"Despite the fact that there was a 40% decline in school-associated violent deaths between school years 1997-8 and 1998-9 (from 43 to 26), the number of Americans who were fearful of their schools rose nearly 50% during that same period. Even after two new well-publicized studies reported school crime to be on the decline, seven months after Columbine, more than 60% of Americans said school safety "worried them a great deal." Parents and school boards continue to call for more metal detectors, locker searches and student identification badges, even as students say they feel less safe and report more crime in schools that use these "secure" school procedures. Since the Littleton shooting, when students and school administrators talk about the safety of their schools, they might as well be speaking about different worlds:"
it is impossible to stop random acts of terrorism, particularly when the terrorist doesn't care if he/she gets killed. unless you have every citizen under complete mind control, it's always going to be possible for someone to sneak a gun into a school and blow away 20 people, or to drive a van full of explosives in front of just about any building in the country. i'm not willing to subject everyone to complete mind control to escape the infinitesimal chance that i will be the victim of one of these acts; presumably, if other people actually realized how small their chances of being a victim are, they would also agree that extreme measures aren't worth the costs to freedom.
oh wait... that would require people to understand probability and statistics. hahahahaha!
One interesting question is, how far can they go to "mitigate a citizen's privacy"? This case shows that they can go so far as to "bug" my keyboard to obtain my PGP passphrase.
The super-illegal things about the government's operations, in my mind, are as follows:
A warrant which allows the government to obtain someone's passwords (through several steps, i.e. keyboard monitoring ) is much more intrusive than wiretapping. Reason: wiretapping only allows the police to hear what is said over the phones (or data lines) from the time of the wiretap onwards. With password detection, the government has surreptitious access to data from ALL points in time.
This is like allowing the government to search your house on a regular basis (without you knowing it). Sure, it would catch more crime, but it's not a provision of our governmental charter to allow this. The government is only allowed to search for specific things relating to a specific crime. If they can have access to lots of data NOT relating to that crime -- data which was encrypted thus manifesting a subjective and objective expectation of privacy -- which may incriminate you, that does not mesh well with the 4th amendment requirement for individualized suspicion.
More recent than WWII -- how about McCarthyism? Anyone suspected of harboring communist sympathies was dragged in for it.
During the Vietnam war, the gov't (FBI mostly) kept photos and lists of protesters. I do believe that the Supreme Court made this illegal.
For a while the FBI was keeping lists of suspected homosexuals. (Oh, wait, I guess that homosexuals commit crimes every time they have sex... good 'ol sodomy laws. However, those are all state laws, and the FBI does not have the authority to keep track of people whose only crime is a state/local one.)
Often, the government keeps tabs on people that it suspects might commit crimes in the future. It had a huge file on Martin Luther King Jr., and even wiretapped the man's phones. Wiretap laws and court rulings have made this illegal, but the overriding point is that law enforcement has a desire to monitor the activities of anyone it thinks might possibly commit a crime at some point in the future. And guess what? That ends up being most people.
What this comes down to is not just whether I've done something that I *should* or *should not* care if other people know about -- it comes down to my FUNDAMENTAL right of personal autonomy.
I should have the RIGHT to decide whether anyone else can read my shopping list, whether anyone else can read my political manifestos, whether anyone can see my porn collection. The issue is the CHOICE.
Again, you're being paranoid. If you haven't done anything illegal, you have nothing to hide.
Do you have curtains on your windows? Do you close the stall door when you go to the bathroom?
The reason you assert your desire for secrecy is not because you're doing something illegal or illicit. It's because you have made a personal choice (or a default choice handed to you from your culture) that you don't want anyone else to watch you eat dinner or go to the bathroom.
Now, you may think it's weird for someone else to have different privacy values than you do. Sure, *you* don't care if random strangers read your shopping list or make copies of your not-to-be-published novel.
But if *I* care about those things, it's my own prerogative and you have no goddamn business telling me otherwise.
I'm all for letting lots and lots of smart, well-educated people (and attractive ones -- fashion models are covered by H-1B visas too) into the U.S.
