Well, I don't know about *this* class, but I once took the online version of one of Harvard's algorithms classes. It was *hard*. In fact I'd go so far as to say it was *very* hard, even though at the time I had thirty years of programming experience and considerable knowledge of the topic already.
You're assuming this careful individualized evaluation of improvement is about raising the scores failing students. But what if it were about raising the bar for students who had prior experience -- as most people these days interested in doing the major would have? It may not be fair to those people, but it could well be for their benefit.
There's a lot of people who take an entry level CS course -- including many non-majors who want to get some basic, useful skills. But people in the major need to be prepared for what's coming, which in a *good* CS program is not going to be easy when you get to advanced algorithms or computation theory. Sure, most technical majors have a thin-out-the-herd class that culls the weak, but if it comes in the junior year it's too late for them to salvage anything from their undergraduate career; even second semester sophomore year is pushing it. If it were up to me I'd administer the shock in the first semester of the freshman year.
Like I said, it may not be fair grades-wise, but that's not the only important thing.
The Soviets screwed up by assuming that cables at the bottom of the ocean couldn't be tapped. It's now public knowledge that they can be tapped. So tapping data lines does them no good unless they can break encryption that is routinely used these days.
So looking at exploit scenarios, there's two that stand out. The first is that Russia discovers (or plants) a weakness in some commonly used crypto software, and then quietly uses that with their taps. The second is that they simply disrupt communications at some point where it will do maximal damage.
... before being a desktop OS becomes strategically irrelevant?
I would argue that most modern desktops are overdesigned. They are conceived as a kind of central information switchboard for digital life, which made sense in 2000. But today all that handy-dandy crap is in your phone, which makes more sense.
What you need on your desktop is haven from all that crap. A distraction-free place to concentrate on things. That's why I use i3.
There isn't a precise semantic distinction between these two terms, and they're often used interchangeably. That leads to confusing terms like "information overload".
But if you think about information as that aspect of data or its context that makes us informed, and we instead call the phenomenon we're talking about "data overload", then things become a lot clearer. What we're talking about is a form of incapacitation, but this is exactly the opposite of becoming informed, which is a kind of empowerment. The experience of becoming informed is one of surprise; it makes you sit up and feel alert.
So the answer is to be both more selective about information and more broad-minded about it at the same time. Absorbing data which simply reinforces what you already know is mind-numbing. Seek data which puts the data you already have in context, or shows it in a new light. That's what I mean by being more selective (stop mindlessly consuming the same old stuff) and more open-minded (seek out data that challenges your preconceptions and takes you out of your rut).
Also, beware data that is packaged to be easy to consume mindlessly. It's junk food data. You need more intellectual roughage, something that takes time and effort to chew.
The thing about wisdom is so much of it is domain specific. Over the course a career a software engineer and a kindergarten teacher learn many lessons which amount to a kind of practical, situational wisdom. Some of what they learn may be transferable to other contexts -- that's one of the reasons that jury trials work. But practical wisdom can fail us in unfamiliar situations because we fail to recognize salient differences.
One of the most interesting characters in Shakespeare is Polonius, the king's advisor from Hamlet. He is almost always played as a total fool,but if you actually listen to what he says, he's clearly not. His problem is that his very considerable practical experience in worldly affairs doesn't extend to supernatural forces goading reluctant people to revenge. And why would anyone expect it to?
Polonius' problem is that he is unaware of himself approaching the limits of his experience. We should be dubious about any definition of "wisdom" that is general in its application, but if you had to settle on an operational test of someone's ability to cope with novel situations, the ability to see a situation from others' perspectives isn't a bad one.
Less educated and less affluent people have much higher rates of divorce and domestic violence. So it is unlikely that they are "better at compromising".
But that's a scenario that's fraught with complications, isn't it? The character of compromises demanded from poor people differs from the kinds of compromises people with plenty of resources face. It's not about where to take vacation this year, it's food or medical care and which bills you can risk going past due on.
I grew up in a quite poor neighborhood, and achieved middle class status through education. My family was better off than most, and I was fortunate enough to win a scholarship to a prestigious engineering school. So I know from personal experience the difference between how poor people live and how middle class people live. My wife, my kids, most of the people I know these days have no idea. They don't know any families where the kids don't have beds to sleep in.
Let me tell you another thing about poor people you probably don't know. For the most part they work. Often a hell of a lot, although these days many of the jobs aren't 9-to-5. You've got to get work where and when you can, and some employers are canny about using computerized scheduling to keep employees below thresholds where mandated benefits kick in.
One in four working class people spend 50% or more on their income on rent. This means you really need two incomes, and low status jobs don't come with perqs like mental health days. So no flexible schedules or after-school programs for your kids; you give them a key and hope for the best.
It's stressful to deal with all that, and that stress breaks up families.
