Some states have a stop and identify law, which means that for a terry stop or higher, when asked you must truthfully tell the officer your name.
Note that this is only for Terry stops and above. An officer may walk up and simply ask that you identify yourself - in the same manner that any regular citizen could do so - and in this instance you are not required to answer. You are not required to interact in any way with a police officer acting in the manner of a regular citizen. To do this they need suspicion and have to escalate it to Terry status.
Note also that in no instance are you required to prove your identity. You need not "show your papers" to anyone.
The statute may be written in such a way that there are one or two other things that the officer may legally ask and that you must answer. New Hampshire, for example, allows the officer to ask your address, why you are there, and where you are going.
Massachusetts does not have such a law, and so you do not have to respond when asked. Period, end of story.
Many people will point out the difference between theory and practice, in that the police will simply disregard the rules and do it anyway and inconvenience you so-you-might-as-well-submit-andbeasheepandyoucantfightandsoonandsoon...
Be aware that a civil rights violation is a windfall in your favor. If you have good evidence, such as a video clearly showing what happened, you can get a court judgement of from tens of thousands to a couple of million dollars... if you are willing to press the issue. This will require some investment and a lot of inconvenience on your part - think of it as an investment of 10,000 dollars to make a potential million.
It all boils down to the strength of your ethics. There can be no ethics without courage. If everyone had the courage to press the issue, then the practice would stop very quickly.
This is a non-story. Traditional mass-produced education is going the way of the dodo, buggy-whip manufacturers, and RIAA.
With Kahn academy and various universities putting their courses on the net, a complete education is currently online. It's not yet super-charged with goodness, but right now it's entirely possible for anyone to get a complete online education up to and including the graduate level. (viz: the Standord online courses)
Kids are voracious learners. Give them the right materials and they will figure it out on their own, at their own speed, and in a sequence that makes sense to them.
We are rapidly reaching the point of not needing teachers. Certainly, the typical role of teacher as one who makes the kids sit quietly and watch a boring lecture are gone. Before ten years are up you will see grade schools perceived as nothing more than jail-time... which is what they are.
Traditional methods haven't changed in two millenia, the system has no feedback for improvement, there is no accountability that rewards goal achievement... there's really nothing to recommend the traditional school system.
Let them duke it out and squabble over whatever they like. They don't have a clue, they can only play catch-up and they won't even be able to do that. They simply won't be able to compete with what the web can offer.
We'll soon be questioning the wisdom of having schools outright, and the kids will be all the better off for it.
Children are voracious learners. Given the chance, they will learn anything and everything they can get their hands on. If you don't disabuse them of the practice, they will carry it on into adulthood.
As homeschool parents know, give the child access to materials - the internet, a CD of dinosaur books, an electronics experimenter's kit - and they will happily figure it out at their own pace, on their own schedule, and in a sequence that makes sense to them.
Forcing kids to learn your subjects at your pace by forcing them to sit still and quiet while you drone on is hard work, and it only teaches one thing: learning is not fun.
For example: How many English classes require students to write book reports, on works which are considered "classic" but not really relevant or interesting? This only makes an association between reading and hard work. It's rare to see an adult who likes to read for enjoyment after a highschools' worth of treatment this way.
I see this all the time in adults. The vast majority think of any type of learning as "tough", "boring", and "not worth the effort". They won't try anything new unless it's forced on them by life circumstances. They have lost the joy of learning.
Learning new things is an evolutionary survival trait, yet we spend 13+ years of a kids life teaching them not to enjoy it.
The standard teaching approach by lecturing has been in use for over 2000 years. Do you suppose that maybe there are more effective ways? Perhaps by experimenting or using our new technology we can raise our adult productivity.
Some professor is experimenting with different methods. I applaud his attempts and eagerly await the results.
Banks are not required to give out cash immediately. In cases where their fractional reserve is in peril, they can delay payouts for some period of time (IIRC it's on the order of 24-48 hours, but this has probably changed over the years).
They use the extra time to get a large dollop of cash from the nearest federal reserve branch. The system is set up specifically to prevent a run on the bank, which is what you are suggesting.
The best you could hope is for the bank to delay cash payouts to other customers as a result. People might lose confidence in the bank, and people might be inclined to move their money elsewhere. Especially if you could, for example, force a reserve run a couple of times in a one-month period.
I'm not aware of any of these actions being illegal, but you can bet that the establishment will take a very dim view. They will begin by arresting people for trumped up charges (arresting peaceful people in line at the bank for trespassing, or public nuisance), then passing laws which make this behaviour specifically illegal.
Banks would implement a policy that reads something like: "we don't open new accounts for people who have closed all accounts in the last year" or something. But then again - you don't need to actually close the account, just remove a wad of cash on a specific date.
OTOH, it would spread your message to other bank customers. You would get a lot of publicity.
Does anyone know how much cash this would require? Some branches keep as little as $250,000 on hand. That would only be 250 people with some disposable income. If everyone went at 11:00 on a non-payday, everyone from noon onward might be affected.
I've been puzzling over the corruption caused by business influence on government for awhile.
Setting it up as a problem in game theory, the tenet "candidate who spends the most money wins the election" makes the outcome a foregone conclusion: elected government officials will be in the pocket of corporations, in all cases.
This may be a way out.
We've bemoaned our inability to influence the political system, but here we see a striking example of the population rising up and affecting specific government actions.
Public outcry stopped the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, or at least it helped. Similarly, public outcry attempted to hurt Bank of America and GoDaddy over their political beliefs.
If we can make this work it will give us the fine control over government that we have been missing. We've been able to affect small companies - HBGary, Stratfor, Ocean Marketing, Sony. (OK, Sony isn't that small, but it was a slice of Sony much smaller than BOA.)
Future companies may need to think twice before supporting oppressive or corrupt legislation - if only because of the chance that the people will rise up and hurt their bottom line.