The system certainly allows for gross exploitation of these workers. However, the solution is more aptly to change the regulations surrounding the H-1B visas than to simply limit the number that may be issued. Permitting more of the visas is a short-term solution, but as a country we would err in not using the increase as a mere stopgap to totally revising the system.
As for training Americans for these jobs? Hah. The majority of Americans apperantly have an allergy to mere algebra, much less the fairly rigorous logical thinking that programming requires. The number of Americans entering computer science programs has been declining for a few years. We're certainly not stepping up to the plate and clamboring for more opportunities to write C++, despite the relative economic security of doing so.
My theory is this: in this time of economic prosperity, even people with flufball college degrees (you know, the Ancient Greek Art History majors of the world) can get reasonable jobs. There's not as much pressure for middle-class college students to major in the practical sorts of fields that are sure to provide jobs -- engineering, CS, etc. In a tighter economy, more people would feel the pressure to obtain high demand skills like programming.
On the other hand, people in less wealthy countries have a ticket to [relative] economic security with nice, practical jobs like programming. More power to them, but Americans are shooting themselves in the feet by not satisfying the tech demand themselves.
What you're really concerned with is a usability issue. Fairtunes has pretty crappy usability, it's true, but the underlying idea is good.
There's nothing to prevent individual bands from setting up paypal accounts, but this is a clunky method -- probably, people would only tip bands they really like, since it takes effort to go to a band's website, find their paypal email address, and then paypal the money over.
However, something like Qpass would be super, especially if it were integrated with gnutella or winamp & there were a match-as-you-type interface. You type in the artist name the server gives you feedback to make sure you enter the artist's name correctly, then tip with as little or as much as you want. your whole qpass account gets charged to your credit card at the end of the month, so you could pay britney spears $0.01 (probably more than she's worth) for your mp3 of "Baby One More Time".
In fact, every website should hook up with qpass to allow for microtips, particularly super ones like slashdot.
I am in a Purchase Circle with everyone from my primary ordering domain: cmu.edu. If a person is from a large domain ( almost any.edu, microsoft.com, etc. etc.) the purchase circles are useless from a consumer's point of view. Knowing the most frequently purchased book from cmu.edu is useless to me since there is no reason that a common domain would correlate to reading preferences.
This feature does nothing good for consumers -- unless they are trying to spy on other consumers -- and is quite destructive in the cases where, as someone pointed out, a domain is held by an individual whose preferences can then be pinpointed.
I never thought I could be swayed from Amazon, but this is it. Too bad for Amazon, since I just signed on to purchase $300 of textbooks.
Read the American Academy of Pediatrics' articles on kids and media. The AAP doesn't limit its recommendations to the viewing habits of 2-year-olds; it has a wide-ranging policy on curtailing or eliminating media exposure for all minors. (Regardless of whether this is good or bad, the AAP in general addresses children of all ages and has a similar message.)
Re:What is this man thinking?
on
Quack!
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· Score: 1
But that is a problem with particular content on TV, not with the MEDIUM itself.
This is a distinction that's being lost in the debate. The AAP is saying that TV (and videos, and the net, etc.) is bad in and of itself. It has no data to support this claim. It's true that there's a lot of garbage out there -- hell, look at stuff that adults watch, like "Friends" and "Ally McBeal" -- and though kids should probably not watch the garbage until they're trained enought to recognize it as such, the presence of bad programs doesn't necessarily mean that the medium itself is evil.
1. Going to school 2. Running around outside like mad 3. Doing homework
I certainly don't deny that exploratory creative play is ideal for kids. Building forts, painting, playing dressup, doing homework, reading, and such were definitely the main childhood activities of most of my [intelligent and successful] friends.
At the same time, I can't be convinced that TV, videogames, and the Net are bad for development, per se. Sure, many tv PROGRAMS, and particular video games, and individual web sites are full of junk that do nothing to help kids grow up and be better people. When created correctly, TV, videogames, and websites can be great ways for children to expose themselves to fantasy worlds and situations that they won't encounter in normal life. They can show kids new ways of thinking about the people and world around them. Granted, we have to be careful that these new ways are healthy, but I'm not convinced that a Discovery channel program is inherently harmful, or that an immersive puzzle-based game like Myst or Riven is a bad way for the under-15 crowd to be spending its time.
