JavaScript is OK...As a programming language JavaScript is incredibly powerful...
Agreed. I'd actually call it a great language, in the abstract. I was poking fun at the implementations, many of which aren't so hot.
...if you take your head out of your ass for a few minutes, forget about traditional OOP involving classes and look at prototypes.
Whoa. Where the heck did that come from? As someone who started OOP with Simula in the '70s, and has actually implemented several OOP languages, including one that was prototype based and one that was method pattern based (sort of like CLOS, but not as ambitious) I'd say you were way out of line with that remark.
Don't automatically assume that you know more than everyone you meet on line, you'll just wind up looking like a jerk.
I think you discount the tendency for the masses to continually use what they find easy.
That's a valid part of the metric. Easy is good. When you're figuring benefits / costs, "easy" reduces the denominator and makes the total score much higher.
When you just compare the accuracy of weather forecasting methods, "looking out the window" doesn't rate very high. But it's generally so easy that in practice it's the technique of first recourse and you'd be a fool not to use it. The great thing about "easy" is that, if you find you need more detail, more precision, or whatever, you haven't used up the alloted resources. And if you don't you are time / money ahead.
Anyone who could go to their bosses and say "our website is so easy to use that people just come back time and time again, and here are the statistics to prove it" is in great shape.
It depends a lot on what your wiki is for, but usage pattern statistics might be a good metric. For example, repeat visitors are people who are getting some value out of the wiki. Trampoline pages (pages people hit and then bounce elsewhere from a link in the page) might be another good thing to track. As well as abort-and-retry pages, where instead of following a link the user goes to the search box and tries something else.
You get the idea.
If the wiki is valuable to the people who are using it, you should be able to tell this from the logs--even if no one ever mentioned wikipedia in public, they could tell how much we care by noting that we keep coming back.
There are more than 2 sides to everything, think of the RIAA debates, the RIAA has one side, the general public has another and the musicians have another side too.
Don't forget the music. It's information, after all, and it wants to be free!
But hitting back at your main point, I think the greater problem isn't that we forget that there are more than two opinions but rather that we keep overlooking the fact that there is only one reality. If two people make two mutually exclusive claims, at least one of them must be wrong. Rather than (or at the very least, in addition to) rushing to find a third incompatible claim, and then a fourth, we should probably spend a little time figuring out which of claims already on the table are bunk and then removing them from the table (by flagging them as contrafactual, and giving proof, not by censoring them).
--MarkusQ
And faint of heart
on
Bash Cookbook
·
· Score: 4, Funny
And it's "faint of heart" not "feint of heart".
And it would be "overviewing basic concepts" not "over viewing basic concepts" if "overview" were a verb.
I made it as far as:
I found Chapter 11 to be very useful (pun intended)
That only works if you can see the results of all the trials.
As it stands, we only have the ability to detect very large planets that are very close to their primary, and even so only a vanishingly small percentage of them. That would be like (modifying your example):
From science, suppose your hypothesis is that something is binomially distributed with p=0.5 (eg number of heads from fair coin flip). Suppose after 100,000,000,000 trials your head-detector spots 100 heads. In that case, you would say:
"Hey, my head-detector sort of works! Uh, a little bit at least.
Could I have more funding please?
If all of this is true, he could have used a KKG sister as the friendly bystander to bring the sisterhood notoriety.
No, if everything in the linked article is true it couldn't be a KKG sister from that location. From the article:
The mailbox just off the campus of Princeton University where the letters were mailed sits about 100 yards away from where the college's Kappa Kappa Gamma chapter stores its rush materials, initiation robes and other property. Sorority members do not live there, and the Kappa chapter at Princeton does not provide a house for the women.
...
However, Graham said there was nothing to indicate that any of the sorority members had anything to do with Ivins.
The building is apparently a warehouse, normally unoccupied, apparently unlabeled, in which various fraternities, sororities, and other campus organizations store stuff. There's no indication that any of the sisters were involved. So unless he had an empty uniform mail it for him, the KKG connection is a dud. The big problem with their case is it's strung together like a badly written made for TV movie; hard to swallow even in the middle of the chase scene, and falling apart more and more the closer you examine it.