We haven't had an effect on the really big companies yet (BOA), but I'm hoping that this grows to be a worldwide trend. We need to install a healthy dose of respect for public opinion. To put it succinctly, the companies have to fear the possibility of public retribution, both legal and extra-legal.
This will give us the power to affect legislation, to control the corruption. This will put government back in the hands of the people.
Because we all know that innovation stems primarily from the "bigger innovation labs", right?
Innovation comes from grass-roots endeavors, and always has. The paradigm is for an individual (or small group of individuals) to start a small business, build it up big, and take market share away from the big companies.
Big companies become clogged by process and moribund. They become "risk averse", preferring to sit on their laurels and collect rent from existing product.
The problem is that the paradigm no longer applies. We've successfully locked out any hope of innovation by the "little guy".
Try to compete against GE, that pays no taxes. Try to invent something that's not covered by an ambiguous patent that *might* or might not refer to your product. Calculate the out-of-pocket expenses for suing someone (or being sued), then the appeal, then the appeal to the supreme court. See if you can predict whether a government agency will shut you down.
We've made it nigh impossible for the small business to succeed nowadays. The only businesses we allow are copies of existing ones - pizza parlors, hair salons, upscale gift boutiques, and so on.
There's a lot of innovation going on nowadays, but it's largely open source. People are fed up with the system, so they throw their ideas and projects open to the world to use. Check out Instructables, Make Magazine, or Hackerspaces.org some time.
Hackerspaces are cropping up all over the world, and a fair number are in the US. All the innovation that would normally drive the economy is being distributed for free, because despite the barriers people *still* want to innovate.
We just don't do it by starting companies any more.
It's interesting to see how the state of learning has changed in the last 10 years, and the pace of change is accelerating.
Does anyone know why we study the subjects we do in high school? Mostly it's because the subjects are classical - things are studied because it's been that way since ancient times.
Take geometry, for example. It's an important subject, but not nearly as useful to the average person as probability, yet we study one and not the other.
Then there's the mode of teaching, several hundred years old, where the student sits quietly in a seat watching the lecturer write things on a board and explain them.
Newer models have emerged. The Kahn academy still uses the lecturer/blackboard model, but improves it in many ways. The video can be viewed at a time of the student's choosing, parts can be rewound and replayed, and most importantly: the lectures can be improved by redoing them.
The Stanford and MIT online courses are just another example of the changing landscape. The Stanford AI course had lots of technical problems that they were unprepared for - ambiguous English phrasing, uneven level of practice versus test, missing technical explanations, and so on.
Despite the problems, they will get better. Indeed, they will get a lot better even the 2nd time they give the course.
We're apparently watching a competition for "esteem" between the top end universities. The colleges are competing for clarity of presentation, comprehension, and usefulness of the data.
In 10 years or so the traditional university model will be gone. There will be no need to go to college when all the standard subjects can be learned very well online, using methods which have evolved to present the material in the best possible way.
We could switch to encrypted E-mail in 6 months if developers had the courage of their convictions.
Firefox is open source, yes? And so is Chrome, I believe? Also Opera?
Don't these projects have an E-mail reader as part of their offering?
All we need is for one of the major browsers to choose an encryption standard and bundle it with their reader, and include a checkbox in the sender that reads "let others read this message" or similar wording.
Overnight people would start using the feature. It would start with Firefox users <-> Firefox users, then expand as people encouraged their friends to use the same standard. People would be encouraged to install the feature in their own reader.
Recipient doesn't have the feature? Various ways to detect and handle this, takes but a moment's thought.
Like a pandemic, encryption would spread to the far corners of the internet.
But no, developers don't like to make the decisions. They like to be consulted by the people who *do* make the decisions ("SOPA is supported by people who don't know how the internet works"), but they don't actually want to *make* the decisions.
This is a subtle point with ethics, so I'm not surprised that you don't get it.
Killing is not unethical per se.
We kill people all the time and consider it ethical because of justifications behind the killing. Police can kill in the line of duty, soldiers can kill in duty of war, doctors can administer mercy killings to comatose patients, and so on.
Killing becomes unethical not because it is killing, but because it is unjust. When the killing goes outside of the bounds of what we consider justified and reasonable, then and only then does it become unethical.
Drone killings are not unethical in and of themselves, but using drones removes most of the social restraint we have against unethical killing. Unlike using a gun, no human "feels" the killing, there are no witnesses, and there is a diluted sense of responsibility.
This makes drones easier to use and as a result, they will be used frequently for unethical killings.
It really depends on your definition of "charity", and your intent - it can be defined as anything that's non-profit and tax deductible, which has a rather large scope.
Lots of things are non-profit and seen as charity donations - art museum and symphony, sports teams (kids soccer and baseball), research towards medicine (aids, MS), EFF and lawyer advocate associations, and so on.
All of these enrich our lives and make the world a better place. Donating directly instead of through a charity organization makes better sense because more of the money goes directly to the organization.
Your local Rotary club, for instance, is manned by locals who donate their time and would better know your community needs.
If your intent is to reduce the suffering of people directly, might I suggest Plan USA.
Plan USA chooses a needy child somewhere in the world and uses your donations to help them grow up. Their administrative overhead is relatively low, and you get periodic feedback showing how your monies are used. They also sponsor village improvements, such as sanitation, clean water, &c.
In addition, your donation is year round instead of just during the holidays. IIRC sponsoring a child is on the order of $325 a year.
The problem here is the "Banning" mentality. We've discovered something that people do which is a danger to other people.
The knee-jerk reaction is "Ban that action!" "Make it illegal!"
This type of logic has several problems, as anyone who has taken even a moment's consideration will see.
