It's politics, not technology
on
If I Had a Hammer
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't buy that the demise of the median worker has anything to do with technological progress. If the average income increases steadily and the median declines, it simply means that a society has problems to fairly allocate its resources. Since people making less than the median typically also make up 50% of the electorate, it looks like these people are voting against their own interests (or do not vote at all). One also has to keep in mind that the events that hurt the median worker the most (deregulation of banks, Bush-style tax cuts, and the whole war on terror) were all political descisions that were completely unrelated to technology.
We know the security is inferior. We know the stability is often questionable. We know it costs money in purchase and/or ongoing licensing fees. BUT: you pretty much get a guarantee that any code written today will continue to run for at least 10 years (due to specific OS version support for that long) and likely a lot longer than that; due to API support normally extending even further. Re-writing shit just because the platform changed costs real world time and money.
Red Hat offers support for their distribution for up to 13 years. If you want, you can still get support for Python 2.2, which was released in 2001.
I think you might be missing the point. He's saying that the new information/digital economy requires less people to run it and is therefore reducing the overall number of jobs.
The emprical evidence for this claim is extremely weak, to say the least. The total number of hours worked is pretty much on par with population growth, so despite the enormous increase in automatization in recent decades, the workforce as a whole appears to be able to adapt to it quite well.
I suspect few desktop users run an OS targeted for "servers" where stability is the number one goal?
Actually, I used to be working on a CentOS workstation for quite some time and it was a very pleasant experience. The only issue I remember is that I had to manually compile some applications to be able to watch soccer streams during EURO 2012, but I'm pretty sure people at the IT department saw this as a feature rather than a bug...
The key words you used are "most likely" and at least you're honest enough to use them. There is no mathematical proof that any cipher (other than the one-time pad) is resistant to all as-yet-unknown quantum algorithms. That doesn't mean that they are actually vulnerable - only that we cannot know with certainty whether they are.
That's the usual situation in complexity theory and it applies to classical algorithms as well. There is also no proof that quantum computers are actually superior to classical computers when it comes to cryptanalysis. Still, most people believe this to be true.
People seem to under-estimate the NSA's capabilities here when I talk to them. They employ a lot of really smart people, and they have the benefits of reading all the public literature as well as all the classified stuff that their academic peers cannot read.
Remember that we're talking about actual physical devices that need to be built and being really smart only helps you somewhat when you need to solder electronics or align a laser. And so far, the NSA employs hardly any physicists which you can also tell from the fact that they've outsourced the research mentioned in the documents to a public university. This is very different than in mathematics or computer science, where it is well known that the NSA is a large employer. That being said, I still think that the NSA might possess some interesting knowledge on quantum computing. I wouldn't be too surprised if they were sitting on an efficient quantum algorithm breaking AES, for instance.
These are hardly shocking revelations. The document mentions to achieve control over two semiconductor qubits, whereas factoring 2048 bit numbers requires at least that many qubits, and probably several orders of magnitude more. The current record stands at control of 14 qubits, achieved in 2010 in Rainer Blatt's group at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, using trapped ions.
All the campus networks I've seen remotely recently do some sort of access control, if only to avoid being a free wifi provider for every porn-torrent enthusiast in the neighborhood.
To the contrary, Harvard operates another wireless network called "Harvard Guest" that does not require a Harvard ID for accessing the internet.
In Germany, a lawyer sending a cease-and-desist letter can ask to get paid for his services from the recipient of the letter. However, the fees associated with this (making up most of the €250 in this case) are essentially lump sums set by law that are unrelated to the acutal amount of time spent for each case. If a lawyer sends out thousands of letters, this means huge profits, which are often shared with the rightsholder through illegal kickback schemes.
This is a well-known problem, but most lawmakers (who were often legal professionals before), prosecutors, and judges see copyright violations as the bigger issue so they tend to welcome this process as a private-sector law enforcement despite the fraud that is usually associated with it.
Encrypting your stuff is all good and nice, but you should use a piece of software that has been written using established secure coding standards. Just because it's open source doesn't mean it's also secure (cf. PHP, OpenSSL). Rather, being open source is a necessary, but not a sufficient criterion in the evaluation of security-critical applications.
Given the track record of this particular application, I'm a bit skeptical whether one should really use it for anything serious.
