Whether the conclusions of those are true or false is not something that hiring committees will delve into too much. If you are young and have a family to support, it can be tempting to take shortcuts.
Yes, the incentive to publish, publish, publish leads to all kinds of problems. But more importantly, the incentives for detailed peer-reviewing and repeating others' work just aren't there. Peer-reviewing in most cases is just a drag, and while it's somewhat important for your career, nobody's going to give you Tenure on the basis of your excellent journal reviews.
The inventives for repeating experiments are even worse. How often do top conferences/journals publish a result like "Researchers repeat non-controversial experiment, find exactly the same results"?
Your relationship with your doctor is based on trust and consent - you don't ask your taxi driver to submit to a breathalyzer before he drives you home, so why should you ask your doctor how he's sleeping? If you don't trust your doctor to be operating on you in good condition, you need to find yourself a different doctor.
I don't ask my taxi driver to take a breathalyzer, but it's not because I trust him. Rather, I trust that he's sober since he knows that there are serious criminal and civil penalties that society will apply to him if he does make that mistake --- from loss of license up to prison time. It's not perfect, but it keeps incentives in the right place.
If there were no such penalties --- and moreover, if Taxi dispatchers routinely encouraged their staff to take hits off of a Vodka bottle in between fares --- then I probably would ask him to take a breathalyzer, or else I would walk. Now replace "walk" with "bleed to death"** and "take a breathalyzer" with, well, I can't really think of a good analogue, since there is none. Now you see where we are in the medical field.
Hospitals need to enforce sleep requirements on surgeons similar to (or better than) those enforced on pilots. If hospitals can't do that, those requirements should be enforced by society at large, with suspension of license being a first-level penalty.
** Yes, I know the focus of this article is on elective surgeries, but these same issues apply to non-elective surgeries as well.
She was asked about her experience with foreign policy and she responded with, essentially, a trivial geographic fact. Leaving aside the fact that her responsibilities as governor did not require her to plan for airborne attack from Russia, leaving aside her blinkered understanding Russian-American warfighting strategy, what she said is essentially "I have no experience or significant understanding of foreign policy". And it would have been better for her to just say that, rather than spouting trivia.
Let's make government incompetent --- then it will inevitably shrink down and we'll be free of it. Oh wait, hmm, doesn't work.
Not necessarily a comment on what happened in this story, just a warning to anyone who believes in the above proposition. If you hate big government, then you're definitely not going to like incompetent, underpaid, under-resourced big government. The solution is to make government work better, never the opposite.
Not only does every news organization have some point of view --- even if that 'point of view' is just slavish devotion to factual truth --- but people should keep in mind that "objective news reporting" has nothing to do with objectivity. It's a business strategy.
Basically once we had a small number of news organizations reaching large audiences, those papers had to work hard not to piss off 50% of their readership. Hence "objectivity", which isn't some noble goal, but rather a way to keep everyone happy. Unfortunately as we've seen, sometimes being objective actually means taking ridiculous arguments seriously, lest you be accused of having "bias".
I don't much have a problem with Fox News being a conservative/Republican Party news organ (which it is, take a look at the ties between Fox's management and the Republican party). I do have a big problem with the fact that they claim to be fair and balanced, and that 'serious' people are willing to accept this figleaf and overlook the slant, even while they would obviously dismiss a self-professed activist network.
Even that whole "I can see Russia from my house" thing was never said by her, but by Tina Fey on a SNL skit.
Please don't play me for stupid. I was there in 2008 and saw her comment on Russia. Yes, it was not 'I can see Alaska from my house' --- that was a Tina Fey sketch made up later to ridicule her for the actual much more stupid answer she did give. This is about the saddest defense of SP I've ever heard. Please stick with 'she didn't know anything in 2008, but she's much better now'. At least that's colorable.
What really kills me about Sarah Palin is not her ignorance, though that is a dealbreaker. It's the fact that I really don't trust her as a person. Basically every friend and political ally she's ever had has a story to tell about how she stuck a knife in their back. A couple of bitter former friends like this are just par for the course, but this is not just a couple of stories. I don't understand why anyone would want to be friends with someone who's obviously such a bad human being, let alone elect them to be their leader. And don't even get me started on how willing she is to accept financial favors, from Wasilla to the present.
... is that elections are largely driven by economic fundamentals and (to some degree) random chance. Meaning, there's a non-trivial probability that Palin might beat Obama. I'm not trying to be an ass about Palin, because I'm sure she's a nice person in the right context, but she has not demonstrated anything close to the knowledge and/or responsibility that I would expect in a Presidential candidate. She doesn't appear to have taken the lessons offered by the '08 election in terms of becoming more informed or dedicated --- all she seems to have learned is that she can get traction by attacking anything remotely related to the left wing. That's great for a pundit, not so great for the President of a large country.
In the long run a Palin presidency would be a disaster for Democrats and Republicans, not to mention Americans in general. These people shouldn't flirt with disaster.
As a professor I can tell you that I don't care if you doodle or daydream. I don't honestly even care if you come to class. But if you do choose to come to my class I want you to at least conceal your inattentiveness, in the same way I would expect you not to take a phone call during a theatrical performance or even a movie I've paid to attend.
