The idea that there is no liberal tendency in the MSM is fairly generous to human nature, given that the vast majority of journalists (and people in media) tend to vote Democrat. Now, granted, if you are far enough left you will view mainstream Democrats as "conservative," but if (as in the grandparent) you want to talk about anecdotes, there are plenty to spin about--when was the last time you saw a positive story on gun rights? Want to check the statistics on positive vs. negative statements made about Obama during the campaign? (certain late night comedy shows barely touched him with a single barb)
If from the perspective of your politics it makes you feel better, call it center-left rather than liberal. But don't be disingenuous about the left having some reasonable advantage in respect to journalistic outlets. (You won't see me disclaiming that talk radio is quite conservative.)
There was a simple solution to this... Let the US government go through the documents redacting sensitive names and locations.
Unfortunately they refused putting those afghans in danger.
Kill your wife, or else I will kill your wife and twenty other people. What, you refused? How dare you put those people in danger!
The government was playing for their best outcome, and in this case I don't think that's sufficient for you to stick them with full culpability for the actions of Wikileaks. With no guarantee on whether Wikileaks was going to play ball in the end, going through and highlighting "all the important stuff that you really, really don't want us to share" could have just made thousands of documents requiring hundreds of thousands of man hours to sift through into a quick-index hitlist.
Even with limited resources Wikileaks could easily have delayed the release date in order to make the redactions, or turned it over to a government (such as Iran) which would delight in embarrassing the U.S. and divulging its secrets, but would also be wiling to redact the civilian information if only so as to look better in the international spotlight.
Given that their actions are getting people killed, what superior motive could they have for releasing the documents on such a brief time scale? (Other than seeking attention, I mean.)
The problem with this kind of modeling is that many "good fitting" algorithms would, if implemented, change the system itself. There's more to competition chess than just the rules on how to move pieces. For example, while a game in isolation would almost always be played to win, there are many times that because of information from ratings (or due to the method of the tournament) you would start the game being equally happy to draw, which will affect how you play.
Now, even if the difference in the number of pieces remaining (e.g.) is a much better predictor of who will win than the ELO system, if you were ever to actually implement it you would no longer be playing the game the ELO system was trying to track--suddenly you have made players more conservative, not as willing to sacrifice pieces for a better mating position. Possibly some would say you had ruined the game.
If anything, we need more of the web dev tools to make pages that are outright guaranteed not to work with IE6-7.
That's a fine philosophy when you're sitting in your armchair, but do you think that people who use websites to generate revenue are really going to say, "Well, the extra profit would sure be nice, but instead we're going to take a moral stand and let the IE6 users slip away to our competitors"?
The main concern is for your visitors to see what you want them to see, not to propagate software evangelism. Hopefully hacks like this will ease the burden on developers, and end-users can migrate as their old systems die off and because the browsers that don't require hacks manage the rendering much faster. It's a slower victory... but still a victory.
Yes, it's entirely appropriate for a scientist to act to keep his objective knowledge out of the reach of these nefarious perverters of truth. Truly, they sound terrible, so I can see why we would want to keep them from blaspheming the sacred data. Of course, it's not like you can just turn down everyone wearing a Fox News badge--anybody could be acting at their behest! Basically, we need to keep the data locked up away from the public in general. (Frankly, they are not worthy to see it anyway.) Really, I can't even imagine the sort of terrible world in which people are allowed to know things without signing off on their good intentions with the High Scientist.
OTOH, I guess if you changed your thinking over the course of seventeen years, you're a weak-ass no-good hippie flip-flopper?
Yes, well, when you have very little data with which to paint the profile of the judicial candidate, the importance of the data you do have increases proportionately. Personally I think if you have to stretch back 17 years to find a commentary from the person on significant and contentious modern issues, they may not be suitable for a Supreme Court appointment in any case. I mean, you can't really go off anything she says now that she's a candidate for the SCOTUS position. Whatever her other virtues or faults, I'm sure she has enough political savvy to give moderate answers to questions for the duration. Once she's on the SCOTUS there is no practical removal option if she delivers a complete turnaround to what the public was expecting. For such a powerful position--which receives a life appointment--the benefit of the doubt is one thing which should be given only with the utmost rarity and caution.