Well, from the evidence I've seen, whatever may tie Ivins to this crime, I've seen nothing to indicate that Ivins acted alone. The fact that they can't place him in the Princeton, NJ area at the time the letters were mailed is a huge problem in that regard, as is the question of who fed false information suggesting Iraqi involvement to ABC's Brian Ross. These facts are not consistent with the FBI's seeming desire to close this case based upon Ivins being the sole culprit.
They can't place him there because he couldn't have been there. According to the FBI's warrants, etc. the letters were mailed from a specific box in Princeton, NJ after 5 pm on September 17, 2001. Ivins was out of the office in Frederick VA earlier in the day (after coming in briefly in the morning), but was back before 5 pm for a meeting. There is no indication that they have cracked his alibi from 5 on sufficiently to allow him to make the round trip during the time window.
Unless they have a real whopper saved up (he hired his secret twin brother to sleep with his wife that night?) Bruce Ivins could not have done it alone. Which (right on the tail of the Hatfill fiasco and the Siegelman fiasco and all the rest) might lead a reasonable person to wonder if he was involved at all.
--MarkusQ
P.S. The best way I've heard of salvaging their case would be if Ivins drove up in the daytime (he might just barely have had time) and asked someone to mail the letters for him. If they had this (presumably innocent foil) in witness protection or something they might actually have a better case than they've shown. But in any case he would have needed an accomplice of some sort.
My zip code is not part of my browser details.
Neither is my age, or my birthday.
My names, not in there either (though they might be able to fetch my "computer" name, which is a nonsense nickname anyways)
Sites I browse? Who cares.
It depends on how they are aggregating the information, and with whom. If you give any of this information to sites you visit it could be tied together and used to identify you, even if no one site has enough information to do so. And it wouldn't be a concern if there weren't people out there willing to use the information against you for everything from the petty "waste this guy's time with (mis-)targeted ads" to the more ambitious "get enough data to do a record search to find out his mother's maiden name and SSN, then drain his bank accounts."
How else do you propose to distinguish between me and my evil twin when I post anonymously?:)
(Besides the fact that he calls me his good twin.)
The point is, I don't have to. I just prosecute you both for the (alleged) DMCA violation, or Guantanamize you both for (allegedly) being a danger to The Homeland, or whatever.
The point of the Evil Bit meme is that you can't build an accurate, effective solution to a fundamentally sociological problem with just technology. But there's no reason you can't put together a flawed, exploitable "solution" that is just plausible enough to cause no end of grief.
Look at it this way, if we believed that such tracking would work (provide accurate information of strictly limited scope with no potential for abuse) no one would object. No one is saying "DNS is evil because it allows people to stalk servers even when they move to a new IP address" or "Cell phone roaming technology X is evil because it never drops calls and routes incomming calls to the right places even when everyone's in constant motion."
The problem is, we think that tracking users this way is error prone, subject to abuse, and consequently inaccurate enough that innocent people get nailed for the supposed malfeasance of others.
Not really. I was intentionally taking conservative numbers, and focusing on the amount of information conveyed by the value (rather than the amount required to store it).
With age only having 6 bits, you get 0..64 (unless you allow for signed values too:P), and some people above 64 actually do visit websites.
I think you mean 0..63, which is the same as saying 6..69, which gives reasonable coverage of 99.9% of the internet using population. But really, the information content is skewed, with the 12..50 age range giving much less information than the tail ends. To see this, consider that just knowing that someone is 115 years old today gives you their name, address, etc. because there is only one such person.
For system details, I'd say a lot more bits than that. If you want truly unique values for every setup, you'd have to do a 4-byte+ unique manufacturer ID and model ID, and that's for every hardware component in the system.
It can't really give you much more than 30 bits or so, since by that point you'd have uniquely identified the person. In practice, the limit is a little lower since many people often use (or could in principle use) any given machine. Realistically, it may take you down to a family at best, or a community (say, for a library or school computer).
IPv6 is 128-bits; without the MAC it's 64 bits.
There's quite a bit of redundancy there. For example, the MAC contains the manufacturer ID, which will typically be replicated across many devices.
Indexes for interests probably take way more than 30 bits. Same for address (considering that each character is 7-8 bits using ASCII)
It would give you all thirty if it were something only you were interested in. Otherwise it's limited to the binary log of the number of people who share the interest. So, for example, something like "mondrian" would give you a lot of information, while "breasts" and "chocolate" wouldn't tell you much.
