I don't live in California, but I do live in the real world.
In the real world, there is a limit to how fast you can speed up a project by dumping money on it. If you don't believe this that just means your experience with the real world is limited. Bad managers are quite generous when they're under time pressure, but a fat slug of money with a countdown clock attached doesn't make up for the lack of planning.
Going to the Moon in eight years was feasible but expensive. Kennedy already knew this when he made his Rice University speech. He didn't just pull that timeframe out of his ass. Going to Mars in three years is just Dunnking-Kruger in operation, the product of a man whose management experience is building bog-standard buildings and slapping brass-plated cladding on them.
He's not saying mobile phones are *inherently* bad. He's saying that the kind of phones sold by carriers today track your movements and possibly eavesdrop on you in other ways. Lending your inherently compromised device to someone else doesn't change that one way or the other.
Sure, if everybody gave up smartphones to protect their privacy, he couldn't do this. But if everyone did that, carriers would offer more secure phones instead.
I used to think that too. However I have observed over the years that people behave a lot better when they face consequences.
There is some behavioral research to support the ineffectiveness of punishment -- over time smarter critters discover ways to avoid the punishment. However that in part has to do with the lab setup. More sophisticated behavioral control aimed at humans creates uncertainty over when punishment will be received. This causes people to *stretch* the conditions under which punishment is expected rather than to narrow them.
Note that I'm not saying everyone is totally depraved. But few people are as good as they think they are and most definitely are better when they're being watched. This does not preclude morally exceptional people such as Marcus Aurelius or Soyen Shaku from being the same when they are alone as when they are being watched.
Actually, one of the defining characteristics of psychopathy is an undersensitivity to punishment or the threat of punishment. Psychpaths do have a high degree of goal orientation. There's some interesting programs for treating psychopathic youths by teaching them to find rewards within the boundaries of social norms.
You are talking about rules you internalized over a lifetime of living in a society that punishes certain behavior. However if you lived, say, in early Anglo-Saxon times, you might well react to a slight by killing someone and igniting a blood feud.
Actually the point of the justice system is to establish peace and order so people can live their lives out with a modicum of predictability. We mainly punish because deterrence is more practical the prevention in almost every case.
We actually do surprisingly little crime prevention, when you think about it. There's nothing really preventing you from grabbing a crowbar from your garage, getting and your car and driving off to brain everyone who's annoyed you in the last month. The fact that you'd be caught and punished deters people, otherwise everyone would be doing it, not just people who are defective in the head.
A pattern recognition program is only as good as the people who train it. The problem isn't that the *statistics* are bad; it's that the data collection system feeding those statistics is biased.
For example, we know both from studies and common sense that marijuana use is extremely commonplace in both the black and white communities, in fact it's used at almost exactly the same rate. However blacks are far more likely to be arrested on marijuana possession charges than whites. Even if you don't feed in race to your algorithm, if the algorithm is any good it will in effect infer race from where the offender lives, the schools he went to, the jobs he's held and so on.
Just taking marijuana charges into account is enough to bias your dataset even if your algorithm is itself color-blind. We don't really have data on how likely someone is to break the law; we only have data on how likely they are to be charged with breaking the law.
This of course is why we have trials. You select a jury who has the fewest or at least the most minimally entrenched preconceptions and have at it.
It's not clear to me at all that this would be an easy suit to defend against; nor is it clear to me that it's an easy suit to win. It depends on specifics, doesn't it? Even if you believe that its a consequence of nature that women are on average paid less than men, that doesn't mean some sufficiently idiotic management might not discriminate against individual women on the basis of sex rather than ability. Nor would it stretch the bounds of credibility that they might leave some kind of paper trail that exposes them. None of that is mutually exclusive with the hypothesis that men on average are better engineers.
Now here's what I think, based on what I know about Oracle from having been an Oracle business partner. The corporate culture of Oracle is greedy and ruthless. It is (or at least was ten years ago) predicated on locked in customers having to put up with Oracle's shit. I think if there were an assumption that women are less marketable than men, they wouldn't hesitate to exploit that. Whether they violated laws is another question, and whether they did it in a way that can be proved is yet another.
That's because you have a lot of experience with what is normal and abnormal in this world, enough to understand how surprising a unicorn on Main Street is. But there is nothing impossible about the anatomy of a unicorn; indeed nothing particularly implausible. If you *read* about a unicorn cantering down Main Street in a fantasy novel, you wouldn't be particularly shocked, unless the author was amazingly good.
When you are a toddler, an unusually small or large dog on Main Street is a wonder. Most people, when it comes to science, are as unacquainted as a small child when it comes to basic science facts, much less more arcane ones. A study of college students and their science knowledge some years ago revealed that a large number of them believed the Moon had no gravity. When asked how the astronauts stayed on the surface of the Moon, the most common answer was "heavy boots". So these people would not be surprised at all if an astronaut stepped out of his spacecraft and floated away because his boots weren't heavy enough.
