I read through the report and it was weird to me as well...
I can't place it exactly...it had a 'Stepford Wives' sheen to it. It seemed fake.
Wonder what model BoA valuers have in mind for this. It weirds me out.
It seems unthinkable to me, but BoA could be looking to be a BTC exchange like Mt. Gox or Bitpay.
It's all about controlling the gateways. BoA loves fees, and they'd make a ton of $$$ charging people to convert BTC to a currency of choice.
Until you can buy gas, groceries, and pay credit card, mortgage, and government fees/taxes with Bitcoin the true power and value of the currency is in controlling the gateway to **actual currency**
That's the final unavoidable pinch point where everyone has to "pay the man"
TFA did not say we need to the government to judge each 'discovery' (btw where does maintaining software, what TFA talks about, fit into 'discovery'?)
TFA said engineers should consider the ethical implications of what they do in choosing their work...which **of course** they should
Everyone, everywhere has patterns of choices of behavior. In work or anything else besides work...in all aspect of life...if you have ethics they have to be consistent. Otherwise why have them?
If you say using ethics in work (computer work here) is bad or not necessary then to be consistent you must also say that same thing for all of the things humans do in life.
this whole thread is about me asking for specific policy alternatives from critics...
you're still avoiding the question...
the fact that, after all this, you ask "What does it matter?" repeatedly instead of giving specific policies leads me to believe there isn't any valuable discussion to be had from you
my plan is simple...actually it's Thomas Jefferson & other founders plan...
what government policy is effecting the behavior you don't agree with?
what do *you* specifically want to change?
identify that, then use your powers as a citizen to advance policy that would be different
this work happens every day on every possible policy...I used to be a social studies teacher & the idea is that theoretically only a person who didn't finish high school or a non-US person should be asking "how" our system works...
I gather from reading your comment and GP that we could actually be seeing M$ pirating its own software.
MS would ideally like people to pay for windows, but failing that they would still rather see pirate windows than linux dominate.
Right. This makes complete sense given the way we've seen M$ for the last 30+ years.
I can completely envision a scenario where M$ releases pirated versions of XP through 3rd parties...lets say 'facilitates' it...
Which explains this:
There is even a common software program used to deliver updates to pirated XP machines. This software also comes with anti-malware tools, and is called "360."
why else would *software pirates* take the time and effort to release updates? It takes manpower, people who have to be made to do the work. I know this is a bit easier given its China but still, pirates don't use resources this way.
Every time...every single time a story like this is posted we get a wave of this:
"you idiots...fuck the government...privacy is dead"
Who are these people? Are they real people or bots? Why does the fact that governments spy mean we, the people who run this country, can't hold them accountable?
It's completely totally up to **US** to demand our government do its job & obey our rights
it came in a pretty package titled "network neutrality" -- in spite of the fact that many of us old timers told you that it will end badly if you let the FCC have any sort of authority over the internet.
What's your alternative? Do you seriously think deregulation is the answer?
Yeah I came to post the same question.
GP may be the type that looks at this all as "inevitable" and will just keep lobbing criticisms of policies while never stating what an alterative would be...that happens alot around these parts.
We need Net Neutrality. Eventually technology will end scarcity such that providing free secure internet will be viewed like the government providing roads.
All I see is a bunch of telecom fiefdoms expanding their influence.
That's certainly one way to view this...I completely understand. However I think we can look at this as a challenge and not an inevitability.
*We run our government* to the degree to which we claim that power. We can demand the FCC end this nonsense! We should all email the FCC and tell them any discrimination in traffic, even if contextualized as a "speed boost" or "preferred delivery" is just marketing language for ending Net Neutrality. Tell them "No"
That's a starting point.
Techies have to get out there and make our voices heard on this. We need to explain why any tiered service is a method to get us to this.
The Net Neutrality blackout day worked...it got the conversation going in the right direction.
I honestly believe that this FCC chairman may be just an airhead. They hire these guys to "create jobs" and "foster innovation" so they are business types usually with a law background. They aren't hired for their technical knowledge.
I can envision a scenario where the FCC chairman said this because he heard some damn TED talk or some kind of one-sided presentation from Verizon.
We need to give the advisors of the FCC chairman and Obama the intellectual meat to use as bait for their bosses when they explain what's happening on a policy like Net Neutrality.
indie bands are getting hosed from all corners these days...
All with very sticky fingers handling the money.
It's true even in weird situations, like a local punk band in my West Coast city that released a *cassette tape* album that had a free download card
Essentially, all they needed was someone to print the cassette for them, b/c the download was through Bandcamp.
