Indeed, you could probably blackmail quite a few people by simply suggesting that you have evidence linking them to OBL now, even if you don't. If they fall for it then they obviously had something to hide.
There is no guarantee that technology like AES will ever be broken. History suggests that it will be, but the complexity of modern symmetric ciphers is such that we may never break them.
Now, what we might come up with is some way to read bits out of RAM chips that has been powered off for years, or other ways to side-step the cipher itself. If the encryption key was selected from a limited keyspace (such as the set of all hashes of 8-character alphanumeric strings) then that would also allow a practical attack.
However, if you encrypt something with a truly random AES key, and completely destroy all vestigial traces of the key and plaintext, then there is no current reason to believe that the plaintext will be recovered before the heat death of the universe, if every atom in the universe is used to construct a computer used to crack it. The keyspace is THAT large...
A DNA test takes 3 days to complete in the same way that it takes 5 days to ship a package across the US or in the way that you leave your car with a dealer for four hours to get an oil change, or in the way that you stand in line for 30 minutes at the grocery store to buy a pack of gum. That is how fast it is typically done for those who care more about cost than speed, but very little of that duration is spent actually doing anything.
There are a number of different kinds of DNA analyses, but most involve probably 20 minutes of enzymatic treatment, and running the resulting fragments out on a gel or capillary, and maybe visualizing the results. You can probably get results in an hour or two cheap if you put the sample at the head of the line for testing.
I'm sure more exotic technologies can get results even faster.
If they were planning a raid for some period of time no doubt they'd have expected this possible result and would have had test equipment nearby. Figure that the body would be taken straight for testing, and they'd probably be swabbing his cheek before the rotor blades even stopped turning. The military is VERY efficient when there is a plan, and if this was priority one you can bet that everything was ready to go minus the sample when it arrived...
It probably would have been even more effective if it had been erected on the boundary line than some hundred metres inside Palestine territory.
Define "effective." I don't see how placement has any impact at all on its effectiveness at stopping attacks. You can argue that it affects legitimacy and diplomacy and all that, but it seems plenty effective to me.
I'm pretty sure the Japanese soldiers were wearing uniforms.
Yup, and I'm pretty sure the atomic bombs were aimed at some of them. Strategic warfare isn't pretty, and fortunately most of the recent world conflicts that the US has been involved with have been so one-sided that it has not been necessary. You do see it in places like Africa where tribes go all-out with genocide and all that.
When I look at history I really don't see much evidence for the real-world practice of "limited war." About the only time you ever see armies limiting themselves is when there is either very little at stake (and loss is preferable to loss of reputation), or where the outcome of the war is in so little doubt that armies are willing to fight with a handicap. Whenever you see true equals going to war you end up with a battle that touches every home. Often they start out moderately limited, but as time goes on and the body counts climb, both sides continue to escalate until one side loses either the will or the ability to fight on.
It should also be noted that the Japanese weren't exactly following the Geneva Conventions. They did wear uniforms, but their treatment of POWs was brutal to say the least. The Germans did follow the conventions on the Western front, and the evidence is that the allies more-or-less tried to do the same (at least on a personal level - strategic bombing was what it was at the time).
I didn't know the CIA had jurisdiction in Pakistan...
Hence the reason that Obama's speech thanked Pakistan for their cooperation. Perhaps their act of cooperation was just not being competent enough to figure out that the US had tracked OBL down so that they could warn him. We'll never know (what, are they going to file a complaint?).
The US pretends to care a whit what Pakistan thinks, and Pakistan pretends to not mind the US doing raids there (at least not enough to do anything about it).
The bottom line is that if an individual manages to tick off half of the nations on the world, and nations controlling probably 90% of the world's GDP, then they better do a good job hiding because once they know where you are there isn't much that is going to protect you unless you control at least the other half of the world.
This was an extremely high value, high profile target who was stationary in a known location. It wasn't as though a single lone agent bumped into him on the street and had one shot at taking him out- this was an operation that should have been planned and executed with the sole purpose of taking him alive, using every varied means at their disposal to do so.
I'm sure they did all of that. However, soldiers are for killing people and blowing things up, first and foremost. I'm sure the mission planners were told that given the option of letting him go or killing him, they were told to do the latter.