Our closest relative is the Bonbon (no not the candy).
Would you be referring to the Bonobo monkeys? There is a great article from Scientific American that I have mirrored. As an excerpt:
This finding commands attention because the bonobo shares more than 98 percent of our genetic profile, making it as close to a human as, say, a fox is to a dog. The split between the human line of ancestry and the line of the chimpanzee and the bonobo is believed to have occurred a mere eight million years ago. The subsequent divergence of the chimpanzee and the bonobo lines came much later, perhaps prompted by the chimpanzee's need to adapt to relatively open, dry habitats [see "East Side Story: The Origin of Humankind," by Yves Coppens; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, May 1994].
...
If this evolutionary scenario of ecological continuity is true, the bonobo may have undergone less transformation than either humans or chimpanzees.
Here's the thing: it's not thought that Homo sapiens evolved from some modern-day species of primates. Rather, fossil evidence supports the conclusion that humans and modern-day monkeys/great apes evolved *from a common ancestor*.
Also, take the following case. Let's say that 5 million years ago, we had this species of primate-type things. Let's call them foobars, and let's say that from this species, humans eventually evolved through a long series of genetic mutations. (If i remember correctly, the first hominoids appeared ~4.5 MYA.) It is the nature of evolution that all members of foobars would NOT have developed the [first of many] genetic mutations that eventually became the human genome. It's entirely possible that a certain foobar with a particular beneficial genetic mutation (let's say a slightly larger brain) took its foobarish mate and wandered off somewhere, relatively isolated from other foobars, and that beneficial gene spread into the offspring of that isolated group. However, the initial group of foobars, living elsewhere, continues to propogate without that different gene.
It could be the case that the first group has a mutation that spreads amongst the population and that group of foobars eventually collects mutations that form, say, the modern-day chimpanzee, just as the isolated group collects mutations that eventually form early hominids. It could also be the case that the first group has no beneficial mutations that spread (maybe the little baby foobar with a great mutation for improved eyesight got eaten by a lion, never reproducing) and the species continues, mostly unchanged; it could be the case that the foobars become unsuited for their environment and become extinct, leaving only their mutated decendants, the foobars-turned-hominoid.
Slashdot Mirror
about a year ago, the Justice Policy Institute released a fairly good study about juvenile crime and perception thereof in the united states.
the full report
an excerpt from the introduction:
"Despite the fact that there was a 40% decline in school-associated violent deaths between school years 1997-8 and 1998-9 (from 43 to 26), the number of Americans who were fearful of their schools rose nearly 50% during that same period. Even after two new well-publicized studies reported school crime to be on the decline, seven months after Columbine, more than 60% of Americans said school safety "worried them a great deal." Parents and school boards continue to call for more metal detectors, locker searches and student identification badges, even as students say they feel less safe and report more crime in schools that use these "secure" school procedures. Since the Littleton shooting, when students and school administrators talk about the safety of their schools, they might as well be speaking about different worlds:"
it is impossible to stop random acts of terrorism, particularly when the terrorist doesn't care if he/she gets killed. unless you have every citizen under complete mind control, it's always going to be possible for someone to sneak a gun into a school and blow away 20 people, or to drive a van full of explosives in front of just about any building in the country. i'm not willing to subject everyone to complete mind control to escape the infinitesimal chance that i will be the victim of one of these acts; presumably, if other people actually realized how small their chances of being a victim are, they would also agree that extreme measures aren't worth the costs to freedom.
oh wait... that would require people to understand probability and statistics. hahahahaha!
The super-illegal things about the government's operations, in my mind, are as follows:
A warrant which allows the government to obtain someone's passwords (through several steps, i.e. keyboard monitoring ) is much more intrusive than wiretapping. Reason: wiretapping only allows the police to hear what is said over the phones (or data lines) from the time of the wiretap onwards. With password detection, the government has surreptitious access to data from ALL points in time.