Yes, I feel so locked in, what with my choices of Ubuntu, or Ubuntu Gnome, or Kubuntu, or Lubuntu, or Xubuntu, or any of the many derivatives of Ubuntu that's out there. And it's all just an "sudo apt-get install" away from appearing on my machine.
Unfortunately, you lose security support when you do this.
The concept that "Free software" (as in copyleft) is more free than more permissive licenses (BSD, MIT, etc. just to name two) is contradictory from step 1.
The FSF considers permissive license to be free software. They do not consider copyleft licenses to be "more free" than permissive licenses. Please stop spreading false propaganda.
And let's not hyperbolically describe this as "holding the users hostage," okay? Users are free to leave the course whenever they want
Not if the forced study participation occurs halfway through the course when users have already invested significant ressources. As long as the annoyance being asked for is less than than the total amount of work invested, people will stay in whether they like it or not, making this approach highly unethical (unless it's clearly communicated before peple enroll).
99.9% of what intelligence agencies do doesn't directly affect "risks to human life". It's spying to get basic information that allows you to know when to launch an operation that actually does influence those risks. You don't find out that some Arab Sheik is a threat to the US unless you're spying on Arab Sheiks. Since Arab Sheiks are hardly the only threat (the Taliban, for example, aren't Arab), the US has to be able to spy on anyone if it thinks something fishy's going on.
But that's not what is happening right now. The US are spying on everyone, no matter whether there is something fishy going on, there might be something fishy going on, or there is nothing fishy going on. Do you seriously believe that there is any realistic chance that any of the NATO allies is going to launch war or state-supported terrorist attacks against the US in the forseeable future? Do you seriously believe that everyone using Google or Facebook is up to something fishy?
I see you put the word "virtual" in parenthesis, perhaps hoping we wouldn't notice it, or if we did, think it really isn't relevant.
From a legal point of view, it is mostly irrelevant and this is not limited to the US or even common law jurisdictions. Factual impossibility is not a valid defense when charged with the attempt of a crime.
This is actually why the Snowden as traitor thing will simply never go away. No matter what. He could bring George Washington back to life to vouch for him, and nobody who serves the US Government (especially the military) would believe that shit. Some previous leaks advanced the Constitution by stopping mass surveillance. This leak is an attack on the entire practice of spying, and since combat troops find spy-data really useful in their jobs (particularly the bits of their jobs that involve not being killed), Sbnowden will never be able to live this down.
Would you care to explain this point? As far as I can tell, neither Snowden nor the journalists he has cooperated with have stated anywhere that they want to abolish intelligence practices completely. Nor have they done anything that endangered ongoing operations with imminant risk for human life.
Science and AAAS (of which I'm presently ashamed to be a member) should be blasted for publishing this tripe. It needs to be retracted, immediately. If they want to have the slightest shred of credibility here, they should at least conduct scientifically rigorous stings.
Informed consent must be obtained for studies on humans after the nature and possible consequences of the studies were explained. All research on humans must have IRB approval.
... the story only shows that German media outlets are not familiar with US entry regulations. He says that he was denied a visa last year, which automatically disqualifies him from the visa waiver program. This is just a garden-variety ESTA issue, and most likely has nothing to do with his stance of the NSA surveillance.
Any reasonably smart Nokia employee would also have seen the writing on the wall and left the sinking ship.
Given the fact that Nokia's revenue used to be more than 10% of Finland's GDP, it might not have been so easy for a large number of Nokia's engineers to move to different jobs at about the same time...
Why go with Maemo when they could have just used Android itself? It would have been much faster to market.
Err, Nokia already had Maemo/Meego devices on the shelves. The decision to withhold their flagship device, the N9, from all major markets came directly from Elop.
Also, if Maemo ran Android apps, then nobody would have developed natively for Maemo. They would have developed for Android and their apps would have been available to a much larger market.
Ah, the good old OS/2 argument. I'm not convinced that it holds here. Technically speaking, Android is inferior to Meego as the latter provides a full-blown POSIX environment, for which many software packages and libraries are already available. Take LibreOffice, for instance. No usable Android port in sight, but packages for Maemo/Meego have been available for a long time. And it would have been a *huge* selling point for Nokia's devices if the had come with a full-blown office suite.
