On the one hand, I would mod up your comment. I think that too many people who criticize NSA and CIA would turn to jelly in the world without them.
On the other hand: Alexis de Tocqueville
“What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?
...
When a nation has reached this point, it must either change its laws and mores or perish, for the well of public virtue has run dry: in such a place one no longer finds citizens but only subjects.”
How often do tsunamis happen, and how big do they get? Japanese gourds wound up all over the North American Pacific beaches.
http://www.npr.org/2013/02/06/...
I do appreciate the points Burz makes, as they demonstrate my point. Merely suggesting that RCRA needs rebooting leads to accusations of conflict of interest and of ill intent. Now put your shirt back on.
Ahem, I'm not a lobbyist and never have been. I guess I'm from "the industry" as I drove a paper recycling truck in the late 80s-early 90s, then ran a state environmental department (about 20 staff) for 8 years, then went back to driving a recycling truck (started solo, now have 30 employees). I hesitated to respond to this, since it really doesn't matter whether I'm a lobbyist or not... it comes across to me as an ad hominem attack. My department adminstered RCRA regulations (Resource Recovery and Conservation Act), which was passed in 1976, and was written by Nixon appointees, for crying out loud. The biggest argument against rewriting it was justifiable fear it would be gutted, my point was that the longer we wait the more likely that becomes.
Now the question is, how many other NSA contractors / staff / moles / spies have been doing the same thing, without Snowden's intention to disclose their behavior?
I agree that simply restricting EPA's regulation is an "end of pipe" solution to the problems at EPA (restricting the power to restrict). But while I think the environment is the most important legacy our generation will leave (or not), there are many problems at EPA. A pile of lead silicate in the sunshine at a mining site is governed by 1872 laws and the cleanup paid by Superfund. Try collecting a stack of leaded silicate at a recycling operation. Outdated EPA codes discourage innovation or investment. In 1960 the USA had 7 secondary (recycling) copper smelters, by 2001 there were 0, because EPA enforcement of "waste" (scrap raw material, defined as "waste") is stronger than enforcement of "extraction" (mined raw material, defined as a "commodity") codes. The codes on EPA books were influenced by property value, making resources extracted from populace more difficult. 14/15 of the largest Superfund sites are at hard rock mining sites EPA can't figure out how to regulate... so they double down regulating recyclers, in a perverse "pecking order" show of strength. Visit this EPA Calculator to see EPA's attempt to put their Codes into legal interpretation, and run virgin leaded ore through it (follow "specific exclusions" path for mined ore, defined under "commodity" exclusion) http://www.epa.gov/osw/hazard/...
I really liked my colleagues (state env regulatory agency) and hate to sound like a jerk. But that social group-think, and "reverence of the environment", doesn't belong in scientific method, and is part of the problem. There is kind of pseudo-religious hostility towards rewriting environmental regulations, which become ossified and subject to work-arounds. Too many environmental regulators seem spoiled by the knee-jerk support of environmentalists, who fetishize the environmental codes, opposing rewrites and sunsetting of old EPA rules (again, out of justifiable but cynical suspicion the RCRA and CERCLA laws won't be replaced by new ones). Resistance to identified problems with EPA testing methods (like TCLP tests applied to vitrified solids, hah!) feeds the backlash at the GOP over continued use of the old code. How many of the comments here simply dismiss the idea in the article because it comes from the GOP? And how often are Democrats willing to sunset an old code before implementing a new one? It's a vicious intractable political cycle.
All I can think of is to put USGS.gov (US Geological Survey) or NASA in charge of EPA, as the problems at EPA are entrenched officials who don't know how to steer their ocean liner to catch the sunset. RCRA and CERCLA are broken, EPA officials know it, but they are too afraid that if they are removed they won't be able to get replacement law enacted, and won't be able to hire the type of people that would write good regulations out of the new laws. Or if it's a coding problem, maybe a software engineer can fix it.