This is like allowing the government to search your house on a regular basis (without you knowing it). Sure, it would catch more crime, but it's not a provision of our governmental charter to allow this. The government is only allowed to search for specific things relating to a specific crime. If they can have access to lots of data NOT relating to that crime -- data which was encrypted thus manifesting a subjective and objective expectation of privacy -- which may incriminate you, that does not mesh well with the 4th amendment requirement for individualized suspicion.
More recent than WWII -- how about McCarthyism? Anyone suspected of harboring communist sympathies was dragged in for it.
During the Vietnam war, the gov't (FBI mostly) kept photos and lists of protesters. I do believe that the Supreme Court made this illegal.
For a while the FBI was keeping lists of suspected homosexuals. (Oh, wait, I guess that homosexuals commit crimes every time they have sex... good 'ol sodomy laws. However, those are all state laws, and the FBI does not have the authority to keep track of people whose only crime is a state/local one.)
Often, the government keeps tabs on people that it suspects might commit crimes in the future. It had a huge file on Martin Luther King Jr., and even wiretapped the man's phones. Wiretap laws and court rulings have made this illegal, but the overriding point is that law enforcement has a desire to monitor the activities of anyone it thinks might possibly commit a crime at some point in the future. And guess what? That ends up being most people.
What this comes down to is not just whether I've done something that I *should* or *should not* care if other people know about -- it comes down to my FUNDAMENTAL right of personal autonomy.
I should have the RIGHT to decide whether anyone else can read my shopping list, whether anyone else can read my political manifestos, whether anyone can see my porn collection. The issue is the CHOICE.
Again, you're being paranoid. If you haven't done anything illegal, you have nothing to hide.
Do you have curtains on your windows? Do you close the stall door when you go to the bathroom?
The reason you assert your desire for secrecy is not because you're doing something illegal or illicit. It's because you have made a personal choice (or a default choice handed to you from your culture) that you don't want anyone else to watch you eat dinner or go to the bathroom.
Now, you may think it's weird for someone else to have different privacy values than you do. Sure, *you* don't care if random strangers read your shopping list or make copies of your not-to-be-published novel.
But if *I* care about those things, it's my own prerogative and you have no goddamn business telling me otherwise.
I'm all for letting lots and lots of smart, well-educated people (and attractive ones -- fashion models are covered by H-1B visas too) into the U.S.
The system certainly allows for gross exploitation of these workers. However, the solution is more aptly to change the regulations surrounding the H-1B visas than to simply limit the number that may be issued. Permitting more of the visas is a short-term solution, but as a country we would err in not using the increase as a mere stopgap to totally revising the system.
As for training Americans for these jobs? Hah. The majority of Americans apperantly have an allergy to mere algebra, much less the fairly rigorous logical thinking that programming requires. The number of Americans entering computer science programs has been declining for a few years. We're certainly not stepping up to the plate and clamboring for more opportunities to write C++, despite the relative economic security of doing so.
My theory is this: in this time of economic prosperity, even people with flufball college degrees (you know, the Ancient Greek Art History majors of the world) can get reasonable jobs. There's not as much pressure for middle-class college students to major in the practical sorts of fields that are sure to provide jobs -- engineering, CS, etc. In a tighter economy, more people would feel the pressure to obtain high demand skills like programming.
On the other hand, people in less wealthy countries have a ticket to [relative] economic security with nice, practical jobs like programming. More power to them, but Americans are shooting themselves in the feet by not satisfying the tech demand themselves.
What you're really concerned with is a usability issue. Fairtunes has pretty crappy usability, it's true, but the underlying idea is good.
There's nothing to prevent individual bands from setting up paypal accounts, but this is a clunky method -- probably, people would only tip bands they really like, since it takes effort to go to a band's website, find their paypal email address, and then paypal the money over.