Sure, you can put God at the big bang, but as a great man once said: I have no need for that hypothesis.
Quoting an early 19th century scientist has about the same merits as quoting from a few thousand years old book, given the scientific revolutions that took place within the last 200 years.
The first cause argument is flawed in the sense that you explain something, by invoking something else (God) that has no first cause and apparently is exempt from causality. So, for all intents and purposes, you can just scratch that "extra" assumption. Ergo: whatever caused the big bang, was there already (and given that time even didn't exist, talking about "before" is truly a stretch already).
Well, if something was already there, where did this something come from?
Interestingly, I found the zero-energy universe to be an superbly elegant explanation: Lawrence Krauss: A Universe From Nothing [youtube.com].
From the viewpoint of science, his multiverse stuff is indistinguishable from intelligent design.
I'm neither a physicist nor a computer scientist, but if you can "hone [your] skills" using the simulator, why isn't it sufficient to have a fast enough simulation of a quantum system using a classical computer, and solve your problems on the simulator?
The reason is scalability. Even with the best currently existing methods, the computational complexity of simulating quantum systems on classical computers grows exponentially with the number of qubits. Quantum computers, being quantum systems themselves, do not have this exponential scaling. With just two qubits, the exponential penalty for classical simulation is rather small (and the classical simulation will be much faster), so the only reason why you would want to build an actual experiment is to make proof-of-principle tests of the technology. With a few tens of qubits, the exponential growth becomes relevant, and classical simulation becomes impractical. Right now, the world record for the full simulation of quantum systems on classical computers is 42 qubits, and the world record for quantum computing stands at 14 qubits. So, while the real experiments still have some way to go before they catch up with what we can do with classical computers, it's not crazy to think that this will happen within the next decade.
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I don't buy that the demise of the median worker has anything to do with technological progress. If the average income increases steadily and the median declines, it simply means that a society has problems to fairly allocate its resources. Since people making less than the median typically also make up 50% of the electorate, it looks like these people are voting against their own interests (or do not vote at all). One also has to keep in mind that the events that hurt the median worker the most (deregulation of banks, Bush-style tax cuts, and the whole war on terror) were all political descisions that were completely unrelated to technology.
We know the security is inferior. We know the stability is often questionable. We know it costs money in purchase and/or ongoing licensing fees. BUT: you pretty much get a guarantee that any code written today will continue to run for at least 10 years (due to specific OS version support for that long) and likely a lot longer than that; due to API support normally extending even further. Re-writing shit just because the platform changed costs real world time and money.
Red Hat offers support for their distribution for up to 13 years. If you want, you can still get support for Python 2.2, which was released in 2001.
I think you might be missing the point. He's saying that the new information/digital economy requires less people to run it and is therefore reducing the overall number of jobs.
The emprical evidence for this claim is extremely weak, to say the least. The total number of hours worked is pretty much on par with population growth, so despite the enormous increase in automatization in recent decades, the workforce as a whole appears to be able to adapt to it quite well.
I suspect few desktop users run an OS targeted for "servers" where stability is the number one goal?
Actually, I used to be working on a CentOS workstation for quite some time and it was a very pleasant experience. The only issue I remember is that I had to manually compile some applications to be able to watch soccer streams during EURO 2012, but I'm pretty sure people at the IT department saw this as a feature rather than a bug ...
The key words you used are "most likely" and at least you're honest enough to use them. There is no mathematical proof that any cipher (other than the one-time pad) is resistant to all as-yet-unknown quantum algorithms. That doesn't mean that they are actually vulnerable - only that we cannot know with certainty whether they are.
That's the usual situation in complexity theory and it applies to classical algorithms as well. There is also no proof that quantum computers are actually superior to classical computers when it comes to cryptanalysis. Still, most people believe this to be true.
People seem to under-estimate the NSA's capabilities here when I talk to them. They employ a lot of really smart people, and they have the benefits of reading all the public literature as well as all the classified stuff that their academic peers cannot read.
Remember that we're talking about actual physical devices that need to be built and being really smart only helps you somewhat when you need to solder electronics or align a laser. And so far, the NSA employs hardly any physicists which you can also tell from the fact that they've outsourced the research mentioned in the documents to a public university. This is very different than in mathematics or computer science, where it is well known that the NSA is a large employer. That being said, I still think that the NSA might possess some interesting knowledge on quantum computing. I wouldn't be too surprised if they were sitting on an efficient quantum algorithm breaking AES, for instance.