Even presuming they are objects (as opposed to optical or mental phenomena), and even presuming an extraterrestrial origin, why assume they are ships? Why couldn't they be organisms? Is that any less plausible?
Our experience with terrestrial organisms show that discarding bits -- like an outgrown carapace -- is a viable evolutionary strategy.
As for why they're here, our experience with life on Earth is that organisms tend to find uses for places, even if they don't spend most of their lives there: sea turtles lay their eggs on the beech; salmon live in oceans and spawn in fresh water, and eels do the opposite.
When director Robert Wise test screened his classic movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still, he was mortified when the audience laughed at certain scenes. Then he realized what they were laughing at: the futility of the military sending tanks to confront something so obviously beyond them. It was the dawn of what people were calling "the Atomic Age", and it didn't feel like a pinnacle in human history. More like standing for the first time on the shore of an ocean you hadn't realized existed.
Now let's imagine a civilization capable of interstellar travel visited the Earth. What reason would the have to be secretive about it? In fact it's presumptuous to assume they'd have any interest in us at all. To them we'd seem hardly different from animals. Chimps, after all, make twig-tools for fishing out termites. And the attitude that local populations and ecosystems need to be treated with respect is largely a product of our new awareness of Earth finite nature. When the planet seemed unbounded to us (as the cosmos would be for a spacefaring civilization) we had no compunctions about our impact on local fauna.
But rare visits by a civilization that had no particular interest in us could produce the appearance of more frequent but secretive visits. They wouldn't be hiding from us, so people would see them, but they wouldn't be visiting places like New York or Washington DC. Not visiting major centers of human power suggests to our parochial view that they're hiding from us, when it's just as possible that they're just picking random (to us) places, which on average will tend to be much more sparsely populated compared to a major metropolis.
Then what about the marvelous artifacts that supposedly exist? Why would they leave such precious things behind? Well, precious is in the eye of the beholder. Imagine you are exploring the home territory of an uncontacted people with stone age technology, if you dropped a gum wrapper the thing would be marvelous to them. Now as an enlightened modern person the notion would be mortifying; you'd pick up after yourself to avoid contaminating their culture. But if you had a more... Victorian attitude, you wouldn't give a flying fuck if the natives worked themselves up over a bit of tinfoil.
Security is not something you ever achieve, so what you have to ask is whether a particular practice does enough good to outweigh its cost.
Making an attacker speculatively register an account and solve a reCAPTCHA at least slows down and complicates an attack. That won't stop a determined attacker, but you can make life harder for him. However you do so at the cost of creating issues for users who occasionally forget their user names. The question is whether the the cost outweighs the obtainable benefits.
I certainly see how username-or-password doesn't accomplish anything by itself, but as part of an overall design it might, under certain circumstances.
Actually this is a good point, but you're presupposing that these two causes of refugee flight are mutually exclusive. In fact they work synergistically. Environmental stress creates economic disruption, creating political unrest, encouraging people predisposed to fight oppressive governments rebel. That in turn prompting oppressive responses which exacerbate the underlying crisis and further erode the regime's credibility. This takes resources and focus away from the response to the underlying disaster, and in any case the inevitable favoritism and corruption push the regime to the brink of collapse.
Take Syria, a perfect storm scenario. It's had a horrifically brutal, but *stable* regime for decades. A multi-year drought depopulated the countryside, further reducing its own agricultural output and creating large urban concentrations of unemployed young men ripe for radicalization. Then a transient spike in global wheat prices created shortages of subsidized bread and huge price spikes in market prices. This was
It's hard to say how much better an honest and generally popular Syrian government would have weathered the crisis, but this much is clear: while oppressive governments *can* produce refugees on their own, they don't necessarily do so. But put a country where people hate and fear their government under stress, and you'll get refugees.
Lobokov is a Russian journalist who is sometimes critical of the Russian government. How does the *prior probability* that the FSB might want to leak embarrassing information on him compare to the prior probability that the CIA would?
This is typical conspiracy theorist thinking: choose a culprit, and then argue from the *possibility* of their having done it, ignoring that it would actually be against their interests.
But to some degree that's normal. Why would I need a computer in my house? That's a question that thirty years ago most people couldn't answer, except maybe "balance my checkbook".
There is an adoption life cycle , and the people on the tails (leading and trailing) tend to base their participation on emotional factors rather than pragmatic ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Which at a place like Harvard means nobody (except legacies) will register for intro for non-majors.
Well, I don't know about *this* class, but I once took the online version of one of Harvard's algorithms classes. It was *hard*. In fact I'd go so far as to say it was *very* hard, even though at the time I had thirty years of programming experience and considerable knowledge of the topic already.
You're assuming this careful individualized evaluation of improvement is about raising the scores failing students. But what if it were about raising the bar for students who had prior experience -- as most people these days interested in doing the major would have? It may not be fair to those people, but it could well be for their benefit.
