Additionally, tenured professors will be bullied by the administration if they underperform. That can get very nasty.
On the other hand, I can tell you (based on first-hand observation) that you'd be astonished how much bullying underperforming tenured professors can tolerate.
These types are not going to give up guaranteed employment. They simply grow a thicker skin. Furthermore, they learn how to strike back. For example, if the department chair tries to increase the teaching load of a non-performer, the inevitable result is horrible teaching reviews and angry students changing majors. The administration very quickly learns to just leave the non-performers alone and wait for them to retire.
The better alternative, of course, is to hire non-tenured faculty. Much easier to get rid of (if necessary), and in general more productive researchers and better teachers.
Most people don't realize that the tenure-track faculty position is rapidly disappearing at U.S. universities. Tenure is instead becoming a tool to accomplish two goals: (1) recruit superstars, hopefully with the goal of increasing your school's numbers in the USN&WR college rankings, and (2) reshape the demographics of the faculty, e.g. increased female and minority hires.
Otherwise, tenure has outlived its usefulness, at least to university administrators. Go to any major university, and you'll find tenured professors who "retired in place" years ago, and who are worse than useless as researchers or teachers. To them, academic "freedom" translates to "leave me alone, you can't tell me what to do". University administrators have had their fill of those types. It's the old "10% making the other 90% look bad" syndrome, and consequently the other 90% must bear the brunt.
The future of academia is one-year to five-year contracts with non-tenured faculty. If you can bring in research contract money, your academic salary will still be reasonably competitive, at least in engineering and the hard sciences. If your research contracts dry up, your contract won't be renewed, and you'll need to move on. Otherwise, you'll be working as an adjunct instructor, teaching 3-hour semester courses at $5K to $15K a pop. You'll find plenty of those at every school nowadays.
As to the original article, the drug lord vs. drug seller analogy is largely a side effect of the economics of Ph.D.s in liberal arts and soft sciences. There are only so many university positions available in sociology, history, english literature, etc., and almost zero positions outside of academia to absorb the surplus. So if you truly love Medieval European History, and cannot conceive of doing anything else with your degree, you're going to fight tooth and nail doing academic scut work for slave wages in the hopes of making yourself more competitive for a rare tenure-track opening.
The analogy falls apart with engineering and computer science, because a good Ph.D. can usually find a relevant job in industry, and quite often at better wages than in academia. Ph.D.s in liberal arts don't have that luxury. For them, it's either academic grunt work, unemployment, or getting a job completely unrelated to your degree.
Being a cheapskate, I didn't want to an exterminator to rip open the wall, with repairs to the wall that might have cost thousands, as was suggested. Instead, I ran a shop vac hose next to the opening, sucking up any wasp that tried to enter or leave the hole. After 24 hours, the shop vac was 1/3 full of solid wasp mass, maybe 10000 of them as a guesstimate. I left it running for a week, each day finding fewer. Then I ran it during the day every couple of days, finding less each time.
A friend of mine had a bunch of yellow jackets nest in the wall of his weekend cabin many years back. He debated sealing up their entrance hole, but knew they would just chew some new openings in the wood paneling.
So he did something different. He got a very high speed, high torque fan, one that ran so fast that the metal blades were almost invisible, and mounted it over the entrance hole late at night while most of the workers were in the nest. He removed the fan guard, turned on the fan, and waited for the sun to rise.
The yellow jackets couldn't see the fan blades, and very obligingly flew out the entrance hole to be instantly ground into a fine mulch. The pheromones released by their demise drew other yellow jackets to the opening, looking for a fight, and they likewise got ground into paste. After that, it was a orgy of insect death.
He ran the fan for a few days, until he could no longer see anything coming out of the hole. Then he fired off a very long blast of wasp spray into the hole and sealed it up. Problem solved, and without a single sting.
This is worse than bullying, it's sexual harassment and extortion.
It may even be worse than that. He had lots of photos of underage girls, and that he told one of his victims that he didn't care how old his victims were.
The Feds may pile on some child pornography charges once they examine all the evidence on his computers.
Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal. I am not a laywer, and neither are cops. So while they can harass you their interpretation of the law doesn't necessarily hold up in court. And even then it's up to the prosecutor whether or not they want to actually pursue it.
Point taken. However, even if the charges get tossed out by a judge, or the prosecutor declines to prosecute, you've just spent a few hours of your life fighting a battle that could have been avoided. Police have the ability to your ruin your day if they so choose, even if nothing ultimately sticks in a court of law. I chose discretion over valor and avoided a pointless legal exercise that would have gained me nothing.
An excellent question, which a lawyer friend of mine also asked me when I told her what had happened. (She said I was crazy to consent.)
I consented because I quickly realized the cop was not going to let me say, "No, you cannot search my car", and just let me drive off. He was determined to search my car. I had Arizona plates (this was in Tennessee), and apparently a lot of drugs were being transported from the Southwest into this area. I also did not have a permanent address ("No, I'm just staying with a relative") and that also set off some flags.
So I had two choices: stand up for my constitutional rights, and possibly spend another hour or two being detained and questioned using whatever excuses the cop could think of, or just let him search my car, find nothing, and let me drive off a few minutes later - which is exactly what happened.
I want to emphasize that the state trooper was unfailingly polite to me the entire time, and I to him. But he was not going to let me drive away without a fight, and I was not going to spend a few hours of my life seeing just how far he was willing to push it. You have to pick your battles in life, and I had nothing to gain by fighting this one.
