Something tells me that this probably isn't the first time that people have taken shots at Trump. He's made a lot of enemies over the years so his staff have probably learned to shore up their defences as well as they can.
I wish the press would do a little fact-checking. They regularly report massive losses from unauthorised copying and sharing of commercial media running into $trillions if you add it all up. And still, the film industry is reporting increasingly higher box-office and sales profits for every movie they release. So who's suffering these losses? Which films are taking a cut in profit because of piracy?
...really don't matter any more. They don't feel the need to understand the things they're legislating for and what the likely consequences will be, e.g. weakening encryption in the USA will make banks, power stations, public records, congress' computers, etc. more vulnerable to cyber attacks. They're simply relaying their paymasters' wishes, mostly verbatim. Some of the documents they use even have embedded metadata from the corporate think tanks and lobby groups that originally wrote them. They should at least learn about document metadata to avoid such embarrassment, otherwise we can replace them with any old popular idiot, you know, like has-been Hollywood B-movie actors;)
...don't use a tracking device as your computer. Smartphones are designed primarily as tracking devices; why do you think Google et al. like them so much? Don't wanna be tracked? Use computers that you own and have control over. A simple hosts file with an appropriate list of known tracking URIs is enough to significantly inhibit the worst offenders and block out some annoying ads while you're at it. Tracking is pretty much impossible to block without resorting to extreme measures like using Linux + Tor.
Re: "they tend to miss the part where you have to think about the problem abstractly and structure the problem properly" -- I agree with your point but I'd take it further. Our education systems aren't very good at assessing problem solving and other forms of higher-order thinking skills. If we can't assess them easily and cheaply (assessment is possible but high-skilled, labour-intensive), then in a competitive, grades-driven education system, there are no rewards (higher grades and bettering your classmates) for higher-order thinking skills. Do you see where I'm going with this? The people who end up being good at the difficult stuff do so because of family and peer support and personal interest (and those interests being encouraged and supported) as well as not having all their free time taken up with continual, stressful, and pointless standardised testing. If you want to find good problem solvers and people who learn through their own volition and initiative, look at graduates from liberal arts schools.
Yes, the problem with poor implementations of public transport is that they're slow, expensive, and inconvenient. Having lived in places, including smaller towns connected by rail services, that have coherent public transport systems and a strong focus on rail, I've found getting around faster, cheaper, and more convenient than cars by a long way, e.g. getting to and from work is at least twice as fast by rail as by car. The biggest complaint in those places is that there aren't enough taxis available at peak times to take people the final stretch to their doorsteps. The smarter people get a bike or electric scooter to fulfil that role, and often the final stretch is easily walkable, i.e. there's better urban planning instead of creating massive, characterless urban sprawls like in north America.
What Matt Ridley fails to recognise is that the Nazis are already on the dark side of the Moon and are hoarding all the helium-3 for their impending return to Earth, invasion, and subjugation of the inferior races... Did Matt Ridley watch Iron Sky http://www.imdb.com/title/tt10... and think it was a documentary?
So far the USA is averaging more than one mass-shooting (involving 4 or more people) per day this year. Ever wondered how non-US people view US gun culture? Here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Reading some of the horribly misinformed comments about unions here leads me to believe that the anti-union propaganda's still working. Check your facts before you assume that workers that have union representation are worse off than those who don't. Also check out the difference in performance of companies that have majority unionised workers vs. those that don't. If a union isn't protecting your pay, health and safety, contracts, and benefits, then who is?
Famed statistician, Hans Rosling, has been telling the world or anyone who'll listen for years that the world is getting safer, less violent, and more prosperous. He also says that in populations where they're getting better education, access to healthcare, and especially women's reproductive healthcare, birth-rates are going down (higher infant-mortality and personal insecurity correlate with higher fertility rates). The only bad news here is for the tiny minority of people in organisations and businesses that thrive on fear, uncertainty, conflict, and violence, e.g. the military, police, security services, and the media. They're facing existential threats because of all this peace and happiness breaking out all over the place. How do you suppose they're countering these existential threats?