However, something like Qpass would be super, especially if it were integrated with gnutella or winamp & there were a match-as-you-type interface. You type in the artist name the server gives you feedback to make sure you enter the artist's name correctly, then tip with as little or as much as you want. your whole qpass account gets charged to your credit card at the end of the month, so you could pay britney spears $0.01 (probably more than she's worth) for your mp3 of "Baby One More Time".
In fact, every website should hook up with qpass to allow for microtips, particularly super ones like slashdot.
I am in a Purchase Circle with everyone from my primary ordering domain: cmu.edu. If a person is from a large domain ( almost any .edu, microsoft.com, etc. etc.) the purchase circles are useless from a consumer's point of view. Knowing the most frequently purchased book from cmu.edu is useless to me since there is no reason that a common domain would correlate to reading preferences.
This feature does nothing good for consumers -- unless they are trying to spy on other consumers -- and is quite destructive in the cases where, as someone pointed out, a domain is held by an individual whose preferences can then be pinpointed.
I never thought I could be swayed from Amazon, but this is it. Too bad for Amazon, since I just signed on to purchase $300 of textbooks.
Read the American Academy of Pediatrics' articles on kids and media. The AAP doesn't limit its recommendations to the viewing habits of 2-year-olds; it has a wide-ranging policy on curtailing or eliminating media exposure for all minors. (Regardless of whether this is good or bad, the AAP in general addresses children of all ages and has a similar message.)
But that is a problem with particular content on TV, not with the MEDIUM itself.
This is a distinction that's being lost in the debate. The AAP is saying that TV (and videos, and the net, etc.) is bad in and of itself. It has no data to support this claim. It's true that there's a lot of garbage out there -- hell, look at stuff that adults watch, like "Friends" and "Ally McBeal" -- and though kids should probably not watch the garbage until they're trained enought to recognize it as such, the presence of bad programs doesn't necessarily mean that the medium itself is evil.
I certainly don't deny that exploratory creative play is ideal for kids. Building forts, painting, playing dressup, doing homework, reading, and such were definitely the main childhood activities of most of my [intelligent and successful] friends.
At the same time, I can't be convinced that TV, videogames, and the Net are bad for development, per se. Sure, many tv PROGRAMS, and particular video games, and individual web sites are full of junk that do nothing to help kids grow up and be better people. When created correctly, TV, videogames, and websites can be great ways for children to expose themselves to fantasy worlds and situations that they won't encounter in normal life. They can show kids new ways of thinking about the people and world around them. Granted, we have to be careful that these new ways are healthy, but I'm not convinced that a Discovery channel program is inherently harmful, or that an immersive puzzle-based game like Myst or Riven is a bad way for the under-15 crowd to be spending its time.
Here's the thing: it's not thought that Homo sapiens evolved from some modern-day species of primates. Rather, fossil evidence supports the conclusion that humans and modern-day monkeys/great apes evolved *from a common ancestor*.
Also, take the following case. Let's say that 5 million years ago, we had this species of primate-type things. Let's call them foobars, and let's say that from this species, humans eventually evolved through a long series of genetic mutations. (If i remember correctly, the first hominoids appeared ~4.5 MYA.) It is the nature of evolution that all members of foobars would NOT have developed the [first of many] genetic mutations that eventually became the human genome. It's entirely possible that a certain foobar with a particular beneficial genetic mutation (let's say a slightly larger brain) took its foobarish mate and wandered off somewhere, relatively isolated from other foobars, and that beneficial gene spread into the offspring of that isolated group. However, the initial group of foobars, living elsewhere, continues to propogate without that different gene.
It could be the case that the first group has a mutation that spreads amongst the population and that group of foobars eventually collects mutations that form, say, the modern-day chimpanzee, just as the isolated group collects mutations that eventually form early hominids. It could also be the case that the first group has no beneficial mutations that spread (maybe the little baby foobar with a great mutation for improved eyesight got eaten by a lion, never reproducing) and the species continues, mostly unchanged; it could be the case that the foobars become unsuited for their environment and become extinct, leaving only their mutated decendants, the foobars-turned-hominoid.