When I was an MIT student many, many years ago, somebody did a study of admitted classes and found they had for years admissions policy had oscillated between looking for well-rounded, versatile students and the most academically advanced students they could find. Every year they'd look for more and more well-rounded students until academic problems started to rise, and then they'd make a panic adjustment. But then they wouldn't really be happy with the crop of super-nerds they'd just admitted, and the process would start all over again.
Now if there were true, why wouldn't you just settle on a reasonable compromise between technical genius and well-roundedness? Just pick a class in the middle of the cycle and do that over and over again? Because that's not how institutions work. People solve the problems and address the priorities of the present, which in turn generates the problem of tomorrow. As long as an institution endures it will create the same problems over and over again and solve them over and over again.
Microsoft's management of Windows fits this pattern. Over the years the pendulum swings between the needs of marketing and the need for a quality release. Yeah ideally you meet the needs of marketing with a quality release, but there's a tension and that causes an oscillation between priorities. It won't change until the institution of Windows looks like it is in real danger.
The reason we don't do it here is because of the false positives. But if you don't really care about individual liberties, the calculation becomes a lot simpler. Do I get a better crime reduction from the yuan I invest in this than I would spending them elsewhere.
Well presumably 4.3 kilos of CO2 would be removed from the atmosphere for every kilo of battery produced, given that CO2 is roughly 23% carbon by weight and 77% oxygen. You'd need to make a lot of batteries to do any kind of significant offset of 40 billion tons of CO2 human activities release into the atmosphere every year. Somehow I can't see us neutralizing our carbon emissions by turning them into 9.2 billion tons of batteries. You might as well try some other kind of sequestration.
So this process is interesting, but not likely to be significant in terms of climate impact.
Doesn't sound like it's a major design flaw; they just have to detect an open phase condition more quickly, or provide an alternative power source to the emergency cooling pumps.
One of the few happy lessons from Fukushima is that defense-in-depth works -- at least to prevent mishaps from developing into the worst possible scenario. So we shouldn't be cavalier about the potential loss of one of our layers of protection.
I'm not altogether I'd call source code "speech", but I'm pretty sure that object code isn't speech. If Apple wanted to use a binary editor to change the number of tries in the object code from 10 to 10,000, then sign the result, they haven't been forced to utter speech.
Yeah, it's a stupidly legalistic approach, but what we're talking about is corner cases where every interpretation of the rules is stupidly legalistic.
Let me be clear I think Apple shouldn't be forced to do this -- or at the very least they shouldn't let the FBI get its grubby mitts on a compromised version of iOS. But that's for other reasons than whether it technically falls under some provision of the law or not. It's because no government agency should have that kind of power.
Well yes, there's always confounding factors as I noted. But I think the argument that welfare automatically makes people dependent on government handouts isn't supported by the data. That it may make some people dependent I don't doubt, but if the effect were as powerful as commonly suggested then you wouldn't see so many people lifting themselves out of poverty during the heydey of the welfare state.
Well, to answer your question literally, we'd have to go back to the 1930s, but that's skewed by the Great Depression, so let's look at Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" programs.
In 1959 the poverty rate for blacks was about 55%. Ten years later it was just over 30%. The poverty rates for whites + hispanics was about 17% in 1959, and about 10% ten years later.
Now saying the Great Society reduced poverty is post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. We can't know that for sure. But the one thing we can conclude is that the public assistance programs of the 1960s didn't mire people in government dependency -- at least most people who were targeted. It's conceivable that this may have happened to some people, just as some people are injured by vaccines.
I know people use "fiat currency" to imply that gold somehow has intrinsic value, but in a gold standard the value of gold is still set by arbitrary decree as well, and you can't stop the government from altering the dollar supply by saying it has to be linked to gold.
There's really no replacement for ongoing economically responsible management of the money supply. The fact that inevitably we'll do something short-sighted and stupid with the money supply doesn't change that. You can't adopt a convention (e.g. "One ounce of gold is worth $1200") that people can't amend in the future.
Entitlement programs aren't welfare. I know you feel the same way about them as welfare, but it's dishonest to treat them if they're the same.
