Suddenly non-university vocational institutes were looked on as crappy and inferior, and it became a mantra (for no good reason) that you needed a 4-year college/university degree
It's the "no good reason" part that's the real problem - because there are reasons and they are good for some people, if not most.
First, there's an oversupply of workers for an undersupply of jobs, so why not be picky with your applicants if you're an employer? A stupid regulation like "4-year degree required" gets rid of more potential bad employees than it excludes potential good employees for many jobs. Part of this is that high school diplomas are merely attendance certificates now, but that's only a tiny part. A bigger part is a slowing of the economy, in real terms, since the early 70's, and a lack of real, good jobs. Stagflation was papered over with sheets of hundred dollar bills - the structural issues were never "solved" and still aren't. We're about twelve miles up on the structural Jenga stack at this point.
The result was a massive spike in the number of people going to 4-year colleges--that number has sextupled or so over the past 60ish years
Yes! There's your oversupply.
and a massive decline in the number of people going to vocational and technical schools
and there's definitely an undersupply there. Why? One is heavily subsidized and one is not. The one that gets the massive subsidies (grants, student loan programs below market rates, etc.) gets two things - an influx of demand, and a concomitant increase in price. It used to be 4-year students could work during the summers to pay for their tuition - but they didn't get Pell Grants, so that was awful.
Tech school prices are nowhere near as inflated, at least yet. People can still afford to go to tech school, and they're, in large numbers, starting to wise up about that. Let's hope nobody starts trying to heavily subsidize it.
But why did the US go full-on socialism with the 4-year student loan program, in particular? There's an assumption that if only the US can produce a huge number of university brainiacs then it can maintain its economic leadership position in the world, maintain its high tax base despite the competition from cheaper labor doing the same work, and therefore maintain its World Police stance. Because if it can't, China is going to eat the US's lunch, and that would be bad for the people in power. People in Power who have lots of university degrees and are, upon self-reflection, smarter than everybody else in the room, so the degrees must be causal.
Dirty secret: populations are, on average, just as smart from generation to generation, no matter how diplomas are being hung on walls.
Second dirty secret: a China-dominated world will cause the citizens of the US to be as miserable as the citizens of Luxembourg and Denmark are today. I'm just hoping the death throes of the Empire don't include firing shots at the new guy. I'm sure some school offers a degree in how starting unwinnable wars is good for an economy.
So you go through Tor to access Facebook, where you immediately have to log in, and...
You really don't know anybody who uses Facebook pseudononymously? If you make an account called 'Hootie McBoob' you might get dinged, but there are thousands of 'Bill Riker's (have some fun with it).
If you're coming in from your home IP or a Verizon or AT&T mobile, you're gonna be decloaked in a hurry, even by a passive listener. So, if you want to participate in a community that's on Facebook but not be known to the outsiders, Tor makes sense. Right now you can exit Tor on one of the spooks' exit nodes, but then you're just enabling the traffic analysis. By offering Tor directly, you avoid the risk of using an additional hostile exit node.
This looks to be Facebook engineers doing the best they can given the cards they're holding. It's obviously more secure to not use any social networking systems at all, but if you rank security/privacy below functionality for some uses, this move makes sense to improve the situation.
This isn't new. Wim Van Eck [wikipedia.org] did it back in 1985
And the spy agencies well before that. I had a high school computer teacher who worked after school at a computer store that just happened to be down the street from a sigint Army base and they had the Compaq franchise for the area - he probably told us way more about the special Tempest-hardened models he had been selling them, in 1987, than he was supposed to. He couldn't help it - the tech was way cool and he was a card-carrying nerd (RIP).
I always suspected after that that Compaq, like so many other tech companies, got their legs on spook funding. It's funny - I spoke with a former Air Force guy the other day about the same thing and when I mentioned 'Tempest' he had a shudder - in the late 70's, early 80's, that was one of two words you could get shot for saying in his unit (probably figuratively...).
It is neat, though, that with an SDR and some DSP code you too can be a spy agency for $50 in 2014. Quick, Otterbox, design a $500 case with a 25' long braided copper cable attached!
my mistaken(?) impression that key finding was "fraction of those stars that have planets" is lower than what we previously believed.
It's "the fraction of the planets that have stars" which does not affect "the fraction of stars that have planets" because the new thought is that there are _way_ more planets than previously estimated.
To be fair, the conversational second-person italics! style of the article is maddening to read, and far worse to skim.
