We already have a union to protect us from the US government. It's called the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). They even use "union" in their name. Have you paid your dues lately?
... it's okay when we do it, but as soon as anyone else does the same thing to us, it's a gross affront to our privacy and the relationship we have with the spying party and possibly an act of war.
Well, yeah; that's because we're God's chosen people, so everything we do to those foreigners is good and moral, but if they do it to us, they're evil and wrong.
[Plug in your favorite country, and translate to that country's official language(s), if necessary, to reach full understanding of how human governments work.]
If you google it, you'll find that most of the hits are for exactly the text you just read in the summary. It doesn't seem to originate with/., though; that sentence is taken verbatim from a news-service report./., like other news sites, has just posted the original article unchanged.
There is a pakistanway.com/net site, a portal website in Pakistan. The reporter that wrote the quoted article might be a regular user of that site, and garbled the country name as a result.
Question 1: You see 5 pennies, the total in the cup is 6, so the missing part is 1 (penny). How hard can that possibly be?
Except that the "6" is just a label. It's obviously not the number of pennies in the cup, because it doesn't make sense to write that on a cup. It can't be the cup's capacity (in pennies?), since we can see at a glance that the cup will hold many more pennies than 6. My first thought was that it's a 6-(fluid)-ounce cup, but that's not exactly consistent with the pennies, and we have no way to estimate correctly from the drawing how many pennies the cup can hold. Or are they pennies? Maybe they're those foil-covered disks of chocolate like you see around Hannuka(h)? But those come in lots of sizes, so that doesn't help us.
Yes, you can guess that any of the above is the correct interpretation. But there are so many possibilities that your guess is likely to be marked incorrect, as happened to the kid.
I'd guess that the drawing of a cup is a misdirection, and the test's writers meant "You need 6 of something, you have only 5, how many more do you need?" That's the only simple question that combines the two numbers in the picture and gives one of the four choices. But it's not obvious why you'd expect a 6-year-old to get that question from the picture. Or even an adult. Or a mathematician.
All we really know is that we're shown a row of 5 penny-like objects and a cup with "6" painted on it, and we're asked to pick one of the four numbers that are the result of some unspecified operation on those numbers. I'd wonder what operation the child chose that gave his answer.
(And indicating an answer by blacking out its letter name is a bit unusual. Why would they do it that way? Circling or checking your choice is the common method; obscuring it isn't, except for the "fill in the oval" multiple-choice notation, and that doesn't obscure anything.)
... why on earth is it necessary for the federal government to spend untold billions to assist in their failure? Oh, wait. I don't need an answer to that. It's obvious, really. Government meddling helps to insure that failure is uniform across the nation!!
Perhaps, in part. But such "meddling" has a history of having other effects. Thus, despite being the top student in my high school (including their first ever to get a "perfect" 800 score on an SAT;-), I didn't qualify for any state-funded scholarships, without which I'd have had no way to pay for college. But I did qualify for scholarships that were federally funded. (They were administered locally, but the money came from federal programs.) Similarly, federal funding in some cases produces more money for paying teachers, leading to either more teachers (thus smaller class sizes) or better-trained teachers; usually both.
But I don't think that even the strongest supporters of federal funding for local schools would claim that the Feds never screw things up. We have too many examples to even consider such a suggestion. But we also have plenty of examples of locally-grown failed schools, along with examples of federal actions (especially funding;-) producing improvements.
The local vs. high-level control issue really is a red herring, which just distracts from finding and correcting the causes of problems that occur at all administrative levels.
With common core, we see the progressive's failed attempt to educate children. With "No Cretin Left Behind", or NCLB, we saw the conservative's failed attempt. (apologies to anyone born and raised on Crete) Both parties like to jack their jaws about the importance of education, but both parties have their part in the "dumbing down of America". And, THAT is why local governments should be tasked with educating children, and the federal government should maintain a hands off stance toward education.
That might not help much, either. An anecdote from my personal educational history: As a freshman in high school, I decided that math was interesting, and read the math text entirely in a few weeks. After briefly showing the teacher that I did understand it all, he handed me another textbook. Then, a month later, another. But after a few months, he apparently ran out of texts, because his reaction to my request for calculus texts was "You're not ready for that." I asked around a bit, and found to my dismay that the rest of the teachers seemed to agree with him. So this part of the "educational system" was now a brick wall that blocked my further learning.