I didn't like Slashdot beta when I tried it. But geez, the crybaby wailing has gotta stop. Slashdot needs to be open to the next new 7 digit users. We need 7 digit users. I don't know whether the beta is the way to get it, but the crybaby syndrome didn't fix Netflix.
Half the people arguing on behalf of anything should probably shut up about it. There are legitimate arguments for and against solar and nuclear, and I used to really enjoy debating them (hypothetically, what if the government spent the equivalent of R&D on anything besides nuclear?) But these days most "advocates" just bog down the dialectic.
Take for example the perfectly logical argument in favor of allowing the Keystone pipeline... If you don't build the pipeline, it gets built anyway, and you have 0% control or influence in the future (if it does turn out to be really really bad). Fairly intelligent analysis, drowned out by trolls with all cap megaphones. I used to belong to a solar energy activist group. Would still like to see it get the equivalent of the Oppenheimer subsidies. But couldn't stand the company, too many dolts agreeing with me.
The nightsoilmen (toshers) processes, while imperfect, were much less toxic than what they were replaced by - Whitehead's flush toilet (which drove them out of business). The outflow from flush toilets in London were directed into the same dry pits as the toshers worked from, making the pits impossible to manage. With no downstream plan for the new flush toilet technology, "The Great Stink of London" came from the stormwater runoff into the Thames, which caused thousands of death in cholera epidemics.
You are right, the work should not perhaps be romanticized, but was not given any incentive to improve... it was flushed away by the new million dollar flushable toilet technology industry. The fact is that the toshers/nightsoil industry created better than average pay in London, certainly much better than blackleg coal mining. But the marketers of "flush toilet technology" stigmatized them, and the sewage treatment plants of today are seen by many in the environmental community as a "correction" to a technological advance. http://retroworks.blogspot.com...
During the mid 1800s another "technological advance" was the sale of mercury as a laxative. I guess it gives great bowel movements (Lewis and Clark's expedition can be tracked today by the mercury laxative residue - they ate a lot of elk and not much fiber). What I find fascinating are the parallels between the toshers and the past decade of private sector electronic waste management. Most of the "export market" buyers of used CRTs turned out to be not primitive wire burners but factories formerly licensed by Proview, BenQ, Wistron, Foxconn etc., which were purchasing very specific models of CRT for refurbishment and sale to markets like Cairo, Lagos, Jakarta and New Dehli. Like the nightsoil workers, they were flooded with product and then denigrated as "primitive recycling". The CRTs were diverted to a shredding industry designed for scrap metal. Leaded glass cullet doesn't shred well, and the glass diverted from reuse private markets still lies around. At one of the largest sites, in Hallstead PA, floodwaters engulfed the CRT cullet piles twice in the past decade, leading to the closure of the recycling facility last summer. http://resource-recycling.com/...
Part of the reason there are so few clues to the cause is the paucity of recorded history in that period. Correlation doesn't mean causation, of course.
So when I park my Fiat in a parking fountain, should I send a dozen tweets sending the cops to the opposite side of the city? "The solution is dilution".
Data destruction industry has finally "jumped the shark" with the posting of the Guardian Newspaper's hard drive destruction just a few hours ago. This sales pitch shows the billion dollar industry behind selling insurance to people afraid of digital losses via old hardware.
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
Identity theft and trade secret losses are real, very real risks. But physically destroying hardware is to data protections as toilet paper on the loo lid is to AIDS prevention. The real threats are phishing (getting employees to log in credentials on fake websites), and loss of active PCs (theft of laptops from the back of cars), and the new credit-card swiping devices used at Target stores are the actual risks.
I have heard the argument that physically destroying the disks eliminates the potential for bad apple employees to skirt the wiping of disks, and that with physical destruction you really control human error. I say bullhockey. When I have a staffer wiping disks, I can inventory the disks and randomly sample them to see if the data has been erased, and replace the staffer if necessary. If the drives are thrown in a mechanical shredder, how do I know a PARTICULAR drive was thrown in the shredder? How will I ever catch the bad apple? Try sifting through the scrap fluff for serial numbers to make sure the right one went through the machine.