Depending on the circumstances you also can't send in the entire US army to go arrest him. Everybody in the country would see them coming and OBL would be in hiding before they even got halfway through the town.
And, in the end, if you're a soldier and the guy you're trying to arrest is shooting at you, or in the midst of a crowd shooting at you, you pull the trigger first and ask questions later. If the guy you're trying to arrest is in a room and people are shooting at you from the doorway, then in goes a grenade and anybody coming out the door is shot.
The fact that they even sent people in shows just how much they wanted to make sure they got him personally. If a bunch of well-armed terrorists were hiding in a house and they weren't so high-ranking they'd have just bombed the living daylights out of the whole compound and checked the dental records after.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nothing. Far more lives were taken in routine strategic bombings.
Civilians dying is just part of war. If you don't want lots of dead bodies all over the place, best not to get into a war in the first place. If you do get in a war, if you really care about civilians then dress your soldiers in uniform so that the people shooting at them can tell the difference.
Depends on what kinds of leaders you're talking about. You'll find examples in both camps. OBL seems to be a genuine fanatic - he was from a wealthy family and clearly could be doing a lot better than living in a cave. Sure, he is more famous than he would have been, but few self-interested people would choose being infamous and living in caves over vacationing in Dubai or whatever.
On the other hand, MANY completely self-interested people do use religion and ideology to control the masses.
I was just wondering about the level of desperation people needed to reach before they think blowing themselves up is a good idea.
How is choosing 70 virgins in heaven over living in a wasteland an act of desperation? If you actually believe what the terrorists are selling, then it is a completely rational decision to make. And, when everybody you respect in life is telling you that the guy preaching that stuff knows what they're talking about, why would you believe differently?
Groupthink is an extremely powerful influence. The solution for terrorism is probably the same as the solution for smoking, and I have no idea what that is...
For all the grief Israel was getting about how the big wall wouldn't do squat to stop attacks, the reality is that attacks were making the news at least weekly before the wall, and now we just have the 2x/yr rocket attack or whatever.
You can like the wall or hate it, but there is no question that it has almost eliminated the routine attacks.
Simple - credit card has an embedded private key. Merchant transmits to card transaction details, card displays summary of transaction on its LCD screen, cardholder types PIN onto card's keypad (NOT a merchant's keypad), and card gives the merchant a signed authorization. Merchant presents authorization to the bank.
Transactions that can be authorized can either be single-use or recurring, with the parameters of recurring transactions defined in advance (max amount and interval). Transactions are always tied to a particular merchant, and submitting subsequent transactions requires the merchant's credentials, so stealing the authorization does nobody any good. All transactions and authorizations have GUIDs that are logged by the bank, so replay attacks don't work.
Cards could have a variety of interfaces, from USB to acoustic modem. The interface need not be secure, since the keys never pass over this channel. This kind of system would support both offline and online transactions, although just as with current cards offline transactions may not catch revocations or over-limit problems until they sync up. On the other hand, offline transactions would be protected from forged cards, since both sides of the transaction need to present a trusted certificate chain. You're also safe from various MITM attacks since the card displays who you're sending the payment to, and the credentials never leave the card. Even if you miss who the payment was made to the bank can easily trace what happened, since whoever planted the MITM device had to apply for its credentials, and the card would log the ID of that device, and for that matter the attacker can't do anything with the transaction authorization unless they present it for payment, which is a lot riskier than selling credit card numbers.
No, said number would only be valid for a particular payee, for a particular period of time, for particular amounts at particular intervals.
Kind of like how a gpg/smime email is protected by a signature, and not by mailing copies of your private key all over the place.
The problem with credit cards is that they authenticate transactions with a shared secret that you share with everybody you do business with. That is 1940s technology.
We're talking about the first Google-backed phone and tablet Android platforms. Suggesting that Google might treat their first tablet the way they treated their first phone isn't going out on a limb. They might, they might not.
Look, I'll take Android over iOS any day. However, the one thing that Apple gets is that long-term customer support impacts the perceived value of the platform. Carriers don't get that - they view a broken phone as a way to sell you a new phone. Google says "hey, it isn't our problem."