Finally, only a fool believes that inventors accomplish the *impossible*. At best, what an inventor achieves is the implausible. Most often what they achieve is the plausible but economically unfeasible. Now it may be that some day in the future an inventor will create something which most scientists now believe to be impossible. Most people won't be particularly surprised if someone invented a material that shields you from gravity, or faster than light travel. That's because they're *ignorant*.
This is known as a false positive. It doesn't really matter because what advertisers are interested in is the achievable true positive rate. When a Mormon sees a superbowl ad for beer, sure that's a wasted impression, but it doesn't matter as long as they reach the beer drinkers.
One thing years of being a software engineer taught me is any fool can come up with security he himself can't defeat. That's because you build it around attacks you envision, but attackers work out easy ways to get you that you didn't think of.
So making the wall nigh impossible for a team of special forces soldiers to climb is not really such a convincing demonstration. What about stopping a bunch of braseros with crane truck? Or a team of terrorists with explosives?
Of course the ultimate thing to do is to just go around the wall, which is what most people in this country illegally *already* do. The natural barrier of the desert is a better wall than the government will ever build.
The problem with most bad strategies is that they depends on the opponent stubbornly attacking the strongest point. Suppose you *did* build a concrete wall -- which would cost way more than five billion, by the way. People would just go over or under it (or around it; most people we're concerned with aren't doing land crossings of the sourthern border). So my point stands: you'd have to *watch* the area of the wall.
The most recent proposals for a steel slat wall could be breached with common tools in minutes. Certainly less than an hour. Explosively formed penetrated can do it in seconds, and since you don't need standoff capability like insurgents taking out an armored cehicle, even simpler designs can be used than the garage built examples we faced in Iraq and Afghanistan. But even a cutting torch or diamond bladed rotary cutter will make reasonably short work of structural steel.
What this means is you have have to check remote sections of fence pretty frequently, and be prepared to find people who get through.
As for locks they don't stop burglary, they only delay it very slightly. It's just about taking a precious minute or two away between the time the burglar enters the house and when cop's arrive. Put the finest deadbolt made on a house in the middle of the wilderness, and it will do exactly nothing to keep anyone out.
Any barrier that can be built by tools can be penetrated by tools, it's just a matter of time and preparation. And in the very remote places the wall will go through, people have lots of time.
For the wall to work, it needs pretty close to continal surveillance in those remote places. Not only along the wall, but in front to detect people who went through or over or under. You also need to be able to catch those people. Once you have those things, you don't really need the physical wall anymore.
No, they do not. People who *use* megaphones *do* have a right to free speech, but that doesn't permit them to blare political slogans at your house at 3AM.
There is a longstanding principle of First Amendment law in the US, which is that the government cannot regulate the *content* of speech except in certain very narrow situations, but it has a lot more leeway to regulate the *manner* of speech as long as it does it in a content neutral way.
So I suspect it's fine for the government to go after political spam bots posing as humans without violating the rights of the spammers behind the bots, as long as it treat all spam bots the same way regardless of who they are working for.
If it's Pelosi's fault, why didn't Paul Ryan put the 5 billion the FY2019 budget?
Normally that's how you do something this big. You put it in the propsoed budget, which forces you to weigh it against other spending and taxing priorities. The budget passes, and you create an "authorization" bill that formally creates or recreates the program. This prevents money from being shifted from authorized programs to off-book uses. Finally you appropriate the money, usually in quarterly tranches.
So, anyone who cares about controlling government spending and possible corruption would be against five billion dollars in a appropriation bill with no formally authorized program. Congress last quarter asked for an accounting of what the administration wanted to spend on this thing, and the administration only was able to itemize 1.7 billion. So if the House enacted an appropriation bill with 5 billion dollars of wall funding, this would immediately give the administration a five billion dollar pot of money it could literally spend on anything it wanted. The most that would be reasonable would be 1.7 billion, and that after an authorization bill restricted the use of that money.
Oh, and a wall in a remote area is just stupid. A wall is like a safe; it doesn't stop intruders, it just slows them down. Anything tools can build, other tools can take apart given time, and for the steel slat fence that time is not particularly long. That means you'll have to patrol the entire length of the wall pretty intensively. Once you start doing that, you don't actually need the wall itself; it's actually the monitoring and patrolling that's doing the job.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't live in California, but I do live in the real world.
In the real world, there is a limit to how fast you can speed up a project by dumping money on it. If you don't believe this that just means your experience with the real world is limited. Bad managers are quite generous when they're under time pressure, but a fat slug of money with a countdown clock attached doesn't make up for the lack of planning.