...including "Silicon Valley's privacy policies" in the list of pet peeves for the CIA/NSA. In fact, Silicon Valley IT giants have a steady stream of revenue from providing services to assist the NSA in their private personal data trawling. It's just business. The public rhetoric is simply PR and marketing to keep their share prices up. None of the IT giants are proposing anything that would actually prevent the NSA from bulk data collection and accessing their data warehouses, security certificates, and encryption keys. The greatest facilitators in the most intrusive and pervasive surveillance programme in history are the IT giants themselves. Let's not forget that.
Agree. How many people who commit acts of terrorism (mostly Christian, not Muslim, as the lame-stream media would have us believe. See: http://www.juancole.com/2015/1...) are not engineers and what explanation do they offer for them for committing acts of terrorism?
The part that caught my attention was, "migrant populations, where people with engineering backgrounds have difficulty in realizing their ambitions for good and socially valued jobs." How about marginalisation and injustice as strong contributing factors?
I believe in better security by cutting back on extra, unnecessary features; all they do is provide more surfaces for finding vulnerabilities. I recently bought an IoT washing machine and have stripped back the extra features, like wash, rinse, and spin cycles, so that all it does is send SPAM messages and participate in DDoS attacks.
"Lawful device interception capabilities" sounds like they'll only let all the security agencies and sub-contractors in a little bit, you know, just the tip. Nice of Blackberry for being such a good sport with all those guys;)
Intelligence agencies aren't supposed to do anything that you or I should hear about. They're supposed to collect intelligence, in this case signals intelligence (SIGINT) secretly, analyse it, compile reports, and quietly hand it on to the people who are supposed to act upon it.
But you're probably right that this traditional role of intelligence has likely been usurped by indiscreet politicians and civil servants looking for media attention and not really bothered about the effect of their actions.
...instead of making up regulations and playing "Gotcha!", why not just beef up and extend public transport infrastructure, make it more affordable, while at the same time reduce the multi-billion dollar subsidies to the oil industry, thereby making private car use more expensive and encouraging more people to use public transport. It'd also make more sense to give priority to people from poorer communities who may be paying a substantial proportion of their income on cars or having to rely on weak, unreliable public transport to get to work. This should result in higher productivity through fewer missed work days and greater availability of workers for jobs. Also, spending less on getting to work means more purchasing power for those people and therefore more economic activity/growth. Everybody wins.
A secretive, clandestine spy agency does secretive, clandestine things and has no scruples. Mmm... what a surprise! The thing we should really be complaining about is that they claim to have effective oversight and act within the law.
Who understands the difference between fundamental (AKA basic or "blue skies") research and applied research? How much do corporations spend on fundamental (not applied) research?
Typical narrow-minded view of research and knowledge. Not many corporations or private organisations invest in fundamental science research and nowhere hear at the scale and intensity that govt. funded research does. Without fundamental research, you don't have anything to base applied research on, which I guess is what they mean when they call it "innovation."
As for self-organising systems, there's plenty of fundamental research to show just how unpredictable and unstable they are in reality.
Under tort law, they are liable. They clearly failed to put into place sensible and reasonable safeguards to protect their clients' sensitive data. CEO Dido Harding made a press statement that she didn't know if the banking details on TalkTalk's database were encrypted (gross negligence, in my opinion).
However, we live in an age of blameless, shameless corporations who know that, as long as they don't emabarrass any powerful people (that doesn't include politicians), they can get away with just about anything.
I've seen several plugins and 3rd party services for popular learning management systems that alert teachers and/or admins to potential drop-outs before they happen. As we've seen from the MIT article, it's not actually that hard to do.
The research on this goes back several years so this part really isn't news.
Slashdot Mirror
AI is no match for human stupidity.