Microsoft would be the other example of a company that takes a long-term view of its products. I'm still getting regular security patches to XP. Android patches security bugs in new releases all the time - when was the last time you saw a backport to even a one-year-old phone?
Apple is selling all the iPhones and iPads they can make. They could not possibly be doing better, unless they sold the same amount and charged more.
Or, unless they made more devices and sold them. There is no reason Apple couldn't make as many devices per year as the competition - the reason they don't is because they know they can't sell them all, and that would just be a waste of money. Sure, Apple couldn't scale up overnight, but after being on the market for years Apple is making as many devices as it planned to. Either that or they're incompetent. No sane manufacturer lets manufacturing volume be the key determiner of sales - at least not in the long term. Now, being sold out for the first month isn't a big deal - you also don't build your factories to crank out first-week demand over the whole life of the product for a hot item like an iPhone.
Unlike the iPad, there is a fully vendor-supported unlock on the Xoom and an underground which happily takes the open-sourced Android (of which iOS is not) and will provide updates for years to come.
You mean like on the ADP, which was sold by Google and which received its last Google-supplied update before they even stopped selling it?
Many older, discontinued, and "abandoned" Android phones are being updated to Froyo or even Gingerbread, regularly.
You mean like the ADP, which only had Froyo come out on Cyanogenmod stable late last fall, and that is only barely usable with the radio memory hack that came out around December?
Google has a history of abandoning their first phone models before they even stop selling them. Apple has a history of supporting them for multiple years. If you're an early-adopter the android picture isn't that pretty.
It wasn't until the Nexus One that Google had a platform that looked like it was reasonably future-proof - and the N1 came out 1.5 years after the first commercially sold android phones.
I think that some people just don't realize that the Motorola Droid and N1 were not the first Android phones out there. When Google puts the Nexus name on a tablet I'll be somewhat more inclined to think that the platform is a keeper...
Yup, RIM was competitive back when the competition was a feature phone with WAP support.
Now only inertia keeps them around. No company would invest in the platform at this point unless the ROI was really quick. Once everybody migrates to either iOS or Android RIM's sales will plummet.
I think that student loans absolutely should be regulated, or preferably abolished.
Why do kids go to a $30k/yr college and take out $15k in loans while their parents somehow come up with another $15k (likely much in loans as well)?
Simple - a 12th grader has no concept of how much money $30k is, and all his friends are going to college, and the guidance counselor says that it is a good idea, and only losers don't go. For whatever reason spending $30k/yr studying history is just considered the norm. The kid gets to hang out with friends all day and gets free food and a roof and nobody asking when he is going to be home, so they gladly sign the line and worry about the debt later.
Education is not a choice that should be up to those who cannot pay for it. I'm fine with general public education. I'd be fine with improving primary education so that graduates are better equipped to enter the workforce. I just don't see the value in letting kids get themselves into huge amounts of debt that they will never have the ability to repay.
Uh, if I want to hire an engineer to build me a bridge then I could care less about their knowledge of the Trojan war. Maybe if I have them building horse sculptures or something I'll care more. The last thing I want is for the most promising engineering students being held up over art classes or whatever.
The problem is that we have way too many PhDs and the degree has lost all meaning and they are difficult to employ. If you want to increase the rigor in the field of study that is one thing. If you want to just impose arbitrary barriers to graduation then you just make it even more into a reward for persistence.
If your only goal is to reduce the number of PhDs you could just as easily award them only to people over six feet tall, and have about as meaningful a result as making them take more history (unless that is the field the degree is in).
Now, personally I love history and all that fluff. I find it intellectually stimulating. However, if I'm interviewing somebody for a job I care a lot less about how interesting conversation at the lunch table will be than if I'm going to end up doing his job for him or having to justify terminating him and keeping the slot open.
Often the problem isn't the students - rather it is the parents who are paying for the degree.
A neighbor had a son who studied some aspect of mid-eval organ music, and ended up being unemployable. Why the parents paid for an education that had no possibility of an ROI was a mystery to me - they weren't independently wealthy as best as I can tell. I think he ended up selling pianos or something in a retail store for not a whole lot more than what you could get at any retail establishment - certainly he wasn't making use of 99% of what he studied, and piano lessons would be a lot cheaper than a degree.