The problem with Internet-connected laptop users is that some are very bad at this. In the same way that it's possible to use a mobile phone in a non-distracting way, it's possible to use a laptop appropriately. But many don't. And it's distracting to see someone engrossed in a screen or vigorously typing away in a manner that's obviously disconnected from the course itself. Worse is obvious IMing between students in the same class, which is distracting and intimidating to students who ask questions or actually participate in the discussion.
I work hard to prepare my courses and get consistently high student reviews. But a lot of the energy in the class comes from the students, and distractions like this work like a control rod in an atomic pile. Believe me, everyone gets a worse experience.
It's particularly hard because I teach Master's students at a decent university. These are adults, mind you, people who are supposed to know these things. They're people who probably wouldn't take a phone call in a theatre, but for some reason they have no sense of etiquette when a laptop is involved. Worse, it's hard to scold adults and nobody else in the class wants to do it.
These aren't bad people. I understand the temptation of having a laptop in front of you, you just want to check that email. But it really does hurt the class experience. I don't want to ban laptops, and honestly I don't want to be a dick. But I wish to god I could disable Wifi at the AP. Unfortunately University IT controls it and they wouldn't be thrilled.
It does sound like they are acting responsibly and merely saying such marked tests need further scrutiny by the school, and only marking tests with a really low probability to be just lucky... but who knows what the individual schools do.
Most of the cheating described in TFA is the type that doesn't leave an evidence trail. Thus we can infer that either (a) schools are using the circumstantial statistical evidence as ground for disciplinary action, (b) most students break down and confess when confronted with this evidence, or (c) the schools are wasting a lot of money tracking down cheaters that they ultimately can't punish.
While I'm sure (b) is true for some percentage of those students who get fingered, my guess is that it's not a particularly high percentage, and moreover that percentage would tend to go down as word spreads that all you need to do is keep your mouth shut. (c) is certainly possible, but TFA claims that cheating has gone way down (70%) --- and thus we must infer that schools are accomplishing this by actually deterring cheaters (i.e., punishing them), rather than just embarrassing them. In my mind, this leaves (a) as a very serious possibility.
And if that's the case --- if it's even possible that it's the case --- then IMHO the company has an ethical obligation to take some responsibility for what's being done with its data, or at least verify their methodology and be much more careful than they seem to be right now.
He later dialed them down as being politically inviable and almost certainly unconstitutional (right on both counts), but when people on the Left makes comments like this (and he's not the only offender), it definitely gives credence to the concerns of those on the Right.
And if Cass Sunstein was the entire Democratic party, and if there was no Republican party, and if he'd even advocated wholesale censorship, and there were no Supreme Court, and the Democrats could maintain majority rule of both houses and the presidency forever, and if.......
Seriously, do you really want to play this game? In five minutes with Google I can find quotes from far more influential people on the Right --- many of them actually elected to the United States Congress! --- that could lead me to believe that the Right is planning to secede from the Union while eliminating the civil rights act and removing the right to a Jury trial and the right of Americans to select their own President, and that's before I get into the crazy fun things they want to do to free speech on the Internet (bye bye Wikileaks).
But I mostly don't choose to believe these things because I realize that they're fringe views and furthermore, just because some people on the Right say crazy things, that does not mean that every piece of legislation supported by someone who is on the 'Right' is a stalking horse for these nutty points of view. Obviously if I could provide some strong evidence that a particular piece of legislation/is/ a stalking horse, that'd be different. But this ain't that.
What is really needed is a good plan to separate ownership of the backbone from ownership of the last mile. If Comcast couldn't legally enter the backbone infrastructure market, and "Mom and Pop Fiber Optics" could get access to Verizon's infrastructure at a "reasonable, non-discriminatory rate" it wouldn't matter if Comcast combined content and ISP services because Comcast would not have any more clout than its smaller competitors.
And I'd like a pony too.
Don't kid yourself that Congresspeople and sundry interest groups are fighting Net Neutrality for anything approaching the idealistic reasons you name. They're opposing it --- solely, simply, absolutely --- because it might separate large ISPs from their profits. The world where this happens is not a world where anyone's going to lift a finger to separate Comcast from its infrastructure.
When Congress decides to fully regulate the Internet --- and they will, regardless of what happens to this bill --- they'll use something splashy like terrorism or kiddie porn, not something esoteric like packet delivery rules.
So call me an evil, ignorant member of the American Right if it makes you feel better, but I can't help but notice this pattern, and can't help but be convinced that the next bit of internet regulation will fit the same pattern, no matter what a bunch of Potomac River Rats say. Granted, having internet access controlled by a handful of corporate monopolies is far from ideal... but how in the hell can you expect to improve that situation by consolidating that power even more into one government monopoly? (Particularly given the FCC's existing track record on "regulating" other communication mediums.)
Laws like the ones you're referring to have always passed, and always will pass, with the full consent of the Right Wing and the Left as they're represented in Congress. And when push comes to shove, plenty more laws will be passed --- don't kid yourself that by killing Net Neutrality and handing control of the 'net over to a consortium of large ISPs you're going to do the slightest bit to stop the next CHIPA or COPA or what have you.