If you were to go down to Florida with the message, "Eliminate all welfare!" that'd be a popular program with all the elderly people there, because they would assume you meant what you were actually saying. But if you said, "Eliminate Social Security!" I guarantee you'd get a different response.
Well, if you're talking about Social Security, you also have to include the fact that it also brings in revenue. Yes, eliminating Social Security would reduce the deficit, but not by the amount we spend on it, and it would have no effect whatsoever on our liquidity.
My source is the federal budget. My figures are actually a little bit off, in that the TANF program (the successor to the old AFDC welfare program) has a budget of 17 billion, not the 10 billion I was estimating, but it's still miniscule.
Well, how close you get to 100% matters, and the amount it matters depends on the scale of the threat you're dealing with.
Suppose you are 90% effective. That's well worth it when you're talking about an adversary with the capability of striking you with ten, or even a hundred warheads, especially if they're small and unreliable. Russia currently has 1800 deployed warheads, with a stockpile of some 8500. But let's say conservatively in a period of high tensions the Soviets have a thousand warhead targeted at the US. 90% effective would mean we get hit with about 100 warheads, which in the Soviet era ICBMs were in the 3-5 MT range, or 200x to 300x the yield of the Hiroshima bomb. Two or three, or even a half dozen such warheads would be survivable for a certain value of "survive", but a hundred would mean a highly probable total collapse of our society.
Now at the risk of sounding like a scare-quotes-intellectual, you really ought to consider how the opponent in this game will perceive and react to your missile defense system. If a hypothetical missile defense system is 100% effective or very close to it, it's game over; your enemy's missile arsenal is just useless junk. But if we're talking 90% effective, we're talking about a system which cannot stop the enemy arsenal from destroying us, provided that arsenal is intact.
So if you are a defense planner in the Kremlin, what is your assessment of this situation? That the Americans are stupid? Or that they intend to whittle down your arsenal with a first nuclear strike and then whittle down the survivors with the missile defense system? And if you are in a tense situation with the Americans, how does this affect your decision making? Do you use your arsenal early or risk losing it later?
So yes, those of us "intellectuals" with the handicap of being educated do rather think how close a missile defense system gets to 100% matters quite a bit. How close it has to be varies by situation of course. A 10% effectiveness rate would be materially useful against North Korea; it would have been merely destabilizing against the Soviets.
You don't know what "bankrupt" means. It refers to liquidity; you are bankrupt when you can no longer meet your current obligations, which the US government has never been close to.
You also seem to be of the delusion that the US spends a lot of money on public assistance. It spends very little. For what we paid for the Iraq war (not including nation building expenses) we could fund US public assistance programs at the current levels for 219 years.
Well, sure, unless it didn't go down the way you suggest.
A really, really smart conspirator keeps the conspiracy as small as possible, and I think most people will agree Clinton isn't dumb. But IT guys learn all kinds of sensitive strategic stuff all the time, for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes its because they assume you'll be loyal. Sometimes it's because they're arrogant treat you like you were a mindless piece of machinery. Sometimes they simply underestimate the degree to which you're in a position to put things together.
In any case you'd offer immunity to a small but well-placed fish even if you didn't think there was anything you could pin on Clinton, just in case there was something you missed. What's interesting that immunity was actually granted, which means the IT guy must feel vulnerable in some way. That's actually an interesting development. It suggests (but does not prove yet) that there was something going on. What it was and how high it goes, we don't know. That's all speculation at this point.
The inability of people to use the algebra they've studied is a big part of why its seen as useless. It's not necessarily a lack of opportunities for using algebra. Look at all the vocational programs out there which teach students "spreadsheet skills". Anyone who's ever had to use a spreadsheet for its intended purpose (rather than as ad hoc databases) has to understand enough algebra not to implicitly divide by zero.