However, I did talk to the school principal (who was to become a friend) about it; he quietly asked around, and referred me to some students at a nearby college who were willing to find books and loan them to me. His attitude seemed to be that this was part of "the system" that he couldn't fight, but the rest of the teachers and administrators didn't have to know what I was reading in my spare time. He eventually helped me get some good college scholarships.
A fun part of this was that my main source of math texts was a couple of young women at the college, who were working on degrees in math and science education. One of the first texts they loaned me was "Calculus for the Practical Man" (which is still in print). I looked at the title, and said something like "So they don't allow you to read it, either?" They grinned, and said I shouldn't tell anyone.
Anyway, note that the high school's blocking of my further education was very much a "local" action. It was carrying out local (county, state) policies, and this had little to do with "liberal" vs. "conservative" doctrines. If anything, the district had a "conservative" population. But what was more at work, with both me and my college-level female friends, was that we were challenging the school's control over our educations, and control is what most administration is all about. This has little if anything to do with political factionalism.
We'd better get used to things being more "personalized," this is what we're moving to.
Various economic (and business) theorists have pointed out that this is part of a general pattern that's well understood: Insurance is based on spreading the cost of unpredictable events over a population, so that the victims of such events aren't bankrupt/homeless/dead/whatever if a disaster hits them. Insurance is basically a gambling game. If an event becomes predictable, insurance no longer works, since only those susceptible to a disaster will want insurance, but the insurance companies will refuse to sell policies to exactly those people.
A classical textbook example is flood insurance. There are many cases where the probability of a disastrous flood event has become predictable. The people and companies in the high-risk area want insurance, but the price is so high that a policy will bankrupt them. Such "insurance" can then only be provided by the government, but in reality, it's more in the nature of planned disaster prevention/recovery than insurance.
Various other theorists studying the medical field have been predicting that this will rapidly happen in medicine, too. Medical insurance made sense when most diseases were poorly understood, and it was impossible to predict with any accuracy who might be susceptible to which medial problems.
But we are getting more knowledgeable about such things. Medical problems are becoming much more predictable in general, and many major medical tests have much better accuracy than a few decades ago. Again, the inevitable result is that insurance companies will get access to the information, and will refuse to sell coverage (or will price it at bankruptcy levels) to people whose tests predict imminent medical problems. Eventually, this will mean all of us. This is how insurance has always worked, and medical insurance is not significantly different.
(Well, except for the fact that we know the exact probability that each of us will eventually have a major medical problem: 100%;-)
Insurance isn't medical care. it's what insurance always is: a way of spreading the cost around in an unpredictable world. It only helps if the problems are unpredictable, but don't hit everyone. Medical problems are becoming more predictable, so medical insurance is slowly becoming irrelevant and unworkable.
In summary: The real problem here is using "insurance" to pay for health care. We don't need insurance; we need health care. As medical knowledge improves, the insurers will do what they always do: They'll collect premiums until just before you are likely to need something expensive, and then they'll refuse to renew your coverage. That's how their business works, when knowledge becomes available and the results of a gamble can be predicted. The "Free Market" system rewards companies that get good at this, and those that aren't as good go out of business.
Note that the summary says "The NSA sought the Japanese government's cooperation to wiretap fiber-optic cables... but the request was rejected." The use of "the request" here is a standard rhetorical trick to get the reader/listener to believe that there was only one request, and it was rejected. But the English is ambiguous. There could have been many such requests, of which one was rejected, and the statement would still be true. They didn't mention how other such requests were handled. The inference should probably be "... but we won't want to tell you how the other requests were handled".
This is a special case of the general concept of "plausible deniability". Look it up.
I do believe there is a vocal minority (that is, I hope it's not a majority) who are so smug about their technical abilities that they feel the need to crap all over the "non-STEM" fields, namely liberal arts.
Yeah, but in my experience, it is a minority. Most "techies" that I know are also involved in hobbies of the "liberal arts" kind. For example, I just played music for a local Scottish Country Dance session, with four other people who are all techies, and are musicians and dancers on the side. But music and dance are poor ways to make a living, so those with the ability to learn technical subjects typically do so, and relegate the artistic stuff to "hobby" status.
And this is nothing new. Historically, an impressive number of the famous musicians from earlier centuries were also scientists, engineers, and/or mathematicians on the side. Before the recording industry arose, a person with both technical and musical skills could make the rational decision to go with a musical career, which often paid fairly well in comparison. These days, if you can handle both, it makes little sense to pick an artistic career over a technical career.