The big opportunity is "digital haystacks", putting randomized and false data out, especially metadata. If enough bad data written on to drives, it has the added benefit of wasting the time of Russian hackers who have too much of it on their hands.
Even if it was true that one can economically retrieve data after it has been erased / overwritten a few times, the buzz-sawing of individual chips in this video fans the paranoia of people over hard drives. You can disassemble the hard drive, or hit it once with a ball peen hammer. Drilling multiple holes through ceramic chips borders on the Pythonesque. Perhaps they were being tongue-in-cheek during the application of physical overkill, but it fans the billion dollar planned obsolescence industry. Most data theft occurs from machines still in use (hacked or downloaded from or stolen), I'm unaware of a single case of a hard drive chip being reassembled to get out the latent data.
Anyway, the safest thing would actually be to produce fake, falsified, false positive Snowden files, hire a team of anti-Snowdens to just make up balderdash, and distribute their files all over the web, not by trying to physically destroy hardware on which the real data is stored. Metadata should be particularly easy to camouflage with digital haystacks of misinformation.
I'm from 3 generations of journalists, and part of the problem is that news outlets need to a) attract readers (make it interesting and simple), and b) are trying to cover stories that are frankly out of the reporters depth and comfort zone. Reporters want to cover both sides of an issue, and the easiest way to do that is to find two sources who disagree strongly... Opposite + Opposite = "fair and balanced". When "long form journalism" is proposed as an antidote, we still suffer from weak audience attention spans and excuses for writing that lacks punch or longer and remains lazy-source.
This, in turn, rewards "experts" who take a polarized view. If your expertise provides nuance, you have to compete for the reporter's attention. So much easier for reporters to submit black-and-white points of view. Often reporters tell me they are afraid NOT to interview loud and ignorant people out of fear of "not having covered their side".
In my particular field (electronics scrap policy) I've tried to interest reporters in identifying victims of policies which lack nuance - a "derivative" of the story which fits the black-and-white reporting model. The "victimhood" of un-nuanced policy can sometimes trigger "blame" and "innocent or guilty" coverage paradigm. I realize too that it's not the reporters fault that readers/audience response to nuanced articles is "Whoosh". "Whoosh" doesn't sell papers and tv ads. I fear this is causing erosion of even stronger news sources (The Economist, WSJ, NYT, etc).
I read the summary twice and thought... WHAT phosphorous shortage?? "Scientists predict..." Is this a joke? I found this article that agrees with me. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ti...
Perhaps the original "source" thought that a finite mineral "reserve" meant the resource itself is finite. The current phosphorous mining operations find enough to last 300 years and then stop exploring for it (making a fininite "reserve" of what they've found). We are going to run out of lots of other things (like tin and copper, sea floor minining is going to be UGLY) before we have to send anyone into the pee-pee mines. I have a limited number of socks in my sock drawer, but it doesn't mean there's a socks shortage, or that we need to mine them from coffins.
This question came up on slashdot a few weeks ago, regarding surveys showing ten percent fewer people expressed belief in evolution. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4612831&cid=45824039 than 6 years ago. An anonymous coward noted:
"As an expression of commitment to the tribe, professing a false belief is way more powerful than a true belief. It bind the community closer, because they've demonstrated their willingness to suppress their own reason for the group. The sillier the belief, the better, of course."
Good point.... Human ingenuity in a free market is indeed a beautiful thing. The potential value that Amazon might write off a premature delivery could incentivize some portion of buyers to, as you say, game the system. BUT, of course there will be others who will treat it as a utility, not taking time to "game the system", and instead pocket the convenience of delivery. Trash collections, electricity, gas, etc. make this likely.
In many US cities, diesel fuel delivery trucks "pre-fill" commercial truck fleets, saving the fleet owner drivers trips to the gas station. It was a new fuel sales model, and creates a savings for the fleet owner. A "gaming" fleet owner could claim, once, that the fuel wasn't needed and get free fuel, but he gives up the convenience of future delivery, "gamers" will be dropped from the model, and over time, Amazon will only service Utility Model clients.