The thing about Net Neutrality legislation is that it really has nothing to do with any of this stuff. Net Neutrality is/not/ about whether you can send encrypted data or child porn. It's about whether incumbent, monopoly ISPs can provide preferential treatment to services that pay them, and route everyone else's traffic to/dev/null. The issues here aren't about what the hell's in the packets, although theoretically Net Neutrality legislation/might/ require the ISPs to act like a common carrier --- the issues here are about whether the packets arrive and how much it's going to cost you.
If you can convince me in some/concrete/ way that this bill is actually a stalking horse for some secret plan to make it easier to censor the net, then I'd like to hear it. But 'a bunch of Democrats with varying degrees of proximity to the administration said things that might be misconstrued to indicate a desire to implement censorship' is not the same as an argument. It's weak fucking tea. Trust me, when both parties work together to implement 'net censorship they'll be quite clear about it, and it won't have anything to do with what packets get delivered with what latency.
Normally I would dismiss your post, which seems full of crazy conspiracy theories that you're pulling from memory "but can be found on Google". However some bright sparks have seen fit to moderate your post as +5 Informative. So please, give me some citations. The only things I've been able to find on Google are completely unverifiable claims from conspiracy-theorist websites.
But more fundamentally --- what is the implication of your post? That opposing Net Neutrality legislation is going to make it harder for governments to censor? Cause it seems to me that a small number of powerful telecoms dominating what people read is more or less a precondition for a modern totalitarian state.
The stimulus package included many billions of dollars specifically marked for upgrading the grid. While this may seem like no big deal, I'm told that it's one of the biggest single investments in the grid (especially R&D) in decades. And there would have been more except that the funds had to be spent immediately and thus many non-shovel-ready projects were left out. We could do a lot more with a second stimulus package. Unfortunately, as your post illustrates, people are so misinformed about the package that the chances of it happening are zero. Oh, the irony.
I'm betting that my Reuters and BBC apps are all pulling the same info from the same sources as the web versions, it's just about presentation and how the interface works.
I've never used those apps, but I do use the Engadget app which I imagine to be similar. It's definitely easier than using the browser, largely because the content is already neatly formatted for the screen and you can avoid some awkwardness from Safari's awful caching. There are a few controls and bells and whistles that work better in the app (mostly image and video viewing), but not very much that's really dramatically better than the web experience.
My point, then, is that these advantages could largely go away with improvements browser and web page design.
So the question then is: what features are so unique that they can only be done well in an app? To me that's mostly the neat animated interactive stuff, but like I said, that stuff is rare end expensive to develop. Is it worth building a tablet-only newspaper for that stuff?
Because it will be a native app instead of the web, for one. The web is a reasonable "lowest common denominator", but really, it still sucks for UIs, no matter how many advances we've made. The difference between a native app and a web-page on this kind of device is massive in terms of how much nicer the native interface is -- in part because it scales up things to be more "touchable" instead of "clickable". I'm glad to finally see a reversal of this trend of "everything as a web page" -- the usability of an app designed for the multi-touch is easily an order of magnitude better than a web page. It's a completely different kind of interface than one you'd do for the web.
While this is all true in theory, my experience is that low-usage proprietary formats have one huge usability disadvantage in practice: namely, it's expensive to produce content for them. So while it's true that your newspaper could have multitouch, interactive, vector-graphics-enabled, hyper-linking, Angry-Birds-quality-animated featurettes, in practice the publishers can only really justify the creation of a small number of such features per newspaper. Absent these you're down to a flat web page/newspaper that's slightly easier to manipulate through an app than through a browser.
But over time, even these advantages will go away as web designers get better at designing for tablets, and browser/web technology improves. It's more or less a self-fulfilling prophecy, since the publisher will inevitably devote more resources to improving web version if it has 10,000x the readership and it's cheaper to develop for.
I've seen this happen with a number of formats over the years. It shouldn't be surprising, once you consider how expensive it would be to produce a product every day/week/month that lives up to the hype of what a tablet-based newspaper should be. Even the iPad 'showcase' version of Wired is basically just a bunch of high-quality image files with a small number of lame 'interactive' features.
So, the problem is only for public key crypto, and for AES we just switch to 512 bit keys and no problem?
Not necessarily. At present we know of a small number of quantum algorithms for problems such as factorization and database search. There are some brilliant theorists working on these things, but the total amount of (wo)manpower being applied to these problems is constrained by the fact that we don't really have any quantum computers to use this stuff with. A consequence of this is that there are vastly more problems for which we don't have a quantum algorithm than those for which we do.
This has led to a lot of interest in 'post-quantum cryptography' and flood of research papers proposing new public-key cryptosystems based on mathematical problems we don't know how to solve with quantum computers. Another poster mentioned the McEliece cryptosystem, which is based on problems in coding theory. That's a little bit old-school. The new hotness is lattice problems --- go to any top academic crypto conference and you'll see a bunch of papers using these. If you're really interested in this stuff, here's a pretty good intro to a book on the subject of post-quantum crypto.
However, all this talk is good for researchers in non-standard areas, but it shouldn't lead anyone to be overconfident that these problems will stay resistant to quantum solutions. You can more or less bank on there being some future 'golden age of quantum computing theory' which should take off right about the same time useful quantum computers become available. Predictably, the problems that receive the most attention will be the ones most widely used at the time --- including the ones underlying the most widely used cryptosystems.