The problem is compounded by teachers and guidance counselors who chant the mantra that education isn't about trade school and that kids should follow their dreams and all that. Being able to make a basic living has almost been turned into a vice.
I think the problem is in part that university has just become the 13th through 16th grades. Kids are institutionalized and can't imagine living in a manner that doesn't involve a cafeteria full of peers their own age trading gossip, with lots of hanging out in the evenings. For various reasons parents are basically just expected to provide a college education for their kids - it is a matter of pride/etc.
So, when little Johnny is in 12th grade he has a few choices:
1. Join the military. 2. Find a job. 3. Hang out in the basement when all your friends are off to college, until the parents make you do # 1 or 2. 4. Sign up for college.
Just about everybody with average grades can go to college SOMEWHERE. Sure, they might not get financial aid, but parents are often all too willing to borrow $100k to finance their kids education.
Talking to my kids friends it is clear that most have no idea what they want to do in life. Many go to college undeclared, or with a major that is tentative at best. Many openly talk about being on a 5-6 year plan. Why not - college is certainly more fun than many avenues of work! It has become the path of least resistance.
There is plenty of opportunity out there for those who learn a trade. College is also a fine way to equip oneself for a career, but one should be pretty sure about the career before making this kind of an investment. I'd never pay for a child to attend a college unless they already have demonstrated proficiency and dedication to the field they are choosing to go into. Want to be a teacher, well volunteer to tutor kids or something in your spare time. Want to be a chemist, well volunteer to help your teacher prep for lab or something and compete in the science fair. No need to make a million dollars before graduating high school, but demonstrate that it is more than a passing fancy that won't last beyond the first 40-hour week.
As far as universities being some kind of great noble institution of general learning - well, that is nice if you want them to go back to what they were in the middle ages - a dumping ground for the children of the wealthy. If you aren't independently wealthy then spending $100k just to feel intellectually fulfilled is a tremendous waste of money. Go get a job first, and if you want take some night classes - if you just want intellectual fulfillment then you can get it without the stress of worrying about grades or degree requirements. If you're paying for it with your own money and meeting your responsibilities then nobody has the right to criticize you.
Yup - when I was working on my PhD I frequently found reading any kind of academic journal highly frustrating. I was at the top of my class in a top-10 university and yet outside of my very specific field the literature was just about incomprehensible, and I have a pretty wide variety of knowledge (in my opinion). Even within my field I found that papers often used needlessly obscure jargon - and not just because of the need for precision. I could understand them but could see how others who haven't read every article on the topic in the last 15 years would not.
I don't expect the average 8th grader to be able to understand a lead article in Science/Nature. However, things have gotten to the point where I can have a PhD in Biochemistry and not be able to truly appreciate what an article is getting at if it isn't in the same sub-sub-discipline. There is rarely a good reason that articles can't be written to be understandable by somebody with a good undergraduate education in the general sub-discipline.
Ditto for seminars. They typically have 10 minutes of half-decent introductory material that anybody with a decent background could follow, and then that is followed by 50 minutes of head nodding for material that only an ultra-specialist could possibly appreciate. Of course, everybody acts engaged because who wants to admit that the emperor has no clothes?
I would say he's not an expert in any given area, but he has bloody good idea about what's going on in anything he touches. I'm pretty sure that's as well due to the hands-on mentality of (partially unsupervised) research he had to do in his PhD - I doubt he's ever gonna touch those boron compounds again (subfield of a subfield of chemistry), but the transferrable skills he learned are invaluable.
I would say that he probably had all those skills before he enrolled for his Ph.D. Certainly the experience of working on the program would have helped develop those skills, as would have working in almost any other area where he could use those skills.
Ph.D.s are just another HR resume filter, backed by some tradition. From my observations in grad school I'm not convinced that you actually "learn" much - certainly not compared to the time investment and limited pay.
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Indeed, you could probably blackmail quite a few people by simply suggesting that you have evidence linking them to OBL now, even if you don't. If they fall for it then they obviously had something to hide.