No, you only think that you're not doing anything illegal. You have no concept of just how many laws cover every single thing you do. Or, for that matter, don't do. Legal experts know better. So do the people who monitor the street cameras when you step off the curb prematurely.
THAT is the problem. If someone for whatever reason decides that they don't like you, they can pull that data and metadata and use it as supporting evidence for whatever transgressions they deem suitable to nail you for.
It isn't just online. The average U.S. citizen breaks (by some estimates) about three federal laws each day, not to mention countless state and local laws. A cop who knows his laws can stop and detain you just about any time he chooses, because he'll be able to cite at least one law that you broke.
My own anecdote: many years back, when I first began working at my current job, I was commuting back and forth from a relative's house while my wife and I were looking for our own place to buy. I would travel about 20 minutes by interstate every morning and evening, and always observed a lot of state troopers pulling people over in the evenings. What I did not realize at the time was that this particular stretch of road was a major drug corridor, and that the troopers were looking for mules hauling large stashes.
One night I had to work late and was driving home after dark. Knowing how active the patrols were, I made certain to set my cruise control at the speed limit, so I wasn't particularly concerned when I saw a state trooper in my rear-view mirror - until the lights started flashing.
At the time I still had my Arizona license plates on my car, and the cops were sure they had a hot one. After a 15-minute stop and search of my car, I was on my way home. But what was the state trooper's excuse for stopping me?
You know those little plastic frames that auto dealers put around your license plate, with the dealer's name on it? Well, as it turns out, where I live it is illegal to obscure any part of your license plate, which means that I was breaking the law by having that plastic frame overlap my plate along the edges and corners. It gave the state trooper probable cause to stop me. At least he didn't give me a ticket.
The moral? Don't assume that this sort of behavior by the authorities is anything new, just because it happens online.
They're not saying that Tesla can't sell their cars in Texas. They're saying that Tesla can't deal them without using a third party dealership.
Its one of the old monopoly laws. Another one would be movie theaters. They used to be owned almost entirely by movie studios. That is, universal, etc would literally own the theater. They broke up most of those relationships and now you have to have separate corporations for many of these things.
This is a classic "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario.
If GM, Ford, Toyota, Honda, etc., entered a state, opened direct factory stores, and drove all the local dealers out of business, people would complain about how out-of-state and overseas corporations were destroying local family businesses and pushing consumers around.
So Texas went the opposite route and gave local dealers all the power - and now they're the ones pushing the consumers around. People are mad only because Tesla and Elon Musk are being affected. If it was some other faceless corporation trying to drive out local businesses, you'd have a completely different response from the Slashdot crowd.
And just to clarify something - Texas isn't barring Tesla from direct sales; they bar ALL auto manufacturers from selling directly to consumers.
My guess is that, at least initially, a driver will be required to be in the drivers seat at all times ready to override any actions taken by the car.
Which means that 999 out of 1000 times, the human driver would wind up making things far worse than if he had let the computer handle it.
You're assuming that the driver will stay constantly alert, and constantly watch what is going on around him, even when he is not driving. Common sense should tell you that it's not going to happen. The person in the car will become distracted or fall asleep, just as any passenger would.
In an emergency situation, the autonomous car will have handled the crisis, for better or worse, long before the human even begins to orient him/herself to what has happened.
Use a separate laptop for travel, or else keep the sensitive stuff on removable partitions (SSDs, USB keys, etc) which never leave the house.
This is absolutely the best tactic. In my research group, it is standard procedure to use a travel laptop when traveling to conferences out of the country, even to "friendly" venues. In my case, I use a MacBook Air with the screensaver and firmware passwords enabled. I don't even bother to encrypt, since nothing goes on the SSD that is the least bit sensitive.
Granted, there is always the remote possibility that someone might succeed in compromising the OS during a business trip, and hoping that I or one of my colleagues will bring that laptop back behind our firewall. When in doubt, that is dealt with by re-imaging the drive as the first order of business upon one's return.
We often joke (half seriously) that the day is going to come when we will buy disposable laptops that will be abandoned or destroyed when traveling to certain countries. Yes, we are paranoid, but are we paranoid enough?
It's common sense, just as it is also common sense to presume that every conversation is being recorded, whether by phone or in person, when meeting colleagues overseas. Despite pious protestations to the contrary by some parties, one can be certain that there is no government on the planet that wouldn't do so if given the opportunity.
In future and today you can use self-driving car, at least in urban areas. They are called buses, trams and commuter rail. They work quite perfectly. In addition there are taxis. All these means of transportation work fine for elderly people (at least if they use modern equipment). And yes, I know they are not driver-less, but you do not have to drive yourself and in certain cities commuter rail services are already really driver-less, like in London or Nuremberg.
Get back to us when that bus, tram or train can drop your off right at your door. Walking half a mile or a mile from the bus stop to your home may not be a big deal to you, but it can be a very big deal to the elderly and infirm, not to mention a mother carrying groceries and shepherding a couple of kids.
And taxis? Where I live, you have to call the taxi company 30 minutes in advance if you want a pick up. Then you're dealing with the human factor, i.e. a driver who passes you by because you don't look "right" (i.e. you're a minority), or tries to cheat his fare by taking the long way to the destination. It happens all the time, even in large cities where taxis are much easier to find. Me, I just finished dealing with my credit card company where a taxi driver skimmed my card a few months back and started making small charges to my card weeks later, hoping I wouldn't notice.