First of all, we shouldn't be banning anything and everything we find that makes life more dangerous. There has to be some sort of risk/reward analysis that considers the total value. Banning smoking in restaurants, banning salt packets in restaurants, banning body-mass-index over a certain value, banning high cholesterol in people, banning having no health insurance... where does it end?
Given: Texting causes accidents. Question: How many accidents are caused by texting? Is it worth putting in any effort, or are the efforts better spent investigating other aspects of driving, such as road hazards, traffic light timing, or automobile construction?
Second, even if we have good reason to we shouldn't be banning something unless doing so is effective. Will banning stop the practice? Historically, consider other bans of the past that are also dangerous: speeding, running red lights, DWI, and so on. Also, consider the bans against drugs, guns, prostitution, and alcohol.
Thirdly, we need to consider unforeseen consequences of the ban. Banning texting forces people to hide their texting by placing the phone on their lap - which is more dangerous than letting people text in the open. Banning drugs, guns, prostitution, and other things has caused a rise of violent crime. How does one detect texting? Will it be a policeman's word against that of the driver? Will the police be able to use texting as a pretense for stop and search? Will the police have a device like a breathalyzer that scans a person's phone? Will we need to abolish peoples' rights to privacy to implement?
And finally, we absolutely need to consider alternatives. Is education more effective than enforcement? (This happens to be true for drugs, for instance.) Will this be an issue in 10 years with self-driving cars, and can we just ignore it until then? Are there other solutions, such as a special "driving keyboard" which make texting a little safer but not completely safe?
The obvious analogy is to ban hunting, because people occasionally get shot. Or ban any dangerous profession (such as machinist) because people occasionally get killed.
There are real things to fear in the world, but small groups will use your fear as a way to increase their control over your behaviour. Try not to give in to the fear - think it through in a clear and logical manner.
Back in my day we didn't have gigabyte memory and disk space was at a premium.
It might seem a bit strange now, but back in the good 'ol days we used to have to break up a project into separate components, just in order to compile it!
This is where your interface and API design skills came in handy. If you could partition some piece of the project off into it's own DLL, you could effectively break up the project into smaller pieces that could be individually compiled.
That's where the name DLL came from originally: "Dynamic link library". You didn't need to have all the code read into memory when you first executed the application - less commonly used features wouldn't get loaded until they were actually asked for.
It's not like it is nowadays, where you actually need all the code to be available all the time. "Rich user experience" they call it.
I suppose it's just the future overtakin' us. Them good old days is gone forever.
Google's street-view car inadvertently logs SSID broadcasts, which are transmitted in the clear. They 'fess up and get washed and hung out to dry. Threats from governments, demands that they turn over the data, investigations galore.
CarrierIQ sends your text messages and keypresses and location information (including your typed passwords) to various third parties including the FBI and carriers... and nothing. A handful of small entities are "seeking suit" against the company.
Where's the outrage? You'd think that CarrierIQ only affects geeks.
Inaction is dealt with in a higher layer, and action taken against someone is in a layer even higher than that.
As mentioned, without the entire framework one can easily construct trivial arguments that make the ethical system seem inconsistent, or which appear to encourage unethical behaviour.
Yes, that layer compels one to reduce suffering by taking action. If you stop at this layer, you can justify forcing people into rehab centers against their will - for just about any reason. Drug use, smoking, obesity, promiscuity, poor personal habits, being gay... anything which in your view will cause someone suffering can be "corrected" with appropriate intervention.
However, we hold the doctrine of "individual dissent" to be at a level higher than honour or ethics. People have the right to choose for themselves. We can *offer* help, but we cannot *force* them to accept it.
It's the old saw "give a man a fish, teach a man to fish". Teaching is clearly the better option, but what if they simply don't want to be taught? Can we force it on them?
Look to your history for examples: did Gandhi advocate using force? Did Jesus? King? How about the reverse: how does history regard eugenics? Hitler?
This is really fundamental stuff that teenagers are supposed to figure out in high school. It's not like there aren't schools of thought that teach it or historical examples to learn from.
It would appear that you are unfamiliar with the "algebra" of ethics. Can you deduce the next layer? The one after that? Are there people whose ethical stance you admire? Can you compare yourself favourably to them? Is your personal hierarchy self-consistent?
And here's the big question, the first one you should ask (of yourself): Is any of this important to you?
Ethics comes in levels, or layers if you like. The different layers direct our actions, so that to have integrity in one layer means that you have to be consistent in your actions according to the rules of that layer.
At the lowest layer, everyone's actions are assumed to benefit themselves. We take the action that gives us the immediate benefit. Steal or kill depending on your needs, simply because it benefits you. Contract killers and pickpockets live at this level.
The next layer up is honor; loosely, it means "I keep my promises". If I say I will or won't do something, you can rely on my word from then on. If I get into an agreement with someone, I will keep it.
This layer overrides the lowest layer. If I'm in a position where I can break a promise because it benefits me, I have to refuse, and if I'm in a position where keeping a promise hurts me, then I have to accept the consequences to still be considered honourable. Keeping honour is hard - you have to be careful of the promises you make. Successful but ruthless businessmen live at this level.
The next layer is good versus evil; loosely, it means "I don't cause suffering in others". I cannot take actions which hurt others, and if my actions inadvertently hurt others I have to stop. Once again, this is more important than lower layers, so that if I have to lose my honour to prevent suffering, I must do it.
It is especially difficult to keep three levels of ethics, but humanity has always admired the people who do. Some successful businessmen live at this level, as did famous pacifists such as King, Gandhi, Buddha, and Jesus. (And yes, nobody's perfect.)
There are other layers which account for the obvious objections you will come up with. It's not difficult to construct a strong logical foundation for complete ethical behaviour that satisfies all of your objections, but it's beyond the scope here. It only takes a little thought, and you should be able to deduce it on your own.