OTOH, I do have some "liberal arts" friends who aren't techies. The rest of do try to be nice to them despite their handicap, and try not to discriminate against them in artistic settings if we can avoid it. Thus, those of us who can handle the sound equipment will often do so to help out friends who are incapable of understanding all the technical stuff required to do the job well. I rarely hear techies putting someone down for being non-technical. (But maybe it's just the crowd that I hang out with.)
Note that the criticism was about a misused ' and the current topic is about building correct software. In most programming languages, a misplaced quote (of either type) is almost always an instantly-fatal error (unless you do it twice, in which case the compiler or interpreter just goes quietly insane;-). If you can't be bothered to get the quotes/apostrophes right, you have no future at all in the software industry. In a software arena, misusing such characters is one of the biggest mistakes you can make.
(Not that there is any shortage of big mistakes to be made. Let's just say that, if attention to "insignificant" details is something that you can't take seriously, you shouldn't be mucking around in software. Or even writing about it in a public forum frequented by software geeks.)
. Besides, the conspiracy theorist in my head thinks a lot of this is faux outrage on the part of the French government. I'm willing to bet that similar to the UK, the NSA is sharing all the information they're getting from the French taps with the DCRI (or other French intelligence service).
Such a conspiracy theory does make a lot of sense. Consider that the main PR approach in the US is to say that the intel agencies can't (legally;-) spy on US citizens; they're only (legally;-) allowed to spy on foreigners. This is just what they're accused of doing in this case, and it's legal under US law.
And to the French government, it's really useful. They can act outraged in public, while listening to their copies of the recordings, and be confident that nothing can be done (legally;-) against it because the NSA is beyond the reach of any French laws or courts.
Sounds like a win-win situation to me, at least from the viewpoint of the US and French governments. And in both countries, the "people" don't matter, because both governments can satisfy them with their own PR based on this story.
If history is any guide, the managers of these systems are trying to find ways to prosecute the researchers for their actions. It's fairly standard to classify security testing methods as attacks (since that's in effect what they are), and publishing the problems is generally considered telling the "terrorists" how to attack the systems.
But this is about what should be expected for systems that depend on "security by obscurity". And the managers of such systems rarely reward someone who demonstrates how they've failed.
I'd be ashamed if my students arrived at such a far-fetched and obviously wrong solution, and I allowed them to publish it... it would make me wonder if I'd managed to teach them anything at all...
Ummm... The story seems to make it clear that this "study" hasn't been published at all. But it did get leaked to the mass media, who did their usual scientifically-illiterate hack job on it, and used it to support their own favorite beliefs.
The only story here is the usual one about how the media finds ways to radically distort both the best and the worst "scientific" work into social propaganda. This includes routinely presenting work that can't even vaguely qualify for the term "scientific" as a "Science says..." news story.
Seriously, it's too abstract and invisible. Being online and virtual, you don't SEE that your mail was steamed open and re-sealed. You don't SEE that someone watches where you go. You don't SEE that someone is standing there listening to your phone call to your wife.
Oh, I dunno about that. I'm part of the generation who grew up watching Lily Tomlin's Ernestine, the telephone operator who has at her fingertips all of your most private information. We laughed at her. Similarly, we thought the movie The President's Analyst was funny.
And the idea of an all-seeing, all-knowing behind-the-scenes data collector is hardly anything new to American culture. Most Americans claim to be Christians, which means that from the earliest age, they've been indoctrinated with the idea that there's an all-knowing, all-powerful being behind the entire universe that knows our every act and thought. The NSA is nowhere near this powerful (yet;-). And, while they may be able to imprison or kill us, they can't condemn us to eternal life in a torture chamber, like the God that most of us believe in can (and does).
The NSA are pikers in comparison with all that. They're pikers compared with Ernestine, and we thought she was funny.
At least for braziians, is the lesser evil, else they will be empowerign the federal government behind overthrowing democratically elected governments all around the world since last century, including the brazilian one, of course.
You were moderated Troll, but you are correct. Come on mods.
Note that gmuslera was modded an "insightful, informative troll". I've been trying for such a moderations for years and never succeeded. I've gotten "insightful troll" and "informative troll", yes, but I've never got all three for a single post.
So I think gmuslera should be roundly congratulated on this achievement.;-)
(And I also think he made a good point. Anyone in Latin America who trusts any American government agency is a fool, and quite ignorant of history. Either that, or they're on the take, and are planning to personally profit from selling out their fellow citizens.)
Reprehensible as it was, It would have ended there, and probably should have. Her reputation was not enhanced by dragging it into the public.