Going to the Moon in eight years was feasible but expensive. Kennedy already knew this when he made his Rice University speech. He didn't just pull that timeframe out of his ass. Going to Mars in three years is just Dunnking-Kruger in operation, the product of a man whose management experience is building bog-standard buildings and slapping brass-plated cladding on them.
Why wouldn't it be OK to use someone else's?
He's not saying mobile phones are *inherently* bad. He's saying that the kind of phones sold by carriers today track your movements and possibly eavesdrop on you in other ways. Lending your inherently compromised device to someone else doesn't change that one way or the other.
Sure, if everybody gave up smartphones to protect their privacy, he couldn't do this. But if everyone did that, carriers would offer more secure phones instead.
Sounds like the worst carnival ride *ever*.
Well, it's probably overused.
Loss of peer esteem is one of the most potent and psychologically painful punishments you can inflict on someone.
I used to think that too. However I have observed over the years that people behave a lot better when they face consequences.
There is some behavioral research to support the ineffectiveness of punishment -- over time smarter critters discover ways to avoid the punishment. However that in part has to do with the lab setup. More sophisticated behavioral control aimed at humans creates uncertainty over when punishment will be received. This causes people to *stretch* the conditions under which punishment is expected rather than to narrow them.
Note that I'm not saying everyone is totally depraved. But few people are as good as they think they are and most definitely are better when they're being watched. This does not preclude morally exceptional people such as Marcus Aurelius or Soyen Shaku from being the same when they are alone as when they are being watched.
Moral compasses develop their direction through fear of punishment. Otherwise there would *never* be a point in punishing anyone.
The statistics have it right.
And how do you know this?
Actually, one of the defining characteristics of psychopathy is an undersensitivity to punishment or the threat of punishment. Psychpaths do have a high degree of goal orientation. There's some interesting programs for treating psychopathic youths by teaching them to find rewards within the boundaries of social norms.
You are talking about rules you internalized over a lifetime of living in a society that punishes certain behavior. However if you lived, say, in early Anglo-Saxon times, you might well react to a slight by killing someone and igniting a blood feud.
Actually the point of the justice system is to establish peace and order so people can live their lives out with a modicum of predictability. We mainly punish because deterrence is more practical the prevention in almost every case.
We actually do surprisingly little crime prevention, when you think about it. There's nothing really preventing you from grabbing a crowbar from your garage, getting and your car and driving off to brain everyone who's annoyed you in the last month. The fact that you'd be caught and punished deters people, otherwise everyone would be doing it, not just people who are defective in the head.
A pattern recognition program is only as good as the people who train it. The problem isn't that the *statistics* are bad; it's that the data collection system feeding those statistics is biased.
For example, we know both from studies and common sense that marijuana use is extremely commonplace in both the black and white communities, in fact it's used at almost exactly the same rate. However blacks are far more likely to be arrested on marijuana possession charges than whites. Even if you don't feed in race to your algorithm, if the algorithm is any good it will in effect infer race from where the offender lives, the schools he went to, the jobs he's held and so on.
Just taking marijuana charges into account is enough to bias your dataset even if your algorithm is itself color-blind. We don't really have data on how likely someone is to break the law; we only have data on how likely they are to be charged with breaking the law.
This of course is why we have trials. You select a jury who has the fewest or at least the most minimally entrenched preconceptions and have at it.
It's not clear to me at all that this would be an easy suit to defend against; nor is it clear to me that it's an easy suit to win. It depends on specifics, doesn't it? Even if you believe that its a consequence of nature that women are on average paid less than men, that doesn't mean some sufficiently idiotic management might not discriminate against individual women on the basis of sex rather than ability. Nor would it stretch the bounds of credibility that they might leave some kind of paper trail that exposes them. None of that is mutually exclusive with the hypothesis that men on average are better engineers.
Now here's what I think, based on what I know about Oracle from having been an Oracle business partner. The corporate culture of Oracle is greedy and ruthless. It is (or at least was ten years ago) predicated on locked in customers having to put up with Oracle's shit. I think if there were an assumption that women are less marketable than men, they wouldn't hesitate to exploit that. Whether they violated laws is another question, and whether they did it in a way that can be proved is yet another.
That's because you have a lot of experience with what is normal and abnormal in this world, enough to understand how surprising a unicorn on Main Street is. But there is nothing impossible about the anatomy of a unicorn; indeed nothing particularly implausible. If you *read* about a unicorn cantering down Main Street in a fantasy novel, you wouldn't be particularly shocked, unless the author was amazingly good.
When you are a toddler, an unusually small or large dog on Main Street is a wonder. Most people, when it comes to science, are as unacquainted as a small child when it comes to basic science facts, much less more arcane ones. A study of college students and their science knowledge some years ago revealed that a large number of them believed the Moon had no gravity. When asked how the astronauts stayed on the surface of the Moon, the most common answer was "heavy boots". So these people would not be surprised at all if an astronaut stepped out of his spacecraft and floated away because his boots weren't heavy enough.