It's a good model for consumable commodities like ink cartridges and office paper, and potentially high turnover items like cameras and cell phones, if the consumer (multinational corp) is a big enough consumer.
And the Netherlands are practically flat enough to bicycle without pedalling.
Seriously though, in a democracy, it is the population's reliance on gasoline which dictates the government's ability to tax it, moreso than tax dictates consumption. The USA is 142 on the list of countries by population density, Norway, Sweden, Finland are the only western European nations with less, and that includes a lot of land north of the arctic circle.. Russia has less population density... and cheaper gasoline, than USA. My family lived in Paris for a year, and we didn't need a car. If we lived in New York City for a year, I'm sure we wouldn't have needed a car either. In either case, we'd probably be happier about gasoline taxes than people in Missouri.
Wow, it looks like the mere idea has generated a visceral reaction. Generating awareness of the kidney shortage is perhaps what bothers people most. But I think they make a legitimate case, as follows.
1) It is a mathematical certainty that the current system will not produce the number of kidney donations needed. So as yucky as liberalizing the trade may sound, people on the front lines need people like these economists to be discussing the matter.
2) The authors bring up a very good point that the current restriction creates a bottleneck. One can only donate a kidney once. Most people therefore hold off, not knowing the "future value" of the kidney (e.g., if a closer friend or family member may need the donation). However, many of us who may be unwilling to contribute 100% to someone would possibly consider donating $500 or $1000 to someone. The current system makes a "kickstarter" donation system impossible. And if I'm paid for a kidney, and can put the money in the bank to draw interest, knowing I can buy another kidney back if necessary, it might make me more likely to give one up.
3) For all the hand-wringing about the poor people who will feel the pressure to sell a kidney, there is a very legitimate argument that those poor people should decide on their own if they want $50,000 for a kidney. What merits the state's law against them selling something they own? And what about poor people who need a kidney? Do they stand a better chance if there are fewer incentives, and fewer kidneys?
Stand down,/. mob. At worst, this discussion brings up the inconvenient subject of donation.
Ok, if you go back to the telestrator, Leonard Reiffel gets the credit, from the 1950s. http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/4247541 I'm intrigued by the Vancouver connection (Fingerworks)... Vancouver must be 1/3 Chinese/Taiwanese. That may be where the DNA mingled, most of the wealthier display device geeks I met had second homes or family in Vancouver. Interesting, Thanks for the lead.
What's disturbing is when they not only got it wrong, but get an Emmy and other journalism awards for an erroneous story. When it comes to tech, they are really out of their element. MIT Study disproves the allegation? Original source admits to fabricating statistics they report? The journalist community never gives themselves an asterisk for gotcha-news-on-steroids. Do a little background on the biggest award winner in 60 Minutes stable, Wasteland. Huge accolades. But source admitted fabricating data, MIT studies prove it wrong. Journalists just cannot cover tech.
The closest thing to ombudsman or peer review is John Stewart or Colbert Report, and they are not exactly techies. Seems impossible to get misreported tech stories corrected. It's like asking an English major to take a Calculus class over again. if it was too complicated for the reporter to get right the first time, they don't want to go back again.
They should give a Polk or Pelley award to Ira Glass, NPR's "This American Life", for going back on his story about Apple and Foxconn in 2012. That was really classy, and it also told an important lesson on how easy it is for a reporter to swallow passionately delivered bullshit about the "juju" of high technology.http://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2012/03/retracting-mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory
I did not realize how huge this "Hollywood" scam went. Kudos to Graham-Cumming for uncovering it. In other news, many foreign language scenes appear not to be spoken correctly. E.g.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhVg2uLVDtk
Slashdot Mirror
On the one hand, I would mod up your comment. I think that too many people who criticize NSA and CIA would turn to jelly in the world without them. On the other hand: Alexis de Tocqueville
“What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?
When a nation has reached this point, it must either change its laws and mores or perish, for the well of public virtue has run dry: in such a place one no longer finds citizens but only subjects.”