Maybe not, but airing things out in public can have other benefits. I've on many occasions responded to such harassment by mentioning it to others working for the same organization, and invariably I get replies describing similar treatment that others have received from the same perp(s). I've even seen a few cases where, after a bit of open discussion of the topic, the aggressor was the one fired. This hasn't happened with me, but I'm pretty sure I've triggered at least a few "reorgs" by talking openly about how the org was being run. This can be to most of the workers' (and the org's) benefit in the long run.
Mistreating someone and then trying to intimidate them into silence is rarely in the organization's best interests. It usually means that the upper management is being kept ignorant of their organization's internal problems, and it doesn't take a managerial genius to understand the problems that this can lead to.
In any case, I seriously doubt that it would have ended there. In my experience, people who get away with such things generally conclude that their behavior is accepted, and they continue to treat others the same way.
and general population cares so much about privacy.....
So do we actually know much about what the general population cares about? It's highly likely that a lot of them are just "keeping their mouths shut" on the topic, as they've been doing since the 1950s with its Red Scare and HUAC and so on.
I don't think I'd believe anything from any supposed survey on the topic. I know how honestly I'd answer their questions. (Actually, I'd probably just keep quiet. No point in asking for trouble.;-)
There was an incident some number of years ago where a formerly-government-turned-Booz employee illegally brought bidding information to Booz. Booz reported the incident to the DoD, and they were barred from all bidding in that region for quite some time-- and thats just what they do when you're straightforward about it.
So how was that employee punished for this?
(And presumably the punishment was well-publicized among Booz Allen employees, to make sure they understand the consequences of actions that cause the company to lose business.)
Holy crap, how did you get me to click on a link to a creationist website??
Well, I'd think that the title, " Saturn's Moon--Does Water Equal Life?" should have been a tipoff. Few actual scientists would use the word "equal" there. Rather, they'd use a word like "implies" or "suggests". Reading the scientific results as saying that life exists iff there is water is a major failure in logic that you expect from creationists and media folks, and of course the data doesn't say that at all.
This sort of misreading is often characterized by the term "straw man". It may mean that the writer really is so ignorant that they misread the scientific findings as saying that the two things are equivalent. But all too often, it means that the writer can't find a way to credibly attack the scientific results, so they intentionally misread the results as implying an equivalence that doesn't exist and wasn't implied, and they attack that bogus interpretation.
It's an old rhetorical trick, and you seem to have fallen for it.;-)
(And we might note that scientific reports on the properties of remote planets rarely use the term "life". This is introduced by the reporters writing about the results, and such comments are the writers' own interpretation of the results. Scientists are probably as interested in remote life as anyone else, but they tend to be aware that the current data says little about that topic.)
Who would have thought that one of the most common substances in the universe would be found outside solar system! The wonders of science.
Yeah; if you do a bit of googling, you'll find that various "authorities" list water as the 3rd or 4th most common molecule in interstellar space. So the real mystery is why anyone would consider it news that water is found in the signature of some remote object. The default assumption should be that anything not hot enough to break up a water molecule into its constituent atoms (or H + HO) will contain lots of water molecules.
But I suppose that's too complex an idea for your typical media writer to get their mind around.
iOS 7 does have improvements in several aspects, for example, battery life has improved greatly.
My wife did the upgrade on her iPad a few days ago, and is shocked by the horrible battery life. She claims she isn't (yet;-) doing anything different than what she was using it for before, but its battery dies overnight, while it used to last several days between charging. That's a rather radical change.
I suggested googling for info, especially on settings that may be different than what she was using before. She found a few suggestions, and might know in a few days whether they had any effect.
What I find disappointing is that we can't seem to find any good summary covering the issue, with a good collection of suggestion on how to deal with battery-life issues. There are zillions of "Well, I tried X, and it seems to have an effect" sort of comments, but nothing the least bit systematic.
Of course, we may just be incompetent at finding such things in iOS land. But that describes much of the Apple fanboy crowd, really, so some good advice sites could contribute a lot to users' happiness levels.
Slashdot Mirror
We already have a union to protect us from the US government. It's called the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). They even use "union" in their name. Have you paid your dues lately?
Why the fuck is a government agency unionized in the first place?
For the same reasons that employees of any organization have ever unionized: for protection from their employers. Duh. ;-)
... it's okay when we do it, but as soon as anyone else does the same thing to us, it's a gross affront to our privacy and the relationship we have with the spying party and possibly an act of war.