The one other thing I should mention is that there's a big difference between finding quantum algorithms for fundamental problems such as database search (Grover's algorithm) or number theoretic problems (Shor's algorithm) and finding quantum algorithms for extremely complex specialized systems like AES. Finding an algorithm that solves a major number theory problem is a big contribution --- if you break a particular cryptosystem, people will just shift away from it eventually and your work will become a footnote. Simultaneously, developing an algorithm that attacks AES is enormously harder using the relatively primitive techniques we currently have. So while right now our best approach to breaking symmetric algorithms is to use generic tools like Grover's algorithm, that's not aways guaranteed to be the case.
Of course, crypto's important to us and the chance for a quantum-resistant cryptosystem is better than none at all, so this is still useful work. If you care about your crypto you need to this stuff it all with a little grain of salt, and hope that QCs are far in the future.
Are they going to block encrypted and VPN traffic as well? Deep packet inspection to disallow the use of proxies? Denying access to DNS servers outside France?
In the past few years working with DRM systems I've basically come to appreciate the 'mom rule'. Namely, if a technology's good enough to keep your mom from accessing data, then it's probably good enough --- meaning it'll keep 90+% of potential customers on the paying hook.
In this case, while my mom's excellent at typing nytimes.com into her browser, I can't see her downloading VPNs, using p2p systems or even accessing mirrors. Thus, while this law doesn't provide a perfect shield against the populace accessing 'bad' things, it'll probably do most of the job. After that all you have to do is keep the media outlets busy with other things, and you've basically got what you need. Berlusconi and Putin have some lessons to teach there.
the original, more-closely-guarded-than-military-secrets BC
Could you provide me with some credible citation demonstrating that such a birth certificate exists, and that Obama is blocking its release? I usually find the [citation needed] crowd annoying, but this is a case where Google has given me nothing more than a bunch of outdated allegations and claims from 2008 that we're 'just days away from cracking the secret of Obama's Kenyan birth'.
Normally I wouldn't feed the trolls, but for some reason the mods saw fit to mod your post +4 Informative. I'd like to know what they know.
When I was in Boyscout Troop 238, we would apply for the right to assembly when we had larger functions in the town's parks weeks or months ahead of time. And it's not because Big Oil wanted us stopped...
Multi-week delays are perfectly reasonable for a Boy scout troop --- they can plan their functions weeks ahead of time. However, it's absolutely not reasonable to delay peaceful political protest on issues that have an inherent component of timeliness, e.g., court cases, legislation, etc. In many cases, enforcing a delay is tantamount to preventing the assembly itself, simply by delaying it until the protest no longer has relevance.
I can't speak to UK law, but most democracies have explicitly guaranteed a freedom of assembly precisely because that right is so important, and because it's so easy to deny. Protecting the right means supporting its spirit, not just paying lip service to it.
*I* don't get that privilege of lifelong income. I work. I get paid.
Many musicians don't. Get paid, that is. Or get bonuses. They make stuff and hope that people will buy it, and that the tiny bit of income they make off of this will add up as people discover their work over the years.
I'd be willing to support a model where musicians get good salaries and bonuses, then we all make their recordings public domain --- sort of like government-funded academic research. But I'm not sure who's going to pay for it.
PS I don't really disagree with your basic position here ---- you've just made the worst possible argument for it.
Facist methods of controlling corporations by publicly financing business losses
I think the current relationship of government and the banking business is so toxic that I'm willing to accept your total misunderstanding of the issue, just as long as it means you're in the neighborhood of the right argument.
I can assure you that the government is not controlling any of the banks it's bailed out. The banking industry is firmly controlling the government, thank you very much --- anyone dumb enough to buy into that little show about sort-of-maybe-but-not limiting executive bonuses is a sucker. But if it helps you to view this through the frame of 'bad shit going on; government bad; damn government must be controlling the bankers', well, whatever --- your heart's very nearly in the right place.
Sure, but that's the second half of my point. In the old days you mostly ran proprietary software on some dedicated mainframe, and portability was a huge issue. Even moving to another mainframe with an identical software configuration was a huge pain. To a lesser extent the same problems hold with the "stick a Dell server under my desk" solution. When it craps out you have to spend real time configuring another one.
Nowadays even the cloud providers run commodity operating systems in virtualized machine instances, along with (mostly) commodity database backends. In principle that means you should be rapidly able to hop from one Amazon site to another, then over to a Microsoft cloud, then down to a VMWare-equipped server running under your desk.
In practice there are some barriers here: the Amazon machine image format isn't the same as the VMWare format, etc. And you have to plan ahead to make sure your data is replicated in the various places you might need it. But the same always held for anyone setting up a mainframe system.
All very good points. I would add that there's a big difference between the old days where you had one local mainframe, and a situation where you have a dozen cloud providers. Even within a single cloud provider (say, Amazon), the service is run across several geographically-distributed datacenters. The failure of one shouldn't take everything down. In an ideal world you could move your server images from place to place, provider to provider, and even to local hardware if that proved necessary. This is a benefit of modern virtualization.
Of course this isn't exactly how things work yet --- you can't easily migrate between services and local hardware. But it's early days and some clients will probably demand that kind of flexibility.
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Whether the conclusions of those are true or false is not something that hiring committees will delve into too much. If you are young and have a family to support, it can be tempting to take shortcuts.
