A problem is that it's difficult to design a system to automatically determine "risky" or "rogue" or "non-normal" behavior in investment banking, because taking crazy bets is what they do, and interpreting their official policies loosely is a big part of that. Sometimes it turns out massively well, in which case bonuses all around; other times very badly, in which case start looking for ways to label the guy "rogue" and fire him. But it's de facto, if not officially, part of "normal" operation of an investment bank; it just sometimes turns out badly.
How much of high school is useful everyday to anyone? I have never once applied the Bohr model of the atom to my daily life (and I'm even an academic researcher in the sciences), nor the writing of Victor Hugo, nor the knowledge I gained of 16th-century French kings. Several of those things are culturally interesting and may make it easier for me to read and understand other things, but hey, that's also true with knowing the basics of how a computer is programmed.
Yeah, I think this is the most important part. Even if you aren't a technologist, it's a bad situation to be in the 21st century and have no understanding of how systems work, at least in principle, because you're unable to offer even commentary or suggestions about them, or think about how to interface with them, in a way that's grounded in anything approaching reality. This has sometimes been called "procedural literacy" [pdf] or "computational thinking" [pdf].
Is it wrong that I find goatse to be a sort of comforting, nostalgic presence these days? Once it may have inspired revulsion, true. But now I think: ah, a familiar friend from the 1990s Web 1.0 internet! We have had our differences, sure, but at least we are not like those Web 3.0 types, eh? Perhaps we are even allies now? Wouldn't we all like to see the looks on their faces when a goatse link gets thrown into the social-media mix?
If contracted out properly, yes. Somehow I expect the U.S. would totally fuck up the privatization, though, and end up with a cost-plus contract that would actually give the privatized T.S.A. more incentive to institute bullshit and expensive security measures, so they could bill back more cost-plus fees to the contract.
I don't actually understand what caused people to suddenly consider it ineffective, either. I mean, yeah, there was 9/11. But the 70s had a whole series of very high-profile hijackings, and nobody apparently gave enough of a damn then to institute the kinds of policies we have in 2011.
The model can work, but only if the government is actually setting the terms and properly bidding out, whereas the U.S., judging on past record, seems to end up in some cozy relationship where the government and the bidders are in cahoots.
The private-bidding model also works in Scandinavia, where for example the bus system of several countries is run by private contractors. The government sets parameters for what routes will be run, what fares will be charged to passengers, etc., and then solicits bids for private companies who submit what their fee for providing the service would be (usually the set fares don't cover the route, so the private firms are bidding on how much subsidy they would require to fulfill the mandated service, essentially).
Somehow I don't have any confidence that a privatized city-bus system would work out as well in NYC as it does in Copenhagen, though.
True, that's an interesting point. Perhaps the mere existence of "intellectual-seeming" games accessible to the elderly can have benefit, separate from the question of how intellectual they in fact are.
She doesn't seem to have a version of the study itself on her website, but I certainly hope the methodology is more rigorous than this makes it sound:
felt that their pattern recognition improved
I am quite sure many Bejeweled Blitz players, if asked after playing some Bejeweled Blitz if their pattern recognition had improved, would tell you "yes". But a more interesting question is whether it had, in fact, improved.
I actually think plenty of your arguments can be applied to criminalizing your own speech here, though, so I didn't mean that entirely facetiously.
Germany has a notion of "advocating against the Constitutional system", which holds that any political position within the Constitutional system is legal but people expressing political viewpoints against the fundamentals of the system can be restricted, or in more extreme cases criminalized. So, for example, arguing for or against state healthcare is legal, but arguing against Germany's Constitutional principles that grant Jews citizenship, or provide for democratic elections, are both illegal. The obvious goal of course is to criminalize neo-Nazis, but it also includes revolutionary leftists, and can include severe criticisms of Germany's constitutional structure, depending on how broadly a procedure and court wish to read it (they generally choose to read it narrowly). Under such a principle, certain arguments criticizing Germany's version of freedom-of-speech, depending on how strongly and how extensively, can themselves be prohibited speech!
I personally feel that people who advocate on the internet for criminalizing speech would be better off in jail. Where does that put me? =D
If of course believe in free speech in normal circumstances, but when people take it to the extreme of attacking freedom of speech itself, well then maybe there need to be limits.
The U.K. doesn't have freedom of speech, as the passage you quoted aptly demonstrates. Any speech that "cause[s] distress or anxiety" is illegal in the UK, if an authority elects to prosecute it, which is a very wide range of speech.
Listen here, Anonymous Coward, you might think you can hide your anti-democratic hate speech behind a veil of anonymity, but we WILL track you down and find who you are, and then your offensive comments, that dishonor the memory of the American Founding Fathers, will be properly punished.