Self-driving cars that are dispatched by smartphone will be fast, they won't pass you by because of your skin color, and they will take you to your destination by an optimal path. They will use existing infrastructure and will be scalable according to population density. They will, in fact, eliminate the money hole known as "mass transit" in all but the most densely populated areas.
Self-driving cars can't get here fast enough, as far as I'm concerned.
Seriously, Occam's Razor debunks better than this. Simply: what the hell makes you think that chemicals are being routinely sprayed out of commercial jets for nefarious purposes? On what basis is the ordinary scientific explanation about vapor condensation not a good enough explanation for the trails? And if the government can spray chemicals in the air on that scale, why can't they make them invisible too?
This reminds me of a guy I spoke to recently who was convinced (by an Internet video) that cameras and microphones are being placed in all cable TV boxes so that they can watch us in our living rooms.
I pointed out to him that his cell phone and his laptop computer already have microphones and cameras built in. On top of that, he carries his cell phone with him everywhere. So why in the world would anyone need to hide anything in a cable TV box, when they could just spy on us using our personal electronics?
And yet... he wasn't convinced. The conspiracy theory had taken root in his mind like a religious belief, and he could not let go of it. And that's why it's a waste of time arguing with a conspiracy theorist, because it's like trying to convince a religious man to reject his beliefs.
The big thing I didn't ever really understand in my EE coursework at the time is how to design an analog circuit to do something. That's partly my fault, partly lack of a high level follow on course, and partly my instructors fault- we never had a chance to design an analog circuit in our coursework, and they never really explained why we were doing what we did- it was just endless repetition of finding v and i at every point in a circuit using multiple methods.
I teach analog circuit design. Your complaint is a common one, but there's a reason why the instructor spent so much time going over circuit analysis techniques: it is impossible to design analog circuits until you become an expert at analyzing analog circuits.
My experience is that many students who want to learn how to design an analog circuit are so deficient in basic circuit analysis that I have to spend an inordinate amount of time just going over large- and small-signal analysis (or more specifically, nodal analysis) just to get them to the point where I can give them a two-transistor amplifier and ask them to pick the right resistor values to make it work. Even then, it is a challenge, with some students resorting to randomly iterating different component values using LTSpice, and hoping the circuit will start to work.
Analog circuit design is hard, and there's no way to make it easy. Your instructor was doing the best he or she could, by reinforcing the basic analysis techniques that any circuit designer must know in order to actually create a working design.
One aspect of autonomous vehicles that few people seem to consider is its potential effect on the housing market.
Consider the size of the RV market, and the number of people who prefer the RV lifestyle after they retire. Now consider the fact that one of the more annoying aspects of owning an RV is that you have to drive it everywhere yourself.
Now imagine twenty years from now when you'll be able to buy an autonomous RV. You go to sleep in it, and in the middle of the night it takes you to whatever destination you desire. In the morning, you open the door and you're in a new city. What you really own is not an RV, but a magic house that can take you anywhere you desire, a few hundred miles every night.
With that kind of freedom, how many people would choose to become high-tech nomads, and never live on fixed piece of property again? In fact, I think this will be a major profit center for automakers. Most people won't bother owning cars when they can call for one on a smartphone, but $100K to $200K super-RVs will become the home of choice and the way for GM and Ford to stay in business.
The first time I read about this thing, I thought, "Why not just set it up at work? Get it running, throw the breakers coming from the power lines, and let this little "reactor" run the plant?"
One of the sure signs of pseudoscience is that the "inventor" cannot do anything useful with his creation, no matter how long he "refines" it.
If I could build a free energy generator, I wouldn't need to prove anything to anyone. If nothing else, I would unplug myself from the grid, and stop buying gasoline. On a larger scale, I could (for example) perform electrolysis of water and sell hydrogen in bulk quantities at a price no one else could touch. I wouldn't need true believers to worship me as a genius. I wouldn't need to put on ridiculous demonstrations. I would just make money, and lots of it.
That fact that Rossi and others of his ilk seem incapable of doing anything practical with their devices except try to solicit money from victims... er, investors, should tell you everything you need to know about their validity.
Don't take it to the bank, but if you're heavily invested in oil stocks, you should be watching the saga.
I've been "watching the saga" surrounding free energy in its various incarnations ever since the early eighties. Another year, another bucket of hogwash. Nothing ever changes except the names of the latest batch of charlatans, and the bogus shell companies they create in an attempt to scam investors.
The fact that Sterling Allan is reporting this "news" should raise a huge red flag. Sterling is a nice enough guy, but he is a "true believer" for every bogus free energy claim that comes along. He has never met an unsubstantiated claim by a free energy crackpot that he didn't unashamedly promote.
You can be quite certain that no public demonstration by Defkalion will be taking place, or at least any sort of demonstration that will convince anyone with an ounce of skepticism. So no, I wouldn't try shorting oil stocks anytime soon. Oil, at least, can be burned for energy. Hogwash, not so much.
How a group like this doesn't get pulled under by Security Theater is beyond me.
On the contrary, you let groups like this meet and hold their convention. And then you identify, photograph, and monitor every attendee. What better way to get the bad guys to voluntarily reveal themselves?
Governments have been doing this for a long, long time. Read about some of the things that the FBI did under J. Edgar Hoover; it will enlighten you.