5-digit zip codes are 5 digits * 4 bits per digit (unless you compress numbers) = 20. 9-digit zip codes are 36, analogically.
Uh, no. A decimal digit only gives you about 3.3 bits, not 4. Remember, it's not how many bits it takes to store something in some scheme, but rather how much information it conveys that we are interested in here.
Anyway, sorry to nitpick:P
Not at all. Raising points like these that leads people to make their assumptions explicit, which is always a good thing.
Nothing wrong with cookies. It's not "private data". My name, credit card and home address aren't included. I WANT websites to know my desktop resolution, screen depth, and even processor speed if it means the website is presented in a manner tailored for and best suited to my needs!!
I'll change my mind when they start tracking national IDs, bank accounts and capturing my webcam streams without my permission.
The problem is, a disturbingly small amount of information is needed to distinguish you from everyone else, creating a virtual "national ID" without you even being aware of it.
Let's do some math.
With 300 million people in the US, as few as 28 bits suffice to uniquely identify you (this assumes that the bits are independent in both source and distribution; in practice some redundancy will be required to make up for the fact that neither is strictly true). Now let's look at how many bits are contained in commonly tracked or easily trackable items:
Your zip code, 16 to 30 bits
Your gender, 1 bit
Your age, 6 bits
Your birthday, 8 bits
Your first name or nick, 10 to 30+ bits
The fact that you are on the internet at all, 2 bits
When you were on the internet, 10 bits or so each time
System details, 4 to 20 bits (fewer bits for generic MSWin boxes)
Your IP address, 32 or 80 bits (inet vs. inet6)
Your MAC address, 48 bits
Your interests, 4 to 30+ bits
Your browsing history...?
You address, 25 bits
It doesn't take too many of these to add up to the 30 or so needed to uniquely identify you, "national ID" or not.
Maybe. Just MAYBE, they listened to a few more people who weren't speaking to terror suspects. Maybe they even listened to purely domestic calls. Honestly the actions of this admin sound a heck of a lot like what Nixon was forced to resign over.
Not just maybe, we already have evidence (contemporaneous documents, sworn testimony, official reports from relevant investigators, etc.) that they monitored purely domestic calls, including calls involving reporters, politicians, and other public figures, and that they started before 9/11.
What we're looking for now is any indication that these weren't the "few bad apple" sort of abuses that they're being painted as, but rather were part of a coordinated pattern of misuse of intelligence resources to conduct oppo research and possibly blackmail. It's following the same arc as the torture story and the US Att. story (It never happened! Well, only once, or a few times at most. It was bad apples! There's nothing wrong with doing it anyway! There's no story here. he memos authorizing it were not official! The President knows nothing! You can't prove any of this!!!) with the exception that the rear guard is fighting harder to cover Bush's xxx^H^H^H Cheney here than in the other cases.
To a first approximation, kidnapping child molesters don't exist. To a second approximation, every single person who might kidnap your child is a friend or family member - you and your child trust them, they won't need a net.
To which you replied:
Sorta right...But also sorta wrong. Such people exist....the total number of such people probably averages out to one in a hundred million. In comparison, current estimates place the number of domestic sexual child abuse cases at one in every thousand.
The grandparent wasn't "sorta right," he was right, and you said as much in the rest of the paragraph. The whole point of saying "to a first approximation" is when you want to address the 99.999999% of the cases and neglect the 0.000001% that are exceptions. To a very good first approximation, kidnapping child molesters do not exist. If you went around introducing yourself to random people at breakneck speed, say one person every three seconds, ten hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, for the rest of your life you still probably would never meet one.
The "burn most your fuel close to the ground" only applies to big rockets that are having to use early fuel to get later fuel up to altitude.
In the present case both those assumptions are violated, making their approach more sensible than it sounds. First off, for a big rocket most of the energy required will be used to 1) get up to speed and 2) gain altitude, with 1) being the biggest concern. For a small rocket, both of these will initially be swamped by 3) friction. The higher you are when you start, the less of your fuel you will waste just overcoming drag.