There is no guarantee that technology like AES will ever be broken. History suggests that it will be, but the complexity of modern symmetric ciphers is such that we may never break them.
Now, what we might come up with is some way to read bits out of RAM chips that has been powered off for years, or other ways to side-step the cipher itself. If the encryption key was selected from a limited keyspace (such as the set of all hashes of 8-character alphanumeric strings) then that would also allow a practical attack.
However, if you encrypt something with a truly random AES key, and completely destroy all vestigial traces of the key and plaintext, then there is no current reason to believe that the plaintext will be recovered before the heat death of the universe, if every atom in the universe is used to construct a computer used to crack it. The keyspace is THAT large...
A DNA test takes 3 days to complete in the same way that it takes 5 days to ship a package across the US or in the way that you leave your car with a dealer for four hours to get an oil change, or in the way that you stand in line for 30 minutes at the grocery store to buy a pack of gum. That is how fast it is typically done for those who care more about cost than speed, but very little of that duration is spent actually doing anything.
There are a number of different kinds of DNA analyses, but most involve probably 20 minutes of enzymatic treatment, and running the resulting fragments out on a gel or capillary, and maybe visualizing the results. You can probably get results in an hour or two cheap if you put the sample at the head of the line for testing.
I'm sure more exotic technologies can get results even faster.
If they were planning a raid for some period of time no doubt they'd have expected this possible result and would have had test equipment nearby. Figure that the body would be taken straight for testing, and they'd probably be swabbing his cheek before the rotor blades even stopped turning. The military is VERY efficient when there is a plan, and if this was priority one you can bet that everything was ready to go minus the sample when it arrived...
It probably would have been even more effective if it had been erected on the boundary line than some hundred metres inside Palestine territory.
Define "effective." I don't see how placement has any impact at all on its effectiveness at stopping attacks. You can argue that it affects legitimacy and diplomacy and all that, but it seems plenty effective to me.
I'm pretty sure the Japanese soldiers were wearing uniforms.
Yup, and I'm pretty sure the atomic bombs were aimed at some of them. Strategic warfare isn't pretty, and fortunately most of the recent world conflicts that the US has been involved with have been so one-sided that it has not been necessary. You do see it in places like Africa where tribes go all-out with genocide and all that.
When I look at history I really don't see much evidence for the real-world practice of "limited war." About the only time you ever see armies limiting themselves is when there is either very little at stake (and loss is preferable to loss of reputation), or where the outcome of the war is in so little doubt that armies are willing to fight with a handicap. Whenever you see true equals going to war you end up with a battle that touches every home. Often they start out moderately limited, but as time goes on and the body counts climb, both sides continue to escalate until one side loses either the will or the ability to fight on.
It should also be noted that the Japanese weren't exactly following the Geneva Conventions. They did wear uniforms, but their treatment of POWs was brutal to say the least. The Germans did follow the conventions on the Western front, and the evidence is that the allies more-or-less tried to do the same (at least on a personal level - strategic bombing was what it was at the time).
I didn't know the CIA had jurisdiction in Pakistan...
Hence the reason that Obama's speech thanked Pakistan for their cooperation. Perhaps their act of cooperation was just not being competent enough to figure out that the US had tracked OBL down so that they could warn him. We'll never know (what, are they going to file a complaint?).
The US pretends to care a whit what Pakistan thinks, and Pakistan pretends to not mind the US doing raids there (at least not enough to do anything about it).
The bottom line is that if an individual manages to tick off half of the nations on the world, and nations controlling probably 90% of the world's GDP, then they better do a good job hiding because once they know where you are there isn't much that is going to protect you unless you control at least the other half of the world.
This was an extremely high value, high profile target who was stationary in a known location. It wasn't as though a single lone agent bumped into him on the street and had one shot at taking him out- this was an operation that should have been planned and executed with the sole purpose of taking him alive, using every varied means at their disposal to do so.
I'm sure they did all of that. However, soldiers are for killing people and blowing things up, first and foremost. I'm sure the mission planners were told that given the option of letting him go or killing him, they were told to do the latter.