Netflix is its own CDN - they will give, for free, one or more caches to any ISP, causing any one movie to transit the ISP's nonfree network connections only once.
But this is about competition for video services, not caching.
it's interesting that you ask that today of all days - the way the news cycle works, today is the last day to drop a big story to affect the US midterm elections. Greenwald promised Snowden that he would publish to maximize political impact (to effect the most change) and an October surprise was strongly hinted at. There's nothing of great surprise on The Intercept today - some decent confirmatory stories but nothing politically destabilizing.
Many people have been of the mind "Greenwald's got this" but it seems now that they've gotten to him. Not to diminish the work he's done in any way but apparently he's passed the torch and forgot to tell anyone - well, I guess as of today he has through silence. If Greenwald (as Snowden's advocate) is done, that changes the political landscape for many currently observing the consuming power structure.
Or are you suggesting that his post is racist because coloured folks tend to be poor more often than white folks? That makes you the racist, not him.
Be that as it may, it's also the standard currently used by US Courts to evaluate policies. In a sane world the Drug War would have been struck down for just this reason decades ago. Not like the CIA recruited the Bloods and Crips to sell crack to blacks or anything - it's all subtle discrimination. No, wait...
"There was no explanation for the change, and it is perplexing to researchers," reports Computerworld.
What kind of stupid researchers are these? Regulatory capture, corporate welfare, and political corruption are plenty sufficient to explain the changes.
Only a knave looking for social justice in every action by a bureaucrat should be surprised, but he should be working at a daycare facility, not as a university researcher.
Some of them really are afraid clicking the wrong Slashdot story while taking a break at work could cost them.
This is a nice example of self-correction. The wild abuses they commit have put them in a position of being unable to effectively keep up in their field.
On the other hand, of course later we'll find out what sweetheart deal from the FCC Verizon got out of this, but it won't be covered on sillystring, so those same government workers will be protected from learning much about their own employer's corruption.
This has been mainline Christian thought, even among evangelicals, for decades. YEC's get the spot-light because they're zany, but this has already been accepted for a good while now.
You can read in Hawking's "A Brief History of Time", his popular science book from the 80's, his conversations with the Pope in the 70's during which the Pope "concedes" time after the Big Bang to science. Hawking gets a little happy about then explaining how time didn't exist until just an infinite moment after the Big Bang, but that's besides the point.
No, the theologically interesting part here is:
we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so.
The bit about magicians and magic wands are a throw away softening statement as nobody has ever imagined the Abrahamic God as requiring magic devices. More concisely then:
we run the risk of imagining God was... able to do everything. But that is not so.
That may well be the most controversial thing a Pope has ever said. And has the potential to re-focus Christians on what Jesus was talking about - they've become lost in Old-Testament vengeance in the most recent millennium. Long gone are the days of Constantine not being able to fight wars of conquest because his army was full of Christian pacifists.
You either leave enough float in your bank account to not have to worry about ever running out or you play the timing game constantly with your bank, who engineered the system for those delicious overdraft fees.
Right, and if you don't have money in your checking account, with a Visa debit account you will get a "transaction denied" message (switch to card B at the register) while with ACH you will get a $40 overdraft fee. If you are doing your errands, you might have five charges and owe $200 in fees. This bird won't fly.
Now watch as the blame-the-victim crowd tells me to constantly keep an eye on all of my balances instead of letting the computers handle that for me. Because progress.
I've seen the "by choosing to buy a feature now and then for a very small amount of money you support our work" claim, but I mean an actual business plan that doesn't depend on occasional contributions - have they ever seen a Facebook data center? The $5M VC money must have some basis, but the "occasional donations" claim does not appear to be it. FB makes money by selling a metric library-of-congress of ads but is largely funded by its public stock, which Ello does not have in play.
Maybe the $5M was somebody's play money, just in case something magical happened by accident?
Ad-free, no analytics for sale, free-as-in-beer proprietary centralized social network, eh?
Who is paying for hardware, software, rent, and electricity, investors? When do they get a return? Yeah, yeah, B-corp - where does the money come from?
Is this a serious venture or a spoof by Facebook to show people that thermodynamics cannot be ignored? Or the Tonika/Disapora* crowd trying to show the value of a distributed system?
I'm assuming this is addressed somewhere and just happened to be skipped by the press coverage I've seen.
B&N doesn't seem to want to carry it. Frustrating.
I had a mail subscription when it still took three minutes to download a large GIF from a BBS. That made lots of sense.