If you study dynamical systems, what you describe is only really true for the class vaguely described as "well-behaved", and in practice almost no dynamical systems are well-behaved--- strange pathological attractors and oscillations and unstable states are the rule, not the exception. If you add in a whole bunch of movements in a dynamical system, the most likely outcome is that it will drive the whole system to different states, shifting prices out of its own activity. Your analysis, assuming price shifts can only be driven by real events exogenous to the market, would only work in a stable, well-behaved system.
Computers are actually better at certain kinds of diagnosis than the overworked GP, though, and have been for years. In particular, computers are very good at conditional probability, and at combining information from thousands of study results that a typical GP doesn't have time to keep up with. The MYCIN AI system beat most doctors in diagnosing blood infections over 30 years ago, but wasn't adopted in actual medical practice mainly for political reasons.
Plus, I don't think the Stones and Beatles even own the rights to their music from the 60s. Weren't both groups screwed out of their earlier song rights by their managers?
That's the point--- now those managers are screwing the public out of its rightful inheritance, too.
Re:Without remorse there is no rehabilitation.
on
Kevin Mitnick Answers
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The response didn't seem that unreasonable to me. You accused him of "some of the most amoral and harmful acts in modern computing history", which is absurd, because he didn't really damage much of anything. He's not even particularly notable as a "hacker"; he's more notable for the crazy overreaction than anything else.
Typical FRAND licensing doesn't imply royalty-free (that's what "royalty-free" licensing is). It's common to impose a few cents royalty per copy, or something of that sort, with the fee shared out among consortium members. That's how the MPEG standard is managed, for example.
They're related in this case due to the licensing involved in implementing a standard that includes patented components. Under FRAND licensing, patent-holders pool patents and agree to license them in a uniform way, but not for free. This makes it impossible to distribute software that implements the patents for free, which makes the general way open-source projects are run impossible.
I suppose it depends in part on what you define as an "open standard" to begin with. Is something really an open standard if it cannot be implemented without paying patent licensing fees?
I believe that under the DMCA, a copy-protection device has to be deliberately for the purpose of copy protection; not every physical fact that makes copying harder is legally a copy-protection device. There are also a number of safe-harbors that permit circumventing DRM for various purposes, such as interoperability.
In any case, I would be willing to be that if, say, the Entertainment Software Association sued the Stanford Library over its game-preservation program, they would lose. In fact they are almost certainly not going to sue them, in part due to the risk of setting a negative precedent.
Slashdot Mirror
A problem is that it's difficult to design a system to automatically determine "risky" or "rogue" or "non-normal" behavior in investment banking, because taking crazy bets is what they do, and interpreting their official policies loosely is a big part of that. Sometimes it turns out massively well, in which case bonuses all around; other times very badly, in which case start looking for ways to label the guy "rogue" and fire him. But it's de facto, if not officially, part of "normal" operation of an investment bank; it just sometimes turns out badly.
How much of high school is useful everyday to anyone? I have never once applied the Bohr model of the atom to my daily life (and I'm even an academic researcher in the sciences), nor the writing of Victor Hugo, nor the knowledge I gained of 16th-century French kings. Several of those things are culturally interesting and may make it easier for me to read and understand other things, but hey, that's also true with knowing the basics of how a computer is programmed.
Yeah, I think this is the most important part. Even if you aren't a technologist, it's a bad situation to be in the 21st century and have no understanding of how systems work, at least in principle, because you're unable to offer even commentary or suggestions about them, or think about how to interface with them, in a way that's grounded in anything approaching reality. This has sometimes been called "procedural literacy" [pdf] or "computational thinking" [pdf].
Is it wrong that I find goatse to be a sort of comforting, nostalgic presence these days? Once it may have inspired revulsion, true. But now I think: ah, a familiar friend from the 1990s Web 1.0 internet! We have had our differences, sure, but at least we are not like those Web 3.0 types, eh? Perhaps we are even allies now? Wouldn't we all like to see the looks on their faces when a goatse link gets thrown into the social-media mix?
If contracted out properly, yes. Somehow I expect the U.S. would totally fuck up the privatization, though, and end up with a cost-plus contract that would actually give the privatized T.S.A. more incentive to institute bullshit and expensive security measures, so they could bill back more cost-plus fees to the contract.
I don't actually understand what caused people to suddenly consider it ineffective, either. I mean, yeah, there was 9/11. But the 70s had a whole series of very high-profile hijackings, and nobody apparently gave enough of a damn then to institute the kinds of policies we have in 2011.
The model can work, but only if the government is actually setting the terms and properly bidding out, whereas the U.S., judging on past record, seems to end up in some cozy relationship where the government and the bidders are in cahoots.
The private-bidding model also works in Scandinavia, where for example the bus system of several countries is run by private contractors. The government sets parameters for what routes will be run, what fares will be charged to passengers, etc., and then solicits bids for private companies who submit what their fee for providing the service would be (usually the set fares don't cover the route, so the private firms are bidding on how much subsidy they would require to fulfill the mandated service, essentially).