How often do tsunamis happen, and how big do they get? Japanese gourds wound up all over the North American Pacific beaches. http://www.npr.org/2013/02/06/...
I do appreciate the points Burz makes, as they demonstrate my point. Merely suggesting that RCRA needs rebooting leads to accusations of conflict of interest and of ill intent. Now put your shirt back on.
Ahem, I'm not a lobbyist and never have been. I guess I'm from "the industry" as I drove a paper recycling truck in the late 80s-early 90s, then ran a state environmental department (about 20 staff) for 8 years, then went back to driving a recycling truck (started solo, now have 30 employees). I hesitated to respond to this, since it really doesn't matter whether I'm a lobbyist or not... it comes across to me as an ad hominem attack. My department adminstered RCRA regulations (Resource Recovery and Conservation Act), which was passed in 1976, and was written by Nixon appointees, for crying out loud. The biggest argument against rewriting it was justifiable fear it would be gutted, my point was that the longer we wait the more likely that becomes.
Now the question is, how many other NSA contractors / staff / moles / spies have been doing the same thing, without Snowden's intention to disclose their behavior?
I agree that simply restricting EPA's regulation is an "end of pipe" solution to the problems at EPA (restricting the power to restrict). But while I think the environment is the most important legacy our generation will leave (or not), there are many problems at EPA. A pile of lead silicate in the sunshine at a mining site is governed by 1872 laws and the cleanup paid by Superfund. Try collecting a stack of leaded silicate at a recycling operation. Outdated EPA codes discourage innovation or investment. In 1960 the USA had 7 secondary (recycling) copper smelters, by 2001 there were 0, because EPA enforcement of "waste" (scrap raw material, defined as "waste") is stronger than enforcement of "extraction" (mined raw material, defined as a "commodity") codes. The codes on EPA books were influenced by property value, making resources extracted from populace more difficult. 14/15 of the largest Superfund sites are at hard rock mining sites EPA can't figure out how to regulate... so they double down regulating recyclers, in a perverse "pecking order" show of strength. Visit this EPA Calculator to see EPA's attempt to put their Codes into legal interpretation, and run virgin leaded ore through it (follow "specific exclusions" path for mined ore, defined under "commodity" exclusion) http://www.epa.gov/osw/hazard/...
I really liked my colleagues (state env regulatory agency) and hate to sound like a jerk. But that social group-think, and "reverence of the environment", doesn't belong in scientific method, and is part of the problem. There is kind of pseudo-religious hostility towards rewriting environmental regulations, which become ossified and subject to work-arounds. Too many environmental regulators seem spoiled by the knee-jerk support of environmentalists, who fetishize the environmental codes, opposing rewrites and sunsetting of old EPA rules (again, out of justifiable but cynical suspicion the RCRA and CERCLA laws won't be replaced by new ones). Resistance to identified problems with EPA testing methods (like TCLP tests applied to vitrified solids, hah!) feeds the backlash at the GOP over continued use of the old code. How many of the comments here simply dismiss the idea in the article because it comes from the GOP? And how often are Democrats willing to sunset an old code before implementing a new one? It's a vicious intractable political cycle.
All I can think of is to put USGS.gov (US Geological Survey) or NASA in charge of EPA, as the problems at EPA are entrenched officials who don't know how to steer their ocean liner to catch the sunset. RCRA and CERCLA are broken, EPA officials know it, but they are too afraid that if they are removed they won't be able to get replacement law enacted, and won't be able to hire the type of people that would write good regulations out of the new laws. Or if it's a coding problem, maybe a software engineer can fix it.
I didn't like Slashdot beta when I tried it. But geez, the crybaby wailing has gotta stop. Slashdot needs to be open to the next new 7 digit users. We need 7 digit users. I don't know whether the beta is the way to get it, but the crybaby syndrome didn't fix Netflix.
Half the people arguing on behalf of anything should probably shut up about it. There are legitimate arguments for and against solar and nuclear, and I used to really enjoy debating them (hypothetically, what if the government spent the equivalent of R&D on anything besides nuclear?) But these days most "advocates" just bog down the dialectic.