The important part is that the layers require courage - the courage to stand by your convictions even though it may be disadvantageous at the time. Anyone can say that they are against child sweatshop labor, but when given a choice between sneakers costing $80 or $140, which ones do you buy?
Without the courage of your convictions, your ethics have no meaning. You are only be espousing what good ethics should be in others.
I'm proposing that in order to satisfy the level of not causing suffering in others, people should be courageous enough to refuse a job offer. This may put people in a difficult position - they may be all the worse because they can't otherwise find a job - but that's the price we pay for integrity: loyalty to our convictions.
This is all basic stuff, things that should be obvious.
If you haven't chosen the path of ethics, if you either don't care about the suffering of others or if you believe other considerations are more important (patriotism to your country, for instance), then by all means take the job. You will most probably receive an excellent income.
Is it reasonable to expect that hindering the development of military software will materially protect truth, justice, freedom, and the American way?...
You are missing the point. It doesn't matter whether your actions will have an effect, in the same way that it doesn't matter whether anyone knows what you do. Ethics is a personal choice, it's the stock you take in your life, it's the mirror you hold up to yourself.
If contributing to a "War App Store" doesn't bother you, then by all means take the job.
Every decision you make should be weighed using the risk/reward formula.
I'm advocating short term benefits at the expense of the long term problems times the *probability* of long term problems.
If there are no long-term problems now, you can't really say what the probability of long-term problems is at the moment. Indeed, the most likely expectation is that there will be *no* long term problems in the future.
Plus, there's the very real possibility that any changes he makes in anticipation of potential future problems will in itself cause short-term problems.
It's not that I'm advocating against fixing broken code, I'm saying that you take risk/reward and expectation of benefit into account.
Sometimes it's not enough to be right - you also have to be effective.
You're going to spend time rewriting things that currently work? That's a recipe for disaster.
Unless you can predict when something will fail (as in - the database uses 16-bit indexing, so when we hit 65,536 orders the database will crash), it's much more effective to leave things alone.
Wait until changes are needed, then straighten out only those pieces that you have to touch when implementing new functionality.
Work to a benefit. Unless you can point to some aspect which will change in a measurable way (it's crashing frequently, it will crash *less* when I'm done, it will cost less in terms of server rental, &c), leave it alone.
Would you support prohibition if it caused more problems than legalization?
You're misunderstanding the difference between evidence based policy and rationale based policy.
You can make a rationale for almost anything. Most issues are not 100% black-and-white, so simply emphasizing the negatives can be used as a rationale when you want to push your own agenda.
The evidence indicates that when prescription-grade cocaine is used, the negative effects are minimal. Most of the corporeal damage comes from the substances used to dilute (ie - cut) the drug, and the true expense of maintaining a habit comes to pennies a day. The rough equivalent of drinking a 2-liter soda per day.
The evidence also indicates that people can keep a family and a job and a cocaine habit. Again, most of the social damage comes from the high expense and low quality of the illicit product.
On the other hand, making illegal something that much of the population wants gives authoritarians the perfect excuse to curtail our freedoms. The police enjoy the ability to root around in our cars, houses, and personal effects looking for drugs. The government gets to regulate how much cash we carry, where our money comes from, and how we travel because we "might" be smuggling drugs.
Don't buy into the "we need to do this because it might lead to that" mentality; don't submit to the fear.
We've done everything possible to stifle innovation over the past 20 years.
Innovation: Patent trolls, nuclear patent portfolios, submarine patents, generic and inscrutable patents, court district shopping, DMCA, ACTA, losing tech to other countries, H1B visas.
Infrastructure: Rationed internet(data caps), net neutrality, spotty cell coverage, polluted water supply, inscrutable laws, discretionary enforcement, tax complexity, offshoring
Growth: Tax breaks to rich companies (if GE pays no taxes, it's hard to make a competing product), regulatory failure (example: deepwater horizon), tax incentives for companies to move from state-to-state, profligate wasteful spending.
Is it any wonder that American innovation has lost its shine?
Okay, you value freedom of speech very highly. It's a fair point.
Now let's see if your valuation of that right should be applied to everyone.
1) Would you sign an NDA preventing you from badmouthing a company, in return for universal health care from that company?
2) Would you sign that NDA if a parent were diagnosed with cancer?
3) Would you sign that NDA if *you* were diagnosed with cancer?
4) Would you prevent all others from signing that NDA, in those circumstances?
It's not quite as cut-and-dried as you make it out to be. Many people think speech should be restricted for subjects that they feel strongly about: hate speech, bullying speech, Fox News bias, and so on. The opinion that freedom of speech is priceless and immutable is not universal by a long shot.
Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean that it's not the best choice for everyone.
When this happens, I'm there. I'll be their first customer.
This looks to the future where China manages all US infrastructure. Where will it end? One can only imagine.
Chinese management and control of the power grid? Water/sewer? National highway repair? Health care?
For all the bad things people will point out, the sum total is that people will get much better services for the money. The Chinese motivation for doing things in an expert, professional manner will more than compensate for the loss of government control.
Your trade is for a government which grants a lot of freedoms, and a government which curtails some of your freedoms (but generally leaving you alone) in a world where all the services run perfectly. And the freedoms granted in the first case seem to be evaporating in any event.
The Chinese couldn't be *that* much worse than the US, and for good infrastructure I'm willing to take the chance.
I agree with you completely. Sharing may become copy-pasting, and putting off motivation is probably the better way to teach.
If only there were some way to compare different models of teaching to determine which way was better. Some process where the amount of learning could be measured in both methods.
Until that magical method is invented, I suppose we'll just have to keep teaching kids in the best way we know how.
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Some states have a stop and identify law, which means that for a terry stop or higher, when asked you must truthfully tell the officer your name.