Secondly, the rule only applies when you are gaining the altitude by burning fuel in the first place. When you aren't having to burn fuel to get up there, you'd always come out ahead launching from a balloon (or even a mountain top) provided you could figure out how to make it work. Heck, with a tall enough tower (hint: think GEO) based on the equator, you could launch a satellite by hand!
Just try announcing that you're going to set up a breeder reactor and write to a few people with nuclear waste asking what their "Buy It Now" price is, and see how that works out for you.
Assuming that you've found a way to do it safely and legally(the more difficult part), I'd say that the price would be in the negatives.
My point was that even asking for pricing would be a sure way to get the feds knocking at your door. And if you could do it legally, the price would likely be pretty high, because nuclear "waste" is very valuable stuff, or it least would be in a rational world where it was legal to use it.
People who claim to understand breeder reactors and why they are the solution to every energy problem must first explain why no one is lining up to buy nuclear waste.
Why aren't people lining up to but nuclear waste? Maybe because it's effectively illegal to do anything with it other than store it on the site where it was produced and/or feed it into one of three(?) approved bureaucratic channels for permanent storage / disposal.
Just try announcing that you're going to set up a breeder reactor and write to a few people with nuclear waste asking what their "Buy It Now" price is, and see how that works out for you.
The Constitution doesn't grant rights, rights are unalienable.
Granted.
But my argument still holds if you shift to that perspective. By passing that law congress has done something that there are explicitly forbidden to do by the constitution; even if no one ever spies on me without a warrant they have an affirmative responsibility to respect and maintain my security against such spying.
But now the attack has moved to a bill passed into law by congress that in and of itself violates the right to be secure against unreasonable searches of every American. You should, at least in theory, be able to establish standing by simply showing that you are one of the broad class of people who might now be subject to unwarranted surveillance at some point, since by that very fact the bill has violated your right to be secure against such an eventuality.
However, I recall that it's still necessary to have an "actual case or controversy" where the plaintiff has a redressable wrong. "Maybe" and "could" don't count.
You'd have to draw the line just right, but I can see how it could be done.
The actual case is that I had something (the right to be secure) which the constitution explicitly granted me. Congress took it from me by passing the present law which provides a path around the constitutional protections. It is redressable by declaring the law void and unconstitutional.
Many similar sounding cases fail because the plaintiffs can't show that the were actually personally effected (wiretapped, jailed, whatever). But were they law being runs up against a positive requirement (equal protection, security, etc.) it should be much easier to establish standing.
For example, if they passed a law saying that it was OK to cook Scientologists and eat them for dinner, any Scientologist should be able to mount a challenge against that law as a violation of their right to equal protection, even if they haven't been eaten. They have a right not only not to be eaten, but to be protected from it by the law.
Likewise, we have a right not only to privacy, but to be secure in that privacy. The present law is a direct assault on our constitutionally granted security.
The ACLU doesn't have standing to bring the case unless they have a plaintiff who can show that s/he's been the subject of an unConstitutional investigation,
We may have moved to a different level here. The fourth amendment says (in part):
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,
Before, when such spying was illegal, a plaintiff needed to show that they had been spied on to prove standing, since otherwise nothing had overtly violated their rights since (absent any illegal action) their right to be secure against such actions was guaranteed by law..
But now the attack has moved to a bill passed into law by congress that in and of itself violates the right to be secure against unreasonable searches of every American. You should, at least in theory, be able to establish standing by simply showing that you are one of the broad class of people who might now be subject to unwarranted surveillance at some point, since by that very fact the bill has violated your right to be secure against such an eventuality.
I mean, if he's going to sell us down the river now, what's the point of voting for him? The only reason this bill "needed to be passed, flawed as it was" was that it provided cover for the Bush administration and their corporate co-conspirators.
There was nothing stopping them from simply getting warrants to continue their "vital national security monitoring of US citizens except the fact that they pee in their pants at the thought of having to tell a judge what they have been doing. The old law would have permitted them to do everything they needed to do, and only would have stopped them from doing things that were gross abuses of power, criminal, treasonous, and so forth.
And yet they'll eat their own rather than let the facts of what they've been doing come to light.
All of your blather may have had some merit (or at least earned some sympathy) if, against the odds, the lunatic theories had proved to be correct, and all people you so glibly dismiss as "not to be trusted" had turned out to be wrong. Even if the Bush administration and their allies had endured some sacrifice to pursue their quixotic quest, we might be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
But that's not what happened.