There's a lot of people who take an entry level CS course -- including many non-majors who want to get some basic, useful skills. But people in the major need to be prepared for what's coming, which in a *good* CS program is not going to be easy when you get to advanced algorithms or computation theory. Sure, most technical majors have a thin-out-the-herd class that culls the weak, but if it comes in the junior year it's too late for them to salvage anything from their undergraduate career; even second semester sophomore year is pushing it. If it were up to me I'd administer the shock in the first semester of the freshman year.
Like I said, it may not be fair grades-wise, but that's not the only important thing.
The Soviets screwed up by assuming that cables at the bottom of the ocean couldn't be tapped. It's now public knowledge that they can be tapped. So tapping data lines does them no good unless they can break encryption that is routinely used these days.
So looking at exploit scenarios, there's two that stand out. The first is that Russia discovers (or plants) a weakness in some commonly used crypto software, and then quietly uses that with their taps. The second is that they simply disrupt communications at some point where it will do maximal damage.
... before being a desktop OS becomes strategically irrelevant?
I would argue that most modern desktops are overdesigned. They are conceived as a kind of central information switchboard for digital life, which made sense in 2000. But today all that handy-dandy crap is in your phone, which makes more sense.
What you need on your desktop is haven from all that crap. A distraction-free place to concentrate on things. That's why I use i3.
You were fortunate in your assignment of college roommate, then.
That's a kind of wisdom that comes easier to people who have savings.
we're overloaded with data.
There isn't a precise semantic distinction between these two terms, and they're often used interchangeably. That leads to confusing terms like "information overload".
But if you think about information as that aspect of data or its context that makes us informed, and we instead call the phenomenon we're talking about "data overload", then things become a lot clearer. What we're talking about is a form of incapacitation, but this is exactly the opposite of becoming informed, which is a kind of empowerment. The experience of becoming informed is one of surprise; it makes you sit up and feel alert.
So the answer is to be both more selective about information and more broad-minded about it at the same time. Absorbing data which simply reinforces what you already know is mind-numbing. Seek data which puts the data you already have in context, or shows it in a new light. That's what I mean by being more selective (stop mindlessly consuming the same old stuff) and more open-minded (seek out data that challenges your preconceptions and takes you out of your rut).
Also, beware data that is packaged to be easy to consume mindlessly. It's junk food data. You need more intellectual roughage, something that takes time and effort to chew.
You don't know about people working under the table.
Is this some kind of John Galt meme, or do you not actually know how to use Google?
The thing about wisdom is so much of it is domain specific. Over the course a career a software engineer and a kindergarten teacher learn many lessons which amount to a kind of practical, situational wisdom. Some of what they learn may be transferable to other contexts -- that's one of the reasons that jury trials work. But practical wisdom can fail us in unfamiliar situations because we fail to recognize salient differences.
One of the most interesting characters in Shakespeare is Polonius, the king's advisor from Hamlet. He is almost always played as a total fool,but if you actually listen to what he says, he's clearly not. His problem is that his very considerable practical experience in worldly affairs doesn't extend to supernatural forces goading reluctant people to revenge. And why would anyone expect it to?
Polonius' problem is that he is unaware of himself approaching the limits of his experience. We should be dubious about any definition of "wisdom" that is general in its application, but if you had to settle on an operational test of someone's ability to cope with novel situations, the ability to see a situation from others' perspectives isn't a bad one.
Less educated and less affluent people have much higher rates of divorce and domestic violence. So it is unlikely that they are "better at compromising".
But that's a scenario that's fraught with complications, isn't it? The character of compromises demanded from poor people differs from the kinds of compromises people with plenty of resources face. It's not about where to take vacation this year, it's food or medical care and which bills you can risk going past due on.
I grew up in a quite poor neighborhood, and achieved middle class status through education. My family was better off than most, and I was fortunate enough to win a scholarship to a prestigious engineering school. So I know from personal experience the difference between how poor people live and how middle class people live. My wife, my kids, most of the people I know these days have no idea. They don't know any families where the kids don't have beds to sleep in.
Let me tell you another thing about poor people you probably don't know. For the most part they work. Often a hell of a lot, although these days many of the jobs aren't 9-to-5. You've got to get work where and when you can, and some employers are canny about using computerized scheduling to keep employees below thresholds where mandated benefits kick in.
One in four working class people spend 50% or more on their income on rent. This means you really need two incomes, and low status jobs don't come with perqs like mental health days. So no flexible schedules or after-school programs for your kids; you give them a key and hope for the best.
It's stressful to deal with all that, and that stress breaks up families.
Even presuming they are objects (as opposed to optical or mental phenomena), and even presuming an extraterrestrial origin, why assume they are ships? Why couldn't they be organisms? Is that any less plausible?