Before smoking was widely banned in bars, there were polls showing that a majority of people, indeed, wished bars were smoke free -- and yet, over 95% of bars allowed smoking. This is called market failure, and for some crazy reason some market-minded people refuse to recognize it. Now, since we have banned smoking, even more people are glad bars are smoke-free.
With a majority of people being non-smokers, it's hardly surprising that most people would wish for smoke-free bars. It involves *somebody else* giving up something to make them feel more comfortable--of course they are for it!
However, a "market failure" is not any instance that simple populism fails to execute a tyrannical control over the situation. First you have to ask what the actual value of not having smoking is to the people who oppose it. Are they hacking up their lungs by virtue of being within fifty feet of a lit cigarette, or are they just moral busybodies who like to complain, but stop noticing the smoke five minutes after showing up? By contrast, what is the value to the smokers of being able to smoke? And what about the people who spend a whole lot of time in bars buying a lot of alcohol vs. people who just drop in every couple of months to meet up with a friend? The opinions of the former group may justify a much greater weighting, and it may just so happen that they are comprised largely of heavy smokers.
The advantage of the free market is that it often tends to sort out these questions automatically, whereas when you or I decide we are going to officiate based on "what people really want", we often forget about these questions with an ultimately oppressive outcome.
Surely it's not that hard to figure out where candidates are listed in alphabetical order and how often the first name wins in those cases.
It is hard because it's not a fixed percentage of people who vote alphabetically, it depends on the demographic distribution that's shown up at the polls this year, how knowledgeable those voters are on the candidates in the race, what their present feelings are about their party (are they apathetic? are they voting for anyone who isn't the incumbent?) etc.
So besides the way the voters voted, what are the "other irregularities," and what is the probability of identifying them in any given election provided a bunch of people did like the outcome and have sat down to find anything that can be considered irregular?
I don't generally post on Slashdot... but couldn't resist. Post them. Now. Please. No doubt it'll hurt US relations with who-knows-who... but the truth is always the best way to create the best change. One day, this man should be nominated, and win, a Nobel Peace Prize.
And you sir should please promptly provide your name, SSN, birthday, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, place of residence, and any PINs or passwords you may use.
It could be that you will not reply with this information as requested, because your purported reverence for "truth" does not extend to disclosing information which would enable others to do you harm.
Well, welcome to the world of classified information, where if operatives get outed, they get a bullet in the back of the head. I'm not sure what's contained in the yet-to-be-released documents, and maybe indeed some or all of it is information that should be brought before the public eye. But I have a feeling (as will be evidenced by your lack of compliance with my request) that your gungho damn-the-consequences attitude to disclosure is based strictly on the supposition that you aren't going to be one of the direct sufferers if things turn out poorly.
I would like everything our government does to have oversight, but in many cases (witness protection, undercover investigation, battleplans, etc.) the correct mechanism for oversight is to create overseers (judges, internal investigators, et al.) who can answer to the public without compromising their safety and well-being by letting any hostile person have the same information. If that system fails then intentional leaks may be a justifiable recourse.
God help us if there was anything, that, say, put crazy little Kim Jong Il in a missile firing mood.
1. It's way too specific. Why internet-generated maps? What about instructions to make burglary tools or improvised weapons?
I seem to recall some concern raised somewhere about Google Streetview, the point being I suppose that it's a good way to scout the area, pick out an upscale house with poor security, etc. It may be an effort to deal with that without singling out Google.
2. If the use of "high tech" makes the punishment worse, is that not a condemnation of "high tech" itself? That would be a bad thing.
Well, I'm not saying it applies particularly well in this case, but in general "value of burglary = reward - (probably of being caught)*(punishment)" To deter crime you want 'value of burglary' to be zero or negative. Using high tech/clever solutions reduces the probability of being caught, so if you want to deter smart criminals without being blanketly draconian, you increase the severity of punishment when technology and planning are involved.
The encryption for streaming voice data is not exactly the best, and Tor means possible third party interception. If someone does decrypt the conversation then just from your tonal range and dialect you are communicating significant information about your identity you wouldn't have to over email (you may even be providing a unique fingerprint). Phone numbers are much more identifying than IP addresses--cellphones can be easily triangulated from the data sent to the carrier, and have to be bought and activated somewhere; a computer can connect to any guy's unsecured wi-fi and fake all the data. I can't really think of the instance in which sending phone calls over Tor would be preferable to some other tech solution.