Yes, the incentive to publish, publish, publish leads to all kinds of problems. But more importantly, the incentives for detailed peer-reviewing and repeating others' work just aren't there. Peer-reviewing in most cases is just a drag, and while it's somewhat important for your career, nobody's going to give you Tenure on the basis of your excellent journal reviews.
The inventives for repeating experiments are even worse. How often do top conferences/journals publish a result like "Researchers repeat non-controversial experiment, find exactly the same results"?
Your relationship with your doctor is based on trust and consent - you don't ask your taxi driver to submit to a breathalyzer before he drives you home, so why should you ask your doctor how he's sleeping? If you don't trust your doctor to be operating on you in good condition, you need to find yourself a different doctor.
I don't ask my taxi driver to take a breathalyzer, but it's not because I trust him. Rather, I trust that he's sober since he knows that there are serious criminal and civil penalties that society will apply to him if he does make that mistake --- from loss of license up to prison time. It's not perfect, but it keeps incentives in the right place.
If there were no such penalties --- and moreover, if Taxi dispatchers routinely encouraged their staff to take hits off of a Vodka bottle in between fares --- then I probably would ask him to take a breathalyzer, or else I would walk. Now replace "walk" with "bleed to death"** and "take a breathalyzer" with, well, I can't really think of a good analogue, since there is none. Now you see where we are in the medical field.
Hospitals need to enforce sleep requirements on surgeons similar to (or better than) those enforced on pilots. If hospitals can't do that, those requirements should be enforced by society at large, with suspension of license being a first-level penalty.
** Yes, I know the focus of this article is on elective surgeries, but these same issues apply to non-elective surgeries as well.
She was asked about her experience with foreign policy and she responded with, essentially, a trivial geographic fact. Leaving aside the fact that her responsibilities as governor did not require her to plan for airborne attack from Russia, leaving aside her blinkered understanding Russian-American warfighting strategy, what she said is essentially "I have no experience or significant understanding of foreign policy". And it would have been better for her to just say that, rather than spouting trivia.
Let's make government incompetent --- then it will inevitably shrink down and we'll be free of it. Oh wait, hmm, doesn't work.
Not necessarily a comment on what happened in this story, just a warning to anyone who believes in the above proposition. If you hate big government, then you're definitely not going to like incompetent, underpaid, under-resourced big government. The solution is to make government work better, never the opposite.
Not only does every news organization have some point of view --- even if that 'point of view' is just slavish devotion to factual truth --- but people should keep in mind that "objective news reporting" has nothing to do with objectivity. It's a business strategy.
Basically once we had a small number of news organizations reaching large audiences, those papers had to work hard not to piss off 50% of their readership. Hence "objectivity", which isn't some noble goal, but rather a way to keep everyone happy. Unfortunately as we've seen, sometimes being objective actually means taking ridiculous arguments seriously, lest you be accused of having "bias".
I don't much have a problem with Fox News being a conservative/Republican Party news organ (which it is, take a look at the ties between Fox's management and the Republican party). I do have a big problem with the fact that they claim to be fair and balanced, and that 'serious' people are willing to accept this figleaf and overlook the slant, even while they would obviously dismiss a self-professed activist network.
Also, the lying, I don't much like that.
Even that whole "I can see Russia from my house" thing was never said by her, but by Tina Fey on a SNL skit.
Please don't play me for stupid. I was there in 2008 and saw her comment on Russia. Yes, it was not 'I can see Alaska from my house' --- that was a Tina Fey sketch made up later to ridicule her for the actual much more stupid answer she did give. This is about the saddest defense of SP I've ever heard. Please stick with 'she didn't know anything in 2008, but she's much better now'. At least that's colorable.
The actual story is here http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/sarahpalin/a/palin-top-10.htm if you're interested.
What really kills me about Sarah Palin is not her ignorance, though that is a dealbreaker. It's the fact that I really don't trust her as a person. Basically every friend and political ally she's ever had has a story to tell about how she stuck a knife in their back. A couple of bitter former friends like this are just par for the course, but this is not just a couple of stories. I don't understand why anyone would want to be friends with someone who's obviously such a bad human being, let alone elect them to be their leader. And don't even get me started on how willing she is to accept financial favors, from Wasilla to the present.
... is that elections are largely driven by economic fundamentals and (to some degree) random chance. Meaning, there's a non-trivial probability that Palin might beat Obama. I'm not trying to be an ass about Palin, because I'm sure she's a nice person in the right context, but she has not demonstrated anything close to the knowledge and/or responsibility that I would expect in a Presidential candidate. She doesn't appear to have taken the lessons offered by the '08 election in terms of becoming more informed or dedicated --- all she seems to have learned is that she can get traction by attacking anything remotely related to the left wing. That's great for a pundit, not so great for the President of a large country.
In the long run a Palin presidency would be a disaster for Democrats and Republicans, not to mention Americans in general. These people shouldn't flirt with disaster.
As a professor I can tell you that I don't care if you doodle or daydream. I don't honestly even care if you come to class. But if you do choose to come to my class I want you to at least conceal your inattentiveness, in the same way I would expect you not to take a phone call during a theatrical performance or even a movie I've paid to attend.
