When I visited Texas I noticed that half the people were really cool guys and the other half were assholes. Of course most other places were like that but Texas took it to extremes.
They could but they don't. I think they made a business decision that it doesn't hurt them to have kids hanging out, and it would hurt them to enforce a policy like that. I assume that if someone got too unruly, they would kick them out.
In Manhattan, most of a restaurant's business is between 12:30 and 2pm. The rest of the day it's mostly empty. So it doesn't do any harm to have people studying or hanging out.
And besides, as the New York Times article said, it's unlikely that a group of teenagers will sit in a restaurant for hours without buying something.
The people around the world aren't smarter than unemployed Americans. The people who came in on H1Bs had better opportunities to get an education than we did.
Linus Torvalds said that his university was free, and he got a stipend besides, so he could sit around in his dorm room all day and play computer games.
Meanwhile Americans are going $40,000 into debt to get college degrees.
Those German scientists went to the best university system in the world at the time.
Give me the same opportunities as the immigrants. Then I'll be glad to welcome them here and compete with them.
In the old days, the way American corporations got skilled employees was to support the local schools, hire workers and train them, give them a long-term commitment with job security, and keep them on even when the economy had a dip.
The worst thing about H1-Bs is that they've abandoned that training and support of American workers.
I blame the Democratic party even more than the Republicans.
We showed the Democrats in 2000 that if they kept moving farther to the right, progressives would vote for third parties, enough to cost them close elections.
But they didn't seem to take any lessons from that. They just kept moving farther to the right. Rahm Emanuel called us "fucking retarded" for wanting single payer health care. That wasn't just Rahm Emanuel talking -- he was talking for Obama.
Well fuck him. I voted for Jill Stein and the Green Party last election. More people would if they understood why it was their interest to do so. She got 0.5% of the vote. That's 0.5% the Democrats could have gotten if they had served the people who voted for them rather than the people who wrote them checks.
I know foreign workers who were and are my friends. I've even helped them with their immigration problems.
However, I know that the system harms me. Foreign workers are driving wages down and making the opportunities worse for us.
The worst part, I think, is that corporations in the past used to hire people with no more than basic skills and ability, and train them. Now they don't have to train Americans. They can hire people with engineering degrees from India and China.
Businesses don't even support education any more. Companies like Intel are getting tax breaks to build plants in certain locations. Those were the taxes that paid for schools.
I think a good grand bargain would be to accept workers from around the world, in exchange for a European-type social safety net, that would make sure that Americans would be assured of the basics in life and have their own opportunities for free training and education when we're out of work. But we don't. And in fact we're going in the opposite direction.
There was an article in Science giving advice to scientists who consult for movies.
Their advice was, don't expect them to be accurate. (Lumiere had people walking around the moon without space helmets.) Just try to get a few useful lessons in there.
One of the things that can work well is movies is showing how scientists work. The interpersonal relationships among scientists works well. Paleontologists throwing rocks at each other at scientific meetings, things like that. (I think that's actually happened.)
“I am very interested to see if these findings can be reproduced in very different environments such as permafrost and caves,” says Michael Knapp, a palaeogeneticist at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.
I have a basic knowledge of chemistry, and I can recognize some of those names from my introductory chemistry and biology books. You can look them up on Wikipedia and find out what they did.
The first reason I find these signatures so attractive and interesting is that it shows you how a great chemist's mind works. They're not single-minded nerds. They're human beings. They have a sense of humor. Their ideas are flying all over the place. Ask them for an autograph and they slip in a little idea about chemistry. You can understand why ideas come to chemists in their dreams.
There's such a thing as chemistry humor. Sometimes you have to understand the chemistry to get it, but if you do, it's very funny.
It's an important lesson to those who think that everything important in chemistry is as formal and dull as a patent application.
The other way to do it is to say, "I want to get a lawyer first before I go to that meeting," and then take as long as required to get a lawyer. You don't have to go to a meeting on their schedule. If you never get a lawyer, too bad. Don't go to the meeting.
You can be sure they'll have legal advice, so you should have legal advice too.
Another good thing to say is, "Could you send me a letter telling me what this is all about?"
These are things that people learn to say after they've had a lot of experience with these things. It's hard to think something like this out the first time somebody springs it on you.
I second the idea of openly displaying an audio recorder. They probably have an audio recorder too (or at least some way of taking notes). If they object, say, "Why do you object to having an accurate record of the meeting?" (The reason they object is that they're going to have several witnesses there, and if there are any disagreements about who said what, it will be two of them against one of you.)
He's not an idiot. He was in an intimidating situation. People respond that way all the time.
The classic situation is to be stopped by a cop on the street. The standard legal advice is to refuse to talk without a lawyer. The reality of the situation is that people can't exercise their rights.