The thing that is owned in "intellectual property" is not well defined. That's a pretty big difference to real property. The concept of intellectual property is not even wrong. Calling each other foolish won't change that.
The definition of "real" property is not exactly carved in granite, either.
For example: assume I own a parcel of land. Does that mean I own everything beneath it, all the way down to the center of the earth? Does that mean I own all the airspace above it, all the way to the top of the earth's atmosphere? Clearly no, yet in general I do have the right to prevent someone from flying a remote-controlled drone directly above my rooftop, and I do have the right to prevent companies from extracting minerals below my land without my permission. I do have some rights above and below my parcel of land, but the limits of those rights must be determined by law and by the agreement of society in general.
And let's take it another step: assume I decide to rent out my property to someone else. He pays me rent, which I use to buy more property, and rent it out to more people. Eventually I am able to sit back and do nothing except collect rent from my property in perpetuity. I can even hire someone to manage my property for me, and do nothing but collect monthly checks and goof off.
But wait - I am now expecting a perpetual income from my property without working for it, based on my one-time purchase of that property. Clearly, this is a grave injustice against society, or so the "I don't believe in imaginary property" Slashdot meme goes. Yet would those same Slashdotters claim that one does not have to right to rent or lease one's own physical property? The fundamental concept of licensing a patent is exactly the same as that of renting one's land. So why is one bad, but the other okay?
You want to reject the entire concept of intellectual property because it is not precisely defined, but the ownership of real property is no more precise. The entire concept of "property" is hazy around the edges, because it is a societal construct in every respect. As the parent put it, "all property is imaginary".
If the current IP laws had existed at the beginning, we would only have a few stories, and an even smaller group of people would own everything.
The current laws are broken-- were intentionally broken by people who got the first big pile of money.
It's reasonable that people should be able to get a decent living and a reasonable return on their investments for a limited amount of time for each creation.
I agree with you completely.
If IP is real in the sense that property is real, then we need to start applying property tax to it.
There is no need, assuming that IP laws are correctly applied. The "tax" that the creator pays is that his IP goes to the public domain once his copyright or patent expires. In return for society enforcing his limited-time monopoly, all of us will eventually share it.
Now in situations where property is owned in perpetuity, then a tax is appropriate, because that is the fee that must be paid to society in order to enforce one's right to retain that property. So I pay property tax on my home, but I must eventually turn over my tax-free patent for the public good.
The problem, of course, is that corporations like Disney want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want perpetual copyright without paying for it. That is what needs to be changed, not the concept of intellectual property itself.
The idea of intellectual property is that you no longer have to bother doing a good job, you just have to own the right to something imaginary and you can make people pay for it.
All property is imaginary, whether it is physical or not. In a society without laws, there is no "property"; there is only what you can take or keep by physical force.
Then civilization developed along with the (imaginary) idea of property, i.e, that you had the right to possess something exclusive of your physical ability to control it, and that society has an obligation to enforce that imaginary right. Somehow you have no problem with that imaginary right, because you see it tied to a physical object, yet reject it when someone devotes his creative efforts to developing something non-physical (i.e. intellectual property) that benefits all of us. I have never understood that line of reasoning among Slashdotters.
For hundreds of years, our economy and the economies of most of the world flourished without this BS, yet fools still think that it would be impossible to live without it.
You mean those "hundreds of years" when 99% of humanity lived as peasants, serfs, and slaves, scraping out a subsistence living using primitive technology? You have a strange definite of "flourished".
The rise of the modern middle class is tied directly to the industrial revolution, which is tied directly to the rise of the concept of intellectual property. I want to see patent and copyright reform as much as anyone, and a return to the much saner limits of 50 to 100 years ago. But I also recognize that much of modern society is built on the pillars of intellectual property, and its historic benefits have far outweighed its more recent abuses.
Let's clean the dirty baby, not throw him out with the bathwater.
So are you talking about your government... or about your next-door neighbor?
I have little doubt that the entire concept of privacy will be moot within 20 years, at least if you are outside your own home. But it won't just be the police watching you; it will be your employer and your neighbors and your friends and your family, and they will probably do an even better job of it. Combine crowd-sourced video from multiple sources, and I can see a day when anyone can track anyone else.
And here's the problem: there won't be a thing any of us can do about it. Surveillance tech is following its own cost / performance Moore's Law curve, and history has shown that when technology gives the average guy the ability to get something desirable at little cost (e.g. file-sharing of music and movies), then widespread abuse will inevitably follow.
With all the usual anti-government rants on Slashdot, people are missing the much bigger picture. They should worry less about the local police and more about every window in every house on every street in their neighborhood.
According to Ars Technica, the maximum sentence for the charges he faces is 10 years and $250,000 - and the sentencing guidelines for this instance, with no history is 0 - 6 months. So, as usual, slashdot blows it out of proportion by either making up numbers or quoting others who made up numbers to get a "oh noes, 30 years for handing out a password" headline.
You're right, he'll probably get probation or a couple of months in prison at worst, which is certainly appropriate for giving total strangers access to his former employer's network. The "30 years" number is the usual Slashdot hyperbole.
But for Keys, the secondary consequences are really much, much worse. If he is convicted, he will almost certainly be fired by Reuters and be blacklisted by major media employers. Who would trust him, knowing that he would pull stunts like that? That is a far more devastating punishment for his misdeeds.
Contact the Wounded Warrior Project. They have taken several donated P4 Dell boxes off my hands.