The problem with Internet-connected laptop users is that some are very bad at this. In the same way that it's possible to use a mobile phone in a non-distracting way, it's possible to use a laptop appropriately. But many don't. And it's distracting to see someone engrossed in a screen or vigorously typing away in a manner that's obviously disconnected from the course itself. Worse is obvious IMing between students in the same class, which is distracting and intimidating to students who ask questions or actually participate in the discussion.
I work hard to prepare my courses and get consistently high student reviews. But a lot of the energy in the class comes from the students, and distractions like this work like a control rod in an atomic pile. Believe me, everyone gets a worse experience.
It's particularly hard because I teach Master's students at a decent university. These are adults, mind you, people who are supposed to know these things. They're people who probably wouldn't take a phone call in a theatre, but for some reason they have no sense of etiquette when a laptop is involved. Worse, it's hard to scold adults and nobody else in the class wants to do it.
These aren't bad people. I understand the temptation of having a laptop in front of you, you just want to check that email. But it really does hurt the class experience. I don't want to ban laptops, and honestly I don't want to be a dick. But I wish to god I could disable Wifi at the AP. Unfortunately University IT controls it and they wouldn't be thrilled.
It does sound like they are acting responsibly and merely saying such marked tests need further scrutiny by the school, and only marking tests with a really low probability to be just lucky... but who knows what the individual schools do.
Most of the cheating described in TFA is the type that doesn't leave an evidence trail. Thus we can infer that either (a) schools are using the circumstantial statistical evidence as ground for disciplinary action, (b) most students break down and confess when confronted with this evidence, or (c) the schools are wasting a lot of money tracking down cheaters that they ultimately can't punish.
While I'm sure (b) is true for some percentage of those students who get fingered, my guess is that it's not a particularly high percentage, and moreover that percentage would tend to go down as word spreads that all you need to do is keep your mouth shut. (c) is certainly possible, but TFA claims that cheating has gone way down (70%) --- and thus we must infer that schools are accomplishing this by actually deterring cheaters (i.e., punishing them), rather than just embarrassing them. In my mind, this leaves (a) as a very serious possibility.
And if that's the case --- if it's even possible that it's the case --- then IMHO the company has an ethical obligation to take some responsibility for what's being done with its data, or at least verify their methodology and be much more careful than they seem to be right now.
He later dialed them down as being politically inviable and almost certainly unconstitutional (right on both counts), but when people on the Left makes comments like this (and he's not the only offender), it definitely gives credence to the concerns of those on the Right.
And if Cass Sunstein was the entire Democratic party, and if there was no Republican party, and if he'd even advocated wholesale censorship, and there were no Supreme Court, and the Democrats could maintain majority rule of both houses and the presidency forever, and if.......
Seriously, do you really want to play this game? In five minutes with Google I can find quotes from far more influential people on the Right --- many of them actually elected to the United States Congress! --- that could lead me to believe that the Right is planning to secede from the Union while eliminating the civil rights act and removing the right to a Jury trial and the right of Americans to select their own President, and that's before I get into the crazy fun things they want to do to free speech on the Internet (bye bye Wikileaks).
But I mostly don't choose to believe these things because I realize that they're fringe views and furthermore, just because some people on the Right say crazy things, that does not mean that every piece of legislation supported by someone who is on the 'Right' is a stalking horse for these nutty points of view. Obviously if I could provide some strong evidence that a particular piece of legislation /is/ a stalking horse, that'd be different. But this ain't that.
What is really needed is a good plan to separate ownership of the backbone from ownership of the last mile. If Comcast couldn't legally enter the backbone infrastructure market, and "Mom and Pop Fiber Optics" could get access to Verizon's infrastructure at a "reasonable, non-discriminatory rate" it wouldn't matter if Comcast combined content and ISP services because Comcast would not have any more clout than its smaller competitors.
And I'd like a pony too.
Don't kid yourself that Congresspeople and sundry interest groups are fighting Net Neutrality for anything approaching the idealistic reasons you name. They're opposing it --- solely, simply, absolutely --- because it might separate large ISPs from their profits. The world where this happens is not a world where anyone's going to lift a finger to separate Comcast from its infrastructure.
When Congress decides to fully regulate the Internet --- and they will, regardless of what happens to this bill --- they'll use something splashy like terrorism or kiddie porn, not something esoteric like packet delivery rules.
So call me an evil, ignorant member of the American Right if it makes you feel better, but I can't help but notice this pattern, and can't help but be convinced that the next bit of internet regulation will fit the same pattern, no matter what a bunch of Potomac River Rats say. Granted, having internet access controlled by a handful of corporate monopolies is far from ideal... but how in the hell can you expect to improve that situation by consolidating that power even more into one government monopoly? (Particularly given the FCC's existing track record on "regulating" other communication mediums.)
Laws like the ones you're referring to have always passed, and always will pass, with the full consent of the Right Wing and the Left as they're represented in Congress. And when push comes to shove, plenty more laws will be passed --- don't kid yourself that by killing Net Neutrality and handing control of the 'net over to a consortium of large ISPs you're going to do the slightest bit to stop the next CHIPA or COPA or what have you.
