"? How convenient...
Unless you have some actual evidence that that was staged, I would call that a clue.
Bin Laden was until some years financed and trained by the CIA
Well, yes, the US financed and trained a lot of Afghan rebels during the Russian invasion. Are we now supposed to believe that the CIA staged the Russian invasion as a pretext for training Bin Laden?
What's the point in making a terrorist strike without any kind of claim [of responsibility]?
There's been no public claim of responsibility because it would guarantee retaliation. The public denials of responsibility give countries hostile to the US an opening to denounce the US for whatever retailiation it might undertake.
The hallmark of conspiracy paranoia is that the easily answered question (why didn't fighters scramble?) is turned into something mysterious with an inflection of the voice, and the completely self-evident (did the hijackers rent the car?) is turned into evidence that sinister forces are constructing a facade. There will be enough genuine questions for us to think about in the weeks and months to come without expending mental energy on fantasy.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, note that deposit accounts are not assets of a bank, but liabilities; loans are not liabilities, but assets. (That is, if you go down to the bank and deposit $100, the bank's assets don't change, because they record both $100 in additional cash and $100 in additional liability to a depositor. A bank can make money only by profitably investing deposited amounts.)
Your assertion that "people in general are still lazy, apathetic, and just plain don't care" is completely false. If I had the energy and motivation to adduce the facts which demonstrate this, you would be very sorry for having made such a rash generalization.
The fact of the matter, however, is that the people who write censorware(*) -- the software itself, the software used to develop the "blacklist," and so on -- are generally members of the Western computing community. Some of them, and their friends, are Slashdot readers. They are members of user groups. They can be identified. They should be made persona non grata.
One might say that if person Z didn't work for the censorware companies, another would, so we can hardly fault person Z. Ridiculous. One might as well say that since there will always be people who write viruses, there is no fault in writing and distributing your own. Censorware aimed at choking off the free speech of an entire people is a damned sight more noxious than a virus. (I am reminded of Jack London's description of "scabs" (strikebreakers), which is perhaps extreme in the labor context in our day but may find some analogy here.)
(* Excepting people who write genuinely multipurpose software tools. And I'd except people who write software which is by its nature limited to filtering for a not-large number of machines -- i.e., for home or business use -- though perhaps not everyone would.)
Hell, try finding one in Ireland. Corned beef is damned near inedible except for use as cold cuts and in hash.
The law recognizes unregistered trademarks. Accordingly, I don't see why a court would take "trademark" to mean only a registered trademark.
(The commonwealth ranks higher in total tax burden -- i.e., federal and state taxes combined -- because it has a lot of people in high federal income tax brackets, but it still doesn't make the top 10.)
Clarke's invention of geosynchronous orbit is fortuitous at best; sci-fi writers don't "invent" the future any more than Hollywood actresses do (notwithstanding the fact that Hedy Lamarr co-invented cellular communications).
This rings true with me. I've read a fair amount of King (though given the volume of his output, far from half) and IMHO the very best stuff he's written is the shorter stuff. Carrie is in my view one of the best novels of the 70s -- it's both a great read and relentless in pursuit of its themes. At the same time, I can't believe anyone will be plowing through The Tommyknockers 50 years from now.
I've read a few of the titles you list as well, but that doesn't mean they're widely read. Data is not the plural of anecdote.
That having been said, I might agree that The Time Machine is still widely read; that book is more a story of a dystopian future along the lines of 1984 than a fictional exploration of time travel, and holds up reasonably well.
My previous list left out Twain's A Connecticut Yankee... (sci-fi?) and The Mysterious Stranger (fantasy, of a sort), though they may be less widely read than I imagine. Speaking of Arthur, I am also reminded that the novels comprising T.H. White's retelling of the Arthur legend, The Once And Future King, date from the late 1930s and early 1940s. That's still a pretty short list, however, given the voluminous amount of sci-fi and fantasy produced before 1950.
I think this optimistic: how many people do you know who have read lots of sci-fi from the 30s and 40s? Take, for example, Edgar Rice Burroughs, who was both incredibly prolific and incredibly popular in his time (roughly, from 1914-50). Some extremely hardcore sci-fi buffs dip into his oeuvre; most don't. Even H.G. Wells and Jules Verne are rarely read in the original (though derivative works based -- usually quite loosely -- on their writings continue to be popular).
Sci-fi really does wear out its welcome, either because it is superseded by actual events (does anyone still want to read a marvelous story about a ship that travels under the surface of the sea? no?) or because the imagined science diverges so far from the known reality (are there aliens living on Mars? no, there aren't) that the concept is no longer intriguing. Horror does better because its fundamental premise that the rational view of the world is incomplete; vampires aren't materially more implausible now than when Stoker first put pen to paper.
Other than Shelley's Frankenstein, Poe's stories, Stoker's Dracula, Lovecraft's stories, Howard's "Conan" stories and Orwell's 1984, I can't think of any pre-1950 sci-fi, fantasy and horror writing (excepting fantasy aimed primarily at young children) which is still actually read widely.
(* Emphasize "actually" and "widely"; the fact that the "Indiana Jones" film series is an update of the Allan Quartermain stories does not mean many people are actually reading the Quartermain novels, nor does the fact that you might be reading them so indicate.)
Further to this, see Douglas Hofstadter's fine piece on the subject, an unauthorized copy of which can be found here.
I don't mean to pick a fight, but your comment illustrates exactly why it's pretentious. "Look at me, I'm hipper and edgier than you, I 'get' it and you don't." I don't think there's anything to "get" in this game other than an extremely fleeting thrill of violating a taboo. RWS think they're being quite clever, but there's nothing really clever going on there.