Take for example the perfectly logical argument in favor of allowing the Keystone pipeline... If you don't build the pipeline, it gets built anyway, and you have 0% control or influence in the future (if it does turn out to be really really bad). Fairly intelligent analysis, drowned out by trolls with all cap megaphones. I used to belong to a solar energy activist group. Would still like to see it get the equivalent of the Oppenheimer subsidies. But couldn't stand the company, too many dolts agreeing with me.
The nightsoilmen (toshers) processes, while imperfect, were much less toxic than what they were replaced by - Whitehead's flush toilet (which drove them out of business). The outflow from flush toilets in London were directed into the same dry pits as the toshers worked from, making the pits impossible to manage. With no downstream plan for the new flush toilet technology, "The Great Stink of London" came from the stormwater runoff into the Thames, which caused thousands of death in cholera epidemics.
You are right, the work should not perhaps be romanticized, but was not given any incentive to improve... it was flushed away by the new million dollar flushable toilet technology industry. The fact is that the toshers/nightsoil industry created better than average pay in London, certainly much better than blackleg coal mining. But the marketers of "flush toilet technology" stigmatized them, and the sewage treatment plants of today are seen by many in the environmental community as a "correction" to a technological advance. http://retroworks.blogspot.com...
During the mid 1800s another "technological advance" was the sale of mercury as a laxative. I guess it gives great bowel movements (Lewis and Clark's expedition can be tracked today by the mercury laxative residue - they ate a lot of elk and not much fiber). What I find fascinating are the parallels between the toshers and the past decade of private sector electronic waste management. Most of the "export market" buyers of used CRTs turned out to be not primitive wire burners but factories formerly licensed by Proview, BenQ, Wistron, Foxconn etc., which were purchasing very specific models of CRT for refurbishment and sale to markets like Cairo, Lagos, Jakarta and New Dehli. Like the nightsoil workers, they were flooded with product and then denigrated as "primitive recycling". The CRTs were diverted to a shredding industry designed for scrap metal. Leaded glass cullet doesn't shred well, and the glass diverted from reuse private markets still lies around. At one of the largest sites, in Hallstead PA, floodwaters engulfed the CRT cullet piles twice in the past decade, leading to the closure of the recycling facility last summer. http://resource-recycling.com/...
Part of the reason there are so few clues to the cause is the paucity of recorded history in that period. Correlation doesn't mean causation, of course.
So when I park my Fiat in a parking fountain, should I send a dozen tweets sending the cops to the opposite side of the city? "The solution is dilution".
Data destruction industry has finally "jumped the shark" with the posting of the Guardian Newspaper's hard drive destruction just a few hours ago. This sales pitch shows the billion dollar industry behind selling insurance to people afraid of digital losses via old hardware. http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
Identity theft and trade secret losses are real, very real risks. But physically destroying hardware is to data protections as toilet paper on the loo lid is to AIDS prevention. The real threats are phishing (getting employees to log in credentials on fake websites), and loss of active PCs (theft of laptops from the back of cars), and the new credit-card swiping devices used at Target stores are the actual risks.
I have heard the argument that physically destroying the disks eliminates the potential for bad apple employees to skirt the wiping of disks, and that with physical destruction you really control human error. I say bullhockey. When I have a staffer wiping disks, I can inventory the disks and randomly sample them to see if the data has been erased, and replace the staffer if necessary. If the drives are thrown in a mechanical shredder, how do I know a PARTICULAR drive was thrown in the shredder? How will I ever catch the bad apple? Try sifting through the scrap fluff for serial numbers to make sure the right one went through the machine.
The big opportunity is "digital haystacks", putting randomized and false data out, especially metadata. If enough bad data written on to drives, it has the added benefit of wasting the time of Russian hackers who have too much of it on their hands.