Well, yeah; that's because we're God's chosen people, so everything we do to those foreigners is good and moral, but if they do it to us, they're evil and wrong.
[Plug in your favorite country, and translate to that country's official language(s), if necessary, to reach full understanding of how human governments work.]
And what the fuck is Pakistway?
If you google it, you'll find that most of the hits are for exactly the text you just read in the summary. It doesn't seem to originate with /., though; that sentence is taken verbatim from a news-service report. /., like other news sites, has just posted the original article unchanged.
There is a pakistanway.com/net site, a portal website in Pakistan. The reporter that wrote the quoted article might be a regular user of that site, and garbled the country name as a result.
Question 1: You see 5 pennies, the total in the cup is 6, so the missing part is 1 (penny). How hard can that possibly be?
Except that the "6" is just a label. It's obviously not the number of pennies in the cup, because it doesn't make sense to write that on a cup. It can't be the cup's capacity (in pennies?), since we can see at a glance that the cup will hold many more pennies than 6. My first thought was that it's a 6-(fluid)-ounce cup, but that's not exactly consistent with the pennies, and we have no way to estimate correctly from the drawing how many pennies the cup can hold. Or are they pennies? Maybe they're those foil-covered disks of chocolate like you see around Hannuka(h)? But those come in lots of sizes, so that doesn't help us.
Yes, you can guess that any of the above is the correct interpretation. But there are so many possibilities that your guess is likely to be marked incorrect, as happened to the kid.
I'd guess that the drawing of a cup is a misdirection, and the test's writers meant "You need 6 of something, you have only 5, how many more do you need?" That's the only simple question that combines the two numbers in the picture and gives one of the four choices. But it's not obvious why you'd expect a 6-year-old to get that question from the picture. Or even an adult. Or a mathematician.
All we really know is that we're shown a row of 5 penny-like objects and a cup with "6" painted on it, and we're asked to pick one of the four numbers that are the result of some unspecified operation on those numbers. I'd wonder what operation the child chose that gave his answer.
(And indicating an answer by blacking out its letter name is a bit unusual. Why would they do it that way? Circling or checking your choice is the common method; obscuring it isn't, except for the "fill in the oval" multiple-choice notation, and that doesn't obscure anything.)
... why on earth is it necessary for the federal government to spend untold billions to assist in their failure? Oh, wait. I don't need an answer to that. It's obvious, really. Government meddling helps to insure that failure is uniform across the nation!!
Perhaps, in part. But such "meddling" has a history of having other effects. Thus, despite being the top student in my high school (including their first ever to get a "perfect" 800 score on an SAT ;-), I didn't qualify for any state-funded scholarships, without which I'd have had no way to pay for college. But I did qualify for scholarships that were federally funded. (They were administered locally, but the money came from federal programs.) Similarly, federal funding in some cases produces more money for paying teachers, leading to either more teachers (thus smaller class sizes) or better-trained teachers; usually both.
But I don't think that even the strongest supporters of federal funding for local schools would claim that the Feds never screw things up. We have too many examples to even consider such a suggestion. But we also have plenty of examples of locally-grown failed schools, along with examples of federal actions (especially funding ;-) producing improvements.
The local vs. high-level control issue really is a red herring, which just distracts from finding and correcting the causes of problems that occur at all administrative levels.
With common core, we see the progressive's failed attempt to educate children. With "No Cretin Left Behind", or NCLB, we saw the conservative's failed attempt. (apologies to anyone born and raised on Crete) Both parties like to jack their jaws about the importance of education, but both parties have their part in the "dumbing down of America". And, THAT is why local governments should be tasked with educating children, and the federal government should maintain a hands off stance toward education.
That might not help much, either. An anecdote from my personal educational history: As a freshman in high school, I decided that math was interesting, and read the math text entirely in a few weeks. After briefly showing the teacher that I did understand it all, he handed me another textbook. Then, a month later, another. But after a few months, he apparently ran out of texts, because his reaction to my request for calculus texts was "You're not ready for that." I asked around a bit, and found to my dismay that the rest of the teachers seemed to agree with him. So this part of the "educational system" was now a brick wall that blocked my further learning.
However, I did talk to the school principal (who was to become a friend) about it; he quietly asked around, and referred me to some students at a nearby college who were willing to find books and loan them to me. His attitude seemed to be that this was part of "the system" that he couldn't fight, but the rest of the teachers and administrators didn't have to know what I was reading in my spare time. He eventually helped me get some good college scholarships.