I once helped a guy at work who had a hobby of making high end penny whistles (the kind they use in Celtic folk music) figure out the right length to make an A-natural pitch whistle. He knew how long to make a B-flat whistle, and had a formula that given the length of a whistle told him how long to make one that was a half-note higher, so all I had to do was invert the formula then double-check my results. Now this was a pretty smart guy; he'd just successfully defended his anthropology PhD thesis. He had no trouble at all following the algebra I used, but when I asked why he hadn't tried it himself he said it hadn't even occurred to him to use the algebra he knew. He'd done well enough in algebra to get into prestigious college, but it was as if he'd been taught to recite Homer in ancient Greek without ever having been taught what it means.
I agree that people should know more statistics (and probability), but the same problem applies; people don't know how to apply the statistics and probability they've been taught. At some point in their school career they were dragooned into performing the mechanics of basic descriptive statistics, but it doesn't stick with them because the way they've been taught it's just a meaningless ceremony full of incomprehensible gibberish.
People's practical math skills need bootstrapping. They can't use those skills until they understand them, and it's hard to to understand them until they can put them to some use.
How many years have we been reading about security researchers mounting clever side channel attacks on things like smart cards? Has everyone here forgotten about Tempest already? So how likely is it that the NSA can't read a phone's hardware UID without acid-etching the CPU, either directly or by recovering the contents of memory? It could be simple as entering a PIN and observing what (wrong) encryption key the CPU generates.
But there are some really good reasons (from the FBI's standpoint) for compelling Apples' cooperation. First, they'd like the legal precedent that manufacturers have to provide them with a way in. Second, they won't have to go hat in hand to another agency to ask for help. Third, it'd be a lot more quick, convenient and cheap to install a compromised OS on a device than it would be to have to disassemble it. You could potentially do that while you had someone in short term custody (e.g. within 100 miles of the US border, which can be done without probable cause and where 2/3 of the American population lives).
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When I was an MIT student many, many years ago, somebody did a study of admitted classes and found they had for years admissions policy had oscillated between looking for well-rounded, versatile students and the most academically advanced students they could find. Every year they'd look for more and more well-rounded students until academic problems started to rise, and then they'd make a panic adjustment. But then they wouldn't really be happy with the crop of super-nerds they'd just admitted, and the process would start all over again.
Now if there were true, why wouldn't you just settle on a reasonable compromise between technical genius and well-roundedness? Just pick a class in the middle of the cycle and do that over and over again? Because that's not how institutions work. People solve the problems and address the priorities of the present, which in turn generates the problem of tomorrow. As long as an institution endures it will create the same problems over and over again and solve them over and over again.
Microsoft's management of Windows fits this pattern. Over the years the pendulum swings between the needs of marketing and the need for a quality release. Yeah ideally you meet the needs of marketing with a quality release, but there's a tension and that causes an oscillation between priorities. It won't change until the institution of Windows looks like it is in real danger.
... above the frozen plain!
The reason we don't do it here is because of the false positives. But if you don't really care about individual liberties, the calculation becomes a lot simpler. Do I get a better crime reduction from the yuan I invest in this than I would spending them elsewhere.
Well presumably 4.3 kilos of CO2 would be removed from the atmosphere for every kilo of battery produced, given that CO2 is roughly 23% carbon by weight and 77% oxygen. You'd need to make a lot of batteries to do any kind of significant offset of 40 billion tons of CO2 human activities release into the atmosphere every year. Somehow I can't see us neutralizing our carbon emissions by turning them into 9.2 billion tons of batteries. You might as well try some other kind of sequestration.
So this process is interesting, but not likely to be significant in terms of climate impact.
Oh, there are plenty of differences, but if you look at it as mere computation you can abstract those differences away.
Doesn't sound like it's a major design flaw; they just have to detect an open phase condition more quickly, or provide an alternative power source to the emergency cooling pumps.
One of the few happy lessons from Fukushima is that defense-in-depth works -- at least to prevent mishaps from developing into the worst possible scenario. So we shouldn't be cavalier about the potential loss of one of our layers of protection.
I'm not altogether I'd call source code "speech", but I'm pretty sure that object code isn't speech. If Apple wanted to use a binary editor to change the number of tries in the object code from 10 to 10,000, then sign the result, they haven't been forced to utter speech.