Even if it was true that one can economically retrieve data after it has been erased / overwritten a few times, the buzz-sawing of individual chips in this video fans the paranoia of people over hard drives. You can disassemble the hard drive, or hit it once with a ball peen hammer. Drilling multiple holes through ceramic chips borders on the Pythonesque. Perhaps they were being tongue-in-cheek during the application of physical overkill, but it fans the billion dollar planned obsolescence industry. Most data theft occurs from machines still in use (hacked or downloaded from or stolen), I'm unaware of a single case of a hard drive chip being reassembled to get out the latent data.
Anyway, the safest thing would actually be to produce fake, falsified, false positive Snowden files, hire a team of anti-Snowdens to just make up balderdash, and distribute their files all over the web, not by trying to physically destroy hardware on which the real data is stored. Metadata should be particularly easy to camouflage with digital haystacks of misinformation.
Mod up
I'm from 3 generations of journalists, and part of the problem is that news outlets need to a) attract readers (make it interesting and simple), and b) are trying to cover stories that are frankly out of the reporters depth and comfort zone. Reporters want to cover both sides of an issue, and the easiest way to do that is to find two sources who disagree strongly... Opposite + Opposite = "fair and balanced". When "long form journalism" is proposed as an antidote, we still suffer from weak audience attention spans and excuses for writing that lacks punch or longer and remains lazy-source.
This, in turn, rewards "experts" who take a polarized view. If your expertise provides nuance, you have to compete for the reporter's attention. So much easier for reporters to submit black-and-white points of view. Often reporters tell me they are afraid NOT to interview loud and ignorant people out of fear of "not having covered their side".
In my particular field (electronics scrap policy) I've tried to interest reporters in identifying victims of policies which lack nuance - a "derivative" of the story which fits the black-and-white reporting model. The "victimhood" of un-nuanced policy can sometimes trigger "blame" and "innocent or guilty" coverage paradigm. I realize too that it's not the reporters fault that readers/audience response to nuanced articles is "Whoosh". "Whoosh" doesn't sell papers and tv ads. I fear this is causing erosion of even stronger news sources (The Economist, WSJ, NYT, etc).
You could run an electric utility, four railroads, and get out of jail free if this can be produced to scale.
I read the summary twice and thought... WHAT phosphorous shortage?? "Scientists predict..." Is this a joke? I found this article that agrees with me. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ti...
Perhaps the original "source" thought that a finite mineral "reserve" meant the resource itself is finite. The current phosphorous mining operations find enough to last 300 years and then stop exploring for it (making a fininite "reserve" of what they've found). We are going to run out of lots of other things (like tin and copper, sea floor minining is going to be UGLY) before we have to send anyone into the pee-pee mines. I have a limited number of socks in my sock drawer, but it doesn't mean there's a socks shortage, or that we need to mine them from coffins.
This question came up on slashdot a few weeks ago, regarding surveys showing ten percent fewer people expressed belief in evolution. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4612831&cid=45824039 than 6 years ago. An anonymous coward noted:
"As an expression of commitment to the tribe, professing a false belief is way more powerful than a true belief. It bind the community closer, because they've demonstrated their willingness to suppress their own reason for the group. The sillier the belief, the better, of course."
Good point.... Human ingenuity in a free market is indeed a beautiful thing. The potential value that Amazon might write off a premature delivery could incentivize some portion of buyers to, as you say, game the system. BUT, of course there will be others who will treat it as a utility, not taking time to "game the system", and instead pocket the convenience of delivery. Trash collections, electricity, gas, etc. make this likely.
In many US cities, diesel fuel delivery trucks "pre-fill" commercial truck fleets, saving the fleet owner drivers trips to the gas station. It was a new fuel sales model, and creates a savings for the fleet owner. A "gaming" fleet owner could claim, once, that the fuel wasn't needed and get free fuel, but he gives up the convenience of future delivery, "gamers" will be dropped from the model, and over time, Amazon will only service Utility Model clients.
It's a good model for consumable commodities like ink cartridges and office paper, and potentially high turnover items like cameras and cell phones, if the consumer (multinational corp) is a big enough consumer.