Like the OP, I have found it very difficult to find donors for older desktops. Craigslist may be useful in that respect, as individuals and small nonprofits sometimes ask for computer donations.
Personally, I have given up on reconditioning and donating desktops. Very few people want them. As others have mentioned, it really is better to recycle them, even if it goes against your grain to toss out a working piece of hardware.
Then add the aspect that someone looking at you wearing one is "recording" or at least "analyzing" everything seen and heard and sharing it with Google or whomever is quite invasive. It is one thing to give away your own privacy... and quite another to violate the privacy of everyone around you all the time.
And please don't bother replying to this with crap like "but you are in public". It doesn't matter if you are in public or not. And quite frankly, sitting in a booth at a restaurant with a few friends, there is way more than a reasonable expectation that your conversations, your body expressions, what you are wearing and eating, etc are not shared with Big Brother or the entire world.
While I agree that wearable computing will have many drawbacks just as you describe, there will be benefits as well. It is not a black or white issue.
Consider a world where no child will be able to bully another without leaving irrefutable video evidence, or a world where no public servant will be able to act like a thug or a rude asshole without leaving a video trail. Consider a world where no supervisor will be able to sexually harass a subordinate without having video evidence sent straight to the subordinate's attorney. And for that matter, consider a world where accusations, true or false, will no longer depend on one person's word versus another's.
Most anti-social behavior takes place in private between two people (perpetrator and victim); by effectively taking away that privacy, you are exposing that perpetrator's behavior to the world. There's the old saying of "an armed society is a polite society", and when everyone is effectively "armed" with video surveillance tech that sends data straight to the cloud, the bullies and low-lifes of the world will indeed be forced to be more polite, whether they like it or not.
The world of wearable computing will indeed be very different, and there will good and bad aspects to it, just as there is with any transformative technology. But that world will be inevitable in any case, because the technology will be too cheap and useful not to be exploited in every conceivable manner.
For me, the killer app for Google Glass is obvious. I want to be able to activate high resolution video recording in an instant, either with a single spoken word or a gesture/shrug.
I have had many instances while driving/walking/jogging when I've seen some imminent accident/collision/crime where I needed a picture right now and not three seconds later. Fumbling for your cell phone camera takes too long; the moment has passed.
Give me that capability and I'll be an early adopter.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, I can tell you (based on first-hand observation) that you'd be astonished how much bullying underperforming tenured professors can tolerate.
These types are not going to give up guaranteed employment. They simply grow a thicker skin. Furthermore, they learn how to strike back. For example, if the department chair tries to increase the teaching load of a non-performer, the inevitable result is horrible teaching reviews and angry students changing majors. The administration very quickly learns to just leave the non-performers alone and wait for them to retire.
The better alternative, of course, is to hire non-tenured faculty. Much easier to get rid of (if necessary), and in general more productive researchers and better teachers.
Most people don't realize that the tenure-track faculty position is rapidly disappearing at U.S. universities. Tenure is instead becoming a tool to accomplish two goals: (1) recruit superstars, hopefully with the goal of increasing your school's numbers in the USN&WR college rankings, and (2) reshape the demographics of the faculty, e.g. increased female and minority hires.
Otherwise, tenure has outlived its usefulness, at least to university administrators. Go to any major university, and you'll find tenured professors who "retired in place" years ago, and who are worse than useless as researchers or teachers. To them, academic "freedom" translates to "leave me alone, you can't tell me what to do". University administrators have had their fill of those types. It's the old "10% making the other 90% look bad" syndrome, and consequently the other 90% must bear the brunt.
The future of academia is one-year to five-year contracts with non-tenured faculty. If you can bring in research contract money, your academic salary will still be reasonably competitive, at least in engineering and the hard sciences. If your research contracts dry up, your contract won't be renewed, and you'll need to move on. Otherwise, you'll be working as an adjunct instructor, teaching 3-hour semester courses at $5K to $15K a pop. You'll find plenty of those at every school nowadays.
As to the original article, the drug lord vs. drug seller analogy is largely a side effect of the economics of Ph.D.s in liberal arts and soft sciences. There are only so many university positions available in sociology, history, english literature, etc., and almost zero positions outside of academia to absorb the surplus. So if you truly love Medieval European History, and cannot conceive of doing anything else with your degree, you're going to fight tooth and nail doing academic scut work for slave wages in the hopes of making yourself more competitive for a rare tenure-track opening.
The analogy falls apart with engineering and computer science, because a good Ph.D. can usually find a relevant job in industry, and quite often at better wages than in academia. Ph.D.s in liberal arts don't have that luxury. For them, it's either academic grunt work, unemployment, or getting a job completely unrelated to your degree.
A friend of mine had a bunch of yellow jackets nest in the wall of his weekend cabin many years back. He debated sealing up their entrance hole, but knew they would just chew some new openings in the wood paneling.
So he did something different. He got a very high speed, high torque fan, one that ran so fast that the metal blades were almost invisible, and mounted it over the entrance hole late at night while most of the workers were in the nest. He removed the fan guard, turned on the fan, and waited for the sun to rise.
The yellow jackets couldn't see the fan blades, and very obligingly flew out the entrance hole to be instantly ground into a fine mulch. The pheromones released by their demise drew other yellow jackets to the opening, looking for a fight, and they likewise got ground into paste. After that, it was a orgy of insect death.