I don't get why anybody wants a print version of a blog in 2014, but if you do, why not get it by mail? It's not like B&N (I thought they went bankrupt?) doesn't feed its CCTV and register activity to the NSA anyway (wittingly or not).
Apparently - most of the distros have leadership elections. The leaders form the committees which make these decisions. If you want "perfect" democracy try Gentoo - you can choose to "use" most any feature or not. I presume, but do not know, that the Gentoo team can pretty well tell from the mirror logs which features are in "use" or not, which may or may not guide (but probably ought to) guide default use tags.
On the other hand, you can have the best feature ever devised and nobody will use it if they don't know about it. Benevolent leadership making decisions for you is not a problem if you have a choice to choose other leaders (even if you don't like government you can choose to like governance) and/or the leaders you have will listen to claims of error.
What? I very much doubt this SSID was broadcast by a stand-alone AP
Brace yourself: defending @timothy for a moment. *
His point wasn't that you need a certain piece of gear, but that for a few dollars (or as others are pointing out "zero dollars", which a few dollars approaches asymptotic to zero) you can incite bureaucrats to attack the air traffic system.
Which I guess is the major strategy of Al Qa'e'da - asymmetrical attacks - so timothy can expect Hydra to be by momentarily for relocation and reeducation.
* someday Slashcode will catch up with the aughts and the at-tag will link this comment as rendered from the database
do we go Schindler, Martin Luther King, Jr., or George Washington at this point to illustrate the 'criminal element'? Oh, nevermind, it's all Jeffrey Dahmers out there trying to eat us.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not aware of any non-mobile hardware powered by Qualcom graphic chips.
Qualcomm is in all sorts of embedded, not just mobile, and Android is only a share of mobile, much less embedded.
Is this for going to be bitcom-mining GPU farms?
GPU mining of bitcoin is dead. GPU's are still useful things, though.
Great post. One point you missed, though:
Suddenly non-university vocational institutes were looked on as crappy and inferior, and it became a mantra (for no good reason) that you needed a 4-year college/university degree
It's the "no good reason" part that's the real problem - because there are reasons and they are good for some people, if not most.
First, there's an oversupply of workers for an undersupply of jobs, so why not be picky with your applicants if you're an employer? A stupid regulation like "4-year degree required" gets rid of more potential bad employees than it excludes potential good employees for many jobs. Part of this is that high school diplomas are merely attendance certificates now, but that's only a tiny part. A bigger part is a slowing of the economy, in real terms, since the early 70's, and a lack of real, good jobs. Stagflation was papered over with sheets of hundred dollar bills - the structural issues were never "solved" and still aren't. We're about twelve miles up on the structural Jenga stack at this point.
The result was a massive spike in the number of people going to 4-year colleges--that number has sextupled or so over the past 60ish years
Yes! There's your oversupply.
and a massive decline in the number of people going to vocational and technical schools
and there's definitely an undersupply there. Why? One is heavily subsidized and one is not. The one that gets the massive subsidies (grants, student loan programs below market rates, etc.) gets two things - an influx of demand, and a concomitant increase in price. It used to be 4-year students could work during the summers to pay for their tuition - but they didn't get Pell Grants, so that was awful.
Tech school prices are nowhere near as inflated, at least yet. People can still afford to go to tech school, and they're, in large numbers, starting to wise up about that. Let's hope nobody starts trying to heavily subsidize it.
But why did the US go full-on socialism with the 4-year student loan program, in particular? There's an assumption that if only the US can produce a huge number of university brainiacs then it can maintain its economic leadership position in the world, maintain its high tax base despite the competition from cheaper labor doing the same work, and therefore maintain its World Police stance. Because if it can't, China is going to eat the US's lunch, and that would be bad for the people in power. People in Power who have lots of university degrees and are, upon self-reflection, smarter than everybody else in the room, so the degrees must be causal.
Dirty secret: populations are, on average, just as smart from generation to generation, no matter how diplomas are being hung on walls.
Second dirty secret: a China-dominated world will cause the citizens of the US to be as miserable as the citizens of Luxembourg and Denmark are today. I'm just hoping the death throes of the Empire don't include firing shots at the new guy. I'm sure some school offers a degree in how starting unwinnable wars is good for an economy.
special software on the computer
What, cryptsetup?
So you go through Tor to access Facebook, where you immediately have to log in, and...