A fun part of this was that my main source of math texts was a couple of young women at the college, who were working on degrees in math and science education. One of the first texts they loaned me was "Calculus for the Practical Man" (which is still in print). I looked at the title, and said something like "So they don't allow you to read it, either?" They grinned, and said I shouldn't tell anyone.
Anyway, note that the high school's blocking of my further education was very much a "local" action. It was carrying out local (county, state) policies, and this had little to do with "liberal" vs. "conservative" doctrines. If anything, the district had a "conservative" population. But what was more at work, with both me and my college-level female friends, was that we were challenging the school's control over our educations, and control is what most administration is all about. This has little if anything to do with political factionalism.
We'd better get used to things being more "personalized," this is what we're moving to.
Various economic (and business) theorists have pointed out that this is part of a general pattern that's well understood: Insurance is based on spreading the cost of unpredictable events over a population, so that the victims of such events aren't bankrupt/homeless/dead/whatever if a disaster hits them. Insurance is basically a gambling game. If an event becomes predictable, insurance no longer works, since only those susceptible to a disaster will want insurance, but the insurance companies will refuse to sell policies to exactly those people.
A classical textbook example is flood insurance. There are many cases where the probability of a disastrous flood event has become predictable. The people and companies in the high-risk area want insurance, but the price is so high that a policy will bankrupt them. Such "insurance" can then only be provided by the government, but in reality, it's more in the nature of planned disaster prevention/recovery than insurance.
Various other theorists studying the medical field have been predicting that this will rapidly happen in medicine, too. Medical insurance made sense when most diseases were poorly understood, and it was impossible to predict with any accuracy who might be susceptible to which medial problems.
But we are getting more knowledgeable about such things. Medical problems are becoming much more predictable in general, and many major medical tests have much better accuracy than a few decades ago. Again, the inevitable result is that insurance companies will get access to the information, and will refuse to sell coverage (or will price it at bankruptcy levels) to people whose tests predict imminent medical problems. Eventually, this will mean all of us. This is how insurance has always worked, and medical insurance is not significantly different.
(Well, except for the fact that we know the exact probability that each of us will eventually have a major medical problem: 100% ;-)
Insurance isn't medical care. it's what insurance always is: a way of spreading the cost around in an unpredictable world. It only helps if the problems are unpredictable, but don't hit everyone. Medical problems are becoming more predictable, so medical insurance is slowly becoming irrelevant and unworkable.
In summary: The real problem here is using "insurance" to pay for health care. We don't need insurance; we need health care. As medical knowledge improves, the insurers will do what they always do: They'll collect premiums until just before you are likely to need something expensive, and then they'll refuse to renew your coverage. That's how their business works, when knowledge becomes available and the results of a gamble can be predicted. The "Free Market" system rewards companies that get good at this, and those that aren't as good go out of business.
Note that the summary says "The NSA sought the Japanese government's cooperation to wiretap fiber-optic cables ... but the request was rejected." The use of "the request" here is a standard rhetorical trick to get the reader/listener to believe that there was only one request, and it was rejected. But the English is ambiguous. There could have been many such requests, of which one was rejected, and the statement would still be true. They didn't mention how other such requests were handled. The inference should probably be "... but we won't want to tell you how the other requests were handled".
This is a special case of the general concept of "plausible deniability". Look it up.
I do believe there is a vocal minority (that is, I hope it's not a majority) who are so smug about their technical abilities that they feel the need to crap all over the "non-STEM" fields, namely liberal arts.
Yeah, but in my experience, it is a minority. Most "techies" that I know are also involved in hobbies of the "liberal arts" kind. For example, I just played music for a local Scottish Country Dance session, with four other people who are all techies, and are musicians and dancers on the side. But music and dance are poor ways to make a living, so those with the ability to learn technical subjects typically do so, and relegate the artistic stuff to "hobby" status.
And this is nothing new. Historically, an impressive number of the famous musicians from earlier centuries were also scientists, engineers, and/or mathematicians on the side. Before the recording industry arose, a person with both technical and musical skills could make the rational decision to go with a musical career, which often paid fairly well in comparison. These days, if you can handle both, it makes little sense to pick an artistic career over a technical career.
OTOH, I do have some "liberal arts" friends who aren't techies. The rest of do try to be nice to them despite their handicap, and try not to discriminate against them in artistic settings if we can avoid it. Thus, those of us who can handle the sound equipment will often do so to help out friends who are incapable of understanding all the technical stuff required to do the job well. I rarely hear techies putting someone down for being non-technical. (But maybe it's just the crowd that I hang out with.)