The Bush administration and the sources they "trusted" (meaning the sources that were willing to report what the administration told them to) proved to be wrong about just about everything, Bush's team profited mightily from the fiasco, and telling people that they weren't liars they were just idiots who trusted each other is going to be a hard sell.
At this point, too, you really can't call the war a fiasco, because, well, we've achieved all but the loftiest of our foreign policy goal from it, and we've just about won the thing.
You can't be serious.
We found the WMD? We replaced Saddam's secular regime with one more friendly to the west? We've gotten Iraq's oil flowing onto the market, pushing prices down and stabilizing the world economy? We've improved the lot of Iraqi women? We've cowered Iran into submission by our demonstration of military might? We'e caught Osama bin Laden? We've...what, exactly are these foreign policy goals you speak of?
We, the American people. The public. People whole follow the news, who watch C-SPAN or even The Daily Show, who look things up rather than just letting them slide by.
Oh look, a little lie of our own!!! "We, the American people", is a total fabrication. In fact, the vast majority of the American people care about one thing in this election - the price of gasoline. If all Americans were as involved, as you said, you wouldn't have a bunch of liberal blogs taking donations and ad revenue to, "get the message out"....
Oh get over yourself. By exactly that same reasoning you could argue that the Constitution was "a lie" because it starts with exactly the same formula. Of course, no reasonable person uses English that way. If I say "I ate grapes for lunch" no one expects the world grape supply to have vanished. If I say that "Americans like to play baseball" no one thinks that I mean that all, or even most, Americans play baseball. And no one expects that the statement that information was made public, learned by the public, in the public domain, known to the public, etc. means that all, or even most, of the people who have access to the information are even aware of it.
Ah, but then if you try to paint the report as an independent source of factual information to which you are simply responding (rather than a contrived source of spin that you engineered to justify your actions) you are....wait for it...lying!.
But that's not what they were doing.
That is exactly what they were doing.
What they were doing is working to ensure that the reports being issued by those agencies followed a "Fairness Doctrine" and received proper information to help guide their analysis! You can't rely on a report made by one guy in a vacuum, you need to have somebody who is experienced, on the ball coordinating information across multiple agencies, bringing their own vast experience to the table... you really need someone like Dick Cheney!
It isn't even remotely related to the Fairness Doctrine as I presume you know.
I would agree that you need someone like Dick Cheney to orchestrate a fiasco like this. But I don't think I'd call repeatedly forcing discredited claims into the channel to "guide their analysis" being "on the ball" (unless you're making a play on his code name, and mean it in a derogatory sense).
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. I'd actually call it a great language, in the abstract. I was poking fun at the implementations, many of which aren't so hot.
Whoa. Where the heck did that come from? As someone who started OOP with Simula in the '70s, and has actually implemented several OOP languages, including one that was prototype based and one that was method pattern based (sort of like CLOS, but not as ambitious) I'd say you were way out of line with that remark.
Don't automatically assume that you know more than everyone you meet on line, you'll just wind up looking like a jerk.
--MarkusQ
We standardized on one language?
Cool. I must have missed that. Now I can strip out all that browser and version detection cruft and just code to the one standard language, right?
--MarkusQ::sarcasm
That's a valid part of the metric. Easy is good. When you're figuring benefits / costs, "easy" reduces the denominator and makes the total score much higher.
When you just compare the accuracy of weather forecasting methods, "looking out the window" doesn't rate very high. But it's generally so easy that in practice it's the technique of first recourse and you'd be a fool not to use it. The great thing about "easy" is that, if you find you need more detail, more precision, or whatever, you haven't used up the alloted resources. And if you don't you are time / money ahead.
Anyone who could go to their bosses and say "our website is so easy to use that people just come back time and time again, and here are the statistics to prove it" is in great shape.
--MarkusQ
It depends a lot on what your wiki is for, but usage pattern statistics might be a good metric. For example, repeat visitors are people who are getting some value out of the wiki. Trampoline pages (pages people hit and then bounce elsewhere from a link in the page) might be another good thing to track. As well as abort-and-retry pages, where instead of following a link the user goes to the search box and tries something else.
You get the idea.