A local indie label with several good releases and some credibility agreed to release the tape, but did not tell the band until after the tape was ordered from teh factory and packaging pressed that they don't get paid until large chunks of the inventory are sold.
Essentially, the "label" was just selling the tapes on consignment in local shops and on its website, which means the "label" has to follow up with all that, going and bugging each dirtball indie shop about their consignment tapes each week (if they're lucky), then contact the artist before they see any money from the tape release.
I'm not saying major labels aren't way worse, I hate them all, just saying local scenes have started to really cannibalize themselves...
I"m glad Spotify is paying artists some money. Are they getting "hosed" as TFA suggests? If competition can pay more, then maybe...
But this isn't only about competition...the RIAA and copyright holders make much of the publishing choices for the artists...we can't really discuss this in the context of the current music industry. Just the damage Clear Channel alone has done....
So, if we imagine a music industry w/ perfect competition, then the free market concept says that if no company rises to challenge Spotify's price structure then **NO** the artists arent' getting hosed.
I know I'm exhibiting the same passive/aggressive pissing-contest bullshit I have been deploring when I do this....but how about let's settle down a bit? let's find some 'middle ground'
(doesn't that sound like what a dept. chair says right before 'budget cuts' are announced?)
to the myriad AC's who are apparently employed in academia, YES I sympathize greatly with the plight of how faculty are treated. Very much so in fact.
i'm not going to list my resume...but I've been an adjunct & worked on post-doc projects in weird arrangements, and taught college classes as a contract staff and as a TA being misused....
I think we are all on the same side here...but somehow somewhere an AC took a part of a comment of mine and ran with it
I'd really appreciate some discussion about TFA in relation to layman's terms...
We could start by discussing how Feynman himself said that a scientist doesn't "know" something unless they can explain it to an upper-level undergrad majoring in the field of the specific piece of challenging theory.
That's not exactly "layman" but I'd venture to say the general/. reader is either a college graduate or self-taught to that approximate level.
to speak on this topic if you don't have experience as an admin or teaching professor or researcher?
have you been a lab tech for 10 years?
either you are some kind of prof., be it adjunct, post-doc, research only, teaching, admin, etc or you've just been spitballing bullshit about academia this whole time from your imagination
either way...you just backtracked completely then tried to make a deformed version of the point you were trying to make before...
If someone was trying to talk about the equal transit time fallacy of how people commonly talk about how airplane wings work, and you try to counter with, "But airplanes exist!" You're completely missing the point, and aren't doing anything to help with the issue that one particular analogy teaches more wrong than right.
that's like saying a person who makes a particular analogy that describes a real behavior theorized in reality is making harmful assumptions because your myopic understanding of physics terms and how they are used in conversation compared to in specific literature triggers your egotistical need to use jargon and your knowledge of the history of a certain research to counter updated understandings of how something like non-local quantum entangled particles are theorized to behave and thereby insult a layman AC who actually had the right idea all along
It quite clearly conflicts with what I've seen in astronomy, physics and electrical engineering fields. So either I give you the benefit of the doubt, and take your description to be accurate meaning those fields have bigger issues, or I assume that most fields are roughly the same, and then that means your perspective is out of whack.
Or, your perception could be wrong!
Or, your collegues and students don't naturally talk to you, a seasoned professor, about the problems from seasoned professors!
It is clear you have already decided how you think about this, as most professors typically do, and are just competing with yourself to see if you can rhetorically "put me in my place"
You are part of the problem, even if it is in a small way.
this is about a condescending phrase you tossed off about laymen and how analogies give them wild notions...
This is one of the reasons people think it obviously leads to faster than light communication, because they think, "If the results are always the same or opposite, I just pick one to communicate a 0 and the other a 1, etc."
and that is ***exactly*** how the tachyon anti-telephone works
someone with a fucking PhD saw the same behavior as the layman, and made a theoretical faster-than-light telephone design based on it
bottom line is that you're wrong in saying that analogies are bad because they give laymen wild ideas...in fact they have **pretty fucking cool ideas**
I feel sorry for the fields of CS and IT Engineering then.
ugh...**more** Lord of the Flies academia pissing-contest bullshit!
this problem spans disciplines...I commented based on my experience and I **assumed** a level of knowledge on my/. readers...I assumed they'd know that typically CS and especially engineering tend to be immune to this bullshit....
that's the problem...
theoretical physics (thanks Cambridge) and the engineering disciplines are becomming as bad as a fucking mail order Literature PhD
just because you know people who dont do this doesn't disprove my point, in fact, from reading your comment it seems you agree with the core of my criticism
why not just say you agree? why start off perpetuating the same pointeless academia pissing contest crap you admit is a problem???
call me cynical, but knowing academics (and those who pose as such) I'm sure that no matter how good your analogy is, they will take the areas where the analogy fails and tell you that you are wrong because of it...
all analogies have huge holes...the Scrodinger Cat analogy for example...
nitpicks aside, I agree that the idea that "Quantum" behavior is somehow mysterious, opaque and difficult for laymen to understand is bound in failings in academia (too much competition, not enough money).
to TFA, I myself came here to say that I honestly thought a link between "entanglement" and wormholes had already been established and was accepted.