You really don't know anybody who uses Facebook pseudononymously? If you make an account called 'Hootie McBoob' you might get dinged, but there are thousands of 'Bill Riker's (have some fun with it).
If you're coming in from your home IP or a Verizon or AT&T mobile, you're gonna be decloaked in a hurry, even by a passive listener. So, if you want to participate in a community that's on Facebook but not be known to the outsiders, Tor makes sense. Right now you can exit Tor on one of the spooks' exit nodes, but then you're just enabling the traffic analysis. By offering Tor directly, you avoid the risk of using an additional hostile exit node.
This looks to be Facebook engineers doing the best they can given the cards they're holding. It's obviously more secure to not use any social networking systems at all, but if you rank security/privacy below functionality for some uses, this move makes sense to improve the situation.
Waiting half an hour to buy a ticket for about ten bucks, then suffering for 3 hours in 100+ degrees heat
We should go see the Wizard of Oz to add some more strawman to this argument.
This isn't new. Wim Van Eck [wikipedia.org] did it back in 1985
And the spy agencies well before that. I had a high school computer teacher who worked after school at a computer store that just happened to be down the street from a sigint Army base and they had the Compaq franchise for the area - he probably told us way more about the special Tempest-hardened models he had been selling them, in 1987, than he was supposed to. He couldn't help it - the tech was way cool and he was a card-carrying nerd (RIP).
I always suspected after that that Compaq, like so many other tech companies, got their legs on spook funding. It's funny - I spoke with a former Air Force guy the other day about the same thing and when I mentioned 'Tempest' he had a shudder - in the late 70's, early 80's, that was one of two words you could get shot for saying in his unit (probably figuratively...).
It is neat, though, that with an SDR and some DSP code you too can be a spy agency for $50 in 2014. Quick, Otterbox, design a $500 case with a 25' long braided copper cable attached!
my mistaken(?) impression that key finding was "fraction of those stars that have planets" is lower than what we previously believed.
It's "the fraction of the planets that have stars" which does not affect "the fraction of stars that have planets" because the new thought is that there are _way_ more planets than previously estimated.
To be fair, the conversational second-person italics! style of the article is maddening to read, and far worse to skim.
I've killed systemd shutdowns hard after 15 minutes of timing out waiting for an nfs share that went offline.
The old system didn't do that. Not to detract from the lovely startup times, but it's not "all baked" yet.
Netflix is its own CDN - they will give, for free, one or more caches to any ISP, causing any one movie to transit the ISP's nonfree network connections only once.
But this is about competition for video services, not caching.
Would this be actual irony, as opposed to Alanis Morrissette irony?
That a song with that name contains no actual examples of irony is ______.
This message brought to you by Deep Metathinking and the Number 12.
it's interesting that you ask that today of all days - the way the news cycle works, today is the last day to drop a big story to affect the US midterm elections. Greenwald promised Snowden that he would publish to maximize political impact (to effect the most change) and an October surprise was strongly hinted at. There's nothing of great surprise on The Intercept today - some decent confirmatory stories but nothing politically destabilizing.
Many people have been of the mind "Greenwald's got this" but it seems now that they've gotten to him. Not to diminish the work he's done in any way but apparently he's passed the torch and forgot to tell anyone - well, I guess as of today he has through silence. If Greenwald (as Snowden's advocate) is done, that changes the political landscape for many currently observing the consuming power structure.
Or are you suggesting that his post is racist because coloured folks tend to be poor more often than white folks? That makes you the racist, not him.
Be that as it may, it's also the standard currently used by US Courts to evaluate policies. In a sane world the Drug War would have been struck down for just this reason decades ago. Not like the CIA recruited the Bloods and Crips to sell crack to blacks or anything - it's all subtle discrimination. No, wait...
What kind of stupid researchers are these? Regulatory capture, corporate welfare, and political corruption are plenty sufficient to explain the changes.
Only a knave looking for social justice in every action by a bureaucrat should be surprised, but he should be working at a daycare facility, not as a university researcher.
Some of them really are afraid clicking the wrong Slashdot story while taking a break at work could cost them.
This is a nice example of self-correction. The wild abuses they commit have put them in a position of being unable to effectively keep up in their field.
On the other hand, of course later we'll find out what sweetheart deal from the FCC Verizon got out of this, but it won't be covered on sillystring, so those same government workers will be protected from learning much about their own employer's corruption.
This has been mainline Christian thought, even among evangelicals, for decades. YEC's get the spot-light because they're zany, but this has already been accepted for a good while now.