I can't see ANY of the things you do with Facebook that you wouldn't be able to do with instant messengers and a web server.
Have you ever tried to get your friends (I'm assuming you have non-programmer friends) to send you stuff encrypted with your PGP key? Yeah, theoretically technology gives you the possibility of ultra-secure communications, but in practice, being able to implement the technical solution doesn't get you anywhere at all.
Likewise, there's simply no way I'm getting the several hundred people on my friends list to communicate with me by any means other than facebook. I can code up the most amazing web-interface ever and it won't matter unless it catches on with the public in general.
Doesn't requiring indentation make Python annoying for an interactive console? If you have to loop over something how can you do that on multiple lines via a console?
The shell knows from syntax if you've started to type a function, conditional, etc. (due to a terminating colon). From there you are free to add the relevant code at whatever appropriate degree of indentation, ending with two consecutive carriage returns. It will all be interpreted as one block so if you need to go back and edit a function you can scroll back to the entire snippet. Also, every input receives a line number, so you can go back and tell it to rerun lines 23-42, etc.
But the point is not to write your programs in the console. If I am writing an actual program I generally have my main code open in my favorite editor simultaneously. If I type "run program.py" iPython will execute that code as well as import any variables or functions I've defined in it for inspection/use in the interactive shell. I find this gives me the best of both worlds.
The summary mentioned Octave as an alternative to Matlab. There is also Scilab (which has some more c-like features).
In recency I have simply been using Python. Use the iPython (interactive python) shell and load scipy (from scipy import *) and you have a very nice calculating environment. The scipy arrays are quite a joy to work with compared with what I remember from Matlab. If you're working with equal size 1D arrays then they can be used without modification in normal mathematical expressions, so a lot of my code no longer involves any iteration with for loops.
There is a graphing library (pylab) based on Matlab syntax. If you start iPython with the -pylab flag it will print out plots the same way as in Matlab. There is also Easyviz which I believe also uses Matlab syntax but interfaces with a number of standard graphing programs (like Gnuplot.)
The sympy package for doing symbolic manipulations is also quite nice, IMHO.
Disclaimer: I only used Matlab casually for my undergraduate math classes.
"Sir! We have analyzed that connection and found it to originate from a public access point. We hacked the system and found it to be a blank virtual machine. It's disconnected now and we don't have any other identifying data. This guy was pretty slick."
"Excellent! Find Dr. Sp0ng, arrest him, and lock him up. No one else would anonymize themselves that effectively, so he is obviously the culprit!"
They are only circumventing the intended aims of the people who lobbied the law into being.
Regarding the written law itself, they are legitimately following and making use of the provisioned measures. It doesn't sound like they are relying on particularly liberal interpretations of the text, but rather are going off of what it plainly states.
Granted, I don't know a great deal about UK law, but it sounds to me like it's rather more on the legislature want to remove these elements than for judges to sit down and play psychoanalyst of the "offender" and for the legislature simultaneously.
But there's the basic problem that if they have no problem with taking resources from another civilization, what problem do they have with taking resources from each other?
(1) Mutually Assured Destruction. Reason the United States and the Soviet Union didn't just conquer each other. If the factions can exert more cost for taking resources than the benefit the resources themselves afford then they will have peace based on that. But if humans are grossly inferior we might not enjoy the same protection.
(2) Love of self. Human beings who would never think of hurting each other are often plenty okay with butchering a cow for food. What makes us sure they would see us as equals rather than cows? It might be thoroughly entrenched in their minds that members of their own species are sacred and cannot ever be acted on with violence, but without a similar caveat extending to anything else.
(3) They are violent towards each other when competing for resources, but the principal actors have reasonably equitable power and it occurs within established social context which does not allow for continuous escalation. I.e., occasionally a leader will be assassinated, there will be a small conquest, etc. people who do not succeed tend to die off or become slaves, but in general the society continues to produce resources and develop with stable governments in place.
As RAH said, we are probably the most warlike and violent race that has reached rudimentary intelligence in the universe.
One always feels enlightened to dose out such pessimism at one's fellows, but there is no honest reason to suppose that an alien species would be less violent.