Something tells me that this probably isn't the first time that people have taken shots at Trump. He's made a lot of enemies over the years so his staff have probably learned to shore up their defences as well as they can.
I wish the press would do a little fact-checking. They regularly report massive losses from unauthorised copying and sharing of commercial media running into $trillions if you add it all up. And still, the film industry is reporting increasingly higher box-office and sales profits for every movie they release. So who's suffering these losses? Which films are taking a cut in profit because of piracy?
...really don't matter any more. They don't feel the need to understand the things they're legislating for and what the likely consequences will be, e.g. weakening encryption in the USA will make banks, power stations, public records, congress' computers, etc. more vulnerable to cyber attacks. They're simply relaying their paymasters' wishes, mostly verbatim. Some of the documents they use even have embedded metadata from the corporate think tanks and lobby groups that originally wrote them. They should at least learn about document metadata to avoid such embarrassment, otherwise we can replace them with any old popular idiot, you know, like has-been Hollywood B-movie actors ;)
...don't use a tracking device as your computer. Smartphones are designed primarily as tracking devices; why do you think Google et al. like them so much? Don't wanna be tracked? Use computers that you own and have control over. A simple hosts file with an appropriate list of known tracking URIs is enough to significantly inhibit the worst offenders and block out some annoying ads while you're at it. Tracking is pretty much impossible to block without resorting to extreme measures like using Linux + Tor.
I thought Nineteen Eighty-four was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
Re: "they tend to miss the part where you have to think about the problem abstractly and structure the problem properly" -- I agree with your point but I'd take it further. Our education systems aren't very good at assessing problem solving and other forms of higher-order thinking skills. If we can't assess them easily and cheaply (assessment is possible but high-skilled, labour-intensive), then in a competitive, grades-driven education system, there are no rewards (higher grades and bettering your classmates) for higher-order thinking skills. Do you see where I'm going with this? The people who end up being good at the difficult stuff do so because of family and peer support and personal interest (and those interests being encouraged and supported) as well as not having all their free time taken up with continual, stressful, and pointless standardised testing. If you want to find good problem solvers and people who learn through their own volition and initiative, look at graduates from liberal arts schools.
Yes, the problem with poor implementations of public transport is that they're slow, expensive, and inconvenient. Having lived in places, including smaller towns connected by rail services, that have coherent public transport systems and a strong focus on rail, I've found getting around faster, cheaper, and more convenient than cars by a long way, e.g. getting to and from work is at least twice as fast by rail as by car. The biggest complaint in those places is that there aren't enough taxis available at peak times to take people the final stretch to their doorsteps. The smarter people get a bike or electric scooter to fulfil that role, and often the final stretch is easily walkable, i.e. there's better urban planning instead of creating massive, characterless urban sprawls like in north America.
What Matt Ridley fails to recognise is that the Nazis are already on the dark side of the Moon and are hoarding all the helium-3 for their impending return to Earth, invasion, and subjugation of the inferior races... Did Matt Ridley watch Iron Sky http://www.imdb.com/title/tt10... and think it was a documentary?
So far the USA is averaging more than one mass-shooting (involving 4 or more people) per day this year. Ever wondered how non-US people view US gun culture? Here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Reading some of the horribly misinformed comments about unions here leads me to believe that the anti-union propaganda's still working. Check your facts before you assume that workers that have union representation are worse off than those who don't. Also check out the difference in performance of companies that have majority unionised workers vs. those that don't. If a union isn't protecting your pay, health and safety, contracts, and benefits, then who is?
Famed statistician, Hans Rosling, has been telling the world or anyone who'll listen for years that the world is getting safer, less violent, and more prosperous. He also says that in populations where they're getting better education, access to healthcare, and especially women's reproductive healthcare, birth-rates are going down (higher infant-mortality and personal insecurity correlate with higher fertility rates). The only bad news here is for the tiny minority of people in organisations and businesses that thrive on fear, uncertainty, conflict, and violence, e.g. the military, police, security services, and the media. They're facing existential threats because of all this peace and happiness breaking out all over the place. How do you suppose they're countering these existential threats?