Depending on the circumstances you also can't send in the entire US army to go arrest him. Everybody in the country would see them coming and OBL would be in hiding before they even got halfway through the town.
And, in the end, if you're a soldier and the guy you're trying to arrest is shooting at you, or in the midst of a crowd shooting at you, you pull the trigger first and ask questions later. If the guy you're trying to arrest is in a room and people are shooting at you from the doorway, then in goes a grenade and anybody coming out the door is shot.
The fact that they even sent people in shows just how much they wanted to make sure they got him personally. If a bunch of well-armed terrorists were hiding in a house and they weren't so high-ranking they'd have just bombed the living daylights out of the whole compound and checked the dental records after.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nothing. Far more lives were taken in routine strategic bombings.
Civilians dying is just part of war. If you don't want lots of dead bodies all over the place, best not to get into a war in the first place. If you do get in a war, if you really care about civilians then dress your soldiers in uniform so that the people shooting at them can tell the difference.
Depends on what kinds of leaders you're talking about. You'll find examples in both camps. OBL seems to be a genuine fanatic - he was from a wealthy family and clearly could be doing a lot better than living in a cave. Sure, he is more famous than he would have been, but few self-interested people would choose being infamous and living in caves over vacationing in Dubai or whatever.
On the other hand, MANY completely self-interested people do use religion and ideology to control the masses.
I was just wondering about the level of desperation people needed to reach before they think blowing themselves up is a good idea.
How is choosing 70 virgins in heaven over living in a wasteland an act of desperation? If you actually believe what the terrorists are selling, then it is a completely rational decision to make. And, when everybody you respect in life is telling you that the guy preaching that stuff knows what they're talking about, why would you believe differently?
Groupthink is an extremely powerful influence. The solution for terrorism is probably the same as the solution for smoking, and I have no idea what that is...
For all the grief Israel was getting about how the big wall wouldn't do squat to stop attacks, the reality is that attacks were making the news at least weekly before the wall, and now we just have the 2x/yr rocket attack or whatever.
You can like the wall or hate it, but there is no question that it has almost eliminated the routine attacks.
Simple - credit card has an embedded private key. Merchant transmits to card transaction details, card displays summary of transaction on its LCD screen, cardholder types PIN onto card's keypad (NOT a merchant's keypad), and card gives the merchant a signed authorization. Merchant presents authorization to the bank.
Transactions that can be authorized can either be single-use or recurring, with the parameters of recurring transactions defined in advance (max amount and interval). Transactions are always tied to a particular merchant, and submitting subsequent transactions requires the merchant's credentials, so stealing the authorization does nobody any good. All transactions and authorizations have GUIDs that are logged by the bank, so replay attacks don't work.
Cards could have a variety of interfaces, from USB to acoustic modem. The interface need not be secure, since the keys never pass over this channel. This kind of system would support both offline and online transactions, although just as with current cards offline transactions may not catch revocations or over-limit problems until they sync up. On the other hand, offline transactions would be protected from forged cards, since both sides of the transaction need to present a trusted certificate chain. You're also safe from various MITM attacks since the card displays who you're sending the payment to, and the credentials never leave the card. Even if you miss who the payment was made to the bank can easily trace what happened, since whoever planted the MITM device had to apply for its credentials, and the card would log the ID of that device, and for that matter the attacker can't do anything with the transaction authorization unless they present it for payment, which is a lot riskier than selling credit card numbers.
No, said number would only be valid for a particular payee, for a particular period of time, for particular amounts at particular intervals.
Kind of like how a gpg/smime email is protected by a signature, and not by mailing copies of your private key all over the place.
The problem with credit cards is that they authenticate transactions with a shared secret that you share with everybody you do business with. That is 1940s technology.
Nah, a real linux user would create a FUSE filesystem that mounts an avi as a directory tree full of still images.
They'd pipe those stills through aalib so that the actual edits could be performed using sed.
We're talking about the first Google-backed phone and tablet Android platforms. Suggesting that Google might treat their first tablet the way they treated their first phone isn't going out on a limb. They might, they might not.