If the wiki is valuable to the people who are using it, you should be able to tell this from the logs--even if no one ever mentioned wikipedia in public, they could tell how much we care by noting that we keep coming back.
--MarkusQ
Don't forget the music. It's information, after all, and it wants to be free!
But hitting back at your main point, I think the greater problem isn't that we forget that there are more than two opinions but rather that we keep overlooking the fact that there is only one reality. If two people make two mutually exclusive claims, at least one of them must be wrong. Rather than (or at the very least, in addition to) rushing to find a third incompatible claim, and then a fourth, we should probably spend a little time figuring out which of claims already on the table are bunk and then removing them from the table (by flagging them as contrafactual, and giving proof, not by censoring them).
--MarkusQ
And it's "faint of heart" not "feint of heart".
And it would be "overviewing basic concepts" not "over viewing basic concepts" if "overview" were a verb.
I made it as far as:
before threwing in the trowl.
--MarkusQ
That only works if you can see the results of all the trials.
As it stands, we only have the ability to detect very large planets that are very close to their primary, and even so only a vanishingly small percentage of them. That would be like (modifying your example):
-- MarkusQ
No, if everything in the linked article is true it couldn't be a KKG sister from that location. From the article:
The building is apparently a warehouse, normally unoccupied, apparently unlabeled, in which various fraternities, sororities, and other campus organizations store stuff. There's no indication that any of the sisters were involved. So unless he had an empty uniform mail it for him, the KKG connection is a dud. The big problem with their case is it's strung together like a badly written made for TV movie; hard to swallow even in the middle of the chase scene, and falling apart more and more the closer you examine it.
--MarkusQ
P.S. I love your sig.
They can't place him there because he couldn't have been there. According to the FBI's warrants, etc. the letters were mailed from a specific box in Princeton, NJ after 5 pm on September 17, 2001. Ivins was out of the office in Frederick VA earlier in the day (after coming in briefly in the morning), but was back before 5 pm for a meeting. There is no indication that they have cracked his alibi from 5 on sufficiently to allow him to make the round trip during the time window.
Unless they have a real whopper saved up (he hired his secret twin brother to sleep with his wife that night?) Bruce Ivins could not have done it alone. Which (right on the tail of the Hatfill fiasco and the Siegelman fiasco and all the rest) might lead a reasonable person to wonder if he was involved at all.
--MarkusQ
P.S. The best way I've heard of salvaging their case would be if Ivins drove up in the daytime (he might just barely have had time) and asked someone to mail the letters for him. If they had this (presumably innocent foil) in witness protection or something they might actually have a better case than they've shown. But in any case he would have needed an accomplice of some sort.
It depends on how they are aggregating the information, and with whom. If you give any of this information to sites you visit it could be tied together and used to identify you, even if no one site has enough information to do so. And it wouldn't be a concern if there weren't people out there willing to use the information against you for everything from the petty "waste this guy's time with (mis-)targeted ads" to the more ambitious "get enough data to do a record search to find out his mother's maiden name and SSN, then drain his bank accounts."
--MarkusQ
The point is, I don't have to. I just prosecute you both for the (alleged) DMCA violation, or Guantanamize you both for (allegedly) being a danger to The Homeland, or whatever.
The point of the Evil Bit meme is that you can't build an accurate, effective solution to a fundamentally sociological problem with just technology. But there's no reason you can't put together a flawed, exploitable "solution" that is just plausible enough to cause no end of grief.
Look at it this way, if we believed that such tracking would work (provide accurate information of strictly limited scope with no potential for abuse) no one would object. No one is saying "DNS is evil because it allows people to stalk servers even when they move to a new IP address" or "Cell phone roaming technology X is evil because it never drops calls and routes incomming calls to the right places even when everyone's in constant motion."
The problem is, we think that tracking users this way is error prone, subject to abuse, and consequently inaccurate enough that innocent people get nailed for the supposed malfeasance of others.
--MarkusQ
Not really. I was intentionally taking conservative numbers, and focusing on the amount of information conveyed by the value (rather than the amount required to store it).
I think you mean 0..63, which is the same as saying 6..69, which gives reasonable coverage of 99.9% of the internet using population. But really, the information content is skewed, with the 12..50 age range giving much less information than the tail ends. To see this, consider that just knowing that someone is 115 years old today gives you their name, address, etc. because there is only one such person.