These are hardly shocking revelations. The document mentions to achieve control over two semiconductor qubits, whereas factoring 2048 bit numbers requires at least that many qubits, and probably several orders of magnitude more. The current record stands at control of 14 qubits, achieved in 2010 in Rainer Blatt's group at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, using trapped ions.
Some time ago, I wrote something on the history and possible future of quantum computing. Moreover, one also has to keep in mind that there are public key cryptosystems that most likely cannot be cracked even with quantum computers.
All the campus networks I've seen remotely recently do some sort of access control, if only to avoid being a free wifi provider for every porn-torrent enthusiast in the neighborhood.
To the contrary, Harvard operates another wireless network called "Harvard Guest" that does not require a Harvard ID for accessing the internet.
Welcome to the only healthcare system in the world that relies primarily on for-profit insurance companies.
Not true, in Switzerland it's the same. However, each insurer needs its premiums for the minimum plan to be approved by the government.
Too bad that our universe is neither AdS (the cosmological constant is positive) nor ten-dimensional as in the papers.
In Germany, a lawyer sending a cease-and-desist letter can ask to get paid for his services from the recipient of the letter. However, the fees associated with this (making up most of the €250 in this case) are essentially lump sums set by law that are unrelated to the acutal amount of time spent for each case. If a lawyer sends out thousands of letters, this means huge profits, which are often shared with the rightsholder through illegal kickback schemes.
This is a well-known problem, but most lawmakers (who were often legal professionals before), prosecutors, and judges see copyright violations as the bigger issue so they tend to welcome this process as a private-sector law enforcement despite the fraud that is usually associated with it.
Encrypting your stuff is all good and nice, but you should use a piece of software that has been written using established secure coding standards. Just because it's open source doesn't mean it's also secure (cf. PHP, OpenSSL). Rather, being open source is a necessary, but not a sufficient criterion in the evaluation of security-critical applications.
Given the track record of this particular application, I'm a bit skeptical whether one should really use it for anything serious.
Yes, I feel so locked in, what with my choices of Ubuntu, or Ubuntu Gnome, or Kubuntu, or Lubuntu, or Xubuntu, or any of the many derivatives of Ubuntu that's out there. And it's all just an "sudo apt-get install" away from appearing on my machine.
Unfortunately, you lose security support when you do this.
The concept that "Free software" (as in copyleft) is more free than more permissive licenses (BSD, MIT, etc. just to name two) is contradictory from step 1.
The FSF considers permissive license to be free software. They do not consider copyleft licenses to be "more free" than permissive licenses. Please stop spreading false propaganda.
And let's not hyperbolically describe this as "holding the users hostage," okay? Users are free to leave the course whenever they want
Not if the forced study participation occurs halfway through the course when users have already invested significant ressources. As long as the annoyance being asked for is less than than the total amount of work invested, people will stay in whether they like it or not, making this approach highly unethical (unless it's clearly communicated before peple enroll).
Is there anything that they won't use the 'think of the children' line on?
Sure, when dealing with pedophiles in the intelligence services.
99.9% of what intelligence agencies do doesn't directly affect "risks to human life". It's spying to get basic information that allows you to know when to launch an operation that actually does influence those risks. You don't find out that some Arab Sheik is a threat to the US unless you're spying on Arab Sheiks. Since Arab Sheiks are hardly the only threat (the Taliban, for example, aren't Arab), the US has to be able to spy on anyone if it thinks something fishy's going on.
But that's not what is happening right now. The US are spying on everyone, no matter whether there is something fishy going on, there might be something fishy going on, or there is nothing fishy going on. Do you seriously believe that there is any realistic chance that any of the NATO allies is going to launch war or state-supported terrorist attacks against the US in the forseeable future? Do you seriously believe that everyone using Google or Facebook is up to something fishy?
I see you put the word "virtual" in parenthesis, perhaps hoping we wouldn't notice it, or if we did, think it really isn't relevant.