The thing about Net Neutrality legislation is that it really has nothing to do with any of this stuff. Net Neutrality is /not/ about whether you can send encrypted data or child porn. It's about whether incumbent, monopoly ISPs can provide preferential treatment to services that pay them, and route everyone else's traffic to /dev/null. The issues here aren't about what the hell's in the packets, although theoretically Net Neutrality legislation /might/ require the ISPs to act like a common carrier --- the issues here are about whether the packets arrive and how much it's going to cost you.
If you can convince me in some /concrete/ way that this bill is actually a stalking horse for some secret plan to make it easier to censor the net, then I'd like to hear it. But 'a bunch of Democrats with varying degrees of proximity to the administration said things that might be misconstrued to indicate a desire to implement censorship' is not the same as an argument. It's weak fucking tea. Trust me, when both parties work together to implement 'net censorship they'll be quite clear about it, and it won't have anything to do with what packets get delivered with what latency.
Normally I would dismiss your post, which seems full of crazy conspiracy theories that you're pulling from memory "but can be found on Google". However some bright sparks have seen fit to moderate your post as +5 Informative. So please, give me some citations. The only things I've been able to find on Google are completely unverifiable claims from conspiracy-theorist websites.
But more fundamentally --- what is the implication of your post? That opposing Net Neutrality legislation is going to make it harder for governments to censor? Cause it seems to me that a small number of powerful telecoms dominating what people read is more or less a precondition for a modern totalitarian state.
The stimulus package included many billions of dollars specifically marked for upgrading the grid. While this may seem like no big deal, I'm told that it's one of the biggest single investments in the grid (especially R&D) in decades. And there would have been more except that the funds had to be spent immediately and thus many non-shovel-ready projects were left out. We could do a lot more with a second stimulus package. Unfortunately, as your post illustrates, people are so misinformed about the package that the chances of it happening are zero. Oh, the irony.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jan/24/obama-gives-more-details-stimulus/
I'm betting that my Reuters and BBC apps are all pulling the same info from the same sources as the web versions, it's just about presentation and how the interface works.
I've never used those apps, but I do use the Engadget app which I imagine to be similar. It's definitely easier than using the browser, largely because the content is already neatly formatted for the screen and you can avoid some awkwardness from Safari's awful caching. There are a few controls and bells and whistles that work better in the app (mostly image and video viewing), but not very much that's really dramatically better than the web experience.
My point, then, is that these advantages could largely go away with improvements browser and web page design.
So the question then is: what features are so unique that they can only be done well in an app? To me that's mostly the neat animated interactive stuff, but like I said, that stuff is rare end expensive to develop. Is it worth building a tablet-only newspaper for that stuff?
Because it will be a native app instead of the web, for one. The web is a reasonable "lowest common denominator", but really, it still sucks for UIs, no matter how many advances we've made.
The difference between a native app and a web-page on this kind of device is massive in terms of how much nicer the native interface is -- in part because it scales up things to be more "touchable" instead of "clickable". I'm glad to finally see a reversal of this trend of "everything as a web page" -- the usability of an app designed for the multi-touch is easily an order of magnitude better than a web page. It's a completely different kind of interface than one you'd do for the web.
While this is all true in theory, my experience is that low-usage proprietary formats have one huge usability disadvantage in practice: namely, it's expensive to produce content for them. So while it's true that your newspaper could have multitouch, interactive, vector-graphics-enabled, hyper-linking, Angry-Birds-quality-animated featurettes, in practice the publishers can only really justify the creation of a small number of such features per newspaper. Absent these you're down to a flat web page/newspaper that's slightly easier to manipulate through an app than through a browser.
But over time, even these advantages will go away as web designers get better at designing for tablets, and browser/web technology improves. It's more or less a self-fulfilling prophecy, since the publisher will inevitably devote more resources to improving web version if it has 10,000x the readership and it's cheaper to develop for.
I've seen this happen with a number of formats over the years. It shouldn't be surprising, once you consider how expensive it would be to produce a product every day/week/month that lives up to the hype of what a tablet-based newspaper should be. Even the iPad 'showcase' version of Wired is basically just a bunch of high-quality image files with a small number of lame 'interactive' features.
So, the problem is only for public key crypto, and for AES we just switch to 512 bit keys and no problem?
Not necessarily. At present we know of a small number of quantum algorithms for problems such as factorization and database search. There are some brilliant theorists working on these things, but the total amount of (wo)manpower being applied to these problems is constrained by the fact that we don't really have any quantum computers to use this stuff with. A consequence of this is that there are vastly more problems for which we don't have a quantum algorithm than those for which we do.
This has led to a lot of interest in 'post-quantum cryptography' and flood of research papers proposing new public-key cryptosystems based on mathematical problems we don't know how to solve with quantum computers. Another poster mentioned the McEliece cryptosystem, which is based on problems in coding theory. That's a little bit old-school. The new hotness is lattice problems --- go to any top academic crypto conference and you'll see a bunch of papers using these. If you're really interested in this stuff, here's a pretty good intro to a book on the subject of post-quantum crypto.
However, all this talk is good for researchers in non-standard areas, but it shouldn't lead anyone to be overconfident that these problems will stay resistant to quantum solutions. You can more or less bank on there being some future 'golden age of quantum computing theory' which should take off right about the same time useful quantum computers become available. Predictably, the problems that receive the most attention will be the ones most widely used at the time --- including the ones underlying the most widely used cryptosystems.