Yeah, it's a stupidly legalistic approach, but what we're talking about is corner cases where every interpretation of the rules is stupidly legalistic.
Let me be clear I think Apple shouldn't be forced to do this -- or at the very least they shouldn't let the FBI get its grubby mitts on a compromised version of iOS. But that's for other reasons than whether it technically falls under some provision of the law or not. It's because no government agency should have that kind of power.
Well, speech isn't eligible for patent protection, so maybe math is speech, and code is math?
Well yes, there's always confounding factors as I noted. But I think the argument that welfare automatically makes people dependent on government handouts isn't supported by the data. That it may make some people dependent I don't doubt, but if the effect were as powerful as commonly suggested then you wouldn't see so many people lifting themselves out of poverty during the heydey of the welfare state.
Well, to answer your question literally, we'd have to go back to the 1930s, but that's skewed by the Great Depression, so let's look at Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" programs.
In 1959 the poverty rate for blacks was about 55%. Ten years later it was just over 30%. The poverty rates for whites + hispanics was about 17% in 1959, and about 10% ten years later.
Now saying the Great Society reduced poverty is post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. We can't know that for sure. But the one thing we can conclude is that the public assistance programs of the 1960s didn't mire people in government dependency -- at least most people who were targeted. It's conceivable that this may have happened to some people, just as some people are injured by vaccines.
Yes, well that's how language actually works, isn't it? "Social welfare" programs are a superset of "welfare", not a subset.
TANF, which supplanted AFDC under the Clinton Administration.
The Fiat standard: 1 Fiat 500 is worth 13.5 ounces of gold.
I know people use "fiat currency" to imply that gold somehow has intrinsic value, but in a gold standard the value of gold is still set by arbitrary decree as well, and you can't stop the government from altering the dollar supply by saying it has to be linked to gold.
There's really no replacement for ongoing economically responsible management of the money supply. The fact that inevitably we'll do something short-sighted and stupid with the money supply doesn't change that. You can't adopt a convention (e.g. "One ounce of gold is worth $1200") that people can't amend in the future.
I was responding to the poster was claiming that "welfare" was bankrupting the country. Actual welfare is a tiny program.
Entitlement programs aren't welfare. I know you feel the same way about them as welfare, but it's dishonest to treat them if they're the same.
If you were to go down to Florida with the message, "Eliminate all welfare!" that'd be a popular program with all the elderly people there, because they would assume you meant what you were actually saying. But if you said, "Eliminate Social Security!" I guarantee you'd get a different response.
Well, a "Ponzi scheme" where the initial investors die off and their interest is transferred to the remaining investors.
Well, if you're talking about Social Security, you also have to include the fact that it also brings in revenue. Yes, eliminating Social Security would reduce the deficit, but not by the amount we spend on it, and it would have no effect whatsoever on our liquidity.
And "Social Security" is not "welfare".
My source is the federal budget. My figures are actually a little bit off, in that the TANF program (the successor to the old AFDC welfare program) has a budget of 17 billion, not the 10 billion I was estimating, but it's still miniscule.
Well, how close you get to 100% matters, and the amount it matters depends on the scale of the threat you're dealing with.
Suppose you are 90% effective. That's well worth it when you're talking about an adversary with the capability of striking you with ten, or even a hundred warheads, especially if they're small and unreliable. Russia currently has 1800 deployed warheads, with a stockpile of some 8500. But let's say conservatively in a period of high tensions the Soviets have a thousand warhead targeted at the US. 90% effective would mean we get hit with about 100 warheads, which in the Soviet era ICBMs were in the 3-5 MT range, or 200x to 300x the yield of the Hiroshima bomb. Two or three, or even a half dozen such warheads would be survivable for a certain value of "survive", but a hundred would mean a highly probable total collapse of our society.
Now at the risk of sounding like a scare-quotes-intellectual, you really ought to consider how the opponent in this game will perceive and react to your missile defense system. If a hypothetical missile defense system is 100% effective or very close to it, it's game over; your enemy's missile arsenal is just useless junk. But if we're talking 90% effective, we're talking about a system which cannot stop the enemy arsenal from destroying us, provided that arsenal is intact.