From a legal point of view, it is mostly irrelevant and this is not limited to the US or even common law jurisdictions. Factual impossibility is not a valid defense when charged with the attempt of a crime.
This is actually why the Snowden as traitor thing will simply never go away. No matter what. He could bring George Washington back to life to vouch for him, and nobody who serves the US Government (especially the military) would believe that shit. Some previous leaks advanced the Constitution by stopping mass surveillance. This leak is an attack on the entire practice of spying, and since combat troops find spy-data really useful in their jobs (particularly the bits of their jobs that involve not being killed), Sbnowden will never be able to live this down.
Would you care to explain this point? As far as I can tell, neither Snowden nor the journalists he has cooperated with have stated anywhere that they want to abolish intelligence practices completely. Nor have they done anything that endangered ongoing operations with imminant risk for human life.
Science and AAAS (of which I'm presently ashamed to be a member) should be blasted for publishing this tripe. It needs to be retracted, immediately. If they want to have the slightest shred of credibility here, they should at least conduct scientifically rigorous stings.
I also doubt that they adhered to their own guidelines for Human research studies:
Informed consent must be obtained for studies on humans after the nature and possible consequences of the studies were explained. All research on humans must have IRB approval.
... the story only shows that German media outlets are not familiar with US entry regulations. He says that he was denied a visa last year, which automatically disqualifies him from the visa waiver program. This is just a garden-variety ESTA issue, and most likely has nothing to do with his stance of the NSA surveillance.
Any reasonably smart Nokia employee would also have seen the writing on the wall and left the sinking ship.
Given the fact that Nokia's revenue used to be more than 10% of Finland's GDP, it might not have been so easy for a large number of Nokia's engineers to move to different jobs at about the same time ...
Why go with Maemo when they could have just used Android itself? It would have been much faster to market.
Err, Nokia already had Maemo/Meego devices on the shelves. The decision to withhold their flagship device, the N9, from all major markets came directly from Elop.
Also, if Maemo ran Android apps, then nobody would have developed natively for Maemo. They would have developed for Android and their apps would have been available to a much larger market.
Ah, the good old OS/2 argument. I'm not convinced that it holds here. Technically speaking, Android is inferior to Meego as the latter provides a full-blown POSIX environment, for which many software packages and libraries are already available. Take LibreOffice, for instance. No usable Android port in sight, but packages for Maemo/Meego have been available for a long time. And it would have been a *huge* selling point for Nokia's devices if the had come with a full-blown office suite.
Sure, you can put God at the big bang, but as a great man once said: I have no need for that hypothesis.
Quoting an early 19th century scientist has about the same merits as quoting from a few thousand years old book, given the scientific revolutions that took place within the last 200 years.
The first cause argument is flawed in the sense that you explain something, by invoking something else (God) that has no first cause and apparently is exempt from causality. So, for all intents and purposes, you can just scratch that "extra" assumption. Ergo: whatever caused the big bang, was there already (and given that time even didn't exist, talking about "before" is truly a stretch already).
Well, if something was already there, where did this something come from?
Interestingly, I found the zero-energy universe to be an superbly elegant explanation: Lawrence Krauss: A Universe From Nothing [youtube.com].
From the viewpoint of science, his multiverse stuff is indistinguishable from intelligent design.
There have been reports on 58 different remote code execution vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 10 in 2013 alone. I would hardly call that "taped together quite well".
I'm neither a physicist nor a computer scientist, but if you can "hone [your] skills" using the simulator, why isn't it sufficient to have a fast enough simulation of a quantum system using a classical computer, and solve your problems on the simulator?
The reason is scalability. Even with the best currently existing methods, the computational complexity of simulating quantum systems on classical computers grows exponentially with the number of qubits. Quantum computers, being quantum systems themselves, do not have this exponential scaling. With just two qubits, the exponential penalty for classical simulation is rather small (and the classical simulation will be much faster), so the only reason why you would want to build an actual experiment is to make proof-of-principle tests of the technology. With a few tens of qubits, the exponential growth becomes relevant, and classical simulation becomes impractical. Right now, the world record for the full simulation of quantum systems on classical computers is 42 qubits, and the world record for quantum computing stands at 14 qubits. So, while the real experiments still have some way to go before they catch up with what we can do with classical computers, it's not crazy to think that this will happen within the next decade.