He ran the fan for a few days, until he could no longer see anything coming out of the hole. Then he fired off a very long blast of wasp spray into the hole and sealed it up. Problem solved, and without a single sting.
It may even be worse than that. He had lots of photos of underage girls, and that he told one of his victims that he didn't care how old his victims were.
The Feds may pile on some child pornography charges once they examine all the evidence on his computers.
Point taken. However, even if the charges get tossed out by a judge, or the prosecutor declines to prosecute, you've just spent a few hours of your life fighting a battle that could have been avoided. Police have the ability to your ruin your day if they so choose, even if nothing ultimately sticks in a court of law. I chose discretion over valor and avoided a pointless legal exercise that would have gained me nothing.
An excellent question, which a lawyer friend of mine also asked me when I told her what had happened. (She said I was crazy to consent.)
I consented because I quickly realized the cop was not going to let me say, "No, you cannot search my car", and just let me drive off. He was determined to search my car. I had Arizona plates (this was in Tennessee), and apparently a lot of drugs were being transported from the Southwest into this area. I also did not have a permanent address ("No, I'm just staying with a relative") and that also set off some flags.
So I had two choices: stand up for my constitutional rights, and possibly spend another hour or two being detained and questioned using whatever excuses the cop could think of, or just let him search my car, find nothing, and let me drive off a few minutes later - which is exactly what happened.
I want to emphasize that the state trooper was unfailingly polite to me the entire time, and I to him. But he was not going to let me drive away without a fight, and I was not going to spend a few hours of my life seeing just how far he was willing to push it. You have to pick your battles in life, and I had nothing to gain by fighting this one.
It isn't just online. The average U.S. citizen breaks (by some estimates) about three federal laws each day, not to mention countless state and local laws. A cop who knows his laws can stop and detain you just about any time he chooses, because he'll be able to cite at least one law that you broke.
My own anecdote: many years back, when I first began working at my current job, I was commuting back and forth from a relative's house while my wife and I were looking for our own place to buy. I would travel about 20 minutes by interstate every morning and evening, and always observed a lot of state troopers pulling people over in the evenings. What I did not realize at the time was that this particular stretch of road was a major drug corridor, and that the troopers were looking for mules hauling large stashes.
One night I had to work late and was driving home after dark. Knowing how active the patrols were, I made certain to set my cruise control at the speed limit, so I wasn't particularly concerned when I saw a state trooper in my rear-view mirror - until the lights started flashing.
At the time I still had my Arizona license plates on my car, and the cops were sure they had a hot one. After a 15-minute stop and search of my car, I was on my way home. But what was the state trooper's excuse for stopping me?
You know those little plastic frames that auto dealers put around your license plate, with the dealer's name on it? Well, as it turns out, where I live it is illegal to obscure any part of your license plate, which means that I was breaking the law by having that plastic frame overlap my plate along the edges and corners. It gave the state trooper probable cause to stop me. At least he didn't give me a ticket.
The moral? Don't assume that this sort of behavior by the authorities is anything new, just because it happens online.
This is a classic "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario.
If GM, Ford, Toyota, Honda, etc., entered a state, opened direct factory stores, and drove all the local dealers out of business, people would complain about how out-of-state and overseas corporations were destroying local family businesses and pushing consumers around.
So Texas went the opposite route and gave local dealers all the power - and now they're the ones pushing the consumers around. People are mad only because Tesla and Elon Musk are being affected. If it was some other faceless corporation trying to drive out local businesses, you'd have a completely different response from the Slashdot crowd.
And just to clarify something - Texas isn't barring Tesla from direct sales; they bar ALL auto manufacturers from selling directly to consumers.
Which means that 999 out of 1000 times, the human driver would wind up making things far worse than if he had let the computer handle it.
You're assuming that the driver will stay constantly alert, and constantly watch what is going on around him, even when he is not driving. Common sense should tell you that it's not going to happen. The person in the car will become distracted or fall asleep, just as any passenger would.
In an emergency situation, the autonomous car will have handled the crisis, for better or worse, long before the human even begins to orient him/herself to what has happened.
This is absolutely the best tactic. In my research group, it is standard procedure to use a travel laptop when traveling to conferences out of the country, even to "friendly" venues. In my case, I use a MacBook Air with the screensaver and firmware passwords enabled. I don't even bother to encrypt, since nothing goes on the SSD that is the least bit sensitive.
Granted, there is always the remote possibility that someone might succeed in compromising the OS during a business trip, and hoping that I or one of my colleagues will bring that laptop back behind our firewall. When in doubt, that is dealt with by re-imaging the drive as the first order of business upon one's return.
We often joke (half seriously) that the day is going to come when we will buy disposable laptops that will be abandoned or destroyed when traveling to certain countries. Yes, we are paranoid, but are we paranoid enough?
It's common sense, just as it is also common sense to presume that every conversation is being recorded, whether by phone or in person, when meeting colleagues overseas. Despite pious protestations to the contrary by some parties, one can be certain that there is no government on the planet that wouldn't do so if given the opportunity.
Get back to us when that bus, tram or train can drop your off right at your door. Walking half a mile or a mile from the bus stop to your home may not be a big deal to you, but it can be a very big deal to the elderly and infirm, not to mention a mother carrying groceries and shepherding a couple of kids.