The one other thing I should mention is that there's a big difference between finding quantum algorithms for fundamental problems such as database search (Grover's algorithm) or number theoretic problems (Shor's algorithm) and finding quantum algorithms for extremely complex specialized systems like AES. Finding an algorithm that solves a major number theory problem is a big contribution --- if you break a particular cryptosystem, people will just shift away from it eventually and your work will become a footnote. Simultaneously, developing an algorithm that attacks AES is enormously harder using the relatively primitive techniques we currently have. So while right now our best approach to breaking symmetric algorithms is to use generic tools like Grover's algorithm, that's not aways guaranteed to be the case.
Of course, crypto's important to us and the chance for a quantum-resistant cryptosystem is better than none at all, so this is still useful work. If you care about your crypto you need to this stuff it all with a little grain of salt, and hope that QCs are far in the future.
Are they going to block encrypted and VPN traffic as well? Deep packet inspection to disallow the use of proxies? Denying access to DNS servers outside France?
In the past few years working with DRM systems I've basically come to appreciate the 'mom rule'. Namely, if a technology's good enough to keep your mom from accessing data, then it's probably good enough --- meaning it'll keep 90+% of potential customers on the paying hook.
In this case, while my mom's excellent at typing nytimes.com into her browser, I can't see her downloading VPNs, using p2p systems or even accessing mirrors. Thus, while this law doesn't provide a perfect shield against the populace accessing 'bad' things, it'll probably do most of the job. After that all you have to do is keep the media outlets busy with other things, and you've basically got what you need. Berlusconi and Putin have some lessons to teach there.
I wouldn't be surprised if they insist on the One True Baguette Recipe.
You have to admit that their baguettes are awfully good.
the original, more-closely-guarded-than-military-secrets BC
Could you provide me with some credible citation demonstrating that such a birth certificate exists, and that Obama is blocking its release? I usually find the [citation needed] crowd annoying, but this is a case where Google has given me nothing more than a bunch of outdated allegations and claims from 2008 that we're 'just days away from cracking the secret of Obama's Kenyan birth'.
Normally I wouldn't feed the trolls, but for some reason the mods saw fit to mod your post +4 Informative. I'd like to know what they know.
When I was in Boyscout Troop 238, we would apply for the right to assembly when we had larger functions in the town's parks weeks or months ahead of time. And it's not because Big Oil wanted us stopped ...
Multi-week delays are perfectly reasonable for a Boy scout troop --- they can plan their functions weeks ahead of time. However, it's absolutely not reasonable to delay peaceful political protest on issues that have an inherent component of timeliness, e.g., court cases, legislation, etc. In many cases, enforcing a delay is tantamount to preventing the assembly itself, simply by delaying it until the protest no longer has relevance.
I can't speak to UK law, but most democracies have explicitly guaranteed a freedom of assembly precisely because that right is so important, and because it's so easy to deny. Protecting the right means supporting its spirit, not just paying lip service to it.
*I* don't get that privilege of lifelong income. I work. I get paid.
Many musicians don't. Get paid, that is. Or get bonuses. They make stuff and hope that people will buy it, and that the tiny bit of income they make off of this will add up as people discover their work over the years.
I'd be willing to support a model where musicians get good salaries and bonuses, then we all make their recordings public domain --- sort of like government-funded academic research. But I'm not sure who's going to pay for it.
PS I don't really disagree with your basic position here ---- you've just made the worst possible argument for it.
Facist methods of controlling corporations by publicly financing business losses
I think the current relationship of government and the banking business is so toxic that I'm willing to accept your total misunderstanding of the issue, just as long as it means you're in the neighborhood of the right argument.
I can assure you that the government is not controlling any of the banks it's bailed out. The banking industry is firmly controlling the government, thank you very much --- anyone dumb enough to buy into that little show about sort-of-maybe-but-not limiting executive bonuses is a sucker. But if it helps you to view this through the frame of 'bad shit going on; government bad; damn government must be controlling the bankers', well, whatever --- your heart's very nearly in the right place.
Sure, but that's the second half of my point. In the old days you mostly ran proprietary software on some dedicated mainframe, and portability was a huge issue. Even moving to another mainframe with an identical software configuration was a huge pain. To a lesser extent the same problems hold with the "stick a Dell server under my desk" solution. When it craps out you have to spend real time configuring another one.
Nowadays even the cloud providers run commodity operating systems in virtualized machine instances, along with (mostly) commodity database backends. In principle that means you should be rapidly able to hop from one Amazon site to another, then over to a Microsoft cloud, then down to a VMWare-equipped server running under your desk.
In practice there are some barriers here: the Amazon machine image format isn't the same as the VMWare format, etc. And you have to plan ahead to make sure your data is replicated in the various places you might need it. But the same always held for anyone setting up a mainframe system.
All very good points. I would add that there's a big difference between the old days where you had one local mainframe, and a situation where you have a dozen cloud providers. Even within a single cloud provider (say, Amazon), the service is run across several geographically-distributed datacenters. The failure of one shouldn't take everything down. In an ideal world you could move your server images from place to place, provider to provider, and even to local hardware if that proved necessary. This is a benefit of modern virtualization.
Of course this isn't exactly how things work yet --- you can't easily migrate between services and local hardware. But it's early days and some clients will probably demand that kind of flexibility.