If we look at earth species as a whole, we find that the predators generally tend to be the most intelligent (i.e. those disposed toward *killing*) which could easily have great influence over the cultural attitudes of the species in question. Humans have also had it pretty easy living on earth, but a more dangerous planet (think with dinosaurs still around) could lead to a species with a greater interest in/respect for war like behavior. Killing each other over limited resources is really just a natural component of evolution and it's entirely possible that different evolutionary conditions could lead to a much greater degree of tribalism. In fact, there might well be multiple intelligent species which arise contemporaneously on the same planet, and being unable to interbreed and competing for survival would probably lead to a much greater degree of xenophobia than humans have developed.
As much as you might hate to think it, human beings could actually be just about the nicest fellas around.
"Should it be or is it even legal to demand this of employees, especially if such a certification was not required at the time of hire?"
The legality is probably contingent on whatever paper you signed when you took the job. In most states mandatory drug testing is legal, so I'm guessing knowledge testing isn't going to be something you could make many successful objections to.
But if the company is forcing you to foot the bill for things they think add to your work value, you might want to skedaddle anyway. I mean, at that point, what do you think the chances are of you ever getting a raise? Find someone less stingy to work for and build a career that will actually carry some rewards.
However, one argument I can think of for why you should personally pay for the certification is that it's something you get to take with you when you leave the company.
I fail to see what would be wrong with sending encrypted emails backed by chained proxies, Tor, etc. It's not like the information is even secret--the whole point was to have it disclosed in a newspaper. Given that he might come under occasional (or constant) investigation by the authorities simply because of the nature of his job, avoiding a physical presence as well as any unusual behavior is a must. What would you recommend as an alternative?
I think the real problem was simply that he sent "hundreds of messages" to the same guy. As soon as the NSA points their attention at that guy, they have access to everything, no matter the medium of communication. Before that they already probably have their list of culprits narrowed down significantly based on the info that was being disclosed. Once they know where to get the unencrypted messages they can analyze them for writing characteristics (such as word frequencies) which correspond to one of their employees, assuming their aren't much more blatant clues slipped in. It may even be at some point he simply had no choice but to reveal details about his identity/job to convince the reporter he was a legitimate leak--I mean, if you perfectly anonymize yourself how do you convince anyone you aren't just a hoaxer? Even if the reporter can successfully destroy any evidence of the content of such communications, that doesn't mean he won't squeal when some scary guys from the government pick him up off the street and tell him horror stories about what might happen to him if it doesn't. (the fact they wouldn't mention who the reporter was could be evidence of his cutting a deal)
I got a ticket for a right turn on red maneuver, which came down to the fact that the light turned red a fraction of a second before I made my turn.
I asked for a hearing and requested information which would verify the accuracy of the timing of the light, including technical specifications, testing data, etc. The city attorney sent me a response claiming to have the information available at his office, but when I went downtown to peruse it, all they had was some details on the contract between the red light camera company and the city and a few tests of the light's vehicle speed reading against a radar gun. Nothing at all about the actual timing of the light.
When I went to attend the hearing, the 'testifying officer' (some guy who had watched the recorded video) could not cite for me how long the light was supposed to be yellow (although he did bring up some non-legal recommendation) which was something I couldn't find even after reading all the apparently applicable state and local traffic laws. He also was only able to roughly count out the length of light being yellow rather than providing a specific measurement.
Despite their not being able to show that the equipment was working properly (to within the relevant margin of error) or in compliance with legal specifications, nor providing me with the information I had requested which may have allowed me to firmly ascertain my own innocence, I was declared "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" of having committed this trespass of a fraction of a second. I could have requested to bring it before a judge but I was told the court fees would be more than paying the fine, and without legal aid it simply did not seem worth the effort.
It also irked me that it took them ~4 months after the fact to send me the notice of the violation. By that time I didn't even remember being at the intersection in question, so I was effectively deprived of my own witness (were there mitigating circumstances? had I loaned my car to someone else that day? I have no idea).
Her indiscretions are not really relevant. Keeping the photos private is consideration to the family, not to her. (I don't think she is likely to issue a preference one way or the other.)
There are still some expectations to privacy on public land. For example, putting a movie cam in the sewer drain to look up people's skirts--not okay. In a way, this is also an instance of taking advantage of an involuntary indecency.
Slashdot Mirror
The balance on his bank account was 12 dozen shoes.