I honestly feel like the problem is NOT with you, a layman, or your analogy, which is fine for understanding the concept of **non-locality** which is core to undrestanding what makes quantum physics "quantum"
Academia has folded in on itself because of Lord of the Flies like competition. Just recently/. had an article on it...comparing getting Tenure to becoming a drug lord>
My experience in CS and IT Engineering has shown the same.
People must stake their *whole careers* on overly specific theories that are not their own...almost no PhD's, even in physics increasingly, do actual **new research** in the best areas. Because of the competition, older acadmecs see it as part of their job to entrench themselves and the theories **they** have devoted themselves into the DNA of the org.
It's how MBA types work...but it has spread to academia. Everyone wants to put their thumb in the big piece of cake to keep it for themselves.
What I'm saying is, your analogy is just fine, and its the fault of academia that the published research hasn't caught up with even **common understanding**
but the simple fact that a lot of eyes are now focused on these people means that the exposure of their "serious" work has been increased by several orders of magnitude.
aw horseshit...you're aware of a problem, but your solution is to **shed all of your values** and **submit to an incorrect system**
you're selling us all out when you try to make this a guiding principle for your decisions:
often that's what really matters - not the underlying scientific value of your work - but that that work is attuned to tackle problems deemed more fashionable
it's people like you that make it difficult to do real science w/o the pop culture bullshit...
the way **we respond** tells society as a whole how to respond...when we play the bullshit game we are teaching society to do the same!!!
you encounter a problem and **roll over** and **sell out** your principles then devote your intellectual energy to justifying your decision and enforcing your perception of events that led to it on others
Slashdot Mirror
You're mistaken there. BTC is simply an electronic record of a sum. BTC is not hard currency.
You can't use BTC for any non-electronic transaction. That's alot of transactions.
That's not a replacement at all. BTC can't replace currency...unless it *becomes* a physical currency.
I read through the report and it was weird to me as well...
I can't place it exactly...it had a 'Stepford Wives' sheen to it. It seemed fake.
It seems unthinkable to me, but BoA could be looking to be a BTC exchange like Mt. Gox or Bitpay.
It's all about controlling the gateways. BoA loves fees, and they'd make a ton of $$$ charging people to convert BTC to a currency of choice.
Until you can buy gas, groceries, and pay credit card, mortgage, and government fees/taxes with Bitcoin the true power and value of the currency is in controlling the gateway to **actual currency**
That's the final unavoidable pinch point where everyone has to "pay the man"
BoA wants to be that "man"
Straw Man fallacy.
TFA did not say we need to the government to judge each 'discovery' (btw where does maintaining software, what TFA talks about, fit into 'discovery'?)
TFA said engineers should consider the ethical implications of what they do in choosing their work...which **of course** they should
Everyone, everywhere has patterns of choices of behavior. In work or anything else besides work...in all aspect of life...if you have ethics they have to be consistent. Otherwise why have them?
If you say using ethics in work (computer work here) is bad or not necessary then to be consistent you must also say that same thing for all of the things humans do in life.
this whole thread is about me asking for specific policy alternatives from critics...
you're still avoiding the question...
the fact that, after all this, you ask "What does it matter?" repeatedly instead of giving specific policies leads me to believe there isn't any valuable discussion to be had from you
if the "government" is doing something, it is somehow under government power
what, specifically, would you want to see changed?
you mention "armed forces and the local police will do all they can to 'follow orders'..."
so you would like local police forces to have different policies when dealing with protesters?
which city? during Occupy many cities had different responses...
if you identify the city then you can determine if police policy is controlled by the Mayor or a City Council
that's one example...just based on your comments about LE and military
so what is it that the government is doing you want to change?
my plan is simple...actually it's Thomas Jefferson & other founders plan...
what government policy is effecting the behavior you don't agree with?
what do *you* specifically want to change?
identify that, then use your powers as a citizen to advance policy that would be different
this work happens every day on every possible policy...I used to be a social studies teacher & the idea is that theoretically only a person who didn't finish high school or a non-US person should be asking "how" our system works...
let's do this more...
if we must suffer AC trolls getting 'firsties' we can at least make lemons into lemonade & collectively mock all AC's...