You can read in Hawking's "A Brief History of Time", his popular science book from the 80's, his conversations with the Pope in the 70's during which the Pope "concedes" time after the Big Bang to science. Hawking gets a little happy about then explaining how time didn't exist until just an infinite moment after the Big Bang, but that's besides the point.
No, the theologically interesting part here is:
The bit about magicians and magic wands are a throw away softening statement as nobody has ever imagined the Abrahamic God as requiring magic devices. More concisely then:
That may well be the most controversial thing a Pope has ever said. And has the potential to re-focus Christians on what Jesus was talking about - they've become lost in Old-Testament vengeance in the most recent millennium. Long gone are the days of Constantine not being able to fight wars of conquest because his army was full of Christian pacifists.
You either leave enough float in your bank account to not have to worry about ever running out or you play the timing game constantly with your bank, who engineered the system for those delicious overdraft fees.
Right, and if you don't have money in your checking account, with a Visa debit account you will get a "transaction denied" message (switch to card B at the register) while with ACH you will get a $40 overdraft fee. If you are doing your errands, you might have five charges and owe $200 in fees. This bird won't fly.
Now watch as the blame-the-victim crowd tells me to constantly keep an eye on all of my balances instead of letting the computers handle that for me. Because progress.
... submit spaz.
I've seen the "by choosing to buy a feature now and then for a very small amount of money you support our work" claim, but I mean an actual business plan that doesn't depend on occasional contributions - have they ever seen a Facebook data center? The $5M VC money must have some basis, but the "occasional donations" claim does not appear to be it. FB makes money by selling a metric library-of-congress of ads but is largely funded by its public stock, which Ello does not have in play.
Maybe the $5M was somebody's play money, just in case something magical happened by accident?
Ad-free, no analytics for sale, free-as-in-beer proprietary centralized social network, eh?
Who is paying for hardware, software, rent, and electricity, investors? When do they get a return? Yeah, yeah, B-corp - where does the money come from?
Is this a serious venture or a spoof by Facebook to show people that thermodynamics cannot be ignored? Or the Tonika/Disapora* crowd trying to show the value of a distributed system?
I'm assuming this is addressed somewhere and just happened to be skipped by the press coverage I've seen.
B&N doesn't seem to want to carry it. Frustrating.
I had a mail subscription when it still took three minutes to download a large GIF from a BBS. That made lots of sense.
I don't get why anybody wants a print version of a blog in 2014, but if you do, why not get it by mail? It's not like B&N (I thought they went bankrupt?) doesn't feed its CCTV and register activity to the NSA anyway (wittingly or not).
Was there a vote taken that I missed?
Apparently - most of the distros have leadership elections. The leaders form the committees which make these decisions. If you want "perfect" democracy try Gentoo - you can choose to "use" most any feature or not. I presume, but do not know, that the Gentoo team can pretty well tell from the mirror logs which features are in "use" or not, which may or may not guide (but probably ought to) guide default use tags.
On the other hand, you can have the best feature ever devised and nobody will use it if they don't know about it. Benevolent leadership making decisions for you is not a problem if you have a choice to choose other leaders (even if you don't like government you can choose to like governance) and/or the leaders you have will listen to claims of error.
What? I very much doubt this SSID was broadcast by a stand-alone AP
Brace yourself: defending @timothy for a moment. *
His point wasn't that you need a certain piece of gear, but that for a few dollars (or as others are pointing out "zero dollars", which a few dollars approaches asymptotic to zero) you can incite bureaucrats to attack the air traffic system.
Which I guess is the major strategy of Al Qa'e'da - asymmetrical attacks - so timothy can expect Hydra to be by momentarily for relocation and reeducation.
* someday Slashcode will catch up with the aughts and the at-tag will link this comment as rendered from the database
Yes we can all piss soup about the 4'th one, but I don't think many people are actually blindsided by it.
Just don't invest in an app that Apple will compete with in the future and you'll be fine. Silly whiners - how hard is that rule to understand?
do we go Schindler, Martin Luther King, Jr., or George Washington at this point to illustrate the 'criminal element'? Oh, nevermind, it's all Jeffrey Dahmers out there trying to eat us.
UPS makes millions of dollars a day by implementing approximations to an NP-hard problem. Perhaps they should just stay home and naval-gaze.
I'd like a wife. I'd like her to be a colleague. I'd like to think I'm not the only one.
Opposites attract. And possibly reduce the incidence of autism.