And taxis? Where I live, you have to call the taxi company 30 minutes in advance if you want a pick up. Then you're dealing with the human factor, i.e. a driver who passes you by because you don't look "right" (i.e. you're a minority), or tries to cheat his fare by taking the long way to the destination. It happens all the time, even in large cities where taxis are much easier to find. Me, I just finished dealing with my credit card company where a taxi driver skimmed my card a few months back and started making small charges to my card weeks later, hoping I wouldn't notice.
Self-driving cars that are dispatched by smartphone will be fast, they won't pass you by because of your skin color, and they will take you to your destination by an optimal path. They will use existing infrastructure and will be scalable according to population density. They will, in fact, eliminate the money hole known as "mass transit" in all but the most densely populated areas.
Self-driving cars can't get here fast enough, as far as I'm concerned.
This reminds me of a guy I spoke to recently who was convinced (by an Internet video) that cameras and microphones are being placed in all cable TV boxes so that they can watch us in our living rooms.
I pointed out to him that his cell phone and his laptop computer already have microphones and cameras built in. On top of that, he carries his cell phone with him everywhere. So why in the world would anyone need to hide anything in a cable TV box, when they could just spy on us using our personal electronics?
And yet ... he wasn't convinced. The conspiracy theory had taken root in his mind like a religious belief, and he could not let go of it. And that's why it's a waste of time arguing with a conspiracy theorist, because it's like trying to convince a religious man to reject his beliefs.
I teach analog circuit design. Your complaint is a common one, but there's a reason why the instructor spent so much time going over circuit analysis techniques: it is impossible to design analog circuits until you become an expert at analyzing analog circuits.
My experience is that many students who want to learn how to design an analog circuit are so deficient in basic circuit analysis that I have to spend an inordinate amount of time just going over large- and small-signal analysis (or more specifically, nodal analysis) just to get them to the point where I can give them a two-transistor amplifier and ask them to pick the right resistor values to make it work. Even then, it is a challenge, with some students resorting to randomly iterating different component values using LTSpice, and hoping the circuit will start to work.
Analog circuit design is hard, and there's no way to make it easy. Your instructor was doing the best he or she could, by reinforcing the basic analysis techniques that any circuit designer must know in order to actually create a working design.
One aspect of autonomous vehicles that few people seem to consider is its potential effect on the housing market.
Consider the size of the RV market, and the number of people who prefer the RV lifestyle after they retire. Now consider the fact that one of the more annoying aspects of owning an RV is that you have to drive it everywhere yourself.
Now imagine twenty years from now when you'll be able to buy an autonomous RV. You go to sleep in it, and in the middle of the night it takes you to whatever destination you desire. In the morning, you open the door and you're in a new city. What you really own is not an RV, but a magic house that can take you anywhere you desire, a few hundred miles every night.
With that kind of freedom, how many people would choose to become high-tech nomads, and never live on fixed piece of property again? In fact, I think this will be a major profit center for automakers. Most people won't bother owning cars when they can call for one on a smartphone, but $100K to $200K super-RVs will become the home of choice and the way for GM and Ford to stay in business.
One of the sure signs of pseudoscience is that the "inventor" cannot do anything useful with his creation, no matter how long he "refines" it.
If I could build a free energy generator, I wouldn't need to prove anything to anyone. If nothing else, I would unplug myself from the grid, and stop buying gasoline. On a larger scale, I could (for example) perform electrolysis of water and sell hydrogen in bulk quantities at a price no one else could touch. I wouldn't need true believers to worship me as a genius. I wouldn't need to put on ridiculous demonstrations. I would just make money, and lots of it.
That fact that Rossi and others of his ilk seem incapable of doing anything practical with their devices except try to solicit money from victims ... er, investors, should tell you everything you need to know about their validity.
I've been "watching the saga" surrounding free energy in its various incarnations ever since the early eighties. Another year, another bucket of hogwash. Nothing ever changes except the names of the latest batch of charlatans, and the bogus shell companies they create in an attempt to scam investors.
The fact that Sterling Allan is reporting this "news" should raise a huge red flag. Sterling is a nice enough guy, but he is a "true believer" for every bogus free energy claim that comes along. He has never met an unsubstantiated claim by a free energy crackpot that he didn't unashamedly promote.
You can be quite certain that no public demonstration by Defkalion will be taking place, or at least any sort of demonstration that will convince anyone with an ounce of skepticism. So no, I wouldn't try shorting oil stocks anytime soon. Oil, at least, can be burned for energy. Hogwash, not so much.
On the contrary, you let groups like this meet and hold their convention. And then you identify, photograph, and monitor every attendee. What better way to get the bad guys to voluntarily reveal themselves?
Governments have been doing this for a long, long time. Read about some of the things that the FBI did under J. Edgar Hoover; it will enlighten you.
The definition of "real" property is not exactly carved in granite, either.
For example: assume I own a parcel of land. Does that mean I own everything beneath it, all the way down to the center of the earth? Does that mean I own all the airspace above it, all the way to the top of the earth's atmosphere? Clearly no, yet in general I do have the right to prevent someone from flying a remote-controlled drone directly above my rooftop, and I do have the right to prevent companies from extracting minerals below my land without my permission. I do have some rights above and below my parcel of land, but the limits of those rights must be determined by law and by the agreement of society in general.
And let's take it another step: assume I decide to rent out my property to someone else. He pays me rent, which I use to buy more property, and rent it out to more people. Eventually I am able to sit back and do nothing except collect rent from my property in perpetuity. I can even hire someone to manage my property for me, and do nothing but collect monthly checks and goof off.