Somehow I don't have any confidence that a privatized city-bus system would work out as well in NYC as it does in Copenhagen, though.
True, that's an interesting point. Perhaps the mere existence of "intellectual-seeming" games accessible to the elderly can have benefit, separate from the question of how intellectual they in fact are.
actually the opposite---the FCC is considering allowing more color into the heretofore reserved 'white spaces'
She doesn't seem to have a version of the study itself on her website, but I certainly hope the methodology is more rigorous than this makes it sound:
I am quite sure many Bejeweled Blitz players, if asked after playing some Bejeweled Blitz if their pattern recognition had improved, would tell you "yes". But a more interesting question is whether it had, in fact, improved.
There's a pretty large gray area between yelling "fire!" in a crowd and any speech that causes someone "distress or anxiety", though.
I actually think plenty of your arguments can be applied to criminalizing your own speech here, though, so I didn't mean that entirely facetiously.
Germany has a notion of "advocating against the Constitutional system", which holds that any political position within the Constitutional system is legal but people expressing political viewpoints against the fundamentals of the system can be restricted, or in more extreme cases criminalized. So, for example, arguing for or against state healthcare is legal, but arguing against Germany's Constitutional principles that grant Jews citizenship, or provide for democratic elections, are both illegal. The obvious goal of course is to criminalize neo-Nazis, but it also includes revolutionary leftists, and can include severe criticisms of Germany's constitutional structure, depending on how broadly a procedure and court wish to read it (they generally choose to read it narrowly). Under such a principle, certain arguments criticizing Germany's version of freedom-of-speech, depending on how strongly and how extensively, can themselves be prohibited speech!
Relevant rant: eBay Patents 10-Click Checkout
EBay was oddly pretty open about this when they acquired a stake.
I personally feel that people who advocate on the internet for criminalizing speech would be better off in jail. Where does that put me? =D
If of course believe in free speech in normal circumstances, but when people take it to the extreme of attacking freedom of speech itself, well then maybe there need to be limits.
The U.K. doesn't have freedom of speech, as the passage you quoted aptly demonstrates. Any speech that "cause[s] distress or anxiety" is illegal in the UK, if an authority elects to prosecute it, which is a very wide range of speech.
Listen here, Anonymous Coward, you might think you can hide your anti-democratic hate speech behind a veil of anonymity, but we WILL track you down and find who you are, and then your offensive comments, that dishonor the memory of the American Founding Fathers, will be properly punished.
If you study dynamical systems, what you describe is only really true for the class vaguely described as "well-behaved", and in practice almost no dynamical systems are well-behaved--- strange pathological attractors and oscillations and unstable states are the rule, not the exception. If you add in a whole bunch of movements in a dynamical system, the most likely outcome is that it will drive the whole system to different states, shifting prices out of its own activity. Your analysis, assuming price shifts can only be driven by real events exogenous to the market, would only work in a stable, well-behaved system.
Computers are actually better at certain kinds of diagnosis than the overworked GP, though, and have been for years. In particular, computers are very good at conditional probability, and at combining information from thousands of study results that a typical GP doesn't have time to keep up with. The MYCIN AI system beat most doctors in diagnosing blood infections over 30 years ago, but wasn't adopted in actual medical practice mainly for political reasons.
Plus, I don't think the Stones and Beatles even own the rights to their music from the 60s. Weren't both groups screwed out of their earlier song rights by their managers?
That's the point--- now those managers are screwing the public out of its rightful inheritance, too.
The response didn't seem that unreasonable to me. You accused him of "some of the most amoral and harmful acts in modern computing history", which is absurd, because he didn't really damage much of anything. He's not even particularly notable as a "hacker"; he's more notable for the crazy overreaction than anything else.
Typical FRAND licensing doesn't imply royalty-free (that's what "royalty-free" licensing is). It's common to impose a few cents royalty per copy, or something of that sort, with the fee shared out among consortium members. That's how the MPEG standard is managed, for example.
They're related in this case due to the licensing involved in implementing a standard that includes patented components. Under FRAND licensing, patent-holders pool patents and agree to license them in a uniform way, but not for free. This makes it impossible to distribute software that implements the patents for free, which makes the general way open-source projects are run impossible.
I suppose it depends in part on what you define as an "open standard" to begin with. Is something really an open standard if it cannot be implemented without paying patent licensing fees?
I believe that under the DMCA, a copy-protection device has to be deliberately for the purpose of copy protection; not every physical fact that makes copying harder is legally a copy-protection device. There are also a number of safe-harbors that permit circumventing DRM for various purposes, such as interoperability.
In any case, I would be willing to be that if, say, the Entertainment Software Association sued the Stanford Library over its game-preservation program, they would lose. In fact they are almost certainly not going to sue them, in part due to the risk of setting a negative precedent.
If you legitimately own a copy on some medium, medium-shifting to another one is legal, just like you can rip your own music CDs to mp3s.