I should also, really, think about my extraneous/incorrect comma usage.
Or don't use commas, which aren't necessary.
Note that the criticism was about a misused ' and the current topic is about building correct software. In most programming languages, a misplaced quote (of either type) is almost always an instantly-fatal error (unless you do it twice, in which case the compiler or interpreter just goes quietly insane ;-). If you can't be bothered to get the quotes/apostrophes right, you have no future at all in the software industry. In a software arena, misusing such characters is one of the biggest mistakes you can make.
(Not that there is any shortage of big mistakes to be made. Let's just say that, if attention to "insignificant" details is something that you can't take seriously, you shouldn't be mucking around in software. Or even writing about it in a public forum frequented by software geeks.)
. Besides, the conspiracy theorist in my head thinks a lot of this is faux outrage on the part of the French government. I'm willing to bet that similar to the UK, the NSA is sharing all the information they're getting from the French taps with the DCRI (or other French intelligence service).
Such a conspiracy theory does make a lot of sense. Consider that the main PR approach in the US is to say that the intel agencies can't (legally ;-) spy on US citizens; they're only (legally ;-) allowed to spy on foreigners. This is just what they're accused of doing in this case, and it's legal under US law.
And to the French government, it's really useful. They can act outraged in public, while listening to their copies of the recordings, and be confident that nothing can be done (legally ;-) against it because the NSA is beyond the reach of any French laws or courts.
Sounds like a win-win situation to me, at least from the viewpoint of the US and French governments. And in both countries, the "people" don't matter, because both governments can satisfy them with their own PR based on this story.
... not a valid argument for any NSA actions against a friendly country.
Friendly? Try walking into any French restaurant and speaking with an American (or British or German) accent, and tell us how friendly they are.
(OK; this is a cheap shot. Everyone already knew about this, right? ;-)
If history is any guide, the managers of these systems are trying to find ways to prosecute the researchers for their actions. It's fairly standard to classify security testing methods as attacks (since that's in effect what they are), and publishing the problems is generally considered telling the "terrorists" how to attack the systems.
But this is about what should be expected for systems that depend on "security by obscurity". And the managers of such systems rarely reward someone who demonstrates how they've failed.
I'd be ashamed if my students arrived at such a far-fetched and obviously wrong solution, and I allowed them to publish it... it would make me wonder if I'd managed to teach them anything at all...
Ummm ... The story seems to make it clear that this "study" hasn't been published at all. But it did get leaked to the mass media, who did their usual scientifically-illiterate hack job on it, and used it to support their own favorite beliefs.
The only story here is the usual one about how the media finds ways to radically distort both the best and the worst "scientific" work into social propaganda. This includes routinely presenting work that can't even vaguely qualify for the term "scientific" as a "Science says ..." news story.
Seriously, it's too abstract and invisible. Being online and virtual, you don't SEE that your mail was steamed open and re-sealed. You don't SEE that someone watches where you go. You don't SEE that someone is standing there listening to your phone call to your wife.
Oh, I dunno about that. I'm part of the generation who grew up watching Lily Tomlin's Ernestine, the telephone operator who has at her fingertips all of your most private information. We laughed at her. Similarly, we thought the movie The President's Analyst was funny.
And the idea of an all-seeing, all-knowing behind-the-scenes data collector is hardly anything new to American culture. Most Americans claim to be Christians, which means that from the earliest age, they've been indoctrinated with the idea that there's an all-knowing, all-powerful being behind the entire universe that knows our every act and thought. The NSA is nowhere near this powerful (yet ;-). And, while they may be able to imprison or kill us, they can't condemn us to eternal life in a torture chamber, like the God that most of us believe in can (and does).
The NSA are pikers in comparison with all that. They're pikers compared with Ernestine, and we thought she was funny.
gmuslera wrote:
At least for braziians, is the lesser evil, else they will be empowerign the federal government behind overthrowing democratically elected governments all around the world since last century, including the brazilian one, of course.
You were moderated Troll, but you are correct. Come on mods.
Note that gmuslera was modded an "insightful, informative troll". I've been trying for such a moderations for years and never succeeded. I've gotten "insightful troll" and "informative troll", yes, but I've never got all three for a single post.