It can't really give you much more than 30 bits or so, since by that point you'd have uniquely identified the person. In practice, the limit is a little lower since many people often use (or could in principle use) any given machine. Realistically, it may take you down to a family at best, or a community (say, for a library or school computer).
There's quite a bit of redundancy there. For example, the MAC contains the manufacturer ID, which will typically be replicated across many devices.
It would give you all thirty if it were something only you were interested in. Otherwise it's limited to the binary log of the number of people who share the interest. So, for example, something like "mondrian" would give you a lot of information, while "breasts" and "chocolate" wouldn't tell you much.
Uh, no. A decimal digit only gives you about 3.3 bits, not 4. Remember, it's not how many bits it takes to store something in some scheme, but rather how much information it conveys that we are interested in here.
Not at all. Raising points like these that leads people to make their assumptions explicit, which is always a good thing.
--MarkusQ
The problem is, a disturbingly small amount of information is needed to distinguish you from everyone else, creating a virtual "national ID" without you even being aware of it.
Let's do some math.
With 300 million people in the US, as few as 28 bits suffice to uniquely identify you (this assumes that the bits are independent in both source and distribution; in practice some redundancy will be required to make up for the fact that neither is strictly true). Now let's look at how many bits are contained in commonly tracked or easily trackable items:
It doesn't take too many of these to add up to the 30 or so needed to uniquely identify you, "national ID" or not.
--MarkusQ
Not just maybe, we already have evidence (contemporaneous documents, sworn testimony, official reports from relevant investigators, etc.) that they monitored purely domestic calls, including calls involving reporters, politicians, and other public figures, and that they started before 9/11.
What we're looking for now is any indication that these weren't the "few bad apple" sort of abuses that they're being painted as, but rather were part of a coordinated pattern of misuse of intelligence resources to conduct oppo research and possibly blackmail. It's following the same arc as the torture story and the US Att. story (It never happened! Well, only once, or a few times at most. It was bad apples! There's nothing wrong with doing it anyway! There's no story here. he memos authorizing it were not official! The President knows nothing! You can't prove any of this!!!) with the exception that the rear guard is fighting harder to cover Bush's xxx^H^H^H Cheney here than in the other cases.
--MarkusQ
The grandparent wrote:
To which you replied:
The grandparent wasn't "sorta right," he was right, and you said as much in the rest of the paragraph. The whole point of saying "to a first approximation" is when you want to address the 99.999999% of the cases and neglect the 0.000001% that are exceptions. To a very good first approximation, kidnapping child molesters do not exist. If you went around introducing yourself to random people at breakneck speed, say one person every three seconds, ten hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, for the rest of your life you still probably would never meet one.
To a first approximation they do not exist.
--MarkusQ
The "burn most your fuel close to the ground" only applies to big rockets that are having to use early fuel to get later fuel up to altitude.
In the present case both those assumptions are violated, making their approach more sensible than it sounds. First off, for a big rocket most of the energy required will be used to 1) get up to speed and 2) gain altitude, with 1) being the biggest concern. For a small rocket, both of these will initially be swamped by 3) friction. The higher you are when you start, the less of your fuel you will waste just overcoming drag.
Secondly, the rule only applies when you are gaining the altitude by burning fuel in the first place. When you aren't having to burn fuel to get up there, you'd always come out ahead launching from a balloon (or even a mountain top) provided you could figure out how to make it work. Heck, with a tall enough tower (hint: think GEO) based on the equator, you could launch a satellite by hand!
--MarkusQ
For one thing, they is grammatically plural.
--MarkusQ
My point was that even asking for pricing would be a sure way to get the feds knocking at your door. And if you could do it legally, the price would likely be pretty high, because nuclear "waste" is very valuable stuff, or it least would be in a rational world where it was legal to use it.
--MarkusQ
Why aren't people lining up to but nuclear waste? Maybe because it's effectively illegal to do anything with it other than store it on the site where it was produced and/or feed it into one of three(?) approved bureaucratic channels for permanent storage / disposal.
Just try announcing that you're going to set up a breeder reactor and write to a few people with nuclear waste asking what their "Buy It Now" price is, and see how that works out for you.