The idea that there is no liberal tendency in the MSM is fairly generous to human nature, given that the vast majority of journalists (and people in media) tend to vote Democrat. Now, granted, if you are far enough left you will view mainstream Democrats as "conservative," but if (as in the grandparent) you want to talk about anecdotes, there are plenty to spin about--when was the last time you saw a positive story on gun rights? Want to check the statistics on positive vs. negative statements made about Obama during the campaign? (certain late night comedy shows barely touched him with a single barb)
If from the perspective of your politics it makes you feel better, call it center-left rather than liberal. But don't be disingenuous about the left having some reasonable advantage in respect to journalistic outlets. (You won't see me disclaiming that talk radio is quite conservative.)
There was a simple solution to this... Let the US government go through the documents redacting sensitive names and locations. Unfortunately they refused putting those afghans in danger.
Kill your wife, or else I will kill your wife and twenty other people. What, you refused? How dare you put those people in danger!
The government was playing for their best outcome, and in this case I don't think that's sufficient for you to stick them with full culpability for the actions of Wikileaks. With no guarantee on whether Wikileaks was going to play ball in the end, going through and highlighting "all the important stuff that you really, really don't want us to share" could have just made thousands of documents requiring hundreds of thousands of man hours to sift through into a quick-index hitlist.
Even with limited resources Wikileaks could easily have delayed the release date in order to make the redactions, or turned it over to a government (such as Iran) which would delight in embarrassing the U.S. and divulging its secrets, but would also be wiling to redact the civilian information if only so as to look better in the international spotlight.
Given that their actions are getting people killed, what superior motive could they have for releasing the documents on such a brief time scale? (Other than seeking attention, I mean.)
The problem with this kind of modeling is that many "good fitting" algorithms would, if implemented, change the system itself. There's more to competition chess than just the rules on how to move pieces. For example, while a game in isolation would almost always be played to win, there are many times that because of information from ratings (or due to the method of the tournament) you would start the game being equally happy to draw, which will affect how you play.
Now, even if the difference in the number of pieces remaining (e.g.) is a much better predictor of who will win than the ELO system, if you were ever to actually implement it you would no longer be playing the game the ELO system was trying to track--suddenly you have made players more conservative, not as willing to sacrifice pieces for a better mating position. Possibly some would say you had ruined the game.
If anything, we need more of the web dev tools to make pages that are outright guaranteed not to work with IE6-7.
That's a fine philosophy when you're sitting in your armchair, but do you think that people who use websites to generate revenue are really going to say, "Well, the extra profit would sure be nice, but instead we're going to take a moral stand and let the IE6 users slip away to our competitors"?
The main concern is for your visitors to see what you want them to see, not to propagate software evangelism. Hopefully hacks like this will ease the burden on developers, and end-users can migrate as their old systems die off and because the browsers that don't require hacks manage the rendering much faster. It's a slower victory... but still a victory.
Yes, it's entirely appropriate for a scientist to act to keep his objective knowledge out of the reach of these nefarious perverters of truth. Truly, they sound terrible, so I can see why we would want to keep them from blaspheming the sacred data. Of course, it's not like you can just turn down everyone wearing a Fox News badge--anybody could be acting at their behest! Basically, we need to keep the data locked up away from the public in general. (Frankly, they are not worthy to see it anyway.) Really, I can't even imagine the sort of terrible world in which people are allowed to know things without signing off on their good intentions with the High Scientist.
OTOH, I guess if you changed your thinking over the course of seventeen years, you're a weak-ass no-good hippie flip-flopper?
Yes, well, when you have very little data with which to paint the profile of the judicial candidate, the importance of the data you do have increases proportionately. Personally I think if you have to stretch back 17 years to find a commentary from the person on significant and contentious modern issues, they may not be suitable for a Supreme Court appointment in any case. I mean, you can't really go off anything she says now that she's a candidate for the SCOTUS position. Whatever her other virtues or faults, I'm sure she has enough political savvy to give moderate answers to questions for the duration. Once she's on the SCOTUS there is no practical removal option if she delivers a complete turnaround to what the public was expecting. For such a powerful position--which receives a life appointment--the benefit of the doubt is one thing which should be given only with the utmost rarity and caution.