Look, I'll take Android over iOS any day. However, the one thing that Apple gets is that long-term customer support impacts the perceived value of the platform. Carriers don't get that - they view a broken phone as a way to sell you a new phone. Google says "hey, it isn't our problem."
Microsoft would be the other example of a company that takes a long-term view of its products. I'm still getting regular security patches to XP. Android patches security bugs in new releases all the time - when was the last time you saw a backport to even a one-year-old phone?
Apple is selling all the iPhones and iPads they can make. They could not possibly be doing better, unless they sold the same amount and charged more.
Or, unless they made more devices and sold them. There is no reason Apple couldn't make as many devices per year as the competition - the reason they don't is because they know they can't sell them all, and that would just be a waste of money. Sure, Apple couldn't scale up overnight, but after being on the market for years Apple is making as many devices as it planned to. Either that or they're incompetent. No sane manufacturer lets manufacturing volume be the key determiner of sales - at least not in the long term. Now, being sold out for the first month isn't a big deal - you also don't build your factories to crank out first-week demand over the whole life of the product for a hot item like an iPhone.
Unlike the iPad, there is a fully vendor-supported unlock on the Xoom and an underground which happily takes the open-sourced Android (of which iOS is not) and will provide updates for years to come.
You mean like on the ADP, which was sold by Google and which received its last Google-supplied update before they even stopped selling it?
Many older, discontinued, and "abandoned" Android phones are being updated to Froyo or even Gingerbread, regularly.
You mean like the ADP, which only had Froyo come out on Cyanogenmod stable late last fall, and that is only barely usable with the radio memory hack that came out around December?
Google has a history of abandoning their first phone models before they even stop selling them. Apple has a history of supporting them for multiple years. If you're an early-adopter the android picture isn't that pretty.
It wasn't until the Nexus One that Google had a platform that looked like it was reasonably future-proof - and the N1 came out 1.5 years after the first commercially sold android phones.
I think that some people just don't realize that the Motorola Droid and N1 were not the first Android phones out there. When Google puts the Nexus name on a tablet I'll be somewhat more inclined to think that the platform is a keeper...
Yup, RIM was competitive back when the competition was a feature phone with WAP support.
Now only inertia keeps them around. No company would invest in the platform at this point unless the ROI was really quick. Once everybody migrates to either iOS or Android RIM's sales will plummet.
I think that student loans absolutely should be regulated, or preferably abolished.
Why do kids go to a $30k/yr college and take out $15k in loans while their parents somehow come up with another $15k (likely much in loans as well)?
Simple - a 12th grader has no concept of how much money $30k is, and all his friends are going to college, and the guidance counselor says that it is a good idea, and only losers don't go. For whatever reason spending $30k/yr studying history is just considered the norm. The kid gets to hang out with friends all day and gets free food and a roof and nobody asking when he is going to be home, so they gladly sign the line and worry about the debt later.
Education is not a choice that should be up to those who cannot pay for it. I'm fine with general public education. I'd be fine with improving primary education so that graduates are better equipped to enter the workforce. I just don't see the value in letting kids get themselves into huge amounts of debt that they will never have the ability to repay.
Yeah, just like how the RIAA lawsuits led to a change in the law...
Uh, if I want to hire an engineer to build me a bridge then I could care less about their knowledge of the Trojan war. Maybe if I have them building horse sculptures or something I'll care more. The last thing I want is for the most promising engineering students being held up over art classes or whatever.
The problem is that we have way too many PhDs and the degree has lost all meaning and they are difficult to employ. If you want to increase the rigor in the field of study that is one thing. If you want to just impose arbitrary barriers to graduation then you just make it even more into a reward for persistence.
If your only goal is to reduce the number of PhDs you could just as easily award them only to people over six feet tall, and have about as meaningful a result as making them take more history (unless that is the field the degree is in).
Now, personally I love history and all that fluff. I find it intellectually stimulating. However, if I'm interviewing somebody for a job I care a lot less about how interesting conversation at the lunch table will be than if I'm going to end up doing his job for him or having to justify terminating him and keeping the slot open.
Often the problem isn't the students - rather it is the parents who are paying for the degree.