Note that this is only for Terry stops and above. An officer may walk up and simply ask that you identify yourself - in the same manner that any regular citizen could do so - and in this instance you are not required to answer. You are not required to interact in any way with a police officer acting in the manner of a regular citizen. To do this they need suspicion and have to escalate it to Terry status.
Note also that in no instance are you required to prove your identity. You need not "show your papers" to anyone.
The statute may be written in such a way that there are one or two other things that the officer may legally ask and that you must answer. New Hampshire, for example, allows the officer to ask your address, why you are there, and where you are going.
Massachusetts does not have such a law, and so you do not have to respond when asked. Period, end of story.
Many people will point out the difference between theory and practice, in that the police will simply disregard the rules and do it anyway and inconvenience you so-you-might-as-well-submit-andbeasheepandyoucantfightandsoonandsoon...
Be aware that a civil rights violation is a windfall in your favor. If you have good evidence, such as a video clearly showing what happened, you can get a court judgement of from tens of thousands to a couple of million dollars... if you are willing to press the issue. This will require some investment and a lot of inconvenience on your part - think of it as an investment of 10,000 dollars to make a potential million.
It all boils down to the strength of your ethics. There can be no ethics without courage. If everyone had the courage to press the issue, then the practice would stop very quickly.
This is a non-story. Traditional mass-produced education is going the way of the dodo, buggy-whip manufacturers, and RIAA.
With Kahn academy and various universities putting their courses on the net, a complete education is currently online. It's not yet super-charged with goodness, but right now it's entirely possible for anyone to get a complete online education up to and including the graduate level. (viz: the Standord online courses)
Kids are voracious learners. Give them the right materials and they will figure it out on their own, at their own speed, and in a sequence that makes sense to them.
We are rapidly reaching the point of not needing teachers. Certainly, the typical role of teacher as one who makes the kids sit quietly and watch a boring lecture are gone. Before ten years are up you will see grade schools perceived as nothing more than jail-time... which is what they are.
Traditional methods haven't changed in two millenia, the system has no feedback for improvement, there is no accountability that rewards goal achievement... there's really nothing to recommend the traditional school system.
Let them duke it out and squabble over whatever they like. They don't have a clue, they can only play catch-up and they won't even be able to do that. They simply won't be able to compete with what the web can offer.
We'll soon be questioning the wisdom of having schools outright, and the kids will be all the better off for it.
Children are voracious learners. Given the chance, they will learn anything and everything they can get their hands on. If you don't disabuse them of the practice, they will carry it on into adulthood.
As homeschool parents know, give the child access to materials - the internet, a CD of dinosaur books, an electronics experimenter's kit - and they will happily figure it out at their own pace, on their own schedule, and in a sequence that makes sense to them.
Forcing kids to learn your subjects at your pace by forcing them to sit still and quiet while you drone on is hard work, and it only teaches one thing: learning is not fun.
For example: How many English classes require students to write book reports, on works which are considered "classic" but not really relevant or interesting? This only makes an association between reading and hard work. It's rare to see an adult who likes to read for enjoyment after a highschools' worth of treatment this way.
I see this all the time in adults. The vast majority think of any type of learning as "tough", "boring", and "not worth the effort". They won't try anything new unless it's forced on them by life circumstances. They have lost the joy of learning.
Learning new things is an evolutionary survival trait, yet we spend 13+ years of a kids life teaching them not to enjoy it.
The standard teaching approach by lecturing has been in use for over 2000 years. Do you suppose that maybe there are more effective ways? Perhaps by experimenting or using our new technology we can raise our adult productivity.
Some professor is experimenting with different methods. I applaud his attempts and eagerly await the results.
Other people have had this idea over the years.
Banks are not required to give out cash immediately. In cases where their fractional reserve is in peril, they can delay payouts for some period of time (IIRC it's on the order of 24-48 hours, but this has probably changed over the years).
They use the extra time to get a large dollop of cash from the nearest federal reserve branch. The system is set up specifically to prevent a run on the bank, which is what you are suggesting.
The best you could hope is for the bank to delay cash payouts to other customers as a result. People might lose confidence in the bank, and people might be inclined to move their money elsewhere. Especially if you could, for example, force a reserve run a couple of times in a one-month period.
I'm not aware of any of these actions being illegal, but you can bet that the establishment will take a very dim view. They will begin by arresting people for trumped up charges (arresting peaceful people in line at the bank for trespassing, or public nuisance), then passing laws which make this behaviour specifically illegal.
Banks would implement a policy that reads something like: "we don't open new accounts for people who have closed all accounts in the last year" or something. But then again - you don't need to actually close the account, just remove a wad of cash on a specific date.
OTOH, it would spread your message to other bank customers. You would get a lot of publicity.
Does anyone know how much cash this would require? Some branches keep as little as $250,000 on hand. That would only be 250 people with some disposable income. If everyone went at 11:00 on a non-payday, everyone from noon onward might be affected.
I've been puzzling over the corruption caused by business influence on government for awhile.
Setting it up as a problem in game theory, the tenet "candidate who spends the most money wins the election" makes the outcome a foregone conclusion: elected government officials will be in the pocket of corporations, in all cases.
This may be a way out.
We've bemoaned our inability to influence the political system, but here we see a striking example of the population rising up and affecting specific government actions.
Public outcry stopped the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, or at least it helped. Similarly, public outcry attempted to hurt Bank of America and GoDaddy over their political beliefs.
If we can make this work it will give us the fine control over government that we have been missing. We've been able to affect small companies - HBGary, Stratfor, Ocean Marketing, Sony. (OK, Sony isn't that small, but it was a slice of Sony much smaller than BOA.)
Future companies may need to think twice before supporting oppressive or corrupt legislation - if only because of the chance that the people will rise up and hurt their bottom line.
We haven't had an effect on the really big companies yet (BOA), but I'm hoping that this grows to be a worldwide trend. We need to install a healthy dose of respect for public opinion. To put it succinctly, the companies have to fear the possibility of public retribution, both legal and extra-legal.