I gather from reading your comment and GP that we could actually be seeing M$ pirating its own software.
Right. This makes complete sense given the way we've seen M$ for the last 30+ years.
I can completely envision a scenario where M$ releases pirated versions of XP through 3rd parties...lets say 'facilitates' it...
Which explains this:
why else would *software pirates* take the time and effort to release updates? It takes manpower, people who have to be made to do the work. I know this is a bit easier given its China but still, pirates don't use resources this way.
Every time...every single time a story like this is posted we get a wave of this:
"you idiots...fuck the government...privacy is dead"
Who are these people? Are they real people or bots? Why does the fact that governments spy mean we, the people who run this country, can't hold them accountable?
It's completely totally up to **US** to demand our government do its job & obey our rights
so are you for or against Net Neutrality?
what is your alternative?
Yeah I came to post the same question.
GP may be the type that looks at this all as "inevitable" and will just keep lobbing criticisms of policies while never stating what an alterative would be...that happens alot around these parts.
We need Net Neutrality. Eventually technology will end scarcity such that providing free secure internet will be viewed like the government providing roads.
That's certainly one way to view this...I completely understand. However I think we can look at this as a challenge and not an inevitability.
*We run our government* to the degree to which we claim that power. We can demand the FCC end this nonsense! We should all email the FCC and tell them any discrimination in traffic, even if contextualized as a "speed boost" or "preferred delivery" is just marketing language for ending Net Neutrality. Tell them "No"
That's a starting point.
Techies have to get out there and make our voices heard on this. We need to explain why any tiered service is a method to get us to this.
The Net Neutrality blackout day worked...it got the conversation going in the right direction.
I honestly believe that this FCC chairman may be just an airhead. They hire these guys to "create jobs" and "foster innovation" so they are business types usually with a law background. They aren't hired for their technical knowledge.
I can envision a scenario where the FCC chairman said this because he heard some damn TED talk or some kind of one-sided presentation from Verizon.
We need to give the advisors of the FCC chairman and Obama the intellectual meat to use as bait for their bosses when they explain what's happening on a policy like Net Neutrality.
indie bands are getting hosed from all corners these days...
It's true even in weird situations, like a local punk band in my West Coast city that released a *cassette tape* album that had a free download card
Essentially, all they needed was someone to print the cassette for them, b/c the download was through Bandcamp.
A local indie label with several good releases and some credibility agreed to release the tape, but did not tell the band until after the tape was ordered from teh factory and packaging pressed that they don't get paid until large chunks of the inventory are sold.
Essentially, the "label" was just selling the tapes on consignment in local shops and on its website, which means the "label" has to follow up with all that, going and bugging each dirtball indie shop about their consignment tapes each week (if they're lucky), then contact the artist before they see any money from the tape release.
I'm not saying major labels aren't way worse, I hate them all, just saying local scenes have started to really cannibalize themselves...
I"m glad Spotify is paying artists some money. Are they getting "hosed" as TFA suggests? If competition can pay more, then maybe...
But this isn't only about competition...the RIAA and copyright holders make much of the publishing choices for the artists...we can't really discuss this in the context of the current music industry. Just the damage Clear Channel alone has done....
So, if we imagine a music industry w/ perfect competition, then the free market concept says that if no company rises to challenge Spotify's price structure then **NO** the artists arent' getting hosed.
I know I'm exhibiting the same passive/aggressive pissing-contest bullshit I have been deploring when I do this....but how about let's settle down a bit? let's find some 'middle ground'
(doesn't that sound like what a dept. chair says right before 'budget cuts' are announced?)
to the myriad AC's who are apparently employed in academia, YES I sympathize greatly with the plight of how faculty are treated. Very much so in fact.
i'm not going to list my resume...but I've been an adjunct & worked on post-doc projects in weird arrangements, and taught college classes as a contract staff and as a TA being misused....
I think we are all on the same side here...but somehow somewhere an AC took a part of a comment of mine and ran with it
I'd really appreciate some discussion about TFA in relation to layman's terms...
We could start by discussing how Feynman himself said that a scientist doesn't "know" something unless they can explain it to an upper-level undergrad majoring in the field of the specific piece of challenging theory.