...including "Silicon Valley's privacy policies" in the list of pet peeves for the CIA/NSA. In fact, Silicon Valley IT giants have a steady stream of revenue from providing services to assist the NSA in their private personal data trawling. It's just business. The public rhetoric is simply PR and marketing to keep their share prices up. None of the IT giants are proposing anything that would actually prevent the NSA from bulk data collection and accessing their data warehouses, security certificates, and encryption keys. The greatest facilitators in the most intrusive and pervasive surveillance programme in history are the IT giants themselves. Let's not forget that.
Agree. How many people who commit acts of terrorism (mostly Christian, not Muslim, as the lame-stream media would have us believe. See: http://www.juancole.com/2015/1...) are not engineers and what explanation do they offer for them for committing acts of terrorism?
The part that caught my attention was, "migrant populations, where people with engineering backgrounds have difficulty in realizing their ambitions for good and socially valued jobs." How about marginalisation and injustice as strong contributing factors?
I believe in better security by cutting back on extra, unnecessary features; all they do is provide more surfaces for finding vulnerabilities. I recently bought an IoT washing machine and have stripped back the extra features, like wash, rinse, and spin cycles, so that all it does is send SPAM messages and participate in DDoS attacks.
"Lawful device interception capabilities" sounds like they'll only let all the security agencies and sub-contractors in a little bit, you know, just the tip. Nice of Blackberry for being such a good sport with all those guys ;)
Intelligence agencies aren't supposed to do anything that you or I should hear about. They're supposed to collect intelligence, in this case signals intelligence (SIGINT) secretly, analyse it, compile reports, and quietly hand it on to the people who are supposed to act upon it.
But you're probably right that this traditional role of intelligence has likely been usurped by indiscreet politicians and civil servants looking for media attention and not really bothered about the effect of their actions.
...runs on Windows XP throughout, as far as I can tell.
...instead of making up regulations and playing "Gotcha!", why not just beef up and extend public transport infrastructure, make it more affordable, while at the same time reduce the multi-billion dollar subsidies to the oil industry, thereby making private car use more expensive and encouraging more people to use public transport. It'd also make more sense to give priority to people from poorer communities who may be paying a substantial proportion of their income on cars or having to rely on weak, unreliable public transport to get to work. This should result in higher productivity through fewer missed work days and greater availability of workers for jobs. Also, spending less on getting to work means more purchasing power for those people and therefore more economic activity/growth. Everybody wins.
A secretive, clandestine spy agency does secretive, clandestine things and has no scruples. Mmm... what a surprise! The thing we should really be complaining about is that they claim to have effective oversight and act within the law.
Turn it into a free-for-all TV show: "Robot Wars in the sky." It'll be a big hit, I guarantee it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Who understands the difference between fundamental (AKA basic or "blue skies") research and applied research? How much do corporations spend on fundamental (not applied) research?
Typical narrow-minded view of research and knowledge. Not many corporations or private organisations invest in fundamental science research and nowhere hear at the scale and intensity that govt. funded research does. Without fundamental research, you don't have anything to base applied research on, which I guess is what they mean when they call it "innovation."
As for self-organising systems, there's plenty of fundamental research to show just how unpredictable and unstable they are in reality.
Under tort law, they are liable. They clearly failed to put into place sensible and reasonable safeguards to protect their clients' sensitive data. CEO Dido Harding made a press statement that she didn't know if the banking details on TalkTalk's database were encrypted (gross negligence, in my opinion).
However, we live in an age of blameless, shameless corporations who know that, as long as they don't emabarrass any powerful people (that doesn't include politicians), they can get away with just about anything.
I've seen several plugins and 3rd party services for popular learning management systems that alert teachers and/or admins to potential drop-outs before they happen. As we've seen from the MIT article, it's not actually that hard to do.
The research on this goes back several years so this part really isn't news.