This will give us the power to affect legislation, to control the corruption. This will put government back in the hands of the people.
If we can make this work...
Because we all know that innovation stems primarily from the "bigger innovation labs", right?
Innovation comes from grass-roots endeavors, and always has. The paradigm is for an individual (or small group of individuals) to start a small business, build it up big, and take market share away from the big companies.
Big companies become clogged by process and moribund. They become "risk averse", preferring to sit on their laurels and collect rent from existing product.
The problem is that the paradigm no longer applies. We've successfully locked out any hope of innovation by the "little guy".
Try to compete against GE, that pays no taxes. Try to invent something that's not covered by an ambiguous patent that *might* or might not refer to your product. Calculate the out-of-pocket expenses for suing someone (or being sued), then the appeal, then the appeal to the supreme court. See if you can predict whether a government agency will shut you down.
We've made it nigh impossible for the small business to succeed nowadays. The only businesses we allow are copies of existing ones - pizza parlors, hair salons, upscale gift boutiques, and so on.
There's a lot of innovation going on nowadays, but it's largely open source. People are fed up with the system, so they throw their ideas and projects open to the world to use. Check out Instructables, Make Magazine, or Hackerspaces.org some time.
Hackerspaces are cropping up all over the world, and a fair number are in the US. All the innovation that would normally drive the economy is being distributed for free, because despite the barriers people *still* want to innovate.
We just don't do it by starting companies any more.
It's interesting to see how the state of learning has changed in the last 10 years, and the pace of change is accelerating.
Does anyone know why we study the subjects we do in high school? Mostly it's because the subjects are classical - things are studied because it's been that way since ancient times.
Take geometry, for example. It's an important subject, but not nearly as useful to the average person as probability, yet we study one and not the other.
Then there's the mode of teaching, several hundred years old, where the student sits quietly in a seat watching the lecturer write things on a board and explain them.
Newer models have emerged. The Kahn academy still uses the lecturer/blackboard model, but improves it in many ways. The video can be viewed at a time of the student's choosing, parts can be rewound and replayed, and most importantly: the lectures can be improved by redoing them.
The Stanford and MIT online courses are just another example of the changing landscape. The Stanford AI course had lots of technical problems that they were unprepared for - ambiguous English phrasing, uneven level of practice versus test, missing technical explanations, and so on.
Despite the problems, they will get better. Indeed, they will get a lot better even the 2nd time they give the course.
We're apparently watching a competition for "esteem" between the top end universities. The colleges are competing for clarity of presentation, comprehension, and usefulness of the data.
In 10 years or so the traditional university model will be gone. There will be no need to go to college when all the standard subjects can be learned very well online, using methods which have evolved to present the material in the best possible way.
It'll be fun to watch as this evolves over time.
We could switch to encrypted E-mail in 6 months if developers had the courage of their convictions.
Firefox is open source, yes? And so is Chrome, I believe? Also Opera?
Don't these projects have an E-mail reader as part of their offering?
All we need is for one of the major browsers to choose an encryption standard and bundle it with their reader, and include a checkbox in the sender that reads "let others read this message" or similar wording.
Overnight people would start using the feature. It would start with Firefox users <-> Firefox users, then expand as people encouraged their friends to use the same standard. People would be encouraged to install the feature in their own reader.
Recipient doesn't have the feature? Various ways to detect and handle this, takes but a moment's thought.
Like a pandemic, encryption would spread to the far corners of the internet.
But no, developers don't like to make the decisions. They like to be consulted by the people who *do* make the decisions ("SOPA is supported by people who don't know how the internet works"), but they don't actually want to *make* the decisions.
This will not change in our lifetime.
This is a subtle point with ethics, so I'm not surprised that you don't get it.
Killing is not unethical per se.
We kill people all the time and consider it ethical because of justifications behind the killing. Police can kill in the line of duty, soldiers can kill in duty of war, doctors can administer mercy killings to comatose patients, and so on.
Killing becomes unethical not because it is killing, but because it is unjust. When the killing goes outside of the bounds of what we consider justified and reasonable, then and only then does it become unethical.
Drone killings are not unethical in and of themselves, but using drones removes most of the social restraint we have against unethical killing. Unlike using a gun, no human "feels" the killing, there are no witnesses, and there is a diluted sense of responsibility.
This makes drones easier to use and as a result, they will be used frequently for unethical killings.
It really depends on your definition of "charity", and your intent - it can be defined as anything that's non-profit and tax deductible, which has a rather large scope.
Lots of things are non-profit and seen as charity donations - art museum and symphony, sports teams (kids soccer and baseball), research towards medicine (aids, MS), EFF and lawyer advocate associations, and so on.
All of these enrich our lives and make the world a better place. Donating directly instead of through a charity organization makes better sense because more of the money goes directly to the organization.
Your local Rotary club, for instance, is manned by locals who donate their time and would better know your community needs.
If your intent is to reduce the suffering of people directly, might I suggest Plan USA.
Plan USA chooses a needy child somewhere in the world and uses your donations to help them grow up. Their administrative overhead is relatively low, and you get periodic feedback showing how your monies are used. They also sponsor village improvements, such as sanitation, clean water, &c.
In addition, your donation is year round instead of just during the holidays. IIRC sponsoring a child is on the order of $325 a year.
The problem here is the "Banning" mentality. We've discovered something that people do which is a danger to other people.
The knee-jerk reaction is "Ban that action!" "Make it illegal!"
This type of logic has several problems, as anyone who has taken even a moment's consideration will see.
First of all, we shouldn't be banning anything and everything we find that makes life more dangerous. There has to be some sort of risk/reward analysis that considers the total value. Banning smoking in restaurants, banning salt packets in restaurants, banning body-mass-index over a certain value, banning high cholesterol in people, banning having no health insurance... where does it end?