Actually, to the extent this was ever funny, it's less so now. There's a difference between cleverly subversive and pointlessly distasteful; "Postal" wasn't even close to the line. (And I did give it a try, once upon a time -- I d/l'ed the demo and played a game or two. I have a dark sense of humor, and this didn't make me smile, not once.)
Don't get me wrong; I don't want Congress to pass a law or for Kyle's mom to march on Washington, etc. But at the end of the day, your time is more precious than you know; don't waste it on pretentious cooler-than-thou crap like Postal.
And what's up with misspelling "forest" with two Rs?
Then perhaps it would have been a novel idea for you to find out what finance was before you took a class in that subject. (I suspect you will also find the novels of Charles Dickens receive a quite superficial treatment in most botany courses, and that most faculty who teach Byzantine art history spend very little time discussing the Lorentz transforms.)
FYI, here's how to start a business: Go down to city hall and fill out a DBA ("doing-business-as") form. Now start doing business under that name. Congratulations on your new business!
Also FYI, here's how to pay your employees. First, get some money and put it in a checking account. Second, write them some checks, or hire a payroll processing firm like ADP to write the checks for you. (They're in the book.)
These and many other very simple questions are addressed in books with titles like "Starting Your Own Business In East Carolina For Idiots And Dummies" which are written at a third-grade level and which are available in your local bookstore for $20 or so. Shockingly, most finance professors will spend their time discussing such trivia as the capital asset pricing model rather than covering this material. Similarly, law professors almost never tell you where the courthouses are, and medical school professors almost never tell you where all the hospitals are.
In my System Analysis & Design course, I spend 3 hours constructing data-flow diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams, and Ghantt charts for programs that take around an hour to code!
If that shocks you, listen to this: In my chemistry lab, my TA made us spend two hours determining the pH of an unknown acid -- when in fact he knew the answer the entire time!
Just because we want there to be zero false negatives doesn't mean we'd have to crank down the level of false negatives that low. Cars are required to have a certain level of safety protection because ideally we want there to be zero highway fatalities, but we don't make people drive around in tanks at 5 mph.
Point well-taken, but federal legislation could shield airports and airlines from liability.
(* One ns = Time from establishment of such a system to the point when a screenplay is written where an innocent man who happens to look like a terrorist is chased by the terrorist, who wants to take advantage of the innocent guy's registration in the "clear" database.)
The "66%" statistic you assert appears nowhere in the Schneier article. Obviously if reasonable rates of accuracy (>99%, and probably higher) weren't acheivable, implementing the system wouldn't make sense.
(* While I acknowledge that the technological challenges are different, it would still be a little surprising to me if a crypto guru who most days can be found arguing that people shouldn't underestimate the processing power that can be thrown at crypto challenges would turn around and argue that face recognition systems aren't technologically feasible.)
What evidence do you have that carry-on baggage checks are largely unsuccessful? Obviously they didn't stop the recent attacks, but I would suspect a lot of air-related violence has been averted by carry-on checks, either directly through interception of weapons or (far more importantly) indirectly by deterring people from trying to carry on weapons in the first place.
(By way of comparison, the current carry-on baggage scanning procedure could be thought of as generating a near-100% false positive rate, in that everyone's bags are checked regardless of whether there's any reason to suspect them, and almost nobody has anything improper in their carry-ons. Keeping people attentive to the X-ray machines is undoubtedly a management challenge, but there are a variety of responses: spot-checking by undercover personnel carrying fake "bombs", making sure people don't work long shifts staring at the scanner, etc. It seems similar efforts could be made in connection with a face recognition system.)
I imagine that airport patrons identified as "terrorists" by the face recognition system would be detained by security, have their ID rigorously checked and have their luggage rigorously inspected. (With high levels of accuracy, this would amount to a few people per airport per day.) I do not imagine that they would be shot on sight. Inconveniencing (and embarrassing) a few patrons at each airport every day is certainly not a good thing, but it is hardly self-evident that it would be intolerable.
I am not a big fan of universal use of face recognition technology for the reasons outlined in Phil Agre's excellent essay on that subject (linked at the bottom of the Schneier piece as well). But we all understand that some compromises have to be made to make air travel secure. If this is the best argument against using face recognition at airports, it's not a good one.
It takes time to scramble fighters -- not a very long time, but maybe 15-20 minutes. And was anyone certain this was a terrorist attack until the second plane hit?
One rented car found with manuals in arab about "How to pilot a commercial plane"? How convenient...
Unless you have some actual evidence that that was staged, I would call that a clue.
Bin Laden was until some years financed and trained by the CIA
Well, yes, the US financed and trained a lot of Afghan rebels during the Russian invasion. Are we now supposed to believe that the CIA staged the Russian invasion as a pretext for training Bin Laden?
What's the point in making a terrorist strike without any kind of claim [of responsibility]?
There's been no public claim of responsibility because it would guarantee retaliation. The public denials of responsibility give countries hostile to the US an opening to denounce the US for whatever retailiation it might undertake.
The hallmark of conspiracy paranoia is that the easily answered question (why didn't fighters scramble?) is turned into something mysterious with an inflection of the voice, and the completely self-evident (did the hijackers rent the car?) is turned into evidence that sinister forces are constructing a facade. There will be enough genuine questions for us to think about in the weeks and months to come without expending mental energy on fantasy.
The real question is: Is plutocracy rule by a planet, or isn't it?
And, more to the point, can you say it ten times quickly?