That's not exactly "layman" but I'd venture to say the general /. reader is either a college graduate or self-taught to that approximate level.
to speak on this topic if you don't have experience as an admin or teaching professor or researcher?
have you been a lab tech for 10 years?
either you are some kind of prof., be it adjunct, post-doc, research only, teaching, admin, etc or you've just been spitballing bullshit about academia this whole time from your imagination
either way...you just backtracked completely then tried to make a deformed version of the point you were trying to make before...
that's like saying a person who makes a particular analogy that describes a real behavior theorized in reality is making harmful assumptions because your myopic understanding of physics terms and how they are used in conversation compared to in specific literature triggers your egotistical need to use jargon and your knowledge of the history of a certain research to counter updated understandings of how something like non-local quantum entangled particles are theorized to behave and thereby insult a layman AC who actually had the right idea all along
you're being unreasonable...
Or, your perception could be wrong!
Or, your collegues and students don't naturally talk to you, a seasoned professor, about the problems from seasoned professors!
It is clear you have already decided how you think about this, as most professors typically do, and are just competing with yourself to see if you can rhetorically "put me in my place"
You are part of the problem, even if it is in a small way.
this is about a condescending phrase you tossed off about laymen and how analogies give them wild notions...
and that is ***exactly*** how the tachyon anti-telephone works
someone with a fucking PhD saw the same behavior as the layman, and made a theoretical faster-than-light telephone design based on it
bottom line is that you're wrong in saying that analogies are bad because they give laymen wild ideas...in fact they have **pretty fucking cool ideas**
yes, it indeed **does** mean that, if *non-locally* entangled, we could have **faster than light communications**
maybe you're the one who should read up...the layman has one up on you using their logic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyonic_antitelephone
read it and weep...you're wrong and the layman was right
ugh...**more** Lord of the Flies academia pissing-contest bullshit!
this problem spans disciplines...I commented based on my experience and I **assumed** a level of knowledge on my /. readers...I assumed they'd know that typically CS and especially engineering tend to be immune to this bullshit....
that's the problem...
theoretical physics (thanks Cambridge) and the engineering disciplines are becomming as bad as a fucking mail order Literature PhD
just because you know people who dont do this doesn't disprove my point, in fact, from reading your comment it seems you agree with the core of my criticism
why not just say you agree? why start off perpetuating the same pointeless academia pissing contest crap you admit is a problem???
see, ^^^this is how you talk about physics in common language!
how many times do we scientists alienate people by trying to sound smart instead of making a connection to **their** a priori knowledge?
call me cynical, but knowing academics (and those who pose as such) I'm sure that no matter how good your analogy is, they will take the areas where the analogy fails and tell you that you are wrong because of it...
all analogies have huge holes...the Scrodinger Cat analogy for example...
nitpicks aside, I agree that the idea that "Quantum" behavior is somehow mysterious, opaque and difficult for laymen to understand is bound in failings in academia (too much competition, not enough money).
to TFA, I myself came here to say that I honestly thought a link between "entanglement" and wormholes had already been established and was accepted.
I honestly feel like the problem is NOT with you, a layman, or your analogy, which is fine for understanding the concept of **non-locality** which is core to undrestanding what makes quantum physics "quantum"
Academia has folded in on itself because of Lord of the Flies like competition. Just recently /. had an article on it...comparing getting Tenure to becoming a drug lord>
My experience in CS and IT Engineering has shown the same.
People must stake their *whole careers* on overly specific theories that are not their own...almost no PhD's, even in physics increasingly, do actual **new research** in the best areas. Because of the competition, older acadmecs see it as part of their job to entrench themselves and the theories **they** have devoted themselves into the DNA of the org.
It's how MBA types work...but it has spread to academia. Everyone wants to put their thumb in the big piece of cake to keep it for themselves.
What I'm saying is, your analogy is just fine, and its the fault of academia that the published research hasn't caught up with even **common understanding**
In gaming out standardized tests...
that's all this is measuring...whose standardized test-prep is better...
this does not measure education level or mental ability
Walking Dead is horrible in every way save for some of the cinemetography and special f/x...and most other zombie films aren't much better.
Only 28 Days Later actually depicts the *end* of such an epidemic accurately.
Zombies can't prepare a meal, they can't grow food, their bodies don't function...
The fact that there could theoretically have been a discussion like this by actual funded PhD scientists is ludicrous to me, BTW...
aw horseshit...you're aware of a problem, but your solution is to **shed all of your values** and **submit to an incorrect system**
you're selling us all out when you try to make this a guiding principle for your decisions:
it's people like you that make it difficult to do real science w/o the pop culture bullshit...
the way **we respond** tells society as a whole how to respond...when we play the bullshit game we are teaching society to do the same!!!
you encounter a problem and **roll over** and **sell out** your principles then devote your intellectual energy to justifying your decision and enforcing your perception of events that led to it on others