Given: Texting causes accidents. Question: How many accidents are caused by texting? Is it worth putting in any effort, or are the efforts better spent investigating other aspects of driving, such as road hazards, traffic light timing, or automobile construction?
Second, even if we have good reason to we shouldn't be banning something unless doing so is effective. Will banning stop the practice? Historically, consider other bans of the past that are also dangerous: speeding, running red lights, DWI, and so on. Also, consider the bans against drugs, guns, prostitution, and alcohol.
Thirdly, we need to consider unforeseen consequences of the ban. Banning texting forces people to hide their texting by placing the phone on their lap - which is more dangerous than letting people text in the open. Banning drugs, guns, prostitution, and other things has caused a rise of violent crime. How does one detect texting? Will it be a policeman's word against that of the driver? Will the police be able to use texting as a pretense for stop and search? Will the police have a device like a breathalyzer that scans a person's phone? Will we need to abolish peoples' rights to privacy to implement?
And finally, we absolutely need to consider alternatives. Is education more effective than enforcement? (This happens to be true for drugs, for instance.) Will this be an issue in 10 years with self-driving cars, and can we just ignore it until then? Are there other solutions, such as a special "driving keyboard" which make texting a little safer but not completely safe?
The obvious analogy is to ban hunting, because people occasionally get shot. Or ban any dangerous profession (such as machinist) because people occasionally get killed.
There are real things to fear in the world, but small groups will use your fear as a way to increase their control over your behaviour. Try not to give in to the fear - think it through in a clear and logical manner.
Back in my day we didn't have gigabyte memory and disk space was at a premium.
It might seem a bit strange now, but back in the good 'ol days we used to have to break up a project into separate components, just in order to compile it!
This is where your interface and API design skills came in handy. If you could partition some piece of the project off into it's own DLL, you could effectively break up the project into smaller pieces that could be individually compiled.
That's where the name DLL came from originally: "Dynamic link library". You didn't need to have all the code read into memory when you first executed the application - less commonly used features wouldn't get loaded until they were actually asked for.
It's not like it is nowadays, where you actually need all the code to be available all the time. "Rich user experience" they call it.
I suppose it's just the future overtakin' us. Them good old days is gone forever.
One thing that's bothered me about all this:
Google's street-view car inadvertently logs SSID broadcasts, which are transmitted in the clear. They 'fess up and get washed and hung out to dry. Threats from governments, demands that they turn over the data, investigations galore.
CarrierIQ sends your text messages and keypresses and location information (including your typed passwords) to various third parties including the FBI and carriers... and nothing. A handful of small entities are "seeking suit" against the company.
Where's the outrage? You'd think that CarrierIQ only affects geeks.
Inaction is dealt with in a higher layer, and action taken against someone is in a layer even higher than that.
As mentioned, without the entire framework one can easily construct trivial arguments that make the ethical system seem inconsistent, or which appear to encourage unethical behaviour.
Yes, that layer compels one to reduce suffering by taking action. If you stop at this layer, you can justify forcing people into rehab centers against their will - for just about any reason. Drug use, smoking, obesity, promiscuity, poor personal habits, being gay... anything which in your view will cause someone suffering can be "corrected" with appropriate intervention.
However, we hold the doctrine of "individual dissent" to be at a level higher than honour or ethics. People have the right to choose for themselves. We can *offer* help, but we cannot *force* them to accept it.
It's the old saw "give a man a fish, teach a man to fish". Teaching is clearly the better option, but what if they simply don't want to be taught? Can we force it on them?
Look to your history for examples: did Gandhi advocate using force? Did Jesus? King? How about the reverse: how does history regard eugenics? Hitler?
This is really fundamental stuff that teenagers are supposed to figure out in high school. It's not like there aren't schools of thought that teach it or historical examples to learn from.
It would appear that you are unfamiliar with the "algebra" of ethics. Can you deduce the next layer? The one after that? Are there people whose ethical stance you admire? Can you compare yourself favourably to them? Is your personal hierarchy self-consistent?
And here's the big question, the first one you should ask (of yourself): Is any of this important to you?
Ethics comes in levels, or layers if you like. The different layers direct our actions, so that to have integrity in one layer means that you have to be consistent in your actions according to the rules of that layer.
At the lowest layer, everyone's actions are assumed to benefit themselves. We take the action that gives us the immediate benefit. Steal or kill depending on your needs, simply because it benefits you. Contract killers and pickpockets live at this level.
The next layer up is honor; loosely, it means "I keep my promises". If I say I will or won't do something, you can rely on my word from then on. If I get into an agreement with someone, I will keep it.
This layer overrides the lowest layer. If I'm in a position where I can break a promise because it benefits me, I have to refuse, and if I'm in a position where keeping a promise hurts me, then I have to accept the consequences to still be considered honourable. Keeping honour is hard - you have to be careful of the promises you make. Successful but ruthless businessmen live at this level.
The next layer is good versus evil; loosely, it means "I don't cause suffering in others". I cannot take actions which hurt others, and if my actions inadvertently hurt others I have to stop. Once again, this is more important than lower layers, so that if I have to lose my honour to prevent suffering, I must do it.
It is especially difficult to keep three levels of ethics, but humanity has always admired the people who do. Some successful businessmen live at this level, as did famous pacifists such as King, Gandhi, Buddha, and Jesus. (And yes, nobody's perfect.)
There are other layers which account for the obvious objections you will come up with. It's not difficult to construct a strong logical foundation for complete ethical behaviour that satisfies all of your objections, but it's beyond the scope here. It only takes a little thought, and you should be able to deduce it on your own.
The important part is that the layers require courage - the courage to stand by your convictions even though it may be disadvantageous at the time. Anyone can say that they are against child sweatshop labor, but when given a choice between sneakers costing $80 or $140, which ones do you buy?