--MarkusQ
Granted.
But my argument still holds if you shift to that perspective. By passing that law congress has done something that there are explicitly forbidden to do by the constitution; even if no one ever spies on me without a warrant they have an affirmative responsibility to respect and maintain my security against such spying.
--MarkusQ
You'd have to draw the line just right, but I can see how it could be done.
The actual case is that I had something (the right to be secure) which the constitution explicitly granted me. Congress took it from me by passing the present law which provides a path around the constitutional protections. It is redressable by declaring the law void and unconstitutional.
Many similar sounding cases fail because the plaintiffs can't show that the were actually personally effected (wiretapped, jailed, whatever). But were they law being runs up against a positive requirement (equal protection, security, etc.) it should be much easier to establish standing.
For example, if they passed a law saying that it was OK to cook Scientologists and eat them for dinner, any Scientologist should be able to mount a challenge against that law as a violation of their right to equal protection, even if they haven't been eaten. They have a right not only not to be eaten, but to be protected from it by the law.
Likewise, we have a right not only to privacy, but to be secure in that privacy. The present law is a direct assault on our constitutionally granted security.
--MarkusQ
We may have moved to a different level here. The fourth amendment says (in part):
Before, when such spying was illegal, a plaintiff needed to show that they had been spied on to prove standing, since otherwise nothing had overtly violated their rights since (absent any illegal action) their right to be secure against such actions was guaranteed by law..
But now the attack has moved to a bill passed into law by congress that in and of itself violates the right to be secure against unreasonable searches of every American. You should, at least in theory, be able to establish standing by simply showing that you are one of the broad class of people who might now be subject to unwarranted surveillance at some point, since by that very fact the bill has violated your right to be secure against such an eventuality.
--MarkusQ
He certainly lost mine.
I mean, if he's going to sell us down the river now, what's the point of voting for him? The only reason this bill "needed to be passed, flawed as it was" was that it provided cover for the Bush administration and their corporate co-conspirators.
There was nothing stopping them from simply getting warrants to continue their "vital national security monitoring of US citizens except the fact that they pee in their pants at the thought of having to tell a judge what they have been doing. The old law would have permitted them to do everything they needed to do, and only would have stopped them from doing things that were gross abuses of power, criminal, treasonous, and so forth.
And yet they'll eat their own rather than let the facts of what they've been doing come to light.
So Obama decided to give 'em a break on this one.
Screw him, I say.
--MarkusQ
All of your blather may have had some merit (or at least earned some sympathy) if, against the odds, the lunatic theories had proved to be correct, and all people you so glibly dismiss as "not to be trusted" had turned out to be wrong. Even if the Bush administration and their allies had endured some sacrifice to pursue their quixotic quest, we might be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
But that's not what happened.
The Bush administration and the sources they "trusted" (meaning the sources that were willing to report what the administration told them to) proved to be wrong about just about everything, Bush's team profited mightily from the fiasco, and telling people that they weren't liars they were just idiots who trusted each other is going to be a hard sell.
You can't be serious.
We found the WMD? We replaced Saddam's secular regime with one more friendly to the west? We've gotten Iraq's oil flowing onto the market, pushing prices down and stabilizing the world economy? We've improved the lot of Iraqi women? We've cowered Iran into submission by our demonstration of military might? We'e caught Osama bin Laden? We've...what, exactly are these foreign policy goals you speak of?
--MarkusQ
Oh get over yourself. By exactly that same reasoning you could argue that the Constitution was "a lie" because it starts with exactly the same formula. Of course, no reasonable person uses English that way. If I say "I ate grapes for lunch" no one expects the world grape supply to have vanished. If I say that "Americans like to play baseball" no one thinks that I mean that all, or even most, Americans play baseball. And no one expects that the statement that information was made public, learned by the public, in the public domain, known to the public, etc. means that all, or even most, of the people who have access to the information are even aware of it.
That is exactly what they were doing.
It isn't even remotely related to the Fairness Doctrine as I presume you know.
I would agree that you need someone like Dick Cheney to orchestrate a fiasco like this. But I don't think I'd call repeatedly forcing discredited claims into the channel to "guide their analysis" being "on the ball" (unless you're making a play on his code name, and mean it in a derogatory sense).
--MarkusQ