Our experience with terrestrial organisms show that discarding bits -- like an outgrown carapace -- is a viable evolutionary strategy.
As for why they're here, our experience with life on Earth is that organisms tend to find uses for places, even if they don't spend most of their lives there: sea turtles lay their eggs on the beech; salmon live in oceans and spawn in fresh water, and eels do the opposite.
Well, if you want to be pedantic, once you'd figured out what makes it unknown it's not "unknown" anymore, is it?
When director Robert Wise test screened his classic movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still, he was mortified when the audience laughed at certain scenes. Then he realized what they were laughing at: the futility of the military sending tanks to confront something so obviously beyond them. It was the dawn of what people were calling "the Atomic Age", and it didn't feel like a pinnacle in human history. More like standing for the first time on the shore of an ocean you hadn't realized existed.
Now let's imagine a civilization capable of interstellar travel visited the Earth. What reason would the have to be secretive about it? In fact it's presumptuous to assume they'd have any interest in us at all. To them we'd seem hardly different from animals. Chimps, after all, make twig-tools for fishing out termites. And the attitude that local populations and ecosystems need to be treated with respect is largely a product of our new awareness of Earth finite nature. When the planet seemed unbounded to us (as the cosmos would be for a spacefaring civilization) we had no compunctions about our impact on local fauna.
But rare visits by a civilization that had no particular interest in us could produce the appearance of more frequent but secretive visits. They wouldn't be hiding from us, so people would see them, but they wouldn't be visiting places like New York or Washington DC. Not visiting major centers of human power suggests to our parochial view that they're hiding from us, when it's just as possible that they're just picking random (to us) places, which on average will tend to be much more sparsely populated compared to a major metropolis.
Then what about the marvelous artifacts that supposedly exist? Why would they leave such precious things behind? Well, precious is in the eye of the beholder. Imagine you are exploring the home territory of an uncontacted people with stone age technology, if you dropped a gum wrapper the thing would be marvelous to them. Now as an enlightened modern person the notion would be mortifying; you'd pick up after yourself to avoid contaminating their culture. But if you had a more... Victorian attitude, you wouldn't give a flying fuck if the natives worked themselves up over a bit of tinfoil.
That stuff comes into play *after* the regime has been destabilized.
Talk about a captive audience.
Security is not something you ever achieve, so what you have to ask is whether a particular practice does enough good to outweigh its cost.
Making an attacker speculatively register an account and solve a reCAPTCHA at least slows down and complicates an attack. That won't stop a determined attacker, but you can make life harder for him. However you do so at the cost of creating issues for users who occasionally forget their user names. The question is whether the the cost outweighs the obtainable benefits.
I certainly see how username-or-password doesn't accomplish anything by itself, but as part of an overall design it might, under certain circumstances.
Actually this is a good point, but you're presupposing that these two causes of refugee flight are mutually exclusive. In fact they work synergistically. Environmental stress creates economic disruption, creating political unrest, encouraging people predisposed to fight oppressive governments rebel. That in turn prompting oppressive responses which exacerbate the underlying crisis and further erode the regime's credibility. This takes resources and focus away from the response to the underlying disaster, and in any case the inevitable favoritism and corruption push the regime to the brink of collapse.
Take Syria, a perfect storm scenario. It's had a horrifically brutal, but *stable* regime for decades. A multi-year drought depopulated the countryside, further reducing its own agricultural output and creating large urban concentrations of unemployed young men ripe for radicalization. Then a transient spike in global wheat prices created shortages of subsidized bread and huge price spikes in market prices. This was
It's hard to say how much better an honest and generally popular Syrian government would have weathered the crisis, but this much is clear: while oppressive governments *can* produce refugees on their own, they don't necessarily do so. But put a country where people hate and fear their government under stress, and you'll get refugees.
Lobokov is a Russian journalist who is sometimes critical of the Russian government. How does the *prior probability* that the FSB might want to leak embarrassing information on him compare to the prior probability that the CIA would?
This is typical conspiracy theorist thinking: choose a culprit, and then argue from the *possibility* of their having done it, ignoring that it would actually be against their interests.
Because dollars being speculated in the asset market are more real than dollars people use to by actual stuff... evidently.
I think the salient point is that the people there are brown.
But to some degree that's normal. Why would I need a computer in my house? That's a question that thirty years ago most people couldn't answer, except maybe "balance my checkbook".
There is an adoption life cycle , and the people on the tails (leading and trailing) tend to base their participation on emotional factors rather than pragmatic ones.
brings out the worst in everyone.
Frankly I would be astonished if a majority of the people promoting or knowingly investing in "block chain technology" has any idea how it works.
Airport security only applies to those of us who fly commercial. When is the last time the top critters in our government flew commercial?
The Obama administration. Does seem like a long time ago, though.