Without the courage of your convictions, your ethics have no meaning. You are only be espousing what good ethics should be in others.
I'm proposing that in order to satisfy the level of not causing suffering in others, people should be courageous enough to refuse a job offer. This may put people in a difficult position - they may be all the worse because they can't otherwise find a job - but that's the price we pay for integrity: loyalty to our convictions.
This is all basic stuff, things that should be obvious.
If you haven't chosen the path of ethics, if you either don't care about the suffering of others or if you believe other considerations are more important (patriotism to your country, for instance), then by all means take the job. You will most probably receive an excellent income.
You are missing the point. It doesn't matter whether your actions will have an effect, in the same way that it doesn't matter whether anyone knows what you do. Ethics is a personal choice, it's the stock you take in your life, it's the mirror you hold up to yourself.
If contributing to a "War App Store" doesn't bother you, then by all means take the job.
If you're worried about the ethics of doing this, here are some suggestions to help you cope:
Pick one or more that helps ease your mind.
This was meant to be posted in response to something else above.
I don't know how it got pushed down in the comment chain. Sorry for any confusion.
Well, let's look at it rationally.
Every decision you make should be weighed using the risk/reward formula.
I'm advocating short term benefits at the expense of the long term problems times the *probability* of long term problems.
If there are no long-term problems now, you can't really say what the probability of long-term problems is at the moment. Indeed, the most likely expectation is that there will be *no* long term problems in the future.
Plus, there's the very real possibility that any changes he makes in anticipation of potential future problems will in itself cause short-term problems.
It's not that I'm advocating against fixing broken code, I'm saying that you take risk/reward and expectation of benefit into account.
Sometimes it's not enough to be right - you also have to be effective.
You're going to spend time rewriting things that currently work? That's a recipe for disaster.
Unless you can predict when something will fail (as in - the database uses 16-bit indexing, so when we hit 65,536 orders the database will crash), it's much more effective to leave things alone.
Wait until changes are needed, then straighten out only those pieces that you have to touch when implementing new functionality.
Work to a benefit. Unless you can point to some aspect which will change in a measurable way (it's crashing frequently, it will crash *less* when I'm done, it will cost less in terms of server rental, &c), leave it alone.
Would you support prohibition if it caused more problems than legalization?
You're misunderstanding the difference between evidence based policy and rationale based policy.
You can make a rationale for almost anything. Most issues are not 100% black-and-white, so simply emphasizing the negatives can be used as a rationale when you want to push your own agenda.
The evidence indicates that when prescription-grade cocaine is used, the negative effects are minimal. Most of the corporeal damage comes from the substances used to dilute (ie - cut) the drug, and the true expense of maintaining a habit comes to pennies a day. The rough equivalent of drinking a 2-liter soda per day.
The evidence also indicates that people can keep a family and a job and a cocaine habit. Again, most of the social damage comes from the high expense and low quality of the illicit product.
On the other hand, making illegal something that much of the population wants gives authoritarians the perfect excuse to curtail our freedoms. The police enjoy the ability to root around in our cars, houses, and personal effects looking for drugs. The government gets to regulate how much cash we carry, where our money comes from, and how we travel because we "might" be smuggling drugs.
Don't buy into the "we need to do this because it might lead to that" mentality; don't submit to the fear.
Go where the evidence takes you.
Iodine isn't available without a license from the DEA.
Not here, or here, or even here.
In fact, I can only find 32 results in the first web site I thought to look in.
Looks like the system works!
We've done everything possible to stifle innovation over the past 20 years.
Innovation: Patent trolls, nuclear patent portfolios, submarine patents, generic and inscrutable patents, court district shopping, DMCA, ACTA, losing tech to other countries, H1B visas.
Infrastructure: Rationed internet(data caps), net neutrality, spotty cell coverage, polluted water supply, inscrutable laws, discretionary enforcement, tax complexity, offshoring
Growth: Tax breaks to rich companies (if GE pays no taxes, it's hard to make a competing product), regulatory failure (example: deepwater horizon), tax incentives for companies to move from state-to-state, profligate wasteful spending.
Is it any wonder that American innovation has lost its shine?
Okay, you value freedom of speech very highly. It's a fair point.
Now let's see if your valuation of that right should be applied to everyone.
1) Would you sign an NDA preventing you from badmouthing a company, in return for universal health care from that company?
2) Would you sign that NDA if a parent were diagnosed with cancer?
3) Would you sign that NDA if *you* were diagnosed with cancer?
4) Would you prevent all others from signing that NDA, in those circumstances?
It's not quite as cut-and-dried as you make it out to be. Many people think speech should be restricted for subjects that they feel strongly about: hate speech, bullying speech, Fox News bias, and so on. The opinion that freedom of speech is priceless and immutable is not universal by a long shot.
Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean that it's not the best choice for everyone.
When this happens, I'm there. I'll be their first customer.
This looks to the future where China manages all US infrastructure. Where will it end? One can only imagine.
Chinese management and control of the power grid? Water/sewer? National highway repair? Health care?
For all the bad things people will point out, the sum total is that people will get much better services for the money. The Chinese motivation for doing things in an expert, professional manner will more than compensate for the loss of government control.
Your trade is for a government which grants a lot of freedoms, and a government which curtails some of your freedoms (but generally leaving you alone) in a world where all the services run perfectly. And the freedoms granted in the first case seem to be evaporating in any event.
The Chinese couldn't be *that* much worse than the US, and for good infrastructure I'm willing to take the chance.
I agree with you completely. Sharing may become copy-pasting, and putting off motivation is probably the better way to teach.
If only there were some way to compare different models of teaching to determine which way was better. Some process where the amount of learning could be measured in both methods.
Until that magical method is invented, I suppose we'll just have to keep teaching kids in the best way we know how.