A neighbor had a son who studied some aspect of mid-eval organ music, and ended up being unemployable. Why the parents paid for an education that had no possibility of an ROI was a mystery to me - they weren't independently wealthy as best as I can tell. I think he ended up selling pianos or something in a retail store for not a whole lot more than what you could get at any retail establishment - certainly he wasn't making use of 99% of what he studied, and piano lessons would be a lot cheaper than a degree.
The problem is compounded by teachers and guidance counselors who chant the mantra that education isn't about trade school and that kids should follow their dreams and all that. Being able to make a basic living has almost been turned into a vice.
I think the problem is in part that university has just become the 13th through 16th grades. Kids are institutionalized and can't imagine living in a manner that doesn't involve a cafeteria full of peers their own age trading gossip, with lots of hanging out in the evenings. For various reasons parents are basically just expected to provide a college education for their kids - it is a matter of pride/etc.
So, when little Johnny is in 12th grade he has a few choices:
1. Join the military.
2. Find a job.
3. Hang out in the basement when all your friends are off to college, until the parents make you do # 1 or 2.
4. Sign up for college.
Just about everybody with average grades can go to college SOMEWHERE. Sure, they might not get financial aid, but parents are often all too willing to borrow $100k to finance their kids education.
Talking to my kids friends it is clear that most have no idea what they want to do in life. Many go to college undeclared, or with a major that is tentative at best. Many openly talk about being on a 5-6 year plan. Why not - college is certainly more fun than many avenues of work! It has become the path of least resistance.
There is plenty of opportunity out there for those who learn a trade. College is also a fine way to equip oneself for a career, but one should be pretty sure about the career before making this kind of an investment. I'd never pay for a child to attend a college unless they already have demonstrated proficiency and dedication to the field they are choosing to go into. Want to be a teacher, well volunteer to tutor kids or something in your spare time. Want to be a chemist, well volunteer to help your teacher prep for lab or something and compete in the science fair. No need to make a million dollars before graduating high school, but demonstrate that it is more than a passing fancy that won't last beyond the first 40-hour week.
As far as universities being some kind of great noble institution of general learning - well, that is nice if you want them to go back to what they were in the middle ages - a dumping ground for the children of the wealthy. If you aren't independently wealthy then spending $100k just to feel intellectually fulfilled is a tremendous waste of money. Go get a job first, and if you want take some night classes - if you just want intellectual fulfillment then you can get it without the stress of worrying about grades or degree requirements. If you're paying for it with your own money and meeting your responsibilities then nobody has the right to criticize you.
Yup - when I was working on my PhD I frequently found reading any kind of academic journal highly frustrating. I was at the top of my class in a top-10 university and yet outside of my very specific field the literature was just about incomprehensible, and I have a pretty wide variety of knowledge (in my opinion). Even within my field I found that papers often used needlessly obscure jargon - and not just because of the need for precision. I could understand them but could see how others who haven't read every article on the topic in the last 15 years would not.
I don't expect the average 8th grader to be able to understand a lead article in Science/Nature. However, things have gotten to the point where I can have a PhD in Biochemistry and not be able to truly appreciate what an article is getting at if it isn't in the same sub-sub-discipline. There is rarely a good reason that articles can't be written to be understandable by somebody with a good undergraduate education in the general sub-discipline.
Ditto for seminars. They typically have 10 minutes of half-decent introductory material that anybody with a decent background could follow, and then that is followed by 50 minutes of head nodding for material that only an ultra-specialist could possibly appreciate. Of course, everybody acts engaged because who wants to admit that the emperor has no clothes?
I would say he's not an expert in any given area, but he has bloody good idea about what's going on in anything he touches. I'm pretty sure that's as well due to the hands-on mentality of (partially unsupervised) research he had to do in his PhD - I doubt he's ever gonna touch those boron compounds again (subfield of a subfield of chemistry), but the transferrable skills he learned are invaluable.
I would say that he probably had all those skills before he enrolled for his Ph.D. Certainly the experience of working on the program would have helped develop those skills, as would have working in almost any other area where he could use those skills.
Ph.D.s are just another HR resume filter, backed by some tradition. From my observations in grad school I'm not convinced that you actually "learn" much - certainly not compared to the time investment and limited pay.