Finally, only a fool believes that inventors accomplish the *impossible*. At best, what an inventor achieves is the implausible. Most often what they achieve is the plausible but economically unfeasible. Now it may be that some day in the future an inventor will create something which most scientists now believe to be impossible. Most people won't be particularly surprised if someone invented a material that shields you from gravity, or faster than light travel. That's because they're *ignorant*.
Oh, in this timeline the *live action* "Beauty and the Beast" movie is the 14th largest grossing film *ever*.
The words of Lord Dark Helmet of Spaceballs have proven prophetic: we are all, indeed, surrounded by A*holes.
This is known as a false positive. It doesn't really matter because what advertisers are interested in is the achievable true positive rate. When a Mormon sees a superbowl ad for beer, sure that's a wasted impression, but it doesn't matter as long as they reach the beer drinkers.
If you programmed it re-entrantly, one of the games could be "Video Arcade Simulation".
One thing years of being a software engineer taught me is any fool can come up with security he himself can't defeat. That's because you build it around attacks you envision, but attackers work out easy ways to get you that you didn't think of.
So making the wall nigh impossible for a team of special forces soldiers to climb is not really such a convincing demonstration. What about stopping a bunch of braseros with crane truck? Or a team of terrorists with explosives?
Of course the ultimate thing to do is to just go around the wall, which is what most people in this country illegally *already* do. The natural barrier of the desert is a better wall than the government will ever build.
The problem with most bad strategies is that they depends on the opponent stubbornly attacking the strongest point. Suppose you *did* build a concrete wall -- which would cost way more than five billion, by the way. People would just go over or under it (or around it; most people we're concerned with aren't doing land crossings of the sourthern border). So my point stands: you'd have to *watch* the area of the wall.
The most recent proposals for a steel slat wall could be breached with common tools in minutes. Certainly less than an hour. Explosively formed penetrated can do it in seconds, and since you don't need standoff capability like insurgents taking out an armored cehicle, even simpler designs can be used than the garage built examples we faced in Iraq and Afghanistan. But even a cutting torch or diamond bladed rotary cutter will make reasonably short work of structural steel.
What this means is you have have to check remote sections of fence pretty frequently, and be prepared to find people who get through.
As for locks they don't stop burglary, they only delay it very slightly. It's just about taking a precious minute or two away between the time the burglar enters the house and when cop's arrive. Put the finest deadbolt made on a house in the middle of the wilderness, and it will do exactly nothing to keep anyone out.
Any barrier that can be built by tools can be penetrated by tools, it's just a matter of time and preparation. And in the very remote places the wall will go through, people have lots of time.
For the wall to work, it needs pretty close to continal surveillance in those remote places. Not only along the wall, but in front to detect people who went through or over or under. You also need to be able to catch those people. Once you have those things, you don't really need the physical wall anymore.
Plus handling them results in high blood levels of synthetic estrogen analogs.
I think you're remembering some kind of straw man.
No, they do not. People who *use* megaphones *do* have a right to free speech, but that doesn't permit them to blare political slogans at your house at 3AM.
There is a longstanding principle of First Amendment law in the US, which is that the government cannot regulate the *content* of speech except in certain very narrow situations, but it has a lot more leeway to regulate the *manner* of speech as long as it does it in a content neutral way.
So I suspect it's fine for the government to go after political spam bots posing as humans without violating the rights of the spammers behind the bots, as long as it treat all spam bots the same way regardless of who they are working for.
If it's Pelosi's fault, why didn't Paul Ryan put the 5 billion the FY2019 budget?
Normally that's how you do something this big. You put it in the propsoed budget, which forces you to weigh it against other spending and taxing priorities. The budget passes, and you create an "authorization" bill that formally creates or recreates the program. This prevents money from being shifted from authorized programs to off-book uses. Finally you appropriate the money, usually in quarterly tranches.
So, anyone who cares about controlling government spending and possible corruption would be against five billion dollars in a appropriation bill with no formally authorized program. Congress last quarter asked for an accounting of what the administration wanted to spend on this thing, and the administration only was able to itemize 1.7 billion. So if the House enacted an appropriation bill with 5 billion dollars of wall funding, this would immediately give the administration a five billion dollar pot of money it could literally spend on anything it wanted. The most that would be reasonable would be 1.7 billion, and that after an authorization bill restricted the use of that money.
Oh, and a wall in a remote area is just stupid. A wall is like a safe; it doesn't stop intruders, it just slows them down. Anything tools can build, other tools can take apart given time, and for the steel slat fence that time is not particularly long. That means you'll have to patrol the entire length of the wall pretty intensively. Once you start doing that, you don't actually need the wall itself; it's actually the monitoring and patrolling that's doing the job.