Before smoking was widely banned in bars, there were polls showing that a majority of people, indeed, wished bars were smoke free -- and yet, over 95% of bars allowed smoking. This is called market failure, and for some crazy reason some market-minded people refuse to recognize it. Now, since we have banned smoking, even more people are glad bars are smoke-free.
With a majority of people being non-smokers, it's hardly surprising that most people would wish for smoke-free bars. It involves *somebody else* giving up something to make them feel more comfortable--of course they are for it!
However, a "market failure" is not any instance that simple populism fails to execute a tyrannical control over the situation. First you have to ask what the actual value of not having smoking is to the people who oppose it. Are they hacking up their lungs by virtue of being within fifty feet of a lit cigarette, or are they just moral busybodies who like to complain, but stop noticing the smoke five minutes after showing up? By contrast, what is the value to the smokers of being able to smoke? And what about the people who spend a whole lot of time in bars buying a lot of alcohol vs. people who just drop in every couple of months to meet up with a friend? The opinions of the former group may justify a much greater weighting, and it may just so happen that they are comprised largely of heavy smokers.
The advantage of the free market is that it often tends to sort out these questions automatically, whereas when you or I decide we are going to officiate based on "what people really want", we often forget about these questions with an ultimately oppressive outcome.
Surely it's not that hard to figure out where candidates are listed in alphabetical order and how often the first name wins in those cases.
It is hard because it's not a fixed percentage of people who vote alphabetically, it depends on the demographic distribution that's shown up at the polls this year, how knowledgeable those voters are on the candidates in the race, what their present feelings are about their party (are they apathetic? are they voting for anyone who isn't the incumbent?) etc.
So besides the way the voters voted, what are the "other irregularities," and what is the probability of identifying them in any given election provided a bunch of people did like the outcome and have sat down to find anything that can be considered irregular?
I don't generally post on Slashdot... but couldn't resist. Post them. Now. Please. No doubt it'll hurt US relations with who-knows-who... but the truth is always the best way to create the best change. One day, this man should be nominated, and win, a Nobel Peace Prize.
And you sir should please promptly provide your name, SSN, birthday, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, place of residence, and any PINs or passwords you may use.
It could be that you will not reply with this information as requested, because your purported reverence for "truth" does not extend to disclosing information which would enable others to do you harm.
Well, welcome to the world of classified information, where if operatives get outed, they get a bullet in the back of the head. I'm not sure what's contained in the yet-to-be-released documents, and maybe indeed some or all of it is information that should be brought before the public eye. But I have a feeling (as will be evidenced by your lack of compliance with my request) that your gungho damn-the-consequences attitude to disclosure is based strictly on the supposition that you aren't going to be one of the direct sufferers if things turn out poorly.
I would like everything our government does to have oversight, but in many cases (witness protection, undercover investigation, battleplans, etc.) the correct mechanism for oversight is to create overseers (judges, internal investigators, et al.) who can answer to the public without compromising their safety and well-being by letting any hostile person have the same information. If that system fails then intentional leaks may be a justifiable recourse.
God help us if there was anything, that, say, put crazy little Kim Jong Il in a missile firing mood.
1. It's way too specific. Why internet-generated maps? What about instructions to make burglary tools or improvised weapons?
I seem to recall some concern raised somewhere about Google Streetview, the point being I suppose that it's a good way to scout the area, pick out an upscale house with poor security, etc. It may be an effort to deal with that without singling out Google.
2. If the use of "high tech" makes the punishment worse, is that not a condemnation of "high tech" itself? That would be a bad thing.
Well, I'm not saying it applies particularly well in this case, but in general "value of burglary = reward - (probably of being caught)*(punishment)" To deter crime you want 'value of burglary' to be zero or negative. Using high tech/clever solutions reduces the probability of being caught, so if you want to deter smart criminals without being blanketly draconian, you increase the severity of punishment when technology and planning are involved.
The encryption for streaming voice data is not exactly the best, and Tor means possible third party interception. If someone does decrypt the conversation then just from your tonal range and dialect you are communicating significant information about your identity you wouldn't have to over email (you may even be providing a unique fingerprint). Phone numbers are much more identifying than IP addresses--cellphones can be easily triangulated from the data sent to the carrier, and have to be bought and activated somewhere; a computer can connect to any guy's unsecured wi-fi and fake all the data. I can't really think of the instance in which sending phone calls over Tor would be preferable to some other tech solution.