If you don't understand that, you're an idiot. (Since we're in hysteria-land, I'll adopt the language.)
You are free to create your own language. I will continue to use the phrase "free library," which most Americans use and understand.
I don't have an item-by-item breakdown of the state budget. As I understand it, over the last 30 years, spending on education, libraries, housing, and the social safety net has gone down, while spending on police and prisons (a significant part of which is drug offenses) has gone up. Health care has also gone up.
"Free libraries" and "free education" are terms that are used in developed societies to refer to services that are provided by the government through taxes, with no charge to the user at point of delivery.
I needed a medical library in New York. The Columbia University library would have charged me $2,000 a year, as I recall. If I could get access to a library like Princeton for $275/year, I'd sure as hell get it.
Makes me wonder, though -- what am I paying taxes for? I thought that was supposed to go to the library.
I visited the Boston Public Library once to catch up on my journals. Nice place.
In New York City, there is basically no public access to basic scientific and medical journals. A few years ago, I couldn't find a public library with the New England Journal of Medicine, so I subscribed myself. That's a pretty basic journal. Last time I looked, there was one public library with the NEJM in the entire borough of Manhattan. And they only subscribed to the paper edition, because the online edition (which has lots of essential information not found in the paper edition) is too expensive. They didn't have BMJ at all.
There is also no public access to most legal documents, which Aaron Swartz tried to address in another one of his exploits. These are documents that are created by government, that are in public domain.
One of the tangental problems is that this country has shrunk government services and we no longer have free libraries the way we used to. Or free education.
DHS does a notoriously bad job of screening through millions of potential threats and figuring out which are the real threats. They're like a smoke alarm that continually gives false alarms until people ignore it.
What does your comment have to do with the conversation at hand? This isn't a false alarm, there is no need to "balance the risks and costs against the benefits." The DHS is being handed weaponized computer exploits and ideally they're going to turn around and say "You. Manufacturer. Fix it."
The DHS is being handed theoretical attacks which have never been used in the real world. The problem is to figure out whether these are realistic problems, and what the priority is for dealing with them.
It may be possible that somebody could hack into an insulin pump. Nobody has ever done so. It's hard to imagine why somebody would want to. Nobody could make any money doing it. Nobody could accomplish a political goal by doing so. It's not like a bank where somebody could transfer money. So it is a false alarm.
If the DHS sends a message to the manufacturer saying, "You. Manufacturer. Fix it." How does the manufacturer they fix it? What are they supposed to do until they fix it? Take it off the market? Take it back from patients? What's the penalty for not fixing it?
Meanwhile, the manufacturer is trying to solve real problems that actually are happening, like having the needle clog up. He's got to take resources away from problems that are happening and apply them to problems that aren't happening.
I realize that there is an attraction to being a dictator and giving orders like, "You. Manufacturer. Fix it." Unfortunately, if you don't understand the industry you're giving orders to, you can wind up doing more harm than good.
before turning all of this over to Homeland Security, I'd like to know how many pacemakers and insulin pumps have been hacked versus how many are out there? Is this a true threat or just bad movie plot from the ScyFy Channel that has taken hold in DHS?
That's one of the questions that the FDA answers a lot better than the DHS. The FDA has procedures to decide whether something is really a problem, so they can prioritize their efforts on the real threats. You could search the FDA's public device adverse events reporting database to see if any hacked pacemakers or insulin pumps have been reported.
What does HHS or FDA know about computer security? Nothing. It is a technical niche.
What does the DHS know about computer security? Even less.
You don't have to know these things, you hire them in. Now, the issue of whether our government will do that based on merit or more likely not is a good point to raise, but it's a separate problem from not having the experience in-house already.
How can you hire, and manage, security experts if you don't know something about security yourself? What's a "security expert"? I know a guy who was a prosecutor for a while, then went looking for jobs as a corporate security consultant. Do you just hire an ex-cop? An ex-FBI agent? An ex-hacker? Do you take it on faith that they know what they're doing?
Years ago, government agencies developed in-house computer expertise, and they did a pretty good job. The VA hospitals developed VISTA, which is a better medical management system than most of the commercial packages. Now the agencies are outsourcing computer development, and the outside contractors haven't done too well. There have been several disasters that ran up costs in the hundreds of millions that never worked, like the FBI's computer system.
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OK, as long as history and science classes have to give arguments on both sides about the existence of God.
When I visited Texas I noticed that half the people were really cool guys and the other half were assholes. Of course most other places were like that but Texas took it to extremes.
They could but they don't. I think they made a business decision that it doesn't hurt them to have kids hanging out, and it would hurt them to enforce a policy like that. I assume that if someone got too unruly, they would kick them out.