But wait - I am now expecting a perpetual income from my property without working for it, based on my one-time purchase of that property. Clearly, this is a grave injustice against society, or so the "I don't believe in imaginary property" Slashdot meme goes. Yet would those same Slashdotters claim that one does not have to right to rent or lease one's own physical property? The fundamental concept of licensing a patent is exactly the same as that of renting one's land. So why is one bad, but the other okay?
You want to reject the entire concept of intellectual property because it is not precisely defined, but the ownership of real property is no more precise. The entire concept of "property" is hazy around the edges, because it is a societal construct in every respect. As the parent put it, "all property is imaginary".
I agree with you completely.
There is no need, assuming that IP laws are correctly applied. The "tax" that the creator pays is that his IP goes to the public domain once his copyright or patent expires. In return for society enforcing his limited-time monopoly, all of us will eventually share it.
Now in situations where property is owned in perpetuity, then a tax is appropriate, because that is the fee that must be paid to society in order to enforce one's right to retain that property. So I pay property tax on my home, but I must eventually turn over my tax-free patent for the public good.
The problem, of course, is that corporations like Disney want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want perpetual copyright without paying for it. That is what needs to be changed, not the concept of intellectual property itself.
All property is imaginary, whether it is physical or not. In a society without laws, there is no "property"; there is only what you can take or keep by physical force.
Then civilization developed along with the (imaginary) idea of property, i.e, that you had the right to possess something exclusive of your physical ability to control it, and that society has an obligation to enforce that imaginary right. Somehow you have no problem with that imaginary right, because you see it tied to a physical object, yet reject it when someone devotes his creative efforts to developing something non-physical (i.e. intellectual property) that benefits all of us. I have never understood that line of reasoning among Slashdotters.
You mean those "hundreds of years" when 99% of humanity lived as peasants, serfs, and slaves, scraping out a subsistence living using primitive technology? You have a strange definite of "flourished".
The rise of the modern middle class is tied directly to the industrial revolution, which is tied directly to the rise of the concept of intellectual property. I want to see patent and copyright reform as much as anyone, and a return to the much saner limits of 50 to 100 years ago. But I also recognize that much of modern society is built on the pillars of intellectual property, and its historic benefits have far outweighed its more recent abuses.
Let's clean the dirty baby, not throw him out with the bathwater.
So are you talking about your government ... or about your next-door neighbor?
I have little doubt that the entire concept of privacy will be moot within 20 years, at least if you are outside your own home. But it won't just be the police watching you; it will be your employer and your neighbors and your friends and your family, and they will probably do an even better job of it. Combine crowd-sourced video from multiple sources, and I can see a day when anyone can track anyone else.
And here's the problem: there won't be a thing any of us can do about it. Surveillance tech is following its own cost / performance Moore's Law curve, and history has shown that when technology gives the average guy the ability to get something desirable at little cost (e.g. file-sharing of music and movies), then widespread abuse will inevitably follow.
With all the usual anti-government rants on Slashdot, people are missing the much bigger picture. They should worry less about the local police and more about every window in every house on every street in their neighborhood.
You're right, he'll probably get probation or a couple of months in prison at worst, which is certainly appropriate for giving total strangers access to his former employer's network. The "30 years" number is the usual Slashdot hyperbole.
But for Keys, the secondary consequences are really much, much worse. If he is convicted, he will almost certainly be fired by Reuters and be blacklisted by major media employers. Who would trust him, knowing that he would pull stunts like that? That is a far more devastating punishment for his misdeeds.
Contact the Wounded Warrior Project. They have taken several donated P4 Dell boxes off my hands.
Like the OP, I have found it very difficult to find donors for older desktops. Craigslist may be useful in that respect, as individuals and small nonprofits sometimes ask for computer donations.
Personally, I have given up on reconditioning and donating desktops. Very few people want them. As others have mentioned, it really is better to recycle them, even if it goes against your grain to toss out a working piece of hardware.
While I agree that wearable computing will have many drawbacks just as you describe, there will be benefits as well. It is not a black or white issue.
Consider a world where no child will be able to bully another without leaving irrefutable video evidence, or a world where no public servant will be able to act like a thug or a rude asshole without leaving a video trail. Consider a world where no supervisor will be able to sexually harass a subordinate without having video evidence sent straight to the subordinate's attorney. And for that matter, consider a world where accusations, true or false, will no longer depend on one person's word versus another's.
Most anti-social behavior takes place in private between two people (perpetrator and victim); by effectively taking away that privacy, you are exposing that perpetrator's behavior to the world. There's the old saying of "an armed society is a polite society", and when everyone is effectively "armed" with video surveillance tech that sends data straight to the cloud, the bullies and low-lifes of the world will indeed be forced to be more polite, whether they like it or not.
The world of wearable computing will indeed be very different, and there will good and bad aspects to it, just as there is with any transformative technology. But that world will be inevitable in any case, because the technology will be too cheap and useful not to be exploited in every conceivable manner.
For me, the killer app for Google Glass is obvious. I want to be able to activate high resolution video recording in an instant, either with a single spoken word or a gesture/shrug.
I have had many instances while driving/walking/jogging when I've seen some imminent accident/collision/crime where I needed a picture right now and not three seconds later. Fumbling for your cell phone camera takes too long; the moment has passed.
Give me that capability and I'll be an early adopter.