I can't see ANY of the things you do with Facebook that you wouldn't be able to do with instant messengers and a web server.
Have you ever tried to get your friends (I'm assuming you have non-programmer friends) to send you stuff encrypted with your PGP key? Yeah, theoretically technology gives you the possibility of ultra-secure communications, but in practice, being able to implement the technical solution doesn't get you anywhere at all.
Likewise, there's simply no way I'm getting the several hundred people on my friends list to communicate with me by any means other than facebook. I can code up the most amazing web-interface ever and it won't matter unless it catches on with the public in general.
Doesn't requiring indentation make Python annoying for an interactive console? If you have to loop over something how can you do that on multiple lines via a console?
The shell knows from syntax if you've started to type a function, conditional, etc. (due to a terminating colon). From there you are free to add the relevant code at whatever appropriate degree of indentation, ending with two consecutive carriage returns. It will all be interpreted as one block so if you need to go back and edit a function you can scroll back to the entire snippet. Also, every input receives a line number, so you can go back and tell it to rerun lines 23-42, etc.
But the point is not to write your programs in the console. If I am writing an actual program I generally have my main code open in my favorite editor simultaneously. If I type "run program.py" iPython will execute that code as well as import any variables or functions I've defined in it for inspection/use in the interactive shell. I find this gives me the best of both worlds.
The summary mentioned Octave as an alternative to Matlab. There is also Scilab (which has some more c-like features).
In recency I have simply been using Python. Use the iPython (interactive python) shell and load scipy (from scipy import *) and you have a very nice calculating environment. The scipy arrays are quite a joy to work with compared with what I remember from Matlab. If you're working with equal size 1D arrays then they can be used without modification in normal mathematical expressions, so a lot of my code no longer involves any iteration with for loops.
There is a graphing library (pylab) based on Matlab syntax. If you start iPython with the -pylab flag it will print out plots the same way as in Matlab. There is also Easyviz which I believe also uses Matlab syntax but interfaces with a number of standard graphing programs (like Gnuplot.)
The sympy package for doing symbolic manipulations is also quite nice, IMHO.
Disclaimer: I only used Matlab casually for my undergraduate math classes.
Yes, but that is also true of just about any other show, including those that appear on CSPAN.
Overheard at the CIA...
"Sir! We have analyzed that connection and found it to originate from a public access point. We hacked the system and found it to be a blank virtual machine. It's disconnected now and we don't have any other identifying data. This guy was pretty slick."
"Excellent! Find Dr. Sp0ng, arrest him, and lock him up. No one else would anonymize themselves that effectively, so he is obviously the culprit!"
They are only circumventing the intended aims of the people who lobbied the law into being.
Regarding the written law itself, they are legitimately following and making use of the provisioned measures. It doesn't sound like they are relying on particularly liberal interpretations of the text, but rather are going off of what it plainly states.
Granted, I don't know a great deal about UK law, but it sounds to me like it's rather more on the legislature want to remove these elements than for judges to sit down and play psychoanalyst of the "offender" and for the legislature simultaneously.
But there's the basic problem that if they have no problem with taking resources from another civilization, what problem do they have with taking resources from each other?
(1) Mutually Assured Destruction. Reason the United States and the Soviet Union didn't just conquer each other. If the factions can exert more cost for taking resources than the benefit the resources themselves afford then they will have peace based on that. But if humans are grossly inferior we might not enjoy the same protection.
(2) Love of self. Human beings who would never think of hurting each other are often plenty okay with butchering a cow for food. What makes us sure they would see us as equals rather than cows? It might be thoroughly entrenched in their minds that members of their own species are sacred and cannot ever be acted on with violence, but without a similar caveat extending to anything else.
(3) They are violent towards each other when competing for resources, but the principal actors have reasonably equitable power and it occurs within established social context which does not allow for continuous escalation. I.e., occasionally a leader will be assassinated, there will be a small conquest, etc. people who do not succeed tend to die off or become slaves, but in general the society continues to produce resources and develop with stable governments in place.
As RAH said, we are probably the most warlike and violent race that has reached rudimentary intelligence in the universe.
One always feels enlightened to dose out such pessimism at one's fellows, but there is no honest reason to suppose that an alien species would be less violent.