So if you are a defense planner in the Kremlin, what is your assessment of this situation? That the Americans are stupid? Or that they intend to whittle down your arsenal with a first nuclear strike and then whittle down the survivors with the missile defense system? And if you are in a tense situation with the Americans, how does this affect your decision making? Do you use your arsenal early or risk losing it later?
So yes, those of us "intellectuals" with the handicap of being educated do rather think how close a missile defense system gets to 100% matters quite a bit. How close it has to be varies by situation of course. A 10% effectiveness rate would be materially useful against North Korea; it would have been merely destabilizing against the Soviets.
You don't know what "bankrupt" means. It refers to liquidity; you are bankrupt when you can no longer meet your current obligations, which the US government has never been close to.
You also seem to be of the delusion that the US spends a lot of money on public assistance. It spends very little. For what we paid for the Iraq war (not including nation building expenses) we could fund US public assistance programs at the current levels for 219 years.
Well, sure, unless it didn't go down the way you suggest.
A really, really smart conspirator keeps the conspiracy as small as possible, and I think most people will agree Clinton isn't dumb. But IT guys learn all kinds of sensitive strategic stuff all the time, for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes its because they assume you'll be loyal. Sometimes it's because they're arrogant treat you like you were a mindless piece of machinery. Sometimes they simply underestimate the degree to which you're in a position to put things together.
In any case you'd offer immunity to a small but well-placed fish even if you didn't think there was anything you could pin on Clinton, just in case there was something you missed. What's interesting that immunity was actually granted, which means the IT guy must feel vulnerable in some way. That's actually an interesting development. It suggests (but does not prove yet) that there was something going on. What it was and how high it goes, we don't know. That's all speculation at this point.
The inability of people to use the algebra they've studied is a big part of why its seen as useless. It's not necessarily a lack of opportunities for using algebra. Look at all the vocational programs out there which teach students "spreadsheet skills". Anyone who's ever had to use a spreadsheet for its intended purpose (rather than as ad hoc databases) has to understand enough algebra not to implicitly divide by zero.
I once helped a guy at work who had a hobby of making high end penny whistles (the kind they use in Celtic folk music) figure out the right length to make an A-natural pitch whistle. He knew how long to make a B-flat whistle, and had a formula that given the length of a whistle told him how long to make one that was a half-note higher, so all I had to do was invert the formula then double-check my results. Now this was a pretty smart guy; he'd just successfully defended his anthropology PhD thesis. He had no trouble at all following the algebra I used, but when I asked why he hadn't tried it himself he said it hadn't even occurred to him to use the algebra he knew. He'd done well enough in algebra to get into prestigious college, but it was as if he'd been taught to recite Homer in ancient Greek without ever having been taught what it means.
I agree that people should know more statistics (and probability), but the same problem applies; people don't know how to apply the statistics and probability they've been taught. At some point in their school career they were dragooned into performing the mechanics of basic descriptive statistics, but it doesn't stick with them because the way they've been taught it's just a meaningless ceremony full of incomprehensible gibberish.
People's practical math skills need bootstrapping. They can't use those skills until they understand them, and it's hard to to understand them until they can put them to some use.
Taking apart a phone, even desoldering the chips and putting them test jigs, isn't a high risk operation for a skilled technician.
How many years have we been reading about security researchers mounting clever side channel attacks on things like smart cards? Has everyone here forgotten about Tempest already? So how likely is it that the NSA can't read a phone's hardware UID without acid-etching the CPU, either directly or by recovering the contents of memory? It could be simple as entering a PIN and observing what (wrong) encryption key the CPU generates.
But there are some really good reasons (from the FBI's standpoint) for compelling Apples' cooperation. First, they'd like the legal precedent that manufacturers have to provide them with a way in. Second, they won't have to go hat in hand to another agency to ask for help. Third, it'd be a lot more quick, convenient and cheap to install a compromised OS on a device than it would be to have to disassemble it. You could potentially do that while you had someone in short term custody (e.g. within 100 miles of the US border, which can be done without probable cause and where 2/3 of the American population lives).