And the Netherlands are practically flat enough to bicycle without pedalling.
Seriously though, in a democracy, it is the population's reliance on gasoline which dictates the government's ability to tax it, moreso than tax dictates consumption. The USA is 142 on the list of countries by population density, Norway, Sweden, Finland are the only western European nations with less, and that includes a lot of land north of the arctic circle.. Russia has less population density... and cheaper gasoline, than USA. My family lived in Paris for a year, and we didn't need a car. If we lived in New York City for a year, I'm sure we wouldn't have needed a car either. In either case, we'd probably be happier about gasoline taxes than people in Missouri.
Wow, it looks like the mere idea has generated a visceral reaction. Generating awareness of the kidney shortage is perhaps what bothers people most. But I think they make a legitimate case, as follows.
1) It is a mathematical certainty that the current system will not produce the number of kidney donations needed. So as yucky as liberalizing the trade may sound, people on the front lines need people like these economists to be discussing the matter.
2) The authors bring up a very good point that the current restriction creates a bottleneck. One can only donate a kidney once. Most people therefore hold off, not knowing the "future value" of the kidney (e.g., if a closer friend or family member may need the donation). However, many of us who may be unwilling to contribute 100% to someone would possibly consider donating $500 or $1000 to someone. The current system makes a "kickstarter" donation system impossible. And if I'm paid for a kidney, and can put the money in the bank to draw interest, knowing I can buy another kidney back if necessary, it might make me more likely to give one up.
3) For all the hand-wringing about the poor people who will feel the pressure to sell a kidney, there is a very legitimate argument that those poor people should decide on their own if they want $50,000 for a kidney. What merits the state's law against them selling something they own? And what about poor people who need a kidney? Do they stand a better chance if there are fewer incentives, and fewer kidneys?
Stand down, /. mob. At worst, this discussion brings up the inconvenient subject of donation.
"The End Is Near" signs didn't go away just because General Electric's purchase of NBC television in 1986 didn't accomplish the job as we feared.
Ok, found it. Elan 2003, of Taipei. Initial Apple contact, Elan maintains that Apple "went around them" via Vancouver (Fingerworks 2005), and Elan responded by hooking up with Android. That's as deep as I can go for now. It's pretty short jump from Taipei to Vancouver in the tech world. http://www.dailytech.com/Apple+is+Forced+Into+MultiTouch+Settlements+Tastes+its+Own+Medicine/article23676.htm
Ok, if you go back to the telestrator, Leonard Reiffel gets the credit, from the 1950s. http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/4247541 I'm intrigued by the Vancouver connection (Fingerworks)... Vancouver must be 1/3 Chinese/Taiwanese. That may be where the DNA mingled, most of the wealthier display device geeks I met had second homes or family in Vancouver. Interesting, Thanks for the lead.
What's disturbing is when they not only got it wrong, but get an Emmy and other journalism awards for an erroneous story. When it comes to tech, they are really out of their element. MIT Study disproves the allegation? Original source admits to fabricating statistics they report? The journalist community never gives themselves an asterisk for gotcha-news-on-steroids. Do a little background on the biggest award winner in 60 Minutes stable, Wasteland. Huge accolades. But source admitted fabricating data, MIT studies prove it wrong. Journalists just cannot cover tech.
The closest thing to ombudsman or peer review is John Stewart or Colbert Report, and they are not exactly techies. Seems impossible to get misreported tech stories corrected. It's like asking an English major to take a Calculus class over again. if it was too complicated for the reporter to get right the first time, they don't want to go back again.
They should give a Polk or Pelley award to Ira Glass, NPR's "This American Life", for going back on his story about Apple and Foxconn in 2012. That was really classy, and it also told an important lesson on how easy it is for a reporter to swallow passionately delivered bullshit about the "juju" of high technology.http://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2012/03/retracting-mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory
I did not realize how huge this "Hollywood" scam went. Kudos to Graham-Cumming for uncovering it. In other news, many foreign language scenes appear not to be spoken correctly. E.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhVg2uLVDtk