So I think gmuslera should be roundly congratulated on this achievement. ;-)
(And I also think he made a good point. Anyone in Latin America who trusts any American government agency is a fool, and quite ignorant of history. Either that, or they're on the take, and are planning to personally profit from selling out their fellow citizens.)
Mondelez says the software will only use and collect aggregate data, and will not record any video or photos."
OK, let's see a show of hands: Who here just laughed when they read that, and muttered something like "Yeah, right, we believe you."?
Reprehensible as it was, It would have ended there, and probably should have. Her reputation was not enhanced by dragging it into the public.
Maybe not, but airing things out in public can have other benefits. I've on many occasions responded to such harassment by mentioning it to others working for the same organization, and invariably I get replies describing similar treatment that others have received from the same perp(s). I've even seen a few cases where, after a bit of open discussion of the topic, the aggressor was the one fired. This hasn't happened with me, but I'm pretty sure I've triggered at least a few "reorgs" by talking openly about how the org was being run. This can be to most of the workers' (and the org's) benefit in the long run.
Mistreating someone and then trying to intimidate them into silence is rarely in the organization's best interests. It usually means that the upper management is being kept ignorant of their organization's internal problems, and it doesn't take a managerial genius to understand the problems that this can lead to.
In any case, I seriously doubt that it would have ended there. In my experience, people who get away with such things generally conclude that their behavior is accepted, and they continue to treat others the same way.
and general population cares so much about privacy .....
So do we actually know much about what the general population cares about? It's highly likely that a lot of them are just "keeping their mouths shut" on the topic, as they've been doing since the 1950s with its Red Scare and HUAC and so on.
I don't think I'd believe anything from any supposed survey on the topic. I know how honestly I'd answer their questions. (Actually, I'd probably just keep quiet. No point in asking for trouble. ;-)
There was an incident some number of years ago where a formerly-government-turned-Booz employee illegally brought bidding information to Booz. Booz reported the incident to the DoD, and they were barred from all bidding in that region for quite some time-- and thats just what they do when you're straightforward about it.
So how was that employee punished for this?
(And presumably the punishment was well-publicized among Booz Allen employees, to make sure they understand the consequences of actions that cause the company to lose business.)
Holy crap, how did you get me to click on a link to a creationist website??
Well, I'd think that the title, " Saturn's Moon--Does Water Equal Life?" should have been a tipoff. Few actual scientists would use the word "equal" there. Rather, they'd use a word like "implies" or "suggests". Reading the scientific results as saying that life exists iff there is water is a major failure in logic that you expect from creationists and media folks, and of course the data doesn't say that at all.
This sort of misreading is often characterized by the term "straw man". It may mean that the writer really is so ignorant that they misread the scientific findings as saying that the two things are equivalent. But all too often, it means that the writer can't find a way to credibly attack the scientific results, so they intentionally misread the results as implying an equivalence that doesn't exist and wasn't implied, and they attack that bogus interpretation.
It's an old rhetorical trick, and you seem to have fallen for it. ;-)
(And we might note that scientific reports on the properties of remote planets rarely use the term "life". This is introduced by the reporters writing about the results, and such comments are the writers' own interpretation of the results. Scientists are probably as interested in remote life as anyone else, but they tend to be aware that the current data says little about that topic.)
Who would have thought that one of the most common substances in the universe would be found outside solar system! The wonders of science.
Yeah; if you do a bit of googling, you'll find that various "authorities" list water as the 3rd or 4th most common molecule in interstellar space. So the real mystery is why anyone would consider it news that water is found in the signature of some remote object. The default assumption should be that anything not hot enough to break up a water molecule into its constituent atoms (or H + HO) will contain lots of water molecules.
But I suppose that's too complex an idea for your typical media writer to get their mind around.
iOS 7 does have improvements in several aspects, for example, battery life has improved greatly.
My wife did the upgrade on her iPad a few days ago, and is shocked by the horrible battery life. She claims she isn't (yet ;-) doing anything different than what she was using it for before, but its battery dies overnight, while it used to last several days between charging. That's a rather radical change.
I suggested googling for info, especially on settings that may be different than what she was using before. She found a few suggestions, and might know in a few days whether they had any effect.
What I find disappointing is that we can't seem to find any good summary covering the issue, with a good collection of suggestion on how to deal with battery-life issues. There are zillions of "Well, I tried X, and it seems to have an effect" sort of comments, but nothing the least bit systematic.
Of course, we may just be incompetent at finding such things in iOS land. But that describes much of the Apple fanboy crowd, really, so some good advice sites could contribute a lot to users' happiness levels.