If we look at earth species as a whole, we find that the predators generally tend to be the most intelligent (i.e. those disposed toward *killing*) which could easily have great influence over the cultural attitudes of the species in question. Humans have also had it pretty easy living on earth, but a more dangerous planet (think with dinosaurs still around) could lead to a species with a greater interest in/respect for war like behavior. Killing each other over limited resources is really just a natural component of evolution and it's entirely possible that different evolutionary conditions could lead to a much greater degree of tribalism. In fact, there might well be multiple intelligent species which arise contemporaneously on the same planet, and being unable to interbreed and competing for survival would probably lead to a much greater degree of xenophobia than humans have developed.
As much as you might hate to think it, human beings could actually be just about the nicest fellas around.
"Should it be or is it even legal to demand this of employees, especially if such a certification was not required at the time of hire?"
The legality is probably contingent on whatever paper you signed when you took the job. In most states mandatory drug testing is legal, so I'm guessing knowledge testing isn't going to be something you could make many successful objections to.
But if the company is forcing you to foot the bill for things they think add to your work value, you might want to skedaddle anyway. I mean, at that point, what do you think the chances are of you ever getting a raise? Find someone less stingy to work for and build a career that will actually carry some rewards.
However, one argument I can think of for why you should personally pay for the certification is that it's something you get to take with you when you leave the company.
I fail to see what would be wrong with sending encrypted emails backed by chained proxies, Tor, etc. It's not like the information is even secret--the whole point was to have it disclosed in a newspaper. Given that he might come under occasional (or constant) investigation by the authorities simply because of the nature of his job, avoiding a physical presence as well as any unusual behavior is a must. What would you recommend as an alternative?
I think the real problem was simply that he sent "hundreds of messages" to the same guy. As soon as the NSA points their attention at that guy, they have access to everything, no matter the medium of communication. Before that they already probably have their list of culprits narrowed down significantly based on the info that was being disclosed. Once they know where to get the unencrypted messages they can analyze them for writing characteristics (such as word frequencies) which correspond to one of their employees, assuming their aren't much more blatant clues slipped in. It may even be at some point he simply had no choice but to reveal details about his identity/job to convince the reporter he was a legitimate leak--I mean, if you perfectly anonymize yourself how do you convince anyone you aren't just a hoaxer? Even if the reporter can successfully destroy any evidence of the content of such communications, that doesn't mean he won't squeal when some scary guys from the government pick him up off the street and tell him horror stories about what might happen to him if it doesn't. (the fact they wouldn't mention who the reporter was could be evidence of his cutting a deal)
I got a ticket for a right turn on red maneuver, which came down to the fact that the light turned red a fraction of a second before I made my turn.
I asked for a hearing and requested information which would verify the accuracy of the timing of the light, including technical specifications, testing data, etc. The city attorney sent me a response claiming to have the information available at his office, but when I went downtown to peruse it, all they had was some details on the contract between the red light camera company and the city and a few tests of the light's vehicle speed reading against a radar gun. Nothing at all about the actual timing of the light.
When I went to attend the hearing, the 'testifying officer' (some guy who had watched the recorded video) could not cite for me how long the light was supposed to be yellow (although he did bring up some non-legal recommendation) which was something I couldn't find even after reading all the apparently applicable state and local traffic laws. He also was only able to roughly count out the length of light being yellow rather than providing a specific measurement.
Despite their not being able to show that the equipment was working properly (to within the relevant margin of error) or in compliance with legal specifications, nor providing me with the information I had requested which may have allowed me to firmly ascertain my own innocence, I was declared "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" of having committed this trespass of a fraction of a second. I could have requested to bring it before a judge but I was told the court fees would be more than paying the fine, and without legal aid it simply did not seem worth the effort.
It also irked me that it took them ~4 months after the fact to send me the notice of the violation. By that time I didn't even remember being at the intersection in question, so I was effectively deprived of my own witness (were there mitigating circumstances? had I loaned my car to someone else that day? I have no idea).
Her indiscretions are not really relevant. Keeping the photos private is consideration to the family, not to her. (I don't think she is likely to issue a preference one way or the other.)
There are still some expectations to privacy on public land. For example, putting a movie cam in the sewer drain to look up people's skirts--not okay. In a way, this is also an instance of taking advantage of an involuntary indecency.