In Manhattan, most of a restaurant's business is between 12:30 and 2pm. The rest of the day it's mostly empty. So it doesn't do any harm to have people studying or hanging out.
And besides, as the New York Times article said, it's unlikely that a group of teenagers will sit in a restaurant for hours without buying something.
Oops, Melies.
The people around the world aren't smarter than unemployed Americans. The people who came in on H1Bs had better opportunities to get an education than we did.
Linus Torvalds said that his university was free, and he got a stipend besides, so he could sit around in his dorm room all day and play computer games.
Meanwhile Americans are going $40,000 into debt to get college degrees.
Those German scientists went to the best university system in the world at the time.
Give me the same opportunities as the immigrants. Then I'll be glad to welcome them here and compete with them.
In the old days, the way American corporations got skilled employees was to support the local schools, hire workers and train them, give them a long-term commitment with job security, and keep them on even when the economy had a dip.
The worst thing about H1-Bs is that they've abandoned that training and support of American workers.
I blame the Democratic party even more than the Republicans.
We showed the Democrats in 2000 that if they kept moving farther to the right, progressives would vote for third parties, enough to cost them close elections.
But they didn't seem to take any lessons from that. They just kept moving farther to the right. Rahm Emanuel called us "fucking retarded" for wanting single payer health care. That wasn't just Rahm Emanuel talking -- he was talking for Obama.
Well fuck him. I voted for Jill Stein and the Green Party last election. More people would if they understood why it was their interest to do so. She got 0.5% of the vote. That's 0.5% the Democrats could have gotten if they had served the people who voted for them rather than the people who wrote them checks.
Very strong mixed feelings.
I know foreign workers who were and are my friends. I've even helped them with their immigration problems.
However, I know that the system harms me. Foreign workers are driving wages down and making the opportunities worse for us.
The worst part, I think, is that corporations in the past used to hire people with no more than basic skills and ability, and train them. Now they don't have to train Americans. They can hire people with engineering degrees from India and China.
Businesses don't even support education any more. Companies like Intel are getting tax breaks to build plants in certain locations. Those were the taxes that paid for schools.
I think a good grand bargain would be to accept workers from around the world, in exchange for a European-type social safety net, that would make sure that Americans would be assured of the basics in life and have their own opportunities for free training and education when we're out of work. But we don't. And in fact we're going in the opposite direction.
When the price of cloning goes down we'll be able to do them all.
There was an article in Science giving advice to scientists who consult for movies.
Their advice was, don't expect them to be accurate. (Lumiere had people walking around the moon without space helmets.) Just try to get a few useful lessons in there.
One of the things that can work well is movies is showing how scientists work. The interpersonal relationships among scientists works well. Paleontologists throwing rocks at each other at scientific meetings, things like that. (I think that's actually happened.)
“I am very interested to see if these findings can be reproduced in very different environments such as permafrost and caves,” says Michael Knapp, a palaeogeneticist at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.
I have a basic knowledge of chemistry, and I can recognize some of those names from my introductory chemistry and biology books. You can look them up on Wikipedia and find out what they did.
Here's one http://cen.acs.org/content/dam/cen/91/3/09103-scitech1-Nozoe155.jpg and here's his entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Djerassi
The first reason I find these signatures so attractive and interesting is that it shows you how a great chemist's mind works. They're not single-minded nerds. They're human beings. They have a sense of humor. Their ideas are flying all over the place. Ask them for an autograph and they slip in a little idea about chemistry. You can understand why ideas come to chemists in their dreams.
There's such a thing as chemistry humor. Sometimes you have to understand the chemistry to get it, but if you do, it's very funny.
It's an important lesson to those who think that everything important in chemistry is as formal and dull as a patent application.
I need a script that mods -1 troll every message that has the word "idiot".
It's worse than "sheeple."
The other way to do it is to say, "I want to get a lawyer first before I go to that meeting," and then take as long as required to get a lawyer. You don't have to go to a meeting on their schedule. If you never get a lawyer, too bad. Don't go to the meeting.
You can be sure they'll have legal advice, so you should have legal advice too.
Another good thing to say is, "Could you send me a letter telling me what this is all about?"
These are things that people learn to say after they've had a lot of experience with these things. It's hard to think something like this out the first time somebody springs it on you.
I second the idea of openly displaying an audio recorder. They probably have an audio recorder too (or at least some way of taking notes). If they object, say, "Why do you object to having an accurate record of the meeting?" (The reason they object is that they're going to have several witnesses there, and if there are any disagreements about who said what, it will be two of them against one of you.)
He's not an idiot. He was in an intimidating situation. People respond that way all the time.
The classic situation is to be stopped by a cop on the street. The standard legal advice is to refuse to talk without a lawyer. The reality of the situation is that people can't exercise their rights.
If you don't understand that, you're an idiot. (Since we're in hysteria-land, I'll adopt the language.)
Potassium chlorate, anyone?
You are free to create your own language. I will continue to use the phrase "free library," which most Americans use and understand.
I don't have an item-by-item breakdown of the state budget. As I understand it, over the last 30 years, spending on education, libraries, housing, and the social safety net has gone down, while spending on police and prisons (a significant part of which is drug offenses) has gone up. Health care has also gone up.
"Free libraries" and "free education" are terms that are used in developed societies to refer to services that are provided by the government through taxes, with no charge to the user at point of delivery.
No, she was just following her career and financial incentives.
My big objection to the Volokh article is that he claims the laws were passed democratically.
Given the lobbying that goes on to give each special interest special favors in the copyright laws, democracy has very little to do with it.
I needed a medical library in New York. The Columbia University library would have charged me $2,000 a year, as I recall. If I could get access to a library like Princeton for $275/year, I'd sure as hell get it.
Makes me wonder, though -- what am I paying taxes for? I thought that was supposed to go to the library.
I visited the Boston Public Library once to catch up on my journals. Nice place.
In New York City, there is basically no public access to basic scientific and medical journals. A few years ago, I couldn't find a public library with the New England Journal of Medicine, so I subscribed myself. That's a pretty basic journal. Last time I looked, there was one public library with the NEJM in the entire borough of Manhattan. And they only subscribed to the paper edition, because the online edition (which has lots of essential information not found in the paper edition) is too expensive. They didn't have BMJ at all.
There is also no public access to most legal documents, which Aaron Swartz tried to address in another one of his exploits. These are documents that are created by government, that are in public domain.
One of the tangental problems is that this country has shrunk government services and we no longer have free libraries the way we used to. Or free education.
DHS does a notoriously bad job of screening through millions of potential threats and figuring out which are the real threats. They're like a smoke alarm that continually gives false alarms until people ignore it.
What does your comment have to do with the conversation at hand?
This isn't a false alarm, there is no need to "balance the risks and costs against the benefits."
The DHS is being handed weaponized computer exploits and ideally they're going to turn around and say "You. Manufacturer. Fix it."
The DHS is being handed theoretical attacks which have never been used in the real world. The problem is to figure out whether these are realistic problems, and what the priority is for dealing with them.
It may be possible that somebody could hack into an insulin pump. Nobody has ever done so. It's hard to imagine why somebody would want to. Nobody could make any money doing it. Nobody could accomplish a political goal by doing so. It's not like a bank where somebody could transfer money. So it is a false alarm.
If the DHS sends a message to the manufacturer saying, "You. Manufacturer. Fix it." How does the manufacturer they fix it? What are they supposed to do until they fix it? Take it off the market? Take it back from patients? What's the penalty for not fixing it?
Meanwhile, the manufacturer is trying to solve real problems that actually are happening, like having the needle clog up. He's got to take resources away from problems that are happening and apply them to problems that aren't happening.
I realize that there is an attraction to being a dictator and giving orders like, "You. Manufacturer. Fix it." Unfortunately, if you don't understand the industry you're giving orders to, you can wind up doing more harm than good.
before turning all of this over to Homeland Security, I'd like to know how many pacemakers and insulin pumps have been hacked versus how many are out there? Is this a true threat or just bad movie plot from the ScyFy Channel that has taken hold in DHS?
That's one of the questions that the FDA answers a lot better than the DHS. The FDA has procedures to decide whether something is really a problem, so they can prioritize their efforts on the real threats. You could search the FDA's public device adverse events reporting database to see if any hacked pacemakers or insulin pumps have been reported.
What does HHS or FDA know about computer security? Nothing. It is a technical niche.
What does the DHS know about computer security? Even less.
You don't have to know these things, you hire them in. Now, the issue of whether our government will do that based on merit or more likely not is a good point to raise, but it's a separate problem from not having the experience in-house already.
How can you hire, and manage, security experts if you don't know something about security yourself? What's a "security expert"? I know a guy who was a prosecutor for a while, then went looking for jobs as a corporate security consultant. Do you just hire an ex-cop? An ex-FBI agent? An ex-hacker? Do you take it on faith that they know what they're doing?
Years ago, government agencies developed in-house computer expertise, and they did a pretty good job. The VA hospitals developed VISTA, which is a better medical management system than most of the commercial packages. Now the agencies are outsourcing computer development, and the outside contractors haven't done too well. There have been several disasters that ran up costs in the hundreds of